Arizona’s new heat officer said Friday that he is working with local governments and nonprofit groups to open more cooling centers and ensure homes have working air conditioners in a more unified effort to prevent another ghastly toll of heat-related deaths this summer.
Huh. That’s pretty awesome. I had no idea that there were native American tribes contructing long aqueducts.
https://www.arizonamuseumofnaturalhistory.org/plan-a-visit/mesa-grande/the-hohokam
Seems like archeologists think that they were most likely wiped out by a population boom followed by a bad drought, though. Still, I had no idea that level of agriculture existed at the time. Pretty interesting.
That level of agriculture is nothing compared to what civilizations like the Aztecs, who figured out how to grow crops in the middle of a lake, and the Inca, who figured out how to freeze-dry crops they grew on landscaped, terraced mountainsides.
The Maya were also really excellent at hydraulic engineering out of necessity because there were no lakes or rivers in much of their domain.
And then there’s the plant we call corn or maize today. This is what it started as (teosinte) before people in Mexico started selectively breeding it over thousands of years:
People really need to understand that ‘stone age’ (or bronze age in the case of the Inca) does not actually mean they were unable to understand how to do really complicated things. People look at an expertly-knapped mesolithic hand axe and think they could do it themselves in 20 minutes with any rock they picked up.