/lit/ - Literature

>>23399995
>>23400181
>>23402332
>>23402359
>>23406623

I think maybe the best example of this process in motion is Jared Diamond's lovable Papuan New Guineans:
By all means he's right when he says the Indigenous people domesticated, built, and maintained, quite an impressive agricultural society. They grew and originally domesticated maybe half a dozen crops, they figured out terracing, nitrogen fixing, managed irrigation & orchards, and had really no issue with soil erosion or feeding their people a really high carbohydrate diet of starchy root vegetables and bananas.

But then pic related is a selection of more or less the extent of their tool development, and they were such persistent cannibals that the act wasn't successfully criminalized, and actually enforced, until maybe 1989 (going by Wikipedia's citation). No masonry, no organized religion, no stratified society - really nothing even remotely resembling a bronze age society. They literally figured out how to "farm really well" and then ceased all development. They're by no means 'stupid' - when they got exposed to new crops, agricultural techniques, they adopted them, but they still persisted in their cock-horn-wearing ways.