Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

Kind of. It's like when historians delineate historic genocides with Nazi genocides. Or slavery vs chattel slavery. Functionally they're mostly the same, but the latter was also something new, and possibly worse. Historically, non-european expansionism/colonialism due to large power asymmetries were regional neighbourhood affairs that ended in mass assimilation within a few generations. European, post age-of-sail conquest/oppression was uniquely brutal in suppressing/eliminating indigenous peoples globally, for hundreds of years without any real effort at integration. Generally Mongols worked with traditional administration systems of territories they conquered, if only because it's easier for nomadic culture to embrace settled people's cultures. Post Mongol conquest, Chinese, Central Asian or Persian empires were basically the same "empires" but administered by Mongol Dynasties - they typically levied tax and drafted troops but didn't intervene much in domestic affairs or customs. European colonies expansion was built on proselytize/imposing continental culture, and deliberately avoided integration in their colonies, stretching out a few decades of bloodshed into a few centuries. IMO that makes Euros "especially brutal oppressors/conquerors", not because Euros are inherently more savage but the logic of certain forms of conquest (made possible by confluence of factors) is sometimes bloodier than others.

Lack of plough animals doesn't extinguish the human creative spirit, it just slows it down a lot.

It is curious why bison were not domesticated. I did a bit of research and could not find a clear reason (some suggestions that maybe Aurochs lived in forests and smaller herds, and that may have made them easier to domesticate... but that seems weak).

I'm wondering how much is due to what I'd call the Harari perspective, in Homo Deus - that Eurasians also invented the "god-centric worldview package" that shifted the view of the world from a more animistic perspective (where all beings share the world and so treating animals in the absolutely horrific ways that domestication and agriculture requires is just unthinkable, since they are seen as other beings sharing the world with us) to the "gods and humans" perspective (where god created humanity, and then every other being is just subservient and lacks a soul and therefore can be exploited, murdered, treated like goods, etc).

Mesoamerican religions, despite all the human sacrifice, did see animals and plants as intrinsically valuable and spiritually significant. Native Americans in the North definitely did that too (and they had more exposure to bisons). That would perhaps have led them not to seek to domesticate animals.

It is curious (to me) that no culture emerged that even tried, though (that culture would likely have outcompeted everyone else).