Only a few countries have grown entirely based on immigration, Australia, New Zealand, and America among them.
I know what you mean by this, but just a fun fact I want to crowbar in:
Humans settled in Australia around 50-60,000 years ago, North America around 20,000 years ago, but when the East-Polynesians (who would become the Māori) settled in New Zealand, Oxford University was already 200 years old.
Right, these new worlds weren’t empty of humans, and I’ve addressed this in other posts. The difference is that those indigenous cultures never evolved far enough to be able to resist the onslaught of the far more technological alien invaders, so their cultures basically ended, and were replaced by the melting pot cultures that came after. A lot of it wasn’t even due to advanced technologies like swords and armor and guns. Pathogens probably did at least half the work for the invaders.
Frankly, that same thing probably happened all over the planet, but it happened so far back that we don’t know about it. The conquering of the Americas and the Pacific nations, happened within our written history, so we’re aware of it, but the earliest indigenous populations probably suffered the same fate.
For instance, millennia ago, Modern Humans and Meanderthals co-existed, with Neanderthals being the older, and presumably indigenous culture, but Modern Humans eventually prevailed. Just knowing human nature as is we all do, it is doubtful that the Neanderthals simply died out quietly. At least in some places, they were almost certainly exterminated. People have been people for as long as there have been people, so it’s a pretty safe bet that at some stage, someone pointed to those people with the heavy brow-ridges, and invented a reason for murdering ALL of them.
After that, civilizations evolved, and isolated by lack of travel options, established their own local/regional cultures that were passed down to create the nations we have today.
America, Australia, etc. are following the same basic path as those ancient civilizations, we’re just here to witness this one, but ancient civilizations were probably just as genocidal in establishing their own cultures, if not worse.
I know what you mean by this, but just a fun fact I want to crowbar in: Humans settled in Australia around 50-60,000 years ago, North America around 20,000 years ago, but when the East-Polynesians (who would become the Māori) settled in New Zealand, Oxford University was already 200 years old.
Right, these new worlds weren’t empty of humans, and I’ve addressed this in other posts. The difference is that those indigenous cultures never evolved far enough to be able to resist the onslaught of the far more technological alien invaders, so their cultures basically ended, and were replaced by the melting pot cultures that came after. A lot of it wasn’t even due to advanced technologies like swords and armor and guns. Pathogens probably did at least half the work for the invaders.
Frankly, that same thing probably happened all over the planet, but it happened so far back that we don’t know about it. The conquering of the Americas and the Pacific nations, happened within our written history, so we’re aware of it, but the earliest indigenous populations probably suffered the same fate.
For instance, millennia ago, Modern Humans and Meanderthals co-existed, with Neanderthals being the older, and presumably indigenous culture, but Modern Humans eventually prevailed. Just knowing human nature as is we all do, it is doubtful that the Neanderthals simply died out quietly. At least in some places, they were almost certainly exterminated. People have been people for as long as there have been people, so it’s a pretty safe bet that at some stage, someone pointed to those people with the heavy brow-ridges, and invented a reason for murdering ALL of them.
After that, civilizations evolved, and isolated by lack of travel options, established their own local/regional cultures that were passed down to create the nations we have today.
America, Australia, etc. are following the same basic path as those ancient civilizations, we’re just here to witness this one, but ancient civilizations were probably just as genocidal in establishing their own cultures, if not worse.