There’s plenty to criticize, but if we’re lumping everything from eskimos to Aztecs together in a group to highlight their crimes, then why not hold Europeans accountable for everything in the Bible?
That's a great idea! Let's lump together all of Europe. For a
direct comparison. Hell, we can include all of Eurasia, since as a land mass it's all the same.
In the last several thousand years of Europe, ALL of Europe, cannibalism has been isolated to groups of starving people engaging in it as a last-resort survival activity. It has been universally condemned in EVERY European society, to the point where when Euros started thinking about true human universals, they thought it was one of the unbreakable taboos for any civilized society. Even in Asia, it existed beyond "last resort survival nutrition" only in tiny fringe societies of isolated jungle people.
In North and South America, cannibalism was a way of life, even for "civilized" groups like the Iroquois Confederation. It wasn't just the Aztecs, oh no. Not at all. Inuit women accused of witchcraft had their hearts eaten. The wise Anasazi cooked and ate human flesh. Mesoamerica, South America, the North American Southwest, the Northwest, the Northeast, the Southeast:
all had cannibals. Every single location's largest societies engaged in ritual cannibalism. This wasn't in some ancient prehistoric time. This was in 1200-1600 AD. That's the world the Spanish and English and French and Portuguese and Dutch walked into when they came to the "new world."
Primitive Europeans figured out not to eat each other by the time Herodotus was writing. They figured out smelting thousands of years before that. Europe is actually where copper smelting originates. People in what is now Serbia were making bronze ~7000 years ago, and it looks like bronze and tin metalworking were invented independently by a number of groups all over Eurasia. What's wild about the North American Indians is that none of them even figured out metalworking with lead and tin, even though ordinary cooking fires can melt these metals.
What explains the lack of smelting? I've got a pretty good idea: draft animals are really helpful for taking down trees and transporting lumber. They also make it easy to haul ore if you invent sledges, even before you have carts. If you can't make a big fire and a big pile of rocks, you can't make metalworking happen.
