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Daughter of Cernunnos said:
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I find mythology is an interesting subject because they typically have gone through a lot of cultural exchange already, seen in how there can be stories from one area that clearly mirror another in basic structure. I remember looking into fairy tales for a course and it's quite amazing how a basic story can be changed/reinterpreted by different cultures/places. For example, Beauty and the Beast has various related stories found across the globe ranging from numerous European sources to as far as China. There's a really interesting site that catalogues all these various interpretations if anyone is curious.

Also, given how many of those mythological stories originally were told orally it's hard to determine their actual exact origins or which version of the story is the most "accurate" in telling since stories change over time to fit different things. Even looking at the Greek Gods history you can note the changes and different interpretations they've gone through over time as their characterizations evolved.

Specifically, asian mythology probably also takes a lot from its neighbors imported through cultural exchange brought by emerging trade routes. There may be some original stories but probably many of the well-known ones today were influenced by that cultural exchange. Even their mention of religion faces local twists. Buddhism in Japan, while having its roots in Mahayana Buddhism, has various branches of it unique to Japan that incorporate more cultural ideals and the mythology taught also incorporates twists unique to Japan. Also, mythological deities are often inspired by similar deities from other cultures.
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From wiki on Buddhism in Japan said:
Iconographical evolution of the Wind God. Left: Greek wind god from Hadda, Afghanistan, second century. Middle: wind god from Kizil Caves, Tarim Basin, 7th century. Right: Japanese wind god Fūjin, 17th century.
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TL;DR - It's very hard to put mythology into strict cultural bubbles of ownership given how many were influenced by cultural exchange between different cultures. Trying to trace mythological "ownership" is also a wasted effort given how many were originally transmitted through oral tradition and not documented till later.
 
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piter_de_vries said:
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The Inca mainly died from European viruses. While the Spanish killed a good number the biggest killer for Inca civilizations was germs. For a group of people so good at medicine apparently they had no way to heal or recover from Small Pox and other diseases brought over and once a few people caught them it spread all over the empire and ended up crippling the Inca greatly.
 
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GayDemiBoy said:
The Inca mainly died from European viruses. While the Spanish killed a good number the biggest killer for Inca civilizations was germs. For a group of people so good at medicine apparently they had no way to heal or recover from Small Pox and other diseases brought over and once a few people caught them it spread all over the empire and ended up crippling the Inca greatly.
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Another problem was that it was they just finished a bloody civil war for the throne. Because smallpox took out the ruler and his rightful heir, the royal family was inbred making further succession confusing (in addition to a bastard child born outside of the royal family), and the one who was declared King was paranoid enough to start a fight he couldn't win. Which the various lands conquered by the Inca took as an opportunity to rebel. The end result was the deaths of even more fighting age men after having been ravaged by disease.

It almost sounds like something out of Old World history, doesn't it? The Inca was a warlike empire that still had hundreds of thousands of fighters at the time they where conquered.
 
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WinchesterPremium said:
Another problem was that it was they just finished a bloody civil war for the throne. Because smallpox took out the ruler and his rightful heir, the royal family was inbred making further succession confusing (in addition to a bastard child born outside of the royal family), and the one who was declared King was paranoid enough to start a fight he couldn't win. Which the various lands conquered by the Inca took as an opportunity to rebel. The end result was the deaths of even more fighting age men after having been ravaged by disease.

It almost sounds like something out of Old World history, doesn't it? The Inca was a warlike empire that still had hundreds of thousands of fighters at the time they where conquered.
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People seem to unable to reconcile the fact that, simultaneously, natives put up a damn good fight against most colonizers, but also lost due to technological differences (and a bit of disease). Pretty much every single native American culture was more or less tactically capable as pretty much every colonizing empire. Centuries of history of War is a common theme of humanity everywhere, after all. At the end of the day, the only real question was who had better and more killing tools. A musket may have been slow to reload, but a miniboll could whizz through any armor and bounce around inside one's body cavities like an organ shredding pinball.
 
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