Kottke on Avatar

Jason Kottke is a well-known blogger who touches on a wide variety of interesting topics. A few days ago, he posted about Avatar, and his belief that the Na'vi would not be so technologically inferior to humans:

"It just doesn't add up. The Na'vi are too capable and live in an environment that is far too pregnant with technological possibility to be stuck in the Stone Age." (Full post)

I had been thinking on this topic as well, but came to an opposite conclusion:

a) The extreme fertility and bounty of the land would mean the Na'vi could easily survive as hunter-gatherers, especially with the flying ikran to make hunting over a large area much more productive

b) If hunting and gathering provides all a people's needs, they are unlikely to progress technologically

c) The connectedness of the Na'vi to all of the life around them, literally networked with the animals and plants would mean that they would be a lot less likely to clear the land, begin large scale agriculture, and end up more technologically advanced

d) Megafauna like the Hammerhead Titanothere would make farming open tracts of land and keeping the land cordoned off very difficult

I'm in the middle of a great book right now:
Guns, Germs and Steel, which tracks all the various seats of technological development across the world, across history and explains why certain cultures advanced technologically (such as China) and why others did not (such as Aboriginal Australians).

Development has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with resources and culture. I'm definitely no expert, so I would be very interested to read a piece by a cultural anthropologist on the Na'vi, but it seems likely to me that they would stay hunter-gatherers until external pressures force them to change.