Mexico is in North America, buddy.

The UN scheme deliberately uses the term "Northern America" to differentiate it from the continent of a similar name. The second sentence on the wiki page says as much:

> Note that the continent of North America comprises the intermediate regions of the Caribbean, Central America, and Northern America.

The UN uses that scheme because Mexico is part of the Latin America region and makes more sense grouped with them for statistical purposes than with the US and Canada.

Even if you interpret my comment to mean something other than what I meant, what I said is still true: Large parts of North America had no cities prior to European settlement.

Like everything in archaeology, that depends on your definitions. Restricting the scope to the lower 48 for sanity and taking Michael Smith's attributes of urbanism (a good default starting point), a good chunk of the US had pre-columbian urbanism. The southwest and southeast are inarguable. The Midwest had similar urban agglomerations on a smaller scale. The PNW and California (aside from the bits already described by 'the southwest') displayed most attributes aside from "true agriculture", which is a silly eurocentric concept anyway. That leaves the Northeast where I'm simply not familiar enough with the archaeology to comment.

Florida, possibly a bit of the plains, and the upper northeast could be said to lack cities, sure. That's a far cry from how I understand your statement. What am I missing here?

Canada? There were a few cities in what is now southern Ontario but AFAIK that's about it.

Is there a point be made by including areas that continue to lack cities and urbanization even today? I was assuming that you were making a point about pre-contact demography in North America being unique in some way. If you were just stating random characteristics it shares with every other continent, my mistake I guess?

Umm... Canada is highly urbanized.

I give up.

Sounds like you understood him perfectly well, then. Not sure why all this writing was necessary in that case.

Because Mexico is in North America, despite what Colin said? Seems worth clarifying.

After a tour de force comment like the one at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27639407 I'm inclined to want more writing from this person, not less.

Most people in the world don't seem to have any problem with distinguishing North-America-the-Continent from North-America-the-Region depending on context. For example in my native tongue there's not even a way of phrasing them differently. Yet humans can somehow disambiguate the two just fine.