Catching up on Jared's excellent "Lands of Red and Gold" timeline while I was home sick the past few days has got me thinking about the enormous potential shifts in society and development based on certain POD's. Of course, in LoRaG the mutation of a strain of yams allows the development of advanced agricultural societies in Australia, far more advanced than anything that developed there in OTL.
So, what sort of PODs could result in significantly more advanced American societies before contact with the Europeans? I could never quite make sense of the fact that the American societies were on the whole so much less advanced - after all resources are relatively abundant (if not too plentiful), there are a number of solid domesticable crops (although they perhaps don't led themselves to primitve cultivation as much as the middle-eastern founder crops,) and there is plenty of room for the creation and sustaining of large civilizations.
In my mind, there are two sorts of PODs for this type of thing:
Geographic/evolutionary PODs - these POD's occur long before humans appear in the America's, and concern the evolution of different crops, animal species etc. For instance, a better strain of wild rice (e.g. the Mississippi Rice TL) the no-extinction of american horses etc.
Cultural/human PODs - This category has a great potential for change, but since they are relatively arbitrary, its much harder to predict how they would come about and what effects they would have. Basically, this category includes anything is a result of human activity. So if in an alternate reality, some Native American sitting around gets a brilliant idea and that results in a more advanced society - that would fit in here.
One of the interesting possibilities for the second category I thought of would be if an artic blizzard wiped out the first (or better yet, the most successful) band of hunter gatherers that crossed the Bering strait, butterflying away most of Pre-columbian american history. Of course this is once again to unpredictable for an serious discussion.
So what sort of POD's would lead to more advanced Pre-Columbian societies. For the purposes of discussion assume there is a butterfly net in place (this is not the place to discuss whether Polynesians brought chickens to or from south america, etc.)
So, what sort of PODs could result in significantly more advanced American societies before contact with the Europeans? I could never quite make sense of the fact that the American societies were on the whole so much less advanced - after all resources are relatively abundant (if not too plentiful), there are a number of solid domesticable crops (although they perhaps don't led themselves to primitve cultivation as much as the middle-eastern founder crops,) and there is plenty of room for the creation and sustaining of large civilizations.
In my mind, there are two sorts of PODs for this type of thing:
Geographic/evolutionary PODs - these POD's occur long before humans appear in the America's, and concern the evolution of different crops, animal species etc. For instance, a better strain of wild rice (e.g. the Mississippi Rice TL) the no-extinction of american horses etc.
Cultural/human PODs - This category has a great potential for change, but since they are relatively arbitrary, its much harder to predict how they would come about and what effects they would have. Basically, this category includes anything is a result of human activity. So if in an alternate reality, some Native American sitting around gets a brilliant idea and that results in a more advanced society - that would fit in here.
One of the interesting possibilities for the second category I thought of would be if an artic blizzard wiped out the first (or better yet, the most successful) band of hunter gatherers that crossed the Bering strait, butterflying away most of Pre-columbian american history. Of course this is once again to unpredictable for an serious discussion.
So what sort of POD's would lead to more advanced Pre-Columbian societies. For the purposes of discussion assume there is a butterfly net in place (this is not the place to discuss whether Polynesians brought chickens to or from south america, etc.)
