Could the Mississippi-Missouri river system have become a cradle of civilization?

I mean, the easiest option IMO would be to have some way of introducing horses to the continent earlier - we saw how IOTL that pigs and horses both exploded beyond their initial populations and "habitats".

So I'd suggest that a potential (relatively late, admittedly) PoD could be a Vinland-Lives scenario, effectively a larger group of Scandinavians and Northern Europeans make their way over for some reason - perhaps we see it happen earlier - it is suggested that Gunnbjörn Ulfsson found Greenland approx a century earlier, so we could have that bring our timeline forward and give ourselves a potential century more to not just develop some homesteads in Newfoundland, but further south and even around the St.Lawrence. Bringing over cattle, pigs, and horses and you've enough of a timeline that horses can spread to the Great Lakes, and onto the Mississippi, but because only the North is aware of the region, it isn't that wealthy, and can still be cut off or be isolated over time to vaguely isolate things.

Now, it should be noted that there were already significant groups, like Cahokia in the region, but if we introduce the horse about 4-5 centuries before Europe arrives, that's a substantial period for horses to spread, be adopted, and even help transform societies - like allowing easier upriver barge traffic.

Though an early introduction of horses would likely mean a collapse in the Bison herds. By 1840 Indian hunting of bison was already unstainable
 
I mean, the easiest option IMO would be to have some way of introducing horses to the continent earlier - we saw how IOTL that pigs and horses both exploded beyond their initial populations and "habitats".

So I'd suggest that a potential (relatively late, admittedly) PoD could be a Vinland-Lives scenario, effectively a larger group of Scandinavians and Northern Europeans make their way over for some reason - perhaps we see it happen earlier - it is suggested that Gunnbjörn Ulfsson found Greenland approx a century earlier, so we could have that bring our timeline forward and give ourselves a potential century more to not just develop some homesteads in Newfoundland, but further south and even around the St.Lawrence. Bringing over cattle, pigs, and horses and you've enough of a timeline that horses can spread to the Great Lakes, and onto the Mississippi, but because only the North is aware of the region, it isn't that wealthy, and can still be cut off or be isolated over time to vaguely isolate things.

Now, it should be noted that there were already significant groups, like Cahokia in the region, but if we introduce the horse about 4-5 centuries before Europe arrives, that's a substantial period for horses to spread, be adopted, and even help transform societies - like allowing easier upriver barge traffic.
Every time this scenario comes up, people jump to Old World introductions, and more specifically, Vinland. It's an AH cliche at this point. Even if by some miracle, it succeeds, then it will still take a very loooong time to introduce horses, and diseases either won't spread fast enough, leave the population levels too low for endemic disease, a major problem for natives IOTL, who had epidemics long after first contact, or will diverge from strains in the Old World, leaving natives vulnerable to another massive dieoff. If death levels are at 99% instead of 90%, I'd be surprised if agricultural societies survived. Plus beasts of burden are not needed for civilization, they might help with some things, but how did Mesoamerica and the Andes accomplish what they did? Just get another crop there, they were already pretty close to the OP's definition.
 
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Though an early introduction of horses would likely mean a collapse in the Bison herds. By 1840 Indian hunting of bison was already unstainable
If anything this will either force a higher usage of horses and other livestock, or an agricultural lifestyle, both of which would improve populations.
 
Llama carts
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I mean, the easiest option IMO would be to have some way of introducing horses to the continent earlier - we saw how IOTL that pigs and horses both exploded beyond their initial populations and "habitats".
That's not really a cradle of civilization though, that's more like how Europe developed.

Personally, I think what @JSilvy and @Revachah mentioned up thread are the most interesting aspects of this. JSilvy's China comparison is quite apt, there's a lot of similar features to the Mid West and North China Plain. I'd go even further with the comparison, the Eastern Agricultural Complex can serve as the same type of starter crop package to China's Millet package. The Three Sisters will inevitably move north, and Maize agriculture will almost certainly supplant aspects of the EAC as it did OTL, and that's okay. Parts of it will remain though, and no one detracts China as a cradle of civilization because they adapted different crops over millet. The problem is, what I just said is pretty much OTL, and we know where that went. The thing that in my opinion would make the biggest change is domestication of Wild Rice (Zizania) and the American Groundnut (Apios Americana). Between those two the Mississippian complex have a fantastic and nutritional crop package (and if we want to continue that China analogy, we have something akin to rice and soybeans). Those two combined with the existing EAC, and the later addition of the Three Sisters would make for a huge shift in the population density there.

If we return to Peccary as Revachah brought up, pig and rice polyculture works incredibly well, and Peccary can fill that niche along with wild rice if they move north along with the Three Sisters. Ducks add to that mix, and suddenly we're looking more and more like China. There's other additions that would probably come along as well over time, such as fish and crustacean polyculture.*

There's obviously some other additions that would be nice besides that. Moose would work as fantastic beasts of burden on these Rice Paddies, Sheep or Goats for clothing (I personally favour Bighorn sheep over JSilvy's Mountain Goats, but either works), potentially Bison or Deer too. I of course have a soft spot for Wapiti as well... But ultimately as others have pointed out, none of these animals are remotely essential. You can develop a dense agricultural society without them, but they are nice addons if you have them. Zizania and Apios Americana would be the biggest game changers though.

*If it isn't obvious at this point, Rice polyculture is an academic research interest of mine.
 
Now, I think a question we haven't really gotten to yet is what the relationship would be with the colonial powers. Perhaps as Cortez heard about the empire on the mainland in Mexico, another conquistador-to-be in the Caribbean would be drawn to the Mississippi. As a result, you would probably see the Mississippians follow a similar direction to Mexico and bring the focus of Spanish colonization east, which would hinder the colonial ambitions of the French and English. The French would probably be first to the St Lawrence and the English would probably still settle in some of the lands east of the Appalachians, and both would likely form an alliance against Spain. In that case, the English and French would support the Mississippian natives in North America against the Spanish, a conflict which they would most likely win with Spain so stretched out. The Mississippians would likely become French or English vassals serving as a buffer between their colonies and Spain. Perhaps they would become a semi-autonomous entity of the British Empire and may westernize like the Five Civilized Tribes. It is unlikely they would industrialize early on, as they would likely primarily serve the British/French by providing natural resources. However, as time passes and the developing world begins to catch up, the Mississippians would likely return as a rising power in the Americas, competing primarily with Mexico and Brazil most likely.
First we must consider butterflies on Mesoamerica, the Carribean, and the rest of the Americas in the Pre-Columbian era, and the climactic changes having millions more people is going to entail. Then we can discuss conquistadors.
 
I do also think that it is noteworthy that most places had some sort of domesticate in the form of sheep, goats, and pigs before domesticating bovids. I'd say probably the best POD in that case would be the domestication of the mountain goat (which I use in my own TL), and perhaps also the bighorn sheep (slightly more difficult as information on their dominance hierarchies vary) and the peccary. I think a good realistic package of domestic animals for North America that would be most similar to Eurasia would be the mountain goat (goat), bighorn sheep (sheep), peccary (pig), bison (cow), turkey (chicken), and American species of ducks and geese as well as... You could also perhaps throw in caribou, elk, white-tail deer, prairie chickens, and rabbits.
For this reason, my favorite starting off point when talking about buffing the Americas is generating a viable native agricultural complex in the Southwest, from whence it can easily spread into areas where civilizations could domesticate mountain goats, peccaries and bighorn sheep. Make nipa grass an annual and it can be the cornerstone crop of a package that would include tepary beans, little or Arizona barley, amaranth, chia and sunflower and I feel like that would be a good start.
 
First we must consider butterflies on Mesoamerica, the Carribean, and the rest of the Americas in the Pre-Columbian era, and the climactic changes having millions more people is going to entail. Then we can discuss conquistadors.
Of course. I was simply extending the timeline of the discussion.

In several other comments, I discussed how a powerful Mississippian civilization would effectively dominate the surrounding areas due to its massive population, expanse, fertile land, navigability, and therefore greater ease of achieving unity. It would effectively be the China of the New World, probably holding about a third of the population. Also, unlike the Andeans who were limited by their geography and distance, the Mississippians would come in contact with the Mesoamericans.

Although to add to that, I imagine the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean would effectively be the Mediterranean and South China Sea rolled into one. Mississippia would likely navigate primarily by river, so would be good at building boats, a skill which may translate into voyaging the intracoastal waterway. Mississippian merchants would come into contact with the Mesoamericans (as well as the Caribbeans), connecting the two civilizations. This would also make the Mesoamericans (and probably especially the Mayans of the Yucatan Peninsula) greater seafarers, as well. Overall, I imagine they would become much more technologically advanced than the OTL Mesoamericans due to the larger population and range of environments to innovate from.

As for domesticates, I don't think they are necessary, but if you were to give the Mississippians mountain goats, bighorn sheep, peccaries, bison, and horses (shameless Tahkoxia plug), they would probably become at least as populous and advanced as the contemporary Chinese civilizations.

EDIT: Also to respond to @Gwyain, while I think Zizania/manoomin/wild rice would be an excellent crop particularly around wetlands, I don’t think it would play the same role as traditional rice, given that the latter has a much higher caloric yield per acre (albeit not as high as maize, potatoes, or sweet potatoes).

As for the elk/wapiti, I would also include the caribou/reindeer, since we actually have a precedent of semidomestication for them.

Even though I’ve included moose for the purpose of zizania farming in my own TL, I think moose is complicated. If it were domesticated, it would have to be with serious effort and in an untraditional way. Obviously less-social creatures like cats and foxes have been domesticated before, but it would have to be a special and deliberate effort (less like the cats and more like the foxes). I think a way fo achieve this would be for wealthy individuals to keep moose as pets and over time selectively breed them.
 
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@JSilvy wild rice isn’t a good proxy for oryza rice cultures.

Even when heavily managed, hybridized and modified wild rice cultivation in California you get only 214 calories per meter sq vs 1482 calories per meter sq with rice.

Sweet potato/Apios/Corn/Gourd/Osage “breadfruit”/tlalcacahuatl (peanut) are very well rounded protein and fat rich food staples.

I’d also argue that a tigernut/chufa of local origin would be prime for very swampy areas as a food in high water tables and excellent fodder for peccary, turkeys, deer. Owens Valley tribes independently cultivated it.

This crop despite being minimally altered* produces more calories per meter sq than any other food crop on earth at 3290 calories.

*I only know of a dozen varieties mostly in Burkina Faso and traditionally 1 in Spain until like 5 years ago
 
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Now, I think a question we haven't really gotten to yet is what the relationship would be with the colonial powers. Perhaps as Cortez heard about the empire on the mainland in Mexico, another conquistador-to-be in the Caribbean would be drawn to the Mississippi. As a result, you would probably see the Mississippians follow a similar direction to Mexico and bring the focus of Spanish colonization east, which would hinder the colonial ambitions of the French and English.
I don't know about this. Spain getting good luck against both Aztecs and Inca was a little improbable, and while Spain could seize a port or two, conquering inland might be a little difficult. Of course, so much depends on the local political situation. The Mississippi-Missouri Basin could be unified into an empire, or it might be a collection of states each about the size of a modern US state.
The French would probably be first to the St Lawrence and the English would probably still settle in some of the lands east of the Appalachians, and both would likely form an alliance against Spain.
The entire concept of "settle" is likely to be far different than OTL when the St. Lawrence could easily have a population several times as dense as OTL, to say nothing about what the east coast south of there might have. You can't simply settle in a country occupied by powerful native civilisations. In that case, colonialism becomes a matter of proxies to exploit and use so things look more like India or the West Indies. You'd probably see a few mixed-race/mestizo countries in the areas most favourable to European settlement (which in the Southeast might look more Northeastern Brazil or the Caribbean in demographics).
It is unlikely they would industrialize early on, as they would likely primarily serve the British/French by providing natural resources. However, as time passes and the developing world begins to catch up, the Mississippians would likely return as a rising power in the Americas, competing primarily with Mexico and Brazil most likely.
If we take the Mississippian heartland as the core of a China-like civilisation, they have a real potential to "pull a Meiji" since they have both coal (Appalachia) and iron (Alabama) in close proximity and a motive to develop a water transportation network given their history and no doubt pre-existing network. Maybe they'd end up like Bengal OTL but they could just as much modernise and emerge as a dominant world power.
 
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Has anyone considered that paradoxically the Mississippi-Missouri may have been a little too hospitable to be the cradle of a civilization. After all, in the Old World no indigenous civilizations appeared along the Rhine, Danube, Dnieper or Volga rivers, even though they flow through very farmable territory and the people there have access to the full range of Eurasian domesticates.

Civilizations as generally understood (i.e. urbanism, literacy, monumental construction, large-scale political organization) seem to appear where there is a sharp distinction between fertile and infertile land, and a need for some large-scale labour-intensive activity (e.g. irrigation in Mesopotamia, flood control on the Yellow River) to drive large-scale organization. Likewise in the Americas, the Mesoamerican civilizations were based around terracing and raised-bed agriculture -productive but labour-intensive and once you've cut your terraces, moving becomes a major hassle.

If you have a farming complex that works pretty much anywhere in the Mississippi Valley, it's possible that the area will end up like pre-Roman Gaul - lots of farming villages but no major urban centres and only loose political organisations. It's hard to build an empire when the lower orders respond to your tax demands by simply moving to the next valley over and farming there instead. So what could drive population concentration and large-scale organization in the Mississippi valley? Flood control?
 
After all, in the Old World no indigenous civilizations appeared along the Rhine, Danube, Dnieper or Volga rivers, even though they flow through very farmable territory and the people there have access to the full range of Eurasian domesticates.
I'm not sure this is true. There were some highly sophisticated Neolithic and early Bronze Age societies in the Danube and Dniester basins that built very large settlements. The main difficulty from my reading seems to have been that the rise of horse-riding steppe societies made these untenable, because they could simply extract more resources from steppe lands than farmers could, and so we don't know enough about them to understand how they worked. Incidentally, this means that a domesticate-short Mississippi-Missouri civilization could evolve in some rather interesting directions, quite different than anything seen in Eurasia or in history.

If you have a farming complex that works pretty much anywhere in the Mississippi Valley, it's possible that the area will end up like pre-Roman Gaul - lots of farming villages but no major urban centres and only loose political organisations. It's hard to build an empire when the lower orders respond to your tax demands by simply moving to the next valley over and farming there instead. So what could drive population concentration and large-scale organization in the Mississippi valley? Flood control?
Look at the Missouri instead. The Missouri flows through steppe land which, while theoretically good farmland, suffers from a shortage of water, making irrigation very important. Nowadays that's done by tapping groundwater, but that's unlikely to be viable for a hypothetical *Mississippian civilization. In fact, this creates a situation very similar to that of Mesopotamia, where the farmable lands close to the river were haloed by a penumbra of steppe lands that proved important for the later history and development of civilization there. The Mississippi-Ohio basin could then be somewhat analogous to, say, the Ganges basin compared to the Indus basin in India, that is overall superior but 'civilized' later.
 
If you have a farming complex that works pretty much anywhere in the Mississippi Valley, it's possible that the area will end up like pre-Roman Gaul - lots of farming villages but no major urban centres and only loose political organisations. It's hard to build an empire when the lower orders respond to your tax demands by simply moving to the next valley over and farming there instead. So what could drive population concentration and large-scale organization in the Mississippi valley? Flood control?
Absolutely flood control. I could easily see that motivating civilization on the alluvial plane of the lower Mississippi.
 
Bringing something over from the other sub-thread; What's the chances of Crocodilopolis-style Alligator worship/ritualised gator wrasslin'?
 
Heck, that's what happened IOTL, except they did have major urban centres and tighter political organizations.
Additionally, I think a Mississippian city would easily be able to beat out all other pre-Columbia cities in terms of population. The trick to having a massive city is having a major hub in or between heavily populated areas that is politically/economically significant and relatively easy to get to. With the Mississippi and its tributaries being easily navigable and with the basin as a whole supporting a large population, you'd probably have at least one Mississippian city breaking the 500,000 mark.
 
Certainly both. Though I do wonder what the effect of a Dust Bowl during pre-Columbian times will have.

Yes,
Periodic droughts have always affected human civilization.
However, the "Dirty Thirties" "Great Drought" was a by-product of the First World War. During the war, both the Canadian and American governments encouraged farmers to plow new lands on the edges of existing farmland. Unfortunately of those lands (e.g. Palliser's Triangle in Southwestern Alberta) were so dry that they only grew crops during the wettest of years. Fortunately 1914 were among the wetter years on record, so crops were plentiful, but when a dry cycle returned, those arid lands in the North American "Dust Bowl" had to be abandoned. The 1930s drought also affected the Ukraine where millions starved to death.

The Fraser River was also "strip-mined" of fish during the early 20th century because tin cans finally allowed edible fish to be stored and shipped for longer periods of timel
 
Both Merrick and workable goblin made some good points about the Mississippi River Valley being too fertile.
If subsistence farmers can make a comfortable living on the vast arable land, there is little incentive for them to submit to a local cheiftan or lord or priest.

The Nile River is surrounded by harsh desert on both sides and seasonal floods always left peasant farmers vulnerable to famine. They also needed gov't surveyors to redraw farm boundaries after every spring flood.
The Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys are also surround - East and West - by harsh deserts. They also suffer rainfall at the wrong time to best crop yields, so priests and kings who owned grain silos quickly became the most powerful people in the land. Only starving peasants would sell their souls into the form of slavery needed to dig lengthy irrigation ditches.
Note how all three civilizations built massive mounds, pyramids, ziggerats to keep grain silos above flood waters.

I submit that humans only "civilize" in times of famine, fires, riots or mud-slides. Consider how all the various Mongol expansions out of Central Asia were driven by famines. Back around 400 years after Christ, the Krakatoa Volcano caused a volcanic winter that drastically dropped temperatures world-wide. When Mongolian herds died off, they raided westwards, forcing Germanic tribes to invade the collapsing Roman Empire. Part of the reason the Roman Empire was collapsing was that they had expanded too far into marginal farm lands (e.g. Lebanon), but crop yields dropped when temperatures dropped. Mongols were closely followed by the Plague of Justinian (probably bubonic) which killed off thousands of mal-nourished Europeans. This short cold snap so weakened the Byzantine and Persian Empires that the new Muslim religion was able to rapidly expand into the power vacuum after 700 AD.
 
To respond to @Gwyain, while I think Zizania/manoomin/wild rice would be an excellent crop particularly around wetlands, I don’t think it would play the same role as traditional rice, given that the latter has a much higher caloric yield per acre (albeit not as high as maize, potatoes, or sweet potatoes).
Wild rice isn’t a good proxy for oryza rice cultures.

Even when heavily managed, hybridized and modified wild rice cultivation in California you get only 214 calories per meter sq vs 1482 calories per meter sq with rice.
I don't think using modern rice yields is an entirely fair comparison for wild rice. Zizania is still not really fully domesticated yet and has only been truly cultivated for around 40 years, and its yields continue to increase. I'm not sure we know what its actual yields are yet. Besides which, cereal yields themselves have vastly improved over the past several hundred years, which also doesn't make for a fair comparison when we're talking pre-modern yields. For example, oats and barley historically had higher yields per hectare than wheat, but today wheat yields nearly 2 tonnes more per hectare than the other two. My point here is that modern crop yields vary dramatically from historical yields and can't always be extrapolated backwards all that well. For that reason I think its safe to say that pre-modern Zizania is probably close enough in terms of yields to Oryza to call it comparable, at least for purposes of founder crops.

But ultimately I don't think Zizania alone is transformative, cereals need a good pulse to pair with, and Apios Americana fits that bill. Its Nitrogen fixing as all legumes are, does well in moist soil (of say, a rotated rice paddy), and its a tuber. Individually both crops are nice, but together in one package they compliment each other tremendously.
Even though I’ve included moose for the purpose of zizania farming in my own TL, I think moose is complicated. If it were domesticated, it would have to be with serious effort and in an untraditional way. Obviously less-social creatures like cats and foxes have been domesticated before, but it would have to be a special and deliberate effort (less like the cats and more like the foxes). I think a way fo achieve this would be for wealthy individuals to keep moose as pets and over time selectively breed them.
I'll admit Moose would make an unusual case. Using Larson and Fuller's model of domestication pathways, I don't think either the commensal pathway or prey pathway are likely, which leaves the directed pathway as the only option. Even though moose aren't particularly social, they're not anti-social or particularly territorial, and the directed pathway led to the domestication of the similarly non-social donkey. The directed pathway (for herbivores) has always come after other (herbivore) domestications though, so there needs to be a founder species first, for which I favour Peccary and Bighorn Sheep.

The problem is, neither of those range close to the Mississippi. @Merrick raises a good point about the Mississippi being perhaps too verdant for a cradle to develop in, and as @AnonymousSauce mentioned, the Southwest might be more suitable for initial development of agriculture (and notably has both Peccary and Bighorns). The Mississippi is definitely a strong contender once things get kicked off, but it is worth discussing whether it is most suitable as a source.
 
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