AHC: Native Americans find the Old World first

Back in the day this crazy guy sailed from South America to Europe in an Incan Reed boat as pictured above. I would say some kind of crazy divergence in the Mayan Timeline.

If the classical Mayan did not collapse I think they could have done well. If they could connect to South America and trade they may eventually develop sufficient nautical technology to cross the big one. For motivation they might have pulled off some kind pilgrimage toward the East.

They could land in Spain where they would promptly be executed as witches.
 
The Polynesians who are suspected to have made contact with South America didn't have metallurgy either, am I right?

They didn't have metallurgy, but they had spent thousands of years developing their own long-range nautical tradition and exploring the Pacific. That's not something that any New World civilization is going to have either the desire or the means to develop easily. And the Polynesians started from the other end of the Pacific, where there are tons of tiny islands to navigate between; the eastern Pacific is much emptier, so any would-be explorer going that way would be likely to return empty-handed if at all.
 
Back in the day this crazy guy sailed from South America to Europe in an Incan Reed boat as pictured above. I would say some kind of crazy divergence in the Mayan Timeline.

If the classical Mayan did not collapse I think they could have done well. If they could connect to South America and trade they may eventually develop sufficient nautical technology to cross the big one. For motivation they might have pulled off some kind pilgrimage toward the East.

They could land in Spain where they would promptly be executed as witches.
I'll be honest, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. For starters, even if you averted the Classic Collapse, that'd only give them about 700 years of continued development to make gigantic ocean-crossing vessels. It took Europe longer than 700 years to achieve that and they had more motivation. What motivation would the Maya have? There's no religious reason to just go gallivanting off eastward into the blue. And why would the Spanish execute them as witches? It'd be clear to the Spaniards that they're foreigners of some sort, they were aware that there were non-Christian people around and if anything they'd be curious, not angry, about other people coming from the west.
 
I saw Thor Heyerdahl's museum in Oslo recently and while I did enjoy it (as I had been a fan of his as a young child), the tone the museum took in the explanatory material sounded nigh on identical to that I associate with conspiracy theorists. It was all a bit odd.

Worth a trip though if you are in Oslo, as you get to see the various craft (if restored)
 
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