AHC: native Americans of 1492 have tech level of Australian aborigines

raharris1973

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So what if the Amerindians had no metallurgy, no masonry, no writing, no states and no extensive agriculture just some gardening and aquaculture.

Could this plausibly be a trajectory of the Amerindians after the crossover from beringia. What happens when Europe encounters natives with no empires and only shells and feathers for ornamentation.

We've done empty America before and Harry turtledove did hominid America in "a different flesh" but this is a little different.

Can this even happen and what would be different about later colonization of the Americas if it did?
 
So what if the Amerindians had no metallurgy, no masonry, no writing, no states and no extensive agriculture just some gardening and aquaculture.

Could this plausibly be a trajectory of the Amerindians after the crossover from beringia. What happens when Europe encounters natives with no empires and only shells and feathers for ornamentation.

We've done empty America before and Harry turtledove did hominid America in "a different flesh" but this is a little different.

Can this even happen and what would be different about later colonization of the Americas if it did?
highly unlikely given the material culture of proto-Native Americans in Siberia, Aboriginals are so because of a 45k expanse of isolation.
 

raharris1973

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What did the former have technologically or culturally that the latter did not? Serious question, not second guessing here.
 

Isaac Beach

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On the Aboriginal end, part of their failure to advance technologically aside the whole desert thing was that even in the more livable coastal areas they were almost exclusively nomadic. Very few Aboriginal tribes were sedentary and so with natively agriculturally useful plants practically nonexistent there was no one with the lifestyle to domesticate a wild plant either. They had what they needed moving from place to place, I don't know much about Native Americans but I don't think this was the case there.
 
Aborigines weren't really "nomadic" in the sense of having no defined territories. Different tribes did have clearly defined territories that they stuck to, only moving around within that territory.

In any case, the lack of Australian agriculture wasn't due to nomadism(that didn't stop any other Neolithic group settling down) but the fact that Australia is frankly a crap place for agriculture. Europeans were barely able to pull it off with 10,000 years of farming experience and an entire planet's worth of crops to choose from.
 
Forgetting the plausibility of it for a moment, if this were the case colonization would be drastically different. There would be no empires like the Aztec or Inca to accumulate large sums of wealth to draw in Spaniards and other Europeans, nor are there empires like them providing a native bureaucracy where Europeans could simply swap out the leadership.

If there is no widespread agriculture, then there are no recognizable maize, potatoes, squashes, sunflowers, cocoa, coca, peppers, and most importantly tobacco. Also no domesticated llamas, alpacas, or turkeys, but that's a smaller issue in the big picture of things. Without this huge package of domesticated plants to bring back to the Old World, European populations might have a hard time growing.

The native peoples will still die en masse to Old World diseases, but it would take longer for these diseases to spread. OTL, places like the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the Mississippi basin were densely populated, perfect conditions for new diseases to spread far and wide and fast. Without agriculture, the whole continent will only be able to support a fraction of its OTL population, and that smaller population will be more thinly spread out. This could mean Europeans would rely on imported labor even earlier and on a larger scale.

On the other hand, without mountains of precious metals and gems already dug up and ready for the taking, without native governments to more easily supplant, without a host of food and cash crops available, and with an even tinier native population to trade with or enslave, I think a lot of colonization in the West is stillborn. It will gradually happen, but not nearly as quickly as OTL. Europe in general is going to be poorer for longer, since it won't be able to exploit the massive amounts of capital generated from the New World, which will stunt its population growth, economic growth, and probably even industrialization. Demographically, there would be even lower numbers of Indian and mestizo populations, but also a significantly higher African population from imported slaves/indentured servants.


Oh I almost forgot, but quinine is also derived from a native plant, though I'm not sure how much humans have influenced its natural evolution. It's possible this plant is never harvested or its properties never discovered, and if that's the case the combination of lack of capital and anti-malarial drugs means that large scale African colonialism just isn't going to happen.
 
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Isaac Beach

Banned
Aborigines weren't really "nomadic" in the sense of having no defined territories. Different tribes did have clearly defined territories that they stuck to, only moving around within that territory.

In any case, the lack of Australian agriculture wasn't due to nomadism(that didn't stop any other Neolithic group settling down) but the fact that Australia is frankly a crap place for agriculture. Europeans were barely able to pull it off with 10,000 years of farming experience and an entire planet's worth of crops to choose from.

Excuse me, yes. That is what I meant. Each Aboriginal nation did have boundaries that they moved around within, yes.
 

raharris1973

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Was there a portion of Amerindians at about the same general tech level as aborigines, or were practically all Amerindian groups of OTL ahead of the aborgines?
 
Was there a portion of Amerindians at about the same general tech level as aborigines, or were practically all Amerindian groups of OTL ahead of the aborgines?
It depends on how you define "ahead". No Amerindian group ever invented a tool as ingenious as the boomerang for example. But I think when it get's down to it maybe Patagonian nations were the closest to the Australians. I could be wrong though.
 
Was there a portion of Amerindians at about the same general tech level as aborigines, or were practically all Amerindian groups of OTL ahead of the aborgines?

Fuegians (Selk'nam, etc.). There's even theories that based on their culture and physical appearance, which are distinct from most every other Amerindian group, they had genetic input from Australia (or Melanesia) tens of thousands of years ago when the Americas were settled.

It depends on how you define "ahead". No Amerindian group ever invented a tool as ingenious as the boomerang for example. But I think when it get's down to it maybe Patagonian nations were the closest to the Australians. I could be wrong though.

Which ones? The pre-Mapuche ones, I'd assume you mean? Because Mapuche society is definitely what would be considered "ahead" by any means.
 
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