Americas equal to Europe?

Yun-shuno

Banned
So with a POD of 50,000 BC can the Amerindians have a culture and technological base roughly equal to Europe? Jared Diamond said that the most advanced Indians were about 3,000 years behind. If you have an early and more expansive settlement of the new world and maybe a surviving population of American horses can you achieve Europe 1490 levels of civilization by 1490 AD?
 
That's wasn't the POD. I wanted an Amerindian civilization that barring ASB was roughly equal to Europe.

I am not an expert on aboriginals but maybe have the horse not go instinct or have the cow migrate to the Western Hemisphere like you said, but also have tons of trade between multiple cultures. Trade allows a large exchange of ideas and technology and if you have civilisations that differ a lot, the better. Heterogeneity and freedom for the people tend to allow more exchanges of ideas and tech between cultures and polities. Try to have a large diversity of cultures in the Americas that allow freedom of thought so science can flourish.
 

trurle

Banned
So with a POD of 50,000 BC can the Amerindians have a culture and technological base roughly equal to Europe? Jared Diamond said that the most advanced Indians were about 3,000 years behind. If you have an early and more expansive settlement of the new world and maybe a surviving population of American horses can you achieve Europe 1490 levels of civilization by 1490 AD?
Reference to early contact theories:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact_theories

As about POD, i would opt for early colonization. For example, let one of the rafts which IOTL colonized Australia 40000 B.P. to deviate into Northern Pacific. And have an incredibly periodical rains plus one curious and stupid cetacean across the course to keep rafters alive during multi-months journey. If done right, American caravels may discover bronze-era Europe someday. And will of course blame the slower European progress to the lack of the potatoes.;)
 
50,000 years is a long time. Lots of time to get ahead, fall behind, get cleared out by steppe nomads or infectious disease, or even achieve nuclear fusion. So much time, such little men. These questions are too big for any of us to give something more than a shrug.

What you're asking is whether a butterfly or two is enough to change the outcome of 10-100 to a 55-55. I personally don't think you can throw a big enough wrench into the prehistory of mankind to get the sort of outcome that would satisfy our need to make right the wrongs of the past.
 
Some sort of earlier transatlantic contact, something that allows the cultures of the Western Hemisphere to connect to the civilizations of Eurasia-Africa and learn from them and (not incidentally) avoid becoming particularly vulnerable disease, would be necessary.

The Americas were catching up to Africa, even Eurasia, at some speed: Literacy had emerged, states and empires were forming, technologies were advancing. It's just that the Americas were still behind, hindered by starting in isolation from smaller populations. It was a race to avoid catastrophe, waged valiantly by the hemisphere's indigenous population, that ended up being lost.
 
I'd think you would need a (likely ASB) POD of having something similar to wheat or barley (maize wasn't quite as handy) native to the Americas, and more big domestic animals. Plus, you might need to get people to the Americas a lot sooner... humans were in the Fertile Crescent practically from the time they left Africa and had a lot longer to experiment with agriculture. Humans got to the new world a lot later and had a lot less time...
 
The best I can think of is having better domestication candidates, preferably some draft animals. This is far from a sure thing though.
 
POD's way too far back to have any direct impact on North America. Humans only started crossing the land bridge at the earliest 25,000 years ago or thereabouts, and if you accelerate that, it's probably because you're rushing more humans across the rest of the world, too, which only strengthens everywhere else at the same time as the Americas. Part of the issue with North America is that, in the Old World, you had a lot of massive river systems in warm areas where agricultural societies collected and flourished. It's no coincidence that you got early societies in the Tigris-Euphrates, Indus and Nile regions, where the soil was good for farming. Once you get those critical masses of people, they tend to feed on each other. Let's leave aside the idea of innovation; all humans have the capacity to innovate, but greater population density means more capacity for trade and idea-sharing. North America doesn't really have a major river for facilitating a critical population mass at the time humans are showing up; humans there still made huge leaps in things like agricultural practices but the population densities just don't seem to have been as huge. The course of the Mississippi wasn't established until about 12,000 years ago, when the last ice age ended. The Amazon is there for your South America needs, but it's one of the last places humans reach.

You could posit a timeline where settlement patterns are such in the North American south that as the Ice Age wanes and the Mississippi begins to form, hunter-gatherers and nomads in the area migrate to the river and begin farming maize. You could also have the Balsas River down in the Tehuacan Valley attract humans a couple thousand years earlier. Either way, you had maize popping up in the Balsas area about 9,200 years ago; have it spread to the proto-Mississippian civilization and let the river attract a critical mass of peoples using the river to farm maize and fuel the roots of an early sedentary society.

Maybe the earlier start allows them to domesticate some sort of indigenous pack animal, like the shrub-ox, instead of it going extinct 11,000 years ago.
 
My take:
The agricultural package DValdron described in "Land of Ice and Mice" is developed during the first peopling of the American Arctic in the mid-late fourth millennium BCE, and in turn kicks the development of a Boreal wetland parallel package also discussed in that timeline, with domestication of moose, wild rice, cattails and arrowhead. Say the Dall sheep is also domesticated in the Arctic, creating another local domesticate that can in time adapt to more southerly climes (good for the Southwest when they get there together o slight after maize, for instance).
By 2000 BCE you have the northern half of North America as agricultural perhaps with bronze and experimenting with iron, connected with the nascent civilizations of mesoamerica by trade routes through the Southwest and along the Mississippi, which disseminate crops and tech all over the continent. Coastal sea trade develops all along the Pacific coast and bring contact with the Andes, all the western face of the Americas gets potatoes and metallurgy, as large polities develop in the Mississippi basin thanks to enviable trading position. Naval technology passes to the Caribbean and the Atlantic, maybe through Mesoamerica. By 1000 BCE, you have settled or semisettled, somewhat metal-using societies from Greenland to Cape Horn (some already having decent iron), all interconnected by coastal navigation and big river basins, with cities in every region and diverse packages of crops and domesticates.
The POD also affects Arctic Eurasia, however, with cascading changes to the Old World. And needs lots of luck (early arctic peoples won't be as quick to develop metallurgy as DValdron's deems his Thule likely to, for example, which is a problem for the scenario).
 
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