Columbian Reversal?

Hello there. This thread is asking for answers, and then discussion, about what would have had to occur to make Native Americans able to discover and invade the Old World (successfully). What I would assume what held the Aztecs and Incas (the natives that didn't revere nature like North American tribes did) back was their lack of mining materials, chiefly iron. What do you think?

EDIT: The POD can be anywhere that makes sense. I don't expect the Cherokee to discover iron working a week before Columbus arrives and suddenly have a fleet of ironclads the next day.
 
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you need a lot more than iron. It would take a complete agricultural package so that civilization/specialization can occur, which means you need grain and livestock. And you need to get people to the Americas a lot sooner so they have time to do all that. And you need to slow down the old world somehow, since they've been developing agriculture/civilization since humanity left Africa, whereas humans were only in the new world roughly 20,000 years ago (yeah, it's debatable, but the best guess for now). All in all, it's a tall order...
 
A Columbian reversal is extremely difficult to pull off because you can't just buff up the Native Americans, you need to sabotage the Europeans-and keeping them undeveloped without also screwing over large chunks of Asia and Africa is hard.

I can't really think of a non-ASB way to do it off the top of my head, TBH. You may want to read Years of Rice and Salt for ideas.
 
Well, avoiding the extinction of some American domesticable megafauna such as Horses and North American Llamas would be helpful, though probably not enough.
The NA Arctic agriculture created by DValdron and, maybe more critically, the secondary Boreal american package could also help. If they appear some millennia earlier (in coincidence with earlier proto-Eskimo cultures instead of the Thule as per canon) they could give the *Americans possibility to colonize Arctic Eurasia (this actually happens to some degree in Land of Ice and Mice). However, I suppose that's cheating.
 
EDIT: The POD can be anywhere that makes sense. I don't expect the Cherokee to discover iron working a week before Columbus arrives and suddenly have a fleet of ironclads the next day.
If you're looking for a definitive, single PoD, I don't believe one exists. Several tonnes of the little buggers are needed.
 
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