I doubt natives would have knowledge of maps.
Eh, we can't be sure they'd take after the Australian natives.
I doubt natives would have knowledge of maps.
Can we introduce some dark religious background? Maybe the natives have some kind of pantheon that favors live human sacrifices and ritual warfare between large masses of slave-warriors. Some kind of Carthaginian element there would be fun to work with.
I'm not so sure.....what about that sociologist's theory, can't remember his name, that east-west landmasses produce more technology than north-south ones? Admittedly North America at least is closer to even than Africa, but even so.. And also, don't the current prevailing theories of economics indicate the areas rich in resources are more likely to stagnate?Who's to say that they wouldn't be discovering Europe? Norfth America has abundant resources..could they have been ahead of us? Though they might have had to be a wee bit more advanced to get to Europe than we had to be to get tehre--no reason to explore out that way, and contrary winds.
Still, Ceasar might have been more than a bit unhappy to have ships armed with cannons arriving in Imperial Rome...
Indeed. I don't think the nomads would survive as independent states, though there'd probably be independence movements by now. Otherwise, I see an unsatisfactory division between agricultural native states and European colonies. As for agriculture....I think yellowheat can be adapted for mass food by pure selective breeding, as old wheat was. And there maybe food crops we haven't identified as such. I'm considering doing a guesswork map of what modern America would look like.Personally, I agree with Hodgkin and Gill's ideas of parallel development, wherein the civilizations of the New World would have been similar to those in the Old. The areas around the New Nile and other great rivers would develop similar civilizations as one saw in ancient Egypt and China, nomadic herders in the Great Plains like those of Asia's steppes, feuding tribalist societies in the tropical south, and so forth. A rather antiquated theory with some inadequecies, but I believe it is a reasonable framework for any potential New World civilization.
As for your question, some random thoughs: I think the exploration of Americas would accelerate considerably. At the very least we could trade for maps with the natives. Also, don't forget the added incentive of plunder. The natives would have gathered, mined or crafted some goods ready for taking. On the other hand, either no or less slavery, as there would be enough potential workers in place already.
If the Americas had been colonized, do you think the American fauna would have been wiped out by these "Americans" as it was by European settlers? Or could they have domesticaded the buffalo or the mountain sheep*? Also, would agriculture ever be developed there? IOTL were the Europeans who brought wheat and other grains to America, and there almost no plant worth of cultivation.
Well it seems likely these natives would have domesticated the llamas- modern scientists did afterall so given enough time I'd guess the locals would too.
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What of the megafauna?
Could ANY of it have survived until modern times?
As I've said the Australians did a good job of it with their giant critters but the Americas are a bigger place and some of the animals there...they gave gunpowder armed Europeans a hard enough time let alone primitive natives.
What else could be useful in the Americas? Any special plants?
We never really bothered with native plants too much- except of course caca, which does the trick in its standard wild state- but given isolated people with only those plants to chose from might not some of them have developed into something useful? I mean...the original corn was pretty useless apparently, little better than grass, but the Mesopotamians over the millenia bred it into the useful stuff we have today.
Plants are particularly special. Lots of stuff out there which is edible and somewhat useful but not in a mass scale. Its hard to say what would have worked out in the long term...I mean over here in Europe there's lots of edible plants which we never bothered to domesticate and fully exploit to their maximum potential.
Once wild rice is discovered and domesticated in the upper New Nile region around the Five Inland Seas, it could form the basis of a thriving agricultural society supporting hundreds of thousands
~SNIP~ native Peruvians ~SNIP~