Inca Empire (or another powerful pre-Columbian state) crosses Atlantic

This may be borderline ASB, but here goes.

Take a look at the following excerpt from Wikipedia.

Túpac Inca Yupanqui, the tenth Inca emperor, is said to have led an expedition lasting between nine months to a year into the Pacific Ocean around 1480, which discovered two islands.[95] It has been suggested that the islands he visited are the Galápagos,[95] or possibly Polynesian islands (Easter Island).[citation needed] The story says that he brought back gold, brass, and the skin and jaw of a horse, none of which would have been found on islands in the south Pacific.

POD: At the same time the Incan emperor does this in 1480, a rival state on the Atlantic coast decides to show off its sailing progress as well in a scenario similar to the US/USSR space race. So they explore east into the Atlantic...and wind up in Europe with a decent-sized fleet which demonstrates that they are a force to be reckoned with.

The Europeans (you can pick where they land) react to these guys and probably do some kind of diplomatic relations. Eventually, the natives start to get sick and the Europeans try to either send them back or heal them (unsuccessfully). 80% of the crew dies of issues unknown to either side and then they go back.

Alternatively, the New World exploration force has maybe 10 ships, of which only 1 goes ashore to see what's going on. The people on that ship gets sick and the other 9 go back to report what happened. Obviously, these foreigners are barbarians that they kill people who came in peace...

Continue on from there.
 
I think it's pretty unlikely any Meso-American culture reaches Europe, and certainly not for the reason of a 'space race' type analogy. It's debatable that the Inca had virtually any contact with civilizations outside of the South American continent (though recent genetic evidence suggests they may have had contact with some select Polynesians).

I think for Meso-America to discover Europe rather than vice versa needs some major butterflies OR ASB intervention. Perhaps if the Norse land more in Vinland and a civilization survives there, nautical knowledge and shipbuilding techniques needed to pass over the Atlantic could fall into the hands of Native Americans...

The Aztec likely, if certain changes were made earlier on, could have a ship capable of reaching Europe, but they're much more likely to make contact with the Tainos in the Caribbean, or the head along the coast somewhere into the Mexican Gulf or towards Venezuela and Guyana.
 
By the time the Europeans were set to cross the Atlantic, there was no Mesoamerican civilization with even broadly comparable navigational or boat-building technology, particularly not on the Atlantic side of the Americas. There's no way this could conceivably happen with a POD in the 15th century.

If you go back far enough (very far) it might be possible to precipitate the development of some kind of seafaring Mesoamerican culture capable of a trans-Atlantic journey, but it's an extreme long shot.
 
As indicated, you'd probably need a PoD or PoDs thousands of years previosuly - possibly even into the Ice Age - to create a fully indigenous civilization in Mexico, Central America, or South America that would have any reason to sail off across the Atlantic. Not only had an effective seagoing technology (or geographical understanding) not evolved, there were still oo many places in the new world where the civilizations could expand and look for trade/conquest opportunities. Either:

(1) Have populations and social evolution occur more rapidly in the new world, leading to radically different and more technologically adept MesoAmerican civilizations by the 1400's, or

(2) Create a PoD in which there is some earlier old world (Phonecian, Roman, Chinese, Islamic, etc, seafaring contact with the centers of New World civilization - just enough for native maritime technology and geographical awareness to grow, but not enough for the native civilizations to be overwhelmed or suffer disease-related dislocations from large scale contact with technologically superior cultures. Maybe a small maritime coastal colony survives for a generation or so before being forgotten and eventually assimilated into native culture. This would leave native people with an incipient maritime technology and the knowledge that there actually were lands across the eastern sea they could travel to.
 

Thande

Donor
I hesitate to use the tired old reflexive claim "it's ASB", but it pretty much is. The American Indians, or whatever you want to call them, had too many in-built geographic disadvantages to do this. Having said that, you can imagine loopholes like, for example, a more successful Vinland colony and Viking shipbuilding techniques being inherited by the local native groups or something...

Incidentally, this is a very old alternate history idea. Virtually as soon as the Americas were discovered and found to have inhabitants, Europeans started nervously realising that potentially they could have come the other way as conquerors through all the centuries when no-one suspected there was a continent there. For example, see this from 1732.
 
Yeah, barring centuries-old PODs the only ones with sea-going technology are the Incas, and they are on the wrong coast... (well, maybe if they got 100 extra years they could expanded and "civilize" Colombia-Venezuela, then sail on the Caribbean, then cross the Atlantic in... what? When Turtledove said that contact between the Americas and Europe was first established in the 20th century in his monumental Muslim bashing work "In high Places", did he specify what of the two shores made the trip?
 
If have heard of Tupaq Inka Yupanki's expedition before but all it seemed to discover was the uninhabited Galapagos. It seems most likely that if the expedition was to make contact with any people it would be the Polynesians (who themselves probably made contact with the Andeans in OTL), who could give them new crops and boatbuilding technology in exchange for Inka metal and textiles. But this would probably be too late to make a significant change in Andean history before the Spanish come.

If one wishes to go further back, I suggest one looks at the Middle Horizon state of Wari: It was much like Tawantinsuyu and it had large sailing rafts. They could quite easily make contact with the Zapotec and the Maya, both of which they could trade metal, ceramics, their own crops and textiles for new crops, foreign bird feathers and rubber. If one wants to make a stretch, one could have the Wari contact the Chumash who had, probably Polynesian-based, sewn plank canoes known as tomols, but to me it seems much more logical and likely that the Wari would contact the Polynesians, at first in their sailing reed rafts but soon in superior large sewn sailing watercraft. Importantly, the Wari in this scenario could easily be the people to discover New Zealand, given that the OTL Māori only discovered it in the late 13th century CE, while Wari of OTL collapsed around 1100 CE. This alone would enchorage further exploration, which could potentially lead to contact with Eastern Australia, where the Wari would be far ahead of the Indigenous Australians. If one wishes to push this scenario even further, let them get to Indonesia and come into contact with a civilization with much to offer the Wari, ferrous metallurgy, printing, gunpowder and knowledge of much of Eurasia, and the Wari much to offer it, new crops, fine textiles and knowledge of much of the Americas and Oceania.
 
Importantly, the Wari in this scenario could easily be the people to discover New Zealand, given that the OTL Māori only discovered it in the late 13th century CE, while Wari of OTL collapsed around 1100 CE. This alone would enchorage further exploration, which could potentially lead to contact with Eastern Australia, where the Wari would be far ahead of the Indigenous Australians. If one wishes to push this scenario even further, let them get to Indonesia and come into contact with a civilization with much to offer the Wari, ferrous metallurgy, printing, gunpowder and knowledge of much of Eurasia, and the Wari much to offer it, new crops, fine textiles and knowledge of much of the Americas and Oceania.

I think this would make a good timeline. Let's say exploration starts in 700, they find New Zealand in 750, Australia in 770, and Indonesia in 800. I don't have time to work on it though, and I'm not familiar enough those cultures to pull it off. Between 730 and 750 they discover a bunch of islands like Fiji and so forth.

Would the Wari and indigenous Australians get each other sick as they're exposed to virgin soil diseases? That may very much discourage extensive exploration of Australia if they don't know what's going on. I can definitely see them having trouble with disease if they reach China.

Now I'm starting to wonder if the Chinese decide to head over to America once they find out about it. Once the Chinese come over, the Native Americans get sick and the Chinese start offloading excess population in the Americas. We all start speaking Chinese :)
 
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