Native Americans Modernize?

birdboy2000

Banned
The big problem is demographic. Sedentary lifestyles supported far larger associated population densities, and Eurasian diseases devastated the native population even in agricultural and urbanized areas, although the areas with the higher pre-contact populations (Mexico, Peru, Bolivia) have generally had far lower levels of demographic replacement.

The Comanche weren't defeated because they were using bows and arrows against guns. They were defeated because a settler society spanning half a continent coveted their land and could muster a far larger army. Even when equipment was even (I don't know enough about the Comanche to say how their guns measured up against the US army's, but in some of the earlier settler/native conflicts, like King Philip's War, it might as well have been; seventeenth-century muskets weren't much better than bows) the settlers could far better endure and replace the losses of warfare because of higher populations.
 
How important would the climatechange in the 1800´s be accounted for? The praire was not such an inhospitable place (for white farmers) when it got a bit warmer.

But, suppose the comancheria would have been recognized as an independent state by a european power set on competing with the USA. Possible?
 
With the entrenched idea that Indians were inevitably doomed, the government and settlers had far fewer qualms about marginalizing them and forcing them to assimilate.

Or being explicitly forbidden to assimilate in any way, shape, or form, but instead forced into non-survivable situations.
 
I'm actually writing a story where this happens to some degree. See elsewhere in the forum.

I think that a critical requirement would be the transfer of lots of technical know-how AND the Native Americans being willing to use it. The latter is easier, merely requiring an open-minded leader. For the former, you'd really need to have European experts assimilate with the Natives. Either the aforementioned leader decides to hire the experts in question ("So, Mr. Struggling Gunsmith, how would you like to become the head of an entire nation's arms industry?") or absorbs a decently-sized European colony.
 
This requires a POD far earlier than the European discovery of the Americas, more likely pre-year zero also. They were at a neolithic level of technology! A neolithic culture buying guns and horses doesn't turn "modern", rather the result is neolithic people with guns and horses, ergo far too few, lacking key technologies and know-hows and most often also poorly organized.

Have to agree with this. Native societies in the Americas run into three big problems when it comes to modernizing and surviving: lack of domesticated things, lack of immunity, lack of time. The last one is particularly important; even if the natives find more things to domesticate and can develop some immunity to European diseases, they have far less time to develop civilizations than Europe did. The old world started experimenting with agriculture from the moment when humans left Africa and found the middle east/fertile crescent area, whereas humans are guessed to have entered the Americas about 20,000 years ago....
 
How could the Native Americans have modernized to the point of Europeans, is it possible? I am thinking of a timeline using the Compache and I want to know how i could get them on par with Europe so they surivive and put up a threat to the future nations of North America.

To the point of Europeans at what time? At the time of contact, or today?

I think you need a pre-Columbus tech transfer. Carthagians, Vikings something like that.

The Vikings make a colony in a sightly different place than OTL, the Jarl has good chemistry with the local indian chief. Vikings eventually get assimilated, but peacefully transfer hoses, Iron, the stirrup, an agricultural package and most important, ships. Thats 4 technologies that changed the world, at the same time. And the same amount of time untill Colombus as we've had after Colombus.

Horses and ships spread like wildfire, nations rise and fall. You'll end up with Nativs with far better communications, exchange of ideas, and the ability to meet europeans at sea. That'll be huge. Caribbean will likly be very different and much richer.

The commanches will be influenced from the rivers in the east and the civilizations in the south. They will likly be nothing like the commanches of otl though.
 
I think it's effectively impossible without a very early POD. A few possibilities.

If the Americas has more of its own animal domesticates, it's plausible that all conditions would be met. More domesticated animals means more protein sources, and possibly beasts of burden. If American horses survive, it will greatly help the dissemination of technology as well. And exposure to domesticated animals should build more disease resistance.

The problem is, I don't buy Jared Diamond's idea that it was solely lacking domesticates that the Native Americans suffered so greatly from plagues in the post-Columbian era. While hunter-gatherers worldwide always suffer from plagues, the record is more mixed for agriculturalists. Papuans, for example, independently domesticated plants, and when Austronesians introduced pigs to Indonesia, they didn't seem to have any major epidemics, and faced no population replacement. Similarly, there were no major epidemics which were caused when Europeans landed in New Guinea. On the other hand, European diseases wreaked a pretty bad toll on some Polynesian islands, despite the natives having access to dogs, pigs and Chickens as disease vectors.

What I think it comes down to is Polynesians were inbred to some degree, while Papuans were not. Many Polynesian islands were settled, after all, by a fairly small founding population. The Americas is similar, insofar as the first wave of Native Americans has been estimated to have been a group of less than 80 people. Later migrations by the ancestors of Na-Dene and Inuit into the Americas diversified North America a bit, but not tremendously.

Still, the issue is, Native Americans are far more similar genetically, even after thousands of years of mutations, than populations in the old world. Related to the immune system, this is big trouble. A genetic weakness for one variant of flu, for example, is highly likely to be shared across virtually the whole population. Essentially, Native Americans could have been the human version of the Irish Potato Famine. Thus while more domesticates might help a little bit, you're still going to get a "great dying" when Eurasia comes a calling.

One way around this is to introduce Eurasian DNA fairly early, and then let contact lapse. A possibility I prefer is Carthaginian/Roman contact. Say there's enough to establish a self-sustaining beachhead with Iron Age technology somewhere in the Americas. The plagues, of course, happen. But contact is also cut off with the outside world when the home country goes to pot, so there is no chance of widespread colonization. Instead you end up with a hybrid "mestizo" culture forming right around the original colonies, with progressively less cultural and genetic influence as you move further from the old colony sites. But you'd still get some - even modern day Mayans and Quecha are around 5% European. 1500-2500 years is more than enough time for natural selection to work its way through the population, and you'd end up with a plague-resistant, mostly Native American population.
 
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