No discovery of the New World

You could do that with all sorts of PODs given long enough.
A valid point... mine was just a suggestion, as it both gives plenty of time and causes a massive enough change to make the desired outcome of no discovery plausible. I guess you could find something as late as 1000 AD to change, but too much later, and you start to get a Europe similar enough to OTL to make the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, etc. all likely to occur at some point. For instance, something that more directly butterflies away the Ottoman Turks would lower the incentive to reach the Spice Islands and China by sea, as the overland trade would continue uninterrupted, but you'd still have the Basque fishermen, and later the English.
 
Honestly, I'm not sure another 250 years of isolation would make much of a difference for the Native American civilizations. They just didn't have a lot of the basic things required for a industrial civilization to develop (beasts of burden, writing, exc.).

But that's just my two cents
 
Three ways to go.
1. No Temuchin, no Mongol conquest of the Silk Road, no gunpowder to Europe, no expensive cannon, no large/centralized nation states, no extra resources to attempt sea routes to India/China, etc. Europe stays feudal another seven hundred years and we are reading this by candle light in a monastory in Brittany.
2. All the Europeans discover/develop trade relations with the Indians at the same time, say, when Columbus doesn't make it back in one piece and one or more members of his crew in a small boat get back and find their way (with convincing souveniers like gold, American spices, other plants and animals) to first Ireland, then Scotland, then England, then the Netherlands, then France, and are captured by Arab corsairs. All the Arab/European nations have trading missions instead of conquest expeditions and the Indians play them off against each other.
3. Columbus makes it to the Americas and doesn't make it back because of a smallpox epidemic caused by his hauling along an unexpectedly sick cabin boy. The remaining and more disease resistant Indians now have iron, gunpowder, literacy, coinage, sailing ships, some European crops, etc. You really have to bring honeybees along on the ships to get proper European crop productivity, and goats for dairy/wool/meat/traction capability.
 
Last edited:
3. Columbus makes it to the Americas and doesn't make it back because of a smallpox epidemic caused by his hauling along an unexpectedly sick cabin boy. The remaining and more disease resistant Indians now have iron, gunpowder, literacy, coinage, sailing ships, some European crops, etc. You really have to bring honeybees along on the ships to get proper European crop productivity, and goats for dairy/wool/meat/traction capability.
Will the crews of three relatively small ships (maybe 150 men all up, probably less... this is assuming first voyage as anything later means Europe knows and will come have another look) really have the knowlage to get these developments properly established?
Assuming some of them do become established (most probably European livestock or crops, less likely limited iron production) how long does it take for the know-how to spread to a suffciently large swath of the Americas to have a significant effect? I'd expect a couple of generations minimum, and as others have commented we've got maybe another 50 years before the Europeans start seriously sniffing around.

Even the, does limited use of iron weapons and armour really improve the natives abilities to stand up to a serious European invasion?
 
Will the crews of three relatively small ships (maybe 150 men all up, probably less... this is assuming first voyage as anything later means Europe knows and will come have another look) really have the knowlage to get these developments properly established?
No. Hell, no. Nor would the natives attempt to learn or use them. There was no incentive, and the mental paradigm didn't really include change and development like ours do.

On the subject of where the Americas could have gone with a few hundred years more of peace...It has seemed to me that they were just on the verge of making a developmental leap.

Metal weaponery was starting to appear, and between the Haudenosaunee and the Incas, interesting strides in organization and goverment were being made.

The ultimate result would still have lagged europe by millennia, though.
 
Top