Why wasn't the Native Americans as advanced as the Europeans, and is there a way they could of been?

An additional factor that slowed the spread of crops in the Americas was that the two major crops that were domesticated have their origins in highland species.

Zea mays was the only one of the two that spread widely and even that took a long time. It's domestication was a fortunate chance arising from a single hybridization of two teosinte species around 7,000 B.C. somewhere in the Balsas river valley in Mexico. It took another millenia or so for varietals capable of growing in tropical lowlands to arise and spread as far as Central America. In South America there were two waves of maize entry, first a higland wave 4000 B.C. and a later tropical lowland one around around 2000 years ago.

As for Solanum tuberosum (Potatoes) it's domestication in the Andes predates that of Maize by at least a millenia. It did not spread beyond its highland home till the Spanish conquest of the Incas.

There were some later abortive domestications of grains in eastern North America which were abandoned with the arrival of Maize. A possible point of divergence would be an earlier domestication of these or their not being abandoned as was the case with knotweed (Polygonum erectum), little Barley (Hordeum pusillum) and Maygrass (Phalaris caroliliana).

There is evidence of a potatoe relative (Solanum jamesii) in western North America being consumed as early 10,900 years ago. It may have been domesticated but not to the degree of it's South American cousin.
 
i think you are putting the cart before the horse here. you need the domesticated animals/crops and ideal geography for large populations. for example if horses didn't die out in america before humans got there or if america had a better staple crop then corn. we would very likely see larger population throughout the Americas and then there could have been more tech development.
I certainly don't disagree with this. I suspect the tech level would still have been lower, just because the Americas can't support as many people as Europe/Asia/Africa together, so even starting with the same prerequisites (easy-to-domesticate crops and beasts of burden, etc), I think the greater population would have made a difference.

The point made by Umbral above about the east-west versus north-south orientation sounds valid too.

Guns, Germs and Steel has been on my 'I should really read that' list for some time now - I think it's just climbed up a few places :).
 

King Thomas

Banned
Beasts of burden, gunpowder, one language, and diseases as deadly to the whites as those in Africa, so instead of disease decimating the Native Americans, it kills the Europeans. Eventually the Europeans will get used to the diseases, but by that time even if they are colonised like Africa in OTL, they have a better chance of breaking free like Africa in OTL.
 
There is always Jared Diamonds answer. And while he has written some abject tosh in his time, I always though this one rang true: The axis of Eurasia is east-west, while the Americas is north south. A domesticate, crop or idea can spread east-west and stay in the same general climate zone. North-south, you run into different conditions pretty soon. The potato would have been a brilliant addition to the peoples of North America, as well as the llama as a beast of burden. But neither could spread through central America. The lack of shipping made the problem worse. It all led to a more static setup, with less exchange of ideas, crops etc.
along with that, there is the whole 'concentration of resources' too. The Fertile Crescent was home to the wild ancestors of cattle, pigs, sheep, burros, wheat, and barley... that's a hell of a package. Plus, modern humans got into the middle east just about immediately after leaving Africa, giving them a LOT of time to develop civilization there. On the industrial side of things, when people began to develop steel and steam power, Europe had several places that combined coal, iron, and water handily in one spot, giving them a leg up on the industrial revolution. The New World was really set back in comparison to this; lack of beasts of burden, quite a few domesticable plants, but scattered all over the place... plus, the late start that humans had when they got there...
 
I certainly don't disagree with this. I suspect the tech level would still have been lower, just because the Americas can't support as many people as Europe/Asia/Africa together, so even starting with the same prerequisites (easy-to-domesticate crops and beasts of burden, etc), I think the greater population would have made a difference.

I don't know. California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Mississippi River system can support a ton of people assuming agricultural civilisations develop there (Eastern Woodlands crops plus a few others perhaps), alongside some domesticated animals (both the American camel and horse, peccary, some sort of deer, reindeer/moose in the north, etc.), and throw in better maritime technologies across the board as a result to better interconnect the region to Amazonia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. Unless the New World natives get really unlucky and have to fight colonisation attempts by Europeans, East Asians, and West Africans (it seems highly unlikely that all three in one TL would all go for outright colonisation even if they were all trading with the New World), they probably just won't be colonised. They might not have gunpowder when Old World civilisations start showing up, but the New World could easily be full Iron Age civilisations.

Or, hell, maybe they are the ones that show up in Europe or Africa. If you have some sort of alt-Taino with superior boats, maybe they would wind up anywhere from North Africa to Iceland at some point. I bet they'd settle Bermuda, and it isn't too far from there to the Azores.

Once contact is established, diseases will devastate each side, but not as bad as OTL's plagues in the New World.
 
You need the horse, or donkey or camel to not go extinct In North America and you might have something
 
People really need to stop saying "one language" as though Afroeurasia has only one language, it has a plethora of languages, or as though it has some baring on development, the Romans had 'one' language, and stagnated so thoroughly it can't quite be described in words.
 
What elements are we using to compare 'more' or 'less' advanced, and why do we consider them so? Is practical metalworking, writing and the wheel the only factors? And why do we consider them advanced? Mesoamerica is littered with examples of extensive hydraulic engineering projects; I think you'd agree that was an example of complex technology, yet you won't see it in Europe at the same extent because although they could have used it to theoretically make life better, there was no real need for it. Europe also could have benefited from the agricultural and civil engineering of pre-Columbian civilizations which involved the precise organization of city districts, public sanitation systems and policies, mass recycling of waste into composted fertilizer (rather than letting a stream drain it away), predicting eclipses and other astronomical events could have many benefits to science and cultural sway, and even the mightiest of European empires would envy the level of administrative craft and command over resources performed by the Incas. To say nothing of the more accurate calendars in the New World, earlier use of a true zero in numerals and mathematics, or the fact that the state of medicine in Europe was rather pitiful compared to nearly every other part of the world, which is saying a lot considering nobody had developed a true scientific method at this time.

With all of these technologies, there was neither a significant necessity nor the opportunity to make the first steps, just like there were none that would lead American civilizations to adopt European-like material practices. Why do we assume that large portions of the Americas, effectively separated from the Old World by thousands of millenia, must be comparable to small parts of Europe? Especially when not all of Europe was representative of those places, let alone representative of the entire continent of Eurasia? That said, as far as social, political and (depending on your point of view) technological complexity goes, European and New World civilizations were more similar than most people automatically assume.

The adoption of technologies and practices doesn't work like a Civilization tech tree. There is no predestined sequence of 'advances' that happen at a more or less predictable rate, and people don't advance along the same 'direction'. It's driven by necessity, opportunity, existing frameworks, and a whole web of other factors; many of them human, any many of them unpredictable. If we played history again, there's no guarantee we'd get the exact same result twice. That's literally what founds the idea of alternate history as a genre.

To see this answered from the perspective of historians and archaeologists, this section of the /r/AskHistorians FAQ has some quality posts on the subject.
 
I mean, in terms of time from settlement to transatlantic contact, Europe was ahead by about 10,000 years so really the indigenous peoples of the Americas gave them an amazing run for their money.
 
I mean, in terms of time from settlement to transatlantic contact, Europe was ahead by about 10,000 years so really the indigenous peoples of the Americas gave them an amazing run for their money.
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No beasts of burden, no gunpowder, little knowledge of mineral resources, younger civilization, poor record keeping, and a lack of a common language. Fix these and you might have an advanced society develop independent of Europe.

Pretty much this. Have the North American Native Americans come anything close to the Mayan, Aztec, and Inca down south, or jumpstart the Mississippian culture and the Pueblo you could have something.

The diseases is unavoidable, but even then the Inca had a chance if not the civil war.
 
What do we mean by advanced here, since civilization can be relative unless we are talking the natives of the U.S Canada and the rest of South America? In that case, the natives would have to better resist European colonization which is much more easily done than one thinks. Have the Pequot confederacy win out in the Pequot war and burn down the English colonies.

Here the natives still the advantage of the Europeans never learn from how they fought and depending on what can be worked the natives could have access to making gunpowder instead of buying it. They knew how to make guns and use them more effectively than the Europeans, their biggest hurdle would be unable to make gunpowder if they can do that maybe create a confederation that both lasts and with knowledge from the Dutch or French, European colonialism can be curtailed and the natives could develop some analogs to Europe.

Not to mention what happened with the Aztecs and Incas were flukes, so it was more bad luck and disease than straight up technological developments, that saw the Europeans win out.
 
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