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

Paleolithic Europe got peopled about 40,000 years ago so double that gap, sorry.

It took me a while to realize you were just screwing with me. I just about had a teleological heart attack...in my brain.

*EDIT* I also seem to have completely misunderstood you, sorry. Yes, it's quite interesting that despite a later peopling of the Americas (no matter the specifics on the exact date), American societies managed to independently develop forms of political and technological complexity 'faster' than the Old World, and all more or less independently at that. As far as anthropological theory goes though it's not too surprising, and just goes to show that change isn't governed by how much time you've spent existing somewhere.
 
Last edited:
This, corn is delicious and nutritious.
Except that maize wasn't domesticated until long after wheat/cereals were domesticated in Eurasia.
Earliest maize - about 9000 yrs ago, about 2000 yrs ago for what's now the eastern USA.
Earliest wheat - about 23,000 yrs ago, in widespread use over 10,000 yrs ago.
Sources below:
The Domestication of Maize - History of American Corn: Maize: a 9,000 Year Old Radical Experiment in Plant Domestication
Scholars agree that maize was domesticated from the plant teosinte (Zea mays spp. parviglumis) in central America at least as early 9,000 years ago. In the Americas, maize is called corn, somewhat confusingly for the rest of the English-speaking world, where 'corn' refers to the seeds of any grain, including barley, wheat or rye.
The process of maize domestication radically changed it from its origins. The seeds of wild teosinte are encased in hard shells and arranged on a spike with five to seven rows, a spike that shatters when the grain is ripe to disperse its seed. Modern maize has hundreds of exposed kernels attached to a cob which is completely covered by husks and so cannot reproduce on its own. The morphological change is among the most divergent of speciation known on the planet, and it is only recent genetic studies that have proven the connection.
...
The earliest undisputed domesticated maize cobs are from Guila Naquitz cave in Guerrero, Mexico, dated about 4280-4210 cal BC. The earliest starch grains from domesticated maize have been found in the Xihuatoxtla Shelter, in the Rio Balsas valley of Guerrero, dated to ~9,000 cal BP.
...
Eventually, maize spread out from Mexico, probably by the diffusion of seeds along trade networks rather than migration of people. It was used in the southwestern United States by about 3,200 years ago, and in the eastern United States beginning about 2,100 years ago. By 700 AD, maize was well established up into the Canadian shield.
Wheat Domestication - The History and Origins of Floury Grains: The Origins of Wheat
Wheat is a grain crop with some 25,000 different cultivars in the world today: most of these forms are varieties of two groups: common wheat and durum wheat. Common or bread wheat Triticum aestivum accounts for some 95% of all the consumed wheat in the world today; the other five percent is durum or hard wheat T. turgidum ssp. durum, used in pasta and semolina products. Bread and durum wheat are both domesticated forms of wild emmer wheat (reported variously as T. araraticum, T. turgidum ssp. dicoccoides, or T. dicocoides).
...
The origins of our modern wheat, according to genetics and archaeological studies, are found in the Karacadag mountain region of what is today southeastern Turkey--wheat makes up two of the classic eight founder crops of the origins of agriculture. There, some 12,000 years ago or so, both einkorn and emmer wheats were domesticated. The earliest collected wheat was wild emmer, at the Ohalo II site, about 23,000 years ago.
...
These scholars are debating the date of the earliest domestication: all of them agree, and the evidence is abundant, that by ca 10,400 years ago, domesticated wheat was in widespread use throughout the Levant region.
...
The earliest evidence for both domesticated einkorn and emmer wheats found to date was at the Syrian site of Abu Hureyra, in occupation layers dated to the Late Epipaleolithic period, the beginning of the Younger Dryas, ca 13,000-12,000 cal BP.

Of course, that time difference is probably due to the later arrival of humans in the Americas.
Another key difference between maize and other cereals (wheat, oats, barley, rye, rice, etc, etc) is that maize needed a lot more work/domestication/selecting to make it a really viable crop for feeding large numbers of people. Modern maize is very useful and easy to cultivate/use, but ancient maize needed a lot more work (source here):
BBC History said:
in its earliest form, not only did maize have little taste, it was practically inedible. It couldn't just be boiled and eaten straight away as it is today. Nine thousand years ago, the maize cob was very hard, and eating it raw would have made you very ill. It needed to be cooked in a mixture of water and white lime. This elaborate process of boiling the raw kernel in lime and water was essential. Without it, the two key nutrients in the vegetable - the amino acids and vitamin B - would not be released. After all that, it had to be ground into a paste and then made into an unleavened dough.


Edited to insert links
 
Except that maize wasn't domesticated until long after wheat/cereals were domesticated in Eurasia.
Given that people were arriving in the Americas when wheat started to be domesticated I think this is a moot point. I mean really, corn isn't going to domesticate itself.

Let's actually compare the two in terms of time encountered to time domesticated:
Humans first start entering the Americas circa 24,000 BP* and have domesticated Corn by 9,000 BP, that's 15,000 years.
Humans first encounter wild wheat 23,000 years ago and have it domesticated by 12,000 BP, that's 11,000 years.
As a crop package, corn is fine. Maybe not the greatest, but it works well enough.

*earliest evidence of human habitation in Mexico is only 10,000 BP, but domesticating corn in only 1,000 years seems a bit absurd.
 
There was simply a lack of contact with vital developments that occured early in specific places within Afro-Eurasia that spread through trade and war. This made the advancement of each region much faster, instead of each civilization developing each milestone on their own.
  • Agriculture (Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley)
  • Chariots (Pontic Steppe to the Middle East, Europe, and China)
  • Bronze Metallurgy
  • Iron Metallurgy
  • Diffusion of Alphabets
  • and Paper, among others.
The only way that Native Americans could possibly stand a chance is if the isolation of the Americas could be somehow broken, without causing direct colonization.
 
Animals, yes, plants, definitely not.
the new world did indeed have a pretty good plant crop package. The problem was, it was scattered all over. Maize started out down in Mexico, and potatoes never made it out of Peru. There were some difficult small seeded grains here and there, but all of them were problematic in one way or another, and generally dropped when maize came along... there wasn't a good counterpart for wheat and barley...
 
Except that maize wasn't domesticated until long after wheat/cereals were domesticated in Eurasia.
Earliest maize - about 9000 yrs ago, about 2000 yrs ago for what's now the eastern USA.
Earliest wheat - about 23,000 yrs ago, in widespread use over 10,000 yrs ago.
Sources below:
The Domestication of Maize - History of American Corn: Maize: a 9,000 Year Old Radical Experiment in Plant Domestication
Wheat Domestication - The History and Origins of Floury Grains: The Origins of Wheat

Of course, that time difference is probably due to the later arrival of humans in the Americas.
Probably not as much as you may be banking on. Remember that culture isn't linear or completely predictable. The Americas may have adopted agriculture a little later, but the time between the first recorded agriculture and the first recorded complex societies is also much shorter -- and occurring at roughly the same time as the Old World.

Unilineal cultural evolution is a myth that has been debunked by anthropologists for decades. I already said this before in this thread, but one can't just assume there's a single path for societies to follow and people who don't follow that particular one fast enough are 'backward', or to put it in another way, 'stuck' at some 'stage' in 'development'. In that sense it's meaningless to say "okay they just arrived in this land as hunter-gatherers, so we can give them X amount of time before they become semi-sedentary and..." That doesn't work; real life is not designed by Sid Meier. As far as social sciences are concerned, time is not the primary mover of change. Not that there's much of a prime mover to begin with. You can get some ideas on how a people might choose to tackle their environment based on what's available, but there isn't only one way and it's ultimately up to that choice of a culture. Because history doesn't really work in 'stages', you can't judge a foreign culture by the development of one's own. For example, the Three Age system only kind of works in parts of the Old World because of the coincidental convergence of certain cultural traditions through diffusion. We don't use it in other parts of the world, so for example it would be incredibly silly to say "This culture developed sophisticated state societies with complex politics, accounting and engineering, able to manage highly diverse populations in excess of what the typical European city had, but they built their architecture with stone tools so they're a Stone Age civilization and therefore several millennia behind Europe".

Thankfully, there has been a rather successful history of outreach in education about the European 'Dark Ages' and how it's misleading to assume that 'progress' of some sort 'reversed' or 'stagnated' during this time when really people just adapted and came up with ways that benefited them more in those new geopolitical conditions than the old ways could have (and while we're on that subject, no evidence to suggest the Romans would have continued getting 'technologically advanced'). But what I think some people might not realize is this is the same logic we can apply to social and technological development in general.

It's also not a good idea to be like Jared Diamond and rely just on one framework for determining and predicting the whole human condition -- determinism is crap. Yes, external factors influence a society's actions. Yes, we must consider many of them. None of them override social agency and it is very possible for human culture and individual decision to override our expectations for how they should act. Even if you think you have the whole culture figured out and have some idea of how that sum of ideas might respond to change, then there's always going to be black sheep, unique groups and people with different ideas created themselves that will influence the larger culture and drive unexpected change. Sub-Saharan Africans independently developed iron working (and steel before it was common elsewhere) without a Bronze Age to speak of, or a long history of heavily urbanized agricultural state societies at that time. The infertile, sometimes toxic soils of the Amazon basin and southern Maya lowlands were the last places you'd expect complex, agricultural, state-level societies to arise, but people found a way that for a time benefited them quite well.

Well, I certainly didn't mean for this to turn into a mini-essay about historical teleology and cultural development. Topics like the pre-Columbian Americas usually come with a lot of misconceptions about the subject which usually tie in with the knowledge of anthropology as a whole -- maybe I get carried away. In short, though, just because a culture has a 'late start' doesn't mean it will never 'catch up'. Human beings as a whole are unpredictable and will always surprise you, defying our attempts at theory!
There was simply a lack of contact with vital developments that occured early in specific places within Afro-Eurasia that spread through trade and war. This made the advancement of each region much faster, instead of each civilization developing each milestone on their own.
  • Agriculture (Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley)
  • Chariots (Pontic Steppe to the Middle East, Europe, and China)
  • Bronze Metallurgy
  • Iron Metallurgy
  • Diffusion of Alphabets
  • and Paper, among others.
The only way that Native Americans could possibly stand a chance is if the isolation of the Americas could be somehow broken, without causing direct colonization.
While a few of these things you mention are only useful 'advancements' within contexts peculiar to them, many of them were indeed instrumental in diffusing cultural ideas and societal complexity. Interestingly, in my opinion, the Americas just before contact seemed they were about to enter a new period of connectivity. A series of trade networks crisscrossed much of North America (including the Mississippi as a vital trade route). Traders followed the expansion of the Tarascans and Aztecs -- who had recently conquered some southern Maya kingdoms (even sending daughters to marry Maya lords, solidifying fealty). The Maya themselves were conducting long distance water trade throughout the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Not only were sailors from Ecuador still trading goods with southern Mesoamerica, but the Incas were beginning to conquer this region. And in addition to some southern conquests, Andean culture was also diffusing south of Tawantinsuyu. Andean-style ceramics, agriculture, and even llama herding was present in many parts of northern Argentina. And then, in addition to a very old trans-Beringian trade link, the Chukchi were starting to raid the Inuit of Alaska, which has interesting implications itself.

But to say a more interconnected America is the only way for Native Americans to have successfully 'stood a chance' against Europeans might not be exactly true, at least, not in the strictest sense of allowing at least some parts to remain independent. The conquest of Mexico was dependent on a lot of 'right place, right time, right people' factors - Cortes happened to find Spanish shipwreck survivors who spoke Maya (allowing him to communicate), and then had multiple instances where he was very nearly defeated by both the Tlaxcala (before he allied with them) and the Aztecs, were it not for the choices made by individuals and pre-existing situations. Using Mexico as a base made the expedition to the south possible, and the conquest of the Incas was rife with similar instances of dumb luck.
the new world did indeed have a pretty good plant crop package. The problem was, it was scattered all over. Maize started out down in Mexico, and potatoes never made it out of Peru. There were some difficult small seeded grains here and there, but all of them were problematic in one way or another, and generally dropped when maize came along... there wasn't a good counterpart for wheat and barley...
While maize (and eventually the Three Sisters) became dominant over the Eastern Agricultural Complex, that's not to say it went completely away; the rest were simply grown on the side. Goosefoot was still a common crop in some parts of the Eastern Woodlands and especially the Eastern Seaboard, little barley stuck around as an inevitable secondary crop (or tolerated weed) that's hard to get rid of, and of course we know about sunflower and squash. The goosefoot that was domesticated by Native Americans also had larger seeds that were easier to prepare.

The Aztecs had pseudocereals of their own such as amaranth which comprised a large portion of the diet. Some of the largest cities in the world were built on these agricultural packages. Whatever do you mean by a 'good counterpart for wheat and barley'?
 
The Aztecs had pseudocereals of their own such as amaranth which comprised a large portion of the diet. Some of the largest cities in the world were built on these agricultural packages. Whatever do you mean by a 'good counterpart for wheat and barley'?
basically, a big seeded grain that is highly adaptable and 'easy' to domesticate (no plants or animals were all that 'easy' to domesticate, but some are quicker/easier than others). Tried to read up on amaranth online, and it's... complicated. Unlike wheat and barley, it's a big family (over 60 species) and it's not clear if the ones they grew in Mexico are comparable to the ones that grow up in the US (which never seem to have been domesticated). It's notable that amaranth never made it out of Mexico for cultivation; for some reason, maize was the preferred plant to acclimate and develop.
when you are comparing crop packages though, it's hard to just ignore the impact that domesticated animals had in the old world. The Fertile Crescent crop package not only included grain/fruit/vegetables, but cows, sheep, and pigs. Later on, they got horses, burros, and chickens. That is one hell of a leg up for developing civilizations that the new world just didn't have. The native Americans did a lot with what they had, but what they lacked really hurt their development...
 
Top