NationStates Jolt Archive

Setting aside any reasons for why they weren't, consider the following...

...how might history been altered had Columbus landed in the Carribean to discover that North American peoples were just as technologically advanced as Europe was at the time?

hmmmm. probably. he might have respected them more. we'll never know huh!!!

It's more interesting to ask "how" could the native americans have been technologically equal to the Europeans. A problem they still might have had would be the accidental biological warfare the Europeans unleashed. It is also questionable whether the local cultures would have attained a social structure capable of sustaining aggressive research to maintain that equality.

It would be simalar to marco polo finding china ... less colinization more trade

If they had been at the same level of advancement, precisely, then they'd have been able to force them back. If the Aztec had guns, Cortez would have been wiped out long before the disease killed them.

If they had been at the same level of advancement, precisely, then they'd have been able to force them back. If the Aztec had guns, Cortez would have been wiped out long before the disease killed them.
That's quite possible, but what would the geopolitical landscape have looked like with European technology? Would there still have been such a diversity of tribes and would they have changed their social structure? They would have needed an industrial base to produce such things as rifles and gunpowder, and it's hard to imagine nomadic societies like the Lakota or agricultural societies like the Iroquois to engage in something like that without changing their tribal structures, if they had done so at all.

Just to toss in a few monkey wrenches and an admitedly wild scenario:

(Partly based on Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel hypothesis)

1) The most likely explanation for a technologically developed Americas would include the survival of several species of mega-fauna suitable to domestication.

2) It is likely that the Indians would have developed greater immunity to different diseases due to having domesticated different species and being exposed to the diseases carried by those species.


Because of this, there might well have be an equally decimating series of epidemics across both Europe and the Americas. This might have allowed for China to retain it's dominance. Due to cultural factors in China, technological development might well have progressed at a much slower pace.