Delay the arrival of the white to North America by 400 years, would the natives have modernized ?

Question

Would the technological gap between the Native Americans and the White Europeans still exist if the europeans did not arrive until the late 1800's ?

Answer 1

I can't see where the impetus for the native Indians to modernise would have come from, other than influence from outside.

Their culture seems to have existed largely unchanged for centuries and, without significant population pressure or dwindling food resources, there was no need to develop from a hunter-gatherer society to anything else.

Frankly - given the choice between sitting in my car on the motorway every day to get to a boring repetitive job and charging around the plains on a mustang catching buffalo - I know what I'd rather be doing.

Answer 2

This is complex. First of all, the technological gap between Europe and the Americas was bidirectional. The metallurgical technology of Europe was more sophisticated, but the life sciences and agricultural technology of the New World was further advanced. However, in military-territorial conflict, metallurgical and weapons superiority is quite valuable. Note that 75% of the world's food crops originate in the New World--in part because the agricultural technology of the whole world system is now based on Native American techniques. Much of Europe became arable after the introduction of Native American techniques for, for example, drainage irrigation, which made many of the bogs of England and Scotland into farmland.

The main issues, however, in the conquest of the Americas were not technological. They were microbial and social-organizational.

Answer 3

Yes, when Europeans first encountered native North Americans they encountered people with a technology roughtly equivalent to the New Stone Age (Neolithic). Now that technology was improving on its own and would have continued to especially under any influences from more advanced MesoAmerican cultures. But the very most we could imagine would be an industrial Europe encountering a medieval-level Americas under the situation you describe.

Answer 4

Gee, a serious answer for Angelo, (sorry). Probably not, as the Europeans were the ones that brought horses to the Americas. Without the horse, the natives would not have been able to invent the wheel, thereby holding back their progress.

Answer 5

Assuming no other outward influences to change their historical way of life, I don't think it would have made any difference, except that they would have been pushed out of their natural way of living at a faster pace.

Answer 6

Yes it would still exist.