Ideas are really arbitrary things. Civilizations can go thousands of years without stumbling onto things that seem intuitive.
The ‘Old World’ had the advantage of being ‘better-established’, so to speak, as human habitation had been in most regions longer than in the ‘New World’, which was largely populated after ~10,000 BCE. But beyond that, I think, it’s just that some ideas tend to snowball and spread, and that the rise of early states and empires speeds up that process to an incredible degree.
It took some ~7000 years for agriculture to spread from the Middle East to Northern Europe, in the slow, sluggish spread of a vital and useful idea before the organization of large polities. And yet, from the time of the arrival of the Roman Empire as a neighbor, it took hardly 100 years for Roman ironworking techniques to become widely adopted in Germania.
Sometimes, it’s just the luck of who you have as a neighbor, and the Old World had a lot of well-developed neighbors passing ideas along like STDs by the 1st millennium BCE. Like I said, it just… snowballs after a point.
Afaik its more of a “Europeans had a massive headstart” thing. Consensus is that humans have only been in the americas for 15-20 thousand years, where europe has been populated by humans for close to 50 thousand
The Mediterranean cultures were the first to the Bronze age. Civilization along the Nile or between the Tigris and Euphrates is on easy mode; the rivers give you water and fertile soil. Huge civilizations that require things like bookkeeping and logistics arise there first, then they start trading with each other. Galleys and sailing ships emerge on the Med, again a nice tutorial level as seafaring goes on this planet. Oh also: Horses exist. The large scale long distance trade needed to produce bronze happens fairly quickly, they beat China to it by hundreds of years.
Meanwhile in the Americas, the only civilization that rivals anything like Egypt in geographic scale are the Incas, whose empire spans the Andes…and they’re nicely bottled up in the Southern hemisphere by the Darian gap. We still haven’t paved a road through there. You can’t drive from Texas to Peru because the bottom half of the Isthmus is some serious bullshit.
For the Aztecs in Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City) to trade with, say, the Mississippi, they’d have to walk across Texas. There was no riding; they didn’t have camels or horses. You don’t get significant seafaring by Native Americans, partially because no American rivers or inland seas are as suitable for it as the Nile or Med. You get long distance trade here and there…but in trinkets carried by nomadic hunters, not bulk cargo hauled by merchant sailors.
Probably the closest are the copper deposits around the Great Lakes and tin deposits in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Carrying a backpack full of tin on foot across 800 miles of Midwestern prairie is why I suppose the New World didn’t have significant metallurgy.
Humans were farming and building shelters for tens of thousands of years before metalworking, if anything it is more of a coincidence that they were discovering it within a couple thousand years of everyone else. Or maybe not a coincidence at all, there are “pre-columbian transoceanic contact theories”.
They may not have had fires hot enough to discover they could melt metals, or did so and just didn’t get the idea of replacing their stone tools that worked pretty well already.
Why do you suppose their metallurgy was so far behind the ‘old world’? Lack of accessible tin deposits?
Ideas are really arbitrary things. Civilizations can go thousands of years without stumbling onto things that seem intuitive.
The ‘Old World’ had the advantage of being ‘better-established’, so to speak, as human habitation had been in most regions longer than in the ‘New World’, which was largely populated after ~10,000 BCE. But beyond that, I think, it’s just that some ideas tend to snowball and spread, and that the rise of early states and empires speeds up that process to an incredible degree.
It took some ~7000 years for agriculture to spread from the Middle East to Northern Europe, in the slow, sluggish spread of a vital and useful idea before the organization of large polities. And yet, from the time of the arrival of the Roman Empire as a neighbor, it took hardly 100 years for Roman ironworking techniques to become widely adopted in Germania.
Sometimes, it’s just the luck of who you have as a neighbor, and the Old World had a lot of well-developed neighbors passing ideas along like STDs by the 1st millennium BCE. Like I said, it just… snowballs after a point.
Afaik its more of a “Europeans had a massive headstart” thing. Consensus is that humans have only been in the americas for 15-20 thousand years, where europe has been populated by humans for close to 50 thousand
Copper and tin seldom occur close together.
The Mediterranean cultures were the first to the Bronze age. Civilization along the Nile or between the Tigris and Euphrates is on easy mode; the rivers give you water and fertile soil. Huge civilizations that require things like bookkeeping and logistics arise there first, then they start trading with each other. Galleys and sailing ships emerge on the Med, again a nice tutorial level as seafaring goes on this planet. Oh also: Horses exist. The large scale long distance trade needed to produce bronze happens fairly quickly, they beat China to it by hundreds of years.
Meanwhile in the Americas, the only civilization that rivals anything like Egypt in geographic scale are the Incas, whose empire spans the Andes…and they’re nicely bottled up in the Southern hemisphere by the Darian gap. We still haven’t paved a road through there. You can’t drive from Texas to Peru because the bottom half of the Isthmus is some serious bullshit.
For the Aztecs in Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City) to trade with, say, the Mississippi, they’d have to walk across Texas. There was no riding; they didn’t have camels or horses. You don’t get significant seafaring by Native Americans, partially because no American rivers or inland seas are as suitable for it as the Nile or Med. You get long distance trade here and there…but in trinkets carried by nomadic hunters, not bulk cargo hauled by merchant sailors.
Probably the closest are the copper deposits around the Great Lakes and tin deposits in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Carrying a backpack full of tin on foot across 800 miles of Midwestern prairie is why I suppose the New World didn’t have significant metallurgy.
Humans were farming and building shelters for tens of thousands of years before metalworking, if anything it is more of a coincidence that they were discovering it within a couple thousand years of everyone else. Or maybe not a coincidence at all, there are “pre-columbian transoceanic contact theories”.
They may not have had fires hot enough to discover they could melt metals, or did so and just didn’t get the idea of replacing their stone tools that worked pretty well already.