I am absolutely stealing "Europe just got a lucky spawn."

Both were advanced, just in different areas.

Though on the technological question, I'm curious how the conflict with europe would have gone if they didn't have to deal with the slew of epidemics that resulted from first contact and killed off the majority of people there before the europeans even started looking at the mainland instead of just colonizing the Caribbean islands.

The Inca were figuring out tactics to use against the Spanish and were able to halt their advance several times, but didn't have the numbers to really push back, plus were just on the tail end of civil war that could have been caused in part by the sickness destabilizing things before the spainish even realized there was an empire there (that wasn't just their wild goose chase for a city of gold).

Not sure if the Aztecs would have turned out differently, though it probably would have been a longer war and perhaps would have gone hot before they made it to their capital and took their leader hostage. But they did awe him to the point that he thought appeasement would be a better strategy, not realizing they had no intention of leaving.

some groups had access to copper and bronze, but none had iron

There were a group on the Washington coast that work with iron that washed up from old japanense shipwrecks before any contact of Europeans.

There's a 4th: absolution. If you see their societies as having equal right to exist then what was done was a horrific atrocity that specific people are guilty of, often including one's ancestors. It's the same with a lot of anti black racism.

So many things are just ideas. It's really fascinating how some ideas can snowball and give incredible power to those in possession of them, while others can be very advanced, yet have minimal effect in the culture's spread or influence.

Austronesian peoples discovered the fire piston - a very useful tool that necessarily utilizes concepts of air pressure and localized temperature - nearly three thousand years ahead of Europeans. Yet some Austronesian peoples who used this tool were quite literally in the stone age, not working metal.

Ideas are incredibly arbitrary things.

They also had metalworking, it just wasn’t iron and in many cases it made no sense to use metal instead of naturally occurring materials with many of the same properties, like obsidian (you can actually make it sharper than a scalpel). It has disadvantages of course, but so does iron; it rusts and requires a ton of energy to create.

The idea that metalworking is somehow a ‘peak’ of civilization was derived from 1800s anthropology trying to divide societies according to how ‘advanced’ (read: similar to European technological development) they were. In many ways some Indigenous American technologies surpassed European ones: ex, land management. When Europeans were destroying every old growth forest they had, some Indigenous American nations were so adept at land management they managed to have settled hunter-gatherers (coastal PNW). As in, these hunter-gatherers didn’t need to move constantly about the landscape to hunt because they maintained it to be bountiful, and still managed to have population centers of similar size as many European ones.

You’ve also got terra preta in South America, which transformed poor quality soil into soil that made horticulture possible. And as long as we’re in Central and South America, one of the first nanotechnologies is believed to be a paint made by the Maya called Maya blue.

That book is fucking amazing and one of my favorite reads by far. It opened my eyes too and got me super curious about the first jesuit encounters with the Brazilian natives in the early 1500s. History as taught in schools is also very "white man brought civilization" and every single one of the natives' struggles is swept under the rug. Finding these first records is hard for me. I might need to hit up university professors.

Yeah, it was wild to see how much of what I had been taught was European ideals and ideas were just Iriqouian critiques that Europeans were convinced of. Then later when he gets to talking about how some of these ideas seem to come from the rejection of Cahokia blew my mind again.

It doesn't, unless you're a colonizing nation, then any justification will do.

There are two significant papal bulls around the time that "allowed" European nations to go and conquer the world to spread Christianity and created the Doctrine of Discovery, meaning that non-Christian civilisations were not actually civilized and should be civilized by force for their own good.

They're really gorgeous too, some incredible artwork from the culture!