Native Americans were able to change their cultures to better fit in with the white settlers around them so yes if they discovered metal presumably they would have been able to adapt their culture. Pictured below Chief Vann's house from the 1800s.
The beauty of it all is this:
Europeans weren't always advanced. It's the Great Divergence which really is as all things history very very hotly debated. But roughly two big divergenes to the favour of European states happened. One around the 16th century and another much bigger one in the 19th century with the development of the industrial revolution. There's many many reasons for this really and whole books and careers are built on studying this.
To quote one of my history teachers way back in high school:
I meant that ultimately, they came out on top, obviously not that they were always on top in eternal perpetuity. Which should be clear when I bring up Egypt's high civilization, which was thousands of years before Europe was even close to a similar state of affairs. And my whole point is that geography plays a huge role.
Depends on the area. The Incans were pretty much on par with the Roman Empire when that nutjob Pizzaro came by. They had developed road systems, a series of tolls, a pretty good by ancient society tax system, a protoscript in the form of quipu, and they could smith metal.
They probably could have given time. The Aimara of Tiwanaku did develop bronze and copper casting (which the Inca refound when Tiwanaku collapsed), as did the Colima people of Mexico with copper. The Muisca were goldsmiths since like 500 AD. They had the basic potential to go on.
Horses were reintroduced to the americas in the 1500’s.
It really depends on them domesticating (at least in North America) the Bison for that. With a domesticated bison, you could plow larger tracts of land for your various crops, or at least transport more goods further.
The Maya and many other mesoamerican civilizations had extremely advanced mathematics. The Mayans were among the first to get the mathematical concept of zero, a huge step in calculations and theories. They also did have the wheel, it’s just that it wasn’t applied to things larger than toys and trinkets. Without large beasts of burden, the idea of the cart just isn’t really going to become wide spread.
I should have explained it better, but I was trying to exclude the Mesoamerican civilizations from my statement. I'm aware of their technological progress. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised they weren't on a closer level with the Europeans, but like you said it was likely down to not smelting copper to discover a way to smelt iron.
Religion can also play a huge part whether or not a culture can advance in technology.
Trouble with that remark is that in Europe given how utterly shit any place that isn't France or the Iberian plains is when it comes to large scale cultivation (Italy and the Balkans have an excellent climate but are far too mountainous to be truly good), anything that wasn't backbreaking labor from sunup to sundown just wasn't going to provide sufficient yields. It wasn't until you had the double-whammy of the potato as a sturdy, practically year-round and high-calorie root crop, and the beginnings of industrialized agriculture to reduce the necessary labor (and necessary caloric consumption) from farmers, that populations truly began to explode in Europe. Wheat and the other grains had an absolutely terrible yield compared to say, rice, so the vast bulk of the European vegetable diet prior to the 1700's were the much hardier and easier to grow legumes. A protein-heavy diet such as legumes and animal protein such as dairy (both bovine and goat), eggs and fish is pretty suboptimal when it comes to getting sufficient calories, no matter how rich it is in other essential nutrients, so as soon as the Europeans had a steady source of calories from imported grains, they were all ready to have a population explosion as their diet went from "starving" to "well-rounded" practically instantly.
Trouble is the inverse also tends to happen, where a well-reasoned debate turns into racist shitflinging. Still, you learn to take the good with the bad here.
I've been staying mostly away from A&N these days, so I haven't seen a whole lot of racist shitflinging lately. It's nice.
My bad, I should have said "dystopia" instead of outright "cyberpunk". Still, AFAIK, in Shadowrun the technology isn't necessarily all A Wizard Did It. It's been a while since I checked the setting, but isn't most of the chrome in there actually just "standard" cyberpunk tech, with a side effect of dampening magic?
Yep. Slapping cyberware in any sort of magic user will pretty much irreversibly fuck them over hard. Even losing 0.1 essence is a permanent reduction in max stats, as well as current stats. Not really sure what that has to do with your post since "A wizard did it" doesn't necessarily mean actual wizards made it happen, just a bullshit handwave caused it.
Nothing to do with your post, necessarily. I was talking about how the creators of the Crow & Coyote (I just noticed, it's C&C. Great, another D&D joke) are likely to just handwave the issues with native peoples developing cyberpunk-tier technology without any external influence by going "A Wizard (Spirit) Did It", and I compared it to Shadowrun, which does it in a much better way.
Here's a dumb idea of how to bridge the technological gap: have the Norse colonization of the Americas be more extensive than it was IRL, leading to the exchange of diseases which ravaged the population after Columbus to occur four centuries earlier. This gives the survivors of the initial wave of smallpox enough time to repopulate. So instead of a disease-ravaged depopulated continent, the later European settlers encounter numerous, technologically equivalent (due to adopting ironworking from the Norse), and very xenophobic (due to oral traditions of how the first batch of settlers brought disease and death) indigenous population.
They had metallurgy but abandoned it.