They seem to go extinct before local civilizations are able to leverage them, missing out on a huge force multiplier.
Europeans reintroduce them much later and use them successfully to conquer large swaths of land.
The "inferior" Native Americans realize the utility of horses and very quickly they become so skilled at using them that today their archetypal image is that of a horseman.
Native American society was technologically inferior.
They lacked written word and the wheel at a time when Europe (and parts of Asia) had the printing press and extensive engineering and mathematical accomplishment.
The Americas were far behind Eurasia by every metric.
There’s a discussion about this in ecological terms by historian William Cronon in his book "Changes in the Land" (1983), which talks about the ins and outs of this so-called technological inferiority, but also touches upon the superiority (or symbiosis) of the indigenous people living lightly on the land, and having an understanding of sustainability that Europeans are only now coming to acknowledge as useful and important.
Native Americans had writing... many indigenous American cultures, such as the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Zapotec, and Toltec, developed writing systems. Other native peoples to the north—mainly Algonquians—had organized pictographing, a common precursor of writing.
People of South America were also the first humans ever to practice metallurgy. Indigenous Americans mastered smelting, soldering, annealing, electroplating, sintering, alloying, low-wax casting, and many other metallurgical techniques independent of any Old World influences. They invented metallurgy a full 3,000k+ years before anyone in the old world ever did (~1200BC in Europe)
Also farming. I mean let's face it, Europeans were probably some of the worst farmers to ever rely on farming. Europe was basically going from one famine to another up until the Native Americans gave them the potato. In addition to the potato (which saved millions of European lives) they also gave them: beans, corn, peanuts, quinoa, potatoes, tomatoes, lima beans, cassava, coke, amaranth, sweet potatoes, peppers (in addition to a ton more that are mostly grown locally still)
I think you should at least do some basic reading before making such sweeping and uninformed generalizations about an entire continent
You’re arguing that in one particular area, metallurgy, the Americas were ahead of Europe.
But that’s not what we’re comparing. We’re comparing the technological state of Europe and Asia to the Americas when the Americas were introduced to the world permanently in the 1500s. Not all Native American tribes were farmers. Speaking as the group as a whole is silly except to state that no tribe was nearly as advanced as the powers in Europe and Asia.
Crazy timeline.
They're from North America.
They seem to go extinct before local civilizations are able to leverage them, missing out on a huge force multiplier.
Europeans reintroduce them much later and use them successfully to conquer large swaths of land.
The "inferior" Native Americans realize the utility of horses and very quickly they become so skilled at using them that today their archetypal image is that of a horseman.