[wahern]

Conversely, as many on HN would attest, plenty of novel and inevitable ideas never saw traction and disappeared to history for being too early to market. Being too early is often worse than being too late. At least with software you can pocket it and maybe in 5, 10, 20 years pick things back up when the winds go your way[1], but in earlier times the next opportunity might not come for generations, long after the inventor and any memory of their contraption are gone.

I haven't read that book; maybe that's pointed out as one of the reasons it can take so long for an invention to appear in history. The stars have to align. It's rarely if ever enough to create a working implementation, let alone merely conceive of it.

And I guess it's probably also worth considering that notwithstanding all the advanced knowledge pre-Columbian civilizations had, they were still nonetheless millennia behind the Old World. The Old World was highly interconnected even 4000 years ago, and even if the New World had the equivalent of the Silk Road, there were just fewer people, fewer civilizations, and fewer cycles of civilization building to shake things out.

[1] Even open sourcing it doesn't help. If I had a nickel for every cool open source project I've noticed that gained huge mindshare and was thought to be novel and heretofore unimplemented approach, yet actually had a substantially similar if not identical 20+ year old implementation sitting on some on old SunSITE FTP server or as a PoC for some ACM paper published circa 1970-1999....