I cannot reply in the case of the African people, but I can in the case of the native Americans (when I speak about them, I mean for the whole continent, since I will be working by examples I have in mind).

First I would like to clarify that the people just adapted to their more relevant demands, ideology and interests, and the available resources in the environment they lived. If you compare European cities with sedentary cultures of native Americans you find they had the same challenges on urban planing and coexistence: access to water, storage of food, security, establishing trade and alliances with each other, developing day to day utilities, medicine to heal, war tactics and strategy. They did domesticated animals (dog, turkey, rabbits [?]) and plants (maize, potato, tomato, beans, etc). Meanwhile the nomads knew how, when, and where to hunt and recollect, survive unforgivable lands and war (giving a hard time to the Europeans for decades)

In the case of the people that inhabited the North of Mexico (Better known as chichimecas) their priorities were to capture resources accordingly to the availability, it is a dry and unforgivable weather, so they rotated from place to place according to the seasons. Missionaries when they arrived tried to concentrate these groups as sedentary and to live near the improvised parishes, and they thought they achieved their goal, but the chichimecas only were there for a while and abandoned the place. Stay put and cultivate was kinda a bad idea for them. On the anecdote, it is narrated by the Spanish that the chichimecas were smart about their tactics, one of them is using wax to unite the point and shaft of their arrows with wax, and when the arrow hit a soldier, the point stay inside the body while the shaft was the only thing out, so it further hurt and killed the victim.

The sendentary native Americans were smart architects, from building on a lake (Teonochtitlan) having observatories (Chichen Itza), cities on top of mountains (Machu Pichu), and having their structures aligned to relevant astronomical shifts (equinoxes and solstices), they developed irrigation systems and sewer systems (Casas Grandes), People living on those cities imply a great need of organization for storing food and access to water on a constant basis, so they did have a writing and numbering systems to keep everything in order.

In the case of the wheel, which was used for carts and pottery for the Europeans, the native Americans did do know about its existence, but was mostly used for toys. The lack of big domesticated animals like the horse and the ox in America is what made it not possible try that until those animals arrived after the Europeans. They solved it by raw manpower carrying products (Tamemes was the name of the job in the mexica territories) and they still did cool ceramic artifacts.

The native Americans also developed metallurgy, but in the case of Mesoamérica it was never used as weapons, they already have obsidian and flint. It was more for crafting ornamental artifacts. And on a interesting note, the Tarascan they used copper and made fishing hooks and big tweezers. That last one was because nobility though they should be hairless, because hair is for savages and animals.

So yeah, native Americans survived and thrived just like the Europeans did in the other side of the world. They just did it differently.

Edits: I wrote this late in the night, fixing typos and adding sources

Soldiers, Indians, and Silver: The Northward Advance of New Spain [Phillip Wayne Powell] Legacies of Resistance, Adaptation and Tenacity: History of the Native Peoples of Northwest Mexico [Susan M. Deeds] Strategic goods from the ancient west of México, Production and Exchange [Eduardo Williams, editor] Rethinking Agriculture: Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives [Timothy P. Denham et al] Evidence for Pre-Columbian Animal Domestication in the New World [D.L. Johnson and B.K. Swartz, Jr.] The Sounds and Colors of Power: The Sacred Metallurgical. Technology of Ancient West Mexico [Dorothy Hosler] Astronomy, Architecture, and Landscape in Prehispanic Mesoamerica [Ivan Šprajc] Aztec Architecture [Manuel Aguilar Moreno] Tula, and wheeled animal effigies in Mesoamerica [Richard A. Diehl and Margaret D. Mandeville]

Its not that they were less advanced, they were just as advanced (maybe even more-so) but in their own way. They were typically very ecologically aware and built their societies around that. They didn't wage war unless it was absolutely necessary, therefore their technology improved at a slow rate.

Then the Europeans came, tore down every thing they built and whitewashed their history. They were not below Europeans, they were just venerable, like innocent puppies being trashed apart by a vicious wolf.