So it is said that all Native American tribes can trace their ancestry back to the crossing of the Ice Bridge from Modern day Russia to Alaska, so North and South American tribes should have the same ancestry yes? Then why did South American tribes become so much more advanced it seems? You have the Aztecs and Myans that established flourishing united civilizations that were fairly technologically advanced. Aquaducts were constructed, farming and agriculture were researched, ect.
Yet in North America, to my knowledge at least, the native tribes barely progressed passes Hunter Gatherers. There were no huge established and united civilizations, the tribes always warred with eachother and never established a nation of their own. They kept to migratory practices, moving with herds of game.
What created this divide? North and South America should have been equally rich in resources at the time yes? Why did North American Native Tribes have little to no technological advancement then compared to their South American counterparts?
Thank you in advance to any answers!
More can always be said, but you might want to check this section of our FAQ. I also hope that it's not overly pedantic to point out that the Aztecs and Mayans were groups that are in North America -- North America comprises the continent from Greenland to Panama, after all.
I’d say at least part of this is a misunderstanding.
For the most part native peoples in the US (particularly those east of about 100° W) weren’t nomadic. The cultures of Eastern Woodlands, Mississippi Valleys, and Eastern Plains were settled agriculturalists. Towns like “Double Ditch Village” near modern-day Bismarck ND have a confirmed period of occupancy of nearly 300 years. And especially within the Mississippian culture (much of the Central Time Zone), large towns and cities were around. Cahokia IL (the largest of these cities) may have had as many as 20,000 residents at its height.
The 14th century saw what is known as the Little Ice Age, a period of unusually cold years in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s speculated that it brought about (or at least contributed to) the collapse of the Mississippian culture. The Anasazi cities in the southwest and Viking settlements in Greenland collapsed around the same time. Between 1300 and 1400 most of the large cities within the US were abandoned and the population moved to smaller towns and villages. Whether or not the climate was the proximate cause, there are also signs of widespread warfare and most settlements develop stronger fortifications. They largely quit building the large platform mounds (sometimes up to 100’ tall) but still remained sedentary farmers. With a lack of written sources, all we can do is speculate as to why the Mississippian culture collapsed. Climate change is the popular theory but it’s far from the only one. Whatever caused the collapse of the large Mississippian polities (climate, war, resource exhaustion) they still hadn’t formed large cities again when De Soto explored the lower Mississippi. He still ran across a lot of smaller towns, but no large urban centers.
Nomadic culture was something of a reintroduction to the plains, and it was really only came back into use in the Plains and Mountain West. California and the Great Basin is really the only are where hunting-gathering never went away. The Lakota for example were settled farmers living in Minnesota and Wisconsin. A series of things combined to get them to adopt what’s known as the horse culture between about 1650 and 1800. The first was warfare. There had always been war, but in the 17th century groups like the Ojibwe gained access to French muskets which were a game changer. The Lakota were regularly losing their choice lands and pushed further into the plains. At the same time horses trickled into the region making hunting far more viable than it had been. Then diseases began to ravage the Lakota and neighboring groups. Diseases tended to hit the denser settled farming groups than those who were beginning to adopt buffalo hunting. The smallpox epidemic of 1772-1780 finished off most of the settled agriculturalists of the Upper Plains. That’s also when the Lakota moved into the territory around the Black Hills they are most associated with today. When Louis and Clark encountered the Lakota in 1804, hey found a group that had been in that place for only about 30 years, living a lifestyle they had fully adopted less than 100 years before.
Other native groups formed large complex political entities. Probably the most famous would be the Iroquois Confederacy. It had a lot of characteristics of a nation-state, controlling most of modern Upstate New York and governed by the Council of 50. It was a loose overarching confederacy allowing broad independence within the 50 subgroups. I hesitate to make comparisons to other groups, but in some ways the Iroquois Confederacy resembles a lot of European federal nation-states. The council under the leadership of a Tadodaho looks in some was a fair bit like the medieval Northern European Parliaments like an Icelandic Alþingi under the leadership of a Lögsögumaður. It certainly couldn’t be further from the hunter-gatherer image you appear to be thinking of.
The question of why each group adopted the lifestyles the did is an interesting one, but it’s not a case of Mexico = large complex farming societies while US = hunter-gatherers. The US had its own large polities of settled farmers with complex political organizations. Sadly in most cases we know little to nothing about those complexities, as we have no writing from those groups.