Righto. The reason, of course, that so many species were domesticated in the Americans, as compared to the Old World, is that with the exception of maize (North America) and potatoes (South America) they weren't very productive in the old calories/acre test.
Since the native Americans were so much more "advanced" than Europeans, why didn't the NAs "discover" Europe and colonize it instead of the other way around?
I've read a great deal about the pre-Columbian history of the New World, and I'm perfectly in agreement that their achievements have often been overlooked, but let's not let hyperbole get out of hand.
While there were areas of what is now the USA where "civilizations" had sprung up, notably in the South and Southwest, they were at best at a stage roughly equal to that of very early Sumer or the peoples discussed in this article, which were 5000 to 7000 years earlier in the Old World.
No large domestic animals, no wheel, no metal (for utilitarian purposes), no writing. That's not an advanced civilization.
BTW, "migratory herdsmen" is not an earlier stage of life than settled agriculture, it's a parallel one. It's far more advanced than the hunter-gatherer stage and to be fully economically viable often requires a settled agricultural society nearby to raid, rule or trade with.
I've been to the site near the Wisconsin/Michigan border ~ and now there's a site of comparable age in Meso-America.
Remembering that smelting copper is logically the first off the block ~ and the easiest to do, you can also start with what are called native ore surface deposits (they look green) and beat them rather than melt them. First time you put that stuff on an exceptionally hot fire you would, of course, discover smelting.
America has had several such deposits and the Old World has had harder to get-at deposits.
So far the Indians are arguably ahead of the Old World when it comes to copper working, or smelting, but the time frames are working their way back to probably "simultaneous discovery" having something to do with the return of human populations to Northern forests (which took time to grow).
The Indians were also CENTURIES ahead of the Euro-African invaders when it came to the use of glass to cut and kill! Their error was to not first invent firearms, or maybe some way of avoiding Hanta Virus!
Now, concerning "writing", the North American plains Indian sign language is clearly identical to what is known as Chinese in the Shang Dynasty shards. No idea how that got here, but it was very useful. Then there several independent writing methods developed in Meso-America ~ and fortunately as I drift off into the great never never smart guys have learned how to decipher them ~ and they are like us. In the Old World ONE form of writing was independently developed ~ that was in Sumer. It's earliest hieroglyphic form appears to have served as the basis for Chinese and Egyptian! All other forms in the Old World arise out of that discovery. Meso Americans devised MORE THAN ONE independent form of writing.
Large Domestic Animals ~ the Llama was domesticated LONG before any Old World animals. The North American cattle had/have endemic brucellosis which means that any native human population that succeeded in breeding the first 3 or 4 generations in the 8 generation domestication process would themselves have suffered from some serious reproductive problems and would have gone extinct before working it out. (SEE: Tame Foxes).
Still, i'm sure more than one Indian looked at a buffalo and said "Hey, I'd like to have one of them so I could build a big wagon and pull it around" ~ it's an obvious application, not one not readily accomplished.
The Indians also had old world dogs and I suppose they could have bred for large dogs but think of the meat bill for those suckers!
The Sumerians, BTW, did their thing in an area of land between the otherwise defensible Euphrates and Tigris rivers ~ and their first settlements appear to have arisen before the arrival of cattle ~ so that meant they were purely hunters.
The THREE SISTERS of the American Indians (and this is North, South and Central American indians) are Corn, Beans and Squash. Grown together this was an incredibly productive food source.
They did this without ploughs ~