Decided to look up theories as to why the Native Americans (North and South) never advanced as much as the Europeans did.
First thing I found sounded reasonable, up until it started going on about how modern crops produce less than 500 years ago, and how the wheat chaff is toxic.
If you want to know more about this, I recommend reading Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's required reading for our class, but I find it rather interesting. It changes your view of human development.
Jared Diamond's a bit of an academic fool or idealist, whichever is better in your eyes. A lot of his history is wrong, underplayed or just dust not connect with what he's saying. The tl;dr is everything is an accident, native cooperation with Yurop is meh, the wills of nations and statesmen is meh, you don't domesticate animals to get domesticated animals, everything is caused by Yurops adaption to deadly pathogens.
Honestly the most likely reason is that Native Americans in the North never had populations large enough to form urban societies and begin creating the specialized roles in society that eventually lead up to scientists, scholars and scribes, or they had the agriculture, the populations but did not yet develop written language to keep information safe and build upon it. The South? Well, it was just a matter of time. Civilization was born in Mesopotamia 8,000 years ago, the Romans brought it to Europe 2,000 years ago and the Incan civilization was born 1,200 years ago. And whilst they lacked the technological discovery of Europe, they had the societies and governments which would have allowed such discovery to accrue from generation to generation - and indeed, when the Spanish did take over, its was made much easier by the assimilation of the local peoples disgruntled at their Incan overlords and they just took over the already existing governmental systems.
He tells a good story though.