Europeans were using roman numerals and an abacus for accounting until the 1200s. In fact, the number zero was initially banned out of concern for fraud. The Medici Bank was an early adopter of the IndoArab numeral system we use today and it helped them become one of the wealthiest families in Europe.

From the 600s to 1400s we can draw a fairly clear line from Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Fibonacci, Pierro della Franchesca to Leonardo da Vinci.

In the old world it could take centuries for ideas to travel, even if they're foundational to modern mathematics, physics etc.

A similar story can be told of sugar which was first refined in South Asia, the engineering process travelled through and was further developed in the Arab world during the Islamic golden age and then went to Europe.

Italian merchant republics—primarily Venice—began managing sugar production in Mediterranean colonies like Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily. However, sugar is a land-hungry and wood-hungry crop. By the 1400s, the Mediterranean was running out of timber (needed to fuel the massive boiling vats) and space.

Christopher Columbus lived in Portugal and married the daughter of a sugar estate owner. When he sailed for the Americas, he brought sugarcane stalks from the Canary Islands on his very first voyage, knowing the Caribbean climate was a perfect match for the "white gold."

The Caribbean offered vast land, tropical rain, and timber. Because the process of cutting, hauling, and boiling cane is so physically punishing and dangerous, European powers scaled up the enslaved labor system to a level never before seen in the Mediterranean, turning the islands into "sugar factories" to meet the soaring demand in Europe.

The profits from sugar were unlike anything seen before. At its peak, a successful sugar plantation could see annual returns of 20% to 50%, far outstripping traditional agriculture or local trade. This led to the founding of institutions like the Bank of England, Barclays and Lloyds. Sugar also provided a cheap source or energy and made caffeine based beverages more palatable to maximize the productivity of human capital in operation of early machinery during the industrial revolution.

Yeah, they invented typesetting in China long before Europe, but they had to prepare characters for each run because of amount of possible characters, the letters were pottery, and it didn't seem like very useful thing so it was abandoned after the inventor's death.

At least that's what I heard, it might be a retcon for PR purposes

Daily reminder that no one is illegal on stolen land.

It's mind boggling how many teachers and professors in my life are still all aboard the "they were savages until we showed up" train.

Build me a musket out of obsidian.

Yeah, but are the people OP is talking nowadays part of a nation currently colonizing native american peoples and do these people need a justification?

We are a wood age civilisation.

TIL! Thanks!

Fun fact: The ancient Egyptian pyramids were built with copper tools, not bronze. Bronze hadn't been invented yet; the Egyptians hadn't established the international trade required to get tin.

They found that copper with arsenic impurities was harder and held its shape better than pure copper, so arsenical copper was cast into basic chisel shape and the edges were cold hammered to work harden them into something that will just about cut limestone for awhile I guess. They also used tube drills and flat saws. They would scatter a slurry of quartz sand and water on the stone to be cut, and then they would work a flat plate of copper back and forth over the sand or rotate a hollow cylinder of copper in place to make a straight cut or drill a hole respectively. In that way they could cut material as hard as granite.

Now as a woodworking tool, even copper is vastly superior to stone in one key way: Ease of repair. You make the bit of an axe out of stone, it's considerably harder than copper, but it's brittle. It's easy to just break, and if you do that you'll never get it back to the same shape because to re-sharpen that bit means napping more of the edge away. A copper axe bit might dull easily, but it can be honed in a minute or so. It bends, rather than breaks.

"Stumbling upon" bronze requires access to tin and knowledge of forging and casting technology. Tin and copper are seldom found near each other, and even if you've got tin it needs to have occurred to you to try melting copper. If you only ever cold work copper, you're not going to figure out bronze.

Hernan Cortes landed on the Yucatan, riding a horse wearing an iron breastplate and carrying a steel sword, and found the Maya and Aztecs living in societies not dissimilar to the Old Kingdom Egyptians. A dude on foot wearing a jaguar skin swinging a wooden club studded with bits of sharp obsidian is scary. A dude on horseback with a matchlock musket and a steel saber is scarier. Imagine a galleon full of 16th century Spaniards dropped anchor at the mouth of the Nile in 2600 BCE and rode into Khufu's Memphis. That's pretty much exactly what went down in what is now Mexico City.

I'm honestly convinced that the Americas would have eventually repelled the European invaders if the introduced (and intentionally spread) diseases weren't so devastating. Guns and metal armor are pretty good in warfare and all, but the size of the army required to subjugate millions of people across varied terrain where the invaders are wildly unfamiliar with the land and how to live in it while the defenders have been present for thousands of years, are very familiar with the land, have established warfare traditions, quickly adapt to introduced technologies, and have allied with historic enemies to repel invaders? Does not tend to go well for the invaders.

Speaking only of that which I learned from the video I linked, my understanding is that cold-hammered copper actually hardens a fair amount. There's a demo using an axe with a cold hammered replica copper blade where he cuts down a tree, for example, and some tests using copper tipped spears. Also, cold hammered copper fishing hooks, which had advantages over bone fishing hooks inreparability and flexibility and would have been useful for fishing in the Great Lakes area. There are still tradeoffs, though, and stone tools were still in widespread use for things they were better for, but there was still a lot of utility in cold hammered copper.

There are also a few Inuit groups who made knives for centuries from a metallic meteorite that landed in the arctic circle.

Isn't Washington coast on the east side of the continent?

OP definitely could have used the Inca empire. Its size far surpassed that of any bronze age state in the Old world.