//This orderly diffusion pattern makes it conceivable that all the wheels in use today are directly descended from the invention of a single gifted individual–an individual, however, who was such a dope that he failed to sign his name on the patent application, thus assuring his (or her) eternal anonymity.//
An excellent book, which goes into a thorough exploration of why certain world populations advanced technologically while others apparently hadn’t can be found in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.
His premise touched on what Cecil mentioned in his reply. The Americas did not have draft animals, cereals for making bread, and other resources, which were found in parts of Western Asia, the “cradle of civilization”. With cereal grains, especially wheat, you can make easily digestable bread; with large animals that could be domesticated, you had creatures that could pull plows and others you could put in a corral and eat at your leisure.
The Native Americans did not have large, domesticatable animals (you will only try to milk a buffalo once). This meant that they had to spend a large amount of time and population on simply hunting and food gathering. (Crop agriculture did help, but you’d have to read the book to understand why corn and squash did not have as much impact as wheat). If you’re spending all your time hunting food, your society doesn’t have the surplus manpower to tinker with science and engineering, to develop metalurgy or advanced pottery.
Cecil and Diamond agree: it wasn’t a lack of intelligence, or racial inferiority that left the Indians in the Stone Age when the first Europeans showed up; it was a lack of resources that would have allowed them to develop at the same time and rate as the Europeans.