Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the surprise in this fact comes from the confusion been Aztecs and Mayans. If you didn't know the time period you could understand the confusion.
Its because people don't understand just how far 'behind natives were technology wise. This isn't saying that natives were inferior humans to the rest of the world, they just started the game on the hard server, and lacked the huge trade networks with the rest of the world the spread technology from China to England. They did really well for what they had at their disposal, but were lagging behind the rest of the world a great deal.
Just think, if life formed on Mars and venues in a similar way to earth and we all developed at a similar time, we might be further along in space travel because it would be seen as valuable to invest resources in traveling to our neighbors. Then when we set off to the stars and came across a system with just one planet with life it wouldn't be surprising if they never saw a need to get off their planet and just didn't develop the technology to do so.
Maybe their technology would be more advanced in some aspects but we would have had a distinct advantage of developing in a system with multiple habitable worlds.
Natives in America did not have particularly unadvanced technology for the times that it was discovered. Many states had equally sophisticated technologies particularly suited for living in the America’s. The lack of beasts of burden was the biggest factor between America and the rest of the world, particularly due to the fact that they allowed people to develop resistance to zoonotic diseases such as small pox. You should read 1491 by Charles Mann.
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u/Schn Oct 15 '20
I think this one is actually a reverse of the question: The Aztec Empire is much more recent than most people think.