It's not in any way a contradiction of the laws of nature, so it's not ASB. That being said, it
is rather unlikely. The best POD I can think of is that for some reason, a much larger number of people migrates to the Americas, either initially or in successive waves. The reason I mention this is that population growth -- as long as sufficient land and other resources are available -- will be exponential. It was in OTL, but it still took a damn long time to sort of "fill up" the Americas with people. The development of increasingly complex cultures was kick-started only when this process was well underway, and large, settled populations formed.
Therefore, significantly more people from the get-go means that the exponential growth of the population will very probably see the 'critical mass' of concentrated populations being reached ealier, and thus there's a developmental head-start compared to OTL.
How to achieve this? There are various ways. There is also quite a bit of leeway, because when it comes to migration into the Americas, there are still a lot of open questions. Just over a year ago, I wrote a fairly long post about the uncertainties and the competing models, which might prove of some use here, so I'll quote it:
Regarding the migration of the first Native Americans (often called "Paleo-Indians"), very little is set in stone. Hypotheses that were considered very well-supported have been put on shaky ground by new discoveries. This has happened more than once, and may well happen again. Previous "consensus opinions" have been demonstrably incorrect, and at present, there isn't even a consensus. There is a majority opinion, but various minority views exist that have serious academic support. Any of them can be correct, or the truth may combine aspects of these competing models. What I'm going to do is to lay out the various models (very generally and roughly) that are (as far as I'm aware) defended by any serious academics at this time.
First, we have the long chronology theory. This model is based on the idea that there was an early population of settlers, possibly present before 40,000 years ago. It has been suggested that this wave of migrants may have been related to Australian Aboriginals— a product of the same early wave of human migration. If such a population existed, they were pushed aside or assimilated by a later second wave of immigration. Some genetically distinct communities may have survived in relative isolation for quite some time. (For instance, some think that the original "Botocudo culture" consisted of a population that was ethnically distinct from modern Native Americans, because the ancient skulls are noticeably different.) Since these presumed early settlers were either wiped out or (if assimilated) weren't numerous enough to leave noticeable phenotypical heritage in the later population, we may assume that this would hold true no matter who forms the second wave of immigrants. But the POD "what if no later migration occurred" can give us an ATL where the Americas aren't empty (as some scenarios have it), but populated by distant cousins of the Australian Aboriginals. I'd call that interesting, and therefore worth mentioning.
There is also the short chronology theory, which comes in a number of flavours, which cover basically every other serious model. They are all rooted in the notion that the first migration occurred after the Last Glacial Maximum, which went into decline after c. 19,000 years ago. The old "Clovis consensus" held that the Clovis Culture was the "mother culture" of all Native Americans. It appeared c. 13,000 years ago, which meant that the ancestors of all Native Americans had migrated across the Bering Bridge between 19,000 and 13,000 years ago, via a supposed ice-free corridor. They moved into North America, producing the Clovis Culture, which then produced countless offshoots that went on to populated the Americas. This is no longer the dominant view, although it still has some defenders.
The fact that a substantial number of older sites have been discovered suggests very strongly that Native Americans (of Siberian origins, so not meaning the supposed 'early arrivals') were present at an earlier time than 13,000 years ago. Sites dating back to 16,000 and 15,000 years ago have been found. Those who still defend 'Clovis first' have criticisms of the dating of each of these sites individually— yet the idea that the dating is wrong every time a pre-Clovis site is discovered is quite implausible. The Clovis first model is looking less credible by the day.
Also, the whole existence of any ice-free corridor has been called into question. Even if that corridor existed, though, those older sites are too old to fit with the idea of entry into the Americas via such a corridor. If there was a corridor, the peoples inhabiting those sites must've arrived before it became passable. The idea that they arrived by boat (the "coastal route" model) has now become increasingly embraced. This would also explain why there are sites in South America that are older than one would expect if settlement occurred via migration on foot. But if settlers went down the western sea-board by coast-hugging boats, things make much more sense. This model assumes that the original settlers from North-East Asia arrived quite shortly after 19,000 years ago. (Some academics place their arrival as early as 23,000 years ago, but that's a distinct minority view.) The original migrant population is generally believed to have been small: about 250 people or so.
Does that give us a shiny new consensus, then? No. Because there are still two competing sub-models. The most broadly accepted one holds that the initial 'Bering migration' was followed up by multiple later waves. Three or four waves of migrants from North-East Asia are believed to have moved into the Americas, with the one around 19,000 years ago being the first. (This model makes any scenario where Native Americans of Asian origin are fully absent quite unlikely, as Burton K Wheeler has noted.)
However, there is also a competing model—less widely supported, but certainly not some fringe belief—which holds that there was just one group of immigrants from North-East Asia. Those c. 250 people who arrived c. 19,000 years ago. They form the ancestral population of all subsequent Native Americans. The subsequent 'waves' of migration throughout the Americas isn't disputed, but the adherents of this model believe that those waves originated with the one ancestral population. So instead of Asians making it to America three or four times, they just made it once, and offshoots of the resulting population migrated throughout the Americas in multiple waves. If we assume that to have been the case, it would explain a few things that have puzzled researchers. For instance, one single and small ancestral population would handily explain why Native American HLA profiles are dominated by an unusually small number of types. (Which is one of the reasons why they were so susceptible to epidemics.) It fits. The odds of one population finding its way into America is also a bit more credible then three or four waves of migration finding the way, thousands of years apart.
You can probably tell that I'm a supporter (albeit a cautious and tentative one) of the notion that there was just one ancestral group of immigrants. In any event, the model is credible enough to reasonably serve as the basis for a POD. You can say "that one group didn't make the trip" and you're done. That still doesn't give you any credible way to populate the Americas with anything even vaguely "white", however.
Of course, there is always the Solutrean hypothesis, which claims that Europeans of the Solutrean Culture moved in from across the Atlantic before anyone arrived from North-East Asia. I find the arguments in favour of this model to be pretty lacking, but it's not pseudo-science. Just very unlikely to be true. Both proponents and opponents tend to politicise this theory very heavily. One thing that is of interest is that supporters of the Solutrean hypothesis have pointed out that there is more "Western Eurasian" DNA in Native Americans than one would expect if their ancestors were fully of East-Asian descent. This is all pretty controversial, and studies are conflicting. Also, critics have argued (not unreasonably) that a lot of claims of "white DNA" in Native Americans are based on DNA taken from modern populations, and reflects no more than simple inter-breeding with Europeans as of 1492. Seems a lot more plausible to me.
However... DNA research of ancient human remains found in Siberia (c. 24,000) years old has revealed these to have far more genes linked to Western Eurasian populations than previously thought (instead of being exclusively linked to East Asian populations). Furthermore, it seems that these Siberian remains belonged to people related to the Paleo-Indians. This opens the door to a new hypothesis: namely that the original population that moved in from North-East Asian may have been a mixed group, including people with more Western Eurasian genetic heritage than anyone had previously suspected. This isn't so unlikely: it's becoming ever more clear that ancient nomadic peoples all over Northern Eurasia were highly nomadic, and travelled greater distances than previously suspected. People whose ancestors came from Western Eurasia ending up in East Asia is no longer just a theory. That happened. And it may just be the case that some of them, nearly twenty millennia ago, were among those who made that fateful journey into a new world. If it should turn out that (some) Western Eurasian DNA in Native Americans is older than 1491, this explanation makes infinitely more sense than the Solutrean hypothesis.
This gives a person, depending on which model he prefers, ample opportunities to craft ATL scenarios that have more people moving into the Americas earlier, which would yield a more densely populated New World earlier on, thus giving complex cultures more time to develop. In OTL, this process occurred at various times in various regions of the Americas, but is generally understood as beginning around 2000 BC at the earliest (Meso-America), 1000 BC at the latest (commencement of the Woodland Period), with other instances beginning somewher in between those two (1800 BC is often taken as a bench-mark regarding the Andean cultures).
Considering the start of similar processes in Eurasia, the Americas lagged several millennia behind. This has nothing to do with any kind of bullshit reason about cultural superiority, to be clear: it is very obviously an effect of a demographic disadvantage. A very small founding population (tine even if you assume multiple waves!) had to grow, and grow, and ultimately spread out and cover a continent. All in archaic times, with none of those nifty benefits that allow modern populations to spread like a damned locust swarm.
I could see this process, with the POD of a larger ancestral population and the subsequent demographic effects, starting a thousand years earlier. If you really let things go their way, you could semi-plausibly give them two thousand years. And that
still puts them about a thousand years behind Eurasia. But development isn't some fixed, linear path. I believe that the set-up I have described would create such
vastly different circumstances that the OTL events -- Europeans anno 1492 basically just moving in and taking over -- are now unthinkable. Not just unlikely, but literally no longer a possibility.
Not least because a larger starting population solves the problem, that I have often mentioned, of the Native American immune system's unusual vulnerability. A significant part of the susceptibility of the Native Americans to Old World diseases derived from their immune system, particularly the
major histocompatibility complex (MHC) of Native American individuals. There are countless MHC types, and a foreign element that gets past some will not get past others. Most human populations contain many MHC types, yet Native Americans are very homogenous in this regard (three types, compared to about 200, which is normal). This unusual trait derives, almost certainly, from the limited ancestral population. It's a major reason why diseases hit Native Americans
extra hard. It's why we see mortality rates exceeding 90%, rather than the Black Death levels (maybe 40%) that you'd actually expect with "virgin soil" populations.
So the POD I suggest is the most fundamental one for giving the Native Americans an extra thousand years (maybe more) of cultural development (and the resulting advances in all fields), while at the same time ensuring that -- even though there will still be a cataclysmic death toll from disease -- the OTL civilisation-wrecking plague apocalypse is averted.
This still doesn't give us the scenario posited in the OP, which frankly suggests that the ATL Native Americans should be more advanced than the Europeans. Given the time-disadvantage I have described, this is very unlikely. The lack of domesticated animals is a distinct disadvantage. I don't believe that what I propose would make domestications any more likely. In fact, maybe even the opposite: more people much earlier may well mean more extintions earlier, too.
But okay, if you steer the timeline to have some ATL domestication occur (I must say that domestication of the bison doesn't strike me as the likeliest option), that's a nice bonus. It's not ASB, but you're definitely in wank territory be that stage. (Note that if they domesticate animals, this will result in an array of New World diseases that will hit Eurasia as hard as the ATL Americas are hit by Eurasian diseases. Two ATL Black Deaths, how's
that for a Columbian exchange?)
