Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively 'landscaped' by human beings. Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as 'man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering.'Īmazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it–a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge. The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets. In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.Ĭertain cities–such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital–were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of conclusions.

Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last thirty years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong. Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago existed mainly in small, nomadic bands and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. Schools & English Language Center DiscountĪ groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492.

Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand.

Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city.

Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492 in this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology in this updated and expanded 2nd edition.Ĭontrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them.

1491 new revelations