In these summaries, we’ll be correcting the record as we explore how the Americas’ first inhabitants shaped the world around them. Settlers mistook overgrown farms for pristine wilderness and saw Indians as primitive people trapped in the Stone Age instead of as what they really were: the survivors of shattered civilizations. This catastrophic and sudden collapse of Native societies shaped European perceptions. They left a trail of devastation behind them, wiping out an estimated 90 percent of a population that may have been as large as 100 million people. European diseases had traveled even faster than the settlers had.
Often, they didn’t need to, as the settlements were empty – the people who’d lived there were already dead. Sometimes, they used violence to drive the inhabitants out. The first Europeans in the Americas often built their settlements on top of Indian settlements. Lots of crops struggle in the Amazon, but fruit orchards thrive.Īmazonian Indians discovered sustainable farming thousands of years ago.Ĭentral American agriculturalists changed the way the world eats. Modern agricultural practices are destroying the Amazon rainforest. So many Indians died after 1500 that it changed the global climate. North American Indians used fire to redesign the landscape. Native Americans didn’t live off the land – they shaped their environment. The Beni was home to an advanced pre-Columbian society. Scholars studying native cultures have often missed the forest for the trees. What’s in it for me? Discover the real New World
In 1491, Charles Mann sets out to recover their ways of life and remarkable achievements. Within a century of Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World, some of humanity’s most sophisticated cultures had all but disappeared. 1491 (2005) is a study of the Western Hemisphere before 1492, the year in which an Italian sailor employed by the Spanish empire first set foot in the Americas.
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