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- Published on: 1625
- Binding: Hardcover
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
By Hugo
Excellent book, captivating, written by a person with great knowledge of the matter. It challenges much of our preconceptions about the Americas before Columbus, and tells us about the scientific advances and new findings about the pre-colonized continent. One of the main thesis is that the diseases brought by Europeans created the illusion of an 'empty continent' as they probably decimated up to 95% of the native population. I found interesting the descriptions about the way of life of the Indians and the comparisons between ancient Americans and Euro-Asians. The book ends with the conclusion that the Native Americans also influenced the colonists and their ideas about freedom, specially regarding the Haudenosaunee of the Northeast.The author also relies on dubious evidence to claim that the Americas were first inhabited earlier than we thought. All genetic evidence points to the peopling of the Americas between 15,000 and 20,000 B.P and all waves of migration came from Asia. The prehistoric archaeological sites are much less than their European counterparts pointing to a much later migration.Also, the author dismisses the 'overkill hypotheses' relying on shaky arguments. According to this theory, humans led to the extinction (through hunting) of thirty-four of the forty-seven genera of large mammals in North America and fifty out of sixty in South America, including saber-tooth cats, camels, horses. The author dismisses this theory attributing it to climate change, forgetting that the same thing happened in Australia where twenty-three of the twenty-four animal species weighing 50 kg or more disappeared shortly after human arrival 50,000 ago. Time and time again analyses yield the same results: the freshest dung balls and the most recent camel bones date to the period when humans flooded America, between 12,000 and 9,000 BC. Only in one area have scientists discovered younger dung balls: on several Caribbean islands, in particular Cuba and Hispaniola, they found petrified ground-sloth scat dating to about 5,000 BC. This is exactly the time when the first humans managed to cross the Caribbean Sea and settle these two large islands.The author is a journalist and wants to challenge our preconceptions and portray the native Americans as more sophisticated people than we thought. However, he, in some cases, acts as their lawyer absolving their ancestors of the massive extinction of animals (when this happened in other parts of the globe) and missing important information in Holmberg's book. Trying to prove that the Americas were inhabited earlier than we thought, he goes against all archaeological and genetic evidence (see Spencer Well's book 'The Journey of Man').
34 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
By Denis Benchimol Minev
There has been much scholarly discussion over the years about pre-Columbian societies in the Americas. How many were there? What technologies did they develop? Did they have writing? What destroyed them? Where is the evidence?In this book, Charles Mann brought together much of the recent scholarly knowledge, piecing together evidence from across North, Central and South America, to come up with a cohesive image of what the Americas looked like in terms of human occupation before Columbus.The book's main arguemnt is that the Americas were already heavily populated with as many as 20 million people when Columbus arrived. These people possessed technology very advanced that was not, as much of history tells, puny and weak compared to what Europeans had developed. Agricultural methods were advanced and very productive, providing the basis for the establishment of large sedentary populations, much larger than previously thought. These large populations were mainly destroyed by disease. What we see today are in fact the remaining population after the equivalent of a holocaust, which is hardly a good basis to judge their capabilities and one time glory.To demonstrate this theory, evidence is gathered from archeology and ancient reports from travellers. From most 16th century explorers, we get a picture of a heavily populated landscape, both in the southeastern US and in the Amazon. However, explorers through the same regions roughtly a century later describe a landscape of peaceful nature without large human interventions. The archeological evidence, as more is discovered, points in the direction of large populations and many characteristics (such as religion and art) of sedentary populations.Particularly interesting is the section on the Amazon forest, in which the author describes the Amazon not as virginal forest but rather an a human construct, a large garden manipulated by ancient inhabitants, now abandoned. Evidence of these people's technology can be found in unlikely places, such as in the formation of terra preta, a highly fertile soil in a land well known for poor soils for agriculture. Additionally, the raised fields of the Bolivian Amazon also point to a highly sophisticated and organized society that would need to be surplus producing in order to spare the manpower for such great public works.An interesting addendum to his argument is about the freedom enjoyed by antive americans, which is much more similar to the freedom we enjoy today and seek to expand, than the Europeans at the time enjoyed. The author does a superb job of piecing together evidence from across the continent to come to interesting conclusions about our ancestors.I highly recommend this book not only to anyone interested in the history of the Americas before Columbus, but to anyone looking for an interesting read about our history as humans.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
By John P. Jones III
It's a great title, and a great book. Though some reviewers have fussed at the sub-title, claiming that there weren't really new revelations in the book, should I be ashamed to admit that almost all the book was history of the best kind; the history I did not know?Of course the book is not literally about that year; it covers the period from the very first arrival of humans in America, which Mann claims is substantially before the 12,000 BC Bering Straits land bridge arrival that I had been taught; and it extends to much beyond the initial arrival of the Europeans, to cover their interactions with the natives. The author devotes major sections to the civilizations in what is now Peru, and Mexico; the prehistoric finds in eastern New Mexico; the Cahokia "mound builders" around modern-day St. Louis; the arrival of the Pilgrims in New England; and life in "Amazonia."Charles Mann is not a "scholar"; instead he has a journalist background writing for "Science" and the "Atlantic Monthly," and I think the reader is much better served as a result. He displays humbling erudition, managing to incorporate observations by Nabokov and Pascal, while also capable of giving a concise explanation of the Carbon-14 dating process in one paragraph. His central premise is to debunk the idea that not many people were in America, in 1491, and that they were "primitives," devoid of higher learning. His first chapter is entitled "Holmberg's Mistake," after the academic who promoted the concept, and Mann quotes from historians George Bancroft, Samuel Eliot Morison and Hugh Trevor-Roper who supported this view. Time and again throughout the book Mann has the gift for selecting an appropriate analogy to make his point, in this case: "It was as if he had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving." Mann certainly does not paint a Rousseauian paradise prior to 1492, with observations like "Because human beings rarely volunteer to spend their days loading baskets with heavy rocks to build public monuments..." nonetheless, he stresses the all too human tendency to denigrate the living conditions and morality of those from whom you are taking their property and land.My copy is thoroughly "marked up," with passages that I want to return to, and consider, and even quote in the future. For example: "trade in goods was important, but it was the trade in ideas that mattered." Mann was discussing the rise of the empires in central Mexico, but it is at least as important to contemplate today, when, nominally, we have such a flow of ideas, but in practice the barriers to the acceptance of new ideas is high. Or how about expressive formulations: "Peru is the cow-catcher on the train of continental drift." In terms of establishing the "glue," that "animating ideology" that holds a society together, and he cites "manifest destine and "Mission civilisatrice," as examples; for the Mexican leader, Tlacaelel, Mann says the following: "He came up with a corker: a theogony that transformed the Mexica into keepers of the cosmic order."Mann writes well, he thinks well, and has presented an excellent synthesis of some of the current theories and research on pre-Columbian America, and what happened to the natives after the arrival of the Europeans. There are some interesting appendixes, particularly the one on calendar calculations. Humbling also is the bibliography, which underscores why there was so much history I did not know. Are there mistakes of fact, as some of the low star reviewers indicate? Probably, in a work so broad in scope, and I trust he would correct in a revision. Are there mistakes in emphasis? Is he too "political correct," in other words? Not for me; think the images of the "innocent white settlers" in those wagon trains being attacked by the "savages," for no reason at all, could still use some additional correction with a dose of reality. Very well done, a solid 5-star read.(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on February 08, 2010)
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