1491

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/books/la-bk-rossi21aug21,1,6284898.story?coll=la-headlines-bookreview

What Columbus didn't find

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus; Charles C.
Mann; Alfred A. Knopf: 466 pp., $30

[reviewed] By Jim Rossi
Jim Rossi is a San Francisco-based writer, covering science and the outdoors.

August 21, 2005

THINK back to high school history class: Remember the part about
buffalo in the New World? It probably went something like this: When
Europeans began settling the interior of North America in the 17th
century, they encountered pristine forests and a vast prairie crowded
with millions of the giant horned mammals along with countless other
animals and birds. Over the next three centuries, desperate colonists,
industrious frontiersmen and heedless sportsmen upset the natural
balance, hunting the bison to the brink of extinction.

But like much of what we learned in school, that's not the whole
story, Charles C. Mann tells us in his book "1491." "The Americas seen
by the first colonists were teeming with game … [but] the continents
had not been that way for long," Mann writes.

Many archeologists and anthropologists now believe, Mann says, that
more people inhabited the Americas than lived in Europe at the time
Christopher Columbus reached the New World in 1492. The largest Aztec
city — Tenochtitlán, the site of modern-day Mexico City — was more
populous than Paris; unlike European cities, it had running water and
clean streets.

At least 4,000 years ago, Mesoamerican farmers developed maize — the
progenitor of today's corn — from wild plants into a staple crop grown
throughout the Americas in a feat of genetic engineering that still
isn't completely understood. "Somebody who did that today would win a
Nobel Prize," Pennsylvania State University geneticist Nina V.
Federoff tells Mann.

Mann is a longtime correspondent for Science and the Atlantic Monthly
and coauthor of four previous books — most notably "Noah's Choice,"
about the need to reform the Endangered Species Act. This is his first
solo gig and his best work, reminiscent of John McPhee's eloquence
with scientific detail and Jared Diamond's paradigm-shifting ambition.
Mann integrates carbon-14 dating, genomic analysis, ancient texts,
archeological inferences from excavated rats' nests and more into a
concise and brilliantly entertaining thesis. I don't agree with all
his big conclusions, but "1491" makes me think of history in a new
way.

In "1491," germs eclipse both guns and steel as a historical force; in
that, Mann owes a greater debt than he acknowledges to the findings of
geographer Alfred Crosby in his 1972 classic, "The Columbian
Exchange." Pandemics of European diseases followed Francisco Pizarro's
march against the Incas and Hernando Cortes' invasion of Aztec Mexico.
Hepatitis, measles, cholera and smallpox preceded colonists into the
interior of the New World, as native traders and messengers
inadvertently transmitted a holocaust back to their homelands.

Genetically speaking, American Indians are believed to be descendants
of relatively small groups that arrived from Asia, probably more than
20,000 years ago. They were less genetically diverse and suffered from
fewer infectious diseases than Europeans. The conquistadors had
immunities to Old World infectious diseases, but not to New World
germs, such as syphilis; still, many more Europeans survived the
encounter than did Indians.

These first explorers saw a continent in convulsive change. "Hernando
De Soto's expedition staggered through the Southeast for four years in
the early sixteenth century and saw hordes of people" lining the
Mississippi River, Mann writes. A century later, Sieur Robert Cavelier
de La Salle canoed down the same stretch of river and found "solitude
unrelieved by the faintest trace of man," according to 19th century
historian Francis Parkman. De Soto didn't see buffalo, but La Salle
found them everywhere, filling the ecological void left by the missing
people. "That's one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic
hunters," UCLA anthropologist Russell Thornton tells Mann. "Everything
else — all the heavily populated urbanized societies — was wiped out."

Contrary to popular belief, Mann writes, most pre-Columbian societies
weren't made up of simple hunters and gatherers who had minimal effect
on the land. Archeologists and anthropologists have found evidence
that the Inca, Maya, Toltec and others operated on a continental scale
with an ambition spanning many generations. Indians cleared forests
with fire, irrigated and terraced vast farmland, and built cities and
temples — producing ingenious technology and culture as well as
devastating wars and deforestation. "Indians as poster children for
eco-catastrophe, Indians as green role models: The two images
contradict each other less than they seem," he writes.

Mann raises crucial questions at a time when mainstream
environmentalism finds itself under political siege. Besides arguing
that much of the Great Plains was a buffalo farm, "1491" contends that
huge swaths of the Amazon rain forest are actually remnants of
gardens, built atop great mounds of charcoal and pottery shards to
grow fruit trees and other crops for a densely populated Amazonian
civilization that pre-dated Christ. These Amazonians greatly
outnumbered the nomads and slash-and-burn farmers who subsist across
much of the region now. "Native Americans had been managing their
environment for thousands of years … [but] in the sixteenth century,
epidemics removed the boss," he writes. "Far from destroying pristine
wilderness … the Europeans bloodily created it."

Mann exaggerates wildly here, I think. Even today, with more than 436
million people tooling around North America, vast landscapes — mostly
mountain ranges, dense forests and desert — remain essentially wild.
And in an ultimate sense, our entire global enterprise still operates
at the pleasure of nature's forces: spasms of geology and weather,
cyclical droughts and floods, and prehistoric climate change.

But if Mann is at least partly right — and I think he is — it's time
for a paradigm shift in ecology. First, learn from history; then plan
for the future instead of trying to recapture the past.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

What happened when

12,000-15,000 years ago: End of last Ice Age; Bering Strait land
bridge connects Asia to the Americas; first confirmed evidence of
humans in northern Europe and the Americas.

2800-2500 BC: First pyramids built in Egypt.

1800 BC: First large temples built in the Americas.

400-300 BC: The golden age of Greece.

476 AD: Rome falls.

760-910 AD: Maya civilization collapses; coincides with severe
long-term drought.

1000 AD: Vikings reach Newfoundland.

1492 AD: Columbus reaches land in the Caribbean.

1533 AD: Pizarro captures the Incan capital.

Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica, National Geographic,

-- 
Jim Devine
"Blessed are the pizza-makers."