![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.ġ491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. 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.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. In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. ![]()
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