daachinese.blogg.se - 1491 columbus

It's also a book that tends to have unimpressive covers, both in the US and the UK editions. In particular, what the people, cultures and human ways of living were like (though animals and nature get a bit of a mention, too). His book is an exciting and learned account of scientific inquiry and revelation.1491 is a book trying to give an overview of current thinking about what America was like before Columbus arrived. Mann sheds clarifying light on the methods used to arrive at these new visions of the pre-Columbian Americas and how they have affected our understanding of our history and our thinking about the environment. Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively “landscaped” by human beings.Amazonian 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.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.”.

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.

Certain cities–such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital–were far greater in population than any contemporary European city.

In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.

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. A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492.