Download 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus AudioBook Free
A groundbreaking analysis that radically alters our knowledge of the Americas before the introduction of the Europeans in 1492. Traditionally, Americans discovered in college that the ancestors of individuals who inhabited the American Hemisphere during Columbus' landing had crossed the Bering Strait 12,000 years back; been around mainly in small nomadic bands; and resided so lightly on the land that the Americas were, for all those practical purposes, still a huge wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last 30 years showing these and many other long-held assumptions incorrect. In a publication that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new era of researchers prepared with novel technological techniques emerged to recently unheard-of conclusions. Among them:
- In 1491 there have been probably more people surviving in the Americas than in Europe.
- Certain places - such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital - were much larger in population than any modern Western city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running drinking water, beautiful botanical landscapes, and immaculately clean streets.
- The earliest places in the American Hemisphere were growing before the Egyptians built the great pyramids.
- Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn with a mating process so complex that the journal Knowledge recently referred to it as "man's first, and perhaps the best, feat of genetic engineering".
- Amazonian Indians discovered how to farm the rain forest without destroying it - a process scientists are studying today in the anticipation of regaining this lost knowledge.
- Native Americans altered their land so completely that Europeans found its way to a hemisphere already massively "landscaped" by human beings.
