A groundbreaking research that radically alters our knowledge of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492.

Traditionally, Americans learned in school the ancestors of the individuals who inhabited the Western Hemisphere during Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years back; existed generally in small, nomadic rings; and lived so lightly for the land that this Americas was, for those practical reasons, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C..LEARNING MUCH MORE approximately 1491: New Revelations from the Americas Before Columbus Mann today makes very clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last 30 years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong.

Within a book that startles and persuades, Mann uncovers how a new generation of researchers built with novel scientific techniques found previously unheard-of conclusions. Among them:

• In 1491 there have been probably more people living in the Americas than in European countries.

• Certain cities–such as for example Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital–were much larger in population than any contemporary European town. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in European countries at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical landscapes, and immaculately clean roads.

• The initial metropolitan areas in the American Hemisphere had been thriving prior to the Egyptians built the fantastic pyramids.

• Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico created corn with a mating process so sophisticated which the journal Research recently referred to it as “man’s initial, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering.”

• Amazonian Indians discovered how to farm the rainfall forest without destroying it–an activity scientists are learning today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge.

• Native Americans transformed their property thus completely that Europeans found its way to a hemisphere currently massively “landscaped” by humans.

Mann sheds clarifying light on the techniques used to arrive at these brand-new visions from the pre-Columbian Americas and exactly how they possess affected our understanding of our background and our taking into consideration the environment. His book is an exciting and learned accounts of technological inquiry and revelation.