Every now and again a book comes along that fundamentally changes my perspective about something big, and this is one of them.

There´s a reason why the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620 and found the forests nicely felled, the fields already cleared, and caches of food ready to be stolen. The reason: a huge population of Indians had already done the work on their behalf. The reason why hardly any of them were left is that the local population had been reduced a few short years before by a European-introduced epidemic that killed 95% of them.

Take this story and multiply it many times over, and you have the story of contact between Europeans and Indians everywhere in the New World. In fact, as the author points out, it may not even be appropriate to call it the "new" world. It seems that the invention of the Neolithic revolution (think farming and villages) had been independently replicated at least twice in the Americas (Central America and the Andes), and at about the same time as it occurred in Mesopotamia. And it also seems that the population of the Americas was probably at least as great if not greater than that of Europe. So, it becomes pretty hard to say which was the new and which was the old world.

The author spent years interviewing the scientists uncovering this kind of data and these kinds of new interpretations, and distills the points of view of various schools of thought at odds with one another. Example: Is the Amazon rain forest a wilderness, or is it in fact just the remnant of a forest that had been heavily shaped by millenia of agriculture by the Indians?

Since I learned most of what I know about the early history of the Americas back in elementary school in Montreal and in high school in Ottawa several decades ago, I discovered that much of what I knew was, uh, dated. Or to be more accurate, wrong.

This book is highly recommended.