1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

Dobyns calculated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died.

When Columbus landed, Cook and Borah concluded, the central Mexican plateau alone had a population of 25.2 million. By contrast, Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million inhabitants. Central Mexico, they said, was the most densely populated place on earth, with more than twice as many people per square mile than China or India.

Dobyns argued that the Indian population in 1491 was between 90 and 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!

Tenochtitlan dazzled its invaders—it was bigger than Paris, Europe’s greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like yokels at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. Boats flitted like butterflies around the three grand causeways that linked Tenochtitlan to the mainland. Long aqueducts conveyed water from the distant mountains across the lake and into the city. Even more astounding than the great temples and immense banners and colorful promenades were the botanical gardens—none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren’t ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never conceived of such a thing.)

The “new archaeological evidence” to which Cann referred was from Monte Verde, a boggy Chilean riverbank excavated by Tom Dillehay of the University of Kentucky; Mario Pino of the University of Chile in Valdivia; and a team of students and specialists. They began work in 1977, finished excavation in 1985, and published their final reports in two massive volumes in 1989 and 1997. In the twenty years between the first shovelsful of dirt and the final errata sheets, the scientists concluded that paleo-Indians had occupied Monte Verde at least 12,800 years ago. Not only that, they turned up suggestive indications of human habitation more than 32,000 years ago. Monte Verde, in southern Chile, is ten thousand miles from the Bering Strait. Archaeologists have tended to believe that paleo-Indians would have needed millennia to walk from the north end of the Americas to the south. If Monte Verde was a minimum of 12,800 years old, Indians must have come to the Americas thousands of years before that.