1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

In the absence of written records, researchers have developed techniques for teasing out evidence of the past. Among them is “glottochronology,” the attempt to estimate how long ago two languages separated from a common ancestor by evaluating their degree of divergence on a list of key words.

The Mi’kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia scoffed at the notion of European superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants all trying to settle somewhere else?

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.

In 1768 the virus struck Siberia’s Pacific coast, apparently for the first time. “No one knows how many have survived,” confessed the governor of Irkutsk, the Russian base on Lake Baikal, apparently because officials were afraid to travel to the affected area. A decade later, in 1779, the round-the-globe expedition of Captain James Cook reached Kamchatka, the long peninsula on the Pacific coast. The shoreline, the British discovered, was a cemetery. “We every where met with the Ruins of large Villages with no Traces left of them but the Foundation of the Houses,” lamented David Samwell, the ship’s surgeon. “The Russians told us that [the villages] were destroyed by the small Pox.”

When Cortés landed, according to the Berkeley researchers Cook and Borah, 25.2 million people lived in central Mexico, an area of about 200,000 square miles. After Cortés, the population of the entire region collapsed. By 1620–25, it was 730,000, “approximately 3 percent of its size at the time that he first landed.” Cook and Borah calculated that the area did not recover its fifteenth-century population until the late 1960s.

Across the Americas, Indians spoke some 1,200 separate languages that have been classified into as many as 180 linguistic families. By contrast, all of Europe has just 4 language families—Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Basque, and Turkic—with the great majority of Europeans speaking an Indo-European tongue.

“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.

Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica.

Mummies were first discovered in the Atacama at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the Chinchorro attracted sustained attention only in 1983, when ninety-six superbly preserved cadavers were discovered beneath a massif that rises above downtown Arica, Chile. About 90 percent of their diet was seafood—fish, shellfish, marine mammals, and seaweed—the Chinchorro ate almost no fruit, vegetables, or land animals. Sometime before 5000 B.C. they began mummifying bodies—children at first, adults later on. Nobody knows why. They peeled off the skin from the limbs like so many socks, covered the result with white clay, painted it to resemble the deceased, and fitted the head with a wig made from its own hair. Such was the skill of the Chinchorro at preserving human flesh that scientists have been able to extract intact DNA from cadavers thousands of years older than the Egyptian pyramids.

most nutrients in tropical forests are stored not in the soil, as in temperate regions, but in the vegetation that covers it. When leaves or branches fall, the carbon and nitrogen in the debris are rapidly reabsorbed by the hyperefficient root systems of tropical plants. If loggers or farmers clear away the vegetation, they also remove the local supply of nutrients. Normally the forest quickly fills in bare spots, such as those created when big trees fall, and damage is kept to a minimum. But if the opening is too large or the ground is kept clear too long, the sun and rain decompose whatever organic matter remains and bake the surface into something resembling brick in both color and impermeability. In short order, the land becomes almost incapable of sustaining life. Thus the tropical forest, despite its fabulous vitality, exists on a knife edge.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many Amazonian Indians, the Yanomamo among them, abandoned their farm villages, which had made them sitting ducks for European diseases and slave trading. They hid out in the forest, preserving their freedom by moving from place to place; in what Balée calls “agricultural regression,” these hunted peoples necessarily gave up farming and kept body and soul together by foraging. The “Stone Age tribespeople in the Amazon wilderness” that captured so many European imaginations were in large part a European creation and a historical novelty; they survived because the “wilderness” was largely composed of their ancestors’ orchards.