1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

Columbus was the first to see the yawning biological gap between Europe and the Americas.

Ever since 1492, the hemispheres have become more and more alike, as people mix the world’s organisms into a global stew.

By knitting together the seams of Pangaea, Columbus set off an ecological explosion of a magnitude unseen since the Ice Ages.

In ecological release, an organism escapes its home and parachutes into an ecosystem that has never encountered it before.

A phenomenon much like ecological release can occur when a species suddenly loses its burden of predators.

Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years.

When disease swept Indians from the land, this entire ecological ancien régime collapsed.

“The post-Columbian abundance of bison,” in his view, was largely due to “Eurasian diseases that decreased [Indian] hunting.”

The product of demographic calamity, the newly created wilderness was indeed beautiful. But it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a ruin as the temples of the Maya.

Indeed, some believe that fewer people may be living in rural Amazonia now than in 1491.

Indian insistence on personal liberty was accompanied by an equal insistence on social equality.

Cultural influence is difficult to pin down in documents and concrete actions.

Accepting that indigenous societies influenced American culture opens up fascinating new questions.

“We were enslaved as American Indians,” he wrote, “we were colonized as American Indians, and we will gain our freedom as American Indians, and then we will call ourselves any damn thing we choose.”