1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

objects tucked into objects, creatures stuffed into their own eyes, humans who were half beast and beasts who were half human—all was metamorphosis and surreal commotion.

the Indians maintained and expanded the grasslands by regularly setting huge areas on fire. Over the centuries the burning created an intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species dependent on indigenous pyrophilia.

Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia.

ethnocentrism seems to be a near-universal human quality—and

“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 ship anchored in wide Narragansett Bay, near what is now Providence, Rhode Island. Verrazzano was one of the first Europeans the natives had seen, perhaps even the first, but the Narragansett were not intimidated. Almost instantly, twenty long canoes surrounded the visitors. Cocksure and graceful, the Narragansett sachem leapt aboard: a tall, longhaired man of about forty with multicolored jewelry dangling about his neck and ears, “as beautiful of stature and build as I can possibly describe,” Verrazzano wrote.

Time and time again Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens. Eating an incredibly nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in—“as proper men and women for feature and limbes as can be founde,”

He goes his way singing, offering flowers. And his words rain down Like jade and quetzal plumes. Is this what pleases the Giver of Life? Is that the only truth on earth?

modern maize was the outcome of a bold act of conscious biological manipulation—“arguably man’s first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering,”

peach palm wood is hard enough that in the Beni it was used for saw blades. Bundles of orange or red fruit hang like clusters of bocce balls from the base of the fronds. The fruit is soaked with oil and rich in beta-carotene, vitamin C, and, surprisingly, protein. When dried, the white or pink pulp makes flour for thin, tortilla-like cakes; when boiled and smoked, it becomes hors d’oeuvres; when cooked and fermented, it makes beer. (The sap also makes a kind of wine.) Two crops a year are not uncommon; in terms of yield per acre, peach palms are typically much more productive than rice, beans, or maize. Trees begin producing fruit after three to five years and can continue for another seventy years. Like strawberries, peach palm throws out adventitious shoots. With a little care, these can be harvested for heart-of-palm—very tasty heart-of-palm, in my experience. Bactris gasipaes, as scientists call it, has more than two hundred common names: pupunha, cahipay, tembe, pejibaye, chontaduro, pijuayo. To Clement, the proliferation of names suggests the plant was used for many purposes by many cultures.

the lowland tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet.

In 1996 the federal government estimated that kudzu had swallowed seven million acres. The figure is now much larger.

Endive and spinach escaped from colonial gardens and grew into impassable, six-foot thickets on the Peruvian coast; thousands of feet higher, mint overwhelmed Andean valleys. In the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, the voyaging Charles Darwin discovered hundreds of square miles strangled by feral artichoke.

They gorged on so many beechnuts and acorns that they sometimes fell off their perches and burst apart when they hit the ground.

“The post-Columbian abundance of bison,” in his view, was largely due to “Eurasian diseases that decreased [Indian] hunting.” The massive, thundering herds were pathological, something that the land had not seen before and was unlikely to see again.