A brilliant work of popular history and scholarship
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This is a brilliant book. Charles C. Mann has taken an enormous range of information and the latest scholarship in archaeology, genetics, history and anthropology and turned it into a fascinating and highly readable history of Amerindians before 1491.
It is impossible here fully to do justice to the scope of the book, but what makes it so important is that it corrects a whole load of fallacies about the ancient Americans.
You thought that Amerindians crossed the Bering Straits 13,000 years ago? Wrong! It seems as though they may have been crossing over 40,000 years ago!
You thought that Amerindians had not invented the wheel? Wrong! The Maya had them on toys.
You thought that Amerindians were defeated because of technological superiority of the Spaniards? Wrong! It was just a question of disease.
And so it goes on! The Amazon basin's ecosystems were created in part by the skills of the Amerindians. The Amazonian societies were so complex that middens with tens of millions of pieces of pottery have been located deep in the jungle. The great herds of bison and birds found in North America were not testament to some primeval paradise but to an ecosystem out of balance after the North American Indians had been decimated by disease.
The list of new discoveries for the general reader in this book is amazing. It blows apart any vague preconceptions you may have about America before 1491, and introduces this strange and distant place to us in prose which is brilliantly accessible and authoritative.
I should add, I am not a friend of Charles Mann! I just loved this book. I also think it's a terrible shame that such a crucial, important book is languishing in the sales lists when so much dross does better. Buy it, and then buy it for all your relations as I have done!
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