In the introduction, Mann challenges the thesis that Native Americans ' came across the Bering Strait about thirteen thousand years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation the continents remained mostly wilderness.' These three main foci (origins/population, culture, and environment) form the basis for three parts of the book.

The New World was not a wilderness at the time of European contact, but an environment which the Indigenous peoples had altered for thousands of years for their benefit, mostly with fire.The level of cultural advancement and the settlement range of humans was higher and broader than previously imagined.(a) population levels in the Native Americans were probably higher than traditionally believed among scientists and closer to the number estimated by 'high counters.' (b) humans probably arrived in the Americas earlier than thought, over the course of multiple waves of migration to the New World (not solely by the Bering land bridge over a relatively short period of time).Although there is no consensus, and Mann acknowledges controversies, he asserts that the general trend among scientists currently is to acknowledge: Mann develops his arguments from a variety of recent re-assessments of longstanding views about the pre-Columbian world, based on new findings in demography, climatology, epidemiology, economics, botany, genetics, image analysis, palynology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and soil science. The author notes that, according to these findings, two of the first six independent centers of civilization arose in the Americas: the first, Norte Chico or Caral-Supe, in present-day northern Peru and that of Formative-era Mesoamerica in what is now southern Mexico. The book presents recent research findings in different fields that suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere-that is, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas-were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought. It was the 2006 winner of the National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public understanding of topics in science, engineering or medicine.

1491, as presented in 1491ġ491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction book by American author and science writer Charles C. An indicative map of the prominent culture areas extant in the Western Hemisphere c.

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