1491

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction book by American author and science writer Charles C. Mann about the pre-Columbian (before-Christopher Columbus) Americas. It was the 2006 winner of the National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public's understanding of topics in science, engineering or medicine. 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 (peak of 100 million), had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought...By the time the Europeans arrived in numbers to supplant the indigenous population in the Americas, the previous dominant people had been almost eliminated, mostly by disease (brought by Europeans since 1492). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus ISBN:1400032059

• Mark Bush disagrees with the population estimate: Most archaeologists are buying into the argument that you had big populations that transformed the landscape en masse. Another group of archaeologists say that transformation was very much limited to river corridors, and if you went away from the river corridors there wasn't that much impact. That's what our findings tend to support.