Is There a Pandemic in North America?

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The population of North America was vastly, vastly higher than our popular image of it. The typical estimates now are that there are somewhere around 40 to 60 million people in the Americas at the time Columbus hit. But this is a truth that, I mean, you wrote this book in 2005, right? Or that's when it was published. And so the kind of, if we truly understood that these landscapes had been thoroughly inhabited by people who figured out how to live there, we might not have made these sort of beginners mistakes.

This week Adam welcomes an author whose book blew his mind more than perhaps any other. Americans are typically taught that prior to the arrival of European settlers, indigenous communities were sparsely populated, lacked technology, and did little to shape the natural landscape. But as this week’s guest Charles C. Mann’s 1491 tells Adam, the most recent research reveals that the American indigenous civilizations were sophisticated, dynamic, and massively populated. Purchase his books 1491 and 1493 at http://factuallypod.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.