New scholarship has demolished this idea of the Americas as a depopulated empty continent. In North America alone, there were upwards of 300 distinct languages spoken. The Incas created a network of roads as many as 37,000 miles long. Tenochtitlan had hundreds of thousands of people and pyramids.
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.
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