The new new world

Charles C. Mann's monumental retelling of pre-Columbian American history, "1491," illuminates the existence of civilizations as populous and sophisticated as those of the European latecomers.

By Steve Kettmann

Sep 29, 2005 | My father can't prove it, but he's convinced that one of his grandfathers was half Cherokee, and he can produce faded old pictures of his mother showing high, angled cheekbones that are distinctively non-European. My mother's side of the family has long taken outsize pride in having an ancestor who was the first governor of Baja, Calif.; only recently did we come across clear evidence that we were actually the adopted poor relations of this family, that is, not Spanish nobility but mestizos of mixed race.

I'd always been curious about this Native American blood flowing in my veins, but like most Americans, I felt confused trying to make sense of the legacy of the people who lived in the Americas before Europeans showed up. The stories we were fed as kids, starting with the tale of the happy local Indians showing up in Plymouth for the first Thanksgiving, always had a bogus, Disney-filtered feel to them, yet there was no alternative narrative beyond the famous image of a proud old Indian, Iron Eyes Cody, shedding a tear at the rape of his people's land. This weeping-Indian image, too, presented pity and guilt in lieu of a real understanding of who these people were and how they lived. There was always a sense that Native Americans had been robbed not only of their land, but of their historical importance as well. Yet, any such thoughts got lost in a gooey, dreamy kind of Indian chic, summed up by those phantasmagorical peyote scenes Oliver Stone tossed into his "Doors" movie.

Charles C. Mann has solved this problem. As he explains in a useful preface to "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus," Mann had been waiting, at least since the early 1990s, for someone to publish a book pulling together the wealth of research conducted in recent years to redefine radically how we think of our continent's history. But no one did. He finally decided that he was going to have to write the book himself. "1491" is less a self-contained work per se and more an induction ceremony into what, for many readers, promises to be a lifelong obsession with the startling new perspective slowly opening up on this prehistory.

What's most shocking about "1491" is the feeling it induces of waking up from a long dream and slowly realizing just how thoroughly one has been duped. We all knew there were problems with the old narrative of brave European settlers crossing the Atlantic to find an empty continent, but it's jarring to discover, as Mann tells us, that in 1491 there were almost certainly more people living in the Americas than in Europe -- and that, in many ways, American civilizations of the time were as advanced as anything across the ocean.

We were taught in school that nomadic peoples scampered across a land bridge over the Bering Strait roughly 12,000 years ago during the last Ice Age -- so how could such thriving societies have developed in the relatively short period of time? Mann has an intriguing explanation, which even in the time since his book went to press has been echoed in press accounts of new findings in science: The old narrative was probably wrong. It now appears likely that even if people did move across the Bering Strait then and make their way south, they did not find an empty continent. Recent discoveries at a place called Monte Verde in southern Chile indicate that early humans were there at least 12,800 years ago.

"All of this is speculative, to say the least, and may well be wrong," Mann sums up. "Next year geologists may decide the ice-free corridor was passable, after all. Or more hunting sites could turn up. What seems unlikely to be undone is the awareness that Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years."

Let that time frame sink in a minute. Then think about what was going on over on the other side of the Atlantic.

"Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the 'New World,'" Mann writes. "Britain, home of my ancestor Billington, was empty until about 12,500 B.C., because it was still covered by glaciers. If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works."

For comparison's sake, new research out of Germany indicates that Europe's earliest civilization existed nearly 7,000 years ago and was centered on what is now Dresden, Germany. This early European civilization, if that is the name for it, lingers on in the shape of more than 150 earthen temples discovered in Germany, Austria and Slovakia, but researchers are only in the first stages of figuring out who the people were who built them and how they lived.

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