Columbus Dramatic Exchange

CHARLES C. MANN — 1491, NEW REVELATIONS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS — 2005–2006–2011

That’s the book we had wanted to read for a very long time. It is absolutely needed in our attempt to understand what the Americas were before they became the Americas with Christopher Columbus sailing into them that he only thought were the West Indies, if not simply India per se. Our whole assessment of this New World before Columbus is based on what the conquistadors reported and what they wanted us to believe and it was altogether a big pack of many things that had nothing to do with what the Americas were before the arrival of the Europeans.

The Europeans brought along, meatal weapons and tools, horses and pigs, and several epidemics that were lethal, fatal, deadly for the Indians, as the author explains, because of the Indians’ particular genetic endowment concerning their immune system, their resistance, and reactivity to new germs. Not only had they never encountered smallpox, hepatitis A, and a few more, in their entire life on this earth and for many thousand years if not several ten thousand years, with apparently a genetic similarity with some native tribes from Siberia, but I will not take this as the answer to the mystery of this genetic handicap that became a deficiency, because the Indians did not react to a…