Another controversy is the chronology of human presence in the Americas: the old date of 12,000 b.c., courtesy of the Bering Land Bridge in Alaska, no longer cuts it. One is the question of pre-contact demographics: old-school scholars had long advanced the idea that there were only a few million Native Americans at the time of the Columbian arrival, whereas revisionists in the 1960s posited that there were eight million on the island of Hispaniola alone, a figure punctured by revisionists of revisionism, now beset by Native American activists for the political incorrectness of adjusting the census.

They built great and wealthy cities they lived, for the most part, on farms and their home continents “were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined.” In defending this view, Mann visits several thriving controversies in the historic/prehistoric record. Plummer, 1995), Native Americans were as active in shaping their environments as anyone else. In fact, writes Mann ( Noah’s Choice, with Mark L. Historians once thought that prehistoric Indian peoples somehow lived outside of history, adrift and directionless, “passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way” that view was central to the myth of the noble savage. Science journalist Mann’s survey of the current knowledge is a bracing corrective. Unless you’re an anthropologist, it’s likely that everything you know about American prehistory is wrong.

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