At the same time, it's also a big misconception to see the population of this giant continent as one homogenous group. Quite the contrary: in addition to the cultures most of us know, like the Inka, the Aztecs, the Olmecs and the Mayans, there were many more cultures I'd never heard of, like the Wari, for example, and other cultures whose names we'll never know. Some were bloodthirsty, brutal and warlike; others were peaceful, surviving under harsh conditions, or democratic to an extent that Europe was at that time unfamiliar with (and tried to suppress).
The most important, inescapable conclusion, is that Europe was, in many ways, the inferior culture. It may seem as if only superior firepower could explain how a handful of foreign invaders could subjugate an entire continent. But the reality was that that firepower was not nearly as superior as you might think, not to mention that Indians got their hands on some of those firearms themselves before long. Physically, the native population tended to be strong, muscular and imposing: they were horrified by the Spanish with their pockmarked faces. It was chicken pox and various other diseases that wiped out huge swaths of the population, often emptying a region even before the colonists caught up with the bugs.
Maybe you've come across the story of the passenger pigeon, a now-extinct pigeon species of which, at one point, there were a billion in the Americas. You'll probably have been told that this incredibly abundant bird (one in four birds in America were passenger pigeons at some point) went extinct due to deforestation and large-scale hunting. And that is all true.
But what's often left out of the story is the odd fact that the Indians before Columbus seem to have eaten very few passenger pigeons. When examining Indian sites, the bones of all kinds of animals can be found, but bones of these birds, despite their apparent abundance, were quite uncommon. How could this be? The shocking explanation is that before Columbus, passenger pigeons were not as abundant: they had large numbers of human predators. That all changed after the Europeans arrived: the mass deaths of the indigenous population paved the way for a population explosion of the bird.
We'll probably never know the real scale of the devastating loss that the "discovery" of the Americas brought about. But this book offers a glimpse, through stories like these. We owe it, not just to the lost peoples, but also to the world, to find out as much as we can about the people who lived in the Americas --even if that is very little.
