I've been meaning to read this book for a while. From what I understand it suggests that the cities what is now known as North and South America, before Columbus came were in fact even more populated and advanced than their European counterparts at the time.
It's very good! An easy read, with lots of neat insights. Didn't expect to appreciate corn so much.
It makes you sound delusional to say that corn is fully a product of ancient genetic engineering but it is consensus science/history/botony as far as I understand
Maize domestication is one of the greatest feats of artificial selection and evolution, wherein a weedy plant in Central Mexico was converted through human-mediated selection into the most productive crop in the world. In fact, the changes were so astounding that it took much of the last century to identify modern maize’s true ancestor. Through modern genetic studies, the molecular basis of this evolution is being unraveled. Maize’s new morphology and adaptation to diverse environments required selection at thousands of loci, and we are beginning to understand the magnitude and rates of these genetic changes. (Tracking Footprints of Maize Domestication and Evidence for a Massive Selective Sweep on Chromosome 10 - In the Light of Evolution - NCBI Bookshelf)
Re the Amazon, in 1491, Mann talks about how it was densely populated and farmed specifically with a lot of trees which Europeans didn't recognize as domesticated. Like in other places they just thought it was "like a garden of eden" where god had simply placed everything nice and convenient for the inhabitant instead of an intensely designed intentional farming system created by humans.
1491 is an all time top book.
NOTE there are similarly-named titles by a crackpot historian. I accidentally bought one by mistake. Make sure you get 1491. (And 1493 by same author I'm sure is fine not crackpot but not as amazing as 1491.)
My understanding is that 1491 is well regarded and even though it's a bit old now has stood up.
1493 was pretty good. Still quite illuminating but it has less of the "wow cool stuff you never learned in school!" parts and much more "this is how the Colombian Exchange has permanently altered the course of world history." Still interesting and a nice companion to 1491, though.
This stuff is so cool. I remember watching a docu on this (which might have been linked from here) where they were uncovering a lost city site on the edge of the Amazon, and pointed out that you could see the remnants of a road because the plants now growing on top of where it was looked different from the plants on either side of it.
