I finished this book while I was flying back from the UK - it's very thought provoking. I'll have to look into this further, but it seems that convential wisdom on pre-Columbian America (north and south) differs between the general population and the paleontologists. Amongst the latter group, there seems to be a growing consensus that the Americas were much more highly populated than we were taught in school - and they didn't exactly live "lightly on the land", either. Within the limits of the technology they had, they did a fair amount of "terraforming" of their own. Which is hardly surprising - people are people, and we always try to change our surroundings to benefit ourselves.

The section on Amazonia is particularly interesting - the "Stone Age" tribes that we thought had been living in a "state of nature" since time immemorial may instead have been remnant populations - cast "back in time" via catastrophic population loss in the wake of the various European diseases - diseases they had no resistance to.

Anyway, it's a great book - I highly recommend it.

Technorati Tags: history, Pre-Columbian