Age of discovery

People use subsaharan extremely loosely. Sub-Sahel might be more accurate, although I don't think anyone uses it. Essentially, where the rainforests hit. Was there Roman contact with the coast areas (Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, etc.)?
 
As far as I know there was no direct contact there, but that's not to say that goods and people from there didn't find their way to Rome via others on the way.
 
There was no way to sail a ship around the fat part of West Africa in Roman days. That is, with sail and oar, you'll never overcome the prevailing winds and current. The only way to sail south in the Atlantic is to cross it about half way westward first.

However, there were caravans across Sahara. And the norther ends of those routes were in parts of North Africa that Rome controlled. So there was contact in that sense. Though I have no idea how many Romans would have made the trip.
 
I don't think many Romans did (hence why they never developed any more detailed conception of what lay south of Roman Africa beyond calling it all 'the place where black people live') but I'm fairly sure that animals from further south did end up in the Roman arenas. Caesar even managed to get hold of a giraffe at one point, but they didn't start killing them until later.
 
The people of the Sahel had extensive contact with the Sub-sahelian people, though. Sure, if you want to talk the Congo or extreme South Africa, then yes these would likely have been relatively isolated from the rest of the world. But if you add up the Swahili coast + everything inland connected to the rest of the world via the Swahili ports (the Lake Victoria region states, Zimbabwe) + Ethiopia, + the Sahel, + everything in the west (at least to modern Gabon) that had commercial connection to the Sahel...the idea of an isolated Africa that would have been spared the plagues of the rest of the world start looking decidedly weak.
 
Trans-Saharan trade started developping before the Roman Empire.

So, as I wrote, Sub-Saharan Africans perhaps got infected by Eurasian diseases in Ancient or Medieval times (perhaps in Ancient then). But Great Zimbabwe and other Zimbabwe-like sites were abandoned in the 15th century for uncertain reasons (no signs of invasion). My hypothesis is the Black Death arriving.

The Iron Age in Sub-Saharan Africa started independently from Eurasia and North Africa. The Nok Culture of Nigeria invented iron working.

The Nok Culture emerged around 1000 BC, so before Trans-Saharan trade started developing.

The introduction of camel, then the spread of Islam across both sides of the Sahara, led to the development of very regular and very large contacts

Yes - that's why I wrote that the expansion of Islam could also contribute to introducing Eurasian infectious diseases to Africa.

And perhaps also the other way around - diseases from Africa could expand into Eurasia.

Native Americans had no opportunity of getting infected before Columbus by our deadly diseases. And it would have been better for them. It is better to experience mass mortality and mass invasion separately (separated by an interval of several centuries), rather than simultaneously at the same time.

Native populations experienced sharp decline caused by diseases and they had no time for recovery, because Europeans were already flooding in.

In prehistoric Europe - long before the Justinian's Plague or the Black Death - there were several population crashes (very sharp declines), caused perhaps by such diseases (alternatively by new immigrants to Europe - but in some cases migrations followed population crashes rather than causing them).

Modern males of Europe are in up to 50% descended from males who started immigrating to Europe late - in the transition period from late Neolithic to Copper Age (they probably brought copper working with them). It is assumed that those people (or at least some of them) were Indo-European speakers. Another plus minus 25% - 30% of modern European male gene pool comes from Neolithic Middle Eastern immigration, which introduced farming, as well as Siberian immigration. Only about 15% - 25% of European Y-DNA is from people who lived in Europe already during the Mesolithic period, before farming spread here.

Of course these percentages differ between various regions of Europe.

For example ancestry from Neolithic Middle Eastern farmers is almost absent in Finland, while very common in much of Southern Europe.

Oldest Mesolithic ancestry is most common in Bosnia-Herzegovina, some other parts of the Balkans, as well as some other regions.

In Scandinavia Mesolithic ancestry is also common, but genetic studies indicate that perhaps original Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Scandinavia abandoned that region, and later it was repopulated by descendants of Mesolithic populations (who learned farming by that time) from Central Europe. In Britain, after farmers started immigrating and occupied grazing grounds of animals, hunters followed the herds and most of them emigrated. That was one of main problems at that time - when farmers come to some region, animals escape from this region. Hunters either learn farming from newcomers, or follow animals.

In Scandinavia local hunters were stubborn and didn't want to adopt farming - they continued as hunters long into the Neolithic (Pitted Ware culture).

Comparison of DNA from Pitted Ware culture and of modern Scandinavians and other populations, shows that Pitted Ware hunters from Scandinavia are most similar to modern populations living east of the Baltic Sea, while modern Mesolithic ancestry in Scandinavia came from Central Europe (Hungary, etc.).

Looks like original Scandinavians emigrated along the Baltic Coast and were replaced by immigrants from Central Europe. Maybe they followed the herds or maybe there was some climate change in Scandinavia which had forced them to leave, and later another group repopulated the region.

Mesolithic ancestry in Bosnia-Herzegovina is also not all local. Some of it was brought by Slavic immigration in historical times. Slavs probably absorbed Mesolithic survivors who had lived in Pripyat Marshes (that area was unattractive for Neolithic farmers and for Indo-Europeans to settle).

==================================================

Coming back to those demographic changes - there was a decrease of population by the end of Mesolithic, followed by rapid increase since the Neolithic, but only until the decline of Linear Pottery culture, which coincided in time with the end of the Atlantic climate period:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Pottery_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_(period)#End_of_the_Atlantic_period

At that time there was a sharp decline in population which lasted some centuries, and then again fast increase during the Funnelbeaker culture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnelbeaker_culture

That demographic catastrophe which ended Linear Pottery culture was probably caused by infectious diseases contracted from domestic animals (Thorgalaeg mentioned this), combined with a climate change (decline in temperatures at the end of the Atlantic period).

In the Americas the diversity of species of domesticated animals was limited compared to Eurasia.

As the result the number of "opportunities" to contract diseases from animals was smaller.
 
Thorgalaeg said:
I see two issues with such theory: first, that seems a lot of things to happen in 300 or 400 years only. I am pretty sure all the amazon is packed with trees older than that.

This theory doesn't claim that forests in the Amazon didn't exist before humans came. It only claims that modern flora of the Amazon is to a large extent the result of human activity in this region during last thousands of years (since the time when native Americans settled in the region). The forest had been there before, later it was colonized by humans (who didn't destroy it but preserved most of it in the way described before), and later those humans died.

Second, conquistadores and explorers used to write down all his adventures and findings, we would have many records about how amazon looked like back then to compare to how it is now.

Large part of the population died already before first Europeans came there (European diseases were spreading faster than Europeans*). But when first Spanish explorer in this region, Francisco de Orellana, travelled across the Amazon, he reported encountering a lot of native villages everywhere, and he reported that their women were skilled in fighting just like their men (so he called the river Amazon - after those legendary Amazons, warrior-females).

Francisco de Orellana's travel in 1541 - 1542 (I think that by that time diseases had already killed large part of the population):



*Smallpox swept through the Incan Empire around 1525 - already before the Spanish invasion.

Though some argue that it wasn't the case: http://www.hist.umn.edu/~rmccaa/aha2004/whypox.htm
 
Disease would have killed a lot, yes, but not so much that extensive civilization would have had time to vanish entirely.

Still, I would be entirely willing to buy it that the amazon was far more populated and far more developed than we give it credit for today. Lord knows people have tended to underestimate the population and agricultural development of the pre-contact Eastern seaboard tribe.
 
Disease would have killed a lot, yes, but not so much that extensive civilization would have had time to vanish entirely.

Epidemic diseases, of the sort that kills say more than a third of people, have massive destabilising effects aside from the direct impact of deaths. Especially in a society previously absent epidemic diseases. And especially if there are many in quick succession (smallpox was accompanied by influenza and measles, to give some of the more common ones; it'd be like if Europe was struck by three Black Deaths in quick succession). Civilizations can collapse rather quickly given the right (or rather wrong) conditions; the Classic Maya collapse took place over less than a century.
 
Yes, but here Columbus to Orelana is half a century, and it's unlikely the plagues swept into South America before serious Spanish continental effort began, which reduces the time frame by another 10 years at least...allow for disease to propagate (not instantlly, over a rainforest), and consider that we don't have major diseases hitting the Incans until 1525, and you're suddenly looking at a time frame that's considerably below a century.

I don't doubt that a civilization collapse can happen relatively quickly ; but in this case the degree of collapse that would be required in the Amazon would be out of all proportion to what we can observe elsewhere in the New World (that wasn't being subjected to colonial depredations at the time)
 
Yes, but here Columbus to Orelana is half a century, and it's unlikely the plagues swept into South America before serious Spanish continental effort began, which reduces the time frame by another 10 years at least...allow for disease to propagate (not instantlly, over a rainforest), and consider that we don't have major diseases hitting the Incans until 1525, and you're suddenly looking at a time frame that's considerably below a century.
If I remember my reading of 1491 correctly, the argument was that at Orelana's voyage, the infrastructure and population would have mostly still been there, but was abandoned/destroyed due to Spanish slave raiding and/or epidemics in the following decades

I don't doubt that a civilization collapse can happen relatively quickly ; but in this case the degree of collapse that would be required in the Amazon would be out of all proportion to what we can observe elsewhere in the New World (that wasn't being subjected to colonial depredations at the time)
I suspect you overestimate the degree of transformation proposed by the "Amazonian Parkland theory". Those were clusters of riverside settlements and "gardens" surrounding those settlements, but the vast majority of Amazonia would have still been rainforest, obviously altered by human influence, but which might have appeared to the untrained eye as "pristine".
You might be interested in one of the reaserach papers from that line of thought:
Amazonia 1492: Pristine Forest or Cultural Parkland?
Here, we present clear evidence of
large, regional social formations [circa (c.)
1250 to 1600 A.D.] and their substantial in-
fluence on the landscape, where they have
altered much of the local forest cover. Spe-
cifically, archaeological research in the Up-
per Xingu (Mato Grosso, Brazil), including
detailed mapping and excavations of exten-
sive earthen features (such as moats, roads,
and bridges) in and around ancient settle-
ments, reveals unexpectedly complex region-
al settlement patterns that created areas of
acute forest alteration.
....
Present soil and biotic dis-
tributions, often isomorphic with the distri-
bution of archaeological features, notably
plazas, residential areas, roads, and road-
side hamlets, are in large part the result of
pre-Columbian land-management strate-
gies. After c. 1600 to 1700, catastrophic
depopulation led to the abandonment
of these works and many settlements, re-
sulting in extensive reforestation in many
areas. The scale of the prehistoric settle-
ments, including exterior constructions,
such as roads, hamlets, wetland structures,
and cultivation areas, suggests that agricul-
tural and parkland landscapes, rather than
high forest, characterized the broad land-
scapes around ancient villages, as is true in
contemporary villages.
 
Yes, but here Columbus to Orelana is half a century, and it's unlikely the plagues swept into South America before serious Spanish continental effort began, which reduces the time frame by another 10 years at least...allow for disease to propagate (not instantlly, over a rainforest), and consider that we don't have major diseases hitting the Incans until 1525, and you're suddenly looking at a time frame that's considerably below a century.

Hang on, Orellana is who we have circumstantial evidence of a (largely) densely-populated Amazonia from. If his accounts are accurate then pestilence wouldn't have hit before the 1540s. The next major expeditions were Portuguese ones undertaken almost a century later, and their accounts still spoke of substantial agricultural Indian populations. Between Orellana and the Portuguese expeditions there's enough time for epidemics to sweep through, breaking down the larger polities, if they existed.

Edit: x-post with tokala
 
it's unlikely the plagues swept into South America before serious Spanish continental effort began

I lack the knowledge to agree or disagree, but what exactly are you basing this claim on?
 
Tokala - thanks for explaining that, I misunderstood that part from Domen's post. Yes, in that scenario that makes perfect sense to me.

Louis XXIV - the fact that while transmission from a single explorer visit is entirely possible, even those were relatively few and far between early on. Prolonged and/or more frequent contact is more likely to have been the point when things went haywire, and in the case of Spain on the SA continent, settlement is a good benchmark of that since it happened within less than 20 years of Columbus.
 
Louis XXIV - a mix of gut feeling, and general historical knowledge: generally speaking it took a little more than en explorer briefly showing up then vanishing again before the plagues really got going throughout native history.

Wasn't it exactly like that on the eastern seaboard of North America? Again, that's what I remeber from 1491:

A few guys showing up and looking around initially, writing of villages pretty much occupying any convenient spot for a settlement.
A few decades later, quite a lot of those villages were deserted, with the first serious European settlers taking over some prime locations abandoned by the locals.
 
This theory doesn't claim that forests in the Amazon didn't exist before humans came. It only claims that modern flora of the Amazon is to a large extent the result of human activity in this region during last thousands of years (since the time when native Americans settled in the region). The forest had been there before, later it was colonized by humans (who didn't destroy it but preserved most of it in the way described before), and later those humans died.



Large part of the population died already before first Europeans came there (European diseases were spreading faster than Europeans*). But when first Spanish explorer in this region, Francisco de Orellana, travelled across the Amazon, he reported encountering a lot of native villages everywhere, and he reported that their women were skilled in fighting just like their men (so he called the river Amazon - after those legendary Amazons, warrior-females).

Francisco de Orellana's travel in 1541 - 1542 (I think that by that time diseases had already killed large part of the population):



*Smallpox swept through the Incan Empire around 1525 - already before the Spanish invasion.

Though some argue that it wasn't the case: http://www.hist.umn.edu/~rmccaa/aha2004/whypox.htm
Well, if we agree on the Amazon being more populated before the europeans arrived than after (which is a safe asumption i think) then we can agree there were more villages many surrounded by some extension of cultured land, mostly around rivers (which were the ones visited by Orellana who used the river to move). But to significantly alter the huge amazonia as a whole a population of many many millions would be needed. It was larger than Europe!

BTW, looking at that map that i find amazing is how these guys could without the proper means or knowledge go through the Andes and then the whole Amazon and come out alive at the other end. A mix of craziness, ambition and balls of steel i suppose.
 
A comparable time frame up north to Columbus/Orellano would be the first visit of John Cabot to the third visit of Cartier - the coastal natives were still alive and well by Cartier's time. It's with the fur trade really picking up mid-XVIth century that thing really got bad, and most sources place the great die-off of eastern seaboard natives around the very late XVIth and early XVIIth century - the Laurentian Iroquoians around late XVIth (and some of that may have been war with their neighbors), and the New England algonquins in the XVIIth, some sources say as late as the 1610s...by which time French and English colonies on the seaboard were in full swing.

The thing is, whiel history tend to talk about the first contact (Cabot/Verazzano/Cartier...and the later two are already 20-30 years after the first) and then immediately move on to Quebec and Plymouth (or Jamestown if you're lucky and not hearing from someone obsessed with Pilgrims), that's just not true. You had several colonization efforts (La Caroline; Roanoke), you had the whole set of Spanish Florida missions (which at points stretched as far north as the Carolinas) appearing with missions and missionaries and exploration inland, you had de Soto's entire inland expedition; you had constant visit by fishermen of the Great Banks who wanted to trade for fur with North-East natives to improve their profit margins, you had kidnapped natives being brought back to Europe then back to their land...essentially, prolonged and repeated contact, exactly as I described.

It was decidedly not a case of "Europeans show up, forget about it, show back up again a few decades later gasp they're all gone".
 
Tokala - thanks for explaining that, I misunderstood that part from Domen's post. Yes, in that scenario that makes perfect sense to me.

Louis XXIV - the fact that while transmission from a single explorer visit is entirely possible, even those were relatively few and far between early on. Prolonged and/or more frequent contact is more likely to have been the point when things went haywire, and in the case of Spain on the SA continent, settlement is a good benchmark of that since it happened within less than 20 years of Columbus.

Although we do have evidence of evidence of expeditions acting as conduits for transmission (Juan Pardo and De Soto).

That particularly early Spanish expedition devastated the Mississippian states of the southeast US, but also didn't outright destroy them. St. Catherine island in Georgia became a center of fighting for Mississippian peoples trying to control the valuable trade with the Spanish missions. Mississippian society was in haywire long before the Spanish mission was set up on St. Catherine and the archaeology suggests that the Spanish mission became a vital focal point for the regional Mississippian peoples to try and protect their prestige/power through trade. In fact while most of the rest of Mississippian states did "collapse" oddly enough the frequent contact 15 years after Pardo's expedition helped keep the local Georgia Mississippian states in tact and population actually recovered slightly.

The point I am making with the above example is, yes multiple waves of disease were more likely once denser European populations moved in - but the effects of even small expeditions shouldn't be discredited
-----

Collapse also is too large a word, the Classical Maya decline saw many Northern cities fade from the picture - but a good many survived/emerged during the era as well.

Still to this day jungle farming (shifting plots, grafting, and raising ground beds) leads to highly efficient agricultural output compared to labor inputs. Pre-Columbian Population estimates across the Americas are almost always revised upwards over time. Archaeologists often tried to estimate historical populations in the Americas based off of remains of domiciles/structures and extrapolate off that, but I have always thought in general that was unsatisfactory considering the makeup of housing for pre-Columbian individuals and how the environment is.

The soil in the Amazon also seems to agree with Orellana, there is like a four-five hundred year period of the soil layer suggesting a period of relatively heavy jungle agriculture in the north of Brazil.
 
Here more about this theory:

http://www.charlesmann.org/articles/1491-Atlantic.pdf

(...) Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise (1971), perhaps the most influential book ever written about the Amazon (...). Written by Betty J. Meggers, the Smithsonian archaeologist, Amazonia says that the apparent lushness of the rain forest is a sham. (...) Agriculture, which depends on extracting the wealth of the soil, therefore faces inherent ecological limitations in the wet desert of Amazonia. As a result, Meggers argued, Indian villages were forced to remain small (...) Beginning in 1948 Meggers and her late husband, Clifford Evans, excavated a chiefdom on Marajó, an island twice the size of New Jersey that sits like a gigantic stopper in the mouth of the Amazon. The Marajóara, they concluded, were failed offshoots of a sophisticated culture in the Andes. Transplanted to the lush trap of the Amazon, the culture choked and died.

Green activists saw the implication: development in tropical forests destroys both the forests and their developers. Meggers’s account had enormous public impact - Amazonia is one of the wellsprings of the campaign to save rain forests.

Then Anna C. Roosevelt, an anthropologist at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, re-excavated Marajó. Her complete report, Moundbuilders of the Amazon (1991), was like the anti-matter version of Amazonia. Marajó, she argued, was “one of the outstanding indigenous cultural achievements of the New World,” a military and commercial powerhouse that lasted for more than a thousand years, had “up to one million” inhabitants, and covered thousands of square miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Marajó’s “intensive cultivation” and “large, dense populations” had im proved it: the most luxuriant and diverse growth was on the lands formerly occupied by the Marajóara. “If you listened to Meggers’s theory, these places should have been a mess,” Roosevelt says.

Meggers scoffed at Roosevelt’s “extravagant claims,” “polemical tone,” and “defamatory remarks.” (...) The dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable in a contemporary academic context, it has featured vituperative references to colonialism, elitism, and employment by the CIA.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s team investigated Painted Rock Cave. On the floor of the cave what looked to me like nothing in particular turned out to be an ancient midden: a refuse heap. The archaeologists slowly scraped away sediment, traveling backward in time with every inch. When the traces of human occupation vanished, they kept digging. (“You always go a meter past sterile,” Roosevelt says.) A few inches below they struck the charcoal-rich dirt that signifies human habitation - a civilization, Roosevelt said later, that wasn’t supposed to be there. For many millennia the cave’s inhabitants hunted and gathered for food.

But by about 4,000 years ago they were growing crops perhaps as many as 140 of them, according to Charles R. Clement, an anthropological botanist at the Brazilian National Institute for Amazonian Research.

Unlike Europeans, who planted mainly annual crops, the Indians, he says, centered their agriculture on the Amazon’s unbelievably diverse assortment of trees: fruits, nuts, and palms. “It’s tremendously difficult to clear fields with stone tools,” Clement says. “If you can plant trees, you get twenty years of productivity out of your work instead of two or three.” Planting their orchards, the first Amazonians transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings.

In a widely cited article from 1989, William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin directly or indirectly created by human beings. In some circles this is now seen as a conservative position. “I basically think it’s all human-created,” Clement told me in Brazil.

He argues that Indians changed the assortment and density of species throughout the region. So does Clark Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, who told me in Bolivia that the low land tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet. “Some of my colleagues would say that’s pretty radical,” he said, smiling mischievously. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, “lots” of botanists believe that “what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.”

The phrase “built environment,” Erickson says, “applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes.” “Landscape” in this case is meant exactly - Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their feet. According to William I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois University, ecologists’ claims about terrible Amazonian land were based on very little data. In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable terrain. But they also discovered swaths of terra preta - rich, fertile “dark earth” that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings. Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties. Contrary to theory, he says, tropical rain doesn’t leach nutrients from terra preta fields. Instead the soil, so to speak, fights back.

Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer of terra preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. “Apparently,” Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, “at some threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate - even regenerate itself - thus behaving more like a living ‘super’-organism than an inert material.”

In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the University of São Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida; and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly - suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculatedbad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time. When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone. I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said goofy things like “wow” and “gosh.” Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was passing through my mind.

Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking, the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything. Scientists should study the microorganisms in terra preta, Woods told me, to find out how they work. If that could be learned, maybe some version of Amazonian dark earth could be used to improve the vast expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa - a final gift from the people who brought us tomatoes, corn, and the immense grasslands of the Great Plains.

“Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this,” Woods told me. “Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused.”

Indeed, Meggers’s recent Latin American Antiquity article charged that archaeologists who say the Amazon can support agriculture are effectively telling “developers [that they] are entitled to operate without restraint.” Resuscitating the myth of El Dorado, in her view, “makes us accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental degradation.”

Doubtless there is something to this - although, as some of her critics responded in the same issue of the journal, it is difficult to imagine greedy plutocrats “perusing the pages of Latin American Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chain saws.”

But the new picture doesn’t automatically legitimize paving the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time big chunks of Amazonia were used nondestructively by clever people who knew tricks we have yet to learn. I visited Painted Rock Cave during the river’s annual flood, when it wells up over its banks and creeps inland for miles. Farmers in the floodplain build houses and barns on stilts and watch pink dolphins sport from their doorsteps. Ecotourists take shortcuts by driving motorboats through the drowned forest. Guys in dories chase after them, trying to sell sacks of incredibly good fruit. All of this is described as “wilderness” in the tourist brochures. It’s not, if researchers like Roosevelt are correct. Indeed, they believe that fewer people may be living there now than in 1491. (...)
 
Top Bottom