Quotes from Charles C. Mann

No sculpture, no carving or bas-relief, almost no painting or drawing—the interiors are completely bare. What we do see are these huge mounds—and textiles.

Despite all the knowledge gained by scientists in the last few decades, this emotional realm remains much harder to reach. An obvious example on the southern coast is the Nazca, famous for the huge patterns they set into the ground. Figures of animals and plants, almost a thousand geometric symbols, arrow-straight lines many miles long—what were they for?

Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach the real. Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way.

The countless fish bones in inland Caral and Huaricanga and the fruit seeds and cotton nets in shoreline Aspero are evidence that they swapped one for the other.

it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole. Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures.

After 1492 the world's ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as Crosby called it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.

In retrospect, Fenn told me, "One of George Washington's most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of '78." Without inoculation, she said, the smallpox epidemic could easily have handed the colonies back to the British.

Katrina was a relatively modest storm that overwhelmed inadequate dikes and levees. Many climate scientists believe that in days to come governments will need to get better at shoreline defense. The world has 136 big, low-lying coastal cities with a total population of about 550 million people. All are threatened by the rising seas associated with climate change.

Maize and the milpa slowly radiated throughout the Americas, stopping their advance only where the climate grew too cold or dry. By the time of the Pilgrims, fields of mixed maize, beans, and squash lined the New England coast and in many places extended for miles into the interior. To the south, maize reached to Peru and Chile. Maize was a high-status food there even though Andean cultures had developed their own agricultural system, with potatoes occupying the central role.

Peru was not the only destination in the mid-century Chinese diaspora. A quarter of a million or more zhuzai, almost all of them men, ended up—more or less willingly, more or less knowingly—in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States.

Coastal flooding could wipe out up to 9.3 percent of the world's annual output by 2100 (a Swedish-French-British team in 2015). It could create losses of up to $2.9 trillion in that year (a German-British-Dutch-Belgian team in 2014). It could put as many as a billion people at risk by 2050 (a Dutch team in 2012). Test cases occurred in 2017, when storms inundated Houston, Puerto Rico, and the Florida Keys.

the Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms—startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic César Paternosto, such major twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko were inspired by Inka art.)

More than nine out of ten Native Americans—and almost all South American Indians—have type O blood, for example, whereas Europeans are more evenly split between types O and A.

Shanghai, with an average altitude of thirteen feet, is among the many Asian cities vulnerable to rising waters.

Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years. As Cahokia shows, they made mistakes. But by and large they modified their landscapes in stable, supple, resilient ways.

Having grown separately for millennia, the [orginal] Americans were a boundless sea of novel ideas, drea,s, stories, philosophies, religions, ,oralities, discoveries, and all other products of the mind....Here and there we see clues of what might have been. Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-relief S, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic syste, based on an ovoid shapes that has no name in European languages.

way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

Before the potato and maize, before intensive fertilization, European living standards were roughly equivalent with those today in Cameroon and Bangladesh; they were below Bolivia or Zimbabwe. On average, European peasants ate less per day than hunting-and-gathering societies in Africa or the Amazon.

what social scientists call governmentality and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference.

Dazzled as he was, Cortés was also aware that with a single command Motecuhzoma could order his army "to obliterate all memory of us." The Spaniards counteracted this threat by inventing a pretext to seize the tlatoani in his own palace, making him first their captive and then their puppet.

Maize swept into Africa as introduced disease was leveling Indian societies. Faced with a labor shortage, the Europeans turned their eyes to Africa.

Holmberg tried to help them, but he never fully grasped that the people he saw as remnants from the Paleolithic Age were actually the persecuted survivors of a recently shattered culture. It was as if he had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving.

In South America, he estimated, the minimum probability that a pathogen in one host will next encounter a host with a similar immune spectrum is about 28 percent; in Europe, the chance is less than 2 percent. As a result, Black argued, "people of the New World are unusually susceptible to diseases of the Old.