Quotes from Charles C. Mann

Syphilis seems to have existed in the Americas before 1492—the third argument. In the mid-1990s Bruce and Christine Rothschild, researchers at the Arthritis Center of Northeast Ohio, in Youngstown, inspected 687 ancient Indian skeletons from the United States and Ecuador for signs of syphilitic disease. Up to 40 percent of the skeletons from some areas showed its presence.

he argued, was not perfectly round but "in the shape of a pear

Based in southern Ohio, the Hopewell interaction sphere lasted until about 400 A.D. and extended across two-thirds of what is now the United States. Into the Midwest came seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, silver from Ontario, fossil shark's teeth from Chesapeake Bay, and obsidian from Yellowstone. In return the Hopewell exported ideas: the bow and arrow, monumental earthworks, fired pottery (Adena pots were not put into kilns), and, probably most important, the Hopewell religion.

The varieties are not like islands, carefully apart," Perales explained. "They are more like gentle hills in a landscape—you see them, they are clearly present, but you cannot specify precisely where they start.

Indeed, there is little record of Wari warfare. Its supremacy was commercial and intellectual; it was based less on infantry troops than on innovative technology.

Like a painting, we will be erased. Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth. Like plumed vestments of the precious bird, That precious bird with the agile neck, We will come to an end.

Not until the 1440s did they learn that the island's warm climate was better suited to another, more profitable crop: sugarcane.

Cahokia was one big piece in the mosaic of chiefdoms that covered the lower half of the Mississippi and the Southeast at the end of the first millennium A.D.

Indeed, some medical researchers propose that syphilis has always existed worldwide, but manifested itself differently in different places.

Cahokia, biggest of all, was preeminent from about 950 to about 1250 A.D. It was an anomaly: the greatest city north of the Río Grande, it was also the only city north of the Río Grande.

A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume).

Until the sickness Massasoit had directly ruled a community of several thousand and held sway over a confederation of as many as twenty thousand. Now his group was reduced to sixty people and the entire confederation to fewer than a thousand.

Far from being the timeless, million-year-old wilderness portrayed on calendars, these scientists say, today's forest is the product of a historical interaction between the environment and human beings—human beings in the form of the populous, long-lasting Indian societies described by Carvajal.

but it was not a history-maker" like smallpox. Treponema pallidum, awful as it was and is, did not help topple empires or push whole peoples to extinction.

Today, about 85 percent of Israel's wastewater—more than 100 million gallons a year—is used for irrigation, according to Seth M. Siegel, the author of Let There Be Water (2015), a study of Israeli water use that I am following here.

Solar research had been the product of anxiety about fossil fuels. When the anxiety faded, so did the interest.

a company's engineers develop new equipment that can pump out more petroleum at a lower cost, the effective size of the reservoir increases. Not the actual size—its physical dimensions—but the effective size, the amount of oil and gas that can be extracted in the foreseeable future.

As a result, much of the red Amazonian soil is weathered, harshly acid, and almost bereft of essential nutrients—one reason ecologists refer to the tropical forest as a "wet desert.

So draconian were the prohibitions that in 1525 the court ordered coastal officials to destroy all private seagoing vessels.

The big mesa is to this day regarded as an apu, an ancient spirit transfigured into rock.

The final result covered almost fifteen acres and was the largest earthen structure in the Western Hemisphere; though built out of unsuitable material in a floodplain, it has stood for a thousand years.

Amazon forest is uniquely diverse and beautiful. But its exuberant canopy is a mask covering an impoverished base. The base is the region's poor soil.

A careful investigator, Young interviewed farmers, recording their methods and the size of their harvests. According to his figures, the average yearly harvest in eastern England from an acre of wheat, barley, and oats was between 1,300 and 1,500 pounds. By contrast, an acre of potatoes yielded more than 25,000 pounds—about eighteen times as much.

slavery was part of the furniture of daily life—at that time almost every minister, usually the most important man in town, had one or two. About 8 percent of the inhabitants of the main street of Deerfield, one of the bigger villages in the valley, were African slaves.