America Before Columbus

Today on Far Future Horizons we commemorate the the five hundred and twenty third anniversary of the discovery of America by embarking on an odyssey through time into the mysterious world of ancient America to shed a light on a different history of the Americas.

History books traditionally depict the pre-Columbus Americas as a pristine wilderness where small native villages lived in harmony with nature. But scientific evidence tells a very different story: When Columbus stepped ashore in 1492, millions of people were already living there.

Columbus found Cuba, though a few years later the Sea Explorer Amerigo Vespucci found the continent of (south) America. After Amerigo published his exploring finds, Martin Waldseemüller dubbed the new continent America; after the Italian explorer.

America wasn’t exactly a “New World,” but a very old one whose inhabitants had built a vast infrastructure of cities, orchards, canals and causeways.

But after Columbus set foot in the Americas, an endless wave of explorers, conquistadors and settlers arrived, and with each of their ships came a Noah's Ark of plants, animals—and disease. In the first 100 years of contact, entire civilizations were wiped out and the landscape was changed forever.

America Before Columbus is available on DVD from Amazon Books. 

America Before Columbus 

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