[arthurus]

Mann in 1491 overturns the whole greenie concept of the "Forest Primeval." The forest in America, North and South was really farmland. The Americans grew different stuff.

[PUGACHEV]

In 1542 Frfancisco de Orellana was the first European to travel down the Amazon river. He stopped along the way to repair his boats and wrote that he was visited by numerous tribes from the interior, of different ethnicities, some of whom were tall and fair skinned, and spoke a different language than the other tribes. By the time the next Europeans came down the Amazon twenty years later, all had vanished, presumably from disease.

I think we still have no idea who lived in the Amazon basin before the conquest, but it was by no means an empty quarter.