1491 In the really first part of the book, I was so confused when Mann was telling the whole story about the “devil tree” and how he went with Siriono Indians to discover the structures. I had to read more than three times to get what was going on, who he was talking about. Firstly, I was the most interested in how Mann compared European technologies with Indian’s. I don’t know if it’s right here to use the word “technology” to talk about tools at that time, I guess it’s an aright word. To me, Indian’s technology was more impressive. I’m not saying here that which better than which, but most of things, tools were made by Indians were more fun, more interesting than how European’s made. For example, European simply made boats to cross the water, Indians thought about those canoes. Those canoes just sound so creative and some how more intelligence. Secondly, after reading deeply this part, I figured that disease was the worst problem effect the death rate of Indian’s population back then. This might sound weird, but then I used to thought that human couldn’t survive because there were so many big predators were living at the same time would attack humans. I never thought that disease was such a problem, because the atmosphere must be so purely clear, the nature was clean, no pollution, and such things like how it is nowadays, then there wouldn’t be any kind of infective diseases or so. Also, the different on using metals between European and Indian was interested to me too. While european mostly used metals for tool-making purposes, Indians were using them as decorations.

In part two of the book, first thing caught my attention is that Mann also talked about Mesoamerica which I have read on Snow, Chapter 7. What’s interested here is that these two authors write about the same thing which is development of agriculture in this region. A really incredible fact to me that by that time, people already knew how to use crops to grow vegetables. They also involved themselves in a lot of social activities of a big population. People work for others in farms to get food and be survived. People by the time lived in complex cultures which had more than one class in society. Secondly, Mann pointed out so many evidences said that Indian might have been living there for long long time before European came. He also mentioned that these Indians ancestor had so many same genetic features to Haplo group which is now considered ancestor of Siberia. Part three of the book, I got to know about Maya tribe. I don’t know if that’s right calling it a “tribe”, like I always said I don’t know much about these long time history facts, I feel like every words I use might be wrong. One thing I have read so many time that, people back then died, or disappeared was a normal thing since they had all kind of problems, hunger, killing each other to be survived, eating wrong things, poisonous foods. All of those reasons explain why people disappeared and killed. Like how Maya people died and disappeared. However, I have been wondering after reading this part, that if they all disappeared, then how do scientists now know or even confirm that those evidences they found was belong to Maya. In stead, those fossils were found might be some other tribe that existed. I’m not saying that I don’t trust what said in the book, I know that once they came up with the conclusion, they must have went through the whole big process of investigate the hypothesis that they were talking about. However, I was just wondering why would they know? There might be something else that I got confused reading in the book. Second thing that I’m interested in is that if they somehow knew that Maya was totally disappeared, there must be other tribes, other groups of people just died and disappeared too that all scientists, archaeologists nowadays still have no clue about, or no evidence at all to start search about them yet. Last thing that I have to talk about is how Indian