Most of what people were taught about pre-Columbian civilizations in America is wrong.
They were far more sophisticated than previously thought (and, for that matter, more sophisticated than Europe in a variety of ways), but their downfall was lack of immunity to Eurasian viruses. Reading 1491 is similar to the feeling one might have of encountering Chinese or Japanese civilization for the first time.
I would also like to plug a third book from Mann: The Wizard and the Prophet.
https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Prophet-Remarkable-Scientists-...
It's about two men, the godfathers of the Green Revolution and the modern environmental movement. The first, Borlaug, is a techno-optimist solving global hunger, while the second, Vogt, is a conservative vis a vis technology, modernity and demographics, and takes a Malthusian opposition to tech and growth.
I have come to see the conversation happening about tech, and between tech and mainstream American culture, as a conversation between wizards and prophets.
Neither side is wholly wrong, and both have good reasons as well as self-interest to believe what they do. But the way they understand the world is deeply different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ni%C3%B1a
From the excellent The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C Mann:
Andean peoples had long known that every few years the coastal climate shifted dramatically, with warm downpours inundating the cold, dry coast. Because the rains usually began around Christmas, Peruvians referred to them as El Niño, a Spanish nickname for the Christ Child. In 1891 three Peruvians—an engineer, a geographer, and a naturalist—separately figured out how El Niños worked. During these times, the Humboldt Current abruptly weakens, allowing warm equatorial water to surge close to the coast; the warm water heats up the normally cold coastal air, which allows it to hold more moisture than usual, which, in turn, causes heavy rainfall on the desert shore. . . . a climatic system that extended across much of the Pacific and influenced the weather as far north as Canada. But the worst effects occurred in coastal Peru, where floods washed away railroads, wiped out farms, and destroyed power stations, blacking out cities. Thousands of “dead guano birds” were incidental damage. El Niño, Murphy said, “brings sickness and death to the population of the Humboldt Current.”
https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Prophet-Remarkable-Scientists-...