Original subtitles

[narrator] Summer, 1492.

After three months at sea,

the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Niña anchor off the Bahamas.

Europe has discovered the Americas.

What happens next?

Conquest and colonization by settlers

who remake America in their image.

They advanced, and destroyed.

But there is another story,

about the animals and plants they brought here.

[rumbling]

And what they found here.

And how the Americas were completely transformed.

It all began 500 years ago.

[narrator] Christopher Columbus left his home in Italy

to fight for his vision.

He aimed to sail west, to the riches of Asia.

This is an era of discovery and lust for expansion,

and it all began with the ambition of a queen.

[knocking on door]

In Europe, the nobles have grown wealthy by trading with the East.

Spices and gold, gemstones and silk are the most lucrative goods.

But Europeans have lost the Silk Road to the Turks,

and foreign trade is in decline.

The wealth of kings is in danger.

Isabella, queen of Spain, is desperate to find new routes to India.

And she has a plan.

-[speaking Spanish] -[interpreter] Let him in!

[narrator] This is the most powerful woman in Europe.

A continent of expanding horizons,

filled with competitive and inventive souls.

For 500 years, they have been building: castles, palaces, centres of trade.

Kings and popes have raised armies to fight each other

and their enemies on Europe's borders.

Nowhere else are rivalries so intense, gold fever so widespread,

religious fervour and business expertise as tightly wound,

as in Europe in 1491.

Ideas are advancing.

Curiosity and the thirst for power push Europe's limits.

[wind whistling]

They're seeking riches and land,

heading towards the frontiers of their world.

But no one can guess that far beyond the end of that world,

lies another, of which they know nothing.

The Amazon is a crowded place.

The Andes cradle a vast empire ruled by powerful god kings.

Mesoamerica may be the most densely populated place on Earth,

home to the most imposing civilizations on the continent.

And the Atlantic coast is filled with villages and fields.

Along the rivers, great cities are built around monumental plazas

and giant earthen mounds.

It is an ancient world, inhabited by hunters and gatherers,

fishermen and farmers, kings, slaves and soldiers.

Down amongst the trees,

where the Missouri, Illinois and Mississippi rivers merge,

in what is today the state of Illinois,

lies one of the most fertile zones of North America.

It's home to one of the largest civilizations in the continent.

The Mississippians: mound builders from the Great Lakes to Florida.

Flourishing in the year 1150.

The first explorers thought these great mounds were natural,

carved by retreating glaciers.

Now we know that they were the centrepieces of cities.

Cities like Cahokia.

Busy trading posts of earth and wood, with populations of thousands of people.

No one knows what they called themselves or what language they spoke.

But we do know why they were successful.

The Mississippians are farmers.

Their staple crop is fuel for the ever-growing population.

It is a plant native to the Americas, unknown to the rest of the world.

[rustling]

Once they learned to grow it, they could stay in one place.

This simple diet translated straight into the energy to build a civilization.

But corn is not a blessing from nature, nor a gift of the gods.

This crop is the outcome of man's first feat of selective breeding.

Scientists realized relatively recently

that the ability to grow corn

is a key to high cultures in the Americas.

[man] The staple crop in North America was corn.

Six thousand years ago, ears of corn were only about as long as a person's thumb

and they were barely edible.

It took thousands of years to develop a more nourishing and larger hybrid,

and also a hybrid that could grow in cooler climates outside of Mesoamerica.

And it wasn't until about 1,100 years ago

that corn reached the Mississippi River Valley.

[narrator] Corn is the result of the domestication

of the wild teosinte grass.

Early Americans started with this spindly stalk...

and over the centuries they developed it into today's giant cob.

Archaeologists and biologists are still debating

how corn was achieved out of a tiny Mexican wild grass.

Corn is one of the keys to understanding American civilization.

Wherever it flourishes, so do great cultures.

Yet the greatest American empire of them all

is found where corn cannot grow:

high in the Andes.

The Inca Empire stretches nearly 2,500 miles

down the west coast of South America.

Incas build palaces, storehouses and castles in the towering mountains.

In their realm of six million people,

they rely on manpower to transport stones.

They have neither beasts of burden nor the wheel.

And the energy for that is provided by another amazing foodstuff.

Incas are famed for their gold,

but their true treasure is less glamorous.

A tuber native to America and unknown in Europe.

Cultivated here 8,000 years ago,

in the region around Lake Titicaca,

in today's Peru and Bolivia,

at an altitude of 4,000 meters.

What is now a staple food in Europe

was a South American invention.

By the year 1491, the Inca grow hundreds of varieties,

domesticated from wild ancestors.

Some poisonous, some even carnivorous.

A thousand years ago, in one city alone,

30,000 tons of potatoes were produced every year.

They preserved the tubers

by mashing them into a substance called "chuño."

After harvest, potatoes are spread on straw

and left out to freeze at night.

During the day they are exposed to the sun.

[speaking Quechuan]

Trampling them eliminates water and allows them to dry.

Chuño can be stored for ten years,

an excellent insurance against possible crop failures.

The Inca carved step-like terraces into the mountainsides

to stop the soil eroding and create a flat surface for their crops.

Terraces absorb more sunlight than steep slopes,

so potatoes can grow at the highest altitudes.

And all this is achieved by manpower alone,

using wooden tools.

In North and South America in 1491,

farmers grow corn and potatoes for a hundred million people.

[speaking Quechuan]

There's another continent across the ocean

where a hundred million more people survive,

growing very different food in a very different way.

In this same year of 1491,

Europeans have to grow food for a similar number of people

in one-tenth of the space.

Europe is a busy and crowded continent. People here lack land.

And what they work on is not even theirs.

[farmer muttering]

[narrator] Most of them are farmers.

Europe is filled with fields owned by the nobles or the church,

tilled by peasants.

[farmer muttering]

[narrator] Their main diet is bread and porridge,

both made from grains.

They plant rye or wheat in winter,

oats or barley in the spring.

And every third year, the field lies fallow to regenerate.

They know how to use wind and water for power.

It is heavier work, with higher yields in a smaller space.

It is an agricultural revolution

and it allows the European population to thrive.

[blades creaking]

And for that, one more element is essential.

[man speaking German]

[speaking German]

[interpreter] You see, old European agriculture

was based on grains: wheat, rye;

while old American agriculture was based on corn.

But another difference is even more important.

European agriculture originated

in a combination of farming and raising livestock.

That was not the case in America.

That gave European agriculture a great advantage.

First, the fertility of the soil was renewed through cow dung,

and secondly, the livestock needed pastures

and that protected ecological reserves.

[narrator] Domesticated animals.

They make all the difference.

[bellows]

America has no cattle, no horses or pigs,

no sheep, mules, goats or hens.

European horses are beasts of burden.

They can pull ploughs.

And cattle provide meat, fur and hides.

The domestic pig is a chief source of meat and leather.

[sniffs]

Like the sheep,

that needs no stable and finds its own food.

Even a mule can pull a cart.

And cows give them milk, butter and cheese.

Europeans are breeding ever more productive animals.

But it's not only people that domesticate animals.

By 1491, the big five-- horses, cattle, goats, pigs and sheep--

have domesticated the European landscape.

They are essential to Europe's prosperity.

And none of these are known to North or South America.

For Inca farmers in the Andes,

their chief source of transport and meat is the llama.

This is the biggest domestic mammal in the Americas.

The llamas also offer dung for the soil and hides for clothes.

But you can't milk or ride them, and the animals can't pull a plough.

So they are no good for fighting or for traveling.

-[llama braying] -But their wool is one of the best gifts.

It's warmer and lighter than sheep's wool

and produces a greater yield.

[llama braying]

[speaking Quechuan]

They use bronze knifes to shear them.

The second principal domesticated animal of the Americas is even smaller.

For the Aztecs, in today's Mexico and Guatemala,

the turkey is so important

that they dedicated two religious festivals to it.

[chirping]

Native Americans have so few domesticated animals

because the biggest native mammals in the Americas have long since died out.

At the end of the last Ice Age, the megafauna in the Americas,

the giant bison and the mastodons, went extinct,

and the reasons for that are probably two-fold.

First of all, as the Ice Age was ending, the climate became much hotter and drier,

and this killed the vegetation that these very large animals depended on.

Secondly, the arrival of hunters into North America

crossed over the Bering Strait land bridge from Asia

coincided with the extinction of these animals,

and very likely these hunters went after these large animals

who were slow and had a lot of meat.

What this left in North America were animals such as bison, deer and antelope

that are not suited to domestication.

[narrator] The animals that remain have one thing in abundance.

Space.

From the glaciers of the Arctic north

to the great plains of today's Midwest,

gigantic herds thunder across North America in search of food.

There is room for antelopes...

and for caribou.

And there is room for bison.

Room for the giant grizzly.

And in the sky above, for flocks of birds that block out the sun.

Billions of passenger pigeons, ducks, and geese

from horizon to horizon.

In 1491, they are hunted.

By hundreds of Native American tribes.

Village dwellers in the forests of the northeast, and nomads on the Plains.

These civilizations develop new methods to guarantee their meat supply.

They can't domesticate these animals,

so they find a way of making their prey come to them.

When they notice that grass grows better after being burnt by lightning strikes,

they start to burn the prairies themselves.

Many tribes such as the Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, Shoshone or Blackfoot

burn the Central Plains and the prairies

to increase their spread.

[fire bow squeaking]

Burning the undergrowth in the fall

keeps the forest open and park-like

and makes hunting easier.

Burning the prairie creates lush grassland.

And the prairies cover 20 million square kilometres.

The new, rich pastures

will lure and increase the numbers of herbivores,

as well as the predators that feed on them.

America in 1492 was not a pristine wilderness.

That's a romantic myth. It was in many ways a managed landscape.

Natives regularly burned the forests and the prairie in order to attract game.

[bison grunts]

[narrator] With this technique, nomadic Central Plains Indians

even lure the biggest mammal in the Americas.

They domesticate the land

in order to attract wild animals.

Wherever they roam, bison are the chief source of food and clothing

and of tools made from their bones.

[grunting]

The bison thrive.

By 1491, North America is home to perhaps 30 million.

They reign on the prairies from Montana to Texas,

pushed east by Native Americans along a path of fire,

opening up forest into virgin land.

The bison have gained a new habitat,

far beyond their original range.

[birds chirping]

Native Americans have neither guns nor horses.

They have to hunt on foot.

They dress in hides,

and they hunt with the bow and arrow or the spear,

all made of wood and leather, bone and stone.

[bison grunts]

The bison hunt is essential for their survival.

Over in Europe, hunting is not about survival.

They hunt if they are noblemen,

for sport, for pleasure and prestige.

[panting]

They have guns, but hunting is a ritual,

carried out with the weapons of a knight.

[boar squeals]

And only the nobles are allowed to hunt.

If ever they catch a peasant,

he will be punished for poaching.

Unlike in America, there's no room here for an abundance of wildlife,

for endless herds.

Wild animals are retreating into forests.

In Europe the land is man-made.

Agriculture and cities push the wildlife back.

[cattle mooing]

Untamed land is now a rarity.

But they have one other major food supply.

Fish should be a cheap and abundant diet for every social class in Europe.

Christianity, the common religion all over Europe in 1491,

approves of fish.

Eating meat is banned on more than a hundred days a year.

The demand for fish is huge.

But there is a problem.

Intensive agriculture is damaging the fish supplies.

[thunder crashing]

Europe's once-unlimited supplies are dwindling fast.

What happened to the fish stocks in Europe?

[man] As people started to grow crops and cut back the wild woods,

this released huge amounts of sediment into the water courses,

which changed them from being fast, clear-flowing rivers and streams

into slow, turbid rivers and streams,

and the freshwater fish found a problem with this.

Particularly migratory species

that came up from the sea to spawn in rivers,

animals like salmon and sturgeon.

There was another factor

which also cut down the supplies of these migratory fish

and that was that people started to build dams along rivers,

and when that happened, the migration runs were blocked

and the populations declined.

[narrator] Once they had emptied and polluted their lakes and rivers,

they turned to the sea.

For the first time, they started intensive sea fishing.

They found abundance on a scale never seen before.

And they exploited it.

Cod and herring from the North Sea were the first to be fished.

Every five years, catches doubled.

By 1300, thousands of tons of dried fish

were exported from Norway to Britain alone.

In the Middle Ages, the seas of Europe were very little exploited

until around the 11th century, when freshwater supplies declined,

and people went to the sea for the first time and they discovered

very large populations of fish,

animals like cod and skates and halibut and turbot.

And they were able to catch as much fish, really, as they wanted.

For hundreds of years after that,

all the way through to the 18th and 19th century,

supplies of marine fish seemed inexhaustible within Europe

and we were able to obtain what we needed.

But later on, towards the end of the 19th century,

industrialised fishing began and we saw supplies begin to be depleted.

[narrator] But this is 1491.

Europe's lakes and rivers are now empty and dirty.

In the Americas, fishing is not an industry.

They don't need it. Fish are for the taking.

Their rivers are not used for power and are not affected by farming.

Native Americans transport their fish

far away from the coasts and waterways,

into the interior, high up into the mountains.

The Incas, high in the Andes, enjoy fish from the Pacific.

The Mississippians trade with communities

as far away as the Great Lakes to the north

and the Gulf Coast to the south.

They even eat fish and seafood from the Atlantic.

Here, too, there is space for abundance.

The waters teem with fish

and with whales, dolphins and manatees.

[whale calling]

Wherever Native Americans trawl their nets,

they find a bounty of thousands of different species.

Menhaden, channel catfish, and sheephead.

They never have to take more than nature can replace.

North and South America look like a primitive paradise.

But it's not that simple.

The greatest numbers of fish live in the Amazon,

the largest river in the Americas and the most voluminous in the world.

To our eyes the Amazon rainforest is an almost untouched Garden of Eden.

But it was once a very different place from what we know today.

When the jungle was cleared in the 20th century for agriculture,

they found the remains of a sophisticated civilization

that once tamed this landscape.

In 1491, this area is home to thousands of people.

They tend orchards with all kinds of fruits:

papaya, mango, cocoa, with nuts and palms.

They speak many different languages

and live in many different social systems.

Their tightly-packed settlements cover an area

of 120,000 square kilometres.

They are linked by raised causeways, bridges, and canals.

Much of this is natural savanna, created by annual flooding.

But they have expanded the grasslands,

regularly setting huge areas on fire.

By 1491, they have created an ecosystem

of plant species adapted by fire

that cannot exist in nature.

Eventually, the jungle will reclaim it.

Further north, in what is now New Mexico,

it looks like no humans could ever have lived here.

Today it is one of the most arid zones on the continent.

The Chaco Canyon.

There is no vegetation, no water,

and there are no animals to be seen.

And it was already like this in 1491.

But once, this area looked completely different.

This is the story of a civilization that developed as far as it could,

used its resources as well as it could, and still declined.

More than 500 years ago,

the Chaco Canyon was covered with lush vegetation

and forests of pine and juniper.

This fertile area was home to the Anasazi.

From the year 700 on,

the Anasazi built the highest and largest buildings in North America.

One is several stories high and has 800 rooms

that overlook the majestic canyon.

A thousand people lived here.

They had no beasts of burden to transport materials.

Thousands of felled trees were dragged down to the Chaco Canyon

on men's bare backs.

There is no account of their lives or of their disappearance.

But environmental historians can tell us what happened...

by counting tree rings and analysing rat nests.

[coyote howling]

Nathan English, of the University of Arizona,

spends much time in the canyon

looking for traces of the ancient nests.

[English] Our interest in Chaco Canyon

is to learn more about how the ancestral Puebloans lived.

There's a number of ways we can do that:

through traditional archaeology, where we dig up ruins and sites,

or we can also look at what the environment was like

around the ancestral Puebloans.

And the way we do that is by looking at packrat middens.

And each packrat midden is like a little snapshot in time

of the area around the midden itself.

So you could think of it like a picture.

And the middens can be up to 40,000 years old in some places.

And what the midden is, is the packrat makes a nest

and it poops in that nest,

and then it only gets its water from eating plant vegetation,

so its urine is very thick and viscous.

That urine seeps into the pile of poop, essentially

and solidifies, almost like amber.

In the meantime, the packrat is also collecting things:

the plants around it, also pot shards,

sometimes even corn or seeds of squash,

and those macrofossils are incorporated into the midden.

So we go out, we collect the midden,

and then we examine the macrofossils in that midden

to look at what the ecology around that midden was like at that time.

[narrator] Not only do rat middens hold information, trees do too.

Dendrochronologists count the rings of ancient logs

to give the exact date

when the very last tree was cut down for construction.

The Anasazi used juniper and pine for their timber,

and to make fire.

Too much of it, some think.

With the trees goes the soil. The forest cannot recover.

Because of erosion, water drains down, creating gullies on the way.

Irrigation and agriculture are no longer possible.

This large population cannot feed itself anymore.

But did they destroy the forests or did the forests leave them?

Other scientists who've worked here

have a couple of ideas of what happened to the woodlands

that were around here

while the ancestral Puebloans were living here.

The first is that natural climate change,

uh, caused the margin of the woodland to move further north and off site.

The second idea is that there were a lot of people living here

and they over-harvested the wood.

We are on the edge of this pinion juniper woodland,

and so it's really possible that natural climate change

would have caused it to move back,

but also we know that the people were harvesting wood for fuel and for timber,

and so it's likely that a combination of the two things

are what led to the loss of forests in this area.

[narrator] The year 1130 rolls around.

It's one of the driest of years.

The Anasazi have survived previous droughts,

but the population has increased greatly.

And there is no suitable territory to expand into.

Without rain, it's impossible to grow enough to support the population.

No agriculture means no culture.

The Chaco Canyon is abandoned.

These ancient Americans cut down the last tree and moved on.

Using stone-age tools, they helped destroy the ecological balance of a whole region.

It's a myth that native Americans always lived in harmony with nature.

Over in Europe they're cutting down the forests, too.

But it's different for them.

[crackling]

Their growing population needs more food and more space to grow it

and they badly need the wood.

They have the tools...

they have the transport...

[lumberman yells]

-[narrator] And they have the energy. -[whistles]

But they're beginning to run out of space.

And time.

Only wood can help them move forward.

Wood has a special meaning in 1491.

[Radkau speaking German]

[interpreter] The Middle Ages were the era of wood.

You find it wherever you look.

Wood was the most important material for building,

for making tools and furniture, and for burning.

It was the only fuel. There was hardly any coal.

[narrator] It is an era of competition,

and wars use up forests, too.

Whole armies are equipped with bows of yew wood.

The yew tree is almost exterminated in Europe.

Armies need iron weapons,

and smelting ovens burn day and night, fuelled with wood.

[soldiers shouting]

[narrator] At the same time, whole forests are used

to satisfy another of their European cravings.

For the great buildings of the age.

[bangs]

[narrator] The cathedrals in the cities are made of stone,

yet they absorb millions of logs for their bases and frames.

Larches are needed for roof supports.

Solid logs of oak, alder and elm

are sunk into the ground to create foundations.

Wood is indispensable

for pillars and ceilings, posts and roof panels,

axe handles and cart wheels.

European castles, cathedrals, monasteries and churches consume entire forests

in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and England.

But who owns the European forests?

And who is making money with them?

[Radkau speaking German]

[interpreter] Who the forests belong to wasn't clear in the Middle Ages.

No wonder that all the great social and economic struggles of those times

were fought in the forests, around the forests and about the forests.

The nobles were mainly interested in the forests as hunting grounds.

But for the peasants, the forests were vitally important.

They couldn't live without them.

They needed them to graze their cattle and as wood for fuel.

[narrator] In this competition for timber,

those who have money make the rules.

And the money is now in the cities.

The richest city of all is Venice.

It's built on wood, literally.

Piles sunk into the mud

to create the platform on which the great stone facades can float.

But behind all this is banking, interest, and capitalism.

The goods that are bought and sold are transported in wooden galleons.

Venice has denuded the forests roundabout

to build its fleet.

The city's demand is insatiable.

And they start to deplete the Alps.

Spruce for masts, larch for planking, elm for capstans,

walnut for rudders, and, most importantly, oak for hulls.

When that is not enough, they cut a swathe across Europe,

all the way from the Adriatic to the Baltic.

The Europeans have exploited their natural resources,

leaving a continent where there are no fish in their rivers

and less and less timber in their forests.

Their continent is crowded with people and they don't know what to do with them.

Nowhere else in the world are rivalries between princes and kings as intense,

curiosity and greed as widespread,

and religious fervour and business expertise as tightly wound

as in Europe in 1491.

And for the first time, the common people have a hunger for new ideas.

The printing press is invented; books take hold and literacy spreads.

But where do they go from here?

[warriors shouting]

Where can all this raw energy be channelled?

This is the time when European kings and queens

send explorers beyond the horizon

to expand and enhance their power.

Some explorers go around Africa to find the sea route to Asia.

One has the vision to sail west, to arrive in the East.

He is a seaman from Genoa, a fervent amateur

who has the crazy idea of sailing into the unknown, to reach India.

Christopher Columbus has spent five years

trying to persuade the one person who can finance his voyage.

Isabella, queen of Spain, finally agrees.

What does the Spanish crown have to lose?

It doesn't cost much to finance three ships.

Spain has so much to gain from a shortcut to India:

treasures, trade and land.

At first, no one wants to board his ship.

Finally he drags together a motley crew of 87 men,

illiterates, petty criminals, even murderers,

who choose probable death at sea in preference to the gallows.

Many are soldiers with nothing to do

since Spain expelled the Moors just months before.

Now, they are soldiers of fortune.

With his band of desperados,

Christopher Columbus sets sail from the port of Seville.

It is the summer of 1492.

He has promised the queen and his crew

that they will be in India in six weeks.

Columbus is the one who discovers America.

But it is the people who come after him,

and what they bring with them,

that will transform the New World.