The American History Podcast, Season 1, Episode 1, The Americas Before Columbus.

Welcome to the American History podcast.

Hosted by Sean Worswick.

Hello, and welcome to the American History podcast, Episode 1, The Americas Before Columbus.

Hopefully you've listened to the introductory episode, which gives you a little bit of

information about the show and myself.

If not,

please go back and listen to it first. Also, feel free to email me any questions you might have

or comments. The email is Sean at the American Historypodcast.com. You can also follow me on

Twitter. My handle is American Hiscast. And lastly, please go over to iTunes and give us a review,

or at least a rating.

This helps others who are interested in American history find the show, and of course, the more,

the merrier, as the saying goes. All right, so let's get into the content. Now, first, I think I want to say that you're going to find this episode both fascinating and informative, because we're going to destroy some myths that many, if not most, Americans, Americans.

Now, I've got four things that I like to cover today, and as I said, I want to destroy some myths, but I also want to discuss, A, the number of Indians who were living or who were living in the Americas.

B, what were they like?

Did they live in harmony with nature as we are often told, or is it's portrayed in our culture?

C, how did they get here?

And then, D, we'll briefly discuss Indians in various areas and how they lived.

Now, the first question we were dealing with is what was the population of Native Americans who were living in the Americas in 1491?

And this is somewhat controversial, and it does vary given who you're reading.

But something around 50 to 75 million Native peoples is kind of the accepted number right now.

Now, at various points in history,

...