the popular idea that European technologies were superior to those of Native Americans, using guns as a specific example. The Native Americans considered them little more than "noisemakers", and concluded they were more difficult to aim than arrows. Prominent colonist John Smith of the southern Jamestown colony noted as an "awful truth" that a gun "could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly". Moccasins were more comfortable and sturdy than the boots Europeans wore, and were preferred by most during that era because their padding offered a more silent approach to warfare. The Indian canoes could be paddled faster and were more maneuverable than any small European boats. Mann explores the fall of the Inca Empire and attempts to assess their population compared to the armies of conquistadors, such as Francisco Pizarro. He discusses the fatal importance of the numerous newly introduced infectious diseases, and the likelihood that these played a far more significant role in the Native American decline than did warfare or other actions by Europeans. He notes that while Europeans probably derived less benefit than expected from their use of horses, as e.g. the stepped roads of Inca settlements were impassable to horses, the Inca did not maximize their use of anti-horse inventions to stop the Spanish intruders. The Inca Empire collapsed because by the time Europeans arrived in force, smallpox and other epidemics had already swept through cities and caused high mortality, due mostly to the natives' lack of immunity to new Eurasian diseases. The contrasting approaches of "High Counters" and "Low Counters" among historians are discussed. Among the former, anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns estimated the number of pre-Columbian Native Americans as close to 100 million, while critics of the High Counters include David Henige, who wrote Numbers from Nowhere (1998). Part Two: Very Old Bones Mann discusses the provenance and dating of human remains, which may provide evidence of the period of first settlement of the Americas. The Clovis culture in New Mexico was one of the first to be assessed using carbon dating. While at first it was believed to have originated between 13,500 and 12,900 years ago, following immigration of peoples from Siberia over the Bering land bridge, recent evidence indicates that Paleo-Indians were present in the Americas at even earlier dates. Agriculture is another focus of this section; Mann explores Andean and Mesoamerican cultures. The agricultural development of maize from