Native America: A 20,000-Year Epic

Long before borders, before Columbus, before empires, there were the First Peoples.

They didn't "discover" America; they built it from the ground up over 500 generations. <break time="2.5s" /> This is not a story

of a single tragedy, but a 20,000-year epic of breathtaking diversity, profound innovation,

and unbreakable resilience. This is the story of Native Americans. <break time="11.0s /> For millennia,

they were the world's greatest botanists, engineers, and astronomers. In Mesoamerica,

the Maya tracked celestial cycles with astonishing precision, creating calendars

more accurate than those in Europe. In the North, they domesticated plants that now

feed the world—transforming a wild grass called teosinte into nutritious corn through selective breeding over centuries. <break time="2.5s" />