ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at a rising tide of gloomy articles and books on Amerindian demography, on the rate of suicide among Amerindian adolescents and young adults, and on the rate of New World species extinctions. An underrated factor behind the reassessment of the Encounter is a general reassessment of the role of rapid change, even catastrophe, in the history of humanity, the earth, and the universe. The chapter describes a geological moment of extreme discontinuity in the deep past to which one may want to refer when measuring the full significance of the Encounter. So much of the world's land surface and waters, and its flora and fauna, macro and micro, have ever been altered so abruptly before, unless indeed people had cataclysmic visitations of asteroids or comets. By Columbus's lifetime, the literate classes of Europe knew more about the centuries prior to the incarnation than Dionysius Exiguus and Bede had known about those after it.
