When Columbus landed in 1492, he stepped onto a continent already home to more people than lived in Europe at the time, not the untouched wilderness later histories imagined. This film lays out the evidence for a managed, populated pre-Columbian America: cities, orchards, canals, and causeways built by civilizations that shaped the land for centuries before European contact. Chaco Canyon, now dry and barren, once held lush vegetation, and the film traces how such landscapes changed after 1500. It follows unexpected chains of ecological cause and effect, like English honeybees imported for honey ending up pollinating the apple and peach orchards European settlers planted along the East Coast, and horses returning to a continent where native horses and mammoths had vanished some 12,000 years earlier. Llamas, it notes, were the primary beast of burden before European livestock arrived. The film also tracks the reverse traffic, American crops like potatoes, beans, and maize reshaping European diets, and the Mexican-domesticated turkey reaching tables it had never sat at before.