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10,800 Years Ago, Early Humans Planted Forest Islands in Amazonia's Grasslands
- vonnik 6y agoAnyone curious about how the Amazon evolved as a worked landscape (like the grain fields of Europe), should read Charles C Mann's books 1491 and 1493. What the developed world sees as an untouched wilderness threatened by development was actually, in many places, a place where large indigenous communities found ways to make the jungle bear more life-sustaining food ... while still appearing to be a jungle. https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colu...
- e40 6y agoI read a book on Percy Harrison Fawcett (forget the name) and it always amazed me how hard it was for people to survive there. And by survive I mean just to take enough sustenance to keep going. It looks lush, but there's little there for humans (who are unfamiliar) to eat, and what there is to eat is hard to get or catch.
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoChannel 4 is in the middle of a series on recent archaeology in the Amazon[1], free to stream if you're in the UK, for the rest of us there's always torrents... 1: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/jungle-mystery-lost-kingdoms-of-the-amazon https://www.channel4.com/programmes/jungle-mystery-lost-king...
- Koshkin 6y ago“Early humans”? Humans, essentially modern from a biological point of view, had been around for a hundred thousand years by then.
- rafaelvasco 6y agoYeah, if you talk about humans as intelligent self aware beings there's been humans here on Earth for several hundreds of thousands of years. That's what I gatter after reading several books in this theme.
- hinkley 6y agoPerhaps they mean early as in 'for dinner'. The official line is that humans may have only been in South America for a few centuries at that point, although there are some who think that there may have been an earlier wave of habitation.
- frongpik 6y ago12,000 B.C. was a major cataclysm that erased the last few pieces of the previous civilization, so it's more or less okay to call 10,000 B.C. as an early period of [this] civilization since people had to start from scratch.
- rafaelvasco 6y agoYeah. From what I know. There's no conclusive evidence to this but, there were some , very advanced civilizations on Earth, hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago. Even more advanced then hours. Then cataclisms happened, their civilizations imploded etc. And disappeared with very few traces left.
- frongpik 6y agoThe big canary in the official timeline is the sudden cutoff date at that time. However the unofficial chronicles are very detailed about what exactly happened and when. From those chronicles, it was a black people civilization, it was massive, advanced, but didn't have any tech in the modern sense, it was on the rise when 850,000 B.C. it suffered the first major cataclysm (this matches with the official timeline when the earth poles got swapped), so I suppose the total lifetime of that civilization was close to 2 million years. For comparison, were only 14,000 years old - toddlers in some sense.
- nescioquid 6y agoAn expedition led by Dr. William Dyer uncovered the remnants of such a civilization in Antarctica in 1930. Tekeli-li!
- paulryanrogers 6y agoSounds fascinating! Where can I read some original sources?
- Proven 6y agoHow did they manage to do that without government subsidies and CO2 taxes?