This Atlas Obscura article asks: > How did this medieval civilization thrive in an environment that would be challenging for us even today? Speaking of the 9t

This Atlas Obscura article asks: > How did this medieval civilization thrive in an environment that would be challenging for us even today? Speaking of the 9th-15th century Khmer Empire [1] in Southeast Asia. > The answer, say archaeologists, is not that the Khmer were somehow ahead of their time... Instead, it was because Khmer urbanites came from a tradition of tropical city-building that looks very different from what we see in the more northerly regions of the Levant and Europe. For nearly 45,000 years, the Khmer’s ancestors were perfecting the techniques required to build and farm in the jungle, manipulating earth and water to make empires whose remains often melted back into nature, leaving very little trace. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Empire