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My favorite discovery about Amazon civilization is that the incidence of human-edible fruit trees is much higher in any area near navigable water. They were mod

My favorite discovery about Amazon civilization is that the incidence of human-edible fruit trees is much higher in any area near navigable water. They were modifying the forest to be more supportive of humans.

e40 2y ago
Where did you read this? I’ve read in multiple places that the jungle there is quite inhospitable to humans because there is little easily accessible food. The source that comes to mind is the book The Lost City of Z.
- dbspin 2y ago
  There's now a consensus of evidence that large areas of the Amazon were planted and cultivated. Bear in mind this an enormous area, and multiple civilisations would have been active simultaneously over thousands of years. Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.adi6317 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.adi6317 Early Holocene crop cultivation and landscape modification in Amazonia https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2162-7.epdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2162-7.epdf
  - mrintegrity 2y ago
    you mean "large" relative to human populations or large relative to the entire Amazon rain forest? Your sources indicate that there was cultivation widespread around the amazon but not that the /entire/ amazon is as it is due to cultivation. Maybe i misinterpret the intended message of your comment.
    - dbspin 2y ago
      I meant that the Amazon basin and Amazonia are enormous geographic regions. It's highly unlikely that the rainforest itself is the result of cultivation. It does seem to be proven at this point that wide areas were cultivated multiple times in distinct eras of human habitation.
hosh 2y ago
That didn’t just happen in the Amazon. The Pacific Northwest had something like that. My understanding is that the Eastern American forests were curated like that too, before it was cut down. I have heard of an oasis in North Africa that was curated this way, and it still survived despite being abandoned by humans. The modern version of this is called a perennial food forest.
- morkalork 2y ago
  It happens unintentionally too, if you've ever been to a state park in North America and seen an apple tree off of a trail, it's because someone once threw away an apple core.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    Yes, much of early cultivation is theorized to have looked like this, particularly before sedentary agriculture. If you have a fairly stable seasonal migration pattern plants you eat or use will naturally "follow" you around and will tend towards forms that make them more attractive to human attention.
    - hosh 2y ago
      I think that minimizes the fact that people were deliberately curating and designing perennial food forests, historically and contemporarily. Our ancestors may not have the scientific knowledge we have now, but they were just as smart as we are.
      - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
        > I think that minimizes the fact that people were deliberately curating and designing perennial food forests, historically and contemporarily. I don't see this minimization (after all, we currently do this unintentionally today and nobody sees this as lack of intelligence and I certainly hope I never implied that people in the past were in any way less capable than ourselves) but I do affirm that people were just as capable of understanding the causes and effects of plant reproduction as they are today. I'm just freely speculating on how to find the most minimal path to explanation and it's easier to explain the differences in the rise of civilization in the middle east vs the new world with other factors rather than something cultural or genetic or otherwise abstractly geographically-bound factors. And besides, I like the idea that people in the past wouldn't have just sat around ruminating how to maximize crop yields but had more fruitful activities to attend to. I don't celebrate the egyptian engineer who figured out how to haul a multi-ton brick up a high slope, I mourn for him (or her)! EDIT: softened wording a bit
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> They were modifying the forest to be more supportive of humans. My understanding is that the rainforest as we know it exists where it does in part because humans spent such effort cultivating edible plants in the area. Many of the most edible crops are not native to the regions in which they now grow, there's not much evidence of ancient-grown forest before ~5kya, and there's good evidence of burn-based plant and soil management.

e40 2y ago

Where did you read this? I’ve read in multiple places that the jungle there is quite inhospitable to humans because there is little easily accessible food. The source that comes to mind is the book The Lost City of Z.

dbspin 2y ago
There's now a consensus of evidence that large areas of the Amazon were planted and cultivated. Bear in mind this an enormous area, and multiple civilisations would have been active simultaneously over thousands of years. Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.adi6317 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.adi6317 Early Holocene crop cultivation and landscape modification in Amazonia https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2162-7.epdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2162-7.epdf
- mrintegrity 2y ago
  you mean "large" relative to human populations or large relative to the entire Amazon rain forest? Your sources indicate that there was cultivation widespread around the amazon but not that the /entire/ amazon is as it is due to cultivation. Maybe i misinterpret the intended message of your comment.
  - dbspin 2y ago
    I meant that the Amazon basin and Amazonia are enormous geographic regions. It's highly unlikely that the rainforest itself is the result of cultivation. It does seem to be proven at this point that wide areas were cultivated multiple times in distinct eras of human habitation.

hosh 2y ago

That didn’t just happen in the Amazon. The Pacific Northwest had something like that. My understanding is that the Eastern American forests were curated like that too, before it was cut down. I have heard of an oasis in North Africa that was curated this way, and it still survived despite being abandoned by humans. The modern version of this is called a perennial food forest.

morkalork 2y ago
It happens unintentionally too, if you've ever been to a state park in North America and seen an apple tree off of a trail, it's because someone once threw away an apple core.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  Yes, much of early cultivation is theorized to have looked like this, particularly before sedentary agriculture. If you have a fairly stable seasonal migration pattern plants you eat or use will naturally "follow" you around and will tend towards forms that make them more attractive to human attention.
  - hosh 2y ago
    I think that minimizes the fact that people were deliberately curating and designing perennial food forests, historically and contemporarily. Our ancestors may not have the scientific knowledge we have now, but they were just as smart as we are.
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      > I think that minimizes the fact that people were deliberately curating and designing perennial food forests, historically and contemporarily. I don't see this minimization (after all, we currently do this unintentionally today and nobody sees this as lack of intelligence and I certainly hope I never implied that people in the past were in any way less capable than ourselves) but I do affirm that people were just as capable of understanding the causes and effects of plant reproduction as they are today. I'm just freely speculating on how to find the most minimal path to explanation and it's easier to explain the differences in the rise of civilization in the middle east vs the new world with other factors rather than something cultural or genetic or otherwise abstractly geographically-bound factors. And besides, I like the idea that people in the past wouldn't have just sat around ruminating how to maximize crop yields but had more fruitful activities to attend to. I don't celebrate the egyptian engineer who figured out how to haul a multi-ton brick up a high slope, I mourn for him (or her)! EDIT: softened wording a bit

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> They were modifying the forest to be more supportive of humans. My understanding is that the rainforest as we know it exists where it does in part because humans spent such effort cultivating edible plants in the area. Many of the most edible crops are not native to the regions in which they now grow, there's not much evidence of ancient-grown forest before ~5kya, and there's good evidence of burn-based plant and soil management.