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Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area
- marojejian 3mo agoOriginally heard about this via Nature podcast's interview with the researcher: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02367-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02367-x This is a continuation of many findings in this direction. It's wonderful to imagine the many societies humans have created, and sad that we'll be able to learn so little about them.
- _heimdall 2mo agoI've always been confused by the idea that we know all civilisation that has happened on earth, human or otherwise. Written record doesn't go back very far at all, and even archeological evidence is lacking. Its believed that homo sapiens have been around for at least 300,000 years and yet we think almost all of that was entirely without civilization. We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well. It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth.
- shimman 2mo agoYou would like the book "Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber. It does a lot to talk about modern anthropological studies that corrected a lot of misconceptions about early humans. Really fascinating book, basically postulates that humans have always been imaginative social creatures that were routinely well travelled; and the idea that early humans weren't also politically or culturally advance is wrong. In fact some societies were purposely designed to ensure things like hierarchy wouldn't exist for example; these societies persisted for thousands of years. Really interesting book.
- culi 2mo agoYes exactly. The myths of native people being hyperegalitarian, one-with-nature types started because colonists came upon cultures in the North East woodlands. Those same people, just a few decades before that were living in Cahokia which was at one point larger than any city in Europe. It was a massive urban city that was also very hierarchical. The hyperegalitarian Algonquian and Haudenosaunee/Iroquois people were basically the result of a successful political revolution that decided to organize themselves like that in response to the hierarchies they experienced.
- suddenlybananas 2mo agoThe Iroquois had slaves, they weren't hyperegalitarian.
- I-M-S 2mo agoThe Iroquois did not have slaves. You might be thinking of individuals that were sometimes taken as compensation for people killed in battle. However, these people were then fully assimilated into the society with all the rights and obligations of anyone in the clan (in most cases, they would even take the name of the deceased). To call these people "slaves" is much more revealing of the Western civilization than that of First Nations.
- suddenlybananas 2mo agoDid those people have the right to leave or do what they wanted? https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790?seq=1 Read this paper and the contemporary accounts and tell me that's not slavery. >To modern Westerners, the use of such a kinship metaphor suggests and is believed to reflect genuine nurturing and closeness; however, in Africa and elsewhere it conveys an entirely different meaning: authority and subordination. >Villagers, forming a gauntlet and armed with clubs, fire-brands, sticks, and other weapons, greeted the prisoners and rained down on these hapless individuals blows designed to inflict pain but not to kill This was often followed by torture and public humiliation and then deliverance to the grieving families, whose "matrons then chose either to adopt or to execute them," or both If you look at pages 11-13, there's a discussion of ritual torture to prevent captives from escaping. 13-14 deal with the torture and execution of unruly captives. 15-16 deal with the etymological relationship between "slave" and "pet/livestock" in Iroquonian languages like Mohawk. Pages 17 and 18 discuss people preferring suicide to capture and the sexual exploitation of female captives.
- gaigalas 2mo agoOur earliest record is the Rigveda (a written down oral tradition, we don't know exactly how far back it goes). I suggest you try to read it at least once. It's almost incomprehensible.
- rishav_sharan 2mo agoNo. And it's not even close. Rigveda would be around 1500Bce. Even Sumerian cuneiform would be far older at 3000 bce. If you want oldest oral records, some Australian aboriginal stories would be the ones at 8000 bce
- rishav_sharan 2mo agoOh and some researchers are putting down the story of "seven sisters"/pleiades to around 100k years ago, back when the 7th star in the constellation was visible
- gaigalas 2mo agoThe recovery of a possible oral tradition regarding this is likely drawn from comparative mythology techniques, which is super interesting (I'm fascinated by it, personally), but in another category.
- gaigalas 2mo agoThe Rigveda is the the earliest unbroken kept record. The Sumerian tablets are likely older, but they were forgotten and then re-deciphered. The transliterations still carry educated choices made by a scholar (there's only so much you can do when the record breaks for a long time). Meanwhile, we know exactly how people spoke those early vedas because there is a tradition that keeps chanting it, without stopping, since before it was written down. That chanting has error correction mechanisms, redundancy and other impressive features that further place the Rigveda in a unique place among earlier works.
- rishav_sharan 2mo ago
- yreg 2mo agoSo what do you claim as 'not foolish' to think? That there were non-human civilizations before the dinosaurs? Do you consider ants/bees to have civilizations or is it just humans currently? Or do you mean that there were human civilizations in the prehistory? And what do you mean by that – is it foolish to think that they were hunter gatherers for hundreds of years? I don't mean to make strawmans, that's why I'm asking.
- _heimdall 2mo agoWell for starters I'd say my basic point is that its foolish to assume nothing came before what we do know about. There could have been past human civilizations, with enough time any natural building materials would effectively vanish. More interesting to me, though, would be non-human civilizations that could have existed well before humans ever came around. I don't consider animals to have civilizations simply for having complex groups (ants or bees, for example). Though separately they do absolutely have emotions, family bonds, and long memories. My cows have proven that, each one is a different personality with their own clicks among the herd, and each cow treats the me and my wife differently so its not like "this one's always mean, this one wants to be petted" etc.
- graemep 2mo ago> Its believed that homo sapiens have been around for at least 300,000 years and yet we think almost all of that was entirely without civilization. Depends what you call civilization. If there was a civilization what happened to it and why did it leave no trace. > We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well. Actually we do have evidence of what came before them, and there were extinction events. > It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth. We might not know about previous civilizations (that is the point of the Silurian Hypothesis - a lot of traces will disappear over time) but we have no evidence that there was any previous civilization, or of any sufficiently intelligent animal to build one. The oldest stone tools we have found are only about 3m years old.
- m0llusk 2mo agoActually, house mice appear to have a common ancestor which lived somewhere around India roughly 400,000 years ago.
- rbanffy 2mo ago> human or otherwise This is a fascinating idea. > and even archeological evidence is lacking. A couple million years and your surface will be forever lost under a subduction zone. There is little sign of a global civilisation predating humans, but there is plenty spacetime for smaller societies that would have completely disappeared without a trace.
- dyauspitr 2mo agoIt’s so crazy that they all just… died because of the old world diseases before anyone really got a chance to meet them as a civilization.
- ErigmolCt 2mo agoThe really haunting part is that Europeans often arrived late enough to see the collapse, but not early enough to understand what had collapsed
- IncreasePosts 2mo agoThe same thing happened to the native North Americans too. When the Pilgrims showed up in Massachusetts in 1620, the whole region between there and maine had been reduced in population by 90+% due to a plague inadvertently brought by traders
- TimedToasts 2mo agoThe thing was that _any_ outside contact was going to be doom for North America. A lack of resistance and no sanitation equaled a tinder box just waiting for the right plague.
- culi 2mo ago> A lack of resistance and no sanitation Precolombian north america actually had really sophisticated sanitation. In urban areas they pretty advanced waste management. In other areas, a lot of their seasonal mobility was possibly driven by sanitation needs. And they have really in depth practices around the ways they treat waterways and waste placement. The problem was actually the exact opposite. Compared to Europeans, they were obsessive about soap and cleanliness. But Europeans lived in really dense villages alongside their livestock for many generations and they suffered greatly from it. The history of Europe is basically one outbreak after another. But ofc over time some amount of immunities developed Maybe if North Americans had less sanitation and kept livestock they would've developed their own deadly diseases too that would've killed Europeans.
- delichon 2mo ago[flagged]
- culi 2mo agoThe Amazon rainforest was extensively modified by pre-Columbian indigenous societies. Some anthropologists have even called it a "manufactured landscape". Modern LiDAR mapping has revealed thousands of large geometric ditches, reservoirs, causeways, mounds, and earthen infrastructure.[0][1] Up to 10% of soils are highly fertile man-made terra preta soils and trees like cocoa, acai, and brazilnut show an unnatural "hyperdominance" distribution due to ancient orchards. Many plants throughout show some degree of domestication[2][3] And some have even proposed a possible human role in the transition of parts of the Amazon from grassland to rainforest about 10k years ago[4] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/282/1812/20150813/77803/The-domestication-of-Amazonia-before-European https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/282/1812/201... You don't achieve a population of 3M people without such extensive landscape modification. [0] https://www.zmescience.com/science/archaeology/archaeologists-used-laser-to-find-a-vast-engineered-world-beneath-the-amazon/ https://www.zmescience.com/science/archaeology/archaeologist... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379120305448 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02773... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/humans-living-in-amazon-10000-years-ago-cultivated-plants-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/humans-living-... [3] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-archaeology/articles/10.3389/fearc.2026.1814264/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-archaeolo... [4] https://www.discovermagazine.com/10-800-years-ago-early-humans-planted-forest-islands-in-amazonias-grasslands-42107 https://www.discovermagazine.com/10-800-years-ago-early-huma...
- aaron425 2mo agoCan you defend your statement and cite how renewable this domesticated area is? Aren’t most areas deforested for cattle farming (legendarily inefficient) and soy plantations (monoculture)? Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2025.107810 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2025.107810
- culi 2mo ago
- guywithahat 2mo agoThere’s an incredible story about Orellana, who captained the first journey down the Amazon River in the 1500’s with Gaspar de Carvajal taking notes. They described cities of hundreds of thousands of people, and sailing for days going through city after city. Decades later people tried to repeat the journey and didn’t find major cities, ultimately calling Carvajal a liar. The reality was everyone died due to new diseases. It’s hard to imagine the impact disease had on South America in particular
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- tastyfreeze 2mo agoNorth America as well. Estimates are that 80-95% of the native population on the continent in 1492 had died from new diseases. Unfortunately, much of the evidence of large scale habitation in North America was plowed under to build farms. In South America the forest at least slowed the complete destruction of evidence. I suspect that as more of the Amazon gets scanned with lidar Carvajal will be vindicated.
- haowen8098 2mo ago[dead]
- khanhnguyen8386 2mo agoThe myth of the 'pristine, untouched Amazon' was always a European trope. Lidar is proving that ancient civilizations were sophisticated ecosystem engineers, shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it.
- uwagar 2mo agoif you dont destroy something, its usually close to an idea of pristine. the trouble is slash and burn agriculture and clearing for beef production.
- smallerfish 2mo agoActually they did something like slash and burn agriculture, but they apparently rotated sites, allowing forest regeneration.
- culi 2mo agoWhich is extremely common in native traditions pretty much around the world. Aboriginals from Australia have a concept of "cool fires" and Californians famously had very careful "cultural burns". Fires were always carefully managed not to burn too hot and kill seeds
- brabel 2mo agoI thought the Australians did burn entire forests to the extent that much of Australia is the result of millennia of that practice.
- curioadu 2mo agoIs that vaguely related to slash-and-burn? Did it also change the ecological system of Australia? Some articles said that Aboriginals might have caused the extinction of a lot of larger animals in different ways, arguably superficially similar to how the mammuth was made extinct and how lions were hunted to extinction in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming#History . Was the plant diversity changed or lowered by the Aboriginals over the years? Is there a difference in the approaches between "fire-stick burning", and the advanced farming or agricultural practices of for instance the Aztecs? Did Aboriginals and some of the Amerindian peoples north of the Aztecs do "fire-stick farming" by simply burning a region and then move in and simply primarily hunt and also gather from certain plants a bit, slightly organized; or did they have large-scale, high-density farming of crops like the Aztecs? Would Pueblos' farming techniques, and those doing Three Sisters farming techniques, be closer to that of the Aztecs than to fire-stick burning? Was fire-stick burning typically more nomadic, and the Aztecs' and others' techniques more sedentary? > While this practice is often cited as a way to improve small gardens for individual use, its historical value lay in larger-scale implementations designed to nurture and sustain entire communities.[14]
- userbinator 2mo agoAmazonian civilization now has an estimated 1M people in 0.3% of warehouse area.
- ErigmolCt 2mo agoFinding hundreds of previously unknown earthworks is a major archaeological result. Extrapolating from them to millions of inhabitants is where I would slow down...
- jgilias 2mo agoThis article linked in the posted one is even better when it comes to “the whole picture” https://www.science.org/content/article/unearth-their-past-amazonian-people-turn-language-white-men-understand https://www.science.org/content/article/unearth-their-past-a...
- harry3369 2mo agoIt's amazing
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- ryanmarsh 2mo agoHas anyone else noticed the shape and order of these settlements indicates they engaged in siege warfare?
- cambaceres 2mo agoI recommend the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann to those of you who find this interesting. I loved it! From wikipedia: > The book presents recent research findings from different fields which suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...