7 ms·

The myth of the 'pristine, untouched Amazon' was always a European trope. Lidar is proving that ancient civilizations were sophisticated ecosystem engineers, sh

The 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 ago
if 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 ago
  Actually they did something like slash and burn agriculture, but they apparently rotated sites, allowing forest regeneration.
  - culi 2mo ago
    Which 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 ago
      I thought the Australians did burn entire forests to the extent that much of Australia is the result of millennia of that practice.
    - curioadu 2mo ago
      Is 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]
  - uwagar 2mo ago
    they also maintained cattle? i dont think 3 million people would have used only 3% of the forest area if their main diet was bovine heavy.
- otabdeveloper4 2mo ago
  > and clearing for beef production I know the real point is that you'd prefer we eat the proverbial bugs, but there's akshually more grassland in the world than forest. You don't need to cut down trees for beef production - it doesn't make any economic sense unless your logistics costs are deliberately screwed by perverse government incentives.
  - uwagar 2mo ago
    i prefer you fix your bugs instead.
  - ithkuil 2mo ago
    So some countries have more forest than grassland?
    - otabdeveloper4 2mo ago
      a) There's way more grassland in the world than forests. (On all continents.) b) Cows walk as they graze, the meat even delivers itself. You just need a herder. Shrimple as. The scheme worked for millennia with zero problems. Nobody had a problem with beef production until tariffs and other fuckery was invented. But apparently we need to switch to eating bugs instead of fixing the root of the problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - graemep 2mo ago
        Beef should not the the main meat in some places. There is a particular problem in the Americas with cattle. Tariffs do sometimes reduce imports from places where cattle are not a great fit - i.e. the very places where forests are cleared too grow grass. All the beef (and most other meat too) I eat is grown in the same country. For a premium you can get higher quality local (i.e. same county) meat.
      - uwagar 2mo ago
        eat your bugs bro. dont fix them.
parineum 2mo ago
> shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it. More accurately, shaping the rainforest the all dying so the rainforest grows back. They didn't live under the canopy, they cut it down.
smt88 2mo ago
The headline literally says they lived in 3% of the forest area, which implies that the vast majority of the rest of the forest actually was untouched
- _visgean 2mo ago
  not really, the 3pct was just what they scanned with lidars so far.
- Terr_ 2mo ago
  Perhaps, but was it untouched by design, or was it untouched because it wasn't economically feasible for them to exploit it? Those two are very very different when it comes to assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points, and the latter is the default across most civilizations ever known.
  - boomlinde 2mo ago
    Since when is "assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points" the topic of discussion? Your original claim which GP responded to is unrelated to that.
    - Terr_ 2mo ago
      > Since when is "assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points" the topic of discussion? I think it's very straightforward. Here's a recap of the thread, you can see it in the quote for the first item: 1. khanhnguyen8386 implied that they were "sophisticated ecosystem engineers, shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it." 2. smt88 challenged that by pointing that 97% of "the rainforest" was probably untouched by this group, as opposed to shaped deliberately. 3. I (Terr_) chime in to emphasize that we shouldn't assume a region was intentionally left-alone when the much simpler explanation is that it wasn't practical to exploit it. > Your original claim which GP responded to is unrelated to that. You have also confused me with some other user.
      - boomlinde 2mo ago
netbioserror 2mo ago
That is definitely not what the Maya did. Or really any civilization with large permanent cities. The record of forest cutting once settlements reach a certain size is consistent and global. The Amazon simply experienced a full civilizational collapse and more than enough time untouched to recover. It might suffice to say: The myth of sophisticated indigenous ecosystem engineers who harmonize with nature is a European trope. Whenever any culture larger and more settled than hunter-gatherers has traditions of forest management and ecosystem balance, don't immediately attribute to them magical wisdom that Europeans somehow lack. Consider that those traditions are an ancient memory of one or more catastrophic ecosystem collapses and the practices of the people who survived them.
- culi 2mo ago
  I mean throughout the Americas you see really complex polycultural farming traditions including the famous chinampas. In Mesoamerica you also have the milpa cycle which is a system where you clear most herbs and lightly burn it to grow your crops in polycultures. After a few years, you grow more trees and these fields turn more into managed orchards that include both fruit trees and trees grown for lumbar. Eventually you let it progress into a closed canopy system. That's just one example, but there are plenty other I could think of that are in very stark contrast to anything you see from European civilizations.
  - curioadu 2mo ago
    > throughout the Americas you see really complex polycultural farming traditions including the famous chinampas. Interesting. Do you know of anything somewhat similar for Africa, ignoring the lands of Egypt and the lands near the Mediterranean Sea?
    - culi 2mo ago
      I recall reading of somewhat similar rotational cropping traditions indigenous to Africa though those centered mostly around root crops like yams. Modern smallholder farms still often practice rotational cropping because of this history (something which the west has only relatively recently come around on). East Africa practiced stuff like homegardens which can be complex, multi-layered agroforestry systems that usually surround homesteads. I've heard the Hausa traditionally did something similar. I haven't read nearly as much on African agroforestry systems though so I can't recommend much readings. Most of what I recall comes from a college course I took a very long time ago on economic anthropology
pibaker 2mo ago
My understanding of why Europeans think the americas were pristine and barely touched by human existence is because smallpox was ahead of European explorers and by the time Europeans set foot on many places on the continent, they saw ecosystems that had recovered from human intervention after the local population had collapsed.
- culi 2mo ago
  I've heard that explanation as well. But I don't know if "recovered from human intervention" is a fair characterization since they couldn't have been more than a decade behind the smallpox/diseases. Estimates range from 5 to 10 million people in the Amazonian Basin by the time Colombus reached the Americas (though some go as high as 20 million). I don't think a few years is enough to erase all trace of human intervention. I think it was just so alien a concept to Europeans who kept very tidy woodlands like dehesa in Spain or the coppiced woodlands of Central Europe. As much as 10% of the soil in Amazonia was man-made terrapreta. And they spread what could best be translated as complex polycultural "orchards" of brazilnuts, aqui, coco, and more. Botanists have been puzzled for years by the hyperdominance patterns of some of these trees until anthropologists realized the human connection. Anyways I guess what I'm saying is that the Amazonian landscape management is so radically different from what Europeans know that they likely just didn't realize what was before their eyes.
  - vasco 2mo ago
    There wasn't a single civilization there. The same way if you arrived in Greece during the roman period you'd have 2000 year old temples to look at and if you go there now you have both the 4000 year old ones and the 2000 year old ones. In the amazon some of the stuff that is there was ancient already at the time of the Discoveries.
    - culi 2mo ago
      > There wasn't a single civilization there. That's what I said. There have been multiple. The linked article is about the Aquiry civilization which numbered 3 million people in only 3% of the land. The Marajoara outlasted them. The Upano Valley civilization predates both of them by 100 years and built dense garden cities. The Beni Mounds spanned over 20k earthen mounds and human-made forest islands that were connected by massive canals and causeways
vasusen 2mo ago
Yes, few years ago I was really surprised to learn that much of highly fertile amazon soil patches were created by humans using biochar. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
- t-3 2mo ago
  Unintentionally. People have been mixing biochar into soil for fertility since the beginning of agriculture with slash-and-burn, but terra preta is the result of waste dumps (human waste, ashes, bones, pottery, other garbage) in settlements composting, not something people were intentionally creating.
ErigmolCt 2mo ago
The important lesson is not that ancient people left no ecological footprint, but that a heavily managed landscape can still remain remarkably biodiverse
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- spwa4 2mo ago
  You mean: it can recover. Also 3M people is probably a lot easier than 220M (and that's just Brazil).
  - puelocesar 2mo ago
    220M is the whole country, which is much bigger than the Amazon. Nowadays it's estimated the Amazon has around 46.9 million people. Much more than 3M, but still much less than your 220M
- tkel 2mo ago
  The lesson is more that indigenous people were (+ are) part of the ecology, not separate from it or above it. With cultural, social, technological, and spiritual practices that were formed dialectically and hyper-locally with the ecology, as a result of it, and as part of it. Often considered a keystone species in these ecologies.
  - suddenlybananas 2mo ago
    Indigenous people aren't any more or less of the ecology than anyone else, unless you believe in blood and soil. Humans are part of the ecology, being indigenous has nothing to do with it.
    - curioadu 2mo ago
      In some ways I agree with you, but I also think that the other commenter indirectly might uncover some insights. For instance, Australian Aboriginals mighy have historically both; fire-stick farmed ("farming" in the sense of clearing land for animals to hunt, apart from some foraging, as far as I can tell) so much and in such a large area that both large animal species and perhaps some plant species went extinct or were greatly decreased in numbers and area; and done it for so many years and generations that the ecology changed and adapted according to repeated and frequent fire-stick farming, to the point of becoming reliant on humans doing fire-stick farming.
b112 2mo ago
shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it. That's the myth. A lot of native populations farmed. Where do you think that farmland came from? It came from tearing down forests and tearing down trees. And yes, ancient peoples could do that with fire, and with older axes. And not only was that wood cut down, but it was also used for fuel. Fuel for fires, for cooking. Fuel to warm a house at night. Mines were a thing. Copper and lead and other metals were dug up from mines Surface mines were heavily damaging to the environment, with all sorts of minerals being dug up, and washed into the local water and river. In fact, the only difference between older civilizations, and our civilization is that we have the technological capability to cause more damage. Native North and South Americans, were not any better, about the environment or living at peace and harmony with nature. As an aside the same goes for violence, for war. Endless North American and South American civilizations waged war. They enslaved, they enslaved other civilizations, they warred with one another, they fought constantly, and just as today those nations had peaceful entities and warlike aggressive entities. Nothing has changed, nothing is different between the historical colonialistic civilizations of the West, and the new world. The Aztecs were supremely violent, taking over civilizations all over the place, just as colonial as the West was. You may wonder why I'm waxing and waning deeply on this topic, but the reason is that there seems to be this predominant thought that somehow, North American civilizations were perfect and pristine, and lived in utter utopian peace with nature and, each other. Nothing could be further from the truth. And do you know why? Because they were human beings. None of this says that the colonial behavior was perfect when European nations came here. Many things were done that should not have been done. However, if you look at the history of the human race, including modern times, colonial behavior has always, I repeat, always been the case. Whether you were the Persian Empire, whether you were what is now India/Pakistan, whether you were China, whether you were any nation on the planet, there has been a history of colonial behavior. This includes all North American and South American peoples. China was a wide-ranging number of kingdoms, that eventually settled to the Five Kingdoms and then a unified country. This was colonialism. This was subjugation and conquering of other peoples, until a unified country existed. You can look at the Roman Empire, the Grecian Empire, the Babylonians. You can go and look at any culture, any history. You can look at modern times, and you can see what might be deemed colonialistic behavior. I cite all of this, because there seems to be recent thought in the last 20 years that somehow, Native Americans and South Americans lived in utter peace and harmony with their environment and each other. Nothing could be further from the truth. So back to the original point that kicked off this rantish blather, no ancient civilizations did not live in harmony with the environment on purpose, and any that had the technological capability or the framework of a civilization like the Aztecs, raised their local environment, ripped down forests, had open mines, destroyed the local environment, hands down.
gabriel666smith 2mo ago
Whilst being aware that the civilization in question ended significantly before European arrival in South America, I have two questions that hopefully someone smart here can help with: 1. The spread of disease (smallpox specifically) being fast enough that most European sources describe a relatively uninhabited Amazon strikes me as potentially interesting. This means that contact and trade was happening between locales. We know that part is true from many sources, but: A) Can we roughly model the spread of smallpox by looking for (for example) populated areas mentioned in one European source that are unmentioned, or mentioned as empty, by another source that would have likely crossed paths with that civ? B) Can this tell us anything about trade routes and volume? Can we make any inferences about pop density, even very weak inferences, which might help us know where to look for stronger evidence? It does seem like each European discovery historically revises the estimated population(s) upwards. 2. LiDAR is awesome. Maybe not in the Amazon - in less foliage-dense places - is it being combined with, for example, an EMF (or some other kind of more granular lightweight detection system) - strapped to a drone? It feels like once we see something interesting on LiDAR, sending a swarm of lightweight drones with some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside is quite a quick way to get interesting information. I don’t know a lot about radio waves, so I don’t know if there’s a suitably lightweight detector for this purpose.
- defrost 2mo ago
  > some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside Been a thing since the 1970s, physics dictates dimensions though - you can go wrap or dangle: * https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/the-megatem-fixed-wing-transient-em-system-applied-to-mineral-exploration https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/the-megatem-fixed-win... * https://cseg.ca/airborne-electromagnetic-systems-state-of-the-art-and-future-directions/ https://cseg.ca/airborne-electromagnetic-systems-state-of-th... * https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysics/airborne-electromagnetics https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi...
  - Cthulhu_ 2mo ago
    I've seen the 'dangle' type in action in the Netherlands last year (I was on the island of Texel for vacation); they were doing a project of mapping underground water if I recall correctly. Really interesting stuff. Would be neat if this could be automated and scaled up, I'm sure most of the world is as of yet unmapped with these kinds of detectors. Same with under the ocean.
aa-jv 2mo ago
See also, the Australian landscape - which early Europeans were certain had been cultivated by some lost tribe of Israel, since it was so pristine, plentiful, and food was abundant. That lasted about 5 years after contact, and 20 years later it was all a waste. The original caretakers were robbed of abundance and plenty.
Cthulhu_ 2mo ago
One quote early in the article stood out to me: > Decades of subsequent research by Ranzi and colleagues have slowly revealed remnants of peoples that occupied even the forest’s most remote areas. They're considered remote now, but that's hundreds of years after the existing civilization was decimated.
doitLP 2mo ago
Not a trope if you go back another 12’000 years or so!

uwagar 2mo ago

if 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 ago
Actually they did something like slash and burn agriculture, but they apparently rotated sites, allowing forest regeneration.
- culi 2mo ago
  Which 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 ago
    I thought the Australians did burn entire forests to the extent that much of Australia is the result of millennia of that practice.
  - curioadu 2mo ago
    Is 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]
- uwagar 2mo ago
  they also maintained cattle? i dont think 3 million people would have used only 3% of the forest area if their main diet was bovine heavy.
otabdeveloper4 2mo ago
> and clearing for beef production I know the real point is that you'd prefer we eat the proverbial bugs, but there's akshually more grassland in the world than forest. You don't need to cut down trees for beef production - it doesn't make any economic sense unless your logistics costs are deliberately screwed by perverse government incentives.
- uwagar 2mo ago
  i prefer you fix your bugs instead.
- ithkuil 2mo ago
  So some countries have more forest than grassland?
  - otabdeveloper4 2mo ago
    a) There's way more grassland in the world than forests. (On all continents.) b) Cows walk as they graze, the meat even delivers itself. You just need a herder. Shrimple as. The scheme worked for millennia with zero problems. Nobody had a problem with beef production until tariffs and other fuckery was invented. But apparently we need to switch to eating bugs instead of fixing the root of the problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - graemep 2mo ago
      Beef should not the the main meat in some places. There is a particular problem in the Americas with cattle. Tariffs do sometimes reduce imports from places where cattle are not a great fit - i.e. the very places where forests are cleared too grow grass. All the beef (and most other meat too) I eat is grown in the same country. For a premium you can get higher quality local (i.e. same county) meat.
    - uwagar 2mo ago
      eat your bugs bro. dont fix them.

parineum 2mo ago

> shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it. More accurately, shaping the rainforest the all dying so the rainforest grows back. They didn't live under the canopy, they cut it down.

smt88 2mo ago

The headline literally says they lived in 3% of the forest area, which implies that the vast majority of the rest of the forest actually was untouched

_visgean 2mo ago
not really, the 3pct was just what they scanned with lidars so far.
Terr_ 2mo ago
Perhaps, but was it untouched by design, or was it untouched because it wasn't economically feasible for them to exploit it? Those two are very very different when it comes to assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points, and the latter is the default across most civilizations ever known.
- boomlinde 2mo ago
  Since when is "assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points" the topic of discussion? Your original claim which GP responded to is unrelated to that.
  - Terr_ 2mo ago
    > Since when is "assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points" the topic of discussion? I think it's very straightforward. Here's a recap of the thread, you can see it in the quote for the first item: 1. khanhnguyen8386 implied that they were "sophisticated ecosystem engineers, shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it." 2. smt88 challenged that by pointing that 97% of "the rainforest" was probably untouched by this group, as opposed to shaped deliberately. 3. I (Terr_) chime in to emphasize that we shouldn't assume a region was intentionally left-alone when the much simpler explanation is that it wasn't practical to exploit it. > Your original claim which GP responded to is unrelated to that. You have also confused me with some other user.
    - boomlinde 2mo ago

netbioserror 2mo ago

That is definitely not what the Maya did. Or really any civilization with large permanent cities. The record of forest cutting once settlements reach a certain size is consistent and global. The Amazon simply experienced a full civilizational collapse and more than enough time untouched to recover. It might suffice to say: The myth of sophisticated indigenous ecosystem engineers who harmonize with nature is a European trope. Whenever any culture larger and more settled than hunter-gatherers has traditions of forest management and ecosystem balance, don't immediately attribute to them magical wisdom that Europeans somehow lack. Consider that those traditions are an ancient memory of one or more catastrophic ecosystem collapses and the practices of the people who survived them.

culi 2mo ago
I mean throughout the Americas you see really complex polycultural farming traditions including the famous chinampas. In Mesoamerica you also have the milpa cycle which is a system where you clear most herbs and lightly burn it to grow your crops in polycultures. After a few years, you grow more trees and these fields turn more into managed orchards that include both fruit trees and trees grown for lumbar. Eventually you let it progress into a closed canopy system. That's just one example, but there are plenty other I could think of that are in very stark contrast to anything you see from European civilizations.
- curioadu 2mo ago
  > throughout the Americas you see really complex polycultural farming traditions including the famous chinampas. Interesting. Do you know of anything somewhat similar for Africa, ignoring the lands of Egypt and the lands near the Mediterranean Sea?
  - culi 2mo ago
    I recall reading of somewhat similar rotational cropping traditions indigenous to Africa though those centered mostly around root crops like yams. Modern smallholder farms still often practice rotational cropping because of this history (something which the west has only relatively recently come around on). East Africa practiced stuff like homegardens which can be complex, multi-layered agroforestry systems that usually surround homesteads. I've heard the Hausa traditionally did something similar. I haven't read nearly as much on African agroforestry systems though so I can't recommend much readings. Most of what I recall comes from a college course I took a very long time ago on economic anthropology

pibaker 2mo ago

My understanding of why Europeans think the americas were pristine and barely touched by human existence is because smallpox was ahead of European explorers and by the time Europeans set foot on many places on the continent, they saw ecosystems that had recovered from human intervention after the local population had collapsed.

culi 2mo ago
I've heard that explanation as well. But I don't know if "recovered from human intervention" is a fair characterization since they couldn't have been more than a decade behind the smallpox/diseases. Estimates range from 5 to 10 million people in the Amazonian Basin by the time Colombus reached the Americas (though some go as high as 20 million). I don't think a few years is enough to erase all trace of human intervention. I think it was just so alien a concept to Europeans who kept very tidy woodlands like dehesa in Spain or the coppiced woodlands of Central Europe. As much as 10% of the soil in Amazonia was man-made terrapreta. And they spread what could best be translated as complex polycultural "orchards" of brazilnuts, aqui, coco, and more. Botanists have been puzzled for years by the hyperdominance patterns of some of these trees until anthropologists realized the human connection. Anyways I guess what I'm saying is that the Amazonian landscape management is so radically different from what Europeans know that they likely just didn't realize what was before their eyes.
- vasco 2mo ago
  There wasn't a single civilization there. The same way if you arrived in Greece during the roman period you'd have 2000 year old temples to look at and if you go there now you have both the 4000 year old ones and the 2000 year old ones. In the amazon some of the stuff that is there was ancient already at the time of the Discoveries.
  - culi 2mo ago
    > There wasn't a single civilization there. That's what I said. There have been multiple. The linked article is about the Aquiry civilization which numbered 3 million people in only 3% of the land. The Marajoara outlasted them. The Upano Valley civilization predates both of them by 100 years and built dense garden cities. The Beni Mounds spanned over 20k earthen mounds and human-made forest islands that were connected by massive canals and causeways

vasusen 2mo ago

Yes, few years ago I was really surprised to learn that much of highly fertile amazon soil patches were created by humans using biochar. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

t-3 2mo ago
Unintentionally. People have been mixing biochar into soil for fertility since the beginning of agriculture with slash-and-burn, but terra preta is the result of waste dumps (human waste, ashes, bones, pottery, other garbage) in settlements composting, not something people were intentionally creating.

ErigmolCt 2mo ago

The important lesson is not that ancient people left no ecological footprint, but that a heavily managed landscape can still remain remarkably biodiverse

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
spwa4 2mo ago
You mean: it can recover. Also 3M people is probably a lot easier than 220M (and that's just Brazil).
- puelocesar 2mo ago
  220M is the whole country, which is much bigger than the Amazon. Nowadays it's estimated the Amazon has around 46.9 million people. Much more than 3M, but still much less than your 220M
tkel 2mo ago
The lesson is more that indigenous people were (+ are) part of the ecology, not separate from it or above it. With cultural, social, technological, and spiritual practices that were formed dialectically and hyper-locally with the ecology, as a result of it, and as part of it. Often considered a keystone species in these ecologies.
- suddenlybananas 2mo ago
  Indigenous people aren't any more or less of the ecology than anyone else, unless you believe in blood and soil. Humans are part of the ecology, being indigenous has nothing to do with it.
  - curioadu 2mo ago
    In some ways I agree with you, but I also think that the other commenter indirectly might uncover some insights. For instance, Australian Aboriginals mighy have historically both; fire-stick farmed ("farming" in the sense of clearing land for animals to hunt, apart from some foraging, as far as I can tell) so much and in such a large area that both large animal species and perhaps some plant species went extinct or were greatly decreased in numbers and area; and done it for so many years and generations that the ecology changed and adapted according to repeated and frequent fire-stick farming, to the point of becoming reliant on humans doing fire-stick farming.

b112 2mo ago

shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it. That's the myth. A lot of native populations farmed. Where do you think that farmland came from? It came from tearing down forests and tearing down trees. And yes, ancient peoples could do that with fire, and with older axes. And not only was that wood cut down, but it was also used for fuel. Fuel for fires, for cooking. Fuel to warm a house at night. Mines were a thing. Copper and lead and other metals were dug up from mines Surface mines were heavily damaging to the environment, with all sorts of minerals being dug up, and washed into the local water and river. In fact, the only difference between older civilizations, and our civilization is that we have the technological capability to cause more damage. Native North and South Americans, were not any better, about the environment or living at peace and harmony with nature. As an aside the same goes for violence, for war. Endless North American and South American civilizations waged war. They enslaved, they enslaved other civilizations, they warred with one another, they fought constantly, and just as today those nations had peaceful entities and warlike aggressive entities. Nothing has changed, nothing is different between the historical colonialistic civilizations of the West, and the new world. The Aztecs were supremely violent, taking over civilizations all over the place, just as colonial as the West was. You may wonder why I'm waxing and waning deeply on this topic, but the reason is that there seems to be this predominant thought that somehow, North American civilizations were perfect and pristine, and lived in utter utopian peace with nature and, each other. Nothing could be further from the truth. And do you know why? Because they were human beings. None of this says that the colonial behavior was perfect when European nations came here. Many things were done that should not have been done. However, if you look at the history of the human race, including modern times, colonial behavior has always, I repeat, always been the case. Whether you were the Persian Empire, whether you were what is now India/Pakistan, whether you were China, whether you were any nation on the planet, there has been a history of colonial behavior. This includes all North American and South American peoples. China was a wide-ranging number of kingdoms, that eventually settled to the Five Kingdoms and then a unified country. This was colonialism. This was subjugation and conquering of other peoples, until a unified country existed. You can look at the Roman Empire, the Grecian Empire, the Babylonians. You can go and look at any culture, any history. You can look at modern times, and you can see what might be deemed colonialistic behavior. I cite all of this, because there seems to be recent thought in the last 20 years that somehow, Native Americans and South Americans lived in utter peace and harmony with their environment and each other. Nothing could be further from the truth. So back to the original point that kicked off this rantish blather, no ancient civilizations did not live in harmony with the environment on purpose, and any that had the technological capability or the framework of a civilization like the Aztecs, raised their local environment, ripped down forests, had open mines, destroyed the local environment, hands down.

gabriel666smith 2mo ago

Whilst being aware that the civilization in question ended significantly before European arrival in South America, I have two questions that hopefully someone smart here can help with: 1. The spread of disease (smallpox specifically) being fast enough that most European sources describe a relatively uninhabited Amazon strikes me as potentially interesting. This means that contact and trade was happening between locales. We know that part is true from many sources, but: A) Can we roughly model the spread of smallpox by looking for (for example) populated areas mentioned in one European source that are unmentioned, or mentioned as empty, by another source that would have likely crossed paths with that civ? B) Can this tell us anything about trade routes and volume? Can we make any inferences about pop density, even very weak inferences, which might help us know where to look for stronger evidence? It does seem like each European discovery historically revises the estimated population(s) upwards. 2. LiDAR is awesome. Maybe not in the Amazon - in less foliage-dense places - is it being combined with, for example, an EMF (or some other kind of more granular lightweight detection system) - strapped to a drone? It feels like once we see something interesting on LiDAR, sending a swarm of lightweight drones with some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside is quite a quick way to get interesting information. I don’t know a lot about radio waves, so I don’t know if there’s a suitably lightweight detector for this purpose.

defrost 2mo ago
> some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside Been a thing since the 1970s, physics dictates dimensions though - you can go wrap or dangle: * https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/the-megatem-fixed-wing-transient-em-system-applied-to-mineral-exploration https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/the-megatem-fixed-win... * https://cseg.ca/airborne-electromagnetic-systems-state-of-the-art-and-future-directions/ https://cseg.ca/airborne-electromagnetic-systems-state-of-th... * https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysics/airborne-electromagnetics https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi...
- Cthulhu_ 2mo ago
  I've seen the 'dangle' type in action in the Netherlands last year (I was on the island of Texel for vacation); they were doing a project of mapping underground water if I recall correctly. Really interesting stuff. Would be neat if this could be automated and scaled up, I'm sure most of the world is as of yet unmapped with these kinds of detectors. Same with under the ocean.

aa-jv 2mo ago

See also, the Australian landscape - which early Europeans were certain had been cultivated by some lost tribe of Israel, since it was so pristine, plentiful, and food was abundant. That lasted about 5 years after contact, and 20 years later it was all a waste. The original caretakers were robbed of abundance and plenty.

Cthulhu_ 2mo ago

One quote early in the article stood out to me: > Decades of subsequent research by Ranzi and colleagues have slowly revealed remnants of peoples that occupied even the forest’s most remote areas. They're considered remote now, but that's hundreds of years after the existing civilization was decimated.

doitLP 2mo ago

Not a trope if you go back another 12’000 years or so!