4 ms·

The Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact

81 points by martian 17y ago

nvasilak 17y ago
It's unbelievably sad that that many people died, and so much collective knowledge was lost. But, it excites me to think that there are still probably a good number of hidden secrets throughout North and South America just waiting to be discovered.
philwelch 17y ago
My favorite paragraph: "I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as "presentism" by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian."
- nebula 17y ago
  I guess the 'Indian' here is referring to native Americans. It amazes me that a bunch of Europeans occupy the Americas, call themselves Americans, and call the people who have been living there Indians.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    This usage arises, of course, from Columbus's designation of the persons he encountered when he sailed to the New World, http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1966/does-indian-derive-from-columbuss-description-of-native-americans-as-una-gente-in-dios http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1966/does-indian-de... and from mapmaker Martin Waldseemueller's labeling of an early map of the territories that Columbus and other Europeans had explored. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/951/why-was-america-named-after-amerigo-vespucci http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/951/why-was-america... But while I can't comment on what speakers of Amazonian Brazilian Portuguese call various kinds of people, I can point out that the term "American" used in the United States refers to anyone in America, not just the European-descended people in America.
    - eru 17y ago
      > refers to anyone in America You mean everyone in the US?
      - philwelch 17y ago
        Interestingly enough, the United States of America is the only country in the world with "America" in its name. Not that it's any justification--I believe the Greeks have a similar bone to pick with Macedonia.
        Retric 17y ago
        None of the States used America, but just as separate countries created the Union, wait European Union the United States used of America to designate where they where. Now in 200 years people might still think of France and Germany as separate countries, but I don't think the distinction is going to last that long.
      - secret 17y ago
        I'm not entirely sure of common usage, but my anecdotal experience is that people in Latin America refer to the people of the US as "North Americans," while in Spain I've heard what would translate as "United Statesian."
  - echaozh 17y ago
    I sort of think the same about the Indians. You know, some people came to India and called themselves Indians. And the natives then became slaves.
    - nebula 17y ago
      Interesting. I can't say I know Indian history thoroughly, but from what I know India never had slavery like America did. There were other social mechanism that were used to exploit human labor in India though. can you elaborate on what people you are referring to here when you say they came to India and called themselves Indians. AFAIK, there is a lot of controversy surrounding the history 'Aryan invasion of India', but I haven't come across any history text that suggests that Aryans turned the natives into slaves.
  - philwelch 17y ago
    White folks tried calling them "Native Americans" once, and a lot of them still do it, but a lot of American Indians have been calling themselves American Indians for so long they don't really care anymore. "Native American" is a name white people made up to make themselves feel better. It will become more of an issue as more people from India immigrate over here. I imagine that in some parts of the country, "Indian" already means Indian more than it means American Indian. Also, the more accurate adjective is "indigenous" or "aboriginal", not "native".
    - jacobolus 17y ago
      Eh. "indigenous" and "aboriginal" are both words which date from the 17th century, not used in the sense you're talking about until the 19th, whereas "native" was used in that sense at least as far back as the 15th century. The OED's definitions of both "indigenous" and "aboriginal" define those words with reference to the word "native". Calling them "more accurate" is a bit absurd, I'd say. Less ambiguous perhaps.
      - philwelch 17y ago
        I've always understood that "native" was defined on an individual level, i.e. you would be a native American if you were born in America. "Indigenous" and "aboriginal" apply to races rather than individuals.
        jacobolus 17y ago
        OED has native, adj: 11. Of a person or social group. a. Born in a designated place; belonging to a particular people by birth; spec. belonging to an indigenous ethnic group, as distinguished from foreigners, esp. European colonists. indigenous, a: 2. Of, pertaining to, or intended for the natives; ‘native’, vernacular. aboriginal, adj: 1. a. First or earliest as recorded by history; present from the beginning; primitive. Of peoples, plants, and animals: inhabiting or existing in a land from earliest times; strictly native, indigenous.
    - barry-cotter 17y ago
  - sethg 17y ago
    Charles C. Mann (the author that the OP quotes) mentions this in the introduction to 1491 (the book that the essay is excerpted from). He says he calls the native Americans "Indians" because most of them prefer that label. (Of course, when possible, it's better to use a more specific name. I was irritated to discover that my son's Cub Scout manual uses the phrase "American Indian Sign Language" to refer to a language that was really only used by the Plains Indians.)
- patio11 17y ago
  a fallacy disparaged as "presentism" Want to go really meta? People who say "presentism" think the game is borked because it requires judging historical cultures against the standards of modern day people of good will. I think the game is borked because it requires judging your answer against the standards of academic liberals, who are invariably the ones who hear the question asked and answered. This question has nothing to do with the culture of America or Europe in 1491 and EVERYTHING to do with the culture of the anthropologists you know in 2009. Answering the question is just a signaling mechanism to remind the people you're talking with that you're all members of the same tribe. I have an expensive piece of paper certifying to my membership in the tribe of We Intensely Dislike Making Absolute Value Judgments, Because Only Evil White People Do That.
camccann 17y ago
Just to highlight the part that I personally find most interesting: Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer of terra preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. "Apparently," Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, "at some threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate—even regenerate itself—thus behaving more like a living 'super'-organism than an inert material." [...] Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. [...] Wikipedia has, of course, an article on terra preta: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta Most interesting is modern attempts by scientists to effectively reverse-engineer the soil; using a combination of crude charcoal, organic compost, and microorganism cultures to convert poor soils into something approximating the robust, fertile terra preta.
diN0bot 17y ago
excellent read. one thought i can't figure out: how come native american diseases didn't equally damage europeans? why the different biology and disease ecosystems?
- cturner 17y ago
  I've no facts but will speculate. It could be that Euro-african civilisations were more effective at cultivating new diseases thanks to the crossover between animals and humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_animals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_animals Guinea pigs and llamas seem to be it for the new world. Whereas the Europeans had a vast list of animals available. They'd live in tight confines with pigs and chickens and cows during long cold winters - fabulous creatures and circumstances for cultivating new strains of disease.
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  Not everyone particularly likes him, but Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" explores pretty much this exact question (as part of a suite of "why did Europeans conquer the Americas instead of the other way around" issues). Glossing over a lot of the details and specifics, the argument he makes is that various factors -- geography, indigenous flora/fauna, etc. -- allowed densely-packed settled human populations to develop in Europe/Africa/Asia before the Americas. And such densely-packed populations are far more conducive to the development of epidemic diseases, which would be why diseases brought by Europeans wrought such havoc on the Americas but not vice-versa (except possibly for syphilis, but that one's still being debated).
  - Tichy 17y ago
    Among other things he says that there were no (or almost no) animals suitable for domestication and mass herding in the Americas. Therefore the native Americans had no contact with herds of animals that would have bred diseases of that kind. Most of those epidemic diseases that killed off lots of people apparently stem from chicken and pigs. (note: guess why it is called "swine flu").
    - 17y ago

81 points by martian 17y ago

It's unbelievably sad that that many people died, and so much collective knowledge was lost. But, it excites me to think that there are still probably a good number of hidden secrets throughout North and South America just waiting to be discovered.

philwelch 17y ago

My favorite paragraph: "I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as "presentism" by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian."

nebula 17y ago
I guess the 'Indian' here is referring to native Americans. It amazes me that a bunch of Europeans occupy the Americas, call themselves Americans, and call the people who have been living there Indians.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  This usage arises, of course, from Columbus's designation of the persons he encountered when he sailed to the New World, http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1966/does-indian-derive-from-columbuss-description-of-native-americans-as-una-gente-in-dios http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1966/does-indian-de... and from mapmaker Martin Waldseemueller's labeling of an early map of the territories that Columbus and other Europeans had explored. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/951/why-was-america-named-after-amerigo-vespucci http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/951/why-was-america... But while I can't comment on what speakers of Amazonian Brazilian Portuguese call various kinds of people, I can point out that the term "American" used in the United States refers to anyone in America, not just the European-descended people in America.
  - eru 17y ago
    > refers to anyone in America You mean everyone in the US?
    - philwelch 17y ago
      Interestingly enough, the United States of America is the only country in the world with "America" in its name. Not that it's any justification--I believe the Greeks have a similar bone to pick with Macedonia.
      - Retric 17y ago
        None of the States used America, but just as separate countries created the Union, wait European Union the United States used of America to designate where they where. Now in 200 years people might still think of France and Germany as separate countries, but I don't think the distinction is going to last that long.
    - secret 17y ago
      I'm not entirely sure of common usage, but my anecdotal experience is that people in Latin America refer to the people of the US as "North Americans," while in Spain I've heard what would translate as "United Statesian."
- echaozh 17y ago
  I sort of think the same about the Indians. You know, some people came to India and called themselves Indians. And the natives then became slaves.
  - nebula 17y ago
    Interesting. I can't say I know Indian history thoroughly, but from what I know India never had slavery like America did. There were other social mechanism that were used to exploit human labor in India though. can you elaborate on what people you are referring to here when you say they came to India and called themselves Indians. AFAIK, there is a lot of controversy surrounding the history 'Aryan invasion of India', but I haven't come across any history text that suggests that Aryans turned the natives into slaves.
- philwelch 17y ago
  White folks tried calling them "Native Americans" once, and a lot of them still do it, but a lot of American Indians have been calling themselves American Indians for so long they don't really care anymore. "Native American" is a name white people made up to make themselves feel better. It will become more of an issue as more people from India immigrate over here. I imagine that in some parts of the country, "Indian" already means Indian more than it means American Indian. Also, the more accurate adjective is "indigenous" or "aboriginal", not "native".
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    Eh. "indigenous" and "aboriginal" are both words which date from the 17th century, not used in the sense you're talking about until the 19th, whereas "native" was used in that sense at least as far back as the 15th century. The OED's definitions of both "indigenous" and "aboriginal" define those words with reference to the word "native". Calling them "more accurate" is a bit absurd, I'd say. Less ambiguous perhaps.
    - philwelch 17y ago
      I've always understood that "native" was defined on an individual level, i.e. you would be a native American if you were born in America. "Indigenous" and "aboriginal" apply to races rather than individuals.
      - jacobolus 17y ago
        OED has native, adj: 11. Of a person or social group. a. Born in a designated place; belonging to a particular people by birth; spec. belonging to an indigenous ethnic group, as distinguished from foreigners, esp. European colonists. indigenous, a: 2. Of, pertaining to, or intended for the natives; ‘native’, vernacular. aboriginal, adj: 1. a. First or earliest as recorded by history; present from the beginning; primitive. Of peoples, plants, and animals: inhabiting or existing in a land from earliest times; strictly native, indigenous.
  - barry-cotter 17y ago
- sethg 17y ago
  Charles C. Mann (the author that the OP quotes) mentions this in the introduction to 1491 (the book that the essay is excerpted from). He says he calls the native Americans "Indians" because most of them prefer that label. (Of course, when possible, it's better to use a more specific name. I was irritated to discover that my son's Cub Scout manual uses the phrase "American Indian Sign Language" to refer to a language that was really only used by the Plains Indians.)
patio11 17y ago
a fallacy disparaged as "presentism" Want to go really meta? People who say "presentism" think the game is borked because it requires judging historical cultures against the standards of modern day people of good will. I think the game is borked because it requires judging your answer against the standards of academic liberals, who are invariably the ones who hear the question asked and answered. This question has nothing to do with the culture of America or Europe in 1491 and EVERYTHING to do with the culture of the anthropologists you know in 2009. Answering the question is just a signaling mechanism to remind the people you're talking with that you're all members of the same tribe. I have an expensive piece of paper certifying to my membership in the tribe of We Intensely Dislike Making Absolute Value Judgments, Because Only Evil White People Do That.

camccann 17y ago

Just to highlight the part that I personally find most interesting: Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer of terra preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. "Apparently," Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, "at some threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate—even regenerate itself—thus behaving more like a living 'super'-organism than an inert material." [...] Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. [...] Wikipedia has, of course, an article on terra preta: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta Most interesting is modern attempts by scientists to effectively reverse-engineer the soil; using a combination of crude charcoal, organic compost, and microorganism cultures to convert poor soils into something approximating the robust, fertile terra preta.

diN0bot 17y ago

excellent read. one thought i can't figure out: how come native american diseases didn't equally damage europeans? why the different biology and disease ecosystems?

cturner 17y ago
I've no facts but will speculate. It could be that Euro-african civilisations were more effective at cultivating new diseases thanks to the crossover between animals and humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_animals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_animals Guinea pigs and llamas seem to be it for the new world. Whereas the Europeans had a vast list of animals available. They'd live in tight confines with pigs and chickens and cows during long cold winters - fabulous creatures and circumstances for cultivating new strains of disease.
ubernostrum 17y ago
Not everyone particularly likes him, but Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" explores pretty much this exact question (as part of a suite of "why did Europeans conquer the Americas instead of the other way around" issues). Glossing over a lot of the details and specifics, the argument he makes is that various factors -- geography, indigenous flora/fauna, etc. -- allowed densely-packed settled human populations to develop in Europe/Africa/Asia before the Americas. And such densely-packed populations are far more conducive to the development of epidemic diseases, which would be why diseases brought by Europeans wrought such havoc on the Americas but not vice-versa (except possibly for syphilis, but that one's still being debated).
- Tichy 17y ago
  Among other things he says that there were no (or almost no) animals suitable for domestication and mass herding in the Americas. Therefore the native Americans had no contact with herds of animals that would have bred diseases of that kind. Most of those epidemic diseases that killed off lots of people apparently stem from chicken and pigs. (note: guess why it is called "swine flu").
  - 17y ago