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.
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.
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.
> they couldn't have been more than a decade behind the smallpox/diseases
I think it was much more than this. Remember Columbus landed in 1492 and these areas were very connected with trade networks, including from the Carribean islands to the mainlands. Diseases could have spread through most of both of the continents in a decade. And then places like what became the United States were not regularly seeing Europeans until ~1620, so the apocalyptic plague would have already had a 100 year head start. Places like the West Coast and interiors of the US or interior of South America would have been 200 years or more post-plague.
Also, many of the earliest explorers of the deep interior often described sophisticated and heavily populated societies. But when others eventually reached those areas to find them sparsely populated wilderness those stories were dismissed as just more legends and rumors of cities of gold. See Francisco de Orellana's description of his expedition down the Amazon for a good example of this.
> I don't think a few years is enough to erase all trace of human intervention
The weather there is quite brutal. Roads need tons of maintenance to remain passable. This is one of the reasons rivers are such an important transportation network.
> Amazonian landscape management is so radically different from what Europeans know that they likely just didn't realize what was before their eyes
This is an interesting explanation. Also, refusing to document previous occupation is a convenient way to claim land rights.
To add to that, most of their structures in the Amazon would have undoubtedly been built by wood (plentiful) rather than stone (scarce).
Also, I think 30 years of a field being abandoned in the Amazon is likely more than enough for it to return fully to jungle. It's not like explorers were running around counting tree rings.
It's hard for temperate folks to appreciate just how incredibly agressive tropical vegetation growth can be. I'm only subtropical but I've got a tree that's about 6 years old and a foot in diameter. And that's after I've topped it at 5 ft(0 branches left, just a stump) every 6 months or so just to try to keep it under control. If I'd let it run rampant it would be at full growth now, around 50ft and 1.5ft across. I had another tree that went from 10 inch seedling to 10ft and bearing fruit in 9 months. A field abandoned for 30 years in the amazon is 100% jungle.
>Europeans didn't really get to most of the more isolated inland areas in the Americas until the 1600s or well after that, though.
It takes more than a few decades for things to regrow. There's a reason that half of all towns in New England have the name "field" in them. The impenetrable thicket that characterizes unmaintained New England land would have been foreign to literally every human to ever set foot there prior to the mid 1700s (decades of re-growth after the natives had been mostly driven off but not long enough for complete cultivation by europeans).
Now, obviously that's not that far inland, but by the time you're talking about the french surveying the continental interior native populations had stabilized. The worst disease epidemics were very much at 1500s and early 1600s thing.
It takes more than a few decades for things to regrow.
Have you ever seen a cleared lot that hasn’t been touched for a decade? We have a few near my house, and it is fascinating how wild they have gotten in such a short time.
Multiplied 10x and set in the rainforest, I would expect signs of humanity to be completely hidden.
Amazon is different beast, humidity, insect fast growing plants. It is nasure on hyperdrive. I wouldn't be surprised if things took 5-10 times faster than england. Or any more dry european places.
Yeah, i spend some time in south america and you can see that even in Rio. If people left the nature would just gulp it up. fun time sleeping in jungle in Iquitos, its crazy how dens the jungle can be
The population collapse in New England happened only a couple of years before the Plymouth colony was established though (they didn't have any meaningful contact with the Spanish colonies where it happened in the mid and early 1500s).
Of course probably it took quite a bit more for it to reach the Amazon but it's not like Europeans were that familiar or explore the region that much until the 1800s or so.
Not as common as old England but vastly more common than the rest of the country because the charters had to be petitioned for and approved by several layers of intolerable assholes so unoffensive descriptive names like <thing>field were preferred over just about everything else. See also North/South/East/West<thing that was previously approved>. Kind of like how modern corporate safe culture bland-washes everything.
They mostly gave all the waterways colloquial names based on the Indians and of course that got copy-pasta'd onto all sorts of charts and maps so the government couldn't redefine those even if they wanted to.
Most of the rest of the country (including the mid Atlantic despite being settled at the same time) was far more deliberately surveyed and named.
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.
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
> The World Without Us is a 2007 non-fiction book about what would happen to the natural and built environment if humans suddenly disappeared... it outlines, for example, how cities and houses would deteriorate, how long man-made artifacts would last, and how remaining lifeforms would evolve. Weisman concludes that residential neighborhoods would become forests within 500 years
A landscape does not become "pristine" a decade after millions of people disappear. The human influence would still be everywhere, but it would not necessarily look like European agriculture
No, what they failed to recognize was indigenous land management that had been abandoned for many decades. In remote areas smallpox moved quite far ahead of European settlers.
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.
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.
With these things it's always an issue of scale. What people don't realize about e.g. homesteading is that it's actually really easy to be entirely self sufficient on very small plots of land. But the tricky thing in the past was transport - when you start shoving many thousands of people into very small areas, you need to start producing more and more food in (relatively) smaller and smaller areas.
Modern times has alleviated this constraint because of mass transport. Now moving tons of cargo hundreds of miles, or even half way around the world, is trivial and relatively rapid, but in ancient times you're looking at moving small amounts of cargo extremely slowly, all under the time pressure of spoilage/infestation. The way places like Rome solved this, or at least alleviated it, was by using river transport but then you're imposing some significant technological, infrastructural, and geographical requirements on settlements.
And then you also need to deal with bad harvests, war, and other such issues. In decentralized systems where most are doing their own thing, this isn't such a big deal. But in a heavily centralized system where potentially millions of people are dependent upon deliveries, a single disrupted harvest could spell the end of a civilization if not properly prepared for. And ancient beliefs that things like human sacrifice could ensure rain were likely in opposition to the rational necessity for preparation of inevitable failures.
---
As a related topic, this is also why war is considered a game of logistics. Think about feeding and providing the other necessities for 10,000 people for just one day. Now imagine doing this for weeks, months, and years - when all those necessities need to come through areas that are potentially being attacked. The fact that war with armies of hundreds of thousands is even possible is quite amazing when you think about the logistics involved just to survive, let alone actually engage in combat.
> Now moving tons of cargo hundreds of miles, or even half way around the world, is trivial and relatively rapid, but in ancient times you're looking at moving small amounts of cargo extremely slowly
This is one of the reasons they flourished near river networks that provided easier transport as well as food. They also build canals, but I’m not sure they were for navigation as much as irrigation.
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
> 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.
Homegardens seem much smaller in scale than large-scale chinampas as practiced by the Aztecs, right?
The important lesson is not that ancient people left no ecological footprint, but that a heavily managed landscape can still remain remarkably biodiverse
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.
This has nothing to do with "noble savage" or whatever other ideologically loaded words you want to surgically introduce to manipulate people's opinions.
Humans are the apex predator. They have a huge influence on whatever the downstream ecological equilibrium winds up being.
This is hardest to deny in formerly glaciated regions because humans were there exerting pressure on the ecosystem the day after the glacier left (well not quite, but close enough). So if you take for example somewhere like pre-colombian Wisconsin, the development eventually pine forest and then hardwood forest all that happened with humans around eating things. The number of wolves you get depends on the number of deer you have which depends on how many the humans eat. And of course the deer eat things too so they affect the plant balance, which affects the other wildlife. And so on and so on. It's a complex web.
In places like the Amazon it's less cut and clear because humans showed up around/just before the last serious change in climate (end of ice age) but once again they've been there for the entire development of the "modern" ecosystem so whatever your balance of plants and animals is that balance is reflective of the pressures put on it by human activity.
Nah, I was adressing the idiology already present there.
I don't dispute that humans are in essence a keystone species, part of nature, etc, etc but the OP talked about indiginous people specifically. We can just as easily say that the japanese were ecologically compatible....up to a point.
The only reason it's brought up is due the idea of the indiginous in tune with nature who was essentially not limited in his ability to further exploit but chooses not to.
Shouldn't you consider individual populations, cultures separately, and not be lumping all native people's together? One can do something another didn't.
With regards to the Late Pleistocene extinction overkill hypothesis that you are referring to, your information is out of date, more recent evidence suggests that humans played only a minor or incidental role, with climate change (the end of an ice age), and habitat restructuring being the primary drivers.
I don't think you understand what the noble savage trope is. I'm commenting on the development of indigenous human societies in the Americas. The vast majority of them were ecologically compatible. This is not a commentary on the morality of individuals. To take the Mexica empire as an example, they were not a moral civilization by our standards (neither were the Spanish colonizers), and they had an over-reliance on corn and obsidian, but other than that they survived in a way that did not stress or extinguish or destabilize the surrounding ecology.
I do not quite buy your arguments, and I am skeptical of several claims that you make. Without specific sources, it is more difficult for me to contest them, though I will not request sources.
From your perspective, what caused the extinction of several megafauna/large species of animals after the arrival of Aboriginals in Australia?
That's mistaking correlation for causation. I don't have proof, but let's consider an alternative: that the climate change that made those areas newly-hospitable to humans made them inhospitable to megafauna. Can you falsify "all of the species were subject to the same environmental shift" before you jump to "arriving humans hunted them all to extinction"?
(And I recognize the parallels to some unsavory arguments, and would like to point out that the evidence regarding contemporary man-made climate change is strong and sound. But that's with industrialization and a couple orders of magnitude more people on the planet.)
> That's mistaking correlation for causation.
I made no such mistake. Though, I was not aware of there being competing theories regarding the significant number of extinct megafauna species around the gross time interval of the arrival of Aboriginals to Australia and Tasmania, my apologies. There are two competing set of theories, namely human-caused ones and natural-climate-caused ones, as far as I can tell. I was only aware of or could only remember the first type of theory.
For a clearer and possibly more settled and agreed upon example: From your or the other commenter's perspective, what caused the extinction of Moa after the arrival of Maori in New Zealand? Some claims that the Moa went extinct within 100 years of human settlement, and that it had a large population before that
>The extinction of all moa species occurred relatively swiftly, between 1380 and 1440, making it one of the most rapid extinctions in history. Contributing factors included habitat destruction through woodland burning, the introduction of non-native predators such as dogs and rats, and the birds' natural life cycle, which featured low egg production.
It's not a good example to use to prove your contention, because it's an outlier, and because it involved the use of technology that wasn't necessarily available to other incidences of megafauna extinction.
I think if you consider that single instance it is mistaking correlation for causation.
However, it happens every time, with a lag. In different climates and environments. When humans expanded out of Africa, spread out over Eurasia, reached North America, South America, Australia, new Zealand extinction of megafauna always followed.
We know that there was large scale hunting and humans are highly effective hunters. Hunting megafauna is the easiest available food source for a pre-industrial society until they get to the point where there is too little megafauna left (and changes, eventually including farming follow). Unlike large carnivores we are not dependent on hunting megafauna so our human numbers do not drop when they are in short supply.
It's still mistaking correlation for causation, even when considering multiple instances, if you can't describe an unfalsifiable mechanic as the cause.
There are two problems here:
1) It hasn't actually happened every time. Elephants, hippopotamuses, large whales, polar bears, grizzly brown bears, certain large bovines, and moose still exist.
2) Extinctions of megafauna are distributed across a time delta from human arrival. I don't know for sure, but I would wager that that delta doesn't necessarily correlate with date (as a proxy for technological development).
That is to say, "humans arrive -> everything big dies" is not so cut-and-dry a rule. It should be clear that other factors are involved.
I'll suggest a third option: humans hunt megafauna to extinction in the presence of conditions that favor such behavior - perhaps climatic, geographic, and/or cultural. So, it happens. But it doesn't always happen.
For the purposes of this conversation, I don't think you've proven the original contention wrong, which was that indigenous people in the Americas found a niche which made their presence and behavior sustainable over long periods of time. If your evidence is the total extinction of American megafauna, then you would be forced to admit that you were incorrect. In fact, you potentially argue for the opposite: in clearing some megafauna but sparing others, humans did indeed carve out a potentially sustainable ecological niche, which their continued presence helps to prove was sustainable. At least, until culturally disparate humans arrived.
A significant number of mega fauna species is hunted to extinction whenever humans arrive.
> If your evidence is the total extinction of American megafauna
The evidence is the extinction of most American megafauna species.
> In fact, you potentially argue for the opposite: in clearing some megafauna but sparing others, humans did indeed carve out a potentially sustainable ecological niche, which their continued presence helps to prove was sustainable.
Humans have continued to survive everywhere, so that is evidence the the presence of humans everywhere has been sustainable.
The comment making the claim about indigenous societies in the Americas is that they are "ecologically compatible". They are compatible with an ecology they altered. This is, again, true everywhere. You might argue that industrialisation has changed this as a (relatively) stable state is not reached because of continuing rapid change, but it was true before industrialisation.
> I'll suggest a third option: humans hunt megafauna to extinction in the presence of conditions that favor such behavior - perhaps climatic, geographic, and/or cultural. So, it happens. But it doesn't always happen.
I have two objections to that:
1. Its not all megafauna, it is most. Some species can survive humans.
2. The extinctions have happened across many different climates and cultures and on every continent and many islands.
It is not proved beyond doubt that humans have always caused extinctions, but the pattern is very consistent, which makes it by far the most likely explanation. Even where hunting is not the direct cause, many things humans do (such as agriculture) will destroy their habitats.
Where humans did not arrive until much later than most places (e.g. in places such as New Zealand or Madagascar) megafauna survived until after they did, and were then gone with a few hundred or a few thousand years.
What does ecologically compatible mean to you? Because it is expressed as some kind of choice.
Were the japanese naturally compatible in the distant past?
And if in the end this ecological compatibility just so strongly correlated with development and ability than what boundary does it actually refer to?
Relax. I don’t think the OP means there’s some genetic flaw in Europeans that makes them ecologically imbalanced by nature.
They’re saying that a lot of indigenous culture and practice was more sustainable. This may be for various reasons, and isn’t true only of American indigenous people but almost certainly people in Japan, India, Australia, etc., where urban civilization that depended on large scale agriculture didn’t take hold.
This is, if you see it, only evidence that there’s no inevitable path for progress and development for our species. We have the ability to look back, see how different parts of the world handled their engagement with their environment, when and where that degraded, and make changes, proving that none of this is inherent to any part of our species, but rather cultural and social structures that emerged for a bundle of reasons.
> They’re saying that a lot of indigenous culture and practice was more sustainable
Europe seems very sustainable to me, people have been living there for thousands of years and are still thriving. Why do you say Europeans doesn't have sustainable agriculture? They wouldn't have been able to become so dominant otherwise.
Because “Europe” hasn’t been one thing for any length of time.
And what even does “become so dominant” mean? You do know evolution isn’t some straight accumulative equation, right? Dominance means all things done are good?
Dominance over what time scale? Sustainable over what timescale?
The sad fact is, for any society, short term dominance causes long term instability. That multiplies a lot when you spend hundreds of years accumulating land and control and wealth. It’s sure sweet while the going lasts. Then what happens when there’s pushback?
We can’t fully answer that question yet. We’re living through that post colonial era of Europe.
My hope is Europe thrives. I doubt it will if it goes back to its old extractive practices. Thankfully, most governments in Europe seem to have moved past that mentality.
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.
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.
Seems as though you are intentionally misunderstanding me. Urbanization is a practice that humans developed without ecological integration, it is a practice of subjugating or disregarding the surrounding ecology, and extermination of most of life within an ecosystem. As opposed to living within an ecosystem for thousands of years, not above or apart from it, most indigenous human societies in the Americas developed in such a way that is compatible and unique to it's hyperlocal ecological niche.
Do you rely on the surrounding plants and animals in your area for sustenance, creating tools, daily life, etc? You do not, that's what I mean by living above/apart. Living in this way does not lead to an ecological society or a shared knowledge base of the surrounding ecology. Do your spiritual and cultural practices involve or integrate that reliance in some way? That's what I'm getting at.
Not true, there are obviously other ways. There is an intuitive distinction between living in harmony with natural systems and simply dominating them with technology. That is all you have to believe, it doesn't have to be grounded in ethnonationalism.
Humans are unquestionably part of the environment, and everything humans do bends the environment to their will, but it would clearly be at odds with how we use words to argue that say a nuclear power station is just as much "part of the ecology" as cultivation of soil.
> distinction between natural systems and simply dominating them with technology
No? There's a rhetorical distinction, there isn't a physical distinction. It's like holistic medicine vs modern medicine, or wellness vs health, or human-centered design vs regular design, or chemical-free food vs regular food
Any given thing is one or the other of these soley based on your perspective of it. Im sending this message to you right now by performing a ritual on a object made of rocks some guy found in the ground
Of course there isn't a physical distinction. This is a bit like saying there isn't a difference between a novel and a poem, because they're just words on a page. The distinction is nonphysical, but it is also obviously not rhetorical either. I said "intuitive" distinction, I'm not sure why you didn't criticise that directly since it admits that the distinction is not completely precise.
What exactly are you doubting? Is the word "harmony" meaningless gibberish in your opinion? Are there any nonphysical words you admit are meaningful?
Everything is nature , but clearly human society is also distinct. Both can be true. Some anthropologist philosophers have referred to this as "first nature" and "second nature", second nature being human society which is also part of first nature but distinct from it.
But you're making out that indigenous people are part of this "first nature" rather than the "second nature", while industrial civilisation is strictly "second nature" which is frankly racist.
The 201 definition is that second nature is a realm of development beyond the bio-social realm, that tends to form into institutions that have their own methods and rate of development and change beyond biological evolution (natural selection, gene flow, mutual aid, etc). Bands, clans, tribes, federations, nations, etc.
Other animals such as orcas also have been shown to have societies, language, culture, and history that is passed onto children. You could perhaps say that is also second nature.
Call it what you want, but clearly modern human society is distinct in that it stands above (quite literally in the form of cities) and uniquely has the ability to threaten the rest of life on the planet. While at the same time being part of nature.
Humans are part of the surrounding ecology whether we recognize it or not, as others have noted in this thread. The difference is many indigenous societies have tended to recognize it and integrate it into socio-cultural practices as a necessary part of survival in their local ecology, while our modern human society mostly does not.
Consider the Kucadikadi people of now-Mono Lake , whose autonym literally means "eaters of the brine fly pupae". That is how closely their society, culture, and language is related to their local ecology, which "evolved" (in the 2nd nature sense) out of thousands of years of human society development and survival in that place. Notably their society has not developed to threaten or extinquish the brine flies on which they depend.
Unsurprisingly this one generated a lot of responses.
My working hypothesis for this question involves colonization, technologically driven scales of time and space, and selection. The essence is totally obvious: either you develop sustainable practices or you go extinct.
Consider a group of people colonizing an area previously uninhabited by humans. When they arrive, they will disrupt the local ecosystem to some extent.
In some cases, the new combined system of ecosystem structure and human culture will settle into an attractor that can support humans for a long time (relative to frequency of colonization). In other cases, it will not, and the human population will die out. (Externally driven parameter changes can also turn a sustainable system into an unsustainable one.)
With a low enough colonization rate, most active communities will be operating sustainably.
Over time, technology increases the rate of spread of humanity. Cultures with more advanced technology increasingly spread into existing settlements as well as taking over existing land.
But the basic process continues: some systems last; some do not. The ones that last longer are the ones with sustainable practices.
This process is now operating at a global scale. Either we get sustainable, or things get bad.
Some people have concluded that the easier path is to colonize other planets.
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.
Since when is "assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points" the topic of discussion? Your original claim which GP responded to is unrelated to that.
> 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.
Still, I don't get where "virtuous environmental brownie-points" enter the discussion or how the first reply pertains to them. It seems like a simple factual statement that is either true or false and can be evaluated as such without invoking virtuous brownie points.
That the Amazon remained largely untouched is true regardless of whether that was the result of a deliberate effort, a technological limitation, a lack of need or any other reason. No one uses "preserved" until now. It can simultaneously be true that the populated areas of the Amazon where deliberately and carefully managed by the population and that the Amazon was largely untouched for any other reason.
> It can simultaneously be true that the populated areas of the Amazon where deliberately and carefully managed by the population and that the Amazon was largely untouched for any other reason.
Certainly, though nothing about the quoted fact that 97% of forest was uninhabited should lead us to make statements like "the pristine untouched Amazon idea is a European myth", nor does it give any information to go off of regarding their possible knowledge of environmental engineering.
Perhaps they weren't basing their statement on the "quoted fact" which was later posted in response to their statement (which FWIW isn't factual; as someone else points out this was not the only Amazonian civilization).
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
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.
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.
I wonder if you couldn’t distribute heavier parts across a swarm - perhaps separating the sender and receiver(s) - running the wave at an angle (or many angles simultaneously) to the surface.
The sources mention mostly aircraft, rather than drones, and human pilots aren’t as good as drones at flying in extremely tight formations, which might allow (if the tech allows in the first place!) parts to be distributed to work around pesky laws of flight.
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.
Between the Mason-Dixon line and the opposite latitude in Brazil it was more Malaria, Yellow Fever, and other mosquito born diseases rather than smallpox that did most of the killing. Malaria alone is responsible for about 5% of all human deaths through history, compared to something like 1% for smallpox.
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
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 . 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]
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.
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)_/¯
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.
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.
The myth of indigenous people's living in harmony with nature is just the current version of the myth of the "noble savage" and remains a disguise for racism, as it takes away the history and moral agency of such people, and trivialises their culture to a "natural state".
The fact is that human being usually alter their environment drastically. They might eventually reach a stable state, but after changing. All over the world megafauna disappeared just as human being appeared. In many cases there are other possible causes such as climate change, but the pattern is very consistent, but from our first spreading out of Africa to the Maoris reaching New Zealand just a few hundred years ago where ever humans go megafauna has swiftly disappeared.
I see you are very uninformed about the original caretakers of the Australian continent .. who very definitely cultivated the land so that there was an abundance of food safety for all. They were a lot more altruistic, also, about how they prepared food - leaving things in place for any forthcoming caretakers that would enter the region.
Every population grow to where they barely can support themselves, including Australian natives. It doesn't matter what you do, until we got good contraceptives starvation was a fact in every culture except after periods where food productivity quickly increased or population levels quickly decreased.
The only way to not starve is to not have sex, and no culture managed that well.
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.
