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.<p>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).<p>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 <i>dehesa</i> 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.<p>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.
Europeans didn't really get to most of the more isolated inland areas in the Americas until the 1600s or well after that, though.
>Europeans didn't really get to most of the more isolated inland areas in the Americas until the 1600s or well after that, though.<p>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).<p>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.
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.
> I don't think a few years is enough to erase all trace of human intervention<p>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.<p>> Amazonian landscape management is so radically different from what Europeans know that they likely just didn't realize what was before their eyes<p>This is an interesting explanation. Also, refusing to document previous occupation is a convenient way to claim land rights.
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.
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
Europeans often failed to recognize Indigenous land management because it did not resemble European cities or farms
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.
There's accounts of Europeans encountering cities in the Amazon, people didn't take them seriously since they disappeared in the intervening time.
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The important lesson is not that ancient people left no ecological footprint, but that a heavily managed landscape can still remain remarkably biodiverse
> left no ecological footprint<p>Well not in a sense you might think.<p>There are few odd things:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta</a><p><a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untouched-amazonian-rainforest-was-actually-shaped-humans-180962378/" rel="nofollow">https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untou...</a>
You mean: it can recover.<p>Also 3M people is probably a lot easier than 220M (and that's just Brazil).
The lesson is more that indigenous people were (+ are) <i>part</i> 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.
Indigenous people in north america contributed to multiple extinctions.<p>This is the noble savage trope you're putting on display
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.<p>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.<p>From your perspective, what caused the extinction of several megafauna/large species of animals after the arrival of Aboriginals in Australia?
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.
> unless you believe in blood and soil<p>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.<p>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<p>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<p>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
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.
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:<p>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:<p>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?<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
> some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside<p>Been a thing since the 1970s, physics dictates dimensions though - you can go wrap or dangle:<p>* <a href="https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/the-megatem-fixed-wing-transient-em-system-applied-to-mineral-exploration" rel="nofollow">https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/the-megatem-fixed-win...</a><p>* <a href="https://cseg.ca/airborne-electromagnetic-systems-state-of-the-art-and-future-directions/" rel="nofollow">https://cseg.ca/airborne-electromagnetic-systems-state-of-th...</a><p>* <a href="https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysics/airborne-electromagnetics" rel="nofollow">https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi...</a>
Awesome, thanks for these.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta</a>
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.
One quote early in the article stood out to me:<p>> Decades of subsequent research by Ranzi and colleagues have slowly revealed remnants of peoples that occupied even the forest’s most remote areas.<p>They're considered remote <i>now</i>, but that's hundreds of years after the existing civilization was decimated.
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.<p>It might suffice to say: The myth of sophisticated indigenous ecosystem engineers who harmonize with nature is a European trope.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>---<p>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<p>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.
> throughout the Americas you see really complex polycultural farming traditions including the famous chinampas.<p>Interesting. Do you know of anything somewhat similar for Africa, ignoring the lands of Egypt and the lands near the Mediterranean Sea?
If you hadn't excluded them, Morocco has a 2000 year old managed food forest.
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).<p>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.<p>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
> (something which the west has only relatively recently come around on).<p>I am not quite sure what you mean by this. Is it consistent with this?<p>> From the 9th century to the 11th century, farmers in Europe transitioned from a two-field system to a three-field system.<p>> Ancient Near Eastern farmers practiced crop rotation in 6000 BC, alternately planting legumes and cereals.[1][2][better source needed]<p>> In China both the two- and three-field systems had been used since the Eastern Zhou period.[3]<p>And shouldn't the "West" be capitalized in this context, since it is used as a name?
> 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.<p>Homegardens seem much smaller in scale than large-scale chinampas as practiced by the Aztecs, right?
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
Perhaps, but was it untouched by design, or was it untouched because it wasn't economically feasible for them to exploit it?<p>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.
I’d assume it was unnecessary because food needs were already satisfied plus the danger from deeper parts of the forest.
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?<p>I think it's very straightforward. Here's a recap of the thread, you can see it in the quote for the first item:<p>1. khanhnguyen8386 implied that they were "sophisticated ecosystem engineers, shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it."<p>2. smt88 challenged that by pointing that 97% of "the rainforest" was probably untouched by this group, as opposed to shaped deliberately.<p>3. I (Terr_) chime in to emphasize that we shouldn't assume a region was intentionally left-alone when the <i>much simpler</i> explanation is that it wasn't practical to exploit it.<p>> Your original claim which GP responded to is unrelated to that.<p>You have also confused me with some other user.
Yeah, I confused you for another user.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
10% of the Amazon soil is man-made terra preta.<p>The paper is just referring to this one civilization. It is definitely not the only Amazonian civilization.
Not really. It refers to a single civilisation. Other societies existed in the neighbouring space and time.
not really, the 3pct was just what they scanned with lidars so far.
<i>shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it.</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The Aztecs were supremely violent, taking over civilizations all over the place, just as colonial as the West was.<p>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.<p>And do you know why? Because they were human beings.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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".<p>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.
if you dont destroy something, its usually close to an idea of pristine.<p>the trouble is slash and burn agriculture and clearing for beef production.
Actually they did something like slash and burn agriculture, but they apparently rotated sites, allowing forest regeneration.
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
I thought the Australians did burn entire forests to the extent that much of Australia is the result of millennia of that practice.
Is that vaguely related to slash-and-burn?<p>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. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming#History" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming#History</a> . Was the plant diversity changed or lowered by the Aboriginals over the years?<p>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?<p>> 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]
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.
> and clearing for beef production<p>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.<p>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.
> shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it.<p>More accurately, shaping the rainforest the all dying so the rainforest grows back.<p>They didn't live under the canopy, they cut it down.
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.<p>That lasted about 5 years after contact, and 20 years later it was all a waste.<p>The original caretakers were robbed of abundance and plenty.