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Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

science.org

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Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#31

Post by guywithahat »

There’s an incredible story about Orellana, who captained the first journey down the Amazon River in the 1500’s with Gaspar de Carvajal taking notes. They described cities of hundreds of thousands of people, and sailing for days going through city after city.

Decades later people tried to repeat the journey and didn’t find major cities, ultimately calling Carvajal a liar. The reality was everyone died due to new diseases. It’s hard to imagine the impact disease had on South America in particular

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#33

Post by paimapi »

WalterBright wrote: post #30
paimapi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are recorded incidents: https://project1492.org/small-pox-blankets/ the controversy is mostly around whether or not it was a systemic, pervasive form of biological warfare. the evidence base is fairly small but needs to be considered in context of Native American cultural habits around durable recordkeeping (eg trade ledgers) vs colonial, and if colonists would record such an act there was also active ethnic cl…

From your reference: "it is the colonizers who get to write the history" There's a simple explanation for this. The colonists were literate, and would keep diaries and write letters about their experiences. Churches would log births, deaths, and marriages. Printers would print newspapers. Later, these materials were fodder for academics who converted them into historical narratives. The Indians were not literate and…

the Native Americans were highly literate, they just didn't record granular details to ledgers because they didn't have strictly hierarchical institutions that utilized this data for controlling their population

there is so much easily searchable resources for this and though it might not be your intent, your comment reads as willfully ignorant for being so broad and bought into the type of 16th century Puritan Eurocentrism that many of the articles above discuss in depth

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_writing_systems * https://www.science.org/content/article/roots-mesoamerican-w... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems * https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indigenous-languages-of-Nor...

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#34

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

NuclearPM wrote: post #25
culi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Aquiry civilization (that this paper is about) actually ceased (either due to collapse or people changing their mind about that way of life, who knows) between 850 and 1000 CE. And WDYM "anyone"? Obviously plenty of people met them and plenty of civilizations derived from them. By the time Europeans got there, the Amazon Basin was home to 5-10 million people (some models push it up to 20 million). I'm sure traces…

[flagged]

I'm not a moderator, but this is not the way to engage here, and your profile seems to have a lot of the same. You should peruse the comments section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html or at least try and bring a little more effort to the conversation. You can make the same point in a way that adds light rather than heat.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#35

Post by shwaj »

NuclearPM wrote: post #25
culi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Aquiry civilization (that this paper is about) actually ceased (either due to collapse or people changing their mind about that way of life, who knows) between 850 and 1000 CE. And WDYM "anyone"? Obviously plenty of people met them and plenty of civilizations derived from them. By the time Europeans got there, the Amazon Basin was home to 5-10 million people (some models push it up to 20 million). I'm sure traces…

[flagged]

You could be more charitable. They did say “or” which you omitted in your quote, and also “who knows”. There are possibilities too. In my view, the primary contribution of that comment was to clarify the time frame.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#36

Post by Gangway0829 »

WalterBright wrote: post #30
paimapi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are recorded incidents: https://project1492.org/small-pox-blankets/ the controversy is mostly around whether or not it was a systemic, pervasive form of biological warfare. the evidence base is fairly small but needs to be considered in context of Native American cultural habits around durable recordkeeping (eg trade ledgers) vs colonial, and if colonists would record such an act there was also active ethnic cl…

From your reference: "it is the colonizers who get to write the history" There's a simple explanation for this. The colonists were literate, and would keep diaries and write letters about their experiences. Churches would log births, deaths, and marriages. Printers would print newspapers. Later, these materials were fodder for academics who converted them into historical narratives. The Indians were not literate and…

If 90+% of whatever society you are from was killed off by disease, and the people who came across the survivors treated them as little better than cattle and systematically destroyed any remaining trace of your society, how literate would history judge you to be?

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#37

Post by PeterHolzwarth »

dyauspitr wrote: post #14
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is a strange and horrific metaphor, analogy, and parable about the effects of isolation - made all the more distressing because it wasn't intentional. It was just our broader ancestors going about their business as normal people.

Yeah, for the most part, I mean there are tales about small pox ridden blankets being intentionally given to the Native Americans, but I don’t know if those are apocryphally or not. Either way it’s not like we had vaccines and immunization back then it would’ve happened anyways.

I definitely get your broader point, but it turns out the smallpox blankets things is a myth. But I know what you mean, nonetheless.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#38

Post by gaigalas »

_heimdall wrote: post #27
marojejian wrote: post #2

Originally heard about this via Nature podcast's interview with the researcher: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02367-x This is a continuation of many findings in this direction. It's wonderful to imagine the many societies humans have created, and sad that we'll be able to learn so little about them.

I've always been confused by the idea that we know all civilisation that has happened on earth, human or otherwise. Written record doesn't go back very far at all, and even archeological evidence is lacking. Its believed that homo sapiens have been around for at least 300,000 years and yet we think almost all of that was entirely without civilization. We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evide…

Our earliest record is the Rigveda (a written down oral tradition, we don't know exactly how far back it goes).

I suggest you try to read it at least once. It's almost incomprehensible.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#40

Post by uwagar »

khanhnguyen8386 wrote: post #39

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.

if you dont destroy something, its usually close to an idea of pristine.

the trouble is slash and burn agriculture and clearing for beef production.

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