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

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

#161

Post by tkel »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #153
tkel wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#162

Post by _heimdall »

shimman wrote: post #29
_heimdall wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You would like the book "Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber. It does a lot to talk about modern anthropological studies that corrected a lot of misconceptions about early humans. Really fascinating book, basically postulates that humans have always been imaginative social creatures that were routinely well travelled; and the idea that early humans weren't also politically or culturally advance is wrong. In fact som…

Thanks! I'll have to check it out.

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

#163

Post by _heimdall »

yreg wrote: post #94
_heimdall wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So what do you claim as 'not foolish' to think? That there were non-human civilizations before the dinosaurs? Do you consider ants/bees to have civilizations or is it just humans currently? Or do you mean that there were human civilizations in the prehistory? And what do you mean by that – is it foolish to think that they were hunter gatherers for hundreds of years? I don't mean to make strawmans, that's why I'm aski…

Well for starters I'd say my basic point is that its foolish to assume nothing came before what we do know about. There could have been past human civilizations, with enough time any natural building materials would effectively vanish. More interesting to me, though, would be non-human civilizations that could have existed well before humans ever came around.

I don't consider animals to have civilizations simply for having complex groups (ants or bees, for example). Though separately they do absolutely have emotions, family bonds, and long memories. My cows have proven that, each one is a different personality with their own clicks among the herd, and each cow treats the me and my wife differently so its not like "this one's always mean, this one wants to be petted" etc.

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

#164

Post by anon84873628 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #21
dyauspitr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of this happened centuries before the germ theory of disease. No one on either side had any real clue what was going on, and most probably thought it was a cruel punishment from the God(s). Often the disease travelled faster than people, and when Europeans arrived, the natives were long since gone.

>Often the disease travelled faster than people, and when Europeans arrived, the natives were long since gone.

I understand the gist of this statement with regards to the size and complexity of indigenous civilizations, but we need to be much more careful with the framing.

Plenty of Native Americans (in both continents) survived the European diseases. but just looking at the North, the English colonists interacted heavily with Native Americans - hence the story of Thanksgiving. The "French and Indian War" pitted an alliance of the French and Indian nations against the English settlers.

It was a deliberate genocide campaign in the 19th century (a good 300 years after initial European contact) that largely exterminated native cultures from what is modern USA.

The current color of the continent is not some accident of "oh well we didn't know any better about disease". In Central and South America (and the far North), native cultures survived to a much greater extent and are still visible today.

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

#165

Post by modo_mario »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #157
modo_mario wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indigenous people in north america contributed to multiple extinctions. This is the noble savage trope you're putting on display

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 le…

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.

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

#166

Post by modo_mario »

tkel wrote: post #132
modo_mario wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indigenous people in north america contributed to multiple extinctions. 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. I don't think you understand what the noble savage trope is. I'm commenting on the development of indigenous hum…

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?

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

#167

Post by frmersdog »

curioadu wrote: post #145
tkel wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hum…

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.)

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

#168

Post by indoordin0saur »

culi wrote: post #58
pibaker wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interven…

> 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.

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

#169

Post by puelocesar »

spwa4 wrote: post #89
ErigmolCt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You mean: it can recover. Also 3M people is probably a lot easier than 220M (and that's just Brazil).

220M is the whole country, which is much bigger than the Amazon.

Nowadays it's estimated the Amazon has around 46.9 million people. Much more than 3M, but still much less than your 220M

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

#170

Post by randomImmigrant »

modo_mario wrote: post #166
tkel wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hum…

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.

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