Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 219 posts

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

#171

Post by dec0dedab0de »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #148
ywvcbk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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 pr…

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.

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

#172

Post by indoordin0saur »

rbanffy wrote: post #136
culi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 expl…

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.

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

#173

Post by curioadu »

frmersdog wrote: post #167
curioadu wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

[dead]

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

#174

Post by tastyfreeze »

guywithahat wrote: post #31

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 dise…

North America as well. Estimates are that 80-95% of the native population on the continent in 1492 had died from new diseases. Unfortunately, much of the evidence of large scale habitation in North America was plowed under to build farms. In South America the forest at least slowed the complete destruction of evidence.

I suspect that as more of the Amazon gets scanned with lidar Carvajal will be vindicated.

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

#175

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> since they couldn't have been more than a decade behind the smallpox/diseases

They weren't. It took centuries for them to make any inroad into the Amazon.

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

#176

Post by walthamstow »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #148
ywvcbk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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 pr…

Is -field really that common? I live in old England and many towns here are called -field, although granted not as many as -ton/-don.

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

#177

Post by Symmetry »

gabriel666smith wrote: post #109
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.

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 local…

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.

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

#179

Post by WalterBright »

culi wrote: post #65
WalterBright wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were these remarkable sophisticated sanitation practices in North America?

Please reread the comment you just responded to. I said it was remarkable (as in, worthy to be remarked) that these practices happened both in urban and non-urban cultures. The North American cities were certainly more advanced in terms of sanitation than anything in Europe at the time. You had stuff like dual aquaducts differentiating drinking water from washing water and public cleaning crews and urban waste maange…

The Aztecs were in Central America, not North America. Recall the quote from Britannica (your cite):

"No native writing system was known among Indigenous peoples of North America at the time of first European contact"

Clearly, North America was not including Central America.

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

#180

Post by Jensson »

aa-jv wrote: post #113
b112 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Post reply on HN