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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

#181

Post by b_t_s »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #172
rbanffy wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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

#182

Post by m0llusk »

graemep wrote: post #97
_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…

> 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. Depends what you call civilization. If there was a civilization what happened to it and why did it leave no trace. > We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior t…

Actually, house mice appear to have a common ancestor which lived somewhere around India roughly 400,000 years ago.

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

#183

Post by rishav_sharan »

gaigalas wrote: post #142
rishav_sharan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. And it's not even close. Rigveda would be around 1500Bce. Even Sumerian cuneiform would be far older at 3000 bce. If you want oldest oral records, some Australian aboriginal stories would be the ones at 8000 bce

The Rigveda is the the earliest unbroken kept record. The Sumerian tablets are likely older, but they were forgotten and then re-deciphered. The transliterations still carry educated choices made by a scholar (there's only so much you can do when the record breaks for a long time). Meanwhile, we know exactly how people spoke those early vedas because there is a tradition that keeps chanting it, without stopping, sinc…

Can you share some thing to read up on this. Most of these claims do sound fantastical. I am not even sure how would one verify that Rigveda is an "unbroken" oral recitation over thousands of years.

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

#184

Post by Jensson »

I-M-S wrote: post #135
suddenlybananas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did those people have the right to leave or do what they wanted? https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790?seq=1 Read this paper and the contemporary accounts and tell me that's not slavery. >To modern Westerners, the use of such a kinship metaphor suggests and is believed to reflect genuine nurturing and closeness; however, in Africa and elsewhere it conveys an entirely different meaning: authority and subordination. >Vil…

I put much more credence into lived experiences than into academic journals. There's plethora of examples in which children/teens of the settlers taken by First Nations would refuse to go back (especially females, which had little rights in the American society back then). Conversely, First Nations children/teens that were taken by the settlers would almost without exception risk life and limb to escape their newfoun…

You know there were lived experiences of black people who didn't mind being slaves as well and were able to roam freely? There is a reason we don't just go by anecdotes, anecdotally white people were very nice to their slaves and never did anything bad to them and let them do whatever they want.

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

#185

Post by Jensson »

randomImmigrant wrote: post #170
modo_mario wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

> 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.

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

#186

Post by Jensson »

tkel wrote: post #127
suddenlybananas wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, but that's no different than the changes brought on by urbanization or climate change due to carbon emissions.

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…

> Do you rely on the surrounding plants and animals in your area for sustenance, creating tools, daily life, etc?

Europeans did that a few hundred years ago, almost everyone did all over the world, that is not unique to anywhere.

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

#187

Post by gaigalas »

rishav_sharan wrote: post #183
gaigalas wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Rigveda is the the earliest unbroken kept record. The Sumerian tablets are likely older, but they were forgotten and then re-deciphered. The transliterations still carry educated choices made by a scholar (there's only so much you can do when the record breaks for a long time). Meanwhile, we know exactly how people spoke those early vedas because there is a tradition that keeps chanting it, without stopping, sinc…

Can you share some thing to read up on this. Most of these claims do sound fantastical. I am not even sure how would one verify that Rigveda is an "unbroken" oral recitation over thousands of years.

This is a well-known, established scholarly fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padapatha

> The oral tradition of the Vedas (Śruti) consists of several pathas, "recitations" or ways of chanting the Vedic mantras. Such traditions of Vedic chant are often considered the oldest unbroken oral tradition in existence, the fixation of the Vedic texts (samhitas) as preserved dating to roughly the time of Homer (early Iron Age or 800 BC).

https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/tradition-of-vedic-chanting-000...

> The value of this tradition lies not only in the rich content of its oral literature but also in the ingenious techniques employed by the Brahmin priests in preserving the texts intact over thousands of years. To ensure that the sound of each word remains unaltered, practitioners are taught from childhood complex recitation techniques that are based on tonal accents, a unique manner of pronouncing each letter and specific speech combinations.

---

It's not some obscure thing, a web search will yield tons of quality information about it.

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

#189

Post by doitLP »

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.

Not a trope if you go back another 12’000 years or so!

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

#190

Post by curioadu »

graemep wrote: post #160
curioadu wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aksum was more east of Egypt than south, right? And part of it lay in the Arabian Peninsula.

More south than east. It conquered part of the Arabian peninsula. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksumite_Empire

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