I wonder if any of this can be used to answer the objections to Biblical stories like Noah's flood: "how did the rainforest come about in a mere 4000 years?" And here we read that the forests were domesticated in the last 3000.
Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival
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Re: Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
They first tried to enslave them, but finished killing most of them as they obviously fought against it. Europeans behaving just like what we expect from white supremacists.
These weren't Europeans in the rain forest (which is a large continent of many different peoples), but mostly Spanish and Portuguese. Who married and had kids with native Americans. They weren't racist as we think of it today, they just held little regard for human life, especially little regard for non-christian human life. To put this in perspective, this period came right after 100 years of bloody civil war in Spa…
I suppose it would have been more accurate to say Iberians. They were Europeans, none the less.
Re: Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival
#33There is also good evidence that there were extensive agricultural urban civilizations around and along the Mississippi. But they were so thoroughly destroyed (by the Little Ice Age, drought, and disease) that by the time European settlers got to those territories, even the descendant peoples had no memory of them. Only a handful of early explorers recorded them, and the principal archaeological traces are earth mounds (some rather large) built in their cities. For quite some time the "Mound Builders" were thought to be a different people entirely from the present native peoples.
Re: Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival
#34When I first saw this post I thought (Amazon.com) came out with a new product called "rainforest." Anyway, so did the natives breed with the Europeans when they "wiped them out" or did the native people migrate to another part of the continent?
Basically malaria was unknown in the Americas before western explorers brought it over. From there it became very prevalent in some places such as the Amazon and essentially made mass agriculture impossible there. Then pretty much everyone starved. There were also things like smallpox that devastated people everywhere in the Americas but those were more a one time thing, people were able to rebuild after they passed.
Isn't a devastating, long-term drought a recent and popular theory as well, decimating many Central and South American tribes such as the Mayans and the Aztec?
Re: Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival
#35I do wish the historians/reporters for this article were more accurate in their use of "decimation". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)#Curren... The 1491 book put the death rates at around 1 in 20 surviving - ie 19 out of every 20 people dying from disease etc.
Are you wishing that the current usage of the word (the title you linked to) would stop, and that usage would revert to the older Latin meaning? Unfortunately that's not how language develops.
I am wishing that articles about history are more precise in their usage, since it can be difficult to tell which sense they mean of the word (historical, at the time of the material they are writing about, current meaning applied to back then).
Re: Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival
#36I do wish the historians/reporters for this article were more accurate in their use of "decimation". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)#Curren... The 1491 book put the death rates at around 1 in 20 surviving - ie 19 out of every 20 people dying from disease etc.
The definition "destroy a large number of" has been around for centuries. You're contradicting long established usage, while pretending to appeal to it.
I am not contradicting it. From their context it was not possible to tell if they meant the deaths of 1 in 10, a number similar to that, about half of all people, 9 in 10, 99 in 100 etc. I gave the proportions as remembered from the book as that gives a far clearer picture.
Re: Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
These weren't Europeans in the rain forest (which is a large continent of many different peoples), but mostly Spanish and Portuguese. Who married and had kids with native Americans. They weren't racist as we think of it today, they just held little regard for human life, especially little regard for non-christian human life. To put this in perspective, this period came right after 100 years of bloody civil war in Spa…
Since when are Spain and Portugal not part of Europe.
I didn't mean that they weren't Europeans, only that very little of Europe was involved and didn't deserve the parent's invective.
Re: Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival
#38I recall reading about this some in the book 1491, which is quite interesting, and talks about how the Americas were prior to Columbus. http://amzn.to/1HQYgSY
This article underscores one of the most interesting points in the book, that was applicable throughout the Americas, but was most startling in regard to the Amazon basin. It was that there was really no "untouched", virginal wilderness in the New World. Even the Amazon ecosystem was stewarded by the people that lived there.
Re: Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival
#39Why is it this article has the vague overtone of "so we can go ahead and chop it all down, right?" on it?
I think it's the "pristine myth" language. Just reeks of let-us-clear-cut-it mentality.
Re: Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since when are Spain and Portugal not part of Europe.
I didn't mean that they weren't Europeans, only that very little of Europe was involved and didn't deserve the parent's invective.
The Dutch controlled large parts of Brazil throughout the 1640s and 1650s, the French had substantial settlements in present-day Guiana and attempted to claim parts of Brazil as "France Antartique," and the English had a number of failed colonies in Amazonia and the Rio de la Plata as well. Heck, even the Scottish attempted to settle a colony in the Darien in present-day Panama. And that's not even including all the buccaneers and slave traders of various nationalities. I'm not interested in wading into the parent discussion, but just wanted to point out that colonialism in Central and South America really was a pan-European phenomenon.
Edit: also worth pointing out that the Spanish monarchs for the period we're talking about were the House of Hapsburg and hence claimed extensive territories in what's now Germany, Austria and Holland, so even many land-locked European regions were involved. There are a surprising number of Iberianized German names in colonial documents from Latin America.
Bizarrely, there was even a minuscule colonial empire ruled by a tiny vassal state of Polish-Lithuanian common wealth for awhile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Courland_and_Semigall...