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.
gabriel666smith 19 minutes ago [-]
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 locales. We know that part is true from many sources, but:
A) Can we roughly model the spread of smallpox by looking for (for example) populated areas mentioned in one European source that are unmentioned, or mentioned as empty, by another source that would have likely crossed paths with that civ?
B) Can this tell us anything about trade routes and volume? Can we make any inferences about pop density, even very weak inferences, which might help us know where to look for stronger evidence? It does seem like each European discovery historically revises the estimated population(s) upwards.
2. LiDAR is awesome. Maybe not in the Amazon - in less foliage-dense places - is it being combined with, for example, an EMF (or some other kind of more granular lightweight detection system) - strapped to a drone?
It feels like once we see something interesting on LiDAR, sending a swarm of lightweight drones with some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside is quite a quick way to get interesting information. I don’t know a lot about radio waves, so I don’t know if there’s a suitably lightweight detector for this purpose.
defrost 10 minutes ago [-]
> some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside
Been a thing since the 1970s, physics dictates dimensions though - you can go wrap or dangle:
The important lesson is not that ancient people left no ecological footprint, but that a heavily managed landscape can still remain remarkably biodiverse
Also 3M people is probably a lot easier than 220M (and that's just Brazil).
tkel 2 hours ago [-]
The lesson is more that indigenous people were (+ are) part of the ecology, not separate from it or above it. With cultural, social, technological, and spiritual practices that were formed dialectically and hyper-locally with the ecology, as a result of it, and as part of it. Often considered a keystone species in these ecologies.
suddenlybananas 1 hours ago [-]
Indigenous people aren't any more or less of the ecology than anyone else, unless you believe in blood and soil. Humans are part of the ecology, being indigenous has nothing to do with it.
curioadu 58 minutes ago [-]
In some ways I agree with you, but I also think that the other commenter indirectly might uncover some insights. For instance, Australian Aboriginals mighy have historically both; fire-stick farmed ("farming" in the sense of clearing land for animals to hunt, apart from some foraging, as far as I can tell) so much and in such a large area that both large animal species and perhaps some plant species went extinct or were greatly decreased in numbers and area; and done it for so many years and generations that the ecology changed and adapted according to repeated and frequent fire-stick farming, to the point of becoming reliant on humans doing fire-stick farming.
suddenlybananas 4 minutes ago [-]
Of course, but that's no different than the changes brought on by urbanization or climate change due to carbon emissions.
pibaker 4 hours ago [-]
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.
culi 3 hours ago [-]
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 intervention. I think it was just so alien a concept to Europeans who kept very tidy woodlands like dehesa in Spain or the coppiced woodlands of Central Europe. As much as 10% of the soil in Amazonia was man-made terrapreta. And they spread what could best be translated as complex polycultural "orchards" of brazilnuts, aqui, coco, and more. Botanists have been puzzled for years by the hyperdominance patterns of some of these trees until anthropologists realized the human connection.
Anyways I guess what I'm saying is that the Amazonian landscape management is so radically different from what Europeans know that they likely just didn't realize what was before their eyes.
ywvcbk 29 minutes ago [-]
Europeans didn't really get to most of the more isolated inland areas in the Americas until the 1600s or well after that, though.
vasco 3 hours ago [-]
There wasn't a single civilization there. The same way if you arrived in Greece during the roman period you'd have 2000 year old temples to look at and if you go there now you have both the 4000 year old ones and the 2000 year old ones. In the amazon some of the stuff that is there was ancient already at the time of the Discoveries.
culi 3 hours ago [-]
> There wasn't a single civilization there.
That's what I said. There have been multiple. The linked article is about the Aquiry civilization which numbered 3 million people in only 3% of the land. The Marajoara outlasted them. The Upano Valley civilization predates both of them by 100 years and built dense garden cities. The Beni Mounds spanned over 20k earthen mounds and human-made forest islands that were connected by massive canals and causeways
vasco 3 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry but you didn't write that, and so I thought it was interesting to add. Maybe you added it in a different comment.
culi 3 hours ago [-]
Ah, you're right. Different comment. My mixup, sorry
ErigmolCt 3 hours ago [-]
A landscape does not become "pristine" a decade after millions of people disappear. The human influence would still be everywhere, but it would not necessarily look like European agriculture
2 hours ago [-]
icantevenhold 2 hours ago [-]
Isn’t that literally what the comment you replied to was saying?
ErigmolCt 3 hours ago [-]
Europeans often failed to recognize Indigenous land management because it did not resemble European cities or farms
suddenlybananas 1 hours ago [-]
There's accounts of Europeans encountering cities in the Amazon, people didn't take them seriously since they disappeared in the intervening time.
vasusen 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, few years ago I was really surprised to learn that much of highly fertile amazon soil patches were created by humans using biochar. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
smt88 4 hours ago [-]
The headline literally says they lived in 3% of the forest area, which implies that the vast majority of the rest of the forest actually was untouched
Terr_ 4 hours ago [-]
Perhaps, but was it untouched by design, or was it untouched because it wasn't economically feasible for them to exploit it?
Those two are very very different when it comes to assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points, and the latter is the default across most civilizations ever known.
boomlinde 3 hours ago [-]
Since when is "assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points" the topic of discussion? Your original claim which GP responded to is unrelated to that.
Terr_ 2 hours ago [-]
> Since when is "assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points" the topic of discussion?
I think it's very straightforward. Here's a recap of the thread, you can see it in the quote for the first item:
1. khanhnguyen8386 implied that they were "sophisticated ecosystem engineers, shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it."
2. smt88 challenged that by pointing that 97% of "the rainforest" was probably untouched by this group, as opposed to shaped deliberately.
3. I (Terr_) chime in to emphasize that we shouldn't assume a region was intentionally left-alone when the much simpler explanation is that it wasn't practical to exploit it.
> Your original claim which GP responded to is unrelated to that.
You have also confused me with some other user.
boomlinde 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I confused you for another user.
Still, I don't get where "virtuous environmental brownie-points" enter the discussion or how the first reply pertains to them. It seems like a simple factual statement that is either true or false and can be evaluated as such without invoking virtuous brownie points.
That the Amazon remained largely untouched is true regardless of whether that was the result of a deliberate effort, a technological limitation, a lack of need or any other reason. No one uses "preserved" until now. It can simultaneously be true that the populated areas of the Amazon where deliberately and carefully managed by the population and that the Amazon was largely untouched for any other reason.
culi 3 hours ago [-]
10% of the Amazon soil is man-made terra preta.
The paper is just referring to this one civilization. It is definitely not the only Amazonian civilization.
_visgean 4 hours ago [-]
not really, the 3pct was just what they scanned with lidars so far.
aa-jv 7 minutes ago [-]
See also, the Australian landscape - which early Europeans were certain had been cultivated by some lost tribe of Israel, since it was so pristine, plentiful, and food was abundant.
That lasted about 5 years after contact, and 20 years later it was all a waste.
The original caretakers were robbed of abundance and plenty.
netbioserror 4 hours ago [-]
That is definitely not what the Maya did. Or really any civilization with large permanent cities. The record of forest cutting once settlements reach a certain size is consistent and global. The Amazon simply experienced a full civilizational collapse and more than enough time untouched to recover.
It might suffice to say: The myth of sophisticated indigenous ecosystem engineers who harmonize with nature is a European trope.
Whenever any culture larger and more settled than hunter-gatherers has traditions of forest management and ecosystem balance, don't immediately attribute to them magical wisdom that Europeans somehow lack. Consider that those traditions are an ancient memory of one or more catastrophic ecosystem collapses and the practices of the people who survived them.
culi 3 hours ago [-]
I mean throughout the Americas you see really complex polycultural farming traditions including the famous chinampas. In Mesoamerica you also have the milpa cycle which is a system where you clear most herbs and lightly burn it to grow your crops in polycultures. After a few years, you grow more trees and these fields turn more into managed orchards that include both fruit trees and trees grown for lumbar. Eventually you let it progress into a closed canopy system.
That's just one example, but there are plenty other I could think of that are in very stark contrast to anything you see from European civilizations.
somenameforme 2 hours ago [-]
With these things it's always an issue of scale. What people don't realize about e.g. homesteading is that it's actually really easy to be entirely self sufficient on very small plots of land. But the tricky thing in the past was transport - when you start shoving many thousands of people into very small areas, you need to start producing more and more food in (relatively) smaller and smaller areas.
Modern times has alleviated this constraint because of mass transport. Now moving tons of cargo hundreds of miles, or even half way around the world, is trivial and relatively rapid, but in ancient times you're looking at moving small amounts of cargo extremely slowly, all under the time pressure of spoilage/infestation. The way places like Rome solved this, or at least alleviated it, was by using river transport but then you're imposing some significant technological, infrastructural, and geographical requirements on settlements.
And then you also need to deal with bad harvests, war, and other such issues. In decentralized systems where most are doing their own thing, this isn't such a big deal. But in a heavily centralized system where potentially millions of people are dependent upon deliveries, a single disrupted harvest could spell the end of a civilization if not properly prepared for. And ancient beliefs that things like human sacrifice could ensure rain were likely in opposition to the rational necessity for preparation of inevitable failures.
---
As a related topic, this is also why war is considered a game of logistics. Think about feeding and providing the other necessities for 10,000 people for just one day. Now imagine doing this for weeks, months, and years - when all those necessities need to come through areas that are potentially being attacked. The fact that war with armies of hundreds of thousands is even possible is quite amazing when you think about the logistics involved just to survive, let alone actually engage in combat.
curioadu 3 hours ago [-]
> throughout the Americas you see really complex polycultural farming traditions including the famous chinampas.
Interesting. Do you know of anything somewhat similar for Africa, ignoring the lands of Egypt and the lands near the Mediterranean Sea?
culi 3 hours ago [-]
I recall reading of somewhat similar rotational cropping traditions indigenous to Africa though those centered mostly around root crops like yams. Modern smallholder farms still often practice rotational cropping because of this history (something which the west has only relatively recently come around on).
East Africa practiced stuff like homegardens which can be complex, multi-layered agroforestry systems that usually surround homesteads. I've heard the Hausa traditionally did something similar.
I haven't read nearly as much on African agroforestry systems though so I can't recommend much readings. Most of what I recall comes from a college course I took a very long time ago on economic anthropology
curioadu 2 hours ago [-]
> (something which the west has only relatively recently come around on).
I am not quite sure what you mean by this. Is it consistent with this?
> From the 9th century to the 11th century, farmers in Europe transitioned from a two-field system to a three-field system.
> Ancient Near Eastern farmers practiced crop rotation in 6000 BC, alternately planting legumes and cereals.[1][2][better source needed]
> In China both the two- and three-field systems had been used since the Eastern Zhou period.[3]
And shouldn't the "West" be capitalized in this context, since it is used as a name?
curioadu 2 hours ago [-]
> East Africa practiced stuff like homegardens which can be complex, multi-layered agroforestry systems that usually surround homesteads. I've heard the Hausa traditionally did something similar.
Homegardens seem much smaller in scale than large-scale chinampas as practiced by the Aztecs, right?
b112 2 hours ago [-]
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 were a thing. Copper and lead and other metals were dug up from mines Surface mines were heavily damaging to the environment, with all sorts of minerals being dug up, and washed into the local water and river.
In fact, the only difference between older civilizations, and our civilization is that we have the technological capability to cause more damage. Native North and South Americans, were not any better, about the environment or living at peace and harmony with nature.
As an aside the same goes for violence, for war. Endless North American and South American civilizations waged war. They enslaved, they enslaved other civilizations, they warred with one another, they fought constantly, and just as today those nations had peaceful entities and warlike aggressive entities. Nothing has changed, nothing is different between the historical colonialistic civilizations of the West, and the new world.
The Aztecs were supremely violent, taking over civilizations all over the place, just as colonial as the West was.
You may wonder why I'm waxing and waning deeply on this topic, but the reason is that there seems to be this predominant thought that somehow, North American civilizations were perfect and pristine, and lived in utter utopian peace with nature and, each other. Nothing could be further from the truth.
And do you know why? Because they were human beings.
None of this says that the colonial behavior was perfect when European nations came here. Many things were done that should not have been done.
However, if you look at the history of the human race, including modern times, colonial behavior has always, I repeat, always been the case. Whether you were the Persian Empire, whether you were what is now India/Pakistan, whether you were China, whether you were any nation on the planet, there has been a history of colonial behavior. This includes all North American and South American peoples.
China was a wide-ranging number of kingdoms, that eventually settled to the Five Kingdoms and then a unified country. This was colonialism. This was subjugation and conquering of other peoples, until a unified country existed.
You can look at the Roman Empire, the Grecian Empire, the Babylonians. You can go and look at any culture, any history. You can look at modern times, and you can see what might be deemed colonialistic behavior.
I cite all of this, because there seems to be recent thought in the last 20 years that somehow, Native Americans and South Americans lived in utter peace and harmony with their environment and each other. Nothing could be further from the truth.
So back to the original point that kicked off this rantish blather, no ancient civilizations did not live in harmony with the environment on purpose, and any that had the technological capability or the framework of a civilization like the Aztecs, raised their local environment, ripped down forests, had open mines, destroyed the local environment, hands down.
uwagar 5 hours ago [-]
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.
smallerfish 4 hours ago [-]
Actually they did something like slash and burn agriculture, but they apparently rotated sites, allowing forest regeneration.
culi 4 hours ago [-]
Which is extremely common in native traditions pretty much around the world. Aboriginals from Australia have a concept of "cool fires" and Californians famously had very careful "cultural burns". Fires were always carefully managed not to burn too hot and kill seeds
curioadu 2 hours ago [-]
Is that vaguely related to slash-and-burn?
Did it also change the ecological system of Australia? Some articles said that Aboriginals might have caused the extinction of a lot of larger animals in different ways, arguably superficially similar to how the mammuth was made extinct and how lions were hunted to extinction in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming#History . Was the plant diversity changed or lowered by the Aboriginals over the years?
Is there a difference in the approaches between "fire-stick burning", and the advanced farming or agricultural practices of for instance the Aztecs? Did Aboriginals and some of the Amerindian peoples north of the Aztecs do "fire-stick farming" by simply burning a region and then move in and simply primarily hunt and also gather from certain plants a bit, slightly organized; or did they have large-scale, high-density farming of crops like the Aztecs? Would Pueblos' farming techniques, and those doing Three Sisters farming techniques, be closer to that of the Aztecs than to fire-stick burning? Was fire-stick burning typically more nomadic, and the Aztecs' and others' techniques more sedentary?
> While this practice is often cited as a way to improve small gardens for individual use, its historical value lay in larger-scale implementations designed to nurture and sustain entire communities.[14]
brabel 2 hours ago [-]
I thought the Australians did burn entire forests to the extent that much of Australia is the result of millennia of that practice.
uwagar 1 hours ago [-]
they also maintained cattle? i dont think 3 million people would have used only 3% of the forest area if their main diet was bovine heavy.
otabdeveloper4 4 hours ago [-]
> and clearing for beef production
I know the real point is that you'd prefer we eat the proverbial bugs, but there's akshually more grassland in the world than forest.
You don't need to cut down trees for beef production - it doesn't make any economic sense unless your logistics costs are deliberately screwed by perverse government incentives.
ithkuil 57 minutes ago [-]
So some countries have more forest than grassland?
uwagar 1 hours ago [-]
i prefer you fix your bugs instead.
parineum 4 hours ago [-]
> shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it.
More accurately, shaping the rainforest the all dying so the rainforest grows back.
They didn't live under the canopy, they cut it down.
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.
_heimdall 6 hours ago [-]
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 evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well.
It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth.
graemep 1 hours ago [-]
> 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 to them as well.
Actually we do have evidence of what came before them, and there were extinction events.
> It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth.
We might not know about previous civilizations (that is the point of the Silurian Hypothesis - a lot of traces will disappear over time) but we have no evidence that there was any previous civilization, or of any sufficiently intelligent animal to build one. The oldest stone tools we have found are only about 3m years old.
yreg 2 hours ago [-]
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 asking.
shimman 6 hours ago [-]
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 some societies were purposely designed to ensure things like hierarchy wouldn't exist for example; these societies persisted for thousands of years.
Really interesting book.
culi 3 hours ago [-]
Yes exactly. The myths of native people being hyperegalitarian, one-with-nature types started because colonists came upon cultures in the North East woodlands. Those same people, just a few decades before that were living in Cahokia which was at one point larger than any city in Europe. It was a massive urban city that was also very hierarchical. The hyperegalitarian Algonquian and Haudenosaunee/Iroquois people were basically the result of a successful political revolution that decided to organize themselves like that in response to the hierarchies they experienced.
curioadu 1 hours ago [-]
While many Amerindians had impressive achievements considering their almost complete isolation from the rest of the world, your claim seems misleading.
> At its apex around 1100 AD, the city [Cahokia] covered about 6 square miles (16 km2), included about 120 earthworks in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions, and had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people.[5][a]
> During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the population of the city of Rome is conventionally estimated at one million inhabitants.
And there are much better examples according to some sources of large cities in the Americas than Cahokia.
> Hernan Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlan on 8 November 1519. Although there are no precise numbers, the city's population has been estimated at between 200,000 and 400,000 inhabitants,[27] placing Tenochtitlan among the largest cities in the world at that time.[28] Compared to the cities of Europe, only Paris, Venice and Constantinople might have rivaled it.
> In the 9th and 10th centuries, Constantinople had a population of between 500,000 and 800,000.[60]
> With the restoration of firm central government, the empire became fabulously wealthy. The population was rising (estimates for Constantinople in the 12th century vary from some 100,000 to 500,000), and towns and cities across the realm flourished.
> Kaifeng-Dongjing became largest and most prosperous city in China, with a population of over 400,000 living both inside and outside the city wall. The historian Jacques Gernet provides a lively picture of life in this period in his Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276, which often draws on Dongjing Meng Hua Lu, a nostalgic memoir of the city.[14]
> Around 750 AD, Chang'an was called a "million-man city" in Chinese records; most modern estimates put the population within the walls of the Tang city at around 800,000–1,000,000.[1]
suddenlybananas 1 hours ago [-]
The Iroquois had slaves, they weren't hyperegalitarian.
gaigalas 5 hours ago [-]
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.
userbinator 5 hours ago [-]
Amazonian civilization now has an estimated 1M people in 0.3% of warehouse area.
ErigmolCt 3 hours ago [-]
Finding hundreds of previously unknown earthworks is a major archaeological result. Extrapolating from them to millions of inhabitants is where I would slow down...
delichon 8 hours ago [-]
> In the past 40 years, Amazônia has lost more than 13% of its vegetation cover.
This is loss of original forest cover, replaced by non-native vegetation: pasture, agriculture & tree plantations. 13% is about the amount of vegetation coverage domesticated in Amazonia over 40 years. It has been converted from wilderness into a renewable, denser source of ingredients for food, clothing and shelter.
culi 8 hours ago [-]
The Amazon rainforest was extensively modified by pre-Columbian indigenous societies. Some anthropologists have even called it a "manufactured landscape". Modern LiDAR mapping has revealed thousands of large geometric ditches, reservoirs, causeways, mounds, and earthen infrastructure.[0][1] Up to 10% of soils are highly fertile man-made terra preta soils and trees like cocoa, acai, and brazilnut show an unnatural "hyperdominance" distribution due to ancient orchards. Many plants throughout show some degree of domestication[2][3]
And some have even proposed a possible human role in the transition of parts of the Amazon from grassland to rainforest about 10k years ago[4]
Can you defend your statement and cite how renewable this domesticated area is? Aren’t most areas deforested for cattle farming (legendarily inefficient) and soy plantations (monoculture)?
The funny/sad thing about the Amazon soil is its incredibly poor nutritionally. Because there's so much rain, many minerals and nutrients get washed out. In fact, poor soils often result in such high biodiversity.[0] Which means when they slash and burn to grow soy, they only really have a year or 2 where the soil can support that. Afterwards all its good for is cattle (if that). But its so plentiful and demand is so high for beef and soy that we keep doing this
> But its so plentiful and demand is so high for beef and soy that we keep doing this
Just to add that about three-quarters of soybeans are used as livestock feed (poultry, pigs, cattle, ...). So really, it's almost all demand for meat and dairy.
GroksBarnacles 8 hours ago [-]
You know "wilderness" serves functions too, right?
dyauspitr 8 hours ago [-]
It’s so crazy that they all just… died because of the old world diseases before anyone really got a chance to meet them as a civilization.
culi 8 hours ago [-]
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 of that culture and history still mark those indigenous cultures today
dyauspitr 7 hours ago [-]
I mean people from the old world.
NuclearPM 6 hours ago [-]
>changing their mind about that way of life
What is this based on? Sounds like bullshit.
ToValueFunfetti 5 hours ago [-]
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.
shwaj 5 hours ago [-]
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.
culi 4 hours ago [-]
It's based on the fact that we don't know.
We've seen multiple times in archeology when we've originally thought of places as "failed state" or "collapsed" it's actually turned out to be a conscious rejection of that way of life. Most famously Cahokia. Which at one point was a larger city than any city in Europe. We now know that it didn't "collapse" so much as there was a political revolution and people decided to move towards different ways of life.
It's best not to assume failure when you have no evidence for it.
esseph 6 hours ago [-]
Name fits.
dkga 8 hours ago [-]
Not all - it is very likely this large Amazonian civilization perished before the Iberian colonists arrived in the region. For example, these geoglyphs mapped in the (super interesting!) paper are dated 2k years before the Europeans first arrived in Brazil.
ErigmolCt 3 hours ago [-]
The really haunting part is that Europeans often arrived late enough to see the collapse, but not early enough to understand what had collapsed
PeterHolzwarth 7 hours ago [-]
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.
dyauspitr 7 hours ago [-]
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.
PeterHolzwarth 5 hours ago [-]
I definitely get your broader point, but it turns out the smallpox blankets things is a myth. But I know what you mean, nonetheless.
BurningFrog 6 hours ago [-]
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.
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 cleanses and genocides committed by the US government repeatedly throughout US history too and those are very well documented, all dotted with stories as bad or actively and intentionally worse than biological warfare
"He was speaking in opposition to a treaty that proposed the Cherokees sell off 20 million acres of homeland—a large portion of present-day Kentucky and Tennessee. This tension exploded with the commencement of independence hostilities in July 1776; some Cherokee leaders sided with the British, and in response the US charged thousands of colonial troops with “the utter extirpation of the Cherokee Nation.”
"Throughout American history, the treatment of indigenous Native Americans has violated numerous articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These violations resulted in the loss of numerous Native American homelands, the Cherokee being only one example, and the genocide of numerous other smaller tribes since the beginning of European colonization. This is largely due to Eurocentric ideals, like the natural law of the Puritan worldview, which elevates the status of European peoples over that of indigenous, Native American peoples through a biased worldview. This mindset is so pervasive and powerful that it still prevails today, evidenced by modern films and television that paint Native American tribes as savage, ignorant and of ill intent toward the “white man”, and the policies of the current United States government."
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 so did not write letters and keep diaries.
Even things like the number of Indians cannot be pinned down with any precision.
culi 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's true. Mesoamerica had a very rich tradition of papermaking (Amatl) that predated paper in Europe (though probably not Chinese). Colonists severely repressed, criminalized, and even destroyed the paper and writing systems. Thousands of Maya codices were burned in 1562. Almost all pre-colombian libraries (amoxcalli) were destroyed
We've deciphered Nahuatl and Maya script but Zapotec, Olmec, Isthmian, Quipu, and other scripts are still not well understood
curioadu 2 hours ago [-]
The destruction during the Spanish conquests of the Aztecs and others was terrible. It was also rather disorganized initially, especially due to the huge delays regarding communication between the Americas and Europe.
In regards to paper, while the Aztecs had impressive achievements, especially considering the almost complete isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world (is there any civilization close to the achievements of the Aztecs and other Amerindians in Africa south of Egypt?), are you sure that amatl/amate counts as paper? It was possibly stretched bark, and not woven.
> The Maya used a writing material called huun starting from the 5th century. It was made from the inner bark of the wild fig tree. It was cut and stretched thin rather than made of randomly woven fibers, which according to one source, disqualified it as true paper.
WalterBright 3 hours ago [-]
Sorry, I was talking about North America.
culi 3 hours ago [-]
The epicentre of Amatl was North America (Mexico)
Gangway0829 5 hours ago [-]
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?
WalterBright 5 hours ago [-]
See my quote from the Britannica.
parineum 4 hours ago [-]
Literate has a definition that requires the ability to read and write. The North American native population was, by definition, illiterate. They had no written word.
It doesn't mean they were stupid, they obviously picked it up quickly when they were exposed to it
paimapi 5 hours ago [-]
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
"No native writing system was known among Indigenous peoples of North America at the time of first European contact"
And yes, I was referring to the North American Indians. I know the Mayans had writing. I even have a book on the Mayan writing system.
> they didn't have strictly hierarchical institutions that utilized this data for controlling their population
People did not write letters and keep diaries in order to control their population.
The book "Empire of the Summer Moon" which is a history of the Commanche empire, and the book laments that their only sources were diaries and letters written by colonists.
curioadu 1 hours ago [-]
I wonder if one could group Central American and North-Central-American civilizations and peoples into two gross and very approximate groups:
1: Sedentary farmers like Aztecs and possibly Pueblos and those doing Three Sisters farming, some of them like the Aztecs having significant civilizational achievements all considered.
2: Hunting nomads, first doing fire-stick farming to create good conditions for hunting animals as well as gather certain plants, and later utilizing horses after their introduction from Europe.
culi 7 hours ago [-]
Malcolm Harris' book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World goes into surprising depth on the history of the California Genocide[0] in the first few chapters. It's a very well-researched work
The same thing happened to the native North Americans too. When the Pilgrims showed up in Massachusetts in 1620, the whole region between there and maine had been reduced in population by 90+% due to a plague inadvertently brought by traders
TimedToasts 8 hours ago [-]
The thing was that _any_ outside contact was going to be doom for North America. A lack of resistance and no sanitation equaled a tinder box just waiting for the right plague.
culi 7 hours ago [-]
> A lack of resistance and no sanitation
Precolombian north america actually had really sophisticated sanitation. In urban areas they pretty advanced waste management. In other areas, a lot of their seasonal mobility was possibly driven by sanitation needs. And they have really in depth practices around the ways they treat waterways and waste placement.
The problem was actually the exact opposite. Compared to Europeans, they were obsessive about soap and cleanliness. But Europeans lived in really dense villages alongside their livestock for many generations and they suffered greatly from it. The history of Europe is basically one outbreak after another. But ofc over time some amount of immunities developed
Maybe if North Americans had less sanitation and kept livestock they would've developed their own deadly diseases too that would've killed Europeans.
InTheArena 7 hours ago [-]
This is commonly repeated, but if you go look at actual record keeping - at the history of early North American and Caribbean/Bahamas colonization through the period where there stopped being as much cross-cultural contact - we see epidemic after epidemic wipe our colonials as much as any. The mortality rate is staggering - even places that should have shown this the most - Haiti for example, the documented evidence was far closer to 100% mortality to Europeans, and significantly less for indigenous. Coming to Haiti during the Haitian revolution was a death sentence for all of the people who lived in squalor in one of the densest cities in Europe - Paris.
Cultures coming together historically were deadly. There is a school of thought that argues that the Persian and Roman downfall was directly associated with the ability of diseases to transit roads.
Of course, this is the stuff that we have records for. It's possible that there was a undocumented mass extinction event, But I tend to be skeptical of historical claims that are based on extremely localized and limited archeological projections.
culi 6 hours ago [-]
Well regardless, we know North American natives had extensive sanitation practices and epidemics were quite rare. Syphilis, tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, and Chagas disease were all present but rarely turned into mass outbreaks.
Mass graves are almost completely absent and life tables show steady and predictable mortality curves over centuries
I find it hard to believe that Europeans living in close quarters with livestock didn't result in increased rates of epidemics tbh but I'll take your word for it
InTheArena 6 hours ago [-]
I didn;t say that it didn't - in fact, the reality was mass casulty events where common in a way that is unthinkable. We do _ in fact_ have plenty of mass graves for colonists. The lack of evidence of the same on the American Indian side makes me skeptical of the whole narrative.
i think it's quite likely that the casualties where in similar scope across two different civilizations, but that the colonialists advantage (if you can call it such) of excess population and higher density of settlers, meant that the colonialists simply outlasted a far smaller population group.
ab5tract 3 hours ago [-]
You’re doing a lot of heavy lifting with this word colonist. The mass graves are either “imported criminal” (being in debt was a crime) or slave populations.
And it was much more about the horrid working conditions that these forced laborers were forced to work under.
BurningFrog 6 hours ago [-]
One story I've heard is that European colonists in the Caribbean only survived a few years before dying of Malaria. The natives didn't do any better.
So the sugar industry started importing African slaves, who actually had some malaria immunity.
This worked pretty well, and the transatlantic slave trade went on for centuries.
WalterBright 6 hours ago [-]
> Precolombian north america actually had really sophisticated sanitation.
I don't know what this means. Moving to another location is practical, but not sophisticated.
culi 4 hours ago [-]
Well if your only definition of sanitation is urban ones, then they had that as well as I pointed out. I think the fact that they had sanitation practices in both urban and rural areas is quite remarkable. Clearly you don't and felt the need to share that opinion. Thanks.
WalterBright 3 hours ago [-]
What were these remarkable sophisticated sanitation practices in North America?
culi 3 hours ago [-]
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 maangement and people bathed daily. While London was throwing its shit in the streets, the Aztecs were building public toilets
applicative 6 hours ago [-]
Spain and Portugal were under Umayyad colonization when this civilization died.
guywithahat 5 hours ago [-]
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
https://www.science.org/content/article/unearth-their-past-a...
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 locales. We know that part is true from many sources, but:
A) Can we roughly model the spread of smallpox by looking for (for example) populated areas mentioned in one European source that are unmentioned, or mentioned as empty, by another source that would have likely crossed paths with that civ?
B) Can this tell us anything about trade routes and volume? Can we make any inferences about pop density, even very weak inferences, which might help us know where to look for stronger evidence? It does seem like each European discovery historically revises the estimated population(s) upwards.
2. LiDAR is awesome. Maybe not in the Amazon - in less foliage-dense places - is it being combined with, for example, an EMF (or some other kind of more granular lightweight detection system) - strapped to a drone?
It feels like once we see something interesting on LiDAR, sending a swarm of lightweight drones with some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside is quite a quick way to get interesting information. I don’t know a lot about radio waves, so I don’t know if there’s a suitably lightweight detector for this purpose.
Been a thing since the 1970s, physics dictates dimensions though - you can go wrap or dangle:
* https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/the-megatem-fixed-win...
* https://cseg.ca/airborne-electromagnetic-systems-state-of-th...
* https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi...
Well not in a sense you might think.
There are few odd things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untou...
Also 3M people is probably a lot easier than 220M (and that's just Brazil).
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 intervention. I think it was just so alien a concept to Europeans who kept very tidy woodlands like dehesa in Spain or the coppiced woodlands of Central Europe. As much as 10% of the soil in Amazonia was man-made terrapreta. And they spread what could best be translated as complex polycultural "orchards" of brazilnuts, aqui, coco, and more. Botanists have been puzzled for years by the hyperdominance patterns of some of these trees until anthropologists realized the human connection.
Anyways I guess what I'm saying is that the Amazonian landscape management is so radically different from what Europeans know that they likely just didn't realize what was before their eyes.
That's what I said. There have been multiple. The linked article is about the Aquiry civilization which numbered 3 million people in only 3% of the land. The Marajoara outlasted them. The Upano Valley civilization predates both of them by 100 years and built dense garden cities. The Beni Mounds spanned over 20k earthen mounds and human-made forest islands that were connected by massive canals and causeways
Those two are very very different when it comes to assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points, and the latter is the default across most civilizations ever known.
I think it's very straightforward. Here's a recap of the thread, you can see it in the quote for the first item:
1. khanhnguyen8386 implied that they were "sophisticated ecosystem engineers, shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it."
2. smt88 challenged that by pointing that 97% of "the rainforest" was probably untouched by this group, as opposed to shaped deliberately.
3. I (Terr_) chime in to emphasize that we shouldn't assume a region was intentionally left-alone when the much simpler explanation is that it wasn't practical to exploit it.
> Your original claim which GP responded to is unrelated to that.
You have also confused me with some other user.
Still, I don't get where "virtuous environmental brownie-points" enter the discussion or how the first reply pertains to them. It seems like a simple factual statement that is either true or false and can be evaluated as such without invoking virtuous brownie points.
That the Amazon remained largely untouched is true regardless of whether that was the result of a deliberate effort, a technological limitation, a lack of need or any other reason. No one uses "preserved" until now. It can simultaneously be true that the populated areas of the Amazon where deliberately and carefully managed by the population and that the Amazon was largely untouched for any other reason.
The paper is just referring to this one civilization. It is definitely not the only Amazonian civilization.
That lasted about 5 years after contact, and 20 years later it was all a waste.
The original caretakers were robbed of abundance and plenty.
It might suffice to say: The myth of sophisticated indigenous ecosystem engineers who harmonize with nature is a European trope.
Whenever any culture larger and more settled than hunter-gatherers has traditions of forest management and ecosystem balance, don't immediately attribute to them magical wisdom that Europeans somehow lack. Consider that those traditions are an ancient memory of one or more catastrophic ecosystem collapses and the practices of the people who survived them.
That's just one example, but there are plenty other I could think of that are in very stark contrast to anything you see from European civilizations.
Modern times has alleviated this constraint because of mass transport. Now moving tons of cargo hundreds of miles, or even half way around the world, is trivial and relatively rapid, but in ancient times you're looking at moving small amounts of cargo extremely slowly, all under the time pressure of spoilage/infestation. The way places like Rome solved this, or at least alleviated it, was by using river transport but then you're imposing some significant technological, infrastructural, and geographical requirements on settlements.
And then you also need to deal with bad harvests, war, and other such issues. In decentralized systems where most are doing their own thing, this isn't such a big deal. But in a heavily centralized system where potentially millions of people are dependent upon deliveries, a single disrupted harvest could spell the end of a civilization if not properly prepared for. And ancient beliefs that things like human sacrifice could ensure rain were likely in opposition to the rational necessity for preparation of inevitable failures.
---
As a related topic, this is also why war is considered a game of logistics. Think about feeding and providing the other necessities for 10,000 people for just one day. Now imagine doing this for weeks, months, and years - when all those necessities need to come through areas that are potentially being attacked. The fact that war with armies of hundreds of thousands is even possible is quite amazing when you think about the logistics involved just to survive, let alone actually engage in combat.
Interesting. Do you know of anything somewhat similar for Africa, ignoring the lands of Egypt and the lands near the Mediterranean Sea?
East Africa practiced stuff like homegardens which can be complex, multi-layered agroforestry systems that usually surround homesteads. I've heard the Hausa traditionally did something similar.
I haven't read nearly as much on African agroforestry systems though so I can't recommend much readings. Most of what I recall comes from a college course I took a very long time ago on economic anthropology
I am not quite sure what you mean by this. Is it consistent with this?
> From the 9th century to the 11th century, farmers in Europe transitioned from a two-field system to a three-field system.
> Ancient Near Eastern farmers practiced crop rotation in 6000 BC, alternately planting legumes and cereals.[1][2][better source needed]
> In China both the two- and three-field systems had been used since the Eastern Zhou period.[3]
And shouldn't the "West" be capitalized in this context, since it is used as a name?
Homegardens seem much smaller in scale than large-scale chinampas as practiced by the Aztecs, right?
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 were a thing. Copper and lead and other metals were dug up from mines Surface mines were heavily damaging to the environment, with all sorts of minerals being dug up, and washed into the local water and river.
In fact, the only difference between older civilizations, and our civilization is that we have the technological capability to cause more damage. Native North and South Americans, were not any better, about the environment or living at peace and harmony with nature.
As an aside the same goes for violence, for war. Endless North American and South American civilizations waged war. They enslaved, they enslaved other civilizations, they warred with one another, they fought constantly, and just as today those nations had peaceful entities and warlike aggressive entities. Nothing has changed, nothing is different between the historical colonialistic civilizations of the West, and the new world.
The Aztecs were supremely violent, taking over civilizations all over the place, just as colonial as the West was.
You may wonder why I'm waxing and waning deeply on this topic, but the reason is that there seems to be this predominant thought that somehow, North American civilizations were perfect and pristine, and lived in utter utopian peace with nature and, each other. Nothing could be further from the truth.
And do you know why? Because they were human beings.
None of this says that the colonial behavior was perfect when European nations came here. Many things were done that should not have been done.
However, if you look at the history of the human race, including modern times, colonial behavior has always, I repeat, always been the case. Whether you were the Persian Empire, whether you were what is now India/Pakistan, whether you were China, whether you were any nation on the planet, there has been a history of colonial behavior. This includes all North American and South American peoples.
China was a wide-ranging number of kingdoms, that eventually settled to the Five Kingdoms and then a unified country. This was colonialism. This was subjugation and conquering of other peoples, until a unified country existed.
You can look at the Roman Empire, the Grecian Empire, the Babylonians. You can go and look at any culture, any history. You can look at modern times, and you can see what might be deemed colonialistic behavior.
I cite all of this, because there seems to be recent thought in the last 20 years that somehow, Native Americans and South Americans lived in utter peace and harmony with their environment and each other. Nothing could be further from the truth.
So back to the original point that kicked off this rantish blather, no ancient civilizations did not live in harmony with the environment on purpose, and any that had the technological capability or the framework of a civilization like the Aztecs, raised their local environment, ripped down forests, had open mines, destroyed the local environment, hands down.
the trouble is slash and burn agriculture and clearing for beef production.
Did it also change the ecological system of Australia? Some articles said that Aboriginals might have caused the extinction of a lot of larger animals in different ways, arguably superficially similar to how the mammuth was made extinct and how lions were hunted to extinction in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming#History . Was the plant diversity changed or lowered by the Aboriginals over the years?
Is there a difference in the approaches between "fire-stick burning", and the advanced farming or agricultural practices of for instance the Aztecs? Did Aboriginals and some of the Amerindian peoples north of the Aztecs do "fire-stick farming" by simply burning a region and then move in and simply primarily hunt and also gather from certain plants a bit, slightly organized; or did they have large-scale, high-density farming of crops like the Aztecs? Would Pueblos' farming techniques, and those doing Three Sisters farming techniques, be closer to that of the Aztecs than to fire-stick burning? Was fire-stick burning typically more nomadic, and the Aztecs' and others' techniques more sedentary?
> While this practice is often cited as a way to improve small gardens for individual use, its historical value lay in larger-scale implementations designed to nurture and sustain entire communities.[14]
I know the real point is that you'd prefer we eat the proverbial bugs, but there's akshually more grassland in the world than forest.
You don't need to cut down trees for beef production - it doesn't make any economic sense unless your logistics costs are deliberately screwed by perverse government incentives.
More accurately, shaping the rainforest the all dying so the rainforest grows back.
They didn't live under the canopy, they cut it down.
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.
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 evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well.
It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth.
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 to them as well.
Actually we do have evidence of what came before them, and there were extinction events.
> It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth.
We might not know about previous civilizations (that is the point of the Silurian Hypothesis - a lot of traces will disappear over time) but we have no evidence that there was any previous civilization, or of any sufficiently intelligent animal to build one. The oldest stone tools we have found are only about 3m years old.
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 asking.
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 some societies were purposely designed to ensure things like hierarchy wouldn't exist for example; these societies persisted for thousands of years.
Really interesting book.
> At its apex around 1100 AD, the city [Cahokia] covered about 6 square miles (16 km2), included about 120 earthworks in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions, and had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people.[5][a]
> During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the population of the city of Rome is conventionally estimated at one million inhabitants.
And there are much better examples according to some sources of large cities in the Americas than Cahokia.
> Hernan Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlan on 8 November 1519. Although there are no precise numbers, the city's population has been estimated at between 200,000 and 400,000 inhabitants,[27] placing Tenochtitlan among the largest cities in the world at that time.[28] Compared to the cities of Europe, only Paris, Venice and Constantinople might have rivaled it.
> In the 9th and 10th centuries, Constantinople had a population of between 500,000 and 800,000.[60]
> With the restoration of firm central government, the empire became fabulously wealthy. The population was rising (estimates for Constantinople in the 12th century vary from some 100,000 to 500,000), and towns and cities across the realm flourished.
> Kaifeng-Dongjing became largest and most prosperous city in China, with a population of over 400,000 living both inside and outside the city wall. The historian Jacques Gernet provides a lively picture of life in this period in his Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276, which often draws on Dongjing Meng Hua Lu, a nostalgic memoir of the city.[14]
> Around 750 AD, Chang'an was called a "million-man city" in Chinese records; most modern estimates put the population within the walls of the Tang city at around 800,000–1,000,000.[1]
I suggest you try to read it at least once. It's almost incomprehensible.
This is loss of original forest cover, replaced by non-native vegetation: pasture, agriculture & tree plantations. 13% is about the amount of vegetation coverage domesticated in Amazonia over 40 years. It has been converted from wilderness into a renewable, denser source of ingredients for food, clothing and shelter.
And some have even proposed a possible human role in the transition of parts of the Amazon from grassland to rainforest about 10k years ago[4]
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/282/1812/201...
You don't achieve a population of 3M people without such extensive landscape modification.
[0] https://www.zmescience.com/science/archaeology/archaeologist...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02773...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/humans-living-...
[3] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-archaeolo...
[4] https://www.discovermagazine.com/10-800-years-ago-early-huma...
Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2025.107810
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWVATekt4ZA
Just to add that about three-quarters of soybeans are used as livestock feed (poultry, pigs, cattle, ...). So really, it's almost all demand for meat and dairy.
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 of that culture and history still mark those indigenous cultures today
What is this based on? Sounds like bullshit.
We've seen multiple times in archeology when we've originally thought of places as "failed state" or "collapsed" it's actually turned out to be a conscious rejection of that way of life. Most famously Cahokia. Which at one point was a larger city than any city in Europe. We now know that it didn't "collapse" so much as there was a political revolution and people decided to move towards different ways of life.
It's best not to assume failure when you have no evidence for it.
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.
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 cleanses and genocides committed by the US government repeatedly throughout US history too and those are very well documented, all dotted with stories as bad or actively and intentionally worse than biological warfare
https://news.uoregon.edu/content/historian-examines-native-a...
"He was speaking in opposition to a treaty that proposed the Cherokees sell off 20 million acres of homeland—a large portion of present-day Kentucky and Tennessee. This tension exploded with the commencement of independence hostilities in July 1776; some Cherokee leaders sided with the British, and in response the US charged thousands of colonial troops with “the utter extirpation of the Cherokee Nation.”
https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2017/04/17/indian-removal-...
"Throughout American history, the treatment of indigenous Native Americans has violated numerous articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These violations resulted in the loss of numerous Native American homelands, the Cherokee being only one example, and the genocide of numerous other smaller tribes since the beginning of European colonization. This is largely due to Eurocentric ideals, like the natural law of the Puritan worldview, which elevates the status of European peoples over that of indigenous, Native American peoples through a biased worldview. This mindset is so pervasive and powerful that it still prevails today, evidenced by modern films and television that paint Native American tribes as savage, ignorant and of ill intent toward the “white man”, and the policies of the current United States government."
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_th... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_No... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_genocides_of_Indigen...
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 so did not write letters and keep diaries.
Even things like the number of Indians cannot be pinned down with any precision.
We've deciphered Nahuatl and Maya script but Zapotec, Olmec, Isthmian, Quipu, and other scripts are still not well understood
In regards to paper, while the Aztecs had impressive achievements, especially considering the almost complete isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world (is there any civilization close to the achievements of the Aztecs and other Amerindians in Africa south of Egypt?), are you sure that amatl/amate counts as paper? It was possibly stretched bark, and not woven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amate#True_paper
> The Maya used a writing material called huun starting from the 5th century. It was made from the inner bark of the wild fig tree. It was cut and stretched thin rather than made of randomly woven fibers, which according to one source, disqualified it as true paper.
It doesn't mean they were stupid, they obviously picked it up quickly when they were exposed to it
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...
"No native writing system was known among Indigenous peoples of North America at the time of first European contact"
And yes, I was referring to the North American Indians. I know the Mayans had writing. I even have a book on the Mayan writing system.
> they didn't have strictly hierarchical institutions that utilized this data for controlling their population
People did not write letters and keep diaries in order to control their population.
The book "Empire of the Summer Moon" which is a history of the Commanche empire, and the book laments that their only sources were diaries and letters written by colonists.
1: Sedentary farmers like Aztecs and possibly Pueblos and those doing Three Sisters farming, some of them like the Aztecs having significant civilizational achievements all considered.
2: Hunting nomads, first doing fire-stick farming to create good conditions for hunting animals as well as gather certain plants, and later utilizing horses after their introduction from Europe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide
Precolombian north america actually had really sophisticated sanitation. In urban areas they pretty advanced waste management. In other areas, a lot of their seasonal mobility was possibly driven by sanitation needs. And they have really in depth practices around the ways they treat waterways and waste placement.
The problem was actually the exact opposite. Compared to Europeans, they were obsessive about soap and cleanliness. But Europeans lived in really dense villages alongside their livestock for many generations and they suffered greatly from it. The history of Europe is basically one outbreak after another. But ofc over time some amount of immunities developed
Maybe if North Americans had less sanitation and kept livestock they would've developed their own deadly diseases too that would've killed Europeans.
Cultures coming together historically were deadly. There is a school of thought that argues that the Persian and Roman downfall was directly associated with the ability of diseases to transit roads.
Of course, this is the stuff that we have records for. It's possible that there was a undocumented mass extinction event, But I tend to be skeptical of historical claims that are based on extremely localized and limited archeological projections.
Mass graves are almost completely absent and life tables show steady and predictable mortality curves over centuries
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024802118
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1071659/
https://globalbiodefense.com/2020/06/15/what-the-archaeologi...
I find it hard to believe that Europeans living in close quarters with livestock didn't result in increased rates of epidemics tbh but I'll take your word for it
i think it's quite likely that the casualties where in similar scope across two different civilizations, but that the colonialists advantage (if you can call it such) of excess population and higher density of settlers, meant that the colonialists simply outlasted a far smaller population group.
And it was much more about the horrid working conditions that these forced laborers were forced to work under.
So the sugar industry started importing African slaves, who actually had some malaria immunity.
This worked pretty well, and the transatlantic slave trade went on for centuries.
I don't know what this means. Moving to another location is practical, but not sophisticated.
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 maangement and people bathed daily. While London was throwing its shit in the streets, the Aztecs were building public toilets
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