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- Hacker News
- It's amazingby harry3369
- 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.by dyauspitr
- yes the disease like European virus which killed the natives in cold blood.
- I've always imaginged that Amazonia is a hive of all types of diseases. I'd rather wonder how did they manage to survive there.by tdiff
- The really haunting part is that Europeans often arrived late enough to see the collapse, but not early enough to understand what had collapsedby ErigmolCt
- Spain and Portugal were under Umayyad colonization when this civilization died.by applicative
- 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.
- 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
- 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.by dkga
- 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
by culi - Finding hundreds of previously unknown earthworks is a major archaeological result. Extrapolating from them to millions of inhabitants is where I would slow down...by ErigmolCt
- Has anyone else noticed the shape and order of these settlements indicates they engaged in siege warfare?by ryanmarsh
- 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
by guywithahat - 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.
by tastyfreeze - I recommend the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann to those of you who find this interesting. I loved it!
From wikipedia: > The book presents recent research findings from different fields which suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...
by cambaceres - This article linked in the posted one is even better when it comes to “the whole picture”
https://www.science.org/content/article/unearth-their-past-a...
by jgilias - Amazonian civilization now has an estimated 1M people in 0.3% of warehouse area.by userbinator
- Originally heard about this via Nature podcast's interview with the researcher: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02367-x
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.
by marojejian - 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.
by _heimdall - 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.
- One quote early in the article stood out to me:
> Decades of subsequent research by Ranzi and colleagues have slowly revealed remnants of peoples that occupied even the forest’s most remote areas.
They're considered remote now, but that's hundreds of years after the existing civilization was decimated.
by Cthulhu_ - > 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.
by parineum - 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.
- 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_pretaby vasusen
- 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 untouchedby smt88
- The important lesson is not that ancient people left no ecological footprint, but that a heavily managed landscape can still remain remarkably biodiverseby ErigmolCt
- 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.
by netbioserror - 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.by pibaker