Engineered waterways helped Ancient Amazonians became master maize farmers
9 comments
·January 30, 2025eszed
marcosdumay
This one is about savanna.
If you meant to say that the Amazon forest never had human development in it, this is true for almost all of the forest. Nothing was demolished.
But then, I'm not sure what you mean by "primordial rainforest". It is a very young forest if that's your question.
eszed
> It is a very young forest
That's what I meant - sorry that wasn't clear.
I remember being taught, '80s -' 90s, that the Amazonian rainforest ecosystem had existed in basically its present form for thousands of years.
That was said in the context of explaining why it shouldn't be cut it down at the rate it currently is. I certainly don't mean to say that now that we know it is such a young forest it's OK to cut it down! I just find it interesting that, and how quickly, such an accepted, "obvious", point of fact has been found not to be true.
What do you mean by "nothing was demolished"?
[Edit: Wait - I think I answered my own question. I meant the idea (of an old forest) had been demolished. Not that anything physical had been. Glad we cleared that up!
marcosdumay
> thousands of years.
Yes, many thousands of years. That's what "young" means for forests.
Probably not in its present form, because it's a quite sensitive forest, that may have probably changed a lot in that time.
But almost all of it hasn't been directly changed by people until 300 years ago. Technically, most still hasn't, but we are getting really close on that "most" thing.
And yeah, there have been civilizations there. They didn't change most of the forest, overall your understanding that it was just there is about right.
mahrain
I hate to suggest it but it’s extensively explored by Graham Hancock when discussing the Americas in season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse.
Even dismissing his ideas around an older civilization wiped away by a “younger dryas event”, the archeological findings in the Amazon were new to me.
barbazoo
How do you know what you got from it was based on reality? I’ve watched Stefan Milos videos on his Atlantis hypothesis and it seemed like he’s not a serious scientist.
fermisea
When it comes to the Americas, the entropy of the entire field of Archaeology is way too high.
Up until 5 years believing that humans were there more than 12k years ago was heresy. Today 30k is the accepted number, while some people are pushing it past 60k.
The belief that there were "civilisations" in the Amazon was also heresy, but now with LiDAR and deforestationthere's megalopolis being found that probably predate both the Andean and Mesoamerican cultures. There's also a set of anthropological elements connecting Andean and Mesoamerican cultures that seem to have their elements in the Amazon - like they share the same origin stories, a very similar god, etc
Anyway, Hancock is a a bit of a crackpot, but he's probably less wrong than everybody else, because we only have access about 1% of all the stuff that can be found in the Amazon, whatever written records that existed from Mayans and Aztecs was destroyed by the Spanish, and every single piece of new evidence seems to point in the direction that there were large organised cities in the Amazon
It seems extraordinary to me that in the past ~decade the idea of Amazonia being this primordial rainforest has been demolished. I'm now curious whether there's any trace of this in the ethnology and folklore of the native people there? Any oral histories about the downfall of civilization? No one would have been expecting it before, so it seems like it could have been overlooked.