Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area
science.org271 points by marojejian 8 days ago
271 points by marojejian 8 days ago
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.
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.
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.
> they couldn't have been more than a decade behind the smallpox/diseases
I think it was much more than this. Remember Columbus landed in 1492 and these areas were very connected with trade networks, including from the Carribean islands to the mainlands. Diseases could have spread through most of both of the continents in a decade. And then places like what became the United States were not regularly seeing Europeans until ~1620, so the apocalyptic plague would have already had a 100 year head start. Places like the West Coast and interiors of the US or interior of South America would have been 200 years or more post-plague.
Also, many of the earliest explorers of the deep interior often described sophisticated and heavily populated societies. But when others eventually reached those areas to find them sparsely populated wilderness those stories were dismissed as just more legends and rumors of cities of gold. See Francisco de Orellana's description of his expedition down the Amazon for a good example of this.
> I don't think a few years is enough to erase all trace of human intervention
The weather there is quite brutal. Roads need tons of maintenance to remain passable. This is one of the reasons rivers are such an important transportation network.
> Amazonian landscape management is so radically different from what Europeans know that they likely just didn't realize what was before their eyes
This is an interesting explanation. Also, refusing to document previous occupation is a convenient way to claim land rights.
To add to that, most of their structures in the Amazon would have undoubtedly been built by wood (plentiful) rather than stone (scarce).
Also, I think 30 years of a field being abandoned in the Amazon is likely more than enough for it to return fully to jungle. It's not like explorers were running around counting tree rings.
It's hard for temperate folks to appreciate just how incredibly agressive tropical vegetation growth can be. I'm only subtropical but I've got a tree that's about 6 years old and a foot in diameter. And that's after I've topped it at 5 ft(0 branches left, just a stump) every 6 months or so just to try to keep it under control. If I'd let it run rampant it would be at full growth now, around 50ft and 1.5ft across. I had another tree that went from 10 inch seedling to 10ft and bearing fruit in 9 months. A field abandoned for 30 years in the amazon is 100% jungle.
Actually, the vast majority of structures are earthen. Even the article states as much
Europeans didn't really get to most of the more isolated inland areas in the Americas until the 1600s or well after that, though.
>Europeans didn't really get to most of the more isolated inland areas in the Americas until the 1600s or well after that, though.
It takes more than a few decades for things to regrow. There's a reason that half of all towns in New England have the name "field" in them. The impenetrable thicket that characterizes unmaintained New England land would have been foreign to literally every human to ever set foot there prior to the mid 1700s (decades of re-growth after the natives had been mostly driven off but not long enough for complete cultivation by europeans).
Now, obviously that's not that far inland, but by the time you're talking about the french surveying the continental interior native populations had stabilized. The worst disease epidemics were very much at 1500s and early 1600s thing.
It takes more than a few decades for things to regrow.
Have you ever seen a cleared lot that hasn’t been touched for a decade? We have a few near my house, and it is fascinating how wild they have gotten in such a short time.
Multiplied 10x and set in the rainforest, I would expect signs of humanity to be completely hidden.
Amazon is different beast, humidity, insect fast growing plants. It is nasure on hyperdrive. I wouldn't be surprised if things took 5-10 times faster than england. Or any more dry european places.
Brasil has tried building a highway to Manaus like twice and each time the interior has eaten it. That's with relatively modern tools.
Yeah, i spend some time in south america and you can see that even in Rio. If people left the nature would just gulp it up. fun time sleeping in jungle in Iquitos, its crazy how dens the jungle can be
The population collapse in New England happened only a couple of years before the Plymouth colony was established though (they didn't have any meaningful contact with the Spanish colonies where it happened in the mid and early 1500s).
Of course probably it took quite a bit more for it to reach the Amazon but it's not like Europeans were that familiar or explore the region that much until the 1800s or so.
Is -field really that common? I live in old England and many towns here are called -field, although granted not as many as -ton/-don.
Not as common as old England but vastly more common than the rest of the country because the charters had to be petitioned for and approved by several layers of intolerable assholes so unoffensive descriptive names like <thing>field were preferred over just about everything else. See also North/South/East/West<thing that was previously approved>. Kind of like how modern corporate safe culture bland-washes everything.
They mostly gave all the waterways colloquial names based on the Indians and of course that got copy-pasta'd onto all sorts of charts and maps so the government couldn't redefine those even if they wanted to.
Most of the rest of the country (including the mid Atlantic despite being settled at the same time) was far more deliberately surveyed and named.
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.
> 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
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.
> since they couldn't have been more than a decade behind the smallpox/diseases
They weren't. It took centuries for them to make any inroad into the Amazon.
> I don't think a few years is enough to erase all trace of human intervention
Appreciate you stating your assumptions.
you might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us
> The World Without Us is a 2007 non-fiction book about what would happen to the natural and built environment if humans suddenly disappeared... it outlines, for example, how cities and houses would deteriorate, how long man-made artifacts would last, and how remaining lifeforms would evolve. Weisman concludes that residential neighborhoods would become forests within 500 years
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
Europeans often failed to recognize Indigenous land management because it did not resemble European cities or farms
No, what they failed to recognize was indigenous land management that had been abandoned for many decades. In remote areas smallpox moved quite far ahead of European settlers.
There's accounts of Europeans encountering cities in the Amazon, people didn't take them seriously since they disappeared in the intervening time.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
This is one of the reasons they flourished near river networks that provided easier transport as well as food. They also build canals, but I’m not sure they were for navigation as much as irrigation.
> 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?
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
> (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?
> 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?
They are larger than you'd think. A couple acres. But chinampas are definitely in another league
The important lesson is not that ancient people left no ecological footprint, but that a heavily managed landscape can still remain remarkably biodiverse
> left no ecological footprint
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...
You mean: it can recover.
Also 3M people is probably a lot easier than 220M (and that's just Brazil).
220M is the whole country, which is much bigger than the Amazon.
Nowadays it's estimated the Amazon has around 46.9 million people. Much more than 3M, but still much less than your 220M
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.
Indigenous people in north america contributed to multiple extinctions.
This is the noble savage trope you're putting on display
This has nothing to do with "noble savage" or whatever other ideologically loaded words you want to surgically introduce to manipulate people's opinions.
Humans are the apex predator. They have a huge influence on whatever the downstream ecological equilibrium winds up being.
This is hardest to deny in formerly glaciated regions because humans were there exerting pressure on the ecosystem the day after the glacier left (well not quite, but close enough). So if you take for example somewhere like pre-colombian Wisconsin, the development eventually pine forest and then hardwood forest all that happened with humans around eating things. The number of wolves you get depends on the number of deer you have which depends on how many the humans eat. And of course the deer eat things too so they affect the plant balance, which affects the other wildlife. And so on and so on. It's a complex web.
In places like the Amazon it's less cut and clear because humans showed up around/just before the last serious change in climate (end of ice age) but once again they've been there for the entire development of the "modern" ecosystem so whatever your balance of plants and animals is that balance is reflective of the pressures put on it by human activity.
Nah, I was adressing the idiology already present there.
I don't dispute that humans are in essence a keystone species, part of nature, etc, etc but the OP talked about indiginous people specifically. We can just as easily say that the japanese were ecologically compatible....up to a point.
The only reason it's brought up is due the idea of the indiginous in tune with nature who was essentially not limited in his ability to further exploit but chooses not to.
Shouldn't you consider individual populations, cultures separately, and not be lumping all native people's together? One can do something another didn't.
With regards to the Late Pleistocene extinction overkill hypothesis that you are referring to, your information is out of date, more recent evidence suggests that humans played only a minor or incidental role, with climate change (the end of an ice age), and habitat restructuring being the primary drivers.
I don't think you understand what the noble savage trope is. I'm commenting on the development of indigenous human societies in the Americas. The vast majority of them were ecologically compatible. This is not a commentary on the morality of individuals. To take the Mexica empire as an example, they were not a moral civilization by our standards (neither were the Spanish colonizers), and they had an over-reliance on corn and obsidian, but other than that they survived in a way that did not stress or extinguish or destabilize the surrounding ecology.
I do not quite buy your arguments, and I am skeptical of several claims that you make. Without specific sources, it is more difficult for me to contest them, though I will not request sources.
From your perspective, what caused the extinction of several megafauna/large species of animals after the arrival of Aboriginals in Australia?
That's mistaking correlation for causation. I don't have proof, but let's consider an alternative: that the climate change that made those areas newly-hospitable to humans made them inhospitable to megafauna. Can you falsify "all of the species were subject to the same environmental shift" before you jump to "arriving humans hunted them all to extinction"?
(And I recognize the parallels to some unsavory arguments, and would like to point out that the evidence regarding contemporary man-made climate change is strong and sound. But that's with industrialization and a couple orders of magnitude more people on the planet.)
I think if you consider that single instance it is mistaking correlation for causation.
However, it happens every time, with a lag. In different climates and environments. When humans expanded out of Africa, spread out over Eurasia, reached North America, South America, Australia, new Zealand extinction of megafauna always followed.
We know that there was large scale hunting and humans are highly effective hunters. Hunting megafauna is the easiest available food source for a pre-industrial society until they get to the point where there is too little megafauna left (and changes, eventually including farming follow). Unlike large carnivores we are not dependent on hunting megafauna so our human numbers do not drop when they are in short supply.
It's still mistaking correlation for causation, even when considering multiple instances, if you can't describe an unfalsifiable mechanic as the cause.
There are two problems here:
1) It hasn't actually happened every time. Elephants, hippopotamuses, large whales, polar bears, grizzly brown bears, certain large bovines, and moose still exist.
2) Extinctions of megafauna are distributed across a time delta from human arrival. I don't know for sure, but I would wager that that delta doesn't necessarily correlate with date (as a proxy for technological development).
That is to say, "humans arrive -> everything big dies" is not so cut-and-dry a rule. It should be clear that other factors are involved.
I'll suggest a third option: humans hunt megafauna to extinction in the presence of conditions that favor such behavior - perhaps climatic, geographic, and/or cultural. So, it happens. But it doesn't always happen.
For the purposes of this conversation, I don't think you've proven the original contention wrong, which was that indigenous people in the Americas found a niche which made their presence and behavior sustainable over long periods of time. If your evidence is the total extinction of American megafauna, then you would be forced to admit that you were incorrect. In fact, you potentially argue for the opposite: in clearing some megafauna but sparing others, humans did indeed carve out a potentially sustainable ecological niche, which their continued presence helps to prove was sustainable. At least, until culturally disparate humans arrived.