Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival | Hacker News Reader

Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival

newscientist.com

180 pointssoneca67 comments

I recall reading about this some in the book 1491, which is quite interesting, and talks about how the Americas were prior to Columbus.

http://amzn.to/1HQYgSY

Seconding this recommendation - I'm planning on assigning this book in a college course on the Columbian Exchange next year. It's got the readability of a longform New Yorker article and the scholarly credibility of an academic book. Totally fascinating material that will up end much of what you learned in high school textbooks.

Thirded. It took me years to become interested in history, and books like this are what finally broke through.

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but I too wasn't interested in history at all until I read this book: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power ( http://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/143911...) Which was a fascinating history from the rise of oil in modern times uptil the first Gulf War. I would love recommendations on other history books that got people turned onto history?

I actually got into history through visual sources and maps, like Colin McEvedy's "Penguin Atlas of Medieval History." But the history books that I remember really changing my life include Simon Schama's "The Embarrassment of Riches" (a fantastic history of the rise and fall of the Dutch empire), Alfred Crosby's "Ecological Imperialism" (similar to 1491, but more wide-ranging), and Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism series (the best history books of the 20th century, in my view).

I also remember loving John Brewer's "The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the 18th Century" and Mario Biagioli's "Galileo Courtier." Also "Mad Blood Stirring" by Edward Muir, which tackles the question of why 16th century Italian street life was so incredibly violent.

Edit: seems apropos to mention that a couple friends of mine are about to launch a site for historians to curate lists of their favorite books on key topics, called Backlist: http://backlist.cc

> I actually got into history through visual sources and maps

I've noticed that fantasy novels often include maps of the fictional geography of the world, and fantasy authors sometimes write introductions basically on the theme "I've always loved maps and thought they were special". Personally, I've never really looked at those omnipresent maps, because they never matter in the story.

On the other hand, maps are incredibly useful when reading history. Or they would be... but history books almost never include them!

Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People by Thurman Wilkins

The Prize is my second favorite book of history/non-fiction ever. My favorite is "The Power Broker" which has a similar sort of style and scale. Highly recommended.

The follow up 1493 is also great.

Also great is James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

There was a great, long-form piece of journalism about this, which I read not that long ago, after saving it for a long time on Pocket, I tried to find it again but failed in my googling, but it was probably by the author of that book, ah found it this time:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302...

I don't have my copy handy to check for sure, but I think this is a full chapter out of 1491.

This article underscores one of the most interesting points in the book, that was applicable throughout the Americas, but was most startling in regard to the Amazon basin. It was that there was really no "untouched", virginal wilderness in the New World. Even the Amazon ecosystem was stewarded by the people that lived there.

Following _1491_: home to millions of people, the jungle mostly consisting of fruit-bearing trees (the modern Amazonian tribes are living in overgrown orchards), and in possession of miraculous sanitation/fertilizer technology.

Everyone should know about terra preta. It turns out it wasn't a soil-enrichment technique, it was sanitation with a side effect of soil enrichment -- and could be very applicable in the developing world (and the developed world!) today. An experiment in Germany -- look up the paper "Terra Preta Sanitation" -- showed that a slightly modified method of terra-preta production can sanitize human waste to well within First World standards.

Terra preta is formed naturally by falling fruits, leaves and branches that get composted on the soil. There's a agriculture method called agroforestry that make use of this concept, it's very promising for organic farms: https://vimeo.com/146953911

I know a couple of people here who have "dry bathrooms" (or banheiro seco) that is just a bucket to collect the poo, when you poo you cover it with dry leaves or grinded wood (they are the source of carbon, and stop the bad smell), when the bucket fills up they take it to an area outside far from the house where it will compost, naturally kill the pathogens (because of the heat it produces) and became terra-preta, much better solution than to send it down stream, easier to decentralize and the end result is the best product you could have.

Great video. Very much in line with Allan Savory's plan to reverse climate change: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl....

Instead of planting trees and pruning he uses rotating herds of animals. Both techniques respect nature and revitalize soil compared to conventional industrial farming practices. I don't understand why there aren't more startups in this space. Climate change is a worthwhile problem to tackle.

The Humanure Handbook (http://humanurehandbook.com/) goes into the specifics of how to build sawdust toilets and manage waste and compost safely. For those even remotely interested, the e-book is only USD$10, and earlier editions are free for the downloading.

If you know someone who lives in the country and is interested in off-the-grid living, or is merely serious about gardening, a copy would make for an unusual gift.

I've read this book and strongly recommend it. The subject matter is not the easiest to write about but the author really does a great job, approaching it in an educative and interesting way. He also clearly demonstrates that this is something important to our civilization as a whole and that ignoring it because it is uncomfortable is a mistake.

For anyone who hasn't read it, do yourselves a favour: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302... that's the original cover story for The Atlantic. Few longforms have hit me as hard as this one did.

There is also good evidence that there were extensive agricultural urban civilizations around and along the Mississippi. But they were so thoroughly destroyed (by the Little Ice Age, drought, and disease) that by the time European settlers got to those territories, even the descendant peoples had no memory of them. Only a handful of early explorers recorded them, and the principal archaeological traces are earth mounds (some rather large) built in their cities. For quite some time the "Mound Builders" were thought to be a different people entirely from the present native peoples.

Original paper here : http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1812/2015...

"Here, we review the evidence of an anthropogenic Amazonia"

side note on Amazon Indians: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dna-search-firs...

DNA Search for the First Americans Links Amazon Groups to Indigenous Australians. a researcher in Reich’s lab, noticed that the Suruí and Karitiana people of the Amazon had stronger ties to indigenous groups in Australasia—Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders—than to Eurasians."

I wonder how much was lost by the Amazon peoples by the invasions of the Clovis peoples from Siberia.

While it's probably in the millions, all projected numbers are extremely rough and work by calculating the percentage likely to have die died in the disease that swept the continent. DO NOT VIEW THEM AS PRECISE OR ACCURATE.

However, the evidence seems pretty convincing that the vast majority of the indigenous people died in the centuries following spanish contact.

Supposedly when Europeans (the later arrivals not Vikings) showed up and disease spread killing many First Nations/Native Americans it caused a dramatic environmental shift.

As forests took over the former areas where the first peoples of the Americas lived trees sucked up a lot of CO2 causing the mini ice age in Europe.

Interesting if true, yet of course very sad as well but if true that pretty incredible to think of such a connection.

The little ice age started before Europeans showed up:

> "cold summers and ice growth began abruptly between 1275 and 1300, followed by "a substantial intensification" from 1430 to 1455"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age#Dating

> As forests took over the former areas where the first peoples of the Americas lived trees sucked up a lot of CO2 causing the mini ice age in Europe.

If you want to account for CO2, should consider native americans (north to south) used the slash-and-burn technique.

That must be a joke?

No it's not. The little ice-age is a well documented period of time of below average temperatures at the end/after the medival ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

There's still a lot of speculation going on, what caused it, because the explanation for the "Big" ice ages (the periodic tilting of the Earth's axis reaching a position that gives to a colder climate) doesn't fit. So there are a lot of possible explanations.

From archeological evidence we know that in the timeframe before the little ice-age begain large parts of the North American population fell victim to disease and/or famine, so one proposed model is, that the regrowth of forrests on (fertile) ground left unmanaged by the decreasing population sucked out a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere.

When I think about the Amazon rainforest and those who have called it home in the past 500 years - especially as we learn that they were more advanced than we had supposed - I think back to Terence McKenna's dying hope to save the plant medicines that are being forgotten and eradicated with deforestation.

We have no idea what manner of spiritually relevant plants are falling into obscurity cum annihilation, and given the resurgent interest in (and power of) ayahuasca, it's worth taking action to document and remember them.

Similar levels of density were reported around the Mississippi river delta

With a little digging you can trace back the development of the consenus surrounding this issue over the past 25 years or so, which would probably be worth an article on its own.

Url changed from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/amazon-rain....

When I first saw this post I thought (Amazon.com) came out with a new product called "rainforest."

Anyway, so did the natives breed with the Europeans when they "wiped them out" or did the native people migrate to another part of the continent?

Basically malaria was unknown in the Americas before western explorers brought it over. From there it became very prevalent in some places such as the Amazon and essentially made mass agriculture impossible there. Then pretty much everyone starved. There were also things like smallpox that devastated people everywhere in the Americas but those were more a one time thing, people were able to rebuild after they passed.

Good video on that, which a lot of people might have seen but still worth linking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk

Isn't a devastating, long-term drought a recent and popular theory as well, decimating many Central and South American tribes such as the Mayans and the Aztec?

[1]http://science.time.com/2012/11/09/mayans/

I believe the drought predated contact by ~7-800 years. Definitely explains the decline of the Mayans, but not really relevant to discussing the effects of Columbian contact.

The Aztec were destroyed by the spanish, particularly Hernán Cortés.

Neither. They died.

That's not correct. There are tens of millions of Native American ancestors living across Latin America today. Latin America has roughly 600 million people, they are not all European and African.

True, but this is in the Amazon in the first 150 years after the Spanish. 90-98% died, mostly of disease. There are more native people now then in 1650.

You're not alone.

I was thinking about an initiative to publish books on recycled paper or something, then I finished reading the sentence.

Why is it this article has the vague overtone of "so we can go ahead and chop it all down, right?" on it?

I think it's the "pristine myth" language. Just reeks of let-us-clear-cut-it mentality.

I don't get that at all. I got the "how presumptuous of Europeans to think that they brought civilization to the area, it was already there and if anything they may have set back the pace of progress."

Totally agree, I got that feeling from it too.

I didn't detect that overtone at all.

Wow, Amazon has so many products.

I do wish the historians/reporters for this article were more accurate in their use of "decimation". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)#Curren...

The 1491 book put the death rates at around 1 in 20 surviving - ie 19 out of every 20 people dying from disease etc.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10691974 and marked it off-topic.

The definition "destroy a large number of" has been around for centuries. You're contradicting long established usage, while pretending to appeal to it.

I am not contradicting it. From their context it was not possible to tell if they meant the deaths of 1 in 10, a number similar to that, about half of all people, 9 in 10, 99 in 100 etc. I gave the proportions as remembered from the book as that gives a far clearer picture.

Here's the dictionary definition of decimate. The primary definition is "destroy a large number of". This isn't recent - I looked it up in the full OED and it's been around for centuries.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/decimat...

Are you wishing that the current usage of the word (the title you linked to) would stop, and that usage would revert to the older Latin meaning? Unfortunately that's not how language develops.

I am wishing that articles about history are more precise in their usage, since it can be difficult to tell which sense they mean of the word (historical, at the time of the material they are writing about, current meaning applied to back then).

Etymology is not the same as dictionary definition.

In fact most Greek and Latin words have been altered a lot in meaning post adoption.

Ah, yes, Viginition is the word you were looking for!

Great content!

I wonder if any of this can be used to answer the objections to Biblical stories like Noah's flood: "how did the rainforest come about in a mere 4000 years?" And here we read that the forests were domesticated in the last 3000.

Many ancient cultures have myths about a great flood or series of floods. It was probably not a single global event, but plausibly to have been based in some shift in climate patterns during protohistoric times.

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