‘Mind blowing’ ancient settlements uncovered in the Amazon
nature.com
nature.com
The other piece is this quote:
> By the 20th century, archaeologists had yet to confirm the rumours, and argued that the Amazon’s nutrient-poor soil was inadequate for supporting large-scale agriculture, and that it would have prevented tropical civilizations
I think it's worth noting that a number of large settlements north of the Rio Grande managed to grow quite large with limited or no agriculture. Particularly where fish were plentiful, farming wasn't taken up even when contemporaneous neighboring groups farmed. Similar to Kosher or Halal, not farming seemed to be a matter of cultural or religious preference/edict among some pre-Columbian indigenous peoples.
Those archaelogists were also ignorant of Terra Preta
The major difference is imagining that you have no knowledge of science. As humans desire control, your brain immediately assumes that gods cause everything, and then to get more control society starts believing they can influence and appease the gods through various rituals, which then develop into organized religion. The total integration of religion with every facet of life is alien to most of us, and certainly to nearly everyone on Hacker News, which is the biggest barrier to imagining yourself living back then.
Otherwise, people fell in love, had children, desired to achieve, were constantly striving and innovating, and all of the same types of people and desires that we have today, leading to kings, wars, commerce, and so on.
There are street numbers, pubs, fast food joints, various multi story buildings with some of the murals intact, especially the gymnasium/public baths really showed to me - “I could totally see myself living in this kind of environment” it was … weird and uncanny, but very educational experience.
Also, I saw 3D Roman recontructions on house blocks. They looked pretty the much same as any house block in Spain on any town/village in the 21th century. Crazy.
We continuously hear headlines of the form “discovery people did X before previously thought.” But why did we think they did not do those things earlier?
The fallacy is to be over conservative and assume that if we have no evidence that something happened, it probably didn’t.
But our prior assumption should be that the earliest evidence for X is much later than the first X.
I suspect there’s still a lot of bias in this view. A fish likely doesn’t realize it lives in water. Similarly, we likely don’t appreciate the role of our modern “religious beliefs” and how saturated our lives are with them and how they have permeated our methods of interpreting experience (physical or cultural). It’s alien to us only in hindsight and removed from the cultural context, but in a thousand years I suspect we’ll be no more immune from criticism.
Agreeing entirely with your other points, we are after all only human. There’s great conceit in our perception of past generations, and this gets more shameless the further back we look and especially across cultural divides.
Inevitably, we must state that they incorporated more supernatural explanations for physical phenomenon than we do today. It’s probably specifically this narrower point that would be alien to most of us.
Makes me want to write a sci-fi story about predicting the reflection of coherent radio signals from distant planets that originated on earth hundreds or thousands of years ago, and the ML model that filters for candidate signals, as though it were more plausible that old civilizations discovered radio before they were wiped out than another advanced civilization inhabit nearby solar systems. Starts with capturing reflections of 1930s broadcasts, but then the method scales by applying it to further objects that reflect ones from further back in time.
There probably wasn’t some industrial level civilization as we know it. But there’s 200,000 years of human history and the there was another ~20ky period like ours 120,000 years ago in between ice ages. Humans migrated across the old world at this time and they likely had societies we’ll never know about.
I try to envision ways they could have achieved cool tech but primitive. So maybe there was no industrial civilization but maybe some mystic religious society devised some way to do computation (if we really wanted to we can build do computation with water and irrigation) and learned a ton about the universe.
My hot take is we do man a disservice by saying civilization began with writing. There were certainly societies that learned lots of truths about the universe and passed them on via memes and superstitions.
Conversely, at each known stage of human civilization, how long will it be before evidence of that civilization becomes unknowable through future archaeology?
Because animal and plant species were very separated, until the "invasive species" phenomenon the last few centuries.
Odds are if there had been an advanced ancient civilization of any size (and an advanced one is going to tend to be large) and for any length of time, they'd have done quite a bit of lead smelting (lead's really useful and super-easy to smelt... shame it's poisonous), and we'd see it in the ice core record.
Let alone something like fossil fuel use. Plus probably dozens of other markers of iron-age industry or later, that I don't know about.
I very much doubt any very-ancient humans/hominids got past Bronze Age tech, at best. If I had to place a bet on it, I'd bet against them having gotten past stone-age tech at all. I think we'd see evidence of it.
Charcoal and iron mining is simply highly visible.
What is "advanced"? Is it a property everyone would agree on? Is it a single scale or some multi-dimensional ordering?
If a civilisation has beautiful spoken-word poetry, while the other has a tradition to play a complex game with baskets and grass knots which one is more advanced?
They seem like the natural frontrunner, in my eyes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haya_people#Archaeological_dis...
It's not as fantastical as radio signals, and not as truly 'lost' - it persisted in oral history, but it's still thought provoking.
Gobekli Teppe recently also demonstrated that we really don't know much, and that the "official" theories are mere speculations which are very likely to be replaced by another theory in the future.
Although Michael Mann's filmography is pretty good, too.
"that dude that wrote the book about the thing" is as far as I usually get. "you know, the cover was blue"
If the soil wasn’t “rich” how did it become such a forest in the first place? Maybe reword it as “forests are not suitable for farmland”.
But the forest remains, and remains almost maximally stable, so any time that anything dies, freeing up resources, they're almost immediately taken back up by the system and converted into more forest.
Clear out the rainforest for traditional agri and you've lost your insane income.
https://www.dw.com/en/the-amazon-nutrient-rich-rainforests-o...
> Terra preta [...] is a type of very dark, fertile artificial (anthropogenic) soil found in the Amazon Basin. [...] Terra preta owes its characteristic black color to its weathered charcoal content,[2] and was made by adding a mixture of charcoal, bone, broken pottery, compost and manure to the low fertility Amazonian soil. A product of indigenous soil management and slash-and-char agriculture,[3] the charcoal is stable and remains in the soil for thousands of years, binding and retaining minerals and nutrients.[4][5] [...] Terra preta soils were created by farming communities between 450 BCE and 950 CE.[10][11][12] Soil depths can reach 2 meters (6.6 ft). It is reported to regenerate itself at the rate of 1 centimeter (0.4 in) per year.[13]
First paragraphs on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
Hancock has a gift for pointing out deeply fascinating aspects of human history. His personal conclusions based on things he brings up include things like advanced, pre-historic civilizations. Regardless of whether you care for those kinds of claims, I think it's almost undeniable that the tidbits he brings up in his discussions, like terra preta, are a real treat to read about. For any fan of history or intellectually curious person, I'd recommend at least watching a video or two of his on youtube, just as a starting point if nothing else, and going from there to read about the various things he brings up.
He is derided as he's a journalist rather than an academic but I don't think he ever pushed that his ideas are absolute truth. Also he's an Ayahuasca advocate, which unfairly brings further derision. He'll talk about more far out theories too if with the right audience.
There's a bit of a split between archaeologists that merely think Hancock is an indication that Archaeology's public outreach is insufficient and those that think he's actively harming public perceptions of the field with misinformation. For the record, I'm more in the former camp.
Anyway, the SAA (an archaeology trade group) devoted 27 pages of a magazine issue to discussing that split and picking apart the arguments in one of Hancocks's recent books. You can find the magazine here to decide for yourself: http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?m=16146&i=634462&p...
For fairness, here's Hancock's response: https://grahamhancock.com/saa-archaeological-record-response...
> [Graham's blog post] Before closing, however, I’m understandably very happy to quote here the useful concise summary of America Before given by anthropologist Jeb J. Card in his contribution to the issue (pp 26-30):
>> [Card's review] Attempting to critique America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock (2019) using the criteria of professional archaeology is doomed to failure, as his goals are outside of the materialist practice of scientific archaeology. In a nutshell, Hancock argues that an ancient civilization of the Pleistocene emerged in North America that was based not on material technology but on psychic/spiritual knowledge. It became a global sea-based society comparable with the late pre-Industrial British Empire. These Ice Age Americans (spoiler: Atlanteans) foresaw a cosmic disaster and spread memetic seeds of sacred knowledge of geometry, astronomy, and the Otherworld and how souls may navigate it around the world. After this civilization was destroyed by impact events from a comet during the Younger Dryas, these advanced people came to be remembered as magicians and gods. Seeking this knowledge today is a path to truly understanding reality and the spiritual elements denied by materialist science.”
> [Graham's blog post] Card’s precis of my arguments is fair, and in general I’d say that his analysis of my work and its function is much more carefully thought through than that of any of the other contributors.
If the author thinks the reviewer pointing to psychic Atlanteans in his work is treating him more fairly than the rest, that doesn't bode well for the overall work.
Still valuable, still rigorous… but no ground truth is possible.
Oof. I have bad news for you about science in general.
More germane to the point, it's probably better to think about "ground truth" as "sufficiently reasonable approximation for the grain that I need to operate at".
Carbon 14.
So while we can reasonably ascertain the age of (organic) artifacts, it does not answer the questions being asked.
In this case, the author being discussed seems to literally looking for non-material/"Otherworld" based explanations for history. I think he would not be insulted, to be called anti-science. There might be something unfortunate going on in broader discussion around the phrase "anti-science" (I'm not ready to defend that too strongly either way), but in this case it seems pretty apt.
In that case, I recommend you check out Erich von Danniken[0], Giorgio Tsoukalos[1] and Charles Dawson[2].
They have some original thoughts that have been wildly popular. Or are you saying that if something is "popular" that it's "conformity" and should be rejected for being conformist?
If it's generally accepted (as bible dogma in the middle ages was), then it must be a false flag designed to hoodwink the masses into accepting false information, because no amount of consensus is enough. amirite?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken
The article references these jungle cities to have disappeared around 1400ce, and I wonder what this estimate is based upon and if it’s not 1500ce instead, as disease could be the culprit…
But that's in a European history context. It seems that ancient in the context of the Americas is usually applied to anything pre-1492.
This article does a lot of that ("Mind blowing!" "Challenges archeaological dogma!" "Mysterious"!), and it repeats something that's very suspect, even amongst conservative historians--it dates civilization in the area to "10,000 years old". Also, much of what's in these kinds of articles is not new, but simply repackaged content.