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Where did you read this? I’ve read in multiple places that the jungle there is quite inhospitable to humans because there is little easily accessible food. The source that comes to mind is the book The Lost City of Z.

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There's now a consensus of evidence that large areas of the Amazon were planted and cultivated. Bear in mind this an enormous area, and multiple civilisations would have been active simultaneously over thousands of years.

Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.adi6317

Early Holocene crop cultivation and landscape modification in Amazonia https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2162-7.epdf

you mean "large" relative to human populations or large relative to the entire Amazon rain forest? Your sources indicate that there was cultivation widespread around the amazon but not that the /entire/ amazon is as it is due to cultivation. Maybe i misinterpret the intended message of your comment.

I meant that the Amazon basin and Amazonia are enormous geographic regions. It's highly unlikely that the rainforest itself is the result of cultivation. It does seem to be proven at this point that wide areas were cultivated multiple times in distinct eras of human habitation.

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