Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area
science.org
science.org
the trouble is slash and burn agriculture and clearing for beef production.
Did it also change the ecological system of Australia? Some articles said that Aboriginals might have caused the extinction of a lot of larger animals in different ways, arguably superficially similar to how the mammuth was made extinct and how lions were hunted to extinction in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming#History . Was the plant diversity changed or lowered by the Aboriginals over the years?
Is there a difference in the approaches between "fire-stick burning", and the advanced farming or agricultural practices of for instance the Aztecs? Did Aboriginals and some of the Amerindian peoples north of the Aztecs do "fire-stick farming" by simply burning a region and then move in and simply primarily hunt and also gather from certain plants a bit, slightly organized; or did they have large-scale, high-density farming of crops like the Aztecs? Would Pueblos' farming techniques, and those doing Three Sisters farming techniques, be closer to that of the Aztecs than to fire-stick burning? Was fire-stick burning typically more nomadic, and the Aztecs' and others' techniques more sedentary?
> While this practice is often cited as a way to improve small gardens for individual use, its historical value lay in larger-scale implementations designed to nurture and sustain entire communities.[14]
I know the real point is that you'd prefer we eat the proverbial bugs, but there's akshually more grassland in the world than forest.
You don't need to cut down trees for beef production - it doesn't make any economic sense unless your logistics costs are deliberately screwed by perverse government incentives.
b) Cows walk as they graze, the meat even delivers itself. You just need a herder.
Shrimple as. The scheme worked for millennia with zero problems. Nobody had a problem with beef production until tariffs and other fuckery was invented.
But apparently we need to switch to eating bugs instead of fixing the root of the problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All the beef (and most other meat too) I eat is grown in the same country. For a premium you can get higher quality local (i.e. same county) meat.
More accurately, shaping the rainforest the all dying so the rainforest grows back.
They didn't live under the canopy, they cut it down.
Those two are very very different when it comes to assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points, and the latter is the default across most civilizations ever known.
I think it's very straightforward. Here's a recap of the thread, you can see it in the quote for the first item:
1. khanhnguyen8386 implied that they were "sophisticated ecosystem engineers, shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it."
2. smt88 challenged that by pointing that 97% of "the rainforest" was probably untouched by this group, as opposed to shaped deliberately.
3. I (Terr_) chime in to emphasize that we shouldn't assume a region was intentionally left-alone when the much simpler explanation is that it wasn't practical to exploit it.
> Your original claim which GP responded to is unrelated to that.
You have also confused me with some other user.
Still, I don't get where "virtuous environmental brownie-points" enter the discussion or how the first reply pertains to them. It seems like a simple factual statement that is either true or false and can be evaluated as such without invoking virtuous brownie points.
That the Amazon remained largely untouched is true regardless of whether that was the result of a deliberate effort, a technological limitation, a lack of need or any other reason. No one uses "preserved" until now. It can simultaneously be true that the populated areas of the Amazon where deliberately and carefully managed by the population and that the Amazon was largely untouched for any other reason.
Certainly, though nothing about the quoted fact that 97% of forest was uninhabited should lead us to make statements like "the pristine untouched Amazon idea is a European myth", nor does it give any information to go off of regarding their possible knowledge of environmental engineering.
The paper is just referring to this one civilization. It is definitely not the only Amazonian civilization.
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.
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.
Interesting. Do you know of anything somewhat similar for Africa, ignoring the lands of Egypt and the lands near the Mediterranean Sea?
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
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?
Homegardens seem much smaller in scale than large-scale chinampas as practiced by the Aztecs, right?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They weren't. It took centuries for them to make any inroad into the Amazon.
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
That's the myth. A lot of native populations farmed. Where do you think that farmland came from? It came from tearing down forests and tearing down trees. And yes, ancient peoples could do that with fire, and with older axes.
And not only was that wood cut down, but it was also used for fuel. Fuel for fires, for cooking. Fuel to warm a house at night.
Mines were a thing. Copper and lead and other metals were dug up from mines Surface mines were heavily damaging to the environment, with all sorts of minerals being dug up, and washed into the local water and river.
In fact, the only difference between older civilizations, and our civilization is that we have the technological capability to cause more damage. Native North and South Americans, were not any better, about the environment or living at peace and harmony with nature.
As an aside the same goes for violence, for war. Endless North American and South American civilizations waged war. They enslaved, they enslaved other civilizations, they warred with one another, they fought constantly, and just as today those nations had peaceful entities and warlike aggressive entities. Nothing has changed, nothing is different between the historical colonialistic civilizations of the West, and the new world.
The Aztecs were supremely violent, taking over civilizations all over the place, just as colonial as the West was.
You may wonder why I'm waxing and waning deeply on this topic, but the reason is that there seems to be this predominant thought that somehow, North American civilizations were perfect and pristine, and lived in utter utopian peace with nature and, each other. Nothing could be further from the truth.
And do you know why? Because they were human beings.
None of this says that the colonial behavior was perfect when European nations came here. Many things were done that should not have been done.
However, if you look at the history of the human race, including modern times, colonial behavior has always, I repeat, always been the case. Whether you were the Persian Empire, whether you were what is now India/Pakistan, whether you were China, whether you were any nation on the planet, there has been a history of colonial behavior. This includes all North American and South American peoples.
China was a wide-ranging number of kingdoms, that eventually settled to the Five Kingdoms and then a unified country. This was colonialism. This was subjugation and conquering of other peoples, until a unified country existed.
You can look at the Roman Empire, the Grecian Empire, the Babylonians. You can go and look at any culture, any history. You can look at modern times, and you can see what might be deemed colonialistic behavior.
I cite all of this, because there seems to be recent thought in the last 20 years that somehow, Native Americans and South Americans lived in utter peace and harmony with their environment and each other. Nothing could be further from the truth.
So back to the original point that kicked off this rantish blather, no ancient civilizations did not live in harmony with the environment on purpose, and any that had the technological capability or the framework of a civilization like the Aztecs, raised their local environment, ripped down forests, had open mines, destroyed the local environment, hands down.
The only way to not starve is to not have sex, and no culture managed that well.
However 80,000 years of original caretaker habitation demonstrates that indeed, stasis with the landscape is attainable.
They took far better care of the land than we do, and they lived in multiple eras of plenty and prosperity. Scientifically demonstrable, even.
The fact is that human being usually alter their environment drastically. They might eventually reach a stable state, but after changing. All over the world megafauna disappeared just as human being appeared. In many cases there are other possible causes such as climate change, but the pattern is very consistent, but from our first spreading out of Africa to the Maoris reaching New Zealand just a few hundred years ago where ever humans go megafauna has swiftly disappeared.
1. The spread of disease (smallpox specifically) being fast enough that most European sources describe a relatively uninhabited Amazon strikes me as potentially interesting. This means that contact and trade was happening between locales. We know that part is true from many sources, but:
A) Can we roughly model the spread of smallpox by looking for (for example) populated areas mentioned in one European source that are unmentioned, or mentioned as empty, by another source that would have likely crossed paths with that civ?
B) Can this tell us anything about trade routes and volume? Can we make any inferences about pop density, even very weak inferences, which might help us know where to look for stronger evidence? It does seem like each European discovery historically revises the estimated population(s) upwards.
2. LiDAR is awesome. Maybe not in the Amazon - in less foliage-dense places - is it being combined with, for example, an EMF (or some other kind of more granular lightweight detection system) - strapped to a drone?
It feels like once we see something interesting on LiDAR, sending a swarm of lightweight drones with some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside is quite a quick way to get interesting information. I don’t know a lot about radio waves, so I don’t know if there’s a suitably lightweight detector for this purpose.
Been a thing since the 1970s, physics dictates dimensions though - you can go wrap or dangle:
* https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/the-megatem-fixed-win...
* https://cseg.ca/airborne-electromagnetic-systems-state-of-th...
* https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi...
Would be neat if this could be automated and scaled up, I'm sure most of the world is as of yet unmapped with these kinds of detectors. Same with under the ocean.
I wonder if you couldn’t distribute heavier parts across a swarm - perhaps separating the sender and receiver(s) - running the wave at an angle (or many angles simultaneously) to the surface.
The sources mention mostly aircraft, rather than drones, and human pilots aren’t as good as drones at flying in extremely tight formations, which might allow (if the tech allows in the first place!) parts to be distributed to work around pesky laws of flight.
That lasted about 5 years after contact, and 20 years later it was all a waste.
The original caretakers were robbed of abundance and plenty.
> Decades of subsequent research by Ranzi and colleagues have slowly revealed remnants of peoples that occupied even the forest’s most remote areas.
They're considered remote now, but that's hundreds of years after the existing civilization was decimated.
This is a continuation of many findings in this direction. It's wonderful to imagine the many societies humans have created, and sad that we'll be able to learn so little about them.
Its believed that homo sapiens have been around for at least 300,000 years and yet we think almost all of that was entirely without civilization.
We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well.
It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth.
It does a lot to talk about modern anthropological studies that corrected a lot of misconceptions about early humans. Really fascinating book, basically postulates that humans have always been imaginative social creatures that were routinely well travelled; and the idea that early humans weren't also politically or culturally advance is wrong. In fact some societies were purposely designed to ensure things like hierarchy wouldn't exist for example; these societies persisted for thousands of years.
Really interesting book.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790?seq=1 Read this paper and the contemporary accounts and tell me that's not slavery.
>To modern Westerners, the use of such a kinship metaphor suggests and is believed to reflect genuine nurturing and closeness; however, in Africa and elsewhere it conveys an entirely different meaning: authority and subordination.
>Villagers, forming a gauntlet and armed with clubs, fire-brands, sticks, and other weapons, greeted the prisoners and rained down on these hapless individuals blows designed to inflict pain but not to kill This was often followed by torture and public humiliation and then deliverance to the grieving families, whose "matrons then chose either to adopt or to execute them," or both
If you look at pages 11-13, there's a discussion of ritual torture to prevent captives from escaping. 13-14 deal with the torture and execution of unruly captives. 15-16 deal with the etymological relationship between "slave" and "pet/livestock" in Iroquonian languages like Mohawk. Pages 17 and 18 discuss people preferring suicide to capture and the sexual exploitation of female captives.
>The ways in which captives were treated differed widely among Native American groups. Captives could be enslaved for life, killed, or adopted. In some cases, captives were only adopted after a period of slavery. For example, the Iroquoian peoples (not just the Iroquois tribes) often adopted captives, but for religious reasons there was a process, procedures, and many seasons when such adoptions were delayed until the proper spiritual times.
>In the cultural practices of the Iroquoian peoples, also rooted in a matrilineal system with men and women having equal value, any child would have the status determined by the woman's clan. More typically, tribes took women and children captives for adoption, as they tended to adapt more easily into new ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_among_Native_Americans...
> At its apex around 1100 AD, the city [Cahokia] covered about 6 square miles (16 km2), included about 120 earthworks in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions, and had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people.[5][a]
> During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the population of the city of Rome is conventionally estimated at one million inhabitants.
And there are much better examples according to some sources of large cities in the Americas than Cahokia.
> Hernan Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlan on 8 November 1519. Although there are no precise numbers, the city's population has been estimated at between 200,000 and 400,000 inhabitants,[27] placing Tenochtitlan among the largest cities in the world at that time.[28] Compared to the cities of Europe, only Paris, Venice and Constantinople might have rivaled it.
> In the 9th and 10th centuries, Constantinople had a population of between 500,000 and 800,000.[60]
> With the restoration of firm central government, the empire became fabulously wealthy. The population was rising (estimates for Constantinople in the 12th century vary from some 100,000 to 500,000), and towns and cities across the realm flourished.
> Kaifeng-Dongjing became largest and most prosperous city in China, with a population of over 400,000 living both inside and outside the city wall. The historian Jacques Gernet provides a lively picture of life in this period in his Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276, which often draws on Dongjing Meng Hua Lu, a nostalgic memoir of the city.[14]
> Around 750 AD, Chang'an was called a "million-man city" in Chinese records; most modern estimates put the population within the walls of the Tang city at around 800,000–1,000,000.[1]
I suggest you try to read it at least once. It's almost incomprehensible.
Rigveda would be around 1500Bce. Even Sumerian cuneiform would be far older at 3000 bce. If you want oldest oral records, some Australian aboriginal stories would be the ones at 8000 bce
The Sumerian tablets are likely older, but they were forgotten and then re-deciphered. The transliterations still carry educated choices made by a scholar (there's only so much you can do when the record breaks for a long time).
Meanwhile, we know exactly how people spoke those early vedas because there is a tradition that keeps chanting it, without stopping, since before it was written down. That chanting has error correction mechanisms, redundancy and other impressive features that further place the Rigveda in a unique place among earlier works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padapatha
> The oral tradition of the Vedas (Śruti) consists of several pathas, "recitations" or ways of chanting the Vedic mantras. Such traditions of Vedic chant are often considered the oldest unbroken oral tradition in existence, the fixation of the Vedic texts (samhitas) as preserved dating to roughly the time of Homer (early Iron Age or 800 BC).
https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/tradition-of-vedic-chanting-000...
> The value of this tradition lies not only in the rich content of its oral literature but also in the ingenious techniques employed by the Brahmin priests in preserving the texts intact over thousands of years. To ensure that the sound of each word remains unaltered, practitioners are taught from childhood complex recitation techniques that are based on tonal accents, a unique manner of pronouncing each letter and specific speech combinations.
---
It's not some obscure thing, a web search will yield tons of quality information about it.
That there were non-human civilizations before the dinosaurs?
Do you consider ants/bees to have civilizations or is it just humans currently?
Or do you mean that there were human civilizations in the prehistory? And what do you mean by that – is it foolish to think that they were hunter gatherers for hundreds of years?
I don't mean to make strawmans, that's why I'm asking.
I don't consider animals to have civilizations simply for having complex groups (ants or bees, for example). Though separately they do absolutely have emotions, family bonds, and long memories. My cows have proven that, each one is a different personality with their own clicks among the herd, and each cow treats the me and my wife differently so its not like "this one's always mean, this one wants to be petted" etc.
Depends what you call civilization. If there was a civilization what happened to it and why did it leave no trace.
> We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well.
Actually we do have evidence of what came before them, and there were extinction events.
> It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth.
We might not know about previous civilizations (that is the point of the Silurian Hypothesis - a lot of traces will disappear over time) but we have no evidence that there was any previous civilization, or of any sufficiently intelligent animal to build one. The oldest stone tools we have found are only about 3m years old.
This is a fascinating idea.
> and even archeological evidence is lacking.
A couple million years and your surface will be forever lost under a subduction zone. There is little sign of a global civilisation predating humans, but there is plenty spacetime for smaller societies that would have completely disappeared without a trace.
https://www.science.org/content/article/unearth-their-past-a...
From wikipedia: > The book presents recent research findings from different fields which suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...
Decades later people tried to repeat the journey and didn’t find major cities, ultimately calling Carvajal a liar. The reality was everyone died due to new diseases. It’s hard to imagine the impact disease had on South America in particular
I suspect that as more of the Amazon gets scanned with lidar Carvajal will be vindicated.
Precolombian north america actually had really sophisticated sanitation. In urban areas they pretty advanced waste management. In other areas, a lot of their seasonal mobility was possibly driven by sanitation needs. And they have really in depth practices around the ways they treat waterways and waste placement.
The problem was actually the exact opposite. Compared to Europeans, they were obsessive about soap and cleanliness. But Europeans lived in really dense villages alongside their livestock for many generations and they suffered greatly from it. The history of Europe is basically one outbreak after another. But ofc over time some amount of immunities developed
Maybe if North Americans had less sanitation and kept livestock they would've developed their own deadly diseases too that would've killed Europeans.
Cultures coming together historically were deadly. There is a school of thought that argues that the Persian and Roman downfall was directly associated with the ability of diseases to transit roads.
Of course, this is the stuff that we have records for. It's possible that there was a undocumented mass extinction event, But I tend to be skeptical of historical claims that are based on extremely localized and limited archeological projections.
Mass graves are almost completely absent and life tables show steady and predictable mortality curves over centuries
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024802118
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1071659/
https://globalbiodefense.com/2020/06/15/what-the-archaeologi...
I find it hard to believe that Europeans living in close quarters with livestock didn't result in increased rates of epidemics tbh but I'll take your word for it
i think it's quite likely that the casualties where in similar scope across two different civilizations, but that the colonialists advantage (if you can call it such) of excess population and higher density of settlers, meant that the colonialists simply outlasted a far smaller population group.
And it was much more about the horrid working conditions that these forced laborers were forced to work under.
So the sugar industry started importing African slaves, who actually had some malaria immunity.
This worked pretty well, and the transatlantic slave trade went on for centuries.
I don't know what this means. Moving to another location is practical, but not sophisticated.
The North American cities were certainly more advanced in terms of sanitation than anything in Europe at the time. You had stuff like dual aquaducts differentiating drinking water from washing water and public cleaning crews and urban waste maangement and people bathed daily. While London was throwing its shit in the streets, the Aztecs were building public toilets
"No native writing system was known among Indigenous peoples of North America at the time of first European contact"
Clearly, North America was not including Central America.
And also:
"No native writing system was known among Indigenous peoples of North America at the time of first European contact"
Also, use of birch bark by the N.A. Indians wasn't until the 1800's.
And WDYM "anyone"? Obviously plenty of people met them and plenty of civilizations derived from them. By the time Europeans got there, the Amazon Basin was home to 5-10 million people (some models push it up to 20 million). I'm sure traces of that culture and history still mark those indigenous cultures today
the controversy is mostly around whether or not it was a systemic, pervasive form of biological warfare. the evidence base is fairly small but needs to be considered in context of Native American cultural habits around durable recordkeeping (eg trade ledgers) vs colonial, and if colonists would record such an act
there was also active ethnic cleanses and genocides committed by the US government repeatedly throughout US history too and those are very well documented, all dotted with stories as bad or actively and intentionally worse than biological warfare
https://news.uoregon.edu/content/historian-examines-native-a...
"He was speaking in opposition to a treaty that proposed the Cherokees sell off 20 million acres of homeland—a large portion of present-day Kentucky and Tennessee. This tension exploded with the commencement of independence hostilities in July 1776; some Cherokee leaders sided with the British, and in response the US charged thousands of colonial troops with “the utter extirpation of the Cherokee Nation.”
https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2017/04/17/indian-removal-...
"Throughout American history, the treatment of indigenous Native Americans has violated numerous articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These violations resulted in the loss of numerous Native American homelands, the Cherokee being only one example, and the genocide of numerous other smaller tribes since the beginning of European colonization. This is largely due to Eurocentric ideals, like the natural law of the Puritan worldview, which elevates the status of European peoples over that of indigenous, Native American peoples through a biased worldview. This mindset is so pervasive and powerful that it still prevails today, evidenced by modern films and television that paint Native American tribes as savage, ignorant and of ill intent toward the “white man”, and the policies of the current United States government."
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_th... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_No... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_genocides_of_Indigen...
There's a simple explanation for this. The colonists were literate, and would keep diaries and write letters about their experiences. Churches would log births, deaths, and marriages. Printers would print newspapers. Later, these materials were fodder for academics who converted them into historical narratives.
The Indians were not literate and so did not write letters and keep diaries.
Even things like the number of Indians cannot be pinned down with any precision.
there is so much easily searchable resources for this and though it might not be your intent, your comment reads as willfully ignorant for being so broad and bought into the type of 16th century Puritan Eurocentrism that many of the articles above discuss in depth
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_writing_systems * https://www.science.org/content/article/roots-mesoamerican-w... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems * https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indigenous-languages-of-Nor...
"No native writing system was known among Indigenous peoples of North America at the time of first European contact"
And yes, I was referring to the North American Indians. I know the Mayans had writing. I even have a book on the Mayan writing system.
> they didn't have strictly hierarchical institutions that utilized this data for controlling their population
People did not write letters and keep diaries in order to control their population.
The book "Empire of the Summer Moon" which is a history of the Commanche empire, and the book laments that their only sources were diaries and letters written by colonists.
1: Sedentary farmers like Aztecs and possibly Pueblos and those doing Three Sisters farming, some of them like the Aztecs having significant civilizational achievements all considered.
2: Hunting nomads, first doing fire-stick farming to create good conditions for hunting animals as well as gather certain plants, and later utilizing horses after their introduction from Europe.
It doesn't mean they were stupid, they obviously picked it up quickly when they were exposed to it
We've deciphered Nahuatl and Maya script but Zapotec, Olmec, Isthmian, Quipu, and other scripts are still not well understood
"No native writing system was known among Indigenous peoples of North America at the time of first European contact"
In regards to paper, while the Aztecs had impressive achievements, especially considering the almost complete isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world (is there any civilization close to the achievements of the Aztecs and other Amerindians in Africa south of Egypt?), are you sure that amatl/amate counts as paper? It was possibly stretched bark, and not woven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amate#True_paper
> The Maya used a writing material called huun starting from the 5th century. It was made from the inner bark of the wild fig tree. It was cut and stretched thin rather than made of randomly woven fibers, which according to one source, disqualified it as true paper.
Aksum for a start.
It conquered part of the Arabian peninsula.
If it had partial natural borders like deserts, mountains and an active volcano, somewhat separating it from the rest of Africa in its south-western and western direction, and sizable numbers of Greeks and other peoples, and located on the very edge of Africa as close as possible to the Arabian Peninsula, it doesn't really seem to me to be the best example, upon closer examination. I can sort of understand why you would mention it as an example, though
Mali? Great Zimbabwe?
.
Great Zimbabwe's Great Enclosure is something, but it seems much less impressive than that of for instance Chichen Itza, despite being younger. And Great Zimbabwe must have had international trade, given artifacts from China was found there. On the other hand, archeologists and Europeans accidentally damaged it, and time wore it down, and thus it might have been more impressive than the current ruins indicate. The building approach with small, mortarless stones, and wooden lintel instead of arches or huge stones, despite the time period being 1100s to 1500s, might have limited what could be constructed, but perhaps the original edifices employed other techniques as well than wooden lintel. Though I do not understand how the wooden lintel survived that many centuries. Dry climate?
No one on either side had any real clue what was going on, and most probably thought it was a cruel punishment from the God(s).
Often the disease travelled faster than people, and when Europeans arrived, the natives were long since gone.
I understand the gist of this statement with regards to the size and complexity of indigenous civilizations, but we need to be much more careful with the framing.
Plenty of Native Americans (in both continents) survived the European diseases. but just looking at the North, the English colonists interacted heavily with Native Americans - hence the story of Thanksgiving. The "French and Indian War" pitted an alliance of the French and Indian nations against the English settlers.
It was a deliberate genocide campaign in the 19th century (a good 300 years after initial European contact) that largely exterminated native cultures from what is modern USA.
The current color of the continent is not some accident of "oh well we didn't know any better about disease". In Central and South America (and the far North), native cultures survived to a much greater extent and are still visible today.
In India the British deliberately caused famines, something they learned to do in Ireland. But the Irish famines are accepted and documented but British historians go out of their way to cover up their crimes against humanity in India and other colonies.
https://www.history.com/articles/colonists-native-americans-...