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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...
Also 3M people is probably a lot easier than 220M (and that's just Brazil).
Nowadays it's estimated the Amazon has around 46.9 million people. Much more than 3M, but still much less than your 220M
This is the noble savage trope you're putting on display
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.
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.
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.
From your perspective, what caused the extinction of several megafauna/large species of animals after the arrival of Aboriginals in Australia?
(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.)
For a clearer and possibly more settled and agreed upon example: From your or the other commenter's perspective, what caused the extinction of Moa after the arrival of Maori in New Zealand? Some claims that the Moa went extinct within 100 years of human settlement, and that it had a large population before that
>The extinction of all moa species occurred relatively swiftly, between 1380 and 1440, making it one of the most rapid extinctions in history. Contributing factors included habitat destruction through woodland burning, the introduction of non-native predators such as dogs and rats, and the birds' natural life cycle, which featured low egg production.
It's not a good example to use to prove your contention, because it's an outlier, and because it involved the use of technology that wasn't necessarily available to other incidences of megafauna extinction.
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.
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.
> If your evidence is the total extinction of American megafauna
The evidence is the extinction of most American megafauna species.
> 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.
Humans have continued to survive everywhere, so that is evidence the the presence of humans everywhere has been sustainable.
The comment making the claim about indigenous societies in the Americas is that they are "ecologically compatible". They are compatible with an ecology they altered. This is, again, true everywhere. You might argue that industrialisation has changed this as a (relatively) stable state is not reached because of continuing rapid change, but it was true before industrialisation.
> 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.
I have two objections to that:
1. Its not all megafauna, it is most. Some species can survive humans. 2. The extinctions have happened across many different climates and cultures and on every continent and many islands.
It is not proved beyond doubt that humans have always caused extinctions, but the pattern is very consistent, which makes it by far the most likely explanation. Even where hunting is not the direct cause, many things humans do (such as agriculture) will destroy their habitats.
Where humans did not arrive until much later than most places (e.g. in places such as New Zealand or Madagascar) megafauna survived until after they did, and were then gone with a few hundred or a few thousand years.
Were the japanese naturally compatible in the distant past? And if in the end this ecological compatibility just so strongly correlated with development and ability than what boundary does it actually refer to?
They’re saying that a lot of indigenous culture and practice was more sustainable. This may be for various reasons, and isn’t true only of American indigenous people but almost certainly people in Japan, India, Australia, etc., where urban civilization that depended on large scale agriculture didn’t take hold.
This is, if you see it, only evidence that there’s no inevitable path for progress and development for our species. We have the ability to look back, see how different parts of the world handled their engagement with their environment, when and where that degraded, and make changes, proving that none of this is inherent to any part of our species, but rather cultural and social structures that emerged for a bundle of reasons.
Europe seems very sustainable to me, people have been living there for thousands of years and are still thriving. Why do you say Europeans doesn't have sustainable agriculture? They wouldn't have been able to become so dominant otherwise.
And what even does “become so dominant” mean? You do know evolution isn’t some straight accumulative equation, right? Dominance means all things done are good?
Dominance over what time scale? Sustainable over what timescale?
The sad fact is, for any society, short term dominance causes long term instability. That multiplies a lot when you spend hundreds of years accumulating land and control and wealth. It’s sure sweet while the going lasts. Then what happens when there’s pushback?
We can’t fully answer that question yet. We’re living through that post colonial era of Europe.
My hope is Europe thrives. I doubt it will if it goes back to its old extractive practices. Thankfully, most governments in Europe seem to have moved past that mentality.
Do you rely on the surrounding plants and animals in your area for sustenance, creating tools, daily life, etc? You do not, that's what I mean by living above/apart. Living in this way does not lead to an ecological society or a shared knowledge base of the surrounding ecology. Do your spiritual and cultural practices involve or integrate that reliance in some way? That's what I'm getting at.
Europeans did that a few hundred years ago, almost everyone did all over the world, that is not unique to anywhere.
Not true, there are obviously other ways. There is an intuitive distinction between living in harmony with natural systems and simply dominating them with technology. That is all you have to believe, it doesn't have to be grounded in ethnonationalism.
Humans are unquestionably part of the environment, and everything humans do bends the environment to their will, but it would clearly be at odds with how we use words to argue that say a nuclear power station is just as much "part of the ecology" as cultivation of soil.
No? There's a rhetorical distinction, there isn't a physical distinction. It's like holistic medicine vs modern medicine, or wellness vs health, or human-centered design vs regular design, or chemical-free food vs regular food
Any given thing is one or the other of these soley based on your perspective of it. Im sending this message to you right now by performing a ritual on a object made of rocks some guy found in the ground
What exactly are you doubting? Is the word "harmony" meaningless gibberish in your opinion? Are there any nonphysical words you admit are meaningful?
Other animals such as orcas also have been shown to have societies, language, culture, and history that is passed onto children. You could perhaps say that is also second nature.
Call it what you want, but clearly modern human society is distinct in that it stands above (quite literally in the form of cities) and uniquely has the ability to threaten the rest of life on the planet. While at the same time being part of nature.
Humans are part of the surrounding ecology whether we recognize it or not, as others have noted in this thread. The difference is many indigenous societies have tended to recognize it and integrate it into socio-cultural practices as a necessary part of survival in their local ecology, while our modern human society mostly does not.
Consider the Kucadikadi people of now-Mono Lake , whose autonym literally means "eaters of the brine fly pupae". That is how closely their society, culture, and language is related to their local ecology, which "evolved" (in the 2nd nature sense) out of thousands of years of human society development and survival in that place. Notably their society has not developed to threaten or extinquish the brine flies on which they depend.
My working hypothesis for this question involves colonization, technologically driven scales of time and space, and selection. The essence is totally obvious: either you develop sustainable practices or you go extinct.
Consider a group of people colonizing an area previously uninhabited by humans. When they arrive, they will disrupt the local ecosystem to some extent.
In some cases, the new combined system of ecosystem structure and human culture will settle into an attractor that can support humans for a long time (relative to frequency of colonization). In other cases, it will not, and the human population will die out. (Externally driven parameter changes can also turn a sustainable system into an unsustainable one.)
With a low enough colonization rate, most active communities will be operating sustainably.
Over time, technology increases the rate of spread of humanity. Cultures with more advanced technology increasingly spread into existing settlements as well as taking over existing land.
But the basic process continues: some systems last; some do not. The ones that last longer are the ones with sustainable practices.
This process is now operating at a global scale. Either we get sustainable, or things get bad.
Some people have concluded that the easier path is to colonize other planets.