Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

marojejian 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Originally heard about this via Nature podcast's interview with the researcher: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02367-x

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.

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delichon an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> In the past 40 years, Amazônia has lost more than 13% of its vegetation cover.

This is loss of original forest cover, replaced by non-native vegetation: pasture, agriculture & tree plantations. 13% is about the amount of vegetation coverage domesticated in Amazonia over 40 years. It has been converted from wilderness into a renewable, denser source of ingredients for food, clothing and shelter.

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culi an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The Amazon rainforest was extensively modified by pre-Columbian indigenous societies. Some anthropologists have even called it a "manufactured landscape". Modern LiDAR mapping has revealed thousands of large geometric ditches, reservoirs, causeways, mounds, and earthen infrastructure.[0][1] Up to 10% of soils are highly fertile man-made terra preta soils and trees like cocoa, acai, and brazilnut show an unnatural "hyperdominance" distribution due to ancient orchards. Many plants throughout show some degree of domestication[2][3]

And some have even proposed a possible human role in the transition of parts of the Amazon from grassland to rainforest about 10k years ago[4]

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/282/1812/201...

You don't achieve a population of 3M people without such extensive landscape modification.

[0] https://www.zmescience.com/science/archaeology/archaeologist...

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02773...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/humans-living-...

[3] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-archaeolo...

[4] https://www.discovermagazine.com/10-800-years-ago-early-huma...

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aaron425 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can you defend your statement and cite how renewable this domesticated area is? Aren’t most areas deforested for cattle farming (legendarily inefficient) and soy plantations (monoculture)?

Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2025.107810

	▲	culi 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The funny/sad thing about the Amazon soil is its incredibly poor nutritionally. Because there's so much rain, many minerals and nutrients get washed out. In fact, poor soils often result in such high biodiversity.[0] Which means when they slash and burn to grow soy, they only really have a year or 2 where the soil can support that. Afterwards all its good for is cattle (if that). But its so plentiful and demand is so high for beef and soy that we keep doing this [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWVATekt4ZA

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GroksBarnacles 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

You know "wilderness" serves functions too, right?

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dyauspitr an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s so crazy that they all just… died because of the old world diseases before anyone really got a chance to meet them as a civilization.

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culi an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The Aquiry civilization (that this paper is about) actually ceased (either due to collapse or people changing their mind about that way of life, who knows) between 850 and 1000 CE.

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

	▲	dyauspitr 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I mean people from the old world.

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dkga an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not all - it is very likely this large Amazonian civilization perished before the Iberian colonists arrived in the region. For example, these geoglyphs mapped in the (super interesting!) paper are dated 2k years before the Europeans first arrived in Brazil.

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PeterHolzwarth 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It really is a strange and horrific metaphor, analogy, and parable about the effects of isolation - made all the more distressing because it wasn't intentional. It was just our broader ancestors going about their business as normal people.

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dyauspitr 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yeah, for the most part, I mean there are tales about small pox ridden blankets being intentionally given to the Native Americans, but I don’t know if those are apocryphally or not. Either way it’s not like we had vaccines and immunization back then it would’ve happened anyways.

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paimapi 15 minutes ago | parent [-]

there are recorded incidents: https://project1492.org/small-pox-blankets/

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."

	▲	culi 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Malcolm Harris' book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World goes into surprising depth on the history of the California Genocide[0] in the first few chapters. It's a very well-researched work [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide

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IncreasePosts an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The same thing happened to the native North Americans too. When the Pilgrims showed up in Massachusetts in 1620, the whole region between there and maine had been reduced in population by 90+% due to a plague inadvertently brought by traders

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TimedToasts an hour ago | parent [-]

The thing was that _any_ outside contact was going to be doom for North America. A lack of resistance and no sanitation equaled a tinder box just waiting for the right plague.

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culi 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

> A lack of resistance and no sanitation

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.

	▲	InTheArena a minute ago \| parent [-]
		This is commonly repeated, but if you go look at actual record keeping - at the history of early North American and Caribbean/Bahamas colonization through the period where there stopped being as much cross-cultural contact - we see epidemic after epidemic wipe our colonials as much as any. The mortality rate is stagginer - even places that should have shown this the most - Haiti for example, the documented evidence was far closer to 100% mortality to Europeans, and significantly less for indigenous. 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. But I tend to be skeptical of historical claims that are based on extremely spotty archeological projections.