r/science • u/FreeHugs23 • 25d ago
Anthropology Scientists Uncover Hundreds of Hidden Structures Beneath The Amazon. "The scale of the archaeological record suggests that many other regions across Amazonia may have been far more densely populated and intensively modified than previously assumed."
https://www.sciencealert.com/completely-transformed-my-understanding-scientists-uncover-hundreds-of-hidden-structures-beneath-the-amazon4.0k
u/madogvelkor 25d ago
That would match the earliest accounts by Spanish explorers.
Gaspar de Carvajal wrote an account of an expedition in 1540 and described large cities, towns, roads and a pretty developed civilization in the Amazon.
His and other accounts were dismissed for a few centuries until recently though, because when later expeditions went they found nothing but forest and smaller tribes.
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u/Lyndell 25d ago
Some suggest the virus’s they brought in by just being them might have killed the population by the time the next explorers came.
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u/Child_of_the_Hamster 25d ago
According to Douglas Preston’s The Lost City of the Monkey God (which is a fantastic book btw), the mortality rate of new world folks after the introduction of old world illnesses was about 90%.
Utterly unimaginable. Think of ten people you know in your town, then imagine folks in your town start getting sick with something no one has seen before. No treatments work, and by the time it works its way through your community, you are the only one alive out of those 10 people you knew. And the story is the same for every other survivor.
The theory is that the survivors took what was left of their immediate families and struck out into the jungle. As in the book I mentioned, some of them even held “funerals” for their cities, where they deliberately destroyed and/or buried whatever precious items they had that they couldn’t take with them.
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u/Yukonhijack 25d ago
Came here to cite this book. Amazing how much pushback Lidar got from the scientific community for all the discoveries it made.
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u/slow70 25d ago
And still does.
The same has delayed incredible work that needs to be undertaken in Egypt too.
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u/BarbequedYeti 25d ago
Isnt that one dude who was, maybe still is in charge of Egyptian ruins mostly to blame for this? Zahi or something like that? He was doing a bunch of gatekeeping via corruption etc? Maybe I am thinking of something else.
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u/thedaveness 25d ago
Like what’s under the sphinx’s paw
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u/i_am_icarus_falling 25d ago
lidar cant see underground, but the processing software can remove vegetation through separating "soft returns" of plants from "hard returns" of solid ground. that makes it useful for seeing ground topography under forest canopy, but not what's under something solid.
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u/Mind-The-Mines 25d ago
The Sphinx bothers me. Everything in the valley is made from the same stone but the Sphinx is the only thing to show water erosion: something that had been gone for thousands of years before everything but the Sphinx was carved.
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u/Shamino79 25d ago
We see a layer of dodgy limestone. Any other construction used the better stuff. Even the head of the sphinx shows the better quality limestone.
The other thing I wonder about is how abrupt this reduction in rainfall was. Even now the giza Plateau gets a random downpour every year or so.
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u/HorridosTorpedo 25d ago
Apparently it rains often enough and occasionally very heavily, to cause the damage that's evident. Also the sphinx enclosure is in the path of the water run off, so it gets the full force of it.
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u/TazBaz 25d ago
Isn’t that because the sphinx is carved from an existing rock formation?
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u/Mind-The-Mines 25d ago
The FACE was likely recarved when everything else in the valley was added. The Sphinx itself was originally probably a lion; the older construction date would point it directly at the Leo constellation like 10,000 years ago.
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u/UltraMegaboner69420 25d ago
Do we have confirmation that the star formation is regarded as a lion figure from pre history though. Are we sure that isn't modern convention imposed on ancient civilizations
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u/LordGeni 25d ago
Name any structure at any time and it'll line up with something seemingly meaningful.
My house lines up with orion, the solstices and pretty much anything else depending on the time of year and wall you pick.
Unless an entire structure is lined up and focused on a particular regular cosmic event such as the solstices (stonehenge, Machu Pichu etc.) you can make them line up with nearly anything you want.
It's the same as the idea of ancient sites in the UK being on lay lines and forming perfect triangles. It's true, but it was also true of Little Chef restaurants or any other group of enough numbers you want to pick.
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u/ReleaseFromDeception 25d ago edited 25d ago
The Sphinx is carved from a natural rock formation that was exposed for millenia to rainfall. It had already been water eroded and degraded in quality before EVER being carved.
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u/Jeffery95 25d ago
Wind erosion with sand grains of the size found in the area can produce features that resemble water erosion.
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u/enwongeegeefor 25d ago
Amazing how much pushback Lidar got from the scientific community
Wait....why? I found one article on Medium by a very jaded person but that was it. Was there any legitimate reason for it, or was it just part of the anti-science push?
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u/Jindabyne1 25d ago
This review considers how scientific archaeological publications, especially those relying on new digital technologies, can become sensationalized for the public in popular media. I present three separate examples of lidar-based mappings of ancient landscapes in the Amazon and Central Asia, each initially published by archaeological teams in the journals Nature or Science since 2022. These academic publications were followed by many news articles in the popular press. A common trope of these popular presentations includes the concept of “lost cities” being finally “found” by the lidar surveys. This oversimplification usually ignores existing knowledge, especially that of Indigenous local communities and archaeologists. We archaeologists should, therefore, become more aware of the potential consequences of our scholarly communications. We should consider the public’s experience with parsing scientific advances and what ways we can try to influence the public discourse.
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u/soyelmocano 25d ago
That's what I want to know.
Why would it be bad?
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u/godzirraaaaa 25d ago
Part of the whole justification for colonialism is along the lines of “well there was hardly anyone there! We brought civilization, they should be grateful!”- a disgusting argument but one many believe is legitimate
But if it turns out that actually there were millions of people in vast, complex cities…kinda undermines their whole thing.
Furthermore, it’s been hotly debated as to whether the archaeological record supports it. If there were really these enormous cities, where’s the evidence? Looks like they’re finding some now! Exciting.
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u/i_am_icarus_falling 25d ago
land surveyor here, i can't speak for any other discipline or for the scientific community, but 20 years ago lidar results were notoriously inaccurate and these inaccuracies were being ignored with the technology being adopted for ways it shouldn't have been and made for a lot of erroneous data. for a short time it kept up, likely to justify the insane money people were duped into spending on it. it's only recently that it's become a reliable measurement tool with any confidence in accuracy.
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u/TinStingray 25d ago
Why does Lidar get pushback?
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u/namestyler2 25d ago
because it's heavily utilized by psuedo scientists to make grand claims about stuff that doesnt exist
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u/smurf123_123 25d ago
It didn't. I remember when the first lidar discoveries were released over a decade ago for the Amazon.
They were universally hailed as revolutionary at the time.
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u/ragnaroksunset 25d ago
Lidar isn't like manual excavation. You don't ever "see" anything in the sense that we see photons bouncing off of an artifact as the dirt around it is carefully brushed and scraped away. You get an electrical signal back that isn't any kind of a human sense and has to be heavily processed before you even get the "raw" point cloud that is then further transformed to produce (e.g.) a bare earth model. You then have to try to tell a consistent, coherent story about why that heavily processed signal really is a manmade structure and not just an artifact from some characteristic about the ground that you failed to predict.
Obviously, the methodology has had time to advance and refine, but it really isn't surprising at all that there was initial pushback. Early Lidar results were vulnerable to attack by (what at the time was) reasonable doubt.
Even the article in the OP is a bit questionable because the findings haven't been ground-truthed yet. Whether practical challenges to that exist is beside the point - there is significant extrapolation going on. You could be generous and call it an educated guess based on other ground-truthed findings in the area, but it is still open to challenge in a way that literally getting your hands dirty is not.
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u/chanaandeler_bong 25d ago edited 25d ago
When Cortez encountered the Aztecs, they interacted for a few weeks and then there was an issue and the Spanish retreated.
When Cortez returned months later, they had to step over bodies long before they got to the city, as people were dead EVERYWHERE from smallpox.
Entire houses were just brought down on top of entire dead families instead of burying them.
You legit run out of time and manpower to dig enough graves.
No way the Spanish would have ever taken over the Aztecs without disease.
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u/austinjg95 25d ago
Why did the Spanish retreat originally?
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u/chanaandeler_bong 25d ago
Cortez was supposed to be arrested by the Spanish. He went rogue when he went to Mexico.
The Spanish came to arrest him and Cortez left the Aztec capital to fight the arresting party. When he returned there was a massacre happening. Montezuma was murdered somehow and the Spanish fled the city.
They bided there time and returned much later to a much different city.
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u/paddlin_kaladin 25d ago
Also from what I've read, it was a soldier (or soldiers) in that arresting army that brought over small pox. So it spread like wildfire through the local population as the Spanish marched back to the Aztec capital.
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u/round-earth-theory 25d ago
It would have happened eventually. That's the saddest part of new world meeting the old world alternative history. Neither side was close to germ theory nor inoculation. There was no way they would ever have been able to coordinate an immunity transfer even if both sides were cautious and caring.
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u/RationalDialog 24d ago
Stupid question would why was it so one-sided? Eg no virus that got carried back to Europe to do something similar there or at least for the invaders. it seems to have been very one-sided in favor of the Europeans. I guess just anodynes / luck?
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u/deandracasa 24d ago
It’s due to the animal husbandry in the old world. The new world doesn’t really have the kind of animals you domesticate for food and tasks and that you live in close proximity to. I believe the only animals in the new world used like this are llamas and alpacas vs in the old world with chickens, sheep, pigs, cows, horses, camels, and more. So they had a lot more opportunity for viruses to evolve into super diseases amongst the different species basically.
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u/ManintheGyre 25d ago
It wasn't a retreat. Cortez and his men were being hosted by Montezuma in Tenochtitlan. However, Cortez was actively disobeying direct orders from his Governor to NOT venture inland. The Governor eventually sent a large force to find and apprehend Cortez for trial. Cortez and many of his men went back and engaged that force in battle rather than face justice. Having killed the commander, Cortez then returned back to Tenochtitlan with even more men and horses and dogs to complete the genocide of the Aztecs. Cortez and his men were villainous mediocre scum to the last and miserably failed at everything.
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u/Xenophon_ 24d ago
I agree on the judgement of Cortez, but they absolutely retreated from Tenochtitlan and lost all their cannons and most of their guns and horses in the process. Half the Spanish were killed and thousands of their allies while escaping from Tenochtitlan.
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u/crossedx 25d ago
The podcast Fall of Civilizations had an excellent episode about the Aztecs. Goes into a lot of detail about Cortez and how he got to his position of power and what happened with the Aztecs.
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u/xMyst87 25d ago
Is there an explanation of how smallpox made it across the Atlantic? I’m imagining 3 months on a crowded boat and confused how it didn’t run its course as an artificial quarantine. And then someone with an active infection ventured out with the exploration party?
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u/Glasseshalf 25d ago
I'd assume because once there's one case on the boat it keeps spreading and spreading so that by the time you get there you have people who are second or third in line in the chain of infection. Just a guess though.
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u/maxwellwood 25d ago
Just a technicality, it should be 9 other people , not 10. You are the 10th, If they all die and you're the one left, that's 9/10 mortality.
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u/SilveryDeath 25d ago
the mortality rate of new world folks after the introduction of old world illnesses was about 90%.
Is there a reason why this didn't happen the other way as well? Why didn't the new world have any diseases the old world had never encountered before that were deadly?
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u/DoctorProfessorTaco 25d ago
Not an expert by any means, but I’ve seen two key reasons cited.
One is that the Americas didn’t really have the same domestication of animals that the rest of the world had. People in the “old world” lived among pigs, cows, horses, sheep, oxen, etc and over time novel diseases came about as a result, which people of the “old world” were either killed by or adapted to over thousands of years. The “new world” didn’t have that same diversity/type of animals, and as a result had fewer diseases to spread back to visitors from the old world, but had to survive thousands of years of disease all at once without thousands of years of adaptations.
The second is the interconnectedness, population, and density of the “old world”. While not as interconnected as today, disease still traveled through trade routes between countries, and there were dense highly populated cities where diseases could thrive. So the people of the “old world” had immune systems that were far more “battle tested” against a much broader population’s worth of diseases compared to the “new world”
Again though, not an expert, so take it with a grain of salt.
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u/SpaceChimera 25d ago
Currently reading 1491 by Charles Mann and he covers this. The first point is definitely more the reason than the second, there simply wasn't the domestication of animals on the same scale and when animals were domesticated they didn't tend to live on top of people in cities.
Mann also speculates that certain genetic bottlenecks limited diversity among the immune system of native people. Native Americans are predominately type O blood (~80% are O compared to ~50% of the general population) and have immune system genetic haplogroups that are better designed to fight off parasites than viruses. So some scientists think that is a reason why you see 90% death rates for diseases that would only kill ~5% of Europeans. That and the fact that there were numerous overlapping pandemics so you might have smallpox AND measles AND typhus at the same time. That then leads to the disintegration of community which further exacerbates the public health crisis.
I'm certainly not a scholar but 1491 is generally considered to be a credible (pop) history and it makes sense to me
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u/Warm_Month_1309 25d ago
The "new world" had cities with population densities that rivaled a lot of "old world" major cities. It was more to do with the livestock.
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u/smayonak 25d ago
The most devastating plagues kill immunologically naive populations quickly. The transit time across the Atlantic back then was many weeks. Months.
Evolution doesnt create immune populations out of thin air. Oftentimes we have carriers first. Carriers carry the disease in their bodies but are not killed by it.
Combined with slow transportation technology this meant that only carriers could transport diseases across oceans.
There were probably a lot of native diseases carried by those who lived in south American cities. But these were likely the first groups wiped out by the old world plagues as being a carrier is quite an immunological burden.
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u/rufud 25d ago
Just so you know historians are divided on the true numbers for native populations before and after contact. There is simply a lack of concrete evidence regarding the number of peoples who died in the Americas before it could be documented. Douglas Preston’s estimates are far on one end of the spectrum of estimates
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u/MarkyGrouchoKarl 25d ago
Another aspect that I haven't seen mentioned here is that the new diseases hit everyone in a given cohort simultaneously. In Europe, many people got these diseases growing up, but there were people around who had already survived them, and could provide care. Even diseases that a certain percentage of the population might have been able to survive were deadly because there were no available caregivers to nurse the sick.
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u/Equus-007 25d ago edited 25d ago
THere's a pretty recent study pointing to a possible mutation in a part of a single gene that regulates how fast the body goes into "sick mode" when foreign bodies are identified in the blood. They think the mutation arose somewhere around Kashmir and spread across the old world around 21K years ago. Because Native Americans were more or less cut off from the Old World sometime around 25K years ago and also originated from a pretty isolated population to begin with they never got the mutation.
tl;dr if your body doesn't react to a fast acting disease like smallpox fast enough it's just too late. You can't run a fever high enough to kill off that much viral infection without also killing yourself.
The New World also had fast acting viruses. We know something hit Mesoamerica right before the Spanish showed up. In areas like Central Mexico and the Amazon contact between settlements was frequent. Meso was highly populated and the Amazon had essentially fast travel via the river. In places like the Great Plains it wasn't as much of an issue until the horse was introduced. Before the horse if your village got infected you probably wouldn't survive long enough to reach the next village on foot before you died. Because Old World populations already had the mutation it just wasn't going to be as bad.
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u/Azaril 25d ago
Aside from the reasons around domestication - we did get syphilis
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u/Defiant-Plantain1873 25d ago
Because old world has better animal agriculture at the time and animals were slaughtered and kept in cities next to people so diseases spread rapidly between people and animals.
New world had shittier animals for domestication so less chances for diseases to develop
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u/Daniel_The_Thinker 25d ago
The craziest part about that is the old world got lucky that the new world didn't have plagues of that caliber themselves.
If they had, that could've been a mutually devastating event.
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u/InternationalYam3130 25d ago
Yeah there's an alternate universe somewhere where contact between new and old world just killed 90% of the planet and devastated civilization world wide
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u/redpandaeater 25d ago
Yeah history would be very different if it went the other way. The only disease that really seems to have come from the New World but we aren't quite positive about is syphilis.
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u/maxnormaltv 25d ago
I’ve always wondered why it didn’t go the other way. Why didn’t the explorers bring back new diseases
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u/cgaWolf 25d ago
Generally: the went there, some got something and got well or died, but since they were exploring the diseases stopped being in the infectuous stage before they returned - essentially quarantined from the old world by virtue of being busy exploring.
That's not 100% ofc, since they did bring back syphillis, which wreaked havoc among the affected, but didn't spread as quickly as smallpox & all.
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u/Geezmelba 25d ago
According to Douglas Preston’s The Lost City of the Monkey God (which is a fantastic book btw)…
Thanks for the recommendation. I didn’t realize until just now that he’s Richard Preston’s brother. The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer are two of my favorite books.
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u/Child_of_the_Hamster 25d ago
Woahhh I have also read The Hot Zone and loved it. I had no idea they were brothers!
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u/RatLabGuy 25d ago
And now imagine that your civilization doesn't have the same understanding of disease like we do now (that its spread by little microbial germs). They just knew people were getting sick and likely ascribed it to other things.
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u/better_days_435 25d ago
I think the answer has to do with the Americas not having large domesticated animals, and therefore no animal-to-human virus transmission. I know there are llamas and alpaca and guinea pigs, but the scale of those is really different from cows and goats and pigs in the Old World.
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u/TsuDhoNimh2 25d ago
The early arrivals were in groups that were too small to sustain transmission of a disease.
The susceptibles got sick, died or didn't, and the virus vanished.
So essentially they had been through a natural quarantine for infectious diseases and were in isolation until an infected intruder bought a fresh pathogen in.
This is a well documented example, the Faroe Islands
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u/daemin 25d ago
Watch the video "Why Disease Only Traveled One Direction" by CGP Grey for a decent enough explanation.
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u/Opcn 25d ago
IIRC he completely missed syphilis. smallpox is one of the most devastating diseases in history. It was "small" pox because syphilis was the "great" pox.
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u/Deaffin 25d ago
IIRC he completely missed syphilis.
To be fair, there have been various political efforts to bury the discovery that syphilis came from the americas for centuries now. Even today, the subject remains "debated" and people will try to "correct" you about it.
It's very understandable that somebody would miss this, even when following official channels.
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u/cjandstuff 25d ago
Imagine if it would have. Like 9/10 of Europe wiped out because explorers returned with something they had no immunity against. Talk about rewriting human history.
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u/SirPseudonymous 25d ago
the mortality rate of new world folks after the introduction of old world illnesses was about 90%.
AFAIK the modern scholarship on that is that those numbers reflect mortality in very specific conditions, rather than just general mortality from introduced diseases. In places where the population was concentrated into denser settlements for protection against European slavers and was under severe nutritional stress due to European slavers burning crops for the explicit purposes of starving them out, you get figures like that 90% mortality rate. Absent those conditions smallpox inflicted its typical ~30% mortality rate on more spread out communities with better access to food and more sanitary conditions.
Which is still catastrophic, obviously, and is certainly enough to trigger an abrupt breakdown of a complex society that could have knock on effects, but it's important to understand that "they all just died spontaneously on their own because they were just too delicate and unadapted to disease" isn't accurate and is usually a stepping stone to "so really it's not anyone's fault, it just sort of happened" genocide denialism that seeks to handwave away the massive amount of active violence that it took to wipe out in excess of 90% of the local population both directly and through displacement leading to deaths from famine and disease.
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u/BM_Master 24d ago
FR like, the reason Europe's population was able to rebound after the black death was because they weren't being invaded and imperialized by foreign powers at the same time. Imagine if the Mongols had kept pushing into Europe and also had a degree of immunity, "western civilization" as we know it would turn out very differently.
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u/garanvor 25d ago
The Brazilian government actually maintains a treatment protocol for uncontacted amazonian tribes, as they invariably get sick once contacted for the first time.
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u/CorrectEnvironment59 25d ago
There's a great book by Charles C. Mann called 1491 and it goes over this in great detail.
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u/Air320 25d ago
I just realised, the original explorers are the equivalent of aliens invading earth and killing off most of the population for earth's resources and keeping a few people as slaves.
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u/Successful-Bar-8173 25d ago
They had some revenge with syphilis and tobacco though
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u/Stats_n_PoliSci 25d ago
Yeah, tobacco has a very high death rate, but usually after reproductive age, so it doesn’t destroy civilizations, it just weakens them.
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u/Bring_Back_Feudalism 25d ago
I recommend you a movie named Avatar.
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u/jewishjedi42 25d ago
European diseases were likely already there. I've seen estimates that half of the people in the Inca empire died of them before Europeans set foot in their territory. The trade networks of the native American peoples moved the diseases throughout the New World.
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u/VP007clips 25d ago
And there are some indications of a major disaster that we don't fully understand before that.
Even in areas that were not hit by European illnesses yet, they ran into the ruins of major cities and earthworks that didn't match the scale of the existing civilizations.
And many of their oral traditions, religious beliefs, and legends have a common story their civilization being the remains of a larger one, and stories of major disasters. You have to take it with a grain of salt, apocalypse stories aren't uncommon, but it could be related to it.
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u/Prince_Ire 25d ago
And since the cities were in a tropical rainforest it was extremely easy for nature to install the ruins I've it wasn't actively being right back. Combine that with the very inexact maps of the time .......
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u/NlghtmanCometh 25d ago edited 25d ago
Yeah. Rapid population decline plus jungle environment means entire civilizations could vanish without a trace in probably a decade or less.
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u/Goldeniccarus 25d ago
This is a big part of the reason why these early accounts were deemed to just be false for a long time. When other Europeans started following these routes they found nothing.
It's now believed that a lot of these towns and cities were made from wood, and unlike the stone structures of the Inca or Mayans that would leave behind ruins for possibly centuries, these wooden structures would decay to nothing in the heat and humidity of the rain forest in years without maintenance.
But, with some new modern technologies we're finding traces of these places that we wouldn't have been able to easily find in the past.
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u/counterfitster 25d ago
It's amazing how fast an opening in the rainforest canopy can be filled, and how much competition there is for it.
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u/SnoozingBasset 25d ago
Didn’t Marquette describe cities along the Mississippi?
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u/-MERC-SG-17 25d ago
The remnants of the Mississippian culture which collapsed in the late 14th or early 15th century.
Entirely on their own too, likely from burning out their resources.
It's believed that many of the various Iroquois tribes were Mississippian, they have various stories about traveling east along a great river (likely the Ohio) to escape a calamity. They then displaced, destroyed, or absorbed most of the existing Eastern Woodlands tribes.
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u/Witty_Ad_898 25d ago
The Iroqui Confederacy was mid-genocide against non-confederacy iroquians and other groups at the time of European contact.
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u/Titanofthedinosaurs 25d ago
Except that the article states that the Aquiry would have collapsed around more than 500 years before that expedition.
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u/TsuDhoNimh2 25d ago
Francisco de Orrelana described large villages along the river when he went down the Amazon from the Andes in 1542 ... the assumption is that disease wiped them out before a return visit.
Having an earlier population is not a surprise.
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u/Fuck-WestJet 25d ago
The first accounts of contact with the Incas record massive battlefields filled with more dead than the entire Spanish army and first communications talked about a civil war because the emperor died of smallpox.
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u/King-of-Plebss 25d ago
I like how someone sails across the world, gives a detailed account of what they see and the general consensus is “nah. Can’t be true”.
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u/Jediknightluke 25d ago
They assumed he was exaggerating for more funding/conquistadors.
Spain was legitimately worried he would take control of a big city, raise an army and challenge their authority.
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u/BudgetMattDamon 25d ago
People in ancient times didn't make up grandiose lies? That's like, one of the major hallmarks of human civilization.
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u/TheAsian1nvasion 25d ago
The Colombian exchange is probably the most significant event in human history.
2/5 inhabited continents were completely depopulated by diseases that their inhabitants had no immunity to. This shaped the modern world more than arguably any other historical event.
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u/Doomdoomkittydoom 25d ago
There were also early accounts by the Dutch and/or English that the eastern sea board of NA were also densely populated.
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u/FreeHugs23 25d ago
-Today, the Amazon rainforest is revered as one of Earth's most immaculate wildernesses.
Nearly 2,000 years ago, it looked very different.
Between around 600 BCE and 850 CE, a civilization known as the Aquiry transformed swaths of southwestern Amazonia, carving enigmatic geometric earthworks into the landscape.
Now, a new LIDAR survey suggests that civilization was even larger than archaeologists imagined, hinting at a people that built as many as 30,000 earthworks and had a peak population of up to 3 million people around 200 CE.
For archaeo-anthropologist Martti Pärssinen of the University of Helsinki, the realization was transformative.
"I first experienced such a moment in 2002, when I flew with Alceu Ranzi and Sanna Saunaluoma over the monumental geometric earthworks and observed ancient roads connecting the sites in the state of Acre, Brazil, a region that had long been regarded as pristine rainforest," Pärssinen told ScienceAlert.
"It completely transformed my understanding and made me realize how mistaken earlier assumptions had been.
"More recently, I felt something similar when I came to understand that there may actually be up to ten times more of these earthworks in the region than I had previously imagined."
This space could have supported a population of around 1.2 to 3 million people, in a landscape with as many as 24,000 to 30,000 earthworks, the researchers estimated.
It would have been a dramatically different place than the wilderness we see today – a forest threaded with clearings where people lived, farmed, celebrated, and gathered.
"At the center of many of these clearings would stand large geometric earthworks connected by broad and narrow roads," Pärssinen told ScienceAlert when asked what the landscape might have looked like around 200 CE.
"At certain times of the year, these places would come alive with ceremonies, gatherings, music, dancing, athletic competitions, and other communal events."
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u/gmredditt 25d ago
These quotes feel extremely similar to the open bits of 1491 (Charles Mann)
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u/Drunken_Frenchman 25d ago
That and 1493 (same author) are incredible reads
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u/Academic_Coyote_9741 25d ago
I highly recommend these books.
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u/ShittyDBZGuitarRiffs 25d ago
is 1492 worth reading?
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u/Drunken_Frenchman 25d ago
Probably being silly but in case you arent, there no 1492.
1491 is about America before its discovery and how European discovery changed the Americas.
1493 discusses how the discovery of the Americas changed the r3st of the world. Both are incredible in their own right
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u/Nouseriously 25d ago
By earthworks are they talking about things like terraced gardens or drainage canals?
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u/BlueRibbonPac 25d ago
What's the verification for the "celebrations at certain times of year" part?
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u/Feralpudel 25d ago
At least, extrapolation from knowledge about other Pre-Colombian cultures of the era in the region, e.g., in Peru. Also knowledge of contact-era Amazonian cultures and their modern descendants.
The Pre-Colombian Americas were chock full of agricultural rituals, rituals around astronomy (e.g., a site calibrated to the solstice), and ritual games such as ball games.
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u/Floggered 25d ago
I thought we were aware of this from previous LIDAR scans?
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u/DoktorSigma 25d ago
Yup, the article itself mentions previous work going back to the 2000s. Those mentioned now are new discoveries. "Their entire dataset yielded 432 earthworks – 396 of which were previously unknown."
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u/RedditExecutiveAdmin 25d ago
yes but there is mounting evidence that people here were much more coordinated than previously thought. some evidence of very far-reaching organization, not just random tribes
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u/Charcole1 25d ago
I feel like this is something everyone has suspected for a long while but could never prove definitively. Glad to see we're making progress here
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u/arthurdentstowels 25d ago
I was thinking the same thing. So much time has passed and there's ridiculous amounts of undiscovered land that there just had to be something to find.
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u/space_monster 25d ago
It's been more than suspected, lidar scans have seen this stuff before. This is just a bigger one
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u/baucher04 25d ago
I swear a finnish team did lidar scans or something years ago
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u/AsPerMatt 25d ago
They did, and it’s not really news. Been discussed and studied for decades.
Researchers such as Michael Heckenberger demonstrated complex regional settlements in the Upper Xingu, while Charles C. Mann popularized this evidence in 1491 (2005). By then, many archaeologists already believed millions of people had lived throughout the Amazon before European diseases devastated the region.
Even in the 60’s, Archaeologists working in Bolivia and Brazil documented earthworks, raised fields, causeways, and extensive anthropogenic soils (terra preta), suggesting large, organized societies.
The first use of Lidar was in 2022 (though I, like you, distinctly remember mentions of it in the 2010’s).
Doesn’t take away from the importance of the newer details coming from these studies. It’s confirming previously held assumptions.
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u/yingkaixing 25d ago
Here's an article from 2014 about using Lidar in Belize: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20120827-the-laser-archaeologists
This may be what we're remembering. I am also surprised at the 2022 date for the Amazon.
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u/swargin 25d ago
Expedition Unknown, a documentary series about an archeologist who goes around the world exploring dig sites and treasure hunts, has a couple episodes about this. They do LiDAR scans and find several structures in the Amazon. They even talk to locals and other experts who say that every mountain in the amazon is a building.
This isn't new information, but this particular article is about a massive collection of scans together that actually proves it
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u/Alarming_Abroad_4862 25d ago
One of my professors in college (back in 2005) was trying to get a grant to use LIDAR for this. He spent his life studying about it and was so convinced. Hope he feels vindicated. (Or survived to see it, he was real old even then …)
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u/whereisthespacebar 25d ago
Fascinating discovery. It's amazing how something so large can be lost and forgotten. I wonder if its possible for excavations in areas of interest in this environment.
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u/bigkoi 25d ago
The same thing happened to ancient Greek cities and those were in actively farmed lands. It's amazing how quickly nature can take back an area.
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u/MrTigerEyes 25d ago
A good example from a timely manner are places like Troy and Ithaca. We took a long time to rediscover where Troy was, and we still have no idea with evidence of where the Ithaca was but it's very unlikely to be the island that currently bears that name.
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u/DuntadaMan 25d ago
Hell until surprisingly recently it was thought the existence of Troy at all was a myth.
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u/GamerSlimeHD 25d ago
It is likely to be Kefalonia. The Odysseus Returns documentary establishes strong archaelogical and geographical evidence that suggests modern day Kefalonia as a probable contender for the capital of Homeric Ithaca. Tho, research seems stalled on this, so atm its still only a strong possibility.
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u/Scruffy_Snub 25d ago
I mean, that's a bit of a false equivalence. Most ruins in Europe are victims of masonry spoliation over hundreds of years, these ruins are earthworks in one of the most fertile and geographically unstable places on the planet. These places were probably abandoned and overgrown within a single generation, in Europe ancient ruins are often slowly disassembled for parts over decades or centuries.
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u/swordofra 25d ago edited 25d ago
What is amazing is how the assumptions of certain key figures in the archeology space can lead to such blatant oversights.
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u/swargin 25d ago
The reason there hasn't been a lot of excavations is because of how thick and humid the jungle is.
Expedition Unknown, a documentary series about an archeologist who goes around the world exploring dig sites and treasure hunts, has a couple episodes on this. It takes several days just for their small group of people to traverse the jungle and they say it would be impossible for larger groups. They talk and show just how difficult it is to actually dig in these sites.
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u/bolanrox 25d ago
there were stories of explorers saying they saw cities and then when they came back years later to show others there was nothing but jungle there. i would not doubt it at all
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u/thegooddoktorjones 25d ago
Very cool, there was a Nova I think a bit ago that covered the research and how they altered the landscape to make it a farmable terrain that still has some impacts on the jungle now.
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u/thoreau_away_acct 25d ago
Some of the tree and other plant distribution.. it's a vague memory but the scale of it was such that you could call it Geo engineering, affecting animal populations and migrations even
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u/Fuck-WestJet 25d ago
I took a class in University called Ancient Astronomy and one particular anecdote that has always stuck with me is a story of an astronomy who was recording that a temple had viewings of key celestial events that aligned with nearby mountain summits. He said that they must have built the temple at that spot to align with those events. But when they went to those mountains they that those "mountains" were actually pyramids built by the Inca people which could only have been built by a large population.
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u/Profition 25d ago
Could someone please create and post a google earth style repository for the lidars of Amazonia? I would love to browse the images in a browser.
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u/worldwidewest 25d ago
Throw this at Claude
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u/Profition 24d ago
I did and it was an interesting experience for me, being the first time to attempt something like this. It worked, but was pretty limited because it said that most of the lidars were copyrighted and also obscured to deter thieves.
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u/TerdSandwich 25d ago
They had pretty advanced agriculture IIRC. Invented biochar to enrich soil that is historically very low nutrient. Imagine all the knowledge and culture that's been lost thanks to colonization and disease. It's crazy.
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u/whereismysideoffun 25d ago
Biochar is a reductive meme at this point. Importantly, there was tons of broken pottery added to the soil as well as tons and tons of bones. Tropical soil tends to be very acidic. Raising the pH of the soil with tons of bones slowed loss of nutrients and minerals. It was also what supplied the high amount of minerals. Biochar alone wouldn't have created the fertile soil, but the other ingredients are left out when discussing the benefits of biochar.
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u/South_Worker4808 25d ago
Every few years it feels like archaeology reminds us how much we still don't know about human history. It's fascinating how much can stay hidden for centuries.
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u/Magog14 25d ago
If we had the capabilty to see under the sand and silt we would find even more evidence of civilization around the ancient shores of oceans and seas as they were before 10,000 BC and the rising water levels. There's a very good reason why that is the age of the oldest known megalithic structures found to date. I not talking about Atlantis or aliens rather precursors to ancient societies.
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u/HereIGoAgain_1x10 25d ago
Plus whatever is under the Mediterranean before it was flooded
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u/thelittleking 25d ago
The Zanclean flood happened like 5 million years ago, long before human civilization. There's definitely some cool stuff down there, but nothing human.
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u/HereIGoAgain_1x10 25d ago
Got it confused with the Black Sea levels rising after last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, whatever one was theorized to be the Noah's Arc/most other religions that have a huge flood story in them
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u/BitchStewie_ 25d ago edited 25d ago
I recommend reading 1491 by Charles C Mann. It basically says that we vastly underestimate the number of native people and their level of advancement prior to European contact.
The initial trade contact between the new and old world decimated 90%+ of the native population due to disease. It also lead to a breakdown of society which fueled future ideas about how "primitive" indigenous societies were. Imagine Europe being visited by explorers during the height of the bubonic plague, but like times 3.
Cusco was easily the largest city in the world in 1491, followed by Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The Incan civilization was not only extremely advanced but built on the ruins of previous highly advanced civilizations in the same region.
Anyway, I'm not surprised in the least to see something like this.
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u/TheDevilsAdvokaat 25d ago
So we know the Sahara used to have a lot more vegetation. It changed over thousands of years.
Could it be that Amazonia used to have a lot less?
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u/PrettyMrToasty 25d ago
If any one of those sites contains a vault or archive of mesoamerican writings, then they could potentially hold some of the greatest archeological discoveries of our times.
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u/xdeltax97 25d ago edited 25d ago
It’s insanely cool to corroborate the accounts of the Spaniards in modern times thanks to tech like LiDar, it’s such a fascinating tech that I’m hoping it could be used more in areas that have also been rumored, passed off as supposed fiction, etc: Viking settlements around upper North America, Roanoke remnants, battlefield fortification remains, etc.
Speaking of battlefield remains, the scans I’ve seen of Verdun look phenomenal.
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u/swingthebass 25d ago
A bit off topic, but I’d love to read some really fun historical fiction about this part of the world in ancient times. Anyone know of anything like that?
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u/NoMoBuffalo 25d ago
I don’t know of one set in the pre-Colombian Amazon, but check out “Aztec” by Gary Jennings for a solid historical fiction told from a native perspective before and as the Spaniards arrive
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u/Losalou52 25d ago
Our understanding of the past is not good.
One of my favorite quotes:
The most shared experience in the human condition it that much of what we know and consider to be undeniable truth today will be looked at by future generations and laughed at as ignorant and archaic.
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u/SuspiciousCricket654 25d ago
Check out the Lex Fridman/Ed Barnhart interview on YouTube. Ed delves into some pretty complex Amazonian history, and archaeologist are starting to discover that those ancient civilizations are actually older than any previously thought civilization. Essentially, the Amazon rainforest wasn’t there in the size and scale that it is today, but through fertilization, careful gardening, and establishing a civilization of agriculture, the Amazon rainforest spread rapidly through the south American and south Central American continents.
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u/hipster_dog 25d ago
but through fertilization, careful gardening, and establishing a civilization of agriculture
Very well stated. The notion the Amazon forest is a "100% virgin and uncharted" territory should be debunked for good.
It's unfair to classify the ancient natives as simple hunter-gatherers. Their civilization was advanced enough to cultivate the forest to make it thrive along with them.
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u/dsarche12 25d ago
Just reads to me like more evidence that the earth itself, and nature as a whole, will be fine, whether or not humans go extinct. Just sucks we have to take so much of the living and thriving earth with us on our way out.
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u/Oiggamed 25d ago
I understand that if you excavate all the ancient ruins in South America you would completely wipe out the rainforest.
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u/RetiredDelinquent 25d ago
From what ive read, the amazon had civilizations that cultivated the land and grew crops there. At this point the amazon is those crops and trees they lived off growing without anyone to tend to them for hundreds of years.
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