Nevermind the eyewitness accounts, Science had explained;
Mysterious mounds in the southwest corner of the Amazon Basin were once the site of ancient urban settlements, scientists have discovered. Using a remote-sensing technology to map the terrain from the air, they found that, starting about 1,500 years ago, ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated centres, featuring 22-metre-tall earthen pyramids, that were encircled by kilometres of elevated roadways.
The complexity of these settlements is “mind blowing”, says team member Heiko Prümers, an archaeologist at the German Archaeological Institute headquartered in Berlin.
“This is the first clear evidence that there were urban societies in this part of the Amazon Basin,” says Jonas Gregorio de Souza, an archaeologist at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. The study adds to a growing body of research indicating that the Amazon — long thought to have been pristine wilderness before the arrival of Europeans — was home to advanced societies well before that.
h/t The Greek
“… When the Aztecs sacrificed people to Huitzilopochtli (the god with warlike aspects) the victim would be placed on a sacrificial stone. The priest would then cut through the abdomen with an obsidian or flint blade. The heart would be torn out still beating and held towards the sky in honor to the Sun-God…” ( from wikipedia )
That is only one of dozens of barbaric things they used to do.
It takes more than building 60 feet tall pyramids and stone roads for a people to be called civilized.
PS: I know that was not the point of Kate’s post…but I am not totally off topic either
Now its done with needle and we call it myocarditis. #brightside
Don’t forget the half million babies slaughtered every year.
Aztecs did that to prevent climate change.
To answer you question. Gang Green has been saying the rain forest jungle bunnies lived one with the land forever. This is proof that is false. They once built large settlements.
I am old enough to remember being taught that large tracts of rain forest were cleared for farming until the soil was nutrient depleted. The farmers moved on to another area. The forest simply retook the abandoned cleared land. But that doesn’t meet the narrative or supports Bruce Cockburn’s wailing about trees falling in the forest.
I find the majority of architecture in the past could very easily be understood when you add water…lots and lots of water.
Far easier to use the water to float and carry your materials.
They had brilliant engineers who could do magic with what they had to work with.
Even ‘Stonehenge’ from an engineering perspective could have quite easily been a foundation to a much larger wooden structure on top.
Adding water really helps in moving a multitude of materials…back in the day…
A-maize-ing!
The part about maise pollen was pretty interesting.
The only ones who are suprised are the small minds of Acadamia.
Archaeologists – Spectacularly wrong time and time again.
I’m a fan of Praveen Mohan’s YouTube Channel where he takes you through some astonishing ancient architectural sites in India. Forget which temple it was but archaeologists claimed it was 900 years old…locals said no…it’s been around for thousands of years. Nope, Archaeologists were having none of it, so 900 years it is. Sheer arrogance.
“…along with patches of unusually nutrient-rich soil that could have been created by people, might indicate that ancient Amazonians had indeed shaped their environment.”
That right there is in need of some serious study.
Terra Prata. Produces a high quality soil from smouldering wood with low oxygen.
Interesting.
“… long thought to have been pristine wilderness before the arrival of Europeans …”
That reminds me…the best explanation they have as to why there are no more trees ( or very little trees) on Easter Island ( it used to be covered with Palm trees) and why the island was abandonned is because the non-Europeans/non-white people that used to live there cut down every freakin tree until there was nothing left.
It was too many people using too little resources and not planning for the future.
The romantic notion that non white – and of course, always noble – savages have always been in harmony with nature until we evil white people came to destroy everything is a tad bit exaggerated, it is mostly a myth.
Unfortunately people like that never came up with a written language, they never documented anything they did including the harm they did to the environment ( or to other tribes, the wars, how many died, how many were forced into slavery etc etc ) , we only know about it because by chance, some clues have survived, such as on Easter Island. But if we knew the entire story we would be horrified, well leftists would be more than us.
People have been aware of these structures and studying them since the 1970’s when oil company surveys started revealing their existence. The people who built them created Terra preta (Indian soil) for agricultural purposes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta). The article also mentions, off-hand, large concentrations of domestic plants. The reality is that the majority of food plants and trees found in the Amazon basin arose from human domestication and breeding and have since gone feral. This is what makes the claims of the greens about the vast, untouched natural wilderness found in the Amazon so laughable. I suspect that this article is more about some new science “journalist” trying to make a name for himself. Those with a vested interest in the prevailing narrative will make sure this news doesn’t get too much traction.
“‘Mind blowing’ ancient settlements uncovered in the Amazon”
What I find “mind blowing” is that anyone would find it “mind blowing” that there are still lots of “mind blowing” discoveries to be made out there.
Wow, mankind can sure be arrogant about what we think we know. I actually find it entertaining watching the Big Bang Theory being ripped to shreds by recent findings. I believe the term I am looking for here is “hubris”.
The Big Bang theory has not been ripped to shreds, but our models of early galaxy formation, some few hundred million years after the BB are being called into question.
Like it was said above, mind blowing only for academics who obviously don’t lift their heads out of their latte very often.
Here is a historical fact that most do not know. The Haida west coast indians, have their myths of sky gods etc creating the world and settling them there, but the truth is even stranger. The Haida Indian, is a descendant of the Ainu of Hokkaido. The two cultures are practically identical, and the DNA is same. Haida migrated up along the Aleutians until finding the west coast. The Ainu of Hokkaido were forcibly moved from their more ancestral home of Japan. The Ainu, were the original (to the best of our knowledge) Japanese, but were forced to flee by the arriving Koreans. The Ainu themselves were once Korean, but had originally migrated down from the Nepal and the Himalayas. So the ancestry of the Haida indian, is that they originated from Nepal.
How do we know. one is by culture, but that evolves and changes over time, but DNA never lies, and the haplogroups of blood types clearly shows the connection. Where else did the original settlers from Nepal land? Peru, by boat. hence the Clovis man theory, which has no evidence, archeological or haplotype, to support is held tightly because scientists refuse to believe there were seafarers that far back.
“… about 1,500 years ago, ancient Amazonians…” – Yeah right. Like Jeff Bezos was alive that long ago. Amazon wasn’t even founded until 1994!
At least that is what I imagine some millennials thinking.
They found some unmarked residential school graves too.
“Scientists had explained”
When people first came, how they came, and how many were there before European contact are all in debate.
The trend seems to be “earlier”, by seacoasts, and many more than the “empty land” theorists had thought.
This article is by Charles C Mann who wrote two books “1491” & “1493” describing the before & after.
// historians have long wondered how many people lived in the Americas at the time of contact. “Debated since Columbus attempted a partial census on Hispaniola in 1496,” William Denevan has written, this “remains one of the great inquiries of history.” […]
The first scholarly estimate of the indigenous population was made in 1910 by James Mooney, a distinguished ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution. Combing through old documents, he concluded that in 1491 North America had 1.15 million inhabitants.
Mooney’s glittering reputation ensured that most subsequent researchers accepted his figure uncritically.
[…]
That changed in 1966, when Henry F. Dobyns published “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques With a New Hemispheric Estimate,” in the journal Current Anthropology.[…]
His argument was simple but horrific. It is well known that Native Americans had no experience with many European diseases […] such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person.
The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated.
e.g. In 1792 the British navigator George Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound.
He found a vast charnel house: human remains “promiscuously scattered about the beach, in great numbers.”
[…]
Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died—the worst demographic calamity in recorded history.
Dobyns’s ideas were quickly attacked as politically motivated, // etc etc
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/?single_page=true
Novel smallpox would be a bitch.
Fauci was alive back then, you’d think he would know the numbers.
Turns out the ruins concealed the cause of the civilization’s failure. Surprisingly not climate change.
Appears to be a combination of something called the Amazonian Economic forum, Jaguarpox, and a leader with severe dementia. Thanks goodness these conditions can’t possibly repeat.
Probably some kooks smoking magic mushrooms in the rainforest convinced the city dwellers to go and the result was societal decline much like gangreens are seeking on a world scale.
Graham Hancock was talking about this on Rogan a few years ago. He claimed that it was known long ago by the first European explorers that the Amazon was heavily populated and that they died of smallpox and other European diseases. Much like the North American Indians. He was ridiculed by anthropologists at the time but now apparently it’s true.