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Town Networks Defy Myth Of Pristine Rainforest
torpor writes "An interesting article being published in Science magazine discusses the ways tribes in the Xinguano region cultivated and integrated the Amazon rainforest into their culture by building 'networks of towns and cities, geometrically structured' to accomodate better use of the surrounding forest region. From an article at agriculture.com: "Brazil's northern Amazon region, once thought to have been pristine until modern development began encroaching, actually hosted sophisticated networks of towns and villages hundreds of years ago, researchers said on Thursday." ... When I saw some of the satellite pictures, I couldn't help thinking it would make a very interesting software model ... Starcraft, Xinguano-mod, anyone?"
Nah. Just a mistake. These guys accidentally looked at the C-64 emulator running "7 Cities of Gold" where Jason in the next cubicle had put little missions and forts over the South American interior. They thought it was satellite imagery.
False alarm, folks. Indiana Jones, better stay home this time.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I, for one, welcome our new city-building Amazon overlords. Or is that war-ladies? We look forward to being entwined in their magic lassoes.
Oh great. Now Bush and Cheney and their rich friends will use this as a justification for clearing the Amazon rain forest: "There have always been people cutting it down".
The big stereotype is the naked savage. In Manifest Destiny days, this allowed people to justify land grabs and massacres by thinking in terms of "progress" and "dying races". The post-Hitler era is less sanguine, but still likes this stereotype -- "noble savages" make for nice guilt-tripping.
The reality is a lot more complicated. There were hunter-gatherer bands in the Americas. But there were also agricultural communities, towns, cities, and everything in between. I'm not just talking about the famous civilizations south of the Rio Grande. The first settlers in what is now upstate New York found large settlements, even nascent cities. These soon disappeared of course -- too vulnerable to epidemics and raids.
And of course these cultures had their environmental impacts, as human cultures always do. It may be comforting to think of natives as ecologically wise -- but any wisdom they actually have, they acquired the hard way. Yes, Pueblo folklore is full of sound ecological concepts -- but it also contains nasty folk memories of the Anasazi culture that was too successful for its own good.
The bottom line is that ecological impact is just a part of being human. To manage this impact we need to find a good middle path between naive romanticisim and glib "progress and development" stupidity.
In particular the animals are crucial- animal power is much more efficient than human power, so any animal that can be domesticated multiplies farming effectiveness up enormously; that means that surpluses are produced that creates trading, and that leads to villages, towns and eventually cities.
Additionally, living with your animals means you are more likely to catch diseases from them- that's why the europeans carried nasty diseases that practically annihilated native populations that lacked domesticated animals. The europeans themselves had built up a tolerance over time, so were mostly immune.
Anyway, putting the book to one side, this discovery is particularly interesting. The sustainable farming technology that these 'primitive' people found is actually better than the slash and burn that is used in the Amazon currently. Who would have guessed that stirring in some graphite into the Amazon soil would improve it so much that long term the soil is preserved? In fact the soil they made is still good nearly 5 centuries later, and is sold commercially.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Basically, the soil 'terra preta' is the secret to how these peoples managed to prosper on land which is currently considered to 'poor soil' only suitable for slash and burn. This soil holds on to the soil nutrients even in the face of high rainfall; and enables farming; it's made by mixing charcoal into the soil.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"This is a very basic problem. In any discipline, you run the risk of falling in love with a theory. Even the physical sciences have this problem. But they at least have Experiment to poke holes in a theory that's beautiful and elegant and logical and utterly wrong. Other disciplines have to be more cautious.
Which is not to say that historical theories are a waste of time. They just have to be taken, as I said, with a grain of salt.
"1491", an intriguing article in the Atlantic magazine last year claims this may be so.
I'm surprised no one has brought this up.
A young farmer, Joseph Smith, translated a book written on gold plates in the 1820s that described several societies that inhabited the Americas for thousands of years. The American Indians are descendants of one of them.
This book is called the "Book of Mormon" and is translated into hundreds of languages. Ask a friend who is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints for a copy and they will gladly give you one for free.
You can read about the heights of their civilization -- 400 years of no wars and complete harmony and prosperity for all -- and the depths of their civilization -- complete warfare including women and children, to the complete destruction of a race.
You'll also understand why some Native Americans had a ceremony of drinking the blood and eating the body of their God (in symbol, of course), and why Quetzecoatl resembles Christ. The strange tribes of Indians who spoke a language resembling Hebrew, as well as the Egyptian-like enscriptions on their tombs and pyramids will also make a lot more sense.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Smith proved his own fraudulence by attempting to translate the Kinderhook plates (a hoax created by local farmers to ferret him out) and more importantly by foisting a fallacious translation of papyri containing the Egyptian Book of Breathings, as the so-called "Book of Abraham". Smith's ability to translate was non-existent, and his 19th-century racist diatribe, "The Book of Mormon", was just pretext for him to get under the sheets with as many young women - read, teenagers - as he could.
He was a huckster, a pedophile, a crook (see the Kirtland Anti-Banking scandal), an accessory to murder (the Danites), a polygamist, a racist, a narcissist, and a phony.
Why use that kind of biased language? That kind of phrase is usually followed by arguments of the form "since it's not pristine anymore anyway, we might as well chop it down", or "since people have lived there in the past, why not settle it again"?
The fact is: those people aren't living there anymore, and they haven't lived there for a long time. And it wasn't Europeans that killed them. Obviously, that environment is not a great environment for humans to live.
Besides, this hardly sounds all that unusual: haven't there been plenty of cities found in other American rain forests?
Just look at the Bush, the acting-POTUS. Ashcroft. The EU Parliament that just allowed SW patents (I'm a US'ian, does it show?).
And of course, the obligatory:
I'm a stupid white man, you Insensitive Clod(c)!
(Search Amazon.com for "stupid white men by michael moore)