[HN Gopher] 'Mind blowing' ancient settlements uncovered in the ...
___________________________________________________________________
'Mind blowing' ancient settlements uncovered in the Amazon
Author : rntn
Score : 139 points
Date : 2022-05-26 13:22 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| seibelj wrote:
| Ancient peoples and societies were very advanced. We constantly
| find earlier and earlier evidence of advanced behavior and
| technology because they were using it. People 10k years ago are
| physiologically the same as us, and human nature does not change,
| so it isn't surprising that many wanted to live in dense
| communities, just as we do.
|
| The major difference is imagining that you have no knowledge of
| science. As humans desire control, your brain immediately assumes
| that gods cause everything, and then to get more control society
| starts believing they can influence and appease the gods through
| various rituals, which then develop into organized religion. The
| total integration of religion with every facet of life is alien
| to most of us, and certainly to nearly everyone on Hacker News,
| which is the biggest barrier to imagining yourself living back
| then.
|
| Otherwise, people fell in love, had children, desired to achieve,
| were constantly striving and innovating, and all of the same
| types of people and desires that we have today, leading to kings,
| wars, commerce, and so on.
| aksss wrote:
| > total integration of religion with every facet of life is
| alien to most of us
|
| I suspect there's still a lot of bias in this view. A fish
| likely doesn't realize it lives in water. Similarly, we likely
| don't appreciate the role of our modern "religious beliefs" and
| how saturated our lives are with them and how they have
| permeated our methods of interpreting experience (physical or
| cultural). It's alien to us only in hindsight and removed from
| the cultural context, but in a thousand years I suspect we'll
| be no more immune from criticism.
|
| Agreeing entirely with your other points, we are after all only
| human. There's great conceit in our perception of past
| generations, and this gets more shameless the further back we
| look and especially across cultural divides.
|
| Inevitably, we must state that they incorporated more
| supernatural explanations for physical phenomenon than we do
| today. It's probably specifically this narrower point that
| would be alien to most of us.
| jwarden wrote:
| I think there is a systematic bias in our perception of ancient
| peoples that is influenced by the scarcity of archeological
| evidence, combined with a common logical fallacy. Until we have
| evidence that people did X before year Y, we are biased towards
| assuming they did not.
|
| We continuously hear headlines of the form "discovery people
| did X before previously thought." But why did we think they did
| not do those things earlier?
|
| The fallacy is to be over conservative and assume that if we
| have no evidence that something happened, it probably didn't.
|
| But our prior assumption should be that the earliest evidence
| for X is much later than the first X.
| aksss wrote:
| I think in my lifetime I've started to see the articles
| morphing a bit more towards "pushes back the date for the
| first evidence of people doing X", which is a better spirit
| of discovery to express. This may be the result of choosing
| better magazines to read though, too. :)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That _is_ the prior assumption for archaeologists. For a long
| time, it was simply treated as "obvious" and there wasn't a
| well-established way to estimate temporal ranges from dated
| finds. Now people use a technique called Optimal Linear
| Estimation that was originally invented by paleontologists to
| estimate extinction dates.
| seer wrote:
| Visiting Herculan in Italy (the _much_ better preserved sister
| city to Pompeii) really put those kind of things for me into
| perspective.
|
| There are street numbers, pubs, fast food joints, various multi
| story buildings with some of the murals intact, especially the
| gymnasium/public baths really showed to me - "I could totally
| see myself living in this kind of environment" it was ... weird
| and uncanny, but very educational experience.
| humbleMouse wrote:
| How can you state they had no knowledge of science? How do you
| think they built things like pyramids and countless other mega
| structures that are exactly aligned with the solar system?
| neaden wrote:
| I think this goes to a question of what we mean when we say
| science. If someone has knowledge of where all the stars are
| and their movements, but thinks of those stars as gods and
| believes that their movements affect sickness on Earth, is
| that science, religion, or some combination?
| rurp wrote:
| I don't think it's possible to develop the ability to
| predict astronomical events without a lot of work analogous
| to modern science. Sure it was probably couched in some
| spiritual terms that we wouldn't recognize, but it's
| probably not all that different to how people will view our
| modern science in thousands of years.
| iostream24 wrote:
| We speak of evidence for having had writing systems, but it's
| worth noting that we preselect for mineral-based writing systems.
| Paper/papyrus/neet-weavings tend to rot if made from organic
| matter. We certainly find marked sticks where preservation of
| organic matter is possible, I.e. frozen crag falling victims.
|
| The article references these jungle cities to have disappeared
| around 1400ce, and I wonder what this estimate is based upon and
| if it's not 1500ce instead, as disease could be the culprit...
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Each time remains of an ancient city are uncovered, I wonder the
| same thing: is the estimation of size of the city correct? They
| include all the settlement remains. But perhaps it was serial -
| that is, new places were built as old ones decayed? They were
| often mud brick. Perhaps it wasn't 1000 people, but 100 moving 10
| times etc.
| roughly wrote:
| 1491 by Michael Mann is a must read for anyone even vaguely
| interested in the Americas before European arrival. It's a
| fantastic book that will change how you think about indigenous
| cultures in the Americas and make this kind of thing seem a lot
| less surprising.
| ghotli wrote:
| I read this in my late teenage years. I can safely say it had a
| great impact on me and how I view the world. It was especially
| jarring as I was still in high school and the narrative I was
| being taught / had been taught was quite... well it left out a
| lot of things.
| aerovistae wrote:
| I think you mean Charles Mann :) Michael Mann is a director of
| heist movies.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| also this guy -- http://www.met.psu.edu/people/mem45
| yesenadam wrote:
| I just get _Log in to your Penn State Account_.
| roughly wrote:
| Whoops, yes, Charles Mann. Too late for an edit or delete;
| guess that typo's just gonna live there now.
|
| Although Michael Mann's filmography is pretty good, too.
| h2odragon wrote:
| hey you were in the right general neighborhood.
|
| "that dude that wrote the book about the thing" is as far
| as I usually get. "you know, the cover was blue"
| bleachedsleet wrote:
| Would also recommend the follow up, 1493 for a comparison of
| how Columbus altered these cultures. Excellent books.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Anyone who has encountered a potato or corn (maize) should know
| that the Americas had superior agricultural technology to
| Europe. Metallurgy and mechanics just leave more obvious
| artifacts.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| These causeway and mound settlement structures have been known
| for quite awhile, the new thing here seems to be the discovery of
| a more complex city like settlement. It's seems like cities and
| complex states probably weren't necessary to build the causeways
| as evidenced by Poverty Point and the mound building peoples of
| Ohio and the later Mississippian/Cahokia. However, given the
| geography in that part of the Amazon basin, these mounds and
| causeways were probably necessary FOR cities to develop.
|
| The other piece is this quote:
|
| > By the 20th century, archaeologists had yet to confirm the
| rumours, and argued that the Amazon's nutrient-poor soil was
| inadequate for supporting large-scale agriculture, and that it
| would have prevented tropical civilizations
|
| I think it's worth noting that a number of large settlements
| north of the Rio Grande managed to grow quite large with limited
| or no agriculture. Particularly where fish were plentiful,
| farming wasn't taken up even when contemporaneous neighboring
| groups farmed. Similar to Kosher or Halal, not farming seemed to
| be a matter of cultural or religious preference/edict among some
| pre-Columbian indigenous peoples.
| ellopoppit wrote:
| >> By the 20th century, archaeologists had yet to confirm the
| rumours, and argued that the Amazon's nutrient-poor soil was
| inadequate for supporting large-scale agriculture
|
| Those archaelogists were also ignorant of Terra Preta
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Yeah, the next half of the paragraph I quoted mentions that.
| I'm not sure if the range of Terra Preta extends all the way
| to the site in question, but it may. Either way it seems like
| some amount of soil improvement was happening on all of the
| mounds I've read about in the region.
| et-al wrote:
| Previous discussion with link to actual paper:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31511047
| [deleted]
| motohagiography wrote:
| Raises the question of what about our present beliefs and
| thinking should change as a consequence of discovering advanced
| civilizations that have risen and fallen not only independent of
| "us," but of our ability to have ever precived the possibility of
| their existence.
|
| Makes me want to write a sci-fi story about predicting the
| reflection of coherent radio signals from distant planets that
| originated on earth hundreds or thousands of years ago, and the
| ML model that filters for candidate signals, as though it were
| more plausible that old civilizations discovered radio before
| they were wiped out than another advanced civilization inhabit
| nearby solar systems. Starts with capturing reflections of 1930s
| broadcasts, but then the method scales by applying it to further
| objects that reflect ones from further back in time.
| hinkley wrote:
| Maybe there's a trick with Euclidean geometry and gravitational
| lensing where you fly one direction, turn ninety degrees and
| scan a supermassive black hole for signals.
| edgyquant wrote:
| This is a hard subject to discuss because there's a ton of fud
| and unintellectual nonsense (e.g. people who want hyperborea or
| Atlantis to have been real industrial civilizations.)
|
| There probably wasn't some industrial level civilization as we
| know it. But there's 200,000 years of human history and the
| there was another ~20ky period like ours 120,000 years ago in
| between ice ages. Humans migrated across the old world at this
| time and they likely had societies we'll never know about.
|
| I try to envision ways they could have achieved cool tech but
| primitive. So maybe there was no industrial civilization but
| maybe some mystic religious society devised some way to do
| computation (if we really wanted to we can build do computation
| with water and irrigation) and learned a ton about the
| universe.
|
| My hot take is we do man a disservice by saying civilization
| began with writing. There were certainly societies that learned
| lots of truths about the universe and passed them on via memes
| and superstitions.
| acegopher wrote:
| I've often wondered... what is the most advanced civilization
| (human or not) that could have existed some number of years
| back and not left evidence, or the evidence was destroyed
| through natural processes, or the evidence would remain in
| places we can't/haven't discovered?
|
| Conversely, at each known stage of human civilization, how
| long will it be before evidence of that civilization becomes
| unknowable through future archaeology?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Reminds me of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
| corpMaverick wrote:
| IMHO, any civilization that advances to the industrial era
| would be leaving artifacts all over the world. It wouldn't
| be confined to an island or a region in a continent.
| corrral wrote:
| We've recovered air trapped in ice cores up to 2 million
| years old.
|
| Odds are if there had been an advanced ancient
| civilization of any size (and an advanced one is going to
| tend to be large) and for any length of time, they'd have
| done quite a bit of lead smelting (lead's really useful
| and super-easy to smelt... shame it's poisonous), and
| we'd see it in the ice core record.
|
| Let alone something like fossil fuel use. Plus probably
| dozens of other markers of iron-age industry or later,
| that I don't know about.
|
| I very much doubt any very-ancient humans/hominids got
| past Bronze Age tech, at best. If I _had_ to place a bet
| on it, I 'd bet against them having gotten past stone-age
| tech at all. I think we'd see evidence of it.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Any civ that discovers iron smelting leaves land scars
| that are easy to recognize.
|
| Charcoal and iron mining is simply highly visible.
| krisoft wrote:
| > what is the most advanced civilization
|
| What is "advanced"? Is it a property everyone would agree
| on? Is it a single scale or some multi-dimensional
| ordering?
|
| If a civilisation has beautiful spoken-word poetry, while
| the other has a tradition to play a complex game with
| baskets and grass knots which one is more advanced?
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| These "jungle people" don't need to clock in to a single
| desk to get their food/do day to day, or have their leisure
| conversations captured by a friend-wielded listening
| device.
|
| They seem like the natural frontrunner, in my eyes.
| JoeyJoJoJr wrote:
| I wonder what they would think about my eyes becoming
| short sighted because I stare at a computer screen all
| day, or my neck aches because I sit in a chair in a room
| all day.
| icare_1er wrote:
| Most of the archeological and historical evidence on
| civilizations are quite frail, and the cards are regularly re-
| shuffled every now and then when a toe or a necklace or some
| ancient tools, are discovered (which is roughly every 10
| years).
|
| Gobekli Teppe recently also demonstrated that we really don't
| know much, and that the "official" theories are mere
| speculations which are very likely to be replaced by another
| theory in the future.
| Imnimo wrote:
| An interesting story of a surprisingly ancient technology is
| this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haya_people#Archaeological_dis...
|
| It's not as fantastical as radio signals, and not as truly
| 'lost' - it persisted in oral history, but it's still thought
| provoking.
| steeleyespan wrote:
| I find I get insights about the future by peering into the past,
| especially when it comes to slaying my enemies.
| stakkur wrote:
| Great, but they're not 'ancient', at least by common definitions
| of what ancient means. They're relatively recent, historically
| speaking.
| yesenadam wrote:
| From a quick google, the most common definitions of _ancient_
| seem to be, _before about 500AD_ or _before the fall of Rome_
| (476). The article says "starting about 1,500 years ago,
| ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated
| centres".
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| Interesting. I have a question though. It notes in the article
| that " Amazon's nutrient-poor soil was inadequate". How can the
| soil be so deficient in a forest where there is constant death
| and decay? Or is it because the trees don't shed their leaves
| seasonally? I would have imagined that a place so rich in
| biodiversity had rich soil.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Most of the nutrients are stored in the forests itself, not the
| soil.
|
| https://www.dw.com/en/the-amazon-nutrient-rich-rainforests-o...
| detaro wrote:
| Dead matter decays quickly (due to hot&wet climate) on the
| surface instead of settling into the ground and decaying there.
| And rich ecosystem also grows fast, picking up any nutrients
| immediately. And high rainfall etc means nutrients would be
| washed out quickly. These three things mean that soil in
| tropical rainforests isn't nutrient-rich, because the nutrients
| are constantly reused everywhere else.
| Razengan wrote:
| That logic doesn't make sense: "This person isn't rich
| because he keeps spending millions."
|
| If the soil wasn't "rich" how did it become such a forest in
| the first place? Maybe reword it as "forests are not suitable
| for farmland".
| minsc_and_boo wrote:
| It's rich because of the insane cash flows going through
| the soil.
|
| Clear out the rainforest for traditional agri and you've
| lost your insane income.
| [deleted]
| axus wrote:
| If you're always spending money (soil), there's nothing
| left for someone else (the farmer) to steal.
| Carioca wrote:
| Just as an aside: indigenous Amazonian populations also
| developed techniques to make the earth better for
| agriculture[1]
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
| zwilliamson wrote:
| I would be curious to hear author and researcher Graham Hancock's
| take on this. His theories on human history based upon
| archeological evidence are very interesting. He predicted old new
| kingdoms were yet to be discovered in Amazon basin. Fingerprints
| of the Gods was one of his good reads
| silicon2401 wrote:
| I came here exactly to share a related tidbit I learned through
| Graham Hancock: "terra preta". It's absolutely mindblowing to
| me and something I think any reader of HN would appreciate,
| too:
|
| > Terra preta [...] is a type of very dark, fertile artificial
| (anthropogenic) soil found in the Amazon Basin. [...] Terra
| preta owes its characteristic black color to its weathered
| charcoal content,[2] and was made by adding a mixture of
| charcoal, bone, broken pottery, compost and manure to the low
| fertility Amazonian soil. A product of indigenous soil
| management and slash-and-char agriculture,[3] the charcoal is
| stable and remains in the soil for thousands of years, binding
| and retaining minerals and nutrients.[4][5] [...] Terra preta
| soils were created by farming communities between 450 BCE and
| 950 CE.[10][11][12] Soil depths can reach 2 meters (6.6 ft). It
| is reported to regenerate itself at the rate of 1 centimeter
| (0.4 in) per year.[13]
|
| First paragraphs on wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
|
| Hancock has a gift for pointing out deeply fascinating aspects
| of human history. His personal conclusions based on things he
| brings up include things like advanced, pre-historic
| civilizations. Regardless of whether you care for those kinds
| of claims, I think it's almost undeniable that the tidbits he
| brings up in his discussions, like terra preta, are a real
| treat to read about. For any fan of history or intellectually
| curious person, I'd recommend at least watching a video or two
| of his on youtube, just as a starting point if nothing else,
| and going from there to read about the various things he brings
| up.
| greenonions wrote:
| I don't really think of Graham Hancock as being a very good
| scientific source, but I think his ideas are a fantastic
| source of wonder about human history. It's simply fun to
| imagine advanced ancient civilizations.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Fingerprints of the Gods? The one where he wrote the whole
| thing stoned? And then remained stoned for 20+ years until a
| hallucinatory snake on an ayahuasca trip told him to quit
| smoking weed.
| tomcam wrote:
| How is this helping the discourse? Do you have anything of
| substance to add?
| rustybelt wrote:
| Some of the best programmers I know are always stoned. Funny
| to see this take on HN of all places.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is he a well regarded expert on this kind of stuff? I've never
| heard of him, just -- title in the format "<Noun> of the
| <Dramatic Noun>" tend to set off little alarm bells in my head.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| No. He's widely regarded as a crank. However, he is quite
| popular.
|
| There's a bit of a split between archaeologists that merely
| think Hancock is an indication that Archaeology's public
| outreach is insufficient and those that think he's actively
| harming public perceptions of the field with misinformation.
| For the record, I'm more in the former camp.
|
| Anyway, the SAA (an archaeology trade group) devoted 27 pages
| of a magazine issue to discussing that split and picking
| apart the arguments in one of Hancocks's recent books. You
| can find the magazine here to decide for yourself: http://onl
| inedigeditions.com/publication/?m=16146&i=634462&p...
|
| For fairness, here's Hancock's response:
| https://grahamhancock.com/saa-archaeological-record-
| response...
| tomcam wrote:
| Thanks for both of these links.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Your "for fairness" response article includes:
|
| > [Graham's blog post] Before closing, however, I'm
| understandably very happy to quote here the useful concise
| summary of America Before given by anthropologist Jeb J.
| Card in his contribution to the issue (pp 26-30):
|
| >> [Card's review] Attempting to critique America Before:
| The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock
| (2019) using the criteria of professional archaeology is
| doomed to failure, as his goals are outside of the
| materialist practice of scientific archaeology. In a
| nutshell, Hancock argues that an ancient civilization of
| the Pleistocene emerged in North America that was based not
| on material technology but on psychic/spiritual knowledge.
| It became a global sea-based society comparable with the
| late pre-Industrial British Empire. These Ice Age Americans
| (spoiler: Atlanteans) foresaw a cosmic disaster and spread
| memetic seeds of sacred knowledge of geometry, astronomy,
| and the Otherworld and how souls may navigate it around the
| world. After this civilization was destroyed by impact
| events from a comet during the Younger Dryas, these
| advanced people came to be remembered as magicians and
| gods. Seeking this knowledge today is a path to truly
| understanding reality and the spiritual elements denied by
| materialist science."
|
| > [Graham's blog post] Card's precis of my arguments is
| fair, and in general I'd say that his analysis of my work
| and its function is much more carefully thought through
| than that of any of the other contributors.
|
| If the author thinks the reviewer pointing to psychic
| Atlanteans in his work is treating him more fairly than the
| rest, that doesn't bode well for the overall work.
| rfwhyte wrote:
| No, Graham Hancock is an anti-science charlatan. No actual
| archaeologists take him remotely seriously.
| aksss wrote:
| Calling people "anti-science" now also sets off alarm bells
| for me. "Anti-science" is analogous to calling someone a
| "heretic" in the 1400's, but with our benefit of hindsight
| into the fallacy of groupthink and servility to orthodoxy.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Especially when the field is archaeology, which is a
| study and not a science. It has its rigor, but it is more
| of an interpretation of understanding rather than
| experimentation.
|
| Still valuable, still rigorous... but no ground truth is
| possible.
| tonyg wrote:
| > no ground truth is possible.
|
| Oof. I have bad news for you about science _in general_.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| describing people who publish original thought as "anti-
| something-important derogatory-name" sets off alarm bells
| for me. Is conformity really that precious? are public
| writings so black-and-white ?
| nobody9999 wrote:
| > describing people who publish original thought as
| "anti-something-important derogatory-name" sets off alarm
| bells for me. Is conformity really that precious? are
| public writings so black-and-white ?
|
| In that case, I recommend you check out Erich von
| Danniken[0], Giorgio Tsoukalos[1] and Charles Dawson[2].
|
| They have some original thoughts that have been wildly
| popular. Or are you saying that if something is "popular"
| that it's "conformity" and should be rejected for being
| conformist?
|
| If it's generally accepted (as bible dogma in the middle
| ages was), then it must be a false flag designed to
| hoodwink the masses into accepting false information,
| because no amount of consensus is enough. amirite?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_A._Tsoukalos
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dawson
| colordrops wrote:
| He was also talking about Gobekli tepe years ago and now you
| see announcements about it like it's news.
|
| He is derided as he's a journalist rather than an academic but
| I don't think he ever pushed that his ideas are absolute truth.
| Also he's an Ayahuasca advocate, which unfairly brings further
| derision. He'll talk about more far out theories too if with
| the right audience.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-26 23:01 UTC)