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Erle Ellis of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, says such evidence suggests that we should be dating the start of the Anthropocene – the era of human domination of the planet – to thousands of years ago rather than in the middle of 20th century. Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama recently argued that “recent investigations of soils in parts of the western Amazon… found little vegetation disturbance“.Ĭlement and his co-authors agree that “the idea of a domesticated Amazonia… contrasts strongly with reports of empty forests, which continue to captivate scientific and popular media”.īut the idea of a domesticated Amazon complements research in other rainforest regions, including the Congo basin and South-East Asia, that also suggest that much of what seems pristine is actually regrowth after dense human occupation. For centuries afterwards it was believed that his accounts were impossible because there were no remnants of these cities found along the Amazon. The remains date back 3000 years or more, say the authors, who include geographer William Denevan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida at Gainesville – both pioneers of the idea that the Amazon has long been modified by humans. Francisco Orellana’s friar kept a diary of their expedition’s 1541 descent of the Amazon and described vast populations in the interior with roads that interconnected cities. Before the arrival of Europeans, the region’s population may have reached 50 million. These fertile “dark earths”, or terra preta, may cover 150,000 square kilometres, much of it now reclaimed by rainforests. Meanwhile, agriculturalists have discovered that many forest soils have been mulched and composted with waste. Remote sensing has revealed extensive earthworks, including cities, causeways, canals, graveyards and huge areas of ridged fields that kept crops like manioc, maize and squash clear of floods and frosts. From Science: Newly discovered traces of ancient roads, bridges and plazas may help dispel the once-popular impression that the Amazon was untouched.
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Archaeologists have uncovered dense urban centres that would have been home to up to 10,000 inhabitants along riverbanks, with fields and cultivated orchards of Brazil nuts, palm and fruit trees stretching for tens of kilometres. This civilization left 13 underground cities in South America in the jungles of the.
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He stated that Gods had come from a solar system known as ‘Schwerta’ and built an underground tunnel system in South America. It's even possible that this configuration was meant to represent the cosmos, they noted.The evidence for this radical rethink has been stacking up for some time. Science Archaeologists discover 81 ancient settlements in the Amazon An aerial photo of one of the structures uncovered in a recent study of pre-Columbian archaeological sites in the Amazon. According to Tatunca, the Amazon was occupied by humans in Year Zero of the Chronicle, 10,481 BC at the time of mystical Atlantis. The distinctive and consistent way Indigenous people arranged these villages suggests that they had specific social models for the way they organized their communities, the researchers said. The principal roads often connected one village to another, creating a vast community network in the rainforest, the researchers said. Most of the villages were close to each other - just about 3 miles (4.4 km) apart, the researchers found.
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Further analysis of the "sun" villages revealed they had carefully planned roads each circular mound village had two "principal roads" that were wide and deep (up to 20 feet, or 6 m, across) with high banks, and smaller "minor roads" that led to nearby streams. The circular mound villages had an average diameter of 282 feet (86 meters), while the rectangular villages tended to be smaller, with an average length of 148 feet (45 m). (Image credit: University of Exeter Iriarte, J, et al. A principal road (in red) connecting the connecting the Caboquim and Boa Esperança villages. It is the legend that drew legions of explorers and adventurers to their deaths: an ancient empire of citadels and treasure hidden deep in the Amazon jungle.