
The Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact - martian
http://spacecollective.org/nagash/5282/1491
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camccann
Just to highlight the part that I personally find most interesting:

 _Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area
the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't
leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights
back. Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer
of terra preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the
layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-
create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason,
scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated by a special suite of
microorganisms that resists depletion. "Apparently," Woods and the Wisconsin
geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, "at some
threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate—even
regenerate itself—thus behaving more like a living 'super'-organism than an
inert material."_

 _[...] Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered.
But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra
preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping
microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread,
Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming
bacterial charge. [...]_

Wikipedia has, of course, an article on terra preta:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta>

Most interesting is modern attempts by scientists to effectively reverse-
engineer the soil; using a combination of crude charcoal, organic compost, and
microorganism cultures to convert poor soils into something approximating the
robust, fertile terra preta.

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philwelch
My favorite paragraph:

"I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would
rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was
delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the
standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as "presentism" by social scientists.
But every one chose to be an Indian."

~~~
nebula
I guess the 'Indian' here is referring to native Americans.

It amazes me that a bunch of Europeans occupy the Americas, call themselves
Americans, and call the people who have been living there Indians.

~~~
philwelch
White folks tried calling them "Native Americans" once, and a lot of them
still do it, but a lot of American Indians have been calling themselves
American Indians for so long they don't really care anymore. "Native American"
is a name white people made up to make themselves feel better.

It will become more of an issue as more people from India immigrate over here.
I imagine that in some parts of the country, "Indian" already means Indian
more than it means American Indian.

Also, the more accurate adjective is "indigenous" or "aboriginal", not
"native".

~~~
jacobolus
Eh. "indigenous" and "aboriginal" are both words which date from the 17th
century, not used in the sense you're talking about until the 19th, whereas
"native" was used in that sense at least as far back as the 15th century. The
OED's definitions of both "indigenous" and "aboriginal" define those words
with reference to the word "native". Calling them "more accurate" is a bit
absurd, I'd say. Less ambiguous perhaps.

~~~
philwelch
I've always understood that "native" was defined on an individual level, i.e.
you would be a native American if you were born in America. "Indigenous" and
"aboriginal" apply to races rather than individuals.

~~~
jacobolus
OED has

native, adj:

11\. Of a person or social group.

a. Born in a designated place; belonging to a particular people by birth;
spec. belonging to an indigenous ethnic group, as distinguished from
foreigners, esp. European colonists.

indigenous, a:

2\. Of, pertaining to, or intended for the natives; ‘native’, vernacular.

aboriginal, adj:

1\. a. First or earliest as recorded by history; present from the beginning;
primitive. Of peoples, plants, and animals: inhabiting or existing in a land
from earliest times; strictly native, indigenous.

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nvasilak
It's unbelievably sad that that many people died, and so much collective
knowledge was lost. But, it excites me to think that there are still probably
a good number of hidden secrets throughout North and South America just
waiting to be discovered.

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diN0bot
excellent read. one thought i can't figure out: how come native american
diseases didn't equally damage europeans? why the different biology and
disease ecosystems?

~~~
ubernostrum
Not everyone particularly likes him, but Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and
Steel" explores pretty much this exact question (as part of a suite of "why
did Europeans conquer the Americas instead of the other way around" issues).
Glossing over a lot of the details and specifics, the argument he makes is
that various factors -- geography, indigenous flora/fauna, etc. -- allowed
densely-packed settled human populations to develop in Europe/Africa/Asia
before the Americas. And such densely-packed populations are far more
conducive to the development of epidemic diseases, which would be why diseases
brought by Europeans wrought such havoc on the Americas but not vice-versa
(except possibly for syphilis, but that one's still being debated).

~~~
Tichy
Among other things he says that there were no (or almost no) animals suitable
for domestication and mass herding in the Americas. Therefore the native
Americans had no contact with herds of animals that would have bred diseases
of that kind. Most of those epidemic diseases that killed off lots of people
apparently stem from chicken and pigs. (note: guess why it is called "swine
flu").

~~~
yummyfajitas
Also, the spread of disease did go both ways. Syphilis came from America to
Europe.

It's also worth noting that Europeans are not at the top of the food chain in
terms of disease resistance. Various European powers raised a flag on New
Guinea, but they never successfully colonized it. It's a cesspool of disease,
and Europeans never managed to do more than establish a few trading posts on
the beach.

