Myth of pristine Amazon rainforest busted as old cities reappear - New Scientist: "The first Europeans to penetrate the Amazon rainforests reported cities, roads and fertile fields along the banks of its major rivers. “There was one town that stretched for 15 miles without any space from house to house, which was a marvellous thing to behold,” wrote Gaspar de Carvajal, chronicler of explorer and conquistador Francisco de Orellana in 1542. “The land is as fertile and as normal in appearance as our Spain.” Such tales were long dismissed as fantasies, not least because teeming cities were never seen or talked about again. But it now seems the chroniclers were right all along. It is our modern vision of a pristine rainforest wilderness that turns out to be the dream. What is today one of the largest tracts of rainforest in the world was, until little more than 500 years ago, a landscape dominated by human activity, according to a review of the evidence by Charles Clement of Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, and his colleagues."
The Real Lost Cities Of The Amazon Rewilderness | MORNING, COMPUTER: "Short version: the Amazon rainforests are rewilded territory. Six hundred years ago, the area was rammed with fifteen-mile-wide cities, plazas, canals, terraced fields and managed orchards. The Europeans showed up with diseases and guns, and as many as fifty million people either died or returned to the deep bush. There is no “pristine” Amazonia — only a largely unrecorded civilisation that collapsed, and the jungle grew over it like a shroud.
I suggested some while ago that the idea of a “wild” Britain is absurd, given that the landscape has been interfered with for thousands of years. Not being a great student of South America, I was surprised and oddly delighted to learn that the Amazon rainforests, always presented to me as some perfect bubble of unmanaged wilderness, contains the same human history, and the same human mystery."
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