It begs the question of what those ditches were for, being so deep.. but if there were lions or other plains stalkers, perhaps the ditches were defensive moats.
The article is interesting, but it's a rather limited perspective. I recently read the book "1491: The Americas Before Columbus," and there was a pretty extensive section on how native peoples changed the environment of the Amazon. As you might suspect given how humans work, the answer was "a lot." But they tended not to change it in the ways that Europeans expected, so their accomplishments got ignored for along time. That book had a pretty thorough debunking of the slash-and-burn idea, too.
It's a fascinating read, I definitely recommend it. And this is definitely interesting news, that the Amazon was settled before it was a rainforest. It's a good lesson in how quickly terrain can change over time, even though we like to think of the landscape as enduring forever.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-11 03:15 am (UTC)It begs the question of what those ditches were for, being so deep.. but if there were lions or other plains stalkers, perhaps the ditches were defensive moats.
Yes...
Date: 2014-07-11 03:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-09 11:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-10 01:03 am (UTC)It's a fascinating read, I definitely recommend it. And this is definitely interesting news, that the Amazon was settled before it was a rainforest. It's a good lesson in how quickly terrain can change over time, even though we like to think of the landscape as enduring forever.