Is the Amazon rainforest MAN-MADE? At least 8 MILLION humans may have lived and farmed the basin

The Daily Mail ^ | 24 July 2015 | RICHARD GRAY

[Brooklyn Attitude]

EnvironMENTAList response to this info “The rain forest is man made?! It must be destroyed immediately!”

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks SatinDoll and uglybiker.

[Ouchthatonehurt]

...and even in West Virginia as early as 2,000 years ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_Creek_Mound

[dennisw]

Very interesting and my guess is true

[hoosierham]

The indigenous peoples in America could have,maybe were, devasted by diseases brought by European explorers.

Just look at abandoned farms and homes in the eastern United States.There are buildings not far from me almost hidden by trees after less than twenty years of standing unused.Former hay-fields returning to forest in like time.

Only in desert climates do man-made structures stand evident for long times.In temperate or tropical zones vegetation quickly grows around and over everything.

[tbw2]

Terra preta (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈtɛʁɐ ˈpɾetɐ], locally [ˈtɛhɐ ˈpɾetɐ], literally "black earth" or "black land" in Portuguese) is a type of very dark, fertile anthropogenic soil found in the Amazon Basin. Around 10% of the Amazon has that soil, created I believe from burning the trees but integrating the charcoal into the ground so that it absorbs much more water and retains more nutrients. You don't get pockets of uber-fertile man-made soil throughout an area without settlement. I wouldn't be surprised if most of what we see as rain forest was farmed like the Maya and Aztec homelands, but returned more quickly after the Spanish brought the pandemics.

[Larry Lucido]

LOL!

[PUGACHEV]

This is all very old news from the 16th Century.

The Spanish Conquistador Francisco de Orellana and the Dominican friar Gaspar de Caravajal and about 120 of their men were the first Europeans to travel down the Amazon River in 1542. Orellana was a bit of a genius: he studied native languages before the expedition and had the extraordinary ability to acquire new languages as he went along. He would stop from time to time at a native village along the Amazon, and with his language skills he would make himself welcome. He would then set up a forge and workshop to repair his boats, which would take weeks. Both he and Caravajal reported that countless chiefs and delegations of tribes from the interior would come to the village to see and observe them, and that the ethnic variety and sophistication of the visitors were astonishing. Some, he even reported were tall and blonde, others told him that they were from large cities far in the interior.

It was more than a generation before any other European went down the river, but apparently by that time disease had devastated the region and nothing was left of the civilizations Orellana had encountered.

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/terrapreta/index

[LucyT]

#17.

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[T-Bone Texan]

Thanks for the very interesting info!