The Ancient Amazon was once a thriving metropolis When one thinks of the lush Amazon rainforest, an

The Ancient Amazon was once a thriving metropolisWhen one thinks of the lush Amazon rainforest, an ancient flourishing metropolis probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. The Amazon is the Earth’s largest rainforest, spanning an area of 6.7 million square kilometers across nine countries, and is home to one-tenth of world’s known species. Trying to survive the Amazon, let alone attempting to build a functioning society, is a pretty grim task, and scientists believed that the Amazon had always been an untouched wilderness before the modern era of deforestation. Yet archaeologists have found evidence that complex societies had existed in the Amazon for thousands of years, and that the wilds of the Amazon only reclaimed these settlements in the past few hundred years.Researchers studied plant and soil samples, and simulated models of the Amazonian landscape to estimate population sizes and language distributions. They found that the Amazon’s “dark earths” — organic-rich soils that formed from the remains of fires, farming, and human waste — first appeared in the Amazon 6,000 years ago. By the end of the 15th century, the dark earths had expanded enough to support populations of over 8 million. But when the European colonists arrived in the Americas with plans of conquest, they also brought along a host of diseases that killed more than 50 percent of the Native American communities. The Amazonian peoples were eventually decimated, allowing Mother Nature to consume the vestiges of their civilizations.Interestingly enough, the Amazonian peoples had successfully built their societies without clearing areas of forest for crop pastures. What researchers hope to figure out next is something that we are still trying to learn today — how the Native Amazonians were able to build complex societies without wiping out their rainforest environment.-DCPhoto credit: http://bit.ly/1GShWhBMore reading: http://bit.ly/1U1fIWFhttp://bit.ly/1S5fdgTHow to survive the Amazon: http://usat.ly/1hPOz9l -- source link

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