It's quite speculative, but also really fascinating. Even if what they claim is not completely right, it definitely shows how the current accepted understanding of the history of the Americas needs an overhaul and a lot more research
PS: if you like this stuff, also check out the movie "The Lost City of Z"
It seems even this is not the case and that the show is just completely wrong.
Do you have any resources you could share that debunk the specific things they show? Like the rock paintings they dated to 10k years ago, or some of the other digs that were dated as 20-25k years old?
Are you saying it is all made up? Or just some of it?
And the 2005 Charles C. Mann book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus".
Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything spends quite a bit of time with complex societies in the Americas as well, and is certainly worth a read as well.
I remember seeing some discussions about it and related topics here on HN a few years ago
However the whole "forgotten civilization" AKA lost city of Atlantis, just seems too far fetched and forced into the various episodes. That part of it makes for good entertainment at least.
In general, I'm a supporter of his work and look forward to further episodes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200329225058/http://sundown.to...
Would you care to elaborate? Have you seen the show? Could you point to the things that are wrong and why?
Genuinely curious and wanting to learn
One the one hand, experts pile up pretty hard on this series and on M. Hancock. Maybe deservedly, I don't know.
But I'm still sour about COVID where experts piled up pretty hard on the lab leak theory. When early on, experts were telling us that science said that masks were ineffective. They were adamant.
Here, the very insistence of those experts, the aggressive tone of the wikipedia page give me an air of deja vu.
But I agree believing in a book like the Book of Mormon because of some random article would be a bad idea
* The BOM mentions multiple disconnected societies that go way way back and over simplified them with the label Jaredites.
* That over simplification of the Jaredites is present at the beginning of the Bible’s Genesis too when Able was cast out and went to one of two neighboring cities. That indicates others outside the faith existed in the locality of the faith but were largely ignored, perhaps a perspective thing. These weren’t meant to be history books.
* The BOM itself is a self described radically abridged work. The book describes at one point a small library worth of religious texts, social history, and likely a variety of secular things that people find more practical day to day. These works were lost during a social collapse. The BOM is a tiny portable collection of religious works taken and compiled by a guy named Mormon and carried by his son Moroni. The word portable there is debatable because the book was made of gold and gold is ridiculously heavy, but nonetheless the book describes being hand carried some distance.
But I will add a few comments for anyone not familiar with the Book of Mormon who is reading this.
- The goal of the Book is to persuade the reader that Jesus is the Christ, the savior of the world. To that end, the authors make a point to say that they are going to leave out a lot of things they could have added so as to focus only on those things that would be of the greatest spiritual worth to us today. Given that, the only real way to know if it is true is to read it, ponder in your heart the message it contains, and then to ask God if it is true. There is a promise in the introduction that if you will do that sincerely, you will know it’s true by the power of the Holy Ghost. I believe in Jesus Christ and in the Book of Mormon because I have followed that exact process.
- Any discussion here about archeological/literary evidence is at best interesting. Even if the Book of Mormon provided incredibly detailed maps of exactly where each city was located, that would not be reason to believe.
- In looking for evidence, you can find lots of things on both sides that seem to either prove it or disprove it. I fundamentally believe this was by design so that the only way we could know would be to read it and sincerely pray. This is different from saying you should believe it because “trust me bro”. You can know 100% independent of anyone else. I just believe God in his wisdom designed the Book so that the reader would want and need an experience with God before they could fully move on from it.
- Once you believe, I have found the incredible amount of supporting evidence for the book to be encouraging, even if it’s not what the foundation of my belief is built on
- One of the reasons pinpointing exactly where the Book Of Mormon took place is so difficult is because the last writer in the book, Moroni, wandered around for newly 40 years. So it’s hard to know exactly how much ground he covered.
- I find it really interesting that it seems the best archeological evidence comes from Lehi’s journey out of Jerusalem (Nahom, valley near the Red Sea, land bountiful) rather than in the Americas
.. could be a poetic term, even though many take it literally.
But I do find it at least a bit ironic that one of the critiques of the book I have seen most commonly has been "If there were so many people, where were all the cities?"
No.
I have heard of an oasis in North Africa that was curated this way, and it still survived despite being abandoned by humans.
The modern version of this is called a perennial food forest.
Only about 100-150 years old, but given how well they've done over that time and how popular they are with the wildlife, I'd bet they stick around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
The city where I live in the PNW has had a huge influx of immigrants from red and blue states who either don't respect the dignity of nonhuman life or want to gentrify communities to their liking. It seems like the first thing they do when they get here is cut down the biggest tree(s) in their yard to live out their pioneer fantasies. I'd say we've lost around 25 trees 75 years or older in just my immediate neighborhood. Then they plant ornamental pears and similar that smell like rotten garbage/death/sex.
Heaven forbid they plant a plumb, walnut or anything they have to (gasp) clean up after. Bumblebees, butterflies and small birds have all but disappeared compared to when we moved in around 2010.
With housing prices going from $100,000 to $500,000 since 2000, while wages haven't even doubled, I'm starting to not recognize this place anymore. It's heartbreaking because it didn't have to be this way. It's not a supply and demand problem, it's a cultural issue. What we value as a society, what we prioritize, how we fund institutions for checks and balances against predatory private equity firms that can't be stopped by the private sector, etc.
My understanding is that the rainforest as we know it exists where it does in part because humans spent such effort cultivating edible plants in the area. Many of the most edible crops are not native to the regions in which they now grow, there's not much evidence of ancient-grown forest before ~5kya, and there's good evidence of burn-based plant and soil management.
Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.adi6317
Early Holocene crop cultivation and landscape modification in Amazonia https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2162-7.epdf
An airframe with a LIDAR device scatter shots a medium angle "spotlight" of pulses at high frequency downwards within an arc area of angles (straight down, a bit to the left, a bit to the right, a bit forward, etc.)
Of the tens of thousands of 'RAW' data points many reflect from top canopy leaf cover, many penetrate further, a lesser number reach the ground.
All the raw points are pipeline processed and the floor() of penetration is extracted from the fuzzy cloud that represents the canopy as a whole.
Ancient banks, levels, roads, et al show up where not eroded as per the image in the article.
It's not a big fraction, but some of the laser beams are hitting the ground, and after data processing you filter them out and they five you the ground topography profile.
https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/972412/view/rainforest-ca...
Here is a side view that shows how the point cloud profile can look like. This is not from a rainforest but some other forest.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/LiDAR-point-cloud-profil...
But yeah, I also think about lost treasure and Indian Jones a lot with these stories.
People likely abandoned them for some unknown reason and moved to other locations, where they'd eventually get wiped out by the Spanish.
He was one of the survivors of the first European expedition through the Amazon and provides the only account we have of something resembling the pre-European Amazon. He talks about large cities with tall structures, roadworks, and very elaborate societies - nothing compared to our common notion of the Amazonian people.
His account was largely dismissed because it was never replicated, but those who believe it to be accurate theorize that this first Expedition unintentionally caused a population collapse by introducing European diseases. You can imagine that by the time other expeditions were organized, it was a completely different place and the jungle would have easily overgrown any abandoned cities.
Good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspar_de_Carvajal#The_Relació...
Replies like yours belong on Reddit, what an insufferable outlook on life and history.
Twenty years ago, brazilian researchers who would mention this theory were considered a bit lunatic, at the “elvis isn’t dead” or “the US reads all the world’s email” level of conspiracy theories.
So playing down these discoveries with discussions of urban density or cities vs villages is pointless, the important finding is that there was some form of civilization there at all.
You are right. However, not only Brazilian researchers, an not just 20 years ago
Check out the movie "The Lost City of Z" or the story of Percy Fawcett
> “the US reads all the world’s email” level of conspiracy theories
Never say never.
