Attempt to think about an surroundings largely untouched by people and the Amazon rainforest may spring to thoughts. In spite of everything, massive swathes of this South American panorama are blanketed in thick vegetation, suggesting it’s one nook of the world that people by no means managed to tame. Right here, there should have been no deforestation, no agricultural revolution and no cities. It looks like a pristine surroundings.

Or so we thought. However a really totally different image is rising. Archaeologists working with Indigenous communities have been proven crumbling city stays and distant sensing applied sciences reminiscent of lidar are revealing the footprints of huge ghost cities. With a lot proof of historic human exercise, it’s now thought the pre-Columbian Amazon was inhabited by tens of millions of individuals – some dwelling in massive built-up areas full with street networks, temples and pyramids.

However that’s not all this analysis reveals. Paradoxically, it additionally supplies proof that the normal view of the Amazon isn’t fully large of the mark. As an illustration, whereas the traditional Amazonians managed their panorama intensively, they didn’t deforest it. And though they developed advanced societies, they by no means went by means of a wholesale agricultural revolution. This may counsel that the pre-Columbian Amazonians broke the mould of human cultural growth, which is historically seen as a relentless march from searching and gathering to farming to city complexity. The reality is extra shocking. The truth is, we at the moment are coming to grasp that there was no such mould – civilisation arose in myriad methods. What seems like an anomaly within the Amazon is definitely a shining instance of a course of that was as vibrant and numerous because the rainforest itself.

Regardless of…