Thursday Things: Lost Cities Found Edition
18 January 2024. Vol 6 No 3. By Dan McGirt. #232
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There has to be a lost city around here somewhere. Photo by Nate Johnston on Unsplash
Lost Cities of the Amazon
Last year I read a fascinating book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Audible | Kindle | Paperback) which is exactly what is says on the tin — an extensive survey of life in the Americas before C² crashed the party in the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. A big theme of the book is that findings by archaeologists and anthropologists in recent decades show that the pre-Columbian Amazon region was far more densely populated than was previously thought.
This shouldn’t be surprising — many indigenous tribes in the region have oral histories that recall the huge settlements of their ancestors. Moreover, in 1542 Francisco Orellana and his men made the first descent of the Amazon from the Andes to the sea1, encountering extensive native cities with thousands of (often hostile) inhabitants along the way.2
Unfortunately, thanks to smallpox and other unpleasantries, those cities had long been reclaimed by the jungle by the time anthropologists starting showing up in the 1800s. They found small roaming bands of hunter-gatherers and assumed it must have been that way in the Amazon basin since time immemorial.
Rookie mistake. But ground-penetrating radar begs to differ.
Archeologists have uncovered a massive lost ancient civilization in the Amazon rainforest that was home to at least 10,000 farmers around 2,000 years ago.
A series of mounds and buried roads in Ecuador was first noticed more than two decades ago by archaeologist Stéphen Rostain.
But at the time, 'I wasn´t sure how it all fit together,' said Rostain, one of the researchers who reported on the finding Thursday in the journal Science.
Recent mapping by laser-sensor technology revealed those sites to be part of a dense network of settlements and connecting roads, tucked into the forested foothills of the Andes, that lasted about 1,000 years.
'It was a lost valley of cities,' said Rostain, who directs investigations at France´s National Center for Scientific Research. 'It's incredible.'
I’m just here for the lost cities. I love lost cities!
And how big were these cities?
While it's difficult to estimate populations, the site was home to at least 10,000 inhabitants - and perhaps as many as 15,000 or 30,000 at its peak, said archaeologist Antoine Dorison, a study co-author at the same French institute.
Some scientists believe it may have been home to a population in the hundreds of thousands, according to the BBC.
That's comparable to the estimated population of Roman-era London, Britain's largest city.
But with much less fog, presumably. And more malaria.
José Iriarte, a University of Exeter archaeologist, said it would have required an elaborate system of organized labor to build the roads and thousands of earthen mounds.
'The Incas and Mayans built with stone, but people in Amazonia didn't usually have stone available to build - they built with mud. It's still an immense amount of labor,' said Iriarte, who had no role in the research.
Caesar Augustus allegedly boasted “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” But if you don’t have marble to work with, you make do with mud. Which, in a way, is even more impressive.
The Amazon is often thought of as a 'pristine wilderness with only small groups of people.
Only by people who haven’t been paying attention.
Get all the details here: Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon “Rostain et al. describe evidence of such an agrarian Amazonian culture that began more than 2000 years ago. They describe more than 6000 earthen platforms distributed in a geometic pattern connected by roads and intertwined with agricultural landscapes and river drainages in the Upano Valley.
Similar findings in Bolivia: Lidar reveals pre-Hispanic low-density urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon The civic-ceremonial architecture of these large settlement sites includes stepped platforms, on top of which lie U-shaped structures, rectangular platform mounds and conical pyramids (which are up to 22 m tall. … Massive water-management infrastructure, composed of canals and reservoirs, complete the settlement system in an anthropogenically modified landscape.
And Brazil: More than 10,000 pre-Columbian earthworks are still hidden throughout Amazonia We report the discovery, using LIDAR (light detection and ranging) information from across the basin, of 24 previously undetected pre-Columbian earthworks beneath the forest canopy. Modeled distribution and abundance of large-scale archaeological sites across Amazonia suggest that between 10,272 and 23,648 sites remain to be discovered and that most will be found in the southwest.
10,000 steps too many
Are you one of those people who obsessively tries to walk 10,000 steps each day for optimal health — and then feels guilty when you don’t hit the mark?
I’ve got three bits of good news for you.
First — walking any number of steps each day is a good thing! Of course, more is better. Up to a point. Fortunately, that point is something less than 10,000 steps.
Second — the 10,000 steps rule was completely made up by marketers. (Just like breakfast.) It all goes back to the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo:
The idea of walking 10,000 steps a day was invented as part of the marketing campaign for an early pedometer ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The Japanese character for 10,000 looks rather like a person walking so the device was called the Manpo-kei or 10,000 steps meter.3
Third — according to recent research, the optimal target number of steps is more like 6000 steps a day:
Scientists Identify The Optimal Number of Daily Steps For Longevity, And It's Not 10,000
By analyzing data on tens of thousands of people across four continents compiled between 15 existing studies, a team of researchers has landed on a more comfortable figure: the optimal number is probably closer to 6,000 steps per day, depending on your age.
Anything more is unlikely to further reduce your chances of stumbling into an early grave.
"So, what we saw was this incremental reduction in risk as steps increase, until it levels off," said University of Massachusetts Amherst epidemiologist Amanda Paluch when the study was released in March 2022.
Read the article for all the details, but the takeaway is just keep moving!
If you find yourself in the desert you may have walked too far. Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
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And by first we mean, of course, the first by Europeans. Maybe some anonymous native South Americans made the trip before 1542, but if so, they left no record of their journey, so it doesn’t count. Those are the rules.
Lost cities/ancient civilizations stuff is extremely up my alley. This was a very cool read.