My favorite discovery about Amazon civilization is that the incidence of human-edible fruit trees is much higher in any area near navigable water. They were modifying the forest to be more supportive of humans.
That didn’t just happen in the Amazon. The Pacific Northwest had something like that. My understanding is that the Eastern American forests were curated like that too, before it was cut down.
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.
In Hell's Canyon Oregon, there were mining camps up and down it and you still see a ton of fruit trees dotting the canyon because of it. Many are intentional, by homes, rows etc, but sometimes you see the odd copse of fruit trees off by itself and well, that's probably where the outhouse as ;)
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.
It happens unintentionally too, if you've ever been to a state park in North America and seen an apple tree off of a trail, it's because someone once threw away an apple core.
A slice of my property I leave to grow naturally. I threw out apple cores into it frequently, hoping one will sprout. They never did. I finally just bought an apple tree and planted it there, it now produces delicious apples once a year.
A couple onions I threw there did sprout!
Yes, much of early cultivation is theorized to have looked like this, particularly before sedentary agriculture. If you have a fairly stable seasonal migration pattern plants you eat or use will naturally "follow" you around and will tend towards forms that make them more attractive to human attention.
I think that minimizes the fact that people were deliberately curating and designing perennial food forests, historically and contemporarily. Our ancestors may not have the scientific knowledge we have now, but they were just as smart as we are.
> I think that minimizes the fact that people were deliberately curating and designing perennial food forests, historically and contemporarily.
I don't see this minimization (after all, we currently do this unintentionally today and nobody sees this as lack of intelligence and I certainly hope I never implied that people in the past were in any way less capable than ourselves) but I do affirm that people were just as capable of understanding the causes and effects of plant reproduction as they are today.
I'm just freely speculating on how to find the most minimal path to explanation and it's easier to explain the differences in the rise of civilization in the middle east vs the new world with other factors rather than something cultural or genetic or otherwise abstractly geographically-bound factors. And besides, I like the idea that people in the past wouldn't have just sat around ruminating how to maximize crop yields but had more fruitful activities to attend to. I don't celebrate the egyptian engineer who figured out how to haul a multi-ton brick up a high slope, I mourn for him (or her)!
EDIT: softened wording a bit
I've been on a quest to find out what went wrong with modernity. Looking through the history, I found out the Renaissance was not what I thought it was. The history of the Silk Roads were not what I thought it was. And I haven't revisited the history of the industrial revolution, but it looks so far, that is where the obsession with maximizing productivity, gains, and work all come from. It is very likely when I look at it again, it is not what I thought it was either.
The significance of perennial food forests is that it's a practice that comes from a very different world view than our normative one that came from the industrial revolution. Yet there's a tendency to evaluate something like a perennial food forest from the world view of maximizing productivity. Maybe we're talking past each other a bit -- I have not put a lot of thought into the difference in how civilizations arose in the old world vs the new world. The patterns of design for something like the perennial food forests in the Americas have shown up in the Old World as well.
I haven't found Occam's Razor very effective in explanatory powers. Treating the minimum path as the floor is one thing; treating it as the most probable theory (and then making decisions based upon it) is something I have concluded for myself as folly. Just my personal opinion; I'm aware I don't hold a popular opinion.
> treating it as the most probable theory (and then making decisions based upon it) is something I have concluded for myself as folly.
Sure, but your tools reasoning about the past are quite limited. Occam's Razor helps us identify where narrative elements are unnecessary for an explanation, and in that it's quite useful. For most of history we must rely on Occam's Razor to even construct any sort of probability model. After all what's easier to believe—acting like the historical record was fabricated with the intent of deceiving us, or acting like the people who wrote the historical records generally had rational reasons to do so? The basis for preferring the latter is inherently an application of Occam's Razor.
You're misusing Occam's Razor because of a misunderstanding about indigenous people's capacity for engineering.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24712701
https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-8/targeted-interventions...
https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/indigenous-peoples-have...
Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest actively encouraged the formation of geological structures in order to increase shellfish yield and sustainability. You seem to think that the simplest explanation is that people just copied happy accidents, when the level of sophistication of these systems combined with the documented propensity of humans to actively engineer their way out of problems leads to the simplest explanation being that what we see with both the food forests and mariculture is such active engineering.
The only way to come to a different conclusion is to assume that something is fundamentally different between Old World and New World populations just because one group's processes are relatively well-documented and the other's isn't. However, that conclusion would be colored by your relative inexperience with the shape of New World solutions. We're just discovering these phenomena because we didn't have the vision to see that they existed, biased as we are to the Eurasian perspective. If all you know are wheels, you won't recognize llama tracks, as it were.
It's been my experience with myself and observing people that beliefs can form in both reasonable and unreasonable ways. While people often times have reasons of their own, I've learned not to take it for granted, or even assume that my reconstruction of those reasoning is correct.
> I've been on a quest to find out what went wrong with modernity.
The late bronze age collapse. Humanity fucked up so bad we don't even know what happened. Everything since then has been meh. Future humans might still see us as in some form of iron age.
It can and humans (like birds) do disperse genetic material. However we are talking about deliberately curated food forests.
The European forests, in contrast were not like that. I remember reading about accounts from settlers in North America noting the park like quality of some of the forests.
As another example, here where I live in the Sonoran (Phoenix), there are a lot of chollas. Those have nasty barbed thorns, but they also produce fruits. There is another native plant that has sticky leaves and can be used to brush off the thorns so that the fruits can be harvested. I learned this from one of Brad Landcaster’s videos on this; Landcaster said he learned it from one of the native elders. They would deliberately plant the plant with sticky leaves near chollas.
Permaculture is another word for it:
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.
Not that this is a new idea - when was the term "rat race" coined? - but I imagine that part of the issue is people who are so caught up in their unexamined expectations that they don't have the wherewithal to question them. You then factor in that the examining and decision-making is taken up by people with a lot more money or political influence. Such is the genesis of, say, white flight (and maybe even "manifest destiny"). Doesn't absolve participants of culpability, but helps us to understand the how and a bit of the why.
> or want to gentrify communities to their liking.
I think you've bent this word beyond breaking.
> I'd say we've lost around 25 trees 75 years or older in just my immediate neighborhood.
What kind of trees? Red Alder which are native to the area for example don't live much more than 70 years.
> while wages haven't even doubled,
Median household income in current dollars has more than doubled in Portland since 2000[1].
> It's not a supply and demand problem
Yes it is. Housing prices increase when demand increases. Portland has an arbitrary growth boundary around the city and a lot of restrictions on height.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/205988/median-household-...
> while wages haven't even doubled,
Median household income in current dollars has more than doubled in Portland since 2000[1].
> It's not a supply and demand problem
Yes it is. Housing prices increase when demand increases. Portland has an arbitrary growth boundary around the city and a lot of restrictions on height.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/205988/median-household-...
Ok I double-checked, and it looks like that graph isn't adjusted for inflation. Here's one that is:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSORA672N
From 2000-2023, yours shows $42,499-$88,740, but that shows $70,870-$88,740 in 2023 C-CPI-U Dollars.
Apparently cumulative inflation has about doubled nationally since 2000, making the consumer price index (CPI) about double, so $1 in 2000 was worth the same as about $2 today:
https://inflationdata.com/articles/2022/08/10/u-s-cumulative...
So real inflation-adjusted wages in Oregon have risen about ($88,740 - $70,870)/$70,870 = 25% from 2000-2023.
If household incomes had actually doubled and also kept up with inflation, they would be ($70,870 * 2) = $141,740 in today's dollars. Or by your graph, year 2000 wages that doubled and also kept up with inflation (so two doublings) would be ($42,499 * 2 * 2) = $169,996.
Admittedly, I don't know where the $28,256 discrepancy comes from, so expected wages would probably be somewhere between $141,740 and $169,996. Maybe someone more studied in economics can tell us.
From Jan 2000 to Jan 2023 and not adjusting for inflation, housing prices in Oregon have risen from $102,749 to $338,927:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POXRMTNSA
So a $100,000 home in 2000 would cost $200,000 by inflation and $250,000 if housing prices matched the 25% wage increase. But they cost $338,927, so are about 1.36 times more expensive than expected, even accounting for higher wages.
After writing this out, I question what a wage increase means if housing prices just match it. Is it really a raise if it's eaten up by rising housing costs?
Had people invested in things besides housing bubbles, say medical breakthroughs or renewable energy, then today's housing costs vs inflationary costs would be $338,927/$200,000 = 1.69. So homes today are 69% more expensive/overengineered than in 2000.
To me, this doesn't represent supply and demand. It shows that people have put their wage gains into more expensive homes, which reduced the supply of building materials and raised housing costs for everyone else. It also shows that a larger segment of the population today isn't working, because our economy has been moving from manufacturing to finance. Meaning that young working people are carrying a higher load to support the retirements of older people who have invested in real estate, mostly through private equity firms.
You bring up a good point about aging and sick trees though. Most in our neighborhood were cut down due to neglect and disease. The 2008 housing bubble crash left lots empty for a year or two and the banks didn't bother paying the water bill, so the trees died. We've also had unusually mild winters where I live in Idaho, allowing invasive pests and diseases to survive and harm trees. There's no talk of any of this in the local media or messaging from our city council though, so there's no consensus on saving the trees. I sympathize that trees must be cut down sometimes for safety, but it's been hard to watch.
My point about income is that it has doubled in the same way housing prices have. If you inflation adjusted the housing prices they aren’t so out of line with median household income.
If your theory about housing prices is building materials, you’re just flatly wrong. The underlying land values have had very large increases in value, and materials are a small portion of the court of a frame built house. Land and labor costs dominate.
> They were modifying the forest to be more supportive of humans.
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.
Where did you read this? I’ve read in multiple places that the jungle there is quite inhospitable to humans because there is little easily accessible food. The source that comes to mind is the book The Lost City of Z.
There's now a consensus of evidence that large areas of the Amazon were planted and cultivated. Bear in mind this an enormous area, and multiple civilisations would have been active simultaneously over thousands of years.
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
you mean "large" relative to human populations or large relative to the entire Amazon rain forest? Your sources indicate that there was cultivation widespread around the amazon but not that the /entire/ amazon is as it is due to cultivation. Maybe i misinterpret the intended message of your comment.
I meant that the Amazon basin and Amazonia are enormous geographic regions. It's highly unlikely that the rainforest itself is the result of cultivation. It does seem to be proven at this point that wide areas were cultivated multiple times in distinct eras of human habitation.
Amazing how many areas of humanities, physical sciences and informatics and engineering were required to achieve this result. Showcases the range and depth of human knowledge perfectly.
How do the LIDARs work for this kind of thing? I always imagined that the light used wouldn't be able to penetrate objects that are opaque in the visible light spectrum.
If sunlight can reach the forest floor then so can LIDAR.
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.
Even when eroded, the presence of straight lines in the eroded remains has typically been used to identify human-made structures.
Why do tree trunks not show up?
Standing or fallen?
.. and who says that fallen logs don't show up?
Bear in mind that the final display is a processed data product with any number of artefacts smoothed, filtered, or cut away by a data processor.
Here is a fisheye photo from the bottom of a rainforest. As you can see, some spots of sky are visible from the bottom. When you fly above the forest and LIDAR is looking down, similarly at some spots the LIDAR laser beams are able to hit all the way to the bottom at some spots through the canopy.
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...
Just finished watching "Ancient Apocalypse" on Netflix. They go over this kind of discovery
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"
> Even if what they claim is not completely right
It seems even this is not the case and that the show is just completely wrong.
The show seemed very convincing, not in the speculative theories about an ancient precursor civilization necessarily, but definitely in some of the findings they show
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?
This is precisely what I'm looking for too. All critiques of Hancock I can find with my feeble googling skills seem to be focused on unimportant stuff such as encouraging uses of psychedelics and accusations of racism.
But what's far, far more important, is debunking evidences like rock painting dating, geoglyphs dating. That thing on Rapa Nui about statues being more-than-half buried seemed really intriguing. The speculation he makes about why that might be so (spoiler alert: that famous lost civilization being there first) seemed interesting to me. Is there a specific debunking of that somewhere?
I'd also be interested in specific debunking of his theory that incas didn't have the capabilities to do some of the rock walls they've made. You know, with heated rocks and all. That seemed interesting too.
The moai are half buried because that's just what tends to happen in erosive environments. Sediment buries things.
As for specifically debunking his LGM speculation, there isn't much because no one with public credentials wants to spend time and effort on it in the current academic environment. You can find debunkings in popular media (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A) and a few scattered "popular" academic publications like the SAA's special edition on Hancock's pseudoarchaeology (http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=634462&p=10&view...), but most of the information is buried in papers and books that don't discuss him at all.
There's just flat out no actual evidence for (virtually?) all of his speculation and you can't prove a negative. Hancock's MO is to take 1-2 anomalous results and spin out media around "these dates don't line up, so let's speculate about something entirely unrelated". The rapa nui episodes in Ancient Apocalypse S2 talk to one actual archaeologist, who doesn't even support the dates discussed in the episodes. They were just anomalous banana phytoliths that were present from sediment intrusions. Dating is hard and this stuff happens regularly, especially in areas without much active research like Rapa Nui. The standard understanding is post-1200, as documented in papers like https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2020.105094 and https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03902-8
> The show seemed very convincing
On a tangent, isn't that a signal of inaccuracy? Accurate people - i.e., committed to be truthful and correct - are very careful and nuanced about what they claim, make weaknesses as clear as strengths, and are careful to not be too convincing, because that can distort their reader's critical thinking.
At least, that's the ideal. But why be especially convincing - why be more convincing than your empirical evidence?
> check out the movie "The Lost City of Z"
And the 2005 Charles C. Mann book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus".
That book is really an incredible eye-opening read, I strongly recommend it.
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.
Thank you. Looks like a fascinating read
I remember seeing some discussions about it and related topics here on HN a few years ago
Hancock is great at showing civilizations that I would have never heard of if it wasn't for his "journalism" (that's he's self-appointed title). He's a good communicator and I feel like I learn at lot from his Netflix shows.
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.
He was a journalist for The Economist in his youth.
You should check out the Miniminuteman series on ancient apocalypse, its pretty interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A
"Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James Loewen
https://web.archive.org/web/20200329225058/http://sundown.to...
The Lost City of Z, the book, was fascinating. Highly recommended. Didn’t see the movie.
I don't know if you're aware, but Ancient Apocalypse is pseudo science.
I know it has that reputation. But besides people saying stuff like your comment, I haven’t seen any specifics about exactly what’s wrong
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
I think this video is good Ressource on the topic.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A
Basically Hancock show lots of interesting and fascinating archaeological sites which is great especially since a lot of these are things that most viewers didn't know about before. But sadly he chooses to use these site only to present his theory for which he's doesn't have any actual evidence.
Thank you for that video. Unfortunately the guy spends the first part of it just hating on Hancock, which I don’t think is a good way to debunk stuff
I was also hoping the guy would find whatever papers or publications were made by the scientists Hancock interviews throughout the series, but he’s mainly just rebutting the concept of an ancient advanced civilization (which yes, is very speculative, and even Hancock says that himself in the series)
Clearly the guy has a lot of detractors, his grand theories are speculative and they certainly have many holes
But it also seems like even mainstream archaeology is also, to some degree, speculative (we can’t really know exactly what happened in the past). And that some of the research that Hancock is supporting his theories on, might actually be right
Anyway, thank you again. I will take Hancock’s most grandiose claims with a grain of salt, but I’m also going to keep an open mind about alternative theories of how the Americas might have been first populated by humans (especially the Amazon)
Yeah, I'm hesitant about this.
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.
The reality of the modern world cannot be explained by the history we are told.
You mean by the history we are told in the Ancient Apocalypse series? No, probably not.
But that's the point! New information such as these discoveries in the Amazon show that the stories told by "mainstream archeology" can't explain the reality of the modern world either!
Where does that leave us? I don't know, but curiosity should be encouraged.
? How do you figure? The idea of "fully explaining" the modern world seems a ridiculous concept but it's not like we have alternatives to the concept of looking to the past in a methodical manner.
The slow movingness of Science with its method and peer reviewing definitely fights against new ideas becoming accepted overnight, but we do get there, and glomming onto personalities with unaccepted ideas will hurt your 'correctness' more than help it.
I watched some of the first season and was actually already open to all the alt archaeology stuff with the precision arguments people make, but the more I looked the more clear it was just BS.
I think the biggest thing about the old world people miss (and thus makes alt archeology so attractive) is the mass use of slaves and general lack of caring about human suffering.
I couldn't believe Red Fort was built in 9 years in 1640, until I had that epiphany, for instance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort
> general lack of caring about human suffering
You may need some evidence. For example, someone looking back on us might think that, because we accept the current level of suffering as normal.
What is alt-arhaeology?
All these people that think big archaeology is wrong because of gobekli Teppe and they now have a couple seasons of the Netflix show referenced in this thread
So amazing that we can see this without even excavating it all.
Everytime I see these I think of lost gold.
Every time i see these I think about Spanish explorers who brought small pox over and caused these cities to collapse, only to return to Spain telling stories of jungle cities. Only to have the fleets turn up to dense jungle years later and fine nothing.
But yeah, I also think about lost treasure and Indian Jones a lot with these stories.
Some of those ancient cities disappeared a lot earlier than Spain even existed, though.
People likely abandoned them for some unknown reason and moved to other locations, where they'd eventually get wiped out by the Spanish.
Exactly, and likely some of these cities were destroyed by rival kingdoms we don't even know existed, if written history in other regions is anything to go by.
Most of the cities disappeared earlier.
I think you are referencing La aventura del Amazonas by Dominican monk Gaspar de Carvajal.
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...
This is what a meant yes. I just couldn't find the reference. Thank you.
There’s proven to be massive amounts of rare earth metals used by the indigenous populations in that area at that time, so it’s only natural to imagine that finding “lost” or abandoned cities from around that time has the potential to uncover large amounts of rare metals as well, potentially even cities that explain the stories told of cities filled with gold. The original comment didn’t need a history lesson on the Spanish conquests.
Replies like yours belong on Reddit, what an insufferable outlook on life and history.
I woke up cranky
Needs a date in the title - this was posted a number of times here when it was published.
(Jan 2024)
The Book of Mormon has made this claim for years
There is absolutely nothing being found here that is consistent with the Book of Mormon besides very general things like people lived there.
Correct. But for a long time people claimed no body even lived there.
But I agree believing in a book like the Book of Mormon because of some random article would be a bad idea
The book of mormon makes no claim as to geography. Nobody can point to "Zarahemla" on a map. Joseph Smith was almost certainly thinking of the regions he lived in as the basis for book of mormon geography (north america). You just need to read the story of "Zelph" [1] where he picked up a bone and went on a rant about how it was actually a Lamanite warrior named Zelph that lived there.
The main reason the North/Central America geography were abandoned is because significant archaeologic evidence surfaced describing pretty much everything about the native american population that lived there for 1000s of years (spoilers, no correlation with the BoM story). That's why in roughly the 50->80s the church started pivoting to pointing to south america as the geography of the book of mormon.
The church has spent a lot of time burying stories like "Zelph" because of how bad they make JS look.
> But for a long time people claimed no body even lived there.
Show me one reputable person that has claimed there were no ancient inhabitants of south america.
Yeah, you’re definitely right that the book makes no geographical claims.
My original comment was mostly in jest considering most members believe it took place in South America.
And yeah, I apologize I didn’t mean literally nobody. I’ll have to see if I can find anything related online, but in high school I was given an anti-Mormon book that had a section talking about how there was no evidence of major cities and there was never as large a population anywhere in Central or South America as large as is claimed in the Book of Mormon.
In all fairness the science at this point also makes no further claims.
There are a couple of things here to prop up your comment:
* 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.
Yeah, I believe the theory that other people were present.
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
To your last point departing anywhere from the western coast of Africa directly into the Atlantic Ocean if not for directed navigation you will eventually drift into northern Brazil provided you survive storms, do not sail during hurricane season, and have sufficient supplies to survive the voyage. Drifting from Africa to Brazil could take several months. So, this is certainly not a journey for a raft, though I vaguely recall somebody tried that experiment with a raft.
There are also cases where more sturdy migrant boats drift from Africa to Brazil. https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-04-17/boat-dri...
> made of gold
.. could be a poetic term, even though many take it literally.
It was pretty specific that the pages were themselves gold sheets with the writings being tiny engravings. If that were true the most logic reason would be high tactility. As the most tactile substance known it can be hammered to within 6 atoms thick before tearing, though it also means gold warps and bends with low effort. When hammered thin enough it can resemble a fabric and with modern equipment can be thinned into a fully transparent electrostatic film.
That there were cities on the American continent 2500 years ago? Is this supposed to vindicate the Book of Mormon as somehow being truthful?
No. Believing in a religious text because of some archeological evidence would be like doing math through prayer.
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?"
Every time I see news about cities discovered in south america I look to see if the dates line up with the Nephite/Lamanite civilizations of the Book of Mormon (roughly 600 BC to 400 AD). This is the closest yet that I've seen. I'm eager to see what they discover in the coming years about their culture and government. Will we find traces of their Judge-based government? Signs that they worshiped Christ and practiced Jewish rituals? It will be interesting to watch this investigation unfold.
>Will we find traces of their Judge-based government? Signs that they worshiped Christ and practiced Jewish rituals?
No.
I began to read this thread just for the horror-show-train-wreck voyeurism of crazy. But your simple riposte made me laugh, so, gold star, you.
to me it seems notable that the conversation turns into comparisons of early Western things.. because of course, it is very unlikely that people on this forum have very much reference of any kind to these very recent science facts. "Pre-columbian art" has been a stable of artistic and intellectual circles for long time.. it is easier to look at one stone figure and wonder
javascript-walled
Not the article per se, but the supplementary materials <https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.112...>
The previous common-sense belief was that the Amazon was never densely populated and had always been exactly like it is today, a dense forest with primitive tribes scattered hundreds of km apart.
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.
> Twenty years ago, brazilian researchers who would mention this theory were considered a bit lunatic
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
Also, the amazing story of Helena Valero, kidnapped by an Amazon tribe, survived just on her wits, and escaped years later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41758857
Read, parse for keywords to take action against - what's the difference?
The article makes its main point to dispute the “City” characterization and how this is “overblown”.
I can only assume trkaky posted in the same spirit of discrediting the news, which I find worth “taking action” against. It might be old news for people in the field, and not reported faithfully (as usual), but what’s the purpose of raining down on one of the most interesting archeological discoveries in the Americas?
Agreed, but:
> “the US reads all the world’s email” level of conspiracy theories
Never say never.
Perhaps the parent comment is alluding to Elvis actually being not dead
He just went home (/s)
[dead]