Hey Scishow I read an article about acheiving fusion ignition last august but we havent been able to replicate it? I know misinformation spreads like wildfire these days but I know you guys list sources and do great work researching for the videos, so I was hoping you could explain to us whats going on with that amd shed some insight on the situation and what fusion ignition might mean for society
I'm sure he constantly mentions that the detectors go miles up-hill both ways. (I think I might be conflating Lidar with Ligo, but I'm having fun here) Oh, and back in his day, he had to detect gravitational waves the old fashioned way... With a shovel.
I watched a documentary on lidar’s contributions on studies of human settlements in the amazon a long while ago. It was amazing to see a city reveal itself through small data points scattered about
My first thought was "Oh, it's about the LIDAR project to map Maya cities!" - but then I read "Amazon". 😁 But yeah, this project in the Central America region revealed in the last few years how vast the Maya civilisation really was. And that the landscape did not always was jungle. LIDAR really did transform the way archaeologists can study long gone cultures in an awesome new way. 😎👍
The Maya weren't everywhere in the new world. Their domain were restricted to the Central America. This is South America. It's as absurd as saying the Inuits are in Utah.
When I was a little kid I used to wonder if the future of archaeology would be scanning through the ground. While we’re not there yet, this is still really amazing. Imagine all there could be to learn about this civilization and potentially many others we never knew about!
Hey Linden! I have always wondered the same. When I found out how alive the sand is in deserts, I started to think about the wonderful things the sand could be hiding. The same with the jungles. I hope that I live long enough to see some!!!!
Geophysical surveys are also very important to archaeology, as used by the Time Team in the UK, for example. See their excellent UA-cam videos, with a new series just out.
There’s also GPR (ground penetrating radar). Most famous use of it for archaeology I can think of it it’s use in finding Richard III’s body under a car park in Leicester, England.
The thing is, there have been news reports about LIDAR and other research finding Amazonian civilizations for decades. "1491" by Charles Mann talked about the degree to which the Amazon had large scale irrigation and agroforestry networks with controlled burns by town building cultures back in 2005, for example, and that book was itself talking about how out of date most general education is with research on the Americas and Precolumbian societies and how little focus they get in schools and even college level history and archeology and anthroipology course. New findings are well and good, but when none of that information is filtering it's way into textbooks and general public awareness and headlines keep presenting additional finds as a brand new thing then it almost doesn't matter. What's the point of research and knowledge if nobody is taught about it?
That's starting now, we are being taught about it literally in this video. It can sometimes take a while for new research to reach the public, that's not extraordinary
My history textbooks in high school were 20 years old so it can take decades for new information to be added to books, without the additional delay of school funding.
Unfortunately, folks, this is not news. LIDAR has been in use uncovering lost civilizations in the jungles of Central and South America since the early 2000's. They've found SEVERAL in the Amazon, and at least two in Honduras. If you're interested in reading about this, I suggest: 'The Lost City of the Monkey God' by Douglas Preston, 'The Lost City of Z' by David Grann, (Yes, such original titles, I know!) or best yet, '1491' by Charles Mann.
Watching NatGeo's Lidar series, I was under the impression that it was a relatively new technology (perhaps by the way they introduced it), so I didn't realize it was something they just kept improving over time, even though it should have been obvious. Thanks for the info :)
LiDar is amazing. I am familiar with it for cave research applications. It's perfect for finding deep sinkholes and pits. Tens of thousands of new caves will likely be found in the next 10 years thanks to LiDar. It is so freaking cool.
Cos jungle soil is actually pretty poor; the nutrients are in the plants. Same as the first European settlers in Australia discovering the hard way that much of Australian rich growth is the same; very thin loam over nutrient-poor dirt, the nutrients in the plants. There's a good reason why in both cases that farms on that soil don't last long and need new areas cleared every year or so.
@@medllensaimon1015 Sorry but it sounds like you are mixing up two related but separate ideas. 1. Yes it is true that there was and still is a disgusting degree of condescension about non European civilisations. Even to the point of, "Aliens must have built it". 2. "White people have to did things up" Not really, but if we wish to understand humanity's history, it usually means having to dig through layers of soil to find evidence. The artefacts found indicate that earlier civilisations did in fact have the brains and skills to make things. It is the unfortunate and incorrect assumptions made by fools and bigots that misinterpret the evidence to concoct the narrative of white supremacy.
This video doesn't say why it was thought that extensive inhabitation of the Amazon was impossible, which is sort of an important point, and speaks to why extensive cities of the same sort in the Congo would have faced serious challenges. Tropical rainforest areas of the world are difficult for people to live in because of tropical diseases like malaria, yellow fever, and many more. These diseases are native to the "Old World" though. The Amazon was originally free of these prolific killers. After Europeans made contact with the Americas, but before they moved deep inland, the diseases they brought moved ahead of them, making life in the Amazon very difficult for humans. The Americans these diseases found had no resistance. So life in the Amazon was perfectly possible for pre-European-contact Americans, but after this the Amazon had a period of relatively greater hazard, before modern medicine made these areas relatively more accessible again.
You need to reappraise your theory. It sort of makes sense but on closer analysis it raises a lot of questions. How did human life continue in the jungle after the spread of diseases from Africa? What is the timeline of the demise of the Amazonian civilisations and slavery?
@@pencilpauli9442 Short / long answer: read Guns, Germs, And Steel, by J. Diamond. The germs introduced by the Europeans killed about 90% of the native population in all Americas. Mumps, cholera, flu, small pox, typhus, tuberculosis, measles, bubonic plague. Malaria was introduced much later. Imagine the specialization levels required for all aspects of a civilized life, after so many deaths their civilization just collapsed. The survivals where the tribes that feared the Europeans so much that they buried themselves deep in the jungle and tabooed any kind of contact with other tribes. Those tribes were hunter / gatherers and that didn't need much specialization, they could survive even after 90% of their people died, they achieved some immunization. As I said before, malaria wasn't one of those diseases until black slaves came from Africa. South american natives apparently were not suitable for slavery, they became apathetic and just died. That's when black slaves were imported from Africa. Amazonian civilization didn't have metallic gold, they just died and the empty cities left to be "discovered" by the Europeans were of no interest, ad thus, no accounts left of them. Their gold was known as Terra Preta, an incredibly fertile soil, man made, and thought to be impossible to happen in the Amazon basin. Maia, Inca and Aztecs had gold, and the story of their demise can be glimpsed thru Spanish accounts.
@@pencilpauli9442 Diseases don't wipe out entire populations as over time people simply develop immunities (or the weak die off and leave the strong alive). What they do is lower the maximum size the population can grow into. Additionally, before the advent of modern medicine, living close together in large urban centers exacerbated the transmission of diseases. So when the advent of plague made urban living impossible, people simply spread out and turned into a more rural lifestyle. This trend isn't limited to the tropics, btw. If you read 14th-16th century diaries and journals written by Londoners, there would be times they called "plague season" during the year when people of means left the city and isolated themselves in country manors. Lower-class people would also run away to their relatives in the countryside. The city itself would lose up to a half of its population during these times. If conditions had stayed that way and nothing had improved, then over a century it was possible for London to have turned into an abandoned city.
@@BBBrasil TBH IT was a rhetorical question, as I'm aware of the impact of colonialism, and the history of intuitional racism But appreciate the book recommendation which I will deffo put on my wishlist, thank you.
The paragraph at 3:44 reminds me of the natural urbanism the human population displays time and time again. The example given reminded me of how cities like Londen and Amsterdam formed with a semi regular spread of villages around them. The next paragraph also reminded me of how the Netherlands (I live in NL, FYI) engineered the rivierdelta of western Europe into fertile farm land. From what I learned in this video the Casarabe and the Dutch could have advanced rural water management and urban water management had they either both existed today.
Brazilian journalist Reinaldo Jose Lopes wrote a book titled 1499: o Brasil antes de Cabral a couple of years ago about how modern archeology is revealing evidence all over america of multiple complex communities as large as european counterparts, buildings with its own architecture, roads and trading routes crossing thousands of km of land, river and sea, diversity of languages, cultural exchange, art, jewelry, diplomacy, big monuments, metalworking, wars and defensive buildings, incredible huge territories with poor soil turned suitable for agriculture. Even what looks like "untouched forest" to untrained eyes might have been transformed to better serve native people, as a lot of plant species are more common than what would occur naturally. At least in Brazil, it took CENTURIES after europeans arrived for their cities to grow populations as big as what is estimated before they arrived.
Brilliant! To think there are so many ancient lost civilizations that we could learn about and discover using this technology! Thank you SciShow for making this video! 👍🏻
Puzzling….LiDAR has been around for a long time. Military started using it then it was used in Central America to uncover thousands of new buildings, roadways etc. And the findings in the Amazon Basin were also discovered a long time ago. And people didn’t just “settle” there, they worked very hard with great ingenuity to extract dry land for agriculture from a seasonal flooded swamp. They were discovered by Spanish explorers who managed to wipe them out with diseases.
As we develop Lidar further, the beam size gets smaller, in other words the resolution gets better. More small beams have a better chance of getting around the leaves of trees, which is why this helps for jungles.
Don't remember where, but had heard previously that it was likely that the Amazon rainforest was far more developed due to an unexpected lack of diversity in trees. The implication was that much of the forest was overgrown orchards rather than naturally occurring.
Being surprised abt these urban settlements says less about how we think of the Amazon and more about how we think of Civilization, Agriculture and Technological progress as unique features of European culture. I think it would be fairly obvious that if humans were in the region, then they were settling. We keep being "Shocked" to find out ancient non-white european cultures were advanced and intelligent as well.
Very cool. I was just reading in the Smithsonian magazine about archeologists in the PNW using Lidar to find possible sites to better understand how humanity moved into North America. It's an awesome tool!
I could gave sworn that charcoal levels in the soil had already shown large scale and long term development of agricultural land in the Amazon basin. Given that it typically requires a connected society to disseminate similar agricultural practices, I'm not at all surprised that a large society was discovered in the area
I think this will change our whole views on the history of human existence. There is so much we don't know and yet to learn. I've always suspected that humans have existed world wide in some form or another. Just jungles and forests aren't so kind in preserving our past as desert and stone.
@@drstone3418 often thought same thing. But we've already done it. It does not pan out too well. What might work is heavy intense cattle movement. We obliterated millions of bison. We can replicate they're movements with cattle or other livestock. Heavy aggressive short term feeding. Fertilizer and move on. It's been proven to work in reclamation of deserts. Dumping water only concentrates salinity and other not so good minerals over time. But at least your thinking about it. 👍👍
I am never ceased to be amazed by LIDAR. Such a cool technology. I’m curious about this culture developing agricultural means of moving water, if they inadvertently helped to make the rainforest grow back once they moved on. If the soil was fertile then it would have made the seeding and growing of locally wild plants that much easier. I believe I’ve heard the term Re-wilding (making an area wild again) after a past civilization has stripped the local area of its wildness in the development of civilization. Food for thought.
As a Brazilian, this video makes me highly unconfortable. Around here, it's common knowledge that the Amazon region was greatly populated by people capable of causing lasting enviormental impacts long before the european invasions started, to the point some people consider some regions in the rainforest as traditional agroforests: we have several spots of black earth, and far much more food palm trees, like Açaí and Cupuaçu, than their natural spreading speeds could explain. I mean, of course there were plenty of human settlings in the rainforest... there are such settlements of indigenous people up to this day! Everything in this video sounds heavily eurocentric, and I really don't like it.
Graham Hancock has been talking about LiDARS use in the Amazon for years, according to him, civilization may have started in the Amazon waaay before though. Evidence like terra preta (dark earth) suggests that the Amazonian civilization thousands of years ago thrived and may have reached a population of more than 20 million.
About ten + years ago BBC Horizon (back when they still made decent science films) made a good documentary about the archaeology hidden in the Amazon, echoing much of what you report here. :)
I learned about this a long time ago when there was a documentary on the expeditions into the Amazon using LIDAR for the first time finding evidence of Crop Rotation. Still Cool though.
In 2015 it was published a study made in the honduran Mosquitia, with the Lidar. They were searching for the "Ciudad Blanca". I recomend to read the book "The Lost City of Monkey God" from Preston. He explains very well whar hat happened in this archeological adventure.
@@pencilpauli9442 litterally digging up a site is inherently going to cause damage to the area. Being able to scan an area without actually disturbing the site is useful. (At the very least you can narrow down the dig to minimize the inherently damaging act of digging)
@@jasonreed7522 You do realise that dig site are surveyed first using radar? The majority of sites are then going to be backfilled once the excavation is complete. Huge swathes of ancient forest aren't going to be chopped down just to see if someone lived there once upon a time. That's not how it works FFS
And the fact that these stories go on and on giving us ONE LESSON in particular. That the EUROPEAN Civilization was not as "civilized" as they think they were when they were stomping around trying to own things.
@@abramrexjoaquin7513 when 80% of the global food supply is based on new world crops, kind of makes you think Eurasia and Africa were failing at something
Could they use LIDAR in the Sahara as well? There may be civilizations that lived there when the Sahara was green. Atlas Pro did a whole video about it lol but I don’t remember if he mentioned using LIDAR to find them.
We have always known about the Amazonians and their millions strong empire it was written about by the first Spanish explorers that did more exploring than conquistadores-ing. Last i heard we think it was those explorers accidentally introducing smallpox or some such that did them in.
The first guy to figure out that the rainforest was not pristine was a doctor of botany from UC Davis. In 1980-81 he flew over the rainforest in a commercial flight and freaked out because when he looked down. He saw furrows, lots of them everywhere and geometrically shaped lakes. Then for some reason it was all discovered all over again in about 87 or so when an explorer was driving along and noticed regular bumps in his Jeep. He got out and looked around and discovered the furrows. Also, could you cut the commercials out of the videos. It's getting really annoying and rude. But, great job on the video-:)! Also as I recall the doctor tried restoring some of the furrows he found in Bolivia and the results were spectacular.
Things have changed a lot in only the last few thousand years. The Ice Age and time after was a different time. Many dry regions today were wetter and many places very wet today were drier then. Western North America was wetter. The Sahara was a savanna. Coastal regions were above water. Forested Canada was mud flats and grassland. The Levant was heavily forested with gigantic trees. Even after things warmed over time those conditions would have persisted a long time. The last few thousand years changed a lot.
You should check out the book The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston. It's about a team of journalists & researchers using Lidar, among other techniques, to locate ruins in Honduras
This wasn't unknown. In is book *1491*, published in 2006, Charles C. Mann describes the state of research into ancient cities in this exact area in detail, as well as excavations much deeper into the Amazon and a great distance away exploring other past urban centers. The recent lidar use *expands* our knowledge in significant ways, but it was used in this region because we already knew there were ancient urban centers in that exact location.
I thought everyone knew about all the settlements in the Amazon because of the "Terra preta" Terra preta soils were created by farming communities between 450 BCE and 950 CE. Maybe I just know cause I'm a gardening buff and that stuff is like black gold to a farmer.
@@spanqueluv9er Oh I just got the dates from Wikipedia, I'm no expert on the origin. Only know it's a man made composted soil with charcoal and other things mixed in and beneficial microbes that will "grow" about a cm a year just from the leaf litter in the forest. Because of that it's been around for hundreds of years past the people who first made it. If I didn't live in a different continent I totally want some as a compost starter.
Shout out to Graham Hancock for talking about this years ago on JRE Edit: no mention of Francisco de orellanas expedition down the amazon? As far as I'm aware, it was the first documented expedition down the amazon.
Talking about the Congo, it would appear that like the Americas Africa was hit by several epidemics of zoonotic diseases, possibly a few thousand years after the domestication of animals starting in the Middle East. So Africa must have gone through various cycles of decimation and the recovery, which would explain why it was reported as half empty by the handful of explorers who went in.
Would it be in the field, or would either 'far, far above the field' or 'on the field' be more accurate? ;) But seriously, congrats. I was keen on archaeology growing up, but 'life' had other plans for me.
My cousin studied to become an archeologist. He studied hard at it too, dreaming that he'd become Indiana Jones. He left the field after years of excavating peat bogs. Too bad, it looks like the field's cool again.
Additional LiDAR fun facts: You can get multiple returns for each laser pulse! this helps with trees but can add noise to the data. Each return also has an intensity value (more reflective = higher intensity) and this can be used for visualisation. Because Airborne and Mobile LiDAR systems use GPS to geo-locate the points, they also have a timestamp that you can then later associate to other data like temperature or wind.
Pretty ironic today's show about the Amazon's ancient urban development was sponsored by a single use plastics pump in the form of tiny "electrolyte sachets".
I worked with LiDAR in my GIS days it was magnificent. I always thought it would have been a magnificent tool in archeology. On a different note, this gives the falsity to the silly notion that there are people who ever lived in “harmony” with nature. Wherever we go we change the environment to suit our needs and comfort.
I think part of the issue is the European-centric pov that history basically didn't start until they arrived. To assume that a civilization wasn't built near one of the Earth's largest rivers is a bit arrogant tbh. It also pairs with the assumption that locations outside of Europe didn't have advanced societies and were just bush people (also the assumption that choosing to live with nature in nature is somehow "less advanced" disregarding the generations of knowledge of flora and fauna and natural remedies it takes to thrive in such conditions).
The Amazon was an agricultural area with a large population, then Europeans introduced smallpox into the continent and so many of those people died that the entire system collapsed and was replaced by forest, now the descendants of those people are clearing the forest again and Europeans are trying to tell them that they are not allowed to do it.
In a jungle you've got fertile soil, hearty plants and food in every direction if you know what to look for. It'd honestly be silly if ancient people DIDN'T decide to settle down there.
The Amazon civilizations had advanced soil generating techniques we still don't understand the process for. You know that Brazil nuts aren't grown on plantations right? They are harvested "wild" from the jungle. Those forests were probably planted by these people 800 years ago, still an economic cornerstone of rural Brazil.
Oh noes! A video is about something that someone else has already talked about? I thought UA-cam was supposed to only have ideas and information never before revealed.
LIDAR is "Relatively" new but it's been in use for things like this since the 80's. Maybe not out in the reaches of the Amazon, but in the PNW it was used to punch through the evergreen forests and it discovered faults on Bainbrisge Island pointed at downtown Seattle, in 2011 it was used in Iowa to study the Effigy Mounds National Monument, etc. It's awesome that it's being used more and more, but it's been SUPER common for almost 30 years at this point and this is not a new or novel use of the technology (except in location).
Poorly researched video. 1. Humans have known about possibility of Amazonian civilizations for several hundred years as the rainforest doesn't cover all of tropical South America. Massive mounds and earth works have been discovered throughout the region and many are observable from space. Literally several videos on UA-cam on this topic. 2. As others have commented LIDAR use to find hidden structure in that region of the world isn't new. LIDAR was first used in the 2000s to find tens of thousands of hidden structures in the jungles of Central America. Multiple Mayan cities have been discovered. 3. The raised causeway isn't knew as they still exist today in areas settled by the Mayans. You can literally still walk on them. And LIDAR has discovered a lot more of the Mayan causeways linking villages and cities.
When you hear about sports drinks that have "electrolytes," yes, that's exactly right. Salts. Mostly sodium salt, plus a little potassium and magnesium salts. You're right that most people get enough sodium already (not necessarily "too much" as sodium isn't particularly harmful), but if you sweat a lot - manual labor or heavy exercise - you really can become deficient. The resulting condition is called hyponatremia if you want to look it up.
![Ancient Amazonian Cities [3 examples...kind of]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/exk_5Vph3ao/mqdefault.jpg)
Try LMNT at DrinkLMNT.com/SciShow. Thanks to LMNT for sponsoring this video.
LMNT? Pat, I'd like to buy a vowel.
Hey Scishow I read an article about acheiving fusion ignition last august but we havent been able to replicate it? I know misinformation spreads like wildfire these days but I know you guys list sources and do great work researching for the videos, so I was hoping you could explain to us whats going on with that amd shed some insight on the situation and what fusion ignition might mean for society
it's Gatorade, Hank. It's just re-packaged electrolyte drink powder bud. Sorry.
Wait, they advertise being full of sodium? Um, thanks, but I need to have LESS salt intake instead of more.
Now please make a video about the quackery of electrolyte drinks.
My dad is an archeologist, and he hasn’t shut up about Lidar for months. Really cool to see how much of an impact it’s actually making!
Pretty much every dad everywhere hasn't shut up about lasers for decades now.
@@Johnny_Shields why would they? lasers are awesome. (I am in no way biased as an electrical engineer)
I'm sure he constantly mentions that the detectors go miles up-hill both ways.
(I think I might be conflating Lidar with Ligo, but I'm having fun here)
Oh, and back in his day, he had to detect gravitational waves the old fashioned way... With a shovel.
@@oracleofdelphi4533 😂😂😂
@@oracleofdelphi4533 p😆😄
I love that we’re now getting this information with out digging up natural land.
I watched a documentary on lidar’s contributions on studies of human settlements in the amazon a long while ago. It was amazing to see a city reveal itself through small data points scattered about
My first thought was "Oh, it's about the LIDAR project to map Maya cities!" - but then I read "Amazon". 😁
But yeah, this project in the Central America region revealed in the last few years how vast the Maya civilisation really was. And that the landscape did not always was jungle. LIDAR really did transform the way archaeologists can study long gone cultures in an awesome new way. 😎👍
The Maya weren't everywhere in the new world. Their domain were restricted to the Central America. This is South America. It's as absurd as saying the Inuits are in Utah.
@@mfaizsyahmi That's exactly what he's saying, he thought it was about the Maya cities _but_ then read "Amazon".
When I was a little kid I used to wonder if the future of archaeology would be scanning through the ground. While we’re not there yet, this is still really amazing. Imagine all there could be to learn about this civilization and potentially many others we never knew about!
Hey Linden! I have always wondered the same. When I found out how alive the sand is in deserts, I started to think about the wonderful things the sand could be hiding. The same with the jungles. I hope that I live long enough to see some!!!!
Geophysical surveys are also very important to archaeology, as used by the Time Team in the UK, for example. See their excellent UA-cam videos, with a new series just out.
There’s also GPR (ground penetrating radar). Most famous use of it for archaeology I can think of it it’s use in finding Richard III’s body under a car park in Leicester, England.
Hi Linden we are getting there - have you ever watched 'Time Team' a UK archaeology program ? All the best to you and yours. Rab
There is nothing cooler than discovering the ingenuity of ancient civilizations.
The thing is, there have been news reports about LIDAR and other research finding Amazonian civilizations for decades. "1491" by Charles Mann talked about the degree to which the Amazon had large scale irrigation and agroforestry networks with controlled burns by town building cultures back in 2005, for example, and that book was itself talking about how out of date most general education is with research on the Americas and Precolumbian societies and how little focus they get in schools and even college level history and archeology and anthroipology course. New findings are well and good, but when none of that information is filtering it's way into textbooks and general public awareness and headlines keep presenting additional finds as a brand new thing then it almost doesn't matter. What's the point of research and knowledge if nobody is taught about it?
That's starting now, we are being taught about it literally in this video. It can sometimes take a while for new research to reach the public, that's not extraordinary
@@ikbintom No, Tom. Way to miss the point by a mile. Stop defending a broken system you ignorant fuqwit.🖕🖕🙄🤡🤦♂️
i even heard that a high school student found some setlements on lidar maps... i think it was 2015, but not sure about the year
thats because theyre not sending you to school to learn. its to take your money
My history textbooks in high school were 20 years old so it can take decades for new information to be added to books, without the additional delay of school funding.
Unfortunately, folks, this is not news. LIDAR has been in use uncovering lost civilizations in the jungles of Central and South America since the early 2000's. They've found SEVERAL in the Amazon, and at least two in Honduras. If you're interested in reading about this, I suggest: 'The Lost City of the Monkey God' by Douglas Preston, 'The Lost City of Z' by David Grann, (Yes, such original titles, I know!) or best yet, '1491' by Charles Mann.
Well it's news to many of us. This channel is great at highlighting this great work. Thanks for the suggestions
Watching NatGeo's Lidar series, I was under the impression that it was a relatively new technology (perhaps by the way they introduced it), so I didn't realize it was something they just kept improving over time, even though it should have been obvious. Thanks for the info :)
Thanks!
LiDar is amazing. I am familiar with it for cave research applications. It's perfect for finding deep sinkholes and pits. Tens of thousands of new caves will likely be found in the next 10 years thanks to LiDar. It is so freaking cool.
Given that civilisations grew on major rivers, the question is why a civilization would not have existed in the biggest drainage system in the world
Cos jungle soil is actually pretty poor; the nutrients are in the plants. Same as the first European settlers in Australia discovering the hard way that much of Australian rich growth is the same; very thin loam over nutrient-poor dirt, the nutrients in the plants. There's a good reason why in both cases that farms on that soil don't last long and need new areas cleared every year or so.
Withe people have to dig things up, they never assume other races have brains that can also solve problems.
@@thekaxmax
Which part of "seasonal flooding" did you not understand?
European settlers also tried to plant European crops.
@@medllensaimon1015
Sorry but it sounds like you are mixing up two related but separate ideas.
1. Yes it is true that there was and still is a disgusting degree of condescension about non European civilisations.
Even to the point of, "Aliens must have built it".
2. "White people have to did things up"
Not really, but if we wish to understand humanity's history, it usually means having to dig through layers of soil to find evidence.
The artefacts found indicate that earlier civilisations did in fact have the brains and skills to make things.
It is the unfortunate and incorrect assumptions made by fools and bigots that misinterpret the evidence to concoct the narrative of white supremacy.
@@thekaxmax LOL I bet you have never set foot on a farm in your entire life.
First learned about this when it was used to uncover cities in southern Africa a few years ago. Amazed to see where this will go.
This video doesn't say why it was thought that extensive inhabitation of the Amazon was impossible, which is sort of an important point, and speaks to why extensive cities of the same sort in the Congo would have faced serious challenges.
Tropical rainforest areas of the world are difficult for people to live in because of tropical diseases like malaria, yellow fever, and many more. These diseases are native to the "Old World" though. The Amazon was originally free of these prolific killers. After Europeans made contact with the Americas, but before they moved deep inland, the diseases they brought moved ahead of them, making life in the Amazon very difficult for humans. The Americans these diseases found had no resistance.
So life in the Amazon was perfectly possible for pre-European-contact Americans, but after this the Amazon had a period of relatively greater hazard, before modern medicine made these areas relatively more accessible again.
You need to reappraise your theory.
It sort of makes sense but on closer analysis it raises a lot of questions.
How did human life continue in the jungle after the spread of diseases from Africa?
What is the timeline of the demise of the Amazonian civilisations and slavery?
Also the racist scientists of the past thought the natives to be primitives unable of building a civilization
@@pencilpauli9442 Short / long answer: read Guns, Germs, And Steel, by J. Diamond.
The germs introduced by the Europeans killed about 90% of the native population in all Americas.
Mumps, cholera, flu, small pox, typhus, tuberculosis, measles, bubonic plague. Malaria was introduced much later.
Imagine the specialization levels required for all aspects of a civilized life, after so many deaths their civilization just collapsed.
The survivals where the tribes that feared the Europeans so much that they buried themselves deep in the jungle and tabooed any kind of contact with other tribes. Those tribes were hunter / gatherers and that didn't need much specialization, they could survive even after 90% of their people died, they achieved some immunization. As I said before, malaria wasn't one of those diseases until black slaves came from Africa.
South american natives apparently were not suitable for slavery, they became apathetic and just died. That's when black slaves were imported from Africa.
Amazonian civilization didn't have metallic gold, they just died and the empty cities left to be "discovered" by the Europeans were of no interest, ad thus, no accounts left of them. Their gold was known as Terra Preta, an incredibly fertile soil, man made, and thought to be impossible to happen in the Amazon basin.
Maia, Inca and Aztecs had gold, and the story of their demise can be glimpsed thru Spanish accounts.
@@pencilpauli9442 Diseases don't wipe out entire populations as over time people simply develop immunities (or the weak die off and leave the strong alive). What they do is lower the maximum size the population can grow into. Additionally, before the advent of modern medicine, living close together in large urban centers exacerbated the transmission of diseases. So when the advent of plague made urban living impossible, people simply spread out and turned into a more rural lifestyle. This trend isn't limited to the tropics, btw. If you read 14th-16th century diaries and journals written by Londoners, there would be times they called "plague season" during the year when people of means left the city and isolated themselves in country manors. Lower-class people would also run away to their relatives in the countryside. The city itself would lose up to a half of its population during these times. If conditions had stayed that way and nothing had improved, then over a century it was possible for London to have turned into an abandoned city.
@@BBBrasil
TBH IT was a rhetorical question, as I'm aware of the impact of colonialism, and the history of intuitional racism
But appreciate the book recommendation which I will deffo put on my wishlist, thank you.
The paragraph at 3:44 reminds me of the natural urbanism the human population displays time and time again. The example given reminded me of how cities like Londen and Amsterdam formed with a semi regular spread of villages around them.
The next paragraph also reminded me of how the Netherlands (I live in NL, FYI) engineered the rivierdelta of western Europe into fertile farm land.
From what I learned in this video the Casarabe and the Dutch could have advanced rural water management and urban water management had they either both existed today.
Brazilian journalist Reinaldo Jose Lopes wrote a book titled 1499: o Brasil antes de Cabral a couple of years ago about how modern archeology is revealing evidence all over america of multiple complex communities as large as european counterparts, buildings with its own architecture, roads and trading routes crossing thousands of km of land, river and sea, diversity of languages, cultural exchange, art, jewelry, diplomacy, big monuments, metalworking, wars and defensive buildings, incredible huge territories with poor soil turned suitable for agriculture. Even what looks like "untouched forest" to untrained eyes might have been transformed to better serve native people, as a lot of plant species are more common than what would occur naturally.
At least in Brazil, it took CENTURIES after europeans arrived for their cities to grow populations as big as what is estimated before they arrived.
Brilliant! To think there are so many ancient lost civilizations that we could learn about and discover using this technology! Thank you SciShow for making this video! 👍🏻
Puzzling….LiDAR has been around for a long time. Military started using it then it was used in Central America to uncover thousands of new buildings, roadways etc. And the findings in the Amazon Basin were also discovered a long time ago. And people didn’t just “settle” there, they worked very hard with great ingenuity to extract dry land for agriculture from a seasonal flooded swamp. They were discovered by Spanish explorers who managed to wipe them out with diseases.
As we develop Lidar further, the beam size gets smaller, in other words the resolution gets better. More small beams have a better chance of getting around the leaves of trees, which is why this helps for jungles.
Not just the beam size getting smaller, but we can scan far more beams per second, which is important when collecting data from a moving plane.
@@mckryall Umm… your comments here have nothing to do with what was written. Wtf are you going on about?🙄🤦♂️🤦♂️🤡🤷♂️
I love Hank's face at the end when he's drinking the LMNT stuff. :D
I was searching for someone to say this!
+
I've had fun looking around at the LiDAR of the state of Wisconsin for a couple years. Simple, free resource. Amazing details ✨️.
Don't remember where, but had heard previously that it was likely that the Amazon rainforest was far more developed due to an unexpected lack of diversity in trees. The implication was that much of the forest was overgrown orchards rather than naturally occurring.
Being surprised abt these urban settlements says less about how we think of the Amazon and more about how we think of Civilization, Agriculture and Technological progress as unique features of European culture. I think it would be fairly obvious that if humans were in the region, then they were settling. We keep being "Shocked" to find out ancient non-white european cultures were advanced and intelligent as well.
^👏👏👏👏👏
Another person figures out that dogma is still a huge problem and impediment to true research across the sciences. Thank goodness.🙌❤️
Very cool. I was just reading in the Smithsonian magazine about archeologists in the PNW using Lidar to find possible sites to better understand how humanity moved into North America. It's an awesome tool!
I could gave sworn that charcoal levels in the soil had already shown large scale and long term development of agricultural land in the Amazon basin.
Given that it typically requires a connected society to disseminate similar agricultural practices, I'm not at all surprised that a large society was discovered in the area
There’s a Discovery network documentary about this on Disney+ that I watched a few months ago. It’s a game changing piece of technology.
I think this will change our whole views on the history of human existence.
There is so much we don't know and yet to learn.
I've always suspected that humans have existed world wide in some form or another.
Just jungles and forests aren't so kind in preserving our past as desert and stone.
@@drstone3418 often thought same thing.
But we've already done it.
It does not pan out too well.
What might work is heavy intense cattle movement.
We obliterated millions of bison.
We can replicate they're movements with cattle or other livestock.
Heavy aggressive short term feeding. Fertilizer and move on.
It's been proven to work in reclamation of deserts.
Dumping water only concentrates salinity and other not so good minerals over time.
But at least your thinking about it.
👍👍
I am never ceased to be amazed by LIDAR. Such a cool technology. I’m curious about this culture developing agricultural means of moving water, if they inadvertently helped to make the rainforest grow back once they moved on. If the soil was fertile then it would have made the seeding and growing of locally wild plants that much easier. I believe I’ve heard the term Re-wilding (making an area wild again) after a past civilization has stripped the local area of its wildness in the development of civilization. Food for thought.
What a freaking awesome discovery. It completely changes how I think about people who lived in rainforests.
Wait until you here what they did in Australia until they were discovered/wrecked
As a Brazilian, this video makes me highly unconfortable. Around here, it's common knowledge that the Amazon region was greatly populated by people capable of causing lasting enviormental impacts long before the european invasions started, to the point some people consider some regions in the rainforest as traditional agroforests: we have several spots of black earth, and far much more food palm trees, like Açaí and Cupuaçu, than their natural spreading speeds could explain. I mean, of course there were plenty of human settlings in the rainforest... there are such settlements of indigenous people up to this day! Everything in this video sounds heavily eurocentric, and I really don't like it.
^Yes to all of that.👏👏🙏
Im amazed by the interconnectivity and causeways
I know they have been using LIDAR in both Mexico and Central America and what they found so far is mind blowing.
There is a series called Lost Cities with Albert Lin, they explore the Amazon and other places from around the world through Lidar.
Im just surprised it took sci show this long to cover lidar in the amazon
Graham Hancock has been talking about LiDARS use in the Amazon for years, according to him, civilization may have started in the Amazon waaay before though. Evidence like terra preta (dark earth) suggests that the Amazonian civilization thousands of years ago thrived and may have reached a population of more than 20 million.
About ten + years ago BBC Horizon (back when they still made decent science films) made a good documentary about the archaeology hidden in the Amazon, echoing much of what you report here. :)
If we were to search for Atlantis, we could use sharks strapped with friken' Lidar.
Let's strap you to a shark for crazy talk 🦈
I learned about this a long time ago when there was a documentary on the expeditions into the Amazon using LIDAR for the first time finding evidence of Crop Rotation.
Still Cool though.
Do you remember the name of the documentary?
Name plz
@@regulargoat7259 Sorry, I do not remember as it was something along the lines of several years ago.
I would have said it if I remembered.
@@thekingoffailure9967 See my reply to Regular Goat. Sorry.
Another excellent story
In 2015 it was published a study made in the honduran Mosquitia, with the Lidar. They were searching for the "Ciudad Blanca". I recomend to read the book "The Lost City of Monkey God" from Preston. He explains very well whar hat happened in this archeological adventure.
That was an awesome book
Thank you
Read “The Lost Kingdom of the Monkey God” by Douglas Preston. Lidar was used to discover an unknown ancient city in the rain forest of Honduras.
Also, conventional archaeology is by definition destructive.
Is it? Let me check the definition of archaeology...
Nope, destruction isn't the definition of archaeology.
@@pencilpauli9442 wow you really misunderstood what she was saying 😂😂
Or, you know, reconstructive.
@@pencilpauli9442 litterally digging up a site is inherently going to cause damage to the area. Being able to scan an area without actually disturbing the site is useful. (At the very least you can narrow down the dig to minimize the inherently damaging act of digging)
@@jasonreed7522
You do realise that dig site are surveyed first using radar?
The majority of sites are then going to be backfilled once the excavation is complete.
Huge swathes of ancient forest aren't going to be chopped down just to see if someone lived there once upon a time.
That's not how it works FFS
I can definitely nerd out on this.
You're in good company here.
I first learned about this in a podcast with Graham Hancock, super interesting podcast!
The whole paradigm of not considering societies without phonetic or hieroglyphic writing systems as civilizations should be reconsidered.
And the fact that these stories go on and on giving us ONE LESSON in particular. That the EUROPEAN Civilization was not as "civilized" as they think they were when they were stomping around trying to own things.
@@abramrexjoaquin7513 when 80% of the global food supply is based on new world crops, kind of makes you think Eurasia and Africa were failing at something
@@NCRonrad 🙄🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤷♂️🤡👎💩
@@spanqueluv9er hieroglyphs, in 2022? Primitive
if you are wondering what these areas looked like look up star forts. everything you said in this lines up with these structures almost to a tee
Anyone else rolling their eyes at researchers not believing that indigenous people could have sophisticated societies?
^Yes. It’s a massive problem that needs routing out once and for all. Dogma fuqqing sucks.
"This settle the debate." Who was right? Those who were vindicated by evidence, or those who required it?
2:54 infrared images can help with that
Could they use LIDAR in the Sahara as well? There may be civilizations that lived there when the Sahara was green. Atlas Pro did a whole video about it lol but I don’t remember if he mentioned using LIDAR to find them.
There’s an ancient forest underneath the Sahara. Surely there are buried cities.
1491 by Charles C Mann is a great book on this topic.
We have always known about the Amazonians and their millions strong empire it was written about by the first Spanish explorers that did more exploring than conquistadores-ing. Last i heard we think it was those explorers accidentally introducing smallpox or some such that did them in.
The first guy to figure out that the rainforest was not pristine was a doctor of botany from UC Davis. In 1980-81 he flew over the rainforest in a commercial flight and freaked out because when he looked down. He saw furrows, lots of them everywhere and geometrically shaped lakes. Then for some reason it was all discovered all over again in about 87 or so when an explorer was driving along and noticed regular bumps in his Jeep. He got out and looked around and discovered the furrows. Also, could you cut the commercials out of the videos. It's getting really annoying and rude. But, great job on the video-:)! Also as I recall the doctor tried restoring some of the furrows he found in Bolivia and the results were spectacular.
Loved it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Things have changed a lot in only the last few thousand years. The Ice Age and time after was a different time. Many dry regions today were wetter and many places very wet today were drier then. Western North America was wetter. The Sahara was a savanna. Coastal regions were above water. Forested Canada was mud flats and grassland. The Levant was heavily forested with gigantic trees. Even after things warmed over time those conditions would have persisted a long time. The last few thousand years changed a lot.
You should check out the book The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston. It's about a team of journalists & researchers using Lidar, among other techniques, to locate ruins in Honduras
You should look at this location 8°07'54"S 57°53'48"W . Lost city of Ratanaba
Cool!!
LiDAR is an archeological super tool 😊
This wasn't unknown. In is book *1491*, published in 2006, Charles C. Mann describes the state of research into ancient cities in this exact area in detail, as well as excavations much deeper into the Amazon and a great distance away exploring other past urban centers.
The recent lidar use *expands* our knowledge in significant ways, but it was used in this region because we already knew there were ancient urban centers in that exact location.
Good video.
Hi Hank!
I thought everyone knew about all the settlements in the Amazon because of the "Terra preta" Terra preta soils were created by farming communities between 450 BCE and 950 CE. Maybe I just know cause I'm a gardening buff and that stuff is like black gold to a farmer.
^We have no idea how far back terra praeta actually goes, so your dates are pointless. None the less it’s fascinating stuff.
@@spanqueluv9er Oh I just got the dates from Wikipedia, I'm no expert on the origin. Only know it's a man made composted soil with charcoal and other things mixed in and beneficial microbes that will "grow" about a cm a year just from the leaf litter in the forest. Because of that it's been around for hundreds of years past the people who first made it. If I didn't live in a different continent I totally want some as a compost starter.
Shout out to Graham Hancock for talking about this years ago on JRE
Edit: no mention of Francisco de orellanas expedition down the amazon? As far as I'm aware, it was the first documented expedition down the amazon.
I know one of the scientists behind this!!!! Wild to see y’all doing a video over their work!!!
No you don’t.🤦♂️
@@spanqueluv9er Ok
Great video, I can't wait to see how this technology will be used from now on. Also, love everything you guys do!
pretty interesting!!
awesome stuff
Talking about the Congo, it would appear that like the Americas Africa was hit by several epidemics of zoonotic diseases, possibly a few thousand years after the domestication of animals starting in the Middle East. So Africa must have gone through various cycles of decimation and the recovery, which would explain why it was reported as half empty by the handful of explorers who went in.
Archaeology student here, learnt about this a few weeks ago! Cant wait to use Lidar in field.
Would it be in the field, or would either 'far, far above the field' or 'on the field' be more accurate?
;)
But seriously, congrats. I was keen on archaeology growing up, but 'life' had other plans for me.
My cousin studied to become an archeologist. He studied hard at it too, dreaming that he'd become Indiana Jones. He left the field after years of excavating peat bogs.
Too bad, it looks like the field's cool again.
I remember reading that they found dark soil somewhere in the Amazon, dark soil like the one humans purposefully enrichen...
Additional LiDAR fun facts:
You can get multiple returns for each laser pulse! this helps with trees but can add noise to the data.
Each return also has an intensity value (more reflective = higher intensity) and this can be used for visualisation.
Because Airborne and Mobile LiDAR systems use GPS to geo-locate the points, they also have a timestamp that you can then later associate to other data like temperature or wind.
Nobody cares, and your pointless info adds nothing to this.🤦♂️🤡🤷♂️
LMNT? Pat, I'd like to buy a vowel.
I literally saw the thumbnail and went “Oh it’s gonna be LIDAR”
Wasn't Graham Hancock talking about this years ago?
Awesome, I read all about this in Lost City of the Monkey Gods.
I should have done archeology for my major
Atlantis, here we come ! :)
Graham Hancock was saying this on JRE like 5 years ago
Pretty ironic today's show about the Amazon's ancient urban development was sponsored by a single use plastics pump in the form of tiny "electrolyte sachets".
And scientists scoffed at Col. Percy Fawcett! He expected it to resemble Inca, but turns out to be more like Pre Dynastic Egypt!
Laser Archaeology: Revealing Bigotry within Archaeology
no i was thinking about this in the shower and i just woke up, HOW
I guess the only thing to do now is to dig those area up while destroying those environments to satisfy everyone’s curiosity
I heard about lidar a few years ago on JRE lol
I worked with LiDAR in my GIS days it was magnificent. I always thought it would have been a magnificent tool in archeology. On a different note, this gives the falsity to the silly notion that there are people who ever lived in “harmony” with nature. Wherever we go we change the environment to suit our needs and comfort.
I think part of the issue is the European-centric pov that history basically didn't start until they arrived. To assume that a civilization wasn't built near one of the Earth's largest rivers is a bit arrogant tbh. It also pairs with the assumption that locations outside of Europe didn't have advanced societies and were just bush people (also the assumption that choosing to live with nature in nature is somehow "less advanced" disregarding the generations of knowledge of flora and fauna and natural remedies it takes to thrive in such conditions).
didn't they do this with GPR from planes decades ago when they surveyed the earth for oil?
The Amazon was an agricultural area with a large population, then Europeans introduced smallpox into the continent and so many of those people died that the entire system collapsed and was replaced by forest, now the descendants of those people are clearing the forest again and Europeans are trying to tell them that they are not allowed to do it.
In a jungle you've got fertile soil, hearty plants and food in every direction if you know what to look for. It'd honestly be silly if ancient people DIDN'T decide to settle down there.
It wasn't always a jungle..
The soil in a tropical rainforest are infertile
@@justsaying4303 yes for growing food since the soil is poor in nutrients but scavenging for food is a lot easier than just a normal forest
@@EmergencyL0tion especially when you consider all the insect populations that they eat. Cut off a fallen tree's bark and you got a snack right there.
The Amazon civilizations had advanced soil generating techniques we still don't understand the process for. You know that Brazil nuts aren't grown on plantations right? They are harvested "wild" from the jungle. Those forests were probably planted by these people 800 years ago, still an economic cornerstone of rural Brazil.
Dude on Rogans podcast was talking about this year's ago. Glad to see this is finally getting more attention.
Episode number#?
@@zorrokitty5666 Graham Hancock. multiple episodes on there with a lot of topics, don't remember which one he is talking about the America's in.
@@zorrokitty5666 1284 just checked
Oh noes! A video is about something that someone else has already talked about? I thought UA-cam was supposed to only have ideas and information never before revealed.
@@ps.2 no one said this at all.
All I said is that's it's cool that it's getting even more attention now.
Huh, last time I heard LIDAR was from Slow Mo Guys
LIDAR is "Relatively" new but it's been in use for things like this since the 80's. Maybe not out in the reaches of the Amazon, but in the PNW it was used to punch through the evergreen forests and it discovered faults on Bainbrisge Island pointed at downtown Seattle, in 2011 it was used in Iowa to study the Effigy Mounds National Monument, etc.
It's awesome that it's being used more and more, but it's been SUPER common for almost 30 years at this point and this is not a new or novel use of the technology (except in location).
LiDAR is not new in any sense.🤦♂️🤦♂️🤡
Poorly researched video. 1. Humans have known about possibility of Amazonian civilizations for several hundred years as the rainforest doesn't cover all of tropical South America. Massive mounds and earth works have been discovered throughout the region and many are observable from space. Literally several videos on UA-cam on this topic. 2. As others have commented LIDAR use to find hidden structure in that region of the world isn't new. LIDAR was first used in the 2000s to find tens of thousands of hidden structures in the jungles of Central America. Multiple Mayan cities have been discovered. 3. The raised causeway isn't knew as they still exist today in areas settled by the Mayans. You can literally still walk on them. And LIDAR has discovered a lot more of the Mayan causeways linking villages and cities.
0:19 modern day Amazon…
With free 2 day delivery.
@@nBasedAce Free 2 day deforestation.
So the dude in the Lost City of Z film wasn't a psycho.
I feel like Scishow reposts this every year. Same story different place?
5:29 replaces SODIUM? the same sodium everyone eat probably too much already? is there something im missing?
When you hear about sports drinks that have "electrolytes," yes, that's exactly right. Salts. Mostly sodium salt, plus a little potassium and magnesium salts.
You're right that most people get enough sodium already (not necessarily "too much" as sodium isn't particularly harmful), but if you sweat a lot - manual labor or heavy exercise - you really can become deficient. The resulting condition is called hyponatremia if you want to look it up.
I wonder if it will show the two migration groups that came before the Europeans.
"(...) since the arrival of Spanish colonizers."
You sure meant Spanish invaders.