Its a good thing that books like 1491 are increasingly validated with archeology.<p>The previous prevailing wisdom held that outside of the Aztecs and the Inca sophisticated urban settlement didn't prevail in the Amazon due to the "Green Desert" hypothesis and primitive tools.<p>This research confirms early Spanish chronicles, previously derided as fanciful, that vast urban settlements existed along rivers for many miles and would stretch continuously for hours as they travelled down river.
Where are the pictures?<p>EDIT: They're only in the PDF: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04780-4.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04780-4.pdf</a><p>From the VUX-1 LIDAR product specs, it seems they flew over the area no with an airplane at > 2,460 ft. to collect the data.<p><a href="http://www.riegl.com/products/unmanned-scanning/riegl-vux-1uav/" rel="nofollow">http://www.riegl.com/products/unmanned-scanning/riegl-vux-1u...</a>
I'm a Native-American from the Andean region. And I had some idea that there were settlements, from a few articles I read some time ago. For example, the Inca and other Pre-Hispanic cultures were known to have traded parrot feathers. There had to be networks in the jungle. This is by far a more comprehensive report.
This seems like a huge opportunity to gather up a bunch of natives that are familiar with navigating the land, professional archeologists, a camera crew, and just let the story unfold itself.<p>Why isn't the entertainment industry more interested in creating exploratory content like this?
I am reluctantly not at all a fan of these kinds of publications of unknown historical sites. All it does is expose to thieves where untold archeological sites are to be found.
Something I mentioned to my friends the other day is that I wish someone with the time, energy and resources would just start lidar-ing large swaths of Earth. And the seabed.<p>Every day we inch closer to some profound realization about humans and where we came from, but no one seems in a rush to figure it out.