The LIDAR keyword had a lot more (Amazon rain forest locations for example) but I only posted the ones pertaining to Mayan sites. Considering the difficulty of even looking for the abandoned sites, and how recently the writing system was cracked, with the addition of LIDAR (and probably AI analysis of LIDAR and satellite data) it’s a good guess that the next twenty years will turn up more stuff than the past 150 years has.
Oh man, it is amazing technology. And it is even finding structures on top of barren bald hills with no vegetation. That in it’s self is unique, it can do what even high definition satellite imaging cannot do on bare land.
And I understand that it might have been difficult to really get a good estimate with what they had to work with prior. But every suggestion that the population might have been higher was shot down without any objective consideration of the evidence presented.
Some things are just logical because they “can’t be explained”. Such as all the missing copper from the great lakes. There was enough copper mined to give every man, woman, and child on the continent each a copper bowl or two. Yet there are actually very few native artifacts. It didn’t just disappear into thin air...
Same with the amount of salt that was extracted in South America from hundreds of sources, or the fact that evidence of cultivated land almost covers every square hector all the way to the very tops of the Andes Mountains from one end of SA to the other... Logic dictates man does not expend calories without a true demand.
So there should have already been logical suspicions rather than immediate rejection of possibilities. We are just at the tip of the iceberg down there. I would like to see them do more Lidar mapping nearer the tip of South America where it is assumed there were very few if any. Bet there is more evidence there than they think... :)
I think it is absolutely incredible, thank you for posting it!