Posted on 03/07/2007 9:48:27 AM PST by SunkenCiv
"These data are directly relevant to the resilience of Amazonian conservation, as they do not support the contention that all of Amazonia is a 'built landscape' and therefore a product of past human land use," Bush says. "Most archaeologists are buying into the argument that you had big populations that transformed the landscape en masse. Another group of archaeologists say that transformation was very much limited to river corridors, and if you went away from the river corridors there wasn't that much impact. That's what our findings tend to support." Bush doesn't expect that his new findings will settle the debate, however... At one end, he says, is Anna Roosevelt of the Field Museum in Chicago (she argues for large populations dispersed throughout Amazonia); at the other is Betty Meggers at Smithsonian (she argues these were very primitive people with low population).
(Excerpt) Read more at eurekalert.org ...
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