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The Amazonian rainforest was transformed over two thousand years ago by ancient people who built hundreds of large, mysterious earthworks.
Findings by Brazilian and UK experts provide new evidence for how indigenous people lived in the Amazon before European people arrived in the region.
The ditched enclosures, in Acre state in the western Brazilian Amazon, were concealed for centuries by trees. Modern deforestation has allowed the discovery of more than 450 of these large geometrical geoglyphs.
The function of these mysterious sites is still little understood -- they are unlikely to be villages, since archaeologists recover very few artefacts during excavation. The layout doesn't suggest they were built for defensive reasons. It is thought they were used only sporadically, perhaps as ritual gathering places.
The structures are ditched enclosures that occupy roughly 13,000 km2. Their discovery challenges assumptions that the rainforest ecosystem has been untouched by humans.
The archaeologists found evidence Amazonians practiced "agro-forestry" by cultivating economically valuable tree species.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday February 10 2017, @02:32PM
> seeded from extraterrestrial origin ( the puzzle of how life originated has too many chicken-and-egg paradoxes for me ),
You realise that panspermia (whether by ancient aliens or natural processes) does nothing to eliminate your chickens and eggs don't you? It just shifts them off-world.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday February 10 2017, @02:57PM
This is typical for proponents of origin myths. "I don't understand how the universe/this planet/life began! Let us assume the presence of external factor X (God, aliens, whatever) to get things started."
Skeptic reply: "But how did X get started?" The typical response is generally question begging.
None of this should be considered proof that panspermia is incorrect -- it just doesn't solve the "problem" that most proponents seem to want to solve.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @07:44PM
It also adds additional wrinkles to the riddle:
How does that lifeform survive the deep freeze that is space, the no-air/no-pressure vacuum of space, and the superheated fall through Earth's atmosphere?
Given BILLIONS of terrestrial years, there's lots of time for biochemical/biomechanical experiments to be tried.
Even the available fossil record shows that there are lots of genetic dead ends in the process.
I would find it interesting if it is proven that life/evolution on this planet actually had -multiple- non-intersecting origin points (fungi/bacteria?).
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