Final Days

[Monte Davis]

MikeB:
 
> There's also some real science (unfortunately my break is too 
> short to find reference) suggesting that the Amazon rain 
> forest is actually an artifact of agricultural planning

It's in Charles Mann's _1491_, among other places. I wouldn't take it that
far; rather, there's evidence from 'anomalous' plant distributions, and a
few sites just beginning to be mapped and excavated, that there were many
more people practicing forest agriculture there from several thousand years
BCE than there are today -- or than the Portuguese and Spanish encountered
as they pushed up the river and across the Andes from the west.

It's not at all clear whether they thinned out for endogenous reasons, or
were hit by waves of disease that ran ahead of the Europeans.

(All this is 2000 km from Aztec (Mexica) or Maya)