Re_think technology
Humans and many other species have always applied situational knowledge to elements around them to do new – and old - things.
Many of these technologies, some thousands of years old, are simply too advanced for us today to understand, or even imagine.
Far from being the wilderness we imagine, the Amazon region has been highly populated with people for millennia.
Deep within the Amazon rainforest, recent surveys by radar and laser have revealed the outlines of huge constructions and cities of ancient
civilizations that are thousands of years old.
There are indications also that the Amazon rainforest itself may be far more than simply a natural phenomenon.
Different species of trees are concentrated in different areas, in ways that are highly unlikely to occur by natural processes alone.
Furthermore, the soil has two distinct layers; a bottom layer that is low in fertility, and a much richer layer on top.
Analysis indicates this top layer was created by burning vegetation, and mixing the ash with water.
Which is to say, it was soil created by humans.
If this is the case, then around the time that early neolithic farmers were deforesting Europe (approximately 40 per cent), thousand of kilometres away, a constellation of ancient cultures, of which we know virtually nothing, were
co-creating – or at the very least cultivating - the Amazon forest.
So, if the Amazon forest is actually a technology – and if it is an intentional creation, then it must surely have been a climate technology....
Recent genetic analysis suggests that Aboriginal communities in Australia have a continuous line of community and culture that stretches back
60 – 70,000 years, making them possibly the oldest organised cultures of humans known to us.
All Aboriginal communities share culture and stories through oral histories, or “yarns”.
Some yarns speak of events in the deep past, for example, one is a yarn of a hunt for birds well over 2 metres tall in a fire-parched land. The descriptions accurately depict a bird that lived over 5,000 years ago.
Numerous Aborigine yarns accurately describe geographical features that would only be visible when the sea level was 30 metres lower than today. That last happened over 10,000 years ago.
These are the oldest true stories in the world.
In around 3000 BC, 500 years before the Pyramids were built, people from what is now Taiwan, mastered the art of building canoes that could take them huge distances across the ocean.
Over the next few thousand years those people and their descendents fanned out from Taiwan to navigate across thousands of kilometres of ocean to South Pacific islands such as Fiji, Tonga and Samoa.
Later they went even further, deep into the Pacific to reach islands like Tahiti, Hawaii and Easter Island between 7 and 900 AD. Others went further south to reach Aotearoa (later called New Zealand by colonists) by 1,200 AD. These were the first Maoris.
The knowledge and expertise required to navigate these distances, in some cases well over 5,000 km, to land on tiny specks of rock, now lies far beyond our reach.
Of course these navigators must have had exceptional knowledge of astronomy, wind, weather patterns, and ocean currents in far more detail than we know today. Through systematic reasoning they expertly narrowed down the possibilities for reaching land in a seemingly featureless ocean. And they must have had ingenious techniques for preserving water and food for weeks of travel across empty oceans on tiny vessels.
But we cannot know for sure how they achieved these feats, and we couldn’t repeat them.
What other technologies could we make if we really put our minds – and our bodies - to it?
Links to further reading below….
1 in a series of 9 from Connection Matters, a series of banners on rethinking our relationship to technology at Invisible Networks exhibition.
If you want to find out more about this project - or anything else - please get in touch…
This is a newsletter about technology and nature; it’s about how the more we have connected to digital networks, the more we have disconnected from each other, and from the living world around us, that actually is us. And this newsletter’s also about how we change that; in our own lives, and in the systems – human-made and more-than-human - on which we all depend.
Further reading….
Amazon
The Supposedly Pristine, Untouched Amazon Rainforest Was Actually Shaped By Humans - Smithsonian Magazine
The origins of amazon forest: Is it really MANMADE? - Rahul Karthick, Medium
‘Many features of the Amazon are man-made’: Q&A with archaeologist Eduardo Neves – Mongabay
Aborigine yarns
The Oldest True Stories in the World – Sapiens
Polynesian navigators
The greatest migration – Harvard Gazette
Maps In The Stars: How Polynesians Used Celestial Navigation To Become The Best Explorers In The World – Trilogy Captain’s Log
Ancient Traditions of Polynesian Navigation - MoeVarua
The Art of Polynesian Navigation: Stars, Waves, and Island Voyaging – Far and Away