Assumed inhospitableness to social development

Price paid for misconceptions

Evolutionary adaptation to forest ecology

False believes revised

Extreme impoverishment and backwardness

Ignorance of early human impact In 1942 Allan R Holmberg, a doctoral student in anthropology from Yale University, USA, ventured deep into the jungle of Bolivian Amazonia and searched out an isolated band of Siriono Indians. The researcher described the primitive society as a desperate struggle for survival, a view of Amazonia being fundamentally reconsidered today. (41)______. The Siriono, Holmberg wrote, led a 'strikingly backward' existence. Their villages were little more than clusters of thatched huts. Life itself was a perpetual and punishing search for food: some families grew manioc and other starchy crops in small garden plots cleared from the forest, while other members of the tribe scoured the country for small game and promising fish holes. When local resources became depleted, the tribe moved on. As for technology, Holmberg noted, the Siriono 'may be classified among the most handicapped peoples of the world'. Other than bows, arrows and crude digging sticks, the only tools the Siriono seemed to possess were 'two machetes worn to the size of pocket-knives'. (42)______. Although the lives of the Siriono have changed in the intervening decades, the image of them as Stone Age relics has endured. To casual observers, as well as to influential natural scientists and regional planners, the luxuriant forests of Amazonia seem ageless, unconquerable, a habitat totally hostile to human civilization. The apparent simplicity of Indian ways of life has been judged an evolutionary adaptation to forest ecology, living proof that Amazonia could not—and cannot—sustain a more complex society. Archaeological traces of far more elaborate cultures have been dismissed as the ruins of invaders from outside the region, abandoned to decay in the uncompromising tropical environment. (43)______. The popular conception of Amazonia and its native residents would be enormously consequential if it were true. But the human history of Amazonia in the past 11,000 years betrays that view as myth. Evidence gathered in recent years from anthropology and archaeology indicates that the region has supported a series of indigenous cultures for eleven thousand years; an extensive network of complex societies—some with populations perhaps as large as 100,000—thrived there for more than 1,000 years before the arrival of Europeans. Far from being evolutionarily retarded, prehistoric Amazonian people developed technologies and cultures that were advanced for their time. If the lives of Indians today seem 'primitive', the appearance is not the result of some environmental adaptation or ecological barrier; rather it is a comparatively recent adaptation to centuries of economic and political pressure. (44)______. The evidence for a revised view of Amazonia will take many people by surprise. Ecologists have assumed that tropical ecosystems were shaped entirely by natural forces and they have focused their research on habitats they believe have escaped human influence. But as the University of Florida ecologist, Peter Feinsinger, has noted, an approach that leaves people out of the equation is no longer tenable. The archaeological evidence shows that the natural history of Amazonia is to a surprising extent tied to the activities of its prehistoric inhabitants. (45)______. The r