i think that’s the clincher as to this debate. this is a geological question, and so prone to less interpretative massaging.

You can never prove a negative, and when they are disproven, it is game over. Tenure positions are won by staying within the mainstream, so this notion that refutation of previous theories is encouraged is bullshit.

For 6 years in Hong Kong we lived across a stream course from a heavily wooded hillside – I had an absolutely beautiful view of this lovely hillside from my study, and I looked at it daily, studied it through high powered binoculars and the telephoto lens of my camera, and took many high resolution photographs of it, which I could blow up big on my computer. I also occasionally took a walk up there, but it was more a scramble than a walk, because the terrain was steep and the vegetation was near-impenetrable, and thick with venomous snakes.

To the untrained eye, it looked just like a jungle-clad hillside, unless the observer happened to notice that the greens of the vegetation were highly variegated, unlike tropical jungle, which tends to be pretty monochrome. Hong Kong just about qualifies as tropical, it sits bang on the Tropic of Cancer, so it has a maritime climate which is tropical in summer and temperate in winter (which means summer is hot, long and wet, and winter is dry and pretty unbearably cold by my standards, but mild by north American standards).

But I happened to know (because I needed to know due to my profession) that at the end of World War II and the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, that hillside had been completey deforested to get wood for fuel and was stripped totally bare, and also that 25 years previous to me and my family going to live there, the banks of that stream course were thickly populated by illegal squatters, who had built a shanty town there, and they had cleared and cultivated that hillside. They planted all manner of fruit and nut trees, and they had even terraced part of the hillside to grow hill rice – through my binoculars and telephoto lens I could pick out the rice which still grew every year, self-sown, even though the squatters had been cleared and re-housed 20 years before. I can provide photos to anyone who is interested.

The trees were mature – my favourite tree, which I took many photos of, was a massive walnut tree, but I spotted many other varieties of trees that had obviously been planted by the squatters. I could even pick out the terraces of self-sown rice which regenerated themselves every year, although the industrious squatters were long gone.

The other notable thing was that when the squatters were cleared (i.e. forcibly evicted and their shanties demolished) they left their dogs behind, which went feral and bred wild dog packs, which used to come down at night and menace the old Chinese ladies who used to take out our garbage. I ended up fighting a successful guerrila war against these wild dog packs with a high powered slingshot (those fuckers never knew where I was, but I rained hell down upon them) – well, those old ladies were important to me, they took out our garbage, they worshipped my half-Chinese daughter, who they thought was breath-takingly beautiful, like a mini-goddess, and they were good people . I needed to protect them, and I did. Besides, there were a lot of little kids living where we lived, and wild dog packs were a major hazard to them which needed to be addressed. Sorry, I digress, as usual.

What is my point? It’s this – the unimproved soils in Hong Kong are poor, they derive from tropical weathering of igneous rocks (in this case granite) and don’t support much without some fertilizer, but they are pretty free draining, and with the addition of some human shit, and with the tropical summers, they will grow stuff amazingly fast – I’m talking about large mature fruit and nut trees having grown in the space of less than 20 years. Han Chinese peasants are excellently good at growing food-producing crops and trees, and I have no reason to believe that the Amazonian natives were any different.

So I think Meggers is off-base and trying to defend her own 39 year old book, which may be a load of outdated and uninformed crap, and green groups have a heavily vested interest in supporting her position. ‘Poor’ tropical soils can easily be improved, and mature vegetation will grow in them amazingly fast, even in their unimproved state – large trees will grow in the space of 25 years, as opposed to hundreds of years in my native Western Australia.

You could not give a better description of the way the “biblical archeology” works. First you had the “maximalists” being the orthodoxy, today the minimalists are ruling after producing “sensational refutations” and now there is a new tendency of findings going in the maximalist line again because this is what is sensational in the media eyes today.

She’s given the game away!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garamantes