The geographic scale of the South American Tupi and Macro-Je-Kaingang language families of that region are suggestive of the possibility that there might have been a couple of large scale Amazonian civilizations at a time depth shallow enough to leave a linguistic trace.

A 2008 National Geographic story linked in the story quoted above, suggests that a contemporaneous neighboring civilization had, at “their height between A.D. 1250 and 1650, the clusters may have housed around 50,000 people” with individual subcities in a cluster each built on perhaps 150 acres.

A few comparisons can ground that number:

Roman era London had about 60,000. The Sumerian City of Uruk probably reached about that size on the late end of the time range from ca. 4100 BCE to 2900 BCE. Jericho had a population of less than 3,000 in the pre-pottery Neolithic A (through about 7300 BCE), and probably didn’t have 50,000 people until sometime in the early copper or bronze ages. At its peak, pre-Columbian Mexico City probably had 150,000 people, and perhaps a dozen other cities in the Aztec sphere of influence had more than 10,000.

The Inca empire on the eve of the arrival of Columbus is estimated to have had 12 million people, although the estimates are necessarily rough and the population density of 39 per square mile would have included large expanses of low population density villages and hamlets interspersed with more dense cities. It isn’t really clear how populous the largest urban areas there would have been.

Ancient Rome had from 450,000 to a couple of million people in its peak years and had fallen to under 50,000 around 500 CE, after its fall. Athens had perhaps 250,000 people in its 5th century BCE Golden era of the ancient world. Homeric Troy was probably smaller than Athens but still of the same order of magnitude, and pre-Epic Troy of the Bronze Age may have been around 50,000 people.

In sum, these Amazonian civilizations were operating on a copper age/early Bronze Age scale, but their largest cities were probably smaller than the largest Inca or Aztec cities.

Does anyone actually believe this crap? I buy into Charles Mann’s hypothesis more than Razib, probably. I’m sure that population numbers in pre-Columbian Amazonia were much higher than previously thought and that the cultures were much more sophisticated.

But I don’t know how anyone could believe that MOST of the Amazonian forest was REMOVED during the pre-Columbian era. In order for that to happen, populations would have to be on the level they are now (ie, several humdred million).

This was clearly spoken by someone with a political axe to grind.