Discoveries indicate US natives were the rednecks of Indian settlement

No one with degree letters or titles has said that, of course, but finds in Central  and South America show those areas had advanced civilizations, while the American Plains Indians were eking out a living in Stone Age hovels. U.S. entertainment – films, TV, magazines, books – often feature romanticized stories and tales of people who “were one with the land,” whatever that means. U.S. Indians were peace-loving tribes and clans until Europeans barged ashore and immediately began exterminating the indigenous peoples.

Recent discoveries in Central America and in the Amazon basin, however, show people who did not leave the land as they found it, but made improvements for civilized living.

From Nature

“Mysterious mounds in the southwest corner of the Amazon Basin were once the site of ancient urban settlements, scientists have discovered. Using a remote-sensing technology to map the terrain from the air, they found that, starting about 1,500 years ago, ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated centres, featuring 22-metre-tall earthen pyramids, that were encircled by kilometres of elevated roadways.”

“kilometers of elevated roadways,” discovered because of the dreaded “deforestation.”

In schools, dogma said the Amazon forest land was too shallow and lacking in nutrients to grow anything other than 100-foot tall trees. Cutting down those trees has made visible urban centers and transportation networks.

As long as the area was only trees, what we could see was not all of the truth.

“Two of the urban centres each covered an area of more than 100 hectares — three times the size of Vatican City. The lidar images revealed walled compounds with broad terraces rising 6 metres above the ground. Conical pyramids made of earth towered above one end of the terraces. People probably lived in the areas around the terraces and travelled along the causeways that connected the sites to one another.”

“These discoveries also counter the narrative that Indigenous peoples were passive inhabitants of the Amazon Basin before the arrival of Europeans. ‘The people who lived there changed the landscape forever,’ Neves says.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01458-9

Recommended: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus,” by Charles C. Mann