Episodes like this make me wish SciShow had a history/anthropology spin off channel

YES STEFAN WITH THE ☕☕☕ As a native person from the Americas, the little aside with the indigenous truth made me feel so seen 😍

Considering how big and vast were some civilizations through Africa and America, I always thought that it was weird to call those places "uncharted" It's like looking into an empty parcel and assume that it's been like this since forever, specially when people have lived there

I've always been astonished at the incredible depth and detail in Australian Aboriginal history. There was a recent study about dormant volcanoes in Australia that correlated the last time they erupted with a traditional story about those mountains... from 30,000 years ago. Like HOW have you carried that knowledge and that story for 30,000 years?! Surviving one of the most horrific onslaughts of colonial violence the world has ever witnessed. Another story that I love is the story of finding the wreck of the Franklin expedition. The local Inuit had already named the place something like "the place where the ship went down" but no one had bothered to ask before they spend thousands and thousands of dollars on a search expedition!

Australia.... the first Europeans kept saying "it looks like a park". While denying that the people who lived there had anything to do with it. The the British decided to remove all evidence of farming and building... to the point that "The Biggest Estate on Earth" by Bill Gammage is 500 pages of saying over and over again "evidence for ... in this part of the continent" for the same three or four activites in 100's of places (Australia is big... it's like saying "we found evidence of writing in London. And Lisbon. And Tbilisi... to support the unpopular idea the Europeans were literate). Meanwhile the Australian government keeps on saying "aboriginals were primitive hunter-gatherers who didn't have the concept of land ownership" and teaching that to our kids. But it seems like that agriculture was invented first in Australia... although the same problems keeping the evidence in Australia mean it could well have been widespread in Africa at the time.

This may be my favorite episode of Scishow. It gives a broader, more interdisciplinary perspective and serves as a course correct for our modern "synthetic" perspective by showing humans in a historical context, and that human habitat and natural habitat are not actually separate things. Also, it shows how vitally important it is to not commit erasure of localized cultures and commit genocide against the few extant millenia-old native peoples. Plastic, nuclear power, and Western society is only one arbitrary way to do society and technology.

Fun fact: the scottish highlands were once dense forest but it got all deforested by the celts. Since then, trees couldn't grow back anymore.

if i know it correctly, the area of czech republic was almost completely deforested in the 14th and 15th century, so most of the czech forests are only a few centuries old. plus there are parts where the trees are not even native to the area.

We stan some interdisciplinary studies with social and natural sciences!

Almost all “primeval wilderness” was once cultivated by humans for their personal gain. There’s almost nothing we haven’t impacted at one time or another.

You know what plant thrives on small frequent fires in the eastern US? Blueberries!! 🥰🥰🥰

Oral histories are like wikipedia. Probably not a primary source, but they can point you in the right directions

The thing that irritates me about this is that we continually classify ourselves as outside of nature, as something unique and special that doesn't follow the natural rules that everything else does, and that viewpoint just feels so arrogant. I don't deny that we have an impact on the world around us, but all life does, to varying extents. If anything is breaking the natural order, it's life as a whole, but even that doesn't make sense, because life emerged from natural chemical interactions.

Only you can prevent wildfires... but you may not want to in order to prevent massive catastrophic ones later. (Don't start wildfires though, seriously leave it to the Forrest service)

I live in Oklahoma and am a botany major. The part about controlled fires is true much of Oklahoma was burned due to human activities

I feel like people forget that intelligent humans lived long ago and were of as varied ethnicities as they have ever been.

That's really interesting insight. Thank you.

I'm reading this book that discusses the forests of my state past and present, and I don't know why but I really like the idea of seeing most of my state's closed canopy forests and unused agricultural fields return to the mosaic of open forests, where oak and pine dominated, where woodlands and grasslands transitioned into each other, were home to populations of wild turkey, whitetails, bobwhite, red wolves, black bears, and cougars, and were managed by low intensity fires. Who knows, maybe this dream will be realized someday.

I appreciated the time you spent acknowledging the impact of indigenous people and the way colonizers overwrite their history. Very classy.

There is a hill near Corvallis, Oregon, where I live, that is known as "Bald Hill", even though it is covered with trees to the top. Why? Because when it was first invaded by American settlers, the Kalapuya, the people who owned the land, had regularly cleared the peak with fire.

(Pre-)historical human-environment-interactions are a great topic to look at. Unfortunately it isn't talked about much in the general public. So great job. :) Although the dichotomy of culture and nature is purely heuristical of course... so I wouldn't call every landscape "disturbed" (01:07) that shows signs of human activity. You wouldn't call a beaver's lodge a "disturbed environment" either... would you? It's great that you show your sources. Could you make the (short) titles show in the link next time please? That would make this much more intuitive. I just had to click at nearly 20 links to search for the paper that speculates about a culture that left artificial hills/levees, pottery and traces of domesticated gourds, manioc and maize not beeing a "full-blown agricultural society" (04:55) because this interpretation seemed quite unusual and interesting to me.

"Traditionally, scientist have been wary of using oral histories as evidence" Anthropologist have left the chat

The same can be sayed for England you know. Modern city dwellers especialy the non english ones do not know how and why the land of the english looks the way it does, they might go out in to a field and think that this is how the land looks like no noticing the canal with mortarless stonework to take flood water away and prevent the field form being a swamp.

Y'all should do more videos about this and bring on indigenous experts to talk about it! I would love to hear more about how indigenous land conservation/ecosystem management is practiced today.

This is explained in Charles C. Mann's "1491". It's truly amazing to realice the extent in which indigenous people throughout the Americas shaped the environment we still live in, in ways we don't understand!

Americans back then: *uses fire for everything* Americans now: "explodes everything* Ah yes technology at its finest

I really love this video, I’m really happy to see Sci Show acknowledge knowledge that is often dismissed by western ideas of science! Could you guys make a video on “X times we learned from indigenous knowledge” or something, such as the Easter Island Moai “walking” or other similar “discoveries”?

Where i live all the lakes where made by medieval people the layout of the woods where all planned centuries ago the paths in the woods are 1000s of years old.

I had no idea what manioc was called in English.

I really like how you presented this without applying a clear value judgement to anything but our ability to know the truth. Excellent science reporting. Thank you.

terraforming before terraforming was as thing

Heck yeah, thanks for covering this topic! And for including the discussion on indigenous knowledge.

Nature: right angles bad Humans: NO, RIGHT ANGLE GOOD Nature: so ugly ;-;

I've been watching a lot of Time Team (archeology reality show) and I am here for this. They go all in for landscape clues.

I for one would like to visit the pre-European invaded port cities in the US. I can easily envision the water highways of the day whether river or ocean. I live near the oldest river in the US, The Susquehanna and where the Conestoga river meet. It's easy to be able to envision how the populace would have thrived in this area, pre-columbus.

Thanks for the english subtitles. As a brazilian learning english, this is great for practicing listening and reading.

This is a great video. good job!

Humans like to change thins, then forget they did it, then change it again, and so-on... :P

Was hoping Australia got mentioned

In some area it's extremely hard to see the difference between pristine and secondary forest unless your an expert u couldnt tell the difference

An excellent example of lost knowledge is the Celts. There's a lot of contemporary writing that points to them having a vast knowledge of the medicinal plants of the area, but all of that knowledge died out with them. I'm sure there are many more less famous examples of lost medicinal plant uses among all the other native groups around the world that should have been investigated with science to see why those uses became common. Sure, some will be placebo, but many won't be, and could open new paths to treatments with fewer side effects or less manufacturing costs or greater efficacy. We can always learn something from our collective past!

Trees are just adult broccoli.

Nature retakes all things eventually.

this is actually such an important issue and i'm so glad scishow brought it up! california is just now looking into using indigenous knowledge on preventing wildfires, since california has dropped the ball so tremendously on that.

I learned about that part of Bolivia in Thomas Mann's book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

The Solomon Islands were in the pathway of the Lapita culture branch of the Austronesian expansion (the ancestors of Polynesians). They brought dozens of species with them from Taiwan and the Philippines, including pigs, dogs, chickens, taro, paper mulberry, ginger, turmeric, purple yam, elephant foot yam, swamp taro, giant taro, breadfruit, betel pepper, areca nut, coconut, ti plant, and commensals like the Pacific rat. The population of the islands are now mostly genetically Papuan, due to population replacement in the recent centuries, but the cultures and languages of Island Melanesia are still predominantly Austronesian. They also cultivated groves of trees suitable for boatbuilding, so those forests definitely aren't "untouched".

What a wonderful think piece. Fantastic work 🙌

I would love to see more content like this! Awesome video!

Yes Amazon rainforest and Congo forest all show signs of people, terra preta in the amazon, same thing with tree islands in the everglades which is a place high in biodiversity and is protected. But was caused by native piling up their trash and leftover making mini islands, o the irony

You should also make video on sentinal island people(India Andaman)

Aboriginal people in Papua New Guinea and Australia have been managing the land through fire, redirecting water, and other methods for more than 40,000 years. They didn't grow domesticated crops or have domesticated animals the same way that Eurasian people did, but they altered the landscape to encourage the populations of the animals they hunted and concentrate the plants that they ate. They also diverted streams into manmade ponds to trap eels and fish. There is abundant evidence that the entire continent of Australia had been extensively altered by humans for tens of millennia before Europeans showed up and proceeded to try to "civilize" the Aboriginal people and turn the land over to destructive European-style agriculture.

5:37 - I wonder if the megafauna of the region had previously kept the forest open/cleared simply by grazing. These huge herbivores surely had an effect on the forest ecosystem, but then humans precipitated their extinction. Maybe prescribed burning then took over as the primary means of keeping the forest open. Just a thought

Dark Emu is a really good book which looks at the ways Australian Aboriginal peoples altered their landscape to better support them - through things like fire, land clearing and agriculture. It looks back through early colonial journals and reexamines the observations explorers made without the racist lens.

This is so cool. I actually love history.

This is an aboslutely exellent video. 6/5 stars.

thank you for acknowledging that history has largely been written by colonizers!

The First Nations people of the Walpole Island reservation in southwestern Ontario on the St. Clair river delta (said to be the largest freshwater delta in the world, which straddles the Michigan/Ontario border) still do regular burns. The island isn't forested though. The smoke can be seen from many miles on both sides of the border. However, the Michigan DNR and maybe the Ontario government also do prescribed burns on other islands to control invasive species. I don't know if the Indian fires are entirely traditional or sometimes for the same reason.

Gotta remember that humans are as natural as anything else on the planet. Humanity will always be a part of nature and nature will always be a part of us.

I think what people mean by pristine and untouched natural environments leans more towards "not flattened entirely to make a concrete jungle, deforested or else irrevocably damaged by humans" and not "completely untouched by any human being ever", actually.

In some parts in Central America and southern Mexico there are some temples and buildings buried under dirt that look like hills. It’s pretty cool when you see one.

Great perspective. And if you do away with the idea of "pristine" ecosystems, I'm all the way there with you! :-) Note: To label an ecosystem pristine makes an assumption that humans are not part of an ecosystem. Think about climate change and you'll find a perfect reason for humans to do away with that fallacy and understand ourselves as intricately link to ecosystems and and behave as a part of ecosystems. This assumption also ignores the fact that ALL organisms within an ecosystem impact that ecosystem. As you pointed out, Native American peoples used this knowledge to their advantage in their relationships with their places.

awesome, thank you for making this clear

Even though I'm not from America but I felt that when he said "..colonizers sometimes lied or changed the history of the indigenous people..." Love u Scishow from PH 🤟

At 6:40 y'all are talking about longleaf pine savannas, which, among other things, are the only home for the highly endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. My wildlife science professor was an expert on that species.

Thats was a very revolutionary episode

Such a great episode.

Excellent video thank you!

Let's not forget indigenous tribes in America were fundamentally different in many ways, frequently clashed and destroyed everything in their path. Point is it was happening long before the 1500s

Thanks for making science better! I'm so glad you guys are going deep!

You should do a show on animals that alter the/their Environment to benefit themselves or as a result of their behavior. Humans can be on the list; but, they are not the only ones and I imagine the list would be interesting.

Thank you for this excellent video! I recommend the book "1491" for anyone who wants to learn more about what science and indigenous histories can tell us about the pre-colonial histories of the so-called Americas.

This was such an interesting video. Thank you guys!

Also strong clue to look for new archaeological sites! Exciting!

Awesome episode, thanks so much for crossing over into other disciplines and acknowledging the detrimental effects of colonial past and present!

Right on! Keep them coming my dude.

Great episode! I took an entire class about this basically in college - and it’s so refreshing to see SciShow challenge colonialism in science and history, and teaching people about this for free!

Australia: Exists!

This video fails to make a necessary distinction, namely that nobody, including anthropologists have made the argument that ecosystems were pristine just because they predated a certain chronological date. However, anthropology WILL tell you that homo sapiens' relationship with the environment fundamentally changed, not with a date, but with the adoption of one key behavior: domestication, whether of plants, animals, or both. Domestication is the basis of all civilization, and any people, no matter when they existed chronologically, had their relationship with the environment change from coexistence to domination with the adoption (or forced adoption through conquest) domestication. Prior to domestication, the basically singular lifeway that typified human existence is that of the semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer, a lifeway that characterized human life for 98% of our species time in this planet. During that period (Paleolithic and prior), there are no clear cut examples of permanent ecological destruction and the resulting collapse of band societies, while after domestication and civilization, collapse due to ecological destruction is the norm and basically without aberration. It is important to note, that "tribal society" is a specific term that intimates a social hierarchy of authority within a society, exemplified in the concept of a chief, however, tribal societies only come about AFTER the emergence of domestication, which itself is the fundamental construction of a hierarchy and arguably the first abstracted, human hierarchy from which all others originate. Prior to domestication, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers specifically existed in "band societies", which are essentially egalitarian and absent any form of institutionalized hierarchies or power structures, such as the ones based on kinship in a tribal society. Band societies, and we know this both from archeological empirical evidence as well as the evidence collected from the still extant hunter-gatherers such as the San people (bushmen), for all intents and purposes, lack the concept of ownership, and many times even lack the abstract idea of quantification (counting) as it's unnecessary without the concept of ownership. This includes ownership over the land and the creatures that inhabit it, and in societies and bands that lack this concept, the relationship with nature is fundamentally one of equal coexistence, and therefore absent self destructive ecological modification. Perhaps one counter example to this is the extinction of the North American megafauna, but not only is there no consensus on this being a solely man-made phenomenon, there's increasingly newly found evidence that has been challenging and profoundly changing the once believed theory that humans entered the continent 13,500 years ago, pushing that date back considerably by 10,000 to 20,000 years and thus altering our previous understanding of human relationships with the north American megafauna. Furthermore, examples of hunter-gatherers altering their environment, specifically hunting grounds through the amplification of natural and seasonal wildfires in grasslands are not the same, both in intent and consequences, as the destructive modification of the environment caused by the manifestations of domestication, namely animal husbandry and agriculture, and this can be seen, for example, in the desertification of the near mideast by the first farmers, which they achieved in less than 1000 years through even the most rudimentary agricultural practices (the near mideast used to not be desert and had thick cedar forests along with lush grasslands prior to human agriculture), a change that is still in effect 10,000 years later. A permanent change such as this has yet to be conclusively attributed to Paleolithic peoples.

You are the driver of your own life, Don’t let anyone steal your seat.

Surprised you didn't atleast mention the Scottish Highlands, most people when asked think they are natural when nothing could be further from the truth.

Best episode. Would love specifics on this

If anybody's interested in the subject of how Native Americans managed the land before colonization, I recommend the book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C. Mann! It's an informative and entertaining read.

Great episode!

The current environment in Australia is the product of tens of thousands of years of change brought about by the current indigenous people

There's some evidence that archaic humans helped speed up the growth of grasslands a lot by intentionally burning down forests to make hunting easier. Which if they did means they changed the climate on a global scale since the increased grasslands had a small but noticeable effect on global temperature.

thanks a lot for your share.

Hi Stefan!

Aw I was looking forward to what you guys had to say about Chichen Itza :(

So how many stars does subtle eco-system-forming get out of five? Seriously thought, this episode settled my inner debate on whether we were just entering the Anthropocene in the 19th century or not.

Nice information.

The implication that written history is more accurate than oral history made me LOL.

Indigenous Australians have survived for tens of thousands of years because of their connection to the land and water. We should be entrusting all our environmental concerns into the hands of our Indigenous leaders, otherwise we get companies like Adani destroying sacred places and poisoning waterways/Great Barrier Reef with their mines. TL;DR Listen to Indigenous voices on matters of land and environment.

there are not many areas of forests on Earth that have never been cut down before by humans

This is precisely why no knowledge base can really be seperate from any other, and it's silly for us to pretend that they are.

Idk I don't remember anyone mentioning that the American forests were a "Park-like " setting at all. But a thick forest mostly made up of American Chestnut. Tho I guess the undergrowth could of been burned off by native we also had Bison in the east pre colonial times which probably had a similar Impact on younger growth plants that elephants do in tropical forests.

I love you guys your videos are awesome:)❤️

This was great. One of the best and most genuinely informative sci show episodes yet. Keep it up!

Would you guys be able to do a video about the water revolution going on in India using permaculture principles to harvest and store water?

THANK YOU for the video!! One of my favored subjects in Conservation is Traditional Ecological Knowledge. The exclusion of Indigenous people from science has made science poorer. Science needs more perspectives and it needs more inputs in order for it to truly serve people.

The forest islands you said were from around 1000 to 1500 years ago? Haven't humans been farming for way longer than that? Like, 20,000 years?