Question

why is the population in Amazon River Basin so low?

Answer 1

The first Europeans to traverse the Amazon river were the Spanish, through Orellana’s expedition, but their first descriptions of the region don’t match the sparsely populated wilderness of the subsequent centuries. For a long time it was believed that their claims of complex cities and powerful warriors had been exaggerated. For the Europeans, there was no way such a dangerous and densely forested area could be home to anything but the simplest and most primitive communities.

Recent findings, however, contradict this view.

For a while now archaeologists have been finding evidences of complex societies that used to live in the Amazon. Those include beautiful works of ceramic and vestiges of ancient roads and cities that suggest the Amazon used to support a much larger population before colonial times. But why no ruins? The problem is that Amazonian cultures have, traditionally, relied more on wood for construction, for obvious reasons. Wood, being organic, soon rots and vanishes, while stone tends to remain for much, much longer. As such, the only vestiges of those long lost cities are their foundations.


Even more fascinatingly, recent studies have found that the very forest might have been molded by human action: 85 species of tree found in the Amazon today have been domesticated, to greater or lesser extent, and of course there’s the whole Terra Preta thing—patches of extremely fertile land created by the native farmers long before the Europeans arrived.

But what happened to all of these people? Well, the same thing that happened to many other civilizations of the Americas: disease. The diseases that came along with the Europeans had a devastating effect throughout the entire continent, and diseases are especially deadly in the more densely populated areas, where bacteria and viruses can easily hop form host to host. By the time the Portuguese and the Spanish began to colonize the region, those civilizations had already began to collapse as a consequence of vast numbers of people dying to those foreign plagues—the Europeans were merely the final nail to the coffin.

Answer 2

Amazon Basin is very sparsely populated due to harsh climatic conditions. There are scattered settlements inland, but most of the population lives in a few larger cities on the banks of the Amazon and other major rivers.