re: Was the Amazon Rainforest Man-Made??

Lord have mercy.

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the general idea that humans have had a major impact on the Amazon rainforest for thousands of years, adapting its ecology to their needs, has been around for a few decades,

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This effect was brought about by the same methods used by every other agrarian society on earth, slash and burn. Its hardly an eyebrow raiser that humans living in a forest for as long as 13,000 years would have an effect upon it.

Meso Americans are fully modern humans with the same intelligence as any other groups. They made the most use of the resources they had.

However, they did not have the resources to "build up" the soil, especially over such a vast expanse of land. They also did not have the knowledge to rotate crops to maintain fertility of the land.

So, they employed the slash and burn method. That means to cut down and burn an area and plant the crops you need. Then, when the fertile soil of one area is depleted, it's abandoned for another area and the process repeats. The depleted area sits fallow until nature restores it. This is certainly not the definition of gardening.

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More than half the total number of trees in the Amazon River Basin come from just 1% of the total number of species.

In other words, the entire forest was domesticated.

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The first statement is not proof of the second statement.

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50,000,000 people lived there.

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OMG, no.

On that note I'm turning in but I've enjoyed our repartee.

I'm betting that cave art can tie all this together.

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And yet, that's what it appears to be.

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Unfortunately, the "Garden of Eden" has pretty well been established for a long time. That particular story refers to fertile crescent of the Middle East in modern Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet.

As hard as it is to believe today that area of Iraq used to be a bountiful agricultural center that allowed several ancient empires to flourish.

Tens of thousands of years of intensive farming have slowly lowered the fertility of the soil and when the Mongols shattered the Abbasid Caliphate they also did an impressive job of wrecking the intricate system of irrigation that had made Baghdad the center of the Muslim world.

Add in some impressively lousy land management, particularly when Saddam Hussein was in power, and you get the desertification of Iraq.

Perhaps. But again, you are using the Bible as your source of information with zero evidence to support it. In fact, the area you propose doesn't even match the biblical description.

ETA: Here is what John Calvin had to say about the location of Eden:

"Moses says that one river flowed to water the garden, which afterwards would divide itself into four heads. It is sufficiently agreed among all, that two of these heads are the Euphrates and the Tigris; for no one disputes that . . . (Hiddekel) is the Tigris. But there is a great controversy respecting the other two. Many think, that Pison and Gihon are the Ganges and the Nile; the error, however, of these men is abundantly refuted by the distance of the positions of these rivers. Persons are not wanting who fly across even to the Danube; as if indeed the habitation of one man stretched itself from the most remote part of Asia to the extremity of Europe. But since many other celebrated rivers flow by the region of which we are speaking, there is greater probability in the opinion of those who believe that two of these rivers are pointed out, although their names are now obsolete. Be this as it may, the difficulty is not yet solved. For Moses divides the one river which flowed by the garden into four heads. Yet it appears, that the fountains of the Euphrates and the Tigris were far distant from each other."

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carefully cateloged damn near every single tree in the rainforest.

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Stahp! Even 21st century technology isn't capable of cataloging 390 billion trees. Your overstatements for effect are outrageous.