Weatherlawyer wrote:

Here is a thread that will close out this empty specuation:
Which would put the colonising of the continent (or at least a boost to
it) some 1000 years prior to the demise of the Moche. Just enough time
to turn the plains of the Amazon into a jungle. So why settle in a
desert?

All pointless speculation. But it does seem that the majority of the
artisans that settled in South America settled on the west coast:

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/alt...32c4948d896f/?

Perhaps.

I was looking fro a source of the dust in an earlier thread but I just
couldn't see how, if the cultures that farmed the Amazon basin got
there in biblical chronological order, would have moved to destroy it.

Whilst a lot of former slaves in the Sumarian empires would have been
made freemen with the rise of the Medes and spurred a move to a world
wide diaspora. It's hard to see a mass deforestation so late in the
settlement. The only conclusion I could jump to was the vast
plantations had some catastrophic event when they reached a critical
point.

Yes I know it was a daft idea. What other ones were there before this
mass transportation was pointed out?