ars tecnica | The Amazon forest is the result of an 8,000-year experiment
Though the Amazon forest may appear wild and uncharted, a new comprehensive study has revealed that it's actually the result of some of humanity's earliest experiments with farming. People have been living in the Amazon for more than 10,000 years, building some of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world. They also dramatically changed the Amazon forest in ways that are still obvious today.
Wageningen University environmental science researcher Carolina Levis and a large international team of ecologists and archaeologists contributed to a study for Science that is bound to transform our view of the Amazon. "People arrived in the Amazon at least 10,000 years ago, and they started to use the species that were there. And more than 8,000 years ago, they selected some individuals with specific phenotypes that are useful for humans,” Levis told the Atlantic's Robinson Meyer. “They really cultivated and planted these species in their home gardens, in the forests they were managing." These early cultivators were domesticating trees at roughly the same time that Neolithic peoples in the Levant were first domesticating wheat and barley.
Working with data from the Amazon Tree Diversity Network, Levis and her colleagues identified 85 domesticated tree species out of 4,962 species in the Amazon. But these 85 species had an outsized influence on the composition of the forest itself. "We found that 20 of these 85 domesticated species are hyperdominants: five times higher than the number of hyperdominant species expected by chance," they write in Science. Overall, about 20 percent of all species in the Amazon forest today are the result of ancient domestication. In areas where large ancient civilizations existed, the numbers of domestics are closer to 30 percent.
Favored trees of Amazonian people 8,000 years ago included rubber, cocoa, Brazil nut, caimito, acai palm, cashew, and tucuma palm. These trees and others were essential as food and building materials for pre-Columbian societies.
Fascinating captain..., wonder why these civilizations all seem to have collapsed back to a stone-age level?
ReplyDeleteIn the Amazon, it was due to (likely) smallpox killing 90+% within a decade after the Spaniards introduced it. Plus, our killer ape natures also go a long way to destroying real wealth.
ReplyDeleteI completely forgot about the small pox and measles epidemics everywhere mesoamericans encountered spaniards
ReplyDeletehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15081506
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/73/2c/bc/732cbca3577d439b6dc2ceebe2da9867.jpg
I suppose this was an indirect result of the primarily raider/herder cultural background of the Europeans vs. the settler/farmer background of mesoamericans.
ReplyDeleteMeaning the Europeans were exposed to those serious diseases through animal husbandry.
ReplyDeleteDo you have any idea whether or not the permaculturist mesoamericans had or expressed ideas about property and property rights? Based on what you've noted, they were engaged in both plant and animal "husbandry" over a very large span of time. Seemingly, they're take on nature stewardship was of a very different nature than what the europeans had been on about.
ReplyDeletelol, why does this activity call to mind the "pinecones and purses" motif?
ReplyDeleteProperty rights were communal. They had a very simple ruling hierarchy as well. As for the pinecones and purses, they were the creators of those huge religious symbols that could only be seen from thousands of get up. I'm sure you've seen the footage from those ancient alien documentaries ;-)
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