Amazon rainforest was shaped by an ancient hunger for fruits and nuts

Nature ^ | 2 Mar, 2017 | Erin Ross

[MtnClimber]

The Amazon has long been held up as an example of untamed wilderness. But people have lived in the world’s largest rainforest for thousands of years, hunting, gathering and farming1. For years, researchers have debated how much of an influence human activities have had on the Amazon. And now, a study describes the extent to which ancient peoples changed the distribution of trees in the forest around them.

The paper2, published on 2 March in Science, finds that many domesticated trees and palms are five times more likely to be over-represented in the Amazon than are non-domesticated ones. The researchers also found that the domesticated plants tended to cluster around the remains of pre-Columbian settlements — or areas where people lived prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. They suggest that this pattern could help other scientists to discover as yet unknown ancient settlements in the Amazon.

“It’s not enough to study the environmental conditions that structure these communities of trees and palms,” says Carolina Levis, a palaeoecologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the lead author of the study. “We need to ask ‘what are the human influences in these communities?’”

[MtnClimber]

Will the leftists make us cut down all of the beneficial trees?

[Ken H]

Amazon rainforest was shaped by an ancient hunger for fruits and nuts

If you're looking for fruits and nuts, California is the place you ought to be.

[JennysCool]

Ironic. Now it’s the fruits and nuts making a god out of the rain forest.

[umgud]

And California is already full of fruits and nuts.

[married21]

Not surprised. People participate with God in creation. He gives us a bunch of little jobs to keep us busy. Like, for example, I read awhile back that the reason there are trees in the Everglades is that the native Americans had trash heaps. The trees got established on the little islands of soil that resulted from the decaying trash.

Also, the reason Yosemite Valley looks so nice, with space to walk between the trees, is that the native Americans did controlled burns to clear out the brush. Muir gets there and thinks it looks naturally “park-like”. It’s natural only in the sense that humans did what they naturally thought best. They deserve some credit for the fine result.

[crusher2013]

Funny thing is most of them came from the east coast in the 70’s and 80’s.

[raybbr]

“”...read awhile back that the reason there are trees in the Everglades is that the native Americans had trash heaps. “””

I’m trying to figure out how they could have generated that much trash. Aren’t Indians supposed to be the most efficient consumers using every part of their kills and getting the most out of their resources?

[arthurus]

1491

About 1491-

Mann discusses the growing evidence against the perception that Indians were not active in transforming their lands. Most Indians shaped their environment with fire, employing slash-and-burn techniques to create grasslands for cultivation and to encourage the abundance of game animals. Indians domesticated fewer animals and cultivated plant life differently from their European counterparts, but did so quite intensively. The author suggests that limited and often racist views about the indigenous people, in addition to lack of a common language among the indigenous people, often led to a failure to recognize these dynamics, and has historically found expression in conclusions like the "law of environmental limitation of culture" (Betty J. Meggers) — whatever Indians did before slash and burn, the logic goes, had to have worked thanks to the vast expanses of healthy forest seen before Europeans arrived.

[arthurus]

Mann in 1491 overturns the whole greenie concept of the "Forest Primeval." The forest in America, North and South was really farmland. The Americans grew different stuff.

[arthurus]

The Indians burned off the forests annually just about everywhere. Burning the underbrush does not harm the established trees unless you wait until the underbrush is very dense, which it is in most of the American forests now due to diligent fire control. The 17th century settlers in New England marveled at the open forests that you “could march an army through.” They also thought the Indians were crazy, burning the forest every year. And the Great Plains- they burned off the grasslands to improve pasture for bison and other hunted large animals.

[arthurus]

The famous mounds all over the south and midwest are essentially trash piles. Some of them are a hundred feet high. Many of the tallest ones are near the coast and are mostly seashells. They ate a lot of scallops and you can only make s many beads and choppers out of the shells, and they eventually become trash, too.

[Alas Babylon!]

There are some estimates that put the post-Columbus pathogen die-off of Native Americans at 90-95%!

The reason later Europeans found such a boundless wilderness was because most of the people died off in the early to mid 1500s.

Note I’m not blaming the Europeans, as they really knew nothing about pathogens and microbes, fungi, and viruses. However, the Old World was a hothouse for creating all kinds of tiny toxic critters due to farm animals like pigs and fowl living in close proximity to people (like in the house itself, as is still done in parts of China).

This means things like swine and avian flu develops the ability to cross over to humans—and back to pigs and birds, very easily. And then back again with even more vigor and strength. Imagine such a flu or disease among people with zero antibodies to any of the thousands of derivatives!

[Eric in the Ozarks]

1491...

[Hardastarboard]

I visited a late 19th Century farm in France once that had a doorway in the kitchen that led directly to the barn. It had a Dutch door in the kitchen where you could see the animals, and I presume feed them table scraps. I can’t imagine the barnyard smells contributed much to one’s appetite, but hey - it was the 1890’s in France.

[SauronOfMordor]

The early Native Americans were firebugs. They understood that the deer they hunted could not eat mature trees, that they lived at the interface between forest and meadow. So they set fires to create lots of meadows for deer habitation.

[Fraxinus]

Even with very efficient use of resources, there would be a rather impressive pile of ashes, charcoal, broken crockery, bones, etc. I also consider it likely that there would have been some mounding up of soil to get sleeping and working spaces up above the water level.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Back in 1876, CRAZY HORSE attempted to burn the US Army out by setting almost 200 square miles of grass, forest and coal seams on fire.

[PUGACHEV]

In 1542 Frfancisco de Orellana was the first European to travel down the Amazon river. He stopped along the way to repair his boats and wrote that he was visited by numerous tribes from the interior, of different ethnicities, some of whom were tall and fair skinned, and spoke a different language than the other tribes. By the time the next Europeans came down the Amazon twenty years later, all had vanished, presumably from disease.

I think we still have no idea who lived in the Amazon basin before the conquest, but it was by no means an empty quarter.

[Conan the Librarian]

I recommend River of Darkness by Buddy Levi.

Very enjoyable book about Orellana.