Posted on 03/03/2017 10:01:09 PM PST by 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?’”
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
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