Posted on 05/22/2011 4:51:51 PM PDT by decimon
One of the world's greatest ancient civilisations may have been built on llama droppings, a new study has found.
Machu Picchu, the famous Inca city set in the Peruvian Andes, celebrates the centenary of its "'discovery" by the outside world this July.
Dignitaries will descend on site for a glitzy event in July marking 100 years since US explorer Hiram Bingham came upon the site, but the origins of Machu Picchu were far less glamorous.
According to a study published in archaeological review Antiquity, llama droppings provided the basis for the growth of Inca society.
It was the switch from hunter-gathering to agriculture 2,700 years ago that first led the Incas to settle and flourish in the Cuzco area where Machu Picchu sits, according to the study's author Alex Chepstow-Lusty.
Mr Chepstow-Lusty, of the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima, said the development of agriculture and the growing of maize crops is key to the growth of societies.
"Cereals make civilisations," he said.
Mr Chepstow-Lusty has spent years analysing organic deposits in the mud of a small lake, "more of a pond really," called Marcaccocha on the road between the lower-lying jungle and Machu Picchu.
His team found a correlation between the first appearance of maize pollen around 700BC - which showed for the first time that the cereal could be grown at high altitudes - and a spike in the number of mites who feed on animal excrement.
They concluded that the widespread shift to agriculture was only possible with an extra ingredient: organic fertilisers on a vast scale.
In other words, lots of llama droppings.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Inca dinka doo ping.
No shit.
Ping to your Llama dung interests.
Mr Chepstow-Lusty and a llama llama ding dung.
Wow. And all this time I thought it was bat guano.
“Cereals make civilizations”
And Beer and Diabetes, too!
When I gave the trinket to you I clearly stated that it was a paperweight not a cookie.
Yeah, well.. it had chocolate chips in it.
Scanned the article and two things stuck on first glance:
“Inca success in Peruvian Andes ‘thanks to llama dung’—”Cereals make civilisations,” he said. “
I need to read it again.
I raise Alpacas now, (quite a change from the Space Industry!), and I can attest to the phenomenal fertility of the dung. You can grow crops in pure un-composted ‘beans’ if you need to. Or wait a few month’s and have ‘black gold’ for mixing with your poorer soil.
For the wool?
when they managed the magic of llama dung.
This is baloney. The Incas did not emerge as a people until somewhere around 1100 or 1200.
This sentence is like discussing what the English were doing in 700 BC. They weren't doing anything, because they didn't exist as a people then.
The Andes region has a loooonnnggg history, possibly as long or longer than any other part of the Earth. But in 700 BC other peoples were around, not Incas.
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