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!
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.
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.
This whole article is garbage.
Civilization may be based on cereals, but somebody forgot to tell the Andean peoples. Their civilization was based on potatoes and fish.
Prior to the Inca empire around 1400, maize was grown as a status food, not a staple crop. Certainly a civilization starting in 700 BC wasn’t “based on maize.” This was true of all Meso-American civilizations, but not the Andean ones.
We’ve had llamas for years. Something interesting about their behavior is that they use communal dung piles. One of them picks a place to do their business and all of them will use that spot over and over. If they stay in one area for a while, they will create an area that will stay significantly greener and more productive for years. I can see how someone might have capitalized on this.
