Free Republic

Early inhabitants fertilized the soil with charcoal from fire remains and food waste. Areas with this "dark earth" have a different set of species than the surrounding landscape, contributing to a more diverse ecosystem with a richer collection of plant species, researchers from the State University of Mato Grosso in Brazil and the University of Exeter have found. The legacy of this land management thousands of years ago means there are thousands of these patches of dark earth dotted around the region, most around the size of a small field. This is the first study to measure the difference in...

A few days ago men removed some female figurines (centerpieces for several weird ceremonies in Rome the last few weeks) from a church and tossed them into the Tiber River. Vatican spokesman Paolo Ruffini dismissed the act as a “stunt”. Regardless of how one assess this act, however, I think it not accurate to describe it as a mere “stunt”. A “stunt” is a gesture that calls attention to a problem but does not itself solve the problem. For example, chaining oneself to a lamppost could call attention to the plight of the unjustly imprisoned but does not itself free...

Flanked by banners of the four evangelists, and gathered under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an international coalition of 200 Catholic laity today assembled in silence near St. Peter’s Square, to pray “as a united army against the enemies of God and the Church.” Standing at the foot of Castel Sant’Angelo on the eve of the liturgical feast of St. Michael the Archangel, the international lay coalition launched an “appeal to the angels against the evil spirits” ahead of the Amazonian Synod being held at the Vatican Oct. 6-27. LifeSite also learned that another act of spiritual...

Tweet Bishop J. Strickland @Bishopoftyler I urge every faithful Catholic to join me in praying this Novena daily until October 6. Pray the intention “that all bishops guard the deposit of faith” May Our Blessed Mother intercede for her Son’s Bride. Novena Prayer to the Sacred Heart | EWTN (link: https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/devotions/novena-prayer-to-the-sacred-heart-311) ewtn.com/catholicism/de… Efficacious Novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus O my Jesus, you have said: 'Truly I say to you, ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you. ' Behold I knock, I seek and ask for the...

"We have long been aware that complex societies emerged in Llanos de Moxos in southwestern Amazonia, Bolivia, around 2,500 years ago, but our new evidence suggests that humans first settled in the region up to 10,000 years ago during the early Holocene period," said Jose Capriles, assistant professor of anthropology. "These groups of people were hunter gatherers; however, our data show that they were beginning to deplete their local resources and establish territorial behaviors, perhaps driving them to begin domesticating plants such as sweet potatoes, cassava, peanuts and chili peppers as a way to acquire food." The archaeological team conducted...

'First Americans were Australian' This is the face of the first known American, Lucia The first Americans were descended from Australian aborigines, according to evidence in a new BBC documentary. The skulls suggest faces like those of Australian aborigines The programme, Ancient Voices, shows that the dimensions of prehistoric skulls found in Brazil match those of the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Melanesia. Other evidence suggests that these first Americans were later massacred by invaders from Asia. Until now, native Americans were believed to have descended from Asian ancestors who arrived over a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and...

Ancient hearth tests carbon dating Bob Beale ABC Science Online Monday, 17 November 2003 Rock art at Serra da Capivara National Park, home of the Pedra Furada site in Brazil (Embassy of Brazil, London) People were keeping warm by a fire in a rock shelter at least 56,000 years ago, according to new analysis of what may be the oldest known human record in the Americas. This is about 40,000 years earlier than generally agreed for when people first arrived in the Americas. The international team of researchers dated charcoal from a hearth at the controversial Pedra Furada archaeological site...

It is often held aloft by environmental campaign groups as an example of one of the last remaining regions of unspoiled habitat left in the world. But instead of being a pristine rainforest untouched by human hands, the Amazon appears to have been profoundly shaped by mankind. An international team of researchers have published evidence that suggests the Amazon was once home to millions of people who lived and farmed in the area now covered by trees.

Forget small nomadic tribes and pristine jungle: the southern Amazon was likely covered in a network of large villages and ceremonial centers before Columbus. Geoglyphs in the southern Amazon are evidence of a once-thriving population. Photograph courtesy of University of Exeter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Before Spanish invaders conquered South America, sparse groups of nomadic people clustered around the Amazon River, leaving the surrounding rain forest pristine and untouched. Or did they? New research suggests a very different story—an Amazonian region peppered with rain forest villages, ceremonial earthworks, and a much larger population than previously thought. The research, funded in part by the...

Parts of the Amazon previously thought to have been uninhabited were home to thriving populations of up to a million people from as early as 1250 AD, research shows. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence there were up to 1,500 fortified villages in the rainforest away from major rivers - two-thirds of which are yet to be discovered. By analysing charcoal remains and excavated pottery, researchers found a 1,100-mile (1,800km) stretch of southern Amazonia that was continuously occupied from 1250 until 1500 AD. People had assumed ancient communities had preferred to live near these waterways, but the new evidence shows this was...

Carson and his colleagues wanted to explore the question of whether early Amazonians had a major impact on the forest. They focused on the Amazon of northeastern Bolivia, where they had sediment cores from two lakes nearby major earthworks sites. These sediment cores hold ancient pollen grains and charcoal from long-ago fires, and can hint at the climate and ecosystem that existed when the sediment was laid down as far back as 6,000 years ago. An examination of the two cores — one from the large lake, Laguna Oricore, and one from the smaller lake, Laguna Granja — revealed a...

It is often held aloft by environmental campaign groups as an example of one of the last remaining regions of unspoiled habitat left in the world. But instead of being a pristine rainforest untouched by human hands, the Amazon appears to have been profoundly shaped by mankind. An international team of researchers have published evidence that suggests the Amazon was once home to millions of people who lived and farmed in the area now covered by trees.

Previously unknown archeological sites in forest islands reveal human presence in the western Amazon as early as 10,000 years ago, according to research published August 28 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Umberto Lombardo from the University of Bern, Switzerland and colleagues from other institutions. The study focuses on a region in the Bolivian Amazon thought to be rarely occupied by pre-agricultural communities due to unfavorable environmental conditions. Hundreds of 'forest islands'- small forested mounds of earth- are found throughout the region, their origins attributed to termites, erosion or ancient human activity. In this study, the authors report...

A series of ancient underwater etchings has been uncovered near the jungle city of Manaus, following a drought in the Brazilian Amazon. The previously submerged images -- engraved on rocks and possibly up to 7,000 years old -- were reportedly discovered by a fisherman after the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon river, fell to its lowest level in more than 100 years last month... Though water levels are now rising again, partly covering the apparently stone age etchings, local researchers photographed them before they began to disappear under the river's dark waters. Archaeologists who have studied the photographs...

To the untrained eye, all evidence here in the heart of the Amazon signals virgin forest, untouched by man for time immemorial - from the ubiquitous fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to the unruly tangle of jungle vines. Archaeologists, many of them Americans, say the opposite is true: This patch of forest, and many others across the Amazon, was instead home to an advanced, even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched infertile soil to feed thousands. The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held that...

Many botanists did not see any connection between maize and other living plants. Some concluded that the crop plant arose through the domestication by early agriculturalists of a wild maize that was now extinct, or at least undiscovered. However, a few scientists working during the first part of the 20th century uncovered evidence that they believed linked maize to what, at first glance, would seem to be a very unlikely parent, a Mexican grass called teosinte... George W. Beadle, while a graduate student at Cornell University in the early 1930s, found that maize and teosinte had very similar chromosomes....

Centuries-old European explorers' tales of lost cities in the Amazon have long been dismissed by scholars, in part because the region is too infertile to feed a sprawling civilization. But new discoveries support the idea of an ancient Amazonian urban network—and ingeniously engineered soil may have made it all possible.

The African source of the Amazon's fertilizer Sid Perkins In the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, massive dust storms from the African Sahara waft southwest across the Atlantic to drop tons of vital minerals on the Amazon basin in South America. Now, scientists have pinpointed the source of many of those dust storms and estimated their dust content. ON THE WAY. Satellite photo shows dust (arrow), bound for the Amazon, blowing away from the Sahara's Bodélé depression. NASA The Amazonian rainforest depends on Saharan dust for many of its nutrients, including iron and phosphorus (SN: 9/29/01, p. 200: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010929/bob9.asp)....

One way to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is to put it back in the ground. In the first of two News Features on carbon sequestration, Quirin Schiermeier asked when the world's coal-fired power plants will start storing away their carbon. In the second, Emma Marris joins the enthusiasts who think that enriching Earth's soils with charcoal can help avert global warming, reduce the need for fertilizers, and greatly increase the size of turnips. J. LEHMANN Drop of the black stuff: terra preta contrasts strongly with normal soil in colour (above) and produces much more vigorous crops (below)....

LAHORE: The vast Amazon rainforest is on the verge of being turned into desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world’s climate, alarming research suggests. And the process, which would be irreversible, could begin as early as next year. Geoffrey Lean and Fred Pearce, writing for The Independent on Sunday, quote studies conducted by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre in Amazonia as concluding that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down. “Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere, including Britain, and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences,...