I, for one, had long held the belief that the Amazon Rain-forest was a pristine place, untouched by humans, and had marveled at the stories about the discovery of new tribes. But a new study seems to turn that belief on its head.
According to it, the Amazon rain-forest may have been nurtured and shaped by humans all along, and even that ancient civilizations once thrived in its thickets and played a role and intervened to make it the massive forest we know today.
And to add to that, the researchers found evidence that indigenous people may have domesticated and cultivated Amazonian plants and trees thousands of years ago. Plants and trees like the Cacao plant, rubber trees and Cashew nuts!!
[Photo Source]
The most interesting for me was the reasoning behind the conclusion. The way the team determined that a plant had been domesticated was a look at a fruit like peach palms.
It seems that the fruits of these plants, when grown in the wild, matured to about one gram but they found some peach palms that bore fruit weighing 200 grams, or 0.44 pounds, which is the average of a fruit from a domesticated plant, which they identified and found that they are still grown by South Americans to this day.
The lead researcher of the study, Carolina Levis, a doctoral student at the National Institute for Amazonian Research in Brazil and Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands, was quoted in an article explaining the logic behind their conclusion and revealed that they
compared her list of 85 plants to another database of more than 3,000 archaeological sites, including ceramics, dirt mounds and rock paintings, dating back before the Spaniards and Portuguese arrived in the Americas 500 years ago. The domesticated plants flourished near the archaeological sites, far more so than non-domesticated ones.
“It’s the first time that we show these correlations between plant species in the forest today and archaeological finds,” she said.
I guess more research will be required for a more definitive conclusion, but if it is confirmed then it would mean that either the ancient civilizations grew and cultivated the plants, or that they purposely settled in areas that had plants they could eat to provide food security to ancient peoples.
That would change our perception not only of the Amazon forests, it would also make us look at ancient peoples, and their civilizations, in a new light.
- http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2017/0303/Can-a-new-study-on-trees-change-the-conversation-about-Amazon-conservation
- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/science/amazon-rain-forest-plants-domesticate.html
- http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untouched-amazonian-rainforest-was-actually-shaped-humans-180962378/
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