March 4, 2017

New Evidence of Wide Spread Forest Management by Ancient Amazonian People

A large Amazon research team studied 1000 forest surveys on a map of 3000 archaeological sites in the Amazon. They focused on 85 tree species domesticated by Amazonian people for food, shelter and other uses. They found extensive use of the Amazon forests by ancient peoples. They were able to show that these species are abundant across the Amazon, thus proving that the ancient peoples planted these trees over wide areas of the Amazon in Pre-Columbian times. Even more tree species were managed by these peoples, but not domesticated. The team will continue to study that aspect of ancient forest management. In the last few years, archaeological evidence of very large ancienrt structures in the Amazon have been uncovered, proving that the ancient Amazon had a much larger population and much more advanced culture than previously believed.

Eurekalert has the report here;
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/nbc-aps022817.php

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