Long Before Making Enigmatic Earthworks, People Reshaped Brazil’s Rain Forest
"A lot of people have the idea that the Amazon forests are pristine forests, never touched by humans,
and that’s obviously not the case." Dr. Watling and her team reconstructed a 6,000-year-old environmental history of two geoglyph sites in the Amazon rain forest.
Dr. Watling and her colleagues found that in contrast with the large-scale deforestation we see today — which threatens about 20 percent of the
largest rain forest in the world — ancient indigenous people of the Amazon practiced something more akin to what we now call agroforestry.
Jennifer Watling said that Our study was looking at the environmental impact that the geoglyph builders had on the landscape,
They may have planted maize or squash, weeded out some underbrush, and transported seeds or saplings to create a partly curated forest of useful tree products
that Dr. Watling calls a "prehistoric supermarket." After that, they started building the geoglyphs.
Since the discovery, archaeological study of the earthworks and other evidence has challenged the notion
that the rain forests of the Amazon were untouched by human hands before the arrival of European explorers in the 15th century.
And while the true purpose of the geoglyphs remains unknown, a study published on Monday in The Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences offers new insight into the lives of the ancient people who lived in the Amazon.