Long Before Making Enigmatic Earthworks, People Reshaped Brazil’s Rain Forest<br />"A lot of people have the idea that the Amazon forests are pristine forests, never touched by humans,<br />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.<br />Dr. Watling and her colleagues found that in contrast with the large-scale deforestation we see today — which threatens about 20 percent of the<br />largest rain forest in the world — ancient indigenous people of the Amazon practiced something more akin to what we now call agroforestry.<br />Jennifer Watling said that Our study was looking at the environmental impact that the geoglyph builders had on the landscape,<br />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<br />that Dr. Watling calls a "prehistoric supermarket." After that, they started building the geoglyphs.<br />Since the discovery, archaeological study of the earthworks and other evidence has challenged the notion<br />that the rain forests of the Amazon were untouched by human hands before the arrival of European explorers in the 15th century.<br />And while the true purpose of the geoglyphs remains unknown, a study published on Monday in The Proceedings of the<br />National Academy of Sciences offers new insight into the lives of the ancient people who lived in the Amazon.
