Ancient agriculture and the Amazon

In case you missed the story about the discoveries in the Amazon basin in recent years, there's a neat summary over at the UPenn website. In brief, the old view of the Amazon as an untouched wilderness has come under question, now that there is strong evidence of extensive settlement and cultivation in centuries past. The old view is dying hard, though, for obvious reasons.

The innovative nature of the ancient cultivation is itself fascinating. Concluding excerpt:

Scientists are still analyzing the biology, but Erickson believes the Amazon Indians enriched their earth with a microorganism, one that resisted depletion and helped fertilize. If better understood, this process of inoculating poor soil with a bacterial booster could aid parts of the undeveloped world starved for agriculture. Recently, geographers estimated that the creators of this ancient technology managed to terraform at least 10 percent of Amazonia—an area the size of France. Along with the raised fields, fish weirs, causeways, and other anthropogenic features, Dark Earth may in fact be one of countless footprints left by a lost civilization. Indeed, if Erickson is right, the Amazon could be humankind’s largest engineering relic.