Now, an expansive new study, and bearing the names of more than 40 co-authors, suggests that the human fingerprint can even be seen across one of the most biodiverse yet unexplored regions in the world, the Amazon rainforest.For more than 8,000 years, people lived in the Amazon and farmed it to make it more productive. They favored certain trees over others, effectively creating crops that we now call the cocoa bean and the brazil nut, and they eventually domesticated them. And while many of the communities who managed these plants died in the Amerindian genocide 500 years ago, the effects of their work can still be observed in today’s Amazon rainforest.“People arrived in the Amazon at least 10,000 years ago, and they started to use the species that were there. And more than 8,000 years ago, they selected some individuals with specific phenotypes that are useful for humans,” says, a scholar at Wageningen University who helped lead the study. “They really cultivated and planted these species in their home gardens, in the forests they were managing,” she said.

“Modern tree communities in Amazonia are structured to an important extent by a long history of plant domestication by Amazonian peoples,” says the paper.Other cultivars remain successful, but they were so thoroughly changed by agriculture that they are no longer found in the forest at large. Peach palm, was domesticated to have fruits as large as 200 grams.

In the wild, its fruits originally had a mass of only one gram. It still appears in gardens and small farms across South and Central America today.The ancient farmers and gardeners of the Amazon would likely have been speakers of languages from and families.

They would probably have lived in “galactic” communities—groups of settlements separated by distance but linked by trade and communication—along the banks of the rivers that cross and irrigate the forest. These archeological sites include anything that suggests human influence: ceramics, earthworks, rock paintings, and mounds of dirt. It can also include anthropogenic soils, or “,” a black mixture of charcoal and organic material that resulted from ancient Amerindian.Because it collates two different data sources, the paper also suggests areas of future research. It finds that certain areas of the Amazon are home to the types of tree species that indicate ancient human influence, but that these places have not yet been explored or excavated by academic researchers. “This tells archaeologists where to do new projects,” says Ariarte. “Human societies increased the abundance and distribution of useful species. This can also be used to preserve the forest, I think,” she told me.

“We can use this as an opportunity to reduce the impacts of deforestation. Now we have huge plantations of soybeans that are destroying the Amazon—while in the forest we have lots of plants that can be used while maintaining the forest as it is.”A recent New York Times investigation found that after slowing during the mid-2000s. More than 850,000 acres of the basin are now burned and converted to farmland every year, releasing in the process.Some geographers, anthropologists, and indigenous people have all rejected the idea that the Americas were an untouched wilderness—“,” as they call this tale—since the early 1990s. (Fifteen years ago, it was the topic of, later.) But this paper further belies that myth in one of the most biodiverse places in the continent, suggesting that humans did not just farm in the Amazon but helped determine some of its major ecological communities. The Science paper cautions that it’s unclear whether human-cultivated biodiversity shapes the ecology throughout the Amazon Basin or just certain sections of it.But Iriarte said that increasing evidence shows that indigenous people were gardeners and stewards of biodiversity. “Perhaps,” he said, “the very biodiversity we want to preserve in the Amazon is not only due to thousands of years of natural evolution but also the result of the human footprint. The more we learn, the more the evidence points to the latter.”We want to hear what you think about this article.

The Lost City of Z is the name given by Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British surveyor, to an indigenous city that he believed had existed in the jungle of the Mato Grosso state of Brazil. Based on early histories of South America and his own explorations of the Amazon River region, Fawcett theorized.

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Look around the Amazon rainforest today and it’s hard to imagine it filled with people. But in recent decades, archaeologists have started to find evidence that before Columbus’s arrival, the region was dotted with towns and perhaps even cities. The extent of human settlement in the Amazon remains hotly debated, partly because huge swaths of the 6-million-square-kilometer rainforest remain unstudied by archaeologists.

Now, researchers have built a model predicting where signs of pre-Columbian agriculture are most likely to be found, a tool they hope will help guide future archaeological work in the region.In many ways, archaeology in the Amazon is still in its infancy. Not only is it difficult to mount large-scale excavations in the middle of a tropical rainforest, but until recently, archaeologists assumed there wasn’t much to find.

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Amazonian soil is notoriously poor quality—all the nutrients are immediately sucked up by the rainforest’s astounding biodiversity—so for many years, scientists believed that the kind of large-scale farming needed to support cities was impossible in the region. Discoveries of and, however, hint that densely populated and long-lasting population hubs once existed in the Amazon. Their agricultural secret?

Pre-Columbian Amazonians enriched the soil themselves, creating what archaeologists call terra preta.Terra preta—literally “black earth”—is soil that humans have enriched to have two to three times the nutrient content of the surrounding, poor-quality soil, explains Crystal McMichael, a paleoecologist at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Although there is no standard definition for terra preta, it tends to be darker than other Amazonian soils and to have charcoal and pre-Columbian pottery shards mixed in. Most of it was created 2500 to 500 years ago. Like the earthworks, terra preta is considered a sign that a particular area was occupied by humans in the pre-Columbian past.By analyzing location and environmental data from nearly 1000 known terra preta sites and comparing it with information from soil surveys that reported no terra preta, McMichael and her team found patterns in the distribution of the enriched soil. The scientists concluded that terra preta is most likely to be found in central and eastern Amazonia on bluffs overlooking rivers nearing the Atlantic Ocean. It’s less common in western Amazonia, where runoff from the Andes tends to add nutrients to the soil naturally, and in highland areas such as Llanos de Moxos in Bolivia, which is home to many impressive pre-Columbian earthworks. By analyzing the environmental conditions most strongly associated with terra preta, the team was able to build a model predicting where undiscovered terra preta sites are most likely to be found.

Overall, they suspect that, composing about 3.2% of the basin’s total area, they report online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.Not only does modeling the likely locations of terra preta reveal possible patterns of human settlement in the Amazon, but it also gives archaeologists “a starting point” for future excavations, McMichael says. “Within a forest of almost 6 million square kilometers, it’s hard for archaeologists to determine site locations for sampling,” she explains. Like the increasingly popular —which can find earthworks hidden under the rainforest canopy but can’t sniff out terra preta—“these statistical methodologies narrow down the probabilities” of where to find promising archaeological sites.Other Amazon experts are more skeptical. Michael Heckenberger, an archaeologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved in the research, points out a possible discrepancy in the sampling methods employed by McMichael’s team. The terra preta sites used to make the statistical model, he says, “just happen to be the areas where there’s been intensive archaeological survey.” The areas designated as terra preta-free, on the other hand, were sampled and categorized by ecologists and geologists, often long before anyone was looking for terra preta or other signs of pre-Columbian settlements in the Amazon. Just because a region is labeled terra preta-free now, Heckenberger suspects, doesn’t mean there isn’t any terra preta there.

It just means archaeologists haven’t been there to look for it—yet. McMichael’s map “serves as a reminder of what we don’t know” about the Amazon’s past, he says.McMichael agrees that a terra preta-free label should not be taken as proof that humans never settled a region. The relative lack of terra preta around the Llanos de Moxos earthworks proves that humans didn’t necessarily enrich the soil, or do so in the same way, everywhere they lived, she says. “I would think that cultures adapted differently to the different environmental conditions,” creating terra preta where the natural soil was particularly poor and modifying their environment in other ways in regions where they didn’t necessarily need to enrich the soil to support large populations.McMichael hopes to use her statistical methods to model all different kinds of ancient human impacts on the Amazon. Her team has a paper in press at the Journal of Biogeography predicting the locations of earthworks, and eventually she hopes to create a map correlating past human settlements with various ecological patterns. If pre-Columbian humans encouraged the spread of particular plants and animals they found helpful in the regions around their settlements, for example, that might affect species distribution in the Amazon today. Soon, scientists might be able to go beyond earthworks and agriculture and read the Amazon’s history in the forest itself.

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