"What do you mean the Native Americans altered the land and cut down forests?!?"
Even so, people in the 1800s made less of an environmental impact on
the valley than the people who lived there before colonization. Loughlin
and his colleagues compared the pollen species in sediment layers from
the last 700 years to the pollen species in layers of lake sediment
deposited long before the first people moved into the region thousands
of years ago. They found that the period before 1588 was most strikingly
different from the original pre-human cloud forest. Even the settlement
and cattle grazing since 1819 disturbed the cloud forest less than
pre-Columbian agriculture.
It has been difficult to understand exactly how and to what extent
pre-Columbian people in Central and South America modified their
environment with agriculture, irrigation, and construction. Different
cultures left different marks on the landscape, and archaeologists are
sometimes still surprised by what they find beneath the dense
vegetation. But Loughlin and his colleagues say this study suggests that
overall, we may have been underestimating how drastically pre-Columbian
people in South America impacted their environment.
No shit?
1 comment:
The Willamette valley in Oregon was covered in grassland with a few trees when the white man first arrived. The reason? The local natives regularly set fires to kill off brush and small trees, grass of course thrives on occasional fires. They did this to maintain a higher percentage than natural of the vegetation they desired.
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