Good day to you, our dear readers! Honestly, we didn’t know about the impending sensation when we held our unofficial competition of high technologies of the ancient world (“The Ancient Modernity“). And just think about it, how enthusiastic we were about a two-thousand-years-old computer and a set of batteries. Or about the structures of the ancient Peruvians which were built only 1000 years ago (ridiculous, compared to the recent news).
Ladies and Gentlemen! An investigation of an international group led by Swiss scientists, Umberto Lombardo and Heinz Veit from the University of Bern (Lombardo, U., Iriarte, J., Hilbert, L. et al. Early Holocene crop cultivation and landscape modification in Amazonia. Nature (2020) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2162-7) proves that the residents of the Llanos de Moxos in the southwestern Amazonia had consciously and purposefully changed the natural landscape of the area, creating artificial forest islands in treeless savannah. This was done approximately… 11 thousand years ago! All in all, 4,500 such mini-forests were created. By the way, these anthropic forest islands are preferential feeding and roosting sites for many species of birds, including the endemic and critically endangered blue-throated macaw (Ara glaucogularis).
One of the questions that arise due to this finding is, what was the reason for such monumental activity? Perhaps the answer to this question is in another interesting finding of Lombardo and his colleagues. The people had begun to cultivate squash (Cucurbita sp.) and manioc (Manihot sp.)… around 10,350 years ago. And this is not a mistake in the number of zeros – yes, approximately 8-9 thousand years BC. our civilization (or a small but very advanced part of it) had already used plant cultivation and landscape design technologies.
Let’s fantasize a bit. If we assume that the people who possessed such knowledge in botany and landscape architecture were also advanced in other sciences, then logically, we can hypothesize that the title of the most ancient city probably does not belong to the Mediterranean Jericho, but to some yet undetected city in the Llanos de Moxos. Moreover, it is possible that the “oldest university” title will pass very soon from the universities of Bologna, Salamanca, Paris or Oxford (or, according to some versions, Cairo’s Al-Azhar) to an ancient university somewhere in the territory of modern Bolivia. So, this study is only a first step in a long way, and when we complete it, our understanding of our civilization and its history will, necessarily, change.
N.B. When this article was already edited for publication, one of our authors put our attention to another article published in the Archaeology magazine (https://www.archaeology.org/news/8628-200414-alaska-howard-s-pass). Archaeologist Jeff Rasic has investigated archaeological sites at Howard’s Pass, located in the mountains of northern Alaska’s Brooks Range. The traces of houses and tent rings, food storage pits and cairns in the shape of pyramids used for hunting traps are dated to around 9 millennium BC. Presumably, half of the area of such structures was located underground, which is especially important in the very extreme climate of this region. This fact already says a lot about the architectural knowledge of the people living in this place. For us, the temporary coincidences of both sites are especially interesting.
Featured image by Jorge.kike.medina – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7318072.