Pre-Columbian human occupation of Amazonia and its influence on current landscapes and biodiversity

Abstract

There is growing evidence that pre-Columbian humans had strong impacts on soils, plant and animal communities and ecosystem functioning in many parts of Amazonia, and that the legacies of these impacts still affect biodiversity and how ecosystems function today. Understanding the history of human/ environment interactions in Amazonia is essential for analyzing the current state of these interactions and imagining scenarios for the future. This study gives a brief overview of these themes.

Niche Construction and Long-Term Trajectories of Food Production

“…There are also suggestions that some of these processes are linked to pre-adaptations in trees with large fleshy fruits, which derive from earlier mutualisms with megafauna who served as seed dispersers (Neves and Heckenberger 2019;Spengler et al 2021). Following early Holocene extinctions, humans began to fill ecosystem services once provided by megafauna (McKey 2019;Neves 2016;Spengler et al 2021). In essence, ecosystem engineering by megafauna resulted in foodrich niches that were inherited by humans and led to new coevolutionary relationships between humans and former megafaunal dependents.…”

Reframing Pre-European Amazonia through an Anthropocene Lens

“…A widespread and common legacy of human transformation of Amazonian landscapes is the forests themselves. Although long thought to be the result of ecological and evolutionary processes with limited influence by humans (Meggers [1971] 1996; Barlow et al 2012;McMichael et al 2012;Bush et al 2015;Piperno, McMichael, and Bush 2015), substantial research since 2000, building on earlier scholarship (e.g., Sauer 1963;Denevan and Padoch 1987;Bal ee 1989;Denevan 1992;Neves 1998) and undertaken from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (Bal ee 2006), demonstrates that Native Amazonians were active managers of those forests, intentionally or not, and to varying degrees (Heckenberger et al 2007;Clement et al 2015a;Piperno, McMichael, and Bush 2015;Roberts et al 2017;Levis et al 2018;McKey 2019). Peters (2000) argued that "managed forest systems are subtle, but they can produce lasting changes" (213) and that "what is overlooked in t[he] historical treatment of tropical silviculture is the fact that the indigenous population … [has] been using, manipulating, and managing tropical forests for several thousand years" (203).…”

“…Forests on and around anthrosols were initially described as "cultural" or "anthropogenic" forests (Bal ee 1989(Bal ee , 2013Denevan 1992;Peters 2000;Shepard et al 2020), in which "species … [were] manipulated, often without a reduction in natural diversity" (Denevan 1992, 374). Recent research by interdisciplinary teams of archaeologists, ecologists, geographers and others revealed that Amazonian forests are not just cultural forests but domesticated ones (e.g., Erickson 2006;Clement et al 2015a;Hecht 2016;Levis et al 2017;de Souza et al 2018;Levis et al 2018;Franco-Moraes et al 2019;McKey 2019;Clement et al 2020). There is significant evidence of human management on species distribution and abundance: "many present Amazonian forests, while seemingly natural, are domesticated to varying degrees in terms of altered plant distributions and densities" (Clement et al 2015a, 2).…”