study confirms that ancient humans intentionally created patches of very fertile “dark earth”

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Thoughts?

9-30-23
Researchers now hope to use the environmental engineering success to combat climate change.

By Jackie Appel, Popular Mechanics

A new study confirms that ancient humans intentionally created patches of very fertile “dark earth” in the Amazon.
Thought the region is incredibly full of life, the soil is notoriously poor.
Researchers hope to leverage this dark earth creation to help combat climate change.
It can be easy to forget that people are part of the environment. When we think of the environment, or of ecological systems, we often think about and describe these systems as things that humans affect from the outside. We are damaging the environment. We are disrupting ecological systems.

But by definition, we are a part of the environment, no differently than any other animal. We certainly have an outsized impact, but we’re still a part of these systems. And recently, a group of researchers released a paper—published in the journal Science Advances—detailing new and exciting evidence that further confirms that we always have been.

The focus of this research was on mysterious patches of what is known as “dark earth” in the Amazon rainforest. Despite its reputation for being incredibly verdant and full of life, the soil in the Amazon is actually notoriously nutrient poor.

Except in certain locations. In and around ancient settlements, researchers had found patches of dark earth—dirt that is incredibly fertile, nutrient rich, and very good at storing carbon.

“When I saw this dark earth and how fertile it was, and started digging into what was known about it, I found it was a mysterious thing—no one really knew where it came from,” Morgan Schmidt, the lead author of the study, said in a press release.

So, the question became: did the ancient inhabitants of this land cultivate this soil on purpose, or was it an accidental byproduct of their lifestyle? In order to find out, a multi-organizational research team undertook an investigation involving everything from soil analysis to interviews with modern indigenous communities in the region to finally understand how this earth came to be.

They started by synthesizing data from years of observations of and interactions with people living in modern Kuikuro villages. This synthesis brought to the forefront various behaviors related to the treatment of the earth that the Kuikuro people would engage in. It specifically highlighted the habitual creation and maintenance of middens—kind of like compost piles filled with “waste and food scraps,” according to a news release—in their and around the centers of villages, which decompose and combine with the rest of the soil in the area to create dark earth. The researchers also noticed that the Kuikuro people spread things like charcoal and ash on fields, which also helps to create dark earth.

Now the goal was to connect the present to the past—could researchers say with reasonable certainty that the ancient predecessors of modern Kuikuro people were also intentionally using these or similar behaviors to create the ancient dark earth?

Well, according to a detailed soil analysis, yes they could. The team confirmed that not only was the dark earth found in patterns that were very reminiscent of those the middens form today, the ancient and modern dark earth have very similar compositions. According to a press release, the soil “was enriched in the same elements, such as carbon, phosphorus, and other nutrients.” These elements are known to reduce the aluminum toxicity that plagues much of the soil in the Amazon.

“The key bridge between the modern and ancient times is the soil,” Samuel Goldberg, one of the authors on the study, said in a news release. “Because we see this correspondence between the two time periods, we can infer that these practices that we can observe and ask people about today, were also happening in the past.”

So, it turns out it was us all along—ancient humans contributing to soil enrichment and participating in the ecological systems of which they were a part. In the future, the research team behind this study is hoping to leverage the ability of this dark earth to sequester carbon and get it out of the atmosphere in an effort to help slow or reverse climate change.

Hopefully, we can help negate some of the damage that modern humans have done to the environment by implementing some of the work that ancient humans did to improve it.

Huh, so they're still doing it... and all this time nobody thought about just asking them how it's done instead of making a bunch of fancy theories about how people used to do it? This repeats over and over. Scientists being baffled about something that people accomplished a long time ago, and just never thinking about asking the people who might still know how. Seriously.

On the flip side, I guess it's good that they did find out now. This way we'll know more about how to emulate the technique...