亚马逊的农业始于一万年前，给我们提供了许多我们喜爱的食物

亚马逊的农业始于一万年前，给我们提供了许多我们喜爱的食物

Around the time the last ice age was ending, agriculture sprang up at several sites. The south-western Amazon Basin has now been revealed as the fifth site at which this great innovation occurred. The planting took place in so-called “forest islands”, patches of soil averaging just half a hectare that are raised enough above the flood plain to allow trees to flourish.

大约在上一个冰河时代结束的时候，农业在几个地方兴起。亚马逊盆地西南部现在已经被发现是这一伟大创新发生的第五个地点。种植是在所谓的“森林岛屿”上进行的，这是一片平均只有半公顷的土地，高于泛滥平原，足以让树木茂盛生长。

Stephen Luntz

There is little doubt that humans have had a major impact on Bolivia's Llanos de Moxos savannah for a long time. Ancient earthworks and canals attest to this, but these are thought to be less than 1,500 years old, leaving open the question of when agriculture there began.

毫无疑问，在很长一段时间里，人类对玻利维亚的大草原(Llanos de Moxos savannah)产生了重大影响。古代的土方工程和运河证明了这一点，但这些被认为不到1500年的历史，留下了一个农业何时开始的问题。

In order to identify the age of human changes to the landscape, Dr Umberto Lombardo of the University of Bern mapped 6,600 forest islands and investigated 82 in-depth to see if they were natural or made by people thousands of years ago.

为了确定人类改变地貌的年代，伯尔尼大学的Umberto Lombardo博士绘制了6600个森林岛屿的地图，并深入调查了82个岛屿，以确定这些岛屿是自然形成的还是几千年前的人类造成的。

Dr Umberto Lombard with some of the cores used to collect sediment samples from the forest islands to identify the crops once grown there. José Capriles, Penn State

"Archaeological evidence for plant domestication is very poorly available, especially in Amazonia where the climate destroys most organic materials. There is no stone in this area because it is an alluvial plain (water deposited)," co-author Dr José Capriles of Penn State University said in a statement.

“关于植物驯化的考古证据非常少，特别是在亚马逊地区，那里的气候破坏了大部分的有机物质。研究报告的撰写者之一、宾夕法尼亚州立大学的何塞·卡普里莱斯博士在一份声明中说:“这个地区没有石头，因为这是一个冲积平原(水沉积的地方)。”

However, Capriles provides evidence in the journal Nature that cassava was grown in some of these islands 10,350 years ago and squash soon after. Maize first appears almost 7,000 years ago.

然而，卡普里莱斯在《自然》(Nature)杂志上提供的证据表明，这些岛屿中的一些在10350年前就种植了木薯，不久之后就被压碎了。玉米最早出现在大约7000年前。

The crops were identified from phytoliths, tiny silica particles formed inside plants whose shape indicates the species they come from. Radiocarbon dating gives the phytolith's age. Based on the abundance of plants suited to the human diet, and the presence of charcoal and shell fragments, 64 of the sampled islands were considered to be of human origin, suggesting some 4,700 of the islands were the product of human activity.

这些作物是从植物岩中鉴定出来的，植物岩是在植物内部形成的微小硅颗粒，其形状表明它们来自于哪个物种。放射性碳年代测定法测定了植物岩的年龄。根据适合人类饮食的丰富植物，以及木炭和贝壳碎片的存在，取样的64个岛屿被认为是人类起源，表明大约4700个岛屿是人类活动的产物。

Sites like these were probably once far more widespread, but the area floods frequently and many locations are buried beneath meters of mud.

像这样的地方可能曾经分布得很广，但是这个地区经常发洪水，很多地方被埋在几米深的泥里。

Come the wet season the savannah floods and the islands are among the few places that stand above the waterline. Umberto Lombardo

The Amazonians had a big impact on our modern diets. Peanuts, chili peppers, and some beans are among the plants first grown there and bred over thousands of years for abundance and taste to give us the foods we love today.

亚马逊对我们的现代饮食产生了巨大的影响。花生、红辣椒和一些豆子都是最早在那里种植的植物，经过数千年的培育，它们的丰饶和美味给了我们今天喜爱的食物。

"Archaeologists, geographers, and biologists have argued for many years that southwestern Amazonia was a probable centre of early plant domestication because many important cultivars like manioc, squash, peanuts and some varieties of chili pepper and beans are genetically very close to wild plants living here,” Lombardo said. “However, until this recent study, scientist had neither searched for, nor excavated, old archaeological sites in this region that might document the pre-Columbian domestication of these globally important crops."

伦巴多说:“考古学家、地理学家和生物学家多年来一直认为，西南亚马逊地区可能是早期植物驯化的中心，因为许多重要的品种，如木薯、南瓜、花生以及一些辣椒和豆类品种，在基因上与生活在这里的野生植物非常接近。”“然而，直到最近的这项研究之前，科学家们既没有在该地区寻找也没有挖掘出可能记录这些全球重要农作物在哥伦布发现美洲大陆之前被驯化的古老考古遗址。”

Capriles and co-authors think they can estimate the diet of the first Amazonian farmers based on the phytoliths they have found, although they guess fish and hunted herbivores occasionally supplemented what was grown.

卡普里莱斯和合著者认为，他们可以根据他们发现的植物岩来估计第一批亚马逊农民的饮食，尽管他们猜测鱼和狩猎的草食动物偶尔会补充种植的植物。

The discovery makes south-west Amazonia only the fifth place in the world known to have invented agriculture, rather than importing the idea from elsewhere. The other four are China, The Fertile Crescent, southwestern Mexico, and the Andes.

这一发现使得亚马逊西南部地区成为世界上第5个发明农业的地区，而不是从其他地方引进农业。其他四个分别是中国、新月沃土、墨西哥西南部和安第斯山脉。