We sometimes think of the Amazon rainforest as unaltered by humans, a peek into the planet’s past. In recent years, scientists have learned that many parts of the Amazon aren’t untouched at all—they’ve been cultivated by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, and mere centuries ago were the sites of cities and farmland. But that’s not the case everywhere. In a new study in PNAS, researchers determined that a rainforest in the Putumayo region of Peru has been home to relatively unaltered forest for 5,000 years, meaning that the people who have lived there found a long-term way to coexist with nature—and the evidence is in microscopic bits of silica and charcoal in the soil.
Click here for original story, This forest has stayed wild for 5,000 years—we can tell because of the soil
Source: Phys.org