亞馬遜的農(nóng)業(yè)始于一萬年前，給我們提供了許多我們喜愛的食物

亞馬遜的農(nóng)業(yè)始于一萬年前，給我們提供了許多我們喜愛的食物

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.

大約在上一個(gè)冰河時(shí)代結(jié)束的時(shí)候，農(nóng)業(yè)在幾個(gè)地方興起。亞馬遜盆地西南部現(xiàn)在已經(jīng)被發(fā)現(xiàn)是這一偉大創(chuàng)新發(fā)生的第五個(gè)地點(diǎn)。種植是在所謂的“森林島嶼”上進(jìn)行的，這是一片平均只有半公頃的土地，高于泛濫平原，足以讓樹木茂盛生長。

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.

毫無疑問，在很長一段時(shí)間里，人類對玻利維亞的大草原(Llanos de Moxos savannah)產(chǎn)生了重大影響。古代的土方工程和運(yùn)河證明了這一點(diǎn)，但這些被認(rèn)為不到1500年的歷史，留下了一個(gè)農(nóng)業(yè)何時(shí)開始的問題。

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.

為了確定人類改變地貌的年代，伯爾尼大學(xué)的Umberto Lombardo博士繪制了6600個(gè)森林島嶼的地圖，并深入調(diào)查了82個(gè)島嶼，以確定這些島嶼是自然形成的還是幾千年前的人類造成的。

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.

“關(guān)于植物馴化的考古證據(jù)非常少，特別是在亞馬遜地區(qū)，那里的氣候破壞了大部分的有機(jī)物質(zhì)。研究報(bào)告的撰寫者之一、賓夕法尼亞州立大學(xué)的何塞·卡普里萊斯博士在一份聲明中說:“這個(gè)地區(qū)沒有石頭，因?yàn)檫@是一個(gè)沖積平原(水沉積的地方)。”

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，卡普里萊斯在《自然》(Nature)雜志上提供的證據(jù)表明，這些島嶼中的一些在10350年前就種植了木薯，不久之后就被壓碎了。玉米最早出現(xiàn)在大約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.

這些作物是從植物巖中鑒定出來的，植物巖是在植物內(nèi)部形成的微小硅顆粒，其形狀表明它們來自于哪個(gè)物種。放射性碳年代測定法測定了植物巖的年齡。根據(jù)適合人類飲食的豐富植物，以及木炭和貝殼碎片的存在，取樣的64個(gè)島嶼被認(rèn)為是人類起源，表明大約4700個(gè)島嶼是人類活動的產(chǎn)物。

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

像這樣的地方可能曾經(jīng)分布得很廣，但是這個(gè)地區(qū)經(jīng)常發(fā)洪水，很多地方被埋在幾米深的泥里。

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.

亞馬遜對我們的現(xiàn)代飲食產(chǎn)生了巨大的影響?；ㄉ?、紅辣椒和一些豆子都是最早在那里種植的植物，經(jīng)過數(shù)千年的培育，它們的豐饒和美味給了我們今天喜愛的食物。

"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."

倫巴多說:“考古學(xué)家、地理學(xué)家和生物學(xué)家多年來一直認(rèn)為，西南亞馬遜地區(qū)可能是早期植物馴化的中心，因?yàn)樵S多重要的品種，如木薯、南瓜、花生以及一些辣椒和豆類品種，在基因上與生活在這里的野生植物非常接近。”“然而，直到最近的這項(xiàng)研究之前，科學(xué)家們既沒有在該地區(qū)尋找也沒有挖掘出可能記錄這些全球重要農(nóng)作物在哥倫布發(fā)現(xiàn)美洲大陸之前被馴化的古老考古遺址。”

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.

卡普里萊斯和合著者認(rèn)為，他們可以根據(jù)他們發(fā)現(xiàn)的植物巖來估計(jì)第一批亞馬遜農(nóng)民的飲食，盡管他們猜測魚和狩獵的草食動物偶爾會補(bǔ)充種植的植物。

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.

這一發(fā)現(xiàn)使得亞馬遜西南部地區(qū)成為世界上第5個(gè)發(fā)明農(nóng)業(yè)的地區(qū)，而不是從其他地方引進(jìn)農(nóng)業(yè)。其他四個(gè)分別是中國、新月沃土、墨西哥西南部和安第斯山脈。