Vanishing rainforests might be considered a modern problem but a study has shown that humans have been tearing up the tropics for at least 45,000 years.
Researchers found evidence that hunter-gatherers in tropical forests in southeast Asia, Australia and New Guinea used management techniques including controlled burning and clear-cutting. The study, the first to look at global data on early humans in such locations, determined that they cleared parts of the forest to create more of the environments that encouraged the animals and plants they liked to eat.
The earliest evidence of farming in tropical forests was found in New Guinea, where humans tended plants including black pepper, sweet potatoes and bananas 10,000 years ago.
The study, by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, Liverpool John Moores University, University College London and École française d’Extrême-Orient in France, and published in Nature Plants, found that tribal populations lived in vast settlements in the forests of Amazonia and southeast Asia. Patrick Roberts, lead author, said: “Indigenous and traditional peoples, whose ancestors’ systems of production and knowledge are slowly being decoded by archaeologists, should be seen as part of the solution and not one of the problems of sustainable development.”