10000 Anos

[Elly Ker]

Firstthe island isn't really an island at all, but a landlocked, forested mound about a quarter of the area of a football field that rises slightly from the tropical lowlands of the Bolivian Amazon. The place is only encircled by water when seasonal rains flood the surrounding savanna. And second, no buried gold or chests of jewels have been found there. Isla del Tesoro's treasure is much more subtle.

Archaeologists and earth scientists have been investigating Isla del Tesoro over the last decade, and they've found a 10,600-year-old garbage dump filled with layers and layers of snail shells, animal bones and charcoal from campfires which have accumulated over several millennia. Now, the researchers have more direct evidence that the forest island was created by humans: the remains of a person who was buried intentionally at the site at least 6,300 years ago.

"As far as I am aware, these are the oldest human remains documented in southwestern Amazonia," says Jos Capriles, the study's lead author and an assistant professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. "There are older human skeletons from neighboring regions such the karstic cave complexes of the Mina Gerais region in Brazil or the Andean highlands, but not from this region."

In the Amazon lowlands, researchers rarely find burials or any archaeological remains from the period before ceramics were developed. The acidic soil and tropical climate often prevent the preservation of human remains or artifacts, but the abundance of calcium carbonate from shells helped to preserve the newly uncovered burial sites.

The burials and refuse heaps attest that hunter-gatherers occupied this region earlier than archaeologists had expected. People on the move generally don't build landfills or bury their dead in specific places, and the archaeological evidence on the Llanos de Moxos forest islands offers new insight into the ways hunter-gatherers were able to permanently alter the landscape, creating seasonal settlements before the dawn of agriculture.

The Llanos de Moxos, a tropical savanna in northern Bolivia, attracts archaeologists because agricultural societies built an extensive network of ceremonial mounds, raised fields, roads and canals in the region beginning around 2,500 years ago. Study coauthor Umberto Lombardo, a geographer and earth scientist at the University of Bern, says he was particularly intrigued by the forest islands that stuck out of the landscape.

"When I first surveyed Isla del Tesoro in 2007, I was completely lost," Lombardo says. "I could not imagine what that was. I thought it had to be anthropogenic because I could not think of any natural process that could create such a deposit. However, it was only after the lab analyses that I started realizing that these islands not only were anthropogenic but actually far older than any other known archaeological remains in the whole region."

Scientists think that during the rainy season, when the Llanos de Moxos flooded, people camped out on the forest islands collecting snails, swamp eels, catfish and other creatures from the surrounding wetlands. The forest islands were probably not intentional earthworks, but rather were created as people kept returning to the same high-ground camps over and over again between 10,600 and 4,000 years ago.

"Once they started dropping food waste and other remains in one site, they ameliorated the fertility of this site and elevated its topography over the landscape," Lombardo says. "These two processes made this site covered with forest, providing shade and construction materials. Also, it became elevated and remained above the water level during the seasonal flood. Basically, the more the site was occupied, the better it became for further occupation."

Researchers now know that the invention of agriculture wasn't a single event occurring in the Middle East's Fertile Crescent and spreading to other regions. Rather, farming was independently developed in several different places around the globe. Lombardo says that, based on genetic evidence, many scholars think southwestern Amazonia was one of the earliest centers of plant domestication in South America. The region may have been a hotspot for crops like manioc, sweet potatoes, wild rice, chili peppers and peanuts.

Some of the behaviors observed on the Llanos de Moxos forest islands could have even laid the groundwork for farming, the research team says. For example, the increased consumption of low-return foods like snails suggests the foragers may have started to deplete some of their other food resources. Intentional burials could also be a sign of increased territoriality and decreased mobility, driving foragers to begin experimenting with agriculture.

Whitney says that although the study brings fresh understanding of the early foragers, our knowledge still contains gaps regarding how these populations became farmers, which the discovery of additional sites could fill. "As the authors note, there is encouraging evidence that new sites with longer sequences will soon be discovered to enable in-depth study of the emergence of agricultural societies."

John Walker, an archaeologist at the University of Central Florida who has studied the Llanos de Moxos, says the new findings are a "significant step" toward better understanding the long-term heritage of indigenous Amazonians, who have historically combined all kinds of economic strategies to sustain their lifestyle, including farming, fishing, foraging and forest management.

"There are many thousands of forest islands like these three, and they were clearly very important places to pre-Columbian communities for a very long time," Walker says. "This paper does a great service in showing how long that story is."

Haban cado en ellos esos habitantes o haban bajado intencionalmente en busca de refugio, alimentos o agua? Se han encontrado restos de nueve esqueletos humanos en los cenotes, cuyos estrechos pasadizos apenas dejan pasar un cuerpo.

Descubrimientos recientes de unos 900 metros de minas de ocre indican que podran haber tenido un atractivo ms fuerte. El descubrimiento de restos de fogatas, escombros de la minera, herramientas sencillas de piedra, seales para no perderse y excavaciones indican que los seres humanos penetraron en las cuevas hace entre 10,000 y 12,000 aos en busca de ocre, un mineral rojo rico en hierro que los pueblos originarios de Amrica apreciaban por su valor decorativo y ritual.

Los mineros primitivos al parecer utilizaron antorchas o leos para iluminarse mientras trabajaban quebrando estalagmitas para extraer el ocre. Hay rastro de holln en el techo de las cuevas que contina visible hoy da.

Roberto Junco Snchez, subdirector de Arqueologa Subacutica (SAS) del Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia (INAH) de Mxico, dijo que el descubrimiento significa que las cuevas fueron alteradas por humanos en la antigedad. Esos mineros antiguos quiz retiraron toneladas de ocre, que convertido en pasta sirve para pintar el pelo, rocas o pieles en diversos tonos de rojo.

Sin embargo, James Chatters, antroplogo forense, arquelogo y paleontlogo de la firma consultora Applied Paleoscience, de Bothell, Washington, observ que ninguno de los restos humanos premayas en las cuevas fue hallado directamente en las zonas mineras.

El doctor Spencer Pelton, profesor de la Universidad de Wyoming y arquelogo estatal, ha efectuado excavaciones en una mina de ocre un poco ms antigua en el sitio Powars II cerca de Hartville, Wyoming.

La demanda pedir efectivamente a los tribunales que permitan a los grupos ciudadanos tomar el control del estado y de la EPA en la aplicacin de la Ley de Aire Limpio en Colorado. Aunque las disposiciones de la ley permiten honorarios de abogados si los ciudadanos ganan su demanda, cualquier sentencia contra Suncor ira al tesoro federal y no a los grupos ambientales.

La amplia accin sobre violaciones pasadas se desarrollar mientras algunos de los mismos vigilantes ambientales y grupos comunitarios tambin atacan las decisiones estatales sobre permisos para cmo opera Suncor ahora y en el futuro. Colorado emiti a finales de mayo un permiso renovado para las plantas 1 y 3 de Suncor, que segn los reguladores toma medidas nuevas y estrictas de monitoreo y capacitacin, pero que los opositores dicen que desafiarn. Tambin hay desafos en curso a un permiso renovado para la planta 2 de Suncor, partes del cual la EPA objet y los grupos ambientales continan impugnando.

El aviso de demanda incluye una investigacin en profundidad sobre el impacto desproporcionado de la contaminacin en las comunidades que rodean a Suncor, hogar de casi 70,000 personas. Los vecindarios en Commerce City, Globeville, Elyria-Swansea y otros lugares son 72% personas de color y 37% econmicamente desfavorecidas, dice el aviso.

Los vecindarios se ubican en los percentiles ms altos del 90% en cuanto a amenazas de materia particulada, toxinas en el aire, partculas de diesel y pintura con plomo, entre otros. Tambin reportan una de las mayores incidencias de enfermedades relacionadas con la contaminacin, como asma, enfermedades cardacas y diabetes. Si bien los vecindarios han sido histricamente inundados por la contaminacin de fundiciones de metales, corrales, plantas de energa y las autopistas ms transitadas de Colorado, la demanda atribuye una responsabilidad significativa a la gran refinera.

Como muchas refineras, Suncor usa el gas subproducto como combustible para sus propias calderas y maquinaria en lugar de comprar gas natural del exterior, dijo Coghill. Si ese gas de refinera no se trata adecuadamente debido a fallas en el equipo o equipos envejecidos, el azufre y otros contaminantes pueden llegar al vecindario.

Michael Booth es el escritor de medio ambiente de The Sun y coautor del boletn semanal de clima y salud de The Sun, The Temperature. l y John Ingold presentan el podcast semanal SunUp sobre temas de The Temperature todos los jueves.

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