The Amazon Rainforest Was Profoundly Changed by Ancient Humans

For more than a quarter-century, scientists and the general public have updated their view of the Americas before European contact. The plains and the Eastern forests were not a wilderness, but a patchwork of gardens, they’ve found. The continents were not vast uninhabited expanses but a bustling network of towns and cities. Indigenous people, we’ve learned, altered the ecology of the Americas as surely as the European invaders did.

Now, an expansive new study, and bearing the names of more than 40 co-authors, suggests that the human fingerprint can even be seen across one of the most biodiverse yet unexplored regions in the world, the Amazon