World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492

This recently published book is reviewed in the Gavin Menzies newsletter and it is certainly welcome in putting scholarly flesh on the strengthening hypothesis of extensive and continuous contact between the old and new worlds.

I have strongly outlined the support for a global Bronze Age trading network that included all points accessible to the Atlantic and have also fingered the city of Altantis at Gibraltar by Seville as the natural entrepot for the exact same reasons Seville became the gateway to the Americas. Scholarly work has pinpointed the actual remains under deltaic mud.

I naturally assumed that plant transfer and the like would be extensive between around 6000 years ago to about 3000 years ago. It is reported here that hookworms travelled from SE Asia and Brazil 7000 years ago. I suspect that was an unlikely but possible accidental voyage, but any further such evidence could change that.

Importantly we have a huge influx of borrowed plants from the tropics of the Americas to similar environs in the old world. A few went the other direction, but the majority went East.

That strongly implies that this is an artifact of Bronze Age seamen originating from the old world and been continuously engaged for centuries as we have projected in previous postings.

We can go a lot further with this new data. We can assert that such efforts were much stronger than anything we have imagined and certainly discovered so far. Just as only a fraction of Bronze Age canters have been discovered in the Middle East, the same is true for the Atlantic seaboard of the Americas. Few built in stone unless it was handy to do so and any scrap bronze was never thrown out.

Our only way to confirm a site is to find the metal forge with signs of a large settlement. With native populations in their million and the settlements of traders and their retainers likely a thousand at most, it is looking for a needle in a haystack.

World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new book by Emeritus Professor John L. Sorenson and Emeritus Professor Carl L. Johannessen which seems to provide a series of smoking guns in relation to the subject of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic trade. In World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492 they postulate that "...124 tropical plants and animals were transported across oceans to and from tropical continents by early tropical mariners. This encyclopaedic volume summarizes the research of Professors Sorenson and Johannessen, opening up new avenues of research and challenging the current ideas of how species were dispersed across the world oceans.

A plant, especially a domesticated one, cannot evolve twice on two opposite continents; they require a DNA source. It takes finite time for it to spread. Eighty-four tropical plants were transported from America to the tropical Old World used now by us. The early mariners selected crops from highlands and shorelines, wet and dry climates, took them to the Old World, and planted them in the appropriate ecological locations. Only 13 plants came to America from Old World locations.

The sailing that maintained medicinal plants in Egypt and Peru during two separate 1, 400 year periods implies continual maritime trade. The most ancient exchanges by mariners were two species of hookworms originating from Southeast Asia. They were found in mummies in Brazil but not in North America. This indicates that diffusion of various types occurred in order to bring these parasites to Brazil over 7,000 years ago.

This research will allow scientists and teachers to openly reassess their current notions of the history of civilization and the interaction between peoples in ancient times..."

To purchase this book please visit the following link:

http://www.amazon.com/World-Trade-Biological-Exchanges-Before/dp/0595524419

National Geographic Airs Documentary on Biochar

This has aired and is worth seeing when you get the chance. Biochar is entering the mainstream and people are now aware everywhere of the potential. Ample experimentation is underway. There is still a lot to be done, but acceptance is now no longer a problem.

As I commented in the very beginning of this emergent story, no one will be able to get past or challenge the thousand year field test in the Amazon. Without that lifetimes would have been wasted. Now everyone knows it works and a decent understanding of why is speeding fresh research.

Of course all the newcomers will have to climb the learning curve, but there is enough data out there, including that on this blog to speed the process. We have already come a long way in eighteen months.

ON TV Lost Cities of the Amazon airs Thursday, November 20, at 9 p.m. ET on the National Geographic Channel.

Centuries-old European explorers' tales of lost cities in the Amazon have long been dismissed by scholars, in part because the region is too infertile to feed a sprawling civilization.

But new discoveries support the idea of an ancient Amazonian urban network—and ingeniously engineered soil may have made it all possible.

(See Ancient Amazon Cities Found; Were Vast Urban Network [August 28, 2008].)

Now scientists are trying to recreate the recipe for the apparently human-made supersoil, which still covers up to 10 percent of the Amazon Basin. Key ingredients included of dirt, charcoal, pottery, human excrement and other waste.

If recreated, the engineered soil could feed the hungry and may even help fight global warming, experts suggest.

Before 1492

Scientists have long thought the river basin's tropical soils were too acidic to grow anything but the hardiest varieties of manioc, a potatolike staple.

But over the past several decades, researchers have discovered tracts of productive terra preta—"dark earth." The human-made soil's chocolaty color contrasts sharply with the region's natural yellowish soils.

Research in the late 1980s was the first to show that charcoal made from slow burns of trees and woody waste is the key ingredient of terra preta.

With the increased level of agriculture made possible by terra preta, ancient Amazonians would have been able to live in one place for long periods of time, said geographer and anthropologist William Woods of the University of Kansas.

"As a result you get social stratification, hierarchy, intertwined settlement systems, very large scale," added Woods, who studies ancient Amazonian settlements.

"And then," he said, "1492 happens." The arrival of Europeans brought disease and warfare that obliterated the ancient Amazonian civilizations and sent the few survivors deep into the rain forest to live as hunter-gatherers.

"It completely changed their way of living," Woods said.

Magic Soil?

Today scientists are racing to tease apart the terra-preta recipe. The special soil has been touted as a way to restore more sustainable farming to the Amazon, feed the world's hungry, and combat global warming.
The terra-preta charcoal, called biochar, attracts certain fungi and microorganisms.

Those tiny life-forms allow the charcoal to absorb and retain nutrients that keep the soil fertile for hundreds of years, said Woods, whose team is among a few trying to identify the crucial microorganisms.

"The materials that go into the terra preta are just part of the story. The living member of it is much more," he said.

For one thing, the microorganisms break up the charcoal into smaller pieces, creating more surface area for nutrients to cling to, Woods said.

Anti-Global-Warming Weapon?

Soil scientist Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University is also racing to recreate terra preta.

The Amazonian dark soils, he said, are hundreds to thousands of years old, yet to this day they retain their nutrients and carbons, which are held mainly by the charcoal.

This suggests that adding biochar could help other regions of the world with acidic soils to increase agricultural yields.

Plus, Lehmann said, biochar could help reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere from the burning of wild lands to create new farm fields.

For example, specialized power plants could char agricultural wastes to generate electricity.

The process would "lock" much carbon that would have otherwise escaped into the atmosphere in the biochar. The biochar could then be put underground, in a new form of terra preta, thereby sequestering the carbon for centuries, Lehmann suggests.

Current Amazonian farming relies heavily on slash-and-burn agriculture—razing forests, then burning all of what's left.

By reverting to the ancient slash-and-char method—burning slowly and then mixing the charcoal into the soil—Amazonian carbon dioxide emissions could be cut nearly in half, according to Woods, of the University of Kansas.

With slash-and-burn, he noted, 95 percent of the carbon stored in a tree is emitted to the atmosphere. Slash-and-char emits about 50 percent, he said.

"The rest is put into different forms of black carbon, most of which are chemically inert for long periods of time—thousands of years."

In addition, the technique would allow many farmers to stay sedentary, Woods said.

Because the soil would apparently remain fertile for centuries, "they don't have to cut down the forest constantly and send it up into the atmosphere," he said.