Category: Plants & People

Generations of archaeologists have studied plant domestication in the Middle East as well as in Asia and the Americas. “But Africa has very much lagged behind,” (Click on title for full story.)

Not only does the presence of numerous compounds suggest simultaneous use of drugs and earlier use of ayahuasca, in particular, but it also indicates intricate botanical knowledge by the owner of the pouch and an effort to acquire hallucinogenic plants, as the plants came from different regions of mostly tropical South America. (Click on title for full story.)

Here, we use tree-ring analyses to look at changes in growing conditions over the past 400 years in a Brazil nut tree population in Central Amazonia. We identify changes in tree recruitment and growth rates associated not only with regional climatic variability, but also major political and socio-economic activities recorded by historical documents in the vicinity of Manaus. (Click on title for full story.)

Unlike plastics, leaves are organic. They can be composed, banana leave add nutrients to the soil, and they act as a hearty compost for gardens. This makes them a perfect solution for our environment. Certainly, not all leaves are suitable for packaging but the size of banana leaves are wide, thick and flexible enough to allow them to be folded without breaking. (Click on title for full story.)

“It’s a shame because the grazing isn’t particularly good. The economic production from that land use is minuscule compared to what was produced by the Maya,” (Click on title for full story.)

Thousands of years ago, some of our ancestors left behind the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and started to settle down. They grew vegetables and grains for stews or porridge, kept cows for milk and turned it into cheese, and shaped clay into storage pots. Had they not done those things, would we speak the languages and make the sounds that we now hear today? (Click on title for full story.)

“The people are nice — except when they’re fighting about poppies.”(Click on title for full story.)

Previously, bundled and hafted, or handled, cactus spine tattoo tools from Arizona and New Mexico provided the best archaeological examples of early tattoo implements from the Southwest. The earliest of these have been dated to between AD 1100-1280. (Click on title for full story.)

We investigated the influence of roadside green infrastructure (GI) on concentrations of particulate matter ≤10 μm (PM10), ≤2.5 μm (PM2.5), ≤1 μm (PM1), black carbon (BC) and particle number concentrations (PNC) under three GI configurations – (i) hedges only, (ii) trees only, and (iii) a mix of trees and hedges/shrubs – separately in close (<1m) and away (>2m) road conditions. These configurations gave us a total of six different real-world scenarios for evaluation (Click on title for full story.)