Rethinking the jungle: the forgotten story of humanity and tropical forests

We all know the story about humanity turning its back on the jungle. While our distant ancestors originally evolved for a life of climbing and foraging in tropical forests, it proved a thankless world to master. Instead, the first step on our human journey is often seen as the moment when our ancient relatives quit the trials of the jungle in favour of a great open space: the African savannah. It was there that the bounty of abundant big game and the development of sophisticated stone tools created the conditions that ultimately allowed humanity to spread around the globe. As for the jungle, it can be easy to assume that most of us never looked back. Even the modern English word comes from the Hindi jangal, which originally meant a place away from human settlement. To this day, tropical forest is often thought of as a pristine environment, unsullied by human activity. But could it be that this seductive narrative of our success owing much to an early decision to shun a hostile and unrewarding environment is just a myth? In a new book, Patrick Roberts has taken a fresh look at humanity’s relationship with the jungle. The startling results lay bare a debt to tropical forests that stretches from long before our early human ancestors down to today.

The air that I breathe

‘I think that in archaeology there has long been this stereotype that jungles act as barriers,’ says Patrick. ‘Because of modern Western views about what cities and agriculture should look like, we can see tropical forests as inhospitable, when that is not necessarily the case. One example that stayed with me was when I was travelling up the Amazon with my student Victor Caetano Andrade. You step on to the boat, and first of all you’re amazed by the mass of water – it’s like being on the ocean, but you’re on a river – it’s really remarkable. Once you’re out of the cities, you can see the edges of the river and they’re flanked by green. So it really seems to fit with this idea of an untouched wilderness. But as we moved slowly upstream, I remember Victor saying, “Oh look, we’re coming up to a village now.” At first, it seemed to me that nothing had changed. But when I looked closer, I saw a concentration of plants like palm trees and Brazil nuts. It wasn’t open-field agriculture like we’re used to in the West, but those stands of trees in the Amazon are still a legacy of people manipulating the range of species present for millennia.’

‘Even when we reached the village, there was an open area to grow maize, but it was still mixed in with stands of palms. So the local population is growing food without clearing all of the trees away. What is also fascinating about these villages is that they are standing on soils – what we call Amazonian Dark Earths – that have been created through human presence, activity, and modification over thousands of years. Various studies have shown, too, that the dominant trees across the Amazon Basin are often those that have economic benefits for humans, suggesting that such societies have been influencing biodiversity over parts of the rainforest that seem superficially “natural”. One recent analysis shows that plants useful to humans have populations six times larger than others. So, while there might not be obvious cities or villages all across the landscape, the legacy of human activity is still there. Once we start seeing the jungle as an environment that can be used in a variety of different ways, rather than somewhere that prohibits forms of agriculture and settlement we are used to in the West, it becomes easier to understand how important tropical forests have been to human history.’