Jungle Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Patrick Roberts

  Cover design by Chin-Yee Lai

  Cover image © Tomas Sanchez: “Meditación en la Selva Ideal,” 1987, acrylic on linen, 31½ x 39½ in; private collection photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images

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  First US Edition: September 2021

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Roberts, Patrick, 1991– author.

  Title: Jungle : how tropical forests shaped the world-and us / Patrick Roberts.

  Description: First US edition. | New York, NY : Basic Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021000308 | ISBN 9781541600096 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541600102 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Rain forests—History.

  Classification: LCC QH86 .R63 2021 | DDC 578.734—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000308

  ISBNs: 978-1-5416-0009-6 (hardcover), 978-1-5-416-0010-2 (ebook)

  E3-20210817-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  1 Into the Light—the Beginning of the World as We Know It

  2 A Tropical World

  3 “Gondwanan” Forests and the Dinosaurs

  4 “Tree Houses” for the First Mammals

  5 The Leafy Cradles of Our Ancestors

  6 On the Tropical Origins of Our Species

  7 Farmed Forests

  8 Island Paradises Lost?

  9 Cities in the “Jungle”

  10 Europe and the Tropics in the “Age of Exploration”

  11 Globalization of the Tropics

  12 A Tropical “Anthropocene”?

  13 Houses on Fire

  14 A Global Responsibility

  Appendix: Tropical Forests in Geological Time

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Sources and Notes

  For Rhys, Ida, and Livia—that they may yet walk through their own “Jungles”

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  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Figure 1.1. An image of the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha (Silvia Pressel)

  Figure 1.2. Artistic reconstruction of Sphenacodon (wikimediacommons.org)

  Figure 2.1. Image of an angiosperm leaf recovered from the Cerrejón Formation in northern Colombia (Carlos Jaramillo)

  Figure 3.1. Comparison of the body size of selected giant sauropods (adapted from Wikipedia / KoprX)

  Figure 3.2. Artistic reconstruction of a hadrosaurid (De Agostini via Getty Images)

  Figure 4.1. Artistic reconstruction of Juramaia sinensis (Carnegie Museum of Natural History / M. A. Klinger)

  Figure 4.2. A reconstruction of Repenomamus snacking on a Psittacosaurus (Wikipedia / Nobu Tamura)

  Figure 5.1. Map of fossil hominins in Africa plotted against tropical forest distributions (Private collection)

  Figure 5.2. Artistic reconstruction of “Ardi” Ardipithecus ramidus (Jay Matternes / Smithsonian)

  Figure 5.3. Map of known Gigantopithecus fossils dated to between approximately two million and three hundred thousand years ago in southern China alongside the reconstructed extent of tropical forest (Kira Westaway)

  Figure 5.4. Map of major Pleistocene hominin sites in Island Southeast Asia (Private collection)

  Figure 6.1. Pleistocene fishhook made from marine shell (Sue O’Connor)

  Figure 6.2. Map showing the earliest known dates of Homo sapiens’ tropical forest occupation (adapted from Roberts and Stewart, 2018)

  Figure 7.1. Present-day mound gardening of sweet potato in New Guinea (Robin Hide, Tim Denham)

  Figure 7.2. Forest islands at Llanos de Moxos, Bolivia (Umberto Lombardo)

  Figure 7.3. The UNESCO-protected Banaue rice terraces in Ifugao on the island of Luzon in the Philippines (Getty Images)

  Figure 8.1. Map of the Caribbean showing the main waves of human colonization of different islands (adapted from Scott Fitzpatrick)

  Figure 8.2. Artistic reconstruction of the now-extinct elephant birds of Madagascar (Velizar Simeonovski)

  Figure 9.1. The ancient Classic Maya ceremonial center of Tikal, Guatemala (Michael Godek / Getty Images)

  Figure 9.2. The central temples of the pre-Angkorian urban complex of Sambor Prei Kuk, Cambodia (visualization by Damian Evans from Lidar elevation data acquired by the Cambodian Archaeological Lidar Initiative in 2015)

  Figure 9.3. Aerial overview of the Angkor Wat temple complex (Damian Evans)

  Figure 10.1. Map of Spanish and Portuguese Empires and regions mentioned in Chapter 10 (Private collection)

  Figure 10.2. Timeline of Europe and the tropics in the “age of exploration” (Private collection)

  Figure 10.3. The streets and buildings of Vigan City in the Philippines (Jason Langley / Alamy)

  Figure 11.1. Map of the transatlantic slave trade (adapted from Pearson / Desai / Science / Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database / Emory Center for Digital Scholarship)

  Figure 11.2. Hand ginning of cotton in India by a Ponduru woman (Meena Menon)

  Figure 13.1. Photograph of Queensland’s rainforest on fire in 2019 (Renier van Raders)

  Figure 13.2. The scene left behind following a fire in a tropical forest in Queensland, Australia (Renier van Raders)

  Figure 13.3. Monoculture oil palm plantation in Borneo, Indonesia (Douglas Sheil)

  PREFACE

  Battling through the heart of the Brazilian Neotropics in July 2019, my student Victor Caetano Andrade and I fended off poisonous snakes, gigantic mosquitoes that can bite through the tough skin of crocodiles, and heat that made sweat cascade like waterfalls into our eyes. Over the previous ten years, my fieldwork in the world’s tropical forests had taken me from the leech-filled rainforests of Sri Lanka to the flammable dry forests of Australia and the volcano-skirted misty cloud forests of Mexico. But nothing had prepared me for the teeming life, stifling climate, and vast array of green that flanks the Amazon, the largest river in the world by volume. Just to reach our field site and host village required a 523-kilometer “slow ferry” (recreio) journey that took a staggering thirty-six hours, followed by another two-hour ride in a small, open boat, which we undertook while loaded down by several awkward boxes of scientific equipment, a rudimentary toolkit for on-site maintenance, and whatever clothes the remaining space and willpower would allow us to carry. Over the course of his summer research, Victor wo
uld suffer a bout of dengue fever, a pus-producing infected boil the size of a small plum on his hand, and the failure of an airplane engine during landing in a local city. This all likely sounds fairly familiar to those of you, particularly in Europe and North America, who have experienced “jungles” only in terms of the films and novels that are set there. From the trials of Apocalypto to Mowgli running with animals, most of us see tropical forests as a kind of terra incognita. They provide artistic metaphors and natural resources, but they are fundamentally different from our own ideas of “home.” In fact, the overwhelming implication of most Euro-American books, series, and blockbusters set in the “jungle” is that tropical forests are fundamentally incapable of sustainably and safely supporting large human societies.

  This notion informs not just popular but also academic thought. Tropical forests are often ignored in discussions of our human story and the history of life on Earth. The dominant narrative of human evolution, for example, is that our hominin ancestors left behind the perils and slim pickings of the forest as soon as they were able, striding out onto open savannahs with novel tools ready to exploit the rich game opportunities that these environments provided. The search for the origins of our own species, Homo sapiens, and its rapid “routes” of dispersal around the globe has similarly focused on open grasslands or, alternatively, coastal settings. Likewise, discussions of the origins of “agriculture” or cities almost never involve tropical forests. We have deemed them “unproductive” and assume that they have uniformly poor soils, deadly natural hazards, elusive animals, and extreme climates that would make it impossible to maintain the types of agriculture and cities we associate with our own, purportedly “complex” human societies. Given the seemingly inevitable devastation inflicted by industrial farming and urban populations on these environments today, we wonder how these habitats could ever have supported sweeping monoculture croplands, vast pastures, and bustling metropoles. Instead, accounts of communities living in tropical forests tend to describe small, often supposedly “isolated” groups that rely on hunting and gathering to survive. These assumptions shape not only how we understand the history of tropical forests but also how we go about trying to protect them. Traditional conservation approaches to tropical forests assume that humans are simply incapable of living in them sustainably and that the best way of protecting them is to treat them as intact ecological “wildernesses,” with minimal human disturbance and presence. Even the word commonly used in English to refer to tropical forests—“jungle,” from the Hindi word jangal—was originally meant to classify something outside the realm of human settlement and home comforts.1

  Yet we should be skeptical of the stories we have so often been told about tropical forests. During my life-changing expedition to the Amazon Basin, two specific moments—far less expected, but far more intense, than any of the struggles Victor and I had under the canopy—stayed with me. These encounters highlight not only the longevity and intimacy of human interactions with these majestic environments but also their ongoing significance to all of us—whether we live in the tropics or not. First: One morning, as we awoke to the gentle shaking of the aging recreio and the sounds of parakeets, Victor, a seasoned traveler in the Amazon and a Brazilian national, pointed at the treetops and said, “We will see a village soon.” I tried to follow his finger but could see no sign of people, houses, or even a clearing that might imply some kind of human presence; everything simply appeared wild and green. Then Victor pointed toward the types of vegetation that had suddenly begun to dominate the riverbanks. On closer inspection, in contrast to the previous mass of forest, a dense concentration of two particular types of plants became clear: açai berry–bearing palms and Brazil nut (or, more correctly, Amazon nut) trees. Long-term work as an ecologist and frequent visitor to settlements up and down the banks of the Amazon Basin meant that Victor knew these plants acted as a living signpost for human populations. Sure enough, a village—fittingly named Ponta da Castanha (or point of Amazon nut trees)—slowly emerged from the tangle of dense vegetation on the riverbank. As Victor and the local people, including our generous host Jucelino, well knew, today’s river-shore settlements are almost always located on top of prehistoric occupation sites. Here, past human societies modified the fertility of the earth and the composition of vegetation over millennia—so much so that these spots still attract local Amazonian food producers today. If Amazonian tropical forests were indeed “untouched” and largely free of human history, how could I be standing in a location that had repeatedly seen settlement for thousands of years?

  Second: At the end of our visit, we pushed off from the shore in a small motorboat. Riding just above the waterline and gripping our belongings and equipment in our laps for dear life, I looked up into the sky. I saw a fast-moving blanket of clouds, sailing above the Amazon rainforest and its human settlements, so close you could nearly touch it. In this moment, perhaps for the first time, I truly appreciated the regional, continental, and global significance of tropical forests. If these forests disappeared, the loss of water evaporating from billions upon billions of leaves would turn this blanket of cloud into a threadbare rag. Few of us realize that tropical forests are globally responsible for a significant portion of the planet’s terrestrial rainfall. In the case of the Amazon Basin, if its tropical forests disappeared, rain would decrease not just locally but also across vast swathes of the South American continent. Thanks to the network of ocean and atmosphere circulation systems that cross the globe, climates as far away as Europe could be impacted. These same forests are also often major carbon sinks, performing over one-third of the planet’s photosynthesis and trapping and storing around a quarter of the world’s land-based carbon. If they disappeared, this carbon would be released into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, less atmospheric CO2 would be recaptured into the biosphere in their absence. In the context of a growing urgency to address the role of emissions in human-induced climate change, I am sure you can imagine what that would mean for temperatures all around our planet.2

  These two experiences provide an entry point into the vital but often remarkably neglected place of tropical forests in human history and the functioning of the Earth that I hope to reveal to you in this book. Tropical forests are not “green hells,” hostile to human habitation and only useful for distant, relentless extraction and clearance. They can be productively lived with and lived in (a fact that I believe casts strong doubts on the assumptions we often make about how human societies, economies, and settlements should inevitably be organized). Indeed, given their importance to the entire planet, we are all going to have to find ways to do this sooner rather than later. As a multidisciplinary archeologist working in the tropics, I have seen how the discoveries of my predecessors and colleagues have increasingly highlighted the adaptive flexibility of human societies living in these environments on a global scale, from our earliest ancestors to the inhabitants of some of the largest urban areas ever to have existed prior to industrialization. I have seen how biologists and ecologists have long emphasized the importance of these, the oldest land-based ecosystems on the planet, to the evolution and sustenance of the world’s greatest concentration of plant and animal diversity. And I have seen how Indigenous populations have long advocated for the critical role of tropical forests in their economic and cultural survival, as well as the importance of their active stewardship to the well-being of these ecosystems. In light of all this, it is remarkable that many of us still think of tropical forests as so inherently separate from human existence. We are happy to hear about Tarzan living among wild animals, to watch searches for “lost” cities by directionally challenged explorers, and to let the dulcet tones of David Attenborough wash over us as he describes a fabulous exotic bird attempting to dazzle an unimpressed mate. Yet the remoteness, biodiversity, and increasingly dramatic disappearance of tropical forests, while fascinating and shocking, also feel disconnected from many of our day-to-day lives. Even when we call for their protection, we tend t
o call for humans to be moved out of them rather than searching for ways in which humans might live alongside them. The plights facing these environments today are undoubtedly poignant, but their apparent distance, isolation, and exoticism all too often allow us to ultimately ignore them.3

  This book is a history of the world according to the tropics and their “jungles.” It begins with a journey through the colorful cast of tropical forests that have inhabited our planet for nearly 400 million years (Chapters 1 and 2), from the first treelike organisms emerging into a warm, wet world to forests that would be recognizable to those inhabiting (or visiting) the tropical portions of our planet today. We will see how, from their arrival on the Earth’s surface, tropical forests have shaped—and been shaped by—barrages of climate change from above and crunching forces of tectonic plates from below. Tropical forests sculpt our planet’s atmosphere, water cycle, and soils and have played a major role in the evolution of life on Earth. We will explore the role of these remarkable environments in hosting the first flowering plants and the earliest four-legged land-based creatures on Earth (Chapter 2), in impacting the evolution of the dinosaurs (Chapter 3), and in shaping the survival and evolution of many of the main ancestral lines of mammals that we flock to zoos to see today (Chapter 4). Tropical forests also played an essential role in human evolution. They were the leafy “cradles” where the first hominins appeared in Africa, splitting off from the last common ancestor between other great apes and ourselves (Chapter 5). They were also one of the diverse environments in which our own species, Homo sapiens, emerged in Africa, before we went on to occupy nearly all of the planet’s continents between 300,000 and 12,000 years ago (Chapter 6).

  Despite the remarkable position of tropical forests in these major evolutionary processes, many of us tend to see them as somewhat detached from our story: as impossible to farm in the absence of deforestation, as deserted, isolated islands, or as unattractive and fragile in the face of urban developments. I want to show you that these preconceptions are often the product of Euro-American ideas of what “agriculture” or “cities” should be. Many of the crops and animals we rely on today were, in fact, first managed and domesticated in the tropics (Chapter 7). Many different human societies grappled with sustainable living on tropical islands, managing local resources alongside new crops and animals brought from elsewhere (Chapter 8). And tropical forests were also home to some of the largest, and also comparatively most successful, preindustrial urban populations ever to have existed (Chapter 9). This, in turn, forces us to ask the question: given all of this evidence of previous innovative human habitation and management of tropical forest environments around the world, why do we commonly think of them as “empty” and “vulnerable” to human presence today? The answer is to be found in the historical processes of the last five hundred years, where Europe and the tropical world collided. Disease, warfare, and murder ravaged the cities and villages of Indigenous populations (Chapter 10). New profit-driven approaches to tropical landscapes saw mining and monoculture plantations strip away forests, erode soils, and act as the sites of forcibly abducted and transported labor as part of the transatlantic slave trade (Chapter 11). The spread of imperial and capitalist forces around the tropics resulted in degraded landscapes, in wealth imbalances between the western half of Europe and northern North America and the tropical world, in racial discrimination and violence, in a marginalization of Indigenous knowledge, and in the onset of significant human-induced climate change, all of which continue to represent perhaps the most major ecological, social, political, and economic challenges facing our societies in the twenty-first century (Chapters 11 and 12). They also led many of us to falsely conclude that these habitats cannot, and do not, support large numbers of people.