Tropical Bounties The Emergence of Tropical Forest Agricultures

The transition from the Terminal Pleistocene to the Holocene (c. 12–8 ka) witnessed increasingly intensive human manipulation of plant and animal resources that resulted in genetic and phenotypic changes in various species as part of what has been termed the ‘origins of agriculture’. This process has been cited as one of the most significant ecological occurrences in human evolutionary history (Bocquet-Appel, 2011; Larson et al., 2014), representing a shift in human interactions with the natural world with global environmental ramifications (Fuller et al., 2011a; Boivin et al., 2016). Martin Jones (2007) has also discussed the cultural and social changes resulting from the new spatial and practical proximity of domesticated plants and animals that made them effectively ‘family’ or ‘kin’. The tropics have, for a long time, been left out of discussions of this process, with poor preservation conditions considered unlikely to produce incipient crop or animal domesticate remains and some even arguing that the wet and acidic soils of tropical forests were too poor to support agriculture (Meggers, 1971, 1977, 1987; Grollemund et al., 2015). Nevertheless, emerging datasets from Melanesia, North and Central America, South America, and Africa are demonstrating that cultivation and, to a lesser extent, herding practices also emerged indigenously in these regions and, in some cases, perhaps as early as the traditional focus point of the ‘Fertile Crescent’ in the Near East. Moreover, these examples are having significant impacts on the way we conceptualize the emergence of ‘agriculture’ and the adaptive and social changes required (Denham et al., 2004, 2009; Barton and Denham, 2011). Here, I explore the distinctive nature of early agricultures in tropical forest environments. I also evaluate their predecessors in the form of human management including forest burning to stimulate faunal and floral growth and diversity, the deliberate movement of faunal species into tropical forest environments, and the emergence of arboriculture cultivation. In doing so, I document how the species and strategies involved in these processes differ globally with varying tropical forest formations, ranging from a focus on long-term forest interaction, drainage system construction, and tree-cropping in Melanesia (Denham et al., 2003; Denham, 2011) to diverse hunting, fishing, and cultivation strategies in theAmazon (Roosevelt, 2000; Meggers and Miller, 2002).