The members of the Nazca culture who painted the giant paintings on the plains, visible only from the air, became extinct because of a plant

The Nazca people cut down the hinbot bush that protected them from floods during El Niño periods, and planted corn in their place. Shouldn't that teach us a lesson today?

Nazca is a desert area in southwestern Peru named after a cultural population that left many interesting and mysterious archaeological findings, the most famous of which are the Nazca lines.

I read about the mysterious Nazca paintings in Peru as a child and since then I aspired to visit and see the lines, when I arrived it was an exciting and impressive experience but also "nauseating", since the paintings can only be seen from the air / in flight, so that all passengers can see the paintings from all sides the pilot maneuvers and turns the The plane makes sharp turns that make the passengers…. To vomit, at the end of the flight every passenger gets off with a full bag in his hand.

Despite the nausea, the feeling is uplifting because the lines/drawings that describe geometric shapes, animals, insects and birds are the work of an artist, the work of the Nazca people who lived in the area until (approximately) the fifth century. Paintings also have a place of honor in the controversial books of Erich von Daniken who tries to prove with their help that beings from outer space are the ones who taught the Nazca people to draw pictures that they cannot see.

Since the discovery of the paintings in the new era, barbed wire of assumptions has developed, who were the artists? How did they manage to draw shapes and figures that can only be recognized from the air? Why were the paintings drawn? Let's start from the end, like any riddle in archeology that has no clear answer, so here too. The archaeologists who examined the paintings claim that these are related to religious ceremonies. There was also someone who showed how the figures and lines can be drawn with great precision... without looking from the air, as for the identity of the painters, archaeological remains were discovered that teach about the existence of a cultural population that developed a means of livelihood / agriculture in the arid region.

Since most of the questions have been answered, one riddle remains - where did the Nazca people disappear, what caused their disappearance? At first it was claimed that the Spanish invaders were the ones who caused their disappearance, but the archaeological findings show that already about a thousand years before the arrival of the Spanish, most of the Nazca settlements disappeared. Another claim was that following the El Nino phenomenon (in the fifth century), there were devastating floods in the area, floods from which the Nazca people were unable to recover.

What caused it?

A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge (England) led by Dr. David Jones publishes its answer to the riddle in the Latin American Antiquity monthly. The researchers attribute the Nazca maidens... to the cutting down of the Hinbot groves!

The hinbot is a type of plant typical for arid areas, even if there are a number of species, (it appears as a shrub in our salt marshes). The leaves of the hinbot (the American species) are eaten by sheep as pasture, and traditional medicinal potions and alcoholic beverages can be made from its fruits and roots. The flowers provide nectar from which bees make excellent honey, the wood is used for roofing for construction and for burning as a material for carving, the seeds of the fruit are an additive to coffee, the resin is used as glue, a plant that enriches the soil with nutrients (nitrates), i.e. a substitute for fertilizers. Above all (for our purposes) Hinbot is a land installation in an area where heavy rain causes floods.

One of the species that grows as a tree is the pale ginseng, Prosopis pallida, its popular name is Mesquite or huarango and it grows in the deserts of South America.

(So ​​great is the importance of the hinbot that suitable species were imported to East Africa in order to enrich the variety of pastures, an import that paid off in its loss since the shepherds claim that the thorns of the hinbot are poisonous and harm the sheep and cattle that eat from it and its fruits)

According to the team of researchers: "The fate of the Nazca population was closely related to the Hinbot (pale) groves." Analysis of vegetation remains in the soil layers suggests a direct connection between the disappearance of the Nazca people and the depletion of the hinbot trees. According to the analysis, until the 3rd - 4th century there were groves (sparse) in the area where the dominant tree was the hinbot. The many positive properties of the hinbot and its enormous contribution to the environment - as mentioned above, played an important role in preserving the soil and the little moisture in the arid region.

The researchers claim that according to their findings "if the hinbot groves that grew around the Nazca settlements had not been cut down, the settlements would not have been affected by the floods". To reach their conclusion, the researchers dug to a depth of one and a half meters (calculating a layer thickness of 1 cm every hundred years). The percentages of plant remains were checked, at the depth of the excavation there were signs of a dominant presence of yinbut, as you get closer to the surface, the yinbut disappear and in their place appear cultivated plants that were used for agricultural crops, the researchers' conclusion is that: the Nasca people cut down the yinbut groves, the trees were used for construction, for burning and many other uses .

Corn fields were sown instead of the hinbut fields to meet the needs of the growing population, the cutting of the hinbut fields exposed the settlements and the fields to natural hazards, an exposure that caused the balance to tip toward the ecological threshold, a threshold beyond which there was nothing to protect the environment from El Niño floods. The hinbut groves protected the land from erosion even when there were strong floods due to El Nino, the hinbot groves created reservoirs (sponge) for the flood water, reservoirs that provided irrigation for many years, without the hinbot groves the floodwaters flowed and deepened the flow channels, the deepening that left the irrigation systems of Nasca people "high and dry",

Irrigation of corn crops in the lands of the arid region led to the salting of the soils, the salting that prevented the continuation of the crops. Indeed, in the upper layers of the soil there are signs of salinity plants, that is, by cutting the hinbot clays, the Nazca people removed the "flood stoppers", and caused the soils to become salty, and thus despite being experts in building facilities for transporting water, despite their multiple skills as farmers, artisans, engineers, etc. they brought The sons of Naska brought their own end.

The researchers conclude and claim that "the findings contradict the accepted approach according to which (until the Spanish conquest) the inhabitants of South America lived in harmony with their natural environment". The environmental balance was tilted, whether by distraction or on purpose, gradual environmental change accelerated the effect of climatic changes and resulted in a disaster, the disappearance of the Nazca population! And today in Brazil soy plantations are planted instead of rainforests.

And so the past also teaches us that the time has come that instead of controlling the environment for the sake of the human population, there will be control of the human population for the sake of the environment.

More on the subject on the science website
The fall of the Mayan culture - they brought it on themselves