Civilization collapsed after cutting key trees

When the Nazca cleared forests to grow crops, fields washed away leaving desert.

The ancient Nazca people, who once flourished in the valleys of south coastal Peru, literally fell with the trees they chopped down, new research has concluded.

The Nazca caused their own collapse when they cleared their forests in order to make way for agriculture, thus exposing the landscape to wind and flood erosion, according to a study published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

Best known for carving hundreds of geometric lines and images of animals and birds in the Peruvian desert that are fully visible from the air, the Nazca flourished between the first century B.C. and the fifth century A.D.

During these centuries they made sophisticated ceramics and textiles and amassed one of South America's largest collection of human trophy heads. Then, between 500 and 600 A.D., this enigmatic civilization slid into oblivion.

"It was not just that they were hit by a huge mega El Nino in about 500 A.D., but that they had already cleared their forests of huarango, a tree that lives in highly arid zones and stabilizes the soil with some of the deepest roots of any tree known-and can live up to 1000 years," Alex J. Chepstow-Lusty a palaeoecologist from the French Institute for Andean Studies in Lima, Peru, told Discovery News. More

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Why Are Our Bees Vanishing? (video)

(VanishingBees.com) Imagine half a million adults skipping town and leaving their children behind. Picture an opened suitcase filled with bundles of cash at a bus stop yet no robber wants to snatch it. The apiary science mystery known as "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD) displays these very symptoms. Not only do our critical crop pollinating honey bees abandon their hives, which they cannot live away from for more than 24 hours, but the queen and the brood as well. Unnatural. Unheard of. Even the predators that usually raid the hive for honey stay away when nothing is protecting it. At first it sounds like an urban legend or an exaggerated tale. Except it's not. The situation is both real and dire. Bees are disappearing all over the planet, and no one knew why. But now the answers are becoming apparent:

• systemic pesticides (not toxins sprayed on to dissipate but taken up into every part of the plant where they weaken bees' immune systems)
• mites and fungal blight brought on by weakened immunity, which would normally be segregated with wax in the sterile environment of the hive but is not because of the incapacitated bees
• cell phone tower radiation, which is disruptive to compromised bees
• mono-cropping (growing a single crop in need of pollination but no other plants on which the bees could survive between harvests)
• stresses in the environment (depleted soil, contaminated fields, genetically manipulated plants by companies like Monsanto)
• like AIDS and mystery flu syndromes and E. coli outbreaks, once the organism is compromised in terms of nutrients and immunity, it is open to opportunistic infections and influences

Vanishing of the Bees - Trailer from Bee The Change on Vimeo.