Manoic and ancient diets
There's an article today on Reuter's newswire about a South American volcano eruption around 1,400 years ago. According to the article there's a well preserved field of cultivated manoic buried beneath the lava flows. The article says that this is the first evidence that the nutritious crop was cultivated by the Mayans. That's manoic, aka cassava, over there on the left. According to Wiki , Cubans use it for IBS . Maybe I should try it. This keys into two books I've read in the past year. In Omnivore's Dilemma , Michael Pollan spends a third of the book discussing and trying to duplicate the diet of ancient peoples and Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse , focuses on how agriculture impacts the success and failure of current and ancient civilizations. This discovery of the manoic field helps explain how the Mayan civilization prospered in an area that was often getting sub-par rainfall. "We have long wondered what else the prehistoric Mayan people were g...