Starting around 4,000 years ago, an elaborate fish-trapping system nourished expanding human populations in lowland Central America, a new study finds. The discovery of this massive construction project indicates that aquatic foods at least partly supported the rise of Maya civilization roughly a millennium later.
Zigzagging across wetlands in what’s now the nation of Belize, an ancient network of earthen channels funneled fish and other aquatic edibles into ponds that formed as flood waters receded in the spring and early summer, say archaeologist Eleanor Harrison-Buck of the University of New Hampshire in Durham and colleagues. Fish trapped in those ponds could have fed an average of around 15,000 people
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