ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 17 January 2018 doi: 10.3389/fevo.2017.00171 Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution | www.frontiersin.org 1 January 2018 | Volume 5 | Article 171 Edited by: B. Mohan Kumar, Nalanda University, India Reviewed by: Bharath Sundaram, Nalanda University, India Jean Kennedy, Australian National University, Australia Louis S. Santiago, University of California, Riverside, United States *Correspondence: Carolina Levis carollevis@gmail.com Specialty section: This article was submitted to Agroecology and Land Use Systems, a section of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution Received: 31 July 2017 Accepted: 13 December 2017 Published: 17 January 2018 Citation: Levis C, Flores BM, Moreira PA, Luize BG, Alves RP, Franco-Moraes J, Lins J, Konings E, Peña-Claros M, Bongers F, Costa FRC and Clement CR (2018) How People Domesticated Amazonian Forests. Front. Ecol. Evol. 5:171. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2017.00171 How People Domesticated Amazonian Forests Carolina Levis 1, 2 *, Bernardo M. Flores 3 , Priscila A. Moreira 4 , Bruno G. Luize 5 , Rubana P. Alves 1 , Juliano Franco-Moraes 6 , Juliana Lins 7 , Evelien Konings 2 , Marielos Peña-Claros 2 , Frans Bongers 2 , Flavia R. C. Costa 8 and Charles R. Clement 9 1 Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Manaus, Brazil, 2 Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, Netherlands, 3 Departamento de Biologia Vegetal, Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil, 4 Programa de Pós-graduação em Botânica, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Manaus, Brazil, 5 Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia e Biodiversidade, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), Rio Claro, Brazil, 6 Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, 7 Instituto Socioambiental, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, Brazil, 8 Coordenação de Pesquisas em Biodiversidade, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Manaus, Brazil, 9 Coordenação de Tecnologia e Inovação, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Manaus, Brazil For millennia, Amazonian peoples have managed forest resources, modifying the natural environment in subtle and persistent ways. Legacies of past human occupation are striking near archaeological sites, yet we still lack a clear picture of how human management practices resulted in the domestication of Amazonian forests. The general view is that domesticated forests are recognizable by the presence of forest patches dominated by one or a few useful species favored by long-term human activities. Here, we used three complementary approaches to understand the long-term domestication of Amazonian forests. First, we compiled information from the literature about how indigenous and traditional Amazonian peoples manage forest resources to promote useful plant species that are mainly used as food resources. Then, we developed an interdisciplinary conceptual model of how interactions between these management practices across space and time may form domesticated forests. Finally, we collected field data from 30 contemporary villages located on and near archaeological sites, along four major Amazonian rivers, to compare with the management practices synthesized in our conceptual model. We identified eight distinct categories of management practices that contribute to form forest patches of useful plants: (1) removal of non-useful plants, (2) protection of useful plants, (3) attraction of non-human animal dispersers, (4) transportation of useful plants, (5) selection of phenotypes, (6) fire management, (7) planting of useful plants, and (8) soil improvement. Our conceptual model, when ethnographically projected into the past, reveals how the interaction of these multiple management practices interferes with natural ecological processes, resulting in the domestication of Amazonian forest patches dominated by useful species. Our model suggests that management practices became more frequent as human population increased during the Holocene. In the field, we found that useful perennial plants occur in multi-species patches around archaeological sites, and that the dominant species are still