Canada

Her research reveals that the region’s early inhabitants moved hazelnuts long distances and managed the shrubby plants, creating and maintaining “large-scale ecosystems and sometimes entire watersheds through prescribed burning and forest clearing, transplanting [and] rock wall constructions” to foster perennial plant species.

“To have this hazelnut study come out and learn that it’s around 7,000 years that the First Nations brought hazelnuts and planted them here was insane,” he said, noting that it meant First Nations were growing food “before ancient Egyptians were planting their wheat fields.”

The research could have big implications for Indigenous land claims, Armstrong added, by challenging existing narratives that First Nations lived passively on the landscape rather than actively tending it.