MSNBC, Postmedia et al. - We're talkin' prehistoric trash

Trash heaped into mounds by early settlers of the Everglades about 5,000 years ago helped give rise to "tree islands" that today are a refuge for alligators, birds, panthers and other wildlife, according to new research.

"We tend to assume humans have an adverse relationship with the environment when often some of the very landscape features we value are created by disturbance of humans," according to Gail Chmura, a paleoecologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada…

The finding suggests the tree islands actually started out as piles of trash discarded from early settlers of the Everglades about 5,000 years ago. Who these settlers were is unknown, though they predated the Seminoles, Chmura noted, and were wiped out by disease with the arrival of Europeans to the New World…

Chmura will present her research Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union's Chapman Conference on Climates, Past Landscapes, and Civilizations in Santa Fe, NM.