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Nasca civilisation contributed to their own downfall by clearing the huarango tree

An ancient civilisation which caused its own demise through forest clearance offers "important lessons for our management of fragile, arid areas", a report has claimed.

The study, published in the journal Latin American Antiquity, says the Nasca society, which flourished in the valleys of south coastal Peru, destroyed the huarango tree to make way for cotton and maize plantations - a move that eventually created the desert now found in that part of the country.

But the tree was crucial to the desert's fragile ecosystem as it enhanced soil fertility and moisture and helped to hold the Nasca's narrow, vulnerable irrigation channels in place, the researchers said.

The Nasca eventually cut down so many trees that they reached a tipping point at which the arid ecosystem was irreversibly damaged.

The society was finally wiped out around 500AD after an El Nino-style flood covered the areas - the effects of which would have been far less devastating had the forests which protected the delicate desert ecology still been there.

Report author Oliver Whaley, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, said: "The mistakes of prehistory offer us important lessons for our management of fragile, arid areas in the present.

"In time, gradual woodland clearance crossed an ecological threshold - sharply defined in such desert environments - exposing the landscape to the region's extraordinary desert winds and the effects of El Nino floods."

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