Marketing experts behind one of Peru's major tourist attractions might be about to launch a new advertising campaign with the slogan 'Machu Picchu - It's Made of Poo!'Not really. Though they should.
The ancient Inca city wasn't strictly made of the brown stuff - I think the buildings are probably traditional stone and similar - but Alex Chepstow-Lusty of the Lima-based French Institute of Andean Studies has been studying the mud in Marcaccocha, a small lake in the Cuzco area, for some years now and his team have found a link between an increase in maize pollen and the presence of excrement-eating mites. Conclusion: farming leads to civilization and the people who became the Incas used llama dung as fertilizer.
The current indigenous peoples, the Quechua, still follow aspects of the Incan lifestyle, which includes using llama droppings for fertilizer and cooking fuel. So in a sense, they like to have their cack and eat off it, so to speak....
