Yeah, they're just assuming that if you wanted to store something you'd store it at the bottom of the hill.

While I'm no archeologist/anthropologist, I have seen an ancient grainery near the green river in Utah. It was about an hour long very steep half hike half rock scramble to get up to the ledge where it was at.

So maybe ancient people had reasons to put storage sites in more difficult to access locations.

> Especially since the article gives evidence that things were stored in the holes

They explain it as these holes are at the top of the mountain. Why climb the large mountain to store your grain there just to have haul it back down later? My own guess answers: safer from animals, precipitation, safe from enemies.

Storing in general could mean different things: putting baskets with grain and produce there for a minute and them someone else immediately pick it up in some bartering exchange, it's not really storing then, I guess? Or, even religious offerings can also be explained as "storing" -- they are stored in there until the "gods" (i.e. elements) destroy them (i.e. consume them) and the gods are appeased, that way ensuring good harvests and other benefits.

My first explanation would be offerings. The rarity of those crops in the area would mean they were more valuable and therefor likely to be used as offerings.

edit: Or heck, maybe they wanted to keep it away from wildlife or invaders.

Why wouldn't you spread out, though, instead of working in basically a line? (At least, as much as topography reasonably allows.) That way, your travel distance to any particular item increases at like sqrt(stuff), instead of just linearly.

We always want to pretend that we're better and more evolved than those knuckle draggers of ages past -- simply because someone else made a computer for us to use.

> Religion always seems like the default explanation for anything without an obvious use and it seems lazy.

This is one of the bits I remember from reading A Canticle for Leibowitz as a kid. It's about monks in a post nuclear armageddon world. At one point they find an ancient fallout shelter with a bathroom, and they interpret it as a spiritual space where a priest would sit on the "throne" and read "holy scrolls" held by the metal bar next to the throne...

I think we make that kind of mistake when doing armchair archeology or anthropology a lot.

We can only speculate on evidence we have. The prehistoric chubby dolls (Venus figurines) from archaeological digs that many hypothesized to be fertility totems can be hypothesized to be just idealized symbols of female form as the shape changed depending upon the average temperature - ice age meant fatter dolls, temperate times meant thinner dolls. https://www.sciencealert.com/the-mystery-of-the-enigmatic-ve...

Your hypothesis is probably correct. The Incas were experts at using their mountainous topography to freeze dry things. In fact the word 'jerky' comes from Quechua.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/jerky

Greentext name, bold unfounded claims, 'scientists' in smug quotes. Troll, arrow down and move on.

> It's safe to say, since it's been proven these holes exist all over the Amazon, that they were created to catch or divert animals, to keep them from reaching their village

Are you serious? There's an absolutely massive logical leap from [these holes exist all over the Amazon] -> [they were created to catch or divert animals]. Do you have some other evidence to argue in favor of this?