bobaloo wrote:Folks have apparently recently figured out that the great eastern forest of North America was anything but, it was actually a well managed nut plantation developed over 1000's of years by the local residents. Hence the massive chestnut, hickory, oak forests of the eastern US.
Apparently the practice of letting pigs forage in the forest was very common in the colonial and frontier days. The pigs would find and eat the chestnuts, acorn, hickory nuts etc. I've heard that it significantly limited the reproduction of those trees and changed the makeup of the forests rather dramatically.
I think it's hard for even those of us that grew up in Eastern woodlands to really imagine what those forests would have been like. Almost all of the "forest" in the eastern US is scrubby stuff less than 100 years old. There are some very small patches of old growth, but not much.