Response to comment by McMichael, Piperno and Bush.

Comment on "Persistent effects of pre-Columbian plant domestication on Amazonian forest composition".

Levis et al (Research Articles, 3 March 2017, p. 925) concluded that pre-Columbian tree domestication has shaped present-day Amazonian forest composition. The study, however, downplays five centuries of human influence following European arrival to the Americas. We show that the effects of post-Columbian activities in Amazonia are likely to have played a larger role than pre-Columbian ones in s...

‘The domestication of Amazonia before European conquest’

Phytolith Assemblages Along a Gradient of Ancient Human Disturbance in Western Amazonia

1 Palaeoecology and Landscape Ecology, Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2 Department of Biological Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL, USA, 3 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama, Panama, 4 Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, US...

Reply to Piperno et al.: It is too soon to argue for localized, short-term human impacts in interfluvial Amazonia.

We welcome the debate opened by Piperno et al. (1) in response to our recent article (2), and thank the editors of PNAS for the opportunity to reply. Although acknowledging that we detected localized human impacts in our study area, Piperno et al. (1) downplay the increases in palms observed at the geoglyph sites, stating it’s “unclear” whether humans actively managed the forest in these locati...

Author Response to Comment on "Aluminum Phosphide Poisoning: A Case Series in North Iran"

Dear Editor; I wish to thank the authors for their careful comment (1), on our short report entitled “Aluminum Phosphide Poisoning: A Case Series in North Iran” (2). Unfortunately, as we were excited to display the findings of our series, some facts were missed from the methods of the article. The results presented in our series was collected from eight patients with definitive aluminum phosp...