Thanks faldage for the etemology of jungle..
any kind of wild or uncultivated area--but local indigious people often exploted the rain forest, even if they didn't cultive them. (and Falible fiend, 'learning' local lore and land marks is just as much a skill as reading a map--and besides, a good percentage of the even literate populations don't understand how to read maps.)
Today, the entire crop of Brazil nuts are "uncultivated" --they are harveted from wild trees growing in the rain forest.
In reply to:
Brazil Nuts are second only to rubber as an export crop from Brazil. Virtually all commercial nuts are collected from trees that grow wild in the jungle. About 40,000 tons of nuts are collected every year, most exported to the industrial West. In the wild, a tree can produce about 300 pods, each with 10-25 nuts. See
http://www.szgdocent.org/ff/f-bnut.htm for more information.
The trees can not be planted in an orchard--they wouldn't grow.
Just because an area is uncultivated, does not mean it could or should be...
I still hold, that european explorers defined areas a jungles, because they wanted to be able to claim them...and it would have been harder for them to justify their land grabs if they called them forests.
