Odd Lots · Friday, August 14, 2026
Remarkably, evidence suggests that Peruvian potato farmers were forecasting El Niño events as far back as 500 years ago. They utilized the visibility of the Pleiades star system, which is affected by cloud cover changes during El Niño, to adjust their planting dates and inform their agricultural practices.
“So the person who first modeled Alminho from a physics perfective Marcaine, It's amazing geophysicist at Lamondhorty Yors Observatory at Columbia University, and as colleagues John Cheng and other climate scientists there at the time, and then an anthropologist by the name of ben Orloff who's an anthropologist at Columbia, they wrote this incredible paper I believe in Nature back in the nineties or early aughts where they essentially showed that there was really good archaeological evidence that Peruvian potato farmers as long as five hundred years ago were forecasting El Nino, and they were doing it based on the visibility of the Pleatees, which is a star system you can see from the Andes, and essentially as El Nino occurs. What it's doing is it's reconfiguring the distribution of high versus low clouds in the eastern tropical Pacific. It's essentially taking convection that was happening near Australasia and moving it eastward, and in doing so, you're creating all these kind of high serious cloud shields over the Andes and that reduces the visibility of this star pattern. They were and they would alter their their their planting dates based on that.”
“So there it is just kind of this remarkable cultural knowledge of being able to grab onto something and be able to make a forecast and inform forecast.”