The lost cities of Amazon

Amazon, the biggest and the most dense rainforest in the world. The rainforest holds a vast array of trees and river paths passing through it. The first is also home to wild animals and its biodiversity is a contributor for decreasing Carbon diOxide levels of planet earth. This 2 million square mile dense forest was thought to have been inhabitable for centuries but recent discoveries have shown evidence that civilizations were present in the dense forest for thousands of years.

The legends of El Dorado or the lost golden city made many Spanish explorers take risks in navigating through the jungle and most of those explorers were never to be found again. The most famous of explorers was Percy Fawcett. This british explorer wanted to search for the lost city of Z which he nicknamed, he got close to the dense forest center but at one faithful day he was never seen again after leaving his base camp. The famous book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon was written by David Grann that told Fawcett’s story.

There are many tribes that exist in the amazon who are not contacted, they are observed through satellite images, initially their lifestyle was observed and it was concluded that the people and ancestors were to unsophisticated to build a complex civilization, but this conclusion was brought to question when the soil examination of the amazon found that it had fertile land well beneath the upper layers of earth. The use of Laser powered ground penetrating radar or Lidar have shown that complex archaeological patterns also exist within the Amazon, most cases the structures were made out of natural clay and wood which meant the forest claimed it. But the patterns and roadways are identifiable. Previous hands-on archaeological work and other remote-sensing efforts had revealed hundreds of isolated sites across more than 1,700 square miles of the Llano de Mojos region, including settlements inhabited year-round by the Casarabe, who hunted, fished and farmed staple crops like maize. Some 600 miles of causeways and canals had also been identified. But the logistical challenges of mapping them in a remote tropical forest hampered efforts to connect the dots and see if, or how, they were related to one another.

In 2013, ecologist Hans ter Steege and colleagues took part in the study of Amazon trees. The team sampled 1,170 scattered plots far from modern society to identify more than 16,000 different species among those 390 billion individual plants. They noticed an unusual trend: Despite that broad diversity, over 50% of the total trees came from 1 type of species (227).

About 20 of these “hyperdominant” plants were domesticated species such as the Brazil nut, the Amazon tree grape and the ice cream bean tree. That was five times the amount researchers expected if chance were the only factor. “The hypothesis came up that perhaps people might have domesticated these species a lot […] which would have helped their abundance in the Amazon,” says ter Steege.

Most of the domesticated species were found far from those uncontacted tribes leading to the thought that there must have been human agricultural efforts to increase these edible fruit trees in population, and that can only be done to sustain a large number of people within a collective society.

Paleoclimate studies have found the Amazon to be much younger than expected, about one fifth of the area would have been scattered with various civilizations containing their own organized rituals. Unlike the Mayans, these civilizations were built using Clay and Wood which made them susceptible to nature. The Mayans used limestone and were inapt to cutting down trees and manipulating their surroundings, on the other hand these civilizations most probably remained within the securities of the forest and gathered food and shelter within nature itself.

2018 saw the discovery of unusually shaped earthwork geoglyphs and communities throughout vast tracts of Amazon forest in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state. These places had previously been assumed to be rarely populated at best. Between 1250 and 1500 C.E. Thousands of settlements, even here, away from major rivers, may have provided housing for up to a million people in a region that makes up only approximately 7% of the Amazon basin.

All of these discoveries point to the evidence of civilizations yet to be discovered in the Amazon. Sadly due to overpopulation and lack of regulations the deforestation efforts have made the work of scientists harder and more complex. It is also contributing to the cleansing of uncontacted tribes living in the amazon.