What's Hidden Under the Unexplored Amazon Rainforest?

in my worldview the Amazon rainforest is the most fascinating and the most mysterious place of the Earth's surface today in the 21st century it's sprawls seemingly endlessly across a vast area of South America roughly 6 million square kilm all in an area of land that's about equivalent to 34 the size of the Continental 48 United States the majority of the rainforest about 60% of it is all contained within the borders of Brazil but significant parts of it also extend out across the borders of parts of Peru Colombia or Bolivia Venezuela Guyana Suriname and French Guyana

as well this huge area of the continent that the Amazon covers is extremely sparsely populated today in rural with only around 30 million total residents spread out all across it which is even fewer people today than live in Poland if the Amazon rainforest was its own independent country it would be among the bottom 10 countries in the entire world in terms of average population density with only about five human beings per square kilometer on average but by far the largest single concentration of people within the Amazon rainforest region today is this random looking blob of

high population density almost in the dead center of it which is the Brazilian city of manow home to well over 2 million people today manow is the seventh largest city in Brazil but its weird location in the middle of the Amazon also makes it the most heavily isolated City in the entire Western Hemisphere to have a population of more than a million people as there isn't a single other city of comparable size to it anywhere within 1,000 km in every direction and so as you'd expect actually physically getting yourself there doesn't work like most other

cities do there still aren't any paved roads that connect manow to the rest of the Brazilian core thousands of kilometers away to the east it's theoretically possible to drive from cities like sou Pao or Rio de Janeiro to manow but for hundreds of kilometers along Brazilian Highway 319 the route is currently unpaved and whenever it rains there which believe it or not is a frequent occurrence in the rainforest the unpaved road turns into a muddy Quagmire with endless nothing all around it no cell service and no chance of getting a tow truck to bail yourself

out so that road is a pretty sketchy option to actually take and even when you get to the other end of the highway close by to manal you'll still have to take a ferry over to the city since the entire length of the Amazon River still doesn't have a single bridge that crosses over it the primary actually paved road that connects manal to the rest of the outside world runs to the north of it up towards Venezuela Brazilian Highway 174 this route makes it at least in theory sort of possible to safely drive along paved

roads to the rest of the Brazilian core but the catch is that you'd have to travel all the way around through Venezuela Colombia and Peru just to reenter back into Brazil again meaning that for most practical purposes the only ways that most people from the rest of Brazil usually get to manous isn't by land but by airplane or by taking a boat down the Amazon River itself which is fully navigable to oceangoing vessels for about 2third of its course deep into the Continental interior another similar blob of high population density in the middle of the

modern Amazon is the Peruvian city of idos which is home to around 500,000 people today and is in theory even more isolated than manousis not because of distance from other large settlements but because of logistics other than for a single 100 km deadend stretch of road that ends in the nearby town of nauda there aren't any other roads at all that connect idos with anywhere in the outside world which makes it the largest city in the world that can't be reached by road that isn't on an island igos exists precisely where it does because it

sits at about the exact spot on the Amazon River that's still fully navigable all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean which is always provided a free to use and easy to use super highway for Peruvian and Brazilian Merchants to take transporting the Amazon's resources out to the Global Market rather than using cars trucks or trains the Amazon River itself provides nearly all of the transportation to the few big modern cities in the Amazon like manouse and ikos so much so that when you travel along it you'll even see floating gas stations and convenient stores

for boats instead of cars and so as you'd expect proper road infrastructure throughout the Amazon region is extremely hard to come by and even the major clusters of people within it don't really have any major roads extending out from from them since the Amazon River is their primary method of transportation and connection to the outside world instead this means that there are huge swats of the Amazon rainforest that are completely absent of any roads at all which makes driving through most of it an impossible feat while trekking through the rainforest on foot is an extremely

arduous process as well simply because of the unbelievable density of trees here once you get out beyond the major settlements and highways it's been estimated that there are probably somewhere around 300 90 billion individual trees densely packed all throughout the Amazon rainforest which is nearly four times as many stars as exist in the entire Milky Way galaxy a single square kilometer of the forest can contain up to 150,000 individual trees and well over 990,000 tons of plant biomass a fact that can be clearly seen when you look at images like these ones of the city

of manous that butts right up against the boundary with the Amazon on one side you have a dense City that's like an island of civilization and on the other you literally have a th000 kilom of super dense wild rainforest that's mostly just empty of people so observing what the Amazon's actual surface looks like from the ground from anywhere beyond the Amazon River or from the handful of roads and settlements dotted throughout it has always been very difficult while for most of modern history observing what the Amazon surface looked like from the air with aircraft or

even with satellites have also been practically imposs possible because of just how insanely dense and thick the rainforest canopy is everywhere throughout it as a result the vast surface area of the Amazon rainforest that Lies Beneath the canopy we can see from the sky easily contains the largest amount of unexplored unmapped an Uncharted land area remaining anywhere on the earth's surface in the 21st century with some scientists arguing that we currently understand even less about it than we do the surface of Mars that's why in my view it's the most mysterious and the most interesting

place remaining on the map in the 21st century and all of a sudden very recently modern advances in the fields of cartography and archaeology like lar scanning are finally after all this time enabling us to penetrate through the previously impenetrable rainforest canopy to see the Amazon surface like we've never seen it before and the last blank space on the Earth surface filled up by the world's biggest rainforest is finally beginning to get mapped out and filled in and some of the things that we've already discovered down there just over the past decade alone have been

so profoundly shocking they beun to upend our entire views on History and Science in the process and even more incredible discoveries down there are probably coming very soon in order to understand why some of these recent discoveries beneath the Amazon canopy have been so shocking you need to understand what the general historical view on the Amazon region has been within mainstream Academia for centuries how they came to those conclusions and why they've all of a sudden very recently this decade in the 2020s begun to be proven incorrect you see for the past several centuries the

generally accepted mainstream view on the Amazon was that it had always been basically a pristine largely untouched Wilderness environment mostly undisturbed and unaltered by human beings this view was reinforced by the fact that for the past several centuries pretty much ever since Europeans first arrived in the Americas the Amazon has always appeared to be very sparsely populated by indigenous people in groups no larger than on a hunter gatherer tribal scale largely because the soil quality throughout the Amazon rainforest is extremely poor and sterile and not very helpful for large scale agriculture that would be necessary

for larger more complex civilizations but this is a pretty weird thing to consider at first because it almost seems counterintuitive when you say that the soil quality in the Amazon is terrible for crop farming well it simultaneously supports more than 390 billion trees in the densest and most biodiverse forest in the world but the reason for this is very interesting you see one of the primary sources of nutrients for all of the plants in the Amazon rainforest actually comes from a highly unexpected Source far away on a completely different continent here at the southernmost edge

of the Sahara desert in central Chad lies the bodell depression an ancient dried up lake bed that used to be a part of the primordial Lake Mega Chad until it was consumed by the expansion of the Sahara several thousand years ago now the dried up lake bed in the bodeli depression here contains massive amounts of exposed rock minerals composed of dead microorganisms that are chalk full of phosphorus an essential nutrient that fertilizes plants for growth the powerful trade winds that whip across the Sahara from east to west will pick up enormous amounts of Saharan dust

including phosphorous Rich dust from around the bodell depression and will then continue carrying all of that dust for thousands of kilometers through the air across the Atlantic and towards South America where about 28 million tons of Saharan dust will fall across the Amazon rainforest throughout an average year including about 22,000 tons of phosphorus that was picked up from the bodeli depression in Chad that provides the Amazon with vitally needed nutrients but because rainfall throughout the Amazon rainforest is extremely high these nutrients that arrive from the Sahara are always rapid washed out from the soil and

eventually drained down into the Amazon River itself which means that the trees and other plants in the Amazon have evolved to essentially pull up the nutrients from the soil about as soon as they're deposited there moreover the very high yearr round temperatures in the rainforest and the high humidity levels means that dead organic material like leaves and Fallen plants or trees decompose extremely rapidly which means that their store nutrients are released and lost very rapidly and Rec consumed by other plants and funn before they can ever be deposited into the soil this all means that

the soils of the Amazon never really gain any buildup of nutrients at all since all of the trees and the other plants within the rainforest are literally living on the Recycled nutrients of all the other trees around them and so the soils themselves are effectively sterile and useless for agriculture which is why historically most of the scientific Community considered large scale agriculture in the Amazon region to be impossible which is why they believed that the existence of large scale complex indigenous societies within the Amazon were also impossible as well the prominent American archaeologist Betty Mears

who specialized in South American anthropology through the Smithsonian institution throughout the 20th century was a very well-known advocate of this idea she wrote a whole book that was published in 1971 titled Amazonia man and culture in a counterfeit Paradise in which she argued that without agriculture in the Amazon being possible the maximum population density that the Amazon red Forest could naturally support through hunting and Gathering was only 0.2 people per square kilm and so the Amazon had to be an extremely sparsely populated place throughout its entire history as a result this view was reinforced over

Centuries by the fact that European settlers and explorers and their descendants only ever seem to encounter small tribes of indigenous people in the rainforest hundreds of which continue to exist across the remote depths of the Amazon still today in fact it's estimated that still today even in the 21st century the Amazon rainforest is so vast so remote and so difficult to access from the outside that there are still around a 100 or so indigenous tribes dotted throughout it that remain so-called uncontacted maintaining their traditional hunter gatherer Lifestyles like their ancestors have for thousands of years

with little if any contact with the outside world the Amazon is the host of the largest number of remaining uncontacted people in the world today and while estimates of their exact numberers are highly varied it's generally believed that there are around 10,000 of them scattered throughout the rainforest hiding from the outside world only observed by us every so often from striking aerial photographs like these ones I'm showing to you right now but they aren't really UNC contacted in the way you think they are they're pretty much all universally aware of the existence of the outside

world and have a very long history of contact with us but they voluntarily choose to hide and remain isolated in the rainforest because they deeply fear what the outside world will do to them if they're found over the past several centuries since the arrival of Europeans and even over just the past few decades in recent living memory countless numbers of these isolated Amazonian tribes have been massacred and enslaved by The Outsiders across the late 19th and early 20th century when the importance of rubber as a strategic material exploded the rubber tree that's naturally indigenous to

the Amazon basin correspondingly exploded in value in importance as well which resulted in an unprecedented surge of European colonists flocking into the Amazon basin to strike out their fortunes and was the Catalyst for the growth of the few big Amazonian cities along the navigable stretch of the Amazon River like manous and igos I mentioned previously however as the demand for labor on the growing Amazonian rubber plantations expanded the European owners of the plantations engaged in massive slave raids on the Amazon's indigenous populations and forced hundreds of thousands of them to work on the rubber plantations

in appalling conditions with extremely high mortality rates as high as 90% in some instances that some historians have compared in scale and brutality to the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide in the aftermath of the rubber boom in the mid to late 20th century the indigenous survivors of this genocide in the Amazon fled into the most remote and difficult to access depths of the rainforest with their memories of the horrors the outside world inflicted upon them passed down through the generations so rather than keeping themselves hidden from the outside world because they just prefer to keep

their more traditional simple Lifestyles they really keep themselves hidden out of this very deeply ingrained fear of what the outside world will do to them again if contact with us is ever reestablished a fear that hasn't helped out very much by the action of loggers miners missionaries drug traffickers and even anthropologists in recent history either throughout the 1960s and70s the Brazilian government basically treated the Amazon BAS as an empty Place full of resources that was holding the country's development back and the indigenous people within were largely sidelined or even killed one indigenous tribe in the

rondonia region of the Brazilian Amazon was almost completely massacred by Brazilian gunmen hired by ranchers and settlers there in the 1970s down to only a single Survivor a man who kept on living a militantly reclusive and distant life in the rainforest for decades up until he passed away from natural causes just a few years ago in 2022 for decades nobody alive knew anything about the man not his name his language or the name of his extinct tribe but they well understood his fears and his intense desire to be left alone from the outside world as

he frequently shot arrows at anyone who ever attempted to initiate contact with him for years he eventually gained the nickname of the man of the whole due to the Deep ditches he would frequently dig around his campsites for protection the Brazilian Ministry of native people discovered him in the late 1990s and eventually fenced off the entire area where the man lived and created a nature reserve out of the area in 2007 which became this isolated island of forest with a lone uncontacted indigenous man inside of it surrounded by a sea of deforested cattle ranches until

the man inside died of natural causes in 2022 leaving his unknown trib's modern genocide ultimately completed throughout the 1970s and ' 80s the Brazilian government tried to establish peaceful contact with indigenous tribes in the Amazon by setting up trading posts in the rainforest with metal tools and other useful objects but the posts would occasionally lead to Violent interactions with the tribes and would frequently spread outside diseases to the tribes that they lacked any immunities to in a process that has gone on ever since Europeans first discover the new world a half Millennia ago which would

sometimes wipe out half of a tribe's population within only a matter of weeks these disasters eventually led the Brazilian Department of unknown tribes to take a radically different approach starting in 1987 when they decided that isolated tribes in the Amazon shouldn't ever be contacted by the outside world at all unless they the tribes voluntarily chose to initiate contact First creating a sort of real world prime directive from Star Trek in the process this was also a part of the late 20th century Brazilian government's creation of the indigenous territories across the country that are heavily concentrated

within the Brazilian Amazon which are currently more than 700 areas Center assign for exclusive use by the country's indigenous population including the veil do jaari in the far west of the Brazilian Amazon here which is believed to contain the highest concentration of uncontacted people in the entire Amazon and by extension in the entire world the territory is roughly the same size as Portugal and it's completely illegal for any unqualified Outsider to enter into it and it contains an estimated 14 separate uncontacted tribes within it numbering around 2,000 people all in all who are occasionally observed

by the Brazilian government from the air which is where most of these striking aerial photographs of uncontacted people in the Amazon have come from the veil do shavari itself is part of a much wider area today that's known as the uncontacted frontier an arc of the remote Western Amazon region that straddles the border between Brazil Peru and Bolivia that's arguably the single most remote location anywhere on the Earth's surface that remains in the 21st century nowhere else in the world today are there more contacted people than here including a highly elusive tribe known as the

moshko Puro on the Peruvian side of the uncontacted frontier around 50 of whom were recently seen and photographed by an organization known as survival International in July of 2024 during a very rare encounter with the outside world because of these very recent photos and this encounter the moshko Piro are now believed to be the single largest uncontacted tribe remaining in the Amazon and in the world probably numbering around 700 50 total individuals their location was also notably captured here only a few kilometers away from an active Logging company which survival International says threatens the tribe's

continued existence critics of the Brazilian system of indigenous territories argue that they permanently Reserve about 133% of the country's total land area to a small population of indigenous people that only make up 0.4% of Brazil's total population and that that much land full of valuable resources getting locked out from development is holding the country's economic development and potential Prosperity back in the process illegal logging ranching and Mining within several of the indigenous territories is already a relatively common practice but the arguments in favor of preserving the system aren't just for the rights of the indigenous

people who live there but also to protect the unknown scale of the biodiversity in the Amazon and the unknown species of plants and animals that are almost certainly still existing there currently unknown to science we have understood for a very long time now that the Amazon is by far the most biodiverse ecosystem on the planet it's estimated that a whopping one in every 10 known species in the world lives just within the Amazon rainforest including at least 2 and 1/2 million species of insects tens of thousands of plant species and around 2,000 bird and mammal

species along with a whopping one in every five fish species which live in the Amazon rivers and streams there's a scientific study from 2001 that concluded just a quarter of a square kilometer in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador was capable of supporting more than 1100 separate individual species of tree the biodiversity of species within the rainforest is so high compared to any other location in the world the brand new Amazon species are still being cataloged by the scientific Community just about every single day on average according to the Brazilian National Institute of Amazonian research headquartered

in manow an estimated 60% of the tree species within the Amazon have yet to be properly cataloged and identified and there's no telling how many insect bird reptile and mammal species remain undiscovered deep within it as well some of the most recent animal discoveries made in the Amazon have been particularly interesting such as this red striped monkey that was only discovered in 2015 this species of dark frog that was only found in 1999 this bald parrot that was only discovered in 1999 as well or this unique species of blind and bright red C fish that

was only discovered in the waters of the Amazon in 2007 there's even a huge new species of Northern green anaconda that was only very recently discovered in the Amazon by researchers this year in 2024 that could potentially be the biggest snake species in the world though that's currently unconfirmed some Amazon researchers believe that the current pace of deforestation going on in the rainforest is destroying the remaining unknown species hidden there faster than they are being discovered and there's probably enti species currently going extinct there before the Scientific Community even becomes aware of them and there's

always the very slight possibility that deep within the rainforests most Uncharted and unexplored depths there could be exotic large animal species that remain undiscovered as well one of the biggest examples in recent history of a large previously unknown animal species getting discovered by the scientific Community was the case of the solola a large Forest dwelling bovine creature that was only unexpected discovered deep within the jungles of rural Vietnam in 1992 and only first photographed in 1993 and the deepest depths of the Amazon are even more remote and difficult to access than where the solola was

discovered in Vietnam so who knows there's a very popular Legend among several indigenous tribes in the Amazon of a mythical monster that's colloquially known as the mop andai and while descriptions of the legend vary widely from tribe to tribe there are some who believe that many of the descriptions of it closely match that of the giant ground sloth known as the mega theum which used to exist across the South American continent before it probably went extinct sometime around 11,000 years ago the meum was a giant ground sloth that was about the same size as a

modern-day African elephant and a very recent discovery in 2023 nearby to the Amazon of a set of megatherium Bones modified into jewelry appears to suggest that at some point in history indigenous people in the Americas used to live side by side with the giant ground sloth the knowledge of which could have potentially been passed down orally from generation to generation and eventually became the basis for the modern mop and gries but that hasn't stopped some people from speculating that the continued reportings of the map andarai by indigenous tribes in the Amazon suggest that the megatherium

could still have survived after all this time somewhere deep inside of the rainforest but that's probably not the most likely possibility because a creature of that enormous a size would leave behind major signs of its existence like carcasses hair droppings remains and Predator droppings and much more that up to date never actually been found and even though the Amazon is a big and remote place hiding a creature of that size for this long would still probably be almost impossible but that doesn't mean it isn't still fun to think about and speculate if a large living

extent land animal currently unknown to science was going to exist anywhere on the Earth's surface today probably would be somewhere deep within the Amazon hidden beneath the canopy and while one of the most fascinating recent scientific discoveries made within the Amazon wasn't of a large legendary living animal it was still just about as exciting as one anyway in 2011 a geoscientist named Andres ruso who grew up in Peru Nicaragua and the United States had heard Legends dating back to his childhood of a boiling hot river that supposedly existed somewhere deep within the Amazon so that

year he sent out on an expedition deep within the rainforest of central Peru to try and see if he could find it and sure enough hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest active volcano he stumbled upon the legendary boiling River now known to the outside world as the chenet teska a fully flowing 6 1/2 km long river whose Waters average a scalding temperature of nearly 86° C or 186 F not exactly boiling technically speaking but still hot enough to almost instant L kill any animal or person unfortunate enough to fall inside the local indigenous people

had of course known about the boiling River in the Amazon for Generations but until Russo's encounter with the river in 2011 it remained completely unknown to the rest of us in the outside world outside of Legend and it's now understood to be the longest and hottest boiling River known in the world a natural wonder as wide as a two-lane Street in nearly 5 m or 16 ft deep in place places made even more puzzling that it isn't volcanic activity that causes the river to get so hot but a geothermal feature beneath the area instead and

almost a century before Russo's expedition in the Peruvian Amazon revealed the boiling River to Western science based only on hearing about a legend Another Western Explorer sent out on a series of expeditions across the Amazon based on hearing similar rumors and legends about long lost civilizations and ruins hidden deep within the Amazon despite the contrary academic consensus a British man named Percy Harrison faucet in the early 20th century faucet became obsessed with finding a lost civilization in the Amazon rainforest that he believed existed and which he steadily began to call the lost city of Z

part of his convictions on this lost civilization's existence stem from the historical record of early European explorers in the Amazon like Francisco de Orana a Spanish conquistador who became the first European to sail through the entire length of the Amazon river between 1541 and 1542 during his search for the legendary city of El Dorado during his early Voyage Through the Amazon Oriana reported coming across several large indigenous cities that featur dense populations organized armies fortified towns well-developed and maintained roads and even Monumental construction projects reporting that for centuries was widely believed to be nothing more

than the wild exaggerations of a glory hung Greek on kador countless Expeditions across the following centuries were made in the Amazon to try and find any traces of these Lost Cities but none were ever successful and the legends of them inspired faet to begin his own Expeditions for them in the early 20th century for nearly 20 years between 1906 and 1924 faucet took seven Expeditions throughout the Amazon region in search of his lost city of Z with a heavy focus on the Southeastern Amazon in Brazil and the Western Amazon region in Bolivia and Peru but

over all that time he never ended up discovering anything very substantial no giant Stone ruins no lost cities and only small bands of indigenous tribes in little villages in 1925 faucet organized his eighth and ultimately final expedition to find the lost city of Z along with his son a friend two horses eight mules and a pair of dogs they sent out for the city of quaba on the edge of the Amazon in Western Brazil and after they crossed the upper zingu river into the rainforest itself none of them were ever seen or heard from again

and simply vanished into the vastness of the Amazon forever their ultimate Fates still unknown to us an entire Century later faucet's ill- faded Expeditions that failed to find any lost civilizations in the Amazon appear to only further support the mainstream consensus that such Amazonian civilizations never actually existed and that the rainforest had always been a largely pristine sparsely inhabited Wilderness but then several decades later beginning in the 1970s a series of steady archaeological discoveries in the Amazon would slowly begin to shift this centuries long held Viewpoint in 1977 a researcher named onmar Diaz discovered a

series of large scale man-made geoglyphs within the UR region of the Brazilian Amazon and recently deforested land there well even further discoveries were made by flying aircraft over the region to date since that time literally hundreds of these kinds of complex geoglyphs have been discovered by researchers across the Aur region that have been needed to have been constructed between 1 AD and 1250 which suddenly reignited the interest in the possibility of there maybe being Advanced pre-colombian civilizations in the rainforest that had remained undiscovered in the apono valley region of the Amazon in eastern Ecuador traces

of settlements were discovered by researchers in the 1970s and then more clues there began to get uncovered by archaeologists led by Steven rosain with France's national Center for scientific research who began excavations in the area in the 19 1990s when they began discovering large Dugout ditches and even roads that had been long overgrown by the rainforest foliage around the same time in the 1990s another team of archaeologists led by Michael heckenberger from the University of Florida began exploring an area in the upper zingu region of Brazil very nearby to the area where faucet mysteriously disappeared

from in the 1920s during his search for the lost city of Z and they also discovered ancient roads Bridges and ditches that appear to form the of long lost walls moats and cway that over Decades of Hands-On on the ground studying steadily added up to a collection of at least 19 large pre-planned pre-colombian villages in the region that featured well-planned circular plazas but researchers still didn't generally consider this to be a truly urbanized area of the pre-colombian past none of the discovered settlements here in the upper zingu had clearly defined Urban centers with Monumental architecture

you would expect in civiliz ations like u-shaped temples or pyramids and so they appear to be more of a collection of Amazonian Villages nwor together rather than any true large-scale civilization their Discovery nonetheless encouraged further searches in other areas of the Amazon though such as in the yanos de Moos region of the Amazon in Northern Bolivia where on the ground research and limited remote sensing studies steadily revealed a similar pattern as in the upper zingu region dozens to even hundreds of isolated small villages across an area roughly the size of Rhode Island but even though

hundreds of kilometers worth of overgrown canals and costway were discovered here and there was abundant evidence of pre-colombian Agriculture and Forest management the logistical problems involved with actually mapping the entire region out in a deeply remote part of the rainforest shrouded from above by the densest Forest canopy in the world proved to make connecting all of the numerous dots in the region an almost impossible task and so for a while it was pretty unclear if all of these small settlements were even related to each other or not the signs were there of a potential Lost

Civilization in the Bolivian Amazon for decades but without any clear Urban centers discovered in the puzzle the researchers mostly just had a series of lost Villages instead but all of that would finally and very suddenly change only very recently in 2022 when a team of archaeologists operating in the region led by hio pumers of the German archaeological Institute released an earth shattering pap in the journal Nature his team pursued a different approach that utilized a new he technology that is quickly revolutionizing the field of archaeology and our understanding of what exists beneath the Amazon rainforest

lar an acronym for laser Imaging detection and ranging flying in a helicopter about 200 M or 650 ft up above the floor of the rainforest the team used an onboard lar system to shoot down a GD of infrared beams down to the surface that ignore the dense foliage in the canopy hit whatever is actually Down Below on the surface and then bounce back up to the system on the helicopter with a measure of distance in between as the helicopter flies over the area being surveyed the lar system steadily creates a colossal number of data points

that eventually creates a high resolution map of the surveyed area without any of the trees being present which reveals what the area actually looks like using this more modern technique the team led by pumers carried out lar mapping surveys of six different are in the yanos de Moos region that revealed a total of 26 unique archaeological sites in the region 11 of which were previously totally unknown to science and two of those sites that were revealed were especially interesting because For the First Time in modern history the lar Maps revealed them to actually be very

significant pre-colombian cities complete with the Monumental architecture that had always been missing from countless searches in the Amazon over the past nearly 5 centuries of History the sites included mud brick conical pyramids that stood more than 21 M or 70 ft tall on the scale of several Mayan pyramids known to exist in Central America and they were shown to Anchor a web of sprawling smaller settlements all connected by Crossways and Roads that stretched out for several kilometers and there were even canals in a complex water management system that connected the main Urban centers with nearby

Rivers the team believes that the settlements were abandoned around 600 years ago sometime around the year 1400 nearly a century before the arrival of the Europeans for unknown reasons but their existence finally proved that dense complex societies within the Amazon rainforest capable of building Monumental architecture did indeed exist at some point in the pre-colombian past and that the Amazon was significantly more densely populated in the past than previously believed the yanos to Moos region in the Amazon a region roughly the size of England is now believed to have supported as many as 1 million people

before the arrival of Columbus and it was all right in the middle of many of the areas that were explored by faucet's lost city of Z Expeditions more than a 100 years ago faet didn't discover any ruins of long lost cities in the area because it turned out he was ultimately searching for the wrong kinds of things the unknown society that built these pyramids and cities in the Amazon of Northern Bolivia didn't used Stone like the Maya Ina or Aztec did that stood the test of time better and made them easier to find instead they

used other natural materials that were more readily available to them in this environment like mud bricks and wood so while back in their Heyday their cities probably looked every bit as impressive as the Mayan cities du to us today the materials they used decomposed more quickly over the centuries of Abandonment and weren't as durable so they ended up just blending in far better with the overgrowth of the Amazon that reclaimed claimed them over centuries without human intervention the discovery of these long lost Monumental cities hidden under the rainforest canopy for centuries in Northern Bolivia was

the most significant archaeological discovery made in the region for the century and heo pumers even prophetically predicted that over the next 10 or 20 years even more previously unknown cities in the Amazon would probably get discovered that would include some even bigger and more complex than the yanos de moo site and it would only take fewer than 2 years for him to be proven right because just this year back in January of 2024 another Earth shattering paper was published by Steven rosain and his team that concerned their own years worth of discoveries and research back

in the aono Valley site that I touched on a bit previously in the Amazon of Eastern Ecuador as I mentioned previously Ross stain and the French national Center for scientific research had been engaged in research in Ecuador's Eastern aono Valley site for decades since the 1990s and just like in the upper zingo and yanos de moo sites his team had found evidence of small Central plazas raised Mounds pottery and jugs scattered evidence of a potential civilization but without a complete map of the entire region obscured by the rainforest canopy it was impossible for them to

put all of these pieces together everything changed however in 2015 when the Ecuadorian government agreed to fund a lar survey of the aano valley to f finally reveal what was all hidden there beneath the foliage over the next several years Rost stain's team used aircraft and onboard liar combined with extensive ground excavations to painstakingly survey and map out a 300 Square km area within the apono valley region of the Ecuadorian Amazon and they published all of their years worth of findings in the journal Nature in early 2024 and their light R survey mapped out what

can only be described as the r inss of a truly lost major ancient civilization that used to exist in the Amazon their survey in this 300 km area about the same size as the island of Malta uncovered more than 6,000 individual rectangular platforms that measured about 20 m x 10 m and about 2 to 3 m High all ranged in groups of between 3 and six units clustered around a plaza with a central platform these were thousands of long long abandoned homes with areas of especially dense settlement concentrations forming heavily urbanized areas and one of

the structures their liar uncovered within the plaza of one of the densest complexes was a massive 140 MX 40 m and 5 m tall platform probably the site of long lost Monumental buildings that were used for ceremonies the settlements were all surrounded by webs of agricultural Fields complete with extensive drainage canals and all interconnected by a huge network of long lost and unused roads that included multiple impressive features one of the roads observed by the survey was more than 25 km long and several of the roads included direct right angles a difficult engineering feat for

any society to have accomplished here in the geographically rough terrain defensive ditches were observed blocking some of the settlements from outside attack and like in yanos De Moos in Bolivia a vast network of costway and canals were discovered that brought abundant water to the area as well this discovery in the Ecuadorian Amazon revealed a society that was even denser and more complex than the previously discovered one in yanos De Moos in Bolivia which itself was also an earth shattering Discovery in its own right some of the researchers involved have even postulated that back in their

Prime the previously Unknown about cities streets and monuments that the indigenous people constructed here in the apano valley rivaled or even surpassed those of the much more well-known Maya civilization in Central America while the team who wrote the paper on the aono valley Discovery stressed that estimating the site's previous population is extremely difficult the paper's co-author archaeologist Anton dorison suggested that as many as 30,000 people could have lived there at its peak which would have put it on about the same scale as Roman era London other experts believe that the apono Valley site could have

supported even more people potentially as high as even a hundred ,000 or so which if that's true would have made it among the largest human settlements anywhere in the world at the time when it was populated the other fascinating thing about this discovery is that it's believed to be ancient like really ancient the team dated the area to be inhabited sometime between around 500 BC at the earliest to sometime between 300 to 600 AD at the latest meaning that whatever civilization existed here did so for around a thousand years along the same rough times line

as the Roman Empire in Western Europe did by the time the European conquistadors arrived in the Amazon these ancient civilizations ruins had already been abandoned for around a thousand years and largely Left Behind to be reclaimed by the rainforest which is no wonder why it was never rediscovered by anyone until the very late 20th to early 21st centuries it's not very often that an entirely brand new civilization previously unknown to recorded history gets discovered these days in the the 21st century but that's exactly what the abono Valley site Discovery was and why it is arguably

at least in my opinion one of the most important archaeological discoveries of this entire Century the area around this part of the Amazon on the Eastern Slope of the andies mountains has soils that are richer than elsewhere in the rainforest because they've been fertilized by Rich volcanic ash from nearby volcanoes which is also a potential explanation for why the site was eventually abandoned one of the volcanic eruptions nearby May have been big enough to have caused an apocalypse but interestingly small pockets of fertile soils have been recently discovered all throughout the Amazon rainforest by archaeologists

that's called Tera praa or black soil translated literally from Portuguese these pockets of teraa are now understood to have been man-made it was created by indigenous people adding a mixture of charcoal bones compost and manure to the infamously sterile Amazonian soil the charcoal they added would then remain stable within the soil for literally thousands of years which binded and retained the soil's minerals and nutrients and turned its color into its characteristic black appearance by doing this indigenous people were able to create fertile soils out of the Amazon themselves and modern archaeologists have discovered patches of

Terra praa all throughout the rainforest over the past few decades with the probability of this fertile soil type appearing believed to be particularly High along the many rivers and streams located all throughout the rainforest this all means that the long held Notions we've maintained for centuries about the Amazon being a sparsely populated nearly pristine Wilderness absent of civilizations have been dead wrong and we're only just starting to understand what could all actually be hidden out there we Now understand that prior to the arrival of the Europeans Amazon was in fact a densely populated place that

hosted complex civilizations and there could have been as many as 8 million or more indigenous people living throughout the Amazon around the year 1500 also at around the same time it's also now believed that as much as 1/5th of the current Amazon rainforest was an open Savannah type environment back then which enabled Amazonian civilizations and environment to more easily thrive in that was only taken over by the rainforest in the centuries after the Europeans arrived and caused an apocalypse to take place there introduced diseases brought by the Europeans like small poox and measles coupled with

their own violence decimated the indigenous populations of the Americas including the indigenous people of the Amazon when Francisco to Oriana sailed down the Amazon River in the 1540s he actually probably did encounter very large Amazonian settlements and organized armies and societies but over the centuries that followed from then disease and brutality steadily took its toll on the rainforest indigenous population to the point where by the turn of the 20th century in 1900 their population had probably fallen from 8 million in 1500 to fewer than 1 million while by the 1980s their numbers crashed even further

to fewer than only 200,000 people remaining far from being an untouched pristine Wilderness the Amazon essentially became the world's best preserved post-apocalyptic landscape instead that was so well hidden by the overgrowth of the rainforest over centuries without anybody left behind to manage it that we didn't even realize it was a major civilizational post-apocalyptic landscape until like literally just a couple of years ago this all ultimately means that additional huge civilizational discoveries could be made out there in the future and the rain Le team that made the massive aono Valley Discovery in eastern Ecuador is already

preparing to survey another 300 km site with lar that's directly adjacent to the 300 squ km site that they already surveyed which could turn up even more history changing Discovery soon and as lar is used by more and more scientists and explorers in the 21st century to steadily peel back the foliage that is hid in the secrets of the Amazon first centuries we will finally start to understand the complete map of the Amazon rainforest in the years and decades ahead and there's just no telling what future great archaeological discoveries await us there the rainforest still

has a very low population density today which means that the ruins and Relics of these previously unknown Amazonian civilizations have been left almost completely undisturbed for centuries or even Millennia and as a result the Amazon rainforest remains today the final vast location on the Earth's surface where previously hidden archaeological wonders could still lie just waiting to be rediscovered again and understood by us the Amazon will probably be the epicenter of major future archaeological discoveries throughout the rest of this decade and into the 2030s and you should pay very close attention to all of it because

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