We were taught that the history of our country begins in the year 1500, when European navigators discovered Brazil. But how is it even possible to discover a land that was already inhabited by millions of people? After all, when that happened, Indigenous peoples were already living here.
The truth is that the history of Brazil begins long before the arrival of the Europeans and some of the most impressive parts of this story took place in a very mysterious location. With its dense forest and in a region famous for its scorching heat, the Amazon may be one of the most dangerous places on the planet. Its beauty, famous all over the world, hides large predators, poisonous plants and even deadly insects.
It’s such a hostile place that it makes survival nearly impossible for people like you and me. Could this be the reason why this huge forest has always been practically uninhabited? Or could the real issue be in its geography?
After all, they say it's impossible to build cities in the Amazon and that the region doesn’t even have land suitable for farming. The fact is that the Amazon has always been seen as the "green hell": wild and unreachable. But is it really that impossible to live well and abundantly inside this forest?
In 1542, Spanish friar Gaspar de Carvajal took part in the first European expedition to travel the entire Amazon River and his account reveals an Amazon completely different from what we imagine. <i>We passed through islands we thought were uninhabited,</i> <i>but once we found ourselves among them,</i> <i>there were so many settlements that we were astonished. </i> <i>When they saw us,</i> <i>they came toward us on the river in 200 canoes,</i> <i>each with twenty to thirty Indigenous people,</i> <i>some with forty.
</i> That forest, densely occupied by Indigenous peoples, continued in their sight as the expedition went on through the Amazon River. <i>This whole river,</i> <i>on the islands, on the banks, and inland,</i> <i>is populated by Indigenous people. </i> <i>There are so many that, if a needle were dropped from the sky,</i> <i>it would surely hit the head of an Indigenous person, not the ground.
</i> Around the year 1500, Portugal was inhabited by one and a half million people. Spain was larger and had almost nine million people. But what about the Amazon?
Well, it was home to no less than ten million people. That’s exactly what we’re learning from recent archaeological discoveries that are shedding new light on the history of that forest. We’re increasingly understanding that the Amazon was home to many peoples who built huge cities far more advanced than we could ever imagine.
The most impressive thing is that these people, literally, created the Amazon we know today. If you’ve ever wondered why there are no pyramids or other monuments in the Amazon, it’s because we’re discovering that the forest itself is a pyramid. The Amazon is the largest monument ever built on the planet.
BRAZIL LONG BEFORE 1500 What if I told you that the Amazon rainforest we know only exists because of the people who lived there in the past? You’d think I’m crazy, right? But the truth is, we can now say for sure that this astonishing forest is the great legacy of ancient peoples who lived in this region centuries ago.
In recent years, historians and archaeologists have been finding more and more evidence that millions of people lived in the Amazon. Ancestors of today’s Indigenous peoples and of many other Brazilians, these civilizations were huge and organized in ways far more complex than we can imagine. We’re talking about huge cities, often connected by road networks and with astonishing technological advances.
Whether by creating a powerful environmental management system that forever transformed the forest’s land, or by digging giant and mysterious geometric drawings, these people lived a sustainable relationship with nature. No wonder they ate better and were healthier than Europeans and many other peoples of the time. And the great achievement of these peoples was nothing less than the largest tropical forest on the planet.
But why are these cities only being discovered now? How did these people live? And if some of these civilizations were really that advanced, why is it so hard to find traces of these peoples?
So, I want to invite you to find out more about Brazil before 1500 with me. Watch this video until the end, because I’ll explain all of this in detail. Oh, and check this out!
This video has been created with consulting from archaeologists and researchers who are precisely doing this research in the Amazon. That means this video has been produced together with some of the top Brazilian authorities on this subject. And it's not just the consulting.
Are you a teacher and like to show Nostalgia videos to your students? This time, you’ll also have supporting educational material specially prepared for a fulfilling experience. It’s complementary information and suggested activities that you can use or adapt as you see fit to work with these themes in your classroom.
And now it’s time for us to discover the lost cities of the Amazon. But for that, we need to go back to the time when the first humans began walking the planet. The arrival of our ancestors in the Americas is something directly connected to the settlement of the Amazon.
There are more than one theory explaining how humans first set foot in the Americas. The most accepted theory by scientists is that it happened thanks to a land bridge that no longer exists. Homo sapiens, in other words, modern humans, emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago.
200,000 years ago, some of these people left the African continent and began spreading across the planet. So, around 30 thousand years ago, some humans reached the far east of Asia. In the planet we know today, that would’ve be the end of the journey.
After all, these people would have found an ocean impossible to cross. However, at that time, the planet was going through a period of low temperatures and the formation of large glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere lowered sea levels. With that, Beringia, a landmass acting like a bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska, was above water.
For quite some time, many humans occupied this land bridge. They were the first Americans. However, around 15,000 years ago, the planet's temperature started rising, the glaciers melted and Beringia began to be covered by water.
Many of the humans on the bridge marched eastward, spreading across the Americas. The result is that, two thousand years later, there were already inhabited regions throughout the entire continent, from Alaska to the south of Chile. As time passed, these settlements gave rise to different civilizations, each with its own culture, language, and traits.
And I bet you’ve heard of at least three of them. The first one are the Mayans, who around 1000 BC, began to settle some parts of Central America quite advanced in astronomy and mathematics, the Mayans built cities with imposing buildings and pyramids that still stand today. By around the year 1300, it was time for the Aztec civilization.
Living in the territory that is now Mexico, the Aztecs also built impressive cities, especially remembered for their huge temples. Lastly, we have the Incas, who began expanding their empire shortly after the year 1400. The Inca people occupied the Andes Mountain region, living in the mountains where today are countries like Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Argentina.
Now, why are these three civilizations always the most remembered when we talk about ancient American peoples? Well, this list isn't wrong. Incas, Mayans, and Aztecs really were really advanced.
The thing is that this list is incomplete! Recent studies are showing that in other parts of the Americas there were civilizations with complex social organization and developments just as impressive as those of the better-known ancient peoples. We are finding out, for example, that the Amazon was also a setting for enormous human development.
We’re talking about populations capable of creating extensive roads in the middle of the forest, building dams and canals to prevent droughts and floods, producing super fertile soils, creating fish and turtle farms, and even managing to modify huge areas of the forest. So why do we see these Amazonian civilizations as less developed than other ancient peoples? Why aren’t they famous like the Incas or the Aztecs?
These questions are very important and we are going to go through all those answers. But before that, we need to ask an even more basic question: Where did this idea that the Amazon was always uninhabited even come from? In the 16th century, when Europeans began to set foot in the Americas, the Spanish Pizarro family came here in full force.
But the goal wasn’t to enjoy our beaches or bring gifts to the local peoples. The four Pizarro brothers ventured into the New World to find riches and expand Spanish control in the Americas. So they engaged in huge conflicts with the Indigenous peoples.
One of the brothers, Francisco Pizarro, is the one who led the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. But what matters to us is his brother Gonzalo. In 1542, he organized an expedition departing from Quito, Ecuador, in search of the land of cinnamon.
That was supposed to be a region within the Amazon rich in spices and seasonings. It’s worth remembering that in the 16th century, the age of great navigations, spices were one of the drivers of the European economy. Due to some unforeseen events, some people got separated from the expedition.
This group was led by the explorer Francisco de Orellana and ended up sailing along that huge river that cuts through the forest. This is how the first European account of the Amazon emerged, written by Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, who accompanied the expedition. You've heard some excerpts from that account at the beginning of the video, but some parts of this story need to be looked at a little more carefully.
One of them is the battle against a group of warrior women. Alright, that encounter probably happened and ended with Carvajal losing an eye to an arrow. The problem is that he described these women as “Amazons”.
But weren’t the Amazons Greek mythology warriors? What are they doing in South America in the 16th century? Something that must be taken into account is that the accounts of the first Europeans in the Americas were written under an European view, of course.
The documents that describe this new world are full of ideas, superstitions, and European interests. Since 16th-century Europeans loved the myths of Ancient Greece, Carvajal referred to these warrior women who lived in the forest as Amazons. This became so famous that his account came to be called “The Account of the Discovery of the River Amazon” and ended up naming the river where the story takes place.
That's right, the Amazon River got the name we use today after a Spanish friar swore he got into a fight with Greek mythological warriors in the middle of the jungle. But what draws historians' attention is that Carvajal’s account shows a hell of a lot of people living on the banks of the Amazon! The villages were as big as cities and even had districts.
One of them stretched for 12 kilometers along the riverbank. Some even had docks. This super-populated Amazon is present throughout the friar’s account, and nowadays, archaeological evidence shows that, in this regard, Carvajal’s texts were far from fantasy or European superstitions.
He wrote about an Amazon rainforest full of people, because that’s probably what he actually found. Near the mouth of the Tapajós River, for example, Carvajal found a huge population of warriors who had many allies and even dominated neighboring villages. That brings us to 1661, when Father João Bettendorf traveled to this same region of the Tapajós River, finding a very populous village.
He founded a Jesuit mission at this location and with that, the Tapajós village grew even more. Today, that village is Santarém, one of the largest cities in Pará. By the way, shouldn’t that make Santarém the oldest city in Brazil?
Officially, the first city in Brazil is São Vicente, founded in 1532, in São Paulo. But what if instead of looking at the year of foundation, we think in terms of continuous human occupation, that is, places that were already inhabited? Santarém emerged in 1661, but in a huge village that existed there long before Europeans ever thought of coming to the Americas.
But let’s talk about the Amazon as a whole. If it had that many people, where did that idea of a forest hostile to humans and inhabited only by plants and animals come from? In 1711, the Portuguese government prohibited the entry of foreigners into Brazil without authorization.
With that, expeditions in the Amazon pretty much came to a halt. With the exception of accounts from religious missions and documents from the colonial administration. That only changes in 1808, when the Portuguese royal family comes to live in Rio de Janeiro and opens Brazil’s ports to friendly nations, allowing the entry of foreigners.
Thus, expeditions in the Amazon resume once again. But instead of seeking riches, these new expeditions include scientists exploring the region to catalog plants and animals. And these scientists find the Amazon to be very different from what was seen at the beginning of colonization.
It’s a dense forest and practically untouched by humans, except for small, isolated villages in the forest. So we have two Amazons. One at the beginning of European colonization, which was full of Indigenous people, and another from the 19th century on, which was practically empty.
What could have happened in that halt to change the human geography of the Amazon like that? The answer is obviously guns, punches, and bombs. The conflicts between Indigenous peoples and the Portuguese often ended with entire villages being wiped out.
Sometimes the result would be crowds of Indigenous people abandoning their homes to hide deep within the forest, in locations farther from the major rivers. Another very important factor was the microorganisms brought by the Europeans. Just like what happened with other peoples in the Americas, the native populations had no antibodies to fight off common European diseases and were devastated by epidemics of flu, measles, and smallpox.
The brutal reduction of the Indigenous population was so massive that it is considered one of the causes of the so-called Little Ice Age, which lowered temperatures in some parts of the planet during that time. This climate phenomenon was caused by the reduction in global population. It is believed to have begun in the 13th century, with the millions of deaths caused by the expansion of the Mongol Empire in Asia.
Then it was Europe’s turn, devastated by the Plague in the 14th century. Starting in the 16th century, the Americas enter the equation, with many Indigenous deaths. The result is that this reduction in human activity and, in the case of the Amazon, the increase in the number of trees taking over the abandoned villages caused the Earth’s temperature to drop slightly.
But let’s keep our focus on the Amazon. The thing is that 19th-century scientists found a dense and uninhabited forest. They didn’t see signs of abandoned villages simply because the vegetation had already completely taken over those spaces.
So, they concluded that those 16th-century accounts of a densely populated forest were the kind of fantasy typical of the end of the Middle Ages. Think about it, Carvajal even described Greek warrior women in the forest. So it must have all been made up, right?
And it was this image of an Amazon without people that was spread and endured to this day. A FOREST FULL OF LEGENDS AND MYTHS Let’s be honest? It’s easy to understand why 18th- and 19th-century naturalists thought that reports of a people-filled Amazon were just fantasy.
Because look, the number of legends about the Amazon is practically a separate chapter in the forest’s history. And many of these myths arose from European superstitions. Just so you know, at the start of the 16th century, Europeans believed that gold grew under the influence of the sun.
So they were always seeking out the warmest regions of the planet. After all, if it's hot there, it's because the sun is shining. "If the sun is shining, there must be gold!
" This includes, of course, South America, with several legends about cities covered in riches. One of the most famous was El Dorado, which was said to be a city built of solid gold. This story seduced many of the first Europeans who set foot in South America, especially after they heard about the Muisca people, who lived in the Andes, where Colombia is today.
The legend says that the Muisca who became leader of his people had his body covered in gold dust. Then he would make an offering by throwing this gold and emeralds into a sacred lagoon. Now imagine telling this story to a guy who thinks gold grows because of the sun?
The guy would go nuts! So when they discovered some silver mines in Peru, in 1545, many explorers started venturing into the forest sure that finding El Dorado was just a matter of time. One of those who believed this was the Spaniard Lope de Aguirre, a rather controversial figure of that time.
In 1561, Aguirre was part of an expedition led by Pedro de Ursúa, who was searching for El Dorado in the Peruvian region. However, the expedition did not go as planned. After internal disputes, Aguirre assassinates Ursúa and takes control of the expedition, going in search of El Dorado on his own.
But, along the way, he rebels against the Spanish crown, declaring himself Prince of Peru and Chile. This causes conflicts with the colonial forces, which only end with Aguirre’s death. One interesting thing is that Aguirre called himself “The Wrath of God” and “The Prince of Freedom”, but the other Spaniards preferred to call him “El Loco”, for reasons that seem obvious.
These legends about the Amazon weren’t exclusive to those first Europeans who set foot here because time passed and new myths emerged. But, if in the 16th century these stories revolved around riches, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, they took on a more scientific tone. In this period, scientific societies were spreading across Europe, funding expeditions around the world.
And after an archaeologist from the United States found the ruins of the Incan city of Machu Picchu, in 1911, several expeditions were launched in search of lost cities in South America. One of these stories centers on one of the biggest mysteries of the early 20th century, when an English explorer disappeared in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. And not just any explorer, but the one considered the real-life Indiana Jones who vanished without a trace.
This story begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of Manuscript 512. This document recounts the supposed discovery of a lost city in the interior of Bahia by some bandeirantes, which supposedly happened decades earlier, in 1753. Already in the 20th century, the manuscript caught the attention of English adventurer Percy Fawcett.
Colonel Fawcett is an experienced explorer and knows South America well. His first trip to the Amazon takes place in 1906, when he spends eighteen months in the forest, mapping the border between Brazil and Bolivia. According to the colonel's research, this lost city would really be located in the interior of Brazil, but in the region of Mato Grosso, in the Xingu River basin, which at the time was still very little known by non-Indigenous people.
Thus, in 1920, he sets out in search of the Lost City of Z, which is how he refers to the place. But the adventure is unsuccessful. In 1925, he leads a new expedition.
The problem is that Colonel Fawcett doesn't want anyone to steal his discovery, so, the route he plans to take through the forest is kept secret. On May 29, the colonel sends a letter to his wife informing her that he is camped in the forest and about to enter unexplored territory. This is the last news the world hears from the famous Colonel Fawcett, who completely disappears in the Amazon rainforest.
Several expeditions try to find him, but his fate remains a mystery to this day. One interesting thing is that Colonel Fawcett did not believe that the city of Z had been built by the peoples of the region, but by foreigners such as ancient Greeks or Phoenicians, who would have sailed to the Amazon. In fact, this says a lot about the European perspective of that time.
To them, it was unthinkable that the Indigenous peoples they saw as savage and primitive could build anything, let alone a city. It's like the pyramids of Egypt. Many people are convinced they were built by aliens because they refuse to believe that a people outside Europe could be capable of building such grand monuments.
In fact, aliens are central figures in a modern legend about the Amazon. I'm talking about Ratanabá, a conspiracy theory about a wealthy and super advanced city that was supposedly founded by extraterrestrials 450 million years ago. Yes, that's right.
Ratanabá would be older than the dinosaurs themselves. And the fun part is, many people swear this city would be the size of Greater São Paulo, and yet, no one has ever seen anything in the forest. But seriously?
Not even those 16th-century Europeans who thought gold sprang from the sun would believe in something like that. These myths and conspiracy theories are curious and even funny. But do you know the reason for showing all these myths to you?
So you can see that we don't need any myths, because we're lucky to live in a time when real lost cities are being found in the Amazon. But why did it take so long for this to happen? Let’s do some math real quick.
The Amazon is nearly seven million square kilometers. It’s so big that if it were a nation, it would be the seventh largest country on Earth. And much of that territory is covered by forests.
If you were an archaeologist searching for traces of ancient peoples in this giant region, where would you start digging? That’s exactly the problem archaeologists face and they have to walk through huge areas of the forest searching for signs of ancient human settlements. It’s a very slow and expensive process.
Not to mention that finding ruins in the Amazon is quite complicated. First, because, as I mentioned earlier, the forest quickly took over the spaces that Indigenous peoples were forced to abandon. Second, the region's high heat and humidity accelerate the deterioration of these remains, especially the organic ones.
Now, for archaeology in the Amazon to be difficult doesn’t mean that we’ve never discovered anything there. The region has thousands of archaeological sites and tools, ceramic pieces, rock art, and even bones found in these places tell us a lot about the history of the region. For example, we know that the first signs of human presence in the Amazon date back 13,000 years and cave drawings show that these people may have coexisted with huge animals that are now extinct, such as mastodons and giant sloths.
Even more important is knowing that the people from this first phase of Amazonian history, which lasted until eight thousand years ago, already knew plant cultivation processes. We also know that, around seven thousand years ago, the first Amazonian shell mounds appeared. If you look at a shell mound, you'll think it's a hill.
But it's a legacy from some of the ancient peoples of the Amazon. Shell mounds are mounds formed of earth, shells, and food remains. They can reach up to six meters high and one hundred meters in diameter and be used as dwellings.
But the presence of human bones indicates that some could be cemeteries. These constructions aren’t exclusive to the Amazon. There are shell mounds across much of the Brazilian coast and even in Africa.
It was also about seven thousand years ago that ceramic production began in the Amazon and this already dismisses the idea that only the Incas, Mayans, and Aztecs created innovations in the Americas. When we think about past civilizations, we must keep in mind that ceramics are a very important advancement. As ceramic pieces can be placed directly over fire, this technology makes food preparation easier.
Moreover, ceramics can also be used for transporting and storing products, especially liquids. Not to mention that many ancient peoples produced ceramics with symbolic value, that is, religious and artistic pieces. And in the Americas, this is an innovation that begins with the native people who built the Taperinha shell mound, in the Santarém region.
As far as archaeological evidence shows us, these people were the first to make ceramics in the entire American continent. As I said, archaeological research in the Amazon is expensive and time-consuming, but even so, we’ve already learned a lot about the region and as researchers gain access to new technologies, new discoveries are made. By the way, did you know you have access to a tool widely used by archaeologists?
I'm talking about Google Earth. Many archaeologists use this tool to study images of the Amazon and, when they find something that might indicate human traces, they go to the site to check in person. Google Earth was essential in one of the most impressive discoveries in the Amazon: the geoglyphs.
That’s the name of those famous lines carved into the ground in the shape of geometric figures and which, in the case of the Amazon, were located in Rondônia, in the southern part of the state of Amazonas, but mainly in Acre. Some Amazon geoglyphs possibly began to be made around 3,000 years ago, and can exceed ten meters in width. But, contrary to what some people say out there, these circles and squares are not signals for extraterrestrials.
The use of Amazon geoglyphs is not yet 100% known, but archaeologists believe they may have been used to mark cultivation areas or ceremonial sites. Around 1,000 geoglyph sites have already been discovered, but this happened in a bitter way, because many of these places were found because of deforestation. With fewer and fewer trees, it becomes easier to see these geometric shapes through Google Earth.
The problem is that deforestation also helps to destroy the geoglyphs. Now, the technology that truly revolutionized research in the Amazon is LiDAR. LiDAR stands for <i>Light Detection And Ranging</i>, which in Portuguese would be something like "detecção e variação de luz".
It works more or less like this: a remote sensor is placed on a plane or drone. As this aircraft flies over the forest the sensor emits laser beams that scan the ground, identifying everything and any unevenness in the ground, up or down. This way, it creates a three-dimensional and 100% accurate model of the area.
So LiDAR captures everything, from small mounds of earth to ditches dug in the forest. And the coolest thing is that the sensor can map the ground in areas completely covered by trees. This way, researchers can identify archaeological sites that might never have been found otherwise.
An important discovery that happened with LiDAR was in the part of the Amazon that lies in Bolivia. This place was home to the Casarabe culture between the years 500 and 1400. In other words, these guys disappeared shortly before the Europeans arrived in the Americas.
LiDAR revealed two gigantic archaeological sites in this area, called Cotoca and Landívar. Archaeologists believe that these two sites, which feature huge earthen platforms, were the main urban centers of this network of settlements of the Casarabe culture. Another discovery in the Upano River Valley, in Ecuador, is even more impressive.
The archaeologists researching this site had already found excavated ditches in the ground and mounds of earth in square or rectangular shapes. With LiDAR, it was possible to see the richness of these remnants much more clearly. There are several urban centers connected by roads that extend up to ten kilometers and each city has housing, irrigated fields, terraces, and plazas.
In fact, some of these plazas, probably used for rituals, form complexes with areas comparable to those of the Egyptian pyramids. But can we really call those "cities"? Where are the stone blocks and the ruins of buildings?
Yes, we can call them cities. Of course, when we think of lost cities, we imagine stone walls, temple ruins, and Indiana Jones or Lara Croft running through them, right? But in the case of the Amazon, that’s not quite how it goes, especially because stone blocks are found in only a few places in the region.
The cities were built with earth, which is the raw material available in the forest. This is not exclusive to the Amazon. In North America, there’s Cahokia, built by peoples from the Mississippi River region.
It looks like earth mounds, right? But they are the ruins of a city that, about a thousand years ago, was more populous than Paris at the time. And the ruins of Uruk in Iraq, show that the houses of one of the planet’s first great cities were made with mud bricks, after all, that was the local resource.
So, the fact that Amazonian cities weren’t made of stone has nothing to do with these peoples being more or less developed than other civilizations. These are cities that were built by Indigenous peoples who lived in complex societies, and some of them had advancements that would leave the Aztecs or the Egyptians speechless. Just think about Marajó Island.
LIVING IN THE LOST CITIES OF THE AMAZON Archaeologists have been studying the ancient civilizations of Marajó Island, in Pará, for over a century. And what is known is that, around 1500 B. C.
, the island already had small villages, but around the year 400 things started to change in some parts of Marajó. It was during this time that the "tesos" began to emerge — large earthen platforms built by Indigenous people. There are various types of tesos, from small to gigantic ones, and archaeologists believe that the function of each teso could be defined by its size.
And it’s the Marajoara ceramics that tell us that. A striking characteristic of the population of Marajó is its ceramics. It’s one of the most beautiful in the Americas, full of painted elements and modeled ones symbolizing life and death.
Another highlight are vases with stylized drawings, showing human figures with snakes and scorpions in place of eyes and arms. Ceramic remains have been found in all tesos, but the ceramics from the smaller tesos seem to have domestic use, so these were probably used as dwellings. In the larger ones, however, more complex ceramics were found, such as funerary urns.
This leads us to believe that these tesos with more than ten meters in height were ceremonial spaces. Most impressive is that next to each teso there were excavated areas from which the earth used in their construction was taken. But these weren’t just simple holes, they were actually a hydraulic control system!
It is believed that these excavated areas formed a system of canals and dams that served both to retain water during droughts and to prevent flooding during rainy seasons. This hydraulic system also had artificial lakes used for fish and turtle farming. Yes, many years before the Europeans set foot here, the Marajoaras already knew the importance of dealing with climate variations.
And this was done in a way totally integrated with the environment. By the way, this sustainable relationship between these Amazonian cities and the Amazon itself was in the DNA of all the region's civilizations. If you want to understand how these cities were, just look at the Upper Xingu.
Archaeological evidence indicates that occupation of the Xingu begins around the year 800, in villages with a circular layout. The foundation of these settlements is large houses used in a communal way. They are located around a central square, where rituals and the burial of the dead are held.
In the square, there is also another building called the House of Men, a meeting place used for gatherings and community decisions. If you leave the village, you’ll find Indigenous people working in gardens and orchards or fishing in rivers and lakes. You’ll also see people working on building roads and new houses or taking care of the organic waste produced in the village.
I’ll talk more later about these orchards and the organic waste. For now, it’s important to understand that these villages kept multiplying until, around the year 1400, the Xingu landscape was completely filled with settlements like this one. Some villages are fortified, possibly surrounded by wooden palisades or ditches dug in the ground.
And all of them, even the smaller ones, are bigger and more populous than the villages that exist today in the Xingu. Many are connected by roads and paths that form a kind of road system in the forest. The result of all this planning is huge communities, with several smaller villages surrounding a larger settlement called a "Plaza-city", which functions as a political center.
One characteristic of life in these communities is the trade system. Each people of the Upper Xingu is specialized in a particular product. So, exchanges involving ceramics, bows and arrows, or body ornaments were common and that still happens today among the peoples who live in the region.
A famous example of a community is Kuhikugu. Created by ancient Xingu peoples, possibly ancestors of the Kuikuro Indigenous people, Kuhikugu is the largest network of settlements ever found in the region, with around twenty villages and an area of approximately 250km². At its peak, Kuhikugu housed 50,000 Indigenous people who lived among complex constructions, like trenches, bridges, and fortifications, and much of the sustenance for these thousands of people came from large orchards and fields used to grow manioc and corn, as well as dams for fish farming.
The abundance and variety of food is directly linked to the Indigenous people's quality of life. In fact, we can make a comparison with the European cities that, with their walls and imposing castles, were seen as the most advanced of that time. But let’s not forget we’re talking about the European Middle Ages.
So the lack of resources and hygiene meant Europeans lived with hunger and disease all the time. But in the Amazon, things were different. Skeletons found by archaeologists show that the Indigenous people were extremely healthy and ate very well.
Bone analyses from archaeological sites in the Amazon indicate that the Indigenous diet was rich and very well-balanced. Besides that, the condition of their dental arches shows that even their oral health was better than that of Europeans of the time. ALRIGHT, BUT HOW ABOUT THE PYRAMIDS?
The cities of the Upper Xingu are a great example of what life was like for these people in the Amazon’s past. Of course, customs varied from group to group, but like I said, one feature was present in almost all of these civilizations: sustainability. That idea so highly valued nowadays was already the norm for the Amazonian peoples centuries ago, who created a kind of green urbanism.
The residential areas of the villages were directly connected to agricultural zones, and everything was perfectly integrated with the forest around the settlement. That doesn’t mean these ancient cities didn’t interfere with the forest. They absolutely did.
The point is that the interference was harmonious. The forest provided benefits to the city, and in return, the city benefited the forest. It was a partnership between people and the environment.
And one of the outcomes of that partnership is none other than the Amazon we know today. That’s right. The forest, which is one of the greatest treasures on Earth, only exists because Indigenous peoples created it.
“Hold up, Castanhari. The Amazon already existed, man! ” “You’re not gonna tell me that used to be a desert and the Indigenous folks just went around planting trees and throwing up bushes everywhere”.
These civilizations didn’t literally build the forest, but we now know for sure that their interference in the environment completely shaped the Amazon rainforest. And we have plenty of evidence for that. The first example is in the Amazon’s soil.
If you dig in the Amazon rainforest, you’ll notice that the soil is yellowish, kind of orange. But there are areas where the soil is darker. This is called "dark earth", and it covers at least 3% of the Amazon basin and is seen as a kind of treasure by farmers, because it’s extremely fertile.
For a long time, scientists thought this soil was created by volcanic ash from the Andes or was connected to ancient lakes in the Amazon. Today we know that the dark earth was created by Indigenous peoples. Do you recall the circular villages, like those of the Xingu peoples?
When archaeologists began studying those settlements, they noticed that the soil around those villages was dark earth. That wasn’t a coincidence. Dark earth forms from the accumulation of waste and organic matter produced by Indigenous peoples.
That's right, the organic waste created in villages was turned into fertilizer, in a process similar to composting, which is becoming increasingly popular today because it's 100% eco-friendly. The fact that many archaeological sites are on dark earth is because this soil is a direct result of the actions of the Indigenous people who lived in those places, and it’s something that has been going on for a very long time. The Madeira River region has areas of dark earth that are 7,000 years old, and the creation of this soil by ancient peoples gave rise to a cycle.
The Indigenous people lived in these places to enjoy the benefits of dark earth, and in return, helped create more dark earth in the forest. It was a win-win relationship and it's a relationship that lives on. Modern villages continue to create areas with this dark, very fertile soil throughout the forest.
This is just one example of how the actions of Indigenous peoples helped shape the Amazon rainforest. Another piece of evidence is in the trees themselves, or rather, in the domestication of trees! The domestication of trees or other types of plants happens when humans start managing a plant species, interfering more and more with its characteristics.
This can be done, for example, so the plant can adapt to a new environment or produce more fruit. It’s a slow process that can alter a plant’s external features or even its genetic structure, sometimes to the point of creating a new species. The Amazon is one of the largest centers for the domestication of plants and trees in the world.
There are about 80 species that went through some form of domestication. Many of them are very well-known: peanuts, pineapple, cassava, sweet potato, cacao, guaraná— and some species were never domesticated, but still have always been managed by local peoples, like Brazil nuts and açaí. That's right!
If you're one of those people who loves to dive into an açaí after your workout, you can thank the Indigenous peoples. But the truth is, it's no exaggeration to say that this process carried out by these peoples greatly altered the Amazon rainforest. This becomes clear when we look at the presence of hyperdominance of certain trees in the Amazon.
The Amazon has about 16,000 different species of trees, and a study conducted by researchers from 120 international organizations showed that, of these 16,000 species, 227 are hyperdominant. And what does it mean to be hyperdominant? It's easy to understand.
Just look at the total number of trees in the forest and realize which ones dominate the Amazon. The forest has nearly 400 billion trees, and half of them, that is, about 200 billion trees, are from those 227 species. But wasn’t the forest always like this?
Well, let’s take a closer look at those 227 species of trees that dominate the Amazon. Some of them are species that were domesticated by Indigenous peoples, and the number of those domesticated trees is about five times higher than that of other hyperdominant species that weren’t domesticated. But this mystery is solved once we realize that this hyperdominance of domesticated trees is much greater near the places where people used to live.
So we can say with certainty that the hyperdominance of domesticated trees is a direct result of Indigenous actions. Indigenous peoples spread these trees throughout the Amazon and the most important thing is that it wasn’t done aggressively, because the trees are native and integrate naturally into the environment. Do you remember about the Europeans from the 19th century, who thought the Amazon was virgin forest?
These people didn’t realize that, in fact, parts of the forest are huge orchards. In other words, they’re places full of fruit trees that didn’t grow there by chance. But these orchards don’t only have fruit trees, because the relationship Indigenous peoples have with Amazon vegetation goes far beyond knowing which fruits or roots are edible or which plants are used to treat diseases.
We’re talking about knowledge worthy of the greatest alchemists on the planet, with species being used in ways that almost seem like magic. One example is the use of capitiú. To this day, Indigenous and traditional communities manage this tree, because its leaves, when they fall to the ground and begin to rot, emit a smell that repels flies that lay eggs in fruits like guava.
Another example is the poison extracted from vines, like timbó. When placed in water, this substance stuns the fish and makes them easier to catch. That’s why many Indigenous peoples use this poison to help with fishing.
But, of course, always in a controlled way. So, all these gardens and orchards full of plants with different purposes, including trees used for building houses or making tools, didn’t just appear in the forest. They were created or managed by Indigenous peoples.
Even when cutting down trees to build houses and settlements, the ancient peoples of the Amazon didn’t tear down the whole forest to create their cities. It was quite the opposite. They made the number of trees around the cities increase and that spread out, changing the face of the forest.
The Amazon is a managed forest shaped by the Indigenous peoples who lived in the region. It is an agroforest. This brings us back to the beginning of the video, when I talked about the pyramids of the Amazon.
Aren’t pyramids the grandest achievements of some ancient civilizations? By that logic, the Amazon is also a monument. After all, it is the greatest achievement of the peoples who lived in this region.
And it’s a unique monument, different from all others built in the world. The Amazon wasn’t designed or built with stones and bricks, but this biome can’t be seen as something that formed on its own. The Amazon we know today only exists because of Indigenous peoples.
They were the builders and engineers of this monument, and together with nature, they transformed the forest and to this day help preserve it. The Egyptians built the largest pyramids in the world. The Chinese built the greatest wall in history.
And the peoples of the Amazon have created the largest tropical forest on the planet. And like every monument, the Amazon is a legacy. It’s part of your history.
It’s part of the history of all Brazilians. And now we need to ask: If everything we’ve seen in this video happened before 1500, why do we only learn Brazilian history starting from 1500? The problem is that we were taught to see history through an European lens, and for Europeans, everything that happened in Brazil before Portuguese colonization is seen as curiosities with little importance.
That’s why we’re taught that our country’s history really begins in 1500, with the arrival of the Europeans. But that view no longer fits here. Science has already shown that it’s outdated.
We’re discovering that the Brazil that existed before Brazil was far grander than what is taught in school. Of course, we still have much to learn about Indigenous peoples, but we already know their journey is just as admirable as other famous civilizations from antiquity. Just think about the ingenuity of the peoples of the Amazon who built complex and fully sustainable cities centuries before that concept even existed.
Or the scientific knowledge of Indigenous peoples, which was essential in the creation of the largest agroforest on the planet. This grand past stretches across every region of the country and remains alive. From farming techniques to our vocabulary, traditional dishes, and medicines, the knowledge of Indigenous peoples has endured for centuries and is still present in the daily lives of practically every Brazilian.
The history of a country is, above all, the history of the people who built that country. So, the history of Brazil doesn’t begin in 1500 with the Portuguese landing here. It starts long before that, with the millions of Indigenous peoples who lived here.
The true founders of Brazil, they were the ones who began shaping the land where we live today, and with their customs and knowledge, helped create what is one of our greatest treasures: The culture of the Brazilian people. Produced in partnership with Alana, this episode was a co-production between Canal Nostalgia and Maria Farinha Filmes, with official support from YouTube.
