hey 42 here there's something strange going on in the Amazon rainforest or rather I should say unusual markings in the soil like these circles and this Square suggest that something strange already happened in the Amazon a long long time ago for all of modern civilization Humanity has shared a common belief a belief born from a lack of evidence and downright common sense that the Amazon rainforest has never been settled by humans the Amazon is a staggering 2.7 million square miles covering eight countries across South America not only is it gargantuan in size it's also really
dense the vegetation here is so thick that Nicki Minaj should write a song about it and it also packs more poison than little fingers Pantry Heavy Hitters such as bullet tants poison dart frogs and the Brazilian wandering spider infest this Lush landscape all told it's a pretty horrible place to call home and it's truly one of the most inhospitable places on planet Earth so I think we can forgive the fact that since European colonization in the 15th century Western Scholars have been writing that this pristine Wilderness has never been inhabited by humans apart from sporadic
tribes of hunter gatherers there has never been a city or over llarge settlement built here because it simply wouldn't have been feasible or even possible but what if that assumption is wrong and not even a little bit wrong what if it turns out that there were millions of people living in the thick dense heart of the Amazon rainforest potentially over five million people what if it once hosted one of the largest most cohesive and well-organized settlements in human history now I work long hours to put these videos together and truthfully sometimes I forget to eat
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a big thanks to hu for sponsoring this video in the past few years new technology has Unearthed strange Clues dotted around the Amazon and beneath its soil that points to exactly that we'll explore all of these strange clues in just a moment but first it's important to understand the biggest reason why a large human civilization in the Amazon is such a hard truth pill to swallow and why it stretches all working knowledge of anthropology if you watched my recent video on the Aztec you'll be well aware that this part of the world has played host
to some of the most remarkable and well-organized premodern civilizations in human history namely the Aztec Inca and mayor the Aztec Inca and mayor built cities such as Cusco and Tenochtitlan with up to 400,000 inhabitants adorned with gilded palaces Grand temples and pyramids they had aqueducts sewers and even fountains but these civilizations were only able to grow to such a size and achieve all this technological progress because of one common discovery that they all unlocked farming it's been a long-established theory that every race and cultural group in human history has had to develop and adopt large-scale
agriculture as a prerequisite skill in order to transition from a nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyle into a permanent settlement the reasoning is pretty logical farming yields more food per square acre than hunting and foraging therefore Den settlements can only Survive by using farming as their main food source the incor ruling the Andes Mountains region had to contend with steep rugged terrain so they developed a novel agricultural method of Terrace farming they built thin slivers of stepped Fields into the slopes of the mountains the azc did something similarly out of the box these floating gardens were called
chinampas due to the water below they were highly fertile and were able to yield multiple crops each year but as we're about to discover the denisons of the Amazon rainforest may have found a way to break the mold of human progress and they might have grown into a large scale organized human civilization of millions of people by somehow bypassing the whole the development of Agriculture step all together something that until very recently anthropologists didn't think was possible and to discover how they did it we first need to travel back to 1542 when the first European
explorer ventured Into the Heart of the Amazon Rain Forest by sailing the length of the mighty Amazon River Francisco de Arana was a Spanish explorer who was actually searching for a mysterious city of gold in the Andes mountains with fellow conquistadors but when the Expedition ran out of food he set off to find some more and eventually chanced upon the mouth of the Amazon River he was in a boat with a frer Gaspar Daval who documented the entire thing and about 50 other men after sailing along the Amazon for a while they realized a CO
was too strong to turn back and so they just soldiered on with no idea where the river leads or how long it is basically they explored the entire thing by accident all 4,000 miles of it it took them a Year by the way all along the banks of the river aralan witnessed large complex human settlements complete with roads and buildings and Technologies not too dissimilar to what they knew back in Spain technologies that the Spanish believed these so-called Savages couldn't have possibly developed themselves without European influence in his diary he wrote there was one town
that stretched for 15 miles without any space from House to house which was a marvelous thing to behold the land is as fertile and as normal in appearance as our Spain remember that the Amazon rainforest is remote smothering thick with vegetation and inhospitable to human life yet in 1542 Arana was describing a city that was 15 mil long by the way that's the WID of pretty much all of present day Central London from chisik to ilford and right in the heart of the Amazon rainforest such a thought challenges everything we thought we knew about the
development of modern human civilizations the trouble was nobody believed him and there's a good reason for that because nobody well no Westerner laid eyes on these marvelous and improbable cities ever again after ARA's Mission it was quite a while until Europeans mounted another large scale exploration of the Amazon almost 200 years in in fact when Spanish Portuguese and other nations returned to the Amazon in the late 17th century and when they did what they found along the banks of the river was nothing the Amazon was deserted whatever whoever had been there before was gone there
were no London siiz cities no roads no buildings at all no signs that humans had ever settled this remote part of the world and that has been the story told ever ever since AR Alana's Tales of mega cities in the jungle were quietly consigned to a few passages in a history book for over 500 years the world has fooled itself into thinking that the Amazon rainforest was never settled by humans other than a few disperate tribes small in their numbers but what if there is an alternate reality what if Arana was telling the truth and
there is a logical explanation for why in 1542 these mega cities could have existed then only 100 to 200 years later they didn't well it just so happens that there is such an explanation when Spanish conquistadors arrived in the 16th century they brought with them a pestilence a pestilence that would change the history of the Americas I'm sure you know what I'm talking about small pox smallpox decimated the Inca and Aztec populations in the early to mid 16th century but it would take another Century before it spread south and penetrated deep into the interior of
the continent so it stands to reason that if there were hundreds of cities collectively filled with millions of people in the Amazon at the start of the 16th century by the end of the 17th century just under 200 years later small pox would have ravaged them potentially killing up to 90% of the population all of this is circumstantial no Europeans were about during this time to observe this Mass die off but what if it were true and what if these enormous Amazonian populations abandoned their grand jungle cities after small pox hit these were very superstitious
people and with so many of their friends and families dying from a mysterious illness they might have reached a conclusion that a deity was wreaking revenge for their sins encouraging them to abandon them entirely that could be why when other European explorers penetrated as deep as Arana did they found nothing but pristine Wilderness but wouldn't there at the very least have been buildings left behind some signs of human habitation well the most likely answer to that is no in a little under 200 years a civilization of potentially over a million people could have disappeared Without
a Trace and I'll tell you exactly why in just a moment but first let's Jump Ahead to the present day because new technology and scientific techniques have already filled in a lot of knowledge gaps about exactly what happened deep in the Amazon all those hundreds of years ago in 2019 researchers flew helicopters across hundreds of square miles of the Amazon they had lidar scanners attached to them that fired laser pulses down into the Earth the equipment on the helicopter then measured the time taken for each pulse to return to the sensor in doing so liar
can measure the Topography of an area with an accuracy of less than 10 cm when they looked at the resulting images it blew their minds they saw rectangular structures that looked like raised platforms pyramids reservoirs and long shapes that looked like causeways and canals a few Victorian explorers had ventured deep into the Amazon to try and find these mysterious cities spurred on by the same legends that Ariana had told upon his return but they never found anything and that's because these Grand structures aren't visible from the ground and even when we started to Fly Above
the Amazon we still had no idea that these features were there since the dense canopy and vegetation covers them but now liar is able to penetrate the vegetation to reveal all and they didn't just find one site of these features they found many and each one was interconnected to the others via long causeways and canals look at this image and tell me the Ring Road around it doesn't resemble a Ring Road from a modern-day City each interconnected city is less than an hour's walk from the next suggesting that what we're looking at here aren't just
an organized individual settlements that sporadically sprung up from small groups of people living together but quite the opposite this was a very large ordered multi-city civilization with some kind of hierarchical leadership and administrative system just look at this image from a research paper each triangle on this map is where liar has uncovered the site of an ancient Amazonian City and most likely there are many more yet to discover at the start of this video I said that no large ordered human civilization has developed without first adopting Mass agriculture here in lies a problem how could
the Amazon once have been home to such a civilization if they never had farming actually hold on a second how do we know they didn't have farming well two reasons firstly despite the Bounty of vegetation covering the thousands of square miles of the Amazon the soil quality here is really poor way below the standard that would be required to sustain Mass Agriculture and secondly to farm the Amazon you're going to have to cut down a few trees recently we've been cutting down vast waves of rainforest to make way for palm oil plantations and other crops
like bananas tea and coffee but whatever civilization lived in the Amazon pre Columbus they cleared almost none of it so what if there was another way for humans to live in large organized groups one that doesn't require farming well for a long time we thought this was impossible after all it's the only way Western Civilization has grown so quickly and became so dominant over the past Millennium but on the ground research and archaeological digs in these pre-colombian cities that the liar flagged up has given us a glimpse into what could have been an alternative evolutionary
path for humankind What If instead of farmers Homo sapiens became gardeners over 12,000 years ago the Amazon was home to megap for giant animals such as Gofers which were similar to elephants Ulus which are a variety of hooved animals and giant sloughs we can see these depicted in these paintings from 12,600 years ago which were discovered in Colombia look at the size of that creature compared to the humans along with the megap fora amazonians would have gorged on oversized fruits such as massive avocados and squash which grew throughout the Amazon at this time over the
next few thousand years however both the giant animals and giant fruits were driven to Extinction due to overc consumption following the proliferation of homo sapiens so then amazonians had to find food to support their growing numbers there were still fish in the rivers and smaller fruits on the trees but it wasn't enough to support larger population numbers it was precisely around this time that farming was first being developed in the Middle East and would soon take Europe by storm but in the Amazon they did something different something that broke the mold of human development they
began domesticating carefully chosen plants they would first create a small Mound up to a hectare in size and then plant shrubs that produce squash and casava as well as Brazil nut trees this differed from farming in two important ways firstly it wasn't a monoculture such as maze so the biodiversity and longevity of the ecosystem was maintained and secondly because these garden plots were communal it prevented Elite hierarchies from developing we only arrived at Kings and Queens in Europe because there needed to exist a hierarchical structure due to large scale farming who else is going to
enforce the ownership of who owns Which farm and who owns Which turn it but as lovely as all of this may have been many anthropologists believe that hierarchical structures are embedded deep within Homo Sapien DNA and So eventually this idilic socialist society of gardeners had to break and sure enough it did you see I've been telling you a small lie this entire video I've been suggesting that the pre-colombian societies that flourished in the Amazon and built these impressive cities did so without any farming but that's not entirely true we don't know when the population of
this area started to grow exponentially but it was probably about 2,500 years ago because that's when they started to modify the soil and yes began farming kind of sort of well let me explain like I mentioned the soil in the Amazon is about as nutritious as a carboard sandwich it's called oxisol it's highly acidic and leeched of nutrient but around 2,500 years ago the indigenous amazonians did something extraordinary they completely transformed soil they supercharge this nutrient pore soil by adding to it a cocktail of charcoal animal bones broken poery compost and other organic materials the
charcoal in particular was the secret Source it remains in the soil for thousands of years and it acts like a sponge holding onto nutrients and moisture that would otherwise wash away in the heavy rain s the result was a giant carbon sponge teeming with microbial life a Gardener's dream today we call this modified soil Tera praa Portuguese for black Earth with this new fertile soil they could begin to grow crops like maze beans squash and cassava right in the middle of the rainforest quicker and on a larger scale than ever before supporting large cities of
up to a 100,000 residents and Beyond but unlike large scale agriculture elsewhere they didn't need to clear vast tracks of forest instead they practiced A Primitive form of aggro Forestry turning the rainforest that's already there into a giant highly productive Garden they did clear some small areas but only where they built their grand structures such as temples and here's where things get really interesting the locations of these patches of Terra praa often coincide with the sights of the cities and structures revealed by liar with causeways and canals leading directly to these Terror Prater based Gardens
why then when later European explorers returned to the area in the late 17th century did they find no signs of human habitation or mega cities like franchisco de Arana did in 1542 well as previously discussed we strongly suspect that disease particularly small pox killed most of the population but that doesn't explain why they there were no visible ruins or great temples pyramids and houses well the most likely explanation is that archaeological digs tell us they built their cities almost entirely from wood why wood well high quality Stone wasn't readily available around these parts and even
if it was they didn't have the metal tools required to work it also have you seen the Amazon rainforest if you hadn't noticed there's quite a lot of wood after the people left the wooden structures simply rotted away in the humid climate even the earthw works became covered in thick vegetation blending seamlessly into the landscape by the time later explorers ventured Into the Heart of the Amazon there was nothing left to see Ariana's Tales of grand cities were dismissed as Fabrications the fever dreams of a man lost in the jungle yet here we are centuries
later uncovering evidence that suggests Ariana may have been telling the truth all along so then the Amazon once for to be an untouched Wilderness was in fact home to a sprawling network of interconnected cities sustained by an indigenous blend of gardening and Agro forestry these people didn't just survive in the rainforest they thrived developing sustainable practices that were thousands of years ahead of their time so what does this mean for our understanding of human history firstly it challenges the LGH held belief that intensive agriculture is a prerequisite for the development of large complex sociey yes
the amazonians did develop farming but it was of a slightly different variety by changing the soil into terraa it allowed them to transform the inhospitable rainforest into a fertile Garden without the need for widespread deforestation allowing them to build vast cities without altering the ecosystem on a massive scale something so far as we know they are unique in having done it also forces us to reconsider The Narrative of indigenous people as mere caretakers of untouched lands the amazonians were sophisticated Engineers city planners and agriculturists their city was as vibrant and complex as any in Europe
or Asia yet their legacy was swallowed by the jungle and almost forgotten by history today we are struggling with the plague of monoculture most of the world population survives on just a handful of crops leaving our food source is susceptible to disease and famine yet the solution to our very modern-day problem has already been solved by remote jungle denisons thousands of years ago the irony is palpable some recent estimates suggest that the pre-colombian Amazon could have been home to over 5 million inhabitants just think about how crazy that is we don't know when their population
apexed but it would be one to 2,000 years later when London reached a population of 1 million in 1801 and that really makes you think if we're just learning about all of this in the past decade how can we confidently say that such Grand settlements haven't been built that are older than even those in the Amazon ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia who knows what civilizations came before us the truth is our history of humanity is still incredibly spotty and we might have been building buildings making laws and fighting Wars for much much longer than any of
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