The Amazon Was Full of Cities. Why Did No One See Them? | The Turning Age | History Mysteries

The Turning Age | History Mysteries In 1925 the explorer Percy Fawcett walked into the Brazilian rainforest to find a lost city he called Z, and he was never seen again. The experts said the jungle had always been empty. They were wrong. The Amazon was full of towns, with roads, plazas, canals and whole networks of settlements. So why did no one see them? This is the story of how the world forgot them. In 1542 Friar Gaspar de Carvajal sailed down the river with Francisco de Orellana and described villages packed along the banks, and for four centuries he was called a liar. Disease spread along Indigenous trade routes and emptied the river before Europeans came back. Then the clues piled up: the black, fertile terra preta soil, the giant geometric earthworks of Acre exposed by cattle ranching, and the ditched towns of Kuhikugu in the Upper Xingu, close to where Fawcett vanished. Finally, lidar looked through the trees and mapped the Casarabe towns of Bolivia (2022) and the 2,500-year-old garden cities of Ecuador's Upano Valley (2024). They were built of earth, timber and thatch, not stone, and the forest grew back over them. Their descendants still live there, and they always knew. Chapters 0:00 The Last Letter 0:42 Everyone Said It Was a Fantasy 1:06 1542: Orellana 1:39 A Counterfeit Paradise 2:12 The Invisible Killer 2:43 Z 3:21 Clue 1: Dark Earth 3:58 Clue 2: The Geoglyphs 4:28 Clue 3: Kuhikugu 5:05 Built of the Forest 5:47 Lidar: Bolivia 6:22 Lidar: Ecuador 6:47 Why No One Saw Them Sources H. Prümers et al., "Lidar reveals pre-Hispanic low-density urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon", Nature 607 (2022): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04... S. Rostain et al., "Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon", Science 383 (2024): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi6317 M. J. Heckenberger et al., "Amazonia 1492: Pristine Forest or Cultural Parkland?", Science 301 (2003): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1086112 M. J. Heckenberger et al., "Pre-Columbian Urbanism, Anthropogenic Landscapes, and the Future of the Amazon", Science 321 (2008): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1159769 M. Pärssinen, D. Schaan, A. Ranzi, "Pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in the upper Purús", Antiquity 83 (2009) J. Watling et al., "Impact of pre-Columbian 'geoglyph' builders on Amazonian forests", PNAS 114 (2017): https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1614359114 Gaspar de Carvajal, account of Orellana's voyage (1542), in J. T. Medina (ed.), The Discovery of the Amazon (1934) Betty J. Meggers, Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise (1971) Percy H. Fawcett, Exploration Fawcett, ed. Brian Fawcett (1953) David Grann, The Lost City of Z (Doubleday, 2009) J. Lehmann et al. (eds.), Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin, Properties, Management (2003) C. Levis et al., "Persistent effects of pre-Columbian plant domestication on Amazonian forest composition", Science 355 (2017): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal0157 A. Koch et al., "Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492", Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2... The images and video in this video are AI-generated illustrations and reconstructions, not historical photographs or footage. The lidar visuals are illustrative, not the published survey data. Music "Lost Frontier" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... #LostCityOfZ #amazon #archaeology #percyfawcett #historymysteries