Is the Amazon hiding a Lost Civilization?

For nearly 200 years, even the idea that an advanced or sophisticated civilization could have emerged from within the heart of the Amazon was seen as completely impossible. They said that the stories told by the Spanish explorers of 15-mile-long cities inhabited by millions of people with huge stone walls and pyramids must have all been myths, fables that the Spaniards made up to continue funding their expeditions. But in May of 1925, the famous explorer Percy Fawcett set off into an almost entirely unexplored region of the Amazon along the Xingu River. He was warned about violent, cannibalistic tribes in this area, and he wrote a final letter to his wife from Dead Horse Camp telling her that it may be up to two years before she hears from him again. The next day, Percy set off into the jungle and disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. While Percy's expeditions drove over a hundred more ambitious explorers to follow in his footsteps through the Amazon, the majority of which also disappeared in this deep wilderness, his disappearance is largely seen as marking the end of the great Victorian explorers, some even calling him the last of the great explorers. Now when Percy disappeared, he was pretty much looked down on by the other aristocratic members of the Royal Geographic Society who thought that he'd spent his life's search in vain, and that finding an advanced or developed or sophisticated civilization in the heart of the Amazon seemed impossible to most explorers and archaeologists of his time. The Amazon was called by many of his contemporaries a counterfeit paradise, the green desert, or the green hell, a place seemingly teeming with life, but only the deadliest kind, not fit for sustaining any kind of significant human population, and especially not one built by these quote-unquote primitive and savage people. But these Victorian aristocrats were wrong. The stories that the Spanish and Portuguese explorers had told 400 years earlier of massive cities within the Amazon were not fables, it was all real. Amazonians did build massive civilizations, including a city with an estimated population of over 1 million people, that's the same size as ancient Rome. These Amazonian cities were complete with highway systems, step pyramids, raised plazas, sprawling geoglyphs, and astronomical observatories. And in today's video I'm going to share with you why I firmly believe that the Amazon is still hiding a lost civilization, or more likely, many different lost civilizations. If you're still having a cup of coffee or cracking open an energy drink first thing you wake up in the morning, you need to grow up. Because for the first 90 minutes that you're awake, your adenosine system isn't even active yet, which, long story short, means that caffeine is not as effective. 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You have hostile wildlife, piranhas, jaguars, anacondas, electric eels, bullet ants, leaf cutter ants. I'm reminded of a story of when Percy Fawcett was on one of his expeditions, and in the middle of the night, they heard a splash in the water, and they didn't hear anything coming after that. Now, typically, if you don't hear anybody calling for help, it's usually not a cause for concern, as the Amazon is filled with all kinds of creatures, from small crocodiles to large fish and sometimes even sharks. And so usually, if you hear a splash in the water, it's usually just some kind of wildlife falling in or jumping out of the water or something. But then they wake up the next morning, and they find that one of their crew members, the remains of his skeleton had washed ashore with only his boots remaining. So apparently, he had gone out to relieve himself in the middle of the night over the river, and he fell in, and the piranhas in the river had eaten him alive before he could even come back to the surface to yell for help. You have diseases and parasites, mosquitoes with malaria, leeches, bot flies, and quicksand. And don't even get me started on the candiru. Essentially, if you're in the Amazon, never, ever, ever use the restroom waist deep, because there is a small little critter about yay big and about this big around that can swim up your pipe, and it will enlodge itself, and it will never, ever leave. And so you're essentially left with two options. You allow your stomach to bloat and bloat and bloat until it fills up and you die from the inside, or you cut off the part that the candiru has lodged itself in. And there were actually explorers who were faced with this dilemma, all of which, as far as I know, nobody opted for the cutting off option. So they perished in the jungle. Another story that I'm reminded of is the reality of small coral snakes. Now, there's all kinds of super venomous snakes in the Amazon, but the coral snake can be especially dangerous because it's so small, but if you get bitten by it, that's the end. Teddy Roosevelt, while he was on his expedition through the Amazon in the early 1900s, one of the local Peruvian indigenous people that he was with, one of his guides, was collecting firewood for the camp at night, and beneath their logs was a curled up coral snake that bit him on the finger. And they had no option other than, Teddy Roosevelt describes this man going over to sit down by a tree and his other indigenous friends going and sitting over him and performing a mourning ceremony over him and crying over him, and they left him sitting underneath that tree to die. So the Amazon is extremely dangerous. And that's not even mentioning the extreme weather. Torrential rains can cause flash floods at night. The heat can be well over 90 degrees Fahrenheit with 100% humidity. This zaps your strength. And while I have not experienced this in the Amazon, I have experienced it in Guatemala. And let me tell you, it was the worst eight or nine days of my life. I was so sick. I was so tired. The Guatemalan jungle, the humidity just completely zaps all the hydration from your body. And getting water is already difficult. I can't imagine what it was like 100 years ago when you're stuck out in the middle of the Amazon and none of the fresh water is potable for you and all of it has to be cleaned or boiled before you can consume it. But I was so sick. And the mosquitoes alone had torn up my arms. It's probably impossible to see on camera, but my arms are completely scarred with mosquito bites from Guatemala and the Peruvian Amazon when I went to go see Machu Picchu. I was completely zapped of energy and there's absolutely no way that I could have done an all day long expedition for months on end in the condition that I was in. I was actually so sick that I was about 75% deaf in both ears. It was quite alarming. Then you have navigation difficulties. Compasses spin in the wrong direction when standing over magnetic deposits in the ground. And it's so far out in the wilderness that most GPSs probably aren't reliable. And most maps for the regions that you're wanting to explore are outdated or are no longer accurate as the landscape can change in just a few years in such a tumultuous environment. And then you have limited resources. Food and water is hard to come by. Like I was saying a moment ago, the water is not potable. So all of it has to be filtered, cleaned or boiled before it can be consumed. And it's just really difficult. Essentially impossible to filter or purify enough water to realistically sustain yourself without getting sick in some awful way. And then acquiring food is difficult because most of the plants in the Amazon have adapted in this vicious environment and are not just orange trees and apple trees for you to go pick and eat. And then you have small game, which is plentiful in the Amazon. But everything in the Amazon, again, has adapted to this extremely dangerous and deadly environment. So all of the animal life, the small game that's there is completely stealthy and you will never see them before they see you, which makes killing and hunting extremely difficult. And finally, the most deadly thing in the Amazon, the very last thing you'd ever want to come across is another person that you didn't expect to see in the Amazon. You have illegal loggers. You have drug traffickers. You have semi-contacted or even worse, completely uncontacted tribes that still inhabit the Amazon today. And I can tell you all of those groups of people are not very kind to unwanted eyes and outsiders walking onto their territory. And many of these reasons are factors for why for the last 200 years, most experts have believed that the concept of a highly developed, advanced, sophisticated civilization growing from out of the Amazon was just basically impossible. But what were these old stories that Percy had believed about ancient civilizations somewhere in the unreached parts of the Amazon? And what were the details that he and many other late explorers found so compelling? Now, history books often cite Francisco de Oriana as being the first European to discover the mouth of the Amazon River, but this isn't true. Like so many figures throughout history, Vicente Yanez Pinzon has slipped through the cracks of time and most people have never even heard his name. But in the year 1500, 40 years before Oriana would be credited with the discovery of the mouth of the Amazon, Pinzon was already at the mouth of the Amazon River and had already seen the evidence of civilization along its banks. No direct quotes from his log survive today, but later Spanish chroniclers tell us that he observed the Amazonians, but they did not have the resources for an extended expedition on foot or deep into the Amazon River. But of course, we have Francisco de Oriana's legendary journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic, navigating the entire length of the Amazon in 1541. But it isn't from Oriana directly that we hear of what the men on the expedition saw, but rather from a Dominican friar named Gaspar de Carvajal, who kept a record of the expedition. In his journals, he says, We came upon a very large settlement where there were many people and they came out to meet us with their bows and arrows ready for war. Riverside tribes farmed turtles and produced luxurious goods for unknown inland empires with great skulls in their crafts. We came upon a very large settlement where there were many people so numerous that they filled the banks of the river and their houses stretched far along the shore. The villages we saw were so great in number and size that they extended for leagues along the river with houses closely set and many inhabitants. We passed a town so large that it had more than 2,000 houses and the people came out in canoes numbering in the thousands to oppose us. The river was lined with settlements, some so populous that we marveled at their extent, with fields and orchards stretching far inland. We saw a city of such magnitude that its houses and streets seemed to rival those of Spain, with people in great numbers living in order and abundance. And for the next 100 years, more and more Europeans descended down into the Amazon River as a result of colonizing South America's Atlantic coast. They see more great cities with large buildings, houses, palaces, walls, and millions of people. But by the early 1700s, something very strange was happening. When expeditions were sent down the river, none of the explorers or merchants saw cities of any kind, only small temporary villages set up on the river's bank inhabited by skittish and sickly looking people. Before long, professional explorers and archaeologists would label the Amazon a quote-unquote counterfeit paradise and a green desert, completely lacking the resources needed to sustain the kind of civilization that the Spaniard explorers described seeing. Never again would any European claim having seen these large cities that the Spanish and Portuguese once spoke of. That is, except for a single document written by an unknown Portuguese explorer in 1753. The explorer describes following a path through the Brazilian Amazon which led to and past a waterfall and eventually to a large abandoned and gated city. There is a large square in the middle of the city with an obelisk of black stone, very notable, and in each corner of it is a spire in the style of the Romans. Over the principal portico of the street, there is an inscription of characters, which for not understanding, we could not copy. On one side of the said square, there is a temple or principal church with statues, and at its entrance, there is a figure of a man carved in stone with a crown on his head and a bow in his hand. The houses are of stone, well-worked, and some with roofs fallen in, but many still standing showing great symmetry and order in their construction. Beyond the city, there are fields that seem to have been cultivated and roads paved with stones, leading to other places unknown to us. And these documents were uncovered by none other than Percy Fawcett himself while studying at the library of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in 1914. Now, Percy Fawcett, when he first arrived in the Amazon, was in the year 1906, and he was working on behalf of the British Royal Geographic Society, and he was attempting to map the border around Brazil and, quite frankly, possibly working as a spy for the British. But during this very first expedition, he began seeing artifacts and pieces of pottery that didn't really make sense and seemed to go against the, as he said, narrow-minded convictions and preconceived notions about the Amazonian world that the British had essentially handed over to him. And he began hearing stories of these ancient, lost, grand cities and civilizations that still existed somewhere in the farthest reaches of the Amazon. And during this initial expedition, he became obsessed with this idea. And it was also the discovery of a small obsidian, transparent, almost glowing black stone statue that he knew somewhere far off in this wilderness existed, or once existed, a lost ancient civilization. And while Percy knew that he was not actually looking for the exact same city that was described in manuscript 512, he used it as fuel or as evidence that this concept of many different grand lost cities in the Amazon or civilizations in the Amazon was probably true, and that his expeditions were a worthwhile pursuit, and that to find this lost city could completely rewrite world history and change our perspective of indigenous Amazonian people and South America as a whole. And as an anthropologist who's incredibly invested in the pre-Columbian world of Central, South, and North America, I think that Percy Fawcett's motive and that his reasoning and that his pursuits were completely justified. And to a certain extent, he was exactly right. Because even when I study pre-Columbian Andean civilization, I can see the influence of an otherwise unknown and as of yet undetected presence somewhere in the Amazon that trickles into the Andean world and influences a city called Chavin de Huantar, which in some ways is considered the mother culture of the Andean world. And I think that the mother culture of Chavin is a civilization that is thus yet unidentified somewhere off in the Amazon. So Chavin de Huantar grows up somewhere around 1000 BC, high up into the Andes. And this is actually a band of people that come from the Keralsupe civilization, which is on the coast of Peru. Keralsupe was a pre-pottery, possibly even pre-religious, pre-art civilization. And they were constantly getting hit by these cataclysmic, apocalyptic tropical storms called El Niños and La Niñas. And after many, many generations, they decided to drop everything and flee up into the Andes to have their civilization actually be preserved and not be continuously destroyed by these tropical storms. And it's right when they get to the Andes that we know that they come into contact with Amazonians. All of a sudden, we see these Keralsupe people. We can follow their DNA sequences all the way up to Chavin because we have burials going from one site to the other and back. And we know that as soon as they establish Chavin de Huantar, they are immediately coming into contact with the Amazonians. They're producing pottery. They have painted artwork. They have what we consider some kind of religious pantheon or like a shamanic religious tradition going on here. And all of this can be traced to other pottery that we have found just to the east, scattered throughout the Amazon. Now, a piece of religious iconography that Chavin adopts and that for a long time, they thought that Chavin invented, but they certainly did not. This comes from the Amazon, is this idea of a werejaguar. I've spoken about this so much. I even talked on the Joe Rogan experience about this. This is one of the most infatuating things for me with the pre-Columbian Americas because it may be the first instance of monotheism in the Americas long before the conquistadors tried to introduce Christianity. But as Chavin de Huantar, we see these figures that are anthropomorphic jaguars. So they're jaguars with a human body or they're humans that have fangs coming out of their mouth. And on the eastern side of the temple at Chavin, on the wall, there are what we call tenon heads, which is a statued head that has a stone tenon on the back and it can be slid into the wall. And only on the east wall facing out towards the Amazon are these tenon heads. Now, today you can see a lot of these heads in the Larco Museum in modern day Lima, Peru, but they're facing out towards the Amazon. So what I think it is, it is the people of Chavin somehow honoring this feline deity, this were-jaguar being or these were-jaguar people and acknowledging them by looking out towards the Amazon. And just as you study more and more Chavin and you study the contemporary Amazonian cultures of which we found some bits of pottery but not really found the exact location of where all of this artwork comes from, you can see that Andean civilization is actually being influenced by the Amazon. And to me, the more I look into Andean civilization, Amazonian civilization, ancient Ecuador and Colombia, the more it becomes obvious to me that the origin of South American civilization, religion, iconography, artwork and pottery must be coming from the Amazon. And in fact, I believe it's Teddy Roosevelt's granddaughter who discovered an archeological site on the Southeastern coast of South America that is about 20,000 years old that has early, early, early, very primitive pieces of pottery in a place that we would have never expected. So actually, some of the earliest evidence that we have for habitation going back 20,000 years in South America is on the Southeast side of Brazil on completely the opposite side of the continent where we would expect to find this early evidence of habitation. And then we have LiDAR scans that have come out in just the last decade that utterly and completely vilify Percy Fawcett's ideas about these lost civilizations. And one was actually just along the Xingu River called Kiriguyu. And it had an estimated population of over 1 million people. And like I said earlier, that's about the size of the height of ancient Rome. Absolutely, completely gargantuan sized city complete with step pyramids, terraces, plazas, long highways stretching off into the far distance in the Amazon. And it was exactly near the Mato Grosso region where Percy Fawcett told his wife that he expected he would find a lost city. When he set out into the area, he was never heard from again. And it's my belief that these lost, ancient South American cities of gold that were told to the Spaniards and later perpetuated by the Spaniards, these were not myths. These were not fables. These were real cities that actually existed. It wasn't just one city. It was many different cities. And that's why you hear this idea thrown around that the Native Americans were lying to the Spaniards saying, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That city of gold you're looking for, it's just beyond the horizon. And then when they get over there and meet that native civilization, they say, oh yeah, it's just a little bit further, just beyond that horizon. You'll see it, you'll see it. And then they're being pointed all over South America, never actually finding these cities. I don't think it's because the Indians were lying to the Spaniards. I think it's because there were so many of these civilizations that had risen and fallen in ancient times and risen and fallen before Columbus and the Spaniards even arrived in the Americas that these legends of these great grand cities were just floating and permeating throughout the Amazon and throughout South America as a whole. And they existed everywhere. We have all of the evidence of many different goldsmithing civilizations all throughout the Andes. And we know that gold was coming out of the Amazon as well. And today, as you're walking through the Amazon, you will reach what are sort of like gardens that just appear where you were just walking through a large track of land. And then all of a sudden you hit a garden with this deep, rich, black soil that we call terra preta. And somehow, someway, in this early primordial period in the Amazon, ancient Amazonians invented a type of soil that just completely blooms these gardens in the middle of the Amazon. And we have absolutely no idea or any evidence of just how long ago this happened. But I would say this is well over 10,000 years ago, possibly pushing up to 20,000 years ago, the ancient Amazonians were doing this. So it's my personal bias, my personal opinion that the origin of religion, artwork, and civilization in South America probably comes from somewhere deep within the Amazon in an unknown and unexplored region that hopefully someday as LIDAR technology and other technologies in the archeological field progress, maybe one day we will find the origin of civilization in South America. I'm Luke Caverns. If you'd like more videos on the history and mysteries of the old world, well, please like and subscribe for more.