The Ancient Amazon

Speaker 1 Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Tudorberg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great?

Speaker 1 With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists.

Speaker 1 You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II.

Speaker 1 Just visit historyhit.com/slash subscribe.

Speaker 3 This holiday, Verizon is helping you bundle up incredible gifts and savings.

Speaker 5 You'll get the latest phone with a new line on my plan and a brand new smartwatch and tablet.

Speaker 7 No trade-in needed, even on our lowest price plan.

Speaker 3 That's two gifts for your family and one for you.

Speaker 7 Or two for you and one for someone else.

Speaker 6 Or three gifts for you and only you.

Speaker 4 Either way, you save big on three amazing gifts at Verizon.

Speaker 2 All on the best 5G network. Visit Verizon today.

Speaker 8 Rankings based on root metric truth score report dated 1 each 2025. Your results may vary.
Service plan required for watch and tablet. Additional terms apply.

Speaker 9 Hi, folks, it's Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman.

Speaker 9 You know, whether you are doing traditional Thanksgiving, a friend's giving, or something in between, Whole Foods Market has great everyday prices on all the things you need for Thanksgiving.

Speaker 17 No way antibiotics ever birds bring quality to your table at a great price.

Speaker 19 You can enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market.

Speaker 11 And remember, Prime gives you shop online and delivery or pickup as you like.

Speaker 23 Fall is all about cozy comforts, but when you're prioritizing your health, it's easy to feel like you're missing out.

Speaker 23 With Hero Bread, you can enjoy all your fall favorites because they're made with Hero Bread sliced breadloaves, tortillas, bagels, dinner rolls, and more.

Speaker 23 Try their all-new hero noodles with 12 grams of protein and just 80 calories. You won't believe Hero Bread's options have 0 to 5 grams net carbs and are high fiber from the taste and texture.

Speaker 23 They've even got small batch drops of indulgent favorites like the popular Hero Croissant. And right now, Hero Bread is offering 10% off your order.
Go to Hero.co and use code FALL25 at checkout.

Speaker 23 That's fall25 at H-E-R-O.co. All figures are per serving of Hero Bread.
Contains 2 to 18 grams of fat per serving. See the product nutrition panels on Hero.co for more information.

Speaker 1 2,000 years ago, at the same time that great cities like Rome, Athens, and Alexandria were at their height in the Mediterranean, thousands of miles to the west across the Atlantic Ocean, equally large and thriving cities were being constructed in the ancient Amazon.

Speaker 1 Epicenters of extraordinary, little-known civilizations who molded the world's largest rainforest to thrive in their millions.

Speaker 1 Today, we often see the Amazon basin as an endless expanse of trees and rainforest, but this massive area of South America, spanning eight countries, was home to a huge range of landscapes, biodiversity, and ancient civilizations.

Speaker 1 The ancient Amazon is a story of agriculture and farming stretching back 8,000 years, of fishfield civilizations along the coast, of cities and highways, of beautiful ceramics and art, and maybe even of an Amazonian Pompeii situated beneath a still smoldering volcano.

Speaker 1 It's the Ancients on History Hit.

Speaker 1 I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, well we're exploring the extraordinary ancient civilizations that lived all across the ancient Amazon basin in South America.

Speaker 1 This area of the world is one of the most exciting for archaeologists right now, because new technological advancements are starting to uncover a whole range of ancient sites beneath the trees.

Speaker 1 Sites that belong to prosperous, well-organized, urbanized societies spread out across a densely populated and richly diverse landscape.

Speaker 1 To talk through this story, I was delighted to interview the journalist, writer and author Lawrence Blair, who has just written a new book that explores these vanished civilizations of the ancient Amazon and more.

Speaker 1 Lawrence, he dialed in from South America for this interview, so we were incredibly grateful for his time. Now sit back and enjoy as we cover the story of the ancient Amazon.

Speaker 1 Lawrence, it is great to have you on the podcast.

Speaker 21 Thanks so much for having me, Tristan. Really pleased to be here.

Speaker 1 I mean, the Amazon and the ancient Amazon, I must admit, When Tom mentions the Amazon today, it still feels, at least to me, quite like a frontier area, Lawrence, with uncontacted peoples and so on.

Speaker 21 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 But looking at what you've written and the research, this needs to be an area full of amazing different ancient civilizations that were there thousands of years ago.

Speaker 21 Oh, definitely. You know, I think we all have this idea, don't we, of the Amazonist, yeah, this pristine wilderness, this kind of backwater, and it's so far away from anything and everything.

Speaker 21 But actually, you know, what's so fascinating is, you know, in the past few decades, alone that idea is really being turned on its head. And actually, you know, we're discovering more and more.

Speaker 21 Archaeologists from Brazil and around the world and various South American countries are finding that this is really a center of world history and should be kind of considered as being up there with the Mexica or the Aztecs, with the Maya, even the Incas and any of the great ancient civilizations of the world.

Speaker 21 So I'm really thrilled to have a chance to talk to you about some of them today.

Speaker 1 It's nice that you mentioned names straight away, like you said, Aztec, Maya, Inca, those kind of Mesoamerican civilizations we sometimes think of.

Speaker 1 And then to put these peoples who lived in the Amazon, sometimes contemporarily with those civilizations, we can really delve into that link as well.

Speaker 1 But no such thing as a silly question to kick it all off. I'm sure we've all got a rough idea about where the Amazon is, but I feel if we delve into the details, it's a bit more complex.

Speaker 1 Lawrence, what and where is the Amazon?

Speaker 21 That's a great question. So the Amazon, you know, is a huge area.
It's the size of Western Europe. It spans eight countries here in South America.

Speaker 21 We're talking about a dozen major rivers that are crisscrossing it. Of course, the Amazon River is the most famous one.
It's 4,000 miles long. And it's the largest tropical forest on the planet.

Speaker 21 And of course, it's crucial to the Earth's climate as well.

Speaker 21 And I think one thing to make clear here is, you know, it's not just this kind of endless expanse of trees, you know, of jungle, to put it that way. We're talking about a huge range of landscapes.

Speaker 21 You know, you've got these kind of tabletop mountains in Venezuela, Colombia, and Guyana. a cloud forest on the eastern slopes of the Andes, big cities, you know, in Manaus and Berlin.

Speaker 21 There are about, you you know, 30 million people or so who live in the Amazon today.

Speaker 21 And of course, also we have this kind of marshy swampland near the mouth of the river and these kind of floodplains in northern Bolivia.

Speaker 21 So it's really, you know, it's a kind of mosaic of different landscapes. And of course, would have looked very different, you know, 500, 1,000, 10,000 years ago, perhaps a bit drier.

Speaker 21 perhaps more savannah interspersed with the forest.

Speaker 21 And I think, you know, one key concept to think about is this idea of this pristine rainforest today that we're looking at and still exists in some places is actually a bit more like a very carefully tended garden that's grown wild.

Speaker 1 And what do you mean by a savanna there? Because I think of Africa, do we mean like tall grasses and big plains as well?

Speaker 21 Exactly. We're talking about

Speaker 21 floodplains, which don't have forests, but during the season where the river is lower, grasses grow. We're talking about patches of forest, patches of grassland, you know, interspersed with forest.

Speaker 21 So really a mixture. And the Amazon connects with with ecosystems on all different sides as well.

Speaker 21 So yeah, really a diverse and very biodiverse landscape. You know, it holds millions and millions of species, many of which we probably haven't even discovered yet.

Speaker 1 And it feels like highlighting that biodiversity, that variance in geographical landscapes across the Amazon.

Speaker 1 And you mentioned looked quite a bit different in ancient prehistoric times, but you know, it's still that great diversity of biomes almost.

Speaker 1 It feels that must be really important to highlight straight away. I guess when we cover the different peoples that existed here.
It's not everyone living very similarly.

Speaker 1 I'm guessing an ancient people living, let's say, in the mountains at the tabletops would have had a very different life to those on an ancient savannah of the Amazon.

Speaker 21 Absolutely.

Speaker 21 We're talking about a huge cultural diversity, you know, hundreds of different groups, thousands even with hundreds of different languages, you know, whose ways of life probably change over the millennia.

Speaker 21 You know, we have, you have small groups of kind of anarchistic hunter-gatherers who who are quite sort of almost democratic, perhaps, in the way they run their affairs.

Speaker 21 Then you have these seasonal farmers, you have big urban centers, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And some of these people, of course, are still around.

Speaker 21 You know, the descendants are still here, and they still have a lot to teach us. Others, of course, are no longer here, and we don't even know their names.

Speaker 21 And I think that this is the real challenge we have here. You know,

Speaker 21 the Mexica or the Maya, even the Inca, they had some forms of writing.

Speaker 21 You know, the Inca had the kipu, these kind of knotted memory cords, cords and of course they interacted very closely with the Spanish.

Speaker 21 With the ancient Amazonians we have so little to go on. You know it's quite fragmentary.

Speaker 21 They left some paintings, pictograms on cliff faces and there's a really fascinating site called the Serania de Chirubiquete in Colombia, which people often call the Sistine Chapel of the Amazon.

Speaker 1 Sorry, what? The Sistine Chapel of the Amazon.

Speaker 21 I know. It's this amazing spot, which is actually off-limits to tourists,

Speaker 21 but it's these huge tabletop mountains and about 20,000 or so and counting of these pictograms in red dye. And for me, the most fascinating thing is that people are still adding to them.

Speaker 21 There are uncontacted people in the area who are still painting. And so it's almost this kind of work in progress

Speaker 21 from the kind of late Stone Age, really, which is still being added to.

Speaker 21 So that's one bit of evidence there. But also, we have other things.

Speaker 21 We have, you know, things that outsiders wrote about them: Portuguese, Spanish, missionaries uh gold hunters bounty hunters i mean of course we have to you know take a lot of that with a pinch of salt but we also have the archaeological record we have pottery a huge amount of pottery we have animal bones we have these huge glyphs you know what are called geoglyphs so it was shaped the way that these people shaped the landscape around them to build roads ditches ponds temples pyramids and i think the most intriguing thing here as well is actually more and more archaeologists or this particular class of archaeologists called the paleobotanist, they're looking at the trees themselves and plant evidence to kind of understand how actually the Amazon was being moulded over many thousands of years by human hands.

Speaker 1 And it makes sense, doesn't it? As you mentioned earlier, because of how much, how...

Speaker 1 important the Amazon is how rich and diverse it is in the plant types it has available that scientists with modern scientific developments and archaeologists they are using that as a particular source of information to learn more about the landscape in ancient history.

Speaker 1 So often in the podcast, we focus on texts, on histories, and on pottery, which no doubt we will look at archaeological items like pottery.

Speaker 1 But it seems here with the Amazon, this is taking it to the next level where you also look to a huge extent at the plant material too.

Speaker 21 Oh, definitely. You know, I think as people who are fascinated by the past, you know, we have a kind of bias, don't we, towards temples and ruins.
And we want to see stone buildings.

Speaker 21 We want to see, you know, papyrus.

Speaker 21 And those things, of course, are fantastic when you have them. But I think we need to almost break out of the idea that every ancient culture should have those things.

Speaker 21 That actually there are ways that you can leave a legacy and a way that you can build a society that really flourishes without large stone buildings and without written writing.

Speaker 21 So it's almost kind of trying to flip the script a little bit and almost understand

Speaker 21 the real diversity of ancient human societies.

Speaker 1 Before we delve into all that with new technology and new amazing discoveries that have been in the news very recently and really want to get to you did mention there about the writings these later writings of spaniards of explorers visiting the amazon some 500 or so years ago i mean that that was interesting to me straight away if that is kind of a written source but but how is that a written source for learning about the ancient amazon are they just interacting with locals and learning more about what they believe their history was Yeah, I mean, you know, but really these first people that are going through the Amazon, they have an agenda.

Speaker 21 You know, we have this famous voyage by Francisco de Orellana and about 60 or so men who, you know, they go to the Amazon in search of this land rich in cinnamon, which presumably the Andeans and Incas have kind of told them about.

Speaker 21 So even there, you know, the pre-Columbian peoples of the Andes, you know, have this concept of the Amazon as being this kind of quite dangerous, exciting, wealthy place.

Speaker 21 So we have this voyage in 1541, 1542, this group of around 60 Spaniards, Africans, Andeans. And they have this incredible eight-month voyage down the Amazon.

Speaker 21 And, you know, they meet some people who are friendly and really take them in and give them food and show them this incredible wealth in terms of ceramics and art.

Speaker 21 In other places, they really meet very stiff opposition. And I think the locals can, you know, they twig quite early on that these guys do not mean us well.

Speaker 21 And so they're fighting these running battles and they've been chased away from towns and they're starving. They're eating crabs.

Speaker 21 They're eating roots and herbs, which Gaspar de Carrajal, who's the chaplain who chronicles this trip, says, you know, made us turn mad and witless.

Speaker 21 Perhaps they were, you know, chewing on an ayahuasca plant or something there. So it's this very strange journey.

Speaker 21 And they come across these tall warrior women, which they call the Amazons, and they talk about these great cities, which are just kind of glimmering inland. And, you know, there's a...

Speaker 21 a fantastic quote by this chaplain, Carl Vajral, who says, all those we have passed along this river are people of much intelligence and ingenuity.

Speaker 21 You know, they're passing these really these towns which are crammed cheek by jowl along the riverbanks, you know.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 it's almost this fascinating glimpse of this lost world. And they weren't the only ones.
Some of your listeners may have heard of Merio Bespucci, who's the man who gives his name to the Americas.

Speaker 21 And he also kind of skirts his way down the Amazon coastline in 1500.

Speaker 21 And he says, you know, all the ancient authors, the people that you'll be familiar with, Tristan, you know, your Pliny's and your Aristotles, said, no, no, no, once you go south of the equator, it says water, there's nothing there.

Speaker 21 Or if there is a landmass there, it's completely uninhabited. You know, it's almost a sort of wasteland.
But Vespucci says, no, no, no, they've got it wrong.

Speaker 21 Their opinion is false, he says, and utterly opposed to the truth. In those southern parts, I have found the continent more densely peopled than are Europe or Asia or Africa.

Speaker 21 So they're quite clear. But for centuries, you know, these tales of this almost urbanized Amazon are really relegated to the realm of legend.

Speaker 1 Why? Why are they relegated to the realm of legend? You'd have thought that more and more people would be fascinated from it earlier on.

Speaker 1 Why do we then get this kind of later myth that actually this was a land without history almost?

Speaker 21 I think that's a really fascinating question. And I think part of it is because, well, you know, let's look at these guys who've survived this voyage.

Speaker 21 They're not the most reliable narrators, you know, as I said, they spend a lot of time kind of tripping on these hallucinogenic herbs.

Speaker 21 Some of them are being poisoned by tree frog toxins, which can also cause you to have visions. And often they don't even dare to disembark.

Speaker 21 They say that the vessel was so full of arrows that it looked like a porcupine. So, you know, how reliable was this testimony?

Speaker 21 And also, I think locals, you know, Amazonians, they had an incentive maybe to fob them off a bit and go, listen, if you just carry on another few miles downriver, there's this incredible city and it's dripping in gold.

Speaker 21 And it's got these powerfully built warrior warrior queens, you know, who take men as

Speaker 21 their captives in war. I mean, you know, what a great way to get these guys to hurry up and move on out of town.
And

Speaker 21 I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is that the diseases which Europeans bring to the new world, which Indigenous peoples and nations have very little resistance to,

Speaker 21 they really inflict a terrible toll in the Amazon. As I say, these are quite densely populated, quite mobile communities with these big trading networks.

Speaker 21 they send ambassadors to each other they send traders they send explorers so these are perfect vectors for for typhus for malaria for for for smallpox and so i think by the time that europeans kind of come back in force about a century later in the early 1600s there's not much evidence left of these people the villages are now gone and it's just kind of pure jungle and so there's one you know portuguese chronicler who says you know these indigenous peoples here in brazil they you know they're not like the ones in the andes or in mesoamerica they live in disorder.

Speaker 21 They're godless, lawless, they're leaderless. And I think that you mentioned the idea of the Amazon being a land without history.

Speaker 21 That was famously the conclusion of this Brazilian geographer called Euclides da Cunha, who, you know, he helped map out Brazil's borders with Peru.

Speaker 21 And he said, you know, this is a land without history. And I think that idea, you know, really has persisted until quite recently.

Speaker 21 You know, archaeologists, particularly ones from the United States who kind of came down to Brazil in the 40s and 50s, you know, they said, well, look, you know, the soil here in the Amazon has always been washed away by downpours.

Speaker 21 There's no stone, there's not enough metal for tools, there's no big animals to hunt. So, you know, this is not really a hospitable place.
It's really hostile.

Speaker 21 And even Brazil's military dictatorship in the 70s, you know, encourages people to come and settle the Amazon. And the slogan is a land without men for men without land.

Speaker 21 And even today, you have conservationists who, I think, mean very well, but they will tell you when they're, you know, doing their funding drives, they'll say, you know, the Amazon, and I quote, is a a vast, untamed wilderness.

Speaker 21 So the notion of Amazonia as this kind of backwater on the edge of world history, I think is really alive and kicking.

Speaker 1 It really is. But let's turn to the bright, exciting part now, Lawrence.
How are the tables starting to turn? What's the progress that is being made in dispelling this myth?

Speaker 1 And there's some really interesting case studies that I think we're going to focus on one by one now.

Speaker 21 Absolutely, yeah. So this is really cutting-edge stuff.
And I think it's changing every day. And it's so controversial and exciting.

Speaker 21 But I think it's the new kind of frontier in world history and archaeology. I think one element of how this is changing is the fact we have these new technologies and

Speaker 21 these new tools. And I think the key one of these is LIDAR, which I think you may well have talked about in your episode on the Maya.

Speaker 1 We probably have, but for our listeners, Lawrence, please explain what exactly is LIDAR.

Speaker 21 So LiDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging.

Speaker 21 And basically, this involves flying over a forested area in a plane and shooting laser pulses, basically laser beams out of the plane towards the ground.

Speaker 21 And you measure how long it takes for them to bounce back. And these laser pulses, they can penetrate through jungle canopy.

Speaker 21 And they kind of, it's almost a bit like a bat, you know, scanning a cave with these kind of sonar squeaks. It gives you this idea of the topography.

Speaker 21 And of course, that includes, we're talking about structures, basically, man-made structures, ditches, roads, temples.

Speaker 21 And that's really revolutionized archaeology in many forested, many tropical areas, but I think nowhere more so in the Amazon.

Speaker 21 And I want to talk about one particular case in particular, which is only really just revealed at the start of this year. This area is in lowland Amazonian Ecuador, an area called the Upano Valley,

Speaker 21 jungle valley, thick forest, a big snowy volcano called Sangay kind of looming over it.

Speaker 21 And people have known for a long time that there are some structures here or some kind of mounds, you know, these maybe a dozen or so, two dozen of these kind of mounds rising up from the forest floor with pottery.

Speaker 21 But we didn't really know how many there were and kind of what connected them until recently, when Ecuadorian archaeologists and international archaeologists did a massive LiDAR survey.

Speaker 21 And what they found was just astounding. You know, we're talking about more than 6,000 of these mounds and platforms.
Some of them are 140 meters long and 40 meters.

Speaker 1 6,000 in that one valley.

Speaker 21 6,000 in this one valley. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
That's just the area that they've surveyed. And these kind of, they're effectively pyramids.

Speaker 21 You know, they're clustered in these 15 settlements. And

Speaker 21 they seem to have been the foundations of temples and houses. And, you know, it looks like this is a society of upwards of 30,000, maybe even 100,000 people.

Speaker 21 And we can see that they were carving these fields and terraces into the hillsides. It's very fertile soil there because of this nearby volcano.

Speaker 21 And I think the most exciting thing that people have pointed to here is this network of these wide, straight roads, thoroughfares even, that cut through the hillsides and seemingly go over rivers and connecting these different towns, neighborhoods and houses.

Speaker 21 And you know, I think these seem to be the streets and the highways of a really organized, urbanized culture with serious resources and manpower, which is centered around two particular cities, which the researchers have dubbed Kilamope and Sangai.

Speaker 21 And I think what's also really fascinating here is they've done radiocarbon dating on some of these sites.

Speaker 21 And it seems as though these kind of garden cities here in the Upano Valley were inhabited from roughly 500 BC through to 450 AD.

Speaker 1 So these are the various different parts of an ancient urban society that we'd usually connect with, I don't know, ancient Rome or maybe Teotahuacan further north.

Speaker 1 And it's at the same time as those cities are in existence in ancient times.

Speaker 21 Absolutely. Yeah, it's the classic development of an early society.
It's got roads, we've got agriculture, we've got some form of urbanism.

Speaker 21 So, like you say, we're really in the same league as classical antiquity around the world.

Speaker 21 And in fact, Steven Rostin, who's one of the leading archaeologists on this particular case, has called them these cities in Amazonian Rome, which I think is a great bit of branding.

Speaker 21 But I think it's also accurate. You know, we're dealing with this.
really interesting culture here.

Speaker 21 And I think, you know, I say this is just the tip of the iceberg when we're talking about what LiDAR could reveal.

Speaker 21 There's a study last year, which was the largest LIDAR survey to date, and kind of looked at one huge area and then extrapolated from that.

Speaker 21 And it said that there could be as many as 24,000 pre-Hispanic earthworks. We're talking about ponds, ditches, paths, geoglyphs, buildings, which still remain hidden.
under the forest.

Speaker 1 In that one valley or a bit further out are we talking about?

Speaker 21 In the Amazon as a whole, you know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that would be quite something if it was all in one, the Upanaya Valley, I must admit.

Speaker 21 No, but it really, we're really looking at these several centers, and that's not the only one.

Speaker 21 We also have an area of in northern Bolivia with its huge temples and geoglyphs and carvings and sort of this kind of almost waterlogged irrigation system, which almost looked like something from the Nile, from the Ganges.

Speaker 21 So, really, we're looking at the tip of the iceberg here.

Speaker 1 This episode is sponsored by Ruler.

Speaker 1 Finding a therapist who not only has time for new clients but also actually takes your insurance can feel impossible. Deciding to reach out and ask for help is huge.

Speaker 1 To then be hit by wall after wall can be so demoralizing.

Speaker 1 Many therapists don't take insurance packages at all, which means that you're stuck paying the full cost out of pocket or paying for an expensive monthly subscription.

Speaker 1 That's where Ruler comes in. They partner with over a hundred insurance plans, making the average copay just $15 per session.

Speaker 1 Now that's real therapy from licensed professionals chosen based on your particular situation at a price that actually makes sense.

Speaker 1 You use your insurance benefits to maintain your physical health, so why wouldn't you do the same for your mental health?

Speaker 1 Thousands of people are already using Ruler to get affordable, high-quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit ruler.com slash ancients to get started.

Speaker 1 After you sign up, you'll be asked how you heard about them. Please support our show and let them know we sent you.
That's rula.com slash ancients.

Speaker 1 You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.

Speaker 3 This holiday, Verizon is helping you bundle up incredible gifts and savings.

Speaker 5 You'll get the latest phone with a new line on my plan and a brand new smartwatch and tablet.

Speaker 7 No trade-in needed, even on our lowest price plan.

Speaker 3 That's two gifts for your family and one for you.

Speaker 7 Or two for you and one for someone else.

Speaker 6 Or three gifts for you and only you.

Speaker 4 Either way, you save big on three amazing gifts at Verizon.

Speaker 2 All on the best 5G network. Visit Verizon today.

Speaker 8 Rankings based on Root Metric Root Score Report dated 1 each 2025. Your results may vary.
Service plan required for watch and tablet. Additional terms apply.

Speaker 9 Hi folks, it's Mark Bittman from the podcast, Food with Mark Bittman.

Speaker 9 You know, whether you are doing traditional Thanksgiving, a friend's giving, or something in between, Whole Foods Market has great everyday prices on all the things you need for Thanksgiving.

Speaker 17 No way antibiotics ever birds bring quality to your table at a great price.

Speaker 19 You can enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market.

Speaker 22 And remember, Prime gives you shop online and delivery or pickup as you like.

Speaker 24 It's time your hard-earned money works harder for you.

Speaker 25 With the Wealthfront Cash account, your uninvested cash earns a 3.5% APY, which is higher than the average savings rate.

Speaker 25 No account fees, no minimums, and free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts anytime. Join over a million people who trust Wealthfront to build wealth at wealthfront.com.

Speaker 24 Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA SIPC, and is not a bank. APY on deposits as of November 7th, 2025, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Speaker 24 Funds are swept to program banks where they earn the variable APY.

Speaker 1 So, you can also potentially, as you highlighted there, and irrigation is something which must also be, you know, so intertwined with these cultures.

Speaker 1 You're getting a little sense, I guess, to say, just the tip of the iceberg, but to learn more about the ancient engineering, how they watered their field systems.

Speaker 1 And also, I mean, you mentioned how Upaneau Valley kind of linked as like the Amazonian Rome.

Speaker 1 Well, if it's got the volcano very nearby and it's fertile lands, it feels more like an Amazonian Pompeii in one kind of way.

Speaker 1 So, hopefully, it doesn't have that same infamous end, but it's still, it's the tip of the iceberg. There could be so much more discovered in the years ahead.

Speaker 21 Absolutely.

Speaker 21 I think, you know, there, like you say, you have this kind of almost ready-made fertile soil, which is really perhaps gives them a head start, you know, and I think it's not coincidental that a lot of, and we'll come back to this later on, but a lot of the early domestication of crops, including even cacao, you know, famously used in chocolate, seems to actually have not originated in the Andes or in Mesoamerica, but from that bit of Amazonian Ecuador.

Speaker 21 So these are real pioneers.

Speaker 21 But, you know, but even elsewhere where you don't necessarily have this fertile volcanic soil and you have a lot more rain, you have these kind of rivers which wash away a lot of the soil, there's actually a growing consensus that Amazonians were actually engineering this kind of remarkable substance of their own.

Speaker 21 which laid the foundations for these kind of thriving, long-lasting kingdoms in the rainforest.

Speaker 21 And that substance is called tera preta in Portuguese or dark earth in English, to the likes of you and me.

Speaker 21 And to kind of just give your listeners a sense of what it's like, this is a kind of deep brown, almost kind of black soil. Think about prodding a black forest gateau.

Speaker 21 It's kind of got that spongy touch to it. It's effectively ancient trash, you know, it's rubbish.
But people, even today, Brazilian farmers really treat it like treasure.

Speaker 21 And this stuff contains got animal bones, it's got mollusk shells, it's got pot shards, charcoal, and full of all these kind of nutrients which agriculture needs, calcium, zinc, phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium.

Speaker 21 And fascinatingly, it's where you find it in the densest concentrations in the Amazon is along these kind of bluffs above these riverbanks, exactly the kind of places where Carvajal and Orellana saw these really densely packed settlements.

Speaker 21 There's some disagreement about exactly what Terra Preta is and where it comes from. And the traditional view is: okay, well, this is this kind of rubbish.

Speaker 21 It's, you know, accidental, you know, byproduct of latrines and cook fires from you know millennia ago others have said that this is this is river sediment it just it's appearing naturally but actually the the growing consensus is that this stuff was actually generated on purpose it's a way of deliberately enhancing amazonian soil to sustain long-term habitation so is this the kind of amazonian developed fertilizer or kind of special man-made soil potentially exactly Exactly.

Speaker 21 I think that that's what we could be dealing with here. Just to give you an example of one kind of people that use this stuff, we have the Kuikuro, who are an Amazonian people.

Speaker 21 They're still around today along the Upper Jingu River, for those who know where that is. And they settled that area about a century before 1492.

Speaker 21 These big towns of a thousand people ringed by paths and wooden palisades.

Speaker 21 Today there's only around 800 of them.

Speaker 21 But, you know, they still live in these circular thatched villages and they still pile their waste, ash, peel from the vegetables, fish bones, broken pots, charcoal, into these big heaps known as mizens.

Speaker 21 And they leave it for a few years and then they go and spread it on their garden plots. And they grow, you know, what they get out of them is incredible.

Speaker 21 Sweet potatoes, beans, papaya, cotton, tobacco. And if they leave the soil alone, they don't plant anything, jungle sprouts from it within a couple of weeks.
So it's incredibly fertile.

Speaker 21 A study just last year has analyzed that terrapreta, this modern terrapreta created by Le Cuicuro with the ancient kind.

Speaker 21 And they found that it's exactly the same in its chemical composition, or pretty much exactly the same. It's just as fertile, just as rich in organic matter.

Speaker 21 And also, it tends to occur near plazas, near squares, and near houses.

Speaker 21 And so, the authors of this study, who include several record researchers, they say, well, you know, this is a very strong hint that terra pretta has been around for millennia and has really been used by ancient Amazonians.

Speaker 21 It's kind of an ancient agricultural technology which locks carbon into the soil, actually, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere and potentially seems to have been producing food for many millions of people across the ancient Amazon.

Speaker 1 And that soil, I say we sometimes overlook this part, don't we, of course, but with farming societies, that soil is crucial to the creation and then sustaining of large, large groups of people, huge groups of people in an area of the world.

Speaker 1 So that soil is testament, do we think, must have been central? to the great size, presumably, of many of these ancient peoples who lived all across the Amazon.

Speaker 21 Absolutely. I think that this is almost their secret source.
It kind of helps them get the edge and build these kind of towns and cities.

Speaker 21 And I think it's interesting that where you see these really, really thick deposits of terra preta, there's also where you see really dense deposits of ceramics and pottery and signs that people are kind of really, you know, thriving.

Speaker 21 There's one spot I went to a few years ago. It's called De Odonil.
It's quite a small fishing village of brick bungalows on the Madeira River in the Brazilian. Amazon estate called Rondonia.

Speaker 21 And this has some of the most kind of densely packed terra preta anywhere in the Amazon.

Speaker 21 If you think about kind of holloways in the English countryside, you know, you walk down these tracks and you have these big banks rising on either side of you, but, you know, and it's studded with this pottery.

Speaker 21 And this actually seems to have been one of the longest continuingly inhabited places on the planet and actually a crucible of not only American civilization, by which I mean the Americas as a whole, but even world civilization.

Speaker 21 Because here you have ancestors of two indigenous groups or family groups, I suppose, called the Arawak and the Tubiguarani, who kind of seem to almost originate from here.

Speaker 21 They're hunting, they're fishing, they're farming, they're domesticating wild plants and vegetables, fruits, developing new languages, and they're going on the move as well.

Speaker 21 The Arawak actually are especially intrepid navigators.

Speaker 21 We find their descendants and their people in the Chaco forest of northern Paraguay, where I'm calling you today, the Orinoco Basin in Venezuela, Guayana, and in the Bahamas.

Speaker 21 And actually, it's their descendants, the Taino, who come across Columbus on Hispaniola in 1492.

Speaker 21 And we actually use Arawak and Taino words every day, you know, barbecue, canoe, hammock, hurricane, maize, potato, tobacco. These are things which have their ultimate origin in the Amazon.

Speaker 21 And just to say a quick thing about the pottery which these people are producing, it's just prodigious.

Speaker 21 You know, I went into this storeroom, this vault in Rondonia with two local archaeologists, and it's just packed to the rafters with crate after crate of this stuff.

Speaker 21 You know, cauldrons, vessels, urns for burying the dead. It's polished, it's brightly painted.
There are monkeys, there are serpents.

Speaker 21 And I think the key thing to bear in mind is this isn't just

Speaker 21 crockery. This stuff is really crucial because it shows us that these aren't people who were scratching a living or kind of frozen in time.

Speaker 21 These are sedentary. cosmopolitan societies that have enough food and enough fuel and material to support this kind of industry of artists and artisans.

Speaker 1 I mean, Lawrence, you call it a crucible of civilization, this particular area, and you've highlighted some of the archaeology there with that pottery, and it's interesting that it depicts some of those animals that they would have shared their world with.

Speaker 1 How far back does that archaeology go?

Speaker 1 How far back in ancient history are we talking with people living, sedentary living, farming in that area of the world and, you know, creating all this beautiful stuff?

Speaker 21 Yeah, that boundary is being pushed back further and further every year. But we're looking at some really dense terra preta deposits for about 6,000 years ago.

Speaker 21 And actually, the oldest ceramics that have ever been found anywhere in the Americas, north or south, actually were found in the Amazon. And they seem to date back to about 7,000 years ago.

Speaker 21 And even going even further back, we have plant materials, you know, fossilized seeds, food waste, which goes back 9,000 years ago.

Speaker 21 And I think this is also the other kind of secret substance, the other kind of key ingredient, which is really perhaps explains the flourishing of these of these Amazonian civilizations.

Speaker 21 You know, it seems as though ancient Amazonians were actually improving and, you know, adapting the forest around them. Archaeologists have identified at least 80 species.

Speaker 21 We're talking about cassava, sweet potato, Brazil nuts, peppers, fruits, palms, tobacco.

Speaker 1 Oh, different crop types that they were

Speaker 1 cultivating.

Speaker 21 Okay. Exactly.
So taking a kind of wild variety and then experimenting with it, propagating it, planting it, until you get the best kind of yields.

Speaker 21 I don't know if, Tristan, have you ever tried a kind of purplish fruit called acai?

Speaker 1 I like to think I'm adventurous with these trying

Speaker 1 things, but I'm afraid I have not come across that one.

Speaker 21 Well, you have to look out for it next time you're at an ice cream shop, but it's starting to take off, particularly in this hemisphere. It's delicious kind of purpley fruit.

Speaker 21 It's tasted a little bit like bubblegum, a little bit like raspberry.

Speaker 21 And this is a fruit which ancient Amazonians basically domesticated and propagated and made it so that it kind of flourishes in these massive big berry pods.

Speaker 21 Basically, it's this really abundant fruit full of all kinds of good stuff.

Speaker 21 And so, this process of domesticating these crops or these plants, I should say, these fruits, this was well underway by about 6,000 BC.

Speaker 21 So, it's up there in the same ligas, yeah.

Speaker 1 That's a mind-blowing. I'm sorry to interrupt once again, but this is a mind-blowing, and this is a time for comparison and contrasting with us places in the world, Lawrence.

Speaker 1 6,000 years ago, they're already testing in the Amazon these different crop types.

Speaker 1 You know, it's, I mean, roughly in Britain, and I really stress roughly, but let's say 5,000 years ago, you've got Scarrabrae and Orkney, and you've got the farming really taking root in places like Britain and maybe stretching like 6,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, around 3,500 BC.

Speaker 1 You know, at the same time or even earlier in the Amazon, farming has really taken root and a rich diversity of farming as well.

Speaker 1 It's a fascinating part of this discussion when you can compare the Amazon that time, really far back in time, with places like Britain and like Mesopotamia as well, the Fertile Crescent, you know, two areas practicing farming, you know, at the same time, but complete other parts of the world.

Speaker 21 Absolutely. You know, yeah, you see these maps of the world which have little circles saying, well, here's where kind of crops originate, here's where farming starts.

Speaker 21 And the Amazon is very rarely included. Sometimes you might see the Andes or Amazon, Andes or Mesoamerica included, but I think we need to add another circle,

Speaker 21 you know, for the kind of the Western Amazon in particular.

Speaker 21 and yeah this is really it's one of the kind of you know uh major centers where farming and i think farming we can talk about that i think it might even be better to use the word agroforestry because this is a kind of way of planting planting uh crops planting fruits vegetables which which you know doesn't involve large amounts of deforestation.

Speaker 21 Crucially, you know, and we're not just talking about kind of tree hugging

Speaker 21 for the sake of it. You know, what we see is that Amazonian civilizations are actually

Speaker 21 creating these trails through the forest about 25 miles into the jungle from their settlements and planting useful and propagating useful fruit trees and vegetables along those trails.

Speaker 21 And I think it's just common sense because if you haven't got, you know, a metal access to metal tools, if you're using a stone axe, it takes you all day to cut down a tree.

Speaker 21 So, you know, it's much easier if you just, okay, we'll thin out the undergrowth a little bit and we'll basically plant this kind of living larder, you know, which kind of just kind of restock itself.

Speaker 21 You know, it's simple. And I think, you know, to give another example, I think we touched on this already, but

Speaker 21 these crops we think of as being quintessentially Andean, like maize, or quintessentially Mesoamerican, like cacao, actually seem to have originated in northwestern Amazonia.

Speaker 21 You know, so cacao, you know, the meshica and the Maya, they use its currency, they drink it as this sacred bitter drink called chopa ladu, was actually first being consumed in the Ecuadorian Amazon about 5,300 years ago, maybe by the ancestors of those Upano Valley garden cities.

Speaker 21 So I think the point you make there, Tristan, about a comparison with England, with the English countryside or the British countryside, I think is a good one, you know, because today it's this kind of jumbled landscape.

Speaker 21 It's gardens, fields, parkland, copses. I think we now understand that it's neither entirely natural nor entirely man-made, right?

Speaker 21 And I think if we go, you can go back a few centuries ago, our ancestors in Britain or across Western Europe were really depending on the forest.

Speaker 21 They were coppicing, they were making hedgerows, they were gathering firewood, they were hunting.

Speaker 21 It's not so long ago that we were also in much closer contact with, you know, we were molded and molded by the woods.

Speaker 21 So, and you know, I think to sum up this stuff on the plant domestication, the rainforest today perhaps has an estimated 400 billion trees.

Speaker 21 The cautious estimate is that around 10% of them, 40 billion, are there because of humans.

Speaker 21 And some would put that figure a lot higher and say that we're basically looking at a domesticated forest that is extraordinary

Speaker 3 this holiday verizon is helping you bundle up incredible gifts and savings you'll get the latest phone with a new line on my plan and a brand new smartwatch and tablet.

Speaker 7 No trade-in needed, even on our lowest price plan.

Speaker 3 That's two gifts for your family and one for you.

Speaker 7 Or two for you and one for someone else, or three gifts for you and only you.

Speaker 4 Either way, you save big on three amazing gifts at Verizon.

Speaker 2 All on the best 5G network. Visit Verizon today.

Speaker 8 Rankings based on root metrics, root score report dated 1 each, 2025. Your results may vary.
Service plan required for watch and tablet. Additional terms apply.

Speaker 9 Hi, folks, it's Mark Bittman from the podcast, Food with Mark Bittman.

Speaker 9 You know, whether you are doing traditional Thanksgiving, a friend's giving, or something in between, Whole Foods Market has great everyday prices on all the things you need for Thanksgiving.

Speaker 17 No way antibiotics ever birds bring quality to your table at a great price.

Speaker 19 You can enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market.

Speaker 22 And remember, Prime gives you shop online and delivery or pickup as you like.

Speaker 1 I think you've also revealed how there is still so much to explore, as I mentioned at the beginning, about this topic and how we are today really just scratching the surface, but giving a great overview and insight and more people can explore this further because there are so many stories, so many archaeological stories yet to be discovered or to be brought to the fore from the ancient Amazon, which is extraordinary.

Speaker 1 But let's move on because, as you said, we've talked about the plants, the trees, that part, that important part of the Amazon.

Speaker 1 But there is one big feature that we haven't really covered yet, or we've just covered a bit in passing is a transport method, which is, of course, the river Amazon.

Speaker 1 Now, Lawrence, we talked about, you know, getting food from the land and soil. What about the fruits of the rivers, the fruits of the river Amazon?

Speaker 1 Do we know about that with these ancient civilizations in the Amazon?

Speaker 21 Absolutely, Tristan. Yeah, I mean, he goes to the Amazon today.
I mean, right now there's a really bad drought, unfortunately, which maybe we'll talk about in a bit.

Speaker 21 But it really brings home how much people, even today, depend on, you the rivers of the rainforest, not just the Amazon, the Solimoist, the Rio Negro.

Speaker 21 This is really a life that's lived on the water or in close contact with the water. Fish is your main kind of protein source.

Speaker 21 So it's natural, of course, that people would have really depended on that centuries or millennia ago.

Speaker 21 To set the scene for your listeners, if you take the ferry down the Rio Amazon today, you set off from Manaus, you sling your hammock, you find a little spot to squeeze in there

Speaker 21 amongst the passengers.

Speaker 21 And it takes you about five days to get down to the mouth of the Amazon at a place called Belém, which is actually where the COP conference, a climate conference, is going to be held

Speaker 21 next year. And so you have this big city on the one hand.
On the left, you have this place called Manasho Island, which is this kind of Switzerland-sized landmass.

Speaker 21 And it's actually there which one of the rainforests longest lasting civilizations emerged. And again, we have the same pattern as with Ecuador.

Speaker 21 You know, Brazilian scholars noted that, okay, there were some hillocks here.

Speaker 21 This is an island which is often underwater for half the year, but it has these mounds and it has these, interestingly, these female figurines, these kind of almost feminine divine images, which obviously we see in other parts of the ancient world as well, you know,

Speaker 21 the Venus. figure, you know, which is quite familiar to a lot of early societies.
So we have these mounds here on Marisha Island.

Speaker 21 And, but, you know, the idea was, well, this this is kind of maybe just a not particularly sophisticated society.

Speaker 21 Maybe they're descendants of an Andean migration that's

Speaker 21 come down from the Andes, come down the rivers, and have kind of gradually shed their quote-unquote civilized ways here in the terrible tropics, because it's right on the equator,

Speaker 21 this particular spot. But again, recent surveys, recent technologies, a change in perspective maybe has helped us find evidence to suggest the opposite.

Speaker 21 We have, in fact hundreds of these platforms scattered across an area of 7,000 square miles. They've got clay floors,

Speaker 21 cemeteries, fireplaces, hearths that have burned consistently for centuries. And the first signs of habitation here are dating back to 3500 BC.

Speaker 21 But actually, these are places of really sustained feasting, worshiping, mourning for over a millennium after AD 300.

Speaker 21 And intriguingly, we have some skeletons skeletons from the Manashoara, this ancient people,

Speaker 21 and they actually seem to have been healthier and stronger, almost a bit like a kind of modern-day Greco-Roman wrestler, than even the average Brazilian today.

Speaker 21 And actually, if you look at the pottery on the ceramics, you see this feminine divine imagery, and the graves of women are actually richer in goods.

Speaker 21 So maybe it's something a little bit like the Amazons that we talked about in Carvajal's chronicle, you know, these warrior women.

Speaker 21 Perhaps we're seeing an echo of of that in the archaeological record in the sense that we have manushoa women who were kind of actually calling the shots you know and maybe even taking their pick of these kind of muscle bound admirers and and just one thing i want to also say about these manashoa you know what's the foundation of of this culture well it seems like they were able to harvest all these aquatic resources, the piranhas, the turtles, the catfish, by building this really ingenious system of ponds and dams, bridges to capture them as the kind of floodwater came in every season.

Speaker 21 And then when it came out, it would leave behind this, you know, effectively a huge archipelago of fish farms.

Speaker 21 So you travel back to Manishau Island, you know, maybe a century before Columbus, and you might see this kind of archipelago of towns connected by bridges and walkways and populated by these kind of industrious and relatively egalitarian fish farmers and potters.

Speaker 21 You know, there doesn't seem to have been this kind of single overbearing king or priestly class, which again, I think, flips the script a little bit about what we think about ancient societies, you know, the pharaoh or the king, perhaps because of the way the environment is so rich and so bountiful, you actually, you know, you don't need to kind of kowtow to this kind of, you know, all-powerful chief, because if he gets too big for his boots, you can sort of set off into the forest for yourself and your family and start your own thing.

Speaker 1 I'm just taking note of the Marajoara culture. I mean, I've got pictures of their pottery in front of me now.

Speaker 1 And it's another one of those civilizations that I'd never heard of, but now I know that we have to do a whole ancient episode just dedicated to that culture because they are, I mean, wow, never heard of them, but incredible archaeology that has survived and more, no doubt, will be uncovered.

Speaker 1 Fishing piranhas, I mean, that is quite something.

Speaker 21 You've got to be careful. Yeah.

Speaker 21 And, you know, and to mention those pots, yeah, there's, there's, we have some of them which still survive and they're huge.

Speaker 21 You know, I'm going to a museum in Berlin a few years ago, and, you know, they're almost the size of two kind of outstretched arms. You can't get your hands around them.
They're massive.

Speaker 21 And they have these protuberances and these almost the kind of fish lips, monkey ears, this kind of owlish expression, even these kind of extended beards, like the beards you see on

Speaker 21 Pharaoh's kind of mummies. So really creative, really artistic.

Speaker 1 I feel there'll be more stories about that in the news, absolutely, over the next few months and years, because, I mean, what it looks like is incredible.

Speaker 1 But we do have to move on as this is the overview of the ancient Amazon. And before we completely wrap up, Lawrence, I think you know what's coming.

Speaker 1 We've covered all these amazing, diverse, ancient civilizations in various parts of the Amazon and how long ago they were farming this area of the world, this rich, biodiverse area of the world.

Speaker 1 What happened to all these prosperous civilizations, these prosperous urbanized societies?

Speaker 21 Yeah, I think it's a great question.

Speaker 21 And it's really one of those great mysteries because we don't have Amazonians themselves outside of oral legend telling us what happened to their distant ancestors.

Speaker 21 I think one factor in the mix was climate change.

Speaker 21 In the millennium prior to 1492, you see in the archaeological record these big long-range migrations by Amazonians and by other lowland peoples in South America.

Speaker 21 It's almost as if they're fleeing something, they're running away from something, or they're displaced by something.

Speaker 21 And we mentioned the Upanuvali cities, that they're in the shadow of this big ominous volcano. And you quite rightly mentioned Pompeii.

Speaker 21 Well, you know, I think we don't yet know, but it seems perhaps there was a big catastrophic

Speaker 21 eruption of this volcano whose name is Sangai, which in Quechua means the frightener. So it's almost as if it was waiting to happen.

Speaker 21 And if suddenly your fields are covered in pyroclastic flow, it's not only going to have an impact on you, but also on your neighbours and your distant trading partners.

Speaker 21 You know, we're talking about cultures which are really in close contact with each other.

Speaker 21 And across the Amazon, production of terra preta, that magical black soil that we talked about, it really falls off sharply around AD 1000. There's much less of this organic soil being produced.

Speaker 21 And you start to see walls made of earth and wood springing up. So it's almost like we're seeing this breakdown in this more pacifistic commercial archipelago of different peoples and

Speaker 21 almost people that are kind of digging in really and fighting each other.

Speaker 21 And around AD 1200, the Manasho mounds that we talked about on the island near Belem are abandoned as the rains seem to be drying up and their fish ponds probably went dry and turned kind of salty because you're right there on the border of the Atlantic.

Speaker 21 And as these societies grew more complex, you know, I think a sudden shortage of a particular fish or a plant or a commodity could really, could really have a kind of domino effect, you know, and trigger this rolling collapse.

Speaker 21 You know, right now in South America, you know, say we're living through this really historic drought.

Speaker 21 The Amazon River is almost at its lowest level since people can remember since it's been recorded. And that's causing problems even today.

Speaker 21 You know, people can't transport their goods people can't get to schools and hospitals so i think you know that would have had a huge impact if you know uh seasonal variations or or or you know cyclical variations in the climate had an effect there and one thing that's been revealed as these and by recent droughts are these carvings in the riverbank near Manaups that show these kind of ghostly faces, a bit like the scream, you know, a famous Edward Monk painting, you know, and these also these grooves for sharpening weapons.

Speaker 21 So I think that that that maybe gives us a hint of what was going on. And crucially, I think, you know, as we mentioned already,

Speaker 21 it's the European illnesses, you know, these plagues which sweep through these places and, you know, before many Europeans even arrive.

Speaker 21 I think crucially, even before Europeans really properly invaded, let's say, South America, these illnesses were racing ahead of them.

Speaker 21 Before they quote-unquote conquered the Incas, The Inca Empire had already been ravished by European illnesses because they were transmitted from one trader to another traveler to another diplomat.

Speaker 21 So really, those very thriving villages which Riana and Cavaja saw in the 1540s were perhaps only the shadow of these great Amazonian powers. And I think actually, you know,

Speaker 21 if we think about some of the Amazonian peoples that are still uncontacted today or living in voluntary isolation is the kind of preferred term, because they're people who are choosing to avoid us and with good reason in many cases.

Speaker 21 And these aren't people who have necessarily been living like that since the Stone Age.

Speaker 21 They may even be the great grandchildren of settled, prosperous Amazonian societies, which just outside of living memory have run away from European colonization.

Speaker 21 Around 1900, there was a massive rubber boom in the Amazon that really saw horrific abuses perpetrated against the Amazonian peoples by different companies from Britain,

Speaker 21 from the United States. And so, you know, these are people who actually haven't always been like that, but actually are still living living well.

Speaker 21 They've realized that perhaps they don't need to live in cities.

Speaker 21 They don't need to live in a way which we would recognize as being a kind of urban, prosperous society, because they have what they need.

Speaker 21 Their ancestors have planted this biome with many, many life-giving species and have developed it to be almost a perfect niche for humans to thrive.

Speaker 21 And I think that's a really important message to bring home here.

Speaker 21 This knowledge of how to live sustainably with the rainforest still exists, not only amongst indigenous communities, but in the Afro-descendant and the mixed-race populations which are kind of living in the Amazon today.

Speaker 21 You know, you go to any village and they'll be able to point out to you, you know, 12, 15, 20 species

Speaker 21 which they use sustainably. In about a year's time, in November 2025, we're going to have this COP conference, the World Climate Conference in Belém, that Amazonian city.

Speaker 21 And Brazil's President Lula has said that, you know, this is a chance for the world to really learn from the Amazon's longest standing inhabitants, that humans can live with and within the rainforest in their millions and live well without destroying it.

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Well, Lawrence, that's a nice way to end it, going from the ancient times to a big conference that is happening in a year to the present day and the lessons that we can take from the people who lived in the Amazon thousands of years ago.

Speaker 1 Lawrence, this has been fantastic. Lastly, your new book about the ancient Amazon and so much more.
It is out today as well, I believe. And it is called...

Speaker 21 It's called Patria, Lost Countries of South America. And it's indeed out today in all the bookshops and on e-readers.

Speaker 21 And it's an alternative history of South America, a journey through centuries of perhaps slightly forgotten or lesser known histories and really trying to put South America back on the map of global history and overturn some of these tropes about guns, germs and steel, which we've all heard.

Speaker 21 And the Amazon is such a big part of that.

Speaker 1 Fantastic. Well, Lawrence, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Speaker 21 Thanks for having me. I've had a great time.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. There was the writer and journalist Lawrence Blair talking you through the amazing story.

Speaker 1 That is the ancient civilizations that lived all across the Amazon thousands of years ago and the archaeology that is coming to light that they left behind. It's all really, really exciting.

Speaker 1 This great diversity of ancient cultures that lived in South America back in ancient times.

Speaker 1 This is a remarkable developing story, so keep your eyes peeled for breaking news discoveries coming out of the Amazon in years ahead about these cultures. I do hope you enjoyed today's episode.

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening to it. You are central to the success of the ancients.
Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor.

Speaker 1 Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe.

Speaker 1 As a special gift you can also get 50% off your first three months when you use code Ancients at checkout. Now that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.

Speaker 26 Take control of the numbers and supercharge your small business with zero. That's X E R O

Speaker 26 With our easy-to-use accounting software with automation and reporting features. You'll spend less time on manual tasks and more time understanding how your business is doing.
87% of surveyed U.S.

Speaker 26 customers agree Xero helps improve financial visibility. Search Zero with an X or visit zero.com/slash ACAST to start your 30-day free trial.
Conditions apply.

Speaker 9 Hi, folks, it's Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman.

Speaker 9 You know, whether you are doing traditional Thanksgiving, a friend's giving, or something in between, Whole Foods Market has great everyday prices on all the things you need for Thanksgiving.

Speaker 17 No way antibiotics ever birds bring quality to your table at a great price.

Speaker 19 You can enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market.

Speaker 22 And remember, Prime gives you shop online and delivery or pickup as you like.