Yesterday I lost my keys. The day before, you might have lost your eyeglasses. But the Amazon Rainforest is so stinking big that they can lose entire civilizations in there:
Archeologists have uncovered a massive lost ancient [sic] in the Amazon rainforest that was home to at least 10,000 farmers around 2,000 years ago.
A series of mounds and buried roads in Ecuador was first noticed more than two decades ago by archaeologist Stéphen Rostain. ...
Recent mapping by laser-sensor technology revealed those sites to be part of a dense network of settlements and connecting roads, tucked into the forested foothills of the Andes, that lasted about 1,000 years.
You gotta give respect to archeologists for being able to pick that sort of thing out from images like this:
I see this picture and I'm like:
They used radar images, as well, to measure the density of the forest floor in certain areas, meaning they were able to outline where a city once stood.
The settlement was reportedly "occupied by the Upano people between around 500 B.C. and 300 to 600 A.D. - a period roughly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire in Europe." It may have housed up to 30,000 people at its peak and incorporated miles of roads and drainage ditches.
The site is marked by "a very dense occupation and an extremely complicated society," according to scientists.
The city was built in the shadow of a volcano which would have helped contribute to the site's good soil for planting. Until it blew up, which is one theory as to why this city collapsed.
It was assumed that South American natives, outside of a few MAJOR cities like Machu Picchu, were nomadic and hunter-gatherers who didn't create cities.
However, this discovery suggests that there were other cities and maybe civilizations we never knew about.
"This is older than any other site we know in the Amazon. We have a Eurocentric view of civilisation, but this shows we have to change our idea about what is culture and civilisation," says Prof Stephen Rostain, director of investigation at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France, who led the research.
And the Amazon rainforest is HUGE! There may be other untold lost cities of the Amazon!
And just so we put this discovery into perspective, you've heard of the Mayans up in Mexico? Yeah?
Well, this city is bigger than ANYTHING the Mayans built.
It reveals a large, complex society that appears to be even bigger than the well-known Mayan societies in Mexico and Central America.
"Imagine that you discovered another civilisation like the Maya, but with completely different architecture, land use, ceramics," says José Iriarte, a professor of archaeology at University of Exeter, who was not involved in this research.
I don't know what the hold-up is, other than protecting the rainforest, not disturbing the people nearby, and the deadly violence throughout Ecuador, but this is the kind of stuff that would get me digging in the dirt ASAP.
We know this much just from satellite and radar, but we won't know more about this civilization until we get our hands dirty and begin digging.
This is such an exciting discovery!
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