Amazing stuff!
"The first hint that sprawling ancient populations once occupied the Amazon rainforest in Brazil was found through the most mundane of happenstances. More than 20 years ago, geographer Alceu Ranzi, now at the University of Acre, sat on the right side of a plane flying over the ocean of green. Looking down, he saw a perfect circle inscribed on the ground, an unnatural shape produced only, he felt certain, by humans. He was right.
Decades of subsequent research ... have slowly revealed remnants of peoples that occupied even the forest’s most remote areas. ... what archaeologists call earthworks—a type of architecture carved into the landscape. Now, using a laser-based form of radar known as lidar, researchers suggest ancient Amazonians were widespread in territories previously considered uninhabited. ...
The area surveyed by the researchers cuts through Acre and Amazonas, two northern Brazilian states that border Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Although scientists already knew there were earthworks in the region, the new study delineated the western and northern borders of the geoglyph-building society, which researchers had previously named Aquiry. Far away from any major rivers, which historically sustained thriving populations, the scientists did not expect the Aquiry to reach such high numbers. ...
The team identified most of the earthworks in the new study as geoglyphs, ditches made in the ground that form geometric shapes including squares and circles, as well as more complex shapes such as pentagrams and octagons. Some are even more sophisticated, combining, for example, circles inside a perfect square. ..."
From the abstract:
"Numerous geometric earthworks have been found in southwestern Amazonia, evidence of a monument-building precolonial civilization. This knowledge has contributed to the discussion about the deep history and the precolonial urbanism of Amazonia, its sociocultural contexts and its environmental legacy.
Estimates of the geographical extent and population size of the forest civilization have remained weak, because the detection of earthworks has been almost exclusively limited to deforested areas where vegetation does not completely hide the structures.
Here we used canopy-penetrating LiDAR data over 4,430 km of flight to define the geographical distribution and quantity of earthworks in this region better. On the basis of both existing data and our LiDAR documentation, we show that this cultural area alone contains as many earthworks as previously estimated for the whole of Amazonia.
We also propose that the total human population of the area in 100–300 ad was 1.25–3 million people.
If similar results are found elsewhere in Amazonia, the total precolonial population density and its effect on the current Amazonian soil and forest structure, biodiversity and even some modelling of the global climate should be re-evaluated."
Odd shapes hidden in dense Amazon rainforest reveal sprawling ancient civilization "Newly found earthworks suggest about 3 million people might have lived in just about 3% of the forest’s entire area"
An aerial shot shows a square-shaped geoglyph in Acre, a state at Brazil’s northern border
Lidar uses infrared light to uncover the shapes hidden underneath dense tree canopies.
Fig. 2: Diverse earthwork types with their topographical contexts.
Fig. 1: Map of the study area.
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