Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon

Back in 2013, archaeologist Dr Jago Cooper presented a four-part series on BBC Four looking into into some of South America’s forgotten civilisations – the Chimu, Tiwanaku, Chachapoyan and Muisca.

Now, in this new series, explorer, paleoanthropologist, evolutionary biologist and stand-up comic Ella al-Shamahi is arguably going one step further as she looks for a definitive answer to one of the world’s ancient mysteries: did giant cities and civilisations once flourish in the Amazon rainforest?

For most people, it’s hard to comprehend just how vast the Amazon rainforest actually is.

A person could enter at its eastern edge, walk 3000 kilometres directly west and still not come out from under the vast canopy.

This haven for about 10 per cent of the world’s species has long been regarded as wild and pristine, barely touched by humanity, and offering a glimpse of the world as it was before humans spread to every continent and, to be blunt, made a mess of things.

But it now appears this idea could be wrong.

Far from being untouched, scientists are coming to believe that the landscape and ecosystem of the Amazon has been shaped by humanity for thousands of years.

Long before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in the 16th century, the Amazon was inhabited, and not just by a handful of isolated tribes.

Millions of people lived in the jungle, building vast earthworks and cultivating multitudes of plants and fish.

But while the first Spanish explorers wrote of giant glistening cities and vast organised armies with populations of thousands, later expeditions saw no more than a few tribes – and dismissed the earlier accounts.

We don’t fully understand why this flourishing society disappeared centuries ago, although it has been suggested that disease and genocide could have very easily wiped out entire villages.

Nevertheless, their way of life could potentially give us crucial clues to how humans and the rainforest can coexist and thrive together – which is particularly relevant bearing in Brazil’s government’s controversial policies.

Thanks to new technologies that can ‘see through the trees’, archaeologists are now making astonishing discoveries perhaps confirming that sophisticated ancient civilisations and cities once thrived across the Amazon basin.

From the flat plains of Bolivia to the forests of central Brazil, new evidence suggests that the 16th-century story may have been right after all.

In the first episode of this series, Ella, who was also the presenter and producer of BBC2’s Neanderthals: Meet Your Ancestors with actor Andy Serkis, and specialises in finding fossils in palaeolithic caves in unstable and hostile territories, lands in the jungles of Brazil.

Here, archaeologists are investigating mysterious geometric shapes that have been revealed in the landscape by extensive deforestation, and Ella helps to discover a vast previously unknown ancient settlement.

She also joins an indigenous community for whom this past is essential to establishing their land rights today.

Can she help them prove once and for all that this land has been theirs for centuries?

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