The first geometric earthworks

14:34time. >> I can think of my backyard and how quickly it's been taken over by nature. We have a cement wall in the back that was there and then within 6 to 12 months you cannot see it. >> Yeah. >> And you know, I mean life finds a way. >> Life [laughter] >> Right? >> Shout out Dr. Ian Malcolm. >> Exactly. So um more than about 20 years ago there was a geographer Alceu Ranzi. He's now at the University of Acre. And he was on the right side of an airplane going over the Amazon jungle and he saw a ring-like structure. And he's like that's not natural, okay? It's really never natural. If you see a

15:15perfect ring somewhere, that's almost always man-made, okay? Unless it's like a meteor impact. But if it's a meteor impact and you can still see it, that's very strange, right? And so, he's like, "There's got to be There's got to be something that made that. It's got to be humans." Decades of sub- subsequent research by Ronse and his colleagues have slowly revealed that the Amazon was populated by millions of people, even in the most remote areas of the Amazon, right? And so, now researchers suggest that ancient Amazonians were widespread in territories that previously we considered uninhabited.

15:56That's where this current story comes in. There's a new paper that we talked about that's out in nature. Science covered it. A lot of um press has covered it. It's showing that in even the most remote areas of the Amazon rainforest, away from rivers, away from the traditional places that we would have expected large-scale civilizations, we are finding structures that demand an economy that is worth millions of people, right? It's one of the most favorite things I think about in archaeology when we look at structures that were built by civilizations of yore. Um the structures are a proxy for how

16:37big the society was, right? We look at I mean, beautiful example is Egypt, 5,000 years ago. They built the pyramids, the three giant pyramids of Giza. The largest one, the pyramid of Khufu, is like one of the largest structures ever. It was the largest structure for something like 4,000 years before some random cathedral in Europe took over. Honestly, that's insane. That's That's actually insane that Egypt built a structure that was the largest structure the largest man-made structure on the planet for 4,000 years, right? If you think about it, like the the the people who built the Colosseum, like Julius

17:17Caesar and the Romans who built the Colosseum, they looked at the pyramids like we look at the Colosseum. >> Mhm. >> It's just insane to think about. And more importantly, when when I look at structures like that, I think about what was the size of their economy? >> Right. In order to be able to >> In order to be able to support the workers. I mean, sure, there was a lot of slavery involved, right? Still, with like getting the stone from like random places, along the Nile, putting it up in a pyramid environment. Guys, there weren't any aliens. It was just an incredibly advanced technology, right? And it and an incredibly advanced civilization

17:58that could like muster together the amount of humans to create something like that. >> The idea of taking the the work process and breaking it down into its fundamental steps in order to be able to scale it to be able to create infrastructure of that size. >> Yeah. >> When no one had ever done that before. >> Yeah. >> Right. So, you're you have a blank slate and you're how do we I I we have this imagination as humans, so I have a vision. I want this thing. I want it to look like this. And they just figured out how to do it without being able to reference how anyone else did it. >> Yes, exactly. >> in and was like, "Oh, we have this thing called >> Yeah. >> cement whatever, right?"

18:39>> Yeah. >> And that's I think truly what's so, you know, and this is what's so fascinating when we think about some of these older generations and cultures in humanity. And we always come back to kind of the same things. >> Yeah. >> Right? And it manifests a little bit differently with little different flavor each time. But everywhere we look across the planet, we have these highly sophisticated, you know, civilizations in time periods where we did not expect there to be this level of collective accomplishment.

19:20>> Yeah. >> Particularly around infrastructure and and all the So, I'm really interested because the Amazon is always talked about so much. >> It's talked about a lot in It's like Egypt and the Amazon. >> Yeah. >> In terms of, you know, uh armchair archaeologists. >> Yeah. >> Uh and the Amazon in particular for a lot of scientists has been the object of a lot of curiosity. >> Yeah. >> For some time. >> Especially from like uh a standpoint of deforestation, >> Yes. >> of climate change, >> Yes. >> a standpoint of like being a carbon sink. And now it's gaining credibility from a standpoint of archaeology, which I think is very, very cool. Um so, the