Joe Rogan | The Amazon is a Colossal Mystery w/Graham Hancock

Some of the more fascinating pieces of evidence in South America have come out recently about these channels and pathways that they've found in the Amazon that could not have been created any other way but by humans creating irrigation, humans creating, it appears like grids, like a city grid. Definitely. The Amazon is a colossal mystery and it's one of the subjects that I explore in depth in America before. First of all, to give some basic figures, the Amazon basin is huge. The Amazon basin is seven million square kilometers in area. Within it, five and a half million square kilometers remains almost entirely unstudied by archaeologists. That's the five and a half million square kilometers that is still covered by dense rainforest. To put that into perspective, five and a half million square kilometers is the size of the entire Indian subcontinent. It's like saying, we've done world archaeology but we've just ignored India. We've done world archaeology but we've just ignored the Amazon. It's the same argument, five and a half million square kilometers. The view was, again, there was a dogma. There was a preconception. Human beings couldn't have flourished in the Amazon. It's not a resource-rich area. The soils are poor. It's a difficult area, challenging to get to very far from the Bering Straits. The view was that humans hadn't entered the Amazon until about a thousand years ago. Then gradually, little by little, that view has begun to change. It's begun to change because of the tragic clearances of the Amazon, because the Amazon rainforest is literally being cut down and turned into soya bean farms and cattle ranches. In that cutting down process has emerged things that shouldn't be there at all. For example, evidence that large cities flourished in the Amazon, enormous cities, which were larger than the ... There was a Spanish explorer who went down the Amazon River system in 1541 to 1542. He was the first European to cross the entire length of South America from west to east along the Amazon. He reported seeing incredible cities, advanced arts and crafts, millions of people, a thriving culture. A hundred years later, when other Europeans got into the Amazon, they couldn't find these cities. They said, oh, Francisco Oriana, that was his name, made it all up. It was just a fantasy. Then in the last decade, as the clearances of the Amazon have proceeded, we've begun to see the traces of those cities. What happened was that the Spaniards brought smallpox into the Amazon. Smallpox devastated the local population because there was no immunity to it. There was a massive die-off. The cities were deserted. Within 50 years, they were completely overgrown by the jungle, and that's why they were not seen by the explorers who came in 100 years later. But now the jungle is being cleared, those cities are emerging. We can say that a city like London, which had a population of roughly 50,000 in the 16th century, there were cities of that size all over the Amazon. Huge numbers of them. A possible total population of the Amazon that exceeded 20 million people. What? Yes, 20 million. This is the latest evidence from the Amazon. Then you ask yourself, how did they do that? How did they feed 20 million people in the Amazon? Because it's a fact. Rainforest soils are poor. It's one of the reasons these soybean farms are a really stupid idea, because once you clear the rainforest, the land is largely unfertile, and you can't grow stuff on it for very long. So how did they feed all these people? The answer was they invented a soil. That soil has a name. It's called terra praeta. Archaeologists refer to it as Amazonian dark earths or Amazonian black earth. It's a man-made soil. It's thousands of years old. It's full of microbes that are not found in adjoining soil. It's based around biochar. You can take a handful of 8,000-year-old terra praeta, and you can add it to barren soil, and that soil will instantly become fertile. It's highly sought after in the Amazon, and it explains how they fed these people. There was science in the Amazon. How did they create this? Well, this is something that's not understood. It's still not understood by soil experts to this day as to how that was done, but it's one of many intriguing evidences, pieces of evidence of much higher development in the Amazon that it has been given credit for and of a kind of science in the Amazon. Jamie's got an image of it up there. So this is it? This is terra praeta, yeah. Wow. Exactly. So was that done by burns? Did they use controlled burns? One way that it was achieved was to do wet burning of middens. They would be burned and smolder. They wouldn't burn fiercely, which just produces charcoal. They would burn and smolder, and that what is called biochar would result, and that's part of the fertility of the soil, but the mystery is the microbial content of the soil, which is completely different from the microbes in neighboring soils, and that remains unexplained. So what are the theories? Composting, some sort of advanced composting? Yes, some sort of advanced composting, but again, what has not been explained is the microbial content of these soils. So there, first of all, is an issue of how two things, how large populations get fed in the Amazon and evidence that there was a culture in the Amazon that was capable of manipulating the environment in such a way that it could support large populations with the invention of terra praeta. Secondly, new evidence previously not recognized. The Amazon is basically a garden. The Amazon is a man-made rainforest. There are certain trees like Brazil nut trees or the ice cream bean tree, which are food crops, which are very, very valuable, and they dominate the tree regime in the Amazon. They're what's referred to as hyperdominant species. In other words, people living in the Amazon over thousands of years selected certain trees, which they then cultivated and grew. So the whole thing is not simply a wild pristine rainforest. It's a very ancient man-made environment, and emerging from that man-made environment, as well as evidence of large cities, large populations, and this mysterious dark earth, are huge geometrical structures. And again, I go into this at length in America before because I love this mystery. We have in the UK structures that are called hinges. I live in the city of Bath, and about 30 miles away, there's a beautiful site called Avebury. And another more famous site called Stonehenge. And what a henge is, is a ditch, which has been dug deep, and then an embankment has been pushed up outside the ditch. When people first saw these structures, they wondered if they'd been built for defense, but then it became obvious they hadn't been built for defense. Because if you want to create a moat, you put it outside your embankment, not inside your embankment. A henge is an earthwork which consists of a deep moat with a large embankment outside it. And it can be circular, it can be square, and in the UK and other parts of Europe, it often contains stone circles, megalithic stone circles as well. But the henge itself is entirely an earthwork. What we find in the Amazon are thousands of hinges that are now beginning to emerge from the cleared area of the jungle, and others that have been identified for the first time with Lidar. Lidar technology is being employed in the Amazon. It's non-destructive. You can see what's under the trees. What is Lidar? Light imaging and detective radar. They bounce laser beams down into the jungle. It's a whole pattern of them. You need helicopters, but it doesn't damage the rainforest. And you can strip away and see what's there. If this isn't too much of a diversion, let me give you the example of Guatemala. Guatemala is a small country, if I remember correctly. It's not much more than 100,000 square kilometers in size. It is filled with intriguing Mayan ruins. Lidar technology has heard of Tikal. What archaeologists didn't know was that literally within walking distance of Tikal, surrounding that whole area were more than 60,000 structures that they hadn't identified. And these have all been identified by Lidar in a country that's just 100,000 kilometers in area. So you have to ask yourself, in that five and a half million square kilometers of the Amazon, if Lidar technology could be applied comprehensively, what would we find beneath there? The evidence already is extremely tempting and extremely tantalizing. And I'm intrigued by these huge geometrical figures, which involve primarily circles and squares. And they are classic hinges in the sense that they are deep ditches surrounded by huge embankments. They're extremely geometrical. For example, you can find an octagon surrounding a square at a place called Jacosar in the Amazon. You can find a square perfectly enclosing a circle. Now that is an exercise called squaring the circle that our academics have given to the Greeks. They said the Greeks were the first people who performed that exercise. But now we find in dated sites in the Amazon that this was being done in the Amazon long before the Greeks. What are the dates? The earliest dates that have been found in these sites now are about three and a half thousand years old, about three and a half thousand years old. But the evidence is that the sites have been constantly remade. And what intrigues me is what remains in that five and a half million square kilometers that has not been investigated yet. We are just, I think, looking at the edges of a mystery. The archaeologists involved who are mainly from Finland and also from Brazil feel the same. Their estimate is that there are thousands of these structures remaining in the jungle. And they're open as to how old they may ultimately prove to be. The investigation needs to be done. But what's fascinating about them is this very powerful geometry and astronomy. So a number of the sites have perfectly aligned to true north, true south, true east, and true west. I'm not talking about magnetic north. I'm talking about true astronomical north. To do that, there's only one way to do it, and that's with astronomy. So that tells us that astronomers were at work in the Amazon. The geometry is very complex and very precise. That tells us that people with geometrical skills were at work in the Amazon. And thirdly, the scale of the sites of hundreds of meters, gigantic earthworks on the scale of hundreds of meters, tells us that this was highly organized project that was undertaken on a very large scale by very large numbers of people. It's a wonderful mystery, and it deserves much further attention. And yeah, that's Jaccosar, exactly, the squares, squaring the circles. So you can see the outside embankment, and then inside it is the square ditch. And then there's another embankment inside that, and a circle inside that. It's crazy that it made a road right through that. Well, a modern road, yeah, because there's no respect for the ancient world, unfortunately. And there's another one. Look at that. Wow, that's incredible. So there are thousands of these things. The stuff that they found in the Amazon, what imaging technology were they using to find all this? Initially, it was entirely found because areas of the rainforest had been cleared. Epic Interest said, we want to make a cattle ranch here, or we want to make a soybean farm here. So we're just going to clear the rainforest. In the process of clearing the rainforest, they start discovering these earthworks that had previously been completely overgrown by the jungle. Then the next step was to say, what can we do to find out more about this? Obviously, they don't want to destroy more jungle. And luckily, we have a technology, which is LiDAR, as I mentioned, which uses radar. And using LiDAR, they've been able to identify many more of these sites, and then to get to the sites without destroying the jungle, and to begin excavations on them, and to find that they go back in the cases of the ones that have been explored so far, at least 3,000 years. This is an intriguing development, completely unexplained in our understanding of the Amazon. And what it suggests is a heritage of extremely ancient knowledge. You don't wake up one morning and create a perfectly geometrical square or circular earthwork that's perfectly aligned to true north, south, east, and west on an enormous scale. There has to be a background to that. There has to be a reason for doing it. And the evidence is none of these sites were lived in. There's no habitation refuse found in them whatsoever. We don't know what they were used for. I make the case in America before that they're connected to a system of ideas, which is found all around the world, which is to do with death and the afterlife destiny of the soul.