As you go into the Temple of the Moon,
you're confronted at the entrance by a serpent.
Carved into the rock wall,
its glistening body seeming almost alive to your touch.
That's no easy task
because that means that the rock was cut away,
leaving only this high-relief serpent on the side.
As you go deeper into the tunnel, more enigmatic shapes appear,
all sculpted from the living rock.
It has a unique atmosphere.
The motes of dust catching in the light as it shines down
from the hole in the ceiling
onto a perfectly-leveled structure, clearly the work of human beings.
The stone plinth, like the serpent, is shaped from the rock itself,
lit from that crevasse above,
giving access both to sunlight and to moonlight.
Known locally as the Temple of the Moon, and also perhaps more authentically
as Amaru Markawasi, the House of the Serpent,
this eerie, rock-cut shelter certainly has a powerful presence.
It's believed the Inca used this space for fertility rituals,
where the hopeful would leave offerings to the goddess of the moon,
Mama Quilla, daughter of Viracocha.
The silence of the place, the coldness, the stillness within it,
uh, all of this focused the mind in a way that seems to me
to have been deliberately designed, not accidentally achieved.
Whoever carved out this sacred chamber, it seems it wasn't the same people
who built the more ostentatious gold-plated temples
that the Inca were famous for.
It's as if the Incas who venerated it built the outer walls to mark off
and thus respect something they found, not something they created.
Are we looking at the work of someone else,
an older culture that understood how to mold stone in fantastical ways?
-
I'm on a hillside above Cusco in Peru,
investigating a possibly very ancient technique for shaping stone
known as Hanan Pacha.
We have a multi-layered mystery, and in order to solve that mystery,
we need to look at the different styles of architecture
sometimes coexisting in the same street.
Anywhere else in the world,
these would be taken as evidence of the handiwork of different cultures.
Midway between the Temple of the Moon and the vast megaliths of Sacsayhuaman
is another of the Sacred Valley's most important sites
that seems to use the same more ancient stone-shaping technique.
Q'enqo.
Its Quechua name translates to "labyrinth,"
and as I begin to explore, I can see why.
One undertakes a journey to get into the heart of it,
a winding pathway that leads you through it
and causes you to reflect inwardly.
Q'enqo is ultimately a place where the individual finds him or herself alone,
surrounded by the mysterious mystical atmosphere,
surrounded by silence.
It's a complex network of sculpted tunnels,
subterranean galleries,
and what appear to be altars carved out of the bedrock.
And all seemingly leading to a central amphitheater,
where Jesus Gamarra once again joins me to share his expertise.
Were the Incas themselves responsible for any of the workmanship
that we see at Q'enqo Chico?
No. No.
While there are small indicators of Inca presence
like small stones and mud joints,
these are always respectfully built over the Hanan Pacha forms.
It is revered with great affection,
and this is done by surrounding it
with very precise and respectful constructions of pieces.
Ancient sculpted rock surrounded
by more rudimentary block work
like I saw outside the Temple of the Moon.
It's a juxtaposition of styles
that we find in many of Peru's most sacred sites.
As at Machu Picchu,
the smoothly-sculpted ceremonial Intihuatana stone…
which again appears to be surrounded by later Inca construction,
perhaps to honor and respect this spot as sacred.
This could explain the curious mix of stonework we see
both in the walls of Cusco and at Sacsayhuaman,
where what Jesus Gamarra identifies as later blocks are added above and around
the possibly much older smoothly-sculpted stones.
Regardless of when these blocks were shaped,
the question remains how?
Could we be looking at the fingerprints of a lost technology of prehistory?
Jesus' research colleague, Jan Peter de Jong, thinks there are clues
back at Sacsayhuaman as to how the rock was so expertly crafted.
Jan, you've just brought me to this very narrow tunnel
with very shiny sides. What's the name of this place?
They call it here the Chincana Chica.
It means "the place where one gets lost."
We're looking at natural bedrock here,
but clearly the tunnel is the result of human workmanship.
Is that characteristic of the oldest style of construction here,
that they work with the natural bedrock and shape it?
Yes, one of the characteristics of Hanan Pacha style
is that the stone is modified with like a mold technology.
You can see that…
they have been working with the stone as if it was soft.
Yes.
Because all kinds of things were pressed into the rock.
So when you say mold technology, you mean softening of the stone
and then pressing down the shape into the stone?
We think that the stones were soft at the moment of construction.
But how were they made soft?
Jan believes the walls of this tunnel are the key to the mystery.
So inside of this tunnel, um, we can see a lot of reflection.
I see it shining like a metallic sheen.
If you touch it, it's very smooth.
We think that it's been treated with heat,
and this heat caused like a layer on the stone,
and that's why it's this shiny.
Geologists call this effect vitrification.
Any idea how much heat would be involved?
Vitrification, it means "turn to glass,"
and that means that we need, like, 1,400 degrees Celsius.
Which is a colossal amount of heat.
Yes. Of course, we don't know how they did it,
but we know that they did it.
When you look at it closely, you have to ask yourself,
"Is that heat source the explanation for the peculiar melted-together appearance
of the gigantic megaliths of Sacsayhuaman?"
The first thing skeptics would say is that the very shiny effect inside the tunnel
is caused by people brushing against the sides of the tunnel.
- Yeah. - What's your reaction?
So a lot of people say, "Yeah, of course. Yeah."
"It's been done by all the hands going through this tunnel,
- touching it there." - Mm-hmm.
But you can see it's also on the roof and the whole wall of the tunnel.
So it won't be logical to say
they've been touching all those places at the same time.
So what about the other argument that it's caused by volcanic activity?
Uh, well, we don't have any volcanoes here.
- Okay. - So it's not a logical explanation.
For Jan, the only viable explanation is
that we're looking at the results of some kind of ancient scientific process,
one perfected by a civilization that predates the Inca.
It has been done in the far past by ancient people.
And we don't know exactly which technology they used.
When I look at Sacsayhuaman,
I think I'm looking at the fingerprints of a lost technology,
of a lost science of stone-working,
a science that we are not masters of today
that we do not have the technology to reproduce.
The exact nature of the technology remains a mystery.
But Jesus Gamarra believes the extreme heat
that allowed the rock to be softened and molded as it was worked
also strengthened and hardened it after it set.
When I look around, in a way, although they're extremely ancient,
the stones have a very modern appearance.
How do you understand what we see in front of our eyes?
Only the parts that have been worked by heat and mold
are preserved without having been destroyed.
The rest of the stone appears rough.
There is the eroding effect of weathering.
What is your explanation of what we're looking at here?
There is a lot of mystery that we can't explain
because these are parts of a great historical past
that happened thousands of years ago.
At certain points, we have to just accept
that we are looking at an impossible engineering task.
Impossible in our terms.
It requires of us to be more open-minded
in our view of the ancients than we presently are.
According to local traditions recorded by the Spanish conquistadors,
the advanced techniques of working with stone
were part of a legacy of knowledge
passed down by the creator-god of the Andes, Viracocha…
…who would cause stones to be consumed by fire,
making large blocks as light as feathers that could be floated into place,
which sounds a lot like the extreme heat theory.
That's why I'm interested in Indigenous traditions
that do speak of the stones being melted or molded together.
Let's keep our ears and eyes open to such possibilities.
This evidence of unexplainable technologies at work
can be found throughout the highlands of ancient Peru.
But could there be proof of ancient scientific achievements
on the other side of the Andes Mountains
that we've similarly overlooked in the Amazon rainforest?
Just because those areas are not attractive
for human beings to live in today
doesn't mean that they weren't attractive in the past.
The investigations that are being done
are revealing evidence that there are huge secrets in the Amazon.
We now know the evidence for human habitation in ancient Amazonia
goes back at least 25,000 years.
That suddenly opens up a much wider timeframe
in which to slot a lost civilization.
The possibilities that we need to be investigating
for creating civilizations become much deeper and much longer.
In fact, it seems the first Europeans to navigate the entire Amazon in 1542…
…may have caught a glimpse of the descendants
of just such a civilization when they passed near here.
The expedition was led by adventurer Francisco de Orellana
and was chronicled by a Dominican friar, Gaspar de Carvajal.
De Carvajal's journal didn't talk of
the endless, seemingly uninhabited forest we see today.
The cleric described the Amazon basin as teeming with cities
inhabited by highly-skilled peoples.
"One settlement," he wrote, "stretched unbroken for around 13 miles."
That's the length of Manhattan Island.
But when European missionaries arrived about a century later,
they saw no such cities.
So historians dismissed De Carvajal's account as a fiction,
concocted to impress the Spanish crown so they'd fund more such expeditions.
But as the endless jungle starts to give up its secrets,
it's beginning to look like those reports were true all along.
Recent discoveries in the Amazon suggest
that there was indeed an ancient civilization here.
Using LiDAR to peer through the dense jungle canopy in Bolivia in 2019…
archaeologists were amazed to see vast man-made structures and roads.
As a result of new research, now we're finding that there were huge settlements.
As we all know, there is a tradition of lost cities in the Amazon.
Cities is the right word to use to describe these settlements.
Based on the data and our knowledge of existing Amazonian villages,
researchers have a good idea of what one of those settlements
known as Cotoca might have looked like.
The city was almost a mile wide,
an entire metropolis, surrounded by canals and causeways.
Some led inwards to raised terraces, perhaps for individual dwellings.
And at the heart of the city lay a towering pyramid mound,
likely a ceremonial center.
What's more, this city appeared to be connected
to at least three similar settlements by raised roads stretching for miles.
We don't know much about the people who lived in this city.
What we do know, hidden beneath the jungle canopy,
is that there are more cities. Many more.
Archaeologists have pieced together evidence
revealing what they call a lost valley of ancient cities
hidden in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
In the western Amazon, archaeologists have recently uncovered
what appears to be a large cluster of settlements
connected by roads, dating back 2,500 years,
much like the geoglyphs I saw in Brazil.
Creating large cities, creating the geoglyphs of Acre State,
this was not considered to be within the potential
of the hunter-gatherer inhabitants of the Amazon,
and yet it clearly was.
More and more of these ancient settlements continue to be discovered,
suggesting a widespread Amazonian civilization,
one that may have been home to as many as 20 million people.
What we are learning now is that the story of the Amazon
is not as it had been told.
Perhaps de Carvajal did witness large settlements in 1542.
But if so, why didn't the Europeans who voyaged down the river
over a century later see any evidence of them?
There's a rather grim explanation.
When the Spanish and the Portuguese came into the Americas,
they brought with them a whole host of diseases
to which European peoples had some natural immunity,
but to which the peoples of the Amazon did not.
Any population here would have been devastated,
while the rainforest quickly reclaimed their settlements.
But we find more echoes of that civilization
in a myth of the Western Amazon from the Tucano people.
The Tucano have an origin story about how their ancestors
were first brought to that area as part of a civilizing mission
in a… in a serpent canoe that travels the length of the Amazon system.
So the legend goes,
this anaconda canoe was helmed by a spirit being
and set down a cargo of human migrants.
Soon after, the divine daughter of the sun came to Earth,
bearing the gifts of fire and tools
as well as knowledge of arts and crafts.
She and her supernatural associates prepared the land for humans to thrive
before returning to their otherworldly abodes.
This sounds to me so much like the civilizing hero stories
that are told all around the world
that I feel it's very much part of the… of the same pattern.
These themes keep on cropping up.
A spirit being who arrived by boat,
much like Quetzalcoatl did in Aztec lore.
Or Hotu Matu'a when he landed on Rapa Nui.
Or Viracocha, who appeared from the waters of Lake Titicaca
after a time of chaos.
Could this daughter of the sun
and her mission to encourage people to settle the Amazon
be related to the same lost civilization I've been looking for?
In the Peruvian Andes,
Viracocha supposedly worked miracles in stone.
But here in the Amazon, where large outcrops of rock are rare,
structures made from less durable material
such as wood and earth clearly predominate.
What's less clear is how they succeeded
in making this seemingly inhospitable place their home.
How did they sustain huge populations
on what we've long considered to be infertile soils?
If we don't get to grips with the ability of the Amazonian peoples
to feed populations of millions,
then we're not ever going to get to grips with the…
the truth about the human story as a whole.
One explanation can be found in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, near Manaus.
Emerging from the very ground of the Amazon itself,
a long buried secret has recently been brought to light.
Evidence of an ancient science that helps to explain
how the rainforest supported large urban populations.
Angela Araujo is an archaeologist
who specializes in humankind's historical relationship with plants.
Recently, she's been focusing her studies on a mysterious phenomenon.
Typically, rainforest soils are not particularly fertile
or suitable for agriculture.
But around settlements, ancient and modern,
scientists have found something astonishing,
self-regenerating patches of soil
they call "terra preta" or Amazonian dark earth.
We have here a soil which is dark in color by comparison with the surrounding soils.
Mysteriously and strangely, it contains bacteria,
which constantly reproduce and renew themselves
and renew the fertility of the soil. It's a kind of magical earth.
And this super-powered soil has been found all across the Amazon
wherever there's evidence of humans.
I'm meeting Angela near a recently-discovered ancient settlement
to see this dark earth for myself.
When did you first become specifically interested in Amazonian dark earth?
Nowadays, we also use this soil
for agriculture in the region.
And all of a sudden, I came across an interaction
between the past and these populations.
I wanted to understand why and how
these populations were connected to such dark soil.
Researchers have found that mixed in with the organic elements
of every patch of dark earth, no matter how old,
are tiny ceramic shards,
undeniable evidence that human populations have been involved
in generating this special soil.
And studies have found samples dating back at least 7,000 years.
How large were those populations?
I can't say for sure, but there are records that suggest
there were at least around three million people
living in the region of the Alto Rio Negro alone.
Do you think that the ancients deliberately,
cleverly invented this soil?
Or did they discover its special properties by accident?
Personally, I don't believe it was intentional.
I believe what happened was that, with so many people inhabiting the area,
a lot of decomposing waste was produced bringing about these benefits.
But it's a chicken and egg argument.
I can't help seeing a paradox here.
On the one hand, we're saying
that there were very large populations in the Amazon
and that as an accidental product of their presence,
they created black earth.
But on the other hand, we're saying that natural Amazon soils
are not fertile enough to support large populations.
Doesn't it seem likely that what made the large populations possible
was the black earth itself?
I believe it's possible
that they realized the area was productive,
but their intention wasn't,
"I will dump waste to fertilize the land and improve crop production."
The research continues.
But to me, the reason this feels so intentional
is that terra preta can be found throughout the Amazon,
inevitably close by prehistoric settlements.
We need to be more open-minded
in our view of the capacity of the ancients than we presently are.
We need to regard them as masters of their environment
who made that environment work for them over thousands and thousands of years.
And given the immensity of the jungle,
who knows how many more patches of terra preta may lie undiscovered
that could push the origins of this miracle soil
even further back into the past.
The proposition I present here,
hotly contested by many archaeologists,
is that the settlement and expansion of human populations in the Amazon
was a planned affair.
But building and maintaining those vast settlements
would have demanded massive amounts of natural resources.
Not just food crops, but something we might imagine
could never have been scarce in the Amazon itself.
Timber.
The Amazon is truly a wonder of natural diversity.
Today, there are around 390 billion trees here,
made up of some 16,000 species.
What if I told you that most of this immense jungle
is the end result of an intentional campaign
undertaken by humans thousands of years ago?
What if I told you the Amazon might have been planted?
Researchers have confirmed that during the Ice Age,
the Amazon wasn't dense jungle, but grassland broken up by trees.
They assumed the warming planet nurtured the sprawling rainforest we see today.
But recently, archaeobotanists uncovered something unexpected.
Half of the forest is made up of just 1.4% of known Amazonian tree species,
the very same species, as it turns out, that happen to be useful to humans.
Was this the result of a long-term project set in motion thousands of years ago,
a project that would eventually blossom
into a widespread Indigenous Amazonian civilization?
And there's something else.
As with terra preta, most of these useful trees are found
close by the newly-discovered ancient cities of the Amazon.
Instead of the hostile, dangerous jungle that we Westerners tend to see,
they were turning it into a homeland for millions,
making the Amazon a garden, making it a place that served human needs.
In the 20th century,
it was thought that the hinterlands of Amazonia was totally virgin.
That humans had not touched it.
And now we know that many of the trees that we have here,
Brazil nut, many palms, are semi-cultivated
and even cultivated and domesticated,
so that our understanding of the forest has changed.
This is truly a scientific project
that's been underway in the Amazon for a very long time.
How long, exactly?
What's really intriguing
is that the oldest date for tree cultivation so far
found in the Amazon is some 10,800 years ago.
That's around the end of the Ice Age,
exactly the time that we see similar leaps forward
in human civilization and innovation all across the globe.
This causes us to ask what else remains to be found
in that vast expanse of the Amazon rainforest
that really wasn't supposed to be there and yet clearly is there.
As we saw with the advanced stonework of ancient Peru,
these sophisticated agricultural projects and settlements in the Amazon
begun thousands of years ago
seem to demonstrate scientific achievements
that are, to say the least, unexpected so long ago.
We have to completely reframe our understanding of the Amazon.
We have to see it as a product of human intelligence, human initiative,
human ingenuity, and human intention.
The most astounding example of Amazonian technology
may also point to an unexpected source for all this advanced knowledge.
I've returned to the Peruvian Amazon to learn more.
This is Iquitos, a port city located at a junction
where the great river is fed by several tributaries.
The port might be young,
but this region has, for thousands of years,
been a center for a profound cultural practice,
the use of ayahuasca.
Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna is an Indigenous anthropologist
and leading expert on this ancient plant-based medicine.
I have witnessed many people taking ayahuasca,
and I'm astonished, you know, by what they experience,
sometimes extraordinary journeys into other realms,
sometimes simply looking into themselves,
finding ways of solving their own problems.
What do you see happening?
Important changes taking place in their lives?
Many people write to me, you know,
and that those experiences were completely life-changing,
changed completely their perspective, you know.
The use of ayahuasca has recently become popular
in our contemporary society.
But for Indigenous people of the Amazon, the brew has long held a sacred power.
Many Indigenous people say, you know,
they take ayahuasca in order to understand the rules of society,
you know, become better human beings.
The preparation of ayahuasca
is the realm of the shaman healers or curanderos.
Like Don Francisco Montes Shuna from the Kapanawa people,
who must blow smoke from an ancient species of tobacco
known as mapacho to purify the ritual.
In the Capanahua language, my name is Shamorin Kyashi Piary.
Shamorin Kyashi Piary means "The Angel of the Jungle."
I come from a line of healers.
I feel the connection to all my ancestors,
my grandmother, my great-grandmother, the whole family.
We are connected and feel the connections with everything to do with Amazonia.
As research progresses,
the evidence is building that ayahuasca can have health benefits.
When brewed, the vine alone has powerful healing properties
thanks to a molecule it contains known to science as harmine.
There have been studies suggesting neurogenesis.
Mm-hmm.
You know, that the harmine will be producing new neurons,
even new beta cells for the pancreas.
Mm-hmm.
And perhaps new cells also for the ligaments and so on.
The harmine in the vine might be a medical miracle,
but it doesn't produce a visionary state.
That only happens when it's combined with the leaves of certain other plants
Indigenous to the Amazon like this one called chaliponga,
which contains the psychoactive chemical at the heart of ayahuasca,
DMT, short for dimethyltryptamine.
DMT is considered one of the most potent psychedelics.
But scientific studies have now confirmed it is non-addictive
and can have therapeutic properties
when administered in controlled doses and circumstances.
We're discovering that when accompanied by talking therapy as well,
it can be extremely helpful in bringing to an end
long-term intractable conditions.
But there's just one problem.
DMT isn't orally active
because enzymes in the gut normally destroy it on contact.
It's precisely here
that the shamanistic science of the Amazon comes in
with a remarkable solution.
So what happens is that the harmine in the vine
will block the destruction of DMT in the gut,
so that the DMT will cross the blood-brain barrier,
go into receptors in the brain.
That is what produces the visions, you know, the DMT.
The result?
Out of the tens of thousands of plant species of the Amazon,
only the combination of the ayahuasca vine with the leaves of a plant containing DMT
will produce the highly-prized visionary effects.
We have two plants, which are not psychoactive on their own,
but are psychoactive when cooked together
to create the ayahuasca brew.
To do that by trial and error
could involve centuries or millennia of experimentation.
I think we have a mystery here. How did they come to this discovery?
Right there looks to me like a scientific project.
It is, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it is based on experience. It's based on observation.
It's based on experimentation, constant experimentation and so on.
- Over thousands of years? - Yes, exactly.
This tradition goes back thousands of years.
I mean, we can't say. Two thousand, three thousand years…
We're getting evidence of science in the Amazon,
the knowledge that Indigenous shamans have accumulated and passed down
over generations, over thousands of years, of plants and the properties of plants
and how they may be mixed together to produce desired effects.
During an ayahuasca ceremony, the shaman summons the visions
by singing an ikaro, a power song.
But the shaman is simply the ceremonial leader.
The plant itself is considered the teacher.
When you take ayahuasca,
you need to prepare a question.
She will provide an answer.
The power of psychedelics to achieve a deeper wisdom
isn't limited to the Amazon.
We see it in many of the world's
most ancient and deeply respected cultures.
It's clear now that what we call psychedelics today
were embraced all around the ancient world.
In Ancient Greece, Socrates and Plato wrote of intellectual breakthroughs
following the ritual taking of a hallucinogenic brew.
Hieroglyphs from Egypt suggest they ingested petals
from the psychoactive blue water lily to communicate with the divine.
And in the Vedic sacrifices of ancient India,
priests seeking to connect with the gods
drank a visionary concoction known as soma.
The fact that these altered states of consciousness have been embraced
throughout prehistory and history
tell us that they're very important to the human experience.
I actually think that it's impossible to understand the ancient world
unless we take psychedelics into account.
What's your own view on how old ayahuasca might be?
They've been experimented with for thousands of years.
- It could be much older. - Yeah.
- It feels ancient to me. - Yeah.
This is an extraordinary mystery.
I believe the complex science of ayahuasca goes back
much further than anyone thinks.
And there's evidence to prove it.