Original subtitles

[intriguing music playing]

[Graham] For those who don't know me, I'm Graham Hancock.

I've been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization in prehistory

for more than 30 years.

Archaeology claims if there were such a thing as a lost civilization,

they would have found it already.

Well, I profoundly disagree with that.

[music continues]

And now, my quest continues...

[airplane engine revving]

...in a part of the world often overlooked by historians of humanity's origins...

The oldest dates that we got were about 13,200 before present.

[Graham] ...exploring some of the world's most intriguing ancient wonders.

There's numerology. There's mathematics. There's astronomy.

This could be considered a lost technology.

[Graham] And making new discoveries.

Wow.

[triumphant music playing]

It's impossible. It's impossible.

I mean, as a kid, I always thought the timeline was off.

[Graham] All with a radical new proposition in mind.

Could the key to discovering a lost civilization

of the Ice Age lie here,

in the Americas?

[triumphant music crescendos]

[triumphant music ends]

[theme song playing]

[theme song ends]

{an8}- [thunder rumbling] - [electronic warble]

[somber music playing]

[Graham] The quest for our origins

and the quest for the origins of civilization,

are fundamental to what it is, to being human.

But I think it's part of the human nature.

If we're convinced that something doesn't exist,

we don't look for it.

[tense music playing]

[Graham] My search for those origins has led me here,

to one of the most striking places in North America.

White Sands.

This is a land of austere beauty and strangeness

that's been hiding a secret for thousands of years.

A secret now unveiled

that's forcing a rewrite of the prehistory of the Americas.

[tense music intensifies]

[Graham] Until the 1990s, we were taught that deep in the Ice Age,

humans migrated from North Asia to Alaska, across the Bering land bridge,

then, around 13,500 years ago,

walked south through an ice-free corridor, before spreading across the Americas.

A scenario held so firmly for so long

that few archaeologists went looking for traces of any earlier human migration.

[tense music continues]

For a very long time, there's been this conviction

that evidence would not be found of a human presence

older than 13,500 years ago.

Turns out, that idea was wrong. Very wrong.

[tense music intensifies, stops]

[Graham] White Sands National Park's resource manager, David Bustos,

{an8}began working here in 2005,

hoping to share with others his passion

for this pristine wilderness and its wildlife.

But he soon found himself on the trail of something else,

something that seemed crazy at first.

I think about 2006, I heard a story about footprints of a Bigfoot. [chuckles]

And there was a government trapper that found these amazing prints.

He described them being 22 inches across and eight inches wide.

- [Graham] Yeah. - What could that be? Must be a Bigfoot.

And I think lot of people gave him a hard time. There's no Bigfoot.

But I was thinking, "I've seen these." [chuckles]

Yeah.

[David] And so we went out, and when we brushed out the footprints,

you could see they had incredible claw marks.

[Graham] Obviously, this was no Bigfoot.

He did find a big footprint of a giant ground sloth.

- That's what they were. - Giant ground sloths.

[Graham] They knew the prints must be very old.

Giant ground sloths went extinct around 11,500 years ago.

Then David and his colleagues found even larger prints nearby from mammoths,

also long extinct.

Some of the gait and stride can be 13 feet long. Really incredible.

Look a little bit further, you'll find the giant camel, American camel.

- [Graham] Yeah. - Sometimes you'll see dire wolves.

[Graham] All these tracks are from megafauna,

giant mammals which suddenly vanished at the end of the last Ice Age.

Many are little more than compacted sand,

buried and protected by layers of sediment over thousands of years,

until erosion brought them back to the surface.

[intriguing music playing]

Among these ancient mammoth tracks,

David also spotted another intriguing set of prints,

and he and his colleagues decided to take a closer look.

When we brushed out these other footprints,

we've seen really nice, clear toe impressions in the heel.

[triumphant music playing]

- [Graham] Human footprints? - Human footprints.

At the same age, it appeared to be, as the megafauna.

It was really amazing.

- Incredible. - [David] Yes.

[triumphant music ends]

[tense music playing]

[Graham] These fossilized human footprints must have been made

in the time of the mammoths and the giant sloths.

At least 11,500 years ago.

And there are thousands of them.

[tense music continues]

There's something intimate and special about White Sands. It's not tools.

It's not a broken femur from a prey animal that's been butchered.

It's human footprints. It's us.

We are seeing the human presence very intimately and very directly

in those footprints.

[tense music continues]

But when were they left here exactly?

Just how old are these footprints?

There's no technology that can date them directly.

So the National Park Service teamed up with the US Geological Survey

to search for more evidence.

[tense music intensifies]

[Graham] And they struck gold,

finding layer upon layer of animal and human tracks going deep into the past.

[camera shutter clicks]

Buried among them were seeds from an aquatic grass...

[camera shutter clicks]

...seeds that could be carbon dated.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Graham] And the results were astounding.

[David] We know that the footprints were here for thousands of years,

at least from 23,000 years to 21,000 years.

Wow.

[suspenseful music slows down]

The discovery of human footprints at White Sands is a huge step forward

in our understanding of the peopling of the Americas.

{an8}We're looking at absolutely incontrovertible evidence

that humans were present in New Mexico deep in the Ice Age,

as much as 23,000 years ago.

It's proof that long before it was possible to spread south

into the Americas through that ice-free corridor,

humans were already here.

[suspenseful music continues]

This changes the history of the Americas, and it changes the history of the world.

These are human beings just like us,

but human beings concealed behind the veil of time.

And our task now is to lift that veil back

and re-establish that connection with our ancestors and the remote past.

[suspenseful music ends]

The footprints hold special meaning and significance

for the Indigenous communities of this area.

{an8}Kim Pasqual-Charlie of the Pueblo of Acoma consulted with the team

{an8}on this groundbreaking discovery.

[Graham] Tell me about the relationship of the Acoma to the land.

How long have your people been here?

Are there myths and traditions about an origin story of your people?

Yes. Our origin story started somewhere in the north area.

And through our migration story that has been passed down

from generation to generation,

we settled here and there, coming down here.

- And that's where my people stayed. - Yeah.

We've been in the Southwest for a very long time.

[Graham] Yeah.

To Kim and her people,

these prints are far more than archaeological records.

- Your ancestors left their footprints. - [Kim] Mm-hmm.

I understand you were involved in finding some of those footprints?

Yes. There's no words to describe it.

We've come to see where our ancestor once walked this earth.

[tense music playing]

And to place my hands in the little footprints of children.

- You know? And it gets very emotional. - [Graham] Yeah.

- [Kim] You know? It's... - Yeah.

I'm sorry, Graham, but it just... [chuckles]

There are times it makes you wanna cry.

- [Graham] Absolutely. - You know?

[Graham] But once the footprints are exposed,

the same process of erosion that revealed them

will slowly start to erase them.

These footprints which testify to the ancient presence of your people

are also fragile.

- Right. - They could easily be lost.

[Kim] You know, maybe 50 years from now,

the next generation won't be able to see the footprints.

- [Graham] Yeah. - [Kim] But the stories will continue.

Our stories will continue.

[wind howling]

[Graham] But the barren landscape begs a question.

Why would all these humans and animals have come here?

[suspenseful music playing]

Remember, North America was different during the Ice Age.

The north half of the continent was smothered by ice.

And this part of New Mexico was very different.

At first glance,

this vast, open desert with patches of brush and wind-sculpted dunes

seems pitiless and otherworldly.

[Graham] But if we wind the clock back to the height of the Ice Age,

conditions here were very different.

The Tularosa Basin held a giant body of fresh water known as Lake Otero

surrounded by vegetation.

[mammoth trumpeting]

Ancient mammoths, ground sloths, and camels came to this watering hole

to feast on the grasses and trees.

- [mammoth trumpeting] - [birds chirping]

And, as we now know, humans followed them.

Establishing the age of the footprints

was a complex scientific problem.

David and a team of experts spent more than a decade building the evidence.

But when, in 2021, they published their findings in the journal Science,

not all reactions were favorable.

[David] I think with anything that's so unique and unusual,

it takes a lot of science to be able to support it.

[Graham] The carbon dating of the seeds was challenged.

But the team confirmed their results using other samples of pollen and sediment

quieting their critics.

Is there still controversy around the 23,000-year-old dates?

I think until you have a time machine, there always will be.

But beyond all these dates also, if you look,

you still see a mammoth footprint

a meter, a meter and a half above human footprints.

- And there's more mammoth prints below... - Below. Yeah.

...so megafauna and people have been on this horizon

- for thousands of years together. - Yeah.

[tense music playing]

[Graham] The White Sands discovery helps to solve

one of the most perplexing mysteries of prehistory,

the sudden extinction of America's Ice Age megafauna

between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago.

The suggestion of archaeology was that human beings hunted down all the megafauna

and butchered them.

I don't know of any hunter-gatherer group

that would willingly exterminate its food supply.

So the notion that humans were responsible for the extinction of the megafauna,

uh, has always seemed, to me, quite bizarre.

[tense music ends]

[Graham] The tracks here prove that humans and those animals overlapped

for at least 10,000 years before their extinction.

I think a much better explanation

for the extinction of the Ice Age megafauna

is the global cataclysm that took place around about 12,800-12,900 years ago,

known as the Younger Dryas.

[thunder rumbling]

[tense music playing]

There was a sudden plunge in global temperatures,

a sudden rise in sea levels,

and the world very rapidly became an extremely difficult place to live.

It's a time we call the ancient apocalypse.

North America was hardest hit,

which could explain both the extinction of its megafauna

and also, the big gaps in human history here.

[tense music ends]

We are going to have to completely change the story of the peopling of the Americas

in the light of this new evidence.

Archaeologists are opening their eyes and their minds

to the possibility of a much older human presence.

[David] We're just touching the tip of the surface of what's to be learned.

I think throughout the Southwest as people look,

they're gonna find sites that are just as old as White Sands also.

So it's like you've opened a door on the past,

- which nobody's stepped through before? - Yeah.

[tense music playing]

[Graham] Paradigm shifts don't happen instantly.

It's the accumulation of evidence that finally discredits an old paradigm

and allows eyes to open to new possibilities.

That's what we're witnessing in the Americas now.

What's been discovered here at White Sands is part of a much bigger story,

a global story that I've been investigating

for more than 30 years.

If we want to clear the fog of amnesia that surrounds our remote past,

we need to look much deeper and much further back

than we've ever done before, right here in the Americas

where the timeline of prehistory

keeps on receding with every new discovery.

[tense music ends]

New discoveries

that are not just being followed by archaeologists.

[tense music playing]

[Graham] So, Keanu.

Graham.

Let's talk about the past.

{an8}- Okay. - Why does the past matter to you?

Well, you know.

I remember as a young child just being inquisitive.

And as I have grown up,

it comes to the question of a fundamental sense of

"who are we?"

Yeah. And what's driven me on this quest of my own for more than 30 years,

um, is to try to get back to some sort of source.

Source of what?

The source of who we are.

- And the timeline. - [Graham] Timeline's all wrong.

That's why those footprints in White Sands were so significant to me.

[Keanu] Mm.

My feeling is that 23,000 years is just the beginning.

We're gonna go back much further than that.

Yeah. I have that... I have that feeling too.

And we are just at the edge of... of rediscovering so much of our lost past.

[Keanu] Mm.

And in a way, America is the place where that story is unfolding.

Well, that's an exciting idea.

[tense music playing]

I think you're on a quest, Graham,

to teach and to bring understanding, perhaps.

[Graham] Well, the issue about the Americas is

that there is so much of our past that we've forgotten.

And my role, such as it is, has been to try to recover,

uh, some of that lost memory.

When I think of the past like that, it sounds exciting.

Absolutely. For me, the past is all about mystery.

It's not about what we do know. It's about what we don't know.

The huge areas that have not been explored or investigated.

The possibilities that haven't been explored.

Yeah.

[tense music continues]

[Graham] We need to start looking specifically for evidence

in places where we might not have looked before.

During the Ice Age,

the northern part of North America was a frozen wasteland.

The places to look are down near the tropics.

Down near the equator.

Places that were warm, comfortable, nurturing, hospitable.

Perhaps even a vast region

that was long believed to be an archaeological wasteland,

but where astounding secrets of the human past

are now beginning to be revealed.

This is the Amazon.

[tense music intensifies]

You're looking at more than six million square kilometers of land

that are still under dense canopy rainforest.

That immense land area is a huge mystery

at the heart of the human story.

And little by little, we're beginning to realize

how enormous that mystery really is.

[tense music continues]

For decades, the dominant view of archaeologists was that

the Amazon's only historical inhabitants

were small semi-nomadic tribes of hunter-foragers,

much like those still surviving in the rainforest today.

But I believe the dominant view is wrong.

[tense music intensifies]

[tense music continues]

[Graham] I'm headed to the far west of Brazil and the state of Acre.

Like most of the Amazon basin,

it had long been blanketed by sprawling rainforest

until vast expanses began to be burned down

to make way for cattle ranches.

[fire crackling]

Coming to the Amazon rainforest is both an exhilarating and depressing experience.

The amount of land that's been cleared of trees

is an unfolding modern day disaster with no easy solution.

But as new swathes of land have been cleared,

it's led to something that no one expected.

[tense music continues]

{an8}[Graham] I'm here to meet Dr. Alceu Ranzi,

a paleogeographer who began his career studying the Amazon's Ice Age animals.

[airplane engine revving]

[Graham] He wants to show me evidence of a mystery

that remains unsolved today.

[tense music intensifies]

- Whoa! - Whoa!

[both laugh]

Roller coaster.

[Graham] From up here, the ongoing devastation is unmissable.

You can see how much of it has been cleared.

- So much. So much. - [Graham] Yes.

Twenty years from now, all the forest will disappear.

But this clearance has opened a little window on a great mystery.

In 1986, Dr. Ranzi was flying over this region

when he caught a glimpse of something unexpected.

I was arriving in Rio Branco by jet, commercial jet.

Yes.

- Sitting in the window seat. - [Graham] Yeah.

- And looking at the environment like this. - [Graham] Yes.

[Dr. Ranzi] Like this.

And then I see a big circle.

[dramatic music playing]

My God. What's this? Huh?

- And the jet is so fast. Gone. - Yeah.

Disappear.

[Graham] He didn't yet realize it,

but in those few seconds, Dr. Ranzi had spotted something,

that if our old notions of the Amazon are true,

simply shouldn't exist.

- Wow. - [Dr. Ranzi] Yeah.

[Graham] Giant geometrical shapes, as much as 1,000 feet across,

formed by trenches and massive piles of earth,

now known as geoglyphs.

Fantastic design. My God.

Fantastic design. And so big.

[Graham] And enormous.

- So enormous. Enormous. - [Graham] Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

[tense music ends]

- Beautiful. Beautiful thing. - [Dr. Ranzi] Beautiful.

[tense music playing]

And what I'm seeing is a square surrounded by an oval.

[Dr. Ranzi] Ah, look. Another one.

- Yes. They're everywhere. - [Dr. Ranzi] Everywhere.

Another one here.

Another one here.

Wow. Incredible.

[Graham] The perfect geometry is only visible

from hundreds of feet in the air.

And yet, somehow, this was all created by people

with their feet stuck firmly on the ground.

[tense music ends]

This, to me, raises a feeling of deep respect.

How do they have the perspective to see how they would look from above?

It's a powerful experience.

I've visited many temples and pyramids and sacred sites around the world,

and this has a very special feeling.

You know, very special.

[triumphant music playing]

I mean, it touches my heart.

[spluttering] I'm... I'm looking at something majestic.

It's as though the curtain is being pulled back from the... from the Mona Lisa.

Suddenly, I'm seeing something that I didn't know was there,

and it had an enormous emotional impact upon me.

It was as though the ancients were speaking to me directly.

"Look what we could do. Don't underestimate us."

"We were scientists."

[tense music playing]

When you first told archaeologists about this phenomenon, what did they say?

- The first one was a famous archaeologist. - [Graham] Yes.

- [Dr. Ranzi] I showed her the picture... - Yeah. Yeah.

...and she looked and said, "Where is it? In the Amazon? It's impossible."

It's impossible? Look at the picture.

Help me, please.

- I don't know what this is. - Yes.

[Graham] The evidence is undeniable

and spread across an area the size of West Virginia.

[tense music playing]

At first, it was thought these mounds

might be defensive ramparts.

But there's no evidence of warfare here.

And the ditches lie inside the mounds, so they're not moats.

And there's no evidence that they were used as settlements.

[tense music ends]

It's impossible to avoid speculation when we look at the Amazon geoglyphs. Why?

Because there are no written documents from their original creators

that tell us why they made them. We don't know why they made them.

[intriguing music playing]

What's your thought about how many there are in the whole area?

- Thousands. - [Graham] Thousands.

- Thousands. Thousands. - [Graham] All right.

Thousands.

[music crescendos, stops]

[Graham] It raises many questions.

How old are these geometrical earthworks?

Are they older or younger

than the Amazon rainforest that long concealed them?

[suspenseful music playing]

What was the size of the workforce that created them in the first place?

And what skills were required to direct the work successfully?

[Graham] This is not new work.

This is people who already knew what they were doing.

They've done it many times before.

I would love to know what was in their minds

when they were making this.

Yeah.

[Graham] It's such a huge effort and energy.

[suspenseful music continues]

[Graham] The geoglyph building project is a compelling mystery,

one that scores of researchers are now grappling with.

Back on the ground, we're meeting Professor Martti Pärssinen,

an archaeologist and anthropologist from the University of Helsinki,

who's been searching for answers alongside Dr. Ranzi for two decades.

[Graham] Clearly, we're looking at an enormous phenomenon here,

not something small.

And a phenomenon that shows knowledge of geometry

and also a high level of organization must have been involved.

[Pärssinen] I think so because many of these are so complicated.

[Graham] Very complicated.

{an8}It is necessary to have pre-planned how to do it and how to organize it.

[music ends]

[Graham] After examining hundreds of geoglyphs,

Professor Pärssinen has uncovered a key piece of evidence

that points to the type of society that built these structures,

ancient raised roads connecting many of the geoglyphs.

[mysterious music playing]

This area is full of roads.

- Hunters and gatherers do not build roads. - [Graham] Mm-hmm.

[Pärssinen] They don't have any need for that.

It needs already society with a much more higher level of thinking.

- [Graham] I see. - And relationships between each other.

- So that is a really complex society. - [Graham] Yeah.

And if I'm right, this was not expected before in the Amazon.

No, it was totally a... surprise for us.

[tense music playing]

[Graham] To figure out more about who the builders were,

Professor Pärssinen's team has been excavating the areas around the geoglyphs,

including this one known as Tequinho.

Archaeologically, tell me what you do find, uh, inside the earthworks?

From Tequinho, we found 40,000, uh, shards of ceramics.

[camera shutter clicking]

[Graham] These shards were around 2,000 years old.

The earthwork itself was dated to around 2,500 years ago.

But the pottery was unexpectedly sophisticated.

- Most of it is of high quality... - Right.

- ...and polychrome ceramics. - Right.

So that polychrome is a rather advanced form of ceramics.

Yes, normally polychrome ceramic is considered to be part of civilization.

[tense music playing]

[Graham] The multicolored ceramics raised an unexpected parallel

with another far-off culture known for their deep knowledge of geometry,

the ancient Greeks.

Generally, historians and archaeologists say that, you know,

the Greeks were amongst the first to create geometry,

but clearly, we have to reconsider that view.

I think you're right because

this Geoglyph culture is exactly the same time

when the Greek culture had archaeological period

that has been called Geometric Greek period.

{an8}[tense music playing]

{an8}[Graham] The fact that two cultures so far apart

{an8}were making geometric art

{an8}and producing sophisticated pottery around the same time

{an8}seems more than a coincidence.

{an8}It's fascinating that we're seeing this parallel development of ideas

between cultures unconnected.

Yes, exactly.

[Graham] I'm not suggesting the Greek and Amazonian cultures were in contact.

But could both perhaps have shared a legacy of knowledge

inherited from a vastly older civilization,

one that traveled the Earth in the night of time,

leaving traces of its wisdom wherever it went?

Now, the way that archaeology explains this is to say,

"Well, look, we all have the same human minds,

and so we're all going to do the same things."

{an8}And the fact that they did them at the same time

{an8}in widely separated geographical locations

is just explained by that shared neurology.

I'm afraid that just doesn't work for me.

It's obvious from looking at the design that there must be a background to this.

This isn't something that just appears out of nowhere suddenly one night.

So how far back can you trace the prehistory of this area?

And is there any evidence that these places were special

before the geoglyphs were put there?

That's a very good question because we excavated up to one meter...

- [Graham] Mm-hmm. - ...and after that, the ceramic disappeared.

But then I noticed that the charcoal continued.

[Graham] Mm-hmm.

And we went down and down and down,

and then we started to take radiocarbon samples,

and finally we found that many of these sites

have been established already 10,000 years ago.

My goodness. Wow. From the deep past.

- From the deep past, exactly. - Yeah. Fascinating.

[tense music playing]

[Graham] So, 10,000 years ago, not long after the end of the Ice Age,

it looks like these same sites may already have held

some great significance to the people who visited them.

That adds more to the picture then.

So in a sense, what we're looking at now is the latest incarnation

of a very long-term association with the land,

- a very long-term project in a way. - [Pärssinen] Yes.

We have evidence of a highly organized, sophisticated Indigenous civilization

taking all the initiatives that we would expect of a high civilization.

[Graham] This research is truly groundbreaking

for our growing understanding of human history.

We have to reconsider our whole ideas of the ancient Amazon

and our whole ideas of ancient civilizations.

To me, this is one of the most exciting discoveries

that has been made in the last 100 years.

It's really, really something special.

[tense music playing]

[Graham] And the work is far from over.

We are now aware of a phenomenon that we didn't know existed 20 years ago.

The next question is how many of them are there?

How many of these earthworks actually exist?

[triumphant music playing]

To date, more than 1,000 geoglyphs have been discovered

in the Acre region alone.

Eight miles from the airfield,

Professor Pärssinen is hoping to add to the tally

in an unexplored part of the forest

near an exposed geoglyph called Fazenda Cipoal.

[triumphant music ends]

Our understanding stopped on the border of the forest,

and now we want to know what's there.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Graham] To detect what's beneath the trees,

the team is depending on a technology that sees through them.

LiDAR.

By using this system, we can clear the vegetation out

and get the results from the bottom.

And in that way, we can see the topography exactly.

[Graham] With LiDAR, you can see what's under the canopy

without destroying a single tree.

You don't have to tear down the rainforest.

You don't have to destroy anything.

Joining the hunt is Fabio De Novaes Filho,

who will be surveying the forest with his drone-based LiDAR system.

[Fabio] We are going to fly at 80 meters.

{an8}That's good.

{an8}Maybe we can have about 100 to 200 points per square meter.

That's excellent.

The topography will be very precise.

[adventurous music playing]

[blades whirring]

[Graham] The device fires laser beams down between the leaves,

detecting changes in elevation.

[music continues]

The data is then used to create a 3D map of the landscape,

revealing any anomalies.

[music ends]

These drones will change everything in archaeology.

[intriguing music playing]

[Graham] While the team looks to see what might be hidden beneath the canopy,

I'm investigating a different question.

Why were the geoglyphs built in the first place?

Archaeological excavations offer no clue as to why they were created.

But the Indigenous people in this area hold knowledge and memories

that help to shed light on the significance and meaning

of these remarkable earthworks.

I've come to the geoglyph known as Jaco Sá to meet one of its caretakers.

[intriguing music continues]

{an8}Antônio Apurinã is from the Apurinã people and works within FUNAI,

Brazil's national Indigenous agency.

[Antônio in Portuguese] The Apurinã are a people

whose origins are closely tied to nature, to the earth.

[in English] What is the opinion of the Apurinã

about these constructions? What is your feeling about them?

[in Portuguese] I am standing in a place

for which I have the utmost respect.

For us, it is a sacred place.

It wasn't made for war. It wasn't made for defense.

It was made to express something cultural.

[Graham in English] If the geometrical shapes have no practical function,

such a huge effort to create them suggests a higher purpose.

There may be a clue in the spiritual traditions of the Apurinã.

[in Portuguese] So, we compare this here

as if it were a circle of the Apurinã

when they dance and pay homage to a deceased chief, a shaman,

to an important person from the village who has died.

[somber music playing]

We see this space as somewhere that would welcome us

once we have left the material world.

[in English] This is a view very strongly held

amongst Indigenous cultures across the Amazon to this day,

that, after death, our soul makes a journey,

ultimately to an afterlife existence.

This is an idea that is found all around the world,

and structures were created to aid the journey of the soul after death.

[tense music playing]

Let's take the example of pyramids.

I don't know of a single pyramidal structure

around the world that isn't connected

to the notion of death and the afterlife journey of the soul.

This is particularly evident in the ancient Egyptian pyramids,

but it's just as evident in the pyramids of the Americas and of Mexico.

[tense music continues]

So it's interesting to learn from Antônio

that the Amazon geoglyphs may have served a similar purpose

for the people who first created them untold thousands of years ago.

[tense music ends]

[intriguing music playing]

[Graham] Back at the airfield, it's time to find out if our LiDAR survey

has detected yet more of these sacred sites beneath the canopy.

So, Fabio, please, tell us what you found.

We surveyed the area using the LiDAR.

And you see the trees?

[Graham] Yeah.

[music crescendos]

And now...

Wow. Incredible.

Wow.

[music ends]

[closing theme playing]

{an8}[closing theme ends]