Original subtitles

This is the Amazon rainforest.

It's breathtaking.

So many people think of the Amazon as this vast natural oasis.

Truly wild, unchanged forever...

...dotted with a few isolated tribes.

But it's a complete myth.

See, a monumental mystery is unfolding out here,

with new evidence of vast societies that thrived along these banks,

and stretched right across the continent

where now there's nothing but dense rain forest.

I want to get to the bottom of this mystery

and find out for myself the real history of the Amazon.

I'm Ella Al-Shamahi.

I'm an explorer and archaeologist in some of the world's most

dangerous and remote regions.

I'll be travelling through the Amazon's conflict zones.

In search of a lost, ancient world.

There's handprints.

There's actual handprints.

I'm seeing how new technology is looking beneath the jungle

uncovering vast, hidden settlements

and revealing the remains of entire civilisations of millions of people.

It's going to raise a whole pile of questions.

Who were these people?

And when did they live here?

Where did they come from?

And perhaps most important of all, what on earth happened to them?

It's the second leg of my Amazonian Adventure.

And I've arrived

in Colombia.

Ella. Nice to meet you.

Hi, Ella, it's a pleasure.

Welcome to San Jose del Guaviare.

I'm on an epic mission

to discover the hidden secrets of the ancient Amazon.

On my journey so far,

I've seen how new technology

is revealing long-lost civilisations

that once thrived in the dense rainforest.

There were people living here hundreds of years ago.

This is real archaeological discovery.

Until contact with Europeans around 500 years ago...

...completely wiped them off the map.

Now, I'm reaching much further back in time,

to discover how those great civilisations first came to be.

Here in Colombia, one spectacular discovery holds clues

to the very first people to inhabit the Amazon.

But this region is dangerous, and without my local guide Oliver,

getting in with cameras would be just about impossible.

Are we OK to have cameras?

If they tell us to turn off the camera, we will do that, obviously.

Do all cars get called over?

Not all, but some do.

Do you have your passports with you?

Everything all right? Yeah, all good.

We can keep on.

What exactly is the sensitivity?

The whole region has been affected by the 50 years civil war,

so, they still are checking people for arms, for example.

And this is a civil war with FARC?

It's with the FARC, Yeah.

War raged between FARC guerrillas and the Colombian government

for 50 years

at a cost of more than 200,000 lives.

But now, an uneasy truce has been agreed.

How's the peace agreement working out in this particular area?

There are still some groups, active groups.

So, that means the peace agreement is failing, basically.

I'm venturing into territory still run by ex-FARC militia.

Because the jungles of Colombia are home to one of the most

incredible finds ever made in the Amazon.

If we can actually get there.

We are going there right now with the permission of the FARC.

Yeah.

And that's essentially what's protecting us and keeping us safe.

It's like a rebel visa, isn't it?

A rebel visa?

Yeah, we've basically got a visa from a bunch of rebels.

After nearly three hours, we arrive at a remote village,

that will be my base for the next couple of days.

The locals are very nervous about the possibility of officials

coming to snoop.

So I let Oliver try to convince them that we're OK.

So, I'm not completely clear on what's going on.

They're having a really big elongated discussion right now

about permissions.

Everybody keeps saying problem, problem, problem,

I'm like, clearly there's a problem.

There's so much distrust.

So, what's the situation?

Well, the situation is basically they do have some doubts.

So, they are not, like, really happy.

But negotiating, we got the access.

Good. All right.

Phew.

Hey! Ella.

You're smiling! How are you doing?

Good.

Joining me is British archaeologist Mark Robinson who's spent

two seasons working here.

Ready to see something spectacular?

Yes, yes.

Backpacks on, we head out from the village.

Mark believes this huge rocky outcrop was a special place

for ancient people.

It's incredible.

Isn't it just?

A good place for me to look for clues.

You can just imagine if you were a pre-Columbian Amazonian,

just kind of, 00f.

You'd see that and it's something, isn't it?

It looks a bit like the Mecca of the region.

It, kind of, draws you in.

War with the FARC has meant this place has been off limits

for decades.

Following the peace treaty, Mark was among the very first

archaeologists allowed back in to explore it.

That is something.

I'm trying not to swear.

That is incredible.

This is the prehistoric Sistine Chapel.

Everywhere I look, there are crazy geometric patterns,

animals,

birds

and plants.

I mean there's so many,

it's kind of overwhelming, there's just so much.

Those are humans up there.

The paintings are like a distant diary

depicting the lives these early Amazonians lived.

We're seeing themes, we're seeing style to this.

This is not an individual, we're talking about groups,

group consciousness and group culture as it starts to develop

and how they depict the world around them.

So, we start to really get an idea of who these people are.

There's handprints.

There's actual handprints.

Some person stood here

and put their hand on that bit of wall.

It's absolutely profound to think that that handprint

may be a handprint of the first people

to have made it to the Amazon.

Experts believe the first people reached the Americas

between 15 and 25,000 years ago,

crossing a land bridge that, then, joined Siberia to Alaska.

Migration continued south over thousands of years,

finally passing through the narrow gap of central America

and into the Amazon.

Those first people could have come through here,

right where I'm standing.

But just how old are the rock paintings?

Is there any way of knowing whether they could have been painted

by some of those very first Amazonians?

There are a number of different techniques in archaeology

that can be used to date things,

are any of them going to be of any use for this wall?

The one that most people know is carbon dating.

But, the biggest problem in this, there's no carbon involved.

We're looking at ochre on the walls, so, that's a real problem for us.

But I'm far from finished here.

Because it turns out that there's much more to explore.

Last year, Mark and his colleagues

discovered 16 more walls of ancient drawings

all completely unknown to science.

And tomorrow, I'm going to be one of the first archaeologists

ever to explore them.

It's morning.

And I'm back on the trail of the first Amazonians.

Oh, my God.

It tastes amazing.

The art I saw yesterday was one of the most breathtaking things

I have ever seen as an archaeologist.

But it turns out it's just the tip of the iceberg.

This is the rock face we need to scale.

Because in this remote part of the Colombian Amazon,

Mark has located another 16 walls,

all covered with more ancient paintings.

This better be bloody worth it.

Mark has only ever been here once before.

Let's check the GPS.

So, the point we had from last year is just up here,

it looks like it's just through the bush here.

We are getting close.

There we go.

And this is it.

As you can see, we've got a beautiful bowl.

Oh, my God.

There's, there's rock art all the way back here,

I've just walked past a turtle, there's all kinds,

it just, it seems to circumvent right around this rock face.

Mark's colleagues have started making 3D scans of the walls,

so archaeologists will be able to analyse every single detail

of these drawings without having to trek through the jungle.

But it'll take time because, incredibly,

Mark estimates there could be more than 100,000 paintings

on this remote outcrop.

It's possibly the greatest cache of ancient rock art in the Americas.

To think that I have the absolute privilege and honour

of being in the very, very first few scientists, of archaeologists

to see this.

It's just mad.

What we're looking at here is undescribed to the world,

it's undescribed to science.

How cool is that?

Compared to yesterday's site,

some of these drawings look simpler,

perhaps even older.

Come have a look at this one here.

And Mark has discovered a clue that could help us work out

just how early they might be.

The little image right here,

it looks like an animal, there's an animal head here

and a large body,

and that shape of the head, as well, it's quite distinctive.

And particularly distinctive is this long

trunk coming off the front.

This is a mastodon.

A prehistoric relative of today's elephants.

But mastodons haven't roamed South America for at least 12,000 years.

The people who once lived here, must have lived alongside them.

Clearly there's an overlap between people and these mega herbivores.

It tells us that this artwork was drawn at that time period.

So, this is a great chronological marker

that these were some of the earliest people.

That's absolutely insane.

I think so many people when they think about archaeology and dating,

they always think about traditional dating methods

like carbon dating and all the rest of it.

But actually, sometimes there's something

right in front of your face, which is an animal on some rock art

that went extinct at a certain point, and it's on this wall.

Unseen by outsiders for 12,000 years,

Mark is now identifying more extinct species on the walls.

A giant sloth...

...and another completely unexpected animal.

That is so clearly a horse, right?

One of the interesting aspects with this horse is the head shape.

This head shape, OK, it's quite a crude representation -

but that's a head shape we expect of one of the earliest horses.

Horses are native to the Americas,

but they went extinct from South America around 13,000 years.

That is amazing.

Living alongside horses, sloths and giant mastodons,

it's clear that the Amazon these earliest people knew

was a mix of forest and open savannah.

Very different from the Amazon we see today.

To think that some of the earliest inhabitants of the Amazon were

here painting when importantly,

the Amazon did not look like the Amazon rainforest of today.

It's absolutely goosebump-inducing.

It's, just, it's insane.

Leaving Colombia, I'm heading south,

back over the jungles of the Brazilian rainforest.

Across the Amazon today, there are at least 400 indigenous groups.

Including about 100 that remain totally uncontacted.

All are genetically related.

Direct descendants of those very first hunters,

maybe even those who left their rock art

over 12,000 years ago.

But just a few groups are startlingly different,

with incredible genetic secrets that are challenging everything

we thought we knew about how the Amazon was first occupied.

One of them is a Brazilian indigenous group called the Surui.

And I'm going to meet them.

But like so many others,

they've been seriously affected by contact with the outside world.

When you look out the window,

there's so many roads, and the roads bring with them

a lot of problems.

So, actually, for the Surui,

it was actually a road, a big highway that was put in in 1969,

that was when 90% of their population

were completely decimated.

Think about that.

That's 90% of their population

being decimated because a road was put in

that brought in outsiders with,

basically, diseases that they didn't have immunities for.

So, basically, this whole area used to be indigenous territory?

Yeah, the whole state was virgin rainforest.

My new Brazilian guide Flavio is taking me to meet the Surui...

...who now live on a small reservation.

Right, so, I guess this is the village.

Yeah.

Oi.

So nice to meet you.

I'm actually quite nervous meeting Chief Almir Surui.

Thank you, thank you for coming out.

So is this?

Ah, your brother.

Hi. Ella, Ella.

Because in the past,

the Surui have not been treated well by scientists like me.

Since the late 1980s, researchers have taken samples

of indigenous blood as a matter of course.

A violation that's been repeated numerous times over the decades,

and that the Surui strongly resent.

Hi.

Hi.

Can I ask when and how was your blood taken?

Did you ever hear from them again?

Did you ever get any results from them?

Weitag Surui's blood was taken in the 1990s,

to be shared and possibly sold,

along with other Surui samples,

without any permission,

to scientists, including those researching ancestral DNA.

They were never told why.

Or given any results.

I'm sad that you were disrespected like that,

I'm really sorry about that.

That shouldn't have happened.

Incredibly, no-one has ever even told the Surui

that their blood samples have opened up a massive mystery.

I want to try to explain that what scientists have discovered

in their DNA is simply astonishing.

But finding a way to communicate genetics to them

isn't going to be easy.

And I'm pretty nervous about how they might react when I try.

I genuinely have no idea how this is going to go.

I am so stressed.

On top of everything,

I feel a huge weight of responsibility for all

my fellow scientists.

I am terrified.

Because the discoveries are turning our assumption about the first

Amazonians completely on its head.

Let's see if I do it this way.

OK.

How many of you are really familiar with this map?

There's something really interesting about yourselves, actually -

the Surui.

It turns out that you,

unlike most other indigenous groups in South America,

you share some DNA, some ancestry,

with people...

...in Australia.

I'm trying to communicate a scientific bombshell...

...that the Surui have some ancient ancestors,

that almost no other indigenous Amazonians share.

The question is, how is there a relationship between here and here?

You guys are one of the few indigenous groups that have it.

Most scientists believe that every indigenous group

in the Amazon can trace their roots back to one ancestral population,

which reached South America at least 15,000 years ago.

But their DNA reveals the Surui are one of just three indigenous

groups in the whole of the Americas who are partly

descended from another, completely different ancestor that they

share with indigenous Australasians.

It means that you're very unique, it means there's something

really interesting going on with you and there's a sign

of ancestry in you that really is very unique and very special.

We still don't know how or exactly

when the Surui's mysterious ancestors got here.

THEY SPEAK IN SURUI

But my attempt at explaining some science has unexpectedly set off

a discussion about their own origin myths.

It's incredible to hear the Surui's own

mythology about their ancient past.

And I feel I've done my best to explain why

we scientists think they're so special.

So this has been a completely profound experience actually.

We, the outside world, have to give them so much more respect,

and we, scientists, also have to give them so much more respect.

And help, because if we let

the loggers and the miners win,

we will have lost one of the most fascinating

pieces of the jigsaw puzzle when it comes to Amazonian history.

One of the most ancient people,

and it would be just absolutely devastating.

THUNDER CLAPS

My hunt for the origins of the people of the Amazon

has taken me deep into prehistory.

I've found new evidence about the very early pioneers

who migrated here at least 15,000 years ago.

And I've met indigenous people with an ancient secret in their DNA.

But how did the first Amazonians go on to forge the great civilisations

that I've found existed centuries before the first Europeans arrived?

The first question is

when did groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers

first begin to settle and build homes?

There are clues in the far west of the Amazon, in Bolivia.

Here, Earth scientist Umberto Lombardo has been

searching for evidence of prehistoric Amazonian settlements.

He's finding evidence in the most unlikely of places -

an ancient rubbish tip of discarded snail shells.

This is hard, it's hard like rock.

But it is not a rock.

We know in this area there are no rocks.

This is a huge flood plain, and all the sediments are very fine.

It looks like a rock because it is full of shells, snail shells.

You see all the shells are fragmented and cemented,

all together and this is actually an apple snail.

Here, we have one, this is a small one.

The oldest shells here have been dated to 10,000 years ago,

when they would have been a major part of the diet for the people

who lived here in what was a difficult and dangerous environment.

These are the Bolivian flood plains.

In the summer months, this part of the Amazon bakes

under a relentless sun.

But in the wet season, it becomes a very different place.

The landscape is so flat, and it rains so much, that it is very

difficult for the water to drain to the rivers.

So when the rainy season starts,

about 80,000 square km of this area get flooded.

But over centuries, the snail shells discarded by these first

inhabitants created something incredible.

Forest islands that became a safe haven from the flood waters.

Umberto believes that as food

and domestic waste gradually built up above the floods...

...trees grew on the drier, enriched ground,

giving shade from the scorching sun.

Each mound became an oasis of shelter in the vast, hostile plains.

Rather than moving around, the people of the Amazon were

settling down, forming the first permanent settlements in the region.

And, amazingly...

...Umberto has even unearthed the remains of the very people

who once lived here.

The skulls are very deformed, squashed like this,

because of the weight of the sediments on top of them.

And from the radio-carbon age we could get from these remains,

we know they are 6,000 years old

and they are among the oldest skeletons from Amazonia.

From the nomadic migrants of 15,000 years ago,

I've discovered the first evidence of people who settled

and built homes around 5,000 years later.

But what happened next?

To find out, I'm teaming up again with Bolivian archaeologist

Carla Beta ncourt.

And you can see this black layer?

Yeah.

I've already seen how Carla's recent excavations in Bolivia

are revealing a sophisticated society that flourished

well over 1,000 years ago.

Now she's contacted me about a new find,

a 1500-year-old skeleton,

which Carla hopes might contain clues

to how Amazonians from that era lived.

The thing with skulls it that they are actually quite light

and this one feels like a rock, and the reason why

it feels like a rock is that it's clearly still covered in dirt.

Carla and I are coming to a nearby lab to see what secrets this

new find might contain.

Hi, Ella, nice to meet you.

This is the moment of truth.

It's like unwrapping a Christmas present out here.

A really careful operation.

Ah look at this. Oh, that's great,

Oh, that's great.

As you can see, there's clearly an eye socket,

there's another eye socket here, you've got the nose.

But you can see the detail, can't you, Carla?

You can see the teeth. Yeah, yeah.

As a palaeoanthropologist, I'm used to studying human remains.

But this is my very first ancient Amazonian.

The teeth of Carla's skull might contain clues to how

this ancient Amazonian lived.

We've got to be careful cos that might just dislodge the whole tooth.

There we go, it's coming out. Perfect.

The enamel, that tooth is really, really worn down

through something it's eaten, through some kind of wear.

Let' do it.

But the best way to analyse this skull...

...is by scanning it with 21st century medical technology.

No"

Oh, wow!

It's cleaned up all the dirt, essentially, it's...

You can just see the bone.

That is so cool.

The teeth... Look at how clean they are finally.

This is why people get so excited about CT scans

because if we were cleaning this up,

we would have had to be really delicate, take it to a lab.

It would have taken time, we may have damaged it in the process.

This is brilliant.

Thank you so much. This is so good

Our examination reveals tooth wear consistent with eating

a grain like maize.

It is really cool to think that that skull has been in the ground

for a thousand years and now it's been brought back to life.

It is so unusual to find human remains in the Amazon,

and I'm basically beside myself that we got to CT scan one of them

and, you know, it wasn't the best preserved human remains,

it was crushed, it was covered in earth,

and yet, you saw what that CT scan did.

That's pretty awesome.

The people Carla is excavating, were not only settled they were farmers.

A crucial step in forging a civilisation.

But there is still one great mystery to be solved.

The Amazon rainforest is a hostile place.

And despite appearances, its soils are poor,

and unable to sustain agriculture.

So how on earth did ancient people tame it, and sustain

a population that experts now estimate was in the millions?

I've discovered that by the time Europeans arrived in the Amazon

almost 500 years ago,

great civilisations were thriving.

But how could they grow enough food to sustain themselves?

Ecologist Carolina Levis and botanist Mariana Cassino

are investigating the mystery,

looking for clues in a small, self-sufficient village.

The natural soils of the Amazon are a light-coloured clay.

But this village was built on something very different.

We can see these big layers of a darker soil.

The soil in some parts are really dark,

full of ceramics and full of charcoal.

When we find this soil with a lot of ceramics,

we know that they were created by human activities.

Ancient people who once lived here transformed the natural soil,

and it's still fertile 2,000 years later.

Now we are finding these black earth soils created by humans

in many, many places of the Amazon.

Scientists have now identified more than a thousand sites in the Amazon

with this magical secret -

charcoal-rich, highly fertile black earth.

Within this dense forest there were once fields,

growing crops like maize and manioc.

But it wasn't just cleared areas that were tended.

Beyond the village, Mariana and Carolina are discovering

that ancient people even tamed the forest...

...turning swathes of jungle

into giant gardens

planted with everything the people here needed to thrive.

Look at that, a big brazil nut tree. Yeah.

Here in this place, we have a huge diversity of plants,

plants used for construction, food, medicinal.

Carolina and Mariana are convinced

that high concentrations of certain trees growing today

can only be explained by centuries of forest management,

with ancient traditions that have been passed down into living memory.

For hundreds or even thousands of years,

the peoples of the Amazon tended the forests,

encouraging rich orchards to grow amongst the trees of the rainforest.

With the collapse of these great civilisations

after the first Europeans arrived,

the gardens and orchards were overgrown,

disappearing into the jungle.

Everywhere I go, I'm meeting indigenous people

whose lives are changing with the times...

...but who still live more or less sustainably within the forest,

often fighting to keep their ancient traditions alive.

The Huachiperi people's story

echoes that of indigenous groups all over the Amazon.

Hola!

Buenos dias.

Como esta, senorita? Very well, thank you.

What kind of fish is this?

You know, where I come from, we think that these eat humans.

No, no, no, she's having none of this.

Hi! This is one hell of an outfit.

Billy wants his arrow for the traditional dance

and he can't find it.

Even without his arrow, Billy's not going to miss this dance...

MAN SINGS

...a tradition handed down over generations.

But like so many indigenous groups,

the Huachiperi have been decimated by disease, in their case

an epidemic of smallpox brought by outsiders in the 1940s.

Like peoples all over the Amazon,

their forest was cleared by loggers,

the land turned over to cattle ranching.

And in the 1960s, they were moved onto two small reservations.

Once, there were around 30,000 Huachiperi.

Now, just a handful remain, like Edi Dariquebe.

MAN SINGS TO DRUMBEAT

You see, this might just look like

what you'd see in a school assembly somewhere,

and I'm sure that's part of it but if you notice, they're all kids

and there's maybe a few dozen people left in the whole world

that speak this language and so really,

this is also a way of keeping the traditions and the language alive.

More than 13,000 years of continuous history...

"from rock art to settlements, farming and civilisation.

Right across the Amazon, indigenous people are struggling

as their world literally disappears around them.

On my journey, everywhere I go, I'm seeing the Amazon being destroyed...

Oh, my gosh.

You can see this, right?

...as modern demands for food lead to agricultural methods

that are having a devastating effect for all of us.

Oh, this is depressing.

They are basically cremating the Amazon.

So they have slashed the most important trees

and the idea is, they burn everything,

they let the grass regrow

and instead of there being lots of shrubs and trees,

you're left with pasture land.

And the cattle come in and after a few seasons,

the nutrients here are going to be pretty terrible

and so the grasses only grow for so long,

so they need to do the exact same thing

to another bit of the rainforest,

and they just keep going and keep going.

And before we know it, that rainforest will be gone.

Like, I've read about this theoretically in the papers,

but being here is just so,

it's so goddamn uncomfortable, to be honest with you.

20% of the entire Amazon rainforest has been destroyed,

and deforestation is rising at an alarming rate.

It's a global catastrophe...

It looks like Armageddon.

...and a disaster for the Amazon's indigenous inhabitants.

Next time...

I'll be getting to grips

with the challenges the indigenous people of the Amazon face today.

I meet surviving communities being pushed to the edge of the forest

and the people who are fighting back...

...to keep 15,000 years of unbroken heritage alive.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media