11.
The Giant Anaconda In the 19th century, the great English explorer
Percy H. Fawcett (the one looking for the Lost City of Z) described a giant anaconda
living in the Amazon jungle.
He claimed to see a massive prehistoric snake over 40 feet (12m) long and no less than a
foot (0.3m) in diameter.
That would make it much larger than any snake living today, and closer to the prehistoric
Titanoboa that lived in South America millions of years ago.
Percy was a famous explorer of the Amazon who went in search of the Lost City of Z and
disappeared in 1925 with his son Jack.
He strongly believed there was a lost city in the jungle but died trying to find it.
Hundreds of others also died while trying to find him.
But he wasn't the only one who allegedly saw this giant snake.
The locals call it Yacumama, which means “mother of water.”
Other early explorers also described seeing a gigantic serpent slithering through the
Amazon, normally in the Amazon River basin.
Some say it's 40 feet (12m), and some say it's over 100 (30m)!
And even though people have seen it repeatedly throughout the centuries, and even though
there are stories told by local tribes about this unusually large snake, nobody has ever
successfully documented it.
10.
UFO Sightings
Something strange was spotted by Google Maps that some people believe could be proof of
an ancient UFO sticking out of the Amazon.
It looks like there is a short line of lights on the trees in this aerial shot of Rondonia,
a state in northwest Brazil.
Even if you don’t think it’s a UFO, you have to agree that looks pretty strange.
The shape has been compared to a cigar which is interesting because of reports of cigar-shaped
alien ships over the years.
It certainly hasn’t been explained so its hard to say what this strange image is.
Maybe the satellite caught a plane flying over at the exact same time?
It’s not the first time stories of UFO’s have come from the Amazon so the mystery continues.
9.
Forest Islands The earliest human inhabitants of the great
Amazon jungle created thousands of man-made islands.
They built artificial pieces of land in the forest, which they used to tame the wild plants
of the jungle and create areas for crops.
If you had told this to European explorers and scientists 100 years ago, they wouldn’t
have believed it.
This most recent discovery has added to the growing list of evidence that people in the
area had a massive impact on the land.
When humans arrived in the Amazon roughly 10,000 years ago, they completely transformed
the landscape.
Specifically, they used these mysterious forest islands to cultivate manioc and squash.
So far, scientists have identified 4700 forest islands in northern Bolivia.
The weather here is quite extreme.
From December to March, everything is soaked and the entire area floods.
Whereas from July to October, this part of the jungle is extremely dry.
These artificial islands were made by heaping mounds of dirt up to a point where, in the
wet season, they would be high above the floodwaters.
They just made enormous mounds of soil that turned into islands when the rest of the flat
land flooded.
It was ingenious, and an excellent way to keep the crops growing throughout the year.
Without these artificial islands, water would have soaked everything and the squash wouldn’t
have grown.
This discovery also proves that small communities in the Amazon shaped the jungle over 8000
years earlier than previously believed.
This discovery has completely changed history as it proves the Amazon was one of the earliest
places for plant domestication in the entire world.
8.
The Strongest Hearts Researchers have found a primitive jungle
tribe living in the heart of the Amazon to possess the best hearts in the world.
As weird as that is to hear, it's true.
The Tsimane people of Bolivia have been confirmed to have the best heart health of any group
of human beings on Earth.
There's just something about the jungle life that’s given them almost superhuman hearts.
According to the author of the study, Dr. Gregory Thomas from the Memorial Care Heart
& Vascular Institute in California, the Tsimane’s simplistic jungle existence has given them
extraordinary protection against heart disease.
Their active life of foraging for food in the rainforest has completely unclogged their
arteries of any cholesterol plaque.
That's the thing that increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes in most Americans.
When the doctor performed CT scans on these people, he found hardened arteries to be five
times less common than among US adults.
The Tsimane have an 85% chance of going through their whole life having no heart issues.
The doctor said that even the oldest people in the tribe have the physiology of an average
20-year-old.
The thing to understand here is that if you want to live a long and healthy life with
better cholesterol and lower blood pressure, just forage for your food like an Amazonian.
They are some of the healthiest people we have on our planet.
7.
Where is El Dorado?
The lost city of El Dorado is allegedly hiding somewhere underneath the canopy of the Amazon,
deep in the jungle where no one has been able to find it.
Most historians have dismissed the story of El Dorado as a legend.
Many explorers and conquistadors lost their lives trying to find it after the success
of finding so much gold with the Aztecs and the Incas.
Some call it El Dorado and others the Lost City of Z.
The thing about El Dorado is that scientists in the 20th century didn't believe humans
could live in the jungle.
At least, not in any meaningful way.
20th-century scholars said large human settlements in the harsh conditions of the jungle was
impossible.
Maybe primitive tribes could live here but not advanced societies.
But now, satellite images have revealed over 200 massive earthworks in the upper Amazon
basin.
This is proof of what was once a great civilization!!
These earthworks are in the form of circles and squares and other geometric shapes, along
with avenues, ditches, and enclosures.
Some of them date back over 2200 years.
Others were made as recently as 800 years ago.
Thanks to satellite imagery, scientists believe there could be over 2000 structures hiding
beneath the jungle here, the remains of lost societies that have been destroyed by time.
Whoever lived here was brilliant, able to work with the different ecosystems of the
Amazon and modify them to grow food and support thousands of people.
It doesn't prove a great city of gold once existed.
But it shows that the Amazon was, once, a bustling place home to a city that contained
about 60,000 people.
That's a higher population than most medieval European cities had.
There were cities in the Amazon greater than those in Europe!
6.
The Harakbut Face In an isolated part of the Peruvian Amazon,
there is an ancient monument called the Harakbut Face, or the Rostro Harakbut.
The Harakbut are an indigenous group who have been living in this part of the Peruvian Amazon
for hundreds of years.
And the face carved into the rock here has been the stuff of legend for generations.
Nobody knows if human hands actually made this mysterious face or if it's a natural
phenomenon.
The face is in the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve, which takes up over almost a million acres
(402,000 hectares) of the Harakbut tribe’s ancestral homeland.
What makes the face in the rock so enchanting is that it’s perched over a rough section
of the Amazon river.
It looks as though it was put there on purpose to serve as a guardian and protect the place.
There's no mistaking the fine lines for anything but a human face.
It has a nose, eyes, a jutting brow, and even a bit of an under-bite.
It looks like a strong male warrior or the image of some great god.
But like I mentioned, not even the local tribespeople know if their ancestors made the face or if
it's just a freak creation of Mother Nature.
And to make things even more mysterious, there are supposedly more of these faces throughout
the region.
But so far, nobody has ever seen them.
5.
Jungle Shaped by Humans We already know that Amazonians have made
massive cities in the jungle.
We also know they made huge artificial islands to combat flooding to grow crops all year.
But there's another secret in the Amazon that scientists are only now understanding.
For a long time, scientists agreed that the tribes of the Amazon lived peacefully with
nature.
Nobody thought they grew crops, cut down large numbers of trees, or did anything to disrupt
the natural order.
But that may not be the case.
Ecologist Hans ter Steege and his colleagues recently did an inventory of the tremendous
diversity of trees in the Amazon.
They looked at 1170 plots of land very far from any currently inhabited areas.
They could identify 16,000 different species of trees.
But what they noticed was that even though the diversity was quite large, half the total
trees made up only 1% of the total species.
What does this mean?
It shows definitive proof Amazonians were domesticating the species of trees that they
liked.
They were clearing land, cutting down the natural trees, and planting the ones they
liked.
Even though there are 16,000 different species, the bulk of the species were Amazon tree grape,
Brazil nut, and ice cream bean trees.
Ancient Amazonians were not as passive with the land as most people think.
They cleared huge parts of the forest, and they did it to plant trees that gave them
more food.
4.
Alien in the Forest Someone recently captured something quite
unbelievable on video in the Amazon jungle.
Let me warn you, what you're about to hear is out of this world!
A pair of British tourists vacationing in a remote region of the Amazon filmed what
appears to be an extraterrestrial visitor.
While filming some children in an isolated Brazilian village, these tourists accidentally
captured a scene straight out of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs with Mel Gibson.
In the video, clear as day hiding in the bushes on the outskirts you can see a small gray
figure.
This figure looks exactly like you would expect an alien from a spaceship to look.
And to make things even weirder, about 20 feet (6m) behind the alien is a bizarre glowing
blue light that appears to be following it.
Nobody's been able to verify what's in this video.
Most logical people have dismissed it as a hoax.
Others believe it to be a confirmation of alien life.
It's hard to say why exactly an alien would creep through the bushes outside an isolated
Amazonian village.
Do you think the footage of this jungle alien is real or is it just another hoax?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments 3.
Ancient Geoglyphs The Geoglyphs of Acre were uncovered deep
in the Amazon rainforest.
According to researchers from Sao Paulo University in Brazil, people once used these strange
geometrical earthworks as ritual communication spaces.
The geoglyphs compose over 450 mysterious earthworks, scattered throughout the Brazilian
state of Acre.
They form fairly simple geometric patterns.
I'm talking about squares, circles, octagons, that sort of thing.
Most are about 13 feet (4m) deep, and scientists say Amazonian tribes created them starting
in 1000 BC.
That’s about 3000 years ago.
And although the local Amazonians have forgotten their purpose, they haven't forgotten their
importance.
Local tribes continue to guard these earthworks sites as sacred places.
The exact purpose of these strange earthworks may be unknown, but we have a pretty good
idea of what they used them for.
They were almost certainly ritual spaces.
Members of the community probably gathered here to watch shamans communicate with ancestral
spirits, the stars themselves, and the spirits of the jungle animals.
These people believed human life was intertwined with natural life, with everything from the
ants to the monkeys to the cosmos itself.
2.
Cosmic Villages Researchers fired billions of lasers from
a helicopter cruising over the top of the Brazilian Amazon.
These lasers were used to look for lost Amazonian settlements and other potential structures
underneath the jungle.
And they didn't disappoint.
Researchers could use their laser technology to identify about 35 abandoned villages.
These villages were constructed between 1300 and 1700 AD, making them relatively recent.
But the cool part is that they were laid out in a pattern meant to mimic the cosmos.
It's incredible to see that people considered primitive by outsiders designed their cities
to look like what they saw in the heavens.
Each village has an almost identical layout.
There are elongated mounds around a central plaza, looking kind of like the marks on a
clock.
But looking at the villages from above, they look like the rays of the sun.
But the similarities continue.
Each village had a diameter of about 282 feet (86m).
Each village had two primary roads cutting through them, with smaller roads leading to
nearby bodies of water.
Plus, each of these identical villages was only about 3 miles (5km) from the next.
And those main roads cutting through them connected each village to the other, forming
a network of villages all connected by roads through the jungle.
When looking at all these villages from above, they represent the cosmos.
The people here were so knowledgeable, they were able to replicate the stars and celestial
bodies of the night sky.
1.
The Australian Connection In a bizarre and shocking new study, researchers
have connected the first Amazonian tribes to the indigenous inhabitants of Australia.
The genetic analysis could shatter everything we thought we knew about human habitation
in the Americas.
Rather than the Amazon being populated by people who moved out of Siberia, into North
America, and then down into South America, it may have been Australians.
The thing is that 15,000 years ago, there was a narrow land bridge called Beringia that
connected Alaska to Siberia.
The agreed-upon consensus for years has been that a significant group migrated into North
America, and they were the ancestors of every person on the two continents for the next
15,000 years.
Seeing as DNA directly links the Native American population of South America to the indigenous
people of Australia, this clearly can't be the case.
It looks like the Eurasians moved from Siberia into North America, while people from Australia
and New Guinea moved across the sea into South America.
Two distinctly different migration groups from two very different parts of the world.
The big mystery now is figuring out how this happened.
The Australians would have needed to cross the ocean to reach the jungle or walk across
a previously unknown bridge that crossed the entire ocean.
What other kinds of other mysteries do you think are lurking in the jungle?
Let me know in the comments and thank you for watching!
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Bye!