Archaeologist says Amazon rainforest a man-made garden planted by vast lost civilisation

An archaeologist has supported claims that the Amazon rainforest is a man-made garden planted by a lost civilisation in ancient times.

Ed Barnhart said archaeologists are constantly finding evidence of a “vast civilisation” that once existed in South America. He said this civilisation was once so extensive – in an area that was long considered to have been largely untouched by humans – that evidence of it is found “every time we open up the jungle”.

However, Barnhart’s colleague John W Hoopes said the phrase ‘advanced ancient civilization’ is “highly problematic”. Academic Hoopes instead argues that the rainforest we see today largely resulted from the activities of ancient indigenous farmers – whose sophisticated and widespread culture was wiped out by colonial genocide and pandemics.

Controversial journalist and author Graham Hancock has suggested the Amazon rainforest was shaped by people using knowledge handed down to them by an advanced ancient civilization. Netflix has just scheduled the release of a second season of Hancock’s series Ancient Apocalypse.

The first season of Ancient Apocalypse proposed human civilization was restarted after the last ice age by the survivors of an advanced civilisation that was all but destroyed by a cataclysm. It was branded the “most dangerous show on TV” by The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage, who claimed the show “seems to exist solely for conspiracy theorists”.

Many archaeologists dismiss Hancock as a “pseudoscientist”. Some even allege that Hancock’s theories reinforce white supremacist ideas because they strip indigenous people of their heritage – an accusation that Hancock strongly denies.

In a four-and-half-hour debate on the Joe Rogan Experience with archaeologist and vocal critic Dr Flint Dibble, Hancock was forced to admit that, thus far, no hard evidence to support his claims of a lost civilisation in prehistory had been found. Nonetheless, Hancock returns to Netflix on October 16 with ‘Ancient Apocalypse: the Americas’ – which features Hollywood superstar Keanu Reeves.

This new series will explore Hancock’s theory that Indigenous American cultures inherited a legacy of advanced scientific knowledge and sophisticated spiritual beliefs from a lost civilisation. Hancock advanced this claim in his 2019 book ‘America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilisation’.

Hancock suggested that the Amazon rainforest is not entirely natural – and that it was, in fact, shaped by a ‘lost’ ancient civilisation from the ice age. Hancock points to the existence of  huge earthworks and terra preta soil – a 5,000-year-old man-made fertile ‘dark earth’ – as evidence for this.

These claims have been supported, in part at least, by Ed Barnhart, an American archaeologist and explorer who specialises in ancient civilisations of the Americas. Speaking to computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman, Barnhart – who appears in the trailer for the new season of ‘Ancient Apocalypse’ – defended Hancock.

He described Hancock as “smart” and a “very good researcher”. Barnhart said: “I think that he’s very well-read, in fact, better read than a lot of my colleagues, but his conclusions I disagree with.”

Barnhart agreed with Hancock’s claims that the Amazon rainforest was planted by a lost civilisation. However, he told Fridman he disagreed with Hancock regarding the antiquity of this lost civilisation – and how advanced it may or may not have been.

When asked if he thought there were “lost civilisations in the history of humans on Earth which we don’t know anything about”, Barnhart – who is the founder and Director of the Maya Exploration Center – said: “Yes I do. And, in fact we, have found some civilisations that we had no idea about just in my lifetime.

“We’ve got Gobekli Tepe [an enigmatic 12,000 year old site in Turkey] and we’ve got the stuff that’s going on in the Amazon and there are some other less startling things that we had no idea existed and push our dates back and give us whole new civilisations we had no idea about. So yeah, it’s happened.”

Asked if he believed there was a lost civilisation in the Amazon that the rainforest “has eaten up” and hidden evidence of, Barnart replied: “Yes I do. We’re beginning to find it.

“There are these huge what we call geoglyphs, these mound groups that are in geometric patterns. I think that the average Joe when they hear the word civilisation they think of something that looks like Rome and I don’t think we’re ever going to find anything that looks like Rome in the Amazon.”

Talking about the ideas espoused by Hancock, Fridman asked Barnhart: “He’s proposed it’s possible that the Amazon jungle is sort of a man-made garden, so it was planted there by an advanced ancient civilisation. Is there any degree to which that could be possible?”

Barnhart replied: “Frankly, I agree with him… It’s the conclusion part that we differ from, sure, but the facts that he’s basing that on are tera pretta, are the huge geometric earthworks – there are ever-increasing evidence of them.

“They’re everywhere. Every time we open up the jungle we find these big works. So yes, there was a vast civilisation that was there. How advanced they were is a question – and also, you know, a perspective thing.”

Barnhart, however, does not support Hancock’s theory that a lost civilisation from the last ice age ‘seeded’ all of the world’s civilisations. He said: “We could have the story wrong, but one thing we’re real good at is finding stuff.

“I mean, we find fish scales – so I find it just too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilisation that was that technologically advanced and that large, that we can’t even find a pot shard from.”

Professor John W Hoopes directs the Global Indigenous Nations Studies Program at the University of Kansas. He agrees that the Amazon rainforest was shaped by the actions of human hands thousands of years ago – but he says they were the hands of sophisticated indigenous farmers.

A specialist in pre-Hispanic indigenous cultures in Latin America, Hoopes is a long-term critic of Hancock’s work. He exclusively explained to The Express why he finds the phrase ‘advanced ancient civilisation’ “highly problematic”.

“The word ‘advanced’ is a legacy of Victorian-era unilineal cultural evolution, the notion that cultures advance along a trajectory from savagery to civilisation,” said Hoopes. “They don’t. It’s far more complicated than that.

“’Civilisation’ can be summarised in two words: ‘like us’. If there is something in a culture that we can recognize as being like ourselves, we are willing to bestow upon them the identity of ‘civilisation’.

“The term has become practically meaningless in archaeology. It is also used to sensationalise.”

Regarding ancient agriculture in the Amazon, Hoopes told The Express: “The ancient people of Amazonia used ‘terra preta’ – black earth technology – to convert heavily weathered, tropical soils into fertile, carbon and nutrient-rich soils that were extremely fertile. This was done over an extensive territory along the Amazon and its tributaries.

“The rich biodiversity of Amazon rainforest habitats today is due in large part to the high fertility of anthropogenic [human made] soils created over millennia by Indigenous farmers of South America. When their populations declined dramatically as a result of pandemics and genocide that followed European colonisation, the rainforest rebounded, growing even more luxuriantly, because of the high fertility of these human-enhanced soils.

“It is not that the rainforest was planted there by an ancient advanced civilization — that is sensationalistic and misleading. It’s that the tropical rainforests of Amazonia owe their density in part to the fertile anthropogenic soils that were abandoned by Indigenous farming communities as a result of pandemics and genocide.

“Those anthropogenic black earth soils were created gradually and over many generations and thousands of years. Another method of agricultural enhancement was raised and drained fields – camellones or waru waru – used to convert wetlands into fertile farmlands. These also became quickly and densely overgrown when they were abandoned due to population decline.

“Ed [Barnhart] has done some really great work. Ed is a good colleague. But he makes a living in part by working as a tour guide – I think some of the things he says are sensationalistic and misleading for the general public.”