Did The Lost City Of El Dorado Actually Exist?

0:02 [Music] legend. Legend tells that somewhere in South America there is a great city of gold, El Dorado, a fabulously rich and sophisticated kingdom that was once home to thousands of people living deep in the heart of the Amazon jungle. This was a stone city with squares and grand plazas and

0:50 wonderful buildings with columns and carvings and statues. To most people, it was just a legend. But for British explorer, 57-year-old Percy Forcet, it was real. It wasn't that far-fetched to imagine that somewhere deep in Amazonia, there was a major civilization. Convinced he knew the location of this lost world, he spent years searching for it. He was someone prepared to put his life on the line, head off into the middle of nowhere and do whatever it took to achieve his goal. With his son Jack and his best friend Raleigh, Forset set out in 1925 to find it.

1:37 They were convinced that this was going to be a great success and that they were all going to be really rich. 30 days into their journey, Forset wrote to his wife, "You have no fear of any failure. Then all three vanished." This is the story behind Percy Forcett's dream. And it seems that he may have been on to something. There really may have been a great civilization in the jungle, but its riches were not gold. The true secret of the real Elderorado was something with the amazing power to completely transform all our lives. [Music]

2:22 In the spring of 1906, Percy Forset was summoned to a meeting at the Royal Geographical Society in London and was made an offer he couldn't refuse. Let's have a look at this section here. The Bolivian government wanted someone to map its borders with Brazil, and 39-year-old Forset was perfect for the job. His family motto was difficulties be damned. All his life, he excelled at everything he had ever done. He was a firstass cricketer, an officer in the Royal Artillery, and a former British Secret Service spy in Morocco. But critically, he was a highly trained mapmaker and geographical surveyor who had been taught how to fix his position anywhere in the world.

3:09 For we have here, this is Forset's mission would be to survey and map the western Bolivian borders with Peru and Brazil. And his exploration, he was told, would be difficult and dangerous. [Music] But to force it, all this sounded like a dream job. The romantic history of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of South America and the mystery of his jungles pulled him in. Now his heart was pounding, even though there were complications. There were my wife and son to consider and another child on the way, but destiny intended me to go, so there could be no other answer. Forset's destiny had been sealed from a

3:56 very early age. I think he was about six or seven and the family was living on the Devon coast. He discovered some Roman remains in a cave near where they were living and they excited him enormously. It made him the center of attention and it caught his imagination and I think that it was that single incident that put the spark there and for the rest of his life he was searching for treasure. [Music] It was this thirst for adventure that made the Amazon job so irresistible.

4:42 There is something about the Amazon. It's the greatest of all rainforests. It's something like 3 and a half thousand miles across. And I think it's that mystery that somehow got to force it, drew him out there and away from all he'd loved into a place of danger. From 1906 to 1911, Faucet made several difficult surveying expeditions into the Amazon jungle. Faucet was a person who had really extraordinary field skills. And it's important to realize that the kinds of work that he did do were were was not easy at all. Not only did Forscid have to deal with the hostile environment,

5:28 disease fevers of one kind or another were everywhere. People were going down within days of starting work in these areas. But to make it worse, Forset was surveying in an area crawling with dangerous locals. He was in one of the most contentious parts of the Amazon in one of the most inflammatory periods in Amazonian history. There were very hostile tribes in the very areas he was going through. There were roaming gangs, people who threatened your lives, people who were killing people. [Music] All of this would to many people have made the assignment sound terrible, but of course to force it, it was just like

6:14 throwing coal on the fire. He loved it. But as the years passed by, something else was beckoning him. Forset was becoming hooked on exploring the Amazon jungle. [Music] [Applause] Deep down inside of me, a tiny voice was calling. At first, scarcely audible. It persisted until I could no longer ignore it. Inexplicably, amazingly, I knew I loved that hell. Its fish grasp had captured me. [Music]

7:00 Forset realized that the surveying work was holding him back and by 1911 he had had enough and resigned. Forett once said that he much preferred the company of savages to civilized bo. I think that says a lot about the man that he was someone who was a maverick, who was an outsider, who wanted freedom, who sort of embraced the wilds somehow. [Music] For's heart was in exploration, but what he needed now was a mission grand enough to satisfy his passion. When he first went out and was surveying, he heard stories,

7:48 stories of an advanced civilization in Brazil. He was on to the gossip, these stories that twirled around and swirled around these areas. He didn't reject them. He rather accepted them. And it was those stories that led him piecing them together like a jigsaw puzzle. I had by this time heard in several places vague traditions about the remains of the ancient civilizations and my imagination was stirred by them to such an extent that the urge to investigate was becoming more and more insistent. We knew that there were incredible civilizations in the highlands and in

8:34 Mexico. So why would there not be in the heart of Amazonia some extraordinary civilization that people just hadn't gotten around to finding? Then in the same year for stopped surveying the ancient Inca ruins of Machu Picchu were discovered in the Peruvian Andes by the US. It was the most important find in South America since the days of the Spanish conquest. This really fired Forset's belief. He became certain that there had to be something even more fabulous out there. Machu Picchu's romantic discovery was recent news, but my objective dated much earlier than the Incas, and I felt it was to be sought farther east in the

9:21 wild still unknown. All the great Indian tribes had traditions of a once great civilization to the east. He was in an area which was at the confluence not just of the Inca civilizations but also the confluence of Bolivian civilizations and these upper Amazonian civilizations. And those areas were talked about with a great deal of interest in the early exploration in the 1500s. One story that obsessed Forset was the historical account of the Spanish concistador's Amazon expedition in 1541. Foret was very familiar with the literature of the Amazon and he must

10:06 have been hugely struck by the earliest accounts accounts from the 16th century. People like Francisco de Ariana who's the man who first descended the Amazon and discovered it for Europe. For 8 months, Oriana and his 57 concistadors traveled down river towards the seas, searching for El Dorado, a kingdom of gold described by various Indian tribes as being a city deep inside the jungle. And eventually, as they went down, they met large groups of people in villages. They went as far as finding roads heading to the interior. They heard that there were towns in the interior. Ariana tells us that there were highly

10:52 populated river banks and we're talking about communities perhaps of 20,000 strong. So this must have played on Forcit's mind. They recorded a different set of groups and different groups of people. Some were dressed, some were not. And they noted that they were in very large quantities. Could this be what Forset was looking for? If so, where was this city? Forset then came across another intriguing record housed in Rio's National Archives Library in Brazil. One of the documents that we know particularly fascinated Forset was document 512. This decaying historical account was

11:38 known simply by the catalog number 512 because it had no author. The name of the person who discovered the city had worn away. So Forscet called him Francisco Raposo. Raposo was a Portuguese soldier of fortune who described how after a long troublesome journey incited by the insatiable greed of gold, he and his men came across a mountain path that had been cut by man rather than by nature. [Applause] And when they reached the top, they saw a spellbinding vista, a huge deserted city.

12:30 The man Forset dubbed Raposo had written, "We went on into this strange city, and we came on a road of great length and a well setout plaza, and in the middle of the plaza, a column of black stone of extraordinary grandeur." We went with fear and trembling into some of the houses, and in none did we find vestigages of furniture or movable objects by which or whose use we might guess at the sort of people who had dwelt therein. The city was deserted, but within it they found all manner of fantastic things. These large halls and columned buildings and broad boulevards. uh just like something you might find in

13:15 ancient Greece or imagine you'd find in ancient Greece sitting there right in the middle of the jungle at at a fork in the river. We marveled that this place had been abandoned by those who had formerly inhabited it. For with all our careful investigations and great diligence, we had met no person in this wilderness who might tell us of this deplorable marvel of an abandoned city whose ruins, statues, and grandeur attested its former populousness, wealth, and its flourishing in the centuries past. Forset was fascinated. Raposo had come across this vast lost city. I've looked at it myself and it conjures up images

14:00 of a lost world, a sort of city of gold. Although there was no mention in the document of the city's location, Forset now had further evidence of the existence of an ancient civilization deep inside the Amazon jungle. And he was also convinced that this was the same city that Oriana had seen 200 years earlier. It was exactly what he was looking for. It was proof positive. This wasn't his imagination. This wasn't something he'd made up or that was just the the myth story of native peoples. Here we had it in black and white. Had Oriana and Reposo seen the lost city of Elorado.

14:46 Forcet himself would never call it El Dorado. I call it Zed for the sake of convenience, he wrote. Even though Forset had never seen this lost city, he was happy to describe what it would look like to his youngest son, Brian. The central place I call Zed, our main objective, is in a valley surmounted by lofty mountains. The valley is about 10 mi wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it, approached by a barreled roadway of stone. I expect the ruins to be monolithic in character, more ancient than the oldest Egyptian discoveries. Judging by inscriptions found in many parts of Brazil, the inhabitants used an alphabetical writing allied to many

15:31 ancient European and Asian scripts. We don't really know an exact moment when Zed came into his mind. He had always believed that there were certain places in the world that were home to advanced civilizations. Forett was also convinced of something else. He believed that the people who lived in these remote hidden places possessed extraordinary abilities. In this he had been influenced by his peculiar upbringing. For had a very unusual background as an explorer. He wasn't someone whose father was someone who wanted to get to the South Pole or North Pole. Nothing obvious about him at all. Rather the

16:16 opposite. He was from a strange background, you could say. His aristocratic father spent the family's wealth and died of drink at the age of 45. And so it was to his mother the young Percy turned for inspiration. His mother was very interested in spiritualism and had a very great influence on Forset and it lasted all his life. Forett's wife Nenina was also interested in seances and astrology and his elder brother Edward was a member of the Theosophy movement a philosophical school formed by Helina Petrova Blavatsky to obtain hidden wisdom and enlightenment. He was influenced particularly in the religious area. Among other things,

17:03 Percy at one point went out to India to be with Helina Blovatski. Lavatzky's many followers included Gandhi, Thomas Edison, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. All this greatly inspired Forset's beliefs, especially Blavzk's conviction that there were master priests capable of producing psychic messages to save mankind. and they lived in remote cities in such places as Tibet and South America. By September 1914, Forset was getting closer to locating his lost city of Zed. In his mind, a vast spiritual civilization.

17:51 But before he could go, the First World War broke out. Forced found himself in the thick of it on the western front. He fought some of the major battles and was very active. Was mentioned in dispatches, was promoted in the field to colonel for I think that for several days he was actually a general. [Music] By the end of the war, Forset had received two medals. The Distinguished Service Medal for Bravery and a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society for his historic mapping of South America. [Music] But his obsession hadn't left him. On his return to England, Forcet was more

18:36 determined than ever to make his path to Zed, as he called it, a reality. Forset told his young son Brian, "The answer to the enigma of ancient South America and perhaps of the prehistoric world may be found when those old cities are located and opened up to scientific research. That the cities exist. I know." Gradually, piece by piece, clue by clue, Forset zeroed in on where Zed had to be. influences from his past, especially his mother and Helina Blavatski. Conversations with tribal peoples, archival records from Francisco de Orana's 1541 expedition of seeing

19:22 communities 20,000 strong, and Reposo's account of a spellbinding vista of a huge deserted city eventually pointed forcit to just one place. His lost city of Zed lay alongside the Shingu River in an area of southwestern Brazil called the Mat Grao. All he needed was the money to get there. But Forset was facing severe setbacks. Britain was exhausted after the war and experiencing a severe economic collapse. To return again would take every penny I could find. I came out of the war convinced that as a world power, Britain

20:09 was on the way. Many thousands must have come through those four years of mud and blood with the same disillusionment. [Music] Raising money for another Amazon expedition proved almost impossible. His hopes were dashed very quickly. He had hoped that the Royal Geographical Society would provide the funds. He found that there wasn't money to come. Money wasn't the only thing Forcet had to contend with. Forcet's professional colleagues began to question the importance and validity of his quest for a lost city called Zed. People were beginning to say, "Just a minute. You know, uh, some of these stories this fellow telling are

20:55 nonsense. this can't be right. Uh it it doesn't make sense. Do we really want to finance this stuff? Many felt that the lost city of Zed could not exist for environmental reasons. They argued that the soil of the Amazon was simply not productive enough to support a large society. Seething with frustration, Forcet wrote, "I cannot induce scientific men to accept the supposition that there are traces of an old civilization in the Amazon, but eventually help did come. Although the Royal Geographical Society couldn't pay for Forcet's next expedition, they

21:41 did support his application with the Brazilian government to secure some money. In 1920, Forset was back in the Amazon, searching for his elorado, the lost city of Zed with two male companions. [Music] But the expedition didn't go smoothly.

22:29 rains flooded their route and destroyed their equipment. Four weeks into their journey, their animals started to die. A starving dog had to be shot and forced killed one of their horses to put it out of its misery. The place became known as dead horse camp. Then one of Forset's companions suffered a mental breakdown and the other ran off to Rio to get married. [Music]

23:20 undeterred for it carried on alone. He really was obsessed with finding this city. People were falling sick all around him, but somehow it didn't seem to affect him. He could go on and on and on. All the explorers are driven people. You you've got to be driven. You've got to be someone who is able to hang on to your vision whatever you come across. And yet this is a man apart. He really was a fanatic. [Music] [Applause] Always driven by the hope of finding Zed. the hope that it was over the next hill, that there would be a new scrap of

24:06 information that would lead him there. Loneliness is not intolerable when enthusiasm for a quest fills the mind. The chief disadvantage seemed to be that were I to find anything of scientific or archaeological value, there would be no witnesses to support my word. [Music] Soon, finding Zed became the least of Forcett's worries. The rainforest looks incredibly abundant. It looks like the perfect place to survive in, but the soils are thin. A lot of that food is right up in the tree canopy. Up there, the monkeys. Your greatest danger is starvation.

24:55 Starvation sounds almost unbelievable in Forest Country. And yet it is only too likely to happen. And after 3 months alone in the jungle, exhausted, without food, and close to death, Forid abandoned his expedition. Back home in Devon, he would spend the next two years kicking his heels with frustration. [Music] The last few years have been the most wretched and disillusioning of my life, full of anxieties. My wife and children have been sacrificed for it.

25:42 I think that his wife and children missed him enormously. Nenina particularly was very sad and lonely with his long long absences. and the children doted on him. Of our 24 years of married life, only 10 have been spent together. Apart from 4 years in the great war, I have spent 10 in the forest. You have to feel for his wife, poor old Nina, whenever he was back in Devon. He felt he wanted to exchange that love and that comfort that she could provide for the danger, for the mystery of the Amazon. Who will ever understand that? that I want no glory from it, no money for myself, that I am doing it unpaid in the

26:28 hope that its ultimate benefit to mankind will justify the years spent in the quest. [Music] In desperation, Forset went to New York to find backers for his next expedition. These kinds of expeditions were quite costly. So he had to be able to self-promote and to make this seem as the most important imaginable expedition out there at the time so that he could um attract the funds, attract the attention and Forset did attract some attention. His promotional speeches convinced scientific institutions like the Museum of the American Indian and the American

27:14 Geographical Society to support his journey with $1,000 each. But it wasn't nearly enough. He gave a series of lectures. He went around to see big business. Forcet was not a man to bring doubt into his conversation. He spoke very forcefully. But he still couldn't raise the money and was forced to come up with a new plan. [Music] Faucet was quite a bit of a self-promoter. He constructed things as what we might call a kind of reality show in which he would then be able to catapult himself into a icon of exploration. Forset approached the National American

27:59 Newspaper Alliance, whose members had a paper in almost every city in the country with a novel idea. He would send runners back out of the jungle with minute-by-minute dispatches of their quest to find the lost city of Zed, so his readers would be able to follow and experience their journey as it happened. Captivated by his idea, the newspapers gave Forcet a very lucrative deal. Similar deals were made with newspapers around the world, ensuring millions of readers, but most of the money would only be paid to force it on the completion of their journey. In some ways, I am rather glad that not one of the three of us makes a red scent

28:45 unless the journey is successful. For nobody can say we were after the money in undertaking this rather perilous quest. [Music] In 1924, Forset was back in Britain. As news of the planned expedition grew in excitement and support, the Royal Geographical Society agreed to pay for their equipment. Eventually, Forset managed to raise around $5,000, the very bare minimum, Forset believed, to get them through to Zed. I found enough to make it imperative to go again. With the right companions, the right organization, and knowledge of the right way to go in, it can be brought to a successful conclusion. And our story,

29:31 when we return from the next expedition may thrill the world, but Forset was reluctant to give too much away to the press before they left. I cannot say all I know or even be precise as to the locality, for these things leak out, and there can be nothing so bitter to the pioneer as to find the crown of his work anticipated. A traveler is someone who who wanders along perhaps just for the sheer hell of it. But an explorer has a dream, has a vision, and is determined not just to pull off that vision, but to bring back information, bring back evidence of whatever it is he or she's found.

30:18 After his disastrous last expedition, Forced carefully picked his travel companions. This time his son Jack, now 21 and as strong as a horse and as keen as mustard, wanted to go with him. With Jack was his lifelong friend, Raleigh Rimmel. Foret knew what he was up against. He was hardened. He'd seen firsthand the forest. He'd lived there. But that wasn't the case for his two companions. Rally Rimmel in his 20ies, his son Jack, again in his 20ies, totally fresh, totally naive. Forset warned them both of the risks. It would be one of the most difficult and dangerous expeditions in the history of exploration. The ultimate test of faith,

31:04 courage, and determination. So here was a man who understood the importance of precision. And yet here also was a mystic, a man who was prepared to set off with two inexperienced companions into the blue into a mapless state and wander around somehow until he found his lost city. Very similar. He told his wife, he said, "Look, we're going to be away a long time. It could be a year. Don't be frightened. Don't expect to hear from us. We're going to go forward. We're going to find zed. We're going to have this enormous success. [Applause] [Music]

31:55 In January 1925, Forset, Jack, and Raleigh sailed from New York to Brazil, watched by the world's press. It was a worldrenowned expedition and it was being followed very closely. By this time they had been interviewed by all of the major newspapers. People were really excited that they were going off to find a lost civilization and they believed they were going to do it. And so there was indeed a huge sendoff. He was a major celebrity. Front page news. [Music] The following month, they left Rio de Janeiro on their 1,000mi journey by

32:42 train and boat into the interior of Brazil. Their destination, the Mato Grao's capital, Kuaba. Forcet called it their stepping off point. On April the 20th, 1925, Forset, Jack, and Raleigh put on their explorers outfits and Stson hats, grabbed their 30 caliber rifles and 18-in machetes, and left for the jungle. Opinion was divided as to whether their expedition was sheer lunacy or not. It's a little bit like Fitz Coral where everyone thinks, "Oh, what a nut getting a ship over a mountain and putting it on another tributary." But people were doing that all the time. So even though

33:28 we might think it's the sign of total madness, uh in fact at the time it was a reasonable conjecture and a bold thing to try. Their direction was towards the Mat Grao's upper Shingu River system, a tributary of the Amazon where Forset believed the city of Zed would be. The Matroso is thick forest. Mat Grao, that's what it means. And it is a devil of a place. That's the sort of phrase he would have used. A thick nasty place. We're used to seeing a horizon. We're used to heading towards something. But in the forest, you see tree after tree after tree and no more so than in the mat grao. Sticking to the deal made with the

34:14 press, Forset used runners to keep the public informed of their progress. As they went on each step of the journey, Forcet would write a report what they had seen, what they had experienced, and this chap would run back to civilization with it. They appeared in the American press, in the British press, in the Australian press, in quite a number of continental European papers. Jack told his mother of meeting stark naked Indians, of never feeling so well on his 22nd birthday, and that it would take a couple of months to reach Zed, possibly on his daddy's 58th birthday. In fact, things were now becoming

34:59 difficult for the explorers. In Forset's private letters to Nina, another story emerged. Along with descriptions of the difficulties of traveling, he revealed how Rley's foot had been poisoned by the insects. I suspect constitutional weakness, and I fear that we shall be handicapped by him, he wrote. There was Rally's foot. It was painful. It was slowing them down. Forced warned him that there would be no way out if it got any worse, but Raleigh refused to go back. Raleigh felt that he'd come all this way. They were so close to the great treasure. He wasn't going to drop out at this stage no matter what. They were also approaching an area where

35:45 there were tribes known to be aggressive. It was Forset's hope that he would be able, as he had in the past, to make friends quickly um to to gain their confidence, uh and in fact more than their confidence, to gain their generosity because they needed their food. It is obviously dangerous to penetrate large hordes of Indians, traditionally hostile. But I believe in our mission and its purpose. I believe our little party of three white men will make friends with them all. [Music] On the 29th of May 1925, 39 days into their journey, they reached dead horse camp where Forset had passed through on his last expedition.

36:33 [Music] Forset sat alone. We know this because Jack also wrote and and said that his father had sat alone and and wrote to his beloved Nenina back in Devon. The attempt to write is fraught with much difficulty. Here we are at Dead Horse Camp, the spot where my horse died in 1920. Only his white bones remain. Jack is well and fit. Raleigh I am anxious about. He still has one leg in a bandage, but won't go back. So far, we have plenty of food, but I'm not sure how long this will last. It is very cold at night and fresh in

37:18 the morning, but the insects and heat are out in full force come midday, and from then until evening, it is sheer misery in camp. I cannot hope to stand up on this journey better than Jack or Riley. My extra years tell, though I do my best to make up for it with enthusiasm. But I had to do this. Despite all this, Forset remained upbeat and ended his letter with, "You need have no fear of any failure.

38:04 The next day, Forsid gave the guide Nenah's letter and waved him goodbye. These were the last words to his wife. With just Jack and Riley as company, he headed out into uncharted territory. [Music] [Applause] All over the world, people waited for

38:51 news, wondering where they were. But there was nothing but silence and the tensions on the home front of course were just awful. Nina had this great faith in him. She did believe that all was well. Even 2 years after Forcit had vanished, Nenah believed he was coming back. Any day now may bring a cable from my husband announcing that he is safe and is returning with Jack and Raleigh. To read her correspondence is heartbreaking.

39:36 10 years after he disappeared, she still believed that he would turn up any day, that he was still alive, probably at that point that he was living in Zed. But the news she longed for never came. And despite the many search parties sent out to try and find them over the years, their bodies have never been found. [Music] 25 years later in 1955,

40:23 the New York Times declared that Forset's disappearance had set off more searches than those launched through the centuries to find the fabulous Elderorado. Were they killed by Indians, as most believe, or did they die of hunger? or was it something else? I don't think he was killed by hostile Indians. I don't think he was bitten by a snake. I don't think he was swept away by flood water. I don't think he's still living out there an immortal in some Shangrila, some city of gold. I think one or other of them stumbled, fell, couldn't keep on going any longer because of disease. And then the others had a choice. Do we

41:10 stay with this dying man, our companion, or do we head off and go for help? Well, there's no help available out there. And I'm afraid they probably all died together, [Music] but no one really knows. They had vanished without trace. [Music] Did Percy Forset and his companions die in vain? Were all those doubters right? There was no great civilization in the

41:57 jungle called El Dorado. had he simply been deluded. In recent years, scientists have made a series of extraordinary discoveries. In the same area where Francisco de Orana and his 57 concquistadors saw cities of 20,000 people in 1541 and just 100 miles west of Forset's last search for Zed, compelling evidence of past civilizations is now being unearthed. He basically traversed one of the areas in which some of the most exciting discoveries in the Amazon basin are taking place. Hidden in the jungle for several hundred years and only emerging now as trees are

42:45 felled to create farmland is evidence of a vast network of ancient sites. These sites seen from the air show an extraordinary crisscrossed landscape with straight lines cutting across the savannah. Amongst the open plains there are also thousands of isolated mounds or islands of rich forest linked by giant causeways. Recently it was discovered in these forest islands there are clear signs of past human habitation. Fragments of food remains, pottery, cooking urns, and human bones are now being uncovered on a massive scale. Here was evidence of a

43:30 huge civilization. Archaeologists believe these sites and forest areas are part of an ancient civilization state that stretches over 160 square miles and was once home to hundreds of thousands of people. It's important to remember that these cities were as large as Constantinople in the 1500s or as large as London which was one of the largest cities of the time. These great civilizations were complex. We know that they had complex religions. They had complex technologies. They were the great engineering societies of the time.

44:19 Could these be the remains of the great cities Francisco de Orana and Raposo had described all those years ago? The ones that inspired Forset's quest to find his lost city of Zed? If so, why had they been swallowed up by the jungle? [Applause] [Music] The answer is almost certain that the people met the fate of all the other Indians who were killed by disease brought in by European explorers with contact from the Spanish in the 16th century. Swiftly over 95% of their population was wiped out and their homes and cities disappeared with them.

45:07 But how did these great civilizations exist at all if the most modern agricultural techniques can't seem to make the jungle productive today? How did these large communities of the past manage to do it? The answer may be in the discovery of the mounds of black earth or terror praa as the Brazilians call it. It is dotted over many areas of the Amazon jungle. When scientists analyzed this terrapator, they discovered that it contained a mixture of common Amazon yellow soil and organic waste. This meant that it was man-made. What we understand from ethnographic and

45:55 archaeological evidence is that these soils formed as a result of very simple activities of burning litter rubbish. The relocating of bits of soil into other places and discard of charcoal from pottery production, fishbone and all the rest. [Music] The extraordinary thing about this black soil is how productive it is. It produces incredibly high yields. If communities rather than just plant and harvest the yields that would come out of very poor soils were able to modify soils, then larger populations could be had, larger villages could be

46:42 had and hence larger societies could be had. [Music] It does seem incredible that where we now can't do anything with the soil, this ancient civilization had brought about an agricultural miracle. Existence of these large populations was predicated on the use of terror praa. It increases productivity in the same way that irrigation increases productivity in dry lands or terraces increase productivity on mountainous lands. Terraptor is so remarkable that scientists are now working out how to reproduce it so it could be used all over the world. I think that what we're going to see is that it's going to play a major role in

47:29 enhancing the productivity of small and mediumcale agriculture and also to provide livelihoods and sustenance for uh rural populations in much of the world. So Percy Forcid was on to something. There really was a society out there that may well have had a great treasure to share with us, but it wasn't gold. as he himself had once written, "The answer to the enigma of ancient South America and perhaps of the prehistoric world may be found when those old cities are located and opened up to scientific research. That the cities exist. I know

48:17 [Music]