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'There is the bonfire of the Christians', we told each other. That happened at sunset. The next day, when the sun set, his fire rose again. A day later, again, only a little smoke spread across the sky. That day the fire had been put out. It seemed that the English fire was gone, that it had been extinguished. What a pity! Why did they insist on going in that direction?

With those words, in 1982, a member of the Kalapalo tribe, in the jungle of Mato Grosso (Brazil), explained to the anthropologist Ellen Basso, from the University of Arizona, his memory of the end of one of the most extraordinary adventures of the century XX: the search by the British explorer Percy Fawcett from the city of Z.

Fawcett was a character almost forgotten until the American journalist David Grann in 2009 turned his odyssey into the bestseller The Lost City of Z: The Story of a Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. This is how Fawcett entered, almost a century after his disappearance on the banks of the Xingu River - one of the largest tributaries of the Amazon -, in the pantheon of British Victorian and Edwardian explorers, at the height of the Mungo Park, Richard Francis Burton , David Livingstone or Richard Hanning Speke .

Of course, others believe that Fawcett doesn't deserve to be there. Canadian John Hemming, who has explored the Amazon for decades, has described Fawcett as "incompetent racist who achieved nothing," and has described Grann's book and Gray's film "insult to true explorers."

Whatever it is, Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925 without a trace with his son, Jack, 21, and his friend, Raleigh Rimmell, was looking for what seems like the most absurd thing to look for in the Amazon: a city

It is assumed that "Amazon" and "city" do not marry in the same sentence. We all know that the inhabitants of that region lived in the Stone Age until the whites arrived. Since Gonzalo Pizarro entered the Amazon in 1541 in search of the mythical El Dorado - a lake whose bed is supposedly covered with gold dust and precious stones - the jungle has provided humanity with many things: rubber, wood, iron, oil , and slaves, captured for centuries by the bandeirantes, first Portuguese, and then Brazilians, who entered it to hunt human beings. The same human beings whom Fawcett called "wild villains, horrible monkey-men with pig eyes" and those we can only imagine or as cannibals or living in perfect harmony with Mother Nature. But not building cities.

It was not the weapons of the Spaniards, but the evils they carried there, such as smallpox or the flu, that decimated the local population

A lost city in the Amazon makes as much sense as Atlantis, or how to mix the Indians of Dancing with wolves with the brokers of The Wolf of Wall Street. Agree. It's a lousy joke. But also the idea of ​​Fawcett. Z's search sounds as ridiculous as the English's claim that he had hunted a 19-meter anaconda, that is, three times the size of the largest specimen of that species ever captured. The English explorer was just an insane adventurer.

Or so everyone thought until in 2003 the journal Science published the article La Amazonia in 1492: Virgin Forest or a Garden Care? , written by a team of five scientists and an indigenous leader, led by the University of Florida anthropologist Michael Heckenberger, in which they described the existence, just where the explorer had been last seen, of the remains of at least 19 large inhabited cores connected by roads 50 meters wide - like a four-lane highway - and elevated above the surrounding terrain. Each town had between 2,500 and 5,000 inhabitants, and was protected from alleged enemies by palisades and moats.

There was nothing left of that civilization that Heckenberger estimated had flourished between the years 1200 and 1600 of our era, that is, from the period that goes from the battle of the Navas de Tolosa until the death of Philip II. As the anthropologist explains in the article, «in 1492 human influence had essentially extended to this entire area. Nothing that was here was natural.

The jungle was not a virgin; the good Amazon savage had never existed. Z was not a city, as Fawcett believed. But yes a culture.

Heckenberger's finding is part of a series of archaeological discoveries begun six decades ago that have destroyed the traditional image of pre-Columbian America. Until very recently, the consensus was that on October 11, 1492 sentences there were 12 million people in the region . And that, with the exceptions of a few cultures - the Aztec and the Inca, which had been preceded by others, such as those of Tiahuanaco in Bolivia, and the Maya and Teotihuacán in Mexico - most of America was a territory «that he had not been bound by man, ”as the United States Natural Space Protection Act of 1964 states, verbatim. That is the idea behind the title that Oscar-winning director Ridley Scott gave to the film he commemorated 500 years of the discovery of America, in 1992: 1492: The conquest of Paradise.

There was no such paradise. That image of pre-Columbian America is as mythological as that of Columbus, who believed he was arriving in Japan when he appeared in the Bahamas. There was neither El Dorado de oro nor El Dorado ecological. To think that is to fall into what geographer William Denevan, of the Universities of Wisconsin and Berkeley, baptized in an article published in September 1992 in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers as "the myth of the pristine land."

For Denevan, “there is substantial evidence that the landscape of America at the beginning of the 16th century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. The population was large. The composition of the forests had been modified; meadows had been created; the wildlife had been altered; and erosion was severe in certain areas. Excavations, roads, fields, and human settlements were ubiquitous.

His estimate is that on October 12, 1492 there were between 54 and 57.3 million Americans , with a margin of error of 25%. That means that, in the highest range, the New World could have had almost 72 million inhabitants, six times the figure that had traditionally been taken for good.

Denevan knew what he was talking about because, in the 60s, he had been the first to discover that the Plains of Mojos, a plain of 110,000 km² - as much as Castilla y León and Galicia together - that floods every year for several months in Bolivia had been created by the human being. The hills that dot the plain are artificial islands where villages had been built and the land had been cultivated. An immense network of land canals of which there are still remains - the so-called ridges - dried up large areas of swamp in the wet season, thus allowing agriculture. About 250,000 hectares -2,500 km²- of the Plains of Mojos were farmland.

In the southern part of the region the land is black. It is the mulatto land, in the countries that speak Spanish, or terra preta de indio (black land of the Indian) in Brazil, which occurs when the forest is burned to maintain itinerant agricultural activity in poor soils, such as those of the Amazon. In the basin of that river, the terra preta occupies an area that, depending on who has made the estimate, can range from the size of the two Castles to that of Spain. Whatever it is, its existence indicates that the great jungle already knew the fires caused by the human being long ago, because the oldest soils of this type date from the year 500 BC

And, as in the case of the culture discovered by Heckenberg 2,000 kilometers from the Plains of Mojos, this agricultural practice disappears without a trace in 1600 . Around that date, the culture of the island of Marajó is suddenly extinguished, at the mouth of the Amazon, which had already been described by the Dominican Gaspar de Carvajal in 1542 . Months earlier, in what is now the border between Brazil and Peru, Carvajal had described an extensive strip of about 300 kilometers on the banks of the river full of villages. Today, there is only jungle there.

What happened? Where did all these people go?

The clearest answer comes in a footnote to the founding myth of the United States.

It was in November 1621 when 102 English Puritans arrived in what is now Massachusetts aboard the Mayflower ship. For months, the Pilgrims, as they are known today, only saw abandoned graves and villages. This is how they survived: stealing the food that the Indians had left in their homes, or the corn they had deposited in the graves for religious reasons. His meetings with the local population were limited to a few armed skirmishes.

America was being devastated not by the conquerors, but by something that not even they knew they had carried: smallpox . Then came the flu, bubonic plague, typhus, measles, mumps ... They were all unknown in America. Its inhabitants not only did not have natural defenses against them, but also did not know how to treat them. The concept of quarantine, common in a Europe that barely a century and a half before had lost a third of the population to the Black Plague, was unknown across the Atlantic.

After the diseases and the conquest came the wars of extermination launched by some of the independent republics, such as the US, Argentina and Brazil

Death spread at an amazing speed, in an extermination that went unnoticed in its time. The agricultural culture Coosa, of the counties of Gordon and Murray, in what is now the state of Georgia, in the US, had between 50,000 and 200,000 people in its semi-autonomous villages when in 1542 Extremadura Hernando de Soto visited it with blood and fire . In 1682, the French René-Robert Cavelier estimated its inhabitants at 8,500. The villages of 400 houses that the Spaniards had seen in the Plains of Mojos were empty. Free from hunters and farmland, and with immense grasslands created by the natives with their forest burning, the bison population exploded. The gigantic buffalo herds of the West, which would be exterminated in the nineteenth century in part to starve the last aborigines, were an involuntary creation of the management of the territory of those same aborigines!

According to Denevan, 74% of the population died. Others carry the percentage to 95%.

After the diseases and the conquest came the wars of extermination launched by some of the independent republics, such as the US, Argentina and Brazil. This is how today there are indigenous communities with hardly any genetic variation. It is the consequence of having been reduced to a few hundreds or thousands of people for centuries, in the most remote of the jungles, swamps or mountains.

Many of the indigenous cultures that disappeared were in the Neolithic, that is, at the time when the human being developed agriculture, and left no trace beyond a few clay pots such as those that Fawcett would find four centuries later in the soil of the Amazon, or forgotten alphabets like those of the rocks found in Puerto Rico in 1880. Only the most advanced, or those that used stone in their constructions, bequeathed signs of their existence to the future.

The collapse was so brutal that it generated the idea among Europeans that those people who had mostly had to withdraw to subsistence farming were not able to generate an advanced culture. The Incas, the Aztecs, the Maya or other peoples were the exception to the rule. And, therefore, they were not indigenous, but descendants of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Chinese ... When in 1804 the then president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, ordered Captain Meriwether Lewis and the second lieutenant Louis Clark to They will explore what is now the West and the North of the United States, specifically commissioned them to be in Quito in case they found Welsh descendants. The founder of the Mormons, Joseph Smith, deduced that the indigenous crafts he had found could not be from the Indians, so he attributed them to the lost tribes of Israel.

Thus, at a stroke, most of the America of October 11, 1492 was lost forever, victim of a demographic catastrophe of which neither its perpetrators nor their victims were aware . The memory of the cultures of the first Americans vanished from the memory of men just as the smoke from the fires of the Fawcett expedition disappeared on the third night from the sight of the Kalapalo.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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