In recent days, the alleged discovery of Ratanabá, a secret civilization in the heart of the Amazon, has spread with great speed through social networks.
According to the posts, which went viral on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram, the city would be “bigger than Greater São Paulo”, it was “the capital of the world” and “hides a lot of wealth, such as gold sculptures and advanced technologies of our ancestors”.
Some conspiracy theories went further and said the discovery would help explain “the true interest of dozens of powerful men in the Amazon” and even the disappearance of English journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian indigenist Bruno Pereira.
This information, however, does not make any sense. “All this is a delusion”, evaluates archaeologist Eduardo Goés Neves, professor at the Center for Amerindian Studies at the University of São Paulo (USP) and coordinator of the Laboratory of Archeology of the Tropics at the Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at the same institution.
For over 30 years, the specialist has been part of a network of researchers working to reveal the past of the Amazon and the peoples who lived (and still live) there.
In his opinion, the emergence of stories such as that of Ratanabá, which has no basis in recent scientific publications, does a “disservice to archaeology”.
“For over 20 years, archaeologists working in the region have argued that there were cities in the Amazon, but this was seen as crazy,” he says.
“Over time, the perspective has changed and the academic community has begun to accept that, yes, there is evidence of large-scale sites, roads and landfills built a long time ago”, continues the expert, who reinforces that these findings do not have nothing to do with ancient civilizations or hidden treasures.
“Now, all our efforts can almost go back to square one with the story of Ratanabá and the propagation of information in the most bizarre ways possible”, he adds.
Next, check out why the main arguments used to talk about the “lost city in the Amazon” don’t make sense — and what scientific evidence reveals about human occupation in the world’s largest rainforest.
An account that doesn’t close
The first detail that draws attention in the posts about Ratanabá are the dates used. In some texts, it is written that civilization would have existed there 350, 450 or even 600 million years ago.
“This doesn’t make any sense from the point of view of the geological and biological history of our planet”, replies Neves.
“To give you an idea, not even dinosaurs existed 350 million years ago. Our oldest ancestors lived about 6 million years ago. But our species itself, the Homo sapiens sapiensappeared 350 thousand years ago in Africa”, he estimates.
That is: there is a miscalculation of at least 349 million years in this history.
“If someone said that cities existed in the Amazon 3,500 years ago, I would even think that this was a question to try to understand better and research. Now, a civilization 350 million years ago? There is no possibility of that”, points out the archaeologist.
Metropolises of the past, small towns of today
The second completely wrong information about Ratanabá has to do with the supposed size of the city. Some posts say that it would be bigger than Greater São Paulo.
Again, this is at odds with the scientific evidence. “We still don’t have an exact estimate of how many people lived in these Amazonian cities, but they certainly weren’t the size of São Paulo at all,” says Neves.
“To give you an idea, in the 16th century, the most populous cities in the world were probably Istanbul, in Turkey, and Tenochtitlán, in Mexico. And they had 50,000, at most 200,000 inhabitants”, calculates the USP professor.
Currently, Greater São Paulo is home to about 22 million inhabitants.
Neves calculates that, before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, there were about 10 million indigenous people in the entire Amazon. “And that number dropped a lot from the 17th century onwards due to wars and epidemics”, he teaches.
Straight lines in the middle of the jungle
The third argument that gives muscle to the rumors about Ratanabá has to do with tunnels found in the Amazon region or with aerial images, which show straight lines and perfect squares, visible between the treetops.
These tunnels, social media posts argue, would serve as a secret passageway and connect different parts of South America.
Straight lines, in turn, do not exist in nature and would be the result of human work, guarantee the rumors.
Neves explains that there really are tunnels in the Amazon. “The images released probably come from the region of Forte Príncipe da Beira, in Rondônia, which was a Portuguese colonial post.”
“These constructions are related to the border disputes between Spain and Portugal in the vicinity of the Guaporé River throughout the 18th century”, he adds.
But what about straight lines? From the few images available, Neves believes they are from a region close to the border between the states of Mato Grosso, Pará and Amazonas.
“These formations have been known for a long time and they really look like perpendicular lines, which is an unusual thing,” he says.
“The main suspicions are that it is a natural formation of limestone or some type of rock that follows this pattern”, says the archaeologist.
“It is unlikely that it was created by humans. But, if it really was made by local people, these constructions must not be more than 2,500 years old”, he adds.
What may be behind the interest in the topic
Neves, who has no profile on social media, confesses that he had never heard of Ratanabá until the second week of June 2022.
“When they started asking me about it, I even went to research and consult other colleagues who study Amazonian archeology, but no one knew about this story”, he says.
Although there are profiles on social networks and even books published about this “lost civilization” in recent years, the topic has only gained popular interest and has become a widely discussed subject in recent days.
In Neves’ assessment, the phenomenon can be explained by a series of factors.
“It seems to me a mixture of the naivety of people, who want to believe in this type of thing, with economic interests in exploring the Amazon”, speculates the specialist, who remembers other similar legends, such as the city of Eldorado, a target of explorers throughout the centuries for supposedly being made of gold.
“And we cannot ignore racism in this context either. When you say that there were ‘advanced’ civilizations 300 million years ago, you are taking from the ancestral peoples, who are the ancestors of today’s indigenous peoples, the authorship of all those constructions”, adds.
“It’s something similar to what we see in the book ‘Were the Gods Astronauts?’, by Erich von Däniken. There, it sounds easier to explain that the pyramids of Egypt were built by extraterrestrial beings than to give credit to African peoples”, he compares.
“And all this denotes a deep racism with all non-European populations, such as indigenous peoples and Africans, as if they were not capable”, he interprets.
Finally, the archaeologist opines that the fact that legends of the type are gaining steam just now serves as a kind of test balloon.
“They act as a smokescreen at a time when we have two people missing and divert attention from the real problem of violence in the Amazon”, he adds.
(Lack of) stones in the way
Neves explains that Amazonian archeology has faced major setbacks over the last few decades.
“In general, the Amazon has few rocks. So, the main raw material used in the constructions of the past was earth and wood”, he contextualizes.
“To understand these periods, we need a multidisciplinary team, capable of working with objects that were left behind and withstood time, such as ceramics, organic remains, soil samples, pieces of food, seeds and bones”, he exemplifies.
To illustrate this difficulty, Neves cites as an example an article published a few weeks ago in the scientific journal nature by experts from British and German universities.
The research revealed the details of two large archaeological sites measuring 147 and 315 hectares (an area equivalent to 205 and 441 football fields, respectively), including the existence of pyramids, in the Bolivian Amazon.
“These earth structures have been known for 60 years, but it was very difficult to define whether they were natural or were built by humans,” says the archaeologist.
“It was only possible to get this answer now, because we have a technology called Lidar capable of doing this type of analysis.”
The future depends on the past
But, after all, given the scientific evidence available at the moment, what do scientists know about the history of the people who inhabited this region?
“We know that the Amazon was densely occupied in the past and that the people who lived there left very visible marks of the way of life they had, with geometric ditches and linear roads”, summarizes Neves.
“And we have data that show us very securely a direct relationship between the individuals who made these constructions in the past and the indigenous peoples of today.”
“It is not, therefore, a question of a lost civilization, which disappeared millions of years ago”, assures the researcher.
According to the Scientific Panel for the Amazon, a publication coordinated by the United Nations (UN) that has a chapter on the peoples who lived in the region before the arrival of Europeans, there is evidence that this tropical forest has been occupied by indigenous people for 12 years. a thousand years.
“During this long history, indigenous societies developed technologies that were highly adapted to local conditions and optimized for the expansion of the food production system,” writes the group of experts who signed the document, led by Neves.
“Amazon archeology shows how deep the indigenous history is in the region, characterized by cultural and agro-biological diversity. It is one of the few independent centers of plant domestication on the planet and one of the first centers of ceramics production in the New World” , follows the text.
“All these technologies can inspire new forms of urbanism, waste management and integrated land use systems”, conclude the authors.
For Neves, this set of evidence allows seeing the Amazon as a “biocultural heritage”, with an interaction between human action and nature over millennia.
“Therefore, to protect the Amazon, we need to strengthen local populations, such as indigenous peoples, riverside dwellers, quilombolas and caboclos, because they play a very important role in the construction and maintenance of this biocultural heritage”, concludes the archaeologist.
