According to archeological finds, it is believed that the Mayans were the first major culture to live in the Americas or the Amazon rainforest. That was until a new, or should I say even older, civilization was just discovered.
As BBC reported, an ancient city or network of cities has just been realized in eastern Ecuador in the Andes foothills. For centuries, it’s been covered in dense vegetation, making it pretty invisible to the human eye.
But thanks to new technology, such as airborne laser sensors or Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), this vast network is no longer hidden.
According to surveys of the area so far, it appears this was a network of “garden cities” built about 2,500 years ago. It lasted for about 1,000 years and seemed to rival civilizations such as the Mayans in Central America and Mexico.
Lead researcher Stephen Rostain explained that it is “an entirely human-engineered landscape built by skilled urban planners. Five major settlements connected by wide straight roads running over great distances” could have been home to an estimated range of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people.
To be clear, this is no small village with what many would probably assume are made up of huts and naked people.
Instead, there are “clusters of monumental platforms, plazas, and streets following a specific pattern intertwined with extensive agricultural drainages and terraces.” Also included is a “complex road system extending over tens of kilometers, connecting the different urban centers, thus creating a regional-scale network.”
And to top it all off, it seems this network is even older than all other known and now lost civilizations in the Americas.
As Rostain says, this means “we have to change our idea about what is culture and civilization.” Literally, the find is rewriting history. And this is just the start of the sites’ surveys.
