America Before

by Graham Hancock

  Again I can’t help but wonder if there might not have been something more active and intentional at work behind the scenes of this process than mere “accompanying.” What I have in mind is the possibility that a deep knowledge of plants and of their nutritional and other properties might have preceeded the first domestication activities that we have evidence for. Surely it is only on the basis of such foreknowledge that crops like groundnuts and manioc could be selected, domesticated, planned, and planted to complement each other’s nutritional contribution to human welfare?

  This is pure speculation, of course. But it’s strengthened somewhat by the curious nature of the manioc roots themselves, which (although there are many varieties) are classified into two main categories—“bitter” and “sweet.” All contain compounds known as cyanogenic glucosides, found in low concentrations in the less popular sweet varieties and in very high concentrations in the greatly prized and more widely used bitter varieties.37 The need-to-know element here is that if you eat any of the “bitter” varieties, without first processing them in the correct way (extracting the glucosides), you will at least suffer from “cyanic intoxication, with symptoms like vomiting, dizziness, and paralysis,” if not die of cyanide poisoning.38

  Ignorant of this, several of the soldiers on Francisco de Orellana’s sixteenth-century voyage down the Amazon ate unprocessed manioc roots. They survived but became mightily sick, near to death, as a result.39 To avoid poisoning they would have had to peel the roots, then grate them, then strain and press the resulting mash to remove the hydrocyanic acid, and at last toast it to produce a fine faintly yellowish flour40—simple but absolutely essential procedures that the indigenous peoples of the Amazon have followed for thousands of years to make “bitter” manioc safe.

  The fundamental question, however, is exactly how and when this processing system was first devised? Obviously since we have evidence of the cultivation of domesticated manioc by 8,000, or perhaps even as much as 10,000 years ago, it follows that the ability to process it must already have been developed by then. It would make no sense to anybody to go to all the trouble of domesticating a species and then growing crops from that species that nobody could eat without getting horribly, and perhaps lethally, sick. That’s why I keep coming back to the haunting possibility that some person or group of people with an interest in the Amazon already understood the potentials of manioc—and the exact steps that would have to be taken to avoid its dangers—long before they ever chose to domesticate it and put it under cultivation.41

  Otherwise, frankly … why bother?

  PLANT GNOSIS

  THE MANIOC ISSUE LOOKS SIMPLE. You just need to peel it, grate it, soak it, strain it, and meticulously cook it to remove the poison, and it is transformed into a useful staple.42 All steps of the processing seem rather obvious and basic in retrospect, but consider the amount of trial and error—the number of volunteers you would have had to make sick or kill—before you arrived at the right method.

  And what would motivate you to start such a project in the first place, unless you already knew the potential of the wild progenitor that would eventually become domesticated manioc?

  The same problem looms on an even larger and more complex scale with other plants of the Amazon, the uses to which they are put, and the processing they require. Anthropologist Jeremy Narby, author of The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, draws attention to curare, the blow-gun and arrow poison, invented—we do not know when—in the ancient Amazon. It produces paralysis and death by asphyxiation as the muscles required for breathing cease to function. It is used, Narby explains, because “it kills tree-borne animals without poisoning their meat while causing them to relax their grip and fall to the ground. Monkeys, when hit with an untreated arrow, tend to wrap their tails around branches and die out of the archer’s reach.”43

  A very useful hunting aid, therefore, and one, moreover, that has been adopted into modern medical anesthesiology. But the real mystery, as Narby goes on to show us, is how it was ever invented in the first place. The consensus among scholars is that curare, of which there are forty types in the Amazon made from seventy plant species, was stumbled upon by chance experimentation.44 Narby doubts this scenario:

  To produce it, it is necessary to combine several plants and boil them for seventy-two hours, while avoiding the fragrant but mortal vapors emitted by the broth. The final product is a paste that is inactive unless injected under the skin. If swallowed, it has no effect. It is difficult to see how anybody could have stumbled on this recipe by chance experimentation.45

  The whole mystery of the Amazonian plant medicines, notably the vision-inducing brew ayahuasca (which itself is a mixture of several plants that are most unlikely to have been fortuitously brought together) is explored in depth in my 2005 book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. In these medicines, as in curare, as in terra preta, and as in the incredible burst of domestication of plants and trees in the Amazon that followed the end of the Ice Age, could we be looking at the cultural DNA not only of a civilization but of a sophisticated civilization that had developed sciences of its own that it began to share with other people—very much including the peoples of the Amazon basin—around the time that the last Ice Age came cataclysmically to its end?

  Judging from the clues that lie scattered like tantalizing jewels across the Amazon, this hypothetical lost science of a hypothetical lost civilization would have looked very different from any of our own sciences, employing not only empirical methods but also shamanistic techniques, vision quests, and out of body encounters in the “spirit world” that most modern Western intellectuals would regard as absurd. Again, however, if we go by the evidence of the Amazon, the plain fact is that the remnants and borrowings of this supposedly laughable form of science have again and again produced practical and down-to-earth results—domesticating and processing huge numbers of plants and trees, for example, or creating “miracle” soils that are still fertile after thousands of years of use, or inventing muscle relaxants like curare that inhibit acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junction. Moreover, unlike Western technology, to which the earth is a dead thing, this ancient technology addresses all the needs, spiritual as well as physical, of the human creature. Again, though the skeptics will scoff, none of the many thousands of people who’ve had their lives transformed by ayahuasca in the past 20 years would deny that something very powerful and very hard to explain is at work here.46

  SACRED GEOMETRY

  FROM THE TIME OF ITS earliest appearance in the archaeological record (which is absolutely not the same thing as the time that it first took shape) Amazonian civilization is a continuum that does not break from the wisdom and insights of its founders. The same basic principles, defining the relationship between humanity and the cosmos continue to manifest and to be re-expressed over thousands upon thousands of years, in some cases evolving and developing into strange new growths, in others devolving and decaying. But just like that enigmatic Australasian genetic signal still found among Amazonian peoples today, other traces of ancient and mysterious connections, though faint, have also survived.

  For example, despite rejecting the old stereotypes of the “savage” and “primitive” Amazon, and despite knowing that prehistoric civilizations of some complexity had once flourished there, scientists at the beginning of the twenty-first century were nonetheless taken aback to be presented with overwhelming evidence of an ancient practice of geometry in the rainforest—and on a very ambitious scale.

  Let’s get one thing straight before we take a closer look at this mystery. Just because people live in a dense jungle, and haven’t attended math classes in high school, does not mean they have no grasp of geometry—“one of the deepest and oldest products of human reason.”1 On the contrary, though often wrongly attributed to Euclid, there is compelling evidence—mysterious in itself—that “the conceptual principles of geometry are inherent in the human mind.”2 This evidenc
e comes from an isolated region at the heart of the Amazon where scientists from the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit of the Collège de France led a study in which the indigenous Mundurukú people were tested on basic geometry skills. The study found that:

  Mundurukú children and adults spontaneously made use of … the core concepts of topology (e.g., connectedness), Euclidean geometry (e.g., line, point, parallelism, and right angle), and basic geometrical figures (e.g., square, triangle, and circle) … and they used distance, angle, and sense relationships in geometrical maps to locate hidden objects.3

  In summary, therefore, isolated peoples in remote parts of the Amazon today, whose contact with technological civilization is extremely limited,4 possess innate geometrical knowledge and are able to deploy it “independently of instruction, experience with maps, or measurement devices.”5 No doubt their ancestors, and probably most humans always, have been blessed with the same neurological gift. Indeed, we see it made manifest down the ages in all kinds of man-made structures. Even the simplest wattle-and-daub hovels tend to be rectangular or square rather than randomly shaped. Likewise, from England’s Stonehenge, to the Great Pyramid of Egypt, to India’s Madurai Meenakshi Temple, to Borobudur in Indonesia, to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, to Tikal in Guatemala, to Tiahuanaco in Bolivia—and to countless other sites too numerous to mention—the design of the sacred architecture of the world is entirely governed by geometry.

  The very universality of this geometry, as an innate faculty of the human mind, is not in doubt, but how it has been expressed by different civilizations in different epochs is culturally driven. Thus, Angkor Wat is not the Great Pyramid and the Great Pyramid is not Stonehenge. All three, however, share the same fundamental geometries and connections to the cosmos that—I have long argued—were incorporated into a system of architecture central to the beliefs and lifeways of a lost civilization of remotest prehistory. When that civilization was destroyed in the series of cataclysms that brought the last Ice Age to an end, there were survivors who took the system with them, seeking to replant it in the many different parts of the world where they found refuge. In some it took root and flowered early, and over thousands of years it manifested in multiple different ways; in others it lay dormant for millennia before bursting into exuberant life.

  Mainstream archaeology recognizes no such universal system, nor even the vestiges of one, and insists that there was no “diffusion” of ideas between these ancient cultures (How could there be when Angkor is 3,500 years younger than the Great Pyramid?). The point is fair but irrelevant to my proposition which does not require diffusion within the past 5,000 or even the past 10,000 years. Instead I suggest that the similarities and differences between certain ancient monumental structures, created around the world at different times by different cultures, are best explained by a remote common ancestor civilization that left a legacy of ideas and knowledge in which they all shared, which their priests, shamans, and sages sought to preserve, and which they in due course deployed in their own different ways.

  One of the hallmarks of this worldwide “system,” whether its widespread presence is coincidental or not, is geometry. And, in turn, whenever the geometry manifests on a monumental scale that could only be achieved by skilled specialists and a large, well-organized workforce, the obvious implication is that a fairly advanced civilization must have been involved.

  That was why, when giant geometrical earthworks were discovered in the Rio Branco area of the Brazilian state of Acre in the southwestern Amazon in 1977 nobody at first paid much attention. This was the era when the Smithsonian’s Betty Meggers still reigned supreme over all things Amazonian. Her Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise had been published just 6 years before and her view that the jungle could never have supported large populations or any form of civilization capable of monumental architecture was the full-blown dogma of the day. Little wonder then, although the Smithsonian had sponsored the National Program of Archaeological Research in the Amazon that found the first “geoglyphs,” that it did not announce the discovery until 11 years later.6

  Locations of principal earthwork sites in the southwestern Amazon discovered by 2018.

  The young man who actually spotted the earthworks from a Smithsonian survey aircraft was Alceu Ranzi, and it was he who named them “geoglyphs.”7 His career took him elsewhere for the next two decades but his interest was sparked again after another overflight in 1999 and, now at the Federal University of Acre, he resumed his research together with colleagues Denise Schaan of the Federal University of Pará and Martti Pärssinen of the University of Helsinki.

  Their first detailed results were published in the December 2009 issue of Antiquity,8 which trailed the findings as evidence of the existence in ancient times of “a sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society in the upper Amazon Basin on the east side of the Andes. This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads.”9

  At the outset of the paper, Ranzi, Schaan, and Pärssinen described “clusters of these monumental earthworks” mostly located on a 200-meter-high plateau:

  Formed by excavated ditches and adjacent earthen walls … the earthworks are shaped as perfect circles, rectangles and composite figures.10

  But why had these stunning Amazonian geoglyphs first been noticed only a few decades previously?

  Ranzi and his colleagues observe that while the geoglyphs were abandoned about 500 years ago, and then heavily overgrown, they have since been revealed by mass clearing of the forest for the cattle industry, thus becoming visible, especially from the sky, over the past 30 years. Indeed, the enormous size of the geoglyphs makes it easier to distinguish their shape and configuration from an aerial perspective than at ground level, and satellite imagery has been made freely available to researchers by Google Earth.11

  NAZCA–AMAZON CONNECTIONS

  TO THE EXTENT THAT THEY are best seen and understood for what they are from the air rather than from ground level, comparisons with the famous “Nazca Lines” of southern Peru were inevitable, and quickly began to be made—particularly so since, in addition to its giant images of animals and birds, the Nazca plateau also features many precise geometrical figures.12

  Ranzi himself has invited the comparison by asserting that the Amazon geoglyphs are “as important as the Nazca Lines”13 and, indeed, his own use of the term “geoglyphs” was, according to his colleague and coauthor Denise Schaan, inspired by the figures on the Nazca plateau. This, Schaan argues, is “unfortunate” because the Nazca Lines “are a different phenomenon. In the Nazca desert, geometric and zoomorphic figures were shaped by the displacement of dark, weathered rocks on the surface to expose a lighter subsurface. In Brazil and Bolivia, however, the ‘figures’ were produced by the excavation of large, continuous ditches forming circles, rectangles, hexagons, octagons and other, nongeometric, shapes.”14

  Nazca geometry. PHOTOS: SANTHA FAIIA.

  I’m not persuaded by this distinction. Whether a painter uses oils or watercolors, the end result is still a painting. Likewise, although different techniques and materials were used—unavoidable given the very different environmental conditions of the Amazon and at Nazca—the end result in both cases is still a “canvas” decorated with immense geometric, as well as “nongeometric,” shapes.

  Though it is now more than quarter of a century in the past, I recall vividly my encounter with Maria Reiche, the venerable “lady of the lines,” at her home in the town of Nazca where she had lived since 1945 surrounded by the ancient geoglyphs that it was her fate to study, protect, and introduce to the world. She had recently celebrated her ninetieth birthday when Santha and I met her in June 1993. Although bedridden with advanced Parkinsonism, her mind was sharp and her voice clear when she shared with us her own view of the significance of the lines:

  They teach us that our whole idea of the peoples of antiquity is wrong—that here in Peru was a civilization that was advanced, that had a
n advanced understanding of mathematics and astronomy, and that was a civilization of artists expressing something unique about the human spirit for future generations to comprehend.15

  I have already explored the mystery of Nazca in previous books so I won’t go over old ground here except to note that among the most iconic of the Nazca geoglyphs, etched into the desert with a single unbroken line extending for more than a mile16 and occupying an area of approximately 90 meters by 60 meters17 is an image of a monkey. Its prehensile tail, stylized into a spiral, is a diagnostic feature of New World monkeys that distinguishes them from Old World monkeys.18 However, no monkeys have ever lived in the Nazca desert. The nearest specimens, for example, capuchin monkeys, spider monkeys, and woolly monkeys, are all native to the Amazon rainforest.19

  TOP RIGHT: Nazca monkey. PHOTO: SANTHA FAIIA. TOP LEFT: Spiral Woolly Monkey tail. PHOTO: STEFFEN FOERSTER, DREAMSTIME.COM [26291981]. BOTTOM: Nineteenth-century illustration of Amazonian spider monkeys.

  Another of the better-known Nazca geoglyphs looks like and is usually referred to as a spider. It has been suggested, however, that the huge 46-meter-long20 image arguably does not depict a spider but a member of a closely related order of millimeter-sized arachnids, the “tickspiders” called Ricinulei.21 More than seventy species have thus far been identified worldwide, not one of them in the Nazca desert. Nor should we expect any there. Ricinulei favor “tropical forests and caves”22 and the nearest populations of this very peculiar creature to Nazca are in the Brazilian Amazon, specifically in central, eastern, and southern Amazonia.23

  There are many strange things about the Ricinulei order, but strangest of all is a single feature that is regarded as its distinguishing anatomical characteristic.24 As described by Brazilian arachnologist Alexandre B. Bonaldo, this is its “system of sperm transfer, which is achieved by an elaborate copulatory apparatus in the male third leg.”25 Although barely a millimeter long, and difficult to discern without magnification, it was first pointed out by the late professor Gerald S. Hawkins of Boston University that this unusual reproductive extension, common to all Ricinulei species, is depicted in the correct place on the third leg of the Nazca “spider.”26