Dozens of ancient villages discovered in 'uninhabited' Amazon rain forest

Doyle Rice | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption 1 million people may have lived in newly discovered Amazon villages Scientists have discovered evidence that as many as a million people once lived deep in the Amazon rainforest, in an area once thought to have been uninhabited.

Long before Amazon.com, there was just the Amazon, a massive rain forest and river in South America.

Tuesday, archaeologists announced the discovery of 81 previously unknown, lost villages in a small portion of the Amazon region, which in total cover more than 2.1 million square miles of tropical terrain in eight countries, including Brazil, Peru and Ecuador.

In addition to the villages, roads and farms were also discovered. The study said there is evidence for hundreds more villages that have yet to be uncovered in the Amazon.

Scientists say that portion of the southern Amazon rain forest was once home to 500,000 to 1 million people before the Europeans arrived in the late 1400s and early 1500s.

This means far more people likely lived in the Amazon than had been previously thought. The study authors write that this new research "definitively discredits early low estimates of 1.5-2 million inhabitants for the whole basin."

The discovery fills a major gap in the history of the Amazon and provides further evidence that the rain forest — once thought to be untouched by human farming or occupation — has in fact been heavily influenced by those who lived in it.

"There is a common misconception that the Amazon is an untouched landscape, home to scattered, nomadic communities," said study lead author Jonas Gregorio de Souza, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter. "This is not the case. We have found that some populations away from the major rivers are much larger than previously thought, and these people had an impact on the environment which we can still find today."

De Souza told New Scientist that “most of the Amazon is still unexplored archaeologically."

First using satellite images, then in-person surveys, scientists found the remains of villages and mysterious earthworks known as geoglyphs — man-made ditches with strange square, circular or hexagonal shapes, the purpose of which remains unknown.

After being hidden for centuries, these strange shapes have been made visible because of deforestation over the past few years.

"Our research shows we need to re-evaluate the history of the Amazon," said study co-author José Iriarte, also of the University of Exeter. "It certainly wasn't an area populated only near the banks of large rivers and the people who lived there did change the landscape."

The study was published Tuesday in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed British journal.