Archeology | Large ancient cities were found in the Amazon rainforest

from Ecuador ruins of larger and older cities than ever before have been found throughout the vast Amazon rainforest.

Around 2,500 years ago, representatives of an unknown culture built settlement centers and roads, the remaining thousands of stepped platforms and earthen ramparts were mapped from the air with laser scanning from the Upano valley at the foot of the Andes in the eastern part of Ecuador.

Ruins were already discovered in the 1970s, but their extent was revealed in a study conducted in 2015, the results of which was published In Science only now, on Wednesday.

The findings are comparable to the ruins of the more famous Mayan cities in Central America, said the professor who led the research group Stephen Rostain From the French state research institute CNRS to the New Scientist science magazine by.

There were several open-plan “garden cities”, and the researchers focused on the two largest ones. Tens of thousands of people lived in them.

Amazon's for a long time it was assumed that only small tribes of hunter-gatherers lived in the rainforest, although the first Europeans who entered the area said that they saw agriculture and cities in the rainforest.

In the light of recent discoveries, it is estimated that up to eight million people lived in the Amazon region before the arrival of Europeans. Diseases brought by the European conquerors killed most of the indigenous peoples of America.

However, all the objects found by the researchers in the Upano valley have been dated to more than 1,500 years old, which means that the cities were abandoned clearly before the arrival of the Europeans. Volcanic eruptions are a possible cause, as deposits of volcanic ash were found in the area.

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