Uncovering the Unbelievable History of Lost Amazonian Cities

What happened was that the Spaniards brought smallpox into the Amazon. All of this happened long before the recordings of history even began. The cities were deserted. Within 50 years they were completely overgrown by the jungle and that's why they were not seen by the explorers who came in 100 years later. Known by some as Amazonian dark earth, terra prater is a form of soil that seems to only be exclusive to the Amazonian basin. According to the author, the oldest inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest actually made terra prater as a means of feeding themselves because the soil in the rainforest was notoriously bad for producing anything. And we can say that a city like London, which had a population of roughly 50,000 in the 16th century, there were cities of that size all over the Amazon, huge numbers of them, and a possible total population of the Amazon that exceeded 20 million people.