Name: What's Hidden Under the Trees of the Amazon Rainforest?
Uploaded: 2026-02-16T17:06:00.000Z
Duration: 49 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In my worldview, the Amazon rainforest is the most fascinating and the most mysterious place of the Earth's surface today.

Adverbs of manner

In the 21st century, it sprawls seemingly endlessly across a vast area of South America, roughly 6 million square kilometers, all in an area of land that's about equivalent to 3/4 the size of the continental 48 United States.

The majority of the rainforest, about 60% of it, is all contained within the borders of Brazil.

But significant parts of it also extend out across the borders of parts of Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and

This huge area of the continent that the Amazon covers is extremely sparsely populated today and rural, with only around 30 million total residents spread out all across it, which is even fewer people today than live in Poland.

If the Amazon rainforest was its own independent country, it would be among the bottom 10 countries in the entire world in terms of average population density, with only about five human beings per square kilometer on average.

But by far the largest single concentration of people within the Amazon rainforest region today is this random looking blob of high population density almost in the dead center of it, which is the Brazilian city of Manaus.

Home to well over 2 million people today, Manaus is the seventh largest city in Brazil, but

its weird location in the middle of the Amazon also makes it the most heavily isolated city in the entire Western hemisphere to have a population of more than a million people, as there isn't a single other city of comparable size to it anywhere within 1000 km in every direction.

And so, as you'd expect, actually physically getting yourself there doesn't work like most other cities do.

There still aren't any paved roads that connect Manaus to the rest of the Brazilian core, thousands of kilometers away to the east.

It's theoretically possible to drive from cities like Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro to Manaus, but

for hundreds of kilometers along Brazilian Highway 319, the route is currently unpaved.

And whenever it rains there, which, believe it it or not, is a frequent occurrence in the rainforest, the unpaved road turns into a muddy quagmire with endless nothing all around it, no cell service, and

no chance of getting a tow truck to bail yourself out.

So that road is a pretty sketchy option to actually take.

And even when you get to the other end of the highway close by to Manaus, you'll still have to take a ferry over to the city, since the entire length of the Amazon river still doesn't have a single bridge that crosses over it.

The primary actually paved road that connects Manaus to the rest of the outside world, runs to the north of it up towards Venezuela.

This route makes it, at least in theory, sort of possible to safely drive along paved roads to the rest of the Brazilian core.

But the catch is that you'd have to travel all the way around through Venezuela, Colombia and Peru just to re enter back into Brazil again.

Meaning that for most practical purposes, the only ways that most people from the rest of Brazil usually get to Manaus isn't by land, but

by airplane or by taking a boat down the Amazon river itself, which is fully navigable to oceangoing vessels for about two thirds of its course deep into the continental interior.

Another similar blob of high population density in the middle of the modern Amazon is the Peruvian city of Iquitos, which is home to around 500,000 people today and is, in theory even more isolated than Manaus is.

Not because of distance from other large settlements, but because of logistics.

Other than for a single 100 kilometer dead end stretch of road that ends in the nearby town of Nauta, there aren't any other roads at all that connect Igidos with anywhere in the outside world, which makes it the largest city in the world that can't be reached by road, that isn't on an island.

Iquitos exists precisely where it does, because it sits at about the exact spot on the Amazon river that's still fully navigable all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean, which has always provided a free to use and easy to use superhighway for Peruvian and Brazilian merchants to take transportation, transporting the Amazon's resources out to the global market.

Rather than using cars, trucks or trains.

The Amazon river itself provides nearly all of the transportation to the few big modern cities in the Amazon like Manaus and Iquitos, so much so that when you travel along it, you'll even see floating gas stations and convenience stores for boats instead of cars.

And so, as you'd expect, proper road infrastructure throughout the Amazon region is extremely hard to come by.

And even the major clusters of people within it don't really have any major roads extending out out from them, since the Amazon river is their primary method of transportation and connection to the outside world.

Instead, this means that there are huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest that are completely absent of any roads at all, which makes driving through most of it an impossible feat, While trekking through the rainforest on foot is an extremely arduous process as well, simply because of the unbelievable density of trees here.

Once you get out beyond the major settlements and highways.

It's been estimated that there are probably somewhere around 390 billion individual trees densely packed all throughout the Amazon rainforest, which is nearly four times as many stars as exist in the entire Milky Way galaxy.

A single square kilometer of the forest can contain up to 150,000 individual trees and well over 90,000 tons of plant biomass, a fact that can be clearly seen when you look at images like these ones of the city of Manaus that butts right up against the boundaries boundary with the Amazon.

On one side you have a dense city that's like an island of civilization, and

on the other you literally have a thousand kilometers of super dense wild rainforest that's mostly just empty of people.

So observing what the Amazon's actual surface looks like from the ground, from anywhere beyond the Amazon river, or from the handful of roads and settlements dotted throughout it has always been very difficult.

While for most of modern history, observing what the Amazon surface looked like from the air, with aircraft, or even with satellites have also been practically impossible because of just how insanely dense and thick the rainforest canopy is everywhere throughout it.

As a result, the vast surface area of the Amazon rainforest that lies beneath the canopy we can see from the sky easily contains the largest amount of unexplored, unmapped and uncharted land area remaining anywhere on the Earth's surface in the 21st century, with some scientists arguing that we currently understand even less about it than we do the surface of Mars.

That's why, in my view, it's the most mysterious and the most interesting place remaining on the map in the 21st century.

And all of a sudden, very recently, modern advances in the fields of cartography and archaeology, like lidar scanning, are finally, after all this time, enabling us to penetrate through the previously impenetrable rainforest canopy to see the Amazon surface like we've never seen it before.

And the last blank space on the Earth's surface, filled up by the world's biggest rainforest, is finally beginning to get mapped and filled in.

And some of the things that we've already discovered down there, just over the past decade alone, have been so profoundly shocking, they've begun to upend our entire views on history and science in the process.

And even more incredible discoveries down there are probably coming very soon.

In order to understand why some of these recent discoveries beneath the Amazon canopy have been so shocking, you need to understand what the general historical view on the Amazon region has been within mainstream academia for centuries, how they came to those conclusions, and

why they've all of a sudden, very recently this decade in the 2000 and twenties begun to be proven incorrect.

You see, for the past several centuries, the generally accepted mainstream view on the Amazon was that it had always been basically a pristine, largely untouched wilderness environment, mostly undisturbed and unaltered by human beings.

This view was reinforced by the fact that for the past several centuries, pretty much ever since Europeans first arrived in the Americas, the Amazon has always appeared to be very sparsely populated by indigenous people in groups no larger than on a hunter gatherer tribal scale.

Largely because the soil quality throughout the Amazon rainforest is extremely poor and sterile and not very helpful for large scale agriculture that would be necessary for larger, more complex civilizations.

But this is a pretty weird thing to consider at first, because it almost seems counterintuitive when you say that the soil quality in the Amazon is terrible for crop farming, while it simultaneously supports more than 390 billion trees in the densest and most biodiverse forest in the world.

But the reason for this is very interesting.

You see, one of the primary sources of nutrients for all of the plants in the Amazon rainforest actually comes from a highly unexpected source far away on a completely different continent.

Here at the southernmost edge of the Sahara Desert in central Chad, lies the Bodele Depression, an ancient dried up lake bed that used to be a part of the primordial lake megachad, until it was consumed by the expansion of the Sahara several thousand years now.

The dried up lake bed in the Bodeli Depression here contains massive amounts of exposed rock minerals composed of dead microorganisms that are chock full of phosphorus, an essential nutrient that fertilizes plants for growth.

The powerful trade winds that whip across the Sahara from east to west will then pick up enormous amounts of Saharan dust, including phosphorus rich dust from around the Bodeli Depression and will then continue carrying all of that dust for thousands of kilometers through the air, across the Atlantic and towards South America, where about 28 million tons of Saharan dust will fall across the Amazon rainforest throughout an average year, including about 22,000 tons of phosphorus that was picked up from the Bodeli Depression in Chad that provides the Amazon with vitally needed nutrients.

But because rainfall throughout the Amazon rainforest is extremely high, these nutrients that arrive from the Sahara are always rapidly washed out from the soil and eventually drained down into the Amazon river itself.

Which means that the trees and other plants in the Amazon have evolved to essentially pull up the nutrients from the soil about as soon as they're deposited there.

Moreover, the very high year round temperatures in the rainforest and the high humidity levels means that dead organic material like leaves and fallen plants or trees decompose extremely rapidly, which means that their stored nutrients are released and lost very rapidly and reconsumed by other plants and fungi before they can ever be deposited into the soil.

This all means that the soils of the Amazon never really gain any buildup of nutrients at all, since all of the trees and the other plants within the rainforest are literally living on the recycled nutrients of all the other trees around them.

And so the soils themselves are effectively sterile and useless for agriculture.

Which is why historically, most of the scientific community considered large scale agriculture in the Amazon region to be impossible.

Which is why they believed that the existence of large scale complex indigenous societies within the Amazon were also impossible as well.

Well, the prominent American archaeologist, Betty Meggers, who specialized in South American anthropology through the Smithsonian institution throughout the 20th century, was a very well known advocate of this idea.

She wrote a whole book that was published in 1971 titled man and in a Counterfeit paradise in which she argued that without agriculture in the Amazon being possible, the maximum population density that the Amazon rainforest could naturally support through hunting and gathering was only 0.2 people per square kilometer.

And so the Amazon had to be an extremely sparsely populated place throughout its entire history.

As a result, this view was reinforced over centuries by the fact that European settlers and explorers and their descendants only ever seemed to encounter small tribes of indigenous people in the rainforest, hundreds of which continue to exist across the remote depths of the Amazon still today.

In fact, it's estimated that still today, Even in the 21st century, the Amazon rainforest is so vast, so remote and so difficult to access from the outside side, that there are still around a hundred or so indigenous tribes dotted throughout it that remain so called uncontacted, maintaining their traditional hunter gatherer lifestyles like their ancestors have for thousands of years, with little if any contact with the outside world.

The Amazon is the host of the largest number of remaining uncontacted people in the world today.

And while estimates of their exact numbers are highly varied, it's generally believed that there are around 10,000 of them scattered throughout the rainforest forest, hiding from the outside world, only observed by us every so often from striking aerial photographs like these ones I'm showing to you right now.

But they aren't really uncontacted in the way you think they are.

They're pretty much all universally aware of the existence of the outside world and have a very long history of contact with us.

But they voluntarily choose to hide and remain isolated in the rainforest because they deeply fear what the outside world will do to them if they're found.

Over the past several centuries, since the arrival of Europeans, and

even over just the past few decades, in recent living memory, Countless numbers of these isolated Amazonian tribes have been massacred and enslaved by the outsiders.

Across the late 19th and early 20th century, when the importance of rubber as a strategic material exploded, the rubber tree that's naturally indigenous to the Amazon basin Correspondingly exploded in value and importance as well as.

Which resulted in an unprecedented surge of European colonists Flocking into the Amazon basin to strike out their fortunes, and

was the catalyst for the growth of the few big Amazonian cities Along the navigable stretch of the Amazon River, Like Manaus and Iquitos I mentioned previously.

However, as the demand for labor on the growing Amazonian rubber plantations expanded, the European owners of the plantations Engaged in massive slave raids on the Amazon's indigenous population and forced hundreds of thousands of them to work on the rubber plantations in appalling conditions, with extremely high mortality rates, as high as 90% in some instances that some historians have compared in scale and brutality to the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide.

In the aftermath of the rubber boom in the mid to late 20th century, the indigenous survivors of this genocide in the Amazon Fled into the most remote and difficult to access depths of the rainforest, with their memories of the horrors the outside world inflicted upon them Passed down through the generations.

So rather than keeping themselves hidden from the outside world because they just prefer to keep their more traditional, simple lifestyles, they really keep themselves hidden out of this very deeply ingrained fear of what the outside world will do to them again if contact with us is ever re established.

A fear that hasn't helped out very much by the action of loggers, miners, missionaries, Drug traffickers, and

even anthropologists in recent history, either.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the Brazilian government basically treated the Amazon basin As an empty place full of resources that was holding the country's development back.

And the indigenous people within were largely sidelined or even killed.

One indigenous tribe in the Rondonia region of the Brazilian Amazon Was almost completely massacred by Brazilian gunmen hired by ranchers and settlers there in the 1970s, down to only a single survivor.

A man who kept on living A militantly reclusive and distant life in the rainforest for for decades, up until he passed away from natural causes just a few years ago in 2022.

For decades, nobody alive knew anything about the man.

Not his name, his language, or the name of his extinct tribe.

But they well understood his fears and his intense desire to be left alone from the outside world, as he frequently shot arrows at anyone who ever attempted to initiate contact with him for years.

He eventually gained the nickname of the man of the Hole.

Due to the deep ditches he would frequently dig around his campsites for protection.

The Brazilian Ministry of Native People discovered him in the late 1990s.

And eventually fenced off the entire area where the man lived.

And created a nature reserve out of the area in 2007, which became this isolated island of forest with a lone uncontacted indigenous man inside of it, surrounded by a sea of deforested cattle ranches.

Until the man inside died of natural causes in 2022, leaving his unknown tribe's modern genocide ultimately completed.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, the Brazilian government tried to establish peaceful contact with indigenous tribes in the Amazon by setting up trading posts in the rainforest with metal tools and other useful objects.

But the posts would occasionally lead to violent interactions with the tribes.

And would frequently spread outside diseases to the tribes that they lacked any immunities to.