32 Wild Historical Facts

3.

In fact, “diseases swept through the Native population so quickly that the Euro explorers didn’t even crack the surface of the civilizations they had.”

—u/TameImpalaFan69

“There was a Spanish explorer (Francisco de Orellana) who first visited the Inca Empire and saw lots of prosperous cities and a great civilization, and told his peers about it when he returned home. But when other folks went to visit said cities, they found nothing but jungle and thought the explorer lied about his story.”

—u/Manu82134

“It took a couple hundred years for the Spanish to get to the west coast. It’s entirely likely that cities fully died out, had their ruins collapsed and overrun by the Amazon jungle, and no one will ever know where they were or what they were like.”

—u/TameImpalaFan69

“This dude had gone on trading ships that went through the Amazon River when he met all these huge cities. It’s wild to me that it’s possible there were inland empires following the Amazon, only to disappear in a few short years from being swallowed up by plague and the jungle. Even wilder that apparently, the trading cities were big enough to get the same kind of river traffic you’d expect from modern-day New York or on the River Thames. Just the idea that a land we thought was only inhabited by scattered tribes potentially contained some of the biggest trading zones in the New World.”

—u/TheStrangestOfKings

Editor’s note: The existence of these ancient cities along the Amazon River is still contested, but new evidence supports Orellana’s claims more and more. Check out this documentary for more info, and read more about Francisco here.