James Stewart
speaker
3,838 appearances
20 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 3 Sep
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
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Remember at the start of the video, when we said all of those expeditions, right from the 1500s to poor old Percy Fawcett in 1925, all of those had scientists saying part of the reason the cities couldn't be found
was because the soil was too infertile to support human life.
Remember that?
Well, modern day science has since shown that to be wrong too, actually, but in the most shockingly brilliant way.
New research shows something surprising.
Ancient Amazonians intentionally created patches of rich, dark soil, known as terra preta or Amazonian dark earth, to make farming possible, and this was no accident.
In fact, they're still doing it today.
Modern indigenous communities like the Kwikuru still make dark, fertile soil by firstly piling up food scraps and organic waste, then spreading charcoal and ash around fields, before finally creating these compost middens.
Over time, these practices produce carbon-rich soil that thrives with nutrients, even in a region where untouched soils are typically infertile.
Try and get your head around this.
Ancient Amazonians weren't just passive forest dwellers.
They actively managed landscapes.
They created fertile ground to grow crops and support large populations, and there's another bonus too.
Because Dark Earth holds huge amounts of carbon, these practices incidentally locked carbon into the ground for centuries or even millennia.
That makes terra preta not just fertile soil, but a potentially powerful example of long-term carbon sequestration.
And that soil does way more than just help provide food.
Woven into all of this is the fact that in almost every example we've talked about in this video, the forest itself is part of the construction.
In an article published in Science in 2017, Levis and colleagues compared distributions of domesticated woody species with archaeological sites and environmental data, and the link they established between them was mind-blowing.
They reported that domesticated tree species are far more likely to be hyperdominant, where a small subset of species makes up a disproportionately large percentage of the total individuals or biomass in an ecosystem, and that the richness and abundance of domesticated species increases near archaeological sites.
Now, this doesn't mean every single hectare of the Amazon forest was designed, but it does mean the old binary of pristine versus human is too simple.
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