James Stewart

And in 2026, they put this theory to the test.

Caitlin Ramosa, an aquatic ecology and conservation scientist at Texas A&M University and her colleagues developed a portable eDNA protocol to map Amazonian manatees.

Now these creatures were known to inhabit the region but were very hard to observe directly due to the murky water and their elusive behavior, making them perfect for this study.

So what she and her team did was filter water along the Amazon for 13 days, taking samples without even using a freezer, by the way.

These are a special preservative.

And amazingly, they still recovered manatee DNA.

They found manatee genetic material at multiple sites in the central Amazon.

What this means in short is you could essentially sit there on a riverbank, collect a couple of water samples and later find out what elusive animals live upstream.

It's a game changer.

The Amazon includes territories of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation, some of which have never come into contact with the outside world.

As such, you might have noticed when we reference the LiDAR articles, we do not name precise coordinates of sensitive sites.

We must treat indigenous communities as living homelands, not just adventure backdrops for us to sit here and make videos about.

So to wrap things up, what's hiding in the Amazon?

The question I posed at the start.

Not a single lost metropolis, not a single myth, but a layered reality.

Evidence of ancient cities that only lasers can see, soils that store human history for hundreds of years, forests shaped by past cultivation, and species that remain invisible until we sample a river.

To be honest, part of the reason I wanted to make this video was to challenge misconceptions.

I've seen all over social media that 60% of the Amazon remains unexplored and loads of stuff as to why that might be.

But ultimately, and hopefully as we've shown, these landscapes weren't lost to everybody.

Local communities and indigenous oral histories often remembered them in the stories of their ancestors or practices handed down over generations.