This reminds me of Francisco de Orellana, the first European to navigate the Amazon. He returned to Spain with tales of a grand, prosperous civilization along t

This reminds me of Francisco de Orellana, the first European to navigate the Amazon. He returned to Spain with tales of a grand, prosperous civilization along the banks, saying that in weeks of sailing they didn't find a single stretch of shoreline unsettled, and that the people and the region were richer than any in all of Europe. Decades passed before there was another expedition, which found mostly rainforest and hunter-gatherers in a much regressed ("primitive") state, leading people to believe he was full of it. Now that the Amazon is being deforested to cultivate fodder for livestock, we are finding the remains of this indeed grand civilization, which Orellano probably destroyed by crop-dusting virulent disease throughout the interior of the continent.