Dan Snow's History Hit - Rediscovering Amazon Civilisations

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

Ella Al-Shamahi, explorer, paleoanthropologist, evolutionary biologist and stand-up comic, joined me on the podcast to talk about Amazon Civilisations.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. I'm super excited about the guest on today's podcast. She is a true adventurer,

explorer. She's a paleoanthropologist. She's also a stand-up comic, so she's as funny as she is learned. She is Ella Al-Shamahi. She is a star of a recent TV show on the lost civilizations of the Amazon, and she is one of the most exciting young historian broadcasters working anywhere in the world at the moment. So great to have her on the podcast, talking all about the Amazon and some of her other adventures as well. If you want to come and watch one of these podcasts live, a live tour, and we'll all be gathering together in a theatre for sure after the end of COVID. It's next October. We're going to be touring the big cities of the UK please go to historyhit.com slash tour and get some tickets

I'll see you all there we're going to listen to who knows I might even try and get Ella to come and do one again but you'll be listening to great historians talking, recording these podcasts with me it'll be fun

in the meantime everyone enjoy Ella Alshamahi Hi Ella, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me, Dan. This is awesome. Do you know what? There's a lot of explorers around today. It's like the late Victorian period, but most of them, frankly, are just going on holiday, whereas you are an actual explorer.

No, no. Hold on. To fair i think i think a lot of us say it with a slightly tongue-in-cheek but i think i think i've got to be honest i had somebody message me the other day who's also basically an explorer just being like do you ever get the impression from our gang's instagram that this is like actually the golden age of exploration and it wasn't 150 years ago. I think to be honest, Explorer is, it means absolutely nothing. And I think if National Geographic hadn't given me that title, I wouldn't have the audacity to use it myself, if that makes sense. Because it's so grandiose and ridiculous, if you think about it, because Google Earth has made us all technically out of a job so do you know what like google earth has basically done a much better job of what we're doing so you know i think in

terms of communicating things i think to see scientists and to see anthropologists as explorers as long as it comes with an understanding of how weird and difficult and kind of gross exploration has sometimes been in the past it's actually a good thing because if i go out onto the street and say to someone oh i'm an explorer and i've got this great interesting thing i want to tell you about they're probably going to be more likely to listen than if i say i'm a scientist and i want to talk to you. But Ella, let's talk about the latest exploration because this is awesome. So we are actually recording on a very sad day.

We just heard that there's been higher than expected illegal destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Bad news out of Brazil today. We're recording this at the beginning of December 2020. The Amazon basin was the site of one of your recent projects. I mean, just tell me a little bit about it. We've had people on the podcast before. Is this an area that obviously is so famous for its natural biodiversity and its huge importance? Are we really beginning to see this as a cradle

of archaeology now as well? Yeah. And it's interesting because I'm, by background, I'm a Neanderthal specialist. And the amount of times when I was in the Amazon where I just I would look at people and go if I was ever going to retrain it would be for this it would be for Amazonian archaeology because as far as I'm concerned it's the new frontier of archaeology it's absolutely mind-boggling like even just speaking to you about it right now I'm getting goosebumps because it's a paradigm shift on a level which we're not used to seeing if that makes sense so essentially we went, if I just give a very basic history lesson, we were told by these kind of early explorers that there were these big cities in the Amazon. And we, and I think quite rightfully, had a lot of suspicion about this

because the next group that turned up, I'm being very kind of facetious in the way I'm describing this, said, well, hold on a second, we can't see these huge sprawling metropolises. So you were all making it up. But actually archaeologists in the last decade or two have started just uncovering all this incredible research to suggest that not only were there absolutely huge populations of indigenous people living in the Amazon rainforest,

but they were the managers of that rainforest, which is where it becomes really relevant to us today, I think, because, you know, we're absolutely terrified about what's happening to the Amazon rainforest. But it turns out indigenous people were living in it, they were actually cultivating parts of it, they're essentially like gardens and orchards and all the rest of it. We're not only killing the rest of it we're not only killing the forest but we're killing the managers of the forest and no wonder it's doing so badly you know did they how do we need to think about the word it's a very difficult word anyway civilizations i mean how how should we think about the the peoples and the societies that have been built there that have now almost well been lost or have been eclipsed?

I think if you want to be technical civilisation, obviously, as you know, as kind of all history junkies know, is kind of like a complicated, slightly, you know, difficult term, it kind of has slightly different definitions. For me, I just take the version that's on the street, you know, these were numerous different groups of people who were living in sometimes what I would describe as sprawling kind of urban environments. And, you know, there's loads of different fascinating details. There's loads of villages connected with roads. There are kind of these hills that they would create. And there were these incredible huge structures like geoglyphs, essentially, landscape like these massive mounds and structures in the landscape that seem to be about religion or worship or

some kind of you know it they weren't dwelled in areas and then you have mounds which get larger and larger and larger and some of the archaeologists are saying maybe that's hierarchy and then you know there's so many things that there just gets to a point where you're saying what is this other than a civilization and in fact technically many many civilizations as soon as you start building one village and then another village with a road in between and you have all these characteristics i'm at the point where i'm like well hold on a second if in a kind of a place the size of Scotland, we're seeing 500 of these just, you know, just from LIDAR. I'm at a loss as to how to describe all of this other than civilization. You mentioned LIDAR there.

Just remind everyone what LIDAR does and why it's such an amazing tool nowadays. So it's this kind of new technology, I guess. I mean, it's been around for a little bit now, but you, it's like a laser that essentially just in this case it kind of just gets rid of the canopy without deforestation which we like um and essentially um kind of reveals the structures underneath and you can imagine a place like the Amazon where it's so built up the canopy is so built up it's so hard to just be on the ground and see anything it's such a useful tool because it's it's the built up, the canopy is so built up, it's so hard to just be on the ground and see anything. It's such a useful tool because it's the thing that essentially can just get rid of that and just look at what's underneath. So suddenly, if you've got, you know, weird structures that have

been built in the landscape, any kind of strange digging, fortifications, that kind of thing, suddenly it starts appearing. But I kind of, I'll more thing, which is I kind of mentioned deforestation. So those geoglyphs, which I mentioned, which are basically like they're like these big structures in odd shapes that are absolutely huge. I mean, you know, you kind of build up a slight sweat walking around them. They're absolutely huge. They don't seem to have any evidence of people living there, as I said. They seem to be ceremonial. Those were noticed because of deforestation and people flying over Acre. It was actually an archaeologist flying over Acre in Brazil and looking down and going, hold on a second, that's not a natural formation.

And then, you know, it was part of the unravelling and part of accepting, really, that there were these huge civilisations in the Amazon. It's worth saying that they didn't disappear by themselves, even though they might not have come into contact directly with European settlers and colonists. The massive revolutionary changes and abandonment of those sites is very much to do with the arrival of Europeans, isn't it? Yeah, it's completely outsiders. So the first Europeans that arrived, you know, very, very soon after, the next Europeans were seeing very, very few of them.

And the actual estimates are, and it's horrible that there was a 90% decimation, 90% decimation because of Europeans coming in, mostly because of Europeans coming in with diseases that indigenous people just didn't have immunities to, which is really uncomfortable for us right now. With COVID, it kind of feels like it's come full circle. But also, you know, there was enslavement, there was murder. It was pretty, I mean, outsiders were pretty ruthless. And it's weird, actually, Dan, because it's, well, it's not weird, but it's one of the biggest issues indigenous people have is that they keep getting decimated by infectious diseases. So the amount of tribes that we met, who, you know, the chief will be like, oh, when I was younger, that was pretty much our first contact. you know 500 there was one group who went from um tens of thousands to 60 in the span of like a generation or two because of smallpox and a few other diseases just wiping through and in fact actually one of the um the tribes that we met or indigenous groups that we met this is where we um i was just reaching out to our fixer um and asking how things were because of covid and he

was like you know what the tribes are have been really, really hit by COVID and the shaman's basically in a hammock with oxygen and it's just really bad. And, you know, they just have, their immunities are worse, basically, when it comes to infectious diseases. I want to talk about how you shot to fame as a sort of surveying paleolithic caves and objects over your own personal safety.

Can you tell me a little bit about why you think it's important that in some of the world's most unstable places like Yemen, Nagorno-Karabakh, you believe that the work that you're doing needs to continue? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of just logical. So think about how many scientists, how many archaeologists, how many, you know, XYZ academics study whales, for example, right? And we're still discovering stuff in whales, right? We're still discovering interesting archaeology in whales. Now think about the places on our planet that are politically unstable. And you can honestly count on your hand number of archaeologists that work in some of these places. If you're lucky in some of them, of course, that's going to be the front line of exploration. Of course, that's going to be where all the biggest new discoveries are going to be found. And in fact, we actually just broke the story.

We were keeping it under kind of wrap until Sunday. keeping it under under kind of wrap um until sunday but um colombia is home to this massive discovery um that we filmed and the archaeologists there including professor jose aliati actually were kind enough to let us kind of break the story um they've found one of the largest rock art collections in the world by indigenous people in the amazon They're talking about miles and miles of rock art. Absolutely incredible in Colombia. Here's the thing, it's in FARC territory in Colombia. So it's in a bit of Colombia where it was just, you know, it was very difficult for people to work there.

And as it was opening up, there's like a group of British Columbian archaeologists who are just a bit, they're a bit like me, they're a bit kind of just gung-ho. And they kind of waded up and they went in and lo and behold, you know, they've just found this incredible, you know, headline grabbing.

You know, I was seeing it being reported everywhere from like the New York Post to like the Israeli Times or something. It was like, you know, it was such a big deal um and that just wasn't a surprise to people like me um and you know I've been saying this for for a really long time that um just like uh people that work with snakes or people that um you know go into deep caves, as I sometimes do, or people that, scientists that, yeah, for God's sake, some scientists, you know, essentially attach themselves to a rocket and send themselves into outer space. You know, there's a lot of risk that's involved in so many

parts of science. And I think we just need to be a bit more nuanced about the way we see unstable places. Because right now, for your kind of listeners that don't know this, it's very, very difficult to get permission to work in politically unstable places. right now for your kind of listeners that don't know this it's very very difficult to get permission to work in politically unstable places it's very difficult to get grants it's very difficult to get universities to give you the go-ahead and my argument and the argument of many others is look you just need to be more nuanced it can't be a blanket no it needs to be you know case by case and taking it apart and seeing if the risks are being well managed, basically. And so how do you how do you persuade people to send you to these places?

I mean, sometimes it's now TV, but it would be either academic and research institutions, would it? I mean, so usually my expeditions are just kind of not televised. And it's many ways it's much safer, safer right to not have a film crew with you it does definitely make you stand out a bit more and in cases like that you know what there are people that are interested in in kind of speaking to you and funding you but I always have to go to more difficult sources and you know I've essentially built up a certain reputation so I I kind of I can get access to certain things but still really tough I've got one or two expeditions that I'm like oh god trying to get funding for these is gonna be a bloody nightmare

you know I can't go to the most of the normal bodies because um it's they they actually just have blanket bans on the countries I want to work in. I find going to very dangerous war zones is very bad for my mental health and my physical health. And I just basically sit in a state of complete panic and heightened blood pressure for weeks on end. How is it for you? So I will say that I never go into a fully active war zone. So if they're actually bombing a city, I'm not going to be there. And I don't think any of us should be.

Like, I don't, by choice, do you know what I mean? I mean, by all means, all the journalists should be, but not somebody who's just trying to find a cave. It's like, be vaguely sensible. But I will be in a place, I will be in another city that isn't being bombed, if that makes sense. And I can see what's happening at a distance. So I think, so I will, I have been in situations where I've been in

a neighbouring region or a neighbouring city, so I can actually see the bombs dropping, but we're in a safe region. And I'd say two things. One is, and this is really important, kind of everybody knows this logically, well, maybe they don't. But just because one part of the country is an active war zone doesn't mean the whole country is an active war zone. Yemen and Iraq right now, there are parts of the country which are actually really quite safe, or, you know, much more manageable, should we say. As for me, and kind of my, I, it's so weird, I tend to get more nervous about things like heights than I do about men with guns. think as a result of that the war zones scare me less I mean I at one point had to get in a cement cargo ship um through pirate waters in a ship really not fit for purpose um to get to an island and I was

honestly I'm not in any way exaggerating this I was more afraid of the cockroaches that infested the ship. I think we're all just different and different things scare different people. And I genuinely, this is kind of slightly embarrassing to admit to, I guess, but I genuinely considered taking a route via basically an Al-Qaeda stronghold so that I wouldn't have to get on a ship with,

not because of the pirates, because of the cockroaches on the floor. You see, I will sleep all day on a ship. In fact, I'm happier sleeping on a ship with cockroaches crawling over my face than having to go and meet lots of scary Al-Qaeda people. Well, listen, I'm so excited about your new show. Tell everyone what it's called.

Jungle Mysteries, Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon. Well, congratulations. And it's really exciting. And come back on again soon to fill us in on what you're up to. Thank you so much, Dan. Thank you. It's wonderful to meet you, I have to say. Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably

asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour. Head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us,

and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth, explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.