For centuries, the story of the Amazon went something like this: thick jungle, scattered tribes, no cities, no grand history. Turns out that story was wrong. Very wrong. A team of researchers flying laser-equipped planes over southwestern Amazonia has found the fingerprints of a sprawling ancient society, one that, at its peak, may have supported several million people across an area roughly the size of Syria. Scientists are calling it the Aquiry civilization, named after the Acre River that cuts through the region, and its story is only now coming into focus more than a thousand years after it vanished.
