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Virginity Lost
Pristine forests of the Amazon were not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; they were invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
Surely in the Amazon, the greatest rainforest on the planet, virginity can be discovered—nature red in tooth and claw? That's what everyone thought until an American oil prospector named Kenneth Lee first climbed aboard a beach buggy and bounced across the grassy lowlands of Baures in the Bolivian Amazon in the early 1980s. After a while, Lee began to wonder why he was bouncing so much in the grass.
On closer inspection, the landscape appeared to be corrugated. It was composed of a remarkably symmetrical series of ridges and trenches stretching as far as the eye could see. From time to time, he came across higher ridges that looked like roads, and wider depressions that seemed as if they might once have been canals. He began to think
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