What happened to Percy Fawcett, the explorer who vanished searching for a lost Amazonian city?
In 1925, a British explorer marched into the Amazon jungle searching for a legendary city he called 'Z.' He was never seen again.
The answer
Lieutenant Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British surveyor and archaeologist, disappeared in 1925 in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil along with his son Jack and friend Raleigh Rimmell while searching for a lost city he called "Z." Fawcett believed an advanced civilization had existed in the Amazon based on a Portuguese manuscript from 1753. Over 100 rescue expeditions have attempted to find him, and approximately 100 people have died in the search. Remarkably, modern LiDAR surveys and satellite imagery have since revealed that complex pre-Columbian urban settlements did exist in the Amazon. A 2018 study in Nature Communications documented hundreds of fortified villages connected by road networks in the very region Fawcett explored, suggesting his theory wasn't as outlandish as critics claimed.
Source: BBC History
- Percy Fawcett
- lost city of Z
- Amazon exploration
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