The vampire catfish, or candiru, is real. Along the Amazon tributaries, the urethra-penetrating abilities of these tiny fish (actually a family of catfishes) is indeed more feared than piranha. In reality, although grisly stories abound, only one person has officially had his urethra invaded by a candiru—an attack that occurred while the man was wading in thigh-high water. While researching Dark Banquet, his book on the natural history of blood-feeding creatures, author Schutt asked Stephen Spotte, ichthyologist and the world’s foremost authority on the biology of candiru, what the odds of an attack would be if someone were to urinate in a candiru-infested stream. “About the same odds as being struck by lightning while being eaten by a great white shark,” Spotte assured Schutt.
The giant turtles inhabiting the swamp near the Mato Grosso Plateau are real, but extinct. Stupendemys geographicus lived in South America approximately three million years ago. Its shell was ten feet long, and the animal weighed between 2.0 and 2.5 tons. Although capable of severing limbs and snapping spines in two, it is quite unlikely that this species survived long enough to have encountered humans.
Whence came the Xavante: The lost cities of the upper Xingu region of Brazil’s state of Mato Grosso are real. Throughout the twentieth century, the remnants of causeways, canals, bridges, and stonework, through which MacCready trekked, existed only as vague and often fantastical descriptions, in local tales told by natives about ancient “ghost cities.” (During Schutt’s studies on the biology of vampire bats, he also worked in the Mato Grosso.) Although the plateau fortress and its draculae tomb remain stoneworks of fiction, the mythical lost cities, pursued by the ill-fated Percy Harrison Fawcett, are proving to be quite real. Until the twenty-first century, with its slash-and-burn farming, the search for dam sites and natural gas, and renewed exploration, most anthropologists and archaeologists believed that the Amazon Basin and indeed all of central Brazil (including the Rio Xingu region) had been pristine and sparsely populated up to and through the arrival of European colonists. Despite stories about lost cities, consensus thinking, by 2003, held that aside from nomadic tribespeople, the land was an archaeological black hole.
University of Florida anthropologist Michael Heckenberger was among the first explorers to take advantage of road building and strip-mine style farming practices to actually roam freely through, and to probe archaeologically, a world that had remained hidden from Percy Fawcett nearly a century earlier. Canals, farming settlements, building foundations, and terra-cotta cooking pots (unearthed from ancient settlements and studied for traces of their former organic contents) revealed that carefully rotated crops and great quantities of farm-raised fish supported towns approaching the population of modern-day Ithaca, New York (30,000 people). From everything we now know, the mythical Golden City of Eldorado might actually have existed.
Heckenberger spent more than two years living with the Kuikuro tribe and reported that the people are familiar with the earthworks and other peculiarities of the landscape. The upper Rio Xingu region, he reported, “[h]ad an economy that supported a large number of people in multiple large villages integrated across the region into a grid-like system. Their rotational [fishery]-agricultural and settlement cycle essentially transformed the entire natural landscape” (Heckenberger et al., 2003). The agricultural methods at the base of intervillage commerce were evidently more sophisticated than, and very unlike, modern slash-and-burn farming practices. The towns were arranged in a “galactic” pattern around a central hub. Nineteen such agricultural cities, in two large clusters, were connected by roads. “Virtually the entire area between major settlements was carefully engineered and managed,” Heckenberger wrote. His team found linear mounds or “curbs” positioned at the margins of major roads—“and circular plazas and bridges, artificial river obstructions and ponds, raised causeways, canals, and orchards.” The earliest construction phases began about A.D. 800, and the civilization lasted until A.D. 1600. A hundred years later, all of these structures had been swallowed by the forest, and the civilization lived on only in mythology. The upper Rio Xingu region of Mato Grosso and Hell’s Gate is so remote that Europeans did not reach the area until about 1750, more than two hundred years after the first colonists established a foothold in Brazil. The disappearance of the canal and bridge builders was likely the result of newly introduced diseases (including influenza) that moved along native trade routes ahead of the people from the east. Current estimates suggest that up to 90 percent of the population was felled by diseases to which the Europeans had long ago become virtually immune. Today’s Kuikuro, Xinguano, and Xavante tribes are descended from the disease-resistant survivors of the people who built the cities.