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The Lost City of the Monkey God: Book Summary + 10 Facts

I just finished reading this book, which is about the pursuit and discovery of an ancient city in the Honduran rainforest. Thank you to my cousin Aly Senko for sending me the book.

What I have written below is not a book review. I am not fit to write book reviews. I am the world’s slowest reader. Finishing a book is a monumental accomplishment for me. This post is more for me than anyone else—Just a way to write down some of the things that I learned, which helps me remember them, and congratulate myself for actually finishing the book.

Summary

The Plot: There were legends of an ancient city in La Mosquitia Rainforest of far eastern Honduras.

(Pardon the misspelling of *Guatemala* on the map below.)

    Names commonly used to refer to this city were La Ciudad Blanca (the white city) and City of the Monkey God.

    The Breakthrough: Finally, around 2012, a group of people that included archaeologists, explorers, the author who wrote this book, and others, found the first evidence that this “lost city” existed, using LiDAR, a laser technology that surveys and analyzes the terrain or topography of a landscape. In this case, they used airborne LiDAR. They flew a plane with a laser that scanned the area as they flew over it. Then, they went into the rainforest to explore the site.

    Results: They confirmed that this “lost city” existed and that people lived there. It seems like more is unknown than known about these people, which makes sense given that their city was just discovered. I’m sure it takes a lot of time to learn about them and even still much will remain unknown. I don’t even remember the author sharing a name of these people or their culture.

    What it seems they have concluded is that these people were their own distinct tribe with connections to both the Muisca people of modern day Colombia and the Maya.

    Their connection to the Muisca was linguistic. Check out the map below, which shows where some of the major indigenous groups of the Americas lived. (Chibcha refers to the language of the Muisca people. I guess that the map sees Chibcha and Muisca as interchangeable words.) The Muisca people originated in central parts of modern day Colombia, but expanded their influence northward into Central America. This is known because there is evidence of Chibchan dialects throughout this region. Archaeologists believe that the people of Mosquitia spoke a Chibchan dialect.

    Also, look at the Maya zone (pink). Maya presence seemed to go no further than modern day western Honduras, which means that they would not have occupied La Mosquitia, which is located in the far eastern part of Honduras. But, the Maya would have been close enough to the people of Mosquitia that historians and archaeologists believe they would have been connected to each other through trade.

    Also, they renamed the discovered city the City of the Jaguar.

    10 Facts

    Here are 10 interesting facts that I learned from the book:

    1) The Honduran rainforest, as of 2010, is disappearing at a rate of 300,000 acres per year. At one point in the book, their LiDAR scans revealed that an area of La Mosquitia rainforest very close to the City of the Jaguar site was being illegally cleared for farming. One investigative journalist traced the farming back to McDonald’s, which of course the corporation denied.

    2) The emphasis on valuing and protecting the natural earth that we so often hear about as typical of many Native American cultures may often have to do with their idea of the “afterlife.”  Whereas in many modern Western cultures we believe that after someone dies they may live on in “the heavens,” many Mesoamerican cultures believed that spirits of the dead lived on in the earth and the mountains. Hence, many natural formations and places were seen as sacred, like churches. Many Mesoamerican people believed that they could venture to these sacred areas to connect with their ancestors. 

    3) After defeating another tribe, the Maya army would force the king of the losing tribe to watch his family be executed before executing him.

    4) The Maya creation myth says that humans came from corn.

    5) Quincunx: This is the name of the geometric pattern that makes the “five side” of a traditional six-sided die.

    6) Smallpox is the most deadly disease in human history. The native population of Hispaniola, the Caribbean island that today is split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in 1518 before Europeans brought smallpox to it was 18,000. In 1519, after smallpox had been introduced, the population was 1,000. By 1542, the native population was zero.

    7) Fer-de-Lance: This is the most deadly snake in Central America.

    Photo credit: OutdoorPhotographer.com

    8) One reason that the Inca may have built Machu Picchu at its specific location (high in the Andes Mountains) was because the elevation was too high for Leishmania, the parasite that causes Leishmaniasis, one of the oldest infectious diseases in the world, to exist, but not too high for the cultivation of coca, the plant that produces the drug cocaine and was considered sacred by the Inca.

    9) Malaria got its name because mal aria means “bad air” in Italian, and before 1897, when people finally figured out that mosquitos were carrying and transmitting the disease to humans via bites, people supposed that malaria was caused in humans by the “bad air of nighttime.”

    10) Global warming will over time facilitate the increase and expansion of infectious diseases to new parts of the world. For example, the sand fly that carries and infects animals and humans with leishmaniasis through its bite currently cannot survive in temperatures under 15-degrees Celsius (69-degrees Fahrenheit), which obviously prohibits it from living far outside of warm, tropical regions near the equator. But, over time, as temperatures around the world increase and previously “cool,” or “temperate” climates become warmer, the leishmania parasite will be able to expand its reach and infect additional populations of people.