In 1541-42 Francisco de Orellana was the first European to travel down the Amazon river from Peru to the Atlantic. He brought fifty men in a small boat, but went ashore somewhere near the Western border of Brazil. He had saved a quantity of iron horseshoes, and built a forge in a native village to make them into nails and build a second boat. Orellana had a genius for language. For years prior to the voyage, he had copied down every native language he encountered in a notebook, and mastered them. He used his skill to establish communication with the village chief immediately, and quickly learned the dialect. To the villagers, who had no notion of anyone from outside their territory, the Spaniards seemed like Martians, and their metal working skill was something they had never seen. Orellana stayed there for three weeks building the new boat, and as news of these remarkable visitors spread, delegations other from other tribes in the interior came to have a look. Orellana was aware of how important his exploration was and he kept a careful and precise account of everything that happened. He recorded that the other people who visited him there were remarkably diverse. Some he wrote were tall and fair skinned, and distinctly unlike the others in custom, appearance, and language.
Orellana went on to complete his voyage, and sailed out of the Amazon and into the Atlantic. It was more than twenty years before anyone else went down the Amazon, and when they did, they found the area had been devistated an depopulated by disease brought by Orellana’s men, and the natives left were uniformly hostile.
Who knows what civilizations existed in the Amazon basin before Orellana, or from what stock they came.