You should do a video about pre Columbian America.

the Cahokia and the Maya are crazy interesting

Well it is also because we know very little about them.

History without an alphabet is not history. That's why we know something about the Maya or the Aztec but very little about the northern American peoples

They are not American. American is an European label applied to the continents inhabited by peoples of many identities. It is Indian history.

@@wolverineeagle Actually, the Amerrisque mountains and Amerique tribes been around forever and how America got its name.not by some illiterate scumbag who changed his name half dozen times.

It could actually be an apt description of what it was used for, for once.

@@viracocha6093 It could be, but archaeologists and ancient historians often mark unexplained items or structures with the "ritual purpose" label.

Idk, man, my mother labels it as yet-to-be-determined-but-probably-religiously-significant. You should never cut out the full term smh.

It's a safe naming strategy. If you don't understanding, just assume it's from some weird cultural/religious thing.

Reminds me of a Stargate episode when Daniel Jackson says "Maybe they're returning from some kind of religious ceremony," and O'Neill says "Why's it always gotta be religious? Maybe they were just having a barbecue."

It really is! I was struck by the similarities of the Poverty Point pregnant female figurines with the ancient European Woman of Willendorf. Maybe it's a collective unconscious thing.

@@AtunSheiFilms That was my first thought when seeing those pendants.

I heard that in South america, all of those pyramids they built were actually from the help of African explorers from the Mall Empire, back around the 1300s (14th century). What a lot of people don't know is that there was a recorded expedition of Malians crossing the Atlantic. The king of the empire at the time wanted to see what was beyond the ocean, so he commanded an giantic sea fleet of 2000 ships and set sail. The fleet and the people who went were never seen again. Most thought they were lost at sea, or that they were hit by an storm. But there is evidence of the Malians might have landed somewhere in South america, and possibly discovered the people living there. I need to research more on it, but doesn't that sound interesting? I hope you do a little search on that event as well!

@@Aceshot777 Ah yes, the Malians are well known for their pyramids. No wait, there are no pyramids in Mali or anywhere in Western Africa. The Mali Empire was a serious civilization but they didn't have an expedition that reached Central America in time to advise on the construction of pyramids ahead of the European arrival.

@@Quintinohthree okay, one- i may have made a mistake on WHICH African kingdom had a part in exchanging ideas of pyramids to North and South Americans. But I still am right about one thing- AFRICANS travelled to the Americas multiple times throughout West Africas history. Probably for centuries they interacted with the "New World".

Wow, that's so cool! Didn't know that.

I would like to better understand the evidence tied to the 90 day build. I also heard that from Professor Barnhart but I am guessing both from the same source?

How droughty could it be when you have the f'n Mississippi River in your front yard?

A shame that they hide the American Indian negroes heritage and classify them as blacks

i know i'm 2 years late, but the anasazi remain the thing that haunted my dreams the most as a kid. i grew up in a native house and my abuela told stories of how her grandparents would tell *her* stories about how there were a group of people, the anasazi, who were evil sorcerers, and all the other natives near them feared them. they considered their lands cursed, and the anasazi would kidnap unruly children to use for their magic. but then, one day, they disappeared. all at once, not one survivor. the first to venture into their lands found everywhere they went abandoned, like everyone had just aup and left, like they'd been wiped from existence. fires were still burning, skins on the drying racks, food out in some houses, but nobody, no animals nor men remained. but they would hear cackling, moans, and growling, always just out of sight, close enough that they never felt alone in the empty villages. the brave men who went dared the spirits to fight them, but nothing appeared. they returned telling of the sun being blotted out in anasazi lands, ash coating every building, noises and evil energy coursing through them, they said the land itself had been cursed. then, 3 days after they walked the anasazi halls, they all disappeared too, nobody that had went was left, all the men vanished, footprints leading towards the anasazi ruins were all that remained. so they swore off ever going there, they believed, some still do, that the anasazi were cursed, and that their ruins are cursed, their spirits forever lingering, tainting the land. every possession they owned that they had ever gotten from the anasazi was destroyed, people spoke of the objects themselves now being cursed, and it is said that all relics of the anasazi, even now, still carry that curse. she swore up and down she would never step foot in an anasazi ruin, not even if there was a gold bar just inside. she swore that as a kid, once her friends had been daring eachother to go even just a foot onto anasazi soil, but nobody even considered it when it came to their turn, they were all too scared. they had grown up hearing the stories of men who had gone after being dared, full of bravado, only to be found later in the ruins, naked, huddled in a corner, weeping about the spirits that had tormented them. one of them, though, was filled with bravery. he pledged to go into the ruins and sit on the floor in one of the cracked and decaying adobe. he came peeling out like a roadrunner, she said, he had heard something while in there. they, perhaps now feeling emboldened, i mean, sure he was scared, but was he dead? no, so surely it must just be an animal in there. they went, and she said the air instantly became oppressive, they all felt it. she couldn't explain it, but it felt like something was unhappy at their daring. they had broken a sacred rule, it started to sink in, then they heard what she described as "evil laughter, bouncing off the adobe walls of the house." they, being kids, hauled ass, and when she got home, her mama was LIVID. she made her burn her clothes, then washed her in the river for an hour, while crying, saying "she had angered the spirits and they wouldn't forget what she had done." they were catholic, btw. trust me it factors in. her "mama" (my great, great, great(?) grandmother,) prayed the entire night on her rosary, begging god to dissuade the anasazi from hurting them, and my grandmother was hysterical, she was scared as-is, but the knowledge that the "taint" of the curse could cling to someone and follow them home terrified her. her papa wasn't home, he had gone, i think into town to work, a trek down from the mountains to some town, where he'd make barely enough to buy the firewood they used to cook. i've actually seen where she grew up, it's literally still there. it's a wood ruin up in the mountains in new mexico (i think?). it's basically all reclaimed by nature. she spoke, and i am serious, a now extinct language. it was an archaic form of castillian, probably at least 400 years old and effectively unchanged from when the spanish mission that converted her ancestors and colonised them. it was unintelligible to latin american speakers AND native castilians. it was close enough to castilian that they could make out /some/ of it. it wasn't until i heard reconstructions of medieval castilian that i recognized it. it wasn't /exact/, but it was enough. i never got to play it for her to see if she understood it though :( i only just took up the lil project of working with her to provide some kind of lasting bit of that linguistic anachronism, but she died on the 11th of july, i never got to record her speaking it... she was the last one i know of speaking that missionary dialect. none of her siblings spoke it, they grew up with their parents who spoke modern spanish. my grandmother grew up in an isolated native community in the mountains with her great grandparents, who were the other speakers of it. it died when she did, but i hope there might still be some legacy of it, even if i failed to preserve it. arguably it died sooner than her. her husband, my grandfather, was uh, a piece of shit. weirdly racist considering he married and had 9 kids with a nonwhite woman. he beat her, held a machete to her throat, all kinds of demented shit, for a variety of bad reasons, the worst was if she spoke spanish in front of the kids. as a result she basically spent a few decades not being allowed to speak her native language, and over time bits started to get washed out by the sands of time on her memory, those gaps filling with modern spanish. by the end she only fluently spoke modern spanish, her native dialect was still in her head, but it was so disused and faded that it was patchy by the time she died. it's so immensely interesting to me though that she was so strong on the anasazi. the fear, the hesitation to even speak about them, the memory of going into an anasazi-built adobe house and being terrified by something, the stories she heard, it's been 700 years since the anasazi stopped being archeologically active, but they still impact modern first nations. they even impacted me, and i'm nowhere near integrated into anything native. outside of outsiders (this isn't a dig or us v them word, am using it to describe the in-group, i.e. the natives who live alongside the ruins and culturally have beliefs about them and the anasazi as a whole, and the out-group, i.e. just folks that aren't native but still know of the anasazi legends) telling the spooky stories that exist on the cultural level for the area as a whole around the campfire, the anasazi are slept on. most of the popular coverage they get is tacky journalism about the curse, never about the people themselves, i guess "funny anasazi rock found with smiley face" isn't quite as good as "the anasazi death curse is making archaeologists kill themselves." the press treats them like some shitty hollywood mummy movie. even the natives, who have mythology about them, still have a lot to say about the history behind them, their pre-vanishing significance, their culture, i mean their ancestors literally lived and traded with them. the mythology was a later development. hell i'd be glad just to have the press actually tell the mythological story most of the time. the anasazi get ignored, any recognition is good, even if i harumph at some of the tackier creepypasta type tellings of it by big corporations. just talk about them, at all, i've literally done a 180, maybe even just tell the creepypastas, please, PLEASE TALK ABOUT THE ANASAZI WE'LL TAKE ANYTHING

Been there. Those mounds are huge.

As an Illinoisan, yeah it's one of those hidden gems of the state you have to check out.

Me too. We unfortunately know so little about it that any scrap is fascinating.

Cahokia is for sure on my list!

I 2nd this statement from W.F. Recent finds & theories @ Cahokia. The City Museum is my favorite place in the US. Soooo much more to offer the historical explorer.

Yes, come see it! I'm a History grad student living in St Louis, and it's my favorite place here.

Hey, I know you! Yep the parallels are really striking, especially since the environments these two religions developed in are so drastically different. It makes me wonder whether humans are just hard-wired to come to certain conclusions about their reality, or whether these religions are both distant descendants of some deeply ancient spiritual practices that originated when we were all in Africa. It's fun to think about.

@@AtunSheiFilms between the bird headed gods of the Egyptian pantheon, and similar statues to the one in Willendorf used by the Ashanti and Fon tribes of West Africa, I'd be very surprised if the ancient religion hypothesis isn't spot on.

Doug Presley - The practice of scalping in the Americas developed separately from the practice of scalping in Europe, so it’s conceivable that other things could arise separately elsewhere.

We also see a lot of the same type of iconography in many African religions. It might be something close to universal in human nature.

@@florintanase9348 it has though lmao it's not active, it is not gaining ground, it's not taught anthropologically or anything anymore. it hasn't been valid for decades. homo sapiens originated in africa, spread out, and while doing so, other hominids who had done so earlier contributed to our genetics via crossbreeding. this is an understood fact, i don't know why you're acting like you have some evidence that changes that, because you don't, nobody does, because we know where we came from. there are no credible anthropologists still arguing the multiregional-hypothesis. also... you're just literally lying when you say "all cultures," and you know it. because, again, we can definitively point to cultures and groups that don't even *have* deities of any recognizable kind, all people starting at the same point doesn't mean literally everyone... is the same? edit; oh i can see your comment history, you're just completely braindead, that's why you're saying such dumb shit so condescendingly lmao

I agree, I usually find that this guy has some great points, but that was a weird take. There have been many interesting discoveries that support the theory that the spinx was constructed at an earlier date. Shooting down speculation without bringing ANY counterarguments is just lazy and disingenuous in my opinion.

Those were built literally thousands of years later.

That is a good guess and isn't far off what I or other archaeologists working there have suggested. There are a few things that are a bit off or wrong in the video (which is fine - there is a lot of conflicting information out there about the site). One thing to note is that there are very few stone sources in the area. Most of the local stone material is just river cobbles (around fist size). The nearest quarry is about 50km away and it is a dried out river/creek that just has a bunch of small cobbles in it as well. There are no large rock quarries in the area or in the entire region. Additionally, soil engineering instead of rock structure engineering has much more importance in the area and dates back thousands of years prior to the construction of the site. Soil engineering principles were used including knowing which soils to use to keep the mounds from deforming from rain and how to cap particular soil levels with clay or sand to make the mounds as structurally sound as possible. If you have any questions about the site, please feel free to ask. I'm happy to answer any questions about it.

Just answered my own question: apparently it was abandoned something like 3000 years before Columbus.

Not many people know about it that’s why.

Wheels were used in children's toys in the Andes. But it's not a great environment for wide use, so that never developed.

Not the OP, but we have evidence on this - the North had plenty of agriculture that required back-breaking labor too, and just paid farmhands for it, and did fine. (Yeah, the North also had legalized slavery in that time period, but much less of it.) The Spanish Empire was far from perfect, but in places that "ran out" of free Indian labor (due to disease + overwork + mixed blood descendants being free Spanish citizens), the settlers whined and complained, but also basically did fine. Over in Europe, plenty of agriculture going on there, and people generally considered places like England or France more productive than Poland or Russia, which were much slower in freeing serfs and ending feudalism for its slavery-esque arrangements. It's entirely possible that the South would have been *more* prosperous had they banned slavery, or done some hybrid indentured-servitude-esque timed arrangement. So a bad idea from an economic angle as well, not just a moral angle.