Ancient World Review

Polynesians Didn't Beat Columbus To South America After All?

Video from 2010. Much of the evidence presented in this video has apparently been disproven by later research.

The theory that the ancient Polynesians reached South America before Columbus is based, in part, on chickens and sweet potatoes.

"Among the intriguing indications that contact might have been made between Polynesians and the native peoples of South America was the supposed pre-Columbian presence of non-native chickens, allegedly introduced to the continent by seafarers from South Pacific islands. More evidence comes from the ubiquity of the sweet potato, a South American native, in the South Pacific — it was already widespread throughout the islands by the time James Cook sailed into the region in 1770." Source: National Geographic 2014.

Since this National Geographic article was written, DNA research has apparently disproved the idea that the chickens studied in South America provided a link with Polynesia:

"Researchers sequenced mitochondrial DNA from 22 chicken bones found at Polynesian archaeological sites and 122 feathers from modern chickens living on islands across the South Pacific. They used an enzyme to remove any contamination by modern DNA that may have clouded the results of earlier studies. When the team compared the 'cleaned-up' DNA of Polynesian chickens with that of ancient and modern South American chickens, they found the two groups were genetically distinct." (National Geographic)

As for the sweet-potato connection, it doesn't hold up, either. According to Science Daily (2018), "New evidence shows that sweet potatoes arose before there were any humans around to eat them. The findings also suggest that the sweet potato crossed the ocean from America to Polynesia without any help from people. The discovery raises doubts about the existence of pre-Columbian contacts between Polynesia and the American continent."

Video from 2014. Whether they got there before Columbus or not, the Polynesians definitely had the capability to reach South America.

Comment: The "chickens and sweet potatoes" evidence may not hold up, but it still seems hard to believe that a seafaring people like the ancient Polynesians didn't have some contact with Pre-Columbian America. There seems to be a lot of plant evidence for early transoceanic contact and some studies have also found genetic links between Native Americans and Polynesia (Christian Science Monitor 2015).

According to a 2014 Science Magazine article, "Polynesians from Easter Island and natives of South America met and mingled long before Europeans voyaged the Pacific, according to a new genetic study of living Easter Islanders."

A later (2017) study, however, found that the people living on Easter Island before Columbus were genetically isolated:

"A study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology found only evidence of Polynesian DNA in human remains on the island that predate European contact in 1722." Source: New York Times (2017). According to the study, "We found no Native American admixture in pre- and post-European-contact individuals."

What's the truth? Who knows? The two DNA studies involving Easter Island directly contradict each other, so it would appear that DNA results aren't as conclusive as we've been led to believe. Whatever the case, though, it still seems highly likely, at least to me, that Polynesians reached the New World a long time ago. Considering their ability to make long sea voyages and spread from island to island across the ocean, I'd be amazed if some of them didn't make it all the way to South America. What kind of impact they had is another question.

A Brief Overview Of Ancient Burial Practices

Video from 2015. Bronze Age burial site. Southeast England.

There are dozens of different types of ancient burials. During some periods various cultures buried their dead in the ground (inhumation), sometimes reusing old grave sites for the purpose (secondary burials). In other cases, the dead were buried and left to decay, then their bones were dug up, wrapped in bundles and reburied elsewhere. Other cultures sometimes bundled or wrapped their dead for burial before rigor mortis had set in, and the ancient Egyptians famously mummified their dead. It was also very common in some cultures for bodies to be cremated with their ashes interred in urns.  And sometimes the intact corpses were buried whole in urns.

Video from 2017.

Some cultures exposed bodies to the elements in platform burials. Platform burials are a form of excarnation or defleshing, a gruesome method for reducing a body to bones by leaving it exposed to the elements or wild animals or by butchering the carcass. Excarnation was apparently common enough that archaeologists have had to develop methods to tell the difference between remains that were defleshed for funerary purposes and those that were butchered by cannibals.

Sky burial, a form of excarnation, is still practiced in "the Chinese provinces and autonomous regions of Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, as well as in Mongolia, Bhutan, Nepal, and parts of India such as Sikkim and Zanskar."

The Ancient History Encyclopedia has a detailed article on ancient burial practices and there are lots of resources on YouTube.

Also see: The Most Fascinating Ancient Burial Rituals.

Burials are usually considered to be a sign of human activity, but evidence has been found in France that the Neanderthals buried their dead:

"A Neanderthal skeleton first unearthed in a cave in southwestern France over a century ago was intentionally buried, according to a new 13-year reanalysis of the site." Source: National Geographic (2013).

"Confirming that careful burials existed among early humans at least 50,000 years ago, the companions of the Neanderthal took great care to dig him a grave and protect his body from scavengers, report the study authors in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." According to this study, the find "serves to establish the existence of intentional Neandertal inhumation in the European Middle Paleolithic."

Report from 2013.

The Man-Eating Wendigo

"The Wendigo is a horrifying creature of Algonquian Native American legends that would devour human flesh to survive a harsh winter. But are they only myth, or are there really cannibalistic humanoids waiting in forests for their next victim?" Source: Ancient Origins.

"The Algonquians are some of the most extensive and numerous of the Native American groups in North America, and they once lived all along the Atlantic Coast and the Great Lakes Region. However, Wendigo-like creatures are also found in the legends of other Native American tribes, including the neighbors of the Algonquians, the Iroquois. Amongst these peoples, a creature known as the Stonecoat bears some similarities to the Wendigo.

Note: "In some traditions, humans overpowered by greed could turn into wendigos; the myth thus served as a method of encouraging cooperation and moderation. Other sources say wendigos were created when a human resorted to cannibalism to survive. Humans could also turn into wendigos by being in contact with them for too long." (Wikipedia)

Why Knights Fought Snails In Medieval Art

"It’s common to find, in the blank spaces of 13th and 14th century English texts, sketches and notes from medieval readers. And scattered through this marginalia is an oddly recurring scene: a brave knight in shining armor facing down a snail." Source: Smithsonian Magazine (2013).

"It’s a great unsolved mystery of medieval manuscripts ... Epic snail-on-knight combat showed up as often in medieval manuscripts as Kilroy across Europe. 'But the ubiquity of these depictions doesn’t make them any less strange,' says the British Library, rounding up a number of examples of the slimy battles."

Pygmy Mammoths Of The Channel Islands (California)

The pygmy mammoth or Channel Islands mammoth .. is an extinct species of dwarf elephant descended from the Columbian mammoth ... of mainland North America. This species became extinct during the Quaternary extinction event in which many megafauna species became extinct due to changing conditions to which the species could not adapt." (Wikipedia)

"Mammoth remains have been known on the northern Channel Islands of California since 1856. They were first reported in scientific literature in 1873." These pygmy mammoths are  an example of insular dwarfism, " the process and condition of large animals evolving or having a reduced body size when their population's range is limited to a small environment, primarily islands."

Note: Isolation can also lead to larger body sizes in some species, as shown in the next video.

Prehistoric Predators: The Terror Bird

"Phorusrhacids, colloquially known as terror birds, are an extinct clade of large carnivorous flightless birds that were the largest species of apex predators in South America during the Cenozoic era; their conventionally accepted temporal range covers from 62 to 1.8 million years ago." Source: Wikipedia.

Terror birds spread into North America around 2.7 million years ago after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama connected the two continents, leading to a cross-migration of flora and fauna known as the Great American Interchange.

It's possible that early humans coexisted with descendants of these monsters in South America. According to Wikipedia, "...reports from Uruguay of new findings of relatively small forms [of terror birds] dating to 18,000 and 96,000 years ago would imply that phorusrhacids survived there until very recently (i.e., until the late Pleistocene); the initial report of such a recent date has been questioned."

Stone Tools Suggest First Americans Came From Japan

Video from 2012.

"Evidence from the Cooper's Ferry archaeological site in Western Idaho shows that people lived in the Columbia River Basin around 16,000 years ago. That's well before a corridor between ice sheets opened up, clearing an inland route south from the Bering land bridge. That suggests that people migrated south along the Pacific coast. Stone tools from the site suggest a possible connection between these first Americans and Northeast Asian hunter-gatherers from the same period." Source: Ars Technica.

It's pretty clear now that the first Americans arrived by boat. The evidence shows that these prehistoric hunter-gatherers traveled down the western coast, establishing camps and settlements and eventually reaching South America long before the Beringia land route emerged near the end of the last ice age.

Video from 2017.

The Clovis-first theory is effectively dead. According to Ars Technica, "At this point, there's not really much debate about whether people had arrived in the Americas before the rise of the Clovis culture, the collection of tools and weapons once thought to represent the oldest human activity in the Americas. Clovis appears starting around 13,250 years ago, so some groups were clearly present earlier. Most of the debate now is focused on the route these earlier people took to reach the thawed, habitable parts of North America."

Related: The Cooper's Ferry Archaeology YouTube channel.

Victims Of Human Sacrifice At Cahokia Were Locals, Not Foreign Captives

Video posted 2018. I'm not sure how old the documentary is.

"The practice of human sacrifice in America’s largest prehistoric city was more subtle and complex than experts once thought, new research suggests." Source: Western Digs (2015).

"Recent studies into the remains of sacrificial victims at the ancient city of Cahokia reveal that those who were killed were not captives taken from outlying regions, as many archaeologists had believed.

"Instead, they may have been residents of the same community that killed them."

Report from 2014. Evidence of human sacrifice discussed at around 6:25.

Note: "Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, which developed advanced societies across much of what is now the central and southeastern United States, beginning more than 1,000 years before European contact. Today, Cahokia Mounds is considered the largest and most complex archaeological site north of the great pre-Columbian cities in Mexico. It may have briefly exceeded contemporaneous London in population." (Wikipedia)

More stories on Cahokia at Western Digs.

Prehistoric Human Sacrifice In Wisconsin

Video from 2015.

Note: "Aztalan is the site of an ancient Mississippian culture settlement that flourished during the 10th to 13th centuries. The indigenous people constructed massive earthwork mounds for religious and political purposes. They were part of a widespread culture with important settlements throughout the Mississippi River valley and its tributaries. Their trading network extended from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast, and into the southeast of the present-day United States." Source: Wikipedia.

Two Prehistoric Bison Kill Sites In The Great Plains

Bison kill site near Elk City, Oklahoma. Video from 2011.

"Between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500 American Indian hunters killed hundreds of bison in a canyon near present Elk City, Oklahoma. During the 1990s the site became a focus of a major research project by the Oklahoma Archeological Survey at the University of Oklahoma. The people who made the kills were part of the Late Archaic (circa 2500 B.C. to A.D.1) groups that survived through hunting and gathering and did not practice horticulture. The site is in a large canyon, one of the deepest of many in the area. The canyon has a number of side branches, some of which are flushed nearly clean of fill. Others are still largely filled with sediments and are visually undetectable on the surface. These deposit remnants contain bone beds and other evidence of bison kills and butchering." Source: Oklahoma Historical Society.

Hudson-Meng bison kill site in Nebraska.(2017)

"Bill Hudson and Albert Meng were local [Nebraska] ranchers who are credited with discovering the bonebed in 1954 while digging for a pond. Originally excavated by Dr. Larry Agenbroad in the 1970s, the dig was over 400 square meters and was considered the largest Alberta Culture [1] bison kill site ever discovered. The bison found are not the same species as the bison that currently live in the United States (Bison bison), but are an animal transitional in evolution between the extinct Bison antiquus and the modern species." (Wikipedia)

[1] I might be wrong about this, but I think "Alberta Culture" refers to an Archaic Period paleo-indian culture which was located in the general area of Alberta, Canada and the northern Great Plains in the US.

Note: "For approximately 6,000 years, between about 8,000 and 2,000 years ago, the Archaic period in the Great Plains was a time of human adjustment to changing ecological conditions. Paleo-Indian bison hunting decreased markedly after about 9,000 years ago, due to a steady deterioration of ecological conditions. Subsequently there were several late Paleo- Indian groups ... which were beginning to shift toward the use of small animal and plant resources. By about 8,000 years ago, both bison and human populations in the Great Plains had decreased significantly. Some groups may have moved into the foothills and mountains to the west and others into the prairies on the east. The Plains was not abandoned during the Archaic period, but ecological conditions made it a much less desirable place." (Encyclopedia of the Great Plains)