Ancient World Review

Propaganda Alert: Early American Big-Game Hunters In America Were Females

The important question about these female hunters is what were their preferred pronouns?

"For centuries, historians and scientists mostly agreed that when early human groups sought food, men hunted and women gathered. However, a 9,000-year-old female hunter burial in the Andes Mountains of South America reveals a different story, according to new research conducted at the University of California, Davis." Source: Science Daily.

This discovery is supposed to challenge the "man-the-hunter" hypothesis. The find is "rewriting history," according to an Ancient Origins headline which includes a picture of a beautiful prehistoric female hunter wearing a feathered headdress of some kind and an off-the-shoulder grass blouse or whatever you want to call it.

This is all BS, of course.  It's just another example of the way modern leftist identity politics is creeping into archaeology. The Science Daily headline ("Early Big-game Hunters of the Americas were Females, Researchers Suggest") is misleading click-bait, for one thing , and doesn't even reflect the content of its own article. To be accurate it should read "Some Women In Prehistoric America May Have Been Hunters."

You have to dig into the story to find out that it's mostly speculation based on a small number of prehistoric burials:

"In 2018, during archaeological excavations at a high-altitude site called Wilamaya Patjxa in what is now Peru, researchers found an early burial that contained a hunting toolkit with projectile points and animal-processing tools. The objects accompanying people in death tend to be those that accompanied them in life, researchers said. It was determined that the hunter was likely [emphasis added] female based on findings by the team's osteologist..."

Note: Osteology is the study of bones. The sex of the remains was supposedly confirmed using a process called protein dental analysis. Maybe I'm missing something here, but if sex is a social construct how can the sex of ancient remains can be determined by analyzing their teeth?

After the discovery of this presumably female hunter's remains, the researchers started digging through the records:

"Looking at published records of late Pleistocene and early Holocene burials throughout North and South America, the researchers identified 429 individuals from 107 sites. Of those, 27 individuals were associated with big-game hunting tools -- 11 were female and 15 were male. The sample was sufficient to 'warrant the conclusion that female participation in early big-game hunting was likely nontrivial,' researchers said."

So this revolutionary discovery which is supposed to overthrow the "man-the-hunter" hypothesis is based on 11 out of 27 burials associated with hunting tools. 

Note: According to the story, there are 429 burials in the record, but only 27 of them (male or female) are associated with hunting tools. This means that only around six percent of the total number of burials were associated with hunting tools. In other words, there is no direct evidence that the other 422 people were hunters and that doesn't seem very likely, to say the least. But never mind that.

The discovery of these ancient remains in the Andes is interesting in and of itself. Whether the remains are actually female is another question. "Sexing" ancient bones has always been a difficult, tentative process. Differences in pelvic structure and other techniques can be used, but new methods of protein analysis have been invented which make it a little easier to distinguish the sexes. For instance, "Archaeologists can now estimate [emphasis added] the biological sex of ancient human remains by analyzing protein traces on a single fossil tooth." (UPI, 2018) Something similar was used in this case. 

The real story here isn't as dramatic as the headlines would lead you to believe. If these remains are female and if the fact that they were buried with hunting tools means that they were actually hunters, this doesn't overthrow the "man-the-hunter" hypothesis at all. It merely disproves the idea that only men were hunters back in the Stone Age and I'm not sure that any reputable archaeologist would ever make a blanket claim like that in the first place.

The researchers (and media) couldn't resist giving their find a blatantly left-wing spin. This can be clearly seen in the following statement:

"'We believe that these findings are particularly timely in light of contemporary conversations surrounding gendered labor practices and inequality,' [one of the researchers] added. 'Labor practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which might lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somehow 'natural.' But it's now clear that sexual division of labor was fundamentally different -- likely more equitable -- in our species' deep hunter-gatherer past."

What nonsense. The guy who spewed out this SJW gibberish is a professor of Anthropology, a notoriously left-wing soft "science." The minute you read jargon phrases like "gendered labor practices and inequality," you know you're dealing with the kind of radlib social-activist propaganda which has become all too common these days. If you ask me, the study of the past would be helped immensely if the whole field of sociocultural anthropology was completely eliminated.

Related: Turning Anthropology From Science Into Political Activism.

The People Of The Clouds (Updated)

"On the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains, in the remote San Martin Province of Peru, lie the abandoned ruins of a mysterious civilization. Modern Peruvians tell us that a people whom they call the Chachapoya, 'the cloud people,' built these structures. The most notable of these is the massive Kuelap Fortress [see videos below], which contains more stone than even the pyramid of Cheops [the Great Pyramid] in Egypt. The Chachapoyan civilization, which according to the carbon-14 dating method dates at least as far back as 400 AD, existed until around 1500 AD. At that time, it succumbed to two external forces that arose in short succession. First, the expanding Incan Empire, which conquered the Chachapoyan civilization around 1490 after 20 years of fierce resistance, and next, diseases that the Europeans introduced after 1492 and which started showing up among the Chachapoya around 1535, diseases to which the Chachapoya had no immunity." Source: Lew Rockwell (2016).

Note: This article is based on the speculative theory that Carthaginians and some of their Celtic allies from northern Italy settled in South America following the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. The article and others I've seen describe the Chachapoyans as "European," but the citizens of Carthage were a Semitic people descended from the Phoenicians who originally founded the city. The Chachapoyans are described in the sources as being lighter than the other people living around them, but that doesn't mean that they were white Europeans.

"Ancient sources described the Chachapoya, the famous Cloud Warriors of Peru, as individuals with lighter skin than that of other peoples from the region, such as the Incas," according to Ancient Origins. "Also, they stood apart not only by their physical characteristics, but by the unique culture which they left behind." Among other things, they were apparently headhunters and shape-shifting sorcerers who mummified their dead. "The Incas feared the mummies of the Chachapoya, viewing them as the living dead who could rise and inflict death upon all those arrogant or ignorant enough to disturb them." (Ibid) The Incas eventually overcame their fear and conquered the Chachapoyas shortly before they themselves were conquered by the Spanish.

The theory that the Carthaginians or Phoenicians may have reached South America is an interesting one and at least theoretically possible since the Phoenicians, in particular, were renowned for their seamanship, but the lack of archaeological evidence probably constitutes evidence in itself that they never made the voyage. Most of the mainstream sources I've found describe the Chachapoya as a tribe of South American indians.

The Chachapoya lived in the Andean tropical cloud forests between the Maranon and Huallaga River valleys, but their culture disappeared after a complex and chaotic sequence of events. In the 15th century they were conquered by the Incas, who apparently treated them very harshly. They staged several failed rebellions and many of them sided with the Spanish during their war against the Incas, only to rebel against the Spanish after they occupied the region and imposed their usual regime of extortion. Spanish soldiers finally subjugated the Chachopoyas and relocated them to Spanish towns. According to Wikipedia, "Disease, poverty, and attrition led to severe decreases in population; by some accounts the population of the Chachapoyas region decreased by 90% over the course of 200 years after the arrival of the Spanish." Note, however, that the Spanish only ended what the Incas had started. The conventional wisdom that the Spanish simply conquered and wiped out the indigenous people of the New World is extremely misleading.

In the popular imagination, the Chachapova are seen as the quintessential lost tribe who founded a "lost civilization" and "lost cities" long abandoned and hidden in the cold and rainy forests. The theory that they were descended from Carthaginians fleeing Rome doesn't seem very likely because the archaeological evidence shows that people began to settle the area around 200 AD and Carthage fell around 250 years earlier than that. Still, the early history of the Chachapova is kind of hazy. The actual civilization they built is thought to have started around 750-800 AD but there are signs of human occupation in the region going back to around 2700 BC, so as far as the dates go I suppose it's possible that the people who created the Chachapova civilization could have been the descendants of the Phoenicians.

Related: Theory of Phoenician Discovery of the Americas

Ancient Peruvian Mystery Solved From Space (2016)

"In one of the most arid regions in the world a series of carefully constructed, spiralling holes form lines across the landscape. Known as puquios, their origin has been a puzzle – one that could only be solved from space." Source: BBC Future (2016).

"The holes are from the Nasca region of Peru – an area famous for the Nasca lines, several enormous geometric images carved into the landscape; immaculate archaeological evidence of ceremonial burials; and the rapid decline of this once flourishing society.

"What adds to the intrigue in the native ancient people of Nasca is how they were able to survive in an area where droughts can last for years at a time.

"The puquios were a 'sophisticated hydraulic system constructed to retrieve water from underground aquifers,' says Rosa Lasaponara of the Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis, in Italy. And they transformed this inhospitable region."

Note: No one is sure who built this water system. According to Wikipedia, "research has led to conflicting results about when the aqueducts were built, in part due to a general lack of historical references both before and after the time of the Spanish Empire. Some archaeologists contend that they were built by Pre-Columbian people around 540 CE in response to two prolonged droughts during that time. The first historical writing of their existence was in 1605 by Reginaldo de Lizárraga, which some contended could indicate that they were built by the Spanish. However, the available Spanish texts do not mention a project to build the puquios, nor describe already existing water systems.^"

New Nazca Line Geoglyph Of Cat Discovered In Peru

"Archaeologists have discovered a gigantic cat geoglyph adorning a hillside in southern Peru, making it the latest of the Nazca Lines — a group of mysterious and enormous human-made outlines of animals, plants and fantastic figures in the desert dating to Pre-Columbian times — to be uncovered in recent years, according to Peru's Ministry Of Culture." Source: Live Science.

"The kitty, which looks like the most gigantic children's doodle ever, was found while archaeologists with the Nazca-Palpa Management Plan, which is supported by the Ministry of Culture, were remodeling a natural viewpoint in the Pampa de Nazca, according to an Oct. 15 statement from the ministry [Spanish only].

"At first, the workers could barely see the cat, because natural erosion on the hillside had almost erased the ancient feline outline. However, after about a week's worth of conservation, archaeologists restored the geoglyph, which dates to between about 200 B.C. and 100 B.C., according to the ministry."

Comment: This cat is seriously cartoonish. I don't want to suggest that there was any fraud involved in this discovery, but it did occur to me that we have no way of knowing whether the archaeologists discovered and restored the geoglyph or just drew it themselves to create some publicity for their tourism industry, the third largest industry in the country. The Nazca Lines are a major tourist attraction, though they're nowhere near as popular as the ruins of Machu Picchu.

Sacrificed Llama Mummies Unearthed In Peru

This video from 2018 shows the excavation of the remains of 30 children and 150 llamas apparently sacrificed by the Incas in Peru. No English version available.

"Archaeologists in Peru have found the naturally mummified remains of five llamas that were sacrificed to the Incan gods about 500 years ago." Source: Live Science (2020).

"The mummified llamas are still adorned with the colorful strings, red paint and feathers that the Inca decorated them with before sending them to their deaths, likely by burying these animals alive."

Note: This isn't the first time the mummies of sacrificed llamas have been discovered in Peru (see video). The Incas also sacrificed guinea pigs in large numbers:

"The Inca empire was one of many around the world that carried out animal sacrifice to its gods. Excavations by Lidio Valdez at the Institute of Andean Studies in Berkeley, California, show that dozens of guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus) were ritually sacrificed there around 400 years ago. The victims were adorned with necklaces and earrings made of orange, red, purple and brown strings. Some were wrapped in cotton rugs. The animals were covered with a layer of clean river sand — and might have been alive when buried. Clay floors were then built over the sand." Source: Nature (2019).

Incidentally, guinea pigs are considered to be a delicacy in Peru.

Prehistoric Predators: The Terror Bird

Interesting documentary despite the bad CGI.

"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."

The 3000-Yr-Old Temple Of Chavin de Huantar

National Geographic documentary from 2014?

Notes: "The archaeological site of Chavin gave its name to the culture that developed between 1500 and 300 B.C. in this high valley of the Peruvian Andes. This former place of worship is one of the earliest and best-known pre-Columbian sites. Its appearance is striking, with the complex of terraces and squares, surrounded by structures of dressed stone, and the mainly zoomorphic ornamentation." Source: UNESCO World Heritage List.

Chavin de Huantar was a ritual center and pilgrim's destination as well as a major trade hub. "More so than its stunning architecture, Chavín de Huántar was a place of great mystical significance. A shaman elite wielded immense power through the use of drugs, architectural conceits, and the aegis (or threat) of divine sanction. Indeed, though religious rites are hardly attestable, this is in part due to their malleability at the hands of the shamans." Source: Global Heritage Fund. In other words, the religious practices at Chavin de Huantar are hard to reconstruct because the shamans adapted their rituals to suit the circumstances.

The site was occupied by pre-Chavin peoples as long ago as 3000 BC. The Chavin Culture built the temple sometime during the mid 2nd - mid 1st millenium BC and it became a major ceremonial center with its own oracle, shamans and a small elite with a direct pipeline to the gods. The Chavin civilization began to decline around 500-300 BC, perhaps as a result of a general loss of political unity in the Andean world.

In 2012, Popular Archaeology reported that "... a recent archaeoacoustic study suggests that the ancients of the 3,000-year-old Andean ceremonial center at Chavín de Huántar, in the central highlands of Peru, practiced a fine art and science of manipulating sound with architecture to produce desired sensory effects. With the assistance of architectural form and placement, and sounds emitted from conch-shell trumpets, the oracle of Chavín de Huántar 'spoke' to the ancient center's listeners."

In other words, the "voice of the oracle" was an acoustical trick. In fact, if there was a voice, it had to be a trick (unless you think that oracles are real). The shamans and temple priests were probably running a con on the gullible pilgrims who visited the temple and the pronouncements of the oracle could have been one of the ways they exerted control over their neighbors.

Related: Exploring Chavin de Huantar - Stanford University.

The Oldest Artificially-Made Mummies In The World

"The oldest deliberately interred mummies were unearthed in the Camarones Valley of Chile. This valley is in the far north of the country, in a region called the Atacama Desert. A narrow strip of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, this desert receives little rainfall and is considered one of the driest places on Earth. The mummies there were found in 1917 by the German archaeologist Max Uhle at Chinchorro Beach near the town of Arica, CNN reported." Source: Live Science.

"The mummies belong to what Uhle called the Chinchorro culture (9,000 to 3,100 years ago), who lived in what is now southern Peru and northern Chile. Chinchorro people settled in coastal villages and relied on fishing as their primary means of subsistence, using fishing hooks made out of shellfish. They also hunted animals on land and gathered edible plants from the surrounding area."

Report from 2019.

Note: The Chinchorro mummies are something like 2000 years older than the oldest Egyptian mummies discovered so far.

Deforestation & The Loss Of Terra Incognita

"A new study counters the view that tropical forests were pristine natural environments prior to modern agriculture and industrialization. Moreover, humans have in fact been having a dramatic impact on such forest ecologies for tens of thousands of years, through techniques ranging from controlled burning of sections of forest to plant and animal management to clear-cutting." Source: Science Daily (2017).

Comment: Humans have lived in the rainforests for thousands of years, but there's a big difference between the controlled burns and clear-cutting practiced by aboriginal tribes and the massive destruction which started during the last century.

For example, the 2012 NASA time-lapse video above shows the scale of the deforestation taking place in one section of the Amazon rainforest between around 1975 and 2010. The changes are pretty dramatic and this kind of destruction is happening all over the world.

According to Wikipedia, deforestation "accelerated significantly between 1991 and 2004, reaching an annual forest loss rate of 27,423 km² in 2004. Though the rate of deforestation has been slowing since 2004 (with re-accelerations in 2008 and 2013), the remaining forest cover continues to dwindle."

Deforestation is an inevitable result of industrialization, economic growth and overpopulation, and the loss of wilderness, even if it hasn't been pristine for millennia, doesn't just have ecological effects. For instance, I've always thought that one of the most appealing things about the ancient world is that it was still an unexplored wilderness to a large extent.

When Julius Caesar wrote his history of the wars in Gaul, he mentioned at one point that no one knew what lay on the other side of the Black Forest. Technically that wasn't true, of course -- the Germanic tribes had been living in the forest for a long time and there was a whole continent full of people to the east -- but the point is that it was still possible at the time for large sections of the planet to be terra incognita, even to a culture as large and sophisticated as the Roman republic.

The loss of this terra incognita has a mass psychological impact. It's the closing of the mental frontier. Like air travel, the disappearance of the wilderness makes the world a smaller place where most people end up concentrated in urban centers, an army of disposable proles who can be found by the millions in shanty slums and megacities surrounded by hundreds of miles of countryside which have been turned into agricultural factory floors.

Deforestation, industrialization and population growth are all connected. There's a feedback loop involved here. Clearing the forest makes it possible to grow more crops which leads to population growth which creates a demand for more crops which leads to more deforestation, and industrialization just makes the whole process faster and more efficient. Villages turn into towns which grow into cities and spread across the land like outbreaks of tobacco mosaic virus while the map changes color from green to brown and concrete gray.

In the near term, the situation looks grim. In the long term, it doesn't matter because it's not possible to eradicate wilderness. The current deforestation is only temporary. Wilderness always returns when civilization collapses and it can happen very quickly. Most people would say that this is no excuse for complacency, but what exactly can be done to stop the loss of wilderness on any meaningful scale? Doing that would require deindustrialization, depopulation and deliberate attempts to stop development in societies which are still struggling to pull themselves out of extreme poverty.

There are still sparsely populated and little explored places on Earth, but the real terra incognita now is outer space.

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.