Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Ancient Americas" channel.

  1. When an excursionists people leave a continent or island, then they typically come across a new continent (or island) with different animals and trees for example. This has happened repeatedly throughout history; the Malagasy of Madagascar (these people originated in SE Asia, not Africa as first thought through a Malay island hopping culture). The animals and trees of the Madagascar microcontinent are very different from anywhere else. The ancestors of the Australian Aborigines for a similar reason (and much earlier) than the Malagasy, and so on. This did not largely happen in the polar Borealis region (Siberia, Alaska, Hudson Bay, Arctic Islands and Greenland). This is because the flora and fauna of these regions were basically contiguous and much the same (caribou or raindeer, walrus, salmon, migrating polar whales, northern fur seal (Siberia and Eastern Alaska) ringed and harp seals, polar bear, musk ox and so on) were often distributed across these lands with only small regional variation. The polar lands technology and it's cultural use by these palaeo-Siberian people were adequate for the North American and Greenland polar wilderness as well, with only a few changes.
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  2. I really enjoy discovering Pre-Columbian Native North American cities and towns, whose history tends to be overshadowed by Meso-American civilizations, such as the Mayans and Aztecs. Also how these cities, like Cahokia, grow and prospered from trade and construction, then later collapsed from political mismanagement, and possibly local resources depletion (like food) and climate change. Evidently, from their height of power, the Cahokians had metallurgy (copper smelting), gardening agriculture (perhaps by human labour alone, not also by draught animal input), gaming with formal rules (Chunkey) and local craft-guild style of pottery and lastly, but not least, alignment of sacred and monumental sites by astronomical observation. Whereas, this happened elsewhere for example in Neolithic North-West Europe, it's fascinating to see it similarly constructed by a completely different culture. This was a civilization as advanced as Bronze Age settlements in Europe and the Middle East.
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