The 'mystery' of who built the earthen mounds in the Midwest was nothing but white dude propaganda

You know, the more I think about this, it had to be aliens. I mean who canexplain early humans’ ability to pile dirt like that.

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Nope.

Posts need to be more than 7 letters long

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Only aliens could pile dirt in unearthly shapes.

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Really? I’m only a sporadic denizen of this site but from what I’ve seen I’d expect anyone who came out as a Young Earth Creationist or Biblical literalist to get roasted here, but good. Here, I’ll test your hypothesis:

The Bible is largely fiction, with only a few small grains of historical truth.

And now I cower in anticipation of a mortal blow from the ban-hammer.

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Ok… I’m a white dude, I grew up in Ohio, my last name is literally “Dicks”. I was told my entire life the mounds were made my native Americans. I’d never heard of any “mystery”. It was always explained to me the civilization was pretty much wiped out by disease brought by settlers and spread in advance of them actually settling any of these areas. Which led them into believing they had some sort of divine providence or some such bullshit.

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What? no… “vast majority” of what? no. Most people do not believe that. Hell I wen’t to a religious private school growing up and they taught evolution and that the world was billions of years old.

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It varies by the mound. But it wasn’t necessary anything as practical and getting away from floods. And their placement doesn’t match that either.

A lot of them are burial mounds. Some of them were representative of animals.

Or otherwise had religious significance. Some housed structures. Religious. Or housing for leadership. Kind of a tour of your various monumental building excuses.

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Huh, I had no idea.

http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/invasives/terrestrialanimals/earthworms/index.html

What we think of as untouched old growth forests is far from the truth, especially after the loss of major tree species like chestnuts.

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Like National Geographic’s ridiculous involvement with 1421. Bad history, bad science, stupid all the way around, but it sounded good so people bought it.

And that the ancient Welsh sailed there. And that the Chinese Qeng-Ho treasure fleet dropped by. It was a busy time.

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I wonder how much this sort of thinking influenced Joseph Smith and his belief that the lost tribe settled in North America.

There’s a small one just a few blocks from my house, at the end of Indian Mound Road. Yea, it’s no secret.

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Thank you. I was really wondering what the OP’s

…it’s hard to claim that you’re displacing or irradiating a gaggle of savages…

…was a spell-check-o for.

But of course… “eradicating.” (-:

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Many of the alt-right echo similar theories – that white people were actually on this land before the degenerate Natives showed up. In the extreme examples, they portray the ignorant Natives as rising up destroying the great white civilizations and driving the poor, poor white people out. Thus, they are creating a justification for expelling – or, in extreme examples of alt-right propaganda, exterminating – non-whites from this land.

It’s sad to say this, but we were this close to creating an enlightened society based on science and egalitarianism. But our innate and instinctual drive for group cohesion and group belonging and groupthink is much stronger and so much more easily exploitable by cynical, mostly right wing political organizations. The groupthink gets amplified 10,000 times more by the Internet echo chamber.

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Came here to mention the white rhodesian myths about Zimbabwe.

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If you haven’t seen it already, I heartily recommend David Macaulay’s Motel of the Mysteries.

Macaulay is the writer/illustrator of such award-winning classics as Cathedral, Pyramid, Undergound, and Unbuilding (which I also recommend highly).

In “Motel…” he applies his trademark technical-pen illustration style and story-telling skills to recount the fanciful story of a group of future archaeologists in the year 4022, in a world where the entire North America continent was buried in 1985 by a series of apocalyptic catastrophes. They disentomb the remains of a late-20th C. motel, and the book tells the story of their struggles to interpret the artifacts they find there.

It’s a real hoot.

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That’s obviously a starting point, but there also seems to be a tendency for people to think of of a lost civilization as someone other than the current locals, even if they are descendants. “Where did they go? Well, they’re still here, they just abandoned the city after a catastrophe and never went back.” Kind of a feedback loop between prejudice and faulty logic.

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You know, I was speculating just the other day that perhaps “venus figurines” were just Neolithic porn, rather than religious items… Venus figurine - Wikipedia

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All people are dicks, as far as I can tell. White people, specifically Western European colonialist people, simply perfected the modern war machine, a complete societal disregard for any cultures that weren’t their own and a godhead that justified both. The capacity for evil is universal, but the execution of it has been pretty localized.

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