Native americans values

Native American History

The Destruction Continues

This biological extermination was only the first wave of atrocity, but it set the stage for the type of relationship that Western settlers would have with a once flourishing ancient civilization. The destruction continued as Western expansion pushed the tribes that remained further and further westward.

Over the next 500 years, Native Americans were abused, killed, and relocated from their ancestral lands in a slow genocide for the sake of ambitious settlers who began to make their home in the bountiful land of North America. By the 1830s, the United States government was actively forcing tribes into treaties; under the treaty system, tribes were treated as independent nations with the right to govern themselves in exchange for giving up large sections of their ancestral lands. Tribal nations moved onto small, geographically isolated tracts of land out West—the beginnings of the reservation system that exists to this day. By the 1870s, a federally funded boarding school system, consisting of hundreds of schools, began educating generations of Native children far from their tribes and families.

In many cases, Native children were forcibly removed from their parents in order to attend the boarding schools. At these schools, they were forbidden to express any part of their Native culture, language, or identity. Sexual, physical, and emotional abuse was common, and most schools forced Native children into intense forms of physical labor.

A famous speech delivered by Captain Richard H. Pratt of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1892 captures the general spirit of these boarding school efforts:

That all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

The great cultures of the Native American tribes that once filled the land of North America slowly dwindled. In the dominant Western culture of the United States, it was commonly accepted that Native peoples were a “vanishing race” and that their traditions and bloodlines were unlikely to last through the 20th century.

Nevertheless, they persisted. Under a series of laws passed throughout the 20th century, Native American tribes increasingly gave up sections of tribal land, but retained their self-governance and self-determination. Many tribal communities have attempted to preserve some traditional forms of life and to encourage economic flourishing amid modern Western culture.

Native Americans Today

Today, there are 574 federally recognized tribes existing in the United States, with 229 of these located in Alaska. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 6.9 million American Indian and Alaska Natives living in the United States, and they make up roughly 2% of the total population. In the wake of centuries of abuse and disruption, these resilient peoples are on a journey of rediscovery and healing.

Native American Beliefs | St. Joseph’s Indian School

Native American beliefs and values, as in any culture, help shape life-changing decisions and plans for the future.

In this section, you will find an overview and resources pertaining to Native American beliefs and traditions, and more specifically the Lakota (Sioux) culture. As with any culture and language, practices are constantly evolving as people and families change along with the world around them. Although similarities are present, the exact meaning behind different Native American beliefs and traditions varies among tribes, clans and individuals. What one group believes or practices might be similar to another, but have differences.

At St. Joseph’s Indian School, our students and their families hold a variety of Native American beliefs and religious affiliations — they come from many backgrounds. We welcome children of all faiths, recognizing the dignity of each human person created in God’s image. We respect each child’s individual family beliefs and do not require students to be Catholic or practice traditional Lakota spirituality. Families record their wishes in their consent packet each year when their children are enrolled at St. Joseph’s. The Director of Mission Integration and Family Service Counselors are in regular contact with families to ensure we are honoring families’ wishes for each child’s education — academically, spiritually and culturally.

There are seven highly regarded values to the Lakota, which include generosity, kinship, fortitude, wisdom, prayer, respect and compassion.

Read more about the Seven Lakota Values.

When Lakota pray, or do anything sacred, they see the world as having four directions. From these four directions — west, north, east and south — come the four winds. Each direction is also identified by a specific color. The shape of the cross in the center of the circle symbolizes all directions.

Native Americans turned out to be Siberians and how plants become predators: scientific digest of the week

Leonid Luneev
BBC

May 23, 2020

Another selection of interesting scientific news of the week:

Chingachguks from the shores of Lake Baikal
Qumran manuscripts revealed a new secret
Hunters from the world of flora
Great joy in the family of little hippos

Russia - the birthplace of the Indians, or when America could be reached by land

Image copyright, Getty Images on the site of which the Bering Strait subsequently formed, into uncharted territory.

Yes, the first natives of North America were settlers themselves. Scientists suspected this, but they did not have solid evidence - they did not know exactly where these people came from. And here is such a very solid evidence finally found.

The author of the photo, MPI-EVA

Photo caption,

The tooth used by scientists to identify the ancestor of the Indians

then he waited for the archaeologist of the Russian Academy of Sciences Svetlana Schneider to pay attention to it and pass it on to experts from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig.

"At first I was very skeptical that DNA could be preserved in it," says the director of the institute, Johann Krause.

However, the dry and cold climate of Siberia preserved the genetic material of a man who lived about 14 thousand years ago, 4,500 kilometers from America. His genome was found to be two-thirds similar to that of today's native North Americans, which Krause says is evidence that this man was the oldest known Native American ancestor outside of America.

The scientist says that people who lived along the shores of Lake Baikal moved around the expanses of Siberia for many millennia, interacting with other ethnic groups, but the genetic isolation of the group from which the Indians originated occurred precisely in the Bering Strait region.

It is curious that today's inhabitants of Lake Baikal have a completely different genetic picture: apparently, the ancient population of these places was replaced 10 thousand years ago by migrants from northeast Asia.

USA: Indians claim rights to ancient skeleton
Cavemen of China turned out to be the ancestors of Asians

A new mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was discovered

Author of the photo, Getty Images

scrolls

Fragments of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, thought to be empty and handed over to British experts solely for the study of the very fabric of the manuscripts, actually kept the text for centuries.

These ancient religious manuscripts, dating back to the 3rd century BC, were discovered as early as the 1940s in the Qumran caves in present-day Jordan.

Hundreds of scrolls with ancient texts have been carefully studied and are of great value to historians and theologians, but their authorship and origin remain a mystery. Well, some of the "empty" fragments, as not of particular interest, ended up at the University of Manchester, where they were noticed by an archaeologist from King's College London, Joan Taylor.

Photographer Manchester University

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"While examining one of the scraps with a magnifying glass, I found something that looked like a small, faded letter lamed, L from the Hebrew alphabet," says Joan. "Honestly, at first I thought that I imagined it, because these scraps were considered empty and were even cut into strips to study the skin itself. But then, barely distinguishable letters began to appear on other scraps.

In total, Joan and colleagues examined 51 snippets and identified six of them that required further study using multispectral analysis. This analysis showed that four of the fragments contain readable passages of text in Aramaic or Hebrew.

Research has not been completed yet, but on the best preserved fragment, you can see four lines of text, 15-16 letters each. Scholars have even been able to read the word Shabbat, which they believe may indicate that it is a passage from the book of the ancient prophet Ezekiel.

"With the new technology for deciphering ancient texts at hand, I had to try developing these letters," says Taylor.

Of course, some of the letters that appear on a piece of parchment may seem like an insignificant discovery to some, but this is not an ordinary parchment, but part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the authenticity of which was confirmed by official excavations at Qumran. And for those who study ancient biblical tests, each letter is priceless.

Scientists in Israel deciphered one of the dead sea scrolls
Cumran manuscripts: another cave
archaeologists in Britain decipher the graffiti of Roman legionnaires

in each plant, a potential predator

is hidden, Gett. Images

Venus flytrap

How does a plant become a predator? It is only in the cinema that a drop of blood is enough for him to start hunting, in life everything is somewhat more complicated. And yet, evolution has given us several plants that are not content with the fruits of photosynthesis and are ready to grab prey rich in proteins and other useful elements on the side.

Pitchers, for example, invented a pit-trap filled with enzymes, falling into which insects dissolve like in gastric juice.

Others, like the Venus flytrap, use a modified leaf trap that snaps shut when the insect touches sensitive hairs, and then the same process of digestion begins.

But how did carnivorous plants come to such a life? To figure this out, Jörg Schultz and Rainer Gedrich, two Ph.D. biologists from the University of Würzburg, sequenced the genomes of the flycatcher and two of its close relatives and compared them with nine other carnivorous plants and the harmless beets and papaya.

And here they were in for a big surprise. It turned out that the key moment in the evolution of meat-eating plants was the duplication of the entire genome, which occurred in a single ancestor of all predators from the world of flora, who lived about 60 million years ago. This duplication released copies of the genes that used to be responsible for roots, leaves, and so on, and the first hunter in the plant world, so to speak, reprogrammed them. Relatively speaking, the genes that commanded the roots to absorb nutrients from the soil changed the order, forcing them to extract food from insects.

Over time, prey and its size changed, fishing techniques changed, and the plants themselves changed. According to Gedrich's calculations, the evolution of predator plants went through at least 6 stages.

Moreover, the scientist believes that most modern plants already have enough gene set to try themselves as hunters. "The road to the life of a predator is open to all plants," he says.

Carnivorous plants are disappearing in England. They will try to revive
To live on Mars and not burn: what the most tenacious plants of the Earth are capable of
Will the plants hear you if you start singing to them?

Welcome, Mama Mabel!

Image copyright, Getty Images

The San Diego Zoo is celebrating the addition of pygmy hippopotamuses to its family, with mom Mabel giving birth to a well-fed, healthy baby boy in April. The zoo management was in no hurry with the news to make sure that everything was in order with the baby, but now the management reports that the young hippo has a good appetite, he has already gained weight (from 5.6 to 11 kg), and is confidently on his feet and follows her mother everywhere.

After getting acquainted with the water in the basin, the hippo is already allowed into a real pool, where he demonstrates the ability to close his nostrils and hold his breath.

Dad, 13-year-old Elgon, is not yet allowed to see his mother and son, because pygmy hippos do not live in families in the wild. However, at the zoo they will still be together in the same pen, but only a little later, in a month, when the baby is still growing up.

A rare baby giraffe was born in a British zoo
A rare white koala was born in an Australian zoo

Pygmy Liberian hippos (Choeropsis liberiensis) are much smaller than their common counterparts (Hippopotamus amphibius) and weigh "only" 160 to 270 kg (normal ones are 10 times heavier). They are more blunt-nosed, they have a rounded head and eyes set on the sides, and not on top, like in ordinary hippos.

Less than 2,500 pygmy hippos remain in the wild. They live in forest rivers in West Africa and are threatened with extinction as their natural habitat shrinks.

This is the first time a pygmy hippo has been born at the San Diego Zoo in more than three decades, and the management says it gives hope that pygmy hippos can be conserved, at least in captivity.

What the Indians believe • Arzamas

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Historian Dmitry Belyaev about what the mythology of South and Central America as a whole was like before Europeans came there

Recorded by Tatyana Zarubina

One can speak about the mythology of the Indians as a single complex of beliefs with a certain degree of approximation. The Indians are descended from several groups of migrants who came to the New World at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, circa
14-16 thousand years ago. The people who came to America already had some ideas about the supernatural and adapted the myths and stories that existed among them to local conditions. As a result, these groups had common mythological plots and motifs. But as for ideas about how the world was created and how deities look like, there is no unity here, moreover, there are mythologies where there are no deities at all, but only spirits. 15,000 years ago, people did not yet have a developed religion, it appears later. Before the arrival of the Spaniards, something resembling a pantheon, a certain divine hierarchy managed to take shape only in the so-called high civilizations: in Mesoamerica (this is present-day Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and a few other countries of Central America) and in the Central Andes (mainly in Peru and Bolivia ). Perhaps the richest record comes from Mesoamerica, as there is an extensive tradition associated with written cultures and developed "priestly mythologies."

Sacred Knowledge

One of the most important features that unites all American Indians is the close connection of mythology with sacred and ritual knowledge, the control of which (and, accordingly, myths) in the New World plays a very important role. There can be many sources of power: control over the economy, resources or population, and military functions, but among the Indians, one of the main sources of power was control over the supernatural sphere.

In high civilizations, the intellectual elite, associated with the storage of sacred knowledge, influenced the formation and dissemination of mythological plots. In Mesoamerica, writing is also emerging - a new way of fixing mythology and controlling it. In somewhat less developed societies, where there was a hierarchy, hereditary leaders and centralized decision-making, the ideology of supreme power also had its influence on mythology. But there were a lot of societies that remained at the level of independent communities: early farmers, hunters and gatherers. They did not create any complex mythologies.

Deities

The Indians have different categories of supernatural beings. It is customary to call the most powerful of them deities, but these are not at all the deities to which we are accustomed in the Old World, because the concept of the supernatural among the Indians is organized differently. Native American deities may be anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, or ornithomorphic.

It is impossible to make a common pantheon for Indian societies: in different cultural and political situations, the same creature can be considered more or less strong, somewhere there are local patron deities; in some city, two deities can merge into one character.

God Tlaloc. Drawing from the Codex Lauda. 16th century

One of the most important deities in all Indian mythology is the deity responsible for rain and thunderstorms. For example, in Teotihuacan in the 6th century AD, such a deity was Tlaloc, the deity of rain (in fact, we do not know his name, but that was the name of a deity similar to him in the 16th century). This is not exactly the supreme deity - it is more accurate to speak of him as a deity associated with supreme power, because it is most often represented in art related to the presentation of power: the Teotihuacan ruler was depicted with the attributes of Tlaloc, sometimes he put on his mask and robes.

The Aztecs in the 15th-16th centuries, just before the conquest, had the god Huitzilopochtli, the “left-handed hummingbird”. It was believed that it was he who brought these people from the legendary ancestral home. They had two temples at the top of the pyramid: one - Huitzilopochtli, and the second - Tlaloc. And it is very difficult to say with which deity they primarily associated supreme power. And among the Maya, a deity played a very important role, which the Spaniards recorded under the name Itzamna, with two incarnations - bird and human. It was considered the patron saint of royal power, was associated with writing, calendar and wisdom. At the same time, the Mayan god was considered the first king, and therefore the kings, when they ascended the throne, likened themselves to the god of corn.

First people

In American mythology, there are many different versions of the origin of the first people. One of the most interesting is that the first people were not created on earth, but came from a hole in the earth or from a cave. This motif is presented in the US Southwest: the Pueblo Indians and others tell of the successive penetration of people from the lowest dark world through several colored worlds into the one where we now live. Another version of this plot contains texts recorded in the Amazon (among the Nambikwara group of peoples). There, people are initially concentrated in a tiny container inside a stone or rock, from where they hardly get out into the light. This plot, apparently, is very ancient, perhaps it existed among people when they were just settling around the planet and came to America along with the first settlers.

God Huitzilopochtli in human form. Drawing from the Telleriano-Remensis codex. 16th century

In the northwest of North America and in South American Guiana, on the contrary, it is believed that the first people descended from heaven to earth. Another option is when the first people are created from wax, honey, or some other unreliable materials. This early humanity turns out to be fragile, and the next people are made from something more suitable.

The ancient Maya, who lived in the 1st millennium AD, believed that people were made of clay. There are many images of supernatural mythical scribes and craftsmen who help the god mold the faces and heads of people from clay, paint them and give them individual features with special sticks. Later, the Quiche Maya realized that clay is a bad material because it is not strong, but corn is a good material. The book "Popol Vuh" says that there were several generations of people and the first were made of clay, the next ones were made of wood, and the present-day humanity is made of flesh, which consists of corn. Modern Quiche say about this that you are what you eat. People eat corn because the human body is made from corn. The related motif of making a wife out of fragile materials (clay, wax, sand, or excrement) is known throughout the Americas, from the Eskimos to the southern Amazon.

Perfume

In addition to deities and ancestors, there are other supernatural beings: spirits, demons, spirit companions. These are parts of human souls that live separately from people - in another world or, for example, in a forest. Here again, things are different. When you sleep and dream that you are somewhere in the forest, this means that your spirit companion is awake. The Maya's spirit companions were often animals. They were called "wai" or "waikhel" - these words are associated with the verb "sleep". Spirits give a person magical power, so a strong sorcerer can have up to 13 additional spirit companions, and these are usually dangerous predatory animals. And a simple person usually has one or two such souls, often a hen or a rooster.

How the world works

In Mesoamerica, the ideal living space is a rectangular area or patio flanked by buildings. The world is the same rectangle or square and four buildings located on different sides of the world, in which some deities live. The Maya have a version that the world trees grow on the four cardinal points (each of its own color) and the vault of heaven lies on them. In the 5th century AD, they had the idea that there were four mountains on the four cardinal points - each of its own color.

The color symbolism of the cardinal points is found not only in Mesoamerica, but also in other Indian societies and, perhaps, is another legacy of the ancient mythology of the first settlers, but in specific mythological traditions it plays a completely different role. In addition to Mesoamerica, a square multi-colored world is described in great detail among the Indians of the Southwestern United States, in particular among the Pueblos. The texts containing this motif were also recorded among the Ojibwe in Canada and the Camayur in Brazil, but they have it rather passing: in the Ojibwe each of the four faces of the medicine pole is painted in a certain color, and in the Camayur on the first tree of the peki Peki is a fruit tree originating from Brazil. Grows in Central and South America. fruits on different sides have a different color.

In a vertical section, the Mesoamerican world is multi-layered. The most common idea is that there are 13 heavens and 9 underworlds. 13 and 9 are very important numbers that both the Aztecs and the Mayans had, this is a specific Mesoamerican numerical symbolism. At the same time, each culture has its own idea of how this multi-layered sky is arranged from the inside. From the Aztec point of view, deities live on one level, ancestors on another, dead warriors on the third, women who died in childbirth go to the fourth, and so on. In the case of the Maya, we do not know who goes to what level after death, but we know that each level is controlled (or lives on it) by a certain supernatural being. Perhaps the same situation was with the underground worlds.

Creation and World Ages

There is also no common idea about the beginning of the world. Somewhere it was believed that the world was created from a giant crocodile (the Maya have images that show that the world is a crocodile or the firmament is the body of a crocodile). The earth can be created by two rival creators, one of whom then becomes the master of the lower world. Such motifs are found among the Indians of the Northeast and Southwest of the United States, on the Great Plains, in California, and then in South America, especially in Southeast and South Brazil. Another popular myth is the famous diver myth. A diver (tortoise, frog, beaver or some kind of bird) dives into the ocean to get land. But in parallel with this, there was the idea that the world has always existed: whether it was once created or not, no one knows.

God Itzamna. Drawing on Mayan pottery. 6th–9th centuries

In Mesoamerica, it was believed that time was divided into world epochs ending in various catastrophes, as a result of which the world is destroyed and then recreated, and each time it can be created in different ways. The nature of these catastrophes gives the name to the days in which epochs end. For example, if an era ended on a day called "jaguar", then people were torn to pieces by jaguars. The current era should end on the day of Ollin - "earthquakes", and it will obviously end with giant earthquakes, which is not surprising, given that Central America is an earthquake zone. In the Northern Yucatan, where earthquakes never happen, they also do not exist in Mayan mythology, but there is the idea of a flood, because there are very heavy rains.

Calendar

The Mesoamerican Indian calendar is associated not only with ritual life, but also with the prediction of a person’s fate, which depends on what day of the calendar he was born (in other cultures where the calendar system was not so developed, there was no such close connection). Here a special priest-fortuneteller plays an important role. He looks at the calendar and says: this man was born on the day of Ahau, which means "lord", so he will be a glorious person. And this man was born on a day that means "jaguar" - and, therefore, he will be cruel, like a jaguar. At the same time, fate could be faked by calling the priest not on the day when the child was born, but, for example, two days later.

Myths about twins

There are several very widespread motifs in New World mythology that can be found from Alaska to the southern border of Brazil. One of the most popular is a set of twin myths. The myth of twins in the New World is best known in a fairly late version. It was recorded among the Maya Quiche in mountainous Guatemala in the middle or second half of the 16th century, and was discovered already in the 19th century in the book Popol Vuh. There, in the center of the mythological part, there is a plot about the adventures of the twin brothers - Hunahpu and Xbalanka, who fight monsters, win and even play ball with the rulers of the underworld, which symbolizes victory over death. After the twins ascend to the sky, they turn into the sun and moon.

Twins with similar functions play an important role in both North American and Central American mythology, although the specific plots there may be completely different. The theme of the transformation of twins into heavenly bodies is very popular. In South America, they do not fight the lord of the underworld, but rather play the role of cultural heroes, monster fighters. Thus, among the Tupi-speaking peoples living in eastern, central and southern Brazil and in Paraguay, the basis of the complex of twin myths is the revenge of sons for the death of their mother. Like the Maya, in some myths, after their exploits, the twins ascend to heaven.

Another extremely widespread motive can be called "search for a groom" or "girls are looking for a good groom, but they find a bad one." It is found from the subarctic zone (Tanaina or Denaina Indians) to Patagonia. For example, among the famous Hurons, an old woman sends her daughters to marry a Deer, but they meet Owl, who deceives them and pretends to be a Deer. When the deception is revealed, the sisters go to the Stag. A very similar story is told by the Desana Indians (Colombia). Unlike twin myths, myths with such a plot were not common in Mesoamerica.

Corn myths

In America, corn is the most important cereal and source of nutrition, and a lot of beliefs and rituals are associated with it. The explanation of how corn arose has always played a significant role in Indian mythology. In Central America, among various groups of the Maya and other Mesoamerican Indians, the motif is very common that it was hidden in a mountain and only ants could get it out of there through a small crack, until the thunder god, or the rain god, or the thunder god, split this mountain with lightning and no corn kernels came out of there.

In the Amazon, maize is replaced by cassava (also known as cassava), which has played a major role in Amazonian societies. In the myth of the Tikuna Indians, there were once no cultivated plants. One old woman noticed how leaf-cutting ants carry something white, she liked the smell. Following the trail, she came to a river channel. On the shore stood a tree on which yams and sweet potatoes grew, and their fruits fell into the water in the form of sweet cassava tubers. The old woman baked the cassava under her arm, then dried it in the sun.

God of corn. Drawing on Mayan pottery. 6th-9th centuries

Myths that tell how cultivated or wild plants used in food grow out of the body of an old woman, young woman or girl are found among the Indians of the Northeast (Hurons and Iroquois ) and the Southeast (Cherokee, Creeks, Seminoles) of the USA and in South America (Guiana, Northwestern Amazonia, Southern Amazonia, Central Andes), and they are not very common in Mesoamerica. Among the Hurons, this is part of the so-called myth of the heavenly woman. A husband throws his pregnant wife from heaven to earth. The twins in her womb argue over how they should be born, and the good brother is born in a normal way, and the bad one comes out of the mother's side, thereby killing her. A heavenly woman is buried, a pumpkin grows from her head, corn from her breasts, beans and other cultivated plants from her arms and legs. Among the Brazilian Munduruku Indians, the plot is as follows: the insatiable Caruebo, the nephew of the old woman Kapiru, demands for food everything that grows in the garden. Kapiru teaches him how to prepare the site, and tells him to bury himself alive, with arms, legs and fingers spread out. Her body spreads throughout the site, corn and other plants grow out of it, and her fingers become cassava tubers.

Some mythological plots of this kind may eventually reduce their range. For example, we know of about 30 images on Moche pottery in which corn, cassava and beans protrude from the body of a frog or toad. In the Nazca fabric image (southern Peru), cultivated plants protrude from the body of a llama, which is led by a frog or toad. At the same time, today the version of the myth that connects the acquisition of cultivated plants with a frog or a toad is limited to the east of South America.

Supernatural power and heat

Many Indian cultures are characterized by the idea of the existence of some kind of sacred power, poured into the world, which gives objects a form and determines the essence of this or that object or being. This power can have different manifestations. One of them is all kinds of supernatural beings.

In Mesoamerica supernatural power is primarily characterized by heat, but heat is not just hot or cold, it is some inner essence of the object that expresses its intensity. Everything in the world is connected with this heat, for example, a hot object or a bright color, a strong alcoholic drink or a hot pepper can possess it. Medicinal or ritual plants have heat, while all other plants are cold. Such a division in Mayan folk medicine, Tzeltal and Tzotzili, was present as early as the 20th century. There one could come across such a description: “This is a mountain plant, but this one is cold.”

Certain limitations are also explained through the concept of heat. Why shouldn't the common man wear bright clothes or use precious feathers? Because his internal heat is low and it is dangerous for him. Noble people belonging to the priestly class, rulers and their descendants, on the contrary, have a strong fever, and they can handle it without any problems. Therefore, the administration of rituals, the consumption of certain drinks and other activities of this kind are concentrated only in the hands of the nobility. As a person advances in age and occupies more and more important posts, or as a warrior wins more victories, and a priest performs more rituals, his inner heat intensifies, he becomes more and more important, wise and powerful. Naturally, this heat is the strongest for the ruler, so you can’t just touch the things that belong to the ruler: they will burn.

Dmitry Belyaev — Specialist in the history and culture of Mesoamerica, Leading Researcher at the Yu. He is engaged in Mesoamerican archeology, Mayan writing and political anthropology.

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What the Indians believe

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What can happen to a trickster

Plots from different peoples of the world, more than others reminiscent of modern jokes

Mesoamerican cocoa

How to make a drink that can calm the heart, drive you crazy and cure tuberculosis

What are burial towers

Why did the Aymara bury noble people in towers

Is plot important in myth

Anthropologist Bronislav Malinovsky came to the conclusion that there is no0011

Mochika comics

What do ritual vessels tell about, created by a culture that had no written language

Where people ate each other

An 1893 map shows where, according to Europeans, cannibalism of different peoples was widespread

similar

Sergei Neklyudov on how scientists explain the similarities between folklore texts

Everything you wanted to know about the toothy womb

How Freud's followers interpreted the myths about vagina dentata

About the Aleutian demons

The story of St.