Transcription
Scattered across the North American continent is a mystery that no one has been able to solve.
When I say North American Indian or Native American, what comes to mind? Do you think of Native Americans bare-chested, rushing across the plains on horseback, chasing down buffalo? Do you think of Native Americans in canoes, in quiet lakes, in the Midwest or eastern woodlands? Do you think of wigwams or their garden plots with corn and beans and squash? Do you think of the Southwest with the Pueblo and the Hopi and the Apache and the Navajo?
The images that you and I have are these images because Europeans gave them to us at contact or from their interactions after contact. These images that we have are telling more so for what they don't say than for what they do. Missing from these mental images are images and scenes known only from archaeology. It turns out that the beginning of Native American history looked quite different from the scenes at contact. The ruins of these ancient cultures still exist. These ruins also happen to be the only link that we have to this early history because in the AD 400s, the first Native American world disappeared.
My name is Nathaniel Jensen. I'm the research biologist with Answers in Genesis and this is They Had Names tracing the history of the North American indigenous people. And if you happen to be one of the indigenous people of North America, stick with me to the end. I have a special request for you. I've been searching for the backstory to the myriads of people who were present when Europeans arrived on these shores. But in this particular episode, you're not going to hear a lot of tribal names. That's because we're dealing with one of the biggest mysteries in pre-Uropean North America. In terms of chapters that this episode covers in my new book, this is essentially a summary of chapters 2 and three.
The history of North America can be told through its progression or series of earthwork mounds, burial mounds, and other structures. One of the earliest of these mounds and most mysterious comes from what is now northeastern Louisiana. The builders of the poverty point culture constructed the second largest earthwork in the eastern United States. This particular mound, you can see in the screen right here, is that particular structure. Notice that this site here in northeastern Louisiana has a series of a semic-ircular arrangement of slightly low rises back then. And I'll give you the dates here momentarily. These rises had houses on top of them. The reason for this arrangement is still debated. One of the most intriguing elements of this site for me is not necessarily the circular arrangement or the size of that earthwork in the back, but the fact that this site has astronomical significance. The arrangement of the mounds and such is astronomically aligned to the equinoxes. That's interesting. It may not seem like much because it's one site, but this was part of a larger network. The poverty point culture interacted with sites 620 miles away. And just to give you a sense for the scale of this, if you draw straight lines out from Poverty Point from where it is now in Louisiana, northward takes you nearly to the Wisconsin border. Northeast takes you to what is now Virginia. And if you go due east from Poverty Point, you basically hit the Atlantic. So this was a economically significant and much larger culture than what first first meets the eye. You can still visit the site. It's open to the public and walk the grounds and see the earthworks. But what what you won't get at this site are answers to questions like who built these mountains? And now that I've given you the dates of a,000 BC to 700 BC, it's it's rise and fall. One of the questions, of course, is why did these people disappear? What relationship did they have to other peoples at that time? I mentioned we're not getting a lot of tribal names in this episode, and that's because this is a mystery. We don't know who built it, and what relationship they have, well, we do know, but I'll get to that. Some of the relationship these people had to later Native Americans.
Another particular culture from an early era that presents a lot of mystery is the Adena people. Their mounds are scattered across the landscape. One of the exciting things to me is not the astronomical significance of this second culture because it's not known that there is any for the Adena culture, but rather that they're so widespread you might even have some of these mounds in your own backyard. So this particular site, I'm going to show you a picture of the Miamiisburg mound is just north of me in southwestern Ohio. This is a burial mound. Notice the trees for scale. If you look closely at the top of this mound, depending on the resolution on your screen, you might see benches. So, it's a tall mound. There were people buried in here. The backyard element, though, doesn't just apply to where I'm living currently in northern Kentucky. It also applies to where I grew up in southeastern Wisconsin, rine, Wisconsin, right here. I spent 23 of my 23 years of my life there. And despite it being my hometown and having a cemetery called Mound Cemetery, this is a cell phone picture I took about a year ago. You can see here from the sign, it goes back to the 1800s, 1852, despite it being here long and me having lived there for so long, it it never really crossed my mind to go looking for Indian mounds, but that's what gives it it its name. There are Dana mounds or from that era at least around the time of Christ. So, while the Romans were constructing their civilization, you had Native Americans building mounds in what is now Mound Cemetery in Rine. This is a city plot. So, you have well-known rine businessmen like JI Case and SC Johnson buried here. You have at least one Revolutionary War soldier buried here who was born 1761, died 1836. But of course, what's of interest right to us right now is the fact that there are Native American mountains. What really caught my eye was the fact that these were known since the mid 1800s and that there was much more known about this site back then than seemingly right now. I came across this book, Antiquities of Wisconsin by Increase A Lapam. This edition is an 1855 edition. Rine, Wisconsin today is only about 80,000 people or less. I think it's shrinking. Rine and its mounds made his book. My point being, we're not a big city in Wisconsin. We're not a big city in the United States. Yet, there were enough Indian ruins here to catch Lapam's attention. I'm going to zoom in here so you can see uh this plate from his book, Ancient Works Near Reine. Now, I'm going to rotate it for reasons that'll become clear here in a minute. I'm going to draw your attention to a particular uh landmark here. If you were able to get a hold of this book, it's it's free online. You'll see there's a whole bunch of little dots. There's some up here. There's a whole bunch in this area over here. That's the area I want to focus on now because this is where we can see a parallel with modern technology to what exists there today. Keep your eye on this bend in the root river. There's a bit of an escarment here, a plateau. So, it drops down of course to the to the river valley. Then up on top of the plateau are all these tiny dots representing burial mounts. With modern technology, namely lidar, it's an acronym representing basically shooting laser pulsers from the sky and then back and forth over the landscape from a plane. You you can take all that data and reconstruct a very detailed topographical map of the location. This has been done, I think, for every county in Wisconsin. Rine County is where Mound Cemetery is. I I took this screenshot because the TIFF image file is half a gigabyte in size and so it just took forever to load. I'm not going to give you the the live view of it because it slogs my computer. I want to zoom in on this section over here. So the city of Rine is on the lake. I think windpoint is up here. The lighthouse the root river system if your screen has enough resolution is right in here. I'm going to zoom in. That's again where the particular bend in the root river is. This is the lidar version. So that basically this is the modern landscape of this region of Rine. This trapezoidal shape represents Mound Cemetery. This represents businesses and residences. This is Kinsey Avenue right here. Drove along this avenue many times growing up and again didn't think to go looking in the cemetery for Indian ruins. You can see on this map several pimple-shaped bumps. The brochure or the office of Mound Cemetery says there are 14 Indian ruins left. This dot here at the corner is not an Indian ruin. I was fooled by it. It's an artificial mound that they put in the corner to try to draw attention. Another thing I want you to notice is the fact that there are only 14. So if we go back to Lapam's map, I'm going to try to alternate these slides here slowly so you can see the point of reference. Again, there is the bend in the root river and Lapam's map. Here's the bend in the root river right now with lidar technology. So we're looking at this area right here both in the modern view and in Lapam's view. Notice again all sorts of dots pockm marking this area. And yet if you look at the modern map 14 left the process of construction farming perhaps over the years again that's that's this map from Lapam is from the 1800s. A lot has happened in this area and we're seen since then. And I'm showing you this not only because it's my hometown because sadly this is also the general rule for mounds like this across the United States. So much modern construction has obliterated much of what's once stood. Again, there there are ways with technology to try to recover some of this lost information. But for some some sites, the critical clues are not radar scans, but they are documents from the 1800s saying, "We saw this. It was here." And you come to the present, and now it's gone. So there may be some in your backyard just just a few streets away from my own neighborhood here in Northern Kentucky. I found out there's a there's a there's a subdivision where all the houses are basically built in a in a bit of a circle because there's a mound right in the middle of the neighborhood that's been protected that dates from a similar era. Lapam and his colleague Dr. Hoy opened up at least one of the mounds and and found and this is what I found interesting people sitting up and facing east. And he has a diagram in his book as well. You can see the skeleton. It's a bit small on my screen maybe on yours too. Sitting up facing east. Another mystery as to why this is. I don't have the answer. Nobody does. This culture based on uh the signage at the Miamiisburg mound site is a 1000 BC to 8,400. If you look at textbooks, one I have recent textbook gives a narrower date range for the Adana mounds 500 BC to 8100. So by this date it would seem poverty point rose and fell and after it fell Adana rose and then eventually fell.
There's one more culture that's especially exciting to me because it's right in my own backyard almost literally. The Hopewell culture, which I've shaded here in bluish purple, the Ohio Hopewell. Ohio was the epicenter of this culture. And this image of one of their great earthworks might look at first pass like two conicle mounds, but this is in fact the ends of a much larger circle. If you have a really big screen and can zoom in, you might see the edge of the circle way back in the distance here. Inside this circle was a ditch, again of unknown purpose, but it's a large structure. The footprint of the great circle encompasses 30 acres. Just across town, this is Newark, Ohio, just east of Columbus, is another set of geometric earthworks. I've shown you just a snapshot here. This is a corridor that connects to a much larger octagon. This, if you're thinking it looks like a golf teapad, it is. This was part of a golf course. It's now been converted to a UNESCO site very recently. I was still treating it as a golf course in the book I just published uh because it was that recent of a of a conversion in status. What I just showed you and I'm going to come back to these so you can get a better mental picture was part of this great circle. What initially looked like two mounds are the edges the opening to that great circle. Then I showed you some of the inside path here. The corridor is right there. That little narrow neck that connects to this octagon and then a circle back here. So again, just for scale and size, I'm going to show you the opening to this circle. That's this image. And the inside of the circle was right here. The octagon, the narrow little neck and the first edges of the octagon are right here. So what they built earthworks in the shape of circles, squares, other shapes. Why does it matter? the Hopeel culture. And this is where it really caught my attention and and woke me up to the early cultures. The Hopeel culture built their mounds with exquisite astronomical significance. One of the first sites I went to was closer to me because I'm I'm in Kentucky and just across the border in Ohio is Fort Ancient. That was my first hopeful experience where they talked about there's astronomical significance. I thought, "Oh, wait a minute. This reminds me of the Maya who were further south and were of course expert astronomers. Consider this this particular mountain site that I just showed you. Circle corridor. There's the octagon. This pathway was lined up to mark the passage of 18.6ear cycles of the moon. I didn't even know there were 18.6ear cycles of the moon. These people did. And they moved large amounts of Earth in precise ways to capture it. Why did they capture that cycle? It's unknown, but they knew what they were doing and they knew a lot about the heavens, more more than I do. There's other sites if you go about 50 miles south of Newark as the crow flies to what's now Chilikothy. There's a number of sites you can visit. This is the Hopton earthworks. Again, another example of you can look at the 1800's drawings. I forget exactly the author's names, but this is a reconstruction from one of their diagrams. This is a site you can visit. Uh they've mowed the grass to mark what the site once looked like, but it's essentially a flat farmer's field now because it's been plowed over so many times. You can take a path along here and stand up, I think, on on this sort of plateau and look down upon this site. Again, yes, geometric shapes, but this corridor is astronomically aligned to the winter solstice. These people knew exactly what they were doing. Just to the west of Chilikothy is the first Hopewell site. I think that that was the cause of its name. Hopewell. This is a very large what feels like an arena. Well, I should say this field down here. So, you park over here. You can take a path along this way. You can walk through this area. But this whole area, lower portion looks like a farmer's field, a flat grassy area. The earthwork walls still exist up here, kind of hidden in the woods. And you can walk this area. They've cut the grass to market. So, you kind almost have to use your imagination. But when you stand in the middle of it, it's a a moving experience to think about how much area these people covered. What sort of it just sort of has a stadium amphitheater feel almost gives you the chills. These again are these are UNESCO sites. You can visit them. There's a whole number of them. The dates for Hopewell from textbooks is just a couple centuries before Christ and several after. And all three of these cultures that I've just showed you are built by unknown people. Unknown why they rose, unknown why they fell. Some of these answers will begin to emerge as we go along in this series. But there's a lot of questions and few answers. Who built Poverty Point? I mentioned that the Hopewell were astronomers like the Maya. That's at least the connection came in my mind. Were the Mayans the builders? Were they up here in North America? And I'm going to show you some data later in this series that will transform that question and give us a dramatic new perspective on this. Did the Mex, those were in Mexico. They built the giant sculpted stone heads if you've ever seen them. These were just across the Gulf in Mexico. Could Mech migrants, refugees have gone up this way or or was this a cere ceremonial site? Could this have had religious significance? And it's the Mechs who went up there and built it. Lots of questions, few answers. These questions are the greatest mystery in pre-European North America.
Now, I mentioned we can tell the history of North America in a series of mounds after all of these are gone and the builders apparently disappear. A new mound culture arose. This is found primarily in southern Wisconsin and its surrounding area. This is from effigy Mounds National Monument just across the Mississippi from Wisconsin into Iowa. You might be able to see at this level of zooming. These effigy mounds are labeled as such because they're built in the shapes of animals often or sometimes we don't even recognize the shapes. They're not geometric mounds. They're categorically different. And I think these are also burial mounds. This is a bird. It seems to be a four-legged creature. This is the marching bear group because they're all lined up here. The setting for this, I've been there, is fantastic. Uh, tremendous view over the bluffs of the Mississippi. There's a really intriguing story here which I'll get to in a minute. Again, this is to zoom in so you can see that there's the wings, there's the tail, there's the legs of what people are calling a bear. It's some sort of four-legged creature all in a row here. This is a again a liar image scanning from the sky. You can see them. There's there's still slight rises. The grass has been cut so you can see it more obviously. Obviously, you can visit this, but notice the dates. These people rise and fall after the others already gone. And this matters. And I'm drawing a distinction between the three earlier cultures and effigy because of genetics.
If you've taken a DNA test, you've probably used, let's say, ancestry DNA or family tree DNA. Typically, they test the autotoal DNA, the DNA you receive from both parents. And this is not the genetic evidence that I'm going to refer to. This type of test is a bit of a double-edged sword. It tests the DNA that you get from both parents. So, I have 50% of my DNA from dad, 50% from mom. Great. I get both sides of my family tree. But as you go back, okay, my dad had 50% from each of his parents. Same for my mom. So, if you do the math, I'm 25% genetically each of my grandparents, 12 and a half% great-grandparents 6 point. Anyway, the numbers drop off real fast. And this test does not allow you to go very back. Doesn't allow you to go very far back in time. You probably already know from your own genealological research what this test tells you. It's kind of a reflection of your grandparents. So, you pay $100, $120, and you don't learn much more than what you already know. The double-edged sword part. The reason this is not so useful for going far back in time is because one parents DNA dilutes the others. That's that's the scientific Achilles heel. To go deep in time to go back to the BC era to figure out who built Hopewell, you need something some type of DNA that does not get diluted by the other parent. Why chromosome DNA is one particular type of DNA. It has the best statistics which is why I've focused on it. But the female side will come up later in the series. The male inherited DNA passed from fathers to sons, not diluted by mom's DNA in theory then functions as a much better tool to penetrate the past. The specific way this DNA works is like a clock. So we know now because we've measured dad's DNA, son's DNA a number of times that on average every generation about three mistakes occur. You compare my DNA to my son's DNA should be on average three three Y chromosome DNA differences. Three letters different. You compare my DNA to my dad's on average there should be three Y chromosome DNA letters different. You compare my dad's to his grandsons 3 + 3 there should be six differences. So you could compare any two men their Y chromosomes count the number of differences and get a rough estimate of how many generations ago they last shared a common ancestor. This has been done globally. This particular diagram represents the DNA from 600 men from around the globe from Europe from North Africa, Subsaran Africa, Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, Pacific Islanders and Native Americans. The letters and colors are just shorthand to know what section of the tree we're in so that we can communicate as scientists and and know exactly what people are talking about. I'm going to rotate this because I want to draw your attention to one particular branch that's found heavily in Native Americans today. That's this branch Q. The technical term is haplo group. So h groupoup Q, branch Q. In this map, the size of the circles represents the relative abundance. So I think among the Navajo for example down here in the southeastern United States it's 90 95% 97% maybe of the total population their Y chromosomes is HA group Q. You notice here this is also found in Asia, Eurasia, including Europe, even in Iceland, Central Asia. There's the biggest circles. If any population has less than 1% of this branch in their population, they're not shown. That's just my cut off. Notice the obvious point here. Largest circles, heaviest abundance in the Americas today. What does this have to do with the hope culture or the Adena culture or the poverty point poverty point culture? There's a hidden clue in the Hapler group Q branches that once you see it, it's difficult to unsee it.
We know from historical records, from archaeology that when Europeans first arrived, there were millions of people here. It's debated exactly how many, but a middle-of the road estimate puts 50 to 60 million people here in 1491. Just for comparison's sake, if you look at Europe in the 1400s, so black death kills off a lot of people in the 1300s. Population declines in Europe and then recovers after the 1400s. So in AD400 in Europe, the population total was about 60 million. And so there were probably about that many in the Americas in 1491. Not not a sparsely populated place where there's just a few gaggle of people going around hugging the trees. Lots of people here. There's civilization here. And then after Europeans arrive, there's a huge population collapse. 80 to 90% of them gone in the next several centuries. And this diagram represents in a sense if we had a time machine or maybe even a time machine with X-ray vision where we could see people's family trees and how they change with time. I want you to notice here this side I just picked 80200. I've got branches multiplying. branches are multiplying because presumably if you're going to have 50 to 60 million people at contact, there must have been population growth. And if there's population growth, the branches of the tree are going to reflect that. For example, my wife and I have four kids. So, we have we have two branches, me and my wife, four kids coming off of our branches. We're that's population doubling two to four. The branches reflect that math. This is true globally. So that we can look at Native American branches, family trees. We can reconstruct family trees from DNA and look at how the branches change. So in theory, there should be lots of branching before Europeans arrive. So I I put, for sake of simple math, 10 on the screen right here. I kill off nine of them. 90% 10% survive. And then depending on where you are in the Americas in the let's say the 1800s some populations begin to recover some 1900s some 1700s. Now for reasons I don't have time to get into we don't have access to the DNA of the deceased. The mainstream community thinks we do. I think we have independent evidence saying this type of DNA is unreliable. So if we have DNA samples from modern Native Americans, the survivors of the population collapse and their descendants, that would be these people here. What would their family tree look like? Let's say we take DNA from modern Native Americans. We compare the DNA to one another because the Y chromosome acts like a clock. We can reconstruct a family tree. What should the branches of Native Americans look like if there was a population collapse? Again, we don't have DNA from these people. We don't have access to these branches really because they're they're gone. They died. This is the smoking gun of that process. Flatline. So, you think of in in the hospital, a heart monitor where lines keep doing this as the heartbeats. Flatlining is when you're dead. Heart stops. Flatlining in genetics is when there's a lot of people who've died. That double meaning fits here. this flatlining because all these branches that one existed once existed are now gone. There's your smoking gun.
Now, let's switch to the actual DNA data to make sure we're all on the same page. This particular study included people from I think it's northwest Mexico and and southwest United States perhaps the Puma people. There's Mayans from Guatemala or Mexico because they're in both places. There's Colombians and there's two Amazonian tribes, the Karatana and Suri. Here's the dates, older dates, 1491. The tips, the branches represent modern time. Here's 1492. Notice flat lines. Flat lines. Flat lines. There's some branching close to the present. There's branching back here. But when Europeans arrived, flat lines. If you take this data and put it in more graphical form where on the horizontal axis you have a timeline, growth, growth, flatlining, recovery. What I didn't tell you is I've got a particular time scale I've been using 4,500 years back to Noah. And that time scale captures real history. If you use the mainstream time scale, the evolutionary time scale, this date of 1492 becomes 6,000 years ago. You completely lose this crystal clear population history. One of the most remarkable findings of modern science. The biblical time scale is the key to understanding the native native American population collapse and recovery and history around the globe. This still doesn't tell us what happened at the Hopewell, but it contains a critical clue now that we know we can we can trust DNA. It recovers known history. What about before Europeans? If you look deep in this particular branch, this this is what we just looked at. Now I'm showing you the rest of this branch that includes Eurasian peoples. This point right here is where the Native American branches separate from European and Asian branches. And I can put dates on it of 300s to 600s AD, which just so happens to be right around the time that the Hopewell culture fell. This may in fact be a cause effect relationship. Whoever these people were, this is around the same time that the Huns were invading Europe. people came across probably the bearing straight came into the Americas wiped out the males it seems because this is the oldest lineage that we have right now in the Y chromosome in the Americas detected it seems may have been a cause in the disappearance of these earlier cultures and these new people might be the cause and the builders of the effiggy mounds. So you can you can watch the sequence of Native American historical events through the mounds bring in genetics and you get an aha this may be why they fell but also the reason why I don't know yet who built this or this or this but I'm hot on the trail of doing so. I told you about the Y chromosome. Stick with us in the series. I'll tell you about some very fresh new clues from female inherited DNA that transform this mystery and the questions about the relationship between North America and Miso America and put it in a whole new light.
If you're Native American and you're watching and you'd like to participate in future research, we have an active project ongoing. I think there's a lot more clues held in DNA that are waiting to be discovered. You can go to the our homepage answers genesis.org/ org/go/thele they hadnames the name of the book scroll down you'll find a place to enter your name email you can put phone number if you want to uh have had lots of people contact me this way I've got contacts now in about 30 to 35 nations message box this goes directly to my inbox and and we can correspond further that way this new book you can find in our our homepage you can find it on Amazon there's a poster that comes with it so I showed you a a a map of the Americas as at contact earlier in this presentation. That's now for sale both through the publisher, Master Books as well as answers and Genesis. You can print that off. You can find it for free online at that same website I just showed you uh to to to follow along as you read this book. The website again is this one, answers genesis.org. They had names. Traced is the book that looks at the global history of the of of humanity that came out in 2022. This represents the fulfillment of scientific predictions that were made several years prior in replacing Darwin. This is the larger origin of species question. The simple version is this. This has been episode one of They Had Names. In episode two, we'll be looking at the biggest secret in pre-European North America. My name is Nathaniel Jensen with Answers in Genesis. I hope you'll join us again next time for they had names.