Transcription
Who were the early humans in North America?
People think I'm crazy when I say this. The very first major community in North America is in the most unlikely place. It's in northern Louisiana. There is a pyramid in northern Louisiana, a big one at a site called Poverty Point that is 3,500 years old. So, it's the same age as the pyramids in Egypt.
The biggest of the Mississippian cities is called Cahokia. Cahokia. And it's right outside of St. Louis. And it was huge. It had a population of 20,000 people and pyramids all over the place, a huge palisade wall around it, thriving metropolis.
And we in America have kind of a collective amnesia. Like, we we never hear about these massive civilizations. Cahokia was the big first city, but then it spread from the Mississippi all the way to the Atlantic. There were hundreds and hundreds of these big cities that had 5 to 10,000 people each. They had a unified religion and culture. They were again not an empire. So, there were warring city-states that were kind of territories that were owned by big kings and then the cities around them were kind of the subsidiary lords and kings. It's so weird that we don't know this because it was clearly documented by the Spanish.