Native America Before 1492 — What Was Actually Here?

There was a city on the Mississippi bigger than London. You can drive past it on Interstate 55 and see the top of it over the trees. Cahokia covered six square miles, held around 15,000 people at its peak in 1100, and its central mound stands 100 feet high on a base the size of the Great Pyramid — built by hand, one basket of earth at a time, with no draft animals and no metal tools. It was abandoned 140 years before Columbus sailed. This is what was actually in North America before 1492: the cities, the farms, the engineered roads, the continental trade networks, the constitutional governments — and an honest account of how much of it we can really know. Not the empty wilderness of the schoolbooks, and not a romanticised version either. In this video: Why the Clovis-first model collapsed, and the human footprints at White Sands dated to 23,000 years ago — and how that date was checked three separate ways. Why population estimates for the Americas range from 8 million to 112 million, and what the honest number is. Cahokia, Monks Mound, Woodhenge, and what was found inside Mound 72. Moundville, Etowah and Spiro. Chaco Canyon's 400 kilometres of dead-straight engineered road, the 200,000 timbers carried 50 miles by hand, and the chocolate found in a New Mexico canyon. The 500 miles of Hohokam canals that Phoenix settlers dug out and reused in the 1800s. Poverty Point, built by hunter-gatherers 3,000 years ago. The Eastern Agricultural Complex — the crops eastern North America domesticated independently, which are now extinct and whose wild relatives grow in ditches as weeds. Why the "untouched wilderness" was a managed landscape burned on a schedule. Clam gardens on the Northwest Coast. The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace, the clan mothers who appointed and removed chiefs, and the honest answer on whether it influenced the US Constitution. Yellowstone obsidian in Ohio burial mounds. Why North America held more language families than all of Europe. And why Plains horse culture is not ancient — plus the 2023 study, co-authored with Lakota, Comanche and Pawnee scholars, that proved the oral traditions right and the written record wrong. Chapters 0:00 A city bigger than London 3:00 How many people were here? 8:00 When did they arrive? 13:00 White Sands 17:00 Cahokia 24:00 The Mississippian world 27:00 Chaco Canyon 32:00 The Hohokam canals 35:00 Poverty Point 37:00 Maize, and the crops nobody remembers 42:00 The managed landscape 47:00 The Great Law of Peace 53:00 Trade across a continent 57:00 Three hundred languages 61:00 What they did not have 64:00 De Soto and La Salle 69:00 The horses Tell me in the comments: which of these had you heard of before, and which is new? Cahokia. Chaco. The Hohokam canals. Poverty Point. The Eastern Agricultural Complex. The clam gardens. The Great Law of Peace. And if you grew up near any of them, say so — a remarkable number of Americans live within an hour of something on that list and have never been told it is there. #NativeAmericanHistory #Cahokia #AncientAmerica #Archaeology #AmericanHistory