Netflix is promoting a cartoon about Mesoamerican child warriors, a rip-off of Kung-fu Panda, and I am reminded of this: Ancient Maya DNA shows male kids were sacrificed in pairs at Chichén Itzá. I'm wondering, how historically accurate is this cartoon? Are you sure you want to celebrate your ancestors?
What sticks is the money quote from co-author Dr. Christina Warinner:
Early 20th century accounts falsely popularized lurid tales of young women and girls being sacrificed at the site. This study, conducted as a close international collaboration, turns that story on its head and reveals the deep connections between ritual sacrifice and the cycles of human death and rebirth described in sacred Maya texts.
I'm still boggled at the phrasing. Is murdering boys less lurid than murdering girls? Do "deep connections" (ie. a superstition about twins) rationalize child murder? Why the fuck does she talk that way?
There seems to be a trend in anthropology where they've gone all in on Rousseauian noble savage bullshit. I've seen a lot of people reference The Dawn of Everything as if it were decades old established scientific consensus and not the three year old revisionist TED talk that it is.
They really, really want to believe that humans are innately peaceful, cooperative and egalitarian, and that feudal slave hierarchies are an invented ideology, strictly European and exported by colonial empires, despite the fact that they occured on every continent in prehistory.
They're not explicitly saying it, because then the agenda would be self-evident, but every fucking word is a rationalization of anarchist or communist ideology to sell to gullible children who think their "praxis" is going to topple fascist billionaires.
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