Trinidad Isn't Really a Caribbean Island — 50 Facts That Prove It
Platinum Diary
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Trinidad is not really a Caribbean island. It is a piece of South America that the sea came up around at the end of the last ice age, eleven kilometres off the Venezuelan coast, and almost everything strange about the place follows from that one fact.
It has a lake made of asphalt that you can walk on, and that keeps handing back the past. In 2017 a team published ten carved wooden objects and a human skull pulled out of it, dated from roughly 3200 BCE to around 700 CE — the earliest wooden carvings known anywhere in the Caribbean. One of them, a weaving tool, carries a strontium signature more radiogenic than anything on the island. The tree it was made from did not grow in Trinidad.
It sits inside the Atlantic hurricane basin and effectively does not get hurricanes. It grew the hottest pepper ever measured. It is the largest net exporter of ammonia on the planet, from a population of about one and a half million. It has mud volcanoes instead of lava ones, and one of them buried a village in 1997.
Fifty facts, and every one of them was checked against a primary source.
WHAT YOU WILL SEE
— The Pitch Lake carvings, and the object whose chemistry says it came from the mainland
— Banwari Trace, the 1969 dig, and the oldest human remains found anywhere in the Caribbean
— Why a country at ten degrees north sits in the hurricane belt and almost never gets hit
— The Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, its verified Scoville figure, and the year it took the record
— Piparo, February 1997, and why the eruption height everybody quotes should not be trusted
— New Courland — the Baltic duchy from what is now Latvia that colonised Tobago in the 1600s
— Why Tobago's rock is a hundred and twenty million years older than Trinidad's, and geologically has nothing to do with it
— The leatherbacks at Matura, and the thing repeated about them that is simply wrong
Several claims that circulate in other Trinidad and Tobago videos were cut during research because the record does not support them. Where sources disagree — and on the Piparo eruption height they badly do — this video says so instead of picking the more dramatic number.
Which one did you refuse to believe? Drop the number in the comments. One of these is disputed by scientists right now.
Subscribe if buried Caribbean history is your thing. This channel is working toward ten thousand subscribers and every one counts.
#TrinidadAndTobago #Trinidad #CaribbeanHistory
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The trinitario cocoa//our coffee beans
Trinidad Isn't Really a Caribbean Island — 50 Facts That Prove It
Platinum Diary
15,029 views
Trinidad is not really a Caribbean island. It is a piece of South America that the sea came up around at the end of the last ice age, eleven kilometres off the Venezuelan coast, and almost everything strange about the place follows from that one fact.
It has a lake made of asphalt that you can walk on, and that keeps handing back the past. In 2017 a team published ten carved wooden objects and a human skull pulled out of it, dated from roughly 3200 BCE to around 700 CE — the earliest wooden carvings known anywhere in the Caribbean. One of them, a weaving tool, carries a strontium signature more radiogenic than anything on the island. The tree it was made from did not grow in Trinidad.
It sits inside the Atlantic hurricane basin and effectively does not get hurricanes. It grew the hottest pepper ever measured. It is the largest net exporter of ammonia on the planet, from a population of about one and a half million. It has mud volcanoes instead of lava ones, and one of them buried a village in 1997.
Fifty facts, and every one of them was checked against a primary source.
WHAT YOU WILL SEE
— The Pitch Lake carvings, and the object whose chemistry says it came from the mainland
— Banwari Trace, the 1969 dig, and the oldest human remains found anywhere in the Caribbean
— Why a country at ten degrees north sits in the hurricane belt and almost never gets hit
— The Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, its verified Scoville figure, and the year it took the record
— Piparo, February 1997, and why the eruption height everybody quotes should not be trusted
— New Courland — the Baltic duchy from what is now Latvia that colonised Tobago in the 1600s
— Why Tobago's rock is a hundred and twenty million years older than Trinidad's, and geologically has nothing to do with it
— The leatherbacks at Matura, and the thing repeated about them that is simply wrong
Several claims that circulate in other Trinidad and Tobago videos were cut during research because the record does not support them. Where sources disagree — and on the Piparo eruption height they badly do — this video says so instead of picking the more dramatic number.
Which one did you refuse to believe? Drop the number in the comments. One of these is disputed by scientists right now.
Subscribe if buried Caribbean history is your thing. This channel is working toward ten thousand subscribers and every one counts.
#TrinidadAndTobago #Trinidad #CaribbeanHistory