Hello everyone - this is the first vid on the channel! im sure the quality will improve as time goes on!

When I first heard about the bodies being neatly arranged in the pit, my first assumption was that they were placed there intentionally after they died, that's literally what happens in every funeral. Somehow this archeologist guy thought they laid down and died in that position like he was uncovering dinosaurs bones or something.

Can’t tell you how much I appreciate that you use no endless annoying pointless distracting sound effects or background music like every single other god damn YouTube channel.

The Sumerians truly hit that critical point where novel ideas became a normal part of society.   Once the writing and trading increased, their innovations increased.

you forgot the part when the ancient Sumerians were two weeks away from developing nuclear weapons

From the thumbnail, it looks like the people in that first civilization were always very surprised.   😳

I have studied Anthropology and Archaeology and I will never get over the whole "Let's do this super elaborate burial that will last forever and no one can disturb it." until some weirdo with a shovel is like "bones. nice."

Even the "believers" of Jonestown had second thoughts once they realized that the guns weren't for their protection.

4:27 the Uruk are sick in case anyone’s looking for another rabbit hole. world’s first true city, essentially—50k people in 2 square miles (as dense as NYC, without the high rises), another 100k in the environs, continuously inhabited for 6,000 years and just basically abandoned after the Arab conquest. I mean left totally desolate. Very “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains.” So cool.

I don’t think it’s really settled who invented the wheel. However, Sumerians get credit for the earliest depictions of wheeled wagons that we’ve found.

I legitimately love that you leave a lot of this unedited; it's refreshing to hear someone just talk without so many little cuts and edits to streamline the delivery in an unnatural way.  Really fascinating early history!

In ancient times Chinese people also used “big man” to refer to an important person. In fact if you watch historic Chinese dramas you will hear it being used “da ren” 大人

I' d like a video or comments from youtubers about the Phoenicians (Lebanon) .  Apparently were an Egyptian Pharaoh hired a Phoenician fleet that successfully circumnavigated the entire continent of Africa. Or The Uluburun Wreck: Discovered off the coast of Turkey and dating to 1300 BCE, this Bronze Age shipwreck proved the sheer volume of international trade. It contained copper from Cyprus, tin from Afghanistan, amber from the Baltic Sea [1.5], and African ebony

Dude, awesome narration — you can’t tear yourself away from listening. In the age of AI slop, this kind of quality is pure gold.

23:04 It’s also largely due to the fact that 12 and 60 can be divided in so many more ways than 10. Ten just has factors of 2 and 5, so you can only really count halves or fifths with whole numbers - like a third is 3.3333… or a quarter is 2.5. But for 12, you already have more with 6, 4, 3, and 2. For 60, you have whole numbers for 1/2 (30), 1/3 (20), 1/4 (15), 1/5 (12), 1/6 (10), 1/10 (6), 1/12 (5), 1/15 (4), 1/20 (3) and 1/30 (2). Figuring out how much a third or a sixth of 100 is so much more of a pain than that, versus how easy it is to find out how much 2/3rds or 5/6ths of an hour is. That’s why it’s so convenient to divide fractions of 360 degrees

A few historical events you have to put into context. At the end of the ice age, ice over North America melted. Ice over Canada and northern US states was 10km (6 miles) deep. When that melted, it produced a hell of a lot of water. Lake Agassiz was formed from the melt water. It was massive. The first water release into the ocean was over land, through a river that doesn't exist any more into the Gulf of Mexico. The second release was the largest, releasing the most water. It was through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls, and the Saint Lawrence River into the Atlantic. This second release caused massive sea level rise. Doggerland was the land between Britain and Europe. Doggerland was flooded, becoming the English Channel and North Sea. At the same time, the valley of the Tigris River flooded. It's mouth emptied directly into the Strait of Hormuz. That valley flooded to become the Persian Gulf. Geologists say the shoreline moved 100 metres per year. That's slow enough for anyone to walk ahead of it, but fast enough that people could see it happening. The people who lived there didn't move west, because that was the desert of Saudi Arabia. They didn't move east, because that was the mountains of Iran. They moved upstream. This was approximately 7,000 BC or 9,000 years ago. The oldest tell in discovered in Mesopotamia is 8,500 years old. This indicates the Ubaid people, or at least some of the people who were absorbed into the Ubaid, were refugees from the valley that flooded to become the Persian Gulf.

Note: Bahrain was a hill before the flood. It was an island after.

So where did the people who lived in that valley come from? DNA studies of skeletons found similarities with people from the Indus valley. Before the flood, the mouth of the Indus river and mouth of the Tigris river were just a 2 week walk along the coast. That's close enough that people could easily have walked it. So settlement of the Tigris river valley could have happened thousands of years before the flood. And the flood was 9,000 years ago.

Second thing: Green Sahara, also known as African Humid Period. (Look it up on Wikipedia.) During the ice age, the Sahara was a cold subarctic desert. Between 14,600–14,500 years ago, the Sahara became a lush grassland, with rivers and lakes. The northern 1/3 of the Sahara was grassland with less than 10% woody (trees and shrubs). The southern 2/3 was 10% to 40% woody. Sahara is vast, different parts had different amount of trees. Satellite archaeology has found over 200 stone structures in the Sahara, most of which have never been explored. One structure that was explored has a mural of the area, showing a lake with trees and animals that exist in Africa today, but require water, such as hippopotamus. Another area has parallel lines that look like irrigation canals. The African Humid Period ended 6,000–5,000 years ago. Oh, wait! That ended just about the time Sumerians arrived in Mesopotamia.

I am not saying Sumerians came from the Sahara. I'm saying Sumerian people came from the valley that is now the Persian Gulf. And some elites came from Bahrain. Tigris valley was a lush, fertile valley before it was flooded to become the Persian Gulf. They were forced to leave their fertile valley, then had to make do in Mesopotamia. But Mesopotamia itself was not as dry as it is now. It was more fertile before the environmental change that turned the Sahara into a desert. But it's also likely that the "gods" of Sumer were people from the Sahara. People of the Sahara were forced to leave when it became a desert. The sages were neither normal Sumerian people, nor gods. The sages were different. Were sages a different group from the Sahara, or were they learned elite from Bahrain?

“Big Man” - love it!  The Thai word for a village headman (Mayor) is ผู้ใหญ่บ้าน (Puu Yai Baan) or literally “Big Man of House.”

The people may have still voluntarily taken the poison and then someone else came around and struck their skulls to make sure they didnt accidentally survive. If they were coerced and murdered you would see a lot more varied and extreme evidence of violence.

Since Sumerians are such ancient people, there is a theory that they actually arrived from Persian Gulf, where they lived before it was flooded by the rising seas few thousand years ago. Today it's known that Persian Gulf itself is a rather shallow body of water, so it would've been dry land before the end of last glacial period. It might've been around the same time that Dogger Land got flooded, separating mainland Europe from Britain, and that event itself wasn't that long ago.

I know you didn’t ask, but I want to toss some advice out there in case you agree with me.

Please don’t ever edit the mistakes. Example: “astrology/astronomy”.

There is so much garbage being uploaded every day where no human being was involved in the creation. It’s making it difficult for people to trust that that what they’re seeing is human.

Very soon, actual human charm will be something people long for. I’m already getting 3 minutes into videos almost daily before I hear something that makes it clear that I’m being lied to by a machine. It’s exhausting, and your video was a breath of fresh air.

I expect this channel to blow up pretty quickly, because you’re damn good at this. I look forward to your work in the future.