Any discussion of Mesoamerican archaeology has to be mindful that this one guy - Brigído Lara - managed to forge around 40,000 ceramic objects, manufactured so perfectly they fooled museum curators and researchers for decades.
He may be responsible for forging virtually all the Totonac pottery on record, opening up not just the possibility that some artwork might be fake, but that everything ever written about this culture is nonsense.
To make matters worse, no one knows whether Lara is lying about the objects he claims. This piece for example, depicting Ehecatl, the Mesoamerican wind god, is supposed to be one of his. But it is so perfect that curators think he's faking that this is a fake.
The piece is old enough that Lara would have been a child when he made it, at the earliest, but he knows so much about how it was made that some have suspected he was trained in the art of ceramic forgery - he might be the apprentice to an older master forger.
In 1910, Leopoldo Batres published Antiquedades Mejicanas Falsificadas: Falsificacion y Falsificadores, the first book-length study of forgery in Mexican antiques, "It offers an eyewitness account of a work-shop of forgers located near the pyramids of Teotihuacan"
Faking archaeological artefacts occurred on a near industrial scale in pre 1910 Mexico. The book has many pictures of forger's workshops and vendors plying their wares.
One academic response to Lara's massive output of forged pottery has been to consider them 'original interpretations', and try to find some value in them as pieces of art.
Lara is not alone though, although he seems particularly gifted. Entire museum collections, such as the Jubaozhai Museum in Hebei, have been suspected of being fakes. Producing these objects may employ around 250,000 people in China alone.
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*Haiti Update April 2025* - the international Kenyan led forces have failed to dislodge the gangs now running the capital, cholera outbreaks have been noted, gang rape is rife and the homicide rate continues to increase.
Rival gangs are looking to spread outside of Port-au-Prince, targeting prisons, roads and buses for kidnapping operations. There's something surreal about the fact that a gang faction called 'Taliban' has a stronghold in a suburb of Port-au-Prince called Canaan.
Politically Haiti is currently ruled by an unelected council, since it has been unable to commence elections and there are no legitimate politicians left to rule. The hope is that new elections will be run in Nov 2025, but the gangs are seeking to destabilise this situation.
Around AD 1500 this six month old child was buried under a pile of flat stones and sealskins, in the shadow of a large cliff at Qilakitsoq, Greenland. Centuries later experts determined he was likely buried alive, on the body of his mother 🧵
Qilakitsoq is in eastern Greenland, and was occupied by the Thule Inuit, who arrived circa AD 1250. They pushed out the original Dorset Culture people, and named the site Qilakitsoq, meaning 'that which has little sky', a reference to the high cliffs.
In 1972 a pair of brothers out grouse hunting stumbled upon a burial site in the cliffs.
Somewhere between 500-800 million people rely on cassava root as their main source of carbohydrate. Incredibly it looks like many of them suffer from chronic cyanide poisoning as a result of improper preparation
The quantity of cyanide depends on the cultivar, growing conditions and differences between the root and leaves of the tuber. The amount ranges from 15-1000mg cyanide per kilo of root.
Turning raw cassava root into a safe and edible food requires careful processing to reduce the cyanogenic glycosides. A combination of crushing/fermenting, plus drying seems best - some simple methods like boiling do very little to detoxify the root.
A thread on the Pacific Dwarf mythology that accompanied the Austronesian expansion - the Primordial Little People Type-Tale
The dominant hypothesis as to why many Austronesian-Polynesian cultures have a foundational little-people story, is that when the proto-Austronesians arrived in Taiwan they found a short statured Palaeolithic people already living there.
This theory was recently strengthened by the discovery of 'negrito-like' human remains in Taiwan, dating back around 6000 years. The skull shows many similarities to other Negrito and African San peoples.
In 2016 the British Dental Journal identified a new child protection issue - the sub Saharan practice of gouging out the healthy tooth buds of children, euphemistically called 'Infant Oral Mutilation' (IOM) 🧵
IOM is the practice of removing erupting infant teeth in order to prevent ill physical and spiritual health - the buds are believed to be tooth worms or bad spirits which cause diarrhea and fevers. The cure is to remove the primary teeth.
The teeth are extracted in an extremely crude and painful manner, using bike spokes, penknives, hot nails, fingernails, razor blades etc, without anaesthetic and with the high risk of blood loss and subsequent infection, including passing on HIV or hepatitis B.
Thread of pictures from Australia, taken from the book Peoples Of All Nations (1922) Vol I.
The British authors survey both the European and Aboriginal inhabitants, considering the former to be a "sub-type of the British race... far more assertive, self-confident, ruthless"
"The Sturdy Stock They Raise On Australian Farms" - the authors mention the low birth rate in the cities, but praise the outdoor Australian lifestyle, as well as pointing to new technologies replacing older rural livelihoods.