Andrew Schulz

Five out of seven of Marcus Aurelius' children died, I'm pretty sure, in childhood.

But all of these babies look like they may have some kind of condition.

Now, what I wonder is when you look at Olmec artifacts, can we look up maybe look up La Venta, L-A-V-E-N-T-A.

But there's this scene here of like maybe a couple dozen people who all have wear jaguar masks.

features about them.

And you'll see in lots of other scenes where you just see these massive groups of people who have these, yeah, so you see that, yeah, that right there, that gathering of people.

So this is like a, this is really, really cool.

These are statues that are a screenshot in time.

So those big pillars standing next to them, those are known as stelae and they had carvings on them.

Well, we found those stelae

uh in the in the jungles or like in the ruins of the city of la venta and then they found this cashier and what this cash is showing is these were jaguar people walking in front of a stele in like a uh in a in a procession some kind of ancient ritual it's like a screenshot of their world but we don't obviously we don't know the context or understand what's going on here but the point i'm getting across is that the olmec heads themselves which always depict normal looking men

are vastly, vastly outnumbered by the amount of artifacts that depict people with werejaguar features.

And so what I start wondering here is, well, my first thought was, okay, this is a whole different class of people.

You clearly have kings that never look like werejaguars, and you have all of these werejaguar people who are, they're like priests or something.

They're like involved in the shamanic realm.

And so I started wondering,

are there people being born with deformities in their world?

Is this some kind of deformity that they revered and that gave you the right to be a part of the priestly class?

So I started looking into mid-1900s Veracruz, Mexico, which is the heart of the Olmec world.

And in the 1970s, there was one medical survey done