Andrew Schulz

You would expose the kid to the elements, give him back to the gods because you can't afford to take care of someone who's lame, right?

Right.

Someone who has a birth defect that's not going to be able to be a participating part of society that's going to hold you back.

Can't do that.

Also, the Greeks, which permeates into the rest of the European world, we care about aesthetics.

You would like your kid to be born fully anatomically normal and healthy.

And so they really prioritize that.

But when the Spaniards arrived in the Aztec capital, in Moctezuma's palace...

When they got up into his palace, they saw that his palace was filled with people of all different kinds of deformities and strange, like people who were so deformed that they were almost like creatures, almost like they had been bred to be that way.

Like they were really, really strange people.

And this surprised the Spaniards that these were like

venerated people that Moctezuma wanted to hang out with.

He saw them as being blessed by the gods, that there was something unique and important about them.

They saw this with dwarves.

Dwarves would have high status because they would look as people who were touched by the gods, that maybe they were clairvoyant of some kind, or there's something special and different about them.

So the Native Americans had this inverted view of deformities and things like that.

Well, in the Olmec world,

This is my personal theory.

I don't know that there's a single other scholar on the planet of like the 12 of us that there are for the Olmec world that would agree with this.

But in the Olmec world, you see there are no gods.