Andrew Schulz

These babies are being revered.

Why would we have baby statues?

Well, just my theory...

uh and one of the only actually one of the only skeletons that we have ever found of the olmec world is a baby we hardly ever find adult skeletons but what i wonder is if when children were born with deformities they were revered and they were seen as being touched by the gods and they were honored with these little statues like maybe their parents would have them commissioned when they would die and maybe a lot of children

Well, we know in general that a lot of children died in ancient times.

Infant mortality was extremely high.

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.