Dr. James Fitzsimmons

If you think about the Americas, the Americas doesn't have, there's no real beast of burden at all.

Um, there's no wheel, um, other than for children's toys, um, because there are no beasts of burden to pull said wheels.

My wife's always like, what about the wheelbarrow?

And I have no answer to that.

No one's ever found an ancient wheelbarrow.

So I don't, I don't know what to do about that.

Right.

But there's no wheels, there's no wheeled vehicles and there's no beast of burden that

The metal, there's no real metal tools.

You get some things that are like bronze in South America, but generally speaking, for most of Mesoamerican prehistory, you don't really get bronze, right?

towards the end a little bit.

And so because there's none of that, it means that there's a premium placed on human labor, on like how much labor you can throw at a problem.

So how many warm bodies can you throw at a problem?

And so things are largely solved by throwing warm bodies at a problem.

So you see these pyramids, every single pyramid that you see, every block is cut with human hands, brought there by human labor.

There's nothing else, right?

And so I think for Central America, at least, they value that jade because it represents labor.

It's like, oh, you've had to spend a bajillion hours making this.

Imagine someone with some tar pitch on something, a string or something, and it's like, just start cutting.

You know, here, what do I want you to do?