brb, having some feelings about a 9,000-year-old wizard

Miniminuteman (Milo Rossi) on Youtube does fun long-form videos about “why this pseudo-archaeology conspiracy theory is wrong, and how the actual archaeology of the site they’re talking about is cooler anyway.”

Specific rec: his video about the Bad Dürrenberg skeleton, which was originally spun as “a mighty white male Aryan warrior,” but turns out to be a woman, dark-skinned, and unusually-inactive, possibly because she was so rich and important that people brought stuff to her. (Wikipedia article on her, if you’d rather read than watch/listen.) She lived around 9,000 years ago, and was buried with so much stuff. Milo explains it as “she might have been the richest human alive in 7,000 BCE” levels of stuff.

There’s a lot of suspicion that she was some kind of religious figure. She had a skeletal malformation that meant she could probably cut off a blood vessel to her brain by holding her head just right, which is a perfect recipe for “the ability to open a connection to the spirit world, i.e. induce hallucinations, on-demand.”

(There was also an infant buried with her. Not her biological child, but a close-ish relative. Nobody seems to have any particular theories about that part.)

What gets me is:

Along with some of the possibly-religious ornamentation buried with her, there were similar decorations buried a few feet away…that tested as being from 600 years later. As in, maybe the religion she represented (led?) (started??) was still going strong for the next 6 centuries.

And then another 8+ millennia went by, and present-day humans dug her up, with absolutely no idea what this religion was. Digging up this skeleton is the only reason we know it existed at all.

If these were already a feature of human culture in 7,000 BCE — before the invention of writing! — how many others do you think we’ve had and lost?

Somewhere in Plato’s realm of forms, there’s a graveyard for all the gods humanity has invented, sustained for centuries, and then abandoned so completely that there’s not a speck of knowledge about them left in the physical world.

And it’s a big graveyard.