The Accuracies and Inaccuracies of 10,000 BC (Part 1)

well it's been a while since i did anything about movies and some of the older videos are pretty crappy so i might as well make a new video breaking down the scientific accuracies and inaccuracies of a movie that portrays uh prehistoric stuff so i have an excuse to talk about some science facts and i just watched a pretty meh if not crappy movie called 10000 bc that was filled with a ton of prehistoric and ancient history topics so why not this will be a pretty in-depth discussion of what life was probably like 12 000 years ago based on the scientific evidence and i'll just be using the 10000 bc film to talk about a time period in history that i really love if i haven't told you guys before i'm a massive history buff especially for pre-history in ancient history because it's a very cool point where prehistory meshes with human history and i just find this period fascinating throughout this video i'll be pointing out and highlighting some of the things the movie does right and what it does wrong in accordance to the scientific evidence ranging from paleontological points to historical points to archaeological points i hope you enjoy and more importantly learn something new oh i also got criticized recently for not citing sources directly so for now on i'll try to show my sources more often my citations will appear on screen normally in the corner and at the end of the video there'll be a bibliography and probably in the description as well also for anyone wanting to do research on paleolithic and neolithic stuff be careful to check if your sources say ten thousand bce or ten thousand years ago it can get you in a lot of trouble about 2 000 years worth of it all right i've talked too long already so without further ado this is 10 000 bce there's more scientifically accurate and historically accurate 10 000 bc [Music] so 10 000 bc starts out and what we can assume is 10000 bce at the end of the upper paleolithic period and the beginning of the mesolithic with the tribe of homo sapien hunter-gatherers called the yagal living in what appears to be the euro mountains or maybe siberia it's unclear both these possibilities are accurate modern humans have been living in the urals for about 75 thousand years and several archaeological sites like kapova cave and the ignebieca cave illustrate these humans lived in the region both before and after 10000 bce and often depicted the wildlife that existed there siberia was obviously inhabited by early humans as well the maltoberate culture existed there for a while from about 22 000 bc to 13 000 bce and possessed an interesting culture most famously creating female figurines out of mammoth ivory often referred to as the venus figurines which likely had some sort of religious significance this is no surprise as by this time homo sapiens were very widely dispersed the aboriginals had already been in australia for tens of thousands of years the island of japan had been already inhabited and the ancestors of the native americans whom the multibarrette culture had a genetic close relationship to had already scrambled across the bering land bridge to colonize the new world in fact every continent except for antarctica was already inhabited by man at this point in time the yugal appear to be primarily based on several nomadic cultures living throughout the russian plane during the upper paleolithic the structures look alright to me but i'm not a huge expert in the field but i know that it has been proven that ancient humans did use mammoth bones and other animal remains to build huts in a similar manner many structures like this have been unearthed throughout eurasia interestingly studies on these bones and a single dwelling vary in age by several thousands of years suggesting that these bones were passed down many generations or at least collected from long dead animals the yegal's hunting style is likely not accurate we have very limited unambiguous evidence of humans hunting mammoths directly and we know even fewer about how homo sapiens likely killed woolly mammoths of the little evidence we have a siberian theoretic vertebrae of a woolly mammoth was discovered with a large and deep puncture mark produced by a quartzite spear tip the spear must have been embedded so deep that it would have caused a great deal of pain blood loss and possibly death for the mammoth the fact that the spear tip was embedded so high on the back it implies that it was thrown from a safe distance and not in close combat our close relatives the neanderthal show evidence they similarly attacked from a distance by usage of throne spears close combat seems like it was neither especially favored nor successful it's likely early humans use superior elevation such as on top of cliffs and ledges to throw objects from above like boulders and projectiles onto the mammoths interestingly a study concerning mammoth hunting and yana siberia during the 20000 bce illustrates that the yana humans hunted mammoths sporadically presumably when ivory for tools was necessary it seems likely that mammoth hunting might have been a rare occasion for early humans than the movie suggests the yegal themselves however are mixed back to some extent i must applaud the film for having a cast with such ethnic diversity having actors that are mixed race pacific island descent native brazilian european egyptian african hispanic etc to portray the yugal and in doing so keeping their race ambiguous this is somewhat clever because at this time in history the racial divisions between humans hadn't yet fully formed due to most of our relatively recent migration from africa and the middle east to other parts of the world it's a fascinating subject and i'd love to do a more in depth talk about in another video concerning how humans evolved and diversified to the wide range of facial structures skin colors etc that we see today in this respect the film did well as most movies and most media for that matter about early humans often portray cave people that are way too how do i put this white for their time period a favorite movie of mine called the quest for fire avoids this comment trope really well taking place 80 000 years ago the race and skin color of humans at this time would have been even less differentiated than it would be in 10000 bce to compensate for this many of the actors are of mixed race or in so much makeup and costume that it is too difficult to determine the race race during prehistoric times and now it developed with us is very complex and again a topic i'd like to go and more in depth than at another time so for now i'll focus on the appearance of what people of this particular region in this particular time period looked like firstly although i just complimented the racial and ethnic diversity for it illustrating how little racial and ethnic divisions there were in early humans the ethnic diversity of the tribe is a problem the yagal as a tribe are way too diverse for their time period none of the tribe members look too close in resemblance to one another and this is of course as a result of the cast being of many different ethnic backgrounds most tribes would be much more homogeneous and much closer related like a family unit a tribe would more or less look the same with nowhere near the diversity exhibited in the movie the people who lived in eastern europe at this time did not look exactly like this some of the lighter skinned actors aren't necessarily accurate light skinned in humans was a relatively recent phenomena and traveled back 12 000 years and many if not all european humans still very much possess the dark skin of their african ancestors eight thousand-year-old remains from hungaria showed that humans living there were dark-skinned other humans at the time such as in italy and luxembourg were similarly dark skinned the yenma culture which would later inhabit the general region during the bronzes 4000 bce additionally possessed overwhelmingly brown eyes dark hair and a skin color that was moderately light but still darker than the modern europeans swedish and scandinavian hunter-gatherers 8 000 years ago such as the motala people were in fact lighter skin but they were the minority interestingly these early swedes might have a genetic relationship with east asian and native american populations a certain derived mutation of a gene commonly found in east asians and native americans have been found in these lighter-skinned montala people and other scandinavian populations suggesting there was a gene flow between the several groups ancestors anyways you can see the light skin is very uncommon even just 8 000 years ago go back even further to 12 000 years ago you get the picture that darker skinned dark-eyed and dark-haired europeans would have been the vast majority in the light skin might not have even existed at all in europeans siberian peoples at around this time looked different as well the malta barrett culture was very closely related genetically and probably physically to native americans as well as several still-existing pneumatic siberians such as the quetz the closest non-american living relatives to native americans they also contributed much to the genetic ancestry of the aforementioned yamaya people they possessed brown eyes dark hair and dark skin and many archaeologists have suggested they would have an appearance close to many of their surviving relatives the jagal aren't terrible they just could have been improved upon a little bit if the film is set in siberia then have more native american looking actors or maybe european native american mixed actors if we are in eastern europe have darker skinned dark-haired and brown-eyed actors significantly light-skinned europeans wouldn't be common for a while probably not until about 6000 bce it's a good thing most of the yoga have brown or dark hair color as blonde or red hair probably wouldn't be common for another few thousand years during the later periods of the mesolithic the volga in euro region as well as much of western europe would later be become populated by a sizeable minority of red haired people red or light colored hair and light colored eyes such as blue or green in western eurasia continued and increased during the bronze age and is supported by illustrations by ancient chinese artists of tokarians as well as genetic evidence as of 10000 bce though such traits don't appear to have existed yet evalet the lead female is said to be of a different tribe likely to the southwest her most striking feature bright blue eyes is sadly inaccurate for the time the imitation for blue eyes wouldn't appear in humans for at the very least under their 4 000 to 6 000 years and the earliest evidence of blue-eyed europeans is from about 5700 bce in sweden in the motala people and in some southern european populations around 5000 bce specifically in spain before 8000 bc blue eyes didn't even exist in the human population around the world again interestingly some of these first blue-eyed europeans were not white or light-skinned per se that evidence shows that the blue-eyed spaniards were still dark-skinned the blue-eyed and dark-skinned phenotype is something almost entirely missing in today's european populations and the combination would truly give these early humans a unique appearance later we see the yegals have a shaman living with them called old mother it is highly implied that the old mother is a neanderthal or other type of archaic human such as a denisovan or a red deer cave person i find it most likely she is supposed to be a neanderthal because they are the most famous of the non-homo sapien humans however neanderthals were long dead by this point becoming extinct about 30 000 years prior however they do say she is the very last of her kind it's possible she is a homo sapien with just a larger percentage of neanderthal ancestry than normal neanderthals and humans did interbreed and even modern humans still possess a small amount of neanderthal dna a bronze age homo sapien mummy named otzi is said to have possessed a higher degree of neanderthal ancestry than modern humans and another much older human named wasse1 my romanian is terrible who lived 37 800 years ago additionally had a recent neanderthal ancestry with a neanderthal ancestor four to six generations prior meaning this guy must have had a great great great great great grandfather or mother who was a neanderthal to put that in perspective if i were to go back four to six generations my ancestors would still be living during the civil war yeah that recent of ancestry was a one as well as washi two even retained some neanderthal traits mixed with sapien ones one such was wider cheekbones and remember this is after the extinction of neanderthals so a part of them lived on within some of us perhaps old mother simply has significantly more neanderthal ancestry than her hosts and thus is considered the quote-unquote last of her kind meaning she is the last significantly part neanderthal human left as although neanderthal genes have been watered down by homo sapien ones elsewhere if she is supposed to be an entirely neandertal woman then they did a meh job here she is depicted as shorter than other humans and has a thicker bulkier body type which is accurate to what we know of neanderthals the only problem is that neanderthals or at least some of them had light skin and red or blonde hair old mother on the other hand has darker skin and is played by an actress who is of chinese and black jamaican descent regardless i found this very interesting as her appearance truly felt purposely ambiguous as it was very difficult to tell her ethnicity or race i believe this was a smart decision on the director or casting or whoever's part i bet an entirely different species of human would have this kind of effect on us as their comparatively independent heritage would challenge our traditional ethnic standards and classifications us homo sapiens create our racial and ethnic groupings in accordance to our heritage other human species might break these groupings altogether one can only imagine how something like a homo erectus would have looked if we were able to see their skin color and complexion homo erectus was much more ancient than us and had a great deal more time to diversify into different races than us our racial diversity would look moot by comparison well i digress apart from the nitpicks i think her character design was it was alright it could be worse i've seen much worse neanderthal depictions now enough of the humans for now let's move on to the mammox mamox i forgot how they said it in the movie as said before later in the film we learned that the yegal traditionally hunt and rely on woolly mammoths migrating through their mountain range for food however over time the mammoths came less and less and fewer and fewer the woolly mammoths they depend on are just like old mother going extinct and their traditional way of life with them the mammoths we see in the film are heavily implied to be the last of the entire continent if not the world and this is great accuracy-wise of 10000 bce the film is set right around at the quaternary extinction event when most of the megafauna around the world were becoming extinct lightly due to a combination between the climate change and human predation woolly mammoths were one of the animal populations most affected by this extinction as their population throughout eurasia were rapidly shrinking at the time the film is set woolly mammoth still existed on the mainland mainly in northern parts of eastern europe and asia such as russia estonia and switzerland and ukraine and even northern parts of western europe such as france and britain siberia was probably a part of the world with the densest population of wooly mammoths at the time and was the location where the very last mammoths existed on the mainland and that's why i tend to favor these opening scenes taking place there the very last mammoth population on the mainland was in geez i can't even pronounce that peninsula of siberia 9650 years ago or 7650 bce well after the date given in the film so this is accurate for the time fun fact is that the woolly mammoths continue to exist on inaccessible islands such as saint paul island and wriggle island long after they became extinct on the mainland well into the start of human civilization in fact mammoths were still around as recently as 2000 bce when the great pyramids that i will discuss later were actually being built the mammoth populations on these islands were very small regal island in particular had around 500 to 1 000 individuals at a time the mammoths themselves look pretty good we know a great deal about what moly mammoths look like while they were still alive our ancestors left us a massive collection of depictions of woolly mammoths made from life some of them more detailed than others and scientists have also found multiple well-preserved frozen mammoth specimens which kept soft tissue details like hair skin meat intact over the millennia due to this it is probably the best known and understood of any prehistoric animal so the margins for speculation and fiction for them are relatively small that being said the mammoths are you know very accurate the tusk shape hair coverage musculature fat etc look great and is consistent with evidence one nitpick is that the mammoths look a little too large for me wooly mammoths were about the size of modern male african elephants and the toss which were the male stood about three to around 3.4 meters or 9.8 to 11.2 feet tall at the shoulder females were smaller around 2.6 to 2.9 meters or 8.5 to 9.5 feet tall they were comparably shorter than most other species of mammoth and the reason for this is unknown that being said i did a pretty rough estimate of the height of the woolly mammoths in the film and found that they were in fact oversized in this shot the actor is about 1.9 meters tall now using his height as a measurement i found that the mammoth in the shot was at the shoulder about two and a half measurements tall or around 4.7 meters tall or 15 and a half feet tall i used the same method for other shots in the film and found that other mammoths were similarly oversized this one for instance was about the same size as the one here the size of the mammoth is somewhat inconsistent in other shots of the film as in some scenes they are larger or smaller than others this scene in particular has a mammoth being absurdly ginormous standing 5.5 meters or 18 feet tall at first i thought this was just a perspective thing with the person supposed to be further away from the camera than the mammoth but i believe the fact this character is hitting the mammoth with his staff illustrates they are supposed to be roughly the same distance from the camera this one here is probably the largest mammoth in the film i tried to do a very rough estimate and came up with something absurd around 8.5 meters or 30 feet tall at the shoulder about as large as the albert the bull statue in iowa the size of the mammoths is less comparable to woolly mammoths and closer to the the colombian mammoth which existed in the americas this scaling up of the size of the mammoths was likely done to make them look more imposing and intimidating to the audience and i understand that just remember real woolly mimics weren't this huge but let me clarify that they were still very big animals nonetheless a character in the film says they found the lead bull this is also very inaccurate we know that woolly mammoths were likely matriarchal just like modern elephants the evidence shows that just like african elephants males were kicked out of the herd upon reaching sexual maturity and thus bulls weren't allowed in the social structure a certain discovery can give some insight of why this is the best preserved adult woolly mammoth head was that of a bull nicknamed the yaki jer mammoth the specimen has temporal glands between the ear and the eye a feature that is the same in bull elephants the glands would secrete temporane and the brain would produce testosterone resulting in the bull entering a heightened aggressive state called must during the mating season due to this both mammoths and elephants would kick out males as they would be a detriment to the stability of the herd real mammoth herds would likely instead have possessed a matriarch an aged lead female with a large amount of experience just like modern elephants wools likely would have been primarily solitary probably only forming small groups with other males only interacting with larger herds in search of females the williams are overall accurate with some minor inaccuracies so good job on that filmmakers much of the opening scenes are pretty great accuracy wise and doesn't really possess too many things anachronistic for the given time period however as the film goes on it seems like it gets progressively more inaccurate and how do i say this shlocky over time i mean oh my god how embarrassing well i guess i'll have to handle this next time tell me if i should make more videos like this in the future or just stick with my other series hope you enjoyed it and learned something new see you next time end of part one [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: TREY the Explainer

Views: 1,533,776

Keywords: 10000 bc, Prehistory, science, cavemen, paleolithic, neanderthal, mammoth, prehistoric

Id: ZiWLm7ASxL4

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 18 2017