What on Earth Happened to the Incas?

if any Native American civilization truly had an impressive impact as a potential powerhouse the Incas definitely would have been a good candidate only these are not the Incas and this is not the Inca Empire technically artifacts and bruinz from this former great power are scattered throughout the constantly historically neglected continent of South America and it's safe to say that at one point this Empire was the most isolated great power in all of history and was divided between its for regional constituents or regions the inhabitants referred to their empire not as the Inca Empire but as the Talton suyu meaning four regions in Quechua as Inca is neither a nationality or language but rather a title given to the nobility or ruling class and hence Inca Empire was a term coined by the Spaniards upon the discovery of this region but hey that's the vernacular we use so I'll stick to it but sadly today it would appear that no political cultural or genetic legacy of the Incas remain in South America and they have simply been replaced by a multitude of new Hispanic nations or have they today let's discuss some of the history of these so called Incas what their lives were like and how they rose fast and burned bright but ultimately met an untimely demise as mentioned previously unlike the Aztecs or Mayans who had a central unified culture and language that being Nevada land mine respectively the Inca Empire had a plethora of highly heterogeneous cultures scattered throughout its relatively colossal territory many of whom may appear very similar but are quite distinct when you take the time to learn about them because there was no written language in the Americas practive the 1500s it's very difficult to determine the ethnogenesis of the various cultures of the Empire but they can generally be easily distinguished from other Amerindians of South America being known as the Andean civilizations lying around the Andes mountain range while the more primitive isolated tribes to their east are known as Amazonian cultures obviously lying in the Amazon rainforest coupled a lack of literacy with the fact that so much information and so many cultures were lost in the Spanish conquest of the Americas and we may never know the true phylogenetic relationship between languages of South America but from what anthropologists can gather native South Americans descend from a few wave of migration from the north with the older groups generally tearing haplogroup q3 while being more recent groups who have arrived a couple thousand years later belonged to c3 some have speculated that the c3 haplogroup and many other innovations in the Americas might have actually come from Polynesian sailors from Oceania but that's a topic for another time it's strange to think about but the Inca Empire actually had a relatively recent rise to power with the Incas originally being a Quechua speaking tribe located deep in the Andean mountains in modern-day Peru in a modest town called Cusco and now I'm not talking about that Emperor Kuzco the king of this small city-state known as Inka Roca dreamed of greatly expanding his control from this small mountainous Kingdom and succeeded in conquering a few neighbouring tribes before he died in 1388 at the age of 103 but it was really his great-grandson Pecha Kucha Inca you punky who fulfilled this wish by conquering the northern Andes in the mid 1400s keeping the administrative center in Cusco but constructed Machu Picchu as his personal estate although contrary to popular belief this was never the capital city Pecha Kucha son Topa or Tupac was responsible for the great expansion south and a little bit further north creating an empire stretching all the way from modern-day Colombia to Chile with the eastern cut-off generally being the border between the Andes mountain and the vast untamed Amazon which even the Incas thought wasn't worth conquering or exploring and for nearly half a century the Incas were the greatest uncontested power of the Americas up until the Spaniards came knocking at its height the Inca Empire was about 2.2 million square kilometres about the size of Greenland or a little larger than modern-day Mexico but the reason this is so er Herbal is the fact that the empire stretched an unimaginably long latitude and the only pack animals the citizens had were the infamous llamas and alpacas two closely related species actually more akin to camels than cows or horses even though in the modern age a few countries such as Chile or Vietnam are noteworthy for their geographical elongated shapes in pre-industrial nations this was quite rare as the logistics of north-south communication became quite the hassle so the fact that the Incas were able to not only conquer a huge stretch of land from the rough Andes do a huge chunk of the Pacific coast of South America using nothing but glorified mountain camels and crude seafaring vessels is quite impressive now you see by this time Hernan Cortez had just finished conquering the Aztecs a bit north and Mesoamerica and attracted by potential wealth and fame his cousin Francisco Pizarro led an expedition south with a couple hundred men and discovered tombs in modern Peru a northern city of the Inca Empire and impressed with what he saw quickly traveled back to Spain in order to obtain permission from the crown to conquer this new land but unknown to them their plan was already in motion the Spaniards who arrived on the northern shores of the Inca Empire had already deployed their deadliest weapon unknowingly to the natives they interacted with epping disease within two years a smallpox epidemic had swept through the Inca Empire utterly devastating the population as it's estimated that out of the roughly 10 million pre epidemic inhabitants at least 75% died of smallpox including the Inca Empire by the way whose death directly led to an even more disastrous civil war between his two sons out of whoppin Huascar with the former eventually coming out on top when Pizarro arrived in the region with his brothers a few years later they were utterly shocked by the sheer devastation seen throughout the land being virtually unrecognizable as the once great power that ruled this allowed the Spaniards to lead a campaign against the greatly weakened husk of an empire with only a few hundred men although they did attempt to gather other native allies from the surrounding areas in their conquest with various degrees of success incas hence fell quite quickly to the incoming spaniards due to a variety of factors including the population being crippled by the smallpox epidemic the civil war that transpired only months prior in the fact that many of the Inca elite that opposed how to Appa actually welcomed the Spaniards in were rewarded after the new government was installed Tupac Shakur I mean Tupac Amaru last emperor of the Inca Empire or any Native American Empire was too fine until the end leaving the surviving Incas and many revolts against the Spanish rule for decades from the fringes of the Andes until he was captured by Spanish officials and executed in 1572 thus ending the line of great Inca rulers the main ethnic groups in the Empire at the time of its downfall with the quechua aymara and several much smaller groups many of whom have gone extinct since the fall of the Inca Empire so it's very difficult to call any single group the real successors of the Incas but needless to say following the incorporation into New Spain the former Inca territory which was renamed Peru would attract many Spaniards who brought African slaves and the third groups gradually intermixed in the following centuries creating a new dominant class of mestizos it's important to realize that many near full-blooded Amerindians or whites living in Latino countries may identify as mestizo due to it being more of a cultural identifiers to them rather than a racial and meaning someone of Quechua or Spanish descent may call themselves mestizo simply because they identify with both European and indigenous aspects of their country's culture so although in the official Peruvian census of 2017 only 26 percent of the country identified as indigenous this number is almost certainly a bit higher and it's actually been found through genetic studies that unlike the mestizo or mixed-race population of Paraguay in Peru the mestizos are far more likely to have more Indian heritage than European and it was much more common for his fantasised high class Quechua was to marry into the mestizo population giving a more balanced gender distribution than Paraguay as it was an only Spanish men whirring indigenous women with indigenous men marrying outside as well in the meantime Peruvians Bolivians and Ecuadorians have shaped their own national identities placing less of an emphasis on racial background as in the past century and a half ever since their independence from the Spanish Empire there have been waves of migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe including Italians Jews crow Apes or poles as well as from East Asia interestingly enough as I discussed in an older video Peru has one of the largest populations of Chinese and Japanese ancestry in the world and it was and is incredibly common for third and fourth generation Asian immigrants to marry into other racial groups of these countries hence you may have someone of mixed Japanese a Mara or Chinese Quechua ancestry tearing the blood of ancient civilizations from both sides of the Pacific if you were to liquidate the population of Peru and separate the DNA of its citizens into their component races the genome would be nearly two-thirds Amerindian a stark contrast to most other former Spanish colonies such as Mexico Colombia Venezuela Costa Rica or Paraguay which all have a majority European genome and the same can be said for Bolivia especially Bolivia which due to its isolated nature has a far higher degree of Amerindian admixture this makes Peru Ecuador and Bolivia some of the only countries in the America where a majority of the National genome is of Amerindian origin meaning that a majority of their population has some degree of ancestry from the previous Empire of the Incas although as I discussed all citizens of the Empire did not refer to themselves as Incas as this was a term reserved only for the ruling class in fact many Latin American leaders following independence from the Spanish claimed partial descent directly from the Inca monarchs with various degrees of truth in these claims today over 60 million people live in territory that was formerly a part of the tahuantinsuyo and although it's near impossible to tell how many of these inhabitants are descendants of the true Incas it's certain that the majority of the 60 million has some degree of ancestry from the former citizens of the Empire the chances of any neo Inca Empire rising from the ashes is virtually zero although the Incas themselves are long gone and never coming back their influence can still be felt across South America and the Hispanic world as inti the Sun of Magog prevalent throughout the polytheistic practices of the Incas is actually on the flags of both Argentina and Uruguay curiously enough the latter of the two having pretty much no connection with the Incas but this just goes to show how much of an impact the Incas had even if their reign burned bright and fast please tell me your thoughts on the Inca Empire in the comments and their modern descendants in Latin America and for today's poll answer what you think happened to the last of the Incas and as always this has been Mason thanks for watching everyone and I'll see you next time

Channel: Masaman

Views: 106,475

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Keywords: masaman, What on Earth Happened to the Incas, What happened to the Incas, What happened to the Incans, Incas, Incans, Mayans, Aztecs, Inca Empire, Incan Empire, Cuzco, Machu Picchu, Tupac, Inca Emperor, Incan Emperor, Incan People, Inca People, Peru, Bolivia, History of the Inca Empire, Peruvians, Bolivians, Genetics of Peruvians, History of Peru, Spanish Empire, Viceroyalty of Peru, Spanish Conquistadors, Francisco Pizarro, Conquistadores, Spanish Conquest of the Inca Empire, Conquistador

Id: s4GfOtXjC-o

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 26 2018