Tagged for OEG Connect: Ancient Americas - YouTube

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What’s of interest? Ancient Americas - YouTube

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Welcome to the Ancient Americas YouTube channel. I’m your host, Pete and together, we will explore the rich and beautiful pre-columbian history of North and South America from the initial migration of humans into the Americas, to the great empires of Mesoamerica and the Andes and everything in between.

This is a history that I find endlessly fascinating but is often neglected in classrooms and misunderstood in popular media. This channel is my effort to educate you, one member of a curious public, on this period’s history and its people.

If you’re tired of seeing this obscure history boiled down to aliens and giants and just want an honest approach, please subscribe to the channel. There’s a lot to learn out there!

Where is it?: https://www.youtube.com/c/AncientAmericas

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This is a fascinating, informative, series of history videos, about 30 minutes each. These are gems!

I found it the indirect way, this all started with reading the 404 Media Post on one of those trends of AI slop, in this case, generated videos of a genre I never heard of “biring hostory videos to fall asleep to” (?), channels with names like

“Sleepless Historian” and several similar-sounding channels like “Boring History Bites”, “History Before Sleep”, “The Snoozetorian”, “Historian Sleepy”, and “Dreamoria”. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall a

The author then presented the Ancient Americas channel as an example of something perhaps, but maybe not, being threatened by AI slop:

I worried about whether AI slop creators would try to emulate creators like Pete, who clearly take great pride in researching and filming their videos. Ancient Americas releases about one 45-minute video per month about indigenous cultures from the Western Hemisphere. Each of his videos features a substantive bibliography and works cited document, which explains the books, scientific papers, documentaries, museums, and experts he sources his research from. Every image and visual he uses is credited with both where it came from and what license he’s using. Through his videos, I have learned an incredible amount about cultures I didn’t know existed, like the Wari, the Zapotecs, the Calusa, and many more. Pete told me in an email that he has noticed the AI history video trend on YouTube as well, but “I can’t say much about how accurate these videos are as a whole because I tend to steer clear of them. Life is far too short for AI.”

So its refreshing to find original content like Ancient Americas, and I was drawn right in to the episode on the Hohokam, which I knew some history (not much really) about the civilizations that built an impressive and engineered system of canals in the region around Phoenix, and then mysteriously vanished.

I remember that when the first white settlers came and found these canals, they were able to clean them out and use them.

Now I need to go finish the video.

Is good educational content really threatened by the flood of generated “stuff”? Maybe, maybe not.