tocharians

@logaems thanks, yeah after looking them up they seem really interesting too, eastward migrating Indo Europeans with rock cut cave frescos, mummification, Buddhism, their own script etc.

Hm but why do we want to rate/rank/compare them?

@zyc I was kinda hoping this poll would:

1. Raise awareness of these cool civilisations to people who, like me, had never heard of them due to near total absence from even historically themed media

2. Be a conversation starter about underrated civilisations in general, possibly leading to me learning about even more similarly underrated examples

@TheAllMemeingEye gotcha; my hot take is - all culture (as long as it does not contain elements of harming others) are quite cool! And it is a very fluid concept as well

Tlingit culture:

Norte Chico perhaps slightly better known than most of these, but that's my personal fave.

@bens Fair enough, that is definitely a cool choice :)

My personal criteria for super obscure and underrated was basically whether, when I've been scouring through wikipedia building a mental map and timeline of civilisations in each region and time period throughout history, and I come across it, I had surprisingly literally never heard of it referenced anywhere else before, despite it seemingly being super significant or impressive for its time and place, and despite me having frequently consumed world history themed memes and educational YouTube videos for several years, but obviously that's biased to my personal experience lol

In the case of Norte Chico, it very narrowly doesn't fall into this category because alongside the Olmec, Sumer, Indus Valley, and Xia Dynasty, it has a fame boost from being the very first cradle of civilisation in its region, and thus occasionally gets brief passing mentions in the mentioned memes and videos

In fact really the one that left the fertile soil in the Americas, Terra someting or other with huge amounts of composted organic waste that was anthropogenic

@JussiVilleHeiskanen Hmmm, I'm not sure which one you're referring to, the closest I can think of is the Maya El Mirador civilisation where they were lifting fertile earth out of the bogs to use for crop growing, but they accidentally did so much deforestation in the surrounding area for wood ash to make cement that all the infertile surface soil no longer held by tree roots flowed into and buried the bogs, leading to crop failures and civilisation collapse

@TheAllMemeingEye I think they are referring to this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

@spiderduckpig ah cool, skimming through the article it seems like the main specifically named proto civilisation using it was the Marajo culture

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marajoara_culture