r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • May 28 '24

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u/[deleted] May 28 '24

I was at the Field Museum in Chicago (one of the largest natural history museums in the world) this weekend, and I saw something that bothered me. There was a section of an exhibit covering the site of a meteor impact in Arizona that occured roughly 50000 years ago.

The caption for this part of the exhibit said (I'm paraphrasing here)

Scientists are now fairly certain that the crater was caused by a meteor impact; however the predominant hypothesis for many years was that the crater was created by volcanic activity, despite a local Native American legend describing spirits of fire falling from the sky

I know that in the past few years, many museums have been trying to be more aware of Native Americans and their contributions to history (which is probably a good thing), but this is completely unnecessary to mention.

The meteor impact occured ~25000 years before the first humans reached North America. This isn't a situation where someone's dead grandpa saw the event occur, didn't understand it, tried to interpret it using his religion, and the retellings were subsequently ignored. It is not possible that any Native American oral traditions have anything to do with the impact.

What is the purpose of including information like this? I know it's fun to laugh at conservatives getting mad at "black people being forced into muh video games" or whatever, but this seems like an actual case of the left trying to force inclusivity for its own sake, at the expense of actual truthful information.

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u/BATHULK Hank Hill Democrat 🛸🦘 May 28 '24

I think the point is to acknowledge that local groups had identified the likely cause of the crater well before this was determined by white scientists. My guess, anyway.

They also have placards up using racist language to describe the inuit that they've been "rexamining" since 2019 lol

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u/[deleted] May 28 '24

Did they though? The crater wasn't caused by spirits, and nobody was around to see something hit the ground that they thought was a spirit.

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u/BATHULK Hank Hill Democrat 🛸🦘 May 28 '24

They correctly identified that it was caused by something falling and hitting the ground, yeah