Passionate about history, journalist François Reynaert publishes "The Great History of the New Worlds", a book in which he traces the history of America and Polynesia before European colonization.
Guest of "Culture Media" Wednesday, he reveals three little-known information on the history of America.
INTERVIEW
In his book
The Great History of the New Worlds
, journalist François Reynaert attempts to tell the story of Polynesia and the Americas from local historical sources, rather than those from European settlers.
Guest from
Culture Médias on
Wednesday
,
he explains what historians have been able to discover by this method, and which he has compiled in his new book.
The first part of his book is devoted to the Americas, with a strong distinction between North America and Latin America.
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François Reynaert recounts in particular the civilizations that have followed one another around what has become of Mexico.
Civilizations with common cultural traits such as the step pyramid, human sacrifices, cocoa cultivation or base 20 calculus.
A game similar to football, where the losing team was sometimes sacrificed
More surprisingly, these civilizations played a very ritualized ball game, a kind of football before its time.
"It's extraordinary, because even today, when we go to visit the sites of what is called Meso-America, we always find something that looks like a stadium," he says.
"It means that there was a lawn with around the stands, we still see them in some places. And in there, we play a ball game. There were two teams facing each other and there is a ball. that we push with the hips and forearms. We are not allowed to touch otherwise. "
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This sport is known to historians, because it was still practiced after colonization by the conquistadors.
"It was an activity common to all the societies of this cultural sphere: the Olmecs, the Aztecs, the Mayas, etc.", specifies the journalist.
And sometimes the losing team was even sacrificed.
Far from sanctifying these societies, François Reynaert in fact recounts the human sacrifices where, sometimes, tens of thousands of prisoners were offered to the Gods one after the other.
But
An express messaging system
Among the things that caught his attention, we also discovered a 20,000 km long path that linked the north to the south of the Inca Empire, from present-day Chile to Colombia.
Quoting a specialist in this society, he describes this path as "the most remarkable work of the 15th century".
"This road network of the Inca Empire went in all four directions. We are in the Andes, so there are lots of places where it is a road which is made with suspension bridges and which are extraordinary", explains he.
The creation is all the more incredible since the Incas knew neither the wheel nor the draft animals.
They had neither cows nor horses.
"On this path, there were messengers who traveled through the Inca Empire. When the Emperor gave an order, messengers left immediately on this road", he adds.
Messengers took turns, warning of their arrival by means of whistles.
Result, and despite the very rugged landscape of the continent, "the messengers went much faster than in Europe at the same time", compares François Reynaert.