Mercurial

The existence of religion in the Americas has been dated as far back as 2250 BC. To find remnants from a culture so ancient - for America - is quite a remarkable event. However, I remember a discussion about the possibility of older pieces, located all of them in hard to reach places. The thing goes like this: since the missionaries purposefully destroyed everything that seemed to compete with the Catholic religion, only in those really remote places any indication of previous cultures or developments would remain, as the mere presence of carved stones and the like would be a signal of heresy which had to be erased.
Thus, the claims from anthropologists about discoveries in the savannahs of the Orinoco, or high in the Andes, in lost or hidden cities - where the hand of the missionary movement could not reach.
It would be interesting to se whether this staff god is somehow connected to the later legends of staffed strangers - they all had staffs - that went around giving knowledge and saving the communities from the disasters that ignorance or simply evil would bring upon them.
And whether we may need one of those now.