Electricity was discovered around 600 bc, electric eels weren’t discovered til the 1740s (named in 1766). Natives in South America likely interacted with them, but we don’t have any records of what they called them. Most likely though we would’ve named them something to do with lightning if we hadn’t figured out electricity when we found them.
https://a-z-animals.com/blog/discover-what-electric-eels-called-before-electricity/
Unfortunately, your article was pretty lazily written. IDK how they even got away with it. It took me about 5 seconds of googling to find that indigenous people in Venezuela called them “Arimna” or “something that deprives you of motion.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/electric-eel-three-species-what-a-shock/597709/
Are you suggesting a blog posted on a-z-animals.com is not a reliable source for facts??
Shocked. I’m absolutely shocked.
I love how things aren’t “discovered” until white people see em. Even though like you pointed out, humans who actually lived in those regions were very well aware of them
Things are only discovered until documented and the information spread, it has nothing to do with race. In the same way Adam Savage said “the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down”
Ah, so you must do things the white way in order for them to count. Got it. By the way, the Aztecs wrote a lot of shit down, Europeans just don’t want hear about it
The Spanish torched much of the cultural heritage of the Aztecs, sure, but the obvious implication of a thing being “discovered” is “when do we start having concrete evidence of this thing being known to our existence?”
So, when someone says “electric eels being discovered” they mean “electric eels becoming concretely documented by people in a way we can verify.”
Also, stuff in our past has been discovered and lost numerous times across the ages. We generally agree that finding the oldest instance of a thing is the “discovery” time of that thing.
I’m Aztec pipil, we didn’t forget all of our history, we were told it as kids. We had all the knowledge, but only when the whites take interest does it become “discovered”. Makes me laugh/cry when I see an add for European chocolate and they say “the Belgians invented chocolate…”
