This Mysterious Cliff Dwelling in Colorado Could Rewrite History!

For centuries, the sudden disappearance of the ancestral Puebloans from their massive stone cliff cities was considered one of archaeology's greatest unsolved cold cases. But modern DNA technology, combined with local history and regional lore, is finally rewriting everything we thought we knew about what happened to them. From 800-year-old Turkey DNA that solved an ancient migration path to the astronomical genius of Chaco Canyon, let's dive in. The Ancient Turkey DNA That Rewrote Native American History 800 years ago, an advanced society vanished from the American southwest without a trace. They left behind massive sandstone castles, cliff dwellings, and one of the biggest cold cases in archaeological history. For centuries, scientists believed the ancestral Puebloans simply disappeared into thin air. But the key to solving their fate wasn't hidden in ancient artifacts or human remains, it was buried in the DNA of ancient turkeys. A quick note on terminology before we jump in. You might know these ancient builders as the Anasazi, but today, archaeologists and native descendants refer to them as the Ancestral Puebloans. The name Anasazi actually comes from a Navajo word that roughly translates to ancient enemy. I'll be using both terms today simply because Anasazi is what most people know and search for, but Ancestral Puebloans is the most accurate term. In the late 1200s, the Ancestral Puebloans suddenly disappeared. Science had been trying to understand who they were and why they abandoned their homeland for years. Now, using DNA from ancient turkeys, a group of researchers say they have the missing piece of the puzzle. One of the problems scientists have had in tying the ancient Ancestral Puebloans to other native populations in America is that tribes are often reluctant to allow scientists to study ancient human remains. Modern Puebloan peoples also believe they know exactly what happened to the Anasazi. Their oral history, passed down from one generation to the next, says that they relocated from Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde to the northern Rio Grande region in New Mexico. However, scientists have never been able to prove this through archaeology. That's what the oral history says, but the physical proof isn't there yet. So, anthropologist Scott Ortman from the University of Colorado tried a different tactic. Since the local tribes wouldn't let scientists analyze ancient human bones, Scott turned to the animals that the ancient people ate. The Anasazi had domesticated turkeys. They were a reliable and noisy source of food. Scott analyzed the mitochondrial DNA of hundreds of turkey bones. The turkey bones were plentiful, found all throughout the Anasazi's homeland near Mesa Verde. Researchers then compared the genetic material from Mesa Verde turkeys to turkeys discovered in the northern Rio Grande region. If the mitochondrial DNA, meaning the maternally inherited genetic material, was a match between turkeys, that would confirm the oral histories. If the turkeys matched, it would suggest the Anasazi fled Mesa Verde and relocated to the Rio Grande, taking their turkeys with them. And sure enough, that's what the evidence provided. The DNA showed that before 1280 AD, the turkeys living in Mesa Verde and the turkeys in northern Mexico were unrelated in the maternal line. But after 1280, after the Anasazi abandoned their cliff dwellings, the turkeys' maternal line did match. The most likely explanation is that the ancient Puebloans moved to join a different population already living to the north. They took their turkeys along for the ride and still survive near the Rio Grande to this day. The two people population of New Mexico are descendants of the ancients who lived in the northern Rio Grande region. These folks are almost certainly the surviving members of the original ancestral Puebloans. But who were the ancestral Puebloans really? Where did their story actually begin? And what drove them to abandon their stone cities in the first place? Science may finally have an answer for where they went, but the exact trigger behind their sudden exodus remains one of history's greatest unsolved questions. The Mystery of the Ancient Puebloan Peoples Some of the most impressive prehistoric ruins on planet earth are in the American southwest. Thousands of archaeological sites are spread across Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. These sites are a reminder that an advanced civilization dominated the area long before Europeans arrived. These people have been revered for centuries as the ancestors of modern populations of Puebloans, from the Hopi to the Zuni. The civilization boasted its own unique architecture, its own system of government, technology, and its own beliefs. They watched the stars, they developed irrigation, and they appear to have been relatively peaceful. With their population concentrated around Mesa Verde, the Anasazi flourished from 600 to 1300 BC. Then, as you know, they took a very long walk and never returned. Even with the address of their new home identified, thanks to the turkey bones, there are still a ton of mysteries to solve. Where were they before they arrived in the American southwest? What caused them to flee their homes? And how did they establish such a successful civilization in a place that was so hostile towards life? They probably established their civilization by utilizing every last resource at their disposal. Starting around 300 AD, archaeologists believe that prehistoric farmers began looking for marshes where the water table was close to the surface. They then used these marshes to experiment with crop growing. These may have been some of the earliest farmers in America. They grew corn, squash, beans, and everything else they foraged. They had their crops, but they also had acorns, grass seeds, wolfberries, sunflower seeds, yucca root, the list goes on. Even in a place that seems as desolate as the southwest, there is plenty of food. There were way more wild animals to eat 2000 years ago than there are today. But the good times can't last when the population keeps rising. As the Anasazi became more and more comfortable, they had more and more children. As their population skyrocketed, so did their food intake. They suddenly needed more complicated solutions to keep their larger communities fed. This became a compounding problem as those marshes I mentioned before started drying up. By the time the civilization reached its peak, they were looking over the precipice into disaster. Their society had grown too large, while their available resources had shrunk at the same time. Solutions included dry farming, trying to produce larger crop yields, and trying to more efficiently process food. You can see this in the archaeological record, where they built increasingly larger storage facilities. That way, when they had a good year, they could try to offset the inevitable bad year. In the Chaco region of New Mexico, where the Anasazi began to consolidate their power around 800 AD, they employed a new farming method. They placed their crops near the steep slopes of cliffs to collect water running off the tops of the mesas. The water running from the mesas became part of a sophisticated irrigation system, supplying water to crops that would have otherwise died. This ingenious system helped keep their crops growing, but they could only grow so much. What they couldn't grow themselves, they procured through trade. Scientists say there was a vast trade network across North America, one that didn't recognize borders. These people traded with cultures in Mexico, Louisiana, California, the Great Plains, and maybe as far away as Canada. They also built a local trade network to shuffle food around, moving extra crops from thriving settlements to communities in need. Combining clever resource sharing with smart farming kept their growing population fed for centuries. But as impressive as their agriculture was, their engineering is where things get truly wild. How did they build massive ancient centers like Pueblo Bonito and Havenweep? It definitely wasn't easy, especially since they pulled it off without complex tools. They had no horses, no donkeys, and no wheels. When they needed wood for their cliffside cities, they had to walk 50 miles into the mountains, cut down a spruce tree, and walk it back. There were no wagons and no beasts of burden to pull them. The answer to how they built their great cities is determination and hard work. Hundreds of thousands of sandstone blocks were carved into shape and stacked to build their cities. These people had expert building planners who drew up blueprints and presumably a reliable workforce. Pueblo Bonito is the massive, famous ancient complex located in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. It is the largest and most famous great house built by the ancestral Puebloans, and it served as the center of the Chacoan world between 850 A.D. and 1150 A.D. At its peak, Pueblo Bonito stood four to five stories high and contained over 600 rooms and dozens of ceremonial kivas. Everyone's always fascinated by Pueblo Bonito's incredible size and complexity, but few realized that the city's construction period only lasted about 150 years. In the middle of the 1100s, the whole society in the Chaco region declined. The archaeological records suggest it happened abruptly over just a couple of years. Whatever happened, it must have been serious. It was enough to scare people out of Pueblo Bonito and to push the farmers into the upland districts. A little while later, there was a mass movement of small local communities migrating into the two most massive cities of Hovenweep and Mesa Verde. It was like the countryside emptied out into these places in some fruitless effort to have safety in numbers. From 1220 to 1280, these communities just burst. The cities swelled with people from the countryside, and when the pressure was too much, they collapsed and society crumbled. But what happened? What forced all the country folk into the cities, and then what ruined the cities? Perhaps some answer can be found in the tantalizing rock art and mystical petroglyphs that the Anasazi left behind. Scattered across the walls of Chaco Canyon are hundreds and hundreds of rock art images. One of them, known as the Supernova Pictograph, is suspected of showing an actual supernova that occurred in some distant part of the universe. The image is a handprint, a crescent moon, and a star in bright red pigment. Some experts think it represents an incredibly bright light seen in the night sky in 1054 AD. The Anasazi, having no true knowledge of what they were witnessing, commemorated the bright light by painting a humongous glowing red star. Out of all the rock art in America, this is one of the few that feels overwhelmingly like a celestial event. Although no one knows for sure what the image represents, with other experts saying it could be a solstice or a comet, many believe it shows the light from a supernova. Trying to understand Anasazi government, beliefs, astronomical prowess, cultural traditions, it's all incredibly difficult because they left no written records of themselves behind. Going back to their pictographs, most of them are geometric designs, mysterious figures, and bizarre spiral motifs. Scientists know the Anasazi performed cosmological ceremonies at Chaco Canyon. There are architectural features in the great houses that appear to align with celestial features, be they planetary bodies or events. For example, some windows were oriented to enhance solar observations, likely part of predicting the seasons. Of course, knowing when seasons were coming was critical for planting crops at the right time and harvesting at the right time. The Quina'a's great houses near Crown Point were engineered specifically so that on the summer solstice, at the crack of dawn, the sun would rise perfectly above the east-facing courtyards. On the morning of the solstice, people would have walked out of the great houses, turned to the sky, and seen the exact same celestial event. The ancestral Puebloans were skilled astronomers, but without written records, it's hard to know a lot about them. One of the biggest debates among scholars is what type of government they had. Nobody knows the specific details, but the conditions of some skeletons have given us some clues. When scientists compared the skeletons discovered in the great houses with the skeletons found on farmsteads, they discovered a major discrepancy in the bones. Those who had occupied the great houses were taller, they ate better food, and they had healthier babies who survived birth more frequently. While there is nothing else specifically to denote the great house skeletons as belonging to elite members of society, it sure is what the data suggests. Whoever lived and worked in these great houses was healthier, stronger, and enjoyed a more carefree lifestyle. On the flip side, the farmers were commoners. Archaeologists don't know if there was an elite class of priests and nobility, or if there just happened to be certain families who controlled aspects of community life. There were certainly some people who were better off, but what titles they held are unknown. Scientists can't even agree on whether there was social violence in Anasazi culture. This is a little problematic because in the local Puebloan folklore and in Hopi mythology, the Anasazi are often described as violent and cannibalistic. That's what the mythology says, but it's not what the archaeological record says. Although they did experience some level of violence, every culture does, and theirs appears to have been significantly less than others. You know who was violent? The Spanish. It's extremely telling that when Spanish conquistadors met the Puebloan communities in the 16th century, they were shocked at how peaceful they were. These weren't the Anasazi per se, but their local descendants living in small, peaceful communities near the ruins of the ancients. The Anasazi boasted an advanced culture of astronomers, architects, and even road builders. Scientists have found evidence of almost 400 miles of roads connecting different cities and sacred cultural centers. They appeared in the southwest, made do with the resources that they had, and then fled when those resources ran out. The best explanation that anyone has for the collapse of the Anasazi is drought. Starting in the 1100s, North America began to experience drought-like conditions, and things got progressively worse, forcing the Anasazi out of certain regions and concentrating them into others. They likely left places that were drying up in favor of places that were still flourishing. But in 1276, the Great Drought came, and there was nowhere to run. The Great Drought is believed to have lasted until 1299. This would have been a period with no rain, or at least such little rain that the crops all withered and died. First, the farmers fled, seeking whatever food there was in the cities, but when the food supply truly crashed, the cities probably became cesspools of violence, famine, and sickness. Their society did a 180, going back to the way things had been when they lived in smaller, more tightly-knit communities. The big cities were abandoned, left to crumble into dust. By the time the Spaniards arrived three centuries later, the Anasazi's descendants had recovered and were living in small, peaceful bands throughout the southwest. Breaking into smaller, scattered communities made survival much easier during hard times. Think about a major drought. If 30,000 people are all relying on a single water source, resources collapse immediately. But if only 30 people depend on that same well, everyone has a fighting chance to make it through. When famine, disease, or political turmoil hits, massive cities become death traps, while smaller groups can easily adapt and survive. Let me know in the comments, but don't go anywhere yet. I still need to tell you more about the origins of the Anasazi, and they might be a little more extraterrestrial than anyone had imagined. Get ready for a wild ride! The Anasazi, the Anakim, and the Nephilim As you know, Anasazi is not what the ancestral Puebloans actually called themselves. Nobody knows what name they had for themselves at the time, but the term Anasazi comes from the Navajo. Roughly translated, it means ancient ones, or ancient ancestral enemies. It definitely suggests there was conflict between the Navajo and the Anasazi, but the exact details are murky at best. The Hopi and the Zuni told tales of cannibalism and violence in connection with the Anasazi, and they weren't the only ones. The Paiute also referenced the Anasazi in their ancestral traditions. Apparently, they were red-haired giants who had to be exterminated. Red-haired giants don't really fit in with everything I've told you about today, but everything you've already heard came from mainstream archaeologists. Now, I'm taking you into the world of alternate history and fringe theories with a little sprinkle of Native American lore for flavor. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, who was the daughter of Paiute chief Winnemucca, wrote a book about a group of people known as the Si-Te-Ka. Sarah supposedly didn't just fabricate the narrative, but she compiled it from the oral histories of the Paiute. According to Sarah's book, the Si-Te-Ka was a race of orange-haired giants who feasted on the flesh of men. They were rude, cruel, and barbaric creatures living in caves and terrorizing the Paiute people. One year, sick and tired of being attacked by the giants, the Paiute banded together to wipe them out. They tracked the giants to their caves and filled them with smoke and fire, exterminating them completely. This doesn't sound like it has anything to do with the Anasazi, but just wait. Stories of human-eating giants sound like pure folklore until you realize the exact same legend appears on opposite sides of the ancient world. Consider the biblical account of the Hebrews wandering the Sinai desert. According to the Book of Numbers, when their scouts finally reached Canaan, the promised land, they discovered it was already occupied by the Anakim, a terrifying race of giants so immense that the scouts felt like grasshoppers beside them. Scripture connects these giants back to the Nephilim, translated in ancient Greek as giants, and in Hebrew as the heroes of old and warriors of renown. Whether in the deserts of the Middle East or the canyons of the American West, the core narrative remains identical. An ancient population displaced by a race of giant, subterranean-dwelling warriors. And that shared myth opens a much bigger question. Could these stories be describing a real forgotten group of people who inhabited the region long before the ancestral Puebloans ever built their cities? According to the Paiute, a race of giant warriors also lived in the American Southwest. In ancient Greece, the word Nephilim translated as giants. In the Torah, the Nephilim are called heroes of old and warriors of renown. When you look at legends from around the world, you start to notice some surprising similarities. Giants appear frequently. They're often connected to a flood, and they are often defeated by regular-sized humans. The question left unanswered is whether these stories are based on a real-life race of giant warriors who once roamed the earth, or if the stories are all playing off each other. One of the earliest myths ever told was that of large-statured people, so it makes sense that giants are embedded in the human imagination. No matter where a culture formed, they told stories about giants. But could there have been actual giants? And could they have had something to do with the Anasazi? The story of early American archaeology is filled with giant human bodies. Throughout the 1900s and early 20th century, there were frequent news reports of giant skeletons being dug out of ancient burial plots. As time went by, these burial plots became lost, buried underneath the rapid urbanization of the country. The skeletons that were supposedly recovered from the tombs also vanished. This narrative has been rejected by the Smithsonian and the National Geographic Society. Both academic institutions claim that no such discoveries were ever made. But there were places in New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado where human giants were allegedly discovered. These are the same states where you find the mysterious ruins and petroglyphs of the Anasazi. Coincidence? I have a very interesting story for you about people who are born with extra fingers or toes if you want to go on a side quest with me. These people are considered polydactyls. It's a word that sounds close enough to pterodactyl to be a little confusing. Anyway, there was an anthropologist named Patricia Crown who studied at the University of New Mexico. Patricia became fascinated by the Mayan belief that polydactyls were born with divine powers. In ancient Mayan society, people with too many fingers or too many toes were seen as mystical beings, closer to the gods than normal people. Patricia looked at that and then looked at the people of Chaco Canyon and saw a connection. Scientists already knew that the Puebloan cultures of Chaco Canyon experienced a high number of cases of polydactylism. They knew because there are plenty of petroglyphs of people with extra fingers or toes. Archaeologists have also dug up a lot of skeletons from the Chaco area of people with extra fingers and toes. Patricia conducted a comprehensive review of extra digits among the Anasazi. Her findings indicated that the society didn't necessarily view these people as supernatural, but they were given special status in both life and death. Patricia said that people with six toes were commonly found buried in important ritual structures, specifically structures interpreted as having religious significance. People with six toes were also more often found buried with culturally valuable objects like turquoise items. To determine just how common polydactylism was among these people, Patricia analyzed 96 skeletons. These were mostly taken from the ruins of Pueblo Bonito. This was not a fast analysis. The skeletons had to be painstakingly reassembled by SETI co-author Karian Martin, and it took years, literal years. In the end, after putting together all of those bones, the anthropologists identified three individuals with polydactylism. That's three out of 96, all with a sixth toe on the right foot. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it's huge. That makes it over 15 times more common in ancient Chaco Canyon than in modern native populations today. How does a specific genetic trait spike that high in one specific spot? The most likely answer is unique, isolated DNA. In the Bible, there is an account repeated multiple times that describes a giant with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. That giant is Gath, a descendant of the Nephilim. Now, this is hugely important because the Bible tells us the Nephilim were wiped out by the flood, but there are still giant people upon the earth long after the flood. So what's going on? These other giants, like Gath with his 24 digits and Goliath of Philistine, as well as the Anakim of Canaan, were not Nephilim. They were the descendants of the Nephilim, and they weren't restricted to the Middle East. They were likely all over the world in thinning numbers. Somehow, these giants survived the flood and passed their genes along to create people who were not as tall or as magical as the Nephilim, but still pretty big, not to mention packing serious fingers and toes. All over the world, you've got stories of giants, giant skeletons that disappear after they're discovered, and stories of extra fingers and toes. All of this is connected to stories of the Nephilim, who were the byproduct of beings who came down from the heavens. Then you've got the Anasazi, who just like the Maya, treated those with extra digits as if they were living remnants of gods. Now, if we lean into the fringe side of history, these pieces start forming a far stranger picture. Could the ancestral Puebloans have carried the lineage of an ancient giant population that vanished thousands of years ago? Think about the end of the last ice age, roughly 12,000 years ago. As the climate shifted, megafauna across the globe, like mammoths and saber-toothed cats, went extinct. But science also knows that global meltwater raised sea levels by 400 feet, triggering catastrophic coastal flooding. Centuries later, nearly every ancient culture on Earth developed a flood myth. In that case, real geological disasters inspired legendary mythology. So what if real people inspired the myths of giant warriors like the Nephilim? What if a taller, isolated human lineage existed alongside early Homo sapiens, only to be hunted or pushed to extinction as resources shrank? Mainstream archaeology does not support the giant hypothesis, pointing instead to natural environmental pressure and regional migration. But fringe researchers highlight intriguing details. When early European explorers arrived in the southwest, local tribes lived nomadic lifestyles using wood, hide, and bone. A sharp contrast to the massive, multi-story stone architecture left behind at places like Chaco Canyon. To some, it almost looked like a total cultural break. Even stranger are the dark clues left behind in the ruins. At sites like Mesa Verde, archaeologists have uncovered burned structures alongside controversial physical evidence of violent conflict and mass trauma. To fringe theorists, these burnt stone dwellings in Violent End mirror the Paiute legend of the Si Te Ca, a story where a feared, isolated population was trapped in stone structures and destroyed by fire. While mainstream historians view these events as desperate internal conflicts caused by extreme drought, it leaves open a compelling question. Are these legends pure folklore or the fading memory of a real, forgotten chapter of human history? Let me know your thoughts in the comments and thanks for watching! Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already and I'll see you soon for more ancient mysteries. Bye!