Dr. Ed Barnhart recounts discovering a lost Maya city in Belize using topographic maps and mountain worship traditions, while discussing the complexity of their 52-year calendar epochs and the Younger Dryas hypothesis regarding comet impacts that reset civilization. The dialogue explores Olmec basalt heads weighing up to 50 tons, independent pyramid development across cultures, and ancient rituals involving bloodletting and mercury burial rites at Altun Ha. Ultimately, the episode contrasts modern architectural efficiency with ancient devotion, suggesting sophisticated indigenous achievements in navigation, astronomy, and construction often overshadowed by disease and conquest. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Leading a Tikal Tour00:14:15
All right.
Thanks for coming, guys.
Dr. Ed Barnhart, it's a pleasure to meet you.
Thank you.
Luke, welcome back.
Thank you very much for having me again.
Yeah, man.
I'm excited to chat with you guys.
Ed, why don't you introduce yourself and tell people who are listening a little bit about your background and how you discovered a lost city when you were 25 years old?
Well, okay.
I'm an archaeologist, explorer, educator, and I've been at this for over 30 years now.
I'm 56 this year.
I got my start in archaeology in, I was a student in the University of Colorado at Boulder, went to Honduras to go to the Maya site of Copan.
There I met my future mentor, Linda Shealy, and I went to study with her for years, learning Maya hieroglyphs, and also from UT going out to do archaeology and survey in Belize.
And that's where, at the age of 25, I found a Maya city.
I used a topo map, kind of played the game of if I was a Maya, where in this huge region would I put a city?
And I guessed right.
So, two years into the project, we actually found a bunch of pyramids around a plaza with a ball court and a palace and Stila.
So, yeah, that was certainly a pivotal moment in my life.
And since then, I've taught for a little while after I got my master's and then my PhD.
But where I really wanted to be was out back in the jungle and all those adventures.
I didn't want to be teaching.
Cultural anthropology to a bunch of people who were asleep in my classroom.
So I ditched that and I started the Palenque Mapping Project, which became ultimately my dissertation.
And then from there, I created Maya Exploration Center, which is now over 20 years old.
And Luke here is the latest member of Maya Exploration Center.
And we kind of, in a almost rogue fashion, teach folks out in the field.
We do field education tours.
So, we give lectures at night and we bring people actually through the ruins and teach them about it.
And it's been great.
For years now, I've traveled all over Mesoamerica and South America, teaching people, but also selfishly making it like I really want to go there.
I'm going to make a trip and people can come and be involved in my research.
And now I've done that for a number of years.
I've gotten into this podcast world by creating a podcast.
I actually didn't mean to make a podcast, it was COVID.
My kids wanted to make a Dungeons and Dragons podcast.
So I spent a week learning how to make podcasts, but by then they were over it.
So I was like, well, damn, somebody's making a podcast in this house.
I guess I'll do it.
So when you just first discovered that Lost City, what was the name of it?
And how did you sort of figure out where to look or what did you use to guess where it would be and where they would put it?
Well, I used everything that I had learned from Linda Shealy and my other classes as a graduate student.
And I, I looked at this big area called Program for Belize.
It was something like 200,000 acres that were given to Belize by Coca-Cola.
Coca-Cola wanted to cut it all down and put an orange grove there to create Orange Crush.
Or is that theirs?
Yeah, theirs is Crush.
But anyway, this huge area was then a research place and UT had a contract for 20 years to study it.
Most of the things they were doing were right along the one and only dirt road through the middle of it.
But I bought topo maps from not even the internet in those days.
It was the early 90s, so I had to actually call people.
But I found topo maps and I looked at the whole place and I said, okay, Maya are mountain worshipers and they call their pyramids Tun Wit Stone Mountains.
And they oftentimes create them in triadic forms, three temples staring at each other.
So I'm going to look at this topo map and try to first find the tallest mountain in this area.
So I located that.
And just as it happened to be, There were two other smaller mountains right next to it that made a triangle, and there were three rivers that were running in the middle of them.
And I thought, that's it.
If I was a Maya, that's where I'd want my city to be.
And it was about 10 kilometers out off the road, so we had to just hack out there a little bit, a little bit every day.
And we found four or five villages along the way.
But then finally, I was crossing one of the smaller peaks on my way to the big peak, and that's where the city was, on one of those three peaks.
It was nice and flat, and that's where we found it.
And when's the last time you were down there, Luke?
10 days ago.
10 days ago?
Yeah.
Where were you exactly?
I was in Guatemala.
Okay.
What were you doing?
So I was leading a tour for Maya Exploration Center.
So we did.
There's a few really well known sites around the main Maya city of Tikal, but we led a tour there at Tikal, and then that was really amazing.
I mean, Tikal is, I mean, it's a.
It's a central city to the story of the Maya.
You know, everything eventually through the height of the classic period runs through Tikal.
And then, so we led a tour out there.
And then by the end of the tour, I did something I've been wanting to do for years, which was booked through him, got on a helicopter, and flew dozens of miles out into the middle of the Paten rainforest, which the Paten is, I think, at least the second largest rainforest in the Americas, which is.
You know, it's second to the Amazon, but it's like 150th the size of the Amazon, but very, very remote.
And it contains the largest pyramid in definitely in the Maya world.
And it's called La Danta, it's La Danta and El Tigre.
And so that was really amazing.
And one of the things that I was so interested about going there is because the head archaeologist at El Mirador, Richard Hansen, he refers to the Architecture there and the stonework there, the word that he's or the phrase that he's kind of coined for it is conspicuous consumption.
And that at the beginning of the Maya world, they were just so wealthy that they could create these pyramids out of the biggest stones that they're ever going to make stones or that they're ever going to use throughout the rest of their 3,000 year history or the 2,000 year history.
And what I was amazed by there is that the stone architecture is so much different than.
As I said, it's so much different than anywhere else in the Maya world.
But rather than taking these huge stones and laying them horizontally, they lay down the stones vertically and slide them in basically the least efficient way possible.
But as far as managing your resources, but in reality, it was the most efficient way possible because throughout most of the Maya world, when I went down last December, I took a 10 or 11 day expedition down into Quintana Roo of Mexico, landed in Cancun, went down to this ancient city called Calac Mul.
And I paid this local ranger a few hundred dollars USD to take me out to this city that, as far as he knew, didn't have a name, but I was able to find it later on.
And it was this site with, it was, I maybe covered a few hundred yards over the course of four or five hours.
And just by the architecture, I was able to, I could tell what era the site was, that it was pre classic.
You can just tell when you walk up on top of a pyramid if it has a triadic structure.
If it's a triadic structure, it's basically a pyramid with a platform at the top, and you have three more pyramids with the larger one in the back.
It's pretty, I mean, that's iconic for the pre classic period.
Sure enough, I was able to do research later on pre classic structure.
But that entire city, the smaller stones, you know, as the trees grow into, As the trees and the vegetation of the jungle climbs up these pyramids, it grows into the structure and pulls the blocks apart.
And eventually they look like mounds.
And, you know, trying to take photos of these things, it's really hard to convey the size of structures.
But in person, you can see it.
However, at El Mirador, even though the construction there was the least efficient way to do it in managing resources, it actually preserved most of these sites perfectly because when they peel the layer of the vegetation off, the stones haven't moved at all.
They were too big for the jungle to ever grow through them.
You know, over the last really, yeah, the stones there are just too big, too tightly packed.
Uh, you know, I would say that they're as long as this table and maybe a foot and a half, 18 inches, 24 inches wide, and they're all slid into each other.
And the joke, they're it's too monumental for the jungle to ever grow through it.
So, this was something that it's like the primordial beginnings of the Maya world, and I've just been looking forward to seeing it for so long.
I finally documented it.
It was so hard to find great photos of this in person.
So, that's what I was doing 10 days ago.
That's incredible.
I wonder how many pyramids do you think are undiscovered in that part of the world?
In like Mesoamerica and South America?
Do you guys have any idea?
I think I can conservatively say thousands.
Thousands?
Yeah.
How many do we know of?
Oh, that's it.
You know, some of the 30 like Luke should actually count them all up.
In Egypt, we know the number, right?
Yeah, it's like 140, 130.
Yeah, yeah.
In Egypt, it seems to kind of vary between, because, you know, a lot of those smaller pyramids were quarried away to, Rebuild modern day Cairo.
Oh, yeah.
You know, so the number kind of drifts between 125 to 140.
And he and I were talking the first trip I ever joined him on.
We were in Palenque, and everywhere you would drive and everywhere you would walk, you know, you can go to an area of Palenque where it's all cleared away and, you know, and the grass is perfectly laid for all the tourists that are there.
But he took us out into the outer ruins on the outside of the city, and everywhere you walk, it's these huge pyramids.
And we were talking there, and he was like, you know, the The common term is that Egypt is the land of the pyramids, but it's pretty obvious this is the land of the pyramids.
There are certainly thousands and thousands of them out there.
And recorded, you know, at least hundreds, probably over a thousand.
Part of the problem is how do we define pyramid, which, you know, is a sticky thing.
Like nobody even wants to say anything here in North America is a pyramid.
We call them mounds, which kind of, you know, makes them inert.
And so in the Maya area, Does it have to be a pyramid type freestanding thing to be called a pyramid?
How tall does it have to be?
Is a five meter one a pyramid or should we call it another kind of building?
But if you, you know, in the broadest definition of pyramid, I'd say that Palenque alone has 100.
Wow.
What is the size of Palenque?
It's 200 hectares, about two and a half kilometers across and only a half a kilometer wide.
It sits up on this plateau.
Above the plains.
So the mountains come up about 100 meters, a plateau of about half a meter, half a kilometer wide is where the city is.
And then the mountains continue to rise above them.
Steve, last time you were here, Luke, I think we looked at this, right?
We looked at kind of like the whole geographical map.
We did.
We looked at his map, and I told him that when you arrived there, you got the job because you had found Belize.
Right.
Right.
And, or I'm sorry, he had found Mashna.
I'm sorry.
He didn't find where he was.
We knew where Belize was.
We knew where Belize was.
So he had got the job because he had discovered Mashna.
And when he arrived, I was telling him that when you arrived at Palenque, there were maybe a few hundred buildings or a couple hundred buildings that were covered.
329.
Wow.
And so, you can take it from there.
But then I mapped about 1,200.
And it's not the whole city either.
There's things, there's some dispersed things on the hills above it, and there's a bunch more stuff to the west.
And somebody just showed me they just finally made a lidar of it.
And about a half a kilometer to the east of where I stopped mapping is a really big pyramid.
You can see it poking out clear as day in this new lidar.
And I'm pissed I missed that one.
I mean, little buildings is one thing.
Little neighborhoods, okay, you know, I'm doing my best.
But I missed a whole dang pyramid.
How long did that take you to map out all that?
Better part of three years.
It was crazy.
And you lived down there the whole time?
Well, I come back for like four months to write up the report and give it to all of the authorities that would give me more money so I could go back down there.
Okay, is this it?
Oh, this is a.
That's a version of it.
That's one version of it.
Okay.
It's definitely my.
The black parts are my map.
The other parts are pretty more LIDAR, color coded so you can see what's high and what's low.
And what civilization lived here?
The Maya.
This was Maya.
Okay, gotcha.
This is classic period Maya.
These guys are.
kind of like the intellectuals of the Maya world, that the engineering here, the architecture is the best, their hieroglyphs are beautifully written and the content is very complex.
There's all sorts of astronomy tied into mythology that like the guy who is buried in the big pyramid in the center there, the temple of the inscriptions, the one that that square is over.
Astronomy and the Long Count00:14:59
He does this magnificent thing where he says he's better than the next lineage bloodline person.
He's vaguely related to the people that were the kings before him.
They got killed by an attack from Kalak Mool, another competing city.
But he says, I'm better than that.
I'm the reborn avatar of the first of our triad of patron deities for the city.
And he ties himself back to a place where Venus was rising in the exact same constellation.
And the distance is like 3,000 years.
And he mathematically or astronomically dates back what the birth of that guy that we just call God won.
And Palenque and Pakal were, he ties himself to the same rise of Venus and says, I am him reborn.
And here's the astronomical proof, which is pretty dang complex for people that we think are somehow lesser than the other great civilizations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One of the things I thought was fascinating was in that, in the Graham Hancock show, the episode that you were in where you're explaining how they did the calendar and the different versions of the calendar.
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And how they had individual names for each day for like 50 something years.
That seems so confusing.
I had to watch it back like five times to understand it.
You know, it really is confusing.
I've been trying to figure it out for 30 years, and there's still things that there are still aspects of the Maya calendar which confuse me.
And their math, too, right?
Like their numerical system.
Oh, yeah.
You know, they.
It was.
Well, it wasn't more complex.
It was simpler, right?
It was only.
There's only three characters.
Is that right?
Well, I'd use the word elegant in that regard.
That they have a positional system of numeration like we do, where we have, you know, the ones, the tens, the hundreds, the thousands, 10,000, so on.
They do it by 20s, but they only have three symbols.
They have a bar, they have a dot, and they have a symbol for zero, which changes from a shell to a flower.
Right.
They can alternate.
But we have.
10 symbols.
We have one through nine and then zero.
Yes.
And we can write any number as big as we want approaching affinity.
They can do the same thing, but it's really only three symbols.
So, in that regard, it's more elegant.
Yeah.
But it's also.
People get pissed off when I say that their system was more sophisticated than ours.
So, let's go with elegant.
Yeah.
Well, it was more sophisticated, though.
Like the things they were able to calculate seemed kind of absurd compared to what we can do today, right?
Like, how.
How is that responsible for these ideas of like different ages and periods of time and like these 52 year epochs that they came up with?
Like, how does that all tie together?
Oh, that's a very long answer.
We got plenty of time.
No, you know, we can see that their system begins with a foundation.
First, they have an accounting system, which they decide is 20, not 10.
You know, that's one proof that they're not being overly influenced by the old world.
I mean, why would they come up with a completely different base system?
From there, they can count things and they start using it to count primarily the dates.
I mean, we know they're counting all sorts of things, probably in the market as well, but we see them counting the days, and then they decide they want to make a year.
They want to make a cycle that they can talk about one year to the next, but they don't pick the solar cycle at first.
They pick a number 260.
That's their sacred calendar.
It's called the Solquin or the Cholqui, depending on whose language you're talking in.
All of Mesoamerica does it, not just the Maya.
It begins with the Maya or the Olmec.
And then it goes everywhere in Mesoamerica until contact.
So it's the most important one.
But it's 260 days, no months, no weeks, just a combination of 20 symbols and 13 numbers.
20 times 13 is 260.
Why that number?
Why 260?
Best we can reckon and what the Maya themselves today continue to say is that it's the gestation period of human.
It's nine months.
Impregnated on one a how, chances are your baby will come out on the next one a how.
And I think it's beautiful that, you know, instead of so many other cultures look to the heavens to make time, but they decided to look inside themselves like, what is a cycle that is uniquely just us?
We look around the world, you know, the sun's 365 days, you know, animals give birth on different time scales.
We have this long, strange nine month pregnancy.
Right.
So, They looked inside themselves.
And from there, they built out the 365 day calendar.
I think once they started a farm, that became a lot more important knowing the solar cycle, when to plant, when to harvest.
So, those two numbers a 365 day solar calendar and then their original 260 day calendar when they put those two together, like cogs spinning into each other, you're only going to hit the same day.
Every 52 years.
So for 52 years, you'll have a unique day.
It'll have one.
The first part of it will be its 260 day calendar name.
The second part will be the 365 calendar name.
But because the two cogs, which they never made or envisioned, that's for Western minds to try to envision it, the two cycles only meet up again at the same number every 52 years.
That's how we get 52 years.
Can you imagine how many generations it takes to do that?
Like you have to be.
You have to have astronomers that are watching the stars daily, recording these things, and then handing it down for generations.
Not for this part.
I don't know.
One part's human and one part's just the sun.
These are the low hanging fruit.
The astronomy comes in when they make their next calendar.
Sure, sure, sure.
They make a lunar calendar.
The long count one?
The long count is the really weird one.
And my friend Chris Powell did his dissertation or master's looking at that long count calendar and trying to figure out.
Is there an astronomical foundation?
And really, as you go forward in it, all of the cycles of all the celestial objects they're looking at the five planets and the moon and the sun they just, the amount of synchronicities that happen in the long count are crazy.
The farther you go up, well, even very early is the surprising part you start getting these cycles that they're noticing, like the number 584.
It keeps coming up and up and up.
That's the synodic period of Venus.
The number 780 is Mars, but that's three times 260.
a frustrating one to me.
I can see the number 780, but I can never really say whether that's just three times the calendar or are they really looking at Mars.
In the Dresden Codex, we have proof because it goes in a bunch of groups of 780 days.
And the guy that we identify as what my teacher called the Mars beastie is hanging off of a sky band.
So it's really like a blatant, this is my number.
What is this?
The Mars one?
There's a Mars.
He's got kind of, he looks kind of dragon-like.
He's got kind of a crocodile face with an upturned nose, but he shows up as the hieroglyph of Mars in a number of contexts.
And in some of those contexts, it's not clear that he's Mars, but in the Dresden Codex, they make a whole almanac dedicated to Mars and showing it going 10 times in increments of 780 days.
Oh, wow.
Which is exactly.
Do you find this, Steve?
Yeah.
That sounds interesting.
Somewhere in the Dresden Codex.
Let's google Dresden Codex Mars.
Dresden Codex Mars.
I think we'll find a picture.
Probably.
Any luck, Steve?
Anyway, the long count's weird.
Yeah.
Because it's their linear count of days.
And they're really not linear people.
They think in cycles.
Right, right.
There he is.
Yeah, on the top left.
That's him.
This?
That one right there, yeah.
Zoom.
There he is.
See his funny little face hanging off?
And he's got hooves, too.
He does.
But he's hanging off of sky bands, and the numbers over there to the left keep counting in increments of 780 days, 10 times.
And they bracket him, and they even his face is in there somewhere.
Yeah, that like right above the first of the hoofed guys hanging down, all three of them, the top right glyph is his face.
That thing.
Yep, that's the one.
Oh, he has a weird hooked nose, huh?
Yeah.
And that's supposed to be Mars.
That is Mars, yep.
He's identified in a bunch of other texts as well, but they don't always say, and he's associated with the number 780.
Yeah.
So this gives us the context of who that guy is and that we understand it better.
Like the text of Palenque talks about Mars.
And when you go to the astronomy programs, he's actually sitting in the sky on the dates that they're talking about.
That's so crazy, dude.
Oh, my God.
Palenque did this crazy thing where.
The, the two farthest out planets uh, Jupiter and Saturn.
They don't really work with the Maya or our calendar systems because they're exterior planets to us.
Venus and Mercury are interior and they're, you know, in a tighter orbit than us around the sun.
Yeah Mars, just by weird coincidence, if if that's what it is is three times 260.
So it was easy for them to play the numerical games of adding Mars in, they kind of double dipped him every three times.
They went around their main calendar.
But the other two were hard.
The math didn't work because they do that retrograde motion as we see them.
There's a time where we're passing them that they actually look like they're going backwards in the sky night by night.
They do a kind of zigzag.
But Palenque figured out how to incorporate them into the calendar by making kind of a parallel system we call the 819 calendar.
And it's apparent that.
That was developed during the time of a king named Khan Balam, the son of Pakal.
And he puts together these numbers.
He's the first one to show us the 819 cycle in the cross group.
And there's a date that shows up again and again and again in the texts of the cross group that's not the day that the temples are inaugurated.
They're inaugurated like a year and a half later.
But if you look at the date they keep talking about, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are in a really tight cluster in the sky that night, and all three of the temples of the cross group can see it.
So it appears that his math before he built the temples was like, this is the perfect day to inaugurate this new calendar that incorporates those.
And we need to make our opening date that day.
But then just like in modern times, his contractors failed him.
They were like, oh, but King, there's been so many days of rain.
And have you seen the price of wood lately?
We just can't do it.
And so a year and a half later is the inauguration date.
But they keep talking about that date.
And for a while, we were like, why are they talking about that date?
Until guys like me got access to modern astronomy software and we could actually run the numbers and go, well, what's happening on that day?
At what point in human history did our astronomy, or in modern human history, did astronomy catch up or get sophisticated enough to figure out, holy shit, the Mayans were onto something?
I think that, you know, there were certain people that were, you know, more than 100 years ago that had access to ephemeris and knew how to use them, those, you know, big, ugly tomes and like, oh, I'll do the math here.
People like Feusterman did it.
In the early 1800s.
But nowadays, you know, I guess it's the 1980s is when we started getting software that we could actually use on computers that wasn't just some guy in a little office somewhere with no access to each other or to tell people what he had found.
But Floyd Lounsbury of Harvard was doing, oh, he might be Yale.
Microdosing with Via Hemp00:02:30
I loved Floyd.
I hope I didn't say that.
Shout out to Floyd.
Harvard or Yale.
It's made up to mine.
He was a very nice guy.
I know a lot of those guys are the ivory tower types, not Floyd at all.
He talked to everybody.
He was such a nice and gentle man, but he used those old ephemeris in the 70s and maybe even as early as the 60s.
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Pottery Evidence in South America00:15:24
To start figuring out some of this stuff, he's the one who really showed us for the first time that there was an 819 calendar and that it had something to do with Jupiter and Saturn.
And I might add you know, when the expeditions of Stevens and Catherwood in the 1830s were happening, as they Arrive in Belize and they go all the way up through the Yucatan and they visit various Maya sites.
So much of these Maya cities are completely overgrown by the jungle.
And the alignments that so many of these buildings have to astronomical bodies are completely covered up by the jungle.
The evidence of it isn't even there until you clear the trees away and then you have people who are studying archaeoastronomy, which is really still kind of in its infancy.
Archaeoastronomy, that's a cool word.
Yeah.
And, you know, just studying the way that ancient cultures really studied their astronomical world.
So much of this couldn't even be observed.
Like when I was at this city that was near Calakmul, El Ramonal, which is a pre classic site, it's impossible to, without modern day technology, without clearing away all the trees, it would be impossible to actually identify any alignments.
Well, that's kind of what.
Most of my career has been getting up on one of these buildings and scanning the entire thing for even one line of stones that I felt was intact.
If I could get just one line of stones, I could guess at the alignment.
But as you say, a lot of them, I got no stones.
Yeah.
And in ancient times, when these cities were at their peak, at least we think that most of these large cities, there are no trees that are growing in the middle of the city.
They're clearing all of it down.
I mean, they use the wood for.
Everything from construction to stucco.
And even in Honduras at Copan, they actually, you know, their city began to fall apart because they had no trees left.
But changed the weather pattern.
Yeah.
No more trees, no more water dropped on their crops.
Yeah.
And so at El Mirador, you know, put yourself to El Mirador is like, you know, the primordial one of the first cities of the ancient Maya world.
You have Noc Bay, and then they think Noc Bay, you know, gets so big that they eventually move over to El Mirador and build another city.
So, you got to think, you know, these tropical areas that are, or these, you know, jungle areas are constantly getting so much rain.
They flood very easily.
They're, you know, these ancient people are constantly exposed to various dangers on the ground, such as the fertile ants, the snake that we talked about last time, as well as other snakes and other dangers.
So, you want to elevate yourself above the jungle.
So, they create these platforms that they live on.
So, they live on these big pyramidal platforms.
And there's obviously no trees on those.
So, it creates this big, empty, open space where they're, Analyzing the stars.
And, you know, over the course of El Mirador, it is as far back as 2800 BC, 2200 BC.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, 2200 years ago.
Okay.
2000 BC.
I'm sorry, 200 BC.
Good night.
200 BC, 2200 years ago, they are, you know, they're studying the stars.
And over the course of the last 2200 years, the jungle has just reclaimed it.
And when you're walking out there, it's impossible to, you know, acknowledge or determine any of these astronomical alignments.
So, so much of it is, uh, It becomes the very last things that are determined as archaeology goes on and you can clear out these cities more and more.
Yeah.
I think there was an initial bias looking at these things saying, well, these people aren't really, they're savages.
They're not scientific.
We weren't even looking for astronomy and really any ruins at all until like the 1960s.
And in terms of their ability to do so, they had the number system, which we don't know how old the number system is, but once they get a A number system that they can really do math with, that was an aid.
And then writing.
When did writing start?
When did books start?
But one way or another, they were able to take a lifetime of research and hand it to a new generation.
Yeah.
That's really what excelled them beyond their neighbors.
Yeah.
I jumped the gun on the astronomy, but for the long count astronomy, they're observing the stars over the courses of generations and consistently handing this down for a very, very long time.
Yeah.
In the Americas, The first human beings that we have evidence for being in the Americas is how long ago?
Now we're thinking about 30,000 years ago.
We've got the White Sands Discovery, which seems to be holding its own.
There were detractors at the start, but then there were rebuttals.
These are the things.
I've seen this happen way too many times.
You get an amazing discovery, but then somebody shoots it down, and then it wasn't that way.
But the White Sands thing, which is 23,000 years ago.
That one's holding pretty strong.
So archaeologically, our cap is now 23,000.
In terms of DNA studies, they're saying that, you know how we can, I mean, those people in lab coats can figure out when things mutate.
They're saying that the earliest DNA in the Americas started to change and isolate.
About 33,000 years ago.
And now the weird number that nobody believes is more like 60.
Wow.
What do you mean when you say change and isolate?
We still believe that humans came across the Bering Strait when it was Beringia.
And that, over a period of thousands of years, opened and closed and opened and closed.
The last time it opened as a corridor that people could walk across, was about 12,000 years ago.
Right.
During the last century.
And it melted and it's been water ever since.
Do you subscribe to the Younger Dryas hypothesis?
Not necessarily.
I mean, I do believe that there was something that happened then.
I don't know what humans were doing at that time and how much it impacted them.
I'm not a geomorphologist.
That Younger Dryas thing has become so hotly contested.
So, okay.
So the last time people were able to make it across that Bering Strait land bridge was before walking across at least was before 12,000 years.
Yeah.
Was it 12,000 years ago or was it 12,000 BC?
12,000 years ago.
12,000.
Okay.
Okay, right, right, right.
And so the first people that came across, you think they just kept going all the way down to South America.
And I guess, like Central America and all that, there wasn't a lot of ice down there by the equator during the Ice Age, right?
So there was like, it would look sort of similar to what it looks like.
I don't know if it's from Antarctica, but places like, you know, with certainly things within the tropics never iced up.
But if you looked at like a map of Mexico and Central America, where like Costa Rica and Panama and Nicaragua are now, that would look nothing like what it looks like, right?
Now, if there was way less water in the oceans and it was all frozen up, it would have a different shape for sure.
There's a shelf that drops off steeply into the Pacific, almost the whole coast from Alaska down to South America.
There's a shelf.
I mean, not a totally flat shelf, but there's parts that we would have to know were land, and then there's a place that's drop off.
Okay.
So they kept going all the way down because the first.
The first evidence of people are like in South America.
Am I right there?
Like around Peru?
I mean, that's what the archaeology is telling us right now.
That's, and so that's the story we have to go with as far as our.
Is it true?
You know, White Sands just changed everything.
I mean, now the oldest stuff we have in South America, like the great site of, what's it, Monteverde?
Tom Dillahaye's site is at like 14,900 years.
And for decades, though, when I was a student, that was the Big discovery, and that changed everything and turned our heads on end and said, you know, wow, is the oldest evidence South America?
But now, just in the last year or two, White Sands has clapped back with a 23.
Wow.
You have those sites in the eastern Amazon, right?
In Brazil that go back about 10,000 years.
Very old stuff there, but it's still not older than Dillahaye's site, Monteverde.
Am I saying that wrong?
I hope not.
There are so many sites in the world.
Yeah, actually, the granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt.
Anna Roosevelt has done heroic, great work in the Amazon and found pottery that was 9,000 years old.
It's the oldest pottery in the entire Americas.
And it's out of caves along the Amazon.
How the heck is that happening?
So, yeah, I mean, I think we're still very much in the process.
We've got to go with the information we have.
I don't think we have all the answers.
I think there are a lot of sites now that need to be revisited.
When I was, again, when I was a student, 30 years ago, I would read about things out of the Amazon that were 25, 30,000 years old, but the literature in my archaeology class would always conclude with that's contested and inconclusive.
In the literature.
In the literature.
So I think there's, I'd like to see us go back to a lot of these sites and revisit them.
Now that 30,000 might not be a crazy number, I'd like to go back to some of those crazy sites and have somebody redig them.
This is a perennial problem with archaeology, too.
It's really not science because, in many cases, we can't replicate the study.
You excavate something, you destroy it.
Can another scientist independently go in there and dig up the same thing?
No, you dug it up.
And so, you know, I've been on many a dig where we've intentionally said, let's only dig part of this site.
Let's leave the other part of the site for future generations in that kind of effort.
But in some cases, like in the case of a cave or something, maybe there's just one part of the cave that's inhabited.
If you dug it all up, that's all that the world gets to know about that for the rest of time.
And the person who dug its interpretation remains the one.
Yeah, I think a perfect example of only being able to carry out a dig or an excavation one time is the temple at Shevine.
Shevine de Hantar.
Essentially, Shevine de Hantar is where the people of the Kural Supai culture get tired of.
Trying to rebuild their.
This is on the west coast of Peru in this, you know, it's like a desert beach.
And they're building, I mean, arguably the very first pyramids on the entire planet, you know, before your official date of the crash.
Yeah, pretty close to the coastline.
They're going on the beach and then they go back in a river valley back like another 15 miles.
Yeah, yeah.
And they're doing that to escape these storms called El Ninos and La Ninas and just constantly hitting this civilization over and over and over again.
Anyways, they get tired of rebuilding their city so many times.
They go, We got to get out of here.
So they go up into the Andes.
And this is where Andean civilization, we think, becomes influenced by the Amazon.
And I think maybe the first time we start seeing architecture with four walls and big interiors that you can walk into.
I say big, but for ancient people, big interiors that you can walk into, huge stones.
And they're being influenced by the Amazon.
And I think this is where Andean civilization gets their pottery, right?
This is the first place we see.
One of the first places we see some pottery pop up.
There's earlier examples that are happening in Ecuador, but it's one of the main corridors where pottery starts being a common wear.
Really, really, really important site.
And when archaeologists first discovered it, or the local people always knew that it was there, but when they first get there, they pull all the artifacts out.
And so when you pull everything out of its original context, you can't study it anymore, if that makes sense.
That is not replicable.
Replicable.
And so, in that way, archaeology is kind of like a technique, right?
You have to do it properly the first time because you can't repeat that, if that makes sense.
Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense.
It's a good example.
To elaborate on what Luke said, underneath Chavin de Pointard were these crazy labyrinths, and they would take twists and turns and have all sorts of little closets along the way.
But at the termination of these five or six different labyrinths were piles of. different kinds of artifacts.
There were some that have just animal bones.
There were some that just had pottery.
There were some that just had like stone sculptures.
And the idea that's been passed down since that excavation is that this was a pilgrimage site and people were taking specific things for specific purposes.
And then the owners of the temple were stashing these things in kind of categories in each one of the labyrinths.
But during those initial excavations, they cleared all that stuff out.
They didn't really take a lot of pictures or drawings.
So there's at least I have never seen any.
And so now we have this literature that describes this very important aspect of this early temple that argues a narrative that it's a pilgrimage site, which I believe.
But the truth is, no archaeologist after that was ever able to assess those collections of artifacts independently.
Going back to the younger Dryas hypothesis, one of the most compelling things about that idea to me is when you compare it to, when you look at things in Egypt, like the Great Pyramid, and you look at how crazy that thing is and how hard it would have been.
The idea that makes it so compelling is that maybe it's possible that human beings were more technologically advanced and then there was some sort of like cataclysm that like wiped them out.
The Younger Dryas Hypothesis00:09:19
And then we had to like hit a reset on humanity where we kind of like knocked us back to the stone age and we had to restart.
And that explains how like it goes from maybe the pyramids really, really old and then future civilizations came and they weren't as sophisticated.
And then they started drawing hieroglyphs on, like these polished granite boxes and stuff like that and like inside the pyramids, and said, oh, started putting their dead people in there and saying they were tombs.
When you look inside of it it's like what's?
How do you explain all these crazy shafts?
That doesn't look like human beings are meant to be in here at all.
Like, how did you move these giant 2 000 ton blocks 500 miles to me, like i've?
I'm really curious.
I I talked to Flint Dibble on here.
He's the only other um like academic archaeologist i've talked to.
I watched that episode.
Yeah he um, I liked him he, he was uh, he made some really strong cases for some things, but the Egypt stuff he just, He just like had blinders on about the Egypt thing?
He wasn't, I don't think he was open minded about some of the Egypt evidence, just like including these vases.
But yeah, the Egypt thing is really interesting.
So I'm wondering, like, what, from your experience, has been the consensus among like fellow academics on like the younger Drys hypothesis?
And what do they say to you or when you have discussions with them about this and these ideas of civilization being reset?
Well, let me start by saying, both you guys know a hell of a lot more about Egypt than I do.
I'm an American archaeologist.
I know what I watch on TV.
Right, right.
So the younger Dryer hypothesis, it's been around for a while.
And I have not discussed it with many colleagues at all.
I see the fights on the internet over it.
And I see the root of discovering its exact nature, I think, falls into geoarchaeology or geomorphology.
I'm not a geologist.
I don't really.
There's a point in which I read these papers and it crests my ability to evaluate whether that's just a bunch of smart talk or whether it actually makes sense.
But, like, archaeologists have been talking about it before this whole did it destroy an entire.
Ancient civilization and wipe it out conversation.
My memory is that we thought that there was, you know, the Younger Dryas has now been connected to this comet in a way that it wasn't originally.
It was seen as a geological episode.
And if memory serves, there was a hypothesis that as the Ice Age was slowly warming up, that ice in a huge lake called like Agassiz in Canada melted enough to cause a huge flood of ice that kind of came down out of the rivers and into the Atlantic.
And that flood of ice quickly lowered the temperature of the Atlantic and raised its sea level so that it caused flooding on the coasts and radically changed the temperature colder again for, I don't know, you know, a couple hundred years or something.
Geology is funny like that.
But that was what I originally read.
And now there's a new idea that it was a comet.
Right.
Or a series of comets, possibly.
Something that impacted the Earth.
Yeah.
Randall Carlson seems to believe that it hit the North American ice sheet right above it.
And that it answers the extinction of the megafauna.
The megafauna here and not Africa, right?
Because Africa still has really large mammals, land mammals, and here we don't.
Right.
And then he.
You know, I mean, mammoths were all the way over to Europe, though, too.
They died out in Europe.
They were in Siberia.
So that is a point to consider.
Okay.
Like the, yes, Africa's larger herd animals remain.
So did Southeast Asia.
But the wipeout of the megafauna in the northern climate was fairly at a uniform time.
It wasn't just the Americas, it was also Europe and across to Siberia and into China.
Okay.
To Randall's point, I.
A team that's working on this comet research that's, I don't know how these guys afforded it, but they paid so much money to have the entire United States LIDAR mapped.
And I'm friends with one of the guys that's on this comet research group.
And he was like, you know, by doing this, we also vicariously created the highest quality LIDAR map of Native American mound sites that's ever been made.
Would you like access to it?
So I got access to it.
Dr. Barnhart's seeing it.
It's pretty amazing.
Wow.
And right here in your state, Luke's been finding all sorts of stuff along the river.
Oh, really?
This will be in the future.
So there are, you know, I mean, I would imagine that some people know about them, but there have to be hundreds and hundreds of mound sites, one in particular that could be, you know, an entire ancient village in Florida that has never been documented before.
And they're on this LIDAR map.
So that's probably down the pipe for me in 2025 that I'm going to go document these things in person.
But, you know, there are quote unquote, it sounds dramatic, but lost cities still in Florida, still in the U.S., you know, out in the woodlands that, you know, need to be discovered.
Lost cities would be Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana.
They are absolutely full of these big Mississippian cities that we've been just ignoring for generations now.
Yeah.
And I called the head of archaeology at the University of Southern Florida and spoke to her on the phone and showed her just one image of this LiDAR map.
And then it was after that she took me very seriously.
She goes, Where'd you get this?
Is it online?
No, it's like a private.
Software that I'm just lucky enough to have.
I know a guy though.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I'll show you some photos offline.
It's really cool.
So, on this map, they also have all the data that I can, I've just glanced at it, and they have marked all these, you know, the superheated shrapnel from what they think is a comet that hits the North Atlantic ice cap.
And that shrapnel, you know, flies across the U.S. Right.
And it, I mean, to the Carolina Bays?
Similar to that.
Yeah.
To that point, all the way, you know, from the East Coast to the West Coast, there are these little indentations in the ground that are, you know, they're not very deep, but you can see them on LIDAR.
And they sprinkle all the way across the U.S., and all of them, you know, on the East Coast, they're pointing northwest.
On the West Coast, they're pointing northeast, and they're all pointing towards some kind of impact site.
Now, did those guys say when?
Did they have an estimation of when these impacts occurred?
I think that's a crux point of this argument.
Exactly.
I think one half of the argument really wants it to be 12,000 years ago during the Ice Age.
I think the other half is over 100 million years ago.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
And I don't know who to believe.
I'm not a geologist, and, you know, we live in a world where, you know, One team of credentialed people go against another team of credentialed people, and then we're stuck in the middle going, I don't know who to believe here.
Yeah, exactly.
Have you seen the images of the Carolina Bays, like the aerial shots of them, like how they have like steam?
You can find it.
I don't think so.
The Carolina Bays, I had a gentleman in here, George Howard, who was showing this.
He's part of that comment research group, and they've shown that there's all these like perfectly symmetrical bays in the Carolinas that say exactly what you were saying how it looks like they were shrapnel from coming from the north, like a shotgun blast.
That went down into the Carolinas.
They're right here.
I'd be curious to see that.
Those little circles in the.
Well, I mean, I could see where geology would say these are impacts.
The question is how long ago?
And can geology stink like that?
Archaeology has carbon 14 and things, but geology can relatively date things by layers, but they don't have very good techniques.
to say, oh, you know, let's test this layer here.
Oh, this one comes back at 100,000 years ago.
Oh, this one comes back at a million.
They don't have that.
And so they give us vague, wide numbers about these things.
This happened somewhere between one and 10 million years ago or something.
So we'd really need, you know, like if any of these things could ever show a half-obliterated campsite or something like that, that would be a smoking gun.
But to this date, I don't think we have that.
Like there's a, you know, Hancock talks about that impact crater that's right in front of the serpent mound.
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Which, you know, what's in Ohio?
Ohio.
Yeah, yeah.
That big, beautiful serpent mound, his, you know, first apocalypse, ancient apocalypse thing, they wouldn't let him in the site.
It was a big hubbub.
He's right that the entire area is a big crater.
And I think he may even be right that the people who made the serpent mound recognized it as a crater or, you know, some kind of unique landscape.
But to argue that.
Flint's Crater Hypotheses00:09:43
The two are concurrent in time.
We just don't have the data yet.
Right, like if you know if, if the head of the snake was blown off by the crater, then boom, smoking gun.
But there's nothing like that.
So that I think it's the.
It's the time depth between these uh, geology says for sure uh, comet impacts, and the time of humans.
That's the, that's the wiggle room that neither side really has a viable answer to right.
Right, you know, the the beach right, neither side can discount the other at this moment Through science.
The beach that's right here on the other side of this studio is called Indian Rocks Beach.
And the legend has it that there's a bunch of Indian burial mounds all around this area.
And just recently, I think it was early this year or maybe late last year, somebody was like building a house and they were like ripping up part of the land and they dug into a burial mound, an ancient Indian burial mound.
And then it's earlier this year?
I believe it was earlier this year.
And, or maybe it was last year.
I laugh because my in laws live here in your same town.
And my mother in law has said for as long as I've known her that the Indian mounds protect St. Pete.
From the weather?
The weather never.
That's the.
The hurricanes never come here because the Indian mounds protect us.
And you're telling me somebody dug them up.
It just happened recently.
And now we just got smoked by three hurricanes.
There you go, Diane.
Your juju's right.
Somebody ruined it.
Yeah.
And then you got Miltoned or Heleneed or whatever you got.
We got Heleneed and we got Miltoned.
Yeah.
That's freaky.
Yeah, well, a lot of people here believe those myths about the herd of the Indian mackerel.
Did everybody, like, beat the tar out of the guy that dug that out?
No, they tarred and feathered him online, that's for sure.
That's funny.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, so you've known Graham Hancock for a long time and you've had these conversations.
No, no, I met him last year.
Oh, really?
I've known of him for a long time.
Okay.
And Luke told me that you were supposed to be the original guy to debate him.
Is that right?
Oh, no, no.
There was a moment where.
People were suggesting to me that I should throw my hat in the ring.
And I was like, oh, no, hell no, I don't want to do anything like that.
Oh, okay.
I don't want to argue about these things.
I love talking about it like now, but God, I'm not going to debate anybody about shit I may or may not know.
I love having the conversation.
I regret all the vitriol that's happened.
You know, it's such a wonderful thing that podcasts like this have created a new and wonderful audience for archaeology.
And it sucks that it's turned into this ugly argument where everybody. points fingers at each other and calls each other stupid.
That's weird.
And Graham is, of course, right in the intersection of that whole thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Graham's definitely a great thing because he's like opened the eyes of like normal everyday people like me who can like look at this stuff and get interested in this stuff.
He's made it like delicious, if you will, for like normal people, you know, not people like you and Flint who have spent their whole entire lives like studying and reading and doing not just the fun stuff, but doing like the boring work too.
Right.
Which is what I talked to Flint about on here.
But I thought like Flint was able to at first, my first reaction was like, yeah, he really kind of like.
Laid out a lot of context to some of the stuff that Graham talks about and filled in a lot of the blanks, especially during that podcast and when he came in here.
But like I said, you know, when I showed Flint these, for example, he was like, oh no, these could have easily been done with like Flint chisels and pounding stones and that kind of stuff.
I saw that whole part.
That was fascinating.
And I was kind of like blown away because I felt like he was so reasonable when it came to the Atlantis stuff, right?
Because he's an expert in Greece and in that time period when Atlantis was supposed to be.
So the guy's like, He's an expert in ancient Greek stuff.
Yep.
And the excavation of Athens and those areas.
So he knows that stuff probably more than most people.
And like I thought he laid out a really compelling case of how Atlantis was probably not a real place.
It was probably just like Plato's cave, right?
It was just like this hypothetical thought experiment, philosophical idea that he came up with.
He did a great job explaining that.
Yep.
Yeah.
And then when he tried to explain these, I was just like, there's some sort of talk.
He talked about those kind of drills that had like the bow drills and.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a possible concept of how it was made.
Yeah.
The trick, you know, this one obviously is a replica, or did your buddy give you that?
It's a 3D print.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
He had these 3D prints made of some of the most, not all of them are perfectly symmetrical.
He owns a couple dozen of them.
But these two in particular, when they were measured on light scanning machines, like this big aerospace company, they found out that from edge to edge, from here all the way to the bottom, they're perfectly symmetrical within the variance of a human hair.
So like unbelievably symmetrical that would.
If we wanted to create that today with granite, it had to be done on a CNC machine.
I, I am equally fascinated and impressed by them, and and, and I did think that Flint's attempt to explain how they could be done was on the right track, but I, I agree with you, we don't know how they did it right, but I don't.
I mean, my conclusion of that is that they were freaking amazing and we are still too, too stupid to figure out how they did it right.
I mean, they were that smart, but that doesn't make them, you know, aliens and it doesn't make them.
Uh, it doesn't like you know.
I mean, you know there's, there's arguments that were aliens, that you know yeah, that all of us are seated from some other and other places.
There's this weird thing that people do, like I think it's a weird thing that Flint does after, like I, after thinking about it for a while, and and like listening to his reaction to that, and just like saying that, Like trying to avoid the conversation by saying that, like, oh, because he purchased that, he's contributing to the cartels and he's contributing to like, the black market.
I don't even want to touch that.
I don't want to be in the same room with that.
Like it's just, it's heresy for anyone to purchase these things and be and like have them in their own possession.
This belongs to archaeology.
This belongs to us.
So I can't entertain that conversation.
You know, it's like a weird cognitive dissonance.
Well, you know, I have contemplated that too.
And it's always, you know, it's a risk for me as a professional archaeologist coming on shows and just casually talking off the cuff about things like.
That I could get myself in trouble for accidentally advocating looting or some shit.
Right.
But, you know, Flint is in a position where he is an archaeologist and he has a responsibility to talk as conservatively as he can as a representative of his field.
Whereas Graham is not an archaeologist, he's a journalist and he has a freedom to hypothesize in a way that Flint would be criticized by his colleagues for.
Well, I don't know.
I mean,.
I think lots of archaeologists have flaky ideas.
We just talk to each other differently because we're in the club.
I don't think, and if you listen to Graham, he never says, these are facts.
He says, this is my gut feeling.
These are hypotheses.
Yes.
And he's free to hypothesize like that as an investigative journalist and be responsible within his own field in a way that Flint, if he said the same thing, Would be deemed.
Irresponsible within his community right, because he has a responsibility to only forward the things that we have factual evidence for.
We, you know, we can, we hypothesize up to a point.
But I think another aspect is that, you know, we archaeologists really try to come up with hypotheses that we can test.
There's, you know, there's tons of hypotheses we could all say, well, you know, I think uh, I think there was a civilization 12 000 years ago.
Okay well, where's the proof Right.
You know, do we have an artifact assemblage?
Do we have buildings?
Do we have a chronological sequence of things in a stratified dig?
Those are the things that we, you know, we try to come up with hypotheses that are testable.
And if they're untestable, well, then, you know, at some point we stop talking about it, at least in archaeology.
Totally.
So he's, you know, I think that people like Flint and myself, Are bound by being representatives of our field to try to not profess hypotheses that we have no possible way of testing and proving or denying.
Yeah, that's the thing about people like Graham versus people like Flint.
There's this, and obviously, I think it is a problem with people who are tied to the big academic institutions that they can't speak out of turn because they have the fear.
Right, of being criticized or losing their positions or whatever.
It's this whole idea of centralized, the centralization of education, you know?
See, I have no such position.
I can talk whatever the hell I want to talk about.
Olmec Faces and Asian Traits00:15:36
That's beautiful.
I'm my own boss.
But I am just as educated as other folks are, in many ways more so, at least for the Americas.
I don't know anything about a lot of other parts of the world.
And, you know, just for the record, I like the dreaming hypotheses things that.
people like Graham Hancock come up with, as long as it's not disparaging some group of people and exalting another, I think it's fun.
I think it's what inspires us.
I think that, you know, most archaeologists, if you ask them honestly how they got started in archaeology, it was dreaming about fantasy things, you know, and then we find a shade of that in history work and we go from there.
But I mean, you know, this is how we get inspired.
And we do owe folks like Hancock a debt of gratitude that he has inspired millions of people to be interested in the kind of things that I do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think I probably would not be sitting here if I hadn't read Fingerprints of the Gods as a young teenager.
Fingerprints of the Gods was the very first place that I ever learned about the Olmecs.
Olmecs, highly fascinating, but very little published about them, right?
Especially in popular media.
So that makes it into Fingerprints of the Gods, which came out in 1995.
And that sort of pushed along whatever interest it had and probably expanded the interest.
So, you know, I read about the Olmecs in that book.
I read about the Amazon.
And, you know, at about 16 or 17, and that kind of fuels an interest.
Also, read about Egypt.
So I start studying ancient Egypt.
And by the time I'm in, by the time I'm about 21, I decide that I'm not going to be able to get through college if I keep going down this marketing route.
I've got to do something that I loved.
And I was always inspired by, you know, we talked about last time, like my grandfather was, all my grandfathers were explorers and antiquarians that, You know, funded digs out in the, at these Mogollon sites in New Mexico and discovered some cool stuff.
And, you know, that inspired me, but also Graham Hancock kind of fueled that wonder, you know, of, you know, I wonder if there is, you know, something out there.
And so when I first started, I was, you know, really hardcore on the, you know, the pyramids have to be 12,000 years old.
And just because I hadn't exposed myself to anything else beyond that.
But then.
When you first came on the show, you were pretty, you know, you believed that you were pretty stuck.
You were talking about a piece of wood that you thought was like one of the pyramids.
Well, so what I was saying was.
Was I think that, okay, so this kind of leading into what I'm saying is I think that as I became, as I started to educate myself more, you know, I read Fingerprints of the Gods and then, you know, just wanted more and more and more and more.
And so, you know, you pick up textbooks at a certain point because it's just, you can't get enough.
And then you read things in textbooks that challenge the preconceived notions that you had.
And so, you know, I've done a huge dive just on Giza in the last year and learned a lot of things that have challenged my.
Beliefs about the pyramids.
And I think that even Graham Hancock has come around to the greater part of the pyramids must be the fourth dynasty under the pharaoh Khufu.
He talked about this on either Rogan or another podcast, but I clipped it and put it on my ex account.
And I became exposed to information like, and I got to see these just a month ago, these cedars of Lebanon that are inside the quote unquote burial chamber, but without a sarcophagus.
It's a strange chamber in the pyramid.
And what pyramid?
The Bent Pyramid.
So, up at the highest chamber in the Bent Pyramid, there are these cedars of Lebanon that are built into the pyramid.
And they only could have been placed there at a time before the top of the pyramid.
Maybe the last 10% is, no, I'm sorry.
Really, the next 50% is built because it's only about halfway up in the pyramid.
But those cedars of Lebanon kind of lock that pyramid into a certain time frame.
They carbon date them, and they're about 4,800 years ago, 2,800 BC.
And, you know, so we know exactly how old these trees are.
So they kind of lock them in place.
And you discover more things like that, like how we were talking about earlier, where you were saying, you know, a smoking gun for a civilization existing in the Americas 12,000 years ago would be, well, what if one of those, you know, meteorite fragments just destroyed a city, right?
Well, at Giza, we actually have something that's sort of similar to that.
The construction of Mankara's, so, you know, you have the Great Pyramid, you have the Second Pyramid or the Middle Pyramid, and then you have Mankara's Pyramid.
Well, You have the mortuary temple, you have the long causeway, and it goes down to the valley temple.
That valley temple there, during its construction, destroyed a workers' village.
There's like these rubbish pits that are just, they pretty much just picked up the city and dumped it off to the side as they're building that causeway and as they're building that valley temple.
And so when they go through the rubbish, they find these seals with a cartouche, and a cartouche is like the encircled sacred name of the pharaoh.
And they only find the two previous pharaohs, which are Khufu and Khafra.
Mankara doesn't appear on there anymore.
And so it shows that the city was destroyed during the creation of that valley temple.
And it's, You know, I learned that in some obscure textbook that you know I would have never guessed 10 years ago that I would read.
I picked it up in Luxor while I was in Egypt and, um, you know, become more exposed to information like that.
And slowly, um, my view on things starts to change.
But at the core of where I started in this journey was reading Graham Hancock, and so that sense of wonder has never left me, although my perception of archaeology has become much more dialed in as time has gone on.
But I still keep that wonder of.
And excitement about things that we don't understand, like how these vases could have been made.
How they, you know, I got to see the unfinished obelisk in Aswan in Egypt.
Wow, yeah.
You know, 1,200 tons made out of solid red Aswan granite.
It's just, I mean, that's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.
And, you know, the peculiar thing is, you know, they have to free out the bottom of that whole obelisk.
And then what you don't see in a lot of photos is right behind it to get to the Nile, they have to clear out the whole granite outcropping that is, you know, Just the same size, much bigger actually than the obelisk.
They have to clear all that out and clear out this causeway and pull that obelisk down into the river where they're going to load it onto a barge and take it 500 or 300 miles where it's going to go.
These things, a lot of these things are still unexplainable.
But for me, as time has gone on, the magic was really instilled in me from reading things like Graham Hancock.
But over time, like I was saying, my views have become more dialed in.
And for me, it's not really a question of timeline now.
More so, a question of technique, or if we want to call it ancient technology.
And so that's why I think it's Graham Hancock give credit where credit's due because none of anything that I'm doing now, maybe I wouldn't be doing any of it had I not read Fingerprints of the Gods.
Right.
Here's a funny sequence of just what he was talking about involving Luke.
You were inspired by these sort of things.
When Luke and I first met, one of our first conversations was about, I'm really still ignorant about.
How to do this whole thing, how to do the podcast and social media thing.
And so Luke tells me, you know, what's really hot on the internet right now?
A search word that's again and again is the Olmec.
And that interest in the Olmec came from folks like Graham Hancock.
It didn't come from archaeology textbooks.
It was tons of people learning that there was this mysterious culture they knew nothing about and they want to know something about it, right?
So Luke tells me the Olmec is a huge keyword.
You want to do anything that involves the word Olmec?
And then people will be interested in it.
And so not long after that, the great courses who I've been working with for years call me up and they say, you know what?
Our marketing department says that everybody wants to know more about the Olmec these days.
Would you be willing to do a 12 lecture series on the Olmec?
And so for the last year and a half, that's exactly what I've done.
We're now in post production, but there'll be 12 lectures coming out about the Olmec to the best of my ability, telling everybody all the little details that they'd want to know.
In a vetted source.
They're so great there.
They have a whole team of fact checkers who just scrutinize everything I say down to, was it 750 BC or was it 751 BC?
Because these sources contradict what you say.
So a really super vetted thing.
But it began with the inspiration of a whole bunch of people wanting to know more about the Olmec because what's, you know, pejoratively called pseudoscience created that interest.
Yes.
Well, that's a great segue to us.
Maybe you can give us some of the highlights of that.
Can you tell us where?
So, were the Olmec one of the first groups of people that were in South America?
Or in what was it?
Middle America?
Mesoamerica.
They have been traditionally called the mother culture.
They are the first ones to really build big cities, to organize tens of thousands of people together, to create at least the evidence of a religious structure.
Like, they were the first ones to make religious art, and they interacted with a bunch of other cultures.
Nowadays, I see it at least as a more co evolutionary thing.
A lot of interaction was happening with the people who would become the Maya, with the people who would become the Zapotec and the Mixtec, and the valley where the Aztecs would develop like 2,000 years later.
Okay.
So they interact with them, but they are.
And what timeline?
What part of history?
We're talking Olmec run from.
1800 BCE to 500 BCE.
So 1,300 years worth of them.
And then they turn, you know, archaeology calls them at that point the Epi Olmec.
And that goes on to about 200 AD.
And when we're talking about the Olmec, we're talking about these big stone carved heads, right?
They almost look like they're from Africa.
They look like African descendants.
Right, right.
There's one of them there.
Luke and I just went through and saw every one of them.
Luke's actually bringing a group.
In two weeks for my exploration center, all through that area.
Last time you were here, we were going through all these photos.
I think that one is back, too.
I boasted that I'd bring everybody to every set, all 17 heads, and then one was in China.
So I missed it by one, but I think it's back.
Okay, cool.
But yeah, these heads are what everybody's fascinated by, and they are incredible.
And their faces are very evocative.
They do look African, though.
And that's controversial to say, right?
People don't like that.
No, I mean, it's common to say.
In fact, you know, it didn't start in pseudoarchaeology.
It started with the very first person who was a historian who took a look at them.
In the 1800s, the first one that at that time they were calling the head of Wayapon, now it's Tres Zapote's head one, a historian came through and looked at it and said, when he wrote it up after his journey, he said, and that looked very Negroid.
And that begins it.
But when you look at the faces of the people of the colony, Casacolcos River Basin, they are like this.
They have these wide noses and thick lips.
It's just a local characteristic.
Yeah, I told a story of what was that town that we were in?
Santiago Tuchla, the big ass guard who looked south.
Yes, so I get to this little museum or we get there.
I'm knocking on the door and we wait for a couple minutes.
The guy was probably taking a nap inside the museum.
It was early.
Yeah, that's so true.
And you can see on the visitor sheet at the Front, like nobody had been there in weeks or something, you know.
So he opens up the door, and I'm looking at this guy's chest, this huge man.
And I look up, and it's this guard who's working there.
And sure enough, there's an Olmec head sitting on top of this guy's body.
Like he looked exactly like an Olmec.
You know, the.
And he was freaky big for someone in that area.
Sure, sure.
That happens all the time.
I mean, everywhere there's some, you know, there's that famous Chinese basketball player.
I mean, he is two foot taller than the vast majority of the people from his country.
Do you remember that 90 year old man that was there who told us that in the early 1900s they exhumed those six basketballs?
Plus foot tall bodies out of the Red Palace at San Lorenzo.
Yeah, he was pretty tall himself, but that guy, yeah, he did say that.
That's true.
I did not put that in my, uh, in my own lecture thing.
I talked about it with the producers.
I said, you know, this is an actual guy who actually said that, but he couldn't produce.
You know, I asked him, where did the skeletons go?
He said, I, they went to the lab and that's the last I saw them.
And that's, you know, well, I can't really work with that, man.
I can't just.
Take a guy in cowboy boots' opinion that there were giants, but he was a member of the excavation and he was a multi generational archaeologist, too.
His grandfather was an archaeologist there.
Oh, wow.
So he knew what he was looking at.
He did say that.
Yeah, yeah.
He said there were, what, three or four bodies that were, he didn't say, he said they were taller than him, is what he said.
You're getting the story from me because he was talking in Spanish and I was, that's true.
And I told you on the bus afterwards what this guy said.
Yeah.
But he did say it.
You're right.
Yeah.
Now, the look of these heads, the way they look like they're kind of African facial features, is that very different from the way the Aztec or the Maya were depicted?
Yeah.
Yep.
They depicted themselves differently, but that was, you know, hundreds of years afterwards.
There's, you know, we all focus on these ones that look so African.
Right.
There's a whole other set of them that look totally Chinese.
If you dig deep, yeah, especially the baby ones.
I do discuss that in the lecture series that a lot of these, we call them chubby babies.
And they're so fat, their eyes are like squinted.
Like that.
And they, no.
No.
That one's another thick lips one.
Yeah.
Look up like Olmec, chubby baby.
There he is.
There we go.
Holy cow.
Yeah.
Look at that guy.
That guy looks pretty Asian, doesn't he?
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, part of the reason or a possible explanation, let me say, is that.
Moving Giant Stone Blocks00:14:39
All of the people of the Americas are Asiatic in phenotype.
DNA is very much confirming that everybody that's an American Indian, their DNA phenotype wise, is from Asia.
And even the Maya themselves have a trait that they don't talk about very often, or it's just private business, but their babies are born with what's called the Mongolian spot.
This kind of birthmark right above their butt.
I've heard of that.
It's a very Mongolian trait.
And the Maya typically, I've seen a friend's baby with that spot on their back.
It goes away, like, I think certainly by year two.
But they are born on the outside with a very Asian trait.
So even today, genetics wise, they're very Asian.
How did the Olmec get there?
I think they were homegrown.
Homegrown.
They developed there from.
Hunter gatherers into basic farmers.
What's funny, one of the things I'm going to push back on in my series is we have traditionally, we archaeologists have said it was the advent of intensive corn agriculture that allowed the Olmec to grow in such huge numbers, to feed a population where they could have a city that had 20,000, 30,000 people in it.
But it's turning out that the oldest of the cities named San Lorenzo actually wasn't.
Doing corn farming, only a very little bit.
They had created this incredible riverine resource system where they put themselves up on a high plateau with this huge kilometer long platform for the royals.
But then there were 20,000, 30,000 people around it, all fishing.
And they would wait for the seasonal inundation to flood all of the floodplains below.
And they'd build up these little islands where they would smoke and cook the fish that they were getting out of that.
and make it kind of less perishable.
It would last longer.
But that was one of their main resources, that and shellfish.
And by the time other cultures influenced them enough to be intensive corn farming, San Lorenzo realized that where they were positioned sucked for corn farming.
It was seasonally inundated.
So the civilization shifted to another part of that area, and the site of La Venta turns up.
La Venta has tons of corn farming around it.
They picked a better place to be corn farmers.
But the origins of Olmec society are not agriculture.
They figured out how to just harvest fish and shellfish out of their region on a whole new level.
And what is the academic consensus on how they were able to cut and move these giant heads all across the land, like down the rivers, across the forest?
It seems like it's almost insurmountable.
I mean,.
I don't think there is a consensus.
I think the commonly accepted story, I will say, is that they did combinations of floating them down rivers and rolling them on rollers.
But I don't really see it happening.
In fact, for sure, the old idea of a raft does not work.
I had a marine engineer who came on a trip with me one time.
And as a gift, he made me this magnificent Excel chart.
That had formulas in it.
And I could say, okay, if my raft is made out of this local wood and it's 50 foot wide, how much tonnage can it hold before it sinks?
Right.
And this formula that he made me, I was able to plug in.
I couldn't get anything higher than really three tons not to sink a raft that was as much as 100 feet across.
And there are places, bows in the river, where that would just wedge.
So, you know, you can't build a raft big enough to not sink.
Like, there's a perfect example of this old theory.
See, that thing, the one that they show displayed there, there's the head in the background, those are like 15, 25 tons.
Wow.
There's no way.
And I had a nautical engineer do the math for me.
That would sink like a rock.
Now, he had a really cool.
Alternative hypothesis.
He said, let's use the principles of Archimedes and buoyancy.
And instead of trying to make a flat thing that got sunk, what if you put a bunch of logs around it that were vertical?
And so, like, just painted a fence around it and it would act like a bobber.
If all of the logs weren't flat horizontal, but they were vertical, the water displacement won't allow you to put a stick straight down in the water like that without it floating.
It's more resistant.
So, he had this idea that, like, maybe they were like bobbers.
They'd just cover them in vertical.
Thick logs, and they could float them down the river like that, and it would be a much tighter radius.
Now, that's also totally unproven, as unproven as these pretty pictures are right here.
Yeah, kind of just adding on to that.
So, what he was saying about that formula where he could plug in a theoretical weight of an Olmec head, and he really couldn't get, if he put a three ton Olmec head on a raft that would wedge going down the river system, then it would still sink the raft.
Well, the smallest head is five tons, the largest head is the Lacobada head.
I've seen estimates at least 42 tons.
And then now, in the last few months, maybe the last six months, I've seen the estimate up at like 50 tons.
And how far away are those big ass heads from where they cut them?
From La Venta, 70 kilometers.
Yeah.
That's huge.
And so, no, we don't know how they moved them.
Wow.
And what kind of stone is it made out of?
Basalt.
It's basalt.
Okay.
So it's a softer stone.
No, no, it's pretty hard.
It's limestone's much, much softer than it.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Basalt's one of the harder stones in Mesoamerica.
Basalt can be right there with granite.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's 43 miles away.
In fact, in Sterling's papers, he.
Through a swamp.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, yeah, you're taking that through all different types of terrains.
But in some of Sterling's earlier papers, he actually describes, he found these huge.
Columns that are this big around, a few feet by a few feet thick, and six plus feet tall that would have been sitting in the.
I think there were some in the Red Palace.
He's found some just discarded next to the river, and he described them as being granite, but they were really basalt.
So, I mean, they're extremely, extremely hard.
I mean, there are ways to move these things that don't involve modern technology.
I'm a huge fan of this guy, Wally Wallington.
I want to meet him someday, but he built Stonehenge in his backyard in like Michigan or Wisconsin single handedly.
He's a really smart contract.
Same size?
Yeah.
There he is.
Oh, this guy.
God, I love Wally.
I sent him 50 bucks I didn't have because Wally needs more cement.
You know, the concepts he's talking about are so profound and simple.
Yeah.
He just uses like counterbalances, right?
And he moves them.
By putting two rocks or pivot points underneath them, and he spins them.
And every time you spin them, it moves half the distance of the two pivot points.
And with that alone, just Wally, not a crew of people, has moved all this stuff.
That's a particular one where he's showing how he can mount one up.
And he also shows how he can lift them up the top stones.
He's doing this by himself with nobody else helping.
Yeah, those are his brother in laws, I think, watching him.
Those guys are funny at the end.
They were like, Call it Wally Hinge.
Call it Wally Hinge.
No, no, call it Stonehenge Reloading.
They're so great.
But here's this, you know, relatively simple man who has shown without major tools how to do this.
And that's not to say we know that that's how it was done by the Olmecs or the Egyptians or whoever, but those weren't necessarily symmetrical stones either.
Wally inspires me just like, you know, the wonderful stories of folks like Hancock.
I mean, he is showing us what's possible, but Wally is different than Hancock.
Wally freaking proved it.
Yeah.
And Wally's been doing this for, you know, a few decades.
Imagine when you have an entire industry of people doing this and trying to, you know, further.
I love that one.
That's crazy.
You know, imagine you have an entire industry of people, highly intelligent people doing this over the course of centuries.
How much, you know, how much you're able to invent and learn how to.
He's got one that shows the same angle that the pyramids of Giza are at.
And how he can make a simple lever system that he can haul five times, 10 times his own weight by himself with this particular angle.
And he can haul it straight up.
That's so interesting, man.
So, you know, he really, there he is twisting it.
He's got two pivot points underneath and he is just turning it.
And every time he turns it around, it goes half the distance between the two pivot points.
I mean, this is how you would move a giant stone.
Yeah.
And if you had a really deep, sophisticated understanding of math like they did, why wouldn't they be able to figure out some sort of.
And you're also motivated by, you know, zealous religion.
And also, I think there's a more practical part too, like creating something huge and magnificent like this.
Like, why did they do it?
Well, I think number one, you know, on the most boring and practical levels, it's a WPA project.
You're a big man king.
You know, 100,000 people want to follow you.
If they don't have something to be engaged in this civilization, then what are they doing there?
Right.
So these big projects they make together cement cultural identity.
Right.
But they're also, on a religious level, they are.
Yeah, look at him just moving that piece so simply.
I love Wallace.
And if they did use some sort of wooden wedges like this or wooden levers to move stuff like this, we obviously wouldn't have the evidence of that.
That would be gone.
We would just have the stones.
Right.
So it makes sense why we wouldn't have evidence of that kind of stuff.
There are these things.
Luke and I were just in Peru and Machu Picchu and Cusco.
And there are these big stones that have just two, like, titties on them.
And they're in the walls.
Why wouldn't they just shave them off?
Are they proud of them?
Why wouldn't they just close them off?
A lot of people say, oh, they're where they would lash ropes so they could move these big stones.
These are those nubs.
But they're always in twos.
And I wonder whether they aren't the evidence of Wally's pivot points.
Yeah.
But the one thing, though, that I can't explain is the freaking scoop marks or like the way those stones, it looks like they were cut using like some sort of acid to soften it or something.
That is a theory that I'm actively trying to figure out.
I think it was acids.
And there are weird like wipe marks that look like, you know, Like somebody cleaned up a spill on the walls.
They are weird.
There's lots of unexplained evidence.
Now, that one gets into, you know, how did they fit them so tightly, not move them?
But the acids wouldn't help them move them.
But the acids would help them cut it, though, right?
Right, right.
Or fit them perfectly.
Yes.
The conventional theory is they were using hammer stones and they would just pick up a five ton stone and go, okay, let's set it down on this one.
It's not quite right.
Pick it back up.
I'm going to peck this place.
Okay, no, do it again.
Oh, no, do it again.
It would take so much effort.
But when it comes to effort, a colleague of mine, Bill Fash, once said something that I love.
I repeat it on all these things, I think. that he simply said, when you're making something for the gods, it's not supposed to be easy.
So I think us Westerners are always looking at something like that and noticing how much work would go into it or our minds boggled it.
But that would take so much effort.
And to our minds, we're always about efficiency.
If you're smart, you're efficient.
But if you're devout, maybe you do do it the long way.
And the harder it was for you, the greater your active devotion.
So, I think that's a profound thing to always keep in mind when we of one culture in time are trying to understand the motivations of ancient people.
Right.
You know, yeah.
Doing something the long and hard way is an act of devotion, not stupidity.
And that says a lot about, like, the ultimate direction the societies are heading in, like, their values.
Like, if you look at our society, our ultimate values are the economy and making, like, working in our nine to five job to survive.
And if you look at it from a grander scale at the whole country, it's like making the economy survive, increasing our GDP, making things more profitable, right?
Not streamlining.
Streamlining, stuff like that.
Sacred Burial Sites Globally00:15:01
And like there's no profit in building, there's nothing to gain monetarily or economically from building a huge shrine that would take hundreds of years to build.
See, it's that kind of thinking that's going to close the National Science Foundation.
I don't want to see that happen.
There are senators a couple years back, I remember because Amaya Sites.
Grant was specifically questioned in Congress as to, you know, a congressman was saying National Science Foundation gave $50,000 to dig up a Maya pyramid.
How does that profit America?
How do we make any money on that?
Congress should have oversight and not allow that.
And we can only allow science that is going to produce a technology that makes us money.
If that was our attitude, we wouldn't learn jacker shit.
Right.
Yeah.
After like all the people that I have that come in here to talk about the ancient world and the stuff that you're talking about, I just like.
It kind of, I'm developing this weird like web diagram of an idea that like we, our civilization might be devolving because of technology.
It's almost like it makes sense that we were way more sophisticated or advanced in the past because of the lack of technology, right?
Something to do with us being surrounded by all these screens and all these.
Cell phone towers everywhere and self driving cars and these iPhones that can connect us with anyone instantaneously.
It's like it buried all these deep senses inside of our bodies to where it almost turned off some sort of magic within us, you know?
Well, the irony is that we've made communication technology that's better than the planet has ever seen, but it seems to just be separating us.
Like in a physical sense, it's isolating us.
It's ironic.
We communicate like never before, but the product is our isolation individually.
Hmm.
Yeah, totally.
What do you make of how these cultures in South America and Egypt and China and all over the world were doing, building these same types of structures at the same time?
Like, how do you think they were connected?
And so, it seems like even when you have the alignments to the cosmos and these temples like Obekli Tepe and in Egypt and in Central and South America, it seems like they were all obsessed with the cosmos and building pyramids and all these.
Similar gods and like flood myths and things like this?
You know, when it comes to the flood myth, I think that's connected to the ice age that everybody was, you know, the rising and lowering of the seas.
I think that was something that humans were experiencing all over the planet.
So that particular one, I think, is fairly explainable.
That one narrow part of what you just asked about.
The other part, I mean, I personally favor a theory of what Star Trek called.
Human parallel development.
Star Trek went on to see it, you know, in all sorts of planets and things.
And of course, that was fantasy.
But I do think that we, as human animals on this planet, have certain compunctions inside of us that are almost instinctual and they are an investigation of our world and they are communication.
And so I think certain things, there were also necessities.
You know, we need shelter, we need food.
How are we going to go about this?
I don't see it.
Like, at least Graham's early books would suggest that it was an advanced ancient civilization that the rest of us got pieces and fragments of and are now still digging our way back up.
I think it was independent around the world.
And that it's kind of a product of humans being the animals we are.
That's the end.
That's a theory, just like Graham's is a theory or a hypothesis.
But I see us as the.
Parallel developing the concept that we could build a house, we lived in a cave, but we could build a cave anywhere.
Let's do it, and it ends up with four walls and a roof.
Um, moving stones.
One that really I think is a very particular invention that I'm fascinated by is the bow and arrow.
That one seems to have not just come from one place and spread out independently developed, but that's a very I look for things that are what archaeology calls diagnostic artifacts.
These are.
Very particular to this culture as signatures on culture.
But, you know, where the bomb is.
Let me get myself back to your.
Africa, like long, long ago.
Okay.
At least I won't pretend I remember the day.
Steve?
That's what we got, Steve.
One of the things I would add on there is I think for people building pyramids all over the world, one, you know, highly, highly conservative, like sober answer might be.
I was walking through the jungles around the city of El Mirador, and I had never seen so many ants in my life before, you know, whether they're soldier ants or fire ants or leaf cutter ants.
And I was, the group of people that I was there with, I was talking to them, and I was like, I was like, you know.
I was going to say 70,000.
Damn it.
I should have said that.
The bow and arrow originated in Africa during the Paleolithic period, around 71,000 years ago.
I had 70 in my head.
I was scared to say it, darn it.
I love how they use a picture of like a modern fucking compound.
Look, I interrupted you.
We were talking about ants.
Well, I was just saying, you know, ants work in much of the way that maybe the Maya people do or did.
They work in unison.
They bring resources back and forth.
And what do they build?
They build pyramids.
It's in them to do that.
They're going to do it naturally.
And it makes sense in their little tiny brain.
And so it could be that human beings, we are wired that way, if that makes sense.
Like ants build ant mounds, they build their own little pyramids all over the world.
Well, human beings are going to do that too because maybe it makes sense to build a structure that way.
You want to build a structure that's huge.
That's a cool element of what you're saying too.
That's exactly.
It turns out looking like a mound because without mortar or rebar, they can't build it up high without it splaying out unless it has a fat base going to a tiny top.
That's the most boring explanation of why pyramids are all over the world.
Any kid, you know, your kids, if they have blocks, you know, they can build a tower a couple of times and the other one pushes it over.
But if you build something with a fat base going up to a tiny top, that's a stable building and you can build the tallest thing you can build before the advent of cement and rebar.
By building a pyramid.
Right.
Yeah.
Another thing I would add, and this is just me being facetious or devil's advocate, but that conversation of pyramids being built all over the world kind of runs hand in hand with why the Egyptians are building the pyramids.
And then you can leap to why do you see pyramids all over the world?
Well, the thing is, a lot of these pyramids, especially the ones, let's say where there are a lot of them, is in the Mesoamerican world, a great majority of those pyramids are actually tombs.
They're places that people.
Might live during their day and then they're entombed inside of it.
And there's thousands of people buried in pyramids all over.
The vast majority of pyramids around the world, there are people buried in them.
So it's just a funny thing.
If we're going to look to the other side of the world for an answer, Pakal's tomb is a great answer.
I mean, that's a pyramid that was only built to be a tomb for him.
I have a theory here in North America where we have pyramids here too.
We have the famous ones are Cahokia and Poverty Point.
But I think they start really, really early, like 6000 BC, where we see hunter-gatherers living along the rivers of like Tennessee and Kentucky and that area up into Ohio.
And one of their big resources are these shells from the rivers.
And they make these big shell mounds.
They're all over here, too.
There's a bunch of shell mounds right here in St. Pete, aren't there?
There was a time a couple thousand years ago where this shell, riverine, or ocean resources was a huge thing.
And so they built up these giant mounds.
And in Tennessee and Kentucky, they started just putting dead bodies in these shell mounds.
And, you know, maybe it was to keep the stink away.
Maybe, you know, maybe there were practical reasons.
Maybe there were religious reasons.
But the practice started long after the first shell mounds were happening.
Like down here, you don't find any bodies in the shell mounds.
But up there, they started doing it along the rivers.
Then all of a sudden, that shell mound isn't a pile of dirt anymore.
It's where grandpa is.
And then your ancestors get connected to that land.
But then the Adena culture starts, like not that long after, maybe, you know, a thousand years, which is not much archaeologically.
The Adena start building dirt mounds and they put all of their burials in there.
And they're building them out of dirt because they're in a different area that doesn't have all those shells.
But maybe their, you know, their cultural practice at that point was.
That's where we put our dead.
We put them in mounds.
And since we don't have enough shells to make a mound here, we'll make it out of dirt.
And this begins this tradition of burying people in mounds in North America.
But the core of it was thousands of years ago, probably putting a stinky body under the shells where you can't smell them anymore.
Ancient landfills.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's a lot of my theories revolve around that.
Yeah, ancient landfills.
I'm sorry.
Trash management is a very underappreciated aspect of human motivations.
I think half the cities that were walked away from were probably mostly because they smelled like shit.
Yeah.
That would explain why they keep near the coast, right?
Like, it's a really dirty and disgusting topic.
But, you know, if you make a city of 20,000 people and you don't have plumbing, I mean, you can only dig so many holes before the place is literally a cesspool and you have to move away for health and safety issues.
Yeah.
There's a parallel topic to that that sort of explains why we think that burial sites in Egypt become sacred sites, you know.
Egypt is one of the places where they think that the bubonic plague began.
And, you know, living right along the river with, you know, you're in this high concentration of, you know, all these rats and snakes and rodents that are living around you.
And they're, you know, they're living among your little house that's next to the river.
It's the perfect place for diseases to begin.
And so it's not that, you know, you have limited place to bury your dead.
And because the vast majority of Egypt is wheat and barley fields, you don't really just want to throw grandpa like out in the field, you know, and you don't really want to bury him.
Among this very scarce, precious land that you have.
So, what do you do?
Well, this kind of gets off into another thing of the Egyptian psychology and their worldview.
But they would acknowledge that the sun, which they were a sun worshiping culture, as so many cultures throughout the ancient world were, they would acknowledge that the sun was born every day in the East and it would die every day in the West.
And so, they believed that when they died, they should be buried in the West and facing East.
How all tombs throughout Egypt are.
They're always on the west side of the Nile, facing towards the morning sunrise, because they thought that they would die in the west and then be reborn again in the east.
Oh, wow.
So, but this began, you know, that early psychology was probably there, and they always wanted to be buried on the west side.
But eventually, originally, what they do is they go out to the desert where the sand, where these big sand pits are, and they clear away the sand, and you bury Grandpa in there, and maybe you bury him.
With some of his crap that you don't really want.
You know, it's like, ah, maybe grandpa would have wanted that.
I don't really have a use for this.
I don't really have a use for this vase.
I don't really have a use for, you know, this necklace.
Like, this is nice, but I never really liked it.
I'm just going to bury it with him.
And, you know, maybe there's some guys in town that are like, you know, I would have liked to have that vase.
Why don't we just go out there and take it?
So, you know, eventually somebody returns to go see his grandpa's grave and it's been desecrated.
And then you can see how the cycle of developing stigmas and, um, You know, superstitions about burials begin.
Cursed tombs.
Cursed tombs.
And it becomes obsessive, right?
And you can see this natural progression from sandpit burial to a sandpit burial being covered with stones.
So they thought that would stop people from desecrating the tombs.
You know, and then it just continues and continues until you get to these rock cut tombs that go into the ground, but that's not enough.
They got to put a building on top of it.
So then we call that a mastaba.
And then that mastaba eventually turns into six mastabas stacked on top of one each other that makes this.
Step pyramid, and then that can develop into a pyramid.
And so it just, it's this, um, there are these, you know, essentially, this is it's like a dump for their bodies that eventually becomes like the central point of their religion, right?
So that's just another example on the other side of the world of this same thing happening as the shell mounts.
Yeah.
No, that makes a lot of sense.
It's fascinating how humans, like, we all feel like we're from somewhere, like this is where I was born, but a lot of our identity and our connection to the land that we feel we're a part of is about dead bodies being buried there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So much of it is about death, right?
It's about your ancestors, and that kicks, you know, death and stuff.
We hope that our ancestors went.
To that other place, whatever it is in our religious perspective.
But then, there, the place where they're dead becomes more than just your dead grandpa.
It becomes like your connection point to your religion and what you think happens to you after death.
Yeah.
Oh, man, that's so fascinating because it at a so necropolis is a Greek word means dead city.
So you have Acropolis, Acropolis, a living city.
You know, you have this necropolis in Egypt called Saqqara.
I'm sure you've heard of this before.
And in Saqqara, you have these fake.
Saqqara Necropolis Afterlife00:04:40
Facades of buildings where the pharaoh is going to be walking around, where people are going to be living in this city in the afterlife.
Like, that's what all these tombs are.
That's why, you know, at Giza.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, that's what they are.
They're like buildings that people are going to continue to live in.
They're going to get up in the next world and still be alive.
And they're building, you know, these giant graveyards.
They're just cities.
You're walking through it, and all of these buildings that we call tombs, that's an oversimplification on our part looking into the past.
This was a building where they would live.
Eternally in the next life, and they actually built temples and places for the pharaoh to walk around.
So, on the third photo right there, those are facades of temples.
On the right, third from the left, I mean, yes, yes.
With some of these buildings, there's not actually an entrance into it, it's just a solid building.
It's like the Osirion, yeah, yeah, there's all these doorways that go nowhere.
Yes, it's thought that these are sacred places where the dead are going to continue to live in the afterlife, and it's just funny how they really, really care about.
Building these cities where dead people are going to continue walking around.
And what's so interesting is that the Maya put forth so much money from their economy to keep up their ancestors' necropoli, you know, where their ancestors lived.
On a very micro level, too, every family had a little family shrine.
If they owned that piece of property through generations, one of the buildings was where grandpa was buried and it becomes a living shrine in their house.
Yeah, it's like an entire part of their city that is just dead.
Is that one of those?
Mastabas in the background?
Is that on the bottom right?
The bottom left, I'm sorry?
Bottom left.
That pyramid in the background.
That's the one that Emotech made, right?
Okay, I'm sorry, not this one.
We go back to the other photo.
The bottom left.
Bottom left.
That's on there.
Yeah, so at the top right, those are actually modern day rafters that are covering up the top two or three layers.
That's the step pyramid of Saqqara.
Okay.
It's like a rafter.
Is that a pyramid or is that the Mastaba thing?
So they think that that is the first.
Pyramid, you know, in order where you can see that if you look up the word mastaba, the idea is that, well, I mean, we know that people from 3100 BC to 2700 BC, very important people such as pharaohs, are being buried in these buildings that, you know, these one by three buildings that look like big stone Twinkies.
That's basically what they are.
And the reason that they evolved from there is because they're burying the person in these shafts that go under the ground.
And What tomb robbers do is rather than coring up just like this.
So, what tomb robbers do, rather than quarrying all those blocks to get to that hole that leads to that tomb, what they do instead is they go, okay, we're just going to dig a parallel hole in the ground and find our way to that tomb and rob all the goods that are from it.
So, they think that the way that the first pyramid was developed was that they had these shafts, these burial shafts under the ground that basically recreates the Pharaoh's apartment that he would have had in Memphis.
They're all, you know, they're decorated in all kinds of different ways.
There's hieroglyphs down there and everything.
And they eventually started out as this one by three structure.
And then they expand it to being basically a large one by one structure, or let's say like a 10 by 10 structure in comparison.
It's huge to be so big that people can't tunnel underneath it and get to the chambers under there.
The way that we know they did that was I was standing next to this pyramid looking at where the casing stones have fallen off, and you can see the original casing stones from the smaller building that's in there.
So you can look at it with your own eyes and go, oh, they turned this building into this building and then added five more on top.
To make it this grand structure that arcs up into the sky.
Right.
So that's the idea.
And then all these other pharaohs and high ranking government people build their tombs and their little temples for the afterlife around it.
And what they're building is a city that they're going to live in in the next life.
Right.
Yeah.
Have you seen those giant, there's out of, I think it's in some of these, this same pyramid near Saqqara, where there's these, like the, I think they're step pyramids, where they have these, like, coming out of the pyramids, there's these kind of like, Canals they cut out of the stone that go to these giant dishes.
There's like these big stone like bowls that have these very weird, and there's these like channels cut out of the rock that go into the pyramid as if they're like something that's supposed to flow out of the pyramid and go into these bowls.
Yeah, Abu Seir is a great, uh, example of this.
Shaman Caves and Bat Guano00:14:57
I honestly couldn't tell you.
I know that Jeffrey that uh, Jeffrey Drum, yeah, yeah, definitely not that.
No, it's these huge bowls, you know, it's so specific that you may not be.
You may not be able to find it on Google.
You can type in, like, probably land of chem bowls.
There's probably, like, some archaeological term that they call it.
Yeah, yeah.
And this isn't my area of expertise, but it is something that's very peculiar.
You have these little channels that run along the foundation of a lot of these sites, and they lead to these little, they're almost like, I mean, I can't see them being anything other than collection bowls.
It's very, very strange.
But I honestly couldn't tell you that.
They lead out, huh?
Yeah, they lead out.
Yeah, they lead out.
Like, they pitch down.
Yeah, it's super strange.
And then, you know, that's, he ties that in with like the smell.
There's a, it's a, what is the smell?
Sulfur?
Sulfur ammonia.
Ammonia.
Yeah, yeah.
Like the higher you go into the pyramids, the more it reeks of ammonia.
It's either from something that was used inside those chambers or people just peeing in them.
It was one of the two.
I don't know.
Yeah, I'm just making a joke.
Some people think it was like bat shit or something.
Yeah.
A lot of guano.
I don't know.
I was in places where there was a lot of.
Cat piss smells like ammonia.
Yeah.
I was in places where there was a lot of.
Bats and it didn't smell like that.
There it is.
Yeah.
How strange is that?
Nice job.
It's a crack team here, Danny.
Yeah.
So, going back to the Americas, what evidence do we have of drugs in these cultures and drug use?
What types of drugs were they using and when did they start using them?
You know, the Mesoamerica, we do not have a whole lot of evidence beyond tobacco.
There's thoughts that maybe mushrooms were involved, but no real proof.
You know, the entire argument is founded around a couple of mushroom stone statues, which really isn't enough.
But South America, they were using ayahuasca and they were also using San Pedro cactus.
And there's a couple of other stray things that are involved in drug use, but they're like to prepare the body, like, To purge the body so that it can receive the hallucinogenic stuff in a pure way.
Like even manioc is said to be that.
Manioc, we make tapioca pudding out of it, but it's poison in its original form.
So they think they were using manioc to just throw up and then take San Pedro or ayahuasca.
Is there any connection with.
I have de Tora too.
Is there any connection with drug use and religion?
Um.
I guess up in northern Mexico, we have the Huichol people who hunt the peyote.
And that seems to be a very, very old tradition.
Now, those poor guys are cordoned off to a little section of mountains in the mainland right across from the Baja Peninsula.
But they'd have this traditional tradition, they do it to this day where they go out into the desert on this kind of like almost like Australian Aboriginal, you know.
Spirit walk.
They go out there and they go to a place that's supposed to be the mountain of creation, and there they hunt peyote like they're hunting deer, and they shoot it with little arrows.
But then they take the peyote and they see recreations of their creation story and bond, and then they walk back across the desert.
So those guys are still doing that.
And there are caves on the border of Texas and Mexico, the lower Pecos.
There's especially one called White Shaman Cave.
Oh, Are you ready?
White Shaman Cave.
Where we can see that same story being played out.
People like hunting little buttons on the ground and the big mountain.
And people obviously, well, they're like turning into ghosts.
You see the top one from the third from the top?
Right there.
That's like people interpret that as like that person's spirit coming out of them in trance.
And this is a big, wide panel.
White Shaman Cave is absolutely amazing.
It's a wonderful thing to see.
But this woman named Carolyn Boyd has really gone to great length to see all the elements of this panel, which is like 6,000 years old, and pretty much nailed what the Wee Chole are still doing there.
In fact, a few years back, she invited a Wee Chole group out to look at it and talk to them about it.
And they just like.
Burst into tears when they saw the whole thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would add and say, you know, if I'm reaching out there a little bit or speculating or if I have a gut feeling, I think it was really interesting.
I don't know.
Maybe it was Paul Rosely on your podcast where he was talking about his ayahuasca experience in the Amazon.
And he was saying that he felt like he shrunk down to this molecular level and he was like floating through the Amazon as like an atom.
And then eventually he kind of moved on to another chapter and he had embodied.
He became a jaguar and started seeing the Amazon through the eyes of a jaguar.
Do you recall him telling this story?
I remember Mike Corey telling a story about doing ayahuasca.
I think it was actually in a Mayan village.
Sure, that's right.
Popular these days, but no, yeah.
I think he's from my Amazon.
I think that was Mike Corey who told that story, and he explained it as like he explained it as like a human body being ripped open, like, like, all like everything pulled open of the human body, and it was like ripping open every fiber of the universe or something like that.
And like, he was like being like shot through the universe.
I'm sure, sure.
I don't want to be ripped open, yeah, yeah, but not his body, like, he was like seeing this, yeah, but.
It's pretty common for people, you know, if you read experiences like just on Reddit, or there are people who put together these collections of people recording their experiences on ayahuasca.
And something that's pretty common is people seeing a jaguar, you know, if they're doing it down in the Amazon, or being able to see through the eyes of a jaguar.
And I just always wonder, I just always wonder if that has something to do or not with your idea of this fanged deity in the Amazon.
I think he is definitely involved in the.
Traditions of ayahuasca and and San Pedro.
I mean it's sometimes there's uprooted San Pedro floating in the background of scenes with this guy.
So but I I do want to point out too that hallucinogenic drugs are not the only way that uh, native Americans found a way to hallucinate, and right be that other world.
Starving to make you hallucinate starving, you know the, the vision quests that were done by the Indians of the Plains.
Those, those didn't involve drugs at all.
That was, that was uh exhaustion starvation, and it would trigger it.
For the Maya, what they would do is they would again starve, keep themselves in darkness, kind of sensory deprivation, and then they cut themselves.
And that sudden loss of blood is what would trigger the vision.
Whoa.
So a really bad cut when you are starved and exhausted is the trigger point.
The Native Americans in the Plains, they kind of ran around.
They didn't know when it was going to happen to them.
They had to hit their threshold.
That's so fast.
But the Maya kind of honed it where they'd get themselves prepped.
And then a quick and intense blood loss would trigger the vision.
Wow.
Because that's so interesting.
Because when you do, I've never done ayahuasca, but I've done DMT.
And when you do DMT, it's almost like it's experiencing death in a way where your soul kind of like leaves your body and you leave like the material world behind.
That's their interpretation that they are entering the world where the dead reside.
Like they want to.
I'm not talking about sacrificing.
Like, are you talking about sacrificing?
No, no.
You're talking about like getting to the edge.
Getting to the edge, right?
Like getting to the Edge of death, but not going all the way.
Hallucinogens, in a way, are poisoning us.
The hallucinations are our body fighting off what it thinks is something trying to kill it.
Right.
What sort of.
So they would starve themselves and then cut themselves so they would bleed out, almost bleed out fully, and then they would experience these things.
And were there any rituals involved in it?
Was this like a ritual?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, this was a king thing.
The kings would cut their penises and then dance around with paper tied to it, and the blood would splatter everywhere.
People would see that.
Then they'd put that paper. in a bowl and burn it.
And that blood and the smoke that it created was the conduit between this world and the other world.
And through the smoke, their ancestors would come down and talk to them.
I find it fascinating that it was specifically their blood.
And we talk about bloodlines.
We talk, you know, we can, ancestry can take my DNA and connect my kids to it.
It's the fluids out of my body that actually show our proof of connection.
It's funny that they specifically burned their own blood to contact only their own ancestor.
They couldn't contact anybody by burning their blood.
It was somebody of their bloodline.
And how do you know specifically they were doing this thing by cutting their dicks and dancing around?
There are, there are, uh, photos, they're not photos, but, uh, uh, carvings that show them doing it.
Show them doing it.
Yashilan, they're a little, you know, they're a little.
Can you find a carving online of this?
I got it.
Yashilan Stila.
That ought to do it.
Yeah.
How do you spell that?
Y A X C H I L A N.
I bet a lot of them probably died on accident by doing this.
Probably.
Though they did have, there was a neat ethnographic or ethnobotanical research that showed that even today, the Maya know a number of blame that are blood coagulators.
Oh, really?
So they can quickly stop the blood.
In fact, one of my guys in Palenque, when I was the guys that were on the machete, she's pulling a rope through her tongue.
Yeah.
And see the bowl at her feet with paper that's kind of folded inside of it?
Mm hmm.
That's she's pulling it.
Women had to pull a thorny rope through their tongue, and men would cut their penis.
But she is, she is there.
It's even there.
I think there are droplets in this one on her chin.
If you zoom in, you can see the blood actually coming out of her mouth.
Yeah, that's that's supposed to be like the blood dripping down.
And then you go down and at her feet, see the thorny, see it obviously thorny.
That's the bowl with the paper in it.
And that paper is going to get soaked.
And in the very next scene, that.
Paper is burning.
The smoke is turning into a big snake who's above her and burping out the first king of the Ashilan dynasty named Yat Balam, penis jaguar.
Yep.
Penis jaguar.
Penis jaguar.
That's a pretty cool badass name, huh?
Yeah.
Nobody messes with penis jaguar.
That's pretty fucking cool.
Or jaguar penis.
Something I think that we should highlight if you go back to where you're zooming in really quickly, just segueing for just half a second, taking a side trip from talking about psychedelics.
You know, one of the things that made a site called Gobekli Tepe so famous was that, you know, they're kind of carving sculptures into the rock.
Like they're removing away the face of the rock to reveal the picture from underneath.
But there, you know, it's these.
Negative relief?
Yeah, yeah.
At that site, it's these very basic, you know, animals and human beings.
But this is exactly the same thing in exactly the same kind of stone.
And it's really some of the most interesting.
Intricately detailed reliefs in all of the ancient world.
And that's on top of having probably the most complicated language in the ancient world as well.
Right.
Yeah.
This, this, the background is deeper than the characters that are carved, is called Ba relief.
And it is much harder to do than carving into a stone because you can just keep carving and fix your mistakes.
This one, your mistakes are pedestaled.
Yeah, exactly.
It's got to be perfect.
And you have to plan it out, right?
And think of it.
That's her husband.
Shield Jaguar and he's holding a torch above her.
So this is a scene that's happening at night.
The interesting thing that we know from hieroglyphs like the one that are above him that's naming him.
That's a Jaguar penis?
No, that's her husband, Shield Jaguar.
Okay.
Whose name is in the elbow of that thing.
But he's not of the bloodline.
She is.
So she has to do the bloodletting because only her blood is going to make it to Penis Jaguar.
If he did the bloodletting, it would just be his nobody grandfather.
So she's the one who's doing it for him.
And then there's a number of scenes like this one.
This one, I think, is in the British Museum, but the other ones are in the Mexico City Museum.
It's a whole building.
This is a lintel.
So it's above your head as you walk in the temple.
And there are four of them that create a narrative of what's happening here.
She lets her blood and then contacts her ancestors.
Yeah, Yashilan lintel 33.
And this is Mayan again, correct?
This is Mayan.
And so it shows her contacting her ants, first letting blood, then contacting her ancestor, then handing him his helmet and shield.
So she's asked the ancestors to protect her husband in battle, and then she sends him off.
Wow.
That's wild, man.
So there's 33.
That's.
These are all part of.
Let's see.
There was one I just saw.
The same ritual.
How about Fourth from the Top?
I think that's another one in the sequence.
I think that's where she's handing him the helmet.
That one.
That one.
So that's the end.
There's his jaguar helmet while she's handing him.
Oh, gosh.
Nice.
Come on.
And that's a soccer game.
Snake Venom in Warfare00:08:38
That's got it.
Okay.
That's it.
Oh, there it is.
There it is.
The one with the big snake.
Go scroll down.
That one.
Click on that one.
Just zoom in on it, Steve.
There you go.
See that guy coming out with the spear and a shield?
He's Yat Balam.
It says it in the hieroglyphs above him.
He's the lineage founder of Yashilan.
And if you follow, see, he's getting burped out of the mouth of a snake.
Follow its undulating body down.
And it starts at the bowl.
The bowl's smoke is turning into the snake.
That's amazing.
Oh, yeah.
Wow.
And she's also holding another bowl in her hand.
Yeah.
Also with the stuff.
And the smoke's combining to become what they call the Boots Chan, the smoke serpent.
And that's the conduit between this world and the other, where shamans can ride it up into the other world and ancestors can ride it down to talk to us.
Wow.
Isn't it amazing how intricate this is?
You have to really look at it for a minute to understand what it is that you're looking at.
I've got a question for you, Dr. Barnhart.
We were talking about things that a minute ago, you know, that people do all around the world that they feel compelled to do.
I thought about this while I was in Egypt, and there's statues of Alexander there, all kinds of depictions of Alexander.
One of the things that the Greeks did, which I always talk about how, you know, when I try to break down, because, you know, introducing people to the Americas, it's so much less in the pop culture.
You kind of have to, you know, that's why I like constantly will refer back to ancient Greece or Egypt or something that's more in the pop culture to help people understand.
Right.
Well, I always talk about how.
The Maya are a scientifically oriented civilization that's very interested in intellectual pursuits.
But that probably causes them to be warring city states that can't really get along and they never become.
I'm sure you've heard people say Aztec Empire, Inca Empire, Maya Empire.
Well, there was never a Maya Empire.
It's just kind of a misnomer because they couldn't all get along.
There was this gigantic civilization of these.
No more so than the Greeks.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So they're exactly like the Greeks that later get conquered by a unified empire that comes in from the West.
Like the Greeks get conquered by the Roman Empire from the West.
The Maya get conquered by, in part, by the Teotihuacan Empire from the West and then conquered by the Aztec Empire that comes from the West.
All that together, that's just one similarity.
When we go back to that Stella and you see the queen, that she is the one that's the successor of.
Penis Jaguar or Progenitor Jaguar.
I guess that's like another PC name you could give them.
I should name her too.
Her name is Lady Earth Shark.
Lady Earth Shark.
Lady Earth Shark.
Okay.
Okay.
So, if you look at her chest, that is so similar to the Greeks putting Medusa at the center of their armor.
Have you seen this before?
The Linothorax?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, that's probably just them, it's the Greeks symbolizing that they have the power of her with them as they're going into battle.
Is that a common thing that you have seen throughout the Maya world?
And do you have any ideas what these.
In terms of warfare, yeah, there's a lot of neat stuff where.
I just showed you the the boots chan right where it's the smoke serpent and things are coming out of the supernatural world into it.
Well, there's helmets that you see, especially at Chichen Itza, where their helmet is actually the mouth of a snake.
The upper part is the upper part of the snake and the chin strap is the lower jaw of the snake.
So conceptually, what a warrior that's wearing a helmet like that is saying is, I'm coming straight out of the supernatural, I'm burping out of the vision serpent Into this battlefield.
Yeah.
You know what's interesting about the Medusa?
They were called the Medusae, and allegedly there was this is from a guy who I know who studied Greek his whole life and reads and translates Greek.
Is this that Amon guy?
Yes, Amon Hillman.
He says the Medusae were these group of women who were kind of like badass killers.
Sure.
And they would, the symbolism of the snakes was they would actually keep snake venom in their hair, and they would use that to, they would literally like drug.
Men and paralyze them and then have sex with them.
And then sometimes they would kill them afterwards.
That sounds like a male fantasy.
I don't know.
Right.
That doesn't sound so bad.
No, don't be a powerful woman.
They would use the venom to paralyze them.
And they had some other sort of concoction, some other sort of drug that would give them erections that would last for days.
And they would just like molest these guys.
Yeah.
And they were like, and then sometimes they would just kill them for fun afterwards.
Oh, and they were called the Medusae.
And that's why the snake depiction was like a symbol for the snake venom they used.
I've never heard this.
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
So, like, another group of powerful women like the Amazons.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But this isn't the same as the Amazons?
The powerful groups.
Just ones that like to be there and have sex with them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is all in Greek.
This is all Greek stuff.
And another thing that they were doing in Greece, in that part of the world in antiquity.
Oh, sorry.
I'm going to whoop your ass and I'm going to give you some Viagra so you just keep going.
Oh, no, don't do it.
Yeah, man.
But another weird thing about the Greeks were like sick fucks.
Like they were like, they were pervs.
Yeah, of course.
They were all into like the Priapis gods and like all these crazy things and really into drugs, allegedly, apparently.
Yeah, definitely.
And there was even like going back to this idea of dying and like dying and being born again.
They would do these things where they would, there was obviously that part of like the world, North Africa was known for these.
Vipers, these North African vipers that would kill a lot of people.
They were dying from viper venom.
Is this the asp?
No, I don't, maybe.
I don't know.
There's a lot of them.
So, what they would do is they would put viper venom on these basically like linens, just little amounts of viper venom, not a lot.
And then they would cut kids' arms or their legs or whatever, and they would wrap the cut in this viper venom just a little bit, just enough to where their body would build up a.
Defense for it.
Oh, okay.
And build up this sort of antibodies against the venom.
And they would use that, they would use the kids' bodily fluids as anti venoms, antidotes to the snake venom.
So, when these guys wanted to get high, when they wanted to die and be born again, they would inject themselves with the snake venom or take the snake venom somehow.
You couldn't, for some reason, snake venom doesn't harm you if you drink it.
You have to actually introduce it right into the bloodstream.
They would do that and then they would wait until they're like right on the edge of death and then they would take the bodily fluids of the children that built up the antibodies to do that.
And this was a really popular way to trip back then.
Yeah.
Now, did this make the children immune to the snake bites?
I don't know.
Probably.
It sounds very much like the.
Development of vaccines where they were like scraping the rocks off of cows.
Yeah, yeah.
Do you have any idea what era that was?
Yeah, this was from at least 200 BC to 200, maybe 200 to 300 AD.
The guy who wrote a lot about this was a guy named Galen, who was Marcus Aurelius's physician.
I got to ask why children?
I mean, couldn't you use ugly old women or something?
Because children had the strongest immune systems.
Well, I guess so.
Very interesting.
You know, that kind of reminds me of you always hear legends, and it probably is true, although Western medicine, as far as I know, hasn't really gone to investigate it.
But there are people in the Amazon that will, you know, can get bitten by a rabid animal or can get bitten by a fertilizer or something, and they'll be offered Western medicine and they'll go, oh, no, no, thank you.
I don't need that.
I have, you know, we have a doctor in our village.
And, you know, they just go off into the jungle, but then they appear a few months later and they're okay.
Right.
You know, I know multiple people in.
Central America, who've been bitten and went to the shaman instead of the clinic and were fine.
Right.
Amazing.
I know another guy who lost a leg, so they're not all fine.
Right.
Right.
Well, if you're from there, I mean, the native medicine is going to be far superior than anything you're going to get in some sort of compounding pharmacy.
Amazon Medicine vs Western Care00:02:47
You know, sadly, the world has changed.
When I started going down there, that was always the case.
Somebody would always trust the local coronero more than the pharmacist, but everybody flocks to the pharmacy now.
They, The native people, at least of Mexico and Guatemala, are obsessed with modern medicine.
They are always like pill poppers now.
I mean, I don't want to stereotype the entire group of people.
We're obsessed with technology and developing technology too, but it doesn't seem like it's good for us.
Yeah, it's not good for them either.
I was having a conversation while I was in New York.
The shining tower on the hill is leading the wrong direction.
Yeah, right?
We're becoming Atlantis.
We're going to get destroyed soon.
Pretty much.
Pretty much.
Probably true.
All right.
I'm ready.
We got to build a base on the moon, Randall Carlson says.
So we were walking around New York.
We were looking at the architecture, and I was talking about how far I feel like we'd.
I was talking to Julian, and we were looking at the Empire State Building.
And I was like, that's still the greatest building on the entire New York City skyline.
It's the most beautiful.
And I feel like American architecture is kind of devolving as time goes on.
It's not as evocative and beautiful and inspiring as it used to be.
And I was telling him, you know, one of the things that's so common when people talk about New York architecture is that everybody's favorite is the architecture that evokes Greco Roman architecture.
Right.
Right.
And I was telling him, I was like, you know, it's probably not an accident that that is our favorite.
That's one of our favorite forms of architecture.
And it came, it's like the first form of architecture that came straight out of their world where they are chiseling in the things they're seeing in their natural world into stone.
And we, We all think that that's the most elegant and probably always will.
And it's kind of the same thing in Mesoamerica.
Some of that architecture is so beautiful because they're taking their natural world and just, you know, painting it onto stone.
Not physically painting it, but they're etching it into the stone.
And it's just a natural evolution out of their world.
And it's like ever since then, it has just kind of gone downhill.
And as far as elegance and beauty, you know, at least my opinion.
No, yeah.
I think it's the trend is functionality right now, which does make me sad.
I do love the ancient stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, what you like in these cathedrals?
It's Greek, Roman, and Egyptian architecture.
And we love it.
And it's symbols of ancient authority and power.
Yeah.
And it's the first thing that emerges, right?
So it's kind of like, That's the precipice of it because it's human beings connected to what we were kind of supposed to be, right?
Like, we probably were.
Which I guess it's kind of an admission we're on a decline, isn't it?
Well, it could have been.
Aztec Sacrifice to Cortez00:15:42
Maybe it was similar.
Maybe they did have these incredible structures and monuments and stuff like we have now in Washington, D.C., but they also had maybe a city of primordial huts or something they lived in outside.
Kind of like Washington, D.C., has all the stuff in the Capitol, and then there's just regular stick frame houses in the neighborhoods surrounding it.
Yeah, I think that was true all over the place.
We, uh, you know, outside of Rome were just peasants living in huts, sure, sure.
Yeah, um, I want to talk about the human sacrifice stuff, sure.
So, um, who was being sacrificed?
Who, first of all, which culture was doing the most sacrifice?
The Aztecs, the Aztecs were, and why do you think that they were doing it and not the other ones?
It was part of their religion.
They, you know, they, unlike their neighbors, decided to follow the war god.
That was their patron deity of the Mashika people.
And he, at least as they understood it, demanded sacrifice and lots of it.
It wasn't people they could just capture.
It was a sacrifice in the way we understand that word, that it was something they wanted and gave up.
So it was capturing in battle.
They would ritually, instead of killing each other on the field of battle, like would happen in Europe, they'd try not to kill them, but wound them enough where they could haul them back to their city and sacrifice them.
Both sides were doing it.
So there was nobody left on the battlefield.
They were either dead or dragged off.
Sounds a lot worse.
It does sound worse.
But that was somebody who was a proud and dangerous warrior, who was a human of quality.
That they took out.
The other category was children, which is horrible to our eyes.
But, you know, if you're to sacrifice something you really value and care about, and it's the category's people, who's the most austere sacrifice?
It's kids.
And, you know, it sounds real barbaric, but I'm pretty sure there's a line in the Christian Bible that Yahweh asks the same thing out of somebody.
Says, sacrifice your son for me.
And he's about to do it.
Who's that?
You know, I'm a terrible Christian.
Abraham and Isaac.
And then he was like, oh, just kidding, trickster God.
Yeah.
But, you know, I mean, Christianity also has at least a moment where God says, prove it.
Yeah.
And prove it by killing your child.
This is a sacrifice you will make to me.
There's also, this happens in Mesoamerica where maybe not necessarily a child, but a young person.
Somebody who's maybe highly valuable, maybe part of a dynastic family, maybe not the prince, but maybe one of the cousins or something, would be chosen, and then he would basically be pampered for an entire year.
And he would be taught music and astronomy and science.
And you build this into a very well rounded person.
And maybe say he's 18 years old, he probably gets maybe.
I'm just kind of spitballing, but I'm just saying maybe he gets whatever girls he wants.
No, he did.
He had a whole harem.
Yeah.
So he gets everything that he wants, he gets all the food that he wants, but 365 days, he will be sacrificed.
And it's basically like fattening the pig, right?
For slaughter.
And he has to walk up, no crying, no getting dragged up there.
You get chosen as a young man.
And they know that he's given every benefit in life and trained where this is a person who is trained for leading us all, but then they walk up.
This is an Aztec tradition where that person walks up and willingly sacrifices himself for the community.
Sacrifice self-sacrifice?
Well, you know, they kill him, but he doesn't get dragged to the stone.
He walks up and lays down on it.
Will you go into gory detail about how they killed him?
Yeah, can you do that?
How specifically?
Heart extraction is what they love to do.
They love to do that.
Is that the only way?
There was head chopping off, too, but the Aztecs loved.
The Maya actually didn't do this heart extraction thing as much until they got more influenced by the people of central Mexico.
It's the classic period.
You really can't find much in the way of Maya.
Sacrificing each other at all, except in the limited context of wars.
There's a, there's a panel in Bonum POCK that shows a war and people getting captured, and then back home there's a head laying on one of the staircases.
There's a guy who has his fingernails ripped out yeah, and they're bringing people to be sacrificed, but uh yeah, the Maya were not as bloody as that until the post classic, like uh, At about 1200, they start really imitating what's happening in central Mexico.
And at that time, it's the Toltecs who are going to develop into the Aztecs.
But the Aztecs love to pull out hearts.
Here's a lot of that one on the top left are good examples of people getting their hearts ripped out.
So they were holding it up.
And some of these images, you know, you see all four ventricles.
They know exactly what a heart looks like.
Wow.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
So, the person would walk up to the top of the pyramid by themselves without having to be escorted.
In this one particular context, that guy who would be cultivated for this moment.
Otherwise, they were just people that they captured in battle, but they would always just, again and again, you see them rip out the heart.
And there was some sort of way, somebody just criticized me that I don't know the anatomy well enough, which is true.
But what they do is somehow with those big, thick obsidian blades that are super sharp.
They would break the rib cage and push down on one part and pull up on another part so they could then reach in and grab the still beating heart and rip it out.
Any anesthesia?
Nope.
Not for these guys.
It just ripped out.
See, that one, the person, the black person or gray, is definitely holding one of those axes and he's got the heart up.
And look, there's even a god going, yeah, give me more.
Oh, the god is hitting the heart.
That's the death god, but he's not the war god.
He's not the war god.
But look at the temple he's on.
It's like covered in blood.
Like covered in blood.
Yeah.
The Aztecs said they told the Spanish that in the last inauguration of the Temple Mayor, their main temple, that has one side to the war god, one side to the rain god, but they said that over a three day period, they sacrificed 20,000 people, and that at some point during the ceremony, the priests were ankle deep in blood on top of the temple.
That it was just a river of blood.
And all these people were alive when they sacrificed.
Yep.
Yep.
And they also did that.
They had a ritual calendar where sacrifices occurred in some of the months.
And then there were these battles.
Actually, the Aztec Empire grew so big that it was a pain in the butt to get to the edge of the empire to actually fight people who weren't part of the empire.
So they kind of kicked out this group called the Tlash Collins that live in between Mexico City and Veracruz.
What is this?
And they would just go every year to fake war with them.
And capture them.
And they could legitimately say, oh, these are not us.
These are our enemies because we've never made peace with them.
And so when Cortez showed up, it was the Tlash Collins who raised their hand.
You're like, yeah, we'll fight the Aztecs with you.
We hate those guys because they were just their sheep for this sort of activity.
Did you do the math, Steve?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's 6,666 people a day.
6,600.
What's that divided by 24?
Divided by 24 is per hour, 300 people an hour.
Jesus Christ.
Now, what is that divided by 60?
Divided by 60.
Five people a minute.
Five people a minute.
That's doable.
That's doable, especially with the quick.
If you had a couple people doing it.
Rip out, drop them, get a next one up here.
Yeah, especially if you had a couple people doing the cutting or doing the extractions.
You could probably.
Now, this is what the Aztecs told, I think, initially, Cortez, and I think that that was also echoed in Sahagoon's very good ethnography.
He was there.
The next generation in what the Aztec capital became Mexico City, and he wouldn't put anything in his book that he couldn't verify from three independent sources, so he's a really good source.
I love what a good investigative reporter.
He was right.
But it is possible a, that the Aztecs were exaggerating to Cortes to impress him or, b Cortes was exaggerating to Spain to validate destroying the empire, and these are nettling questions we may never answer.
What is this Noche Trieste?
That's the time that the Spanish screw up, get their hostage killed, who's the king.
Montezuma dies, and without him as the hostage, the Aztecs are free to just kill the Spanish.
And they are planted in the middle of the city and they have to escape at night along the causeways across the lake.
And that's the sad night, the Noche Trieste.
Oh, okay.
And they get decimated.
But a lot of people do survive.
The capitalists.
Cortez survives, a couple hundred people.
There were like less than a thousand Spanish in the capital at that point.
I guess there were only a couple hundred.
Cortez was returning with a couple thousand.
The story goes it was Pedro Alvarado who screwed it all up.
Pedro Alvarado was this red haired, fiery dude.
The Spanish called him the son of the sun, Tonatillo.
And they had been there for months.
They had.
Montezuma captured as a polite guest of their quarters, but he really couldn't leave, and he was ordered to do whatever he wanted by Cortes bring me gold, all this sort of stuff.
They were stockpiling gold in the compound that the Spanish had been given.
But then Cortes gets word from the coast that Cuba has sent a couple of ships with 1,000 more men to come and subdue him, that he was not allowed to.
Attack and colonize.
He didn't have the authority and they were coming to stop Cortez.
And Cortez said, Okay, Alvarado, you're in charge here.
I'm going to go over to the coast and I'm going to convince these people to be with us, not against us.
And he does that.
He, you know, Cortez was actually trained as a lawyer.
So he had the gift of gab.
And he goes over there and gives them this magnificent speech saying, We're all going to be rich beyond our wildest dreams.
And what I really need is a thousand Spaniards to turn the tide here so you guys can become my army and become.
Amazingly rich, or you can arrest me right here.
What do you want to do?
And but he convinces them and they head back to Mexico City.
But while he was gone, Pedro Alvarado is invited to this uh feast, like they are again and again.
But somebody at the feast tells him, Oh, do you like the food?
Oh, it's humans, you're eating humans.
Ha ha ha, you're you're you're a cannibal like us.
And he freaks out and he has everybody close the doors of this banquet.
And he murders everyone in there.
They're unarmed.
He has the soldiers kill women, children, men.
It's like a civilized party.
And he goes nuts and kills them.
So when Cortez gets back, he finds Alvarado and his men barricaded into their compound, and the Aztecs are all over it.
And so they put Montezuma up on the roof to try to quell things like, everybody calm down, calm down.
This didn't happen.
But.
Montezuma gets stoned by the mob.
They just throw stones and kill him up on top of the building.
So now they've got dead Montezuma.
And there's nothing stopping the Aztecs from coming in and killing him because they were being polite because he was their hostage, but now he's dead.
Wow.
That's what triggers the Noche Triste.
They're like, oh shit, get the gold and let's get out of here.
But they're on an island in the middle of a lake and there's only causeways.
And the Aztecs smartly break the causeways in various places.
There are places where boats can pass through that are wooden bridges, and they break those so the horses can't get out.
The first wave of horses get out with Cortez, but the other ones that stayed behind and tried to load up their bags with gold found the bridges destroyed and just fell right into the lake or were killed there.
So the ones that weren't quick enough, that's actually a cool piece of archaeology.
I would love to.
Make an overlay over Mexico City of where the city was and where the causeways are and track the causeways because there's almost certainly somewhere under the streets of Mexico City a skeleton of a horse piled with gold.
You know, it would be hard as hell to find it, like a needle in a haystack.
But if the stories are true, there's a couple of horses covered in gold laying under the streets of Mexico City.
You know, one of the things with the Spaniards having such, you know, Vicious battles with these Aztecs, and then, you know, really using and possibly exaggerating where the Aztecs are exaggerating how many people they're sacrificing to impress the Spanish.
One way or another, it affects our perception of them.
We see them as very brutal, savage, warrior people.
But at the same time, in so many ways, with people in the ancient Americas, like the Fang deity, you know, cutting all these people's heads off, but he has this puppy with him everywhere he goes.
He loves his puppy.
They have this really funny.
It's in these depictions in South America.
You can see this warrior god going throughout South America and just slaughtering all these people.
They call him the Decapitator deity.
Yeah.
But he always has a little puppy with him.
But that's South America.
But it's just some.
Cute, like, dichotomy of ancient Americans.
But going back to the Aztecs, you know, they love flowers, they love poems, they love their natural world, they love collecting, capturing animals and making zoos.
Tenochtitlan Courts and Markets00:06:10
You know, they had astronomical observatories and they had their own archaeological department as well.
And they'd bring monuments from around Mesoamerica and study them, you know.
And they're really, actually, this surprised me.
I would think the best.
Sculptors and mover of megaliths in the entire.
The Aztecs.
Yeah, yeah.
Maybe more.
Huge stones.
That's beautiful work.
Maybe more impressive or just right there with the Olmecs.
Like when you go to Mexico City's museum and you walk into the Aztec exhibit, you will be blown away.
The size of the monuments there carved out of this black basalt and the polish that's on them is really otherworldly.
It's really amazing.
Probably the most impressive thing that I have seen.
As far as sculpture work in all of the Americas.
And another interesting part of who these people were is so when you went up to the emperor of Montezuma's temple or Moctezuma's temple, when the Spaniards get up to the top of it, think about the famous story of the Spartans who had all these strange, deformed people with them, but they're kind of pushed off to the side.
In the classical world, you kind of ignore people who have.
Deformities and people who don't have this perfect, picturesque, idealistic form, I guess.
But in Mesoamerica, they venerated these people.
And in the emperor's palace in Tenochtitlan, he would have these deformed people living with him and he would be pampering them.
So it's just like you're living in a totally different world, right?
These very, very violent people who do things and sacrifice so many people that we see as so barbaric.
But then they.
They weren't like caring for them like special needs school children.
Sure, exactly.
Yeah, they were seen as touched by the gods.
Deformity, dwarfism was seen as an obvious thing that God has touched this person.
And so from a young age, those people would be told, look, you're a vessel of the gods.
You are born and destined to be a liaison between us and the gods, and we're going to keep you close.
And those people probably from an early age said, Well, that sounds good.
Right.
I'm in on that.
Yeah.
Sure.
It's like a lot of incest.
Inca, a lot.
Maya, I don't think we have much evidence of it, though, much in the way of like Europe's royal development.
Right, right.
There came a point where the eye was inbred.
I mean, it's just because there was a limited amount of royal families who wanted to keep their bloodline pure.
For the Maya, even more so, because it wasn't just a bloodline.
It was a conduit to the ancestors who had influence on the gods.
Right.
So these people were so sophisticated and brilliant and artistic and in touch with their inner selves, but they were at the same time cannibals.
Yeah, I find it a fascinating study in the capacity of humans that we make these dichotomies of good behavior and bad behavior and good and evil.
And here's this culture who definitely checks the boxes of evil, cutting people and ripping their hearts out and killing children.
Okay, bad, bad, bad.
But then on the other hand, you have, you know, poems and music and love of flowers and public money spent on botanical gardens and museums and, you know, at least outwardly saying we are politicians, we're diplomats, we're public servants.
So there was so much that we would think, you know, you're either a barbarian or you're civilized.
Right.
But here's a culture where the two were like, Two sides of a coin, and there was not a conflict of interest in there.
It was so impressive to the Spaniards that they would ask Cortes if they had really seen what they saw.
They were so astonished by the city of Tenochtitlan that they couldn't believe it.
Imagine the things that they had seen back in Spain, right?
So it kind of gives you an idea.
I was just reading back Bernal Diaz's book, and he says that when they're on the causeway first coming into the city, he said, One of the soldiers looked at me and said, Are we dreaming this?
That's cool.
That's amazing.
And their market, I mean, was it 50,000 people a day?
60,000 people a day?
Yeah, 60,000 people a day.
They said that Seville's market was a fraction of Tenochtitlan's market.
One of them said maybe Shanghai's market.
One of them had been to China area, said maybe it rivals Shanghai's market, but it was way bigger than Seville's market.
Yeah.
And they had institutions of basically people who were policemen going around and catching people who were selling fraudulent goods in the markets that were there.
The Aztecs did.
I mean, there was counterfeit money.
People would make ceramic chocolate beans and try to buy things with counterfeit money, and they'd get busted.
But there were like haircutting places.
It was like a mall.
There were stores where you could buy various things.
There were like soothsayers.
And there was a court in the middle of the.
Probably a couple of different courts in the market.
But if two people were arguing about something involving their economy, they could walk up to this judge's platform and that person would decree who was right.
And they'd hear the story and say, okay, you're in the wrong, you're in the right, give that guy his money back.
Templar Knights and Disease00:06:52
Wow.
And it's just a tiny glimpse, you know, just maybe a couple years into their, you know, a glimpse into their world.
So much more than just, you know, that sacrifice.
And, you know, and they were sitting on giants of the rest of the Mesoamerican world.
So you can just imagine.
All the history that has been lost because of the destruction.
And at this time, 1492, Christopher Columbus lands in the Bahamas.
Slowly after that, Europeans are exposing themselves by trading and just exploring on the coast of the Yucatan.
And that disease is beginning to spread all through the Americas.
A year later, that market we just talked about is covered in dead bodies with pustules all over them.
Yeah.
That's when the Spanish actually bust in to finally conquer the city, like a year and a half after they start.
The causeway they take is close to the market.
And they say that trying to get to that market, the streets are just piled with dead bodies, not from war, but from disease.
Wow.
What diseases specifically?
13 different deadly diseases.
Yeah, the big ones at that point were mumps, measles, and smallpox.
Okay.
The malaria and yellow fever don't really come in until so many.
People die that the Europeans start importing black slaves.
And then from Africa, yellow fever and malaria come in.
Wow.
Yeah.
And a lot of these diseases actually, you know, they begin along these river systems, these tightly populated river systems.
And several of them came from the Nile, like we were talking about earlier, 1800 BC.
Now they're in the Americas.
You know, these things have just constantly mutated, you know, since the beginning of civilization.
And they've Crawled their way all the way over to the New World.
Which I think is also a point, you know, in the debate of how early did Europe meet the Americas?
I feel like if there was substantial contact at any point, that we would see disease spread from that point and we would find some sort of pattern.
Some of those diseases you can't detect in bones, but some you can, like smallpox, you can tell from bones.
And so if.
Archaeology would find some sort of mass, if misunderstood, die off.
Because we know that happened.
I mean, that signature is clear as a bell at the known contact period in the 1500s, just mass death.
But do we see it earlier?
Like, it is confusing.
There is actually a big hiccup in North America somewhere right around 1300.
Where a lot of the maybe it's the 1200s where the Mississippian sites a lot of them are abandoned and new ones start up and wonder, you know, what caused that shift.
And there it's temptingly close to when the Vikings were hit and had briefly a compound or a place in Canada, but that was more like a thousand.
So it doesn't quite.
When did Hernando de Soto come over?
1538, later than that.
Yeah, okay, landed right here.
Could have been.
We're pretty close to where he might land.
Then he landed in St. Augustine?
Well, he landed in St. Augustine first, but then he came up here.
And the first place, Uvita, I think is actually at the top of Tampa Bay.
The very northern part of Tampa Bay is where Uvita was.
And he talks a lot about how the bay was.
That's Fort DeSoto.
Yeah.
There's a park there called Fort DeSoto.
I think that's it.
I think that's it.
That's where Uvita was.
It's right at the northern mouth of the bay.
He lands here and sends forces, leads forces.
Up through central Florida, all the way up to where Tallahassee now was the capital of the Appalachian civilization.
Right.
He keeps going through Georgia, two and a half years worth of a reign of death.
An interesting thing about that particular moment in regards to the disease, I'm too far away.
When he gets up to South Carolina, and there's this big kingdom, Kofitakachi, led by this queen.
He sees in the outer villages that bodies are piling up and they're dead.
Their disease bodies.
And they don't really know.
The queen's saying, look, we don't have much corn because we have this crazy disease going around and farmers are dying.
And probably one of the reasons their army was depleted and couldn't fight De Soto off as well is because there was a mass death.
De Soto goes into the main temple in Kofittakachi and sees these tombs with big statues of warriors near them.
But in one of the tombs, He finds Spanish artifacts.
He finds metal.
He finds, uh, like these glass beads and pearls.
And he knows he was like, Where did you get these things?
Where, you know, he was looking for gold and silver, but he finds these Spanish artifacts.
And the queen tells him, Well, there were, there was a community of people that looked just like you guys that was on the coast, but they all died off.
And we know that there was a, uh, A Spanish failed colony somewhere up the coast like that.
And so those guys showed up like five years earlier, and it was enough to spark the disease.
Where by the time De Stoto got there, the temples of the local villages were piling up with bodies without explanation of how they died.
Wow.
I heard a story, I think it was yesterday or two days ago, maybe, where we had a gentleman in here who was explaining to us how when Christopher Columbus sailed over, he had the Red Cross of the Knights Templar on his sails.
And he said that that was intentional to deceive the natives, to make them think that they were Templars when he, like, allegedly, like, they were familiar with the people of the Knights Templar in, like, the 1200s or 1300s or something like that, that had already been here.
Hmm.
I don't know if you've ever heard anything like that.
I have not heard that.
And there are so many different crosses.
Caribbean Coast Connections00:15:27
Yeah.
I get confused by it.
I look on the internet for, like, you know, which one is the Knights Templar, and you get a panel of 50 different crosses, and it's like, oh, no, it's got to have the little.
Hairs on the edge, it's got to be more square, not rectangular.
It's not theirs, but that is funny.
I guess that goes along with the premise that this persistent idea, like uh, Oak Island has, that somehow the Knights Templar came over here and hid all their treasures, including the holy grail and the holy and the uh, the art.
The funniest part of that would be that, like, oh yeah, they liked those Europeans, those Europeans were nice to them, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is kind of weird, isn't it?
Like, if the rest of them are jerks, if you could take a time machine and go anywhere in history, any location.
One time where would it be?
Oh, that's a funny one.
I generally think that I would be murdered as some sort of devil immediately.
No, you get to you get to you get to fly in like a flying saucer and you're protected So they can't shoot any arrows at you or anything.
You know, I mean, I think my answer is changed over time.
Yeah currently I would go to Peru either Cusco or Tijuana and try to watch how they put those buildings together.
I would love to Actually, witness those temples that we can't figure out how tight the stones are actually built.
Yeah.
I would love that.
But I would be hidden like in a coat.
Yeah.
Or they would just think you're like an alien or something visiting the temple.
Exactly.
They would look at you and they would draw a picture of you on the temple.
These recent things about aliens, the main reason I don't, I'm not buying this one either is because we haven't fired up the war machine.
That's exactly what humans will always do.
Oh, look, foreigner, murder them.
That's what we always do.
We're not like, oh, gosh, do you guys come in peace?
No, we never come in peace.
We come to kick your ass or take your stuff.
So that's exactly what.
If the government actually thought there were aliens, we'd be bombing the shit out of the ocean right now.
Unless we got one captive, right?
And they just have one.
Maybe civilization doesn't care about it.
What if we don't know where they are?
We're throwing another star system or another dimension.
We don't know how to get to them.
Well, I guess those.
Those, those chess games could be playing out, but you know, if they could get, our first response has always been, kill.
If they could get a hold of a, an alien with a, with a flying saucer craft, wouldn't they?
We want to just like figure out how we could use it and make it ourselves so we could dominate the world.
I, I do agree with that, and I think that that may or may not have already happened.
Yeah yeah yeah, I like uh, you know, going back to Graham's idea of this ancient lost civilization and how it, how it somehow connects, like the fang deity, to Varicosha And to, yeah, it's Varicotia, right?
The white, long haired, tall thing that came out and explained to them, taught them how to live.
Varicotia was around for a long time.
Only strangely after contact period did the stories of his whiteness and tallness come out.
Yeah.
The one thing that is interesting, the one open door, I think, to that theory is that so much of the oceans haven't been explored, right?
We've only explored maybe 5% of the ocean floor.
So, like, maybe during the Ice Age, could there have been a place that existed that is now underwater and hasn't been explored that could have been some crazy civilization?
If maybe this was the one time that Plato was actually a historian.
It's absolutely true that the coastline during a lot of human history was way out there.
So the idea that there could have been major cities out there or just the evidence of people walking back and forth from one continent to another.
Absolutely, that's on the table.
And I hope that someday technology will be able to let us investigate those questions.
Right now, they're kind of a what if moment.
Yeah, there's evidence of very, very ancient cities.
I mean, if not the Ice Age, maybe just within a couple thousand years afterwards, right here off the coast in Florida.
Huge cities and these mounds that are, I don't know, maybe several hundred feet off of where the modern day coastline is.
But when the coastline was lower, oh, yeah.
Florida's shelf is very shallow.
Yeah, I wasn't aware of cities hundreds of miles off the coast of Florida.
Oh, it's close to me neither.
Well, I say cities, but I just mean settlements where they have these mounds that are built up and they've seen them off the coastline.
The ones from a couple thousand years ago that are mounds, that are like shell mounds and earthen mounds.
Now, I'm not an expert in Florida, ancient Florida, but yeah, I mean, I have seen numbers going back five, 7,000 years ago.
And of this chapter of these mound builders that existed off the coast of Florida and in Florida.
I mean, you can still find evidence of mounds going back to this same date, but all across the Caribbean down into Guyana, you see these cultural similarities.
And it's thought that maybe at one point in time when the sea level is a little bit lower, it's easier for people to hop from South America across the Caribbean up into Florida.
Right.
So that's not the case.
The distance would be shortened.
Yeah, yeah.
There's definitely now a DNA connection, too, between the top of South America, the people of the Caribbean.
But the link to Florida is not as clear.
Yeah.
No, it's not as clear.
Now, that's not Ice Age, but that's sometime afterwards.
But that's pretty far back in time.
Yeah.
And Graham talks about that Bimini Road, which is in the Caribbean.
Right.
That's geology.
I have a friend who doesn't want me to name him, but he is a geology professor.
Okay.
In the University of Puerto Rico.
And he sent me a dissertation of one of his students.
Oh, really?
That was not trying to debunk Bimini Road, but he was following, he was just doing his dissertation on this particular geological phenomena, which he called it like a table something.
But this dissertation had examples just like the Bimini Road.
All over the Caribbean.
Oh, really?
So it's not, it's a geological phenomenon.
Yeah, it doesn't look like that.
Of the water rising and setting, and it's limestone, and it.
That looks fake, by the way.
That one doesn't look real.
That looks like AI.
Yeah, you never know what's real these days.
Maybe that one might be it.
I mean, it's weird.
It fractures, it's limestone that's like, you know, compacted seafloor, and then the water lowers 300 feet, and that stuff gets dry, rotted, like, you know, when a place gets muddy and then it gets dry, and all of a sudden all of the mud chunks turn into kind of random.
Rectangular chunks.
Yeah.
See, that one looks the same thing.
That one looks good.
And then the water comes back up and it floats these things out in a unified pattern that in Bimini especially, it looks roady.
Yeah.
But you know, leading to what?
If the road is in such good condition and in these major blocks, where's the building it's leading to?
Right.
Is a question.
But without arguing against in that direction, it's just, it's geology.
And there's a, How much have you looked into the whole Atlantis theory?
Have you paid a lot of attention to it?
No, not hardly at all.
I mean, these sort of invitations have me looking at it more than I've ever looked at it in my life, but I would not claim to be an expert or even have thought much about it before this phase of my life.
Right.
Yeah.
When you're talking about the, like, this one is one of many.
What if there's a bunch of stuff submerged under the ocean?
Graham's right about that.
But.
In most cases where we know, like the example Luke just brought up, there are some things that are off the coast of Florida that are man-made and now underwater.
But we have things on the mainland too that connect to them, and we have artifact assemblages that find ourselves in a certain amount of time or a certain time frame, carbon-14 things.
I'm a fan of what I call the preponderance of evidence.
One-offs disturb me.
One-offs are not a pattern, nothing that we can, as detectives, find a pattern that we can find an answer out of.
So I, you know, when Easter Island has, you know, 500 dates now that are all confirming dates around 600 to 1,000 years as the first habitation of the island, you know, you can't just walk in with, well, you can, and Graham did, with a big what if.
You know, like, well, okay, so, you know, the archaeology says this.
And then that one kind of made me sad because at first I was watching that episode and he was talking to a Rapa Nui person and asking them about their history.
And they were telling him, like I've been told when I've been to the island.
You were there?
I've been to the island a couple of times.
Really?
Yeah.
I'm going back next year.
I heard something crazy happen where they had to stop people visiting or something.
A couple of times.
Well, I haven't heard about fires lately.
Right now, there's just a protest at the airport because the locals are pissed off that the one and only airline that goes there changed their immigration forms.
They're kind of letting anybody get in there again, and they're pissed off.
But what I was going to say is, you know, he talked to these local folks and they told him what the Moai were.
They're our ancestors.
Here's how we moved them, all this stuff.
And then the very next segment, he goes, But, but what if they're wrong?
What if they seem much more ancient?
Like, oh, God, you just missed it, man.
You were doing so good with the whole respecting and asking their opinion.
And then you just go, But what if they're wrong?
Yeah.
Like, I don't know, you know?
Yeah, what if they're wrong?
I guess, I mean, It's always possible they're wrong, but, you know, he did such a great job respecting their opinion and then just stomped it.
What did you think when you went there?
What did you think about those big heads?
I love them.
They're full bodies.
The ones that look like heads are just buried.
They're at the quarry, and the slope over the hundreds of years have covered the bodies until they're just the heads, but the bodies are all there.
Aren't there some similarities?
Aren't there some similarities between those Easter Island sculptures, those?
Guys that they're carved out of the stone and the pillars that go Beckley Tepe.
I mean, I heard they're like, I saw some stuff.
Their hands are there.
Oh, that hands, those crossed fingers.
That is an interesting part.
They're in this pose, that crossed fingers, and then they're in that fertility, you know, fertility pose where they're, you know, grabbing their crotch.
Yeah.
It's a very common.
You know, again, if there's one thing that humans have been doing forever is grabbing our dicks.
Yeah.
But it is true that you see that on these monolithic statues of people.
I mean, really, around the world, they are all grabbing themselves in a very similar fashion.
Like, even out in Micronesia and Indonesia, those islands out there have those monoliths of people standing in that same pose.
Those are more similar to the Easter Island heads.
Even though the Gobekli Tepe pillars are similar, they're different.
Just a lot.
They're also related to the, the tiki doll that everybody's bought on their trip to Hawaii.
Those are, you know that that's a Polynesian thing, and Easter Island people got you know isolated, separated and still with the their origins, of their traditions, turned this moai thing into a competition where there were oh, there are over a thousand of them on the island only one quarry.
All the other, all the villages, would one up each other by ordering these moai and assembling them on the ahus in their villages.
Have you seen the videos of them walking?
Yep.
I think it's neat.
And that's actually people listening to them.
And that happened the first time they walked them.
I think his name is Pavel.
Pavel was working with Thor Heyerdahl in the 60s or 70s.
He asked the local people, well, how did they get there?
And they said, well, they walked.
And he's the first one to use the ropes.
Right.
But then it was Hunt and Lippo who did it, did a recreation, not on Easter Island because Easter Island wouldn't let them.
They did it in Hawaii.
But they successfully, a couple of guys with ropes just wobbled them.
I guess I can say now that I've made one third of a map of the island for the Rapa Nui people.
I intend to give it to them.
The problem that I'm having is that their first cultural organization is still there.
It's called Mao Hanua.
But during COVID, everything went nuts and they kicked those guys completely out and stole the computers and just like everything that I did for that first group is out and those guys are out.
So now I have to like introduce myself to the new guys and pretend I never knew the old guys.
So they let me continue making my map.
Oh, God, no.
But I made one third of a map for them.
And how do you go about making that map?
It was drone.
It was drone and photogrammetry.
Oh, wow.
Thank you, Jeff and Patrick and Jim, because I don't know how to use that equipment, but I have buddies who do.
Oh, cool.
So I was kind of the archaeology part of it, and they were the drone experts.
And we made one third of the island, but we did the crater, and we were not the first to see them, but we documented them again roads leading out from the crater to different villages.
Oh, wow.
And what was weird that we saw that I don't know whether anybody else saw was along the roads there we found, I guess, three fallen moai who were intact.
They weren't broken, but they're just laying on the roads between the quarry and a village.
And I don't know what happened.
These are the roads that they say that they were walked down, that they made a prepared surface so it was nice and flat and they just walked them from the quarry to the villages.
But there's a couple of them that are just laying there on the side of the road, and it just is a head scratcher.
Why wouldn't you just pick him up?
Did it fully?
Is this a game where like he tripped and that's it?
He's not a moai anymore.
Inca Stone Road Stories00:05:20
You know, he's not broken.
There's no reason why.
Or even if, you know, how heavy are those things?
Why wouldn't you move this thing?
Oh, they're tons and tons.
I mean, there are some small ones.
There's a little white one on one edge of the island that's like less than a ton.
It's a couple hundred pounds.
Did you know that there's one of them that's most of them are basalt, right?
Am I wrong about that?
They're definitely volcanic stone, but I don't know whether it's basalt or something else.
You know, there's one that I think is the one that was taken to the British Museum that's made out of diorite.
No, that's the white one.
That's the little white one.
The little one.
Okay.
And it's still there.
I had a guy on one of my trips actually, he said, I'm not going with you today.
I'm going to get a mope head and I'm going to find that little white moai.
And he did.
He sent me some pictures.
It's on the far end of the island on.
At the base of one of the volcanoes and looking at the sea.
And it was funny when he got there, that's the little guy I'm talking about.
It was like, it's four foot tall or something.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
It's just a little, the tiniest little moai, and he's made of weird diorite.
Yeah, it's very weird.
You know, another thing, Danny, is one thing I love talking about, you know, these different mysteries and why they're doing this.
Another thing that's very interesting about Easter Island that I think, you know, maybe most people don't realize is that these very, Famous walls that you see in Peru, you know, constructed by the Inca.
Yeah.
There is a small section, just one, is it one singular wall?
It's like one singular compound on Easter Island where you can see that same, that same thing.
Vinapu.
Yeah.
And it really is.
I've seen both.
I mean, that is very similar.
That is very similar.
That is Inca looking architecture.
Just one building.
Yeah.
I don't think it's very similar.
I think it is.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I've walked around it and looked at it.
We even did like a 3D scan of it, but then somehow we lost it.
How would we find a picture of it?
Vinapu.
Vinapu, Easter Island?
V I N A. P U.
Oh, wow.
I like your studio.
I can just call things into the sky, right?
And they appear.
Yeah, look at that.
I mean, that's the little chinking stone in there.
It's very, very, very.
Oh, yeah.
It looks identical, doesn't it?
It's very Inca looking.
And, you know, they have been finding that the, I think it's the Mapache people of Chile share genetic DNA with Polynesian folks.
So, one way or another, either they influenced Polynesia or back and forth.
I guess that study suggested that the Mapache, that Polynesians made it to South America.
Yeah.
It looks like they just did, they set those stones up like this.
And just cut the outer edge like hot butter, like just to make it flat.
Yeah, like with a laser.
Yeah, with a laser or something.
It's like, it doesn't make any sense how they did that.
And, you know, I love that there are mysteries that we still haven't solved.
And I think that all ideas that are not disparaging others should be on the table and allowed to flow.
Yeah.
Well, and think about how this happens, right?
I mean, you have people coming from Southeast Asia.
Asia, like those islands that are out there in Indonesia, Micronesia.
Sailing, just setting sail off into the ocean, founding these little islands.
You can kind of watch it.
You can see these archaeological sites all through the Pacific Ocean, eventually ending up on Easter Island.
If you look up how far Easter Island is, like on Google Earth from South America, not only have these people made it all the way from the other side of the Pacific to Easter Island, but they eventually make it to South America.
And then South Americans come back and, I mean, clearly build something on Easter Island.
It's just, this is this huge thing.
They were impressive boat builders.
There is a story during the Inca Empire that they.
Look at that.
They made.
It's insane how far.
Naval fleets to combat the people on the coast and conquer them.
And there was one story about the Inca fleet gets caught up by a storm and goes out to sea, maybe as far as Galapagos, but then like a year later.
They show back up on the coast and finish the job of conquering the people on the north coast of Peru.
So I forget exactly where I read that, but there's this story of them making it pretty far out and then coming back a year later.
Yeah.
I mean, just this alone is astonishing.
It really is, man.
Wow.
Well, thank you guys for doing this.
This has been super fun and enlightening.
I loved it.
Thanks for inviting me.
Yeah.
My pleasure.
Um, by the way, we have two questions.
I think it'd be cool if we got them here.
Oh, cool.
Instead of, I mean, it wouldn't be you want to do Patreon questions?
Yeah, okay, a couple questions to wrap it up for Patreon.
I love Patreon.
Um, Dr. Barnhart, what's your take on Dr. Eski, uh, Willerslev genetics studies and Skoglund et al. Y population in relation to migration in South America?
Mercury as Otherworld Symbol00:05:24
I'm sorry to say, I don't know those names.
I, you know, I'm not a geneticist.
And that's not stuff, unless that's what I was just talking about, the Mapache stuff.
You know, I mean, the truth is that I feel like these DNA scientists are like our priests of today.
I have no way of determining by myself whether these people are telling me the truth, not that they're, you know, purposely lying to me, but how they went about collecting that information.
And how they boiled it down into a 10 page paper that I wrote and then decide is truth.
Right.
The whole thing just gives me an ick.
Yeah.
No, I know what you mean.
I hate that I have no way of determining the validity of what they're saying to me.
Yeah.
I can say, even without knowing those names, my response is Zick.
All right, let's go to Sam McInnes.
I was touring Alton Ha in Belize where the jade heads was found.
Our guide said his grandfather was one of the guys who discovered it.
My question, though, is I asked him if mercury was found on the site, and he said there was a pool of liquid mercury found.
What do you think they were doing with the mercury?
Okay.
By the jade head?
Is he talking about the crystal skull?
I've seen this jade head.
No, no.
It's a big, thick jade head that they found in Altuja.
Now it's in a vault in Belmopan, the capital.
I've seen it.
There.
I think that's it.
Oh, shit.
That's wild.
It's a really cool head.
Now, I don't know the archaeological context of this particular thing, whether there were mercury or not, but I have.
Personally, I've been involved in finding mercury more than once.
So, mercury was something that they were depositing.
And mercury is interesting.
It's actually cinnabar, which is just burned down.
It becomes mercury, this liquid, silvery metal.
I think that they loved it because it was a red, powdery substance, the same thing that they put all over bodies.
Cinnabar.
They paint Maya.
King's bodies with it all the time.
Is this the same stuff they would paint on the side of the walls that like lasts forever?
No, for that, they'd use like ochre or hematite.
Got it.
Cinnabar is much harder to come by.
The only real source I know of any plenty is in the Belize Mountains.
And what is cinnabar?
What is the origin of it?
It's interesting.
I mean, I'm not, again, I'm not a geologist, but it's actually a metal.
And when you burn it, it turns into liquid mercury.
What?
I was in an excavation in Copan.
I was.
Lucky enough to be in the excavations of the tomb of the founder, Yash Kukmo, the first of 18 kings.
Him and his wife were buried in the same building.
But the wife was on top, and then there was a staircase going down, and then we excavated and found Yash Kukmo underneath her.
But in that staircase area, there was a, and both these bodies, by the way, were covered in red cinnabar, like dusty red cinnabar.
They painted it all over there.
But in the staircase, there was a pot.
And it had mercury in it and it kind of freaked us out because this is a heavy metal.
You you, you die if you ingest heavy metals yeah, so everybody had to wear these.
We got these stupid painter masks from the hardware store like they were going to do anything to save us.
It was stupid, it was just all.
There was no point to them.
But we all wore them in this hot tunnel as we extracted this thing.
But it was a.
It was a kind of a bulb-shaped vessel and it had nine layers of of of mercury, separated by something that was like cheesecloth.
So we We excavated it first on the top layer.
Noticed, oh, that's mercury, and we're in an enclosed space.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know how liquid it was.
I wasn't the one who looked at it.
And then we whisked it off to the lab, and the lab carefully took it apart and saw that there were nine layers, which is interesting because they're supposed to be nine levels of the Maya heavens.
But that liquid and reflection is kind of a symbol of the other world for them.
They.
The mirror is often said, the smoking mirror is the place that the reflection into the other world or the still body of water, when you see your reflection on that, that's supposed to be looking into the other world.
So I imagine in one way or another, the mercury and its liquid and reflective quality meant it was a vision into the other world.
Is there any utility for mercury?
Like, what does it do?
Do we know?
Well, now we put it in thermometers.
Okay.
That old school thermometer that tells us what the temperature is, that's mercury in there.
Yeah.
Luke, last time you were here, you were explaining some sort of like crazy chemical or something that was used that they were, there was these deposits where they would find.
Atacama Desert Mining Secrets00:03:17
Oh, the Atacama Desert.
We touched on that a little bit, but that would be South America.
Right.
I'm not exactly sure how geologically you explain it.
Acids.
Yeah.
The Atacama Desert is the ingredient in nitroglycerin.
So it's basically nitroglycerin.
Like the reason that Chile stole the Atacama Desert from.
Bolivia is because they discovered this huge cache of what we need to make nitroglycerin.
And all of a sudden, a worthless desert had a precious mineral that we could blow ourselves up with.
Oh, wow.
And Chile stole it from Bolivia because of that.
But you have these ancient Inca roads that just descend into the desert.
And why did the Inca need to be out there?
And a potential possibility is that they're.
You know, harvesting these acids and using them on the stone to soften the stone, you push the stones together rather than creating a perfect seam and joint between the stones.
Or even less than the stones themselves.
The Inca are big time miners of gold and silver, and acids help you dissolve the rock away from the gold and the silver.
That's an essential part.
In fact, an environmental disaster in Peru today is that all of these.
Old and new mines are leaking sulfuric acid out of them that is not natural.
It's a byproduct of the mining that's gone on.
And the sulfuric acid can like melt stones?
Yeah, it can melt soft stones around in those like copper, gold, silver mines.
So that's not the same thing.
Like my dad totally schooled me.
My dad's a chemist, and like none of those acids could burn through andesite.
So I really, I kind of dropped that.
But now I think maybe it's hydrofluoric acid because there's a lot of fluorite, and the other part is sulfuric acid.
Hydrofluoric acid is sulfuric acid plus fluorite.
And Peru has a ton of fluorite.
In fact, the Inca were making jewelry out of it.
And so you could take those two things inert.
You can carry sulfuric acid in a vessel without it burning through or hurting yourself.
But if you take that and fluorite and put them together, you make hydrofluoric acid, and that will burn through everything.
Anything, yeah, you isn't that from Breaking Bad?
You remember that they could carry it in plastic, right?
It was weird through the floor.
The that's it, floor.
Yep, it was Breaking Bad that made me think, like, and then they ended up having stuff.
There's fluorite, and they ended up finding like a specific type of like tub where it wouldn't burn through it.
It was like a plastic uh barrel or something.
In Breaking Bad, yeah, there's something weird about uh plastic, which is, I guess, a petroleum product that it won't burn through, but it'll burn through uh andesite like nobody's business.
I have geologists who are.
I'm trying to get them a sample from a seam in between Inca walls.
I've asked a couple of times and the Peruvians are like, no, you can't cut into our walls, weird gringo.
Exploring Caverns with Luke00:03:23
But I got to find myself a Peruvian partner who can approach them instead of me.
But the geologists, I was like, well, hey, can I come into your lab and can we burn a chunk of vandesite with hydrofluoric acid?
They were like, everybody knows that could be done.
That's just a fact.
What you've got to prove is that they were doing it.
I still want them to burn a rock for me, but I see their point.
Like it's just because I can burn a rock doesn't mean that that's that's how the Inca did it.
That's fascinating.
I got to find.
But they do say that if I get a sample, that they can do neutron activation on that sample and figure out what elements are there and that if a strong acid was used, they can detect it.
Wow.
So I got to get that sample.
Yeah.
Hopefully we can make that happen.
We'll send Luke down.
Yeah.
We'll send Luke down on the mission.
Luke and I have a great symbiosis here.
Luke wants to adventure.
I have a ticket to adventure.
I've given Luke a ticket to ride.
He's going all over the place bringing groups that I used to bring for years.
Now Luke's going to go to South America.
He's going to go to Central America.
He's even going to go to Cambodia this year.
Are you?
All for Maya Exploration Center.
And he has this whole social media thing that I'm totally ignorant in.
So we have a great partnership like this.
And I see a lot of myself in Luke.
He's passionate about these subjects and fearless and smart.
And he's a good communicator.
And it's funny, now.
I'm an older guy.
I'm a dad.
Part of me is like, want to chide Luke, like, you know, the jungle's not a game, son.
But the other half is like, you know, I remember when I was 20 and I skipped off deep into the woods, not knowing Jack or shit, had great adventures.
And yeah, I did get hurt.
And I loved every minute of it.
So I, you know, I'm given.
Watch out for those car traps.
Luke gets an opportunity to go to all these places while still paying his rent.
And I, number one, Get to be in this kind of world.
I would have never met you without Luke.
But also, you know, I feel like the things that I've done and the company I've built isn't just going to crumble when I'm gone.
I could hand it off to the next generation, and Luke is that next generation, along with Zach Lindsay and Vanessa Christman.
I've got a new dynamic group of people that I'm super excited about, and Luke is the spearhead of it.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
You guys are a hell of a team, dream team.
Big shoes.
Big shoes.
We're going to do it together.
Yeah, yeah.
Cool.
Well, send me the links that I can put below where people can find more of your stuff.
Or can you tell me right now where people can go to find your projects?
Our trips that Luke's leading, you know, people are going to be just like when I was a kid.
I started this thing and said, well, what if people want to come with me to these sites that I don't know much about, but we'll go explore them together?
That's kind of what Luke is doing now.
He's going to bring people and they're going to go with some of these places.
He's there at the First time too, but he has what I don't have, which is me as the Spider Man like man in the chair.
I'll be watching them the whole way by WhatsApp and going, Hey, buddy, go rescue them.
Hopefully that'll never happen.
But anyway, it's Maya Exploration Center is our website, and it's mayaexploration.org.
Lucky Time in the Caverns00:01:00
Beautiful.
And then Luke Caverns all over social media.
Yeah, yeah.
Just my name, Luke Caverns.
You know, I am heavily influenced and inspired by Dr. Barnhart.
I mean, I read Lost City of Z. 2016, and then you know, I wanted to learn more about the ancient Americas, so I hopped on the great courses.
I read or I listened to the lecture series, Lost Worlds of South America, and then I watched it, fell in love with him as a lecturer, and then found out that we don't live that far apart from each other.
Then I reached out to him.
We met up for breakfast a little while ago now, and now we've become very close friends.
And being close friends with this guy is like one of the coolest things in my life.
So I'm very blessed and I'm lucky to be here.
And it's very surreal to be here to be speaking with you again for the second time.
And I'm just very lucky to be sitting in this chair right now.