Luke Caverns
Appearances
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
A year later, that market we just talked about is – covered in dead bodies with pustules all over them. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
13 different deadly diseases. 13 different ones. Yeah, the big ones at that point were mumps, measles, and smallpox.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And they've crawled their way all the way over to the New World.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And so, if archaeology would find some sort of mass, if... misunderstood die off because we know that happened i mean that that that signature is clear as a bell at the the known contact period in the 1500s just mass death but do we see it earlier like it is confusing the
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 what caused that shift. It's temptingly close to when the Vikings were hit and had briefly a compound or a... a place in Canada.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
1538.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Later than that. Landed right here. We're pretty close to where he might have landed. Didn't he land 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 difficult.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
There's a park there called Fort DeSoto. I think that's it. I think that's it. That's where Uvita was.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
He lands here and sends forces, leads forces up through central Florida. All the way up to where Tallahassee now – Tallahassee was the capital of the Apalachee civilization. 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 –
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
When he gets up to South Carolina, and there's this big kingdom, Cofiticachi, led by this queen, he sees in the outer villages that bodies are piling up, and they're dead. They're diseased bodies, and they don't really know the queen's saying anything. Look, we don't have much corn because we have this crazy disease going around and farmers are dying.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And probably one of the reasons their army was depleted and couldn't fight DeSoto off as well is because there was a mass death. De Soto goes into the main temple in Cofetacachi 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 like these glass beads and pearls.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 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 Spanish failed colony somewhere up the coast like that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I have not heard that. And there are so many different crosses. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
It's not there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Right. But that is funny. I guess that goes along with the premise that this persistent idea like Oak Island has that somehow the Knights Templar came over here and hid all their treasures, including the Holy Grail. The funniest part of that would be that like, oh yeah, they liked those Europeans. Those Europeans were nice to them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You know, it really is confusing. I've been trying to figure it out for 30 years, and there are still aspects of the Maya calendar which confuse me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You know, I generally think that I would be murdered as some sort of devil immediately.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You know, I mean, I think my answer's changed over time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I would love that. But I would be hidden, like in a coat.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
that's what we always do we don't we're not like oh gosh do you guys come in peace no we never come in peace we come to kick your ass right or take your stuff so that's that's exactly what if it was if the government actually thought there were aliens we'd be bombing the out of the ocean right now
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Well, I guess those chess games could be playing out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Well, I'd use the word elegant in that regard, that they have a positional system of numeration like we do, where we have the ones, the tens, the hundreds, the thousands, ten thousands, 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. They can alternate. But we have 10 symbols.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 in these mounds that are, I don't know, maybe several hundred feet off of where the modern day coastline is. Really? But when the coastline was lower, oh yeah. Florida's shelf is very shallow. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
What are you talking about? Well, you know, I say cities, but, you know, I just mean like settlements where they have these mounds that are built up and they've seen them off the coastline.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
The ones from like a couple thousand years ago that are mounds, that are like shell mounds and earthen mounds.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
No, no, I'm... I'm not an expert in, in Florida, you know, ancient Florida, but, um, yeah, I mean, I have seen numbers going back, uh, five, 7,000 years ago and, uh, of this, this chapter of, I don't, uh, of the chapter of these mound builders that existed, uh, off the coast of Florida and in Florida.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I mean, you can still find evidence of, of mounds going back to this same date, but all across the Caribbean down into Guyana, you see like these, uh, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
With small boats, the distance would be shortened. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, no, it's not as clear. Now, that's not Ice Age, but that's sometime afterwards. But, you know, that's pretty far back in time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Right, that's geology. I have a friend who doesn't want me to name him, but he's a geology professor in University of Puerto Rico. And he sent me a dissertation of one of his students. Oh, really? That was not trying... 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But he – this dissertation had – examples just like the Bimini Road all over the Caribbean. Oh, really? So it's a geological phenomenon of the water rising and setting, and it's limestone.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
That one might be it. I mean, it's weird. It fractures. It's limestone. It's like compacted seafloor, and then the water lowers 300 feet, and that stuff gets...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
dry rotted like you know when you when a place gets muddy and then it gets dry and all of a sudden all of the mud chunks turn into kind of rectangular chunks yeah see that one with the same thing diving that one looks and then the water comes back up and it floats these things out in a in a unified pattern that in bimini especially it looks roadie yeah but you know you know leading to what
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
if the road is in such good condition and in these major blocks where's where where's the building it's leading to right uh is it is a question but without you know 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 any attention to it no not hardly at all right
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. When you're talking about this one is one of many, what if there's a bunch of stuff submerged under the ocean? Graham's right about that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
We have one through nine and then zero. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. 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. Mm-hmm.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You were there? I've been to the island a couple of times.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, I'm going back next year.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
A couple of times. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And then you just go, but what if they're wrong? Yeah. I don't know. You know, what if they're wrong? I guess. I mean, it's always possible they're wrong. But, you know, he was did such a great job respecting their opinion and then just stopped it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I mean...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Their hands are there. Oh, that hands, those crossed fingers. That is an interesting part.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
They're in this pose, that crossed fingers, and then they're in that fertility pose where they're grabbing their crotch. Yeah. It's a very common – Again –
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
If there's one thing that humans have been doing forever is grabbing our dicks.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 – Those islands out there have those monoliths of people standing in that same pose. Those are more similar to the Easter Island heads.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Even though the Gobekli Tepe pillars are similar, they're just a lot different.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
They're also related to the tiki doll that everybody's bought on their trip to Hawaii. That's a Polynesian thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yep.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I think it's neat.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. But then it was Hunt and Lippo.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
who 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 the Their first cultural organization still there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
It's called Malhanua. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But I made one third of a map for them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
um and how do you go about making that map uh it was drone it was drone and photogrammetry oh wow thank you jeff and patrick and jim because i i don't know how to use that equipment but i have buddies who do oh cool so i was part of the archaeology part of it and they were the the drone experts and we made one third of the island but we made we we did the crater and
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And we were not the first to see them, but we documented them again. Roads leading out from the crater, two different villages. And what was weird that we saw that I don't know whether anybody else saw. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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, it's a head scratcher. Why wouldn't you just pick them up?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Is this a game where he tripped and that's it? He's not a Moai anymore? He's not broken. There's no reason why. How heavy are those things? Why wouldn't you move this thing? Oh, there are tons and tons. There are some small ones. There's a little white one on one edge of the island that's less than a ton. It's a couple hundred tons.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Oh, that's a very long answer. We've got plenty of time. No, we can see that their system begins with a foundation. First, they have a counting system, which they decide is 20, not 10. 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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Did you know that there's one of them that's, most of them are basalt, right? Or am I wrong about that?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Definitely volcanic stone, but I don't know whether it's basalt or something else.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You know, there's one, I think it's the one that was taken to the British Museum, that's made out of diorite.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 moped 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Oh, wow. Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
It's just a little – the tiniest little moai, and he's made of weird diorite.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 stonework.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And it really is. I've seen both. I mean, that is Inca-looking architecture.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Just one building. Yeah, I don't think it's very similar.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Oh, wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I like your studio. I can just call things into the sky and then they appear. Yeah, look at that. I mean, that's the little chinking stone in there. It's very, very Inca. It looks identical, doesn't it? It's very Inca looking. And, you know, they have been finding that – I think it's the Mapache people of Chile share genetic DNA with – Polynesian folks.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So one way or another, either they influenced Polynesia or back and forth. I guess I guess that study suggested that the Mapache, that Polynesians made it to South America. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And, you know, I love that there are mysteries that we still haven't solved. Yeah. I think that all ideas that are not disparaging others should be on the table and allowed to flow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, well, and think about how this happens, right? I mean, you have people coming from Southeast 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 miraculous... They were impressive boat builders.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
There is a story during the Inca Empire that they... Look at that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
It's insane how far it is.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
They made 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Um, from there they can count things and they start using it to count primarily the days. 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, a cycle. that they can talk about one year to the next, but they don't pick the solar cycle at first.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, I mean, just this alone is astonishing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You know, I'm not a geneticist, and that's not stuff. Unless that's... when 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. The whole thing just gives me an ick. I hate that I have no way of determining the validity of what they're saying to me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I can say even without knowing those names, My response is ick.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
By the jade head? Is he talking about the crystal skull?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I've seen this jade head. No, no. It's a big, thick jade head that they found in Altuha. Is there a picture, Steve? Now it's in a vault in Belmopan, the capital. I've seen it. I think that's it. Oh, yeah. That's wild. It's a really cool head.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Now, I don't know the archaeological context of this particular thing, whether they were mercury or not, but I have personally 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. Wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
this liquid silvery metal um i think that they loved it because it was um it was a red powdery substance the same thing that they put all over bodies cinnabar uh they they 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 last for that for that they'd use like ochre okay or uh or hematite got it uh
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And 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 that? It's interesting. I mean, again, I'm not a geologist, but it's actually a metal. And when you burn it, it turns into liquid mercury. Why? I was in an excavation in Copan.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
They pick a number 260. That's their sacred calendar. It's called the Sol King or the Chol Ki, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 buried. underneath her. But in that staircase area, there was a and both these bodies, by the way, were covered in red cinnabar.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
They like dusty red cinnabar. They painted it all over there. But in the staircase, there was a pot and And it had mercury in it. And it kind of freaked us out because this is a heavy metal. You die if you ingest heavy metals. 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...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
There was no point to them, but we all wore them in this hot tunnel as we extracted this thing. But it was kind of a bulb-shaped vessel, and it had nine layers of mercury separated by something that was like cheesecloth. So we excavated it first. On the top layer, noticed, oh, shit, that's mercury. And we're in an enclosed space. Yeah. Well, I don't know how liquid it was.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 there's 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...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Like, what does it do? Do we know? Well, now we put it in in thermometers. That old school thermometer that tells us what the temperature is, that's mercury in there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Oh, the Atacama Desert. We touched on that a little bit, but that would be South America. I'm not exactly sure how geologically you explain it. Acids.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
The Atacama Desert is... It's 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And Chile stole it from Bolivia because of that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But you have these ancient Inca roads that just descend into the desert. And, you know, why do the Inca need to be out there? And, you know. Potential possibility is that they're, you know, harvesting these acids and using them on the stone to soften the stone. You push the stone together rather than creating a perfect seam and joint between the stones.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 so if you're impregnated on one a how chances are your baby will come out on the next one a how
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, it can melt soft stones around in those, like, copper, gold, silver mines. Right. 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. Really? So I kind of dropped that. But now I think maybe... Maybe it's hydrofluoric acid because there's a lot of fluorite. And the other part is sulfuric acid.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 can take those two things in earth. 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 anything.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Isn't that from Breaking Bad? You remember that? They could carry it in plastic, right? It was weird. All the way through the floor. That's it. Floor. Yep. It was Breaking Bad that made me think, like...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
In Breaking Bad, there's something weird about plastic, which is, I guess, a petroleum product, that it won't burn through. But it'll burn through andesite like nobody's business. I have geologists who are 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 vandecite with hydrofluoric acid? They were like, no. Everybody knows that could be done. That's just a fact. What you've got to prove is that they were doing it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I still want them to burn a rock for me, but I see their point. Just because I can burn a rock doesn't mean that that's how the Inca did it. That's fascinating. 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've got to get that sample.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, hopefully we can make that happen soon.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, we'll send Luke down on the mission. Luke and I have a great symbiosis here. You know, I... 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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
All for my exploration center. And he... 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, you know, now... I'm an older guy. I'm a dad.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Part of me is like, want to chide Luke, like, you know, it's 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. I had great adventures. And yeah, I did get hurt. I loved every minute of it. So, you know, I'm given... Watch out for those cartels.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Dream team. Big shoes. Big shoes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Well, our trips that Luke's leading, you know, people are going to be just like 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And I think it's beautiful that 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. The sun is 365 days. You know, animals give birth on different time scales. We have this long, strange nine-month pregnancy. So they looked inside themselves.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But he has what I don't have, which is me as the Spider-Man-like man in the chair. I'll be watching 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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, wanted to learn more about the ancient Americas, so I hopped on the Great Courses.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 –
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
one of the coolest things, uh, in my life. So I'm, 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, and, um, I'm just very lucky to be sitting in this chair right now.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And we kind of, in an 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Can you imagine how many generations it takes to do that? 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
That's the synodic period of Venus. The number 780 is Mars, but that's three times 260. So that's 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 what? 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. Can you find this, Steve? Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Google Dresden Codex Mars.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I think we'll find a picture. Probably. Any luck, Steve? Anyway, the long count's weird. Because it's their linear count of days. And they're really not linear people. They think in cycles. Right, right. There he is. On the top left. That's him. This? That one right there, yeah. There he is. See his funny little face hanging off? And he's got hooves, too. But he's hanging off of sky bands.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And the numbers over there to the left... Keep counting in increments of 780 days, 10 times. And they bracket him, and 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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... I 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. So this gives us the context of who that guy is, and then we understand it better. Like the text of Palenque talk about Mars, and when you go to the astronomy programs, he's actually sitting in the sky where – On the dates that they're talking about.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Palenque did this crazy thing where the two farthest out planets, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 are
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
were hard the math didn't work because they do that retrograde motion as we see them that 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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,
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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, this, this. new calendar that incorporates those. And we need to make our opening date that day.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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, we 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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I think that there were certain people that were more than 100 years ago that had access to ephemerises and knew how to use them, those big, ugly tomes, and like, oh, I'll do the math here. People like Voisterman did it in the early 1800s.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So I was like, well, damn, somebody's making a podcast in this house. I guess I'll do it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Nowadays, 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. Floyd Lounsbury of Harvard was doing – oh, he might be Yale. I loved Floyd. I hope I didn't missay that. Shout out to Floyd.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 ephemerises in the 70s and maybe even as early as the 60s.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
To start figuring out some of this stuff, he's the one who really showed us for the first time that there was an 8-19 calendar and that it had something to do with Jupiter and Saturn.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Well, I used everything that I had learned from Linda Shealy and my other classes as a graduate student. And 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah. And in ancient times, you know, when these cities were at their peak, they're at least, you know, 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 yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Even in Honduras at Copan, their city began to fall apart because they had no trees left.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Changed the weather pattern. No more trees, no more water dropped on their crops.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, and so at El Mirador, El Mirador is one of the first cities of the ancient Maya world. You have Nakbe, and then I think Nakbe 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So it creates this big, empty, open space where they're analyzing the stars. And, you know, over the course of El Mirador is as far back as 2800 BC, 2200 BC. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. 2200 years ago. 2000 BC. I'm sorry. 200 BC. Good night. 200 BC, 2200 years ago. They are... They're studying the stars, and over the course of the last 2,200 years, the jungle has just reclaimed it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And when you're walking out there, it's impossible to acknowledge or determine any of these astronomical alignments. So, so much of it becomes the very last things that are determined as archaeology goes on, and you can clear out these cities more and more.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But once they get 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. That's really what excelled them beyond their neighbors.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But the White Sands thing, which is 23,000, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Then it melted and it's been water ever since.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. You know, I'm not a geomorphologist. That Younger Dryas thing has become so hotly contested.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I think it crept up from Antarctica, but places like, you know, certainly things within the tropics never iced up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
It would have a different shape, for sure. There's a shelf that drops off steeply into the Pacific, almost the whole coast.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
From Alaska down to South America, there's... 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But I found topo maps, and I looked at the whole place, and I said, okay, my – are mountain worshipers, and they call their pyramids Tuned Wheat 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And so that's the story we have to go with as far as our evidence. Is it true that the archaeologists... You know, White Sands just changed everything. I mean, the oldest stuff we have in South America, like the great site of... What's it, Monteverde? Tom Dillehay's site is at like 14,900 years. And for decades, when I was a student, that was the big discovery.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You have those sites in the eastern Amazon, right, in Brazil, that go back about 10,000 years?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Very old stuff there, but it's not older than Dillehay's site, Monteverde. Am I saying that wrong? I hope not. 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...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 re-dig them. This is a perennial problem with archaeology, too.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 says, remains the one.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, I think a perfect example of only being able to carry out a dig or an excavation one time is the temple at Chavin. Chavin de Jontar. Essentially, Chavin de Jontar is where the people of the Corral Supe culture, they get tired of trying to rebuild their... This is on the west coast of Peru. It's like a desert beach.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And they're building, I mean, arguably the very first pyramids on the entire planet, you know, before the official date. Right on the beach? Yeah, pretty close to the coastline.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
There's one on the beach, and then they go back in a river valley back, like, another 15 miles.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
This is the first place we see, one of the first places we see some pottery pop up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
They... There's earlier examples that are happening in Ecuador, but it's one of the main corridors where pottery starts being a common wear.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
It's a good example. To elaborate on what Luke said, underneath Chavin de Quantar 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,
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 uh the idea that's been passed down since that excavation is that this was a pilgrimage site and people were taking specific things for for specific purposes
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And we found four or five villages along the way. But then finally on, 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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So the Younger Dryas hypothesis, you know, 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, you know, the root of discovering its exact nature, I think, falls into... You know, geoarchaeology or, you know, geomorphology. I'm not a geologist.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 –
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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, a couple hundred years or something. Geology is funny like that. Yeah. But that was what I originally read. And now there's a new idea that it was a comet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
10 days ago.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I was in Guatemala. Okay, what were you doing? Yeah, 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...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But, 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... That is a point to consider. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
It was also Europe and across to Siberia and into China.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Okay. To Randall's point, 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 possible.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 seen it. It's pretty amazing. Wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Right here in your state. Luke's been finding all sorts of stuff along the river.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Really? This will be in the future.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
so there there are um 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 that could be you know an entire ancient village um in florida that has never been documented before and they're they're on the slide art map so that's that's probably down the pipe for me in 2025 that i'm going to go document these things in person but
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, they are absolutely full of these big Mississippian cities that we've been...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
yeah just ignoring for generations yeah and i called the uh the head of archaeology at uh the uh university of southern florida and uh spoke to her on the phone and showed her just one image of this lidar map and and then it was after that she took me very seriously seriously she goes where'd you get this and is it online uh no it's a it's it's it's like a private software that i'm just lucky enough to have i know a guy though yeah so um
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So I'll show you some photos offline. It's really cool. So on this map, they also have, you know, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And they're all pointing towards some kind of impact site.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Did those guys say when? Did they have an estimation of when these impacts occurred? I think that's a question. A crux point of this argument.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And I don't know who to believe. I'm not a geologist, and we live in a world where one team of credentialed people go against another team of credentialed people, and then we're stuck in the middle going on. Mm-hmm. I don't know who to believe here.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
No, I don't think so.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
it's a central city to the story of of the maya um you know everything eventually through the height of the classic period runs through t call and then um 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 uh booked uh through him i got on a helicopter
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I could see where geology would say these are impacts. The question is how long ago. And geology stinks 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, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And so they give us vague, wide numbers about these things. This happened somewhere between 1 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Like there's a Hancock talks about that impact crater that's right in front of the serpent mound.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
In Ohio. 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 some kind of unique landscape.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
and flew dozens of miles out into the middle of the Peten Rainforest, which the Peten is, I think it's at least the second largest rainforest in the Americas, which is second to the Amazon, but it's like 1 50th the size of the Amazon, but very, very remote. And it contains the largest pyramid in America. Definitely in the Maya world. And it's called La Danta. It's La Danta and El Tigre.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But to argue that the two are concurrent in time, we just don't have the data yet. Like if the head of the snake was blown off by the crater, then boom, smoking gun. But there's nothing like that. So I think it's the time depth between these, geology says for sure, comet impacts, And the time of humans. That's the wiggle room that neither side really has a viable answer to. Right, right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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... The hurricanes never come here because the Indian mounds protect us. And you're telling me somebody dug them up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
There you go, Diane. Your juju's right. Somebody ruined it. Yeah. And then you got Milton or Helene or whatever you got. Helene and we got Milton.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. Hmm. I love having the conversation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I regret all the vitriol that's happened. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, he talked about those kind of drills that had like the bow drills. 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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 as,
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I am equally fascinated and impressed by them, and I did think that Flint's attempt to explain how they could be done was on the right track, but I agree with you. We don't know how they did it. But I don't, I mean, my conclusion of that is that they were freaking amazing, and we are still too stupid to figure out how they did it. I mean, they were that smart, but that doesn't make them, you know,
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
aliens and it doesn't make them... There's arguments that we're aliens. That all of us are seeded from some other place.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
We just talk to each other different 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. 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 – Right. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I think another aspect is that we archaeologists really try to come up with hypotheses that we can test. There's tons of hypotheses. We could all say, well, I think there was a civilization 12,000 years ago. Okay, well, where's the proof? Do we have an artifact assemblage? Do we have buildings? Do we have a chronological sequence of of things in a stratified dig.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. So he's, you know, I think that people like Flint and myself are bound by being representatives of our field to try to
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
not profess hypotheses that we have no possible way of testing and proving or denying.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I can talk whatever the hell I want to talk about. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 most archaeologists, if you ask them honestly how they got started in archaeology, it was dreaming about fantasy things. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, I think I probably would not be sitting here if I hadn't read Fingerprints of the Gods as a young teenager. You know, Fingerprints of the Gods was the very first place that I ever learned about the Olmecs. You know, Olmecs, highly fascinating, but very little published about them, right? Especially in popular media. So that makes it into...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And what I was amazed by there is that the stone architecture is so much different than... As it 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
fingerprints of the gods which came out in 1995 and and you know that sort of you know kind of pushed along you know whatever interest it had and probably you know 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Well, so what I was saying was, I think that- Okay, so this kind of leading into what I'm saying is, is I think that as I, as I became, as I started to educate myself more, you know, I read Fingerprints of the Gods and, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And then you read things in textbooks that challenge the preconceived notions that you, that you had. And so, you know, I've done a huge dive just on Giza in the last year and, um, learned a lot of things that have challenged my beliefs about the pyramids.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And I think, I think that, you know, even Graham Hancock has come around to, you know, the greater part of the pyramids must be, uh, fourth dynasty, you know, under the Pharaoh Khufu. Uh, he, he talked about this on, on either Rogan or, um, another podcast, um, but I clipped it and put it on my ex account. And, um,
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And I became exposed to, you know, information like, and I got to see these just a month ago, these cedars of Lebanon that are inside the, you know, it's quote unquote burial chamber, but without a sarcophagus. It's a strange chamber in the pyramid. In what pyramid? The Bent Pyramid.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But those cedars of Lebanon kind of lock that pyramid into a certain time frame. They carbon date them and they're about... They're about 4,800 years ago, you know, 2,800 BC. And, you know, so we know exactly how old these trees are. So they kind of lock them in place.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 meteorite fragments just destroyed a city, right? Well, at Giza, we actually have something that's sort of similar to that. The construction of mencaras.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But in reality, it was the most efficient way possible because...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So, you know, you have... You have the Great Pyramid, you have the Second Pyramid or the Middle Pyramid, and then you have Menkaure'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 worker's village.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
There's like these rubbish pits that are just – they pretty much just picked up the city and dumped it off to the side. Right. as they're building that causeway and as they're building that valley temple. And so when they go through the, when they go through the rubbish, they find these, they find these seals with a cartouche and a cartouche is like the encircled sacred name of the Pharaoh.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 Calakmul, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And, you know, become more exposed to information like that. And slowly 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,
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
uh, and, and excitement about things that we don't understand, like how these vases could have been made, how they, you know, I, I got to see the unfinished obelisk in Aswan in Egypt, you know, 1200 tons made out of solid red Aswan granite. Um, And it's just, I mean, that's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And so that's why I think that 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
right you know here's a here's a funny sequence of just what he was talking about involving luke you know you are you were inspired by these sort of things when luke and i first met we were one of our first conversations were about you know 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 pejoratively called pseudoscience, created that interest.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And it was this site with – 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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're 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. So they interact with them. But they are – And what timeline?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
We're talking Olmec run from 1800 BCE to 500 BCE. So 1,300 years worth of them. And then they turn – archaeology calls them at that point the Epi-Olmec. And that goes on to about 200 AD. Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You can just tell when you walk up on top of a pyramid if it has a triadic... If it's a triadic structure, it's basically a pyramid with a platform at the top, and you have three more pyramids with a 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...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
No, I mean, it's common to say. In fact, it didn't start in pseudo-archaeology. It started with the very first person who was a historian who took a look at them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
In the 1800s, the first one that at that time they were calling the Head of Wayapon, now it's Tres Sapotes 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 Cozacolcos River Basin, they are like this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
They have these wide noses and thick lips. It's just a local characteristic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah. I told a story about what was that town that we were in?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Santiago Tushla, the big ass guard who looks.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yes. Yes. So so I get so I get 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 he's probably taking a nap inside the museum.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
It was it was early. I mean, we.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah. Oh, that's so true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can see on the visitor's sheet at the front, nobody had been there in weeks or something. 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. He looked exactly like an Olmec.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And he was freaky big for someone in that area.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
That happens all the time. I mean, everywhere... There's that famous Chinese basketball player. I mean, he is two foot taller than the vast majority of the people from his country.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Do you remember that 90-year-old man that was there who told us that in the early 1900s, they exhumed those six-plus-foot-tall bodies out of the Red Palace at San Lorenzo?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, he was pretty tall himself. But that guy, yeah, he did say that. That's true. I did not put that in my... In my Olmec 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. I asked him, where did the skeletons go? He said, they went to the lab, and that's the last I saw them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 he didn't say.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 told you on the bus afterwards what this guy said.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. Really? If you dig deep, yeah, especially the baby ones. I do discuss that in the lecture series that I... A lot of these, we call them chubby babies.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And they're so fat, their eyes are like squinted. Like that? No. That one's another thick lips one. Yeah. Look up like Olmec chubby baby. There he is. There we go. Holy cow. 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 all of the people of the Americas are Asiatic in phenotype.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You know, DNA is very much confirming that everybody that's an American Indian, their DNA, phenotype-wise, is from Asia. Yeah. And even the Maya themselves have a trait that they don't talk about very often. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And the Maya... Typically, I've seen a friend's baby with that spot on their back. It goes away, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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, 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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... Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
i had a i had a marine engineer who came on a trip with me one time and as a gift he made me this magnificent uh excel chart that 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 And we this this formula they made me I was able to plug in.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
so i you know there you can't build a raft big enough to not sink like there's a perfect example of this old theory see that thing that the one that they they show displayed there oh there's the head in the background those are like 15 25 tons 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Now that's also totally unproven. As unproven as these pretty pictures are right here.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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... You know, if you put a three-ton Olmec head on a raft that would wedge going down the river system, you know, then it would still sink the raft. Well, the smallest head is five tons. The largest head is the La Cobada head.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
The stones there are just too big, too tightly packed. 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 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
From La Venta, 70 kilometers.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
That's huge. And so, no, we don't know how they moved them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
No, no. It's pretty hard. Limestone's much, much softer than it. Oh, really? Yeah. Basalt's one of the harder stones in Mesoamerica.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Basalt can be right there with granite. Really? Yeah. Oh, it's 43 miles. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But in some of Sterling's earlier papers, he actually describes, he found these huge columns that are, you know, this big around, you know, a few feet by a few feet thick and, you know, six plus feet tall that would have been sitting in the, I think there were some in the Red Palace. They're really basalt. They're extremely, extremely hard.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 Michigan or Wisconsin single-handedly. He's a retired contractor.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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, call it Stonehenge Reloaded. They're so great.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But here's this 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Wally inspires me just like the wonderful stories of – of folks like Hancock. I mean, he is showing us what's possible. But Wally is different than Hancock. Wally freaking proved it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And Wally's been doing this for a few decades. Imagine when you have an entire industry of people doing this and trying to further... I love that one. That's crazy. Imagine you have an entire industry of people, highly intelligent people doing this over the course of centuries. How much...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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, ten times his own weight by himself with this particular angle. He can haul it straight up. That's so interesting, man. So, you know, he really there. There he is twisting it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. This is difficult. But, I mean, this is how you would move a giant stone.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And you're also motivated by, you know, zealous religion. Mm. 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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Well, I think, number one, 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? So these big projects they make together cement cultural identity. But they're also –
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
On a religious level, they are – yeah, look at him just move that thing so simply.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
These are those nubs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But they're always in twos. And I wonder whether they aren't the evidence of Wally's pivot points.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 to... How did they fit them so tightly, not move them? But the acids wouldn't help them move them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But the acids would help them cut it, though, right? Right. Or fit them perfectly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
The conventional theory is they were using hammer stones, and they would just pick up a five-ton stone and go, oh, 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, now do it again. Oh, no, do it again. That's... Yeah. It's... It would take so much effort.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But, you know, 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. Our minds boggled it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 act of devotion. So I think that's a profound thing to always keep in mind when we have one culture in time. are trying to understand the motivations of ancient people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Oh, that's – you know, somebody like Luke should actually count them all up as best we can. Because Egypt, we know the number, right? Yeah, it's like 140, 130. Yeah, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Doing something the long and hard way is an act of devotion, not stupidity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You know, hundreds of years to 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. There are senators a couple of years back. I remember because a Maya sites grant was specifically questioned in Congress as to, you know, a congressman was saying National Science Foundation gave fifty thousand dollars to dig up a Maya pyramid.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
In Egypt, it seems to kind of vary between – because, you know, a lot of those smaller pyramids, they 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 –
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
How does that profit America? How do we make any money on that? Right. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
If that was our attitude, we wouldn't learn jack or shit.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. In a physical sense, it's isolating us. We communicate like never before, but the product is our isolation individually.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 interesting. That one narrow part of what you just asked about.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. And that's a theory, just like Graham's is a theory or a hypothesis.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. Yeah. moving stones. One that really I think is a very particular invention that I'm fascinated by is the bow and arrow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 archeology calls diagnostic artifacts. These are very particular to this culture.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
um as way as signatures on culture but you know let me get myself back to your um Africa like long long ago okay at least I I won't pretend I remember the day Steve that's what we got Steve
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
One of the things I would add on there is I think for people building pyramids all over the world, one highly, highly conservative, sober answer might be I was walking through the jungles around the city of El Mirador and I 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I was going to say 70,000.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Damn it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I had 70 in my head. I was scared to say it. Darn it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Luke, I interrupted you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
We were talking about ants.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Well, and I was just saying, you know, ants work in much of the way that maybe the Maya people do or did. You know, they work in unison. They bring resources back and forth. And what do they build? They build pyramids. You know, it's in them to do that. They're going to do it naturally. And it makes sense in their little tiny brain.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
and so you know it could be that 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 to build a structure that way it turns out looking like a mound because um 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
by building a pyramid.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And we were talking there and he was like, you know, the common term is that Egypt is the land of the pyramids, but it's pretty obvious this is the land of the pyramids.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Well, the thing is, a lot of these pyramids, especially the ones, let's say where 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I have a theory here in North America where, you know, we have pyramids here, too. We have, you know, the famous ones are Cahokia and Poverty Point. But I think they start really, really early, like 6000 B.C., 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. So they built up these giant mounds. And in Tennessee and Kentucky, they started just putting dead bodies in the shell mounds.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
thousands and thousands of them out there and recorded you know at least hundreds probably over a thousand it's 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 in the Maya area
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 Yedinas start building dirt mounds, and they put all of their burials in there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
A lot of my theories revolve around that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. Yeah, that would explain why they keep them near the coast, right? Like, it's a really dirty and disgusting topic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. Hmm.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, there's a parallel topic to that that sort of explains why we think that burial sites in Egypt become sacred sites. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And, 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 thought that, you know, you have limited place to bury your dead. And because the vast majority of Egypt is wheat and barley fields.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But, you know, 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. That's how all tombs throughout Egypt are.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. And so, but this began, you know, that early psychology was probably there and they always wanted to be, they always wanted to be buried on the West side.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But eventually, originally what they do is they go out to the desert where the sand, you know, where these big sand pits are and they clear away the sand and they, you know, 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 thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 you 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 why don't we just go out there and take it
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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, you know, superstitions about burials begins. Cursed tombs. Cursed tombs, and it becomes obsessive, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And you can see this natural progression from sandpit burial to a sandpit burial being covered with stones, because they thought that would stop people from desecrating the tombs. 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've got to put a building on top of it. So then we call that a mastaba.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And then that mastaba eventually turns into six mastabas stacked on top of each other that makes this step pyramid. And then that can develop into a pyramid. And so it just – it's this – there are these – essentially this is – It's like a dump for their bodies that eventually becomes like the central point of their religion, right? Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So that's just another example on the other side of the world of the same thing happening as the shell mounts.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah. Yeah. So much of it is about death, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
It's about your ancestors and that kicks, you know, 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 the, your connection point to your religion and what you think happens to you after death. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah. Oh, man, that's so fascinating because it – 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And in Saqqara, you have these fake 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 – Yeah, yeah, that's what they are. They're like buildings that people are going to continue to live in.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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, they're 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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? The third from the left? Yes, yes. With some of these buildings, there's not actually an entrance into it. It's just a solid building.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah. Where 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
On a very micro level, too.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Sure, sure.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 a living shrine in their house yeah it's like an entire part of their city that is just is that one of those uh mastabas in the background is that the on the bottom right uh so that bottom left i'm sorry bottom left that that pyramid in the background that's one of the that's the one that emotep made right
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Okay, I'm sorry, not this one. Will you go back to the other photo?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, the bottom left.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. Are they rebuilding it?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Is that a pyramid or is that the mastaba saying something?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So they think that that is the first pyramid 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And the reason that they evolve 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So what tomb robbers do, rather than coring 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 decorated in all kinds of different ways. There's hieroglyphs down there and everything.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
It sits up on this plateau above the plains. So the mountains come up about 100 meters, a plateau of about half a kilometer wide. is where the city is, and then the mountains continue to rise above them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And what they're building is a city that they're going to live in in the next life.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
That's very weird.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah. Abu Sir is a great example of this. I honestly, I couldn't tell you. I know that Jeffrey, that Jeffrey drum. Not that. Yeah, yeah. Definitely not that. No, it's these huge bowls. You know, it's so specific that you may not be able to find it on Google Images. It's a type in like probably land of chem bowls.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
There's probably like some archaeological term.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Sure. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
sulfur ammonia ammonia yeah yeah the higher you go into the pyramid the more it reeks of ammonia it's either it's either from something that was used inside those chambers or people just peeing in them one of the two I don't know I'm just making a joke some people think it was like bat shit or something yeah yeah guano I don't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah. Maybe it's cats. I was in places where there was a lot of bats and it didn't smell like bats. There it is. Yeah. How strange is that, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Nice job.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You know, 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. Mm-hmm. But South America, they were using ayahuasca, and they were also using San Pedro cactus.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
We did. We looked at his map, and I told him that when you arrived there, this was, you got the job because you had done the, you had found Belize, right? Right. And, or I'm sorry, you had found Moshnah. Moshnah. He didn't find Belize. We knew where Belize was. So he had got the job because he had discovered Mashnah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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, you know, manioc, we make tapioca pudding out of it, but it's poison and it's it's it'll it'll poison you in its original form.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So they think they were using manioc to just throw up and then take San Pedro or ayahuasca.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But they have this traditional – they do it to this day where they go out into the desert on this kind of like almost like Australian aboriginal 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 like shoot it with little arrows. But then they take the peyote and they –
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. Are you ready? White Shaman Cave. Where we can see that same story being played out. People like hunting little buttons on the ground.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And the big mountain. And people obviously, well, they're like turning into ghosts. You see the top one from the... The third from the top. That's like, people interpret that as like that person's spirit coming out of them in trance. This is a big, wide panel. White Shaman Cave is absolutely amazing. It's a wonderful thing to see.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 Weechole are still doing there. In fact, a few years back, she invited a Weechole 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, I would add and say 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And it's so popular these days.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah. But not his body.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 on the Amazon or being able to see through the eyes of a jaguar.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And I just always wonder if that has something to do or not with your idea of this fanged deity in the Amazon.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I think he is definitely involved in the traditions of ayahuasca and San Pedro. Sometimes there's uprooted San Pedro floating in the background of scenes with this guy. But I do want to point out, too, that... But hallucinogenic drugs are not the only way that Native Americans found a way to hallucinate and be that other world.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Starving, you know, the vision quests that were done by the Indians of the plains, those didn't involve drugs at all. That was 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Wow. And so you can take it from there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 hit their threshold.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But then I mapped about 1,200. Sure. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Two years into the project, we actually found a bunch of pyramids around a plaza with a ball court and a palace and stela. So, yeah, that was certainly a pivotal moment in my life. And since then, I've – I taught for a little while after I got my master's and then my Ph.D., but – Where I really wanted to be was out back in the jungle and all those adventures.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Hallucinogens, in a way, are poisoning us. The hallucinations are our body fighting off what it thinks is something trying to kill it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I find it fascinating that it was specifically their blood. And we talk about bloodlines. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
There are photos, not photos, but carvings that show them doing it. Yashilan, they're a little... Can you find a carving online of this? Yashilan Stila. That ought to do it. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 plants that are blood coagulators. Oh, really? So they can quickly stop the blood.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
In fact, one of my guys in Palenque, the guys that were on the machete, she's pulling a rope through her tongue 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I think there are droplets in this one or chin if you zoom in. you can see the blood actually coming out of her mouth. Yeah, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
The smoke is turning into a big snake who's above her and burping out the first king of the Yashilam dynasty named Yat-Balam. Penis Jaguar. Penis Jaguar.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Penis Jaguar.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
That's a pretty cool, badass name, huh? Yeah. Nobody messes with Penis Jaguar. That is pretty fucking cool. Or Jaguar Penis.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And it's really some of the most 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
The background is deeper than the characters that are carved. It's called bas-relief. And it is much harder to do than carving into a stone. You can just keep carving and fix your mistakes. This one, your mistakes are pedestal mistakes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
That's her husband, Shield Jagbar, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
No, that's her husband, Shield Jaguar, 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. Right. So she's the one who's doing it for him. And then there's a number of scenes like this one.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 lentil. 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 she contacts her ancestors. Yeah, Yashilan Lentil 33? Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
That's wild, man. So there's 33. That's – These are all part of the same ritual. Let's see. There was one I just saw. 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 she's handing him.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Well, I'd 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And that's a soccer game. That's not it. That's not it. Oh, there it is. There it is. The one with the big snake. 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 the shield? He's Yat Balam. It says it in the hieroglyphs above him. He's the lineage founder of Yashilan.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You barely noticed that. She's holding another bowl in her hand. Yep. Also with the stuff in the... the smokes 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 write it down to talk to us.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Isn't it amazing how intricate this is? You have to really look at it for a minute to understand what it is 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I thought about this while I was in Egypt and there's statues of Alexander there, all kinds of depictions of Alexander.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
one of the things that the greeks did which i always i always talk about how uh 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Well, I always talk about how the Maya are, you know, 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, you know, I'm sure you've heard people say Aztec Empire, Inca Empire, Maya Empire, whatever. Well, there was never a Maya Empire.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. Mm-hmm. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I should name her too. Her name is Lady Earthshark.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Lady Earthshark.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Lady Earthshark, okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 just... 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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And do you have any ideas what the... In terms of warfare, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
There's a lot of... There's neat stuff where... There... 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Is this that Amon guy?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
This is classic period Maya. These guys are kind of like the... 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So like another group of powerful women like the Amazons.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah. Yeah. But this isn't the same as the as the Amazons. The powerful Greek warrior women.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
to do that. And this was a really popular way to trip back then. Now, did this make the children immune to the snake bites?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I don't know. Probably. It sounds very much like the development of vaccines where they're like scraping off of cows. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah. Do you have any idea what era that was?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Mm hmm.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I think because children have the strongest immune systems.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. There are people in the Amazon that will, you know, can get bitten by, by a rabid animal or can get bitten by a fertile ants or something.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
There's all sorts of astronomy tied into mythology, 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. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And there'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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You know, I know multiple people in, uh,
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Sadly, the world has changed. When I started going down there, that was always the case. Somebody would always trust the local corandero more than the pharmacist. But everybody flocks to the pharmacy now. The native people, at least of Mexico and Guatemala, are obsessed with modern medicine. They are like pill poppers now. I mean, I don't want to stereotype the entire group of people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, it's not good for them either.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 – our architecture is kind of devolving as time goes on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. And I was telling him, I was like, I was like, you know, it's probably not an accident that that is our favorite.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 there are,
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
chiseling in the things they're seeing in their natural world into stone and 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
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 washington dc is tons you know it's greek roman and egyptian architecture and we love it and it's symbols of ancient authority and power yeah
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I guess it's kind of an admission we're on a decline, isn't it?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
I think that was true all over the place. We, you know, outside of Rome were just peasants living in huts.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Um... It was part of their religion. They, unlike their neighbors, decided to follow the war god. That was their patron deity of the Mexica people. And he, at least as they understood it, demanded sacrifice and lots of it. It wasn't... 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
They got killed by an attack from Calakmul, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So it was capturing in battle. They would ritually, instead of kill 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. He 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But, you know, I mean, Christianity also has at least a moment where God says, prove it. And prove it by killing your child. This is a sacrifice you will make to me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
There's also... 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, probably 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And you build this into a very well-rounded person, and maybe say he's 18 years old, he probably gets – I'm just kind of spitballing, but I'm just saying maybe he gets whatever girls he wants. No, he did.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
He had a whole harem.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And he has to walk up, no crying, no getting dragged up there. You get chosen as a young man and 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. Self-sacrifices.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Well, you know, they kill him, but he doesn't get dragged to the stone. He walks up and lays down on it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Will you go into gory detail about how they killed him? Yeah, can you do that?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
How specifically? Heart extraction is what they love to do. Is that the only way? There was head chopping off, too, but the Aztecs loved... The Maya actually... didn't do this hard extraction thing as much until they got more influenced by the people of central Mexico. Okay. It's the classic period. You really can't find much in the way of Maya, uh,
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
sacrificing each other at all, except in the limited context of wars. There's a panel in Bonampak 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, and they're bringing people to be sacrificed. But... Yeah, the Maya were not as bloody as that until the post-classic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Like 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. Both of those ones 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And he mathematically or astronomically dates back what the birth of that guy that we just call God-1 is. And Palenque and Pakalwar, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
They know exactly what a heart looks like.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. Nope. Nope. Not for these guys. It just ripped out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. The god is eating the heart. That's the death god, but he's not the war god. But look at the temple he's on. It's like covered in blood. The Aztecs said, they told the Spanish that...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
In the last inauguration of the Temple Mayor, their main temple that has one side is to the war god, one side is 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yep. Yep. And they also did, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So they kind of kicked out this group called the Tlaxcalans that live in between Mexico City and Veracruz. 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 Tlaxcolins who were raised their hand.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
6,666.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
That's doable. That's doable, especially with the quick break, pull up, rip out, drop them, get a next one up here.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Now, this is what the Aztecs told, I think, initially Cortes, and I think that that was also echoed in Sahagún'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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 Triste situation? That's the time that the Spanish screw up, get their hostage killed, who's the king.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 Triste. And they get decimated. But a lot of people do survive. The captain survived. Cortez survives. A couple hundred people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 Spanish. 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 Cortez, bring me gold, all this sort of stuff. They were stockpiling gold in the compound that the Spanish had been given.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But then Cortes gets word from the coast that Cuba has sent a couple of ships with a thousand 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 Cortes. And Cortez said, OK, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And he does that. He you know, Cortez was actually trained as a lawyer. So he had the gift to 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 feast like they are again and again. But somebody at the feast tells him, do you like the food? Oh, it's humans. You're eating humans. Ha, ha, ha. You're a cannibal like us. And he freaks out. And he has everybody close the doors of this banquet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. And so when Cortes 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, hey, everybody calm down, calm down.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
This didn't happen. But. Montezuma gets stoned by the 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 they were being polite because he was their hostage. But now he's dead. Wow. That's what triggers the noche triste.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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... they 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 archeology.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. It would be hard as hell to find it, like a needle in a haystack.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But if the stories are true, there's a couple of horses covered in gold laying under the streets of Mexico City.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
You know, one of the things with the Spaniards having such vicious battles with these Aztecs, and then, you know, And really using and possibly exaggerating, or 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 his 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
They call him the decapitator deity. This is the fang deity? Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. You know, they had astronomical observatories and they had their own archaeological department as well.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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 and beautiful work. Maybe... Maybe more impressive or just right there with the Olmecs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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...
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
So, when you went up to the emperor of Montezuma's temple or Montezuma'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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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?
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
These very, very violent people who do things and sacrifice so many people that we see as so barbaric, but then, you know, they, they venerate and take care of them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
They weren't like caring for them, like, like special needs school.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Sure. Exactly. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
They were, they were, they were seen as, no, they were seen as touched by the gods. Deformity, dwarfism was seen as an obvious that God has touched this person. And so from a young age, those people would be told, uh, 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
And those people probably from an early age said, well, that sounds good. I'm in on that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Was there a lot of incest? Inca, a lot. Maya, I don't think we have much evidence of it. Though, much in the way of Europe's royal development, there came a point where it 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
It was a conduit to the ancestors who had influence on the gods. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Yeah, I find it a fascinating study in the capacity of humans that, you know, we make these dichotomies of good behavior and bad behavior and good and evil. And here's this culture who, you know, definitely checks the boxes of evil, you know, cutting people and ripping their hearts out and killing children. Okay, bad, bad, bad.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But then on the other hand, you have poems and music and love of flowers and public money spent on botanical gardens and museums. And at least outwardly saying, we are politicians, we're diplomats, we're public servants. So there was so much... that we would think you're either a barbarian or you're civilized.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
But here's a culture where the two were like two sides of a coin and there was not a conflict of interest in their lives.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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. So it kind of gives you an
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
There was counterfeit money. People would make ceramic chocolate beans and try to... 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.
Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Like, I'm not saying that the acid could dissolve and soften the stone to make it like a cinnamon roll. I just mean it softened it where it was compressed by half an inch. With the Americas, it's like we're studying aliens, right? Because they're so different from the Western mindset.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And it's just two centuries, you know, and it's this blip in time. After that, you have Alexander's father, Philip of Macedon, and he basically, he sees all the Greeks bickering with each other and he just conquers all of them while they're bickering with each other. And then he uses their force to invade Persia. And then really Alexander, he gets in the car and drives it like he stole it.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And then it's over after that. Then you have Hellenistic society. But it's just this little blip in classical Greece that is like, it is this one short period
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
of limitless capacity of a civilization to express itself to the fullest and do everything at the highest level it's ever going to be done and the only thing the only thing that's ever been similar to that and surpassed it is the united states and uh And that's why I feel like so drawn to this, to studying the Greeks, you know, and kind of as a reminder of like how precious our society is.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
We have so many problems. The United States has done so many bad things, but a lot of people suffered to give you and I the ability to sit here today. And I think
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
don't have to condone anything of it nobody's asking really for like my opinion on it i don't have to judge it but i should have an appreciation for what was given to me from the blood of so many people and just be aware of it you know um So, yeah. Yeah. Cool. Cool.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, I think so. I think so. And I just love the fact that they were interested in the Egyptians too. You know, it's this cool little window. When you're at Saqqara, you know, one of the oldest places in Egypt, and you're standing there looking at the...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The earliest periods in history, in Egyptian history, dynastic Egyptian history, they haven't really figured out how to make circular standing columns. So they have these columns that are attached to walls.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But the design of these Doric-looking columns, they're not Doric, they're Egyptian, and it's the Dorians, which are really just Greeks, that come down into Egypt all throughout history, maybe over 2,000 years after these columns are put up, and they're like... This is really, really nice. We could make this out of marble.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
They must be, right? Yeah, yeah. Well... Yeah. I mean, if I don't know how much like geopolitics or whatever you'd want to get into, but I mean, you know, cartels are using, uh, Russian guns. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Look at the way that, you know, look at the way that each one of these limestone blocks are something different. We don't have the stable, huge granite stones back in Egypt that you can lift this giant stone up and it doesn't crack in half, but we have marble. We can make this out of marble. Let's do that. They go, and then the whole design of Greek columns, these big marble temples, they're
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That's derivative of, or it's built on top of the columns that they took out of Egypt, that design there. And it is so obvious when you're there looking at it. And so, you know, who really knows? I mean, here's something else. The Olympics. We didn't even talk about that, but it's too much to go into. But, you know, we get organized sports from the Greeks as well.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, man. Thanks for having me back. The studio has evolved so much since I've been here.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Well, when the Greeks are trying to figure out... So as the Olympics start becoming really, really popular, I should have said the Olympics are the thing that's most similar to the Coliseum that the Greeks have, but I think the theater is actually more important. But when the Greeks are trying to figure out a good philosophy for,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
as to how to allow other Greek states or other people on the fringes of the Greek world to participate in the Olympics, the Greeks are trying to figure out, well, how exactly do we do this? And they couldn't figure it out. So they go down to Thebes in Egypt or Luxor in Egypt, and they speak to these priests there, or were they Egyptian philosophers? What was going on there?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It's invisible in Egypt. We don't know. Um, but we know that the, that the Greeks were going down there to get wisdom from the Egyptians and that, and that a lot of Greek wisdom is derivative of, of things that were going on in Egypt, but it's this invisible chapter of history. And I just, I just love that.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And man, like next time I come, we got to talk about Alexandria because Alexandria is a Greek city built in, in Egypt and, And so much, it's like its own little civilization where it's Greek genius fused with Egyptian, ancient Egyptian, like really ancient, ancient Egyptian knowledge. And it creates the most beautiful city that the world has ever seen.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Of course, it was ruled by a king, so it's different from Athens. But man, Alexandria, even Rome couldn't hold a candle to the city of Alexandria. Yeah, so that's something we'll have to talk about some other point.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Like we were saying, I love the direct essay-focused parts of talking about ancient history, and then I love just having philosophical conversations about how we connect to the ancient people. What I was saying is inside baseball as to how
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, there's, uh, Yeah, I think like mid-2023, there was something that went viral, and it was the cartels had new kits. They were completely kitted out, and it was whatever, some kind of AK-47 that they had that a gun expert that I follow, he said he zoomed in, and he did a whole analysis of it, and he's like, this is a Russian model. So, yeah. Wow.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
where you and I sit in this little sphere that we currently live in that everybody watching is so invested in, you know, it's cool to be like, uh, I guess like self-aware, self-analytical of the space that you're in and talking about it. I love these kinds of conversations. Yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah. When does this take place?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I'm just getting snitched on everywhere, too.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And we've got a big day tomorrow, too.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I'm looking forward to hearing about the Kurt Cobain case.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Okay.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That's not very open-minded of you.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So yeah, it's gonna is gonna end up as a Netflix documentary. I might it might, it might. It's the perfect kind of thing.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So morbid curiosity. Okay. So he was shot in the head with a shotgun after he had passed. Yeah. Is it, do you think, or do most people think that it was his wife that did that?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The loots and who knows what else. Yeah, right, right.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I can't wait to see how this all unfolds. This is seriously cool.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Well, I mean, I'm sorry, it's dark, but it's obviously fascinating.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I would say the loot is probably like a hobby. It's probably just a little side thing. There's probably many, many more lucrative things than that too.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It feels like I'm in a real studio this time. I walked in, and it was like I was on the set of a TV show or something. I just love it. The colors are so vibrant, and I don't know. It's just like you guys have just evolved so much in the last, what's it been, a year and a half?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, man. Well, that's profound that you're taking the step to do this. That's really cool.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Probably so. Yeah. Sorry to take a dark detour, but I was so fascinated in this. I wanted to, I want to learn something from you about it.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, for sure. I know I'm going to hear a lot about it tomorrow. No doubt.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah. That seems to be, you know, from the limited knowledge I know of it, it just sits in, it just sits in these airplane hangars in Russia. And I think it's, you know,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Sounds like a nightmare, man. Could you imagine the people who are, you know, I used to work in nursing homes when I was in college and yeah, during college and the things that people admit to at the end of their life is shocking. All the time in nursing homes, in people's last days, they admit to a murder and
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Could you imagine living with the cloud of that over you after you had done something that dark? One of my chronic nightmares is that I have murdered somebody and I'm trying to live with that. I don't know why this is happening to me psychologically. Those dreams are so freaking dark and so scary and so filled with guilt. I couldn't imagine people who had actually done that, you know?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Past life, could be a past life. It could be. I was like Jack the Ripper or something. Yeah, could be, could be. But, you know, yeah, I just couldn't imagine. This will be our last episode? Yeah. No, I'm just playing. But yeah, I just couldn't imagine actually living Having actually done that, dealing with the guilt of it.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I mean, not only have you done something awful, you have also ruined your own life. You know what I mean? It's just horrible. All the way around, it's horrible.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, I mean, Putin's a, I wouldn't say, he has a value for history. He knows a lot about history. Certainly he's an expert in Russian history. And I think anybody that's a world leader like that probably has an appreciation for like world history on a grand scale. So I would imagine that he's got resources allocated to the little side hobby of collecting ancient artifacts, you know?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The huge Pollyanna walls, that's really the, whether they are the, whether they're the andesite or the granite or even the basalt, or I'm sorry, whether it's andesite, granite, basalt, or there's even some limestone ones. But then the limestones, they can be different. Like you can have smaller cellular stones. I think that's a big mystery.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
With the imperial stones, the ones that are more square, I think it's a... There was a... there's a literary source that comes from the late 1600s. And it's a man who was born in Inca, but he, you know, I guess was colonized or whatever. And he becomes, he learns to speak Spanish and marries a Spanish woman. And he ends up writing about his childhood growing up amongst the Inca.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And he says something in there about he says something in his dialogue about how he would watch the Inca stone masons. And he says something, he's like, he's like through, they had that, you know, they had masterful skill with these, with these metal hammers or metal tools based on unknown centuries of expertise would carve out these square Imperial stones.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So yeah, a lot of evolution and the vases have multiplied. Yep. But yeah, man, I'm just happy to see that your channel has grown so much and you guys have matured as the show so much.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So these little square ones he's talking about, he was seeing them do it as a kid. However, you also have contemporaneously with him, you have these other sources that are talking about people trying to – people who are observing the Inca trying to move these giant stones and failing to do it.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And then there are – there were Spaniards that were asking the local Inca, I think at the – I think it's the – the temple of the temple, the moon, um, you know, how did they move these stones? And then the Inca told them, well, no, these stones had always been here. They were built by the gods, something, you know, akin to that.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Um, and so the mystery there is, is the big cellular polygonal stones, you know, how, how were those done? Um, were they melted by, were they softened by acids? You know, I, I don't, I don't agree with the geopolymer thing, but I think that's,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I think that if it were possible to be able to take these acids that, you know, we know that there are these acid deposits down in the Atacama Desert and that there are these Inca or ancient South American highways that lead off. They could be Wari. They could be, you know, the Inca built on top of the highways of the Wari Empire.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The Wari may have been building on top of the highways of an older empire. But you have these roads that go all the way down into the Chilean desert and then just fade into the desert. That's kind of where they end. why do they have this road that's going down there? Well, we know that there are these natural acid deposits that people were mining down there.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Now, the question is, what are they doing with these acids? We don't have a lot of evidence for that, as far as I'm aware. But it seems plausible and interesting to me, the possibility of bringing those back up to what we consider today the Inca realm. And rather than cutting and chiseling the stone away to fit perfectly with each other,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
well what if you're able just to soften the edges of stones and then basically you know slide them smush them together and that creates these perfect seams that you see you know in the in these um i'm sure you did this as well but uh you know every time you can get a glimpse of the spaces between the stones almost always the the stones are fitted together all the way to the back you know or at least very very closely and on the out on the outside they're they're perfect
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, so right here. So yeah, I just think that the idea of them being able to soften the edges of the stones and then slide the stones together rather than having to cut them to fit together just would be such an ingenious and much more easy way to be able to construct these. How you lift the stone up 15 or 20 feet up above your head, I really don't know. That's the perennial mystery.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But I agree with you. And I think that the acid idea is just so good. And you see on the exterior right here, it looks like there was acid dripping down the front of it. This front part that doesn't get pressed against another stone, it looks like there's acid that's eaten away at the front of the stone there. What are your thoughts?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, there may be another example in Cusco, but I know, I'm almost certain that there's a Spanish chronicler that refers to at Tiwanaku, there is acids being used. But, you know, Tiwanaku is basically the blueprint for, or at least archaeologists think is the blueprint for, you know, the later construction that you see at Cusco and Machu Picchu.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But there may be another there may be another literary source that's more relevant to Cusco itself. Ryan, that that photo that you had up there where you were showing the joint of those blocks. I'm sure you noticed that, you know, so there's so there was an earthquake in in, I think, 1695. And then there's another earthquake in 1655.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Traveling a lot. I went to Egypt twice in the last five months and went to Mexico and Guatemala in between there. And yeah, just traveling and figuring out a lot of the direction that I'm taking going forward. Yeah. I feel like my perspective of the world has just changed so much since I started traveling a lot about three years ago.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And then there's another one in like 1995 or something close to that time. um that knocked down the colonial buildings but the but the the ancient buildings are still standing there but while they're doing that it's displacing the joints of the blocks so you can see that top block has slid back and on that bottom stone that outward lip is pointing up so it looks like It's been compressed.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, it's been compressed and that stone smushed down that softer, acidly dissolved stone that's on the surface and it smushes it down and it makes that perfect crease there. And I think, I honestly think that
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
for me that's the smoking gun of of that okay this it literally looks like this block has been sitting on top of the other one for thousands of years or however long and and at one point the top of it was soft and it compressed it you know just maybe by half an inch you know i mean that that's what and like i'm not saying that the acid you could dissolve and soften the stone to make it like a cinnamon roll i i just mean it softened it where it was compressed by half an inch you know
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That for me though, that lip there is the most telling sign. And then I think that the exterior, the front of the stones, the way that they have been chipped off and the little scoops where it looks like the stone was softened and some of it was pulled away in the process of moving the stone or mounting the stones and putting them on there.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I just think that those two pieces to me just look like the exterior of the stone was softer at one point in time.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The dilemma that we have with studying the Maya is the same dilemma that we have with studying the Egyptians in that we look at them the way they wanted to be looked at. Their propaganda worked and it worked for all of eternity. The big mystery here is that the ancient Egyptian lotus flower does not exist anymore. They used them so much and they were so popular that they went completely extinct.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah. You know, I think, I think, um, like we were talking last night is, is it's, it's funny. We're reaching in, we're kind of reaching this new stage where it's going to be interesting to see how, how so much of this plays out. Um,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
cause we were talking about, I know this sounds like it's not gonna be relevant to what you're saying, but we were talking about last night, Plato's Atlantis and how, um, and how there's not really a consensus or at least maybe like an alternative community. Like what exactly are we talking about?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You know, are we literally talking about Plato's Atlantis or is it more like how you and I say, well, you know, when somebody is referring to Atlantis, it's just a placeholder for this idea that civilization goes back further than, uh, pre-dynastic or dynastic Egypt and Mesopotamia, right? It's just a placeholder word. It's an umbrella term for that. You know, I think that this whole
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
this whole rejuvenated interest in looking for these archeological mysteries produces a lot of valuable fruit, right? And I think that slowly but surely it's going to and is inspiring new archeologists to come in and just have, even if it's just a 25% more open mind, things are being discovered and you're seeing things in a new light, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Rather than like the archeologists that put us on the wall of shame, just shooting it down, you know, there's no mystery, there's no intrigue, there's no romance. And even the idea of romance in archeology is problematic, right? Like that's what they say.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Because that was maybe a year ago or so, I was getting blasted on the wall of shame for saying that, well, you know, I'm not trying to, me personally, I said this publicly, I was like, I'm not trying to sell mystery what I'm doing is just conveying the romance and the wonder of the ancient world. And I'm putting on display how much I love it and how beautiful I find it and intriguing I find it.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Well, then I get blasted for that because no, no, no, romance is something, that's an outdated way of viewing. So everything is just, it's so sterilized. And you and I are being chastised by people who, it feels like they're so jaded by their own, they're so jaded by their own profession. It's like they don't even love their own profession. It's a very weird thing.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And they're making themselves the unnecessary villains in this whole sphere. But to getting what you're saying, yes, I do feel like I do feel like more and more people who would maybe traditionally be placed in the academic sphere are coming around to maybe not saying they're on board with Atlantis or ancient aliens or whatever, you know, but they're saying, Oh, you know what?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That, that is pretty interesting how these blocks were made. It is pretty interesting. Well, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe they were softened. Maybe these people who, you know, overshot the mark by looking for X, Y, and Z because they're seeing the evidence of these softened stones. Well, maybe the softened stones itself is indicative of that there is something more.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I know we were talking last night and I was saying like, man, I've traveled so much, I'm ready to actually just to stay home for a little bit. But I've been gone for at least 10 days a month for the last three years, traveling everywhere. It's a lot. Yeah, yeah, it's been a lot.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So I think there's this middle ground that as time goes on, hopefully everybody kind of comes towards and acknowledging that there is something more to our ancient history.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, I think there's something worth touching on there. You know, poor Flint ends up being the middle of all this because he debated Graham. But, you know, but yeah, you know, it's a good example. You know, prefacing all this, everybody that I know that's met Flint personally likes him. They say that he's nice, you know, and that he's a nice guy.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Exactly. And personally to me, Flynn has been very nice to me. He gave me a bunch of resources for like Bronze Age archeology. This is almost two years ago when I was expressing to him my interest in Greece. Gave me a bunch of resources, spent a lot of time messaging me that he didn't have to take.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And then I even talked to him about when I, and we'll talk about this later, but this certificate program I'm doing at the University of Greece, he was one of the people that really encouraged me to take that next step. Um, and, um, you know, but I think that when he was on, um, when he was on Danny Jones and Danny brings up the vases and his first response is, yeah, I disagree with them.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But I think that it's kind of laid this foundation of having a perspective of the ancient world and also knowing what traveling is like and traveling on my own. Like I spent a considerable amount of time in Egypt by myself and getting around Cairo on my own, getting from Cairo to Alexandria by myself.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It's like, well, Flint, come on, man. Like you're not winning on, you're not winning over anybody by saying that, you know? And I think the thing is, at least if you're going to be involved in the public sphere, you should want to win over people. Right. Um, but you know, maybe that's, I don't know.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I'm not sure what Flint does on his day-to-day job, but maybe that's more so the skill of an orator or a lecturer to know how to talk to people and win them over and be open-minded. I just don't know. But I think that... him saying that just that one thing is maybe indicative of so many people on that side, like people that put you high on the wall of shame.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It's just, you're just, they're just automatically opposed. And there's not a whole reason to be. You don't have to disagree. You and I talk about this and people who are, you know, I don't even love the alternative history word, like the name for this whole space or whatever, Um, I don't really care for that, for that word, but because it's so ranging, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Like I'm probably me personally, I'm probably one of the most, maybe the most conservative person in this whole sphere, you know, least willing to say, ah, I don't know about this way out here idea, but I definitely think that these have merit. Um, you know, my view of Atlantis kit might be a lot more dialed down than someone else's, right. But we still get all thrown in the same box. And, um,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So yeah, I just, I don't know. We're just, we're kind of at, we're just really at the forefront of like a new age. And 10 years from now, I think things will be a lot more refined.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And I think the people who, that are in this space that have ideas that are more centered around the actual data and well thought out ideas, they will be people who are still speaking and writing and, you know, putting out videos and talking about these topics and the other people will have faded out. And that's the way it was in archeology before.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
200 years ago you know in the early 1800s you had all these archaeologists who were as pseudo-scientific or whatever as archaeologists say independent researchers are today and then it becomes more dialed in and then you have this golden age of archaeology and then it kind of gets to you know where it is today and and uh so we're at like a new renaissance right where people are looking at things for their themselves they have all these new tools available and it's just going to take time for it to go through the weeds you know
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And there's so many instances of, you know, so archaeologists, maybe it was last night at dinner when I was thinking about this, or I was watching, I was watching Danny's episode with Flint recently.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I was thinking about, I was thinking about people like Flint, his position as a historian, as an archeologist, you know, these guys are, are arbiters and holders and like collectors of, of, of knowledge, right? Like they, and they're the ones that teach it to students that come in. Um,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But there's still so many other people who have specialized interest in fields that can be closely associated with archaeology. And being open to hear those people's opinions would greater inform your view of the things that you study, right? Like, you know, a guy who's...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I think I learned a lot about the world, about the ancient world, but also like contemporary people, you know, people in Egypt, in the Western world, we have this idea that like, oh, well, you know, is it safe over there?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
you know, a mechanical aerospace engineer or whatever, like Dunn and Dunn's son, you know, who love these vases and know everything about them. Well, these guys don't spend all their time learning about the culture of ancient Egyptians like I do or the Greeks or whatever like I do. So I have this vast, you know, set of knowledge here that's applicable to history.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And I know the cultural context behind things. And I may know a little bit about the vases, but I can't dismiss his opinion about the vase, you know? And I think that that's kind of the thing that I just find interesting that some archeologists, and it's a lot of people in a lot of industries, they just automatically dismiss something.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And what I think it is, is it's like, I think it's just the association that they don't like. One of my fears of reaching out to a local museum or something to be able to look at a vase that they have, like in San Antonio, they have a green diorite vase there. I probably sent you a photo of it. And I've thought about going to ask to... go into their lab and look at it.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But then, you know, one of my fears is like, you know, what if they look into me, they see that, you know, I've been on these podcasts or whatever, that some people don't like me. Oh, you know, they see this guilt by association and they, you know, they dislike me.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And that's what I think a lot of this is, is that like, oh, so Graham Hancock and people that like Graham Hancock are interested in the vases, I'm instantly going to oppose it. And I just think in the long run, that isn't going to do any good for anybody. And I think eventually it will die out.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I think, you know, you look at these archeologists that are in there that are active, like on X on YouTube that are in there, you know, twenties and thirties, a lot of them are more open to being a part of the conversation because they understand we have this new space that has this massive amount of dialogue.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That's another thing I think is interesting is we're kind of coming out of an age where there's a clear wall, right? Like academics did not associate with the public. They existed in their own fraternities, right? And you put out magazines and stuff and the public just kind of accepted it because there wasn't this huge discourse. But now we have like the Roman forum, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Where everyone can gather on X or on social media or on YouTube and discuss things and discuss things and discuss things. And there's less of a, uh, there's less of a hierarchy now, you know?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So we're reaching this whole new phase of society where if you want to be involved in, in academia in the same way that if you want to be involved in politics, now, if you're going to go on a political campaign, you've got to come on podcast and appeal to, you know, the vast majority of people.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You know, these are just normal people trying to get through life and enjoy their life and not get caught up in anything that complicates them enjoying their life in the same way that we do, right? And I've just learned so much about, you know, having a greater perspective and a more realistic perspective of the world.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Cause now we have our own forum, you know, um, or we have our own Agara, like in Athens, you have this place that people come and meet and discuss. And, um, yeah, we're just reaching this new place.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And I think that for anybody to be successful in what they're doing, if they care about, you know, being involved in the public, they've got to learn like the skill of oratory, something that used to be so important in ancient times, you know? Yeah, it's, I just, I love this. I love this conversation right here.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
This is something I think about a lot, this place that we're in right now and thinking about what is our little space going to look like 10 years from now?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I mean, look at your podcast studio 50 years ago. This isn't possible to do this. It's not possible to project your voice out and this.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
whether you know uh whether gatekeepers of you know knowledge or academics or whatever uh like it or not this is the place that the world is in and um this you know yeah i just think it's so cool yeah true well you've been doing a lot of work on the vase topic over the last year so what's happening there yeah so i was trying to remember where i even got started on this um
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So I've had an interest in ancient Greece my whole life. And when I announced that I was going to this continuing education certificate program at the University of Athens, a lot of people were shocked that it felt like I was stepping away from the Americas. But I stepped away from the classics to study the Americas. Anybody that's heard me on podcasts, my very first interest was ancient Greece.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It was the movie Troy, it was the ancient biblical world, reading the Iliad and the Odyssey as a little kid, as little as I could comprehend of it. And so, you know, eventually this just started creeping back in as I got older. And my bachelor's degree is in anthropology. And what that is, is the study of ancient cultural anthropology. So it's the study of ancient people, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So my preference of study, what I like to dig into is not necessarily the hard artifacts of these vases or how are the pyramids made. For me, the interesting idea is, okay, what can I learn about people at the time that these vases were made and their relationship to the vases? What can I learn about the people at the time of the pyramids and their relationship to the pyramids?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So one of the things I find really interesting there is there's this little village that existed on the Mahdi outcrop. And during the construction of the Menkaure pyramid complex, that village was displaced and those people were moved out of the way to build the valley temple.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And also, I think somewhere along the way, I started having an appreciation for, like, the origins of Western society and, you know, where these things have come from. And as we'll talk about later, some of this began with me studying the vases and how ancient cultures interacted with the vases and how...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And you can see the archeological evidence, like the upheaval of this village and all their trash gets dumped in the desert. And you can go look rummage through that trash and learn things about those people. I find that really interesting. And that can go endlessly deep. And so that was one of the pulls to me for Greece because, you know, you can study Greece from so many different angles, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It's this deeply human civilization, right? And I think that's why I constantly say with the Americas, it's like we're studying aliens, right? Because they're so different from the Western mindset. And also, we don't have literature. And literature brings out the human aspect. Otherwise, you're dealing with public propaganda.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So the dilemma that we have with studying the Maya is the same dilemma that we have with studying the Egyptians in that we look at them the way they wanted to be looked at. Their propaganda worked and it worked for all of eternity. Because when you think about Egyptians, you think of the pharaohs, you think of the timeless pharaohs up on the walls.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
we can only view them the way they wanted to be viewed as these semi-divine, more than human people, right? And so it gives this degree of separation and that's where you get this intense fascination with them because they're so different from us.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But then also, you know, as somebody who loves just daily life in the ancient world, the Greeks are compelling too because you can get so deep into learning about ancient people and what the visceral part of just normal life was like. And so I had been, that had been creeping in for maybe like five years now.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And I never talked about it in a public sphere because Greece is, it's so detailed, it's so nuanced, there's so much going on. I said this in a video recently that, you know, with Egypt, you're limited to, and there's lots of nuance in it, but you're limited to the study of bones, pottery, and other smaller artifacts and buildings, you know, whether it's the pyramids or temples or whatever.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But with Greece, you have this added element of literature and that is incredibly vast. And there's so many sources to bounce back and forth from. And also learning the language is such an intense part of being an expert in Greece. So I never talked about it publicly because it's too nuanced for me to talk about. But as a hobby, I had been looking into it.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And somewhere along the way, I was going through Google Earth, through a museum in Athens, and then another one in Crete. Now, so you have these, you have several different ages of Greek history. Two biggest ones are the classical period, the height of Athenian democracy, the war, the Peloponnesian War against Sparta and Athens.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But then you have this older age, the Age of Heroes, the end of the Bronze Age, which is where the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Trojan War takes place during this time. That's also a deep fascination of mine. Like probably so many people throughout the last 3,000 years, that's been most people's first fascination with history.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so where this mainly takes place is in the Peloponnese and on the island of Crete. This is where the Minoan civilization existed. And the two major players in the late Bronze Age is you have two cultures. You have the Minoan culture and you have the Mycenaeans. And when was this? I mean, this is anywhere from, let's give it rough numbers, 2000 to 1000 BC.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I think that some of this has to do with Egyptian, uh, mythology, mystery schools, you know, psychedelic usage or something. And it's kind of, you know, dripping into Greek society. And then somewhere along the way, you know, the Greeks have this, uh, they have this, you know, epiphany that, that, uh, is the origin of Western society. Anyways.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
More accurately, maybe like 1800 to 1200 BC. And then you have these frays at the beginning where it's building and where it's falling. And so, I mean, these are major players in the ancient world. But there are these lost civilizations, basically, that all we have left are the ruins. They didn't leave us literature. And the literature that they left us is very limited.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
This is the mystery of linear A and B, which are basically just, they're like ledgers for keeping up with goods and things like that. But I find these civilizations very interesting. I find the Minoans really, really interesting. So you have the city of Mycenae. This is probably important to know. You have the city of Mycenae, which is in the Peloponnese.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And this is the major Bronze Age superpower in Greece, led by, if you've seen the movie Troy, you know the king Agamemnon? Well, he's the king of Mycenae. And he leads this huge campaign where he essentially, as the story goes, unites all the kingdoms of Greece into this empire, and they launch this war against Troy.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Now, Troy, you know, the famous reason behind this is that Helen of Sparta leaves with one of the princes of Troy and goes off to Troy, and so they launch this war to go get her back. But if there really is a Trojan War, which I think there probably really was one, it was probably actually for access to the Black Sea because Troy controlled the ports from the Aegean to the Black Sea.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so if you get access to the Black Sea, you get all of the agriculture that's there. And of course, Crimea, like in Ukraine, that place has been, you know, that place has been like the Garden of Eden for producing grain in the ancient world for thousands of years and even all the way up to today. So that's probably what it's really about.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so I was just fascinated with these civilizations and wanted to learn more about them. And what I always do is I will drop down into Google Earth Street View inside of a museum and I'll walk through the museum. And And at the museum in Athens in the Mycenaean section, there are these Egyptian vases that are there. And there's also vases that look like they're like pseudo-Egyptian vases.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You can tell it's Pretty similar, but it's weirdly different. Like some of them, I'm sure you've seen the ones that have a little spout coming out the end. Yeah, that's something that the Greeks are adding on to the vases. And sometimes it's literally just like a little stone addition that's tied to the vase and then wrapped around the rim.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And then they drill a hole there and you can pour the vase, right? And then I thought, oh, that's really interesting. Like, what the heck are the Mycenaeans doing with these Egyptian vases? Okay, that's weird. So this is roughly 1500 BC. Do they know the Egyptians? You know, so that led me down this rabbit hole. And this is maybe about a year ago this started.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So then, you know, the twin civilization or the sister civilization of the Mycenaeans is the Minoan culture. That's on Crete, which is just this island in southern Greece, you know, in the Mediterranean or at the bottom of the Aegean. And the Minoan civilization is this very attractive, literally and figuratively, civilization culture. That builds these huge, enormous three or four story palaces.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Um, yeah, just a lot has changed in the last three years. And, um, Yeah, so much, so much, yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
They have all these really interesting, beautiful murals on their walls. Their women are supposedly like the most beautiful women that have ever existed. You can look at their murals and it's like, wow, that's a pretty lady.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Um, and, uh, they've got these sports of them, uh, like jumping over bulls and, and they, there's even a theater and ancient games and you can just tell it's like proto classical Greece, um, you know, pre Olympics sports that are going on. It's fascinating culture. Certainly filthy rich.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And they have this, another thing that's alluring about them is the eruption of Thera and the destruction of the city of Akrotiri, which is, it's like Bronze Age Pompeii. And it's Santorini. And so the volcano erupts in about... I think it's 1650 BC and you know, just levels this city. And a lot of people think that this might be the origin.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
This might be the kernel of truth that we find from Plato's Atlantis of this civilization, this advanced Minoan civilization collapsing or being destroyed by this cataclysmic event. And yeah, Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. So that's... So this is a depiction of... I forget what city that is. That might be the city of Akrotiri. Those are some of the palaces. But... So, yeah. So you have Minoan civilization.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
At the very least, it's hurt. And the city of Akrotiri is completely destroyed by the fourth largest volcanic eruption in known history. Wow. Yeah. So this is about 1650 BC. It was such... an incredible event that had disrupted all the weather patterns nearby. And even Chinese dynasties recorded, not recorded the event as though they knew it was a volcano, but it affected the weather in China.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And the Chinese dynasties recorded this event. So that's a very interesting thing. It's got that similar allure to Pompeii of the city just being like frozen in time in a way or a cultural layer of the city being frozen in time because eventually people go back and build back on top of it. But incredibly advanced, incredibly elaborate, wealthy civilization existing on the islands of Greece.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so I start just – studying about it for fun and when i'm going through their museum i notice whoa there's a lot of pre-dynastic egyptian vases in this museum or at least things that look like it that's really interesting and uh this came from when i was working at my nine to five i would take up all my company time researching minoan civilization um and uh that was a good time um so uh
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, so I end up finding this collection from 1965. Ryan, you can pull it up. There's this private collection that exists on Crete. And I don't include the guy's name because I don't want to evoke his family or whatever in this. So these are... what at least he thought were specimens of actual Egyptian vases that were found on Crete.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, man. I could walk anywhere in Egypt and nobody's going to mess with you. Everybody is so, so nice. Latin America can be safe to travel to. You go where you're supposed to go. Go where tourists need to be. Go to archaeological sites, back to your hotel, town square where restaurants are at. You're going to be fine.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And there are others, but I just thought that these are some of the best ones. So on the left here, you've got this Egyptian diorite vase. In the middle, it doesn't say, but that looks like granite to me. It looks like your OG vase. Um, you know, it's so finely polished. It looks like it'd be translucent. And on the right, you have this bowl. I don't know how big this bowl is.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
As far as I know, these artifacts aren't, these are in a private collection. I don't think they're actually on display. Uh, although I would like to go to Crete and find out someday.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So I found this really interesting because it's this mystery of – okay, so you look at – and maybe you've seen this diagram before where they show the provenance of where these vases – where we know that these pre-dynastic hardstone vessels have been found. And right about 3100 BC, according to the – archaeological record.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Right about 3100 BC, when the first dynasty is created, dynasty zero, it ends. There's no more of these vases being made. From then on, until from 3100 BC to 2100 BC, we see them increasingly and then drastically less being buried in royal tombs. And by the end of the old kingdom, there are no more people being buried with these. You
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
um after 2100 bc you know according to the record there shouldn't be any more of these vases laying around they should all be underground in tombs there are no more um you know for the at least for the most part so where are these where are these vases coming from because these appear in crete and in the bronze age late bronze age greek world
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
um about a thousand just under a thousand years after the time they disappear from the archaeological record in egypt so i found that compelling like okay so maybe a clear maybe obvious answer is these are treasured artifacts in the egyptian world that they're using as gifts to give to you know neighboring cultures um you know i don't know how how they end up there but the the next thing i thought was interesting is is that the minoans thought that these were
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
so amazing that they try to recreate them in their own local stone now the minoans i may have it up here yeah so they've they they're limited to their local stones which is serpentine alabaster limestone and soapstone um and here are a few but there are many many many many many more that exist uh of these specimens of the of the minoans trying to recreate these uh
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
recreate these vases out of their own local stone. And I found this very interesting. And so I just kept looking into it. Okay, well, what is the relationship between the Egyptians and the Minoans? Clearly there's something going on here. And clearly the Minoans are fascinated by the Egyptians. And so this is where it gets really, really dense. Starting off on a
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe there is granite and diorite on the island of Crete. I would imagine that there is, but the Minoans weren't using it. They didn't have the tools or the expertise to be able to craft these out of them. So these are made out of stones that are half... Half as hard or soft. So yeah, so these are specimens that are created by the Minoans.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But, you know, outside of that, you know, you never know what can happen to Latin America. But in Egypt, you can go anywhere, do anything, visit anybody, and you're just perfectly safe. You know, it would be totally against the worldview and the religion of people living in Egypt to commit things like petty crime or to put your life in danger.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So I started researching the relationship between the Minoans and the Egyptians. Clearly there is one. Whereas in the mid-1900s, it was actually... basically a closely held opinion that there really wasn't much of a relationship between the cultures at all, and that Minoan culture is completely independent of Egyptian culture. It's not inspired by it or anything like that.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And there are even some records of archaeologists writing to Hans Wunderlicht, who has this book called The Secret of Crete, And, uh, basically writing him with exactly the same sort of attitude that we're talking about now, this is like in the sixties, you know, saying there's absolutely no evidence of, you know, uh, cross-cultural contamination, you know, whatever.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And, um, but yet clearly there is. So when I was going around Greece or I'm sorry, when I was going around Egypt, um, in the last, last few months, there is, um, Some compelling ideas that I still need to look into in the future, but during the Amarna period, so this is at the end of the 18th dynasty, right, you know, probably let's call it roughly 1300 to 1400 BC.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
During the Amarna period, you have this pharaoh who is formally born Amenhotep IV, changes his name to Akhenaten. You've probably heard of this guy before. He basically just cuts the legs out from under the Theban priests and just levels all of the priesthood and makes himself the high priest of the one true sun god. He's a conehead, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, the way he's depicted in statues and everything. And his family members as well, they have the elongated skulls.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Elongated skull guy.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Hopefully there's no Coneheads watching that are offensive. Right, right. But, you know, so during this time, there's like an artistic liberation happening. Now, it's only, you know, it's noticeable, but it's not like the artwork completely changes. But there are palatial floors that have these designs, which as far as we know, are completely foreign to the rest of Egyptian history.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And the Egyptologist that I was with when we were in the Cairo Museum, there's an Amarna period. Amarna period is Akhenaten's little kingdom that he establishes when he changes the whole Egyptian world and flips it on his head to worship the Aten. That's the Amarna period. And we call that because he moves the capital of Egypt from the...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You know, Egyptians are very nice, and Egypt itself is very safe. I love traveling to Egypt.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
the economic capital from Memphis and the religious capital from Thebes or Luxor to a place called Tell el-Amarna, which is, it's the modern name for it, but we just call it the Amarna period. One of his palace floors or one of his palatial floors is this completely foreign art style. And the Egyptologists that I were with, they were like, this is Minoan artwork. And there's this...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I was surprised to hear it. There's this commonly held idea, which I can't find anywhere online, but all the Egyptologists I spoke with in Egypt agreed that during Akhenaten's reign, maybe even before it, there were Minoan artists that were being pulled into Egypt. to create art pieces. And maybe they were doing other things as well.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And then I would tell them, well, you know, there's these really nice pre-dynastic vases that end up in Crete. And of course, you know, the Egyptologists, they weren't aware of this. But I was like, I was like, how do you think that they get there? And then they were like, I don't know, maybe a gift or maybe a part of, you know, maybe it's the Pharaoh showing appreciation back or whatever.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But clearly the Minoans are taking these things home with them. And they're fascinated by them. And there's so much more that I could go on with how Egyptian and Minoan culture can be connected. But I think everybody watching here thinks it's pretty obvious. Ryan, if you go to that lotus phase, this is something I found really interesting when I was going through them.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
This is the most famous specimen, but I've seen at least four or five others of these Minoan bowls. This is made out of locally sourced serpentine stone from Crete. So this was not made in Egypt and brought back to Crete. They think anywhere from 1700 to 1450 B.C.,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Um, and what it is, is it's a, it's thought that this is a mortal mortar and pestle, um, bowl that has the Egyptian Lotus leaves on the side of it. And this was, this was the inception of my, of this fascination I've had with this Lotus flower. Like what, what, what is the purpose of this flower and why are they depicting it on this stone? Because it's very much a Greek thing to be. Okay.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, so whether it's anywhere in Latin America, Mexico, Central America, South America, all three I've been to just in the last eight months or so. And, you know, for the most part, the people you meet there are really nice, just like the people you meet in Egypt. But, you know... there's elements to that society that can be far more dangerous, like organized crime.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So the Egyptians, let's look at these vases. This is like, This is like the apple of the ancient world, right? You know, apple is very sleek, very elegant, very minimalistic, very subtle. And the Egyptians are very subtle people. You look at, you go from pre-dynastic Egypt with these vases. You look at vases later on in Egyptian history. They're all very minimalistic and subtle.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You look at Egyptian tomb wall art. It's very stoic. It's very eternal. It's not overly flamboyant. They're just these subtle, minimalistic people who their whole purpose in life is reaching for eternity. Everything about Egypt is eternal. Look at their statues. They're standing like this. Sometimes they're striding forward. It's this eternity that they're evoking and reaching towards.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And even Greek philosophers identified – like they identified that as well, that that's what the Egyptian mindset was. But the Greeks, the Minoans as well, if you go look at – Minoan wall art or murals. It's very much them taking place, picking flowers or, um, participating in parties or jumping over bulls or hanging out together. It's very Greek.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And even the Greeks later on kind of go back and embrace this, uh, glorifying the beauty of their life in the now, if that makes sense. And so, when you look at Greek pottery later on during the classical period, the pottery, sometimes the pots will show you what is being used, like, you know, if they're drinking wine out of the...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
out of this, you know, vase or whatever, they'll have a depiction of a symposium around the vase and people are hanging out and drinking wine. It's like, sometimes the Greeks will just display on a vessel what the vessel is used for, right? And so I looked at this and I was like, hmm,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
okay, is that the Minoans literally showing us that this is a mortar and pestle bowl used for grinding up the lotus flower to be used in something? And this is where this fascination began for me. And the more I looked into it, the more I realized, how polarizing that area of research is. Because the big mystery here is that the ancient Egyptian lotus flower does not exist anymore.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
He's like describing the experience of the lotus flower. He says, when you take of the lotus flower, your mind expands and your eyes become imbued with dynamic properties. And we have this idea of Egyptians living in the desert. They didn't live in the desert. They lived in the fertile oasis on the green Nile, walking on grass every single day. God's really out there. He's far away and distant.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
They used them so much and they were so popular that they went completely extinct. Now we have modern... We have modern lotus flowers. The Maya had a blue lotus flower. Now, there's a difference between the blue water lily and the lotus flower. The water lily is a lily, the lotus flower is a lotus flower, and they're completely different, but they look so similar.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But the lotus flower does not exist anymore in Egypt. You also have them in India and you have them maybe in Japan and then in Mexico and in Egypt. Those are the places on the world that they're grown. But the species are all slightly different. The Egyptian lotus flower was its own unique thing that doesn't exist anymore.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
We have evidence of them though, organic evidence, because they will be essentially mummified and stored in a tomb and And then you can go find like the crusted up petals of a lotus flower. And then they go and then, you know, they put them they put them in like the little glass display and they're kept in laboratories where they can be examined.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And the last time I know that one was examined is maybe in the 90s. And they they compared it to the modern day lotus flower. I don't know where this modern day lotus flower came from, either in the Americas or India. but there was like a 15% difference in the DNA of the flowers.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Organized crime does not exist in Egypt. Egypt is a military state. And also their religion itself, it would be haram to commit petty crime against people. Um, that dilemma does not exist in Latin America. So there is organized crime.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And it was something about that 15% difference that actually would, I wish I could explain the chemicals behind it, but that 15% difference was a drastic difference. So anyways, the research that we know as far as what the Egyptians were using the lotus flower for is numerous and bountiful, but yet scant and hard to interpret. So all around ancient Egypt, man. Ryan, I sent you some photos of...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, it's not in this folder, but in the other one. All around Egypt, dude, when you go, just look for the lotus flower. You're going to see it everywhere. Everywhere. So this is, I think that this is in the Temple of Seti. This is outside the Osirion. Okay, so there's lotus flower too. So you see the lotus flower at the top of these, you see them open and closed.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So do you see right here at the bottom in the middle, you see that closed lotus flower column and to the left of that, you see the open lotus flower column. So you see these columns everywhere and the column is like, look at the column itself as the stem of the flower and it's blooming up into the temple ceiling. Now, a lot of temple ceilings, it's the night sky.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so part of me wonders if I've wondered just from coming from the Maya world and in the Maya world, everything is so symbolic. and so deeply meaningful and there's nothing that's wasted space. Everything is conveying a message to you.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
When I was in Egypt and I was talking about these columns, there was an Egyptologist there and I was explaining to her, some of my expertise comes from studying Latin America where everything is so symbolic and deep and everything has a meaning. What do you think behind that? And she told me, she was like, don't Mayanize this, just appreciate it. And I was like... Are you kidding?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, you know, I had thought that surely there is some kind of deep meaning behind the columns, the top of the columns either being enclosed or a blooming lotus flower. And then the column itself is essentially symbolic of the stem of the flower. Or sometimes it's symbolic of a wrapping of different offerings.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And when you are traveling around in Latin America and you veer off, you know, the, the safe path that you're supposed to be on, like if you're there with a tour company, you're gonna be fine. Um, but you know, there's this added element of, of danger there. And so,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Like you can see on this closed one, they're wrapped together. Okay, so on the left, that comes from the Temple of Seti just outside the Osirion. And All around the Egyptian world, you're going to see these offering scenes where it's the Pharaoh giving an offering to Amun or whatever God is in front of him.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And on that offering, there's going to be this little stand, there's going to be a vase of some kind, and then it's going to be the lotus flower. You'll have one that's open, you'll have two that are closed. and sometimes there'll be a papyrus flower there as well. Sometimes they're either draped over the vase or they're coming out of the vase.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And you're gonna see this everywhere, all over the Egyptian world. And so one of the polarizing things is the interpretation of, well, what is this flower being used for? What is it being used for? Well, we found these pornographic images before. where you see people performing all kinds of interesting and complicated positions. And they're all sniffing of the lotus flower.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
They've got the lotus flower coming off the top of their head. They're using the lotus flower, like, you know, in these parties. And so one of the interpretations here has been, and the research has shown, from using the lotus flowers and the chemicals that are in them. Ryan, in my, in the... Oh, wow, you pulled that up fast. Yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
holy crap yeah he already had this one ryan already had that okay okay um i'm just messing with you right uh um yeah so uh that's funny okay so go to go to my paper ryan i don't think we can show that on the final broadcast by the way we might have to blur some things out but man art is art Wow. That's okay. Yep.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So this, I think, I think you'll really love when I get to the end of painting this picture, this is a deeply profound element of Egyptian society. I've never seen anybody talk about, but it just, it takes a little while to build up to it. All right. So, so blue Lotus effects, if you go to that, So this is like a synthesized, hyper-simplistic version of the paper that I'm writing.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
you know, even in times when I step off the beaten path and go out into the jungle, um, you know, I think that might be the thing that Dr. Barnhart worries about for me is, you know, I always tell him I'm worried about that. I'm personally worried about, um, you know, dangers such as like snakes and things like that.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Sorry, sorry. No foreplay on that. We went straight to it. All right. So the most definitive ancient use is that it's agreed widely to have been used during religious rituals and sexual enhancement because of the presence of apomorphine. That's what I wanted to get at. So... So apomorphine is something that is used in modern day Viagra.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And there was a research team that was working in Egypt in the late 90s. And they produced this documentary that I named my paper after. It's aptly called The Flower That Seduced Egypt. And basically at the end of this research, they deduced that the thing that they can find the best evidence for right now
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Technology is much more limited 30 years ago than today, and nobody's picked this research up since then. The most definitive thing that they can find evidence for that the Egyptians could have been using it for is sexual enhancement and, like, vigor, right? And I found that really interesting.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But they also hypothesized the idea that it could have been used... There's elements about the flower that could be used for preserving youth and health, but also the psychedelic aspects of it. It's a fact that the fruit of the... All right, so the fruit of the lotus flower. It's a fact that the chemical that that produces is...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
When consumed in a moderate amount, whether you're distilling it in the leaves as well, but also the fruit, if you distill it and age it and put it in wine, which wine would have been consumed in Greece, also in Egypt, but in Egypt, they're also brewing beer. If you smoke it in moderate amounts, it will have a mild psychedelic effect.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
it'll be like if you took a couple of puffs of a blunt or something like that, um, you'd get this kind of soothing feeling. You'd feel a little bit better. Um, and then in consumed in high amounts, like with anything, it's going to have a profound effect. It's going to have a strong effect, probably similar.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
What I've seen it, uh, described as is, is it would probably be more similar to, uh, or consuming cannabis. Um, But there's an ancient source that attests to this. And it says, so I'm just going to read this verbatim. So Odysseus visits the land of lotus eaters. This is in the Odyssey, written by Homer in the Dark Ages, probably somewhere around 800 BC.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And he's like, he's like, well, you know, I'm worried about you for the, for you finding people out there, you know? Um, so there's, there's this added element of, of like this, this wildness that can be in Latin America, but, um, Um, again, you travel with a, with a company, you're going to be fine. Uh, Cusco, as you know, is absolutely amazing. That's one of the best cities I've ever been to.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Likely the island of Gerba off the coast of Tunisia. So this is Odysseus speaking here, but Homer writing. He says, they started at once and went out among the lotus eaters. Now this is his expedition around the Mediterranean trying to get back home to his family in Greece. So they started at once. They went around...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
They went about among the lotus eaters who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home and did not even want to go back and say what happened to them, but were for staying and munching on lotus with the lotus eaters without thinking further of their return.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Nevertheless, though they wept bitterly, I forced them back into the ships and made them fast under the benches." Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to go home. So they took their places and smote the gray sea with their oars. So he visits the land of the lotus eaters. And basically what it's saying here is that...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Whoever was eating the fruit of the lotus, which is at the core of the lotus flower. Lotus flower does not grow in Tunisia. It grows on the Nile. Whoever was eating that enjoyed it so much that they just stopped caring about anything, right? It's kind of like the stigma that we have against like potheads. Like, you know, you smoke weed all the time. You're just not going to care about anything.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You start doing drugs, you're not going to care about anything, right? So, there's a lot of people who interpret this as, oh, okay, this is having some kind of, this is not just like they're eating zebra cakes and they're getting fat and just enjoying it and they don't want to go anywhere because it's so delicious.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
This is having some kind of effect on them that is affecting their, you know, psychedelic state and making them not care about going home, which is the whole mission that they're on is trying to get back to, trying to get back to Western Greece.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so I found this really interesting, and I thought, okay, is there any archaeological evidence that we can attest to that the lotus would actually be in Tunisia or on the coast of Tunisia? Well, yes, Phoenician trade routes. The Phoenicians around this period – this is the Late Bronze Age –
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
um that that the odyssey takes place there are phoenician trade routes going all around the mediterranean and so you have phoenicians that may be stopping in the nile delta where the london where the where the uh the lotus grows in abundance you know acquiring these lotus and then going around on their trade routes and so is this some is this some you know very scant uh
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
only remaining evidence of the fact that the lotus was a hot commodity, not only in Egypt, where it's clearly being consumed in abundance because it's on every single temple wall in every tomb wall everywhere, but also it's popular in the Mediterranean. So there's something really profound about this, about this flower.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So I say trade routes connecting ancient Tunisia to Egypt through Phoenician trade routes are well-established. Could bundles of the Egyptian lotus have been a regular trade item? Question mark. I say, by the fifth century BC, the Greek traveler Herodotus was certain that the lotus eaters still existed off the east coast of Libya near Egypt. So that's really interesting.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So, you know, that's almost a thousand years later. Is there anything below that, Ryan? Oh wow, okay. Okay, so Herodotus says, a promontory jutting out into the sea from the country of the Gendanis is inhabited by the lotus eaters who live entirely on the fruit of the lotus tree. The lotus fruit is about the size of the lentisk berry and in sweetness resembles the date.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You can walk around, you can walk down any street, any alley in Cusco that you want to. And it's this perfectly nice, serene city. Um, but yeah, Latin America of course has this like little bit of like a wild flavor to it.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The lotus eaters even succeed in obtaining it from a sort of wine. So there, it's the lotus being mixed and aged into the wine and being consumed that way and clearly having some kind of profound effect on them. That's why they're so famous. And that's the other thing is, okay.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You know, a population of a bunch of fat people gorging themselves on cake is not really attested to in the historical record. There was something even more particular about those people that is worth preserving in history, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That can get kind of muddy because we are talking about the Odyssey, which is a historical fiction that's written around 800 BC about events that took place somewhere around 400 years earlier. But there's all kinds of things in Homer's writing where... we have evidence of the fact that he's using real peoples and places as part of his historical narrative.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But that doesn't mean that Agamemnon, Menelaus, Helen of Sparta, Achilles, Hector, you can go Andromache, it doesn't mean any of those people actually existed, but Troy, Mycenae, Sparta, Ithaca, these are all real people and places.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so that can be, you know, the lotus eaters could have been something that's famous around the Bronze Age, Eastern Mediterranean, that there's this place where these people are constantly getting high, you know? So Egyptian origins of Minoan civilization and religion. So this is a little side note here. So many archaeologists and historians, including Sir Arthur Evans himself.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Now, this is the man who, quote unquote, discovered Minoan civilization. He's really the guy that bought that bought the land that the palace of Knossos on Crete exists. They knew that something was there and they knew that it may be related to this famous King Minos. So he buys it, he discovers it, and he believed or proposed that
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Either A, Minoan religion was derivative of Egyptian religion and Minoan society was largely inspired by Egypt, or B, the Minoans were Egyptian colonists who continued to pay back tribute to the pharaoh until the Bronze Age collapsed.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And I put the former is probably the more accurate one, that Minoan religion may have been derivative of Egyptian religion and that society may have been inspired by Egypt. I think that one's probably more true, even though they have so many peculiarities.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That's an unknown.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yes. They can as well. They can be. But the limited research that's been done is that they're even more mild. They think it'd be even more mild than the ones that were on the Nile.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah. So I say all that to say that
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It's really cool. So we have scant evidence all the way around, but highly likely that the chemicals that are in the lotus flower, people were using it to get horny. They're using it in these sex parties. They're using it as a sexual stimulant. And that the people off the coast of Tunisia that Odysseus met,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
according to the story, it was having some kind of effect on them that was making them not care about anything. So it has this sort of multipurpose thing. Also, the researchers in the 90s proposed that it had properties that would help preserve your youthfulness. And there's another source that attests to this. I think that's probably worth bringing up right now.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Okay, so Ryan, I sent you a photo that it's a little bit blurry and it's some hieroglyphs that are on a temple wall. There's no lotus flower actually depicted in the photo. There you go. All right. So this is on a Ptolemaic temple. I believe it is the temple of Edfu. And there's a British archaeologist who translated this. And essentially, one part that we're taking from this
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, I can talk about that. So I got an email from... uh maybe about a year ago while i was um while i was on a trip in mexico and um and it was from some russian agent and it was like this email that self-destructed after i read it or after i opened up the link and read this message but it was basically this guy telling me that he's this
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
is this is, I believe it's Ptolemy X. This is a Greek pharaoh ruling during the Greek dynasties. So you have the Ptolemaic dynasties, which is the last chapter. I believe this goes from three, well, let's start with Alexander. So 332 to 30 BC. So about 302 years of this dynasty. It begins with Alexander. It ends with Cleopatra's death. This is Ptolemy X, I believe. That's his hand.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
He's holding this- Got a funky hand. Holding this scepter. Yeah. Greek Egyptian art gets real funky. They have these pudgy spaghetti arms. And then the real elegant Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom Egyptian artwork, wall art, is completely gone. It's this weird phase. And the hieroglyphs get very, very complicated. Yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But we get a really interesting anecdote here, where on this wall, Ptolemy says he's essentially giving an offering of the lotus flower to the god Amun. And he tells Amun, he's describing the experience of the lotus flower, and he says when you take of the lotus flower, or when you sniff of it, you take of it, Um, your mind expands and your eyes become imbued with dynamic properties.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That's the, that's the direct translation. And then it goes on to talk about like the holy aspects of the flower. And I was like, your mind expands, your eyes become imbued with dynamic properties. Wow. So we're having it. It's affecting the psychological state. It's affecting, you know, clearly, you know, when you're high, you get a little bit loopy.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And then it's also has this has this vigor aspect to it. So it's making you like sexually strong. It's having the psychological effect on you. It's having a visual effect on you as well. This is like a drug that's doing quite a lot. And then it got even deeper. Ryan, if you'd go back to my paper.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Ah, man, I know, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Okay, so Egypt and the Lotus. Let's go back 12,000 years to the first Egyptians that are arriving, that we know of, that are arriving in the Dakhla Oasis. They're migrating in from the greater Sahara. The Sahara is drying up.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
people are moving to the mediterranean coast they're moving to the atlantic coast they're moving down into the congo or in the savannas today they only have a few options but but there's also this option of this really fertile yet congested nile valley uh off to off to the east and so you know anywhere from 12 000 years ago uh to just 6 000 years ago people are moving into the nile
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And this is probably worth touching on. This is why the deeper I've gotten into this, the more I think like, okay, there's an interesting argument here that I've never seen an academic make. These are ideas that I've come up with myself. It's kind of like I look at ancient Egypt like New York City. You have this huge influx of people arriving in this new land.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You have New York City, which for whatever reason is this limited amount of space where everything is happening. And something like that with all that energy and all that investment is either destined to fall or it's destined to be greatness, right? The Nile is sort of similar to that. As the Sahara is drying up, you have all these people who are pushed into this small compacted area.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You can't have miles and miles and miles to take your cattle around and feed in all this random grass and set up camp everywhere and just live off of the land. You have to form a sedentary lifestyle and people are packed on top of each other. So that's how they're destined to fail miserably or be an enormous success.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
maybe a success so great in such a fertile place that it creates a civilization that's powerful enough to create the world's largest structures before human history and other civilizations are even doing anything. They're all, you know, around the ancient world, everybody else for the most part are still cavemen when the pyramids are being built at the pyramid's youngest date, you know?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
he's a Russian merchant of some kind and that he was in Mexico. And he said, he said something about like, I've been following your, you know, adventures or whatever. If you find anything, you can contact me through this number and I'll meet you anytime, any place in Mexico. And he just said he'd buy whatever I found. And I was like, Oh God. So I deleted the message.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so I just find that fascinating. But so you have Egyptians rising, uh, arriving in Egypt. And one of the first things that they would notice as they're going down to the Nile all throughout the day is they would have known noticed this flower. So I write, uh, the Egyptian blue Lotus rises from the depths of the Nile blooms to worship the sun and descends back into the river every single day.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That flower, uh, emerges from the primordial water to worship the sun and then goes back under every single day. There's something divine about that that separates itself from all the other plant species that these ancient people would have ever noticed. So they would have seen something divine about this. I was talking to Ryan about this last night.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
This is the pious chapter of human history where You know, when we were talking about... I see when people talk about vases, what is the common saying that some people use when they say, you know, the precision indicates purpose, or there's something... Yeah, function. Yeah, the precision indicates function. Well, the only issue that I would take with that is...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Sure, sure. So the only issue I would take with that is we're dealing with a different chapter in humanity going back this far. And it's really at the 5th century BC when the Greek philosophers like Socrates, he starts telling the people, telling all the young people around the Agora... You know, if the Greek gods really do exist, they're far away. I don't even know if they exist, honestly.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But here's what I do know. Here's how we can control our lives and make our lives better in this day. The Athenian court did not like that at all. We're dealing... that is the age when the domino, the first domino gets pushed down and we start getting towards this Western mindset of, of function, right? Like before ancient Greece, gears didn't exist.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Gears are a very Western thing, you know, like technology, right? Um, It's kind of the same thing when we talk about the Maya calendar. The Maya calendar gets put into, makes it look like there's these gears that rotate together, I'm sure you've seen before. The Maya didn't view it that way because they didn't have gears. It's a totally, it's ingrained in us functionality.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
We are an impious people. We don't, you know, most of us, 50% of us at least, don't believe or know for certainty that there's any God out there. We have a very Socratic approach. We're like, well, you know, if God's really out there, he's far away and distant. It doesn't have a lot to do with our lives, but here's what we can do to control our lives. That began in Athens in the fifth century.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Everything before that is a very pious people. Everything they did was holy, right? So that's, as a little side note, that's one of the things I would say, I was telling Ryan, I was like, you know, I don't know, and to my Western mind, it sounds disappointing to say it, but I just wonder if the perfection of the vases isn't because the vase themselves is holy in some way. It has to be perfect.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It's for the God or whatever. We're just dealing with people that are so different than us, and they exist on the other chapter of humanity where life is based about the gods. All right, so getting back to this. So Egyptians would have noticed this
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
this lotus cycle as being a clearly divine cycle as far back we know as at least 12,500 BC when the first ancestors of the dynastic Egyptians arrived in the Dakhla Oasis. Now you had people in Egypt long before that, we have bodies that are 30,000 years old, but people really, really start arriving we can detect around 12,500 years ago. People started arriving in Egypt and arriving and staying.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I never responded to it, but it, but it was, you know, it, The message was clear and astounding that, whoa, okay, this black market is alive and well, and they are wanting to buy things. I met a Russian archaeologist. Whoa, am I connecting two things here? I met a Russian archaeologist that same week. Whoa. Oh, got to be. Got to be connected. I'm having an epiphany right now.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Sometimes people would arrive and then the people would die or they'd move on to somewhere else, but these people were staying.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, I think the beginning of pre-dynastic Egypt, they only put that, that's pretty recent. It's like 4,000 B.C., So, but, but these people that are arriving like in the Dakhla oasis, when we find their bodies and burials, they have the same genetic makeup as dynastic people.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So these are people who are arriving in Egypt and they're not leaving, but we have other bodies of people 30,000 years ago that have nothing in common with Egyptians. And so we think that these were people who arrived and then most of them left, but this dude died here. So he got buried, if that makes sense.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Right. Exactly. Exactly. Um, yeah, I, so I think that definitely it's a, it's a beautiful place to live and always was, even when the Sahara is green and you would have people living there, but, but they weren't forced to stay there. So they, so they leave, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Like we have, we have evidence of, um, of Homo erectus, you know, this, uh, cousin of, of us Homo sapiens that were living there as well.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
and then you have these uh semi-nomadic people that we can tell were they would set up camp in one place and then 100 years later we see evidence of them in another place but they're not at the old place there's not two contemporaneous locations and then they disappear from the archaeological record so they just left egypt because there's more green area somewhere else but as the sahara is drying up you only you can only live along the nile that's this you know
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
500-yard strip of land on the east, 500-yard strip of land on the west. That's this incredibly fertile oasis. You know, we have this idea of Egyptians living in the desert. They didn't live in the desert. They lived in the fertile oasis on the Green Nile, walking on grass every single day. These were filthy, filthy rich people. Yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Um, so they would have noticed this sacred cycle of this blue Lotus going up and down. And this Lotus becomes basically the central, it becomes the central image of Egyptian society. It's on all their columns. It's in, um, it becomes the very symbol of life itself in ancient Egypt. It's symbolic of life. Um, there's an interpretation that sometimes when the
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
When they have the lotus up to their nose or when they have the lotus blooming, hanging over their head, it means the person's alive. But when the lotus is hanging over their head and it's closed, it means that the person has died. It seems like the lotus permeates all aspects of Egyptian society and it has multiple effects on you when you consume it, maybe depending on how you consume it as well.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And it's like this wonder drug. And it has a sacred element about it where it rises every single day to worship the sun. The Egyptians are a sun worshiping cult. That's what they do. You know, that's why all their tombs are on the west side of the Nile because the sun is born in the east and it dies in the west.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So, you know, the saying that we have when people die, when they say, oh, they've gone west, we get that from the Egyptians. Um, so they're a sun worshiping culture. Everything is about the sun for the Egyptians and they're watching this flower worship the sun too. And then the flower becomes the very symbol of life, death, resurrection. Okay. Ryan, pull up a satellite image of Egypt.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
This is, this is the part where it gets spooky is the very makeup of of the part of Egypt that is alive is in the shape of a lotus flower.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
How much more fitting could it be? And in the Nile Delta, where that flower is blooming, that's where all of the lotus flowers grew in abundance, was in that delta. So the Nile itself.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You see it immediately. The Nile itself is the single most unique makeup of a country in the entire world. And it is symbolic. Not only is the flower itself symbolic of ancient Egypt, it's the symbol of Egypt that the Egyptians used to identify themselves. They may not even have realized, but it was by some divine appointment. That the landscape itself is in the shape of a flower.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And that flower blooms out into the Mediterranean. And all of these cultures around the Mediterranean are influenced by this culture. You know, it's this, you know, I would be very slow to ever say that I think that the Egyptians knew this. the shape of their land.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Although, you know, maybe they, maybe they did, but if they mapped it all out and understood, but you know, they probably didn't see it from the satellite image, but it's one of these things that makes me think like, whoa, is there a, is there a divine aspect of this? Like. I bet they did, man. divine aspect that their land is in the makeup of the flower.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Okay, so I met a Russian archaeologist. Oh, my gosh. This is where the connection is. Okay, so I met a Russian archaeologist that same week, and he told me that he was called up to Moscow to verify some Aztec artifacts, I believe, and they put him on a golf cart, and he's driving through these... he's driving through these, you know, uh, airline hangers basically.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The flower is the single most important central key to their civilization. It's just profoundly deep mystery here that I've never seen anybody talk about. That's cool. But so this is, if you go back to the paper.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Well, yeah, they certainly had maps. I just wonder, you know, we don't have evidence of the map. Well, we have evidence of some maps, but not like of an entire, you know, their entire country or whatever. So here we have, next is Shape of the Nile.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So from satellite imagery, the Nile spreads out like the head of the lotus flower, growing out from a long stalk and blooming into the Mediterranean, just like their knowledge did. It bloomed out into the Mediterranean and thus spread to the rest of the world. So I put coincidence? What is the likelihood
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
that this flower that is unique to Egypt, the flower they depicted most by far on their temple and tomb walls would also be reflected in the landscape of Egypt from space. Egypt is the single most unique country geographically on the entire planet. Next, we have Gift of the Nile. The Greek traveler Herodotus around 450 BC famously wrote that the Egyptian civilization is a gift from the Nile.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It was a unique and enormous oasis protected by monuments and deserts on both sides, continually fertilized by the black soil carried in from the river itself. So it's seasonally inundated. So So the Nile River was seen by the Egyptians as the center of the world and life itself, while the flower was symbolic of life itself, while the Nile River itself is also in the shape of the lotus flower.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It's just a profoundly deep thing, right? Yeah. And so I just... It made me... And this all came from the Minoans depicting that flower on that mortar and pestle bowl. And it made me think, so maybe it's the Minoans that tip off to us what exactly this was being used for. It had some kind of psychedelic purpose. It had a profound psychological effect on the Egyptians. It was a sexual stimulant.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The chemical, the apomorphine that's used in that is what's used to treat Parkinson's disease today And it's also used in Viagra. So it's like this wonder drug for the Egyptians that I think, depending on how you brewed it or how you aged it and how you consumed it, had different effects on you.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And on top of all that, they start messing around with it because it's rising every day and going back into the water to worship the sun. So it's this core central aspect of ancient Egypt. Have you ever heard an Egyptologist talk about it though before? Never, no.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Right, right, yeah. And I have seriously dived deep on trying to find a deeper meaning to this flower. And it's like it's just brushed off, you know? Even when I'm in Egypt, so the Egyptologists I talk to, they don't really care too much about, you know, the... purpose of the flower or what the deeper meaning is or why it's on the temple columns. Here's an idea I had.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I don't know if the evidence stacks up. It's just hard to find the evidence researching this, especially on my own. One thing I had thought, the first thing that struck me was
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
During the Christian era of Egypt, when people were going to sleep in the temples, they're going, they're sleeping in the temples and they're hoping, these are pagans, not Christians, they're going to sleep in the temples and the priests that are there would take some kind of offering or whatever and they'd set out this little sack for the people to sleep on.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And it's these buildings that are full of ancient artifacts. And he said, he said some of the doors are like halfway open cause there's people walking in and out. And he said, he saw, you know, just a hundred yards of Egyptian statues on these, uh, you know, on these, um, uh, shelves. And, you know, it was just hanger after hanger after hanger. And they pulled him into, uh, this, uh,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And I should say, this is maybe around 300 BC that this is happening. Supposedly it's based on ancient practices, but we don't really know. We don't even know what's going on in Egyptian temples, by the way. Like this is off limits. Normal people couldn't go, you know, your regular Egyptians couldn't really go inside of the temples.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It doesn't have a lot to do with our lives, but here's what we can do to control our lives. That began in Athens in the 5th century. That is such a perfect example of who the Athenians are as a people. Their central piece of public architecture is not a pyramid. It's not a coliseum. It's just an open colonnade building for people to meet and talk to one another.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Maybe every so often on a sacred parade or something like that, you might be able to go in it once a year or once in your lifetime. but it was closed off just for the priest. And there was an area that was closed off for the Pharaoh himself in some temples, like at Luxor Temple, or I think there's an area of Carnac Temple as well.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But during the Christian era, these priests that are still holding on to, and maybe even the early Roman era, they're still, as they say, they're holding onto these ancient practices. And they bring people into the temple a certain part of it, and they'd set out these little beds or mats or whatever.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And you could lay down inside of the temple underneath the night sky that was painted on the temple wall. And when you slept in the temple, the God would come visit you in your dream and would help a woman conceive a child or help somebody with their illness or ailments.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Whatever problem it was, you just hoped that the God of the temple you're going to visit would visit you in your dream and help heal you.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
um well supposedly there's scant research to suggest that of course all this is scant we're dealing with the ancient world um uh that these people may have been consuming things or drinking some kind of wine or like a like a beer an ancient beer and we don't know if those beers were infused anything to make the dreams more vivid you know but you know like uh
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
For anybody that's watching, if you ever smoked weed or something and you go dream or you take melatonin, you'll have intense dreams there.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so there's this idea that there may have been psychedelics, mild psychedelics that the Egyptians had access to, maybe the blue lotus that's being infused in these wines or beers that they're drinking, or maybe they're even smoking something to enhance their dream as they fall asleep. And I wondered if I was laying down in the temple of Komombo. I'm sorry.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I was laying down in the temple of King Canoom, and he's just this ram-headed god. And he has this beautiful temple, and he's got the night sky on his temple. And even at Dendera, there's like this beautiful blue night sky, and you have the goddess Nut going up and down. She's the Milky Way. And you're laying down there, and you can only imagine the torches like sparkling on the night sky.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
and you're seeing this column that's acting as the stem of the blue Lotus and the blue Lotus is blooming into the night sky. And it made me wonder symbolically it, maybe it's undetectable, but is that symbolic of the fact that the blue Lotus is the gateway into the outer world? Does that make sense?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Because it's certainly very like a Mayanist way to interpret things, but I wonder if that's needed, you know, somebody with somebody with, uh,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
highly symbolic perspective on the ancient world coming into Egypt and seeing something that an Egyptologist who was introduced to the Egyptian world from reading an Egyptology textbook you grow up within parameters right and you can't see outside the parameters it takes someone else with a different perspective to come in and see that and that was one of the ideas I had too is are these columns that are blooming into the night sky from the lotus flower is it symbolic of the fact that that is the path to get to this night sky outer world because
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Latin American Mexican hangar and he said it was Aztec statues that he'd never seen before just tons of them you know these huge megalithic statues if you go to the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico and you walk in that Aztec area you're going to be blown away dude there's stuff there that is
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The Egyptians viewed all the stars in the night sky as being the places where the gods lived and where their ancestors lived. And so they didn't know that they were giant balls of gas in space. And so it makes me wonder if that lotus flower, another purpose of it is to consume it, to have vivid dreams.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
that call upon the essence of these gods or ancestors to come down into your sleep and heal you, something akin to that. And dreams are so important in Egyptian society. One of the very first stories we have from Egypt is the story of Joseph, of the Bible in Egypt. maybe during the Middle Kingdom, sometime between 1600 and 1800 BC.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And whether or not he was a real figure, we still have this ancient story of a man who was profoundly gifted at interpreting dreams. And so much so that when he's in prison in Egypt, he's brought up to the palace to start interpreting the Pharaoh's dreams. Well, then we have stories that come down to us, whether they're true or not, it's either Jozer or it's Imhotep.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It might be Jozer that is having these dreams where either Horus or Ra is disappointed in Jozer's reign and he wants him to build some kind of grand monument to bring favor and honor back to the God to bring favor on Egypt. So that's 2700 BC as far as we know that Jozer and Imhotep
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
have this dream that inspires the first the first pyramid you know so there's just this very important aspect of dreams there but there's no archaeological evidence for dreams right so it's it's just this interesting vast very dense topic that i've been wrapped up in um if if you go back to the to the paper ryan really quickly though i mean what are your thoughts
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It's very polarizing, controversial, you know, I was telling one of my close friends, I love the guy to death. He's a Roman historian. I was talking to him about it when we were in Egypt, and I could see him grimacing at this. He just knew it was controversial, and if I go down this route, it's going to be controversial, even though it's nothing that crazy. It's really not. No, no.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, so... The place where the highest quantity of these vases were being made. Ryan, on my paper, I think I have maybe something written about this where it might be Egypt in the vases or Blue Lotus in the vases. Okay, Egypt in the vases. There we go. Okay, yeah, you're already on it. All right, so if you'd scroll into the first section.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I don't know why it doesn't reach like the, the popular stage as well as other cultures, but there's so much there. Um, but yeah, so he said that he was absolutely mind blown and maybe this was, this was a year ago. I had this conversation and he said it, it wasn't long before then it was within a few years of then. Um, But he said, yeah, that the Russians have so much.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So let's start off with my idea of why granite and diorite are being used over softer stones like alabaster this early on. So I put down, the main thing that I see proposed in most textbooks is, is this a luxury or prestige item? I've even seen the little lug handles. They'll call them necklaces like you have over here on your alien. That's what a lot of people do.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Ross, yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry, Ross. I didn't mean to. He's easily offended. But I've seen a lot of people propose that they could have been necklaces or they're luxury prestige items. I loved Ryan's idea that he was equating them to like watches, where, well, a watch doesn't have a greater purpose other than telling time, but it's an art piece, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It's something to, we don't question why we obsess over watches, right? I liked that. So in later Egyptian society, statues of pharaohs and gods are carved from stones like granite and diorite. Does the type of stone indicate wealth? Does it indicate wealth only because it's a harder stone? Or is there another thus far invisible significance to it? Like, does the color matter?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Whereas in the Olmec world, the color of stone might matter.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I think so. Um, From what I can gather is that the Egyptians don't put a preference on a type of stone just because it's hard. From what I can tell. Although there's, of course, contradictory evidence to that. But, you know, at least in later dynasties, like we were talking about earlier, there are sarcophagi that are made out of gray whack.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And the properties of that gray whack is it sparkles like a diamond does. And I can imagine in an environment like down in a tomb where the only light being cast on it is from a torch, the torch is flickering. It's flickering over the over like this sparkling, you know, glowing orange sarcophagus.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
maybe the properties of it, like you're saying with Brescia, they may like that and not really put much of a difference to it other than they know if they work with Brescia, it's going to be easier than working with diarite. But then does that make, if you have something like that made out of diorite, is it a symbol as though you could afford to have that made? So there's that.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And they also have, so there's four codices, Maya codices around that we know of, of the thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands that existed 500 years ago. And of the four that we know of, the Russians have one in Moscow. And so now that I'm thinking about it, I was talking to that guy about, you know, me exploring around in the jungles.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Then I put, is there a divinity to the vases or the type of stone? Is it supposed to be more difficult to work because in making the vase, you are bringing honor to the gods or performing some kind of holy thing? Does it have a divinity? Does it need to be perfect because it is holy or does it need to be perfect because it has a function? Those are some of the things that I juggle with.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Like we were talking earlier, we're dealing with at least what I see as a pious society that has not reached this Western Socratic conclusion that comes to us in fifth century Athens, where people start realizing that the gods don't really have much to do with our lives. You know, this... Further back in history, even further away, this is very far away.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Even at the youngest date, we're talking about 2,000 years before Athens. So we're deep into pious civilization at this point, people caring about honoring the gods. And I put, harder stones like granite and diorite. This is actually sort of my... This is my thought here.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Rather than there being a divinity to the purpose of the vases or why the vases are perfect or the stone, I say harder stones like granite and diorite are less porous than materials like alabaster, which would... make them preferred for storing valuable slash expensive liquids like imported Minoan question mark wine and other oils.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You can more effectively age and store wine in harder, less porous stone phases, which prevent the liquid from absorbing into the stone and the stone is less likely to fall away and chip away into the liquid.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so I wonder, do wealthier people prefer, because they're storing something valuable like wine imported from Bronze Age, early, early Greece, it's so valuable and so expensive, they're going to infuse it with the lotus flower. It has this powerful, psychedelic, holy aspect to it. You don't want it diluted. You don't want it absorbing into the stone.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You want to age it so that it's more powerful. It's more, you know, it has a more profound effect. So, and you can afford to have it made in a nicer vessel. So you do that. But why is the vessel perfect? Well, I don't know. You know, that's the reason I say is like, what if it's a holy thing as well?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It needs to be perfect because you're putting some kind of perfect, expensive, imported compound from the other side of the Mediterranean. So then I say, why did the creation of hard stone vases end around 3100 BC, the beginning of Dynasty 1? I should really say around Dynasty 0.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Dynasty 1 to Dynasty 0, there's a controversy there over what exactly it is, but Dynasty 0 is the reign of the king Menes, but we don't know if Menes is the same king as Narmer. We don't know if he's the same person, like if he gives himself the pharaonic name, or if Menes is Narmer's father. So we have Dynasty Zero.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But at Dynasty Zero, the vases are not being made anymore, according to the archaeological record that we have. So David, what's his name? Mianna.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I've never seen, I've never seen a stone vase. Cause I've gone, you know, I've, I've gone to the museums and, that I know he's been to in Alexandria, where you're looking at the Ptolemaic dynasties, the end of Greek civilization. And I've looked for hard stone vases. There's hard stone statues being made. There's a granite bust of Alexander's head.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And then it's the same week I got that email.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So this is a whole other thing we'll talk about one day is Alexandria. Oh my gosh, that's such a cool topic. Because I think the Greeks learned how to do a lot of things that were happening in the Old Kingdom. But a lot of things come back during that time period. But hard stone vase making does not come back during that period.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And it doesn't exist, as far as I'm aware, during the Persian era, during the invasion of the Assyrians to... 21st Dynasty, you know, towards the end of Egyptian civilization, the end of the New Kingdom, these hardstone vases aren't around anymore. From what I know, and archaeological data I've looked at, is that it's agreed upon by a lot of Egyptologists that
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But my email address isn't hard to find. They could probably find it. Yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
from dynasty one or dynasty zero, the vases are not being made anymore. They completely end. Now from there, it doesn't mean they disappear because we have Jojer who Egyptologists say he gathered thousands of these vases, anywhere from... I think the number is controversial, but it's anywhere from 10 to 40,000 vases of these hardstone vases that he stored underneath his pyramid.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And the traditional thought is that these were heirlooms from his ancestors, right? You've heard this before too. Now, Jozer's ancestors, I'll just read it off here. Because it's more concise the way I wrote it. So the overwhelming majority of pre-dynastic hardstone vases were discovered beneath Jozer's step pyramid complex. The overwhelming majority.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I can't believe I just thought about this.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I mean, scant evidence of them found in other places, but the vast majority of them are found here. And then I should also say... We find them in burials, you know, it ends at 3100 BC, 3000, 29, 28, 27 is his. But everywhere in there, we're still finding them scarcely buried in other people's tombs.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
People love these heirlooms and they want themselves buried with it to maybe take it with them into the next world. That continues all the way to 2100 BC. After 2100 BC, there's nobody being born in, there's nobody who's dying in 2000 BC that's burying themselves with these phases because they're not accessible anymore.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
For one reason or another, they're not, and they never appear in tombs again after that, that they've marked. So the overwhelming majority of pre-dynastic hardstone vases were discovered beneath Djoser's step pyramid complex and are believed to have belonged to Djoser's ancestors who were likely from northern Egypt.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Archaeological and literary evidence such as Manetho's history of Egypt from the 3rd century BC and the Narmer palette from 3100 BC tell us that dynastic Egypt began when a king from the south, Narmer, or Menes—we don't know if those are the same people or not— This is where the smiting pose, where the Pharaoh is grabbing his opposing ruler by the hair and crushing his head in with the mace.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
"...smiting their king and declaring himself the first king of the two lands." This conquering of northern Egypt's kingdom likely disrupted and halted many different aspects of their society.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And I assume the industry involved in creating these vases, along with the technology used to make them, was lost, hidden, destroyed, or buried during the chaos, answering the questions of why we do not find them being crafted in the archaeological record beyond 3100 BC or Dynasty Zero. Because they're all in the north. Almost all of these vases are up in the north.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That, like, the Mexican government is involved in it? Well, the Russian government is involved in it. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm sure, yeah. Well, you know, I'm sure, you know, all of those high-ranking Russian officials, I mean, Putin's a historian. He has an appreciation for history. You know, I'm sure it's a little side...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
We don't really find them down south at Aswan. We're not really finding them down south at Luxor. They're all up in the north in the Memphite region in all of the burials around there. And then Jojer, who was born in Memphis in the north, takes all of his ancestors' vases and buries himself with them. And I just wonder if he is hearkening back.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Clearly he is, because he's saying, these are the heirlooms of my ancestors. So he had to know who his direct ancestors were and that they were pre-dynastic Egyptians living in the north who made these vases and are responsible for them. But they're not made anymore. And it made me wonder, and I had that realization. I was like, oh, wow. This is, yeah, that's right.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
If you look at the archeological record, there's a different type of vase making that's being made in the South. Have you ever seen the pottery that is a similar shape to these vases, but they're red and black? It's called like Badarian culture. Um, so those, um, those vases are being made in the South and you have Nakata culture as well.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That's making different kinds of, of, of vessels, but these hard stone vases are from the North. And I think that looking through Jozier, you can see, oh, okay, this is something that was wiped out when that first, when the first Pharaoh, the guy who united both lands came in, um,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I think that that unification, the chaos, the war breaking out, the leveling of northern Egyptian government to be subservient to the now pharaoh of the two lands, I just wonder if that's one of the industries that completely ended. Was it too expensive in the chaos of it? Was the place where these things are made, was it destroyed?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Something is there, and I think a smoking gun is the fact that Jozer and his immediate ancestors are Memphites from northern Egypt, because not every pharaoh is in the straight lineage. A pharaoh will die, or he'll be usurped or assassinated, or he'll be overthrown or whatever.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Um, so it's kind of messy, but Jozer and his ancestors are Memphites from Northern Egypt and we interpret those as being his ancestors. So I just wonder if, if that's my explanation or my possible theory as to why they're not made anymore.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, and you know, I don't really have a strong understanding of the technicalities behind making it. And that's how I preface my whole thing is it's not about, my explanation is not about how they were made. That's not what I do. You know, I study culture, I study the people, and I try to put the pieces together of how people are interacting with these vases.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And can we find a history to go along with the vases, right? Can we give them some kind of context? And so that's what I look for. And so in that, I think... I think, well, I mean, I'm just proposing an idea as to why they were stopped being made, what happened to the technology that it falls out during the chaos of this unification of upper and lower Egypt. And then as far as the use of them,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
My thought is that wealthy people who are getting a hold of and have the access to use the lotus flower in imported wine, foreign wine. I mean, they have their own wines too, but inexpensive wines and brews and beers and they're aging lotus and they want it to stay preserved in something high quality, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Something that the liquid isn't going to absorb into and it's not gonna flake off into the liquid. It doesn't explain why the vases are perfect. And I should say, just to be honest, a good counter to my own argument is these could be later uses of vases that have been laying around, right? So it's hard to say. That's a good counter to my whole argument too.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
hobby for him you know to have his boys go all around the world and collect things to bring to him you know he doesn't have time to go like on a on a right tour across mexico or egypt or something so they just steal things and take them back yeah that's crazy yeah so they're getting it you think they're getting most of do you think they're doing it themselves going out to these places and like looting you think they're they're getting it yeah so um
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But yeah, that's my premise and my approach, kind of what I'm working on right now with these vases. Nice, nice.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Exactly. Well, and I wonder with a lot of the certificates, is it, I mean, I think either way is fine. But sometimes on the certificates, they're either saying this was found in a tomb from 2600 BC, or they're estimating when the artifact was made, right? So that's kind of the hard part is, okay, you can't judge how old the vase is.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Because the vases are made in the north, but when they're found in tombs in the south, that tomb in the south is usually hundreds of years later, right? So, you can't use it to say, okay, this was made in 2600 BC in the south, when really it was made 500 years earlier in the north. So, yeah. Yeah. And it can go back way further than that. I mean, I'm saying 3100 BC.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That's when they stopped being made. These things are made hundreds of years before that. So...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
yeah that's cool yeah and potentially thousands of years before that i guess i mean possibly there there are those uh there are those photos i should say in in aswan which is in the south um of supposedly a 10 000 year old grave that has what looks like we you and i've talked about this it has what looks like a hard stone vase in there but i don't know that that exact specimen if we know where that was it just looks like it in the photo and that's
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
What is it? Is it an 8,000 BC grave? It's something crazy.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So I would love to find that specimen of what's in that photo.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, okay.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Well, so in the chaos of my wife graduating from med school and us buying a new house and everything, I have only had phone calls about it and not really dived into it myself. But from what I can understand is this is another –
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
finding that's being projected from a very credulous archaeologist, Italian archaeologist, who supposedly found something in the Great Pyramid two years ago or three years ago. And it was basically immediately proven to be false or lacked any credibility.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so now, a couple years later, he's back with a new finding that he's used a satellite image to scan underneath Khafre's Pyramid, which is the center pyramid. And he says that he's found these eight cylindrical structures with these five duplicate structures inside Khafre's Pyramid. Okay.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So in the Paten in Guatemala, one of the things that they're combating right now is, you know, the cartels have their own LIDAR drones. The cartels have their own LIDAR planes. Everything the Mexican government has, the cartel has as well. And so they launch expeditions themselves to go find these lost cities.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I think the very first thing that made my BS radar go off... Now, I don't want to say... I don't think there's any reason, anything wrong with people being excited about stuff like this. And do I think there's probably something under Koffer's Pyramid? Yes, I do. We can get into that in a second.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But the problem with this whole scan is that Well, the immediate smoking gun that this is credulous at best is that the scan did not pick up the structures that are already in the pyramid. It couldn't see the structures that we know are in there or the voids that we know are in the pyramid. It picked up different voids. And then I think the problem is they made this graphic and they took...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
They took the 3D model of the king's chamber with the relieving chambers on top of that, and they duplicated it five times in their little graphic. There was another image that you had up that showed it. Anybody who's well-versed in Egypt looks at this and knows, I don't know if a serious researcher would make a graphic that looks like this. I should just say that those gigantic columns are...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
yeah yeah i mean there's i don't know it it seems highly unlikely to me that this is uh that this is going to be proven to have a lot of validity to it uh maybe mostly based on the fact that it didn't pick up the voids that we know are in the pyramid what are your thoughts on it um
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Oh, gosh. You may have to zoom in. I'm not a good seer. I think that's the problem.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
All right, so having proposed in my book, the Giza Power Plant and Giza, the Tesla connection, that important features related to power generation might lie beneath the Giza pyramids in Egypt, I have been asked to comment on the recent announcement of the discovery of massive previously undiscovered voids and constructions beneath those pyramids.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Um, you know, I have a, uh, I'm sure we've talked about this before and maybe you have access to this as well. Uh, you know, there's a complete LIDAR map of the entire United States that the, uh, I think the comet research group has, and, uh, they gave me access to it. You probably, you might have it too. Um, uh, Why am I blanking on his name? Who's the... George? No, Carolina Bays.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
My initial impressions, based on my own research and that of others referenced here, are that if the reported scan data and analyses are correct, this would be a major discovery and a validation of my own theories, but more importantly, provide motivation to pursue a path towards clean energy and a safer environment.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The reason for that, I believe, does not come from me, but from a remarkable German physicist named... Friedman Freund. I'm not familiar with him. Freund, yeah. Freund. He's talked about him before. All right. Do you want me to read the whole thing?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I mean, why not? Let's go through. All right. So Robert Votter, Chris Dunn, and Dr. Freund at the SETI Institute, NASA physicist Dr. Friedman, while researching the physics behind earthquake lights.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
with the hopes of developing an earthquake early warning system, discovered that when igneous rock in the lithosphere is put under stress, proxy defects in the mineral cause positive hole electrons to shoot to the surface, He was able to demonstrate during lab experiments that electrons will flow when igneous rock is put under pressure, describing it as semiconductor physics.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Dr. Freund gives an excellent explanation of his discovery during a TED Talk in Christ Church, New Zealand in his highly recommended YouTube video. All right. This looks like this is going to be incredibly long. It's not that long. Is it not? Okay. I'll take it from here. I'm just going off the cursor right here. I know.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, well, so like you and I were saying, I'm extremely skeptical of these guys. But I think it's pretty commendably transparent that Chris says, like, you know, my own confirmation bias may be at work here. Because obviously he is personally... like maybe like emotionally invested in something like this. And this is personally exciting and vindicating to him.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But I think it's, I think, yeah, I think it's good that he put out a statement. I know his audience is waiting for him to put out a statement. And I think at the end to say, hey, this is something I am also personally excited about. So maybe my confirmation bias as I work here, I think that's commendable on his part. Yeah. But as far as, you know, I... He's super logical, smart.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Why am I... Chris? Chris, yeah, yeah, yeah. Chris gave it to me. So Chris gave me this LiDAR map. Chris Cottrell. Chris Cottrell, yeah. These don't exist on... these don't exist for Mexico. You can't find, even though they've LIDAR scans so much of Mexico, you can't find these scans anywhere.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I feel much more confident about the Scan Pyramids project than I do about these guys. Because these guys, you know, Scan Pyramids, those guys, you know, they take their time and they do really good work. And they've, I mean, the discovery of the void in the pyramid, that's... Big deal. It's a big deal. It might be the biggest...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
when they go in there, it'll be one of the biggest moments in archeology. Um, it'll be one of the biggest moments ever in archeology, you know? Um, but, uh, yeah, I'm more skeptical of, of these guys. And so we'll, we'll just, we'll just wait, wait to see. Um, unfortunately I just, I'm maybe fortunately I, I'm so busy right now.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I don't have the time to like dive into this, but I'm looking forward to seeing, uh, what it turns into. And like I was saying, you know, you and I both know there are people in Egypt that are going to, are going to go figure out what's going on and, publish something about it.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah. Now, I was talking to, I was talking to Johanna the other day, and I was, we were talking, and when I was in Egypt, I was noticing, you know, when you go to the Giza Plateau, it's like a pincushion with these labyrinths and shafts that are all over the plateau, just falling off into the earth, and they're so interconnected under the ground, like you've got the Osiris shafts and everything.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And I was talking to Egyptologists while I was in Egypt, and I was saying, what's the likelihood that the pyramid could have covered up
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
older shafts and tunnels that used to have entrances up here on the top of the up here on the top of the plateau that they just covered it up and now it's sealed off and you can't get into it but maybe there's still something in there and then everyone i asked was like no no that's that that didn't happen i'm like well why And he's like, well, Khufu wouldn't have done that.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You know, these guys wouldn't have done that. I'm like, what do you mean? Did you know the guy? Yeah. Do we know anything about him? Well, here's the really odd thing is I had an Egyptologist tell me that Khufu wouldn't have done that, you know? Yeah. He goes, Khufu wouldn't have done that. He wouldn't have covered up a different tomb. That's not something that they did. And I'm like, really?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That's creepy to say that.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, and it's not like we can know him in the way that you can know Plato or Socrates or something. Nobody knows anything about him. But then I was thinking, you know, there's a village that used to exist over there that Menkaure just turned over and removed everybody from their homes to build his valley temple. So, you know, there's evidence.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And they drew the line in the sand on that day in the early 5th century BC between West and East. And that's where Western society was born on that day.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
There's more evidence to say that they were disrupting things going on and building on top of things. And it's such an Egyptian thing to tear down a temple and build something new out of it. I don't know why you would say that. Yeah. Yeah, that's the way it is all over the world.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And the reason is, is that the, the, the value of the artifacts at these sites is, well, I mean, it's enormous, right? So if you would just, if you just projected onto the world or made, you know, made a LIDAR scan immediately accessible or even privately accessible, it's going to spread like wildfire and these sites will get looted like that. And they already do.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, well, and I think that, and that's sort of, you know, I was kind of like poking at him for like anything more, you know, just something more than what's traditionally known. I mean, even the most...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
even the most boring, conservative idea of that could be there are shafts in there that hold tombs or whatever that are older than the pyramid that are now sealed off, but is there stuff still in there that's completely cut off? And they were completely opposed to this idea. And so that's when I was talking to Johanna the other day, and I was saying, well, you know,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
I don't have any doubt that they're really, you know, that those scans maybe did pick up some kind of void underneath Koffer's Pyramid. But when they make it out to be like it's a machine or something, you know, I don't know. I mean, at the very least, I would say that there's shafts and tunnels under there that lead to something ancient.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But, you know, as far as I can't give any credence or credibility to what people think they might be because nobody really knows, you know.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Oh, yeah. I'd love to talk about this. Yeah. Yeah, so as we were talking a little bit earlier, you know, the origins of Western civilization just had been eating away at me for a long time. I never really talk about modern-day history, just because I try to keep my channel and what I do as an escape from real life, you know...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The ancient world, as dangerous as it was, is this safe, nice place that we can go to now and just get immersed in it. And that's kind of what I try to do. But I'm as red-blooded American patriotic as anybody gets. And I love United States history. I love what the United States represents, that we are...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
ideologically speaking, supposed to be the heroic civilization that grabbed its own destiny and is trying to execute this American experiment as best as possible, right? We're such a unique people. And I love that about us. And you look at just the boys that went off in World War II. Think about those guys that got drafted. That is the United States of America. I love the United States.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And we are so deeply tied to the Greeks in so many ways. I can see ourselves in them when I study them. Um, not to get, not to get like overly, overly, uh, into the nuances of it, but think about the, um, think about the, the, the battle of Thermopylae with the Spartans, the movie 300, right? Um,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So by the time that Mexican or Guatemalan archeologists get to a lost city that they maybe knew of 50 years ago when somebody, you know, like a medical plane or whatever is flying over and they go, oh, look at that. There's some giant pyramid down there. They mark it on the map and then they know that something's out there.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
there's a lot of nuance here, but it's the first time when, when Darius and then his son Xerxes are trying to invade. And as the movie, as the movie 300 goes, it says Darius is annoyed by the idea, by the idea of Greek freedom. You know, there are these Greeks who are starting to realize that they're getting away from Kings, you know, the whole ancient, think about this,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The whole ancient world was ruled by strong men. If you study ancient Egypt, the idea is that it started off with chieftains, and then you have these villages that are ruled by a strong man who asserts his dominance, and then he establishes his own little government, and eventually it grew up into regional rulers, and then one day it culminates into a pharaoh, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Well, that's the same way in the rest of the ancient world. All of the Americas, as far as we know, were ruled by kings or emperors. But there's this... on the Aegean, in Greece, these men had this realization that they could build a civilization that wasn't ruled by a king. It kind of evolves.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You have, you know, maybe during the Bronze Age, you have an emperor like, you know, Agamemnon in a certain way ruling over all of Greece, but then it goes down into kings during the Dark Ages. In the Archaic Period, you have kings. And then as the Archaic Period is emerging into the Classical Period, Athens moves to this era of tyrants, and it's all based around Athens, Greece.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
They had this era of tyrants, and then a tyrant is not, it doesn't have the negative connotation back then that we give it today. People quite liked tyrants, like Pasistratus. He was a pretty good guy. He built a lot of, he made a lot of public architecture for Athens, and they look upon his rule with You know, like rose-colored glasses. They liked him.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But eventually they move away from that, and they move into a democratic society. They have the Athenian democracy, which is basically mob rule, and it had a lot of problems. But it was very special. You know, it was the first time that people had this idea... that we don't have to be ruled. We can rule ourselves and we don't need a king. Where did this come from?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
In a world that was only ruled over by kings, how do you have the epiphany to break the chains of... You're defying the laws of reality at that point, right? And I think... A really poignant thing here is the two longest lasting democracies in all of human history. The United States were roughly 250 years. At number one, we're the longest lasting.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And people don't realize how special we are because the second longest lasting is Athens at 189 years or 186 years. That's it. What we live in is such a special little piece of paradise that human beings are able to grab onto and hold for just a little bit of time.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The 50 years later, a team finally gets there and it's all been looted, but maybe been looted recently because there's a bunch of Gatorade bottles, you know, laying around. Um, and it's the cartels that are out there, you know, they, uh, illegal logging. So they're, they're cutting down trees.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You know, the Roman Empire, if you include the late Roman Republic, which is really kind of an empire without a name, lasted centuries. And well, we don't really know exactly when Rome fell and it's kind of controversial, but hundreds and hundreds of years, vastly longer than Athenian democracy and vastly longer than the United States. But I think that something I connect deeply with
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
is this battle at Thermopylae when 300 Spartans, you know, they couldn't send the whole Spartan army. The Spartans have to answer to the Oracle of Delphi. The Oracle of Delphi gives this really ominous message back to the Spartans that's saying, all of Sparta will fall unless a king of Sparta dies.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And basically, all of the other religious leaders of Sparta are totally against this war against the Persians. Most of the Greek world is like, I don't really want to go to war against the Persians. They're open to just letting the Persians come in and wreck everything and establish complete, reassert their dominance over Greece.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And the main players are Athens and Sparta that want to fight against Persia. Now, the Athenians had already won the Battle of Marathon, but the Battle of Thermopylae is more famous because it's like the Alamo. It's the first time in history that we have a recording of the loser being the moral victor of the war, or of a battle.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So you have these 300 Spartans that are accompanied by other Greeks, but we just look at the Spartans. And it's this vastly outnumbered army, but you have these 300 Spartans that go up to Thermopylae Pass and they kind of, they go against the wishes of of the religious leaders of ancient Greece, and they're led by Leonidas.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And he knows how important this is to go meet the Persians up here, and he funnels them into Thermopylae Pass, where the Persian army, I think it was Herodotus that said that the army was so big that it drank the rivers dry. It was a massive army, and they think anywhere from 130,000 to 300,000 Persians are marching along the northern coast of the Aegean to come down and storm Greece.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so Leonidas and his 300 Spartans accompanied by, I think, 5,000 other Greeks, but not all of those 5,000 Greeks stay. A lot of them flee when they see the size of the Persian army. They position themselves at Thermopylae Pass, and essentially what they're doing is these 300 Spartans to preserve Greek identity, to preserve Greek freedom.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And then while they're cutting down trees, they're finding cities or they have their own expeditions that are going out to find cities and they just blow holes in the side of pyramids. I, I was at a site, um, near, uh, El Ramon Al in, um, in Campeche, Mexico. And it was a site that had already been looted. Locals may be looting it. I don't know if cartel did it or not.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Now, this doesn't mean that Spartans weren't ruled by a king, that Sparta itself wasn't ruled by a king, but the idea of Greek society, and they don't realize it yet, but what Western society... is either going to be crushed or 300 Spartans are gonna stand there and give the rest of Greece time to prepare for the Persian invasion and give Athens time to prepare.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And Greece and Athens are bitter rivals and becoming more and more rivals. And they'll have an entire war against themselves later on. But those 300 Spartans give this selfless, brave sacrifice. Not one of those men thought that they were gonna make it out of there alive. And they drew the line in the sand on that day in the early fifth century BC between West and East.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And that's where Western society was born on that day. They drew the line in the sand and they said, we are Greeks, we are free. And those 300 Spartans, that battle of Thermopylae at the end of the day, every Spartan had died and roughly about 20,000 Persians had been killed out of the maybe 100,000 to 300,000 person army. which was insane losses.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Like it completely demoralized the Persians as far as we know from Greek sources. but it invigorated all of Greece. And they realized that they're more disciplined, unified, trained armies that actually had formations could actually inflict damage upon this massive slave army that the Persians had. And that the idea of Greek freedom was worth fighting for.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And I think it was the first time that the Greeks realized that their identity as a people could be completely eviscerated. And so they, all of a sudden they become invigorated in who they are and they become very patriotic. And then, so the Persian Wars continue, the Greeks win the Persian Wars at slim odds. And then all of a sudden, classical society, because of that, explodes.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The Parthenon, the Acropolis of Greece is rebuilt. And then you have this, you know, glorious golden era of ancient Greece that forms from this. And you have this explosion of, okay, so let's say Athens is a result of this incredible amount of wealth from all the different Greek city-states, giving money to Athens to help Athens build their fleet, to help Athens build their army.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Sparta also benefits from this, but Athens has a much more liberal approach to society. They don't have kings, but Sparta does. But again, Sparta is also not like Persia, so there's some nuances there, but we focus more on Athens. So think about this. What is at the center of... What's at the center of Egyptian civilization? The pyramids.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
If you go based on traditional Egyptian thought, and let's just go on, not even the actual, necessarily the purpose of the pyramids, but let's go to like... The central focus, the juiciest time of Egyptian society, which is during the New Kingdom, like the biblical time.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Those Egyptians would have been living in the shadow of the pyramids, who they thought were built in tribute of great kings, right? Their whole society reinforces the idea of God-kings, right? You're living under the rule of a living God, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And the center of your society is either the temple built to the god and the pharaoh in the middle of the city or the pyramids that sit across the Nile ominously from you. That's the center of Egyptian society. It's all about the god-king. Go to Roman society. The center of the city is the Colosseum.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
You know, you would be able to go to the Colosseum only on days when the Colosseum was open and you had to pay to go, right? So, you're paying money back to... the palisade or you're paying money back to the emperor just to be able to go have the biggest show in town, right? Or, or it's, or the Roman forum, but you know, that's a little bit more complicated.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The center of Athenian society is the agora, which is the marketplace, right? And in that marketplace, you had these buildings, you had this one, the main building that was this long stoa. And a stoa is a covered, long colonnade building. And there were several of them built throughout Athens. But they were built for the sole purpose of the Athenians using them however they wanted to.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But they'll cut down these trees or they'll make these trees fall. And you'll have this big tree that grows out of the side of a pyramid. And if you cut down that tree and get it to... tip over, it'll just pull out this huge part of the pyramid and then they'll sift through that.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And all that it ended up being was a building that while you were running out into town to go to the market, which we think people went to the market every single day, you buy fresh produce and take it home for that night for dinner and you have to go back to the market the next day. But this is where people met and mingled. But that stoa is where people just gathered around and just talked.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
They just talked and they hung out. And there was a group of philosophers, I think under Zeno, that would meet there so often that when they would come by, everybody would be like, okay, let's get out of the way. All the stoics are here because they were the people that met at the stoa. So these group of philosophers that meet at the stoa, that's where we get the name the stoics.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And I just think that that is such a perfect example of who the Athenians are as a people. Their central piece of public architecture is not a pyramid, which they think glorifies some god king. It's not a coliseum, which glorifies giving money to the government to watch violence take place, which would have been fun. It's just an open colonnade building for people to meet and talk to one another.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
There's the stoa. So, um, and, uh, so, you know, all the philosophers would hang out here, people would gather and talk and all the questions that humanity would ask later on. Um, they say, they say that, uh, there's a famous, here we go. That's what it would have. So this is the recreated Stoa that's at the Agora right now in Athens. And so, you know, Aristotle would have hung out here.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Socrates would have hung out here. Plato would have hung out here. All their students would have hung out here at the Stoa. And as the saying goes, is that all of the study of philosophy in later history is just footnotes or derivative of Plato's writings, that he covered everything. Every question that's ever been asked was asked by the ancient Greeks. And I just think about...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
that fight for independence and freedom and for a civilization that's able to rule over itself to then turn around and create a marketplace that's just for the people to meet and it's central it's the the central part of its public architecture is not a pyramid it's not a coliseum it's a it's an open colonnade for people to gather and talk to each other that is the society
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That as one of my favorite historians, Jeremy McInerney, he says that Athenian society, I have it written somewhere. I mean, they give us mathematics, history, philosophy. I can go on and on and on and on and on about everything.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so it's this, I went to the site that had 16 pyramids in this, I don't know, maybe thousand by thousand yard span that we went and looked at. And every pyramid was just cratered in, you know, looking for different artifacts because there's nothing on the surface other than pottery. So in the Americas, I mean, people are,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
all of the things that were invented in Greece after they basically pushed off the Persians, after the Persian Wars, in the height of classical Greece, everything that laid the foundation for all of Western society occurred in 150 years, over the course of 150 years in Athens, Greece.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
It was one of these few moments in time where people reached an endless capacity and were able to do things at the highest level. They were so, so smart. And another thing that makes them unique is that they're so free. They have this – the closest thing that the Greeks had to what the Romans had in the Colosseum was the Greek theater.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And people would go to the theater once a year, and for three days, you'd watch from sunup to sundown. You'd watch these plays after plays after plays. And they were written and practiced all year long. And the plays were relevant, whether they were comedic or tragic, they were relevant to what was going on in Athenian society at that time.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And it was also highly critical of Athenian society as well. So they were like...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
they of all the things that they gave us this sense of freedom the sense of fighting for freedom the sense of bravery philosophy asking questions mathematics invention or whatever the most important thing that they gave us is what was on display in the theater and it's self-awareness a civilization to be able to look at itself and be critical of itself because it won't
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
it won't step on the ego of a ruler, right? When there's no ruler, you can be critical of yourself. And so the Greek plays would call out politicians in the middle of the play. They would make a joke out of somebody and talk directly to this politician.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Or there would be in the play, the Lysistrata, the women of Greece from all around Greece come to Athens and they gather and they meet and they figure out, well, how are we gonna stop the war between Athens and Persia? And they all agree, all the women, well, Lysistrata, she proposes, she goes, well, what I say we do is I say we just stop having sex with our husbands.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And then the other women go, okay, I'm out of here. I'm not doing this now. And so it's this whole play where it's like the women decide that they're gonna restrain from having sex with their husbands. And throughout the play though, even though it's a comedy, there's these tragic elements and these self-aware elements where they kind of lament the fact that Athens and Sparta aren't close anymore.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
This would have hit hard with the people watching this because the people watching this are literally the Athenian soldiers who have killed Spartans yesterday Literally yesterday they killed Spartans and tomorrow at the end of at the end of or you know in three days at the end of this they're gonna suit back up and go back out into the Peloponnese or wherever to fight the Spartans these are these are people who would sit and watch plays and gather and
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And listen to people being critical of the own war that they're in. And it's just this amazingly intense self-aware society that you don't see anywhere else in the ancient world. And it's so personal. And I can see us in them. And the Founding Fathers did too. That's why Washington, D.C. is made of Greek architecture. The Founding Fathers were...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
so many of them could speak Greek or Latin, you know? Um, and it's kind of this, it's kind of this jumped over, uh, chapter or it's this, I don't know. It's just overlooked. Like the connections between Americans and the Greeks is so far overlooked, but we're so similar to them. Studying them helps us understand ourselves.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
at least in, I should say, Central America and Mexico, yeah, it's a vicious war for preserving archeological sites. South America is a lot harder because I don't know too much about organized crime in South America as much as I'm more familiar with it in Mexico, but it doesn't seem to be as big of a problem, and it might be because the sites are even less accessible.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And, um, and that felt like something that when I was deciding on whether or not I was going to go back to school, I had been on the fence about it. You know, I didn't know if I wanted to go get it. I don't know. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I felt like I wanted to go next step with doing something. And I think I wanted to connect with something that
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
is deeply interesting not only because it's an ancient topic but deeply relevant and something i could really learn from and that was why rather than doing something in the americas or doing something in egypt which feel like these alien cultures i wanted to jump down the hole of something that can help me better understand myself in the world that i live in as well as another ancient world that connects me to another ancient world like egypt if that makes sense
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And so, yeah, I applied to this continuing education certificate program at the University of Athens in Greece and spoke with a couple of the administrators there and they accepted me. And so I begin in September. That's cool.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Well, they were so religious to the point that – so you had this great leader. His name was Pericles. He's the first citizen of Athens. So he's like this high-ranking general. He's not a tyrant. He's not a king, but he's also not a normal politician. He's like this – Dude, that was a great general, a great leader. He becomes the first citizen, basically. That's his title.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
He is the leader that everyone follows. And he was a great man. And every historian basically agrees that this was a great man. Um, his nephew, Alcibiades, uh, later on towards, uh, the, uh, maybe the middle part of the, of the, of the second per or the second, um, Peloponnesian war. Um, he is a well-liked figure. His Pericles nephew as well.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Um, very charismatic of incredibly good orator basically gets everything he wants and everyone's in love with him, whether it's men or women. Um, And he's about to be sent off on this Sicilian expedition. And right before he goes, there are these statues of Hermes that are violated. And the Athenian court...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
apparently there are witnesses that saw that it was alcibiades and he's young at this point that apparently there are witnesses and he's probably being framed this is the reality that alcibiades uh and his young buddies went and vandalized these uh these hermes statues before he was going to be sent off on this expedition he's a very high-ranking athenian and uh
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And while he's off on that expedition, they send word to put him on a boat and send him all the way back to Athens where he's going to be put on trial potentially for execution for violating these statues. So while you have a part of Athenian society – now that's 414 B.C.,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
um in 399 bc socrates is going to be executed for impiety and corrupting the youth for saying things like uh you know if the gods really are here they're far and just they're distant and far away right so you have these two different sects of society and probably you have these niche you probably really what it is is it's a small niche of society the socratics and the other philosophers that question whether or not the gods really even exist but all the rest of athenian society is extremely religious extremely pious
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
but yet have this sense of freedom, right? It's an interesting, it's a weird place that we're in, but it's so unique and precious. But I actually think that we do have a sense of self-awareness In a similar way that the Athenians did. I think their civilization was just as tumultuous and complicated as ours is, and yet ours and theirs was so much better than the alternatives.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
The jungle is considerably larger in South America. Um, so like in Peru, you don't have, you still have a big looting problem when you're talking about, uh, sites that are out in the desert, like Moche culture, Nazca culture, like the Nazca lines, you know, the Nazca have their own pyramids.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
And I think that that's testament to how flawed humans are. Uh, like Athenian society is extremely dangerous. Um, but it wasn't as dangerous as a lot of other places in the world. Um, you know, the politics, people wanting to become a political, that was a battle of life and death. Like if you wanted to become a high ranking politician, um,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
if you were successful, there was a chance that somebody was going to try to frame you for a crime to have you executed. These are people that live like a block away from you, you know? So, but for the people, maybe the lower ranking higher class society.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So you have Athenians, but then you have servants and you have the servant class that has no rights at all, but maybe they still have a better life than servants in other places in the world. So it's this complicated thing, but it's just the origins of this Western mindset. Now, um,
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Now, I say that I think that we're self-aware in the way that they are because of how much Americans bicker with each other and how, you know, it is kind of split down the middle. Maybe that comes from the two-party system, which the Athenians didn't have the dilemma of. That's another thing. They had a complete... They had a literal democracy.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
So mob rule, like you could be swayed left and right. And that was the problem with Athenian society.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That's a huge difference. So, you know, we have Republican measurements in place to stop that from happening. The pendulum doesn't swing as much in the United States, but you can't blame the Athenians because they literally just invented that form of government, right? Yeah. but it was better than being ruled over by a bad king.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Some people think so. Some people think that a direct democracy would be better. So there's that. There's dangers to direct democracy, too. So that's kind of something that the founding fathers were worried about, was that they liked the mentality of the Athenians under like Periclean Athenian society. They liked that. That's a whole deeply nuanced conversation.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
But I think that we have a similar outlook on the world that the Athenians do, or especially our, I'm sorry, our own civilization. We're as self-aware as they were because we have the freedom to bicker with each other so much. we constantly self-analyze ourselves. Or at least I feel like I do. Or maybe we analyze each other a lot. Yeah, that's what it is. We analyze each other a lot.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is the opposite of self-awareness. Sure, sure, sure. But... people who are ruled over by a complete monarchy don't have the freedom to do any of that at all, right?
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Yeah, they can't judge other people. There's nothing to judge. And if you judge, the only person to judge is not your fellow citizen because you're all subservient to the God-King and you're not going to cast your judgment on the God-King. So in a way, what I mean is that Athenian society is self-aware because they're able to cast judgment on each other. And that's why their forums existed.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
They have these huge mound sites that all of them have been looted, but most of the time it's done by locals. Um, you know, often the jungles, these old ancient Inca cities, um, they're completely inaccessible. You have to launch a state-sponsored expedition and send people out there for an incredibly long time just to find something like that. So South America, it's not as much of a problem.
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That's why the Agora and the Stoa existed. That's why the Athenian courts existed. So it gave people the ability to lob jabs at each other and be self-critical of each other. Now, some people are self-critical of themselves. Those people end up becoming the philosophers. Does that make sense? So you have this...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
incredibly intricate society that i'm still just an infant in learning um you know there's there's there's this is an endlessly deep topic um that's deeply nuanced with people who are as intelligent and as perceptive as we are and more intelligent and more and more perceptive than we are and people who are extremely in touch with logic and reasoning and who spent
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
so so so much time having deep philosophical conversations asking these perennial questions that we still ask today and I think that that connected with me on so many levels more so than just like ancient historical or archaeological fascination it felt like if I could better understand the civilization I'd better understand myself and I'd be a better person having known it if that makes sense
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, the Romans, it's kind of like... They're fascinating, but you're studying... We are the Romans, essentially. We really are more similar to the Romans than the Greeks. That's a fact. The Greeks are like an ideological thing to aspire to. And in reality, it's just a blip of Greek time. That's really all it was. It rose, and then it fell. And that's why the...
Matt Beall Limitless
An Extinct Lotus Flower had Psychedelic Impacts on Ancient Egypt | #49 Luke Caverns
That's also why, whether or not Plato's Republic and the story of Atlantis really is based on a kernel of truth, it's the reason he talked about it, because Atlantis is supposed to represent Athens. It's this rise of this very self-confident, capable, luxurious, beautiful civilization, and then it becomes overly competent and arrogant, and then it falls.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And when you hear the sound of the Papua New Guinea people singing and the way they harmonize with each other, these people are so connected to the earth that it's the earth singing to you through them. Does that make sense?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's beautiful, though. There's one of a man. He's right next to the camera, and he's singing, and you have all these people around him, and it's just, like, stunningly beautiful. Here it is. Here it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It must have been amazing to see in real life. Think about this. You have the Library of Alexandria, This is all in one block. You have the Library of Alexandria. You have the Museon, which is right next to it. So both together, they make the world's first university. And I mean, you can just imagine like walking through those halls. Across the street from that is Alexander's mausoleum.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I think it's just on loop. 10 hours. It's a 10-hour video. But, you know, hearing that makes me, like, emotional hearing it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Oh, my God. It's gorgeous. And you look in his eyes, and it's like he has very innocent eyes. Yeah. You know, it's the human embodiment of the planet itself is that guy that you're looking at and what you're hearing. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Does he have a little daughter with him or a little girl? And he, like, cuts up the fish and he hands it to her and they give each other, like, an Eskimo kiss? I don't believe it's that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's so true. I've been having these conversations with my wife recently. All of our friends are sort of – we're all kind of newlyweds. My wife and I are about to approach our two-year anniversary.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
our relationship is interesting because it kind of mimics like ancient people where, you know, a man has got to, you know, in ancient times, the man would go off at a certain point periodically.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
He and all of his, he and all the other men of the village or the younger men would go off until they killed a big animal and they drag it back and they'd be rewarded by the gratification of the women that are there. And then they would play their part in helping to feed everybody. And you have this like a, The woman, like, admires the man. The man's helping take care of her. You have this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And then the men also get their time away to be manly and be masculine and brave. Now we exist in this world where before I was able to quit my job and pursue this full time, I was doing marketing just to make ends meet. And I'm existing in this digital world that doesn't even exist. I produce ads for companies that don't even have a physical brick and mortar store. It's all completely made up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So his mausoleum, we think the Emperor Hadrian, if you've heard of Hadrian before, that he modeled his mausoleum on Alexander's. So we kind of have an idea of like what the mausoleum may have looked like. And we have a marble statue of Alexander on top. So people are walking by every day in the middle of this town.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I would come home every single day, and I had no male role in my little family. My wife is in the middle of dental school, and so we're both going off and coming back and doing the same thing every day. And it's like this unnatural cycle, and you wonder why people are so unhappy. And now that I've been traveling quite a lot,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Um, you know, I go off, uh, you know, I go off, I travel, I'm able to, you know, help provide for us. I'm gone. I come back and our relationship is strong and it's intimate and romantic. And she like, you know, admires that kind of aspect about me. And I'm like, like, oh, this is kind of, this is kind of how this is a healthy, this is actually a healthy thing for our relationship.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And it's just reminded me more and more of how this modern world is so dystopian and so sick and poisonous to our minds. We're operating in a made-up realm. It's just so much of what we do is completely made up and unnatural.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
We should be living by a fresh body of water, and you and I should be running off into the forest and killing something with our hands or with a bow and dragging it back, and all the women are, yay! That's what life should be like. But it's unfortunately science fiction.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
For sure. Yeah, I've seen that. I mean, you go off on your hunting expeditions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
wow here we are where are you at when you do that well i really love utah i really love like the the wasatch mountains i love that area i'm scared of the northwest my wife wants to take me to montana and go hiking i'm like i'm not going hiking out northwest there's gris i don't belong out there there's grizzly bears i mean those things there's nothing you can do man nothing you can do
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I'm okay on the East Coast with just black bears. They're like rabbits. But, dude, a grizzly bear?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Have you seen the video of the guy who's up on top of this granite facing? And he's, like, filming. And he goes, there's a young grizzly bear down at the river below me. And he's up on this granite face. And he was like, I'm going to scare him off. And he goes, hey, bear. Hey, bear. And the bear goes and charges directly to him and knocks down all the little trees.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And it comes up to the granite face and it can't reach him. But I'm like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And then across the street from that is the palatial district where all the rich people live. And then off by the bay, you would have had Cleopatra's palace. And so it's this beautiful place. But when the boats come into the dock, you had to give up all the scrolls that you had because the Ptolemies are obsessed with obtaining the world's knowledge and they want the originals.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
He's headed right towards yeah, and if you're a good shot with a high-powered gun, you might be able to kill it But you'll be mauled to death.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Oh, it's terrifying. Could you imagine people trying to navigate into or migrate into the Americas and they have to deal with the short-faced bear and polar bears?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
it's it's utterly insane man people lived in a gnarly place in the u.s like we had we had american lions bigger than the african yeah exactly we had elephants we had woolly mammoths we had camels here we had gigantic horses we had huge dire wolves we had giant giants giant oh there's a giant sloth caves in nantahala and uh you can see them and they're like carved out
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And it's cool because there's multiple layers of history there. So you have this mega fauna ice age history of these huge giant sloth caves carved out in these prehistoric mountainsides. But the Cherokee used those caves to hide in to escape the Trail of Tears. Wow. Yeah, that's fascinating stuff up there, man. So you have like levels of history just in that one area of the country.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
If you go out there, you'll feel like you're in a primordial place that's, you know, kind of spiritual. I'm down. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I feel like I could have talked to you for 10 more hours.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah. So everything I do is just under my name, Luke Caverns. You know, Caverns was just a name that like my wife and I came up with to use like a nomer because of privacy. But my real last name is Reagan. And, you know, I like I shared I have this family history and loosely connected to the presidential family. That's like a different branch of our family. Oh, wow. From Tennessee. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
and um and so i kind of want to do it for privacy but like that's impossible so i just i've just run with it and uh but yeah loot caverns you can find you can find everything i do under that and uh you know i for a long time i thought maybe i'd specialize in one area but man i'm interested in in in the ancient history of the entire world and and uh i'm just always going to embrace that and explore the explore the ancient world on foot and um yeah
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
They don't want a copy. So what they would tell people is, you give us your writings, we'll write down a copy, and we'll give you back your original. But what they would do is give back the copy and keep the original. And this is something called the Library Wars. This is the whole thing. But it was connected to the docks.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Thank you for being here. It was really fun. Thank you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so most of the buildings in Alexandria are made out of stone to prevent fires. But the interior of Alexandria's library would have had all these wooden shelves that would cross where you'd stack all the scrolls in. So everything just – maybe the actual structure of the building doesn't burn down, but the entire interior of it burns up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so when Caesar sets fire to the docks to burn all of Pompey's ships, it crawls up the docks and burns the library down. Well, Augustus did the same thing a decade and a half later. Augustus came and he seized Alexandria. And this is when Cleopatra and Mark Antony die. He seizes it. And then there are rebellions because the Alexandrians are very rebellious.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Like if you were to look up, if you were to go to some bookstore, there's a popular one called the Sons of Coronado. And it's like this legacy of people looking for Spanish gold. And somewhere in there, my family will be in there. And so this started in the 1890s. And it's this long saga of the gold being – the treasure being dragged to San Antonio and all these people get killed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
They don't want to be ruled by the Romans. And So I think it's Caracalla that he was being made fun of by the Alexandrians. There was a theater in town. It's actually the place where stand-up comedy was invented in Alexandria. Really? And the butt of all the jokes was always the Roman emperor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So you'd have people talking shit about the Roman emperor standing up in the middle of Alexandria's theater. And so the Roman emperor was always the butt of the joke. Well, Caracalla – I believe it's Caracalla – He's one of the brothers in Gladiator 2, the new Gladiator if you've seen it. I haven't seen it. He's one of the brothers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But the movie doesn't really depict the actual emperors very accurately. But he gets tired of it. So he just comes down to Alexandria on like a royal visit and executes 25,000 people in the city of Alexandria and burns down parts of it. So he burned down the library for the third time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And then there was another emperor named Aurelian when a local Alexandrian declared himself the new Egyptian pharaoh. I think he was a real Egyptian. He declared himself like the newest pharaoh and he created this revolt. And then Aurelian had to come and put the revolt down and he burned down the library again. So this is – we're getting close to like 300 AD at this point.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Now, in 365 AD, there was a huge earthquake that was off of the coast of Crete, I think, which is the most southern Greek isle. It's where the Minoans lived. I believe it's there or it's off the coast of Cyprus. And so that earthquake just reverberates down to Egypt and this massive tsunami destroys the entire city of Alexandria. And it said it was so catastrophic that –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I think it's Pliny the Elder or Pliny the Younger comes down in a rescue mission from Italy and he comes to Alexandria and he records that 50,000 people in the city are missing because of, you know, the wave that gets pushed in and that all of the giant boats, these are giant, giant, gigantic boats in Alexandria's harbor, are sitting on top of all the rooftops in the city.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And it's after this point that the location of Alexander's body and the location of Alexandria's library just... Completely go missing. So so they're both utterly destroyed. And most likely, all of the giant stones that were used to build the city were repurposed for, you know, other things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But in one fell swoop, Alexandria's library, the museum and Alexander's mausoleum completely disappear from the historical record.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And only one of these four Reagan brothers makes it out. He gets involved in – in oil drilling out in East Texas. And then so my family moved out to East Texas and then his son was born, which is my grandfather. And then he continues this legacy of continuing his father's oil company, but then he also begins gold mining in New Mexico.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
A really long time. A really long time. I think about that with foraging. Yesterday I was reading Exploration Faucet. Have you ever read this before or listened to the audio book? It's Percy's personal diary. Oh, wow. There's an audio book of that? Yeah, it's on Audible. Dude, you'll get wrapped up in it. You won't be able to stop listening to it. He just has these amazing experiences and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
ah, man, he would be like your best, like your all-time guest, you know, if you could have him on. Sure. He had a great accent, too. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so you listen to his audio book, and the way he talks about meeting the indigenous people that live deep in the Amazon, you know, it would take him weeks to get to these little villages.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And while he's out in New Mexico, he hears these legends of these seven lost Spanish gold mines. And because there was a local police officer who was like a treasure hunter and he knew who my grandfather was and the story behind our family. He sought them out, and they went off looking together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And while he was out there, he would see like the systematic mathematical structure with which they would set up these giant villages and how they would build these huge like thatch wood homes with foundations that are stones. And these people were – he said that they had like beautiful skin. They spoke elegantly. They sang songs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And he was like – he's like this isn't – he's like these people in the Amazon are not – primitive savages, like my colleagues at the Royal Geographic Society in London believe that they are. These are people who are the descendants of a fallen great civilization. He was like, the way they interact with each other is so sophisticated.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I don't quite know. There's some things that are left out. He has some... Before he started writing this, I think he always had these ideas in the back of his mind. And so you don't really get the origin of why he initially started thinking this. But while he's exploring South America, he's hearing all these stories of semi-contacted people. You have...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
natives who still live the native life, but they can speak Spanish. And he could speak a little bit of Spanish and communicate with these people. So he would hear about, oh, yeah, there's this huge city of gold off in the jungle. Months travel that way. And it's the same kind of legend that all these Spaniards had heard.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So it's this idea of, well, there was this civilization that used to be out there. And so Percy thought that maybe it has something to do with Atlantis. And so that was part of his journey looking for it. And then he it's actually his wife, Nina Fawcett, I believe, when she's in a library in England, she finds a Portuguese document. I think it's manuscript 512. Have you ever heard of this?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I could have the name of it wrong, but I think it's manuscript 512. And in that, it's these guys who are kind of like semi-professional Portuguese explorers in the mid 1700s that are going around Brazil. And they find this huge stone city with statues that they thought looked like Greek gods in the middle of the Amazon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so, you know, the perception, like my perception looking back through it is like, well, I mean, yeah, these are Portuguese guys who come from Europe. So when they see something that's native. Their only lens to see it through is what they've grown up knowing, which is the Greek and Roman world. So that's how they communicate this idea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I don't know how long it took them to find it, but he found the seven lost Spanish gold mines of New Mexico. And he opened up this company called Three Bells Mining and Milling Company. And that was open for about eight years. And they opened up these – They opened up these mines that go back to probably about the 1530s.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But they found this big stone city in the middle of, I think it's, I'm pretty sure it's Brazil's jungle. And so this was completely forgotten until Percy's wife found this. So When he first went down to the Amazon, he was only there on a mapping expedition on behalf of Great Britain, which he was probably a spy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I'm guessing that that's what was actually happening there because he was a spy when he was in the military. And I think what he was doing is on an official basis, he's charting the border around Brazil with the Amazon River. But really what he's doing is collecting information so that maybe Great Britain can have a colony there someday. But then the war disrupts all of that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And he has to go fight in World War One, which is funny because it's the same thing the Nazis were doing in the 1930s. But anyways, so while he's there on his first while he's there on his first expedition, he doesn't initially I think he's interested in these ideas of ancient history. But it's when he's there and he's off in the jungle, he's finding all these artifacts on the ground.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And he was like, he's like. The way that the pottery – there's clay pottery and then there's stone vessels and eating utensils that he was finding, really elegant little statues and things. He found one that was made out of this solid black stone that he could never – and it had this glow to it. And he could never – maybe not a glow but like a –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Like if you shine the light on it, you can tell that it's translucent in a way. I've seen stones like this in the Aztec realm. They have these scepters that have these orb things on the top. And if you shine a light on it, it's like this otherworldly looking thing. I can only imagine if you're on like peyote.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I don't know. And it's missing now. It's lost. It went missing with him or somewhere in his expeditions that doesn't exist anymore. But there's an illustration of it in exploration faucet that you could find.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so he thought like when he was seeing all this on his first expedition, he's like, wait, these aren't these primitive savages that all my colleagues that I don't even like back home think that these people are. This is it. This is an advanced culture. There's something that's lost here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so Percy didn't know if it was a fallen civilization that lived in the Amazon or whether it was still out there somewhere. And he was trying to find either the ruins of it or the living city, right? So he didn't really know if it was fallen or not.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah. But I do know that he had the utmost admiration and respect for these people. Like, he was completely infatuated with their way of life and trying to—you know, what his goal was— was to prove that the narrow-minded perspective of the English aristocrats who thought that they were the pinnacle of civilization, he was determined to prove them wrong.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So the Spaniards were up all the way in New Mexico in the 1530s, and they were opening up Native American gold mines and expanding them. And so he found these gold mines that go hundreds of feet into the ground as this huge, expansive gold mining operation happened. Well, somebody dies after a smelter explodes, and the company goes under. They lose everything. My family falls into poverty.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so he had a great admiration for these people. And he wanted to try to find a big, big civilization, something with enough people that could rival Europe. And where he went missing was in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. And and the last place that they know that he was at was on May 29th, 1925. And he wrote a letter to his wife from Dead Horse Camp.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And he was like, it may be a while before you hear from me. It could be up to a year or two before you hear from me. I'm about to head into a very dense area. And my trail runners who would go back and forth with his notes, they weren't going to follow him out there because it's too dangerous. And that was the last letter that he had written.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And he was going – he was heading off into what's called the Zingu region, which is like the Zingu River. And it's one of the most hostile regions in the Amazon. Maybe even today. Teddy Roosevelt had trouble when he went there. But the Zingu region is – is where all of the major LIDAR came out within the last 10 years. They found all the ruins of these giant cities.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And there's a city called Kiriguyu, I think. And it had an estimated population of about a million people, which is the size of Rome. And, you know, when you look at the LIDAR images, you can't get a perspective of how big they are. I have access to a LIDAR database of the entire United States, and I've mapped all kinds of huge uncharted mound sites in Florida, all of the southeast.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I have hundreds of sites marked. And when you first look at them on a map, you're like, oh, okay, maybe that looks like it's 50 feet long or something. No, they'll be like 300 yards long, like these giant raised platforms in the middle of the forest here in the US.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And if I had access to LIDAR data like that, where I could measure it down on the Amazon, some of these things are miles long, like raised platforms are a mile long, and they have highways. Maybe we should pull up just an image of a LIDAR scan from the Amazon. But you'll see this central city area. You'll see step pyramids and raised platforms.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Maybe this is where people lived or maybe this is where the market was. And there will be a road that cuts straight through it. And you can see the road just goes off in the distance for miles and miles and miles. And so what they would do. Here we go. Yeah, this is so this is one of these sites in this one of these sites. I believe this is in Brazil or maybe it's in northeast Bolivia.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And is all that area covered completely with jungle right now? Completely covered in jungle. Yeah. So if you went out there- You wouldn't see any of this. You may not realize that you were standing on a mound. You really got to train your eyes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I filmed this little series about a year and a half ago called Jungle of Stone, where I was going through the jungles in Central America, and we charted this city that had 16 pyramids in it. We were there all day long, and we charted 16 pyramids. And when I put it out, I got all these comments that were like, you're not doing anything but walking on a bunch of hills because it's so hard to see it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
The jungle just claims everything back. So it takes, you really have to sit with seeing these things in person for a while before you start recognizing, oh, that is a mound or that is a pyramid. That is a structure under the jungle. And so Percy Fawcett, where that Lidar came out is one of the places that he told his wife.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
My dad's born during that time, and my dad didn't really get to experience all of that excitement. He had to spend his life climbing out of poverty. But he had this love for history. He had this love for American history, really, and he instilled in me the importance of history growing up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
This century for sure. This century is going to be insane. It's going to be insane. Like, you're going to have everyone scanning everything. All of the Amazon will be mapped with LIDAR by the end of the century. All of the Sahara is going to be mapped with LIDAR by the end of the century.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah. Well, those are my two big things. Like when we talk about Atlantis and we talk about lost civilizations, I mean my thing is the Sahara and the Amazon. Both of these things existed pre-Ice Age, especially if we're talking about pre-Ice Age civilization. The Sahara – is an oasis, you know, 10,000 plus years ago. It's an oasis.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You have, what, two or three of the world's largest lake systems on there. You have rivers everywhere. You know, it would have been like a beautiful place to live.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Well, yeah, that's amazing. And you know, whenever I, you know, so growing up, I mean, gosh, I read Fingerprints of the Gods when I was 16. I remember like sitting on the couch after school and reading it. And my dad comes up to me, he's like, that's a big book. And I go, I know. It's like I'm reading a textbook for fun, you know. And it was dense reading for me as a 16-year-old.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so, you know, I was so inspired by Graham. And then I went off and like got traditionally educated reading. And so I kind of have both of these perspectives. And I'm often shocked and disappointed at how other professional archaeologists and anthropologists explain popular mysteries, you know, like there was an Egyptologist on another popular podcast and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And then the podcast host asked him to properly explain the mystery around the pyramid. And it was just so subpar, I was shocked. And I was like, I'm not even an Egyptologist. I know how to explain these things. And I felt the same way about Zahi. Maybe there's some kind of language barrier there, but it was also like he didn't want to explain these things on a basic level.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But one of the things that I never see talked about is... is the concentration of energy along the Nile Valley. If I had to drop a pin anywhere on the earth where I think Atlantis would be, I would probably put it in the Sahara somewhere, along one of these major lakes where there's a lot of people living at one time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And then later on, as the Sahara dries up, you know, say beginning around like 800, I'm sorry, 8000 BC, it starts rapidly drying up. It's probably a little bit before that. And then by about 4000 BC, it's completely dry. So your Saharans only have a few places that they can go. They can go to the Mediterranean coast. They can go to the Atlantic coast.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And that fascination of exploration and kind of ancient American history, hearing those stories carried over into me during my childhood. And so I've just – I have always been fascinated by this. And I guess getting to where I am now, I was halfway through my marketing degree in college. And I'm sitting on my bed in my dorm room with my girlfriend at the time who I'm married to now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
They can go down kind of into the Congo and in the savannas. Or they can go to this fertile valley oasis where it's like 500 yards on each side where it's just completely lush tropical oasis. And so some people went there. And so you have this hyper concentration of energy and all these people living somewhere together for what we know is the first time in history.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Like we can verify it, I guess, if that makes sense. And and so rather than being able to have these huge pieces of property where they can all live separated from each other, kind of like in the Sahara, you have all this space and so luxurious. Now you have to live on top of each other and you have to build up these cities. You know, you're like building cities.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so all that energy compacted into one place in this fertile oasis is either destined to completely crumble and fall apart or it's New York City. It's this thin strip of highly concentrated, genius, hardworking people figuring out how to extrapolate the most out of their natural world and create some of the greatest things the world has ever seen. Just like New York City, we did it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
any egyptologist explain things that way like i think that's i think that's a good explanation at least and i'm open to things in egypt being much older like the sphinx is definitely older than the pyramids um but uh i'm just always disappointed at like the very low level with which um archaeologists and anthropologists will come in and try to explain things to a popular audience and it's kind of like you were asking okay but how do you know that like explain that to me right in a way that i can understand how do you know this and there's never a proper explanation and i
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
don't know what that is it's like it's like they strongly dislike the fact that there's mystery out there and that there are other people who are attempting to enter the mystery that are not part of the good boys club you know so they have this exactly so they have this knee-jerk reaction to it all they hate all of it they don't want to be a part of all of it and um that's not going to work going forward like
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You know, not to be political, but this recent election showed that you're going to have to appeal to the popular audience in the future. Everyone is, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And we watched the movie The Lost City of Z about Percy Fawcett. And something about that guy's journey reminded me so much of my family, kind of reminded me of my dad, reminded me of my grandpa. And it changed something in me like that day. I could not ignore. I was probably 20 at the time. I could not ignore this love that I always had for ancient history. But, you know, archaeologists are poor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
There's two things I'll say there. You know, kind of like I guess a running theme of this is we're about to enter into like an archaeological Wild West in a way. You know, I think that, you know, Jimmy getting involved with with Gobekli Tepe and the trees that were there, having the trees, the orchards planted over the sites. And they're removing them now. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And it's just it's just proof that a guy like I started watching Jimmy 2018. I mean, gosh, was I I just graduated from high school. And so he was kind of – like inspired me to be like – he was this young charismatic guy that could go online and research topics and enthusiastically present these topics. And he was effective at doing it and inspired me for a long time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And lo and behold, I guess what, six, seven years later, he's still at it. And he's actually – Not just inspired people to be interested in the ancient world but had an actual effect on something on the opposite side of the planet.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Like when all this happened, I was like – I was like, yeah, I mean I get the concern but I don't think the Turkish government cares what any of us over here in the US think. Sure enough, they removed the trees. And then there's kind of like the backpedaling of – of, oh, well, it was always in the plan to remove the trees. But I think people might disagree with Jimmy's approach, whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But you can't deny the fact that he himself, an independent guy, was able to make so much noise that he affected a government on the opposite side of the planet. You know, and it's and in a way it's like it shows me like, oh, you know, these these expeditions that I'm planning and things that I'm going to go out and survey and document for myself. Like these can make these can make real changes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And these are things I had planned in Florida, here in the here in the southeast, in the States, in Central America and in the Amazon. And it's like encouraging. Like, wow, I mean, we're really approaching. a time when independent people are going to start making real noticeable differences, and not just in the digital space where people are interested in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You know, they're there. It's an extremely hard life and it's really hard on on your family, too. Um, and I just knew I had to, I had to create a life for myself where I could do what I loved because I had like a 1.7 GPA in college and I was not going to, to make it through my classes. And so I changed, I got a degree in cultural anthropology.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Well, it's quite literally in my blood. Back in the late, well, I should say the 1890s, my family, they were cattle rustlers right here in the hill country, actually, maybe a little bit further, quite a bit further west of San Antonio.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Uh, I wrote like we had a mock thesis statement and I wrote it on the Amazon and the lost, uh, lost civilizations and you know, how they were wiped out from, uh, from, uh, Spanish influenza. And, uh, yes, that's where I'm at today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah. Well, attacking each other. I mean I just experienced this the other day. So I had a – I guess being early on in my career, I'm passionate about so many different things, and I'm the kind of person that's like, oh, I'm passionate about this. This is what I'm going to do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so I applied to the University of Athens in Greece, and I was really into the classics, and I was going to go for that. And then I just had this – let's just say I was in the jungle, and I had a mind-opening experience, and I was reminded of the fact that – My purpose here, the reason I started doing all this was continuing my family's legacy. I'm interested in a lot of different things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I'm not going to specialize. I'm not going to hunker down in this academic path or whatever. I just decided I'm not going to go through with this. I start publishing content in my research on the Americas again. And the Americas are very mysterious. I mean, very comparable to Egypt. The amount of questions that haven't been answered is insane. And the Olmec world is fascinating.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so, you know, Graham in Fingerprints of the Gods, he talks about how the Olmecs, he thought that they may have like African features. And, of course, that was 1995.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so, I don't know, 2015, you guys are talking, and he's like, well, you know, I published that then, but DNA research has come out that says that these people don't have African DNA in them and that maybe this is Polynesian, maybe this is Australasian people intermixing, and that's why they have this unique look, whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But in the Olmec world, there's this monument that is actually called El Negro. And you look at it, and it's not an Olmec. It is an African man. And so I post about this on my ex-account, and I just kind of like list everything I've seen in the Olmec world. And I'm like, you know, this is really fascinating. Maybe this is evidence of Africans who were in the Olmec world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I hadn't seen this monument before I saw it in person. Because you go in the Olmec realm or the region in Mexico and you go to these museums and you look at the log or the ledger that people have been on and nobody has visited this museum in the last four months. And before that, it was six months before that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And these monuments just kind of sit underneath these metal roofs to protect them from the rain. It's like this completely lost civilization.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go. There we go. So if you pull up an Olmec head, you'll see that these guys are very different looking, and especially if you can get – yeah, yeah, there we go. Look at – okay, so that's a regular Olmec head. So you can see that these are two different races of people. You know, the Olmecs have very soft features, round faces, big eyes, big lips, kind of big noses.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
They have very soft features. And this El Negro monument has these high cheekbones, this defined jawline.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Well, the only counter I give to that is when you when you visit the Olmec realm, you see a lot more than just the heads. You see a lot of Olmec faces, dozens and dozens and dozens of them, maybe well over 100. And when you've seen them all and you kind of get a gist of like the way they generally look, this guy will really stand out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Like I took a group of students there and we all as soon as we all came in and saw it based on everything we'd been seeing for the past week, it immediately stood out to us.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And that hair as well. It's kind of that curly hair, or at least it looks like it to me. And so anyways, he could be Olmec. My identity is not tied up in what I think this is or is not.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It certainly does look that way. But I was on a plane to Mexico a couple months ago, and I was going into the Olmec realm. And I was like, I wanted to take a picture of this guy. I'm looking to the left of me. And he was an Olmec man sitting next to me. And he was he was you know, he looked like he didn't look like any Mexican I've ever seen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
There's something there with the DNA of the Olmec people that is definitely connected with something else that that you don't see if you go to the Maya realm that you don't see if you go to like Mexico City. They have something in their DNA. They have this very specific look about them. I don't know exactly what it is, but I'm like looking and I'm like this Olmec guy next to me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So fascinating because it clearly could have been African explorers that made it. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what. Could we look up – gosh, look up the Traveler Olmec Monument if you would please, Jamie. It's the traveler. I want to call him... I think he's Monument 13. There's another one called Monument 19 that we should look at. But he's this man that's very clearly not... There we go.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Top left, the one that's on Reddit. In fact, this might be my post on Reddit. Yes, yes, sir. So this guy right here. All right. So this is really, really fascinating. So let's diagnose this. All right. So flags. Flags are invented. This is a very unknown fact.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Flags are invented, or the first place that we have evidence for it is along the Nile Valley on these pre-dynastic pots, which they're not the stone vases, but just like clay pottery. They would make little paintings on them. And people have these riverboats that have these flags on them, and the flags would say what city you had come from or what village you had come from.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so flags are an old world thing. We don't have any evidence of flags in the new world. All right. He's also wearing a turban. He's got this big turban that's draping off the back of his head. And he very clearly has this distinct beard that's popping out. Now, Native Americans, sometimes they're Asiatic. They have Asian DNA. And Asians don't really grow typically.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Sometimes they'll grow the little stash and a little bit of a beard here, but they don't have that. big, thick beard that you would see, you know, like in Europe or along the Mediterranean in the Middle East. And so this guy has this big, thick beard and then he's got boots on his feet as well. And we think that these are these glyphs that you see to his left and right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And these are really, really early Olmec glyphs. And they interpret that foot to the left as saying that he came from somewhere. He was a traveler. And so this The thought here is – so this is around 900 BC, give or take, a little bit. They don't really – they really have no idea when these are made. Like you go to all the monuments and it says made somewhere between 1500 BC and 400 BC.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
They'll say 1500 BC and 400 BC. And so they really are uncertain about how old a lot of these monuments are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But if we shoot for dead center 900 BC, the Phoenicians out of the Mediterranean are launching these sailing expeditions around the coast of Africa. These are the ancient world's greatest sailors that we know of. And so there were like experimental archaeological or scientific, I don't know, expeditions done that show if you would send one of these early Iron Age boats or if you send any ship –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
out of the gates of Hercules or the Strait of Gibraltar, and you send it out into the Atlantic, and it drifts just a little bit too far without turning south along the African coast, it will be carried by a current across the Atlantic Ocean down into the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and straight into the Gulf of Mexico.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And if that had happened, if people who had looked like they're in the old world like this guy, if that had happened, Somebody from the Old World, the largest civilization at the time, the empire in this area would have been the Olmecs. And the reason I feel so strongly about that is because we do not have flags, turbans, or boots in the ancient Americas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
This guy looks nothing like a Native American. And the flag, turban, and boots are all Old World features.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's this raised relief art style. So people talk about it a lot with Gobekli Tepe. I mean, think about this. This is 11,600 years ago, and you have artisans and stonemasons who have been practicing for so long that now they're able to take a blank piece of stone and carve the face off to reveal the artwork from underneath it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Not carve the artwork into the stone, but carve the stone away and reveal this sculpture from underneath. Yeah. How similar does that look? It's bizarre, right? Real similar. And so it's the exact same kind of art style that you see in the Olmec realm.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You know, I'm writing a paper about this, but this might be a good place to talk about it. So, you know, the handbag mystery is very fascinating. We have them in Assyria. We have them in Mesopotamia. As far as I know, I don't think one's been found in Egypt. You can see them on the top of those T-pillars in Gobekli Tepe. And there's one in the Olmec realm. Are you familiar with this? No.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Monument 19, if we can look that up. I mean, dude, I think it's the coolest handbag. And when I saw it in person, I, like, jumped. I had been waiting years to see it. That's crazy. It's the same thing? Olmec Monument 19. So this guy, he's wrapped in, he's sitting in Quetzalcoatl. Could you do the one at the top left where we get the full picture? There we go.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So this stone is probably about this big. It's probably about this big, and it sits on a table like this. So he's sitting inside the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl. And so he's sitting inside the feathered serpent, and he's holding this handbag. And I'm not sure – so he has this – and if you see, he has a feathered serpent mask around his head as well. I'm not sure what exactly is above him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Well, there are actually two – It's really hard to make it out. But what's above him, that little box-looking thing, is some kind of box that's being held up by two birds on each end. But the important thing here is the fact that this is the first depiction of the feathered serpent in all of Mesoamerica that we know of.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And it might be the oldest handbag known as far as what we have official dates for. And so the idea here is that he's some kind of sacred shaman, bringer of enlightenment, bringer of knowledge, something like that. And so I had been on the hunt for another handbag. Everywhere I go, I'm always looking for handbag. I was in Cambodia a couple weeks ago. I'm
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
going around the temples of Angkor Wat, and there's hieroglyphs and carvings all over the walls. I'm looking for a handbag. I can't find one. But when I was in central Mexico, I was at a site called Cacashla, and I found another handbag person. I've never officially published it. It's on my X if you'd want to look it up. What is the timeline for that one? They don't really know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
When you look at the monument, it says anywhere from 1400 B.C. to 400 B.C. That's just what they think. I mean, the Olmec realm is so uncertain, and we don't have hard dates for almost anything. They appear on this historical timeline as a fully-fledged civilization capable of creating what you're seeing from the very beginning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Just like so many civilizations, it's like as soon as they arrive, you know, As soon as they arrive in the world, they're doing everything to the fullest capacity. And we don't have any evidence in the Olmec realm of them working their way towards being able to do things like this. It's just from the very beginning they're able to make monuments like this, move these 50-ton Olmec heads.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
The largest head is – you'll find this interesting. So – There was a nautical engineer that MEC, which is an organization I'm with. It's the Maya Exploration Center. It's run by Dr. Ed Barnhart. I'm a member of it. And one of the guys that worked with us traveled into the Olmec realm. He's a nautical engineer. He's fascinated with...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
He's fascinated with how were the Olmecs moving these huge heads up and down these rivers. So they live in, like, the rivers, swamps. They have to cross some mountain ranges. How are you getting these heads 90 miles away from the Sierra de la Tuxla volcanic belt? That's where they're pulling the basalt from. Because we found unfinished heads, like, at the base of these big basalt quarries.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And they're transporting them 90 kilometers away through, you know, like I was saying, rivers and valleys. 90 miles or kilometers? Yeah. I think it's kilometers. It's kilometers as the crow flies, I'm pretty sure. And so much further when you're actually dealing with the complications of the terrain. And so he was fascinated, like, okay, how do they get them to the river?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And then how do they get them on the boat? And when it's on the boat, how exactly does this work if they're transporting it by boat? And kind of the same mystery in Egypt too, right? Like how do the nuances of these things work?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So he devised this algorithm or whatever where you could put in the hypothetical size of your Olmec raft and put in the hypothetical size of an Olmec head into this database or whatever. And when you made a raft that was too big to go down the narrow stretches of the Coetzcalcos River, which is like the Olmec's Nile River…
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
When the raft was too big and too wide to actually go down the river and you put a five-ton Olmec head on it, it would sink that raft. But the smallest Olmec head is six tons, and the largest one is 52 tons. So how are they doing it? And this is something that all archaeologists have quietly known, this idea of they're just being transported on these simple balsa rafts must be wrong.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's unexplained. How are these things being done? And I just find this realm really fascinating.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And do they even know what language they spoke? No, we don't know what language they spoke. We don't even know what they called themselves. The only reason we call them the Olmecs is because Cortes, 1519 to 1521, he's moving through Mexico to conquer Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
During this time, you have these Spanish chroniclers that are taking in information, taking in information but not at the rate that everything's being destroyed. All these people are dying from this disease and influenza. And there's a record of what the people who lived in the Olmec region are called at that time in 1520, let's say.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And the Aztecs called them the Olmecs in their language Nahuatl. And those Olmec – the name means the rubber people or the people of the land of rubber. They produced rubber, and that's how the Olmecs were so rich so early on in time. But these were not – the people living in 1519 are not the Olmecs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
There has already – the Olmecs have fallen, and there are other cultures that have risen and fallen in this same region as well. The Olmecs are far, far, far, far into the distant past. Wow. The Aztecs maybe didn't even know who the Olmecs were. Whoa. So are you familiar with Teotihuacan? Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
The three massive – we have the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Moon, and then the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. And they formed this kind of like Orion's Belt alignment similar to Giza. Yeah. Well, you know, when the Aztecs arrived in Mexico, Teotihuacan had been abandoned for almost a thousand years, we think. So when they arrived, Teotihuacan is already gone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
We don't even know the name of Teotihuacan. We don't know the name of the people. We don't know the name of the city. We know their relationship with other people around them, like the Maya were at war with Teotihuacan, but the civilization had already fallen. So when the Aztecs arrived, the Olmecs had been gone for, Almost 2,000 years at least. The Olmecs had already been gone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Teotihuacan had been gone for 1,000 years. The Maya had already collapsed. The Maya collapsed long before the Spanish got there. And so, you know, it's just, again, like the Americas are just so mysterious and there's so much to know there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So kind of getting back to what I was saying is when I talk about the mysteries of the Americas, I immediately get accosted by other of my quote-unquote colleagues. I don't have any colleagues in the academic realm, but other academics who will immediately jump in my comment section on X or whatever, and they'll reprimand me, and they'll be like, oh, so back to the pseudo-archaeology, is it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I'm like, so I can't talk about anything that's fascinating. I need to talk about things that are boring so you don't get upset with me. And now it's just like the popular audience has completely had enough of it. And I'll have like 15 people jump in and defend me. It's fun to watch. Yeah. And they'll be like, OK, this is a perfect representation of what you guys do. I step just slightly out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
of this line or what you think is appropriate for me and I'm talking about things that are interesting that inspire people to be interested in the ancient world to go see these sites like these people they don't like you they don't like the people that you have on but how many people do you think you've sent to Egypt You had a significant impact.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
This show had a significant impact on me being interested in the ancient world. And I have traveled all over the world because largely some of this show inspired me to do that. And I'm probably one of the few people that found you because of Graham Hancock. Yeah, rather than the other way around. And, and so, you know, I've traveled all over the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
That went about as well as I thought it would when you told me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And then what I have done is inspired other people to travel around the world. So, you know, how many of these archaeologists that are keyboard warriors hiding, hiding behind, you know, a desk or whatever, how many of these people are inspiring people to travel around the world?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And, you know, it's just, it's just, again, we're about to reach this like archaeological Wild West where I don't really know what's going to happen in the future. It's,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
He had a great opportunity to win over the popular audience and come in and make a really good impression, and he did exactly the opposite of that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah. And the institutions are feeling the pressure of independent media, you know, like going back to the Go Beckley Tepe tree situation. It'll be really interesting to see, you know, like Jimmy's in an interesting position where maybe there's a way that, like,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
The relationship between independent people and the popular, enthusiastic audience and the archaeological departments in Turkey can have a better relationship because of these things in the future.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
From what I can see in the limited amount that I see – and this is the hard part is sort of we get a skewed view into the archaeological world or the academic world. And sometimes I don't even know what's what because –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
because the archaeologists that make their opinions known are usually the ones with really bad opinions you know and and then all the other people that are pretty agreeable they just kinda sit on the sideline right and it's hard to know like what are most people What are most of these future archaeologists – where are they thinking? Where's their mind at?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And some of the young people I talk to, they are fascinated by Graham Hancock. They may not agree with – I guess in a way I could say is they may love the first nine episodes of Ancient Apocalypse. But in the 10th episode where Graham gives the end of his thesis, they'll be like, OK, I see the evidence differently, but this is really fascinating.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And some of the mysteries you pointed out along the way are valid. Yeah. The idea of the artifact record of the tools that we have that the Egyptians in the old kingdom were using does not fit the megalithic architecture that they then produced. Okay, what's the answer to this mystery? Could it have been that we're missing a chapter?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
uh of of history that's before that where a different civilization did it or is there uh for some reason there's an artifact record that's lost to us today and so you have you know guys like graham who will come in and pause it well there could have been a lost civilization that that did this and then an archaeologist the young archaeologist may disagree with the lost civilization but they say but graham you really pointed out the fact and made it well known that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You know, the artifact record that we have of how they built the pyramids, that's a big mystery. And how they built the pyramids, that's a big mystery. This is worth considering. And they like Graham. You know, so a lot of young archaeologists, at least I say a lot, it's really just the ones I talk to in my spare time that are my age. They're fascinated by these ideas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And my hope is maybe these people become leaders someday. But at the same time, like, I don't know, to get ahead in that world, man, you got to be a dog.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Zahi is a really good example of what I think goes on in archaeology in Egypt. You know, you have a lot of different missions from different countries working in Egypt. You have like a German mission. You have the American mission, you know, different people working at different sites. And I can't speak to every country that's working there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You have Australian missions that are working in Egypt, digging at certain sites. But yeah. But, you know, when I watch Zahi, I'm like, yeah, this is the what you're seeing. This is the attitude that has been at the spear point of Egyptology for the last lifetime. And and you can just imagine what goes on. Like, I mean, think about being on a dig site with him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Think about working in his industry underneath him. Think about all the people that were a part of the discoveries that he made that feel so disrespected and so overlooked. You know, not once during that podcast did he ever acknowledge all the hardworking archaeologists that were actually there in the dirt doing all this hard work. He just took all this limelight.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so, you know, clearly his identity is tied into what's in his coffee table book. And, you know, for him to act like that's the Bible of Giza is insane. I own the book and I and I've read it and it has half of a page about the subterranean chamber in Khufu's pyramid. So it's it's you can write a whole book about that. What is your... I don't mean to interrupt. Keep going.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Oh, I was just going to say, I was just going to say, man, um... When you go to Egypt, there are some things that you're going to be appalled by, by like the modern Egyptian world. I do this series on YouTube called Megaliths You've Never Seen Before. And I'm always trying to like find these weird obscure blocks that you never see on Google. And I'm walking around the side of the Pyramid of Unas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah. And there's a turd on the side of the pyramid. A human turd? Yeah, and it's from the guard that's sitting up on top of the hill, the Egyptian guard looking down at me. And I go around to Land of Kim, who I'm traveling with. Have you heard of him before?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
He's an American that lives in Egypt, and he's got his theories on the pyramids. And I'm traveling with him, and I was like, there's a turd on the pyramid over there. And he's like, yeah, yeah, you know. And I was like, a tourist? And he goes, no, not tourist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so, you know, the poop on the pyramid is pretty much like that's kind of my mental, that's burned into my brain, my image of Egyptology in some aspects, like when it's isolated to Egypt. I can't speak for all the other missions that operate in Egypt, but what were you about to say?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I don't know. I mean, you know, I know that the Egyptians, it's obvious that they have technology that is lost to us today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah. But I really don't know. As far as the manufacturing aspects, the engineering, the potential usages of these artifacts, it's not really my specialty. These vases are – oh, this is a heavy one –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
These vases are fascinating, but I guess my interest would be studying what can we learn about the context around these things and how they existed in their world and how people interacted with them more so than what did these things – what were they actually used for I guess and how exactly were they made? And so I just don't know about Chris Dunn's theory.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You know, I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is like, well, you know, most of the pyramid is limestone and the interior is granite. I hear people talk about how like the makeup of the granite could be conductive in some way, but man, it's just, it's like the farthest thing from my set of knowledge. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, there's a lot of dark history in here. And so they're cattle rustlers that are out in Dryden, Texas, in Sanderson, Texas. And I mean, right on the Rio Grande. And that's how they made their money. They were fascinated, kind of like everybody, with finding gold, with finding lost Spanish treasure and Native American artifacts. So They're living in this area called the Reagan Canyon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, I find that fascinating. I think that the main drama around those scans was, you know, when the scans came out, I don't think anybody was denying what was seen on the scans. I think it was like they had the artistic interpretations of the art concepts that they produced of what they thought was in there. And I think a lot of people were like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, that was a little weird.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Because even me, I was a little bit like, huh? When they made a... They made an art concept of it, and they took the king's chamber and the relieving chambers in the Great Pyramid and superimposed it onto the Middle Pyramid. And they, I guess, quintupled it. Like they made five of them. And I was thinking like, why do that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Like you're kind of undermining what your skin is when you're creating like a fantasy image because – You're getting ahead of yourself. And when he was in there, they tested it all before. So he was able to scan up through the pyramid, and he got the pinnacle of the pyramid, and he got all four corners.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so they tested it, and they did it several times just to confirm that what they were getting was right. And I think the move-on scan only scanned like 19% of the pyramid. This is the 60s. But they didn't find anything, but the Stanford project came the next decade, and they found subterranean chambers under Coffers Pyramid. There's one like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
69 feet down and another one, 120 feet down, huge chambers, bigger than the chambers inside the pyramids. And so, um, yeah, I mean, I guess we just have to wait and see, um, what's going to happen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I know that the scan pyramids guys, the ones who found the, the void above, uh, the grand gallery in the great pyramid, I know they're interested in this now and they're going to verify whether, if this is true or not. And, um, Yeah, I'm interested in seeing how this goes. This could be a big year, man.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
If they actually drill into that void above the Grand Gallery, that's going to be a big deal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I have no idea. It's pretty big, right? It's the size of two semi-trucks? It's the same size or bigger than the Grand Gallery itself. And the Grand Gallery, when you go in, it's a huge building. You're inside a building inside of the pyramid. And it's as big or bigger than that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And the most conservative explanation is that it's an open interior that served as a ramp where they were pulling the blocks up higher up to the top. Nobody really knows exactly how they were built. And the angle of that grand gallery is really, really steep. I don't know that you could pull an 80-ton granite block up an angle that steep.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It seems like everyone who's an expert in that, you know, who studies independently is like, no, you're never going to pull weight up. To be honest, I have no idea. You know, I'm... I was fascinated when I heard an Egyptologist when I was in Egypt in January, and I was asking him, what do you think that they're going to find in that void?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And he was telling me, I think that that's where Khufu is buried. And I was like, oh, okay, really? So you actually think that he's still in the pyramid? And he was like, yeah, I think all the rest of it was a decoy. And I think that his son, who's able to continue his legacy, like permanently sealed him in that in that tomb. And I was like, that's that's fascinating.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And and I said I said, you know, there's other voids that they found, too. What do you think of those? And so we're standing on this felucca at 1 a.m. on the Nile and we're just, you know, shooting the shit. And he was like, he's like, I have something to show you. And he pulls out his phone. He was like, I cannot send to you, but I will show you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
There was a lot of things that he wasn't familiar with, like Zep Tepe. It's either the Turin or the Turid Kings List, which talks about the pre-dynastic, like, semi-mythological kings going back, you know, tens of thousands of years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
For one second, he showed me a photo of the inside of a chamber that I hadn't seen before. And it hasn't been published yet. I'll let you know when it comes out. But it's burned into my mind. It's from the floor, shooting across the room. All you can see is two walls meeting each other and a roof. And I said, that's in the Great Pyramid? And he was like, And he wouldn't share it with me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I didn't want to press him too much. That one stole his phone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Well, you know, man, that's happening all over the world. Like this delay of information is all over the world. Do you remember the tunnels that came out or the – maybe it's in November, the headlines that – no. Yeah, it was in November. The headlines that came out about the tunnels that were found under Cusco in Peru that connect to Sacsayhuaman and they go underneath the Cora Concha.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
They knew about that a long time ago. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's documented. In fall of last year, I made friends with the head archaeologist at that site. And one early morning at like 4 a.m., he took me down inside part of the tunnels. Whoa. Yeah, I was in there before it all came out. And he took me into... So all these archaeologists, they live on site. And these are all Inca people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So they believe that they're studying their ancestral heritage. These are really good people. And I'm in their shoddy little home that's on the archaeological site. I mean, they probably make no money. But they're just so passionate about this. And they feel like they're doing something that's one of the most important things anybody in the world is doing. And have you been to Peru? No.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
When you go to Cusco, man, the Sacred Valley, it has something there that not even Egypt has. I don't know how to explain it. Really? It's a sacred place. The Sacred Valley is exactly right. It's a magical kind of place. Machu Picchu, you should book two days when you go because you're going to get rained on on one of the days.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But you're out there on this 7,800-foot mountaintop, and it's so steep you cannot see the bottom when you're looking over the side of the city. And you're just in this sacred place in the middle of the Amazon up in the mountains, and it's just a different place, man. It has a type of charm that not even Egypt has. Egypt, you're going to be blown away by the structures.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You're going to be blown away by the pyramids and the temples. But this is something else. It has an otherworldly, like you feel like you're on some kind of like Star Wars planet when you're there. It's fascinating. Because of the environment? Yeah, it's like the environment. You know, I wondered if it was, when you're in Cusco, you're at 11,500 foot elevation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You know, how was he the former head of the Ministry of Antiquities and Culture? How are you not familiar with this?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I wondered if I was like missing oxygen to my brain. And I was like, whoa, this place is awesome. But no, it really is amazing. And the people are so nice. And so anyways, it was a trip. So what was that? I think it's I think it was very similar to Alexandria's library. I think it was a place of study where people are studying the studying the stars.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Archaeoastronomy is like is like the next frontier of archaeology. It's the way that people it's the way that ancient people are interacting with the night sky and what they know about the cosmos. You know, the Maya were calculating like millions of years into the future and millions of years into the past. And they had this numerology system that's just amazing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But anyway, so I'm at Sacsayhuaman, and they take me into this back room, and they show me all these bodies that they pulled out of the tunnels. And it was these – they thought that they were like sacred guardians of – whatever is inside of this tunnel. And these are all buried at Sacs de Beaumont. So there's like skulls everywhere. There's boxes and all these bones.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
There was like an obsidian mirror with like a little stick on it, a bunch of gold artifacts in this room. It was just boxes upon boxes upon boxes upon boxes. And I haven't seen any of this stuff published yet. So this is how much of a delay there is on archaeology. What is the delay in that stuff?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, it's what I think it is, is, well, you kind of have I would I would say it's a mix of a lot of different things. Let's say let's say the most non malicious side is that these countries are totally dependent upon tourism and they want to prepare like a media, you know, like a big media buzz to drive tourism. So they want to do it at the right time of the year.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And then it'll inspire people to book their trip down to the Sacred Valley. It's a money-making machine, right? It's their biggest draw to come and see this part of the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah. They just want to hold it off to like the right part of the year. This is something I've heard in Peru. This is something I've heard in Egypt. Do you remember the tomb of Thutmose II that was just discovered recently? I heard about that. So let me think that that came out two or three months ago. And when I was there in October, I had heard that it was found.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So these things are happening way, way in advance. Now, the other side is there's sort of this Zahiwas effect, like Ed Barnhart, my professor and mentor, he wanted to study in Peru whether or not the Inca or ancient Peruvians are fusing these andesite stones together. So you've seen how the stones fit together in the same way that they do at the Valley Temple in Egypt, the red granite. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So they're using this gray andesite, which is sometimes the andesite is harder than the granite in Egypt. And they're morphing these stones together at impossible angles. I'm sure you've seen the 12-sided stone, and maybe you've seen the scoop marks on the side of the stone where it looks like the outside of the stone was softened at one point, and you could scrape a piece off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so it's Dr. Barnhart's idea that somehow... Well, and it's not without evidence. So in the Chilean desert, the Inca are building upon – the Inca Empire were building upon roads that went all across South America. And these roads weren't initially – the foundations weren't laid by the Inca.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
They may have been improved by the Inca, but they go back to the Wari Empire, which predates the Inca, and it almost certainly goes back further than this. The southernmost point of these highways, it goes off into the Chilean desert, into the Atacama Desert, and they just kind of disappear into the desert. And for a long time, it's been a mystery of roads.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
What the heck are these Peruvians doing down in the Chilean desert? What is it down there? What's a resource that they need? But there are these acid deposits that are down in that desert, and somehow they invented this clay pottery that whatever they used to make it, the acid wouldn't melt through the pottery, so you could carry it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
There's evidence of this at Tiwanaku as well, which I'm sure you've heard of Tiwanaku. There's evidence of this acid at Tiwanaku, and people would talk about how the acid could melt the stones. And sometimes they talk about how bird poop or bird – I don't even know, like throw up or whatever could melt the stone. And so there's all these, you know, ideas or these myths about the stones melting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Anyways, Dr. Barnhart's idea was that those roads go down there because they're mining and collecting the acids and they're bringing them back and they're softening the outside of the stone. And rather than carving the stones to fit together, they're setting the stones on top of each other and it's creating its own morph, if that makes sense. The stones are morphing together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so he – there's two reasons, but you see them a lot as to why he thinks this. There was an earthquake in 1650 that destroyed the Spanish city that was sitting on top of the Inca city of Cusco. So you have this ancient city that's there, and the stones are so massive the Spanish couldn't tear them all down, so they just gave up and they built new buildings over it. In 1650, this –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Horrific earthquake knocked down the Spanish city and ancient buildings were still there, hadn't moved at all. In 1950, another earthquake happened, knocked down the Spanish city and the ancient city is still standing. So now these are preserved as cultural heritage monuments and they don't build over them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But they like a Starbucks or a KFC or a McDonald's will be built inside of an ancient Inca building. You'll walk in and it's like megalithic stonework inside of KFC. It's amazing. Wow. But it's everywhere. It's the whole city. It's the whole modern city. When you go one day, you just walk, walk, walk, walk, walk.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
One of the projects we're going to do for the Maya Exploration Center is I'm going to go down to Cusco for a month, and I'm going to make the world's first map of where all the stones actually are. There is a map that tourists get, but it's a shitty map. It's not even accurate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So that's one of my projects is I'm going to map all of these stones and where they are around Cusco, and it'll be like on an app or a website or something where you can find it. But yeah, it's just, it's incredible. So they preserve the stones.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Maybe just look up Cusco Cyclopean stones. We may be able to find an image. And I could show you something on my phone. I know I've got it on my phone. Okay. Maybe I could send it to you, but I'll actually send you the photo. Not these. So some of these are from Sacsayhuaman. Okay, so to the top left here, so that's the 12-sided stone. It's on this building.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
When you walk around this building, the name is escaping me right now. It's the Palace of Something. When you walk around this building, you're going to see some of the stones where an earthquake has separated. So you have two stones that sit perfectly on top of each other. Well, when an earthquake happens, one of these stones will slide back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And when it does, you'll see an angle that ramps up like this up to the exterior. And so what it looks like is the stone is placed on top and it's smushed the stone down. Does that make sense? Whoa. Man, if we searched hard enough, we could find it here. I will send you this photo. I've got it on my phone. Wow. Yeah. Just that idea is fascinating.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, I was having a conversation with, like, my mentor, Dr. Ed Barnhart. He's a friend of Graham. He was one of Graham's guest experts on season two of Ancient Apocalypse when he went to the Maya realm. He and I were talking this morning, and he was like, he's like, you know, it's become a battle of, like, who has this right to talk about these things, you know?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So it's not that they have to carve it perfectly, but rather that the weight of the other stone... They get it roughly the right shape and then lay them down on top of each other.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
um it's on it's on one of these walls so that one you have your cursor on that's fake i walked up to it and it's like hollow i was like tapping on it's just a fake wall um some i don't know why in cusco they have some they they some people will decorate their walls as to make them look like those cyclopean walls and you go knock on it and it's like plastic but there's tons and tons and tons and tons the majority of the city is just the ancient city
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, somebody went up to it in the middle of the night, like a drunk tourist, and started hitting it with a hammer, the 12-sided stone, which is like the most sacred stone in Cusco.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, okay, so you see this long, the stone of the 12 angles, that one right there in the middle? That stone is in that alley right there. If you could find it, but, you know, I'll send it to you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
yeah yeah yeah that's what's so weird about it like look at this stupid house that's falling apart that's on top of these ancient stones yeah it's it's crazy man it's uh it's an amazing place you'll walk around and just be consistently stunned by the amount of stone work that's there and what they are able to achieve and this kind of cyclopean stone work where the stones all have these you know no two stones are exactly alike um
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You see that stonework in one place in Egypt, which is at the Valley Temple next to the Sphinx. And you don't see that, as far as I know, recreated anywhere else. But in Peru, it's everywhere.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, so that's kind of a repaired wall. You can see that it fell apart and they put it back up. But these are mortarless buildings. Oh, hey, if you go just one below the one that you're at right now, so this is the Temple of the Moon at Machu Picchu. Look at the size of the stone wall. That's one stone on the lower part of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And you can see that the size of the stones that are together, as earthquakes have rattled the city, the wall still kind of holds together. It bends and holds together, completely mortarless. It's just fascinating. And on top of that, Machu Picchu itself... 60% of the megalithic construction work is in the foundation of Machu Picchu. So it's underneath what you're seeing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And there are areas that are roped off where you can go down like underneath the city, but it's all roped off and I don't know a lot about it. I got a little bit of a photo of where you can go down into these, I think they're like man-made labyrinths that are underneath the city, but there's a lot more there. And so when you're there, you just get this, like, intrigue.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I was curious how Egypt would stack up because I did Peru last year. And then the day I landed from Peru, I headed off to Egypt for a month. Damn, what a life. You got a great life, dude. That's cool. Yeah, well, thank you. That's really cool. How far is this from Nazca? Very far. Peru is deceivingly big. Peru is like half the size of the United States. Really? It's really, really big. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah. I had no idea. Yeah, the Nazca Lines are really, really, really far away. It's very hard to do a – you can't do a tour of like all of Peru. It's too big. It would be like it would be like if you were going to go on a United States tour, you'd have to pick a place to go because it's just so massive. Usually when people like do a tour of Peru, they'll pick like Paracas, Nazca.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Does the fact that I have a degree in anthropology, that's what gives me the right to have... more of an opinion on somebody else, that's kind of what it's become. And it's like one side is accosting the other over their fascinations and their interests and the fact that they're able to make a living from the things that they're fascinated about and talking about it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You know, you pick these desert coastline areas and you go see that because to get from there to the Sacred Valley is quite a journey. Yeah. Yeah. It would take it takes like a day and a half of consistently traveling to actually get there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah. Man, there's going to be so much like that that's going to be found. What is all that stuff? Well, you know, it's amazing how exactly... One, what's the inspiration for making these giant – the sophistication is in the planning and the math behind how exactly you make these images in the ground that are miles wide and very intricate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Like if you look at the spider, the spider – there's a spider there that's anatomically correct for a local spider that's there. And there's some aspect about the spider and a detail that they incorporate there. That you would only know if you were like really studying these little creatures and wanted to recreate it on a massive scale. But the legs, man, they're mapping.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I mean, look, this is an enormous thing in the ground that if you don't have flight, you're never going to be able to know that you did it. That you did it precisely, right? Or unless you had very meticulous planning and everything. But again, what's the inspiration for that? What's the inspiration? Why would you be doing this? What is this for?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Well, you know, the Nazca, the exact timeline of their civilization is a little bit blurry. But, I mean, they had disappeared more than a thousand years before the Spanish arrived.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, he does. I actually think that's a pulpa line, which is a different culture that does the same thing. If you look up pulpa lines, you may be able to find it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yes. But this is AI. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. This is the AI. Oh, wait. Look at the shark. Look at the shark on there. Isn't that cool? So you have seafaring. Dude. Okay, do you know of Vanapu in Easter Island? I think it's called Vanapu. It's this platform building that on Easter Island with all the big heads that is the exact same architecture as what we're seeing in Peru.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
These people are traveling out into the Pacific Ocean and back. You know, it just, it's fascinating, man. Thor Heyerdahl with Contiki, he proved it. Yep, there we go. Yeah, so, you know, it's fallen apart. It's not the same stone. It's a local volcanic sandstone, I think. I don't think that this is basalt. It might be basalt, but it's a volcanic stone. I'm actually pretty sure it's basalt.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And it feels like academia has become bitter because being in the academic world is a very rough and jaded place. And a lot of young aspiring archaeologists who existed, who maybe would have had an approach like me, but existed during this time where you could only... have your pursuits if the university signed off on it, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's made out of the same thing of the Easter Island heads. So you have this Vanapu, but another project that my exploration center is working on later this year is we're going down to make a new updated map, archaeological map of Easter Island, Rapa Nui. And I'm not going, but this is Dr. Barnhart doing it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And there's another site down on the remote end of the island where there's another structure like this that you never see mentioned. And so that we're going to document that and put that out. So there's no doubt that, I mean, these people are incredibly advanced, incredibly connected, incredibly intelligent. And it's just so mysterious. OK, do you know of the Blythe lines? Have you heard of this?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah. Yeah. We should look this up. Yeah. So where's Blythe? Oh, I think it's right before you get to Nevada. You're like driving. So if you if you you'll pass right by if you're driving from Las Vegas into California, I think. So Blythe lines. Yeah, we should. Yeah, we should zoom in from Google Earth. This would be cool.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Oh, so that's Blythe, California. You might be able to look up Blythe lines.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, they're huge. Whoa. So, dude, this is not the fuck is that this? This is I mean, to me, it's pretty obvious that there are people who are and this is they think that this is younger than the Nazca lines. But even if it is, it's pretty obvious to me that you have traders and you have people who are very capable of traveling all up and down the Americas. It's all interconnected.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And how many of these lines exist? It's not really majorly studied, but I think that there's a few of these of these images that are out there and more that are further off into the desert that some people have. One of them was a monkey. How do they even know what monkeys are?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Well, OK, here's that's a great that's a great question there. Were there monkeys in California? No, I doubt it. But an idea of how this could happen is – so at Teotihuacan, like I was talking to you, this is an hour north of Mexico City. There were monkeys that we have found that were in zoos in Teotihuacan, like dead monkeys that are buried.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And this species of monkey is only found in the southern Amazon. So it's all the way up in northern Mexico. So all of these things are connected. Okay, another – Jamie, could we look up, please –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Okay. So those monkeys are in Peru. Well, even so, there are Amazonian monkeys that are coming all the way up here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
There's a fence around it. It could be a deer. Yeah, it could be a deer. But are deer out there?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Scroll back up again. Let me see that again. Yeah, they have no idea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Okay, do you know about... Have you ever heard of were-jaguars? No. Oh, dude. This is like... This is my shit. Okay, so were-jaguars. It is another piece of evidence of at least... Well, the lower part of North America connecting with the Amazon. Oh, dude. This is badass. All right, so... So the very first some of the first evidence that we have of people in the Americas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But now universities are like ideologically captured and every little thing that you do has to be aligned with the university. And so all of your fascinating ideas that you have in your mid-20s, you know, to your mid-30s when you're young and able to go off into the jungle and find something, they all get shut down by people who had their ideas shut down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So you think of like, where do you where do you imagine that people migrate into the Americas? Like, where do you think we would find the first evidence? Oh, boy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, maybe so. Or, you know, traditionally people think that maybe you would find it in Alaska coming in. You know, people migrating over during or before and after the Ice Age. Sure. Or, I'm sorry, during and before the Ice Age. And then some people might think that, you know, you have Polynesians that are skipping across the Pacific that are coming into Alaska.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But most of the time, it's West Coast. People think you'd find something out there. Some of the oldest evidence that we have are 30,000-year-old caves on the east side of the Amazon, on the east side, the opposite side of the Americas, as far away as you can possibly get from where people would have traditionally arrived in the Americas. Now, that evidence is constantly changing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
There's constantly new things that are being found, like white sands, and there's 150,000-year-old bone tools or chisels that are being found where people were cutting into woolly mammoth bones, crazy stuff. But one of these old evidences is people in the Amazon 20,000 to 30,000 years ago on the East Coast in Brazil, on the Atlantic Coast.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And they have these, I think it may have been Teddy Roosevelt's granddaughter that found this. She was a South American archaeologist. She was inspired to go to the Amazon. It's really interesting. In the Olmec realm, there's what's called a were-jaguar. It's just like a werewolf, spelled sort of the same. But you have these two different dichotomies in the Olmec world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You have the Olmec heads, which, by the way, I brought you a head.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So this is made... So this is made from basalt by the modern Olmec people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, super cool. So these guys – Thank you. These guys, we don't know who they are. We don't know exactly what they represent because they're just guys with normal faces. They have Olmec faces, but they're all wearing this helmet. What the hell does the helmet mean? It could be two different things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's a signature of their divine rulership, like we think they might be kings, somebody who can commission a monument this big. This is a testament to his power. Or these are revered ballgame players, the Mesoamerican ballgame. I'm sure you've dove into this a little bit. Or it's both, that the most masculine thing that you can be is a great Mesoamerican ballgame player, and that's the king.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But now it's like it's the Wild West where you can have somebody like me or whoever, put together an expedition and, you know, I legally cannot start digging up the ground and excavating things, but I can go and document things and survey things on my own, you know, with local permission, whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
He wants to see himself out of it. It's the same thing as Marcus Aurelius' son. Why am I forgetting his name? The really bad emperor. God, I can't remember his name. But anyways, he wanted to be seen like Hercules fighting in the Colosseum. And, um, so we think this might be a kind of similar thing. There's a whole different type of people that are existing in the Olmec realm.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Um, we can look up, uh, uh, Olmec where Jaguar, please, Jamie. Um, thank you. And, um, There's a whole different type of person. So here's one image. If you keep scrolling, you'll see images that are carved into... So this is a little bit of a better image right here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But sometimes when they're carved into jade and you can see the light reflecting off of it, you get a better image of what these things really look like. So where Jaguar, Olmec, and maybe do jade. Oh yeah, there we go. Top right. Yeah, check that guy out. So that's a human. That's not an animal. It is a human who has turned into the essence of a jaguar.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And we see this everywhere, all over the Olmec world. But they're never the colossal heads. They're always in jade or they're smaller Olmec monuments. And sometimes the heads are maimed, like the head is just completely destroyed. And there's these jaguar claws that are carved into an Olmec face, like tearing apart its face, tearing apart the symbol that's on the top of their head.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so a lot of people have wondered, like, why are these scratch marks in all of these Olmec monuments? But all the scratch marks only appear in Olmec monuments that are not the were jaguar. And so what I think – this is a little bit of research that I'm doing, and I'm writing a book on the Olmecs right now – is what I think is there's a feud between the rulers and the shamanic class.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I think that these were jaguar people, these people who are taking some kind of hallucinogen, taking a psychedelic, and basically imbuing the essence of a jaguar in some strange, crazy way that we can't explain, these are feuding with each other. And when I'm in – And I'm in these museums where you have these mushroom stone effigies that are all lined up. I'll ask a local archaeologist there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I'll be like, so these mushrooms, do you think that these depict hallucinogens that they may have been taking to get high? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. No. I'm like, really? You look at all the crazy shit that ancient Americans are making. If you look at ancient American artwork anywhere, you can tell it's all mind-bending stuff to look at. Clearly, I think they're being influenced by plants.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Now, this were-jaguar isn't just isolated to the Olmec world. It also pops up at a place called Chavin de Huantar. Have you ever heard of this? No. This is in the Andes. It's one of the oldest cities in the Andes. So before Chavin... We can follow the DNA evidence of burials.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Like you can tell, okay, these people are younger if we carbon date their bodies that are buried underneath these temples, and they're related to these people that are older. So you're trying to piece together this DNA web, but it's very, very loose.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So there's a place called – there's a culture called Kerala Supe culture, and they are building pyramids before the old kingdom of Egypt ever even existed. This is 5,500 years ago at least. on the coast of Peru, like right on the beach. And there's like 15 huge pyramids out there. But this is a non-pottery, non-artistic culture. So we don't have pottery and we don't have art from them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Oh, well, I mean, yeah, if I got permission, but I mean, you would be, it would be next to impossible for me, for somebody like me to do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And we don't have stone statues or anything like that, just these structures. And from what we can tell, they keep getting hit by these like apocalyptic storms, these tropical El Ninos and La Ninas that are just
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
destroying their civilization and they're trying to to rebuild it again and eventually they say you know what forget this we're moving up into the andes well when they move up into the andes on chevin de wantar they then come in contact with amazonians they meet amazonians for the first time and all of a sudden these people they have pottery they have art they have gods they have a pantheon they have stone statues and they are were jaguars they they are these shamanic people
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Oh, this is from – oh, is this on my – oh, cool. So I posted about this today. So these faces right here, these are on the side of the Temple of Shevin that faces east off into the Amazon. And when you look at Shevin pottery, it's the same as Amazonian pottery in the region. So the people of the Andes –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
As soon as they interact with the Amazon, they take – they acquire this religion, this culture, this iconography. They completely change as a people, and they start building – the first structures that we know of that have interiors because before this, these pyramids that were out on the coastline, you're like walking on top of this big stone mound, but it's Chavin.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's a, it's a huge square style building that you can, that has open doors that you can walk in through. And all of this happens as soon as they interact with Amazonians. And so, yeah, so this is, it's a huge structure. And the stones that make up the staircases, oh my God.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Oh, well, you would have the local universities there who also have their own high credentialed people who are going to – if I don't come in with a PhD, I'm never going to go get a PhD. But if I don't come in with something like that, then I don't have the experience. I don't have the authority to be able to do something like this, and they would never trust me to carry out like a good excavation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Okay, have you seen, the name is escaping me right now, but Wandering Wolf went out there, Michael Collins, and he saw these big trilithon stones that are sitting on the side of the mountain in Peru. Do you remember this? Giant stones. That white stone is the same white stone that's used in the staircases and on the door jams and the lintels here at Chavin.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So you see the open door right there at the bottom? Yeah, so those white stones on the side, Those stones may have come from that quarry that he went and visited, where those gigantic, you know, trilithon, balbec-sized stones are. How far is that? It's really, really far from here. I don't know. That would be something good that I should know. So some of it's megalithic, some of it's decent size.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's really that front wall right there with that entrance, the steps going up to it. And then on the inside of the temple, you have the megalithic stonework. And then you have this... Then you have this monolith on the inside. So you see this guy? Look at that. That's a human with jaguar fangs coming out of his mouth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And all of these tenon heads that are on the side of the temple, they're facing out towards the Amazon. It's telling us that this religion, this idea of these people who are –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Somehow, doing these shamanic practices, which I think are so clearly, so obviously, is plants like ayahuasca or whatever it is, inducing these people into a state of consciousness where somehow they're taking on the effects of the jaguar. You and Paul Rosalie talked about this, and when he was talking about his…
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
his experience with ayahuasca, I believe he said, and maybe it was on this show, that for a moment, like he shrunk down to the size of an atom and he's floating through the Amazon. And then all of a sudden he was looking through like the eyes of a jaguar for a moment. And this is something that- Constant theme amongst people who've done ayahuasca. Yeah, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So this is something that I think, I think it's evidence. I mean, we can go, we can talk about this forever, but I think there's so much evidence. Oh, isn't this cool? Yeah. Well, there's also evidence that jaguars eat the same plants. Yes, yeah. Have you seen this on, what is it, Weird Nature? There's a documentary out there called Weird Nature. Where the jaguar's tripping?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, and it makes it akin to catnip, and it's like the jaguar also has its own catnip.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Right, not damage anything. Yeah, yeah. So they would never trust that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah. And again, it fucking breathes air. Could be as ancient as 8,650 years. Yeah. Yeah. Good night. Good night.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Well, OK. OK, so two things there as far as what's in the Amazon. First, think about how let's just talk about North America above Mesoamerica. So, like, let's just... Let's just include like the modern day United States. Think about all the tribes that existed here, how complicated these histories are. You know, Squanto is born in the early 1600s among these tribes in Massachusetts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And when he comes back, he forms this thing called the Wampanoag Confederation, whatever, whatever. Just in that little area, there's all these different cultures with their own history, their own knowledge and everything. That's one little part of Massachusetts. Now think about the rest of the country and how vast and sprawling and intricate and how deep that history really goes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And you can just place the United States inside the Amazon. That's how big the Amazon is. Yeah. And we just refer to natives, tribes who lived in the Amazon as Amazonians. But it's so much more complicated than just that. Now, the next thing is this whole conversation about talking about the were jaguar.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I get a lot of flack for this topic because you have, let's just call it like boomer archaeologists who have this knee-jerk reaction to psychedelics and hallucinogens because it's so – ingrained in them that like all drugs are bad as if all drugs are the same, you know what I mean? And I'm talking to this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I was in Mexico last year and we were in the Yucatan and I was there with an archaeologist from the Midwest and he was an archaeo astronomer, which is like I was saying earlier, it's a guy who studies the way that I think it's like Pueblo ancestral tribes would have interacted with the night sky and study the night sky and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I've seen it all over the place. If you look on, I think like the Smithsonian did something on the top 10 forgotten places in the United States. It's like the most remote areas of our country. And somewhere in there is Reagan Canyon. And so out there, they developed this fascination for looking for lost Spanish gold.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's gnarly, man. Yeah, so much of Egypt is gone. And this is why I don't think that, you know, like I love the mystery of the ancient world and why I'm so baffled when people want to immediately shut anything down. Because of the amount of history that is lost to us is completely baffling. You know, Egypt has been getting looted
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I was like, I asked him, I said, okay, so what kind of hallucinogens do you think they would have had? And I think he told me like peyote and cannabis and stuff like that. And I was like, okay, so have you ever, you know, we were like every night we get together and we'd all smoke and just talk about ancient history and stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You know, you come up with so many interesting ideas and perspectives and points of view, you know, when you smoke with like an actual purpose and you're trying to, you know, think, I'm sure you know very well what I'm talking about. And so he's sitting around with all of us and he doesn't want – he's not interested. And I'm like, so you've been studying archaeoastronomy for this long.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Have you ever tried cannabis or peyote or anything that's up there? I think there's another one called Datura. Have you ever heard of this?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah. Well, it might explain why Teotihuacan civilization and all their iconography is so terrifying. Like if you look up the great goddess of Teotihuacan, it's these guys with handbags picking this detour and like putting them in their handbags. Oh, boy. Yeah, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so their whole civilization is like very dark and scary. But I asked this archaeologist. I said, OK, have you ever gone out and studied the stars from the Native American point of view while you're smoking cannabis or you take peyote? And he's like, oh, no, I wouldn't do that. And I'm like –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You have committed your entire life to studying this ancient culture that you know very well was studying the stars and taking hallucinogens. And you, as someone who's supposed to be an expert in this field, you don't want to put yourself in the shoes of these people. I was like, dude, if you laid out at night...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
With everything you know about the Pueblo ancestral people and you smoked weed for the first time or you did peyote or something. You stayed up and looked at the stars. You might have an epiphany about something that you've never realized because your brain is just operating in a different way than it normally does. And he was very slow to like – to be open to this idea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And, you know, the Zahi thing kind of reminded me of this is like, you know, he has preconceived ideas about his world and his personal beliefs that interact with the archaeology, you know? And so it's really hard for us to, Study the ancient world from a completely unbiased point of view because you have so many preconceived ideas about your modern world that influence your archaeology.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And that's why the widely – that's why there's no widely accepted – or it's not widely accepted among archaeologists – that Native Americans were heavily influenced by hallucinogens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I really think it's because so many of these people are older archaeologists that have a knee-jerk reaction to drugs of any kind, and they couldn't possibly fathom the reality that the culture they spent their life studying are all doing hallucinogens all the time. Unquestionably.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's totally obvious. It's completely obvious. Yeah. But, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It really is, man. I was telling my wife this. I didn't – I don't smoke a lot. When I do, I'm like out in Big Bend, out looking at the stars and stuff. And every time I smoke, it's like some kind of purpose. Like I'm in like some kind of sacred place and I don't do anything harder than just smoke cannabis. But whenever I do, I have some kind of realization about myself personally.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I don't know six or seven years ago when I first smoked I was laying up looking at the night sky and we had taken some photos out in the desert and I was looking at myself and I put on a little bit of weight and as I was looking at myself I had disassociated and I was like this person does not represent the brain that's in my mind I need to lose some damn weight you know I had this realization on myself the last time I was out I was out in Big Bend laying under the stars in the middle of the desert and and I had this like realization that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
We know for the last, let's say, 3,000 years at least, foreign nations have been coming in and raiding Egypt and taking the artifacts out. And so, you know, so much of the artifact record is lost. And I think that the real problem is the confidence with which somebody like Zahi speaks.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You know, all the time I spend traveling and I get to see so many amazing ancient sites and meet so many cool people. And I'm just constantly go, go, go, go, go, go. Like I'm trying to just make this life work. And I had this realization that the most important thing I do is make dinner for my wife and take my dog on walks. And I would have never had that like epiphany.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Like, dude, all this stuff is really cool, but it's for fun. And this is the stuff that you love. Your purpose is to take your dog on walks and spend time with your wife. And one day it's going to be to spend time with your kids. And every time I go into it with this idea that I hope that I have some kind of realization, I always do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And it's just like I have this – I know that ancient plant medicine is like the key to unlocking so much of the ancient world. And so –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And then you can take that same chemical and they'll pour it in the water and rather than fishing or spearing fish in the water or hooking them, they pour it into the water and they create these little canals off of the Amazon and fish, piranha, whatever will swim up in it and they pour that liquid wherever that hallucinogen isn't and it stuns the fish and they all come to the top and they only take what they need and they send the rest back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
which is another reason why I don't think that Native Americans are responsible for the extinction of all the megafauna in the Americas. Because, you know, okay, so I'm out in the woods in East Texas a couple weeks ago, and we're just walking around, and we're talking about the Caddo people. Have you heard of the Caddo Indians before?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I was trying to talk to my friend who doesn't know a lot about Native Americans, trying to, like, tell him, trying to give him the essence of the people. And the words came to me, and I was like, if nature itself took an anthropomorphic form. That's the Native American. These are people that lived perfectly with their environment or tried to, at least most of them did.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And yeah, it's just amazing, man. So much can be learned from that. They did some wasteful things. I know, I know. Like the buffalo jumps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, that's true. And I'm really speaking in generalities. Like I could go on and on about all the horrific things that the Aztecs did. This is just a general – Or the Comanches. Or the Comanches. Did to other Indians.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's not like this was a – it's not at all like this was a utopia at all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Exactly. Jaguar is not utopia if you're an antelope. Yeah, yeah, very much so. So, you know, there's some nuance there. But, yeah, I just – I don't know. It's just fascinating. You had a good point in a podcast earlier. I think you were talking about Oriana, his expedition down the Amazon, and you were talking about how he was able to use the stars to navigate back to Spain.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's okay for you to have your perspective and the way that you view the ancient world based on the data that's been available to you. It's okay to have your opinions. But when you're so confident about your opinions that you then begin to chastise other people, put them down for it, and then go the next mile and start making accusations of them being a racist and things like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And you were like, well, you know, that's what people used to do. Everybody was an astronomer. How much of this experience has gone to us today? We don't sit around and look at the stars anymore. And that's one aspect. We don't interact with natural plant-based hallucinogens anymore. There's so many things about the natural world that we don't interact. with.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so many of these people who still today exist in the natural world like the wild, you know, Percy Fawcett interacting with these Amazonian tribes that still live like this today. These people are still around. They're still existing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Man, that is crazy. Wild. I mean, you're looking into the past.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Just in your frame right there, what you were looking at has existed since the beginning of time. Yes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
They're in the same time zone as you are right now. Same time zone. Whatever it is right now, it's the same time. That's crazy. And when our civilization, when we all destroy ourselves and thousands of years go by and everything in the studio is gone, it all turns to dust, those people will continue the legacy of humanity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
No, you are exactly right. So when the Spaniards- That's Country Boy Can't Survive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
song in reality. Dude, you are exactly correct. I mean, you're exactly correct. So when the Spaniards arrive, they obviously they land in the Bahamas with Columbus 1492. But they come down to like Hispaniola, Jamaica. And in the early 1500s, they start poking around on the shores of the Yucatan. And. And they're kind of trading and interacting with these people. These are explorers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
They're all curious. But they didn't realize that they were giving these Native Americans disease, and that disease was spreading through the Maya world. And maybe more than a decade later, when Cortez arrives in the Maya world, he documents how all the Maya people are very scrawny and small and sickly and weak. He didn't realize they were all dying off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So eventually Cortes conquers Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, in 1521, and he sends Pizarro down to find the gold that the Aztecs were getting from South America or from this distant land. They didn't 100% know exactly what South America was yet. He goes down to South America and he conquers the Inca Empire. And then after that, Oriana descends down the Amazon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And when he descends down the Amazon, he sees these cities that would go on for 15 miles long. I mean these 15-mile long cities full of millions and millions of people, these giant circular stone buildings, these huge bustling civilizations everywhere.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And then later on in the 1700s, 1800s, and then really densely in the early 1900s, like with Percy Fawcett, Theodore Roosevelt, everyone around them, they were looking for these big cities that the Spaniards had seen, but they didn't exist and they didn't find any evidence of it at all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And a lot of people like the British and the Royal Geographic Society, they brush it off as, oh, the Spaniards were lying so that they could secure funding for further expeditions. And this was like their livelihood, the way that they could stay rich. Of course, then the LIDAR proves that these civilizations were there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Now, the stuff that's been excavated in the Amazon, we haven't excavated anything in the center of the Amazon. It's really expensive. It's hard to do. Archaeologists don't want to live out there. Whatever, whatever. There's a million reasons why it doesn't happen. But on the peripheral of the Amazon, there are areas that get cut flat for logging.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Like as civilization slowly encroaches on the Amazon, they are finding these villages that are these – they're basically cities that are these huge geoglyphs that are cut in the ground. Have you seen these in the Amazon? They're huge. I believe so. Yeah. I believe this is some stuff that Graham was showing. Maybe so. I think Graham has talked about this before. Maybe he was in America before.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
What should he look if he's looking for images? Just Amazon geoglyphs. They'll come up. There are these huge squares. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, we definitely talked about this. These things are gigantic, and they're all over the peripherals of the Amazon. But these were the preppers living on the outside.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
They weren't living in the hustle and bustle of the million-plus population city in the middle of the Amazon. These are the guys living on the outside, and they all survived this apocalyptic disease that went through.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
The mountain folks. Yeah. Actually, I'm moving there tomorrow. Are you really? Yeah, I'm in the middle of moving right now. What a cool place to live. Yeah, it's beautiful up there, man. Dude, it's an ancient place. Have you heard of the Nantahala Rainforest?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Oh, you got to go there tomorrow. Where's that? It's in western North Carolina in Appalachia. I grew up going to Nantahala every year. My parents live in Nantahala now. And it's a beautiful, completely magical place. And it was part of what inspired this like explorer, you know, kind of thing in me. When you're there, even as a kid, I knew that this was an ancient place.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It turns out, as an adult, when I start researching it, it's this pocket of green, I mean solid, dark green rainforest. In the U.S., we have three rainforests. We have Hawaii, we have Oregon, and we have the Nantahala rainforest that most people don't know about. It's this pocket in the middle of these mountains that has looked exactly the same since before the Ice Age.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's one of the oldest places in North America. Wow. And it's just an incredibly magical, old, ancient place. And I'm just, like, drawn back there. But anyways, yeah, you should go check that out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, yeah. Well, so my wife is, so she's like from South Carolina and she came to Texas when she was younger and then we met in college. And my family, when we first moved to the States, like my family moved to North Carolina in like 1694 or something crazy like that. And so we have some roots up there. Have you ever been to Gatlinburg, Tennessee? No.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I really did not like the letter that they wrote to Netflix to try to get season one taken down of Ancient Apocalypse. And, you know, they sometimes they'll rebuttal and say, oh, well, you know, I never blatantly called him a racist. Like, well, OK, even if you didn't blatantly do it, you insinuated it and you were OK with insinuating it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So the first name of Gatlinburg was Reagan Town. And so that was where my family were one of the founders of that town. There's an old hotel there called Reagan Motel. So my family's originally from there. And then they moved down to Texas and started cattle rustling in the late 1890s. Um, but I don't know, just drawn back up there. I always love vacationing there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so my wife and I are like in the middle of moving right now. And so, uh, two days ago we packed up these two U-Hauls, drove them to East Texas to my in-laws. And then we drove to Austin last night, got a hotel doing this. Tonight we drive back to East Texas and then tomorrow we drive to North Carolina. Wow. Yeah. So what is the history in terms of like human occupation in that area? Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Man, the people sprouted out of the ground. Yeah, it's that old, man. That's something I'm really looking forward to getting into. And I'm kind of excited in a way to get out of Texas because it's hard to study Native American history in Texas because you've got to travel so far and everything's so arid.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Like, you know, Austin, this was an ancient Native American settlement here that we have built this city on top of. The Alamo in San Antonio was built on top of a Native American settlement. And all of our major cities are just a reskin of an ancient city. And in Texas, it's really hard. We have the Galt site that's here in Austin that proves that Clovis First was wrong.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Maybe you're familiar with this. But up there, you're closer to mound country, where all the mound builders are. I'm a little bit north of that. But in North Carolina, it's one of the places that the Spaniards had a really hard time infiltrating because of the mountain ranges and because of how fierce the Native Americans were.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And so the archeological projects up there are headed up by like two hillbillies that live in the country, and they're the coolest guys. They own this little department store called the Tiger Store in Hayesville, North Carolina. And they have dug up like Spanish armor under the ground and Spanish swords and all kinds of crazy stuff. And I've gone hiking out there. And, oh, we got to look this up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Jamie, can we please look up Judicula Rock? It's one of the only megaliths in North America. And it's this gigantic megalithic stone that has the same sort of art style as all the Native American stuff that we've seen. And it's some kind of primordial map of western North Carolina. It's massive, dude. You couldn't fit it in this room. It's called Judakula.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
If you just try to spell it in some way, you might find it. There you go. And there's an old photo of an archaeologist laying behind it. There you go, to the top left. That one or maybe the one that's colorized there. That one's really, really pretty. So nobody knows what this is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And the Native Americans who were asked some of the stories about the early Native Americans who were asked how this got here, who moved it there, their stories are that giants placed this and that giants used to live in this land. And that they created these stones.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I have gone around when I was a little bit younger, I would go through the rainforest and like wandering up these hillsides and you'd find these huge stones laying there with all of these images carved into them. And of course, you know, there's no funding that's out there. There's not even a there's not even a police department out there. So no research is being done out there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And some of these people exist in a realm where in their little bubbles where they throw around the word racist all the time. And then when they get to the wider world where the rest of us exist, they find out very quickly that none of we don't throw that term around lightly and accuse people of these things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But it's a fascinating place as old as time itself. And all of these people are from like a chapter before contact period. Whoa. Yeah, it's fascinating, man. It's a very ancient, mysterious, mystical place. It's one of those places that kind of gives me the feeling that Peru gives me when I'm out there, that I'm in a very, very, very old place.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And of course, you know, the Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountain range in the world. Is there any theory as to the age of that? Well, I think when you go there, they attribute it to a culture that lived in the area between 100 AD and 1000 AD. But, you know, that's just totally guesswork.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
judicula and the cherokee indians yeah now the you know the the hard part about the hard part about studying some stuff with native americans in the u.s is that there's a lot of like you know modern native americans they're very prideful about their culture and and you know a little bit of mythology gets gets mixed in like when you go when i go visit the uh i forget what it what exactly it's called um
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But there's a there's a Native American village that still exists in this area of the country. And it's like operated and it's kind of a tour place where they take people through what the cities would have looked like or what the towns would have looked like in the middle of the rainforest. But the hard part is when I talk to the representatives there, which are Native American Cherokee people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
They'll tell me, oh, yeah, you know, the ancient people that were here, they used to be six foot five. They were very tall people or whatever. And there's no evidence behind that at all. And so it's hard to like, OK, we have Cherokee bodies. So are these are these oral memories that are being passed down through time that come down to the Cherokee?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And, you know, as a as like a, you know, a modern day American anthropologist, do I brush off what they say and just be like, well, you know, they're They're carrying on these myths about their people. They want to build it up. Or are they really holding on to something that's true? Because, man, I would love to talk to Graham about this. Okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So, you know, one of the biggest things that refutes, I know it sounds like I'm bouncing all over the place, but one of the biggest things that they try to use to refute the Sphinx's age, you know, about the Sphinx that could date back to the time of Leo 10,500 years ago or 10,500 B.C., 10,500 B.C.,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
is they say, well, there's no evidence that you could carry down the knowledge of constellations that far. You've heard this before, right? Like, how do we know that people in 10,500 BC even recognize the constellation of Leo? And how is that knowledge carried down? Dude, there is evidence of this. Okay, the squared spiral. Have you seen this motif anywhere? We can look it up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And then, you know, at the end of the podcast, when he said, you know, the kind of temperature came down. And then I think maybe you asked something like, you know, well, what can people do to help archaeology? And he was like, oh, well, you can donate to the SAA. But the SAA is the one that wrote the letter. And it's like, oh, man, that's just – It's not a good look.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Greek meander pattern. But you'll also see it in the American Southwest. You'll see it out in the Mississippian cultures. You'll see it in Mexico. You'll see it in South America, Peru. You'll see it in Greece. You'll see it in Egypt, Rome. This, yeah, this pattern.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So, you know, a lot of times this, they say that this is like, well, when people use the term swastika, the swastika is just two meandering patterns or squared spirals that are laid on top of each other. That's what it is. Yeah, so it's a squared spiral. But when you take two of those and lay them on top of each other, it becomes a swastika.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And you and I recognize where these meanders connect because of a certain recent culture that perverted this symbol and turned it into something evil. But this is an ancient symbol, and it's found all over the world. And it even dates back to Ukraine. You may be able to find this. There's an ivory bone handle in Ukraine from like 11,000 years ago that has this squared spiral that's on it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So this is 11,000 years old, found on every continent on the planet. Oh, yeah. So it's even found in pottery. You can see it in pottery in ancient China, ancient Japan. It's in Cambodia. It's all across the ancient world. And I was asking, oh, I know one that we could look up. Could you look up the Temple of Mitla in Mexico? So Temple of Mitla. And if we look there, you'll see it all up and down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Now, Temple of Mitla is a shamanic temple. They think it was like a Mecca site that people would go to. It was built to last for all of eternity. And of all the megaliths in all of Mesoamerica or ancient Mexico and Central America, this site uses the largest stones. So each one of these lentils that you see, this is like one solid piece of volcanic stone. Very, very hard stones.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Okay, so you can see the squared spiral, right? Can you see the step pattern that leads up to them? And you can probably find another photo where you see the step pattern leading up to the spiral. So it's like you're walking up steps into a spiral, and it's this loop that continues on forever. I have a ton of these photos on my phone. They're found all over Peru. There we go.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Um, now this is not quite exactly it. But okay, so what this what this really is this step pattern in this motif of the spiral here is it's the Big Dipper in the night sky, you can go look at the Big Dipper. and the Big Dipper changes over the course of the year.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So if you look at it as though it's not a Big Dipper, and you look at it as though it's a staircase to a spiral, that's exactly what ancient people are seeing the Big Dipper as. And the Big Dipper is spinning in the night sky throughout the year. So this ancient symbol is them documenting a constellation. For over 11,000 years, human beings have been documenting a constellation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So if you're looking for the proof as to whether or not people 11,000 years ago were recognizing, a lion in the night sky, boom, there you go. This is 11,000 years old.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, okay, so look in here. So it's a step up to a spiral, a step up to a spiral. And, dude, it's the Big Dipper. Just look at the Big Dipper in the future as though it's this constellation, and it's the same thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Your theory. This is my theory and, like, something I've been studying for a long time. But there are other archaeologists who – they kind of have a passive interest in this and they have said maybe it's the Big Dipper or something. But these aren't – these then people, if I were to go to them and be like, OK, well, you know this ivory bone handle in Ukraine goes back 11,000 years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So it's proof they'd be like, OK, stop. You know what I mean? So this is my theory that I have been studying for a long time. And everywhere I go in the Americas, I find that spiral pattern everywhere and I always ask people, what does this mean? Um, when I'm in the Mediterranean, I'll ask people, what does this mean? I'm going to go to, I'm going to go to Greece at the end of the year.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I'm going to ask because it's all over Greek temples, you know, and, um, and all I ever get from Greek archaeologists is that it's a river bullshit. It's not a river. And then in Latin America, I get a bit better of an explanation and maybe this is, maybe this is really it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
they think that it's like the, they think that it's like the, the step, the steps through life in the, in the rejuvenation of life. Right. So it's like, it's like the big dipper has some kind of esoteric meaning with it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But I, I have been thinking about this and I think that this, the reason that throughout all these ancient cultures, you see this meander pattern in so many different orientations is it's documenting, it's documenting the flipping of the big dipper through the night sky throughout the day. And, um, And that's all, you know, I'm trying to explain something that's 11,000 years old.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Oh, God, I don't know. I don't know. That's getting, like, beyond my level of knowledge with archaeoastronomy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, I don't know, man. I mean, the procession of the equinoxes, it takes at least, what, 12 to 24, it's either 12 or it's 24,000 years to be able to... If we wanted to investigate an ancient culture that's possible of being able to document this, it'd be worth looking into if the Maya were aware.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Yeah, well, and then check this out. Hipparchus' discovery detailed in his lost work, but referenced by Ptolemy, the pharaoh over Alexandria in the Almagest, 2nd century CE. So this is happening in the city of Alexandria. All this is being studied in Alexandria's library. Marks the earliest confirmed understanding of procession in scientific sense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Dude, that was lost in the burning of Alexandria's library. Yeah, how crazy is that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Several different times, like five different times. God. Mm-hmm.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
You would have to be transfixed. You know something interesting that I was just reminded of is this meandering pattern. It continues in the ancient Mediterranean world, so Greece, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, until Alexandria's library is burned and stops after that. You see it on the monument of Augustus. which dates to about 9 BC, but that's for his death. But Augustus would have seen Alexandria.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
He would have been familiar with these motifs. I believe after that in Rome, we don't see this motif anymore of the squared spiral. In Mesoamerica, in Mexico and Central America, This squared spiral motif stops with the burning of the Maya codices from Diego de Landa in like 1574.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
He gathered all of the writing in the Maya world together in the city of what is modern-day Merida, and he burned it all up. And it was called multiple pyres. So imagine, let's say a pyre is at least from the floor to the ceiling stacked with codexes. Like have you ever seen the sticky notes that are connected on each side? That's how the Maya books looked. and he burned all that history.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Today, we only have three or four that exist, and one of them is controversial as to whether or not it's a forgery. So he destroyed all of the written history of the Mesoamerican world in one fell swoop. And to give you an idea of just how much it was, when the Spaniards arrived in the Aztec world, so the Aztec were standing on the shoulders of giants, being the Maya and all the other cultures.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Well, you know, so the first time Caesar is chasing his rival Pompey across the Mediterranean, and Pompey flees to Alexandria, and... Alexandria was kind of in the basket of Rome. The Ptolemies, who are the Greek pharaohs in Egypt – so the Greeks are controlling Egypt after Alexander comes in 332 BC. So Alexander dies. His best friend Ptolemy becomes pharaoh. So –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
The Aztecs were producing... 250,000 pieces of paper a year. It's something like that. It's an incredible amount of written knowledge and all of that knowledge is burned and gone. And so, you know, just again, when archaeologists stand behind their opinions so strongly as to chastise other people for speculating about, oh, well, you know, this could be this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And, you know, there were bandits that would hide up in the hills and they would sack Spanish caravans and drag the gold up into the hills to not get caught, to hopefully come back for it later. And the Spanish are out there mining for gold and everything. So my family gets caught up in one of the biggest mysteries of Texas history.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
It's so silly because we're disconnected from the ancient world by a considerable margin. I mean, none of us really understand what's going on. I was having a conversation with...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Dr. Barnhart, we were at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, and we're looking at all these Maya gods up on this mural, and everything in Mesoamerica, whether it's the Maya, the Olmecs, the Aztecs, Teotihuacanos, Zapotecs, whatever, it's all very fierce and dark and scary, kind of scary to us.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And we're looking up at it, and he's like, you know, I've always wondered, like, where's the love in their religion? Like, you know, where are all the doves that you see, like, in Christian churches and stuff? And he was like, but, you know... In reality, if we could speak to them, we would probably be so embarrassed and shocked at how wrong our ideas are about who these people were.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And, you know, his attitude and his approach to the ancient world, I just love it because, you know, he just presents like the evidence that's available, gives his idea of what he thinks the evidence means while also saying, you know— This is just my idea from this. We could be completely wrong, and we probably are completely wrong.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Think about if you died and 5,000 years from now people started going through your belongings, what would they think of you? It probably wouldn't be a very good representation of you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I'm not going to say Egypt. I feel like Egypt is such a – like everyone says Egypt. I would say Egypt. I know. I know. If Egypt wasn't an option – But why would you want that to not be an option?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Man. Egypt is a creme de la creme, man. It's the most monumental, beautiful, like, you know, when you try to imagine what it would have looked like. You know, if you've seen visual recreations of the Giza Plateau, you know, the Valley Temple must have been absolutely stunning. Okay, so one day when you go to Egypt, hopefully you go this year.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
When you go to the Valley Temple, for me, it's the best thing in all of Egypt. I think it's more stunning what it must have looked like than even the pyramids themselves. The blocks are absolutely gigantic. Like one block is bigger than this whole wall. And brought from 500 miles south in Aswan, these are the ones with the cyclopean strangely angled stones like you see in Peru.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And when you walk in, most people ignore it, but that floor is a calcite white crystal floor. And so imagine when it was polished and when it was finished off, it must have been gleaming. And at some point in time, there were these diorite kofra statues. Maybe you've seen them before. They're like impossibly well-made out of the hardest stone in Egypt.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But the Ptolemies were very weak, not very good rulers. And so Rome kind of does like what the US does where they get pulled into conflicts. And then once they're there and they conquer everything, they seize all the power. And so Rome had done this to Egypt. And so they controlled Egypt and they were pulling all of their – they were keeping the Ptolemies in power.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
the hardest stone in Egypt and it's this busy black diorite gleaming polished statues and the lintels that go above would have allowed when the Sun you know reaches its like zenith in the sky in the day in the middle of the day it would have shot through these holes in the ceiling and so it would have illuminated the white floor and you would have had the solid black statues that are that are shining in this in the Sun's light and so you're walking in and it's like glowing inside of the temple and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And and when you walk outside the front door of the temple, there's a dock in it and you can see the dock like slopes into the ground. So the water isn't there anymore. The Nile is much further to the east now. But it would have. But the Nile came straight up to the front step of the of the valley temple.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
So you so imagine you're like you're going, you know, you have someone pushing your little boat along on a pike in, you know, in Egypt and you're you know, you're taking in like You know, you're taking in the nature around you and like the seabirds that are flying over you and the palm trees that are everywhere. And like imagine the sound of the water as you're coming up to the temple.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And it's this huge temple. It's the largest building on the planet at the time, probably, other than the pyramids themselves. And then you step into it and it is the most sacred, most impressive thing that exists on the earth at that time. no matter if it was made in 2500 B.C. or if it was made in 10,000 B.C., is the most impressive building that exists in the world at that time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And what exactly was going on in these buildings, I don't know. This is kind of another hot take of mine is, man, I don't believe that when you see all these pantheons of these gods in the ancient world, I do not believe that ancient people are making all this shit up and building all these temples for these gods that never existed just to control the masses, whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I mean, it's extensive amount of work all across the entire world. You know, the Maya are building temples for these gods, these beings that they're meeting. The temple of Luxor that you'll go to see, you know, the story goes that Amenhotep built this last chamber, which is made out of these huge—Amenhotep III builds this last chamber, huge megalithic granite blocks to meet the god Amun-Ra.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And I'm standing there inside the chamber looking around, and he's the only person supposedly that's allowed in. That's a story that we know how true that is. I don't know, but— And I'm just thinking, man, either is it more likely that all this is made up or is it more likely that they went to the extent to do all this because it was all real? And they're really interacting with these beings.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
The most realistic way I can think of is by being involved in shamanic practices and hallucinogens and interacting with things that do not exist in our 3D plane. And that adds to the allure of like when I'm standing in the Valley Temple, I'm like, what the hell is actually going on in here at this time? So after going through all that, I had to say Egypt. You have to. Yeah, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
As cliche as it might be. My second one would be like if I could be like, okay, take me to the height of Amazonian culture. Just let me see just how amazing it is. Right. You know, it really seems like stone architecture comes out of the Amazon. Now, where Paul lives, it's all clay on the ground. But when you get halfway through the Amazon, you start reaching like granite and limestone bedrock.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
the Roman soldiers were, and they were pulling all that grain into Egypt. And so Caesar follows Pompey, chases him to Alexandria, and so that Pompey can't flee, Caesar says, we'll burn the docks. Well, when you landed in Alexandria, you would land at this dock that went to a road called Soma Road. So you had Soma Road and Canopic Way, and it was like the street corner.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And that's on the eastern side. So you're in like Guyana, French Guyana, Brazil. And it's treacherous places to go through in the middle of the Amazon. But I think that that's where cities in the Amazon are going to be found one day. And it was towards the end of Oriana's expedition. So that's about where he would have been. And, man, I bet you there's stuff out there that would just amaze us.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
I think the Amazon is the origin – just me personally – I think the Amazon is the origin of American – pre-Columbian American, the height of their civilization. I think it's the origin of their religion and shamanic practices. I think it spread out all the way up to Mexico itself. And, you know, later on, the ancient Americans have a corn god, which they call the maze god.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
But I think before that, they had this were jaguar religion where people are taking hallucinogens and psychedelics. And so I think that all the evidence points towards that the origin of civilization in the Americas begins in the Amazon and spreads out from there. And I would love if a time machine could pull back that canopy and show me what the actual height of that was like. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
Have you ever heard the natives in Papua New Guinea and the songs that they sing that emanate through the jungle? Have you ever heard this before? I only study native people in the Americas. I've got my hands full with that. I can't really start studying. I'm fascinated by the people that live on Sentinel Island. And akin to that are the people, the semi-contacted people of Papua New Guinea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2328 - Luke Caverns
And when you listen to the songs that they sing, it reminds me so much of what I heard yesterday and what I've known. But when Percy Fawcett says he hears the songs they sing, it reminds him like, oh, this is an advanced culture. This is something that's being handed down through time. It's beautiful. It's timeless.