The Most Alarming Ancient American Mysteries | Luke Caverns

You're listening to a quick ad. You know what else is quick? Selling your car on Carvana. Just put in your vehicle information and we'll give you an offer. Done. No hassle, no negotiation, no guy from an online listing lowballing you. Which means by the time I'm done explaining this, you could have basically done it. Still haven't started? Hey, better late than never. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Something I think is so fascinating when we talk about the dangers that people moving west towards California was. So, you know the gold rush of the mid-1800s? I never realized this. One of the reasons you needed a wagon train wasn't just for convenience. It was so. So that you could make it past the Great Plains. Because quite literally, when you leave the woodlands and get into the Great Plains, it is literally an ocean of grass. It's just grass. There's no trees, there's no coverage, there's no protection. That's why they have the tent over the back of the wagon so you can have some protection. They set up tents. But you need that wagon train so everyone can stay together and stay along the same trajectory. Because there was no trails preserved in the Great Plains. The. A wagon trail three days later, like as the wheels are cutting through the grass, would disappear because the ground was so soft. And if it rained, it's completely gone. Gone. So people would emerge from this tree line into an ocean from horizon to horizon. No trees at all. And the only thing out there are roaming tribes of the Great Plains. And so in the Great Plains, you have this lack of convenience. Yes. That Native Americans had. So think about this. So in the woodlands, which would be most of the East Coast, you had a lot of convenience. You had a lot of rivers and you had a lot of wood to use. So you can have a much more sedentary lifestyle. There's more luxury, right? So this is why we have all the mounds on the East Coast. And people were staying put in one place. And when you're able to stay in one place, you're able to farm corn and build up these big pyramids. We call them mounds, but it's kind of. It's a little bit disrespectful or downplaying. The significance of it. These are full-on pyramids. If you saw them in ancient times, you wouldn't even know it wasn't made out of stone. That's how monumental these things were. And so it was a much more luxurious, sort of peaceful place. Less warfare. Less violent tribes. But in the Great Plains, think about this. You have. The reason that a lot of those natives were pushed to the Great Plains is because they weren't originally great warriors. Like the Comanches were just getting destroyed. By everybody around them until one day they emerged as great warriors because they're pushed out into the Great Plains where it's the worst real estate. So what do they have to do to survive? They have to become the most violent people around. And so in the Great Plains, imagine how fierce the natives are that are able to survive in the Great Plains, right? So you have this added element that you can get lost in the Plains trying to get to California. And then you also have the most savage Native American tribes roaming around the Great Plains. And this is the thing that I found so shocking. Is that the Great Plains Indians were such good navigators and had such a perfect understanding of their geography, of their own territory. That get this. If you were a large U.S. military convoy moving through Comanche territory in the Great Plains from Texas, you know, all the way up to Colorado. If you were within a 500 mile radius. You were in danger of being attacked by the Comanches 500 miles. They could attack from 500 miles away overnight. Not not overnight, but it was like, but it was like, there's some fast fucking horse. Yeah, not not overnight, but it was like it was like immediate like they could they could do direct targeted attacks. They could smell you from 500 miles away. Yes. Yeah. And it like literally like smell you. No, I don't know. But but but yeah, that's so it's it's a big part of SG Gwynn's book is that is that they could they could plan strategic. Military attacks from 500 miles away and that's what made it so hard is because you didn't know how many Comanches there were or where they were at, but they always knew where you were at and they would never stay in the same place twice like they would move from place to place following following their herds of buffalo and they had herds of wild horses as well and yeah, they could plan strategic military attacks from 500 miles away and you would never anticipate them coming and as soon as they attack they were they would disappear and so yeah. You could never get a sense of of where they were or where when they were coming or where they were coming from. It's just a and that's why like you think of the Wild West to think about that being born into that world and your only lot in life. You have no money on the East Coast. Your only lot in life is like, okay kids there. I hear about this place over in California is what they call it. It's lots of gold out there. We're going to have to do that having absolutely no idea that there are commanding. She's rolling around the plains that will scalp you and torture you to death and burn you alive. You know, it just like it's just a completely wild place just 160 years ago. It's just fascinating world man. So this this post-colonial interaction between Native Americans and Europeans. I just I'm finding it infinitely fascinating because it is it is the furthest thing from black and white, which is the way people tend to treat it. But man, is it a complicated like nuanced issue? Yeah 1883 is another one that shows that I haven't seen it yet pretty amazing. Yeah, well, you should watch that because there's a lot that you're describing in the fever dream in my head of picturing these things comes from a lot of the imagery that was filmed in that I actually liked 1923. I love that show man. I love it was fucking awesome 1883 was what we're talking about some of Taylor Sheridan's like pre Yellowstone limited series 1883 was was pretty amazing and there's I don't want to give plot points away to you if you haven't seen it. But you know, they're same kind of idea there. They're they're going down the Oregon Trail. I think that's what it's called and you're fighting the terrain like you said, which includes shit that we take for granted like oh we came to a little you know, 25 meter wide River people are going to die when we cross this right all the way to some of the roaming tribes and get hunted. Mm hmm. That's that's that's crazy. But we got on this tangent because we were talking about the years leading up to Montezuma actually being killed in the Spanish finding out about him and then working their way east to west inward inland to get to 10 a cheat line and then eventually, you know, yeah, do the deed here but so they land in the east you were talking about how they went down first they were finding the Bahamas we got on the sidetrack about the guy Alvarez who found Brazil and all that before Oriana. Alvarez yeah shout out Alvarez sounds like a third basement but anyway, so, you know, he finds that but now we're fast forwarding a little bit to the days of like when Cortez is coming so Cortez sends people ahead of him, I guess, who go there first and how were they greeted like I remember there was something maybe I'm fucking this up and mixing this up with another one but there were people of the Aztecs who looked at the Spaniards as gods. Sure. Yeah, that's, that's kind of something that is that is thrown out there. We really don't know the veracity of a statement like that. The Spaniards seem to say that a lot, like about every encounter that they thought that we were gods, you know, there's a lot of there, I would say I would say it's right down the middle it's 5050 as to whether or not any of the Native Americans actually thought that they were gods. I think where this comes from is that there was a prophecy that the great feathered serpent God Quetzalcoatl would return one day, and on the exact astronomical day, or at least that I'm sorry that year, which for the Gregorian calendar was 1519 to the Aztec calendar, it was exactly that year that Cortez arrived it's just one of these great coincidences, or is it coincidence, but this is where this idea comes from that. I think where this comes from is that there was a prophecy that the great feathered serpent God Quetzalcoatl would return one day, and on the exact astronomical day, or is it coincidence, but this is where this idea comes from that. recommendations right now. Also, if you'd like to join my community for a chance to make money producing content from the show you can do so via the discord link in my description below and finally you can join my patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the patreon link in my description below as always please take one second to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already i really appreciate that also the like button's a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description um but he was already kind of on a short leash with the spanish crown and so he did uh he did not have permission to invade the mainland but he decided to do it anyways before he was essentially reprimanded and pulled back and the position was given to a different conquistador right so he goes ahead and invades mainland mexico mexico anyways so he lands on the coast of vera cruz and the first people that he meets as far as we know are the maya and uh so he meets the maya and he says that these are like sickly small weak looking people now what he didn't realize is that these maya already had european disease from the last 20 years of other europeans poking around on the yucatan and trading with them these europeans had had been infecting the maya so the maya were some of the were the first people in mexico to get infected with this disease and it was spreading across and it had reached vera cruz by the time cortez 20 years later came to vera cruz he meets with the maya and he essentially he sees some gold artifacts he sees some riches and he asks them he essentially says what all aliens say when he says take me to your leader so you know he hears of he hears of tinochtitlan in 1519 when he first arrives in vera cruz these maya people are telling him about the city of tinochtitlan and the emperor moctezuma so it's within seven to nine months later he marches there with 150 conquistadors and other like native guides essentially people he's paid off or maybe he's forced to them to guide him through and escort him through so he's kind of got his he's got his 150 uh men and then he's got his uh then he's got his local guides or slaves or soldiers whatever it is and they go on this seven month expedition where they're on horseback and walking from the coast of vera cruz all the way to tinochtitlan and um and yeah it's it's it's seven or nine months later they're at the capital of mexico and they i believe in that first meeting if i'm getting my history wrong and again everybody watching i'm i'm just now getting to colonial history in my own studies but i believe it's in that first meeting that moctezuma dies when the spaniards first arrive and then the war continues for about another year uh the aztecs essentially replace moctezuma with their own local leaders like another another guy steps so the aztecs replace him yeah yeah so the spaniards kill him war breaks out and the aztecs start fighting the spaniards and they say we have a new leader now essentially we think that they are all had already replaced moctezuma um before the spaniards so i told i told you they were held up in that palace before and they i think they were held up in the palace for maybe around 100 days or so if i'm getting my history right here um and so by the time the spaniards flee that palace in the middle of the night they flee in the middle of this storm and they like cover the the horse's hooves with these cloths so that on the cobblestones it's not so loud and uh of course they they don't make it out undetected while they're in the middle of the bridge in the middle of the night the flare and the horn goes up at the front of the bridge and then it goes off at the back of the bridge and like a million aztecs storm these 150 conquistadors and the conquistadors barely make it out but they've like filled their armor with gold you know and everything that they've stolen and so anyways we think that during this period uh the aztecs had already replaced moctezuma with somebody else because you needed order so probably you know the second or third guy becomes this becomes this new emperor and so the war isn't over with the death of moctezuma uh the spaniards flee they barely make it out cortez barely makes it out alive his horse gets killed it falls over he falls into the water and with all of his armor he's going to sink to the bottom of the lake and drown and a couple of his men reach in and grab him out while they're being attacked it's a crazy story um and uh just they barely make it out of tinochtitlan eventually the the aztecs kind of retreat after enough of them get sliced down and they barely survive and then the war continues they come back they conquer mexico city uh or they conquer tinochtitlan the next year and then just completely subdue all of mexico and they eventually they essentially just turned tinochtitlan into mexico city and then they launched their expedition down into peru how many people how deep was the spanish it was only army it was only 150 guys i'm pretty sure it was only 150 guys yeah so it never got above that though oh i you know i don't know i mean i think that they came i imagine that when they came back with the second expedition it was much it was many more soldiers plus the help of other indigenous people that now saw that the aztecs were weakened and wanted them dead too so this second phase of the war is when we get this period of uh the spanish priests giving the aztec people the blankets that had smallpox in it you've heard that you've heard this i'm sure this is for people this is that well i i don't know all the details of it i just know that there were spanish friars and priests who probably genuinely wanted the betterment like people think that we're talking about uh like uh biological warfare here um we want what's best for you yeah yeah this smallpox it's it's hard to say man because the more i've studied it um you know back then they have uh what's the theory of like the the four fluids or whatever it was usually like blood saliva pee something else uh you know they they didn't really understand um they didn't really understand virology uh germ theory and so we think as as i've looked more into it i started off thinking that they knew that they were spreading disease but i don't think that they did i think that they i think that these priests genuinely cared about the souls of these people and wanted to protect them and and comfort them because there were lots of spaniards that weren't bad people um there are lots of spaniards that genuinely cared about the aztecs or the natives that they're interacting with and wanted the best for them um but ultimately ended up hurting them even more you sound like a spanish apologist yeah no i'm just kidding uh no it's um no but that's probably really what was happening is is they they really were giving the women and children these blankets to keep them uh to keep them warm during the winter without realizing that they had brought these blankets from the caribbean surrounded by other uh surrounded by other your peons that were breathing all over them and giving all their putting all their diseases into these blankets and then those blankets just decimate people in mexico city just bodies thousands of bodies piling up in the middle of the markets it was like the the spaniards are walking through the markets and it's just piles of dead aztecs everywhere now another similar thing happens here is that there's a spanish friar down in peru a decade and a half later and he's baptizing after pizarro uh pizarro is a colleague of cortez i think he's a cousin or nephew of cortez gets sent down on an expedition to conquer peru you and i talked about this on my on my first episode um where uh ottawapa like spits on the bible and throws it on the floor or something yeah yeah and uh so there was a spanish friar there that was trying to baptize the inca people and so he had this bowl of holy water and he had thousands of people putting their face in the bowl of holy water yeah that's great and all he was doing was giving each one of these people directly giving them the spanish influenzas and smallpox and so even though he was the guy trying to save their souls he himself probably killed more people than any spaniard ever did i'm gonna save your soul and send you to god god yeah man just what a savage savage time on every front wild time man wild time you know i even think about that from i used to be um it's funny like uh my my wife she's cute i took her to uh peru and and i'm talking to her about uh we were going through cuzco and i'm showing her all the inca temples with these uh you know spanish churches built over the top of them and i'm explaining to her like the spanish church essentially cuts off the power of the temple because the temples are astronomical observatories that are meant to connect to the sun and the night sky and the stars and they they act as like celestial astronomical clocks they have a purpose they have a purpose they have a purpose and by building this uh building on top of it you cut off the inca people from their spirituality from their source right and i was going through all with her and by the end of the trip she's like i don't like the spanish you know she's like she she does she doesn't like the spanish at all and uh you know the inca people are just so nice but um you know it's just funny but as a historian it all eats away at you and you end up realizing that like no no general group of people are ever as bad as they're portrayed to be there are individual people that are awful but yeah the vast majority of people are just caught up in the tsunami of civilization right i wish we would take that lesson yeah today even people define different groups of people around the world and i mean you draw it along borders you draw along religions you draw it along races they'll use anecdotal things to define the whole and it's and it just repeats itself history repeats itself over and over again but i never understand that you know there's there's cultures there's some ideas that are strongly infested in some cultures that you may be like i i don't love that but judgment people on people you know when we look at this history and that's important why you're given this context as well so that everyone listening understands similarly to today you know where we have men in suits going back rooms and shake hands and drop bombs you know maybe they didn't wear suits back then they didn't have fucking you know hugo boss and all that but same idea just you know a few guys decide this is what it is and then suddenly you send the pawns out there as they would look at them which is unfair to describe them that way but that's how they looked at them to do dirty work and you know you it could be everything from some savage conquering and war to what you're talking about with you know priests saying i'm gonna save your soul and spreading massive disease that kills people welcome back freaking frack welcome to the jungle abc wednesday abbott is back it's gonna be the best year yet thank you now we can finally turn this up and everyone's going wild y'all think you run this school but you don't it's going great abbott elementary anything can happen in the jungle right guys season premiere wednesday on abc and stream next day on hulu the real cost of a break-in isn't your valuables it's the feeling that your home stopped being safe simply safe keeps danger away from your family with three layers of protection one smart ai cameras and live us-based agents help stop intruders before they break in two we sound the alarm at points of entry three our agents request emergency response plans starting around a dollar a day right now get 60 off your new system with professional monitoring at simply safe.com spotify outdoor deterrence plans start at 49.99 a month visit simply safe.com licenses for alarm license information it's brutal man yeah it is it is it's a it's a fascinating time man it's two different worlds disconnected by more than ten thousand years of from each other completely different world views in some ways similar what do you mean in some ways similar just the humanity you know like like um okay so we study the ancient amazonian people and judging what's funny is judging by their archaeology which thus far we haven't found a lot of the archaeology we've only found smaller civilizations on the periphery of the amazon like you know probably the main hubbub of all these great lost cities in the amazon we hear about we're probably further into the center of the amazon where oriana said to is said to have seen them where you have like a um where you actually have stone bedrock instead of clay and out in the west like where paul is at um yeah and but on the peripheral of the amazon where it's much easier to access we found all kinds of civilizations out there and the archaeology that comes up is pretty interesting the only thing the only thing that we find are uh we find these raised platforms that essentially come up from these uh from these canals and so you have these you have this farmland you have these raised platforms you have these dugout canals that go through the ground and so from what we think is that a lot of these amazonians on the on the periphery of the amazon didn't necessarily walk from place to place all the time they get in these little canals and little tiny boats and sail up and down from town to town but all of these canals that come up from these canals all we find is the archaeological remnants of giant parties just yeah this is kind of similar um on it yeah this is this is pretty similar this is a a lidar map that's shown up now this is a larger city that's closer into the interior of the amazon it sort of gives you an idea but it isn't exactly what i'm talking about maybe you could look up like amazonian geoglyphs and uh you'll probably see a shot you'll probably see a drone shot from the sky and that'll that'll be a lot closer um this this right here though this lidar scan this is like a major city there's there's a step pyramid there's a huge platform in the middle there's highways smaller one over there on the far left that's green is that a mini step pyramid yeah probably a mini step pyramid so it's got that raised platform and then it's got a mound up on top of it so that raised platform you probably had some normal people setting up their huts and then those two mounds right next to it that probably royal people are much more wealthy important people living up even more elevated okay yeah so what do we got on this here we go perfect dude yeah yeah so any of these so um that looks like the movie signs it does right yeah yeah dave was like on it yeah yeah so we we don't come on mel where are you we don't understand why they make these geoglyphs and why they made these shapes what the orientations are truly meant for they were talking talking to aliens could be you ever seen the nazca lines the nazca mummies no the lines they were talking to aliens in the ground oh dude we're gonna have to go down the nazca all right all right finish this point then we're going down the nazca um that's going in the title nazca line aliens boom everyone loves it let's do it cool um so this is actually similar to the nazca lines it's it's giant geoglyphs that are made into the ground but essentially people would live in these raised platforms similar to this and you can see huge lines spanning off from here and they're ditches in the ground that'd be filled with water and people would sail and land on the ground and they'd be on the ground and little boats from one place to the other and essentially all that ancient amazonians did was farm and party and go to war and sleep with each other's wives that's basically it that's so listen you got to throw that in there yeah swinging so that's in time that you know that's the in many many ways you look at them and they're like okay you know they they like to have a good time they like to kill each other and they like to have sex like good for them pretty similar to everyone else around the world you take out the killing we're good yeah and so that's you know so much of the mesoamerican world is so similar to to other parts of the world and yet the way that those pieces interact with each other is just assorted completely differently right it's what was that one right there i was looking at is that a dude drawn into the you see it in the second row deep yeah yeah that's altered right yeah yeah i've never seen this one that looks like bigfoot with a club humans probably altered the amazon 2000 years ago oh no paul rosalie's gonna have a heart attack don't click that yeah yeah well that's kind of an overblown thing because people will go the amazon's a man-made garden cook luke no it isn't the amazon's not a man-made garden what this is this is literally what will happen you'll be walking through the amazon and all of the amazon has grown to every creature every plant in the amazon has grown to defend itself from other things so it's just a vicious cycle of death in the amazon like uh you know a lot of the i'm making generalizations here but a lot of the plants aren't edible uh you know the you got these huge thorns on these trees that are like you know thorns that are a foot you know a foot long and and razor thin you don't even see them until you've run into the tree it's just uh the amazon's incredibly formidable place that seems like it wouldn't be possible to inhabit and at some point in that i mean probably 10 000 20 000 years ago ancient amazonians in this primordial lost like mystic sea uh in the ancient world in this very blurry time invented a type of soil black soil called terra preta and this soil could grow anything that they needed and so they they made patches of gardens in the amazon small little patches now we found a bunch of them but it doesn't mean that the amazon looked like the great plains and then people planted the forest there they just re-engineered the soil in parts to be able to grow the things that they needed to survive and so you'll be walking through the amazon and then all of a sudden percy faucet did it but he didn't know what terra preta was he just found these gardens that were full of all the fruits and everything that he needed like his guys would be starving and they would come across a farm or something like that in the middle of the amazon that he would say the entire vegetation is different with fruit that he'd never seen before but it looked delicious and it was edible and his men would gorge themselves on it and they he would just find pockets of this well he was finding gardens he's finding amazonian gardens exactly and these are like i'm talking about tiny little like all these little black spots on your table that's about how common they would be in the amazon the vast majority of it is just natural wilderness that's been there since before the ice yeah i think i think most people who say that i can't say all people i'm sure some people who run with that have indeed been there but most people who are saying that and seeing that have never been there and when you go there you will see you will realize especially when you go into the middle of the amazon like i was able to do with paul you will realize what a speck you are and what a crowning achievement of mother nature that biosphere is i mean it's just like it almost doesn't make sense like and there were some times where i'd take in a moment and i'd be like my god the five-year-old me is just like jumping for joy right now like i'm floating in the water in the amazon like this is the most special thing ever but you know paul might literally clip what you just said right there because if and i understand this completely it frustrates him so much when people say that because he's trying to save the amazon and what happens is in fairness to some of the people who make comments along those lines what they really say is that we have found some man-made things like a garden in the amazon and then someone takes that quote and says it's a man-made thing and makes some article that they're going to sell ad space in but the article headline to get people to click needs to be amazon man-made and most people read the headline they see the tweet about it and they're like oh it's man-made suddenly now people get under the assumption therefore that well because it's man-made we've done it before i'm sure we can do it again we can rebuild it keep cutting the trees down and of course that makes absolutely no sense that's going to drive someone like paul nuts and it should and so he wants to get out there to educate people to be like yo you got to be real careful saying this because that's not what it is at all in fact and this is what he does come down here and see it i'll show you you'll realize within two seconds that ain't the case this stuff is older than seemingly the world itself not literally but you know what i mean for sure it's like this has been around since fucking the dinosaurs were around or whatever but you know it's it's really important i think that we talk about that stuff the right way because people don't see this in their backyard it's the amazon jungle it's way down there oh that's really cool i've read about in books i've seen a couple movies that's awesome but it's you don't see it every day and so you don't have the appreciation that the amazon jungle which is i forget what percentage of the world's coverage it is but it's a way smaller percentage than this it represents 20 though of the world's global oxygen supply so when it gets to an exponential point of no return hopefully it never gets there because we can save this thing but if it gets past a certain point to where i'm making up numbers right now but 43 of the amazon were taken out therefore there's it's going to go into extinction it cannot be turned away back around we are going to face a world that's missing 20 of the oxygen moving forward and we'll totally fuck up the entire ecosystem that we enjoy be it here in new jersey or over in spain or china wherever like you need something like that to exist so i appreciate someone like you who studies ancient history and looks at the amazing things that human beings and ancient civilizations have been able to pull up i appreciate the fact that you also understand the actual basis of what's there in the first place which is the land and the ecosystem and i think that's a really important that existed long before the people were actually using it. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that the. Well, one, I'm making two points. One, I think that clickbait titles have done such a disservice to, like, anything in the scientific world because it just. People just get these, you know. And freedom of speech, you can say whatever you want. People is really people's responsibility to educate themselves. You know, otherwise we just destroy ourselves. But, you know, the clickbait titles that nobody actually reads the article or, even worse, it's a clickbait title and then you have to pay to actually read the article. You know what I'm saying? So it's Amazon Rainforest, man-made, question mark? And you click on it and then you have to. And then it all gets blurred out and you can't read it and you're like, oh, I guess it just must be man-made. This is what everybody else is saying. This is what this is saying. Anyway, so clickbait titles from articles suck. And people get so much wrong just because of stupid titles. And that's not just archaeology. But, like, I think it especially creates, like, very inaccurate. Accurate understandings of the ancient world. Oversimplified understandings of the ancient world, for sure. And then the second thing is, you know, that idea. That idea, I mean, it allows people. When people believe that, they don't really care if China is logging up the entire Amazon. That's right. Or if they're planning on cutting highways straight through the Amazon. And America's buying it. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, it just allows people. Especially with the Amazon in particular. But it just allows people to just not really care about the natural world because, oh, it's just man-made. We could just do it again. You know, maybe they think that. So. That's right. And it's, you know. That's obviously. That's something that's personal to me at this point. Not just because we've done content on it in here and had a guy like Paul and a bunch, but, you know, getting to see it and appreciate it. It's just. It's the coolest thing ever. And, you know, as I move along, that's something I want to do more of. Yeah. Go see some things up close. It's one thing to sit here in your comfy little studio and talk about it like an armchair quarterback. But when you actually go see it, for better or worse, depending on where you're going and what you're seeing, you know, you can speak to it more. And you can understand it. And I just think, you know, there is some shit in this world that is magical. And then there's some magical shit that human beings have been able to pull off to make it even more magical. And, like, it doesn't need to be one or the other. With things, you can appreciate both. You can study the history and learn from it. And you can also study the setting and environment and preserve it. You know, those two things should be hand in hand. Yeah. Not even like the bloods and crypts meme either. They should just be friends in general. Yeah, I totally agree with that. But the. So the Aztecs get taken out quickly, you know, by the Spanish. And then disease spreads. And then, you know, the Spanish obviously pretty much colonized Mexico. When you fast forward and you get to somewhere, somehow, how we got to today. But you had put a pin in the Mayans, but in particularly the Olmecs and that whole history. I know that's something, like, one of the things I love about you is that you are constantly traveling to all these places to go see it for yourself. And it's like a quest, too. Like, you're always dressed the part, too. I really appreciate that. But, you know, you've gone down and looked at a lot of the Olmec ruins and the places. Where they existed. And to me, the Olmecs, we talked about it in episode 175 a little bit. But it's a very. Among the ignored parts that we already highlighted, the fact that South America seems to be so ignored in a lot of these history discussions, ancient history discussions these days. The Olmecs are passed over so much. So for people out there who really have no idea what their origins were and who they were and what the civilization was like, can you just give the download on the Olmec people and their base history? Yeah, yeah. So the Olmecs, man, incredibly ancient. It's the origins of Mesoamerica. Now, the basics of Mesoamerica is basically everything below the Rio Grande. So below Texas is essentially the most northern edge of Mesoamerica. And it continues all the way through Mexico into Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador. And it kind of fades out as you get closer to Panama. That's essentially Mesoamerica. And this has been my central area of expertise for quite a long time now. You know, it was what I studied in college and got my anthropology degree in. And this was the world that opened up to me. I'm fascinated by it. And it's infinitely complex. But on the Veracruz coast, which is to the west of the Maya realm to the east of where the Aztecs will later be, there's a river that connects to the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America, as some people call it now. It's called the Coetzcalcos River. You know, I actually get a lot of flack for that 'cause I make custom maps for my videos and I still call it the Gulf of Mexico. - And you get flack for that? - Yeah, yeah, people will be like, "No, no, it's the Gulf of America." - It's just a logistical nightmare, though. - I'm like, "Guys, you know what? "I'm just gonna stick with tradition here." It's been the Gulf of Mexico for like 500 years. - It was fun to say. - Yeah, yeah. - You know. - So I'm not switching up because one guy says so. - What the fuck? - Yeah, I agree, I agree. - WPS! - That's right. So anyways, yeah, so it's the Coetzcalcos River connects to the Gulf of Mexico. And along this river, it's essentially like, think of the Coetzcalcos River as the Nile River that the Egyptians, you know, the Nile River gave the Egyptians their civilization. We did this whole rundown last time. It's not of the credit of the Egyptians, it's of the credit of the Nile. The Nile just gifted these riches to the Egyptians. So the Coetzcalcos River just gifts all of this fertile land to the Olmecs. And in fact, I brought a group of students with me in December and we went to San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan, which is the first capital, really, the central metropolitan area of the Olmec world. And it's wonderful. It's way up on top of this hill. And as you look down the hill towards the Coetzcalcos River in these alluvial floodplains where all of their maize crops or their corn would grow, I took a photo of it, dude. If I were to show an Egyptian that photo, they would think that I took a photo of somewhere in Egypt. It's that similar. It's just, and I've been to other fertile crescents as well and looked at it and I'm like, oh wow, these all have the same similarities. It's these low valleys where the river consistently flows and floods and, you know, creates this alluvial fertile plain. And this is how civilization begins. It's just fascinating seeing that. So the Olmec world begins at San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan. It's the fertile crescent of Mexico. It's the most overlooked fertile crescent of the entire world. I mean, well, you have seven fertile crescents. Mexico is the most overlooked one. It begins with San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan, about 3,800 years ago, so 1800 BC, I should say. And so the Olmecs essentially, they get their rise from, they have port cities as well that are actually on the Gulf. San Lorenzo is inland a little bit along the river. And so they're sailing out on the coast and they're fishing. They have, you know, all types of resources from their ability to catch fish as well as raise corn. So they're just booming. They essentially rise before everybody else and they just mastered agriculture. Before any of the other cultures in Mesoamerica even get started. And what's really crazy is it seems like right at the beginning of their civilization, they're able to quarry these 60 ton stones, the 60 ton solid basalt stones out of the Sierra de la Tuxela volcanic belt to their northeast and quarry them and transport them 90 miles away to this city and carve and erect these massive Olmec heads. And it's like they're doing this from the very beginning of their society. There is no, from what we can tell through the archaeology, there's no lead up to this. There's no developmental period before they're able to do this. They're just doing it from the very beginning. So we could look up just, I don't know if you have, my eyesight's not that great, but just Olmec heads or something. Yeah, they're insane. It's crazy. How much did you say they weighed? So this is, okay, so this is a really, this is a really cool mystery about the Olmec heads. It looks like a pooling garden. Oh, it's crazy. Yeah, it's beautiful, man. There's 17 known heads, but there's actually three more heads that most people have never seen, but they're made out of sandstone. And they're not even human. They're like a were-jaguar, half-human, half-jaguar faces. Yeah, we'll get into this. It's really, really cool. This is actually something that connects to South America and Peru, by the way. Okay. And I think it has its origins in the Amazon. This is kind of my other area that I'm looking into. So you asked about how much they weigh. So get this. So the Maya Exploration Center, of which I'm a member of, this is run by my mentor, Dr. Ed Barnhart. On one of his Olmec expeditions, he had a nautical engineer that was traveling with him who was fascinated by this idea of how do the Olmecs transport these heads? So he created this. This algorithm that you could put in, I'm not exactly sure what it was, a software or a site or something, where you could input the theoretical weight of your Olmec head and the theoretical size of your Balsa River raft. And he found that if you made the raft too big to go down the narrow stretches of the Coetzcalcos River and you put a five-ton head on that raft, it would flip the raft and sink it. Okay. So the engineering. So going back over this, if it's too long and too wide to go down the narrow stretches of the river to actually make it to the city, it's already too big to go down the river, and you put a five-ton head on it, it would sink the raft. The smallest head is six tons, and the largest head is 52 tons. So nobody knows exactly how these things were transported. It's just all archaeologists have quietly known. What's your idea? Aliens. Could be. A little UFO came down. Welcome back, frickin' frack. Welcome to the jungle. ABC Wednesday. Abbott is back. It's going to be the best year yet. Thank you. Now we can finally turn this up. And everyone's going wild. Y'all think you run this school, but you don't. It's going great. Abbott Elementary. Anything can happen in the jungle. Right, guys? Season premiere Wednesday on ABC and stream next day on Hulu. See, that would be the easiest way to do this. That's what I'm saying. It makes the most sense. But see, the problem with the alien thing is we have to figure out, like, you know, the aliens come down, and then Native Americans are like, please, we're starving. Our children are dying. We need something like penicillin. And they're like. No, no, no, no, no. We'll teach you. You need these rocks. Right. We'll lift the rocks for you. Because then they can pray to something. Yeah, then they can pray to something. And have their soul saved. Yeah, yeah. Because the real life happens after that on Earth. Could be. See? I already got all the holes filled in. I know you do. You're not going to plug these. I think you've been plugging the aliens every episode. Not every episode. There's a lot of misinformation out there. But when we look at the ancient world. There's some stuff that I'm like, come on. You know. Something happened. You know what? I actually have to agree with you. You know, I kind of like. When I think of, like, little green men in spaceships, I kind of roll my eyes at that idea. But at the same time, then I also find myself, like, as a religious person, I find myself studying ancient people. And I see the bizarre things that they come up with. And the things that they believe. And the things that they, you know, have this conviction about. And, you know. There's entire eras. There's two entire eras of Maya civilization where they give no credit to any single person for anything. And they dedicate every temple to a god. And never lift up one person. It's like they do it all for the gods. The Egyptians seem to do everything for the gods. You know, there were Greeks who literally actually believed that the gods exist. Well, I mean, most Greeks did. It was only the philosophers that started kind of questioning whether or not the gods existed. But, you know, you see so many aliens. Ancient cultures go so far out of their way for their gods. It just makes me think, like, okay, what is actually the answer to this? Is it that people are just looking for something? Like, they're looking for an answer, so they kind of just make something up? Do they make it all up to be able to control the people beneath them? Or does it make more sense that these people were so convicted by their beliefs because. What they were experiencing actually happened to them? And it's like, what's the line between. What's the line between an ancient person taking some kind of natural hallucinogen and interacting with a deity while he's in that space. Right. and an alien? What's the line that you draw there? It gets weird, man. And, like, okay, can. You know, I'm saying this as a very self-aware Christian. Where does, like, Christianity. How does Christianity fit in this? Sure. You know, it's a fascinating thing. And so I agree with you. Like, I laugh about the alien stuff, but then I also have to remind myself, like, well, you know, my hot take about the ancient world is that I actually think it's more likely that it's not all made up. Yeah, I mean, and I enjoy joking about it in all seriousness. And I wonder what the hell's out there in this giant galaxy that we have no idea the ends of it and all that stuff. But we live in this world, especially. Especially when it comes to religion, where people want to make things everything or nothing, right? Religion is at the top of that sphere. Yeah, it is. And there's all these different world religions, and there's these different stories and different interpretations and different translations and different characters and different. I could go on down the list, right? And to me, it's like, where are there themes that it's like, oh, wait a minute, and that lines up with that a little bit, that lines up with that a little bit. Maybe there's some sort of truth there. I mean, if it's a different experience. And then you get to. The way that conscious human beings have the ability to experience things. I've talked to you about my friend, Riz Vert. So he was on episode 274 with me at the time of this recording. We just recorded a new one. I haven't put it out yet, but it's definitely out now if you're watching this podcast right now. But, you know, he's an MIT simulation theorist, absolute genius, great guy too. And he's thinking about, you know, some of the most unanswerable questions there are, which have to do with the mathematical probability and scientific evidence for the idea that things exist as zero and ones around us. And our consciousness just can't understand that. And one of the things, many things that he talks about is that when it comes to like UFO sightings or things that anything that has to do with an alien or something not of this earth that appears in written record or oral record throughout human history, it's like it's possible and it's even been, it's been reported this way that there are people who can be standing next to each other in the same place and only one person witnesses, you know, something supernatural going on. The other person doesn't see it at all. So something in this person's consciousness is transcribed to just a little bit of a different frequency. That's not the word to use, but it's set to just a little bit of a different frequency than the other person and it allows them to see this and experience this and then, you know, maybe get whatever information, comes from that. So if you look at things like the pyramids that pop up in all these different places and civilizations that were stuck in different time periods, basically, over time, and when you look at some unexplainable stuff like the Olmec heads and things like that, where is there potentially some divine intervention? We know there's a lot of world leaders that have liked to lie about, oh, I got talked to by the gods, therefore you got to worship me and they're full of shit. But which ones weren't? Which ones actually did have some sort of prophet, you know, seeing through to whatever the other side is? I don't care what that is, whether that's God, whether it's simulation, whether it's aliens, whether it's future beings, I don't know. But you have to at least, as crazy as it sounds, and it sounds fucking insane to even say it out loud, but you have to ask these questions when you're looking at some amazing innovations that ancient civilizations did where we have evidence that, like, they didn't have iPhones. You know, they didn't have something that's totally different than an iPhone but technologically equivalent to that yet they were able to pull something like this off there is something there man oh i i totally agree with you i i actually think i i really think that the answer is to a lot of this is going to be found in uh god i don't even know what we would call it like psychedelic archaeology psychedelic archaeology i don't know i just made that up um but you know i think that um i think that once this boomer generation of archaeologists moves on moves the i love that was a very nice very nice texas christian boy way saying that yeah now i i'm not going to discredit archaeologists they all do basically all of them do amazing work there are people who make their public opinions known that are very bad public opinions but vast majority of archaeologists work super hard jobs and achieve a lot for very little credit however it's impossible for our preconceived notions of our modern day reality to not bleed into our profession right so i can't tell you how many archaeologists i have spoken to and tried to talk to them about the psychedelics that the culture of which they are an expert in was partaking in and you know i uh i met an archaeoastronomer i'm going to spend a week with him and archaeoastronomer yeah archaeoastronomy it's it's kind of a new uh what a flex it's an it's a new frontier of archaeology it's essentially the study of ancient cultures interaction with the night sky so trying to study ancient astronomers and what they understood about the about the night sky and how that can further re-reinform and change our perspective on the culture that we're studying or the ancient sites that we're looking at like you may not understand why this building is not lined exactly to true north and why it's 15 degrees off and why is this building also 15 degrees off but yet the retaining wall is facing a different direction yada yada yada well if you were able to unlock the secrets of the city you would realize that each of the orientation of these buildings and walls had a purpose that was facing towards the night sky or the sun and that shadows and knives of light would like shine through the buildings and they're all astronomical solar clocks it's crazy stuff dude like it's it's really really in depth now i had this realization uh in like 2021 uh i did uh i did some edibles with my buddy and we're laying down looking underneath and i hope you did mood i don't know they were moved they just say it for the camera they were moved right they were moved no thank you for our sponsorships please continue so um so i'm laying there looking at the night sky and uh you know i must have taken 30 milligrams or something and uh you know i'm i'm i'm blasting off you know and i'm laying there and after a couple hours like i've lost my ego i'm no longer me anymore uh i'm just i'm just one with the night sky and with the universe and i'm like looking at a photo of myself and not even not even looking at it as though it's me i just can't even believe that that's my body that i exist inside of and makes you have all these realizations about yourself and the things you need to fix about yourself it's very medicinal the whole experience is and i had this feeling um where i felt like whatever god is i understood him i couldn't put it into words but i could just feel it i could feel it deeply to my core and i could only feel it in that moment once i sobered it up it it kind of went away i wasn't able to like access that it just it's like it frees you up it opens your mind up to some other i mean i you probably maybe experienced something like this before and uh yeah just like that yeah and so i'm uh so you know i'm having this experience and then and then it just opened up my eyes to like oh this is you know i can see how a culture doing this for thousands of years and trying to figure out the secrets of their natural world how religion can form and how people can learn so much about you know the introspective aspects of reality and maybe this is where shamanism comes from and and ancient priests like it probably has something to do with this because i can only imagine if i were to do this for my entire lifetime the things i would experience and the insights that i that i might have right and um so anyways i start talking to um i start well as time goes on i experiment more and more and i have different realizations about archaeology like i'll be thinking about these ancient cultures that i'm obsessed with and i will realize different aspects of their society that i'd never realized before it's like things would unlock and i would get these new perspectives and uh and i i found it like incredibly helpful it's not like i do this a lot but i've just found it incredibly helpful and so i'm talking to this archaeoastronomer and i'm like i'm like okay so you study the pueblo ancestry people and he's like yeah and i'm like what kind of psychedelics do they do and so he lists them out to me and i'm like i'm like i'm like do you ever go out and stargaze at night at these you know at these sites that you study these cliff dwelling sites out in the desert he's like oh yeah all the time i'm like do you ever do the psychedelics that they did and then stargaze and he's like no no i would never do that i would never do that i would never do that and he had this knee-jerk reaction and it's just very it was the boomer in him bleeding through into the archaeology right like because you have this preconceived notion of drugs you know drugs all drugs bad there's no there's no distinction between like crack cocaine and weed right well well let's let's talk to hunter biden who's listen that was like listening to michael jordan breakdown basketball i mean i was that was incredible so hunter biden talking about crack oh i know yeah best thing best three minutes and 15 seconds on tv please continue anyways yeah yeah so um yeah you know to so to a lot of boomers there's no distinction between natural plant medicine you know medicinal drugs things are mostly harmless non-addictive you know uh marijuana isn't changing the chemical makeup of your brain to force you to become addicted to it and it's also not poisoning your body right uh like alcohol cigarettes other drugs do they just destroy your body um you know there's no distinction there and so he had this like knee-jerk reaction where it was like beneath him to ever do something like that and i talked to him that whole week and i was like dude i'm telling you man if you did if you if you took these natural psychedelics and hallucinogens with everything you know about this culture i promise you the pathways your brain is going to go down you're going to have epiphanies about a culture you've studied your entire life because you're going to view them from a perspective you've never you've never experienced before and you're going to be stepping into their shoes and it was like i wore him down by the end i think he's done take this mushroom yeah yeah yeah um and so um i forget oh well we got off onto this because i think that um i think that the origins of a lot of civilization is probably found in shamanism and psychedelics and i think that that i think that like this renaissance archaeology like like independent archaeology is going to grow and grow and grow there's already so many people who are researching things on their own and making discoveries on their own i think maybe one of the best examples is uh the youtube channel history for granite he's done so much research on the pyramids oh i've seen that yeah i've seen that channel he's done so much research on the pyramids that egyptologists have acknowledged his his discoveries and his perspectives and it's got these things are going to end up in textbooks it like wow yeah he's he has been he is like the first wedge you know there's been all these other people he is the first wedge to to go through now that's cool yeah that's good you got it break through onto each other's sides a little bit you know what i mean we gotta find some common ground for sure and i think you i've always cited you as an amazing example of that because you come from both worlds you come from understanding some of the alternative perspectives and being genuinely interested in it since you were a little kid but you are also academically trained under ed barnhart at college like this is this is what you're an expertise in from the from the academic side of it you know so you you understand the establishment and the anti-establishment and where both have a point on certain things and you've done a really good job to this point in your career of straddling that line and kind of being a peacemaker there and i hope you continue to do that because some of the fighting especially you know behind keyboards on twitter it's just like guys get the fuck stop this yeah you know get in a room and talk yeah it's a it's a tough place to be um it's a tough place to be i used to want to be involved more in the conversation like actively going out and being involved in the conversation and i've realized the best thing i can do is kind of just retreat back into my space focus on my own work and interact with people that want to interact with me right um you know because i'm really not accepted by the alternative side although i'm cool with a lot of those people we're all fine but in the accepted by them you know i'm never going to be part of the club and so i'm just kind of you know out here on my own island i like that yeah i'm just out here on my own island i've got your own friends yeah and uh so that's kind of where i'm at and i think that i think that the appetite for all the fighting is dying off i think people are just kind of over it because it's i hope you're right about that but i disagree i i think people i i think there's people that unfortunately live for it you know yeah it's just how it is and it's human nature we just now have more accessibility than ever to be able to do it instantaneously all day every day yeah yeah yeah yeah that's true we've kind of evolved to that yeah so you know that's my my role is i want to be one of these people in this kind of uh renaissance of archaeology sort of doing it on my own now that doesn't mean i have legal permits to go dig at places but man there's been so many artifacts that have been excavated and so many narratives that have in puzzles that haven't been pieced together yet from you know so many so many artifacts get excavated and then handed over to a museum and never get looked at again they just sit in a glass case and they sit there forever such a shame and they never get studied but as i've gone around the world and focused on certain cultures i have noticed patterns between things where i will try to go research it and no other archaeologist has ever acknowledged certain things that i've noticed and i've realized this particularly with the americas and um that the americas are just very much under understudied and this is kind of you what you and i were talking about recently where i was thinking about doing uh going to school in athens and yeah i mean i always loved the classical world i grew up loving it just like everybody else did my grandpa uh on his nightstand he had this book called western progress and it was essentially the origins of western society all the way up to like uh henry v in england from the pharaohs through greece and egypt through medieval times all the way to king henry and i would look at that book and look at it and look at it and i poke through it and look at the pictures and read what i could much more dense reading i was able to Greece and Rome that first sparked my love for the ancient world. And it was weird as I was going down the path of committing to go to school for a year. It was going to be about 18 months in Athens at the University of Athens. I was committed. I was about to pay. And then it was like the day before, I just had this huge wave of guilt come over me. And I felt like I was betraying a world that had given itself to me. Studying the Americas was not something I ever anticipated that I would do. I always found it interesting, but I never anticipated that I would specialize and go all in on it. But when I changed my major, I was 20 years old. I was going to fail all my marketing classes. I was going to flunk out of college. I had to appeal to the dean to be able to switch to anthropology. They barely let me switch my major. I switched. And in Texas, they breed Mesoamerican archaeologists or Mexican archaeologists that specialize in ancient Mexico, what we've been talking about this whole time. And they just breed that. There really wasn't much about Egypt. I took one part of a semester of a class on Egypt. And I just focused on the Americas. And that's how I met Dr. Ed Barnhart. And that's how I came to learn about, you know, great archaeologist Linda Shealy. And it's how I came to learn about the Maya, the Aztecs, the Toltecs, the Zapotecs, you know, and then later on the Inca. And it was like the Americas just opened itself up to me and like accepted me. Thank you guys for checking out this clip. If you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe and hit the like button on this video. It is a huge, huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clip's full podcast episode, that link is in the description below or right here. And finally, you can follow me on Instagram and X by using the description below.