#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns

Watch all episodes ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Dr. Ed Barnhart holds a Ph. D. and has over 20 years of experience in North, Central, and South America as an archaeologist, explorer, and instructor. In 1994 he discovered the ancient city of Maax Na (Spider-Monkey House) & in 1998 he directed a three-year effort to survey and map the unknown sections of Palenque's ruins. Ed's map is currently one of the most detailed and accurate ever made of a Maya ruin. SPONSORS https://buy.ver.so/danny - Get 15% off your first order. https://bit.ly/viiadannyjones - Try VIIA & use code DANNY. https://manscaped.com - Use code DANNYJONES for 20% off + FREE shipping. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://www.mayaexploration.org Ed's YouTube channel: @archaeoedpodcast Luke's YouTube channel: @lukecaverns FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Finding an undiscovered Mayan city 09:32 - How many undiscovered pyramids are left? 15:35 - Ancient Mayans' advanced calendars 28:29 - Ancient Mayan archaeoastronomy 36:43 - White Sands: oldest humans in America 46:50 - Younger dryas population reset 51:58 - Undiscovered lost cities in the United States 01:01:40 - Graham Hancock 01:27:02 - New theory explains how Olmec heads were moved 01:40:45 - Why all ancient civilizations built pyramids 01:52:47 - Death & religion in ancient Egypt 01:59:53 - Drugs in ancient America 02:05:32 - Blood rituals in ancient Mayan civilization 02:14:21 - Warfare in Mayan civilization 02:22:50 - Ancient influence on modern architecture 02:25:28 - Human sacrifice in Aztec culture 02:34:40 - La Noche Triste 02:44:48 - Spanish disease in Aztec civilizations 02:54:13 - Aliens or lost civilization? 03:04:30 - Easter Island Moai heads 03:10:18 - New mystery of Easter Island 03:13:53 - Patreon questions 03:15:26 - Mercury & chemicals in ancient South America Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Danny Jones?

  All right. Thanks for coming, guys. Dr. Ed Barnhart, it's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you. Luke, welcome back.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Thank you very much for having me again.

• 0:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, man, I'm excited to chat with you guys. Ed, why don't you introduce yourself and tell people who are listening a little bit about your background and how you discovered a lost city when you were 25 years old?

• 0:25Speaker 02

  Well, okay. I'm an archaeologist, explorer, educator, and I've been at this for over 30 years now. I'm 56 this year. I got my start in archaeology in, I was a student in the University of Colorado at Boulder, went to Honduras to go to the Maya site of Copan. There, I met my future mentor Linda Shealy, and I went to study with her for years, learning Maya hieroglyphs, and also from UT going out to do archaeology and survey in Belize. And that's where, at the age of 25, I found a Maya city. I used a topo map, kind of played

• 1:09Speaker 02

  the game of if I was a Maya, where in this huge region would I put a city? And I guessed right. So, two years into the project, we actually found a bunch of pyramids around a plaza with a ball court and a palace and stele. 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 masters and then my PhD, but where I really wanted to be was out back in the jungle and all those adventures. I didn't want to be teaching cultural anthropology to a bunch of people who were asleep in my classroom. So, I ditched that and I started the Palenque Mapping Project, which became ultimately my dissertation.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  And then from there, I created Maya Exploration Center, which is now over 20 years old. And Luke here is the latest member of Maya Exploration Center. And we kind of in a almost rogue fashion, teach folks out in the field. We do field education tours. So we give lectures at night and we bring people actually through the ruins and teach them about it. And it's been, it's been great. I, for years now, I've traveled all over Mesoamerica and South America, teaching people, but also selfishly making it like, I really want to go there. I'm going to make a trip and people can come and be involved in my

• 2:34Speaker 02

  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. So I was like, well, damn, somebody's making a podcast in this house. I guess I'll do it.

• 3:00Danny Jones?

  So when you just first discovered that lost city, what, what was the name of it? And how, how did you sort of figure out where to look? Or what did you use to guess where it would be? And more like where they would put it?

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Well, I used everything that I had learned from Linda Shealy and my other classes as a graduate student. And I, I looked at this big area called Program for Belize. It was something like 200,000 acres that were given to Belize by Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola wanted to cut it all down and put an orange grove there to, to create Orange Crush. Or is that theirs? Yeah, there's this crush. But anyway, this huge area was then a research place and UT had a contract for 20 years to study it. Most of the things they were doing were right along the one and only dirt road through the middle of it. But I bought

• 3:55Speaker 02

  topo maps from not even the internet in those days. It was the early 90s. So I had to actually call people. But I found topo maps and I looked at the whole place and I said, okay, Maya. Are mountain worshippers and they call their pyramids Tuned weak stone mountains. And they oftentimes create them in triadic forms, three temples staring at each other. So now I'm going to look at this topo map and try to first find the tallest mountain in this area. So I located that and just as it happened to be, there were two other smaller mountains right next to it that made a triangle. And there were three rivers that were running in the middle of them. And I thought, that's it. If I was a Maya, that's where I'd want my city to be.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  And it was about 10 kilometers out off the road. So we had to just hack out there a little bit, a little bit every day. And we found four or five villages along the way. But then finally 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.

• 5:01Danny Jones?

  And when's the last time you were down there, Luke?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  10 days ago.

• 5:05Danny Jones?

  10 days ago. Where were you exactly?

• 5:08Speaker 01

  I was in Guatemala.

• 5:09Danny Jones?

  Okay, what were you doing?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  So I was leading a tour for Maya Exploration Center. So we did, um, there's a few really well-known sites, um, around the main Maya city of Tikal. But we, we led a, a tour there in, at Tikal. And then, um, that was really amazing. I mean, Tikal is, is, uh, I mean, it's, it's a, 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 Tikal. 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,

• 5:47Speaker 01

  which was, uh, booked, uh, through him, got on a helicopter and flew dozens of miles out into the middle of the Paten Rainforest, which the Paten is, I think it's the, at least the second largest rainforest in the Americas, which is, uh, you know, it's, it's second, second to the Amazon, but it's like 1/50th the size of the Amazon, but very, very remote. Um, and it contains the largest pyramid in, uh, definitely in the Maya world. Um, and it's called La Dona. It's, uh, um, La Dona and El Tigre. And so that was really amazing and. One of the things that I was so interested about going there is because the head archaeologist

• 6:30Speaker 01

  at El Mirador, Richard Hansen, he refers to the architecture there and the stonework there, the word that he's, or the phrase that he's kind of coined for it is conspicuous consumption and that at the beginning of the Maya world, they were just so wealthy that they could create these pyramids out of the biggest stones that they're ever going to make stones, or that they're ever going to use throughout the rest of their 3,000 year history, or the 2,000 year history. And what I was amazed by there is that the stone architecture is so much different than, as it said, 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

• 7:12Speaker 01

  them in basically the least efficient way possible, but as far as managing your resources. But in reality, it was the most efficient way possible because throughout most of the Maya world, when I went down last December, I took a 10 or 11 day expedition down into Quintana Roo of Mexico, landed in Cancun, went down to this ancient city called 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. And it was this site with, it was, I maybe covered a few hundred yards over the course of four or five hours. And just by the architecture, I was able to, I could tell what era the site was, that

• 7:57Speaker 01

  it was pre-classic. 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 the larger one in the back. It's pretty, I mean, that's iconic for the pre-classic period. Sure enough, I was able to do research later on, pre-classic structure, but... That entire city, the smaller stones, you know, as the trees grow into, as the trees and the vegetation of the jungle climbs up these pyramids, it grows into the structure and pulls the blocks apart and eventually they look like mounds and, you know, trying to take photos of these things, it's really hard to convey the size of structures, but in person you can see it.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  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, over the last-

• 9:01Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. The stones there are just too big, too tightly packed. Uh, you know, I would say that they're as long as this table and maybe a foot and a half, 18 inches, 24 inches wide, and they're all slid into each other and the jungle, they're, it's too monumental for the jungle to ever grow through it. So, this was something that, it's like the primordial beginnings of the Maya world and I, I'd just been looking forward to seeing it for so long. I've finally documented it. It's so hard to find great photos of this in person. So that's what I was doing 10 days ago.

• 9:30Danny Jones?

  That's incredible. I wonder, how many pyramids do you think are undiscovered in that part of the world? In like Mesoamerica and South America? Do you guys have any idea?

• 9:42Speaker 02

  I think I can conservatively say thousands.

• 9:45Danny Jones?

  Thousands?

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:46Danny Jones?

  How many do we know of?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Uh, that's, you know, I, uh, somebody like Luke should actually count them all up.

• 9:52Danny Jones?

  Because Egypt, we know the number, right?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like 140, 130.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. In, 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. 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,

• 10:16Speaker 01

  we were in Palenque and everywhere you would drive and everywhere you would walk, you know, you, 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 uh, the outer ruins on the outside of the city and everywhere you walk, it's these huge pyramids. And we were talking there and he was like, you know, the, the common term is that Egypt is the land of the pyramids, but it's pretty obvious this is the land of the pyramids. There, there are certainly thousands and thousands of them out there.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  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 the Maya area, does it have to be a pyramid type freestanding thing to be called a pyramid? How tall does it have to be? Is it, is a five meter one a pyramid? Or should we call it another kind of building? But if you, you know, in the, in the broadest definition of pyramid, I'd say that Palenque alone has a hundred.

• 11:28Danny Jones?

  Wow. What is the size of Palenque?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  It's, uh, 200 hectares, about a two and a half kilometers across and only a half a kilometer wide. It sits up on this plateau above the plains. So the mountains come up about a hundred meters, a plateau of about half a meter, half a kilometer wide is where the city is. And then the, and then the mountains continue to rise above them.

• 11:56Danny Jones?

  Steve, last time you were here, Luke, I think we looked at this, right? We looked at kind of like the whole geographical map.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  We did, we looked, we looked at his map and, uh, and I told him that, um, when you arrived there, this was, you got the job because you had done the, uh, you had found Belize, right?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  And, um, or I'm sorry, you had found.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Machna.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  I'm sorry. He didn't find.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  We knew where Belize was.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  So, um, so he had got the job because he had discovered Machna. And when he arrived, I was telling him that, um, when you arrived at Palenque, there were, uh, you know, maybe a few hundred buildings or a couple hundred buildings that were.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  329.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Wow. And so, you know, you can take it from there.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  But then I, I mapped about 1,200 and it's not the whole city either. There's things, there's some dispersed things on the hills above it, and there's a bunch more stuff to the west. And somebody just showed me they, they just finally made a lidar of it. And about a half a kilometer to the east of where I stopped mapping is a really big pyramid. You can see it poking out clear as day in this new lidar. And I'm pissed I missed that one. I mean, little buildings is one thing, little neighborhoods, okay, you know, I'm doing my best, but I missed a whole dang pyramid.

• 13:13Danny Jones?

  How long did that take you to map out all that?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Better part of three years. It was crazy.

• 13:18Danny Jones?

  And you lived down there the whole time?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Well, I come back for like four months to write up the report and give it to all of the authorities that would give me more money so I can go back down there.

• 13:29Danny Jones?

  Okay, is this it? This is, oh, this is a, uh?

• 13:32Speaker 02

  That's a version of it.

• 13:32Danny Jones?

  That's one version of it. Okay.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  It's definitely my, uh, the black parts are my map. The, uh, the other parts are, are pretty more light or color coded, so you can see what's high and what's low.

• 13:43Danny Jones?

  And what, what civilization lived here?

• 13:47Speaker 02

  The Maya.

• 13:48Danny Jones?

  This was Maya. Okay.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  This is classic period Maya. These guys are kind of, uh, 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. There's all sorts of astronomy tied into mythology that, like the, the guy who, uh, is buried in the big pyramid in the center there, the temple, the inscriptions, the one that, that, that square is over. He does this magnificent thing where he says he's better than the next lineage,

• 14:30Speaker 02

  bloodline person. He's vaguely related to the people that were the kings before him. They got killed by an attack from Kalakmool, another competing city. But he says, "I'm better than that. I'm the reborn avatar of the first of our triad of patron deities for the city." And he ties himself back to a place where Venus was rising in the exact same constellation. And the distance is like 3,000 years. And he's, he, he mathematically or astronomically dates back what the, what the birth of that guy that we just call God One.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  And Palenck 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.

• 15:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I thought was fascinating was in that, um, in the Graham Hancock show, the episode that you were in where you're explaining how they did the calendar and the different versions of the calendar. I love the holiday times of the family, but I find it very demanding to have to go to all these parties, dinners and shopping for gifts. Every year I tend to burn out quicker than the last, but I don't plan on that happening this year. Getting older is inevitable, but feeling older is not. As we get older, our body's ability to create energy declines, but recent scientific discoveries have found we can actually increase our energy levels in our cells by taking something called N M N. N M N has been shown to increase energy and endurance, activate our body's ability to

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  link in the description or head on over to V E R dot S O slash Danny and use the coupon code Danny at checkout to save 15% on your first order. That's code D A N N Y at V E R dot S O slash Danny to save 15% on your first order. It's linked below. Now back to the show. And how they had individual names for each day for like 50 something years. That is, that seems so confusing. I had to watch it back like five times to understand it.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  You know, it really is confusing. I've been trying to figure it out for 30 years and there's still things that there are still aspects of the Maya calendar which confuse me.

• 17:34Danny Jones?

  And their math too, right? Like their numerical system.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You know, they.

• 17:39Danny Jones?

  It was, well, it was, it wasn't more complex. It was simpler, right? It was, it was only, there's only three characters. Is that right?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Well, I, I'd use the word elegant in that regard, that they, they have a positional system of numeration like we do, where we have, you know, the ones, the tens, the hundreds, the thousands, 10,000, so on. They do it by twenties, 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.

• 18:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  They, they can alternate. But we have 10 symbols. We have one through nine and then zero.

• 18:14Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but it's also.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  People get pissed off when I say that their system was more sophisticated than ours. But so let's, let's go with elegant.

• 18:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, it was, it was more sophisticated though. Like the things they were able to calculate seemed kind of absurd compared to what we can do today, right? Like, like how, what, how is that responsible for these ideas of like different ages and periods of time and like these 52 year epochs that they came up with? Like, how does that all tie together?

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a, that's a very long answer.

• 18:58Danny Jones?

  We got plenty of time.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  No, you know, they, we can see that their system begins with a foundation. First, they have accounting system, which they decide is 20, not 10. You know, they're, 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? Um, from there, they can count things and they start using it to count primarily the dates. I mean, we know they're counting all sorts of things, probably in the market as well, but we see them counting the days and then they decide they want to make a year. They want to make a, a cycle that they can talk about one year to the next, but they don't pick the solar cycle at first. They, uh, they pick a number 260. That's their sacred

• 19:45Speaker 02

  calendar. Uh, it's called the Solkeen or the Cholke, depending on whose language you're talking in. All of Mesoamerica does it, not just the Maya. It begins with the Maya or the Olmec and then it goes everywhere in Mesoamerica until contact. So it's the most important one, but it's 260 days, no months, no weeks, just a combination of 20 symbols and 13 numbers. 20 times 13 is 260. Why that number? Why 260?

• 20:17Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  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. And I think it's beautiful that, uh, you know, they, instead of so many other cultures look to the heavens to, uh, to make time, but they decided to look inside themselves. Like what is a cycle that is uniquely just us? We look around the world, you know, the sun's 365 days, you know, animals give birth on different time scales. We have this long, strange nine-month pregnancy.

• 21:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  So they looked inside themselves and from there they built out the 365-day calendar. Well, I think once they started to farm, that became a lot more important, knowing the solar cycle, when to plant, when to harvest.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  So those two numbers, a 365 day solar calendar and then their original 260 day calendar, when they put those two together like cogs spinning into each other, you're only going to hit the same day every 52 years. So for 52 years, you'll have a unique day. It'll have one, the first part of it will be its 260 day calendar name. The second part will be the 365 calendar name. But because the two cogs, which they never made or envisioned, that's for Western minds to try to envision it. The two cycles only meet up again at the same number every 52 years. That's how we get 52 years.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Can you imagine how many generations it takes to do that? You have to be, you have to have astronomers that are watching the stars daily, recording these things and then handing it down for generations.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Not for this part. One part's human and one part's just the sun. They use the low hanging fruit. The astronomy comes in when they make their next calendar.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  They make a lunar calendar.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  The long count one?

• 22:25Speaker 02

  The long count is the really weird one. And my friend Chris Powell did his dissertation or masters, looking at that long count calendar and trying to figure out, is there an astronomical foundation? And really, as you go forward in it, all of the cycles of all the celestial objects they're looking at, the five planets and the moon and the sun, they just, the the amount of synchronicities that happen in the long count are crazy. The farther you go up, well, even even very early is the surprising part, you start getting these

• 23:04Speaker 02

  cycles that they're noticing, like the number 584. It keeps coming up and up and up. That's the synoptic period of Venus.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  The number 780 is Mars, but that's three times 260. So that's a, 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 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.

• 23:47Danny Jones?

  What, what is this? The Mars?

• 23:49Speaker 02

  There's a Mars. He's got kind of, he, he looks kind of dragon-like. He, he's got kind of a crocodile face with an upturned nose, but he shows up as the hieroglyph of Mars in a number of contexts. And in some of those contexts, it's not clear that he's Mars, but in the Dresden Codex, they make a whole almanac dedicated to Mars and showing it going 10 times in increments of 780 days.

• 24:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Which is exactly.

• 24:21Danny Jones?

  Did you find this, Steve?

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:24Danny Jones?

  That sounds interesting.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Somewhere in the Dresden Codex.

• 24:25Danny Jones?

  I want to see what this guy looks like.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Google Dresden Codex Mars.

• 24:27Danny Jones?

  Dresden Codex Mars. I think we'll find a picture.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 24:30Danny Jones?

  Any luck, Steve?

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Anyway, the, the long count's weird.

• 24:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Because it's their linear count of days and they're really not linear people. They think in cycles.

• 24:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, right. Right.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Here's, there, there he is. Yeah. On the top left, that's him.

• 24:47Danny Jones?

  This, this?

• 24:49Speaker 02

  That, that, that one right there. Yeah. Zoom. There he is. See his funny little face hanging off and he's got hooves too.

• 24:57Danny Jones?

  He does.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  But he's hanging off of sky bands and the numbers over there to the left keep counting in increments of 780 days, 10 times. And they bracket him and they even, his face is in there somewhere. Yeah. That like right above the first of the, the hoofed guys hanging down, all three of them, the top right glyph is his face.

• 25:20Danny Jones?

  That thing.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Uh, yep, that's the one.

• 25:23Danny Jones?

  Oh, with a hook. He has a weird hooked nose, huh?

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:27Danny Jones?

  And that's supposed to be Mars.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  That is Mars. Yep. He's identified in a bunch of other, uh, texts as well, but they don't always say, and he's associated with the number 780.

• 25:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  So this gives us the context of who that guy is. And then we understand it better, like the, like the texts of Palenque talk about Mars. And when you go to the astronomy programs, he's actually sitting in the sky where, uh, on the dates that they're talking about.

• 25:57Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy, dude. Oh, my God.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Palenque did this crazy thing where the, the two farthest out planets, uh, Jupiter and Saturn.

• 26:07Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Mars, just by weird coincidence, if, if that's what it is, is three times 260. So it was easy for them to play the numerical games of adding Mars in. They kind of double dipped him every three times they went around their main calendar. But the other two were hard. The math didn't work because they do that retrograde motion as we see them 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.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  And it's apparent that that was developed during the time of a king named Khan Balam, the son of Pakal. And he.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Puts together these numbers. He's the first one to show us the eight nineteen cycle in the cross group. And there's a date that shows up again and again and again in the texts of the Palenque of the cross group. That's uh, that's not the day that the temples are inaugurated. They're inaugurated like a year and a half later. But if you look at the date they keep talking about Mars Jupiter and Saturn are in a really tight cluster in the sky that night. And all three of the temples of the cross group can see it. So it appears that his math before he built

• 27:51Speaker 02

  the temples was like, this is the perfect day to inaugurate this, this new calendar that incorporates those and we need to make our opening date that day. But then, just like in modern times, his contractors failed him. They were like, oh, that 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 until guys like me got access to modern astronomy software and we could actually run the numbers and go, well, what, what's happening on that day?

• 28:29Danny Jones?

  At what point in human history did our astronomer in modern human history did astronomy catch up or get sophisticated enough to figure out, holy shit, the Mayans were on to something?

• 28:42Speaker 02

  I think that, you know, there were certain people that were, you know, more than a hundred years ago that were had access to ephemeruses and knew how to use them, those, you know, big ugly tomes and like, oh, I'll do the math here. People like Foisterman did it in the early 1800s. But nowadays, you know, I guess it's the 1980s is when we started getting software that we could actually use on computers. That wasn't just some, some guy in a little office somewhere with no access to each other or to, to tell people what he had found, but. Floyd Lounsbury of Harvard was doing, uh, oh, he might be Yale. I loved Floyd. I hope I didn't miss say that.

• 29:25Danny Jones?

  Shout out to Floyd. Harvard or Yale.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  He was a very nice guy. I know a lot of those guys, you know, 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 ephemeruses in the seventies and maybe even as early as the sixties.

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• 31:54Speaker 02

  To start figuring out some of this stuff. He's the one who really showed us for the first time that there was an 819 calendar and that it had something to do with Jupiter and Saturn.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  And I might add, you know, when the, when the expeditions of Stevens and Catharwood in the 1830s were happening, as they arrive in Belize and they go all the way up through the, as they go all the way up through the Yucatan and they visit various Maya sites, so much of, so much of these Maya cities are completely overgrown by the jungle. And the alignments that so many of these buildings have to astronomical bodies are completely covered up by the jungle. The evidence of it isn't even there until you clear the trees away. And then you have people who are studying archaeology astronomy, which is really still kind of in its infancy.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Archaeology astronomy, that's a cool word.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, just studying the way that, that ancient cultures really studied their astronomical world.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  So much of this couldn't even be observed. Like when I, when I was at this city that was near Kalakmul, El Ramonau, which is a pre-classic site, it's impossible to, to, without modern day technology, without clearing away all the trees, it would be impossible to actually identify any alignments.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  Well, that's kind of what most of my career has been.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  You know, 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.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  I could guess at the alignment. But as you say, a lot of them, I got no stones.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  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 even in Honduras, at Copan, they actually, you know, their city began to fall apart because they had no trees left.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Changed the weather pattern.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  No more, no more trees, no more water dropped on their crops.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so at El Mirador, you know, put yourself, so El Mirador is like, you know, the primordial, one of the first cities of the ancient Maya world. You have Nakbay, and then I think Nakbay, you know, gets so big that they eventually move over to El Mirador and build another city. So you've got to think, you know, these tropical areas that are, are these, you know, jungle areas are constantly getting so much rain, they flood very easily, they're, you know, these ancient people are constantly exposed to various dangers on the ground, such as the Ferrolance, the snake that we talked about last time, as well as other snakes.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  And other dangers. So you want to, you want to elevate yourself above the jungle. So they create these platforms that they live on. So they live on these big pyramidal platforms. And there's obviously no trees on those. So it creates this big, empty, open space where they're analyzing the stars. And, you know, over the course of, El Mirador is as far back as 2,800 B.C., 2,200 B.C. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, 2,200 years ago.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  2,000 B.C., I'm sorry, 200 B.C.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  200.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  200 B.C., 2,200 years ago, they are, you know, they're studying, they're studying the stars. And over the course of the last 2,200 years, the jungle has just reclaimed it. And when you're walking out there, it's impossible to, you know, acknowledge or determine any of these astronomical alignments. So so much of it is, it becomes the very last things that are determined as archaeology goes on and you can clear out these cities more and more.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  I think there was a, an initial bias, looking at these things, saying, well, these people aren't really, they're savages, they're not scientific, we weren't even looking for astronomy, and really, any ruins at all, until like, the 1960s. And in terms of their ability to do so, they had the number system, which we don't know how old the number system is, but once they get a, a number system that they can really do math with, that was an aid, and then writing. When did writing start? When did books start? But, one way or another, they were able to, to take a lifetime of research, and hand it to a new generation.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  That's really what excelled them beyond their neighbors.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. In the Americas, the first human beings that we have evidence for being in the Americas, is how long ago? Now, we're thinking about 30,000 years ago. We've got, we've got, uh, 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, then it wasn't that way. But, the White Sands thing, which is 23,000, that one's holding pretty strong, so archaeologically, our cap is now 23,000.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  In terms of DNA studies, they're saying that, uh, you know how we can, I mean, those, those people in lab, lab coats can figure out, when things mutate, they're saying, uh-

• 37:40Speaker 02

  That the earliest DNA in the Americas started to change and isolate about thirty three thousand years ago. And now the weird number that nobody believes is more like sixty.

• 37:53Danny Jones?

  Wow. What do you mean when you say change and isolate?

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Uh, the, we still believe that humans came across the Bering Strait when it was Berenjia. 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 twelve thousand years ago.

• 38:17Danny Jones?

  Right, during the last.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Then it melted and it's been, it's been water ever since.

• 38:20Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Do you subscribe to the, uh, Younger Dryas hypothesis?

• 38:25Speaker 02

  Not necessarily. I mean, I do believe that there was something that happened then. I, I don't know what humans were doing at that time and how much it impacted them.

• 38:36Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  You know, I'm not a geomorphologist. There's, that Younger Dryas thing has become so hotly contested.

• 38:44Danny Jones?

  So, so, okay. So, the last time people were able to make it across that Bering Strait land bridge was before, walking across at least was, uh, before twelve thousand years.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:56Danny Jones?

  Was it twelve thousand years ago or was it twelve thousand B.C.?

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Uh, twelve thousand years ago.

• 39:01Danny Jones?

  Right, twelve thousand. Okay, right, right, right.

• 39:05Danny Jones?

  And so the first people that came across, you think they just kept going all the way down to South America? And apparent, I guess, I guess, like, Central America and all that, there, there wasn't a lot of ice down there by the equator during the Ice Age, right? So there was like, it looked sort of similar to what it looks like now.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  From Antarctica, but places like, you know, with certainly things within the tropics never iced up.

• 39:29Danny Jones?

  But it's, but if you looked at like a map of Mexico and Central America, or like Costa Rica and Panama and Nicaragua are now, that would not look nothing like what it looks like right now. If there was way less water in the oceans and it was all frozen up.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  It would, it would have a different shape, for sure. There would be, there, there, there's a shelf that drops off steeply into the Pacific, almost the whole coast from.

• 39:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 39:51Speaker 02

  From Alaska down to, uh, down to South America, there's. There's a shelf. I mean, not a totally flat shelf, but there's, there's parts that we would have to know were, were land. And then there's a place that's drop off.

• 40:05Danny Jones?

  Okay. So they, they kept going and all the way down because the first,

• 40:11Danny Jones?

  the first evidence of people are like in South, South America. Am I right there? Like around Peru?

• 40:16Speaker 02

  I mean, that's what the archaeology is telling us right now. That's, uh, and so that's the story we have to go with as far as our,

• 40:25Danny Jones?

  Is it true?

• 40:26Speaker 02

  You know, white sands just changed everything. I mean, now the, the oldest stuff we have in South America, like the, the great site of, what's it? Monteverde? Uh, Tom Dillahay's site is at like 14,900 years and four decades that when I was a student, that was the big discovery and that changed everything and turned our, our, our heads on, on end and said, you know, wow, is the oldest evidence, South America, but now just, just in the last year or two, white sands has clapped back with a 23.

• 40:59Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  You have, you have those sites in the, uh, in the eastern Amazon, right? In Brazil that go back about 10,000 years.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Very old stuff there, but it's still, it's not older than, uh, Dillahay's site, Monteverde. Am I saying that wrong? I hope not.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  There's so many sites.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually the, 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 and along the Amazon. How, how the heck is that happening? So yeah, I mean,

• 41:39Speaker 02

  I think we're still very much in the process. We, we, we've got to go with the information we have. Uh, I don't think we have all the answers. I think there are a lot of sites now that need to be revisited. When I was, again, when I was a student, 30 years ago, I would read about things out of the Amazon that were 25, 30,000 years old, but the literature in my archaeology class would always conclude with, that's contested and inconclusive.

• 42:06Danny Jones?

  In the literature.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  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 now that thirty thousand might not be a crazy number. I'd like to go back to some of those crazy sites and have somebody redig them. Uh, uh, this is a perennial problem with archaeology, too. It's really not science because in many cases we can't replicate the study. You excavate something, you destroy it. Can another scientist independently go in there and dig up the same thing? No, you dug it up. And so, you know, I, I, I've been on many a dig where we've intentionally said, let's only dig part of this site.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Let's leave the other part of the site for future generations in that kind of effort. But in some cases, like in the case of a cave or something, maybe there's just one part of the cave that's inhabited. If you dug it all up, that's all that the world gets to know about that for the rest of time. And the person who dug its interpretation remains the one.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think a perfect example of, of, um, only be able to, only being able to carry out, you know, a, a dig or an excavation, uh, one time is, uh, the, the temple at Chavín, uh, Chavín de Hantares and they, they, uh, essentially Chavín de Hantares where the, uh, people of the Corral Supé culture, they get tired of trying to rebuild their, this is, this is on the, uh, the, this is on the west coast of Peru, uh, in this, uh, you know, it's like a desert beach and they're building, I mean, arguably the very first pyramids on the entire planet. Um, you know, before your, the official date of, yeah, uh, pretty close to the coastline.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  There's one on the beach and then they go back in, uh, a river valley back like another fifteen miles.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And they're doing that to escape these, uh, storms called El Niños and La Niña. And it just constantly hitting this civilization over and over and over again. Anyways, they get tired of, of rebuilding their city so many times, they go, we gotta get out of here. So they go up into, they go up into the Andes and this is the, uh, this is where Andean civilization, uh, you know, we think becomes influenced by the Amazon. And, uh, I think maybe the first time we, we start seeing, um, architecture with four walls and big interiors that you can walk into. I say big, but you know, uh, for ancient people, big interiors that you can walk into, huge stones. And, uh, they're being influenced by the Amazon. And I think this is where Andean civilization gets their pottery, right?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  This is the first place we see, one of the first places we see some pottery pop up.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  There's earlier examples that are happening in Ecuador, but it's one of the main corridors where pottery starts being a common wear.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  So, really, really, really important site. And when archaeologists first discovered it, or, you know, 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. 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.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. It's a good example. To elaborate on what Luke said, underneath Chavín de Quontar were these crazy labyrinths. And they would take twists and turns and have all sorts of little, like closets along the way, but at the termination of these five or six different labyrinths, were piles of different kinds of artifacts. There were some that have just animal bones, there were some that just had pottery, there were some that just had like stone sculptures. And the idea that's been passed down since that excavation is that this was a pilgrimage site, and people were taking specific things for specific purposes.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  And then the owners of the temple were stashing these things in kind of categories in each one of the labyrinths. But during those initial excavations, they cleared all that stuff out. They didn't really take a lot of pictures or drawings, so there's at least, I have never seen any. And so now, we have this literature that describes this very important aspect of this early temple, that argues a narrative that it's a pilgrimage site, which I believe, but the truth is, no archaeologist after that was ever able to assess those collections of artifacts independently.

• 46:49Danny Jones?

  Um, going back to the, the younger Dryas hypothesis, the, when I, one of the most compelling things about that idea to me is the, when you compare it to, when you look at like things in Egypt, like the Great Pyramid, and you look at how crazy that thing is and how hard it would have been, the, the, the idea that makes it so compelling is that maybe it's possible that human beings were more technologically advanced, and then there was some sort of like cataclysm that like wiped them out. And then we had to like hit a reset on humanity where we kind of like knocked us back to the Stone Age and we had to restart. And that explains how like it goes from maybe the pyramids really, really old, and then future civilizations came and they weren't as sophisticated. And then they started drawing hieroglyphs on like

• 47:34Danny Jones?

  these polished granite boxes and stuff like that. And like inside the pyramids and said, oh, started putting their dead people in there and saying there were tombs. When you look inside of it, it's like, what's, how do you explain all these crazy shafts that doesn't look like human beings were meant to be in here at all? Like, how did you move these giant 2,000 ton blocks, 500 miles? To me, like, I'm really curious. I talked to Flint Dibble on here. He's the only other like academic archaeologist I've talked to.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  I watched that episode.

• 48:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he, um, I liked him. He, he was, uh, he made some really strong cases for some things, but the Egypt stuff, he just, he just like had blinders on about the Egypt thing. He like, he wasn't, I don't think he was open minded about some of the Egypt evidence. It's like including these vases. Um, but, but yeah, the Egypt thing is really interesting. So I'm wondering like what, what from your experience has been the consensus among like fellow academics on like the younger Dryas hypothesis? And what do they say to you? Or when you have discussions with them about this and these ideas of civilization being reset?

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Well, let me start by saying, both you guys know a hell of a lot more about Egypt than I do. I'm a, I'm a, an American archaeologist. I, I know, I know what I, I watch on TV.

• 48:51Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  So, uh, the Younger Dryas hypothesis, you know, it's been around for, for a while. Um, and I have not discussed it with many colleagues at all. I see, I see the fights on the internet over it. And I see, you know, the, the root of discovering its exact nature, I think, falls into, uh, you know, geoarchaeology or, uh, you know, geomorphology. I'm not a geologist. I don't really, there's a, 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.

• 49:33Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  But, uh,

• 49:38Speaker 02

  like archaeologists have been talking about it before this whole, uh, this whole did it destroy an entire ancient civilization and wipe it out conversation.

• 49:49Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  My memory is that we thought that there was, uh, that, you know, the Younger Dryas has now been connected to this comet.

• 50:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  In a way that it wasn't originally.

• 50:04Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  It was seen as a geological episode. And if memory serves, uh, there was a, there was a hypothesis that as the ice age was slowly warming up, that ice in a huge lake called like Agassiz in Canada, uh, melted enough to cause a huge flood of ice that kind of came down out of the rivers and into the Atlantic. And that flood of ice quickly lowered the temperature of the Atlantic and raised its, uh, its sea level.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  So that it caused flooding on the coasts and radically changed the temperature colder again for, I don't know, you know, a couple hundred years or something. Geology is funny like that.

• 50:56Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  But that was what I originally read. And now this, that, now there's a new idea that it was a, that it was a comet.

• 51:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  That impacted.

• 51:04Danny Jones?

  Or a series of comets, possibly.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Something that impacted the earth.

• 51:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah, Randall Carlson seems to believe that it that it hit the North American ice sheet right above.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  And that it answers the the extinction of the mega fauna.

• 51:17Danny Jones?

  The mega fauna here and not Africa, right? Because Africa still has really large mammals, land mammals, and here we don't.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 51:24Danny Jones?

  And then he.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  But you know, I mean, mammoths were all the way over to Europe, though, too. They they died out in Europe. They were they were in in Siberia. So that is.

• 51:33Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  That is a point to consider.

• 51:35Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  Like the, yes, Africa's larger herd animals remained. So did Southeast Asia, but the the wipeout of the mega fauna in the northern climate was fairly at a uniform time. It wasn't just the Americas. It was also.

• 51:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Europe and across to Siberia and into China.

• 51:55Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  To to Randall's point, I a team that's 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, he was like, you know, by doing this, we also vicariously created the highest quality LiDAR map um 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 saying it's pretty amazing.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  Wow, right here in your state. Luke's been finding all sorts of stuff along the river.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  So this this will be in the future. Um. 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. Uh, so that's that's probably down the pipe for me in 2025. I'm gonna go document these things in person, but you know, there are quote unquote, it sounds dramatic, but lost cities still in Florida, still in the US, you know, out in the woodlands that, you know, need to be discovered and lost cities would be.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, they are absolutely full of these big Mississippian cities that we've been.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Just ignoring for generations now.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  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. She goes, "Where'd you get this?" And-

• 53:34Speaker 02

  Is it online?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Uh, no, it's, it's, it's, it's like a private software that I'm just lucky enough to have.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  I know a guy though.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, so, uh, I'll show you some photos, you know, offline. Uh, it's, 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. Uh, and they have marked all these, uh, you know, the superheated shrapnel from what they think is a comet that hits the northern, uh, North Atlantic ice cap and that shrapnel, you know, flies across the US.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  And it, I mean, uh-

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Have you seen the Carolina bays?

• 54:08Speaker 01

  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 US and all of them, you know, on the east coast, they're pointing northwest, on the west coast, they're pointing northeast and they're all pointing towards some kind of impact site. Now-

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Did those guys say when, did they have an estimation of when these impacts occurred? I think that's a, that's a, uh, a crux point of this argument.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. Um, 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 a hundred million years ago, so.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  And I don't know who to believe. I'm not a geologist and, you know, we live in a world where, you know, one team of credentialed people go against another team of credentialed people and then we're stuck in the middle going, "I don't know who to believe here."

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 55:00Danny Jones?

  Have you seen the images of the Carolina bays, like the aerial shots of them? Like how they have like, steam, you can find them.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 55:06Danny Jones?

  The Carolina bays, I had a gentleman in here, um, George Howard, who is showing this. He has a, he's part of that comet research group and they've shown that there's all these like perfectly symmetrical bays or in the Carolinas that say exactly what you were saying, how it looks like they were shrapnel from, coming from the north, like a shotgun blast that went down into the Carolinas. They're right here. I'd be curious to, to-

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Those little circles in the, uh- Well, I mean-

• 55:36Speaker 02

  I could see where geology would say these are impacts. The question is, how long ago?

• 55:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  And can, geology stinks like that. Archaeology has, you know, carbon 14 and things, but geology can relatively date things by layers. But they don't have very good techniques to say, oh, you know, let's, let's, uh, let's test this layer here. Oh, this one comes back at a hundred thousand years ago. Oh, this one comes back at a million.

• 56:02Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  They don't have that. And so, um, they give us vague, wide numbers about these things. This happened somewhere between one and 10 million years ago or something. So.

• 56:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  And so we'd really need, you know, like if any of these things could ever show, you know, a half obliterated campsite or something like that, that would be a smoking gun. But to this date, I don't think we have that. Like there's a, you know, Hancock talks about that impact crater that's right in front of the serpent mound.

• 56:38Danny Jones?

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• 58:05Danny Jones?

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• 58:15Speaker 02

  Uh, in Ohio, Ohio. Yeah, that, that big, beautiful serpent mound is, you know, a 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, uh, and I think he may even be right that the people who made the serpent mound recognized it as a crater. Or, you know, some kind of unique landscape, but to argue that the two are concurrent in time, we just don't have the data yet.

• 58:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Like if, you know, if, if the head of the snake was blown off by the crater, then boom, smoking gun, but there's nothing like that. So that I think it's the, it's the time depth between these, geology says for sure, uh, comet impacts and the time of humans. That's the, that's the wiggle room that neither side really has a viable answer to.

• 59:11Danny Jones?

  Right, right. You know, the, the beach.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Neither side can discount the other at this moment.

• 59:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Through science.

• 59:18Danny Jones?

  The beach that's right here on the other side of this studio is called Indian Rocks Beach. And the legend has it that there's a bunch of Indian burial mounds all around this area. And just recently, I think it was early this year, or maybe late last year, somebody was like building a house and they, they were like ripping up part of the land and they dug into the burial mound, an ancient Indian burial mound. And then it's.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Earlier this year.

• 59:45Danny Jones?

  I believe it was earlier this year. And or maybe it was

• 59:49Speaker 02

  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 Saint Pete.

• 1:00:02Danny Jones?

  From the weather.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  The weather never that's the the hurricanes never come here because the Indian mounds protect us and you're telling me somebody dug them up.

• 1:00:10Danny Jones?

  Just happened recently. And now we just got smoked by three hurricanes in a row.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Diane, your juju's right. Somebody ruined it.

• 1:00:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  And then you got Milton or Helene or whatever you got.

• 1:00:20Danny Jones?

  And we got Milton. Yeah.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  That's that's freaky.

• 1:00:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, a lot of people here believe those myths about the well, the Indian, the Indian magic.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  Did everybody like beat the tar out of the guy that dug that out?

• 1:00:31Danny Jones?

  They tarred and feathered them online. That's for sure. That's funny.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 1:00:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So you've spent, you've known Graham Hancock for a long time and you've had

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  No, no, I met him last year.

• 1:00:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  I've known of him for a long time.

• 1:00:46Danny Jones?

  Okay. And Luke told me that you were supposed to be the original guy to debate him. Is that right?

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no. There was, 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.

• 1:01:02Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  I don't, 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.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  I love having the conversation. I regret all the vitriol that's happened. You know, it's such a wonderful thing that podcasts like this have created a new and wonderful audience for archaeology and it sucks that it's turned into this ugly argument where everybody points fingers at each other and calls each other stupid. That's, that's weird. And Graham is of course, you know, right in the intersection of that whole thing.

• 1:01:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, Graham's definitely a great thing because he's like opened the eyes of like normal, everyday people like me who can like look at this stuff and get interested in this stuff. He's made it like delicious, if you will, for like normal people, you know, not people like you and Flint, who have spent their whole entire lives like studying and reading and doing not just the fun stuff, but doing like the boring work too, right? Which is what I talked to Flint about on here, but I thought like Flint was able to. At first, my first reaction was like, yeah, he really kind of like laid out a lot of context to some of the stuff that Graham talks about and filled in a lot of the blanks. Especially during that podcast and when he came in here, but like I said, you know, when I showed Flint these, for example,

• 1:02:26Danny Jones?

  he was like, oh no, these could have easily been done with like Flint chisels and pounding stones and that kind of stuff.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  I saw, I saw that whole part. That was, that was fascinating.

• 1:02:34Danny Jones?

  And I was kind of like blown away that because I felt like he was so reasonable when it came to the Atlantis stuff, right? When he, because he, he's an expert in Greece and in that time period when Atlantis was supposed to be. So the guy's like, he's an expert in ancient Greek stuff.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:02:49Danny Jones?

  And the excavation of Athens and those areas. So he knows that stuff probably more than most people. And like I thought he laid out a really compelling case of how Atlantis was probably not a real place. It was probably just like Plato's cave, right? It was just like this hypothetical thought experiment philosophical idea that he came up with.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  He did a great job explaining that.

• 1:03:11Danny Jones?

  Yep. Yeah. And then when he tried to explain these, I was just like, there's some sort of cog-

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  He talked about those kind of drills that had like the bow drills and-

• 1:03:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a, that's a possible concept of how it was made.

• 1:03:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  The, the trick, you know, this one obviously is a, is a replica or did your, did your buddy give you that?

• 1:03:29Danny Jones?

  It's a 3D print. Yeah. Yeah. He had these 3D prints made of the, some of the most, not all of them are perfectly symmetrical. He owns a couple dozen of them. But these two in particular, when they were measured on light scanning machines, some that like this big aerospace company, they found out that like from edge to edge, from, from here all the way to the bottom, they're perfectly symmetrical within the variance of a human hair. So like unbelievably symmetrical that would, if we wanted to create that today with granite, it had to be done on a CNC machine.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  I I am equally fascinated and impressed by them and and and I did think that Flint's attempt to explain how they could be done was on the right track, but I I agree with you. We don't know how they did it.

• 1:04:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  But I don't, I mean, my conclusion of that is that they were freaking amazing and we are still too too stupid to figure out how they did it.

• 1:04:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  I mean, they were that smart, but that doesn't make them, you know, aliens and it doesn't make them, it doesn't, I mean, you know, there's, there's arguments that were aliens that, you know.

• 1:04:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  And that all of us are seeded from some other.

• 1:04:41Danny Jones?

  And there's this weird thing that people do, like, I think it's a weird thing that Flint does after, like, I after thinking about it for a while and and like, listening to his reaction to that and just like saying that, like, trying to avoid the conversation by saying that, like, oh, because he purchased that, he's contributing to the cartels and he's contributing to like the black market. I don't even want to touch that. I don't want to be in the same room with that. Like, it's just, it's heresy for anyone to purchase these things and be and like have them in their own possession. This belongs to archaeology. This belongs to us. So I can't, I can't entertain that conversation. You know, it's like a, it's like a weird cognitive dissonance.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I 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.

• 1:05:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  But, you know, Flint is in a position where he is an archaeologist and he has a responsibility to talk as conservatively as he can as a 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, by his colleagues for. Well, I don't know. I mean, I think lots of archaeologists have flaky ideas. We just talk to each other different because we're in the club.

• 1:06:12Danny Jones?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  Um, I, I don't think, and if you listen to Graham, he, he never says, these are facts. He says, this is my gut feeling. These are hypotheses.

• 1:06:22Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  And he's free to hypothesize like that as an investigative journalist and be responsible within his own field in a way that Flint, if he said the same thing, would be deemed irresponsible within his community.

• 1:06:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  Because he has a responsibility to only forward the things that we have factual evidence for. We, you know, we can, we hypothesize up to a point, but I think another aspect is that, you know, we, archaeologists really try to come up with hypotheses that we can test. There's, you know, there's tons of hypotheses. We could all say, well, you know, I think, I think there was a civilization 12,000 years ago. Okay. Well, where's the proof?

• 1:07:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  You know, do, do we have an artifact assemblage? Do we have buildings? Do we have a chronological sequence of things in a, in a stratified dig? Those are the things that we, you know, we, we try to come up with hypotheses that are testable.

• 1:07:29Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  Um, and if they're untestable, well, then, you know, at some point we, we stop talking about it, at least in archaeology.

• 1:07:36Danny Jones?

  Hmm, totally.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  So he's, you know, I, I think that, uh, people like Flint and myself are bound by, uh, being representatives of our field to try to, uh, not profess hypotheses that we have no possible way of testing and proving or denying.

• 1:07:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's the thing about people like Graham versus people like Flint. There's this,

• 1:08:04Danny Jones?

  and you know, obviously, it's a, I think it is a problem with people who are tied to like the big academic institutions that like they can't speak out of turn because they have the fear, right, of being criticized or losing their possessions or whatever. It's this whole idea of centralized, the centralization of education, you know?

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  See, I have no such position. I can talk whatever the hell I want to talk about.

• 1:08:26Danny Jones?

  That's beautiful.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  I'm my own boss. But I am just as educated as other folks are, probably 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, I like the dreaming hypotheses, things that people like Graham Hancock come up with, as long as it's not disparaging some group of people and exalting another. I think it's fun. I think it's what inspires us. I think that, you know, most archaeologists, if you ask them honestly how they got started in archaeology, it was dreaming about fantasy things, you know, and then we, we find a

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  shade of that in history work and, and we go from there. But I mean, you know, this is how we get inspired. And we do owe folks like Hancock a debt of gratitude that he has inspired millions of people to be interested in the kind of things that I do.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think I probably would not be sitting here if, if I hadn't read Fingerprints of the Gods as a, you know, a young teenager.

• 1:09:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  You know, Fingerprints of the Gods was the very first play, 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 Fingerprints of the Gods, which came out in 1995. And, and, and, you know, that sort of, you know, kind of pushed along, you know, whatever interest it had, and it probably, you know, expanded the interest. So, you know, I read about the Olmecs in that book. I read about the Amazon.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  And you know, at about sixteen or seventeen and that kind of fuels an interest. Also read about Egypt. So I start studying ancient Egypt and by the time I'm in, by the time I'm about twenty-one, I decide that I'm not going to be able to get through college. If I keep going down this marketing route, I've got to do something that I loved and I was always inspired by, you know, we talked about last time, like my grandfather was, all my grandfathers were explorers and antiquarians that, you know, funded digs out in the, at these Mogollon sites in, in New Mexico and discovered some cool stuff. And, um, 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

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  when I first started, I was, you know, really hardcore on the, uh, you know, the pyramids have to be 12,000 years old and just because I hadn't exposed myself to, to anything else beyond that. But then-

• 1:10:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah. When you first came on the show, you, you were pretty, you know, you believed that you were pretty stuck. You, you were talking about a piece of wood that you thought was like-

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Well-

• 1:11:06Danny Jones?

  One of the pyramids-

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Well, so what I was saying was, was I think that, okay, so this is kind of leading into what I'm saying is, is I think that as I, um, as I became, as I started to educate myself more, you know, I, I read fingerprints of the gods and, uh, and then, you know, just wanted more and more and more and more. And so, you know, you pick up textbooks at a certain point because it's just, you can't get enough. And then you read things in textbooks that challenged the preconceived notions that, 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. 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 fourth dynasty, you know, under the pharaoh Khufu. Uh, he, he talked about this on, on

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  either Rogan or, um, another podcast, um, but I clipped it and put it on my X account. And, um- And I became exposed to, you know, information like, and I got to see these just, just a month ago, these, uh, these Cedars of Lebanon that are inside the, you know, it's quote unquote burial chamber, but without a sarcophagus. It's a strange, it's a strange chamber in the pyramid.

• 1:12:12Danny Jones?

  In what pyramid?

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  The Bent Pyramid. So up at the highest, uh, the highest chamber in the Bent Pyramid, there, 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, uh, no, I'm sorry. Then I really, the next 50% is built because it's only about halfway up in the pyramid. But those, those Cedars of Lebanon kind of lock that pyramid into a certain timeframe. You know, they, they carbon date them and they're about, uh, they're about 4,800 years ago. You know, 2,800 B.C. and, uh, you know, so we know exactly how old these trees are. So they kind of lock them in place and you discover more things like that. Like how we were talking about earlier where you were saying, you know, a smoking gun for

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  a civilization existing in the Americas 12,000 years ago would be, well, what if one of those, you know, uh, meteorite fragments just destroyed a city, right? Well, at Giza, we actually have something that's, that's sort of similar to that. The construction of, uh, Menkara's, uh, so you know, you have the, you have the Great Pyramid, you have the Second Pyramid or the Middle Pyramid, and then you have Menkara'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. There's a, there's like these rubbish pits that are just, they pretty much just picked up the city and dumped it off to the side as they're building that Causeway. And as they're building that Valley Temple.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  And so when they go through the, uh, when they go through the rubbish, they find these, uh, they find these seals with a cartouche and a cartouche is like the encircled sacred name of the pharaoh. And they only find the two previous pharaohs, which are Khufu and Kafer. Menkara 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,

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  I would have never guessed 10 years ago that I would read. I picked it up in Luxor while I was in Egypt. 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 and excitement about things that we don't understand, like how these vases could have been made. How they, you know, I got to see the unfinished obelisk in Aswan in Egypt. You know, 1,200 tons made out of solid red Aswan granite.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  It's just, I mean, that's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. And, you know, the peculiar thing is, you know, they have to free out the bottom of that whole obelisk. And then what you don't see in a lot of photos is right behind it. To get to the Nile, they have to clear out the whole granite outcropping that is, you know, just the same size, much bigger actually than the obelisk. They have to clear all that out and clear out this causeway and pull that obelisk down into the river where they're going to load it onto a barge and take it 500 or, you know, 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.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  But, 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, you know, if we want to call it ancient technology. And so that's why I think that, you know, Graham Hancock, you know, give credit where credit's due because none of anything I would, that I'm doing now, maybe I wouldn't be doing any of it had I not read Fingerprints of the Gods.

• 1:15:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  You know what's really hot on the internet right now, a search word that's again and again is the Olmec. And that was, that, that interest in the Olmec came from folks like Graham Hancock. It didn't come from archaeology textbooks. It was tons of people learning that there was this mysterious culture they knew nothing about and they want to know something about it, right? So Luke tells me the Olmec are the, 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.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  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, they're so great there. They have a whole team of fact checkers who just scrutinize everything I say, down to was it 750 B.C. or was it 751 B.C.? Because these sources contradict what you say. So really super vetted thing. But it began with the inspiration of a whole bunch of people wanting to know more about the Olmec

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  because what's, you know, pejoratively called pseudoscience created that interest.

• 1:17:56Danny Jones?

  Yes. Well, that's a great segue to us. We, maybe you can give us some of the highlights of that. What, where, can you tell us where, so were the Olmec, the, one of the first groups of people that were in the America or in South America? Or in, what was it, Mezzo, Middle?

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  Mezzo, yeah. 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 a, uh, at least the evidence of a religious structure. Like they're the first ones to make religious art and they, they interacted with a bunch of other cultures. Nowadays, I see it at least as a more co-evolutionary thing. A lot of interaction was happening with the people who would become the Maya, with the people who, who would become the Zapotec and the Mishtec. And the, the valley where the Aztecs would develop like 2,000 years later.

• 1:18:52Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:18:53Speaker 02

  So they, they interact with them, but they are.

• 1:18:55Danny Jones?

  And what time, what timeline, what part of?

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  We're talking, uh, Olmec run from 1800 BCE to 500 BCE. So 1300 years worth of them. And then they turn, you know, archaeology calls them at that point, the Epi Olmec. And that goes on to about 280.

• 1:19:15Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm. And when we're talking about the Olmec, we're talking about these big stone carved heads, right? They look, they almost look like they're from, from Africa. They look like African descendants.

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  Right, right. There's, 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.

• 1:19:35Danny Jones?

  Last time you were here, we were going through all these photos.

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  I think that one is back too. I, I boasted that I'd bring everybody to every set, all 17 heads. And then one was in China. So I, I missed it by one, but I think, I think it's back.

• 1:19:47Danny Jones?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:19:48Speaker 02

  But yeah, you know, these heads are what everybody's fascinated by. And then they are incredible and, uh, and their faces are very evocative. They do look African though.

• 1:19:59Speaker 03

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• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  And that's controversial to say, right? People don't like that.

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  I mean, it's it's common to say. In fact, you know, it didn't start in pseudoarchaeology. It started with the very first person who was a historian who took a look at them. In the 1800s, the first one that at that time they were calling the head of Waipun. Now it's Trace Sapothe's head one. A historian came through and and looked at it and said, when he wrote it up after his journey, he said, and that looked very Negroid. And that's that begins it. But but when you look at the faces of the people of the Cozacoalcos River Basin, they are like this. They have these wide noses and thick lips. It's just a a local characteristic.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I told a story about what was that town that we were in?

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  Santiago Tuschla, the big ass guard who looks so.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  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 of minutes. The guy was he's probably taking a nap inside the museum.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  It was it was early. I mean, we.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, that's so true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, and you can see on the visitor's sheet at the front, like, nobody had been there in in weeks or something, you know. So he opens up the door and I'm looking at this guy's chest, this huge man. And I look up and it's this guard who's working there. And sure enough, there's an Olmec head sitting on top of this guy's body. Like, he looked exactly like an Olmec, you know, the the.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  And he was freaky big for someone in that area. That happens all the time. I mean, everywhere. There's some, you know, there's there, there's that famous Chinese basketball player. I mean, he is two foot taller than the vast majority of people from his, from his country.

• 1:22:43Danny Jones?

  Do you remember that ninety, you remember that ninety year old man that was there who told us that in the early nineteen hundreds, they exhumed those six plus foot tall bodies out of the Red Palace at San Lorenzo?

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was, he was pretty tall himself, but that guy, yeah, he did say that. That's true. I, I did not put that in my, in my old lecture thing. I, I talked about it with the, the producers. I said, you know, this, this is an actual guy who actually said that. But he couldn't produce, you know, I asked him, where did the skeletons go? He said, I don't, they went to the lab and that's the last I saw them. And that's, you know, well, I can't really work with that, man. I can't just take a, a guy in cowboy boots's opinion that there were giants. But he, he was a member of the excavation and he was a multi-generational archaeologist too. His grandfather was an archaeologist there.

• 1:23:35Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:23:36Speaker 02

  So he knew what he was looking at. He did, he did say that.

• 1:23:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  He said there were, what, three or four bodies that were, that he didn't say, I don't, he said they were taller than him is what he said. Now, you're getting the story from me because he was talking in Spanish and I was, and I told you on the bus afterwards what this guy said.

• 1:23:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  But he did say it. You're right.

• 1:23:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Now, the look of these heads, the way they, the way they look like they're kind of African facial features. Is that very different from the way the Aztec or the Maya were depicted?

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yep. They, they, they depicted themselves differently, but that was, you know, hundreds of years afterwards. There's, there's, you know, we all focus on these ones that look so, so African.

• 1:24:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  There's a whole nother set of them that look totally Chinese. If you dig deep, yeah, especially the baby ones. I do discuss that in the lecture series that a, a lot of these that we call them chubby babies. And they're, they're so fat, their eyes are like squinted.

• 1:24:38Danny Jones?

  Like that?

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  Uh, no, no, I mean, that, that one's another thick lips one.

• 1:24:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  Look up like Olmec chubby baby.

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  There he is.

• 1:24:50Danny Jones?

  There we go.

• 1:24:50Speaker 02

  Holy cow.

• 1:24:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Look at that guy. He's like, that guy looks pretty Asian, doesn't he?

• 1:24:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:57Speaker 02

  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. You know, DNA is very much confirming that everybody that's a North, that's an American Indian, their DNA phenotype wise is from Asia. And even the, you know, the Maya themselves have a trait that they don't talk about very often, or, you know, 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.

• 1:25:34Danny Jones?

  I've heard of that.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  It's a very Mongolian trait. And the Maya, typically, I've seen a friend's baby with that spot on their back. It goes away like, I think certainly by year two.

• 1:25:46Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  But it's, they are, they are born on the outside with a very Asian trait. So even today, it's, they're, they're genetics wise, they're very Asian.

• 1:25:58Danny Jones?

  How did the Olmec get there?

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  I think they were homegrown.

• 1:26:02Danny Jones?

  Homegrown.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  They were, they, they developed there from hunter gatherers into basic farmers. What's funny, one of the things I'm gonna push back on in my series, is we, 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, to feed a population where they could have a city that had 20, 30,000 people in it.

• 1:26:32Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  But it's turning out that the, the oldest of the cities named San Lorenzo actually wasn't Doing corn farming, only a very little bit. They had created this incredible riverine resource system. Where they put themselves up on a high plateau with this huge kilometer long platform for the Royals. But then there were twenty, thirty thousand people around it. All fishing and they would wait for the seasonal inundation to flood all of the flood plains below and they'd build up these little islands. Where they would smoke and cook the fish that they were getting out of that. And make it kind of, you know, less perishable. It would last longer.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  But that was one of their main resources, that and shellfish. And by the time other cultures influenced them enough to be intensive corn farming. San Lorenzo realized that where they were positioned sucked for corn farming. It was seasonally inundated. So the civilization shifted. To another part of that area and the site of La Venta turns up. La Venta has tons of corn farming around it. They picked a better place to be corn farmers, but the origins of Olmec society. Are not agriculture. They figured out how to just harvest. Fish and shellfish out of their region on a whole new level.

• 1:28:00Danny Jones?

  And how, and what is the? What is the academic consensus on how they were able to? Cut and move these giant heads all across the land, like down the rivers, across the, like through the forest. It seems like it's almost insurmountable.

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't think there is a consensus. I think the, the commonly accepted story, I will say. Is that they did combinations of floating them down rivers and rolling them on rollers. But I don't really see it happening. In fact, for sure, the old idea of a raft does not work. I had a, 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, uh, 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?

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  And we, the, this, this formula that he made me, I was able to plug in. I couldn't get anything higher than really three tons not to sink a raft that was as much as a hundred feet across. And there are places, bows in the river where that would just wedge. So, uh, 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 showed displayed there, oh, there's the head in the background. Those are like 15, 25 tons. There's no way. And I, and I had a nautical engineer do the math for me.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  That would sink like a rock. Now he had a really cool alternative hypothesis. He said, let's, let's use the principles of Archimedes and buoyancy. And instead of trying to make a flat thing that got sunk, what if you put a bunch of logs around it that were vertical? And so like just painted a fence around it and it would act like a bobber. If all of the logs weren't flat horizontal, but they were vertical, the water displacement won't allow you to put a stick straight down in the water like that without it floating. It's more resistant. So he had this idea that like, maybe they were like bobbers.

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  They'd just cover them in vertical thick logs and they could float them down the river like that. And it would be a much tighter radius. Now that's also totally unproven, as unproven as these pretty pictures are right here.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, kind of, uh, just adding on to that. So what he was saying about that, that formula where he could plug in the, you know, the, a theoretical weight of an Olmec head and he really couldn't get, you know, if he put a three ton, uh, Olmec head on a raft that would wedge going down the, the river system. You know, then it would it would still sink the raft. Well, the smallest head is five tons. The largest head is the Lakhobata head, and I I've seen estimates at least forty two tons. And then now in the last few months, maybe the last six months, I've seen the estimate up at like fifty tons.

• 1:31:17Danny Jones?

  And how far away are those big ass heads away from where they cut them?

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  Uh, from from La Venta, seventy kilometers.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  That's huge. And so, no, we don't. We don't know how they moved them.

• 1:31:32Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  And what kind of stone is it made out of?

• 1:31:36Speaker 02

  Basalt.

• 1:31:36Danny Jones?

  It's basalt. Okay. So it's a softer stone.

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  No, no, it's pretty hard. It's limestone's much, much softer than it.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, basalt's one of the harder stones in in Mesopotamia.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  Basalt can be right there with granite.

• 1:31:48Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:31:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, it's forty-three miles.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  In fact, in fact, um, in fact, uh, in Sterling's papers, he, uh...

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  Threw a swamp.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're I mean, you're taking that through all different types of terrains. But, uh, in some of Sterling's, uh, earlier papers, he actually describes, uh, he found these huge columns that are, you know, this this big around of, you know, a few feet by a few feet thick. And, you know, six plus feet tall that would have been sitting in in the, uh, I think there were some in the Red Palace. He's found some, um, just discarded next to next to the river, and he described them as being granite, but they were really basalt.

• 1:32:28Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  I mean, they're they're extremely, extremely hard.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  I mean, there are ways to it to move these things that

• 1:32:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  don't involve modern technology. Like, I'm a I'm a huge fan of this guy, Wally Wallington. I want to meet him someday. But he built Stonehenge in his backyard in like Michigan or Wisconsin, single-handedly.

• 1:32:50Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  He's a retired contractor.

• 1:32:52Danny Jones?

  Same size?

• 1:32:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. There he is, Wally Wallington. God, I love Wally. I sent him fifty bucks I didn't have because Wally needs more cement. Um, you know, the, the, the concepts he's talking about are so profound and simple.

• 1:33:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he just uses like counterbalances, right?

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  And he moves them by putting two rocks or, you know, pivot points underneath them. And he spins them and every time you spin them, it go, 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, uh, he can mount one up. And he also shows how he can lift them up, the, uh, the cap, the top stones, the.

• 1:33:39Danny Jones?

  He's doing this by himself with nobody else helping.

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, those are his, those are his brother in laws, I think, watching him. Those guys are funny at the end. They're like.

• 1:33:47Danny Jones?

  The bottoms.

• 1:33:48Speaker 02

  Call it Wally hinge, call it Wally hinge. No, no, call it Stonehenge Reloaded.

• 1:33:54Speaker 02

  They're so great, but here's this, you know, relatively simple man. Who has shown without major tools, how to do this and, uh, and, and that's not to say we know that the, that's how it was done by the Olmecs or the Egyptians or whoever, but.

• 1:34:08Danny Jones?

  Those weren't necessarily symmetrical stones either.

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  Wally inspires me just like, uh, you know, the, the wonderful stories of, uh, of folks like, like Hancock. I mean, you know, he is showing us what's possible, but, but well, Wally is different than Hancock. That Wally freaking proved it.

• 1:34:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  And while he's been doing this for, you know, a few decades, imagine when you have an entire, you have an entire industry of people doing this and trying to, you know, further.

• 1:34:39Speaker 02

  I love that one. That's.

• 1:34:40Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  You know, imagine you have an entire industry of people, highly intelligent people doing this over the course of centuries. How much, um, you know, how much you're able to invent and, and learn how to.

• 1:34:52Speaker 02

  He's, he's got one that, that shows the, the same angle that the pyramids of Giza are at. And how he can make a simple lever system that, that he can haul, you know, five times, 10 times his own weight by himself. With this particular angle and he can haul it straight up.

• 1:35:10Danny Jones?

  That's so interesting, man.

• 1:35:12Speaker 02

  So, you know, he really, there, there he is twisting it. He's got two pivot points underneath. And he is just turning it and every time he turns it around, it goes half the distance between the two pivot points. This is difficult. But I mean, this is how you would move a giant stone.

• 1:35:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and if you had a really deep sophisticated understanding of math like they did, why wouldn't they be able to figure out some, some sort of?

• 1:35:41Speaker 02

  And you're also motivated by, you know, zealous religion.

• 1:35:46Speaker 02

  And, and also I think there's a more practical part too, like creating something huge and magnificent like this, like, why did they do it? Well, I, I think number one, you know, on the most boring and practical levels, it's a WPA project. You're a big man, king. You know, a hundred thousand people want to follow you. If they don't have something to be engaged in this civilization, then what are they doing there?

• 1:36:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:36:10Speaker 02

  So these big projects they make together cement cultural identity.

• 1:36:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:36:17Speaker 02

  But they're also, um, they're on a religious level, they are, yeah, look at him just move that thing so simply. I, I love Wally.

• 1:36:25Danny Jones?

  And if they like, like, if they did use some sort of wooden wedges like this or wooden levers to, to move stuff like this, we obviously, we wouldn't have the evidence of that. That would be gone. We would just have the stones.

• 1:36:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:36:38Danny Jones?

  So there's, it would make sense why we wouldn't have evidence of that kind of stuff.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  There's a, there, there are these things, Luke and I were just in, uh, in Peru and Machu Picchu and Cusco. And there are these big stones that have just two like titties on them. And they're, they're in the walls, you know, why wouldn't they just shave them off? Are they proud of them? Why? You know, why wouldn't they, why wouldn't they just close them off? A lot of people say, oh, they're, they're where they would, uh, lash ropes so they could move these big stones.

• 1:37:07Danny Jones?

  These are those nubs.

• 1:37:08Speaker 02

  But they're always, they're always in twos. And I wonder whether they aren't the evidence of Wally's pivot points.

• 1:37:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but the, the one thing though, that I can't explain is the fricking scoop marks. Or like, so the way those stones, it looks like they were cut using like, and some sort of acid to soften it or something?

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  That, that is a theory that I'm, I'm actively trying to figure out. I thi- I think it was acids and there are weird like, wipe marks that look like, uh, you know, like somebody cleaned up a spill on the walls. They, 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, but

• 1:37:55Danny Jones?

  But the acids would help them cut it though, right?

• 1:37:57Speaker 02

  Right, right, or fit them perfectly.

• 1:38:00Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:38:00Speaker 02

  Like the conventional theory is they, they were using hammer stones and they would just

• 1:38:04Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:38:05Speaker 02

  Pick up a five ton stone and go, ah, okay, let's set it down on this one. It's not quite right. Pick it back up. I'm gonna, I'm gonna peck this place. Okay, now do it again. Oh, no, do it again. That's

• 1:38:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Speaker 02

  It's

• 1:38:16Danny Jones?

  Like, like

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  It would take so, so much effort. But you know, when it comes to effort, a colleague of mine, Bill Fash once said something that I, I love. I repeated 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, us Westerners are always looking at something like that and noticing how much work would go into it. Or our minds boggled it like, but that would take so much effort. And to our minds, we're always about efficiency. Like, you know, if you're smart, you're efficient.

• 1:38:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:51Speaker 02

  But if you're devout, maybe you do do it the long way. And the greater, the harder it was for you, the greater your active devotion. So I think that's a profound thing to always keep in mind when we of one culture in time are trying to understand the motivations of ancient people.

• 1:39:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:39:08Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:39:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  Doing something the long and hard way is an act of devotion, not stupidity.

• 1:39:14Danny Jones?

  And that says a lot about like the, I think the, the ultimate direction the societies are heading in, like their values. Like if you look at our society, our ultimate values are the economy and making, like working in our nine to five job to survive. And if you look at it from a grander scale at the whole country, it's like making the economy survive, increasing our GDP, making things more profitable, right?

• 1:39:40Speaker 02

  Streamlining.

• 1:39:41Danny Jones?

  Streamlining, stuff like that. And like, there's no profit in, there's nothing, there's nothing to gain monetarily or economically from building a huge shrine that would take, you know, hundreds of years.

• 1:39:52Speaker 02

  See, it's that kind of thinking that's gonna close the National Science Foundation. I don't want to see that happen. There, there are senators a couple of years back, I, I remember because Amaya cites

• 1:40:04Speaker 02

  Grant was specifically questioned in Congress as to, you know, a congressman was saying, National Science Foundation gave $50,000 to dig up a Maya pyramid? How does that profit America? How do we, how do we make any money on that? We shouldn't, uh, Congress should have oversight and not allow that. And we can only allow science that is going to produce a technology that makes us money. If that was our attitude, we wouldn't learn jack or shit.

• 1:40:31Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, after like all the people that I have that come in here to talk about the ancient world and the stuff that you're talking about, I just like, it kind of, I'm developing this weird like web diagram of an idea that like we, our civilization might be devolving because of technology. It's almost like it makes sense that we were way more sophisticated or, or advanced in the past because of the lack of technology, right? Something to do with, with us being surrounded by all these screens and all these cellphone towers everywhere and, and self-driving cars and, and these iPhones that can, can connect

• 1:41:16Danny Jones?

  us with anyone instantaneously. It's like it buried all these deep senses inside of our bodies to where it almost like turned off some sort of magic within us, you know?

• 1:41:25Speaker 02

  Well, the irony is that we've made communication technology that's better than the planet has ever seen, but it seems to just be separating us. Like in a physical sense, it's isolating us. We can communicate like never before, but the product is our isolation individually.

• 1:41:43Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah, totally. Um, what do you make of how these cultures in South America and, and Egypt and China and all over the world were doing, building these same types of structures at the same time? Like, like what, how do you think they were connected? And, and so like, it seems like even when you have the alignments to the cosmos in these temples like Obekli Tepe and in Egypt and in Central and South America, it seems like they were all obsessed with the cosmos and building pyramids and all these similar gods and like flood myths and things like that.

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  You know, when it comes to the flood myth, I think that's uh connected to the Ice Age, that everybody was, you know, the the rising and lowering lowering of the seas. I think that was something that humans were experiencing all over the planet. So that particular one, I think, is fairly explainable. That that one narrow part of what you just asked about. The other part, I mean, I I personally favor a theory of, you know, what Star Trek called uh 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

• 1:43:01Speaker 02

  of us that are almost instinctual, and they are an investigation of our world, and they are a communication. And I 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? Um, I I don't see it like like at least Graham's early books would uh suggest that it was a 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. Um, and that it's kind of a product of humans being the animals we are.

• 1:43:43Speaker 02

  That's that's the and that's a theory, just like Graham's is a theory or a hypothesis. But I I see us as uh the parallel developing, the concept that we could build a house. We lived in a cave, but we could build a cave anywhere. Let's do it. And it ends up with four walls and a roof. Um, moving stones, uh one that really I think is a very particular invention that I'm fascinated by is the bow and arrow. That one seems to have not just come from one place and spread out independently developed. But that's a very, I I look for things that are what archaeology calls diagnostic artifacts. These are very particular to this culture.

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  Um, as way as signatures on culture, but you know.

• 1:44:30Danny Jones?

  Where did the bow and arrow start?

• 1:44:31Speaker 02

  Back to your, um, Africa, like long, long ago.

• 1:44:35Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:44:35Speaker 02

  At least I, I won't pretend I were, I remember the day.

• 1:44:40Danny Jones?

  Steve. That's what we got, Steve.

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  One of the things I would add on there is, um, I, I think for people building, uh, pyramids all over the world. One, you know, highly, highly conservative, like sober answer might be, uh, I was walking through the, the jungles, um, uh, around the city of El Mirador and I had never seen so many ants in my life before, you know, whether they're soldier ants or fire ants or leaf cutter ants.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  And I was, the group of people that I was there with, um, I was talking to them and I was like, I was like, you know.

• 1:45:15Speaker 02

  I was gonna say 70,000, damn it. I should have said it.

• 1:45:18Danny Jones?

  The bow and arrow originated in Africa during the Paleolithic period around 71,000 years ago.

• 1:45:23Speaker 02

  I, I had 70 in my head. I was scared to say it, darn it.

• 1:45:27Danny Jones?

  I love how they use a picture of like a modern fucking compound bow.

• 1:45:31Speaker 02

  I interrupted you. You were talking about ants.

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  Well, and I was just saying, you know, um, ants work in much of the way that maybe the Maya people do or did. You know, they work in, they work in unison. They bring resources back and forth. And what do they build? They build pyramids, you know, it's, it's in them to do that. They're going to do it naturally. And, uh, and it makes sense in their little tiny brain. 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. You want to build a structure that's huge.

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  Element of what you're saying too. It turns out looking like a mound because, um, without mortar or rebar, they can't build it up high without it.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  Splaying out unless it has a fat base going to a tiny top. That's, that's the most boring explanation of why pyramids are all over the world.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  Any kid, you know, your kids, if they have blocks, you know, they can build a tower a couple of times and the other one pushes it over. But if you build something with a fat base going up to a tiny top, that's a stable building. And you can build the tallest thing you can build before the advent of cement and rebar. By building a pyramid.

• 1:46:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, another thing I'd add, and this is just me being facetious or devil's advocate, but you know, that conversation of pyramids being built all over the world kind of runs hand in hand with, with, you know, why the Egyptians are building, are building the pyramids, you know, and then, and then you can leap to, and you know, why do you see pyramids all over the world? Well, the thing is, a lot of these pyramids, especially the ones, you know, let's say where there are a lot of them is in the Mesoamerican world. A great majority of those pyramids are actually tombs, you know, they, they're places that people might live during their day and then they're entombed inside of it, you know, and there's thousands of people buried in pyramids all over, you know, the, the vast majority of pyramids around the world, there are people buried in them.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  So it's just, it's just a funny thing, you know, if, if we're going to look to the other side of the world for an answer, you know, Pakal's tomb is a great, is a great, I mean, that's a pyramid that was only built to be a tomb for him.

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  I have a theory here in North America where, you know, we, 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 6,000 B.C. where we see hunter gatherers living along the rivers of like Tennessee and Kentucky and that area up into Ohio. And they're, they're, one of their big resources are these shells from the rivers. And they make these big shell mounds. They, they're all over here too. There's a bunch of shell mounds right here in St. Pete, aren't there? There was, there was a time, a couple thousand years ago where this shell, riverine, or ocean resources was a huge thing.

• 1:48:28Speaker 02

  So they build up these giant mounds. And in, in Tennessee and Kentucky, they started just putting dead bodies in the shell mounds. And, you know, maybe it was to keep the stink away, maybe, you know, maybe there were practical reasons, maybe there were religious reasons, but the practice started long after the first shell mounds were happening. Like down here, you don't find any bodies in the shell mounds, but up there, they started doing it along the rivers. Then all of a sudden, that shell mound isn't a pile of dirt anymore. It's where grandpa is. And then your ancestors get connected to that land. But then the Adena culture starts like not that long after, maybe, you know, a thousand years,

• 1:49:13Speaker 02

  which is not much archaeologically. The Adena start building dirt mounds and they put all of their burials in there. And they're building them out of dirt because they're in a different area that doesn't have all those shells. But maybe they're, you know, their cultural practice at that point was that's where we put our dead. We put them in mounds. And since we don't have enough shells to make a mound here, we'll make it out of dirt. And the, and this begins this tradition of burying people in mounds in North America. But the core of it was thousands of years ago, probably putting a stinky body under the shells where you can't smell them anymore.

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  Ancient landfills.

• 1:49:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:49:55Speaker 02

  That's a lot of my theories revolve around.

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, ancient landfills. I'm sorry.

• 1:50:00Speaker 02

  Trash management is a very underappreciated aspect of human motive motivations. I think half the cities that were walked away from were probably mostly because they smelled like shit.

• 1:50:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would explain why they keep them near the coast, right?

• 1:50:16Speaker 02

  Like, it's a really dirty and disgusting topic, but you know,

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a, there's a parallel topic to that, that sort of explains why we think that burial sites in Egypt become, become sacred sites, you know? Egypt is one of the places where they think that the bubonic plague began. And, you know, living right along the river with, you know, you're in this high concentration of, you know, all these rats and snakes and rodents that are, that are living around you and they're, you know, they're living among your little house that's next to the river. It's the perfect place for diseases to begin. And so it's not that, you know, you have limited place to bury your dead. And because the vast majority of Egypt is wheat and barley fields, you don't really just want to throw grandpa like out in the field, you know?

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  And you don't really want to bury him among this very scarce precious land that you have. So what do you do? Well, This kind of gets off into another thing of the Egyptian psychology and their worldview, but you know, they would acknowledge that the sun, which they were a sun-worshipping 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. 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.

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  So, but this began, you know, that early psychology was probably there, and they always wanted to be buried on the west side. But eventually, originally what they do is they go out to the desert where the sand, where you know, where these big sand pits are, and they clear away the sand, and 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, I don't really have a use for this vase. I don't really have a use for, you know, this necklace, like, this is nice, but I never really liked it, I'm just gonna bury it with him. And, you know, maybe there's some guys in town that are like, you know, I would have liked to have that vase, why don't we just, why don't we just go out there and take it? So, you know, eventually, somebody returns to go see his grandpa's grave, and it's been desecrated.

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  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? 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. You know, and then it just continues and continues until you get to these rock-cut tombs that go into the ground, but that's not enough, they gotta put a building on top of it, and we call that a mastaba. And then that mastaba eventually turns into six mastas stacked on top of one each other that makes this step pyramid, and then that can develop into a pyramid. And so, it's

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  this, there are these, you know, essentially, this is...

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  It's like a dump for their bodies that eventually becomes like the central point of their religion, right? So that's just, that's just another example on the other side of the world of the same thing happening as the, as the shell mounts.

• 1:53:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:53:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so much of it is about death, right?

• 1:54:05Speaker 02

  It's about your ancestors and that kicks, you know, we, 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.

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, man, that's so fascinating because it, it at a, so necropolis is a, is a, a Greek word means dead city. So you have acropolis, acropolis, a living city. You know, you have this necropolis in Egypt called Saqqara, and I'm sure you've heard of this before. And in Saqqara, you have these fake facades of buildings where the pharaoh is going to be walking around, where, 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, that's what they are. They're like buildings that people are going to continue to live in, they're going to get up in the next world and still be alive. And they're building, you know, these giant graveyards, they're just, they're cities.

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  You're walking through it and all of these buildings that we call tombs, that's an oversimplification on our part, looking into the past. This was a building where they would live eternally in the next life, and they actually, they built temples and places for the pharaoh to walk around. So on the third photo right there, those are facades of temples.

• 1:55:24Speaker 02

  On the right, third from the left?

• 1:55:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, with, with, with some of these, with some of these buildings, there's not actually an entrance into it, it's just a, it's just, it's just a solid building.

• 1:55:34Speaker 02

  The Osirion.

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:36Speaker 02

  Where there's all these doorways that go nowhere.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Yes, it's thought that these are sacred places. where the dead are going to continue to live in the afterlife. And it's just funny how they really, really care about building these cities where dead people are going to continue walking around. And what's so interesting is that the Maya put forth so much money from their economy to keep up their ancestors. Necropolis, you know, where, where, where their ancestors lived.

• 1:56:01Speaker 02

  On a very micro level too, every family had a little family shrine if they owned that. Piece of property through generations, one of the buildings. Was where grandpa was buried and it becomes. A, a living shrine in their house.

• 1:56:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like an entire part of their city that is just.

• 1:56:19Speaker 02

  Is that one of those? Uh, mustabas in the background? Is that the, on the bottom right?

• 1:56:25Speaker 01

  Uh, so that.

• 1:56:26Speaker 02

  Bottom left, I'm sorry.

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  Bottom left.

• 1:56:28Speaker 02

  That, that pyramid in the background, that's one of the, that's the one that Emotep made, right?

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  Um, okay, I'm sorry, not this one. Will you go back to the, to the other photo?

• 1:56:36Speaker 02

  The bottom left.

• 1:56:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:56:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  Are they like?

• 1:56:48Speaker 02

  Is that a pyramid or is that the mustaba thing?

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  So they think that that, they think that that is the first. Um, pyramid, you know, in, in order where you can see that, uh, if you look up the word Mastaba. Um, the idea is that, well, I mean, we know that, that people from thirty one hundred B.C. To twenty seven hundred B.C. Very important for people such as pharaohs are being buried in these buildings that, you know, these one by three buildings that look like big stone twinkies. That's basically what they are. And, um, and the reason that they evolved from there is because they're burying the person in these shafts that go under the ground. And what tomb robbers do is rather than quarrying up just like this. So what tomb robbers do, rather than quarrying all those blocks to get to that hole that leads to that tomb.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  What they do instead is they go, okay, we're just going to dig a parallel hole in the ground. And find our way to that tomb and rob all the goods that are from it. So they think that the way that the first pyramid was developed. Was that they had these shafts, these burial shafts under the ground that basically recreates, uh, the pharaoh's apartment that he would have had in Memphis. They're all, you know, they're decorated in all kinds of different ways. There's hieroglyphs down there and everything. And they they eventually started out as this one by three structure. And then they expand it to being basically a large one by one structure. Or let's say like a 10 by 10 structure in comparison. It's huge to be so big that people can't tunnel underneath it and get to the chambers under there. The way that we know they did that was I was standing next to this pyramid,

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  looking at where the casing stones have fallen off. And you can see the original casing stones from the smaller building that's in there. So you can look at it with your own eyes and go, oh, they turned this building into this building. And then added five more on top to make it this grand structure that arcs up into the sky.

• 1:58:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  So that's the idea. And then all these other pharaohs and, you know, high ranking government people, build their tombs and their little temples for the afterlife around it. And what they're building is a city that they're going to live in in the next life.

• 1:58:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:50Danny Jones?

  Have you seen those giant, there's, and I think it's in some of these, this same pyramid near Saqqara, where there's these, like the, I think they're step pyramids, where they have these like, coming out of the pyramids, there's these kind of like canals, they cut out of the stone that go to these giant dishes. There's like these big stone like bowls that have these. And there's these like channels cut out of the rock that go into the pyramid. As if they're like something that's supposed to flow out of the pyramid and go into these bowls.

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, Abu Sear is a great example of this. I honestly, I couldn't tell you. I know that Jeffrey, that Jeffrey Drum. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:30Danny Jones?

  Definitely not that.

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  No, it's these huge bowls, you know, it's so specific that you may not be, you may not be able to find it on Google Images.

• 1:59:37Danny Jones?

  It's a type in like probably land of chem bowls.

• 1:59:39Speaker 02

  There's probably like some archaeological terms that are following them.

• 1:59:42Speaker 01

  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, 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, I honestly couldn't tell you.

• 2:00:02Danny Jones?

  Not in, huh?

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, they lead out.

• 2:00:03Danny Jones?

  They lead out, like they're like they, it goes down, the pitch is down. Yeah, it's super strange. And you know, that's, he ties that in with like the smell. There's a, it's a, what is the, what is the smell sulfur?

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  Uh. Sulfur ammonia.

• 2:00:19Danny Jones?

  Ammonia, yeah, yeah, like the, the higher you go into the pyramid, the more it reeks of ammonia.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  It's either, it's either from something that was used inside those chambers.

• 2:00:28Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:00:29Speaker 01

  Or people just peeing in them. It was one of the two. I don't know. Yeah, I'm just making a joke.

• 2:00:33Danny Jones?

  Some people think it was like bat shit or something.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:35Danny Jones?

  Guano.

• 2:00:36Speaker 01

  I don't know. I was in places where there was a lot of that.

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

  Cat piss smells like ammonia.

• 2:00:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

  I was in, I was in places where there was a lot of bats and it didn't smell like that.

• 2:00:45Danny Jones?

  There it is.

• 2:00:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. How, how strange is that?

• 2:00:47Speaker 02

  Nice job. It's a crack team here, Danny.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:52Danny Jones?

  Um, so when it, going back to the Americas.

• 2:00:59Danny Jones?

  What evidence do we have of drugs in these cultures and drug use? Like what, what types of drugs were they using and when did they start using them?

• 2:01:09Speaker 02

  You know, the Mesopotamia, we do not have a whole lot of evidence beyond tobacco. There's, uh, there's, there's thoughts that maybe mushrooms were involved, but no real proof. You know, the, the, the entire argument is founded around a couple of mushroom stone statues, which really isn't enough.

• 2:01:30Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:01:30Speaker 02

  But South America, they were using ayahuasca and they were also using, uh, uh, San Pedro cactus. And there's a couple of other stray things that are involved in drug use, but they're like to prepare the body, like to, to purge the body so that it can receive the hallucinogenic stuff.

• 2:01:51Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:01:52Speaker 02

  In a pure way, like, uh, even maniok is said to be that, you know, maniok, we make tapioca pudding out of it, but it's poison and it's orig, it's, uh, it'll, it'll poison you in its original form. So they think they were using maniok to just throw up and then take San Pedro or ayahuasca.

• 2:02:12Danny Jones?

  Is there any connection?

• 2:02:13Speaker 02

  Uh, de toro too.

• 2:02:14Danny Jones?

  Is there any connection with drug use and religion?

• 2:02:17Speaker 02

  Um, I guess up in northern Mexico, we have the Huichol people who hunt the peyote. And that seems to be a very, very old tradition. Now those poor guys are cordoned off to a little section of mountains in the mainland, right across from the Baja Peninsula. But they'd have this traditional, uh, they do it to this day where they go out into the desert on this kind of like, almost like Australian Aboriginal, you know, uh, spirit walk. They go out there and they, they go to a, a place that's supposed to be the mountain of creation. And there they hunt peyote like they're hunting deer, but and they, they like shoot it with little arrows.

• 2:03:02Speaker 02

  But then they take the peyote and they see recreations of their creation story and bond. And then they walk back across the desert. So those guys are still doing that. And there are caves on the border of Texas and Mexico, um, the, the lower Pecos. There's especially one called White Shaman Cave. Oh, are you ready? White Shaman Cave. Um, where we can see that same story being played out. People like hunting little buttons on the ground and the, the, the big mountain. And people obviously, well, they're, they're like turning into ghosts.

• 2:03:43Speaker 02

  You see the, uh, the top one from the, the third from the top. That's, that's like, people interpret that as like that person's spirit coming out of them in trance. And this is a big wide panel. White Shaman Cave is absolutely amazing. I, it's a wonderful thing to see, but this, uh, this woman named Carolyn Boyd has really gone to great length to see all the elements of this, this panel, which is like 6,000 years old and pretty much nailed what the Huichol are still doing there. In fact, she, a few years back, she invited a Huichol group out to look at it and talk to them about it.

• 2:04:27Speaker 02

  And they just like burst into tears when they saw the whole thing. Yeah.

• 2:04:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would, I would add and say, you know, if I'm, if I'm reaching out there a little bit or speculating, or if I have, you know, a gut feeling, I think it was really interesting. I don't know, maybe it was Paul Rosley 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, molecular level, and he was like floating through the Amazon as like an atom. And then eventually he kind of moved on to another chapter, and he had embodied, he became a jaguar and started seeing the Amazon through the eyes of a jaguar. Do you recall him telling this story? This is-

• 2:05:06Danny Jones?

  I remember Mike Corey telling a story about doing ayahuasca. I think it was in the, maybe it was in the, I think it was actually in a Mayan village.

• 2:05:15Speaker 02

  Sure. And it's so popular these days.

• 2:05:18Danny Jones?

  Sure, sure. But no, I think-

• 2:05:19Speaker 02

  It comes from the Amazon.

• 2:05:20Danny Jones?

  I think that was Mike Corey who told that story. And he explained it as like, he explained it as like a human body being ripped open, like, like all, like everything pulled open of the human body, and it was like ripping open every fiber of the universe, or something like that. And like, he was like being like shot through the universe.

• 2:05:41Speaker 02

  I'm out.

• 2:05:42Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 2:05:42Speaker 02

  I don't want to be ripped open.

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:45Danny Jones?

  Not his body, like he was like seeing this.

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's, it's pretty common for people, you know, if you read experiences like just on Reddit, or there are people who, who put together these collections of people recording their experiences on ayahuasca. And something that, that's pretty common is people seeing a jaguar, you know, if they're doing it down in the Amazon, or being able to see through the eyes of a jaguar. And I just always wonder, I just always wonder if that has something to do or not with your idea of this fanged deity in the Amazon.

• 2:06:18Speaker 02

  I, I think he is definitely involved in the traditions of ayahuasca and, and San Pedro. I mean, it's, sometimes there's uprooted San Pedro floating in the background of scenes with this guy, so. But I did want to point out too, that- Hallucinogenic drugs are not the only way that Native Americans found a way to hallucinate and be that other world.

• 2:06:41Danny Jones?

  Starving to make you hallucinate.

• 2:06:42Speaker 02

  Starving, you know, the, the vision quests that were done by the Indians of the plains. Those, those didn't involve drugs at all. That was, that was 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'd cut themselves. And that sudden loss of blood is what would trigger the vision.

• 2:07:09Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 2:07:10Speaker 02

  So a really bad cut when you are starved and exhausted is the trigger point. The, the Native Americans in, in the plains, they kind of ran around. They didn't know when it was going to happen to them. They gotta, they had to hit their threshold.

• 2:07:24Danny Jones?

  That's so fascinating.

• 2:07:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:07:33Danny Jones?

  Wow. Because that's so interesting, because when you do, I've never done ayahuasca, but I've done DMT, and when you do DMT, it's almost like it's experiencing death in a way, where your soul kind of like leaves your body and you leave like the material world behind.

• 2:07:45Speaker 02

  That's their interpretation, that they are, they are entering the world where the dead reside.

• 2:07:49Danny Jones?

  Like they want to, and I'm not talking about sacra, like, are you talking about sacrificing?

• 2:07:55Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 2:07:55Danny Jones?

  Okay, you're talking about getting high.

• 2:07:57Speaker 02

  Getting to the edge.

• 2:07:58Danny Jones?

  Right, getting to the edge, right, like getting to the edge of death, but not going all the way.

• 2:08:02Speaker 02

  Hallucinogens in a way are poisoning us. The hallucinations are, are our body fighting off what it thinks is something trying to kill it.

• 2:08:10Danny Jones?

  Right. What sort of, so, so they would starve themselves and then cut themselves so they would bleed out, almost bleed out fully, and then they would experience these things? Were there any rituals involved in it? Was this like a ritual thing?

• 2:08:22Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I mean, this was a king thing. The, the kings would cut their penises and then dance around with paper tied to it, and the blood would splatter everywhere. People would see that. Then they'd put that paper in a bowl and burn it, and that blood and the smoke that it created was the conduit between this world and the other world. And through the smoke, their ancestors would come down and talk to them. I find it fascinating that it was specifically their blood and we so we talk about bloodlines. We talk, you know, we can ancestry can take, take my DNA and connect my, my kids to it. It's the, it's the fluids out of my body that actually show our proof of connection.

• 2:09:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:09:16Danny Jones?

  And how do you know specifically they were doing this thing by cutting their dicks and, and dancing around?

• 2:09:20Speaker 02

  There, there are, there are photo, they're not photos, but, uh, uh, carvings that show them.

• 2:09:27Danny Jones?

  Show them doing this.

• 2:09:28Speaker 02

  Yaxilan, they're a little, you know, it's a little.

• 2:09:30Danny Jones?

  Carving online of this?

• 2:09:31Speaker 02

  I got it. Yaxilan Stila, that ought to do it.

• 2:09:36Danny Jones?

  How do you spell that?

• 2:09:39Speaker 02

  Y A X C H I L A N.

• 2:09:44Danny Jones?

  I bet a lot of them probably died on accident by doing this.

• 2:09:47Speaker 02

  Probably, though they did have, there's, there was a neat, uh, ethnographic, uh, or, uh, ethnobotanical research that showed that even today, the Maya know a number of plants that are blood coagulators.

• 2:10:01Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:10:02Speaker 02

  Quickly stop the blood. In fact, one of my, my guys in Palenque, when I was, uh, the, the guys that were on the machete, she's pulling a rope through her tongue.

• 2:10:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:11Speaker 02

  And see the, see the bowl at her feet with paper that are, that's kind of folded inside of it. 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, it's even there, I think there are droplets in this one on her chin. If you zoom in, you can see the blood actually coming out of her mouth. Yeah, that's, that's supposed to be like the, the blood dripping down and then you go down and at her feet. See the thorny, see, obviously thorny, that's the bowl with the paper in it. And that paper is going to get soaked. And in the very next scene, that paper is burning, the smoke is turning into a big snake

• 2:10:53Speaker 02

  who's above her and burping out the first king of the Yaxilan dynasty named Yat Balom.

• 2:11:00Speaker 02

  Penis Jaguar.

• 2:11:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:11:02Danny Jones?

  Penis Jaguar.

• 2:11:03Speaker 02

  Penis Jaguar. That's a pretty, that's a pretty cool badass name, huh?

• 2:11:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:07Speaker 02

  Nobody messes with Penis Jaguar.

• 2:11:08Danny Jones?

  That is pretty fucking cool.

• 2:11:09Speaker 02

  Or Jaguar penis.

• 2:11:10Speaker 01

  Something I think that we should highlight, if you, if you go back to where you're zooming in really quickly, um, just segueing for just half a second, taking a side trip from talking about psychedelics. You know, one of the things that made, um, that made a site called Go Beckley Teppy so famous was that, you know, they're kind of, uh, they're kind of carving sculptures into the rock. Like they're removing away the face of the rock to reveal the, the picture from underneath. But there, you know, it's, it's these-

• 2:11:37Speaker 02

  Negative relief?

• 2:11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It, for, for, at, at that site, it's these very basic, you know, uh, animals and human beings. But this is exactly the same thing in exactly the, the same kind of stone. 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.

• 2:12:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:03Speaker 02

  This, this, uh, the background is deeper than the characters that are carved. It's called Ba relief and it is much harder to do than carving into a stone. Cause you can, you, you can just keep carving and, uh, fix your mistakes. This one, your, your mistakes are pedestal.

• 2:12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's gotta be perfect.

• 2:12:21Danny Jones?

  You have to plan it out, right?

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  And think of it-

• 2:12:23Speaker 02

  That's her, that's her husband, Shield Jaguar, and he's holding a, 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.

• 2:12:37Danny Jones?

  That's a Jaguar penis?

• 2:12:38Speaker 02

  Uh, no, that's hers, that's her husband, Shield Jaguar.

• 2:12:42Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:12:42Speaker 02

  Whose name is in the, the, the elbow of that thing. But she, he's not of the bloodline. She is. So she has to do the bloodletting because only her blood is gonna make it to, to Penis Jaguar. If he did the bloodletting, it would just be his nobody grandfather. So she, she's the one who's doing it for him. And then there's a number of scenes like this one. This one I think is in the British museum, but the other ones are in the, the Mexico City museum. It's a, 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.

• 2:13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, Yashilun Lentil thirty-three?

• 2:13:32Danny Jones?

  And this is how's that mine again, correct?

• 2:13:34Speaker 02

  This is mine. And so it shows her contacting her and first letting blood, then contacting her ancestor, then handing him his helmet and shield. So she's asked the ancestors to protect her husband in battle, and then she sends him off.

• 2:13:50Danny Jones?

  Wow. That's wild, man. So.

• 2:13:54Speaker 02

  There's thirty-three. That's.

• 2:13:58Danny Jones?

  This is, these are all part of, um.

• 2:14:00Speaker 02

  Let's see, there was one I just.

• 2:14:01Danny Jones?

  The same ritual.

• 2:14:03Speaker 02

  How about, uh, fourth from the top? That's, I think that's another one in the sequence. I think that's where she's whole handing him. I'm sorry. That's where she's handing him the helmet.

• 2:14:13Danny Jones?

  That one.

• 2:14:16Speaker 02

  So that's the end. There's his Jaguar helmet.

• 2:14:19Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh.

• 2:14:19Danny Jones?

  Nice.

• 2:14:20Speaker 02

  Come on. And that's a soccer game. That's not it. Oh, there it is. There it is. The one with the big snake. Go scroll down that one. Click on that one.

• 2:14:29Danny Jones?

  Just zoom in on it, Steve.

• 2:14:30Speaker 02

  There you go. See that guy coming out with the spear and a shield? He's Yat Balam. It says it in the hieroglyphs above him. He's the lineage founder of of Yashilun. 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.

• 2:14:51Danny Jones?

  That's amazing.

• 2:14:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And she's also holding that she's she's holding another bowl in her hand.

• 2:14:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:57Speaker 02

  Also with the stuff in the, and the, this, 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 ride it down to talk to us.

• 2:15:14Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  Isn't it amazing how intricate this is? You have to really look at it for a minute to understand what it is that you're looking at. I've got a question for you, Dr. Barnhart. We were talking about things that a minute ago, you know, that that people do all around the world that they feel compelled to do. I thought about this while I was in Egypt and there's statues of Alexander there, all kinds of depictions of Alexander. One of the things that the Greeks did, which I always, I always talk about how, you know, when I try to break down, because you know, introducing people to the Americas, it's so much less, in the pop culture, you kind of have to, you know, that's why I like constantly will refer back to ancient Greece or Egypt or something that's more in the pop culture to help people understand.

• 2:15:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:15:53Speaker 01

  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. Well, there was never a Maya Empire, it's just kind of a misnomer because they, they couldn't all get along. There was, there was this gigantic civilization of these-

• 2:16:21Speaker 02

  No more so than the Greeks.

• 2:16:23Speaker 01

  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, the Greeks get conquered by the Roman Empire from the west.

• 2:16:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  The Maya get conquered by, in part by the Teotihuacan Empire from the west and then conquered by the Aztec Empire that comes from the west. All that, all that together, that's just one similarity. When we go back to that, when we go back to that Stella and you see that, you see the queen, that she is the one that has the, she is the one that's, that's the successor of Penis Jaguar or Progenitor Jaguar, I guess that's like another PC name you could give them, but-

• 2:17:03Speaker 02

  I should name her too, her name is Lady Earthshark.

• 2:17:05Speaker 01

  Lady Earthshark.

• 2:17:06Speaker 02

  Lady Earthshark, okay.

• 2:17:07Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:17:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:17:17Speaker 01

  The Linothora?

• 2:17:18Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  And, 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 and, and do you have any ideas what the, what the-

• 2:17:32Speaker 02

  In terms of warfare, uh, yeah, there's, there's a lot of, there's neat stuff where I, there-

• 2:17:39Speaker 02

  I just showed you the the boots chan, right? Where it's the smoke serpent and things are coming out of the supernatural world into it. Well, there's helmets that you see, especially at Chichen Itza, where their helmet is actually the mouth of a snake. The upper part is the upper part of the snake and the chin strap is the lower jaw of the snake. So conceptually, what a warrior that's wearing a helmet like that is saying is, I'm coming straight out of the supernatural. I'm burping out of the vision serpent into this battlefield.

• 2:18:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah. You know, it's interesting about the Medusa, they're, they were called the Medusae. And allegedly there was, this is from a guy who I know who studied Greek his whole life and reads and translates Greek.

• 2:18:21Speaker 01

  Is that, is this that Aman guy?

• 2:18:22Danny Jones?

  Yes, Aman Hillman. He says the Medusa were these group of women who were kind of like badass, like killers.

• 2:18:29Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:18:30Danny Jones?

  And they would, the, the symbolism of the snakes was they would actually keep snake venom in their hair. And they would use that to, they would literally like

• 2:18:43Danny Jones?

  drug men and paralyze them and then have sex with them.

• 2:18:47Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:18:47Danny Jones?

  And then sometimes they would kill them afterwards.

• 2:18:50Speaker 02

  That sounds like a male fantasy. I don't know.

• 2:18:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:18:53Speaker 01

  That doesn't sound so bad.

• 2:18:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:18:54Danny Jones?

  Don't do it, powerful woman. They, they would use the venom to like, to like paralyze them. And they had some other sort of uh concoction, some other sort of drug that would give them erections that would last for days. And they, and they would just like molest them. They would just rip these guys. Yeah. And they were like, and then, and then they would, sometimes they would just kill them for fun afterwards.

• 2:19:16Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:19:16Danny Jones?

  And they were called the Medusae. And that's why they, the, the snake depiction was like a symbol for the snake venom they used.

• 2:19:22Speaker 02

  I've never heard this. That's fascinating. So like, like another group of powerful women like the Amazons.

• 2:19:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:28Speaker 01

  But this isn't the same as the, as the Amazons? The, the, the powerful Greek warrior women?

• 2:19:34Danny Jones?

  Have sex with them. Yeah, yeah. This is like, this is all in Greek. This is all Greek, Greek stuff. And another thing that they were doing in Greek, in Greece, or in, in that part of the world in antiquity.

• 2:19:43Speaker 02

  I'm sorry.

• 2:19:44Danny Jones?

  No, no, no.

• 2:19:45Speaker 02

  I'm gonna whoop your ass and I'm gonna give you some Viagra. So you just keep going.

• 2:19:50Speaker 01

  Oh no, don't do it.

• 2:19:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, man, but the another weird thing about the Greeks were like sick fucks like they were like they were pervs.

• 2:19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:58Danny Jones?

  They were all they were like all into like the Priapus gods and like like all these crazy things and really into drugs allegedly.

• 2:20:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:07Danny Jones?

  Apparently.

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 2:20:09Danny Jones?

  And there was even if like going back to this this idea of of dying and like dying and being born again, they would do these things where they would there was obviously that part of like the world, North Africa was known for these vipers, these North African vipers that would kill a lot of people that were dying from viper venom.

• 2:20:27Speaker 01

  Is this the ASP?

• 2:20:29Danny Jones?

  Uh, no, I don't maybe, I don't know.

• 2:20:32Speaker 01

  There's a lot of them.

• 2:20:32Danny Jones?

  So what they would do is they would they would put viper venom on these basically like linens, just little amounts of viper venom, not a lot, and then they would cut kids' arms or their legs or whatever, and they would wrap the cut in this viper venom, so a little bit, just enough to where their body would build up a defense for it.

• 2:20:53Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:20:54Danny Jones?

  And build up this sort of the antibodies against the venom and they would use that the they would use the kids bodily fluids as.

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• 2:21:32Danny Jones?

  Anti anti venoms antidotes to the snake venom. So when these guys wanted to get high, when they wanted to die and be born again, they would inject themselves with the snake venom or take the snake venom somehow. You couldn't you for some reason snake venom doesn't harm you if you drink it. You have to actually introduce it right into the bloodstream. They would do that and then they would wait until they're like right on the edge of death and then they would take the bodily fluids of the people of the children that built up the antibodies to do this. And this was a really popular way to trip back then.

• 2:22:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, did this make the children immune to the snake bites?

• 2:22:06Danny Jones?

  I don't know, probably.

• 2:22:08Speaker 02

  It sounds very much like the development of vaccines where they're like scraping paws off of cows.

• 2:22:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:15Speaker 01

  Do you have any idea what era that was?

• 2:22:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, this was, this was from at least 200 B.C. to 204, maybe two to 300 A.D. The guy who wrote a lot about this was a guy named Galen, who was Marcus Aurelius's position.

• 2:22:33Speaker 02

  I gotta ask, why children? I mean, couldn't you use like ugly old women or something?

• 2:22:37Danny Jones?

  I think because children had the strongest immune systems.

• 2:22:40Speaker 02

  I guess so.

• 2:22:41Speaker 01

  Very interesting. You know, that kind of reminds me of, you always hear legends and it probably is true, although Western medicine, as far as I know, hasn't really gone to investigate it, but there are people in the Amazon that will, you know, can get bitten by, by a rabid animal or can get bitten by a fertile ants or something and they'll be offered Western medicine and they'll go, oh, no, no, thank you. I don't need that. I have, you know, we have a doctor in our village and, you know, they just go off into the jungle, but then they appear a few months later and they're okay.

• 2:23:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:23:10Speaker 01

  You know.

• 2:23:10Speaker 02

  I know multiple people in Central America who've been bitten and went to the shaman instead of the, instead of the clinic and were fine.

• 2:23:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:23:21Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 2:23:21Speaker 02

  I know another guy who lost a leg, so they're not all fine.

• 2:23:23Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Well, if you're from there, I mean, the native medicine is going to be far superior than anything you're going to get in some sort of compounding pharmacy.

• 2:23:32Speaker 02

  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. They, the, the native people, at least of Mexico and Guatemala are, are obsessed with modern medicine. They, they are always, they, they are like pill poppers now. I mean, I don't want to, you know.

• 2:23:54Danny Jones?

  It's so weird, isn't it?

• 2:23:55Speaker 02

  Stereotype the entire group of people.

• 2:23:57Danny Jones?

  We're obsessed with technology and developing technology too, but it doesn't seem like it's good for us.

• 2:24:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not, it's not good for them either.

• 2:24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I was having a conversation while I was in New York.

• 2:24:06Speaker 02

  The shining tower on the hill is leading the wrong direction.

• 2:24:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:24:10Speaker 01

  While, while I was in.

• 2:24:11Danny Jones?

  We're becoming Atlantis. We're going to get destroyed soon.

• 2:24:13Speaker 01

  Pretty much, pretty much. Probably true.

• 2:24:16Speaker 02

  I'm ready.

• 2:24:18Danny Jones?

  We gotta build a base on the moon, Randall Carlson says.

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  So we were walking around New York, we were looking at the architecture and I was talking about how, you know, how far I feel like we'd, I was talking to Julian and we were looking at the, we're looking at the Empire State Building and I was like, that's still the greatest building on the entire New York City skyline. You know, it's the most beautiful. And I feel like, you know, American, our architecture is kind of devolving as time goes on. It's not as like 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, people talking 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,

• 2:25:04Speaker 01

  it's probably not an accident that that is our favorite, that's one of our favorite forms of architecture and it came, it's like the first form of architecture that came straight out of their world where they are chiseling in the things they're seeing in their natural world into stone. And we all think that that's the most elegant and probably always will. And it's kind of the same thing in Mesoamerica. Some of that architecture is so beautiful because they're taking their natural world and just, you know, painting it onto stone, not physically painting it, but they're etching it into the stone and it's just a natural evolution out of their world. And it's like, ever since then, it has just kind of gone downhill and as far as elegance and beauty, you know, at least my opinion.

• 2:25:47Danny Jones?

  No, yeah, I think it's, that's the

• 2:25:49Speaker 02

  The trend is functionality right now, which does make me sad. I do love the ancient stuff.

• 2:25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's the first thing that emerges, right? So it's kind of like, that's the precipice of it because it's human beings connected to what we were kind of supposed to be, right? Like we probably weren't

• 2:26:14Speaker 02

  I guess it's kind of an admission, we're on a decline, isn't it?

• 2:26:17Danny Jones?

  Well, it was, it could have been, maybe it was similar. Maybe, maybe they did have these, you know, incredible structures and monuments and stuff like we have now in Washington DC. But they also, you know, had like, maybe like a city of like,

• 2:26:30Danny Jones?

  Primordial huts or something they lived in outside, kinda like we have, kinda like Washington DC has, you know, all the stuff in the Capitol and then there's just regular stick frame houses in the neighborhoods surrounding it.

• 2:26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:41Speaker 02

  I, I think that was true all over the place. We, you know, outside of Rome were just peasants living in huts.

• 2:26:47Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. Yeah.

• 2:26:48Danny Jones?

  Um, I want to talk about the, the, the human sacrifice stuff.

• 2:26:53Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:26:54Danny Jones?

  So, um, who was being sacrificed? Who, first of all, which culture was doing the most sacrifice?

• 2:27:04Speaker 02

  The Aztecs.

• 2:27:05Danny Jones?

  The Aztecs were. And why do you think that they were doing it and not the other ones?

• 2:27:11Speaker 02

  Um, it was part of their religion. They, you know, they, unlike their neighbors, decided to follow the, the war god. That was their patron deity of the, of the Mexica people. And he, at least as they understood it, demanded sacrifice and, and lots of it. It wasn't, it wasn't people they could just capture. It was, uh, it was a sacrifice in the way we understand that word, that it was a, something they wanted and gave up. So it was capturing in, in battle, they would ritually, instead of kill each other on the field of battle, like what happened in Europe,

• 2:27:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:28:06Speaker 01

  Sounds a lot worse.

• 2:28:08Speaker 02

  It does sound worse. But that was, you know, that was somebody who was a proud and dangerous warrior, who was, you know, a, a, a human of quality that they took out. The other category was children, which is horrible to our eyes, but you know, if, if you're to sacrifice something you really value and care about, and it's the category's people, who's, who's the most astir sacrifice? It's, it's you, it's kids.

• 2:28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:36Speaker 02

  And you know, it sounds real barbaric, but I'm pretty sure there's a line in the Christian Bible that Yahweh asks the same thing out of somebody, says, "Sacrifice your son for me." And he's about to do it. Who's that? You know, I'm a terrible Christian.

• 2:28:52Speaker 01

  Abraham and Isaac.

• 2:28:53Speaker 02

  And then he was like, "Oh, just kidding, trickster god."

• 2:28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:29:10Speaker 01

  There's also, um, uh, there's also, this happens in Mezzo America where, uh, maybe not, maybe not necessarily a child, but a young person, uh, somebody who's, you know, maybe highly valuable, uh, you know, maybe part of a dynastic family, maybe not, probably not the prince, but you know, maybe one of the, one of, maybe one of the cousins or something, uh, would be chosen and then he would basically be pampered for an entire year and he would, and he would be taught music and astronomy and science and, and you know, you, you build this into a very well-rounded person and, and you know, you know, maybe say he's 18 years old, he probably gets, you know, maybe, I'm just, I'm just kind of spitballing, but I'm just saying, you know, maybe he gets, you know, the girls, whatever girls he wants.

• 2:29:51Speaker 02

  No, he did. He had, they had whole hair.

• 2:29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, uh, he gets everything that he wants. He gets all the food that he wants, but 365 days, he will be sacrificed. Um, and it's basically like, uh, fattening the pig, right? For, for slaughter.

• 2:30:06Speaker 02

  And he has to walk up, no crying, no getting dragged up there. You get chosen as a young man.

• 2:30:12Speaker 01

  And they know that the child knows about it from the beginning.

• 2:30:14Speaker 02

  Benefit in life and trained where this is, uh, this is a person who is trained for leading us all. But then they walk up, this is an Aztec tradition where that, that person walks up and, and willingly sacrifices himself for the community.

• 2:30:30Speaker 01

  Sacrifice self?

• 2:30:31Speaker 02

  Well, you know, they kill him, but he doesn't, he doesn't get dragged to the stone. He walks up and lays down on it.

• 2:30:36Speaker 01

  Will you go into gory detail about how they killed him?

• 2:30:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Can you, yeah. Can you do that? How specifically?

• 2:30:42Speaker 02

  Heart extraction is what they love to do.

• 2:30:44Speaker 01

  They love to do that most.

• 2:30:45Speaker 02

  And they have these.

• 2:30:45Speaker 01

  Is that the only way?

• 2:30:48Speaker 02

  Uh, there was head chopping off too, but the Aztecs loved, you know, the, the Maya actually, uh, didn't do this heart extraction thing as much until they got more influenced by the people of Central Mexico. It's the classic period. You really can't find much in the way of Maya.

• 2:31:08Speaker 02

  Sacrificing each other at all, except in the limited context of wars. There's a, there's a panel in Bonham Park that shows

• 2:31:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:31:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:29Speaker 02

  And they're bringing people to be sacrificed.

• 2:31:31Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:31:32Speaker 02

  But, uh, yeah, the Maya were not as bloody as that until the post classic. Like, uh, at about 1200, they start really imitating what's happening in central Mexico. And at that time, it's the Toltecs who are gonna develop into the Aztecs. But the Aztecs loved to pull out hearts. Here's a lot of that, that one on the, both of those ones on the top left are, are good examples of people getting their hearts ripped out.

• 2:32:02Danny Jones?

  So they were

• 2:32:02Speaker 02

  Holding it up.

• 2:32:03Danny Jones?

  So they were

• 2:32:04Speaker 02

  And some of these images, you know, you see all four ventricles. They know exactly what, what a heart looks like.

• 2:32:10Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:32:11Speaker 01

  It's amazing.

• 2:32:12Danny Jones?

  So they would, the, the person would, would walk up to the top of the pyramid by themselves without having to be escorted.

• 2:32:18Speaker 02

  In this one particular context, that guy who would be, uh, you know, cultivated for this moment.

• 2:32:24Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:32:24Speaker 02

  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, uh, the anatomy well enough, which is true. But what they do is somehow with those big, thick, uh, 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.

• 2:32:59Danny Jones?

  Any anesthesia?

• 2:33:01Speaker 02

  Nope, nope, not for these guys. It just, just ripped out. See that, that, that one, the person, the black person

• 2:33:09Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:33:09Speaker 02

  Or gray is, uh, is definitely holding one of those axes and he's got the heart up.

• 2:33:16Speaker 02

  And look, there's even a god going, yeah, give me more.

• 2:33:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, the god is eating the heart.

• 2:33:21Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a, that's the death god, but he's not the war god. He's not the war god. But look at the temple he's on. It's like covered in blood.

• 2:33:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:29Speaker 02

  The Aztecs said, they told the, the Spanish that 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.

• 2:33:54Danny Jones?

  And all these people were alive when they sacrificed.

• 2:33:57Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. And they also did, they, they had, they had a ritual calendar where sacrifices occurred in some of the months. And then there were these battles. They actually, the Aztec empire grew so big that it was a pain in the butt to get to the edge of the empire to actually fight people who weren't part of the empire. So they kind of kicked out this group called the Tlaxcollins that live in between Mexico City and Veracruz.

• 2:34:25Danny Jones?

  What is this?

• 2:34:26Speaker 02

  And they would just go every year to fake war with them and capped 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 Tlaxcollins who were raised their hand. You're like, yeah, we'll fight the Aztecs with you. We hate those guys because they were just their sheep for this sort of activity.

• 2:34:49Danny Jones?

  Did you do the math, Steve?

• 2:34:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's 6,666 people a day.

• 2:34:56Danny Jones?

  6,006, what's that divided by 24?

• 2:34:58Speaker 04

  Divided by 24 is per hour, 300 people an hour. Jesus Christ.

• 2:35:03Danny Jones?

  Now, what is that divided by 60?

• 2:35:06Speaker 04

  Fight it by sixty. Five people a minute.

• 2:35:10Danny Jones?

  Five people.

• 2:35:11Speaker 02

  That's doable. That's doable, especially with, you know, the quick.

• 2:35:14Danny Jones?

  If you had a couple of people doing it.

• 2:35:16Speaker 02

  Rip out, drop them, get a next one up here.

• 2:35:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, especially if you had a couple of people doing the cutting or doing the extractions. You could probably.

• 2:35:23Speaker 02

  Now, now, this is what the Aztecs told, I think, initially Cortez, and I think that that was also echoed in Sahagun's very good ethnography. He, 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.

• 2:35:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:35:52Speaker 02

  But it is possible, A, that the Aztecs were exaggerating to Cortez to impress him, or B, Cortez was exaggerating to Spain to validate destroying the empire.

• 2:36:08Speaker 02

  And these are nettling questions we may never answer.

• 2:36:10Danny Jones?

  What is this Noche Triste?

• 2:36:13Speaker 02

  That's the time that the Spanish screw up, get their hostage killed, who's the king, that 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, that's the sad night, the Noche Triste.

• 2:36:37Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:36:38Speaker 02

  And they, they get decimated, but a lot of people do survive. The, the captains survive, Cortez survives, a couple hundred people. There were like,

• 2:36:48Speaker 02

  less than a thousand Spanish in the, the capital at that point. I guess there were only a couple hundred. Cortez was returning with a couple thousand. The, the story goes, it was, it was Pedro Alvarado who screwed it all up. Pedro Alvarado was this red haired fiery dude. The, the Spanish called him the son of the sun, Tonatío. And they had been there for months. They had Montezuma captured as a polite.

• 2:37:20Speaker 02

  Guest of their 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 pile, stockpiling gold in the compound that the Spanish had been given. But then Cortez 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 Cortez. And Cortez said, okay, Alvarado, you're in charge here. I'm gonna go over to the coast and I'm gonna convince these people to be with us, not against us. And he does that. He, you know, Cortez was actually trained

• 2:38:03Speaker 02

  as a lawyer. So he had the gift of gab and he goes over there and gives them this magnificent speech, saying, we're all going to be rich beyond our wildest dreams. And what I really need is a thousand Spaniards to turn the tide here. So you guys can become my army and become amazingly rich, or you can arrest me right here. What do you want to do? And but he convinces them and they head back to Mexico City. But while he was gone, Pedro Alvarado is invited to this feast like they are again and again. But somebody at the feast tells him, uh, do you like the food? Oh, it's humans. You're

• 2:38:44Speaker 02

  eating humans. Ha, ha, ha. You're, you're, you're a cannibal like us. And he freaks out. And he has everybody close the doors of this banquet and he murders everyone in there. They're, they're unarmed. He has the soldiers kill women, children, men. It's like a civilized party. And he goes nuts and kills them. So when Cortez gets back, he finds Alvarado and his men barricaded into their compound and the Aztecs are all over it. And so they put, uh, Manazuma up on the roof to try to quell things like, hey, everybody, calm down, calm down. This didn't happen. But

• 2:39:26Speaker 02

  Monizuma 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 Monizuma. 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.

• 2:39:46Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:39:47Speaker 02

  That's what triggers the Noche Triste. They're like, oh shit, get the gold and let's get out of here. But they're on an island in the middle of a lake and there's only causeways. And the Aztecs smartly break the causeways in various places. There are places where boats can pass through that are wooden bridges and they break those. So the horses can't get out. The first wave of horses get out with Cortez, but the other ones that stayed behind and tried to load up their bags with gold, 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 archaeology. I would love to make an overlay over Mexico City of where the city was

• 2:40:32Speaker 02

  and where the causeways are and track the causeways because there's almost certainly somewhere under the streets of Mexico City, a skeleton of a horse piled with gold. You know, they, it would be hard as hell to find it like a needle in a haystack.

• 2:40:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:40:48Speaker 02

  But if the stories are true, there's a couple of horses covered in gold laying under the streets of Mexico City.

• 2:40:55Speaker 01

  You know, one of the things with, with the Spaniards having such, you know, vicious battles with these, with these Aztecs and then, you know, 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. But at the same time, in so many ways with people in the ancient Americas, like, like the Fang deity, you know, cutting all these people's heads off, but he has this puppy with him everywhere he goes.

• 2:41:26Speaker 02

  He loves his puppy.

• 2:41:27Speaker 01

  They have this, they have this really funny, it's in these depictions in South America. You can see this, this warrior, this warrior god. Going throughout South America and and just slaughtering all these, you know, all these people.

• 2:41:39Speaker 02

  They call him the decapitator deity.

• 2:41:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he always.

• 2:41:42Speaker 02

  This is the Fang deity?

• 2:41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he always has a little puppy with him, but that's South America, but it's just some cute like dichotomy of ancient Americans. But going back to 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. And they'd bring monuments from around Mesoamerica and study them, you know. And they're they're really, actually, this surprised me. I would think the best sculptors and mover of megaliths in the entire.

• 2:42:23Speaker 02

  The Aztecs.

• 2:42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, maybe more.

• 2:42:26Speaker 02

  Huge stones and beautiful work.

• 2:42:28Speaker 01

  And maybe, maybe more impressive or just right there with the Olmecs. Like when you go to the, 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 are carved out of this black basalt and the polish that's on them is really otherworldly.

• 2:42:47Speaker 01

  It's really amazing, probably the most impressive thing that I have seen as far as sculpture work in all of the Americas. And another interesting part of who these people were is. So when you went up to, you know, the emperor of Montezuma's temple or Montezuma's temple. When the Spaniards get up to the top of it, think about, think about the famous story of of the Spartans who had all these strange deformed people with them, but they're kind of, you know, pushed off to the side. You know, in the classical world, you kind of ignore people who have deformities and, and, you know, people who don't have this perfect picturesque, idealistic, you know.

• 2:43:31Speaker 01

  Idealistic form, I guess.

• 2:43:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:43:33Speaker 01

  But in in Mesoamerica, they venerated these people. And in the emperor's palace in Tenochtitlan, he would have these deformed people living with him, and he would be pampering them. So it's just like you're living in a totally different world, right? These very, very violent people who do things and sacrifice so many people that we see as so barbaric. But then, you know, they they venerate and take care of.

• 2:43:59Speaker 02

  They weren't like caring for them like like special needs school.

• 2:44:02Speaker 01

  Sure, exactly, yeah.

• 2:44:03Speaker 02

  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, look, you're a you're a vessel of of the gods. You you are born and destined to be a liaison between us and the gods, and we're going to keep you close. And those people probably from an early age said, well, that sounds good. I'm in on that.

• 2:44:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:35Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:44:35Speaker 01

  It's it's like.

• 2:44:36Speaker 02

  Bring me to the palace.

• 2:44:36Speaker 01

  Was there a lot of incest?

• 2:44:39Speaker 02

  Inca, a lot. Maya, I don't think we have much evidence of it, though they're much in the way of like Europe's royal development.

• 2:44:49Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:44:50Speaker 02

  There came a point where they was inbred. I mean, it's just because there was a limited amount of royal families who wanted to keep their bloodline pure. For the Maya, even more so, because it wasn't just a bloodline. It was a conduit to the ancestors who had influence on the gods.

• 2:45:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:45:08Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:45:09Speaker 01

  So these people were so sophisticated and brilliant and artistic and in touch with their inner selves, but they were at the same time cannibals.

• 2:45:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's I I find it a fascinating study in the capacity of humans.

• 2:45:26Speaker 02

  That, you know, we, we, we, we make these dichotomies of good behavior and bad behavior and good and evil.

• 2:45:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:45:32Speaker 02

  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. But then on the other hand, you have, you know, poems and music and love of flowers and uh

• 2:45:48Speaker 01

  Puppies.

• 2:45:49Speaker 02

  And, and public money spent on botanical gardens and museums and, uh, and, you know, uh, at least outwardly saying, we are, we are politicians, we're diplomats, we're, we're public servants. So there, there was so much that we would think, you know, you're either a barbarian or you're civilized.

• 2:46:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:46:11Speaker 02

  But here's a culture where the two were like up two sides of a coin and it, there was not a conflict of interest in their lives.

• 2:46:18Speaker 01

  It was so impressive to the Spaniards that they would ask Cortez if, if they had really seen what they saw. You know, they were so astonished by the city of Tenochtitlan, um, that they couldn't believe it, you know, and imagine the things that they had seen back in Spain, right? So it kind of gives you an idea.

• 2:46:35Speaker 02

  I was just reading back, uh, Bernal Diaz's book and he, he says that when they, when they're on the, the causeway first coming into the city, he said, one of the soldiers looked at me and said, are we dreaming this?

• 2:46:49Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:46:50Speaker 02

  That's cool.

• 2:46:51Speaker 01

  That's amazing. And their market, I mean, what was it? 50,000 people a day? 60,000 people a day?

• 2:46:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, 60,000 people a day. They said that, uh,

• 2:46:58Speaker 01

  Visiting their market.

• 2:46:59Speaker 02

  Not like Seville's market was a fraction of Tenochtitlan's market. One of them said, maybe Shanghai's market. One of them had been to, uh, to China area. He said, maybe it rivals Shanghai's market, but it was way bigger than Seville's market.

• 2:47:18Speaker 01

  And they had institutions of, uh, of basically people who were policemen going around and, and catching people who were selling fraudulent goods in the markets that were there, the Aztecs did, I mean.

• 2:47:29Speaker 02

  There was counterfeit money. People would make ceramic, uh, chocolate beans and try to, try to buy things with, with counterfeit money and they'd get busted. But there were like hair cutting places. There were, it was like, it was like a mall. There were, there were stores where you could buy various things. There were, uh, there, there were like, uh, soothsayers there. And there was a, there was a court in the middle of the, probably a couple of different courts in the market. But if two people were arguing about something involving their economy, they could walk up to this judge's platform and that, 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.

• 2:48:12Speaker 01

  And it's just a tiny glimpse, you know, just, just maybe a, a couple of years into their, you know, a glimpse into their, uh, world. So much more than just, you know, that sacrifice and that, and you know, and they were sitting on giants of the rest of the Mesoamerican world. So you can just imagine all the history that has been lost because of the destruction. And at, and at this time, you know, uh, you know, 1492, Christopher Columbus, you know, lands in the Bahamas. Slowly after that, people are being, uh, 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. And, you know, it's.

• 2:48:52Speaker 02

  A year later, that market we just talked about is covered in dead bodies with pustules all over them.

• 2:48:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:59Speaker 02

  That's when, 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, 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.

• 2:49:20Speaker 01

  What diseases specifically?

• 2:49:22Speaker 02

  Thirteen different deadly diseases. Yeah. The, the big ones at that point were.

• 2:49:28Speaker 02

  Mumps, measles, uh, and smallpox.

• 2:49:34Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:49:35Speaker 02

  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, uh, and malaria come in.

• 2:49:51Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:49:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a lot of these diseases actually, you know, they begin along these river systems, these tightly populated ri- river systems, um, and several of them came, came from the Nile, like we were talking about earlier, eighteen hundred B.C. Now they're in the Americas, you know, these things have just constantly mutated, you know, since the beginning of civilization and they've crawled their way all the way over to the New World.

• 2:50:14Speaker 02

  Which I think is also a point, uh, you know, in the, in the debate of how early did Europe meet the Americas?

• 2:50:23Speaker 02

  I, I feel like, uh, if there was substantial contact at any point, that we would see disease spread from that point and we would find some sort of pattern. Some of those diseases you can't detect in bones, but some you can, like smallpox, you can tell from bones. And so if archaeology would find some sort of mass, if misunderstood, die off.

• 2:50:50Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:50:50Speaker 02

  Uh, cause we know that happened. I mean, that, that, that signature is clear as a bell at the, the known contact period in the fifteen hundreds, just mass death. But do we see it earlier? Like, uh, it is confusing, like, there is actually a, a big hiccup in North America, somewhere right around thirteen hundred, where a lot of the, maybe it's the twelve hundreds, where the Mississippian sites, a lot of them are abandoned and new ones start up and wonder, you know, what caused that shift? And there, it's temptingly close to when the Vikings were hit, uh, and had briefly, uh,

• 2:51:34Speaker 02

  a compound or a, uh, A place in Canada, but that was more like a thousand. So it doesn't quite.

• 2:51:41Danny Jones?

  When did Hernando de Soto come over?

• 2:51:44Speaker 02

  Uh, fifteen thirty eight.

• 2:51:46Danny Jones?

  Later than that. Okay.

• 2:51:48Speaker 02

  Landed right here. Could have been here. You're, we're, we're pretty close to where he might have landed.

• 2:51:52Danny Jones?

  In St. Augustine?

• 2:51:53Speaker 02

  He came, he, well, he landed in St. Augustine first, but then he came up here and the first place, uh, 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.

• 2:52:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's a park there called Fort De Soto.

• 2:52:13Speaker 02

  I think that's it. I think that's it. That's where Uvita was.

• 2:52:16Danny Jones?

  It's right at the northern mouth of the bay.

• 2:52:18Speaker 02

  He lands here and sends forces, uh, leads forces up through central Florida. All the way up to where Tallahassee now, Tallahassee was the capital of the Appalachia civilization.

• 2:52:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:52:35Speaker 02

  They keeps going through, uh, Georgia, two and a half years worth of a reign of death. An interesting thing about that particular moment in regards to disease, I'm too far away.

• 2:52:50Speaker 02

  When he gets up to South Carolina and there's this big kingdom, Kofitakachi, led by this queen. He sees in the outer villages that bodies are piling up and they're dead. They're, they're, they're disease bodies and they don't really know the, the queen saying,

• 2:53:12Speaker 02

  "Look, uh, we don't have much corn because we have this crazy disease going around and farmers are dying." And it's probably one of the reasons their, their army was depleted and couldn't fight, uh, De Soto off as well. It's because there was, there was a mass death. De Soto goes into the main temple in Cofitacachi 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 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

• 2:53:56Speaker 02

  and the queen tells him, well, there were, there was a community of people that looked just like you guys that was on the coast, but they all died off. And we know that there was a, a Spanish failed colony somewhere up the coast like that. And so those guys showed up like five years earlier and it was enough to spark the disease where by the time De Soto got there, the temples of the local villages were piling up with bodies without explanation of how they died.

• 2:54:29Danny Jones?

  Wow. I heard a story, yes, I think it was yesterday or two days ago, maybe where we had a gentleman in here who was explaining to us how when Christopher Columbus sailed over, he had the, the red cross of the Knights Templar on his sails. And he said that that was intentional to deceive the natives to make them think that they were Templars when he, they like allegedly like they were familiar with the people of the Knights Templar and like the 1200s or 1300s or something like that, that had already been here.

• 2:54:58Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:54:58Danny Jones?

  I don't know if you've ever heard anything like that.

• 2:54:59Speaker 02

  I, I have not heard that. And I, there are so many different crosses.

• 2:55:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:05Speaker 02

  I get confused by it. I look on the internet for like, you know, which one is the Knights Templar? And you get, you get a panel of 50 different crosses and it's like, oh no, it's gotta have the little hairs on the edge. It's gotta be more square, not rectangular. It's not theirs. But that is funny. I would 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, the Holy Grail.

• 2:55:32Danny Jones?

  And the holy, and the, the Ark.

• 2:55:33Speaker 02

  The funniest part of that would be that like, oh yeah, they liked those Europeans. Those Europeans were nice to them.

• 2:55:38Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. That is kind of weird, isn't it?

• 2:55:42Speaker 02

  Like the rest of them are jerks.

• 2:55:44Danny Jones?

  If you could take a time machine and go anywhere in history, any location. One time, where would it be?

• 2:55:50Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a funny one. You know, I generally think that I would be murdered as some sort of devil immediately.

• 2:55:56Danny Jones?

  No, you get to, you get to, you get to fly in like a flying saucer and you're protected. So they can't shoot any arrows at you or anything.

• 2:56:01Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, I, I think my answer's changed over time.

• 2:56:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:56:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:26Speaker 02

  I would love that, but I would be hidden like in a coat.

• 2:56:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:30Speaker 02

  Or they would just think. So they wouldn't kill me.

• 2:56:32Danny Jones?

  They would just think that you're like an alien or something visiting.

• 2:56:34Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:56:34Danny Jones?

  They would look at you and they would draw a picture of you on the temple.

• 2:56:36Speaker 02

  These recent things about aliens, the main reason I don't, I, 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 murdered them.

• 2:56:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:56:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:56:58Speaker 02

  Or take your stuff.

• 2:57:01Speaker 02

  So that's, that's exactly what, if it was, if, if the government actually thought there were aliens, we'd be bombing the shit out of the ocean right now.

• 2:57:13Danny Jones?

  Unless we got them, unless we got like one captive, right? And we have, and they have it, they just have one. And they don't, maybe, maybe the civilization doesn't care about it. Well, what if we don't know where they are? We're throwing like another star system. Or in another dimension, we don't know how to get to them.

• 2:57:27Speaker 02

  Well, that, I guess those, those, those chess games could be playing out, but.

• 2:57:31Danny Jones?

  You know, if they could.

• 2:57:31Speaker 02

  Our first response has always been kill.

• 2:57:34Danny Jones?

  If they could get ahold of a, an alien with a, with a flying saucer craft, wouldn't we want to just like figure out how we could use it and make it ourselves? So we could dominate the world.

• 2:57:43Speaker 02

  I, I do agree with that. And I think that, that may or may not have already happened.

• 2:57:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like, uh, you know, Going back to Graham's idea of this ancient lost civilization and how it how it somehow connects like the Fang deity to Varikosha and to to uh yeah, it's Varikosha, right? The the white like long haired tall thing that came out and like explained to them like taught them how to live or how to like

• 2:58:13Speaker 02

  Varikosha was around for a long time, only only strangely after contact period did the stories of his whiteness and tallness come out.

• 2:58:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the the one thing that is interesting, the one open door, I think, to that theory is that so much of the oceans haven't been explored, right? We've only explored like maybe 5% of the ocean floor. So like maybe during the Ice Age, could there have been a place that existed that is now underwater and hasn't been explored that could have been some crazy civilization if maybe this was the one time that Plato was actually a historian?

• 2:58:50Speaker 02

  Um, I I it's absolutely true that the the coastline during a lot of human history was way out there. So the 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 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.

• 2:59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's evidence of very, very ancient cities. I mean, if not the Ice Age, maybe just, you know, within a couple thousand years afterwards, right here off the coast in Florida, huge uh cities in these mounds that are, I don't know, maybe several hundred feet off of where the modern day coastline is. But when the coastline was lower, oh, yeah, yeah, there's

• 2:59:41Speaker 02

  Florida's shelf is very shallow. There's Yeah.

• 2:59:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I wasn't aware of of cities hundreds of miles off the coast of Florida.

• 2:59:48Speaker 02

  Cities, me neither.

• 2:59:49Speaker 01

  Well, 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 they've seen them off the coastline.

• 2:59:56Speaker 02

  The ones from like a couple thousand years ago that are that are mounds that are like shell mounds and and earthen mounds.

• 3:00:04Speaker 01

  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 five, seven thousand years ago and of this this chapter of I don't of the chapter of these mound builders that existed off the coast of Florida and in Florida. 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, you know, maybe at one point in time when the when the sea level is a little bit lower, it's easier for people to hop.

• 3:00:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00:41Speaker 01

  You know, from South America across the Caribbean up into Florida.

• 3:00:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:00:45Speaker 01

  So that's not, that's not.

• 3:00:47Speaker 02

  The the distance would be shortened.

• 3:00:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:00:50Speaker 02

  There's definitely a now a DNA connection too between the top of South America, the people of the Caribbean.

• 3:00:58Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 3:00:58Speaker 02

  But but the link to Florida is not as clear.

• 3:01:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's not as clear. Um, now that's not Ice Age, but that's sometime afterwards, but you know, that's pretty far back in time.

• 3:01:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and Graham talks about that Bimini Road, which is in the Caribbean.

• 3:01:12Speaker 02

  Right, that's that's geology. I I have a friend who who doesn't want me to name him, but he is a geology professor at in University of Puerto Rico.

• 3:01:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 3:01:24Speaker 02

  And he had he he sent me a dissertation of one of his students.

• 3:01:27Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 3:01:28Speaker 02

  That was not was not trying. Was not trying to debunk Bimini Road, but he was he was following, he was just uh, doing his dissertation on this particular geological phenomena, which he called it like a table something.

• 3:01:43Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 3:01:44Speaker 02

  But but he showed that this dissertation had. Examples just like the Bimini Road all over the Caribbean.

• 3:01:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 3:01:53Speaker 02

  So it's not, it's, it's a geological phenomenon. Of the water rising and setting and it's limestone and it.

• 3:02:00Danny Jones?

  That looks fake, by the way. That one doesn't look real. That looks like AI.

• 3:02:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you never know what's real these days.

• 3:02:06Speaker 02

  That one might be it. I mean, it's weird. It fractures it. It's, it's limestone. It's like, you know, compacted seafloor. And then the water lowers 300 feet and that stuff gets 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.

• 3:02:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, see that one with the ladies diving, that one looks.

• 3:02:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:02:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:02:37Speaker 02

  But you know, you know, leading to what? If the road is in such good condition and in these major blocks, where's, where, where's the building it's leading to?

• 3:02:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:02:47Speaker 02

  Uh, is, is a question. But without, you know, arguing against in that direction, it's just, it's geology. And there's a.

• 3:02:57Danny Jones?

  How much have you looked into the whole Atlantis theory? Have you paid a lot?

• 3:03:02Speaker 02

  No, not hardly at all. I mean.

• 3:03:05Speaker 02

  The, these, these sort of invitations have me looking at it more than I've ever looked at it in my life. But I'm, I would not claim to be an expert or even have thought much about it before.

• 3:03:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:03:15Speaker 02

  This phase of my life.

• 3:03:16Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah.

• 3:03:17Speaker 02

  You know, when you're talking about the, like, this one is, is one of many. What if there's a bunch of stuff submerged under the ocean? Graham's right about that. But in most cases where we know, like, like the example Luke just brought up, there are some things that are off the coast of Florida that are, are manmade 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 and, and, or a certain timeframe. Carbon 14 things.

• 3:03:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:53Speaker 02

  I, I, I'm a fan of what I call the preponderance of evidence. One offs disturb me. One offs are not a pattern, nothing that we can as detectives, find a pattern that we can find an answer out of. So I, I, you know, when. When Easter Island has, you know, 500 dates now that are all confirming dates around 600 to 1,000 years as the, the, the first habitation of the island.

• 3:04:27Speaker 02

  You know, you can't just walk in with, well, you can, and Graham did, with a, with a, 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.

• 3:04:52Danny Jones?

  You were there?

• 3:04:53Speaker 02

  I've been to the island a couple of times. Yeah. I'm going back next year.

• 3:04:56Danny Jones?

  I heard something crazy happen where they had to like stop people visiting or so there's like fires or something?

• 3:05:00Speaker 02

  A couple of times. So, well, hmm, I haven't heard about fires lately. Right now there's just a protest at the airport because the, the locals are pissed off that the one and only airline that goes there changed their, uh, immigration forms.

• 3:05:16Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 3:05:17Speaker 02

  They're kind of letting anybody get in there again and they're pissed off. But what, what I was going to say is, you know, he talked to these local folks and they told him what the Moai were. They're our ancestors. Here's how we moved them, all this stuff. And then the very next segment he goes, but, but what if they're wrong?

• 3:05:38Speaker 02

  What if they seem much more ancient? Like, oh God, you just missed it, man. You were, you were doing so good with the whole respecting and asking their opinion. And then you just go, but what if they're wrong?

• 3:05:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:49Speaker 02

  Like, I don't know, you know?

• 3:05:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah. What if they're wrong?

• 3:05:52Speaker 02

  I guess, I mean, it, it's always possible they're wrong, but you know, he was, did such a great job respecting their opinion and then just stomped it.

• 3:06:01Danny Jones?

  What did you think when you went there? What did you think about those, those big heads?

• 3:06:06Speaker 02

  Oh, I, I love them. They're, they're, they're full bodies. They're ones that look like heads are just buried. Uh, they're, they're at the quarry and the, the slope over the hundreds of years have covered the bodies until they're just the heads, but the bodies are all there.

• 3:06:20Danny Jones?

  Aren't there some similarities? Aren't there some similarities between those Easter Island, um, sculptures, those, those guys that they're carved out of the stone and the, uh, pillars that go back Lee Tepe?

• 3:06:33Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 3:06:34Speaker 01

  I heard they're like.

• 3:06:35Speaker 02

  In a.

• 3:06:36Speaker 01

  In a.

• 3:06:36Speaker 02

  Their hands are there. Oh, that hands, tho- those crossed fingers. That is an interesting part.

• 3:06:42Speaker 01

  They're in, they're in this pose that cross fingers and then they're in that fertility, you know, fertility pose where they're, you know, grabbing their crotch. Yeah.

• 3:06:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:06:50Speaker 01

  That's a, it's a very common.

• 3:06:52Speaker 02

  And again, if there's one thing that humans have been doing forever is grabbing our dicks. Yeah.

• 3:06:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, but it is true that, that you see that on these monolithic statues of people. I mean, really around the world, they, they are all grabbing themselves in a very similar fashion. Like even out in Micronesia and Indonesia, those, those, those islands out there have those monoliths of people standing in that same pose. Those are more similar to the Easter Island heads. Even though the Gobekli Tepe pillars are similar, they're just a lot different.

• 3:07:28Speaker 02

  They're also related to the, the tiki doll that everybody's bought on their trip to Hawaii. Those are, you know, that, that's a Polynesian thing.

• 3:07:37Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 3:07:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:08:01Speaker 01

  Have you seen the videos of them walking?

• 3:08:03Speaker 02

  Yep. I think it's neat. And that, 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 Hjardal in the sixties or seventies. He asked the local people, well, how did they, how'd they get there? And they said, well, we, they walked and he's the first one to use the ropes.

• 3:08:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:08:24Speaker 02

  But then it was Hunt in Lippo who did it, did a recreation, not on, 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, I guess I can say now that I've made one third of a map of the island for the Rapanui people. I intend to give it to them. The problem that I'm having is that the. Their first cultural organization still there. It's called Maualhenua. 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.

• 3:09:08Speaker 02

  And pretend I never knew the old guys. So they let me continue making my map.

• 3:09:12Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 3:09:13Speaker 02

  But I made one third of a map for them.

• 3:09:16Speaker 01

  And how do you go about making that map?

• 3:09:18Speaker 02

  Uh, it was drone. It was drone and photogrammetry.

• 3:09:22Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 3:09:23Speaker 02

  Thank you, Jeff. And Patrick and Jim. Because I, I don't know how to use that equipment, but I have buddies who do.

• 3:09:30Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 3:09:31Speaker 02

  So I was kind 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 we were not the first to see them, but we documented them again, roads leading out from the crater to different villages.

• 3:09:48Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 3:09:49Speaker 02

  And what was weird that we saw that I don't know whether anybody else saw. So along the roads. There we found. I guess three fallen Moai. Who were intact. They weren't broken. But they're just laying on the roads between the quarry and a village. And I don't know what happened. These are the roads that they say. That they were walked down, that they made a prepared surface. So it was nice and flat and they just walked them from the quarry. To the villages. But there's a couple of them that are just laying there on the side of the road and it just. It's a head scratcher. Why wouldn't you just pick him up? Did it?

• 3:10:28Speaker 01

  Fully intact.

• 3:10:29Speaker 02

  Is this a game where like he tripped and that's it? He's not a Moai anymore. I, you know? He's not broken. There's no reason why. Or even if, you know?

• 3:10:37Speaker 01

  How heavy are those things?

• 3:10:38Speaker 02

  Why wouldn't you move this thing? Oh, there are tons and tons. I, I.

• 3:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:10:42Speaker 02

  I mean, they, there, there are some small ones. There's a little white one on one edge of the island. That's like less than a ton. It's a couple hundred.

• 3:10:49Speaker 01

  Did you know that there's, there's one of them that's, uh, most of them are basalt, right? Am I wrong about that?

• 3:10:56Speaker 02

  Definitely volcanic stone, but I don't know whether it's basalt or something else.

• 3:11:01Speaker 01

  You know, there's one that I think it's the one that was taken to the British Museum. That's made out of diorite.

• 3:11:07Speaker 02

  No, that's the white one. That's the little white one.

• 3:11:09Speaker 01

  The little one. Okay.

• 3:11:10Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 3:11:34Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 3:11:35Speaker 02

  It's just a little, the tiniest little moai and he's made of weird diorite.

• 3:11:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:12:02Speaker 01

  There is a small section, just one, is it one singular wall? It's like one singular compound on Easter Island where you can see that same, that same.

• 3:12:11Speaker 02

  Vinapu.

• 3:12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:12:12Speaker 02

  And it really is. I've seen both. I mean, that is, that is Inca looking architecture.

• 3:12:17Speaker 01

  I don't think.

• 3:12:17Speaker 02

  Just one building.

• 3:12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think it's very similar. I think it is.

• 3:12:20Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 3:12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:12:21Speaker 02

  I've walked around it and looked at it. We even did like a 3D scan of it, but then somehow we lost.

• 3:12:25Speaker 01

  How did we find a picture of it?

• 3:12:26Speaker 02

  Vinapu.

• 3:12:27Speaker 01

  Vinapu, Easter Island?

• 3:12:29Speaker 02

  V I N A P U.

• 3:12:32Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 3:12:33Speaker 02

  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. That's, it's very.

• 3:12:41Speaker 01

  Little niche stone.

• 3:12:42Speaker 02

  Very.

• 3:12:43Speaker 01

  Okay, it looks identical, doesn't it?

• 3:12:44Speaker 02

  It's very Inca looking. And, you know, they have been finding that, I think it's the Mapache people of Chile.

• 3:12:54Speaker 02

  Share genetic DNA with Polynesian folks. 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.

• 3:13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:13:11Danny Jones?

  It looks like they just did, they, they set those stones up like this and just cut the outer edge like hot butter. Like just to make, to make it flat.

• 3:13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, like with a laser.

• 3:13:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, with a laser or something. It's like, it doesn't make any sense how they did that.

• 3:13:28Speaker 02

  And you know, I, I, I love that there are mysteries that we still haven't solved and, and I think that all ideas that are not disparaging others should be on the table and allowed to flow.

• 3:13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and, and think about how this happens, right? I mean, you have people coming from Southeast Asia, like those, those, those islands that are out there in Indonesia, Micronesia. Sailing, just setting sail off into the ocean. You know, founding these little islands, you can kind of watch it. You, you can see these archaeological sites all through the Pacific Ocean. Eventually ending up on Easter Island. If you look up how far Easter Island is like on Google Earth from South America. Not only have, 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.

• 3:14:25Speaker 02

  They were, they were impressive boat builders. There is a story during the Inca Empire that they.

• 3:14:31Speaker 01

  Look at that.

• 3:14:32Speaker 02

  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, on the north coast of Peru. So. I, I forget exactly where I read that, but there's a, there, there's this story of them making it pretty far out and then coming back a year later.

• 3:15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, just, just this alone is astonishing.

• 3:15:12Danny Jones?

  It really is, man. Wow. Well, thank you guys for doing this. This has been super fun and enlightening.

• 3:15:21Speaker 02

  I loved it. Thanks for inviting me.

• 3:15:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 3:15:25Speaker 04

  By the way, we have two questions. I think it'd be cool if we got them here.

• 3:15:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, cool.

• 3:15:29Speaker 04

  Instead of, I mean, it wouldn't be long enough.

• 3:15:31Danny Jones?

  Patreon questions?

• 3:15:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:15:32Danny Jones?

  Okay, a couple of questions to wrap it up for Patreon.

• 3:15:35Speaker 02

  I love Patreon.

• 3:15:37Danny Jones?

  Dr. Barnhart, what's your take on Dr. Eske, Willerslev, genetics studies, and Skoglund at all? Why population in relation to migration in South America?

• 3:15:53Speaker 02

  I'm sorry to say I don't know those names. I, you know, I'm not a geneticist. And that's not stuff, unless that's what I was just talking about, the Mapache stuff. You know, I mean, the truth is that I feel like these DNA scientists are like our priests of today. I have no way of determining by myself whether these people are telling me the truth. Not that they're, you know, purposely lying to me, but how they went about collecting that information? And how they boiled it down into a 10-page paper that I wrote and then decide is truth?

• 3:16:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:16:35Speaker 02

  The whole thing just gives me an ick.

• 3:16:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, I know what you mean.

• 3:16:40Speaker 02

  I hate that I have no way of determining

• 3:16:44Danny Jones?

  That's not your way.

• 3:16:45Speaker 02

  The validity of what they're saying to me.

• 3:16:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:48Speaker 02

  So I can say even without knowing those names, my response is ick.

• 3:16:55Danny Jones?

  All right, let's go to Sam McInnis. I was touring Alton Ha in Belize where the Jade Heads was found. Our guide said his grandfather was one of the guys who discovered it. My question though is, I asked him if mercury was found on the site. And he said there was a pool of liquid mercury found. What do you think they were doing with the mercury?

• 3:17:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:17:19Danny Jones?

  By the jade head? Is he talking about the crystal?

• 3:17:21Speaker 02

  I've seen this jade head. No, no, there it's a big, thick jade head that they found in Altuha. Now it's in that. Now it's in a vault in Belma Palm, the capital. I've seen it.

• 3:17:35Speaker 02

  There, I think that's it.

• 3:17:36Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:17:38Speaker 02

  That's why it's a really cool head. 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. This liquid silvery metal. I think that they loved it because it was, it was a red powdery substance, the same thing that they put all over bodies. Cinnabar. They paint Maya kings' bodies with it all the time.

• 3:18:19Danny Jones?

  Is this the same stuff they would paint on the side of the walls that like lasts for hundreds of years?

• 3:18:23Speaker 02

  For that, they'd use like ochre or hematite.

• 3:18:27Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 3:18:29Speaker 02

  Cinnabar is much harder to come by. The only real source I know of any plenty is in the Belize Mountains.

• 3:18:34Danny Jones?

  What is cinnabar? What is the origin of that?

• 3:18:36Speaker 02

  It's interesting. I mean, I'm not, again, I'm not a geologist, but it's, it's actually a metal. And when you burn it, it turns into liquid mercury.

• 3:18:45Danny Jones?

  What?

• 3:18:47Speaker 02

  I was in an excavation in Copan. I was lucky enough to be in the excavations of the tomb of the founder, Yash Kukmo, the first of 18 kings. Him and his wife were buried in the same building. But the wife was on top and then there was a staircase going down and then we excavated and found Yash Kukmo underneath her. But in that staircase area, there was a, and both these bodies, by the way, were covered in red cinnabar. They like dusty red cinnabar. They painted it all over there. But in the staircase, there was a pot. And it had mercury in it and it kind of freaked us out because this is a heavy metal. You you you die if you ingest heavy metals.

• 3:19:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:32Speaker 02

  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 that. There was no point to them, but we all wore them in this hot tunnel as we extracted this thing, but it was a it was a kind of a bulb shaped vessel and it had nine layers of of mercury separated by something that was like cheesecloth. So we 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. I wasn't the one who who looked at it. And then we whisked it off to the lab and the lab

• 3:20:14Speaker 02

  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 that liquid and reflection is kind of a symbol of the other world for them. They the 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.

• 3:20:53Danny Jones?

  Is there any utility for mercury? Like, what does it do? Do we know?

• 3:20:56Speaker 02

  Well, now we put it in in thermometers.

• 3:21:00Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 3:21:00Speaker 02

  That that that old school thermometer that tells us what the temperature is, that's mercury in there.

• 3:21:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Luke, last time you were here, you were you were you were explaining some sort of like crazy chemical or something that was used that they were there was these deposits where they would find.

• 3:21:17Speaker 01

  Oh, the Atacama Desert. We we touched on that a little bit, but that would be South America.

• 3:21:22Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:21:22Speaker 01

  Um, I'm not exactly sure how geologically you explain it.

• 3:21:26Speaker 02

  Acids. The the Atacama Desert is.

• 3:21:31Speaker 02

  It's the ingredient in nitroglycerin. So it's basically nitroglycerin. Like the, 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.

• 3:21:52Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 3:21:53Speaker 02

  And, and, and Chile stole it from, from Bolivia because of that.

• 3:21:58Speaker 01

  But you have these, you have these ancient Inca roads that just descend into the desert. And, uh, you know, why, why do the Inca need to be out there? And, you know, a potential possibility is that they're, you know, harvesting these acids and using them on the stone to soften the stone. You push the stones together rather than creating a perfect seam and joint between the stone.

• 3:22:21Speaker 02

  Or even less than the, than the stones themselves. The, the Inca are big time miners of gold and silver. And acids help you dissolve the rock away from the gold and the silver. That's an essential part. In fact, a 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.

• 3:22:54Speaker 01

  And sulfuric acid can like melt, melt stones?

• 3:22:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it can melt soft stones around in, in those like copper, uh, gold, silver mines. So that's not the same thing. Like my dad totally schooled me. My dad's a chemist and like, none of those acids could burn through and to site. So I, I kind of dropped that. But now, now I think maybe, maybe it's hydrofluoric acid because there's a lot of fluorite. And the other part is sulfuric acid. Hydrofluoric acid is sulfuric acid plus fluorite. And Peru has a ton of fluorite. In fact, the Inca were making jewelry out of it. And so you could take those two things in earth, you can carry sulfuric acid in a, in a vessel without it burning through or hurting yourself.

• 3:23:44Speaker 02

  But if you take that and fluoride and put them together, you make hydrofluoric acid. And that will burn through anything.

• 3:23:51Danny Jones?

  Isn't that from Breaking Bad?

• 3:23:53Speaker 02

  You remember that? They could carry it in plastic, right?

• 3:23:56Danny Jones?

  All the way through the floor, the floor.

• 3:23:59Speaker 02

  Yep. It was Breaking Bad that made me think like, shit.

• 3:24:02Danny Jones?

  And then they ended up having.

• 3:24:03Speaker 02

  There's fluoride.

• 3:24:04Danny Jones?

  And they ended up finding like a specific type of like tub where it wouldn't burn through it. It was like a plastic barrel or something.

• 3:24:10Speaker 02

  In, in Breaking Bad. There's something weird about, uh, plastic, which is I guess a petroleum product that it won't burn through. But it'll burn through, uh, uh, and a site like nobody's business. I have geologists who are, I'm trying to get them a sample from a seam in between Inca walls. I've asked a couple of times and the Peruvians are like, no, you can't cut into our walls, weird gringo. But I'm, I'm, I gotta find myself a Peruvian partner who can approach them instead of me. But, uh, the geologists, I was like, well, hey, can I come into your lab and can we burn a, a chunk of Van de site with hydrofluoric acid? They were like, everybody knows that could be done. That's just a fact.

• 3:24:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:24:54Speaker 02

  What you've got to prove is that they were doing it. I still want them to burn a rock for me, but yeah, I see their point. Like it's just because I can burn a rock doesn't mean that that's, that's how the Inca did it.

• 3:25:05Danny Jones?

  That's fascinating.

• 3:25:06Speaker 02

  I gotta find, but, 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.

• 3:25:18Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 3:25:19Speaker 02

  So I gotta get that sample.

• 3:25:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Hopefully we can make that happen soon.

• 3:25:22Speaker 02

  Get that sample.

• 3:25:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we'll send Luke down on the mission.

• 3:25:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:25:42Danny Jones?

  Are you?

• 3:25:42Speaker 02

  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 he, you know, I see a lot of myself in Luke. He's, you know, 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. Part of me is like, want to chide Luke, like, you know, it's the jungle's not a game, son.

• 3:26:15Speaker 02

  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 and had great adventures. And yeah, I did get hurt and I loved every minute of it. So I, you know, I'm giving

• 3:26:28Danny Jones?

  Watch out for those cartels.

• 3:26:29Speaker 02

  Luke gets an opportunity to go to all these places while still paying his rent. And I, number one, get to be in this kind of world. I would have never met you without Luke. But also, you know, I feel like the things that I've done and the company I've built isn't just going to crumble when I'm gone. I could hand it off to the next generation and Luke is that next generation along with Zach Lindsay and Vanessa Christman. I've got a new dynamic group of people that I'm super excited about. And Luke is the spearhead of it.

• 3:27:02Danny Jones?

  That's amazing. Yeah. You guys are, you guys are a hell of a team, dream team.

• 3:27:06Speaker 01

  Big shoes, big shoes.

• 3:27:09Speaker 02

  We're, we're going to do it together.

• 3:27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:27:11Danny Jones?

  Cool. Well, um, send me the links that I can put below where people can find more of your stuff. Or can you tell me right now, like where people can go to find your project?

• 3:27:20Speaker 02

  Our, our trips that Luke's leading, you know, people are going to be just like when I was a kid. I, I started this thing and said, well, what if people want to come with me to these sites that I don't know much about, but we'll go explore them together. That's kind of what Luke is doing now. He's going to bring people and they're going to go with some of these places. He's there at the first time too, but he has what I don't have, which is me as the Spider-Man like man in the chair. I'll be watching the whole way by WhatsApp and going, hey buddy, go, go rescue them.

• 3:27:51Speaker 02

  Hopefully that'll never happen. But anyway, it's Maya Exploration Center is our website and it's mayaexploration.org.

• 3:27:58Danny Jones?

  Beautiful. And then Luke Caverns, all over social media.

• 3:28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, just, just my name, Luke Caverns. Um, you know, I, 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. 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, then I reached out to him. We met up for breakfast, you know, a little while ago now, and, and now we've become very close friends. And, uh, you know, being close friends with this guy is like, one of the coolest things in my life. So I'm, I'm very blessed and I'm lucky to be here. And it's very surreal

• 3:28:45Speaker 01

  to be here to be speaking with you again for the second time. And, uh, I'm just very lucky to be sitting in this chair right now.

• 3:28:51Danny Jones?

  Hell yeah, bro. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it very much. Thank you. Thank you guys both for your time. And, uh, we'll link everything below. And, uh, that's it. Good night, world.

• 3:28:59Speaker 03

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