Camp Gagnon - Lost ‘Hidden Tunnels’ Just Discovered in South America | Luke Caverns

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

Luke Caverns joins us in the tent today to talk about his anthropological career, which led him to Peru and Cusco for a Mayan exploration, researching ancient sites and stones, going through hidden tunnels, and uncovering many ancient mysteries that allow him to share his unique experiences with us... WELCOME TO CAMP 🏕️Shoutout to our sponsor: Relay and BlueChewJoin the Relay App community HERE: http://www.joinrelay.app/camp👕🧢 GET YOUR CAMP DRIP HERE: http://camp-rd.com🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets Here: https://markgagnonlive.com🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History Here: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.comTimestamps:0:00 Luke Caverns Made It To CAMP1:28 Traveling to Peru2:54 Stonework of The Inca6:20 Was There a Prehistoric Incan Empire20:55 Cusco’s Hidden Tunnels + Ancient Sites Over Caves27:00 Yaxchilan Temples31:00 The Diversity of Mesoamerica35:14 Nubs on Ancient Stones + Ancient Incan Mortar42:38 Destruction of Tiwanaku46:23 Exploring Machu Picchu1:04:08 The Discovery of Machu Picchu1:10:46 The Incan Rope Language1:13:14 Sun God Shrine at The Coricancha1:17:24 Ancient Knowledge of Frequency + Chichen Itza’s Acoustic Phenomenon1:22:03 The Lost Ancient Skills1:24:33 Destruction of Aztec & Maya Texts1:27:57 Maya Codex Survives Dresden Bombing1:30:23 Astronomical Alignments of Mesoamerican Buildings1:34:32 Ancient Benefits to Understanding Seasons1:38:38 Ancient Cultures Adopting Past Civilizations#history #foryou #secret

This is what I'm in right now. I haven't talked about this publicly. When the Americans are bombing the hell out of Dresden, there was a historical cultural art museum there, and one of the Maya codices was being held there. And one of the young boys working at the library, he was told to go gather some of the artifacts and bring them down in the basement to protect him.

And one of the first ones he grabbed was the little Maya codex. And he grabbed that and held onto it and protected it through the bombing. And he's the dude that later on cracked the Maya code and learned to read that codex. This is Lou Caverns. He's an anthropologist, and is on the hunt for lost American civilizations.

And today, he reveals the secret of Incan technology from their impossible masonry and pyramid construction to why Machu Picchu may have been an ancient college for understanding the world. There's a city called Vilcabamba that the American explorer Hiram Bingham was looking for. And Vilcambamba is the city that the last Inca emperor fled to. This is where the story gets interesting,

because Hiram Bingham was looking for that in the Peruvian Amazon and accidentally found Machu Picchu. He never found the city of Okabamba. This episode is fascinating. We touch on a lot of ancient civilization and ancient technology, but we go all across the board discussing history of the Mesoamerican tribes all the way from Central America to South America, and no one is better to talk about it than Luke. He's a fantastic storyteller and extremely knowledgeable. And I mean, this guy has dedicated his entire life to this topic.

So I hope you enjoy this episode. much as I enjoyed having it without further ado. Sit back, relax. You're welcome to Luke Caverns. How are you, sir? What's up, man? We've been talking about doing this for way too long. Too long. Honestly, I've mentioned to you in our text that our initial DMs are now ancient history. Yeah. I think we've been talking since like 2023. Let the record show. I'm an OG Luke Cavern supporter. Maybe at that point you're already pretty popping, but I mean, earlier than Rogan, you know what I mean? I was watching. Way before. I was watching before you went on Rogan, you know what I mean? I'm a real one. Um,

But yeah, dude, I'm just like a casual anthropology nerd. And I love reading anthropology books. And then, of course, by the work of, you know, Graham Hancock and, you know, folks like him, I have become fascinated with ancient civilizations. And I think similarly, in you much more, in a much more robust way, have really taken that on as like a life calling to actually go to these places and dig into not only what you can see and feel. sort of like touch by being in this places, but also the actual data and like science behind it, having like an anthropology background, you can actually be like, okay, here's what's really going on. And I think you straddle like a really cool lane for, I think, younger generations of like explorers that are excited about the world.

And I think ultimately answering like the biggest questions about what humanity is. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? And then the biggest question that I don't know if any of us can answer is, where are we going but we'll focus on the first two for now so i'm curious you you had even mentioned

in the text which is so funny you're like do you don't happen to be in new york i was like really you're like yeah bro i'm mostly in different countries where i can't really speak the language and i'm trying to like get by yeah so you just you said that you were recently just in peru yep and where in peru in lima uh i was in lima for a couple days and then uh then i've spent most of my time in in Cusco. Okay. Yeah. And what brought you down there?

What were you going to look at? So usually, well, so I work for an organization called the Maya Exploration Center. And basically we just take people on like adventure travel tours. And while I'm there, I spend a little bit of extra time wherever I'm going and researching things that I'm interested in, making videos for YouTube. And then a couple times a year, I just travel somewhere completely on my own, nothing to do with with touring or anything like that. So that's why I was there.

And then my poor wife, I still haven't taken her on a honeymoon in like two years. So that was like, it was like our second pre-honeymoon. So I took her to Peru. She just, I was telling you, she graduated from dental school. And so I took her with me. She paid respect. Yeah, now that she's a doctor, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, I was down there researching the Inca and all the, you know, crazy stonework that's that's in Peru and just taking some people around Peru. Yeah, I love it down there. Yeah, what can you tell me about the Inca? Oh, gosh, man. There's so much. You know, we know a lot about the Inca. Essentially, they seem to appear sometime around, sometime around like 800 AD. The kingdom of Kusko emerges in the current day city of Kusko. And they start out as a kingdom. And they exist in this really fertile valley. They call it the sacred valley. And so you've got these terraces.

Have you ever seen the terraces in Peru? It's like essentially they square out a part of the mountain side. And it'll go, I mean, dude, literally goes from one horizon down to the other, from the bottom of a mountain all the way to the top of the mountain. And it's just farmland, like these lines of farms. And so they're raising a lot of potatoes here. I mean, man, they're making so much food in ancient times that they can. feed like 20 million people or just in this little valley. And so the kingdom of Kusko, which are the Inka people, they control that. And so over time, all that wealth bubbles over, like it just, you know,

like the pot overflows and they eventually become an empire and they take over all of Peru. And so Kusko is just an incredible town. I think that the most interesting thing about the Inca world that everyone is obsessed with is the stonework that's there. So maybe you've heard of or seen Saqse Waman, which is, you know, the stones that are like, I mean, there are some stones that are so big you couldn't fit them in this room. Right. Just absolutely gigantic. Nobody really knows how exactly they cut them or shaped them into the shapes that they're in.

It's just so enormous. And then down inside the city, there's stonework that's not this large, irregularly shaped polygonal stonework, but we call it imperial style and they are square or rectangular stones that are just perfectly cut alongside each other and it's the greatest stonework in all of the ancient world like you think Egypt is good once you go to when you go to Peru

you're going to see stonework there that just I mean dude it it just completely other than one one or maybe two temples in Egypt just completely out classes yeah yeah this just You could click anywhere. There's all different kinds of stonework.

So that one right there, that's the 12-angled stone. That's the 12-angled stone at the Palace of Inka-Roka. And it's just amazing. So they call it granite, but it's actually gray and the site. And it's just the precision with which these things are cut or they're shaped. It's really amazing. And seeing it in person is quite, it's just quite mind-blowing. I mean, it's remarkable.

Like how big are these stones specifically, like the cuts of these? This stone is probably a similar size to this table. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Probably the face of it. Now, I would say it goes in maybe two feet or so. So it's about the size of this table. It's about two feet thick.

And then all of the stones are just perfectly aligned to every stone around them. And there's not one stone in all of the Inca world that is, you know, there's no two stones that are identical. So they're all shaped to fit along. the stones around them. And it's just, it's just amazing, man. I mean, so when the, I guess, the place where the mystery comes from with these is, is it's kind of like if you go to the Inca realm or if you go to Egypt, there's the debate whether did the Inca really do this or was it, did this happen a long time?

Or, you know, thousands of years ago. Did the Egyptians really do this or did this happen thousands of years? A pre-kingdom empire? Was there a prehistoric civilization that did this? What's up, people? Let's take a break really quick, because I'm going to talk to the fellas. Let me ask you something.

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starts that conversation, at least in Peru, was you had Spaniards who were there early on. And, you know, most Spaniards were just invested in conquering these, you know, native kingdoms and plundering them for all their gold and everything. And then there were some people, like there were friars and priests and stuff that actually cared about the natives and wanted to convert them to Christianity. And then you had some people who maybe like

me and you would, you and I don't really, I mean, yeah, having a bunch of gold would be cool, but I'm not really in the place in society where I can take advantage of that. I'm also not like a priest either. I'm not baptizing people, but I can see the significance of these people and we should know more about

this, like just a general interest in that. in the history and the anthropology. There were people there that had those interests. So one of them is the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish, I forget, was he a captain or he was a general? Anyways, his name was, I mean, I'm wanting to say Gaspar de Carvajal, but it's not him, it's Garci Laso de la Vega. And so he's the son of an Inca prince.

and he essentially writes this account of his childhood up until the point he was like 18 or 19 or maybe he was 21 that he grew up in in the city of Kusko and dude it's a book that's like this thick this big it's huge book um it's called the royal commentaries of the incas and it's essentially him talking about his childhood and there's all these strange things that he talks about and when he talks about the stonework up at tsaouaman he says that the indians that were there um and i'm in the term Indians because that's what he says. He says the Indians that were there would speak of

that the gods or that a race before like earlier people had placed these stones here that the stones had always been there. And then they speak about underneath Sox de Waman he remembers going into a place that was called the Chinquanas,

which was this huge tunnel system that would go underneath Soxiawaman. So you have Kusko here. and up on top of the on top of this hillside is this fortress of sox-de-Wamon and so they're both in kusko but he talks about how there were these tunnels that you could enter in up at saksa-Wamon and go underneath the city of kusko and then from there these tunnels would go out into the andy's so like underground for thousands of miles i mean must or hundreds of miles at least must have been he talks about that um there's so much more that that he talks about and other spaniards talk about and

and that people in, I would say, so that book came out in 1609. There's another account written by like an anonymous. We don't know who the author was, but it's a Jesuit chronicler from the year 1600. And then there's Ciazza de Leon, I think in the 1650s, he writes his account of Cusco. And there's several others, but they just give you these glimpses into things that were going on in Cusco. And like, it'll just be one sentence. He'll say the Indians say that the stones had always been there or something akin to that. And there'll be multiple instances.

And then they just move on, you know. And it's like they almost don't even realize that they just wrote down like this huge mystery. Right. And so by the 1800s, over 200 years later, people go back and read this and are like, wait, this is weird, right? And so from the 1800s, well, people were looking for the Chinquanas, this tunnel system since the 1800s. But there's all kinds of other things that people are looking for for almost 200 years now that are highlighted or at least spurred on to us from the Spanish chroniclers that tell us that there's something more here than just like, oh, the Inca made this, right?

That's interesting. That's where this whole mystery starts. That's why people are interested in Peru. I've heard similar things about the Egyptians that like sometimes the New Kingdom Egyptians will talk about, you know, Giza or any of the other pyramids. and they'll say, oh, yeah, this came from the people before us or something to that effect. And it's like, oh, are they referencing old kingdom Egyptians,

which is, you know, a thousand years before or whatever? Or is it from the proto society that, you know, was before them? But it's a similar kind of phrasing where like these stones have always been here. Like these stones are from the people that were before us, which you can imagine if you are Incan, which this guy, you know, ethnically, you know, obviously was mixed, like Spanish and Incan, but has, I would imagine that they would have some type of reverence for their people and they would say no no we did this so I'm curious where that comes from

right like is it a is it almost more respectful to your culture if you say like oh this came from before us or is it an actual historical account that oh no this was already here and no one really knows how it happened you know yeah yeah this is something that's happening right now with the chinkanas and so there's multiple teams in Kusko that are looking for these tunnels and in fact I'm the face of the English-speaking campaign, like the crowdfunding to do this. We just launched it last week, and then I've got a, I'm working on a video for the Cusco's Ministry of Culture right now, like a crowdfunding video. But it's highly debated over who actually discovered them or who is supposed to be able

to get the credit because the team that I'm working with is the team that's actually licensed by the Ministry of Culture to be carrying out these excavations. There's another team that's not licensed to be able to do this. And the reason that the feud happens is because the team that's not licensed or they don't have the, they don't have the permits or whatever to be able to dig for the tunnels and scan for them. It's a very complicated subject. I don't know all the details of it, but apparently it's because their motives, the team that doesn't have the permit, is they believe that it was a lost civilization, a pre-Inca, maybe pre-E. pre-Peruvian native culture, right? And then so the ministry of culture in Peru is like,

no, your whole objective here completely insults our ancestral heritage. Like, why would we give you this permit to be able to do this when you don't even think that we, like the indigenous people did this, right? And it's kind of like where that comes from is its backlash for the complete annihilation of the native world. right during the colonial period so now you have people there that are completely 100% full-blooded inca you know speaking still speaking ketsua the language and they're tired of and there's a lot i should say there's a lot of white people that work on this other team that wants the permits so they come in

looking for something and they're saying yeah we want to come in to kusko and dig here but we don't think that the we don't think that the ink are responsible for this and the ink are like excuse me you know So it's kind of like you have a lot of this race, cultural. Politics getting in the way of actual good archaeology and good history. Yeah, and it's kind of like as someone who, you know, I know a lot about ancient Egypt. It's like my, I don't know, like a passion of mine, right? But I'm educated in and I would say my specialty is the pre-Columbian world, like, you know, studying Native Americans.

and in the time I've spent studying it, I've learned to really learn to kind of sympathize with that. I first would sort of roll my eyes like, they're not trying to erase you. They just don't think that you did this, you know, whatever. And so I'd spend more time learning about, you know, the colonial world and everything. And I realized like, okay, this actually is a real argument.

Like, you know, looking for something that, looking to find this answer to this ancient mystery. and then not even being open to giving credit to the ancestors of the native people who live there, yeah, is bizarre. And the more I get into it, the more I'm like, yeah, that kind of is a colonial mindset. Like, okay, I get it now. And it just, but it took years of me being in it to sort of set in. But then you have the backlash of like, you know, people say that way of thinking it's like too woke, you know, whatever.

It's like, well, man, history is really, really complicated. Yeah, nuanced. I've heard it said that history is a different country. You know what I mean? That if you try to ascribe, like, your modern day morals onto it, it's like, dude, it's a different world. It fundamentally, like, ethically was completely different. And by trying to politicize it and then letting that get in the way of the work you're doing seems like it would be fraught with issues.

And that's why I like the way you're approaching is like, no, no, let's just actually figure out where these things are, what they were used for. And, you know, from that, we can deduce, like, who created them, right? Yeah, yeah. It's kind of, this is the way that I would, this is the way that I would describe what I think is happening is I think it's possible that the Inca are not responsible for everything that's in Kusko or at Saqse Waman, Machu Picchu. You know, there's a lot of amazing stonework there. And there are Spanish chroniclers that talk about the Inca giving credit for the stonework to some precursor people. right uh you know they say that the stones were always there there's even um mound sites i think i think this is a great example in in the eastern united states there are giant mounds that that are out here on the east coast is this like the serpent mound serpent mound plus a million others maybe a million literally a million others um and there are european explorers going through north america this is very like i never see podcasts people talking

about North America. But there are European explorers going through that learn to communicate with the natives and they say, who built these mounds? And the natives go, the gods made them. The mounds were always here. Okay, well, that doesn't mean that it was, yes, it does mean it was entirely different civilization. But archaeology has showed us when we excavated all that the people who made those

are the ancestors of these people five to nine thousand years ago, right? So not the same civilization, a completely different. people, but ethnically, they are connected to each other. Right. And so what I think is happening in Peru and what I think is happening in Egypt is it's the Egyptians calling back on ancient, ancient, ancient, ancient Egyptian world and like hearkening back to it. So it was the, it was always the Egyptians that did it.

It wasn't like a precursor people that are of a completely different race. And for the Peruvians, for the Inca, when the Inca are saying, you know, the gods built these. These were always here. Well, they're probably harkening back to an even more ancient Peruvian civilization, right? That's what I think is actually happening there. So it's really a mix of both. That's fascinating.

Yeah, I guess, yeah, that's actually a great distinction that the Inca is almost a nationality, right? Like, that's like a federalized version of the people that are there and they built an empire. But then there's an ethnic heritage of whatever you want to call that. It's just the people of the land, right? Yeah, yeah. In the Inca are latecomers. They're, right. This is 800.

Yeah, this is 800. 800. There were people there for however many thousands of years before that. The earliest evidence that we, I say we, the earliest evidence that that is recorded, that they found archaeological evidence for it. But here's a problem is that it would be like, it would be like trying to get the permit to do huge excavations in New York City to try to find like the most ancient evidence of habitation.

You know, how hard that would be to do that here? Like how much of the infrastructure you'd have to, you know, dig up. It would be possible. So they found a little bit of evidence of people as far back as two or three thousand BC in Cusco. So people have been living there for a long time because it's a very advantageous place to live. Like people identified it thousands of years ago that it's a great place and people just always live there. But those very first people were not Inca, right? Like the civilization of Cusco did not exist.

It's just it's the it's the prehistoric precursors to what will eventually become later on. Likely the ethnic ancestor. Exactly. That's a great distinction. Yeah. And that's kind of the way I feel about Egypt is it's like, so I'm sure you've heard the conversations of Zeptepe and the Kings List and the Kings List goes back 27,000 years ago. And then people, you know, some people will say, well, this is, you know, the Egyptians

talking about, you know, they have this 27,000 long year history and they come from this ancient civilization. So there was another people that did this. Often that gets wrapped up with Atlantis. but there is a distinction between like zepp teppy is not atlantis those are two different things um but uh yeah it's it's very interesting i was having a conversation with uh julian about this and he would he has a good saying where he's like yeah when we talk about history the further back you go the less details you know so it becomes really easy to skip centuries like this but if you were talking about the 1900s man

you could study your whole life and not fully understand the 1900s but and it's so it's funny how cavalier we talk about uh you know that's just one century ago it's so it's weird how cavalier we are about like 47 centuries ago you know i was just talking to an egyptologist and he was like oh yeah you know and there were some pharaohs in this period they didn't rule for very long and i was looking at like the dates of like the the listing of the pharaohs and it was like seven years 10 years yeah i was like dude that's a whole presidential two terms you know what i mean yeah yeah imagine if you were just like oh yeah Obama he didn't rule very long you'd be like no i mean it was a massive moment in US history.

Like, it really meant a lot to the people. Exactly, right. And you just kind of brush it off, like four of those in a row. You're like, yeah, these guys didn't matter. Yeah, and there's so much nuance there. Yeah. Yeah. Was this the Egyptology you had on the show?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm curious with the tunnels specifically in Kuzco. Do we know of any of them? Have any of them been discovered with LiDAR? Not yet. No. Well, okay, so they're running GPR, so ground penetrating radar.

and they see pockets in the ground but they're deeper than they thought and so as they're excavating down they keep running the GPR inside the excavation hole and the cavity is still below them so they're trying to find it is it possible that with this GPR

that that's like an aquifer or like is it possible? Oh yeah okay so they might just be drilling into the ground like oh we're going to find a tunnel and they're like oh we found the water table yep yeah it's very possible yeah that's tricky and yeah they're just man they're just like throwing darts in the dark like it's yeah no one has seen these tunnels

since the spanish chroniclers nobody really knows what happened to them like there's all kinds of stories from from the early 1800s unto like the 1980s of people who supposedly saw them people who were supposedly taken into the tunnels but yet they're always sworn to secrecy they say they saw things in them and they can never talk about where the tunnels were but we know that I mean, I feel very confident in the fact that they're real. Like, Garcilaso de la Vega, like the way he talks about seeing them as a kid, the details are very exact. And he doesn't harp on it. He doesn't make this big thing out of the tunnels.

It's like, you know, obviously the tunnels. Exactly, exactly. It's the way he talks about it. Now, if there were a whole chapter and he's going on and on and on about how amazing it was, how cool it was and blah, blah, blah. If he's really building it up, then I might be more speculative. But no, he's just kind of like. mentions it as if anyone would know about it, right?

Does he mention what they were used for? No, no, he doesn't mention what they were used for. Could you speculate? Well, every pre-Columbian site, I shouldn't say every, but a lot of pre-Columbian sites, major ones, are built over natural caverns in the ground. So when we call them tunnels, my guess is they're modified caverns. You know, then the Inca just go in and renovate it and turn it into a huge thing, right? and like maybe they do actually make tunnels that branch off from this cave system.

But ancient pre-Columbian cities a lot of times are built over the top of caves, and we don't really understand why. You heard of Teotibokan? The pyramid of the sun, moon, and the temple of Ketalkoa or the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Huge pyramids in Mexico. Those are built over cave systems. There are caves at Chichenita. There's a good night.

There's a sonote right underneath the Great Pyramid at Chichenita. Sanote? Yeah, it's just a, it's just a different kind of cave. It's like a sinkhole where, you know, probably millions of years ago, the land basically just falls into this hole into the ground, and there's these huge rivers that go into ground. Anyways, it's a cave. And then there's a site called Yoshelan that's got caves like the pyramids.

like the pyramids are built onto these hillsides and in the hillsides there are caves inside of them there's another site called balamku that has this amazing cave underneath it's like this this mouth that opens up in this Maya temple it's in a campeche Mexico and this mouth opens up and you go down into this cave and and they say it goes like 500 yards back and had all these burials in it and oddly enough when I was there they told me that no one had no one have been in it since 1995. I don't know why. These are very sacred things.

But man, it's literally all over the pre-Columbian world that sites are built over the top of massive caves. Why? Oh, the site of Mietla is built over a Meela Mexico, is built over a cave, which is a modified cave that's turned into tunnels and labyrinths now. And there's another, there's a Francisco Borgoa, who was a Portuguese explorer. He went down in those caves in like 1674, and he says that like the wind would whistle through the tunnels

and it was so cold it would blow out their oil lamps and they said that the smell was so putrid that they thought that it must have been the gateway to hell. And so they covered up all the entrances to the tunnels and built a church over it. And so now a team there is trying to find the tunnels, the entrance to the tunnels. So all over.

Wow. We're talking about Kusko. That's in Peru. Right. But Mietla is up in Mexico, right? So it's all over the Americas that when Native Americans find a large cave system, they build a city on top of it. And man, we don't know why they did that. That's fascinating.

But it's such a universal thing. It's just everywhere. Everywhere that there are caves and you can build a city on top of it, it happens. And we don't really know why exactly it is. There's so much speculation because the way that a Native American in Meso, America, which is like Mexico and Central America, might view a cave, would be inherently different than a Peruvian might view a cave. In Mesoamerica, they called them Shabalba or Leoba, which means the underworld.

I remember that from Rodel Dorado. Yeah, yeah. And so they thought it was, they thought it was like a gateway to the underworld. And so you would have underworld priests that would go down there and perform rituals of which we don't really understand what these rituals were, or the king. might, if it was a civilization that had kings, and it would kind of go back and forth between like a priest class and just a king.

And which that's a fascinating discussion in itself. But, you know, we think that the king would go, he might be wearing like a certain garb and he would go down into the underworld and perform some kind of ritual and come back up, wearing something different, and take part in some kind of parade to do something and for some kind of significance that we don't understand.

It's like, dude, it's just a completely lost world. The pre-Columbian Americas, it was an insanely sophisticated world that was just completely eviscerated by disease. And we lost all of the context to this. I mean, you walk around a Maya city, like I could take you to a place called Yashilon. It's awesome. It's like being in Indiana Jones there. Or more like Tomb Raider. It feels like Tomb Raider.

And you're walking around these temples, and you know that the people who built these temples are incredibly intelligent. and that every single little detail of the temples is important, and we don't know anything about it. Because Yashilan starts in about, so despite what some people might think, we actually have a pretty good timeline for the ancient Americas because they did a really good job of making it pretty easy to carbonate things. And to know the chronology.

So, like, in Egypt, they built. the pyramids in such a way where the pyramid could be robbed. You could go in and out of the pyramid, right? If you could put a body in it, if the pyramid was a tomb and you put a body in it, which is highly debated. And I have a particular opinion on this that I have not met anyone that shares, but when we talk about it. When we get to Egypt, we'll get into that. But, you know, the Egyptians didn't do a very good job of building pyramids for, wow, this is actually something I've thought about. Like if they wanted to build a pyramid that was just a tomb And no one could ever

Break into the tomb They could have done it They could have done it the way that the Mesoamericans did it So anyways the Mesoamericans what they would do is The pyramid would start out half as tall And the king would live in the palace on top of the pyramid And then when he died his palace would be turned into a tomb chamber And he'd be laid to rest in it

And they'd build the whole new pyramid on top of it So it was impossible to break into, so it was completely preserved forever. So we know when we break into that tomb chamber and you date his bones, you know exactly how old he, how old this guy is. And you know exactly how old the pyramid above him must be, right? Wow. So we have a very good understanding of the chronology of Mesoamerica. So Yoshelan here begins about 200 AD, although there must have been people living there before that. But like the kingdom really grows.

from there and it goes until about 850 or 900 so about 700 years and um and this is mexico mexico yeah uh along the usama center river so right across the river from guatemala and uh and so think about this this is something i think is crazy is like this civilization starts in 200 AD and it falls somewhere around 800 to 900 that feels like it's kind of recent to us but what i've learned is when i study the pre-columbian world that's exceptionally far away because they fell 600 years before Columbus arrived. Like an entire civilization rose and fell, and then 600 years would go by,

and these jungles are being covered up, or these ruins are being covered up by the jungle, and then Columbus arrives. Wow. So, like, that happened hundreds of times to hundreds of different civilizations throughout the Americas, where they would rise and fall,

and it would be, you know, nearly a thousand years or thousands of years until Europeans would arrive. We might be closer. I mean, I have to check my math on this. We might be closer to Columbus today than they were to Columbus when they fell. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Like if it's 1492, right?

Like, it would be like not far off. Which, when we think about Columbus, you're like, oh, that's ancient history. These people were twice as old. Twice as old. When they fell. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, that's remarkable.

There's so much. And what they were building in 200. I mean, even just these buildings here are just like, unbelievable. It's amazing. Well, in the Maya world had already existed for well over 2,000 years leading up to this. So the pre-Columbian world is just, it's just amazing, man. It's so dense. There's so much mystery.

And there's so much that we don't understand. And that's why my answer to a lot of things about the pre-Columbian world will be like, well, this is what I've seen. This is what it's like when you go there. But ultimately, I don't know. It's actually a lost civilism. A lost world. It's just a lost world.

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because if you were to go, they all realized that they worship the same gods and they sort of have the same way of life. But Athens and Sparta really didn't get her long. Corinth really didn't like either of them either. And so it's kind of like, you know, they all don't really like each other. However, they all kind of have the same culture. I mean, the Cretans today. Exactly, exactly.

They would barely call them so the Carta. Exactly. And so the Maya world is exactly the same way. Exactly precisely the same way. So when we say terms like Maya civilization, they probably wouldn't see it that way. Not necessarily during all periods would they see it the same way. So it's like every single city that you go to in the Maya world, you have to treat it in some ways like its own individual civilization because it had its own kings, it had its own royal family. They have their own history.

It's incredibly dense. So when people say Maya, what are they really saying? Like, it's just like the broad... It's the broad term of that whole Yucatan Peninsula down into Guatemala all the way down to the Pacific coast on the other side, down to El Salvador and Honduras. It's this giant section of Mesoamerica or Mexico and Central America in modern terms. And essentially what makes people Maya is they worship, they worship this collective group of gods. and well there's a bunch of one we could go through all of them but it kind of doesn't matter but they worship the same collective group of gods and they have the same way of life

but they all have a different local language however they would all ascribe to a to one how do I even say this it's like a it's like a it's like a it's like a it's like a it's like a a collective language but it was it was written so you would write in hieroglyphs so all All my hieroglyphs are the same language. Interesting. However, it would be like, okay, you know, I'm from Texas and I speak, I would speak Comanche. You're from, well, you're from Florida. I would speak Seminole.

Yeah, so Seminole. And so, however, you and I have agreed that we're both going to speak, that everyone's going to speak Cherokee also. So we can communicate with each other. But when I'm at home, I'm going to speak my language. When you're home, you speak your language. However, we can all also speak Cherokee. And so we've all agreed that we're similar enough that we shouldn't be, that we're similar enough that if our land got invaded,

we were still going to have our scuffles and our fights and maybe our wars and battles. But if someone who's not anything like us attacks us, we'll all come together, right? So it's kind of like the Greeks, like all the Greeks come together to fight Persia. Well, the Maya kind of come together to fight outside threats as well. So the Maya world and the Greeks, like if you want to know how to think about the Maya, just think of the Greeks. It's exactly the same. Oh, that's fascinating. Utterly completely exactly the same, actually.

Right. Yeah, I mean, I've even spoken with like Native Americans and they'll be like, yeah, like the term Native American like just doesn't even, like it's a descriptor for just all people of the Americas. Like it's like it's a non-descriptor, right? It's like calling like everything in the ocean a fish. You know what I mean? Like it's generally right, but like you're missing so much nuance. So much, man. So with, I don't want to get off topic really quick on the Peruvian stones.

Because there's something that I've heard with the notches. Okay. I'm curious what your theory is with like the notches that on these stones. Would you mind pulling those back out, Christos? Thank you. Like on these stones, I've heard like, oh, these notches maybe were used for framing the other stones that they were cutting out and that they were used to basically almost act as like a stencil so that all of them would fit perfectly together.

The next photo you'll see. There you go. So these like nubs that you see and that perhaps they all had these nubs and some were shaved down, some weren't. I'm curious, do you have a thought on this or have you read anything that you thought was compelling? Yeah, it's tough, man. Because again, like, you know, I'm a cultural anthropologist and like historian.

So I do like I study the way people lived and the way they interacted with their environment And then I just studied like the cultural history So this would be like engineering Right You would need like an engineer's eye to look at that But my guess is I have seen these things all around the world Now the popular ones are Peru and Egypt But I was just in Cambodia and I saw it on the

The Cambodian pyramid of Coquere Massive pyramid and it had these nubs my guess is that if you have generations upon generations of people who are working this kind of stone and they're moving things that are this heavy there's got to be something about that nub that you would like if I gave you 500 years to learn how to be an expert stone mason and I gave you no tips at all no advice you just had to figure it out and you were living for 500 years I think something would happen naturally where you would end up with that nub. That's what I'm saying.

It's like there's something about the way we're wired and the way we interact with stone that you mess with that thing long enough, that's going to come out. That's useful. I don't know exactly how. My guess is it's a pivot point. I don't know why with there's two of them on there. If there's two, I don't know if it's two pivot points necessarily, but I know it'd be a lot easier to drag that stone if you just had those two

points like this on the ground and you're dragging it rather if you're dragging the whole thing, right? Because it'll move much more easily on those two points. You can also turn the stone, right? So if you had like, if you had it bound with ropes, you could spin the stone around and leverage it. But why at so many places you don't see, you'll see so many nubs that just never get shaved down, man, I don't know. I do not know. Are some of them shaved? Like, do we know that? Like, oh, there was likely a nut where they got shit? I mean, we don't know. I mean, we don't know. know that. Yeah, I don't, and maybe if I stared at like every block I ever see on a wall where there's

nubs, I might find something. I don't know if there's anyone who's done this. Right. But no, we just assume that there had to be other stones that had those that get shaved and shaved down and flattened because, okay, so at the pyramid of Mancara in Egypt, it's very, very, very, very similar to this stonework right here, at least these large, lower gray andesite stones. and they're all pillowed out.

And then you can see on one part where they're coming across and they're flattening all the stones and getting rid of this pillowed effect and then they just stop and just ends. It's like they all just, all the workers just put down their tools and never worked on it again. And in Peru, we see walls that are like that as well.

So we just assume that there were definitely stones that had those nubs that just, for whatever reason, it never got shaved down. Fascinating. And is there a theory or a couple theories as to why they're so different. Like, none of these stones, like you had mentioned, are, you know, there's no two the same,

which, you know. Well, yeah, okay, I know what you're asking. So Peru is, the Andes in general, are prone to earthquakes. And earthquakes plays, like, a major role in the destruction of civilizations. So, like, Lima culture. This is in the city of Lima.

They experienced a lot of earthquakes. And Lima culture really had always been there, but I could be wrong, and I'm not an expert about Lima culture, it's not really my interest. But I think their height is somewhere between 500 and 1,000 AD. And they had experienced so many earthquakes that they learned how to build pyramids that were anti-seismic. So like, it couldn't be knocked down.

So what they would do is they would take bricks about like, can I grab this? Yeah, please. So they would take bricks about the size of this little. Actually, that's full of dominoes, if that's helpful for your illustration. So they take bricks that are about this size, and then they sit them on top of each other. And so you put one here, put one here, but you leave a little space in between them. And then you take another block, like a lentil block, and you add it right here. So you have all these blocks stacked on top of each other with little bits of space.

And so when an earthquake would happen, the whole structure would jiggle back and forth. And so it would never fall down. It would just move with the earth. That's so clever. Yeah, it's amazing. And so what we think is that by using stones that are this large, there's also something that you're not seeing here. So only the faces of the stones touch each other.

As soon as it goes inside, okay, so say, I'm trying to think of like, how can I describe this? So you have the face of the stone. And if you were to take one layer off and look down on it from the top, you would notice that the face here is connected. But on the inside, the sides of the stones move away. from each other. So there's a triangular space

between each side of the stone and it's filled with gap fat. It's like this red paste glue stuff that they would make from llama fat. It's like a mortar. But kind of, but it was like it's like a, the way I would describe it

is like shock absorber. And so when an earthquake happens, the blocks don't shatter because they're pressed against each other. you have a shock absorber between the stones. And so the stones are moving back and forth like this. Oh, that's fascinating. And they stay perfectly, the various shapes of them.

It allows the face on the outside to stay locked together. But if the stones were pressed up against each other, they would all crack. Like you'd see a crack go down the middle. And none of these stones are cracked because they have this, like, they had this almost like a cartilage. That's what I was the word I was looking for. It's like a cartilage between the stones. And does the cartilage still exist? Yeah.

Like it hasn't like like degraded due to... I don't know about that, but I know that I have looked between stones and it's still there. Fascinating. Yeah, yeah. That is so clever. And so it's basically like anti-earthquake technology. Yes.

Yeah, it is. Wow. Yeah, it's fascinating. And that's seen all through like Central and South America? No, no. This is exclusively to what we call Inca sites, but... Because they're more earthquake prone. Yes.

Because they're on a fault line, I presume. I don't know. but I would guess. Yeah. Wow. That is so interesting. I never would have guessed that. Now, in Peru, the Inca are really the only people that achieved this kind of stonework.

The only thing that's similar is in Bolivia. You have, good Lord, what's the name of it, Tijuana, in Bolivia. And it's very similar stonework there. But Tijuanau is a crazy place because it looks like a bomb went off in the city. It's just, you know, these giant stones just scattered around. And for so long, nobody knew the assortment of the stones and how they all went together. And they've been reconstructed. Like, somebody scanned it all and reconstructed it using like 3D models, like blocks.

And it used to be some kind of building. And it's like, it's like it's just blown up. Okay, so that's one there. So that's actually a courtyard. It looks like it's a building. It's, yeah, it's the next photo over, sir. if you just go one to the right yeah yeah one to the left of that one

perfect so so you can see all these stones they're kind of so what they're done what's happened here is they've laid all these blocks out and they've laid all these blocks out in a way where you can walk in between

them almost like it's a little museum but in the original photos they're like blown apart it's just scattered all throughout Puma Punku and Tijuana and nobody knew the original assortment of these stones for a long time. And we still don't necessarily know. There's just a model of it that was recreated where it was supposed to be some kind of temple

that's surprisingly unique in the pre-Columbian world, not like anything anyone has ever seen before. And nobody knows why they were all scattered about. My most boring answer is that it happened during like early colonial times and they just ripped that thing apart for some reason and it was never recorded. Like it was, do you think it was road to apart by humans? Like, not like an earthquake or some other type of natural phenomenon. No, it's like, yeah, it's like two.

Well, so this is in, this is in a high altitude valley. So the overgrowth, you wouldn't see that. And it's just grassland out there. And I don't think it was shaken apart by an earthquake because, like, the way the stones are scattered. It's just not the way it would look like in an earthquake. It looks like it was dismantled. Strange. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's very odd, but it was never recorded. And so my most boring guess is that in the early colonial period, they just dismantled the entire thing for who knows what reason. I don't know. A lot of weird stuff happened in early colonial times that wasn't recorded. That's my most boring answer. My crazy answer? Allens.

My crazy answer is I don't know. I have no idea what we do that. There's other places in Egypt that are like this, where the entire city is just utterly. completely destroyed, or I should say the temple, is like the temple of Babastis, the temple of Tannis, Egypt. The city is just utterly annihilated, and there's no explanation. You know, I've seen ruined temples in Egypt, and they don't look like this.

This looks like somebody hit this thing with a cruise missile. And, yeah, it's very odd. bizarre. And, like, you wonder if the Spanish did it, they may have recorded it, right? Like, they would have been like, hey, we destroyed, you know, a pagan temple. We got rid of this thing and we're, you know, like, proselytizing. You would think so. But not all the time.

You know, the Spanish were as good as they were bad. Right. A lot of really fascinating, brave, amazing Spaniards during the colonial periods and then a lot of really bad, evil people. Right. Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. Okay.

And when you were just in Peru, what was the specific site that you were looking at? Is that the one that we just saw with the stone? Oh, I went, I went all over the place. I was at, I was in Kusko. I went to Soxie Waman. I went to, I went to, good night. What's the name of the, well, I went to Oante Tombo. There's another one.

I cannot think of the name. There's another city that I went to, and then on Machupeju. And, yeah, so went there, went to Machu Picchu twice. That was, Machu Picchu's amazing. Have you ever been? No, that is a bucket list item of mine. I was telling Joe this. It's more amazing than Egypt.

It's just, it's not comparable. It's, it's, Egypt is in the middle of a major metropolitan area and the pyramids sit up on top of this hill and there's a million people there and the smog is insane. And, you know, it's fine. But, and the pyramids are amazing. They really are one of the most amazing things in the entire world. It's not like being in the end. ND in Amazon after you've traveled for days to be able to get here. Like if I wanted to go see the pyramids, I could, from New York, I could be there in 13 hours

like that. As soon as I land in Cairo, I can see the pyramids. I cannot just be like, oh, I just want to go check out Machu Picchu. You know, it's a journey. Don't they limit visitors? They do. Yeah. Yeah.

You have to like get a ticket. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas at Giza, great, great example. Like Giza, you can just show up and buy your ticket that day. You don't have to make a reservation with Montchreux. Pichu, you're looking at like six months in advance to book your ticket online. And then you have to travel all the way down to South America. You have to go from Lima to Kusko.

And then you can't, and then people don't realize Machu Picchu is four hours from Kusco. And you have to go by car. And then you've got to go by train to get into the Amazon to see Machu Picchu. And so, you know, it's a whole journey just to get out there. And then when you're standing up on the mountain, looking at the city with the wind of with Winapechu, the mountain top behind it, it's just, oh man, yeah, like, there's no comparison. This is one of the most amazing places in the entire world. And do we know when this was built?

Like, is there an estimate on roughly? Yeah, well, the vast majority of the site was made, the vast majority of site was built during like the late Inca period. So right up to, they were still building the city that when the Spanish arrived. So it's very, very late, at least the majority of the construction. But there's archaeological evidence of people on this mountain, I think 2000 BC. Wow. Yeah.

People have been living in this area for a long time. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then Machu Picchu itself was built much closer to 13, 1400s. Yeah, yeah. The main mystery here, the thing that gets thrown into a wrench is do you see on here, Do you see the blank part in the middle of the city where it looks like it's like a dirt floor? So right next to where that grassy knoll is

just to the bottom left of that. Yep, right there. That thing, yeah. So they call that the Temple of the Moon, I believe, because they think that it has a lunar alignment, but I don't think it does. The alignment doesn't work. We don't really know what that temple was.

But in that temple right there, It's the only part of Machu Picchu where you have the huge megalithic stones, the things that you would see in Soxia Waman and in Kusko. Oh, yeah. So you can tell like those stones are really, really, really massive. I would say one of those stones is the size of your entire wall here. Wow. And up on top of this mountain, it's really amazing. And so that's kind of the wrench that gets thrown in here.

It's like, okay, if it was a precursor civilization and it wasn't the Inca, Why do they only build one temple here on top of this mountain like this? And all the rest of it is built with, it's still great architecture, but it's much more crude than that. So it's this wrench that gets thrown in where people will think Machu Picchu must be built by this really advanced ancient civilization. However, when I was there, I wasn't expecting it, but it was only that one temple that had that construction. So I was like, well, did those guys really come out here and only build this one temple way out here up on top of the? mountain? I don't know. I mean, is it crazy to think that a precursor civilization built a specific smaller relatively temple with these giant megalithic rocks and then a later civilization built the

rest of it? It's not crazy. Yeah, the ancient world is a foreign country. It's not it's not crazy, but it certainly it certainly challenges like my rational thinking, right? Because you almost have to throw your rational thinking out of the window in some cases when you're studying the ancient world because you know i look at this in one way i look at this one temple and i go oh you know i came to matripecheo yeah it's only this one temple that has this massive megalithic stonework i don't think an ancient precursor civilization will come all the way out here just to build one building um i don't know maybe the inca really did do it and and the reason this is this stonework is here like this is because this was one particularly important building. However, that's assuming that I understand even 1% of the Inca mindset or the ancient Peruvian mindset. There can be a perfectly rational explanation if I could talk to someone who lived in a precursor civilization and be like, well, why did you build this? And we go, oh, why did we come all the way out here to do this? Well, because this, this, this, and that happened. And we thought we needed to build

this here for this sacred alignment in the sky, blah, blah, blah. And I would go, oh that's that's crazy okay and then and then they would and if he could be like and there's actually more of these scattered throughout the mountains here that you just haven't found and I'd be like oh I get it so this is like a it's like a it's like a a place of study or worship or of astronomy or whatever and it's this one place where you got I mean dude native Native Americans do all kinds of stuff like the more I've gotten into this it's so much of a battle to remind myself um to constantly remind myself that I don't know everything you know because it's like Linda Shealy

who was my mentor's mentor she's like a world class Maya archaeologist and she would constantly say that we need people from outside of the field to look inwards because it's so easy

to know so much that you confuse yourself like you get so lost and right you get so close to the mosaic you can't even tell what you're looking at exactly right right and so I constantly have to take a huge step back, you know, in like, okay, why would just arguing for the ancient lost civilization idea? It's possibly just as likely that this little temple here existed long before the rest of the city because the people who went there would perform something that the, I think it's the Native Americans of the Great Plains that would go out into the wilderness and starve themselves and like hang themselves to a tree and starve themselves until they would hallucinate. and they would have visions,

and then they would go back and give, like, the prophecies of that vision, and that was, like, a central core component to that society. Well, this could easily be the same thing, right? So it's like, it's just a completely alien world that we're trying to study here. And to feel super confident about any, about assertations about something like this, I think it's a misstep. So anyways, yeah, that's Machu Picchu. Is there anything else with Machupeachu that you find,

interesting or stark. Like obviously we have this one specific temple that was potentially used for something. I'm maybe remiss in calling it a temple. But was there a large population of people living here at one point? They don't think so. They think that the population was under a thousand people. There have been people who've gone in and looked at each in every room and exactly how much water. So from where the photo is being taken, you're actually standing on Machu Picchu. And what you're looking at, this peak in the background that we always think of when we think of Machu Picchu, that's actually Winapecichu. So he's standing on Machu Picchu.

Most people have never actually seen a photo of Machu Picchu. It's funny. So if you'd zoom out, yeah, thank you so much. So on Machu Picchu, the mountain that he's standing on, there's a spring up at the top. It comes out of the mountain and it trickles down. And they reshaped the mountain side. and they made these aqueducts where they turned the, they turned the path of the water to go down into the city.

So originally it was just going off the mountainside. They turned it to the side and it goes down into the city and it winds through the city into these like natural, but they're fountains with natural spring water coming out. And you can drink the water today. And the fountains have been running for, you know, since the city was made. It's amazing.

And so what's crazy is, is they say that at least the research has been done is that 60%. Here's, okay, here's something else I should add. Most of the megalithic architecture at Machu Picchu, the only thing that's accessible is that one temple, but they found other gigantic stones like that underneath the floor that you walk on. Like the entire foundation is made up of those megalithic stones. and 60% of the stonework of itself at Machu Picchu is the foundation of the city

because it has tunnels in it that are about this big and it directs the water and it provides a stable foundation for the city that exists on top of a mountain in an area that gets plagued by earthquakes. So they built up the foundation of the city. Yeah, it's totally insane. And so the tunnels aren't accessible. Oh yeah, so here's where one of them pops out. And so you can go up and drink that water today.

it comes right out of the mountain. That is wild. There's so much, man. It's an amazing place. What I think Machu Picchu is when I'm there, oh yeah, that's beautiful. What I think Montu Picchu is when I'm there is I very much get a library of Alexandria feel. This is a place of study. This is a place where the most important people of this civilization were allowed to come here.

And another thing that's really fascinating about it, man. Oh, this is like, this is what I'm in right now. I haven't talked about this publicly. So, like, lost cities of the Inca, this idea has fascinated explorers for a really long time. There was a city called Vilcabamba that the American explorer Hiram Bingham was looking for. And Vilcambamba is the city that the last Inca emperor fled to. And why am I – sorry, I'm blinking on his name right now. I'm blinking on several things.

What's it? Monco Inca. He's the last Inca emperor. He took about 250,000 Inca people out of Kusco, and they either built a new city or there was an ancient city that they knew that they could use way out. Yeah, so here's Monco Inca. Or there was an ancient city that existed out in the Amazon. I say the Andean Amazon, but it's still in the Amazon that was available.

Maybe it was abandoned or maybe it was like a, not a very powerful place, but he knew it's where he could bring a hundred, several hundred thousand people to come build this new colony to get away from the Spaniards. So he takes 250,000 to like 500,000 Inca people out of Kusco. It's basically a mass exodus way out into the mountains to a place called Vilcabamba. And I think that they live out there in peace and no one knew where they were for 11 years. And then Monco Inca comes back into like the semi-contacted like colonial world and he gets stabbed to death in the street and eventually

and eventually the city of Vilcabamba like the people kind of starve out and they have to come back and the city is eventually lost to history but it was this famous lost Inca city and this is where the story gets interesting because Hiram Bingham was looking

for that in the Peruvian Amazon and accidentally found Machu Picchu. He never found the city of Vilcabamba. It was later explorers that went on and found Vilcabamba. So what this has opened up here, and I think that this is only sort of recently, and it's something that I only became privy to last month in Peru,

was I was talking to a proving historian there, and he was telling me about his idea that there's something more special about Machu Picchu than the city of Vilcabamba, because Vilcabamba was no secret. It was only the location was a secret, but everyone knew about it. Yeah, there's a huge exodus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. but Machu Picchu, the Inca explicitly went out of their way to never, ever talk about it. They abandoned it at contact period when the Spaniards were getting, when they had taken over Kusco and they were starting to spread out.

People just, the Inca people picked up everything and abandoned Machu Picchu because they can tell when they excavated it, there was like nothing there. Literally, there was nothing in the city. Other than, you know, there's some leftover artifacts. Like there's a little museum there. But way, it's like, it's like stark how much is. not there that should have been. And so there's this idea that, okay, well, they must have picked up and left in a band in the city. But never, nobody, not one Inca person, all of the Incas that were interviewed and used as sources in Spanish chroniclers, not one person ever even uttered the actual

name of Machu Picchu. So nobody knows its significance, why it was so significant, and why the Inca people explicitly went out of their way to not even utter its name. I mean, the silence kind of indicates the importance in a way. Exactly, exactly, yeah. Why do we know that it's called Machu Picchu? Like, what does that mean? Was that a name of the mountain. Okay.

Yeah, it's just the name of the mountain. And that's the name that the Inca used. No. Well, well, it's the name that the Inca that the Inca people were using in 1911 when Hiram Bingham was down there and found the city, right? So they called the mountain Machu Picchu,

but this is 115 years ago. That's what they called that mountain. So he just used, if my history is correct, he just used the same name for the mountain for the city. That makes sense. We do not know what the city's name was. Wow. Yeah, it's crazy, right?

And the fact that they keep it so silent, it does kind of give it an air of reverence. Mm-hmm. Or maybe like a hideaway. But it's also a massive undertaking to build a city like that to not tell anyone or not have anyone know. Right, right. My thought is there's so many observatories.

There's little reflection pulls. that are in some of the so reflection pools about this big and they found other reflection pools that are made out of that are made out of slate

in like black basalt and man they're so expertly made it's amazing like we talk about we talk about the I'm sure you've seen the like the precision pre-dynastic vases from Egypt

that kind of stonework the same quality of stonework is seen in these reflection pools and it's basically this circular clock about this big It's just perfectly carved and perfectly circular. And so they would sit it in the middle of these open-roofed buildings. And so astronomers would sit down and there would be,

there's these little grid marks on the side of these bowls. And so they'd have the water sitting perfectly flat in it and they would be watching the stars inside this bowl. And so they were figuring out like the cosmic wheel. And these artifacts have been found all throughout Machu Picchu. It's actually one of the most common things found at Machu Picchu. And so my thought is, oh, this is an Alexandria type situation here. This is a university.

This is where all the brightest minds in the Inca world were right here. For a long time, it was thought of, it was thought of as the Playboy Mansion of the Emperor. Like, what would they do? There was this legend that one of the palaces that's at Machu Picchu is like the palace of the concubines. It's like where his concubines were being held. and one of them is called the nursery because he would impregnate all the most beautiful women and they would give, you know, they would give birth here. That's kind of just a myth.

Or at least people say it's a myth. There's nothing really behind it. These are just kind of popular myths and legends that have been passed down. But, you know, the way my mentor, Dr. Ed Barnhart and I look at it is like, it's probably both. You know, it's probably, the Inca Emperor can do whatever you want. Machu Picchu is the most stunning place in the Inca realm, maybe other than the ancient city of Kusko itself. Kusko must have been really been amazing.

But like, you know, if in the winter, the Inca Emperor wants to go up to Machu Picchu where there's these amazing views in the brightest minds, well, why wouldn't he have like some concubines there to hang out with, you know, while he's got, so I don't know. But, yeah, Machu Picchu, my guess is probably all of the sacred knowledge of the understanding of the cosmos and the universe

and maybe religion was happening at Machu Picchu. Now, how difficult, like, it's difficult to get to Machu Picchu now. How difficult must it have been then? Oh, it was almost impossible. I mean, yeah, I mean, he talks. This is a two-week journey, like, by foot? Oh, man, you know, I don't know how long it took him to get to Machu Picchu from Kusko, because he didn't know he was looking for it.

He's kind of meandering through these outskirts of the Inca realm and trying, and like, you know, asking locals for clues, you know, I'm looking for this lost city of Il-Kabamba. Is there anything that you, here, this is, this is like, here's like the discovery of Machu Picchu broken down in like a paragraph. Hiram Bingham is going through the outskirts of the Inca realm. He knows about the lost city of Bilkabamba. He knows it's off to the east of Kusko in the Andean Amazon.

So where the Andes Mountains meets the Amazon, it's very, it's just a jungle. It's a mountainous jungle. And so he's going from village to village and asking the locals, do you know of anything of of cities in the jungle, like abandoned cities. You ever seen, you know, like, Tiamplo, Templo, you know, and they're communicating with them. And all of them are like, yes, yes. And he would be taken to sights left and right.

Most of them were very insignificant. I think like all of them were not that significant. There would be little vestiges along the river where there would be like a little farmhouse at the bottom of a river that was covered up. by the overgrowth, but on top of it, you could see the terraces going up the mountain. You could tell, oh, this was a wealthy farmer who was wealthy enough to build this big stone house, but this isn't a city.

This is like his estate, basically. And so these locals out near the modern-day city of Guada Phoenix say, yes, up here on top of this mountain, there's some temples up there that we know about. And he's like, okay, take me up there. Now, these are temples that think about it, probably 600 years ago, or I'm sorry, five hundred years ago is when machi Picchu is abandoned well not everybody leaves like probably you had my guess when i'm up there and i'm just thinking about all the little stuff that never gets recorded in history you probably had people who are living down at the bottom of the mountain that are

just farming because there's all kinds of farming terraces there too so you had 700 people that lived in the principal part of the city but you probably had maybe a few thousand that lived on the outskirts and they were all farmers, right? Lower class people. Well, when the city gets abandoned, you definitely have people that are like, dude, we should just go live up there. Right? Let's just go.

You got a sick spring? You got a nice little architecture. We know that this was happening in the Maya world. Like we found evidence of later Maya people living in the ruins and hanging out. Like we've even found little Maya board games from kids that were going and hanging out and abandoned buildings playing games. So cool. Like kids do.

today. So yeah, it's amazing. And all of that was pre-Columbian, right? So it's like we found evidence of kids hanging out and abandoned buildings after the city had been abandoned before, way before Columbus was ever there. So it's fascinating. So you probably had these farmers that when Machu Picchu gets abandoned, all these guys are like, dude, we're not going to Volcombo. Let's just go live up there. Like the Spanish aren't going to find us. And then eventually those people get absorbed into the, Like as the modern world spreads out into those furthest reaches, they eventually come down from the mountain to get things like plumbing, electricity, blah, blah, blah, right? And then the jungle just grows over all those ruins and they sit up there.

And a few generations later, the grandchildren of those people are like, yeah, you know, there is a, there is like a little town up there or whatever that my great grandpa used to run around him. But I've never been up there. I've never, you know. And so this guy comes and he's like, he's like, oh, this green girl wants to go see these stupid abandoned buildings. Okay, yeah, well, give me, you know, give me $100 and I'll take you up there. And so they go up there and it's, there's like, it was really, really difficult to get up there because they didn't know exactly how to get up the mountain because at some points it's just sheer rock granite face.

Right. And there's all kinds of stories of they'd be going up and it start raining in the middle of the day. Because it rains almost every, it rains almost every day there. And, you know, he had his guys like falling down the side of the, I don't think anybody died, but they would slip and fall and roll like 30 feet. And so everybody, according to the story, everyone would just bust out laughing and they would all just sit on the side of the mountain for like 30 more minutes and rest and then go back up. And I think it takes him, I could be wrong on my history here.

I'm not an expert on Hiram Bingham. But I think it takes him a few days to like get up there and get settled. And then he starts really wandering around the ruins. And he's having to cut his way through the jungle. but he talks about how the stonework, the jungle never affected the stonework. Like the stones are just so tightly packed together. And I think he says,

I think he explicitly says he's at the temple of the sun in Machu Picchu. And it's like this half-circular temple where there's a straight-edge wall on the side. And we know from the alignments that it's a solar temple because the sun, I think it, I don't, I'm not sure what equinox or solstice it is, but it rises up through a gateway on the opposite side of a different mountain. There's a different stone gateway that they eventually found.

And, I mean, it must be like two miles away, but you can see it up there. Like when people are walking up there, you have to stare and you can see people walking up there. And so the sun will rise on some equinox or solstice and it'll shine through that gateway and come straight through the window. And when it hits that back wall, they know that this new season has started. So there's so much there telling us that this is an astronomical observatory. This is a university, basically, is what Machupechu is. Or I should say it's the navel of their understanding of their world, right?

This is where their understanding of everything comes from. But when Hiram Bingham found that temple, he didn't know any of that about it. But when he found it, he says something like he would dare to say that it's the greatest stonework in the entire world. And he was obviously up to speed on Egypt, at least for 1911. Maybe he had never been there, but definitely he'd seen photos. and stuff and he explicitly says that it's either it's either the greatest in the world or i think he may even compare it to egypt and he says it's better and when you see it in person you're like are there celestial hieroglyphs around machipechu or like any type of art outside of just the

architecture no isn't that so weird the inca if they are responsible for um if they are responsible for this stonework, the Inca were a non-written language culture. They did not write down language and they did not have hieroglyphs in the way that the Maya did or the Egyptians did. So you go all throughout their temples and they're just blank. It's just empty. Like it's so weird, right? Because they can manipulate stone so well and yet they write nothing into it.

Their form of language is what we call kipus. Have you heard of this before? It's like a string and coming down from the stone. are more strings that are tied into little knots and formations. And we know that this was a language. It was a numerical language that's never, ever been deciphered. And that's how they wrote stuff down. And so you would go into a building and it'd be like a library where you could sort through

the kipoos and you would be able to keep up with information. And it was like a supposedly, I mean, obviously it's genius, but we never deciphered how to read this. But it was an ingenious way of keeping vast amounts of information in such a small, easily transportable little device. It's like a hard drive. Yeah, exactly. And so you'd go into like a library

if you wanted to know something, you would go sort through the kipus that are hanging from the ceiling and you could read the kipu by like, I guess running your finger down it. And man, I don't know. It beats me. Like what fruits can we eat in this area?

And somehow you can decipher it from like basically this like library, this book that's written into these threads. Yeah. Oh, that is fascinating. Isn't that crazy? We've found these kipus. We found some of them.

There's a lot. There's a lot of them, yeah. Like there's so many that there's a hotel that I stay in called Hotel Ruinus in Kus in Kusko. And they've got two Kipu's framed on the wall. So there's a lot of them, but we just have no idea how to read it. No one, like, has there been one that's been deciphered? I guess without any type of context. No, no.

And I think the Spaniards explicitly went out of the way to kill the Kipu readers to get rid of them. Yeah. So, you know, they wanted to basically just eviscerate anything that wasn't Christian. Right. And in doing this, they covered up a lot of, like, ancient knowledge, sacred knowledge of, you know, the native understanding. Like, there's a place in the middle of Kusko called the Khoracancha. And I gave a lecture in the middle of the Kora Kansha talking about what exactly it is today. So the Khorcahantra was a solar temple.

Sun Temple in ancient times for the sun god in tea i believe and the spaniards when they came into cuzco they okay so you can see the Spanish church built over this wall this lower wall here so that lower wall was the outer wall of the coracancha and in that little in that little curved area was a corner and it was a shrine for the sun god and uh and so the the Spanish

they tried to go to great lengths to to pull down all of the native architecture, but they just couldn't do it because the stones are so heavy and they're so packed into each other. So they're like, okay, well, let's just build something on top of it. And so by building this massive church over the top, what they did inherently, whether they knew it or not, my guess is the Spaniards maybe didn't understand it all,

but they essentially understood that what they were doing would stop the function of the temple. And so what the temple is, is they are, they're again, astronomical observatories. They're solar and cosmological clocks. And so you would have these windows that would have all these different kinds of alignments. And man, if you and I can walk through it,

I could express it to you more. But we would go into each little room and I would go look at the amount of niches, which would be a window that doesn't actually go through. So there's a wall on the other side of the window. It's like a window to nowhere. It's called a niche. I would go go in this room and we count them up to seven.

And the next room we count them to five, and the next room we count them to four. They're empty. On the opposite side, this one will have three, this one would have five. This one has seven with a door in the middle. And then pull out our compass. Okay, so this faces such and such direction to the east. So you can guess if I removed the Spanish church that's on top of it that cuts off the windows on such and such date, which is usually it would be like the, let's say the end of springtime,

the beginning of the wet season. Okay, so as soon as the sun would come up this corner, it would shine this window into the back wall, into these niches, and the astronomer would know that the raining season is begin. It's time to start planting everything. And that is just one aspect of it. And there's probably, you know,

there's probably a mixture of different things that are happening in affecting their religion, their cosmology, their, you know, philosophy, everything. know, it was within that one building, and by the Spain, you're just building the church on top of it. Yeah, it's a bit off of the power, right? And so it's like impossible to study it now and to observe these things happening because you have, now what's another cultural heritage site, because it's a 500-year-old church sitting on top of it. So it's like it just cut off the power of the temple itself. And that was the whole purpose of it. The fact that there's no symbols almost lends more credibility to that this was an academic cosmological institution and not necessarily. only ritualistic or religious. I would presume, right?

Like if I think, like, it's a strange comparison, but even like an observatory today or like an academic building today, it's not necessarily having sculptures or pictures of, you know, the academic things, right? Like, it's almost sort of austere and kind of stark in its ornamentation. And in the same way, they're like, yeah,

we're using this to figure out when the equinox is. We don't need, you know, deities or anything like that because this is not a ritual place. Inherently, this is a tool. This is basically a literally like an atlas in a building. Yeah, yeah. That's fascinating.

It's crazy. It's crazy. And that's everywhere, man. It's all over the pre-Columbian world. All over it. I want to ask you about resonant frequencies. Oh, gosh. What's up, guys?

I'm on the road. I would love to see you guys there. Obviously, if you don't know, I'm a stand-up comedian, and stand-up comedy is my passion. It's the thing I love to do. And seeing you guys all come out to the shows truly makes my life. I hang out after the show and say what's up to everybody. So if you want to come through, check out the show, say what's up to me. It would mean the world.

You can see me at all these dates and more on my website, mark agnonlive.com, and I'll see you guys on the road. Okay, so resident frequencies, I've heard from people that they are able, I heard from one person in particular that is a vocalist, that in going to some of these sites, specifically in Central South America, there's windows that you can, like, sing into that will, like, have this resonance that is a specific key. And if you know the key, it creates, like, this hum that, like, reverberates throughout the entire space. Have you seen anything like this?

What can you say to that? I've seen people doing it. But, man, I just, it's one of those things that's, it's not in the archaeology. It's a phenomenon that, we can observe. But, and I mean, there's no doubt that it's happening. They're actually going there and finding this resonance or this key.

And it really reverberates, you know, quite significantly in this chamber or in this niche or whatever. But whether it was something that the ancients were aware of and were using, man, it's just one of those things that, like, if they were doing it, they weren't talking about it, right? But it doesn't mean that it wasn't happening. two things I should say about that. It's kind of like the Egyptians never,

okay, well, I'm going to make multiple points with this one point, but it's kind of like we find something, and at least for me, I want to give the ancients as much credit as possible. So have you ever seen this phenomenon where people go to the temple of Ketokouac Kugokon at Chichenita and they'll clap in front of it. It'll make the sound of the Ketzal bird. Have you seen this?

Yes. Could we pull it up actually because it's great if anyone hasn't seen it? It's fascinating. Well, there's so many archaeologists who will say, no, that's just completely a coincidence, right? But the Maya were genius people. Everything that they did in their civilization

indicates to us that they were genius people. And I also don't think that they have to write every single thing down either. You know? it's kind of like oh yeah so let's play it this this is a simple echo actually it's very simple to explain when you clap in front of a pyramid i mean of a slope the sound will go to to the top in this case a pyramid and if there are a cavity or a tempo like in this case the echo will come back to you if you clap in front of an egyptian pyramid nothing happens

because the sound goes away. So here, the sound comes back. Why sounds like a bird? Don't ask me that. Because we don't know. But this is really impressive. Experts from different countries, experts in acoustics, I have come here to study,

to try to... Fascinating. It's crazy, right? I mean, it's like, it stones me every time. And so another phenomenon about this pyramid is that, and I'll get back to the, to the, acoustics thing, is that there's on the spring and fall equinoxes.

The sun, it's basically rising and setting at what are called cross-quarter days. And so it's rising and setting on the corners of the pyramids. On the northeast corner and the, I'm sorry, the northeast corner and then the southwest corner. And maybe that's inverted. but essentially what it's doing is this casting light down onto the pyramid and then from the corners of the pyramids those stepped corners

it casts a light onto the side of the staircase where you have a serpent head at the bottom and throughout the day or I should say really in the morning and at the evening it looks like there is a serpent undulating down the entire pyramid so it's coming up and then it's descending back down into the underworld and inside the serpent's mouth is its own rattle. It's like its own tail. So it's telling you it's this cyclical cycle,

like the serpents going down into the ground. So both of those phenomena happen at that one pyramid, and it's about 50-50. Some archaeologists look at both those and like, yeah, of course the Maya knew what they were doing. Look at everything else that they've done. Yeah, this isn't, it's not crazy. Of course they knew this.

And then there are others are like, ah, it's probably coincidence. Like, I don't know, I don't know if they were that smart. You know, so, you know, a lot of people were kind of quick to dismiss some of these things. Now, another thing I should say, another point I should make is just because a civilization didn't write something down doesn't mean that they weren't doing it, right? So one of the really silly arguments about whether or not the Egyptians built the pyramids is that they, you know, they might, people will say the Egyptians never wrote down how they built the pyramids. Okay. well do you also know that the Egyptians never ever ever ever ever ever wrote down how to mummify somebody do you know how many people they mummified they never wrote anything of it they never wrote any of it down why because it's probably sacred coveted important knowledge right like to be mummified means that you're being elevated beyond the natural realm your body is being preserved for eternity also the the Egyptians are the only people in the ancient world that are being mummified and

in such a way. Why would they want the Mesopotamians to know how to do this? You know, why would they want rival civilizations to know how to do this? Why would they write down how they built the pyramids so that the Syrians can copy it? Right? You get what I'm saying? So it's kind of like a, that's kind of like a non-argument. You know, for me to dismiss it because they never wrote it down.

Well, the Egyptians never wrote down how they mummified in anybody. Yeah, there's millions of mummies. It's also hubristic to say that just because we don't have it doesn't mean they didn't write it down in addition to that point, right? Like, I mean, anything for Egypt, for example, like in the, you know, like the delta would have just absolutely been eviscerated by humidity or whatever else. Like papyrus would have just been destroyed if it was kept in that region. And I imagine the same thing with, you know, the Maya or anyone else in a rainforest in Central America. Like if they wrote anything down, which, I mean, are there any manuscripts or like any types of written? Yeah.

So the Maya are, it's probably, well, okay, well, let's say in the Americas, the Americas, the. Maya are almost certainly the most sophisticated civilization that ever existed in the Americas. Some could argue the most sophisticated ancient civilization ever. You know, as far as their understandings of the inner workings of the natural world, they far outclassed the Egyptians, far out class. It's not even remotely close. Probably similar would be the Greeks, like the Greek understanding of astronomy and of the natural world in philosophy and science.

That's why I was saying earlier. That's why I was comparing them. The Greeks and the Maya are very, very, very similar. So the Maya had writing, full-blown writing. They also, they even had like, they had formal hieroglyphs all the way down to cursive writing. And they had many, many different languages, but you had your one like general federalized language

that all the different kingdoms would ascribe to to know how to communicate with each other. And they're writing in stone on pottery and on paper. and we call them codexes, but the codexes don't preserve very well. So you'll find... What are they written on? It's a... Yeah.

It's a... I want to say it's a type of thatch paper, like thin-cut fatch, right? I don't know the process of how they made them, but... They're analog to papyrus. Like, basically... It's, yes. It's a fibered paper that they made out of whatever the local arborage is. Yes, exactly, exactly.

And so papyrus were... scrolls, one long piece of paper that you would roll up. And a codex is one long piece of paper, almost exactly the same, but compressed differently, where have you ever had sticky notes where you pull them out and it's like an accordion? That's how they would fold it. Well, they'd fold it accordion style. And so you read it like this and then you flip it over and read it the other way. Interesting.

And so, you know, they're about this big and they can be like this thick. We assume that there were thousands of them. But in 1574, I believe, or maybe it was the 1600s. But I actually think it was the late 1500s. The Spanish, the Spaniard Diego de Landa gathered up all of the, he sent out all these expeditions to gather all of the Maya codexes. And he put them in these multiple pyres. Now, a pyre is a small mound. So, like, you know, imagine how many books I could stack from the floor to the ceiling here in multiple different pires.

and then he just threw matches on him and burned it all up. And so we assume that there were thousands of them because we have several different Aztec codices, but the Aztecs were not as sophisticated as the Maya. The Aztecs are late comers. They arrived. I guess here's where we could sort of differentiate the civilizations, but the Aztecs arrive thousands of years after the Maya had been around.

The Aztecs are late comers to the game. The Aztecs aren't even from Mexico, I should say. So, but we can get into that. But when the Spaniards arrived, the Spanish chroniclers that were going through the Aztec City of Tenocht and keeping record of everything, they said that they were told that the Aztecs were producing 180,000 pieces of paper or their codices a year, 180,000 books a year were being made. Okay, that's 1520-ish, all right? The Maya had already been riding for 2,000 years leading up to that.

And so Diego Delanda burned all of it. Oh, God. And he left us with three codices left. Three? Three of them left. Yeah. They were just like just found somewhere, like stashed or he kept them? I should do a video on how these were preserved.

I think one of them was kept by one of his men to be studied and he studied it as well. He's a weird guy. Like he learned how to He learned how to speak one of the local languages And learn how to decipher the language But he was also the guy that burned them all Bizarre man And then there were two others that were

I think that the two others We don't know how they were preserved One ended up in Germany And in Dresden Germany and survived the bombings Here's fascinating story When the Americans are bombing the hell out of Dresden There was a historical Like cultural art museum

him there and one of the Maya codices was being held there. And I could be getting my history wrong. People fact-tricked me on this. But I think one of the young boys working at the library, his parents worked there or his parents owned it or something like that. And he was told to go gather some of the artifacts and bring them down in the basement to protect him. And one of the first ones he grabbed was the little Maya codex.

And he grabbed that and held onto it and protected it through the bombing. And he's the dude that later on cracked the Maya code and learned to read that codex. Whoa. Yeah, so he cracked the Dresden Codex, which is what tells us the world of, it tells us about the world of Maya astronomy. It allowed us to be able to understand how much they understood about the stars.

And that's just from one random codex that happened to get preserved somehow. Oh, dude, listen to this. So the Dresden Codex is, yeah, Uri. Uri Noorazole. There's a Soviet and Russian linguist. Wow. Wow. That is fascinating.

Yeah, crazy stuff, man. Can we look at the Dresden Codex? I would love to see what that looks like. Oh, that is fascinating. So, yeah, here it is. Dude, I mean, these are beautiful. And it's complex, too, man. They're still trying to understand everything about them.

It's so little understood that my mentor, Ed Barnhart, made a discovery about the about the dressing codex he'd have to explain it it has something to do with venus and he thinks that in all of these numbers and codes the the cycles of venus are being tracked through the uh through the mathematics in these it's it is you can do three hours just talking about this it's crazy so this dresden codex is so complicated and illuminated so much about the mesoamerican understanding of astronomy, that there's a book that I have called the foundation of Mesoamerican astronomy that's based on this codex here that's this thick and this big, because what it did was it illuminated so much.

Like, in a very simplistic way, I'll tell you, by understanding this codex, what it did was when explorers are exploring the Maya world, they don't understand what. why the cities are kind of strangely aligned. Like, why is the street not straight? Why is the front wall of this temple parallel to the wall on the other side of the road, but yet the wall, the retaining wall is, but the inside wall is cocked a little bit to this other angle. Like, are these guys just really incompetent architects,

or is there a reason that it's cocked off to the side? And it makes the city look like it's asymmetrical, and there's a lot of mistakes, okay? proverbially speaking the deciphering of this Dresden codex essentially told explorers and archaeologists studying these cities to cut off the canopy of the jungle that sits over the top of the cities and look at the direction that the buildings are facing towards the night sky and use that as your compass to figure out the way that the cities are constructed

And so what it did is just pulled the lid off that was covering up the answer. And then when you do that, you realize that the cities are a celestial reflection of the night sky. And all of the cities are solar cosmological clocks trying to figure out the messages in the sky. Because if you understand the daytime sky to a certain extent, but really the nighttime sky, if you understand it, you can understand everything about the natural world. Like there's so much. Okay, so one of them is if you lock the northern face, at least in Mesoamerica, if you lock the northern face of your pyramid towards the helical rising of the Pleiades constellation, which is the seven stars, this is where you get the seven sages, the seven wizards, seven cities,

like this is where the significance of the number seven comes from, at least in the Mesoamerican pre-Columbian world. if you lock it onto the helical rising what a helical rising is is when a constellation brings the sun into the sky right it's the last constellation to appear before the sun if you lock it on to that you will automatically lock your you will lock the opposite back corner of the back wall if you build the temple just right you'll lock the back corner into the rising of the sun And what will happen is when the sun rises, it'll create this knife into the back wall. And then this tiny little knife of light will perfectly align with that back corner. And when it aligns, you know that spring has started.

And it's like a clock. And so you can figure out the secrets of the whole world by studying the night sky and building architecture that acts as a clock. And this goes into so many other avenues. But the Dresden Codex told us a lot about the understanding of, of that also comes into numerology because they're they are basically what they're doing is you have these astronomers that are watching bodies through the night sky and they realize that some of the stars move and some don't some are permanently locked into the night sky and some of them move

like the planets move right and so they're able to identify over time the planets but then they realize that like the planets don't always seem to come back to the same spot in a regular rhythm as other planets. And so they're tracking them and tracking them and tracking them. Then they end up tracking celestial movements over the course of multiple generations. So you have people who are spending their entire life tracking the stars and then handing it down to other people. And so with the Maya, the Dresden Codex showed us that over the course of hundreds of years, they were tracking the alignments of certain celestial bodies. And they could calculate dates, like 30,000 years into the future and like a million years

into the past. It was just totally insane stuff was happening in the Maya world. And yeah, that's why I'm just obsessed with it. I mean, that is fascinating. Yeah, yeah. And now, just as far as, like, practical application, like, just understanding the seasons obviously has a litany of benefits, right? Like, you can understand, like, which animals are going to migrate, like, when

things will come into season, like, when it will rain, you can plant crops. Are there other benefits beyond just, like, agrarian? that would be my assumption but I wonder if there's anything else must be um i wonder if like when to have children you're like okay well we need kids to be born in this season because they survive more so people should have kids around this time like i wonder if it just transcends and everything you know yes i you're exactly right you're hitting it on the head um that that's what i think is that these things are more important than just knowing the time of the year it it must have affected everything on a level that's invisible to us. It's imperceivable. If we go to war during the rainy

season, we lose more. So we need to go to war when it's the first day that's dry because they won't know it. And if we have good technology, then we can do a surprise attack and they won't see a coming. It's like a, it's like a cold war to perpetually understand the natural world and how you can use it to your benefit, right? And with the most technology is you win more. Like you have more people, you grow more food. Like it just seems like it is the downriver of everything. Yes. It is. is. Yeah, it's, it's interesting. There's also an inversion of that that seems to happen because here's a really interesting parallel. The reason I bring up the Maya and paralleling them to the Greeks is because they're actually both plagued by the same philosophical and moral

issues. Like, the Greeks had all the brain power to be the Roman Empire, but they're too moral to do that. And the Greeks cannot unite because they don't agree with each other. right um they're they're very philosophical people that have differentiating views and a very high moral compass right so they can't always get along so they always end up battling uh against each other and then what happens to the greeks none of it ends up mattering because an empire from the west just mows them all down swiftly you know i what within a couple hundred years just mows down all the greeks and takes over their cities which is the roman empire exactly the same thing happened to the Maya,

literally exactly the same thing. The Maya are Maya city states that are obsessed with science, and we assume must have been philosophy is right there with science, but if it was written down, it was destroyed by Diego Delanda, so we don't understand Maya philosophy, but definitely it absolutely existed. Actually, I think it definitely did exist, and I haven't heard any historian talk about this,

but I just read the account of the conquest of Mexico and the Aztecs had philosophers. So the Maya definitely did because the Aztecs were just riding on the coattel of these previous civilizations. So the Maya definitely did. I need to think about that more. I just now thought about that. But anyways, the cities can't get along with each other

because they're so sophisticated, they view things differently, and they probably have a very high bar, right? and they're, I don't know, probably much more conscientious than like the Romans would be. Well, the Aztecs don't care about any of that, and all they care about is empire and expansion. So they just swept through all of Mexico and destroyed the Maya. Now, the Maya were kind of already collapsing, but they just sweep through and destroy them. So both the Greeks and the Maya, highly sophisticated, very advanced civilizations, obsessed with science, technology, probably philosophy,

that are made up of city states that all ascribe to the same culture but can't get along so they have this weakness of them and they both get conquered by an empire that sweeps in from the West. Whoa. Yeah, it's crazy. So it's almost a direct analog. Yeah, and they're exactly about 500 years apart from each other. I'm sorry, they're exactly about 1,000 years apart from each other.

So we know so much about like Greek philosophy and, you know, Greek, you know, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and their contributions to, you know, math, science, philosophy. Is that the same way with the Maya or if not why? Like, why are, is it just because the writings are gone? Like, I wonder why the Greek writings were preserved in such a way, like these ideas of the Republic and things like that, despite, I mean, I'm assuming being older in terms of, like, chronology. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so, okay, so let's follow, let's follow, let's follow the collapse of ancient Greece, right? So if you go back to like the archaic period, well, okay, let's go to the Bronze Age. You have like the Mycenaeans and then you have the Minoans.

Well, the Bronze Age collapses and it goes into this archaic and dark period. That's where like the earliest spark of like real Sparta happens and what will be classical Athens. That's where the spark begins. And then by about 500 BC, we enter into the classical period. The classical period of Greece is basically framed by two major wars. You have the Persian wars and you have the Peloponnesian wars. And everything in between that is like the height, kind of the height of the Western world, like the birthplace of the Western world.

Who you and I are, the way we interact with each other, the way we talk with each other, was born in Athens, Greece during that, like, 80-year period. So first off we have Socrates, who is a smelly hobo That walked around Athens and just Ask people questions And annoyed the hell out of everybody I love I love being like tapped into ancient Greece

TikTok algorithm because it's so funny Like people making memes about Making memes about Socrates But anyways, so they kill Socrates They immortalize him Plato spends his entire life basically validating Socrates, you know, who he was and perpetuating his teachings, but in a different way.

And then you have Aristotle. And the reason his teachings are perpetuated is because Philip of Macedon basically told Aristotle you're going to teach Alexander. Alexander conquers the largest empire in the world and spreads the Hellenistic culture across the Mediterranean down into Egypt. okay the next person to step in to basically take over that Hellenistic world are the Romans but the Romans don't really get conquered by anybody in the way that the Aztecs do after they conquer the Maya right

so the Romans don't have this people that show up from the opposite side of the planet and just eviscerate the Roman world right so the Romans were essentially just barbaric vicious extremely violent people that basically took over all of Italy.

And they had this awakening at some point that they shouldn't have kings anymore. So they kill all the kings and they have this pretty cool republic for a while. But the Roman Republic is just so poor. It was a city of like brick buildings and mud. Like it just early Rome would have sucked to live in. Like you think people talk about like living in Rome during the, the empire would have been rough, living in Rome during the Republic would have sucked. So eventually Rome, you know, they grow, they grow, they grow, we don't have to go through

the rise of the Roman Empire, but eventually they turn into a full-blown empire. And they adopt the aesthetic of ancient Greece and the aesthetic of Ptolemaic Egypt. So that's the city of Alexandria. They adopt those aesthetics and basically bring them to Rome and build these new like pseudo-Greek buildings. This is the Greco-Roman architecture. talk about. Yes.

Specifically Greco and Roman. Yep, yep. And then they also have a, they also, there's, you know, even though the Romans had to conquer the Greeks, the high-ranking Romans had a respect for the Greeks. Like they didn't, you've heard the name Archimedes before. Absolutely. They didn't want to kill Archimedes. There was an order that was sent out that once, by some general or whatever, when they

get to Archimedes apartment in the city of Syracuse, Sicily, to not kill him. he died in the frayed anyway. So there was a, there was respect and a reverence for the great minds of Greece because, you know, they wanted to adopt that and pull that into Roman society. They needed water displacement. They're like, dude, how do we do this? Yeah, exactly. And so they revered, um, they revered the Greeks and they held on to that.

And then they would copy the Greek manuscripts and basically keep them up. They had their own libraries. Well, Rome just never really gets conquered. It kind of teeters off. But it's still today Rome's not really conquered. You know, it's survived ever since the rise of the empire, even though it's kind of morphed in a different ways. Of course. And then so the medieval period kicks off.

And then, you know, the power kind of moves from Rome all the way up. Like through Germany, eventually the power gets to France and then one day ends up in England. Well, all of this harkens back to the Holy Roman Empire. And so you have these new manuscripts that are copied. And those, the Greek writings just are intentionally preserved. And they sit like in the farthest back corner of our mind. And our civilization is just like, I don't think people realize it. But, I mean, you know, we morally and philosophically, we descend directly from the Greeks.

And we were just lucky that nobody ever conquered the Romans, just burned all their writing. Because that's what happened to the Aztecs and to the Maya. So now taking, I mean, first off, tremendous recap. I mean, that's like a phenomenal telling of basically like Greco-Roman history in a nutshell for even idiots like me to understand. I mean, truly, I'm flummox. You're not an idiot, man. You know a lot. I know a little bit of our comedies.

I mean, that's, that's it. Thank you guys so much for tuning into the first episode of Luke Caverns. As you can tell, the guy is an absolute genius and an expert when it comes to Mesoamerican history. We have a second episode coming out with Luke very soon where we go through the entire anthology of the Olmecs, the Mayans, the Aztecs, even the Inca, where Luke explains the totality of why they exist, how they interface with each other, and why it matters to the understanding of the Americas today. So if you're interested, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out when that episode drops. Thank you so much to Luke. And thank you so much to you guys for tuning in. In the meantime, you can check out Religion Camp. You can check out

history camp or some of the other episodes on this channel. Episode two with Luke will be coming out very soon. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks so much.