Megalithic Marvels - Ancient Apocalypse 2: Episode 1 Review

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

In this episode, Stephen Toma joins me to recap episode 1 of Graham Hancock's latest season of Ancient Apocalypse. What did we think? What was our favorite parts? Watch to find out 2025 PERU &/or EASTER ISLAND TOUR

Stargate Voyager. Well, I'm excited to be joined by my bro, Stephen Toma. We connected on our Peru trip just a couple months ago, had an amazing time. And I loved Stephen's passion for history. We did a show together, again, a couple months ago, recapping the incredible experience we had in Peru with a couple other guys. And Stephen, you brought so much to the table. Really love your passion for history, your depth of index.

insight. So welcome back to the podcast, my friend. Good to be here, Derek. Yeah, let's, let's keep going down the rabbit holes, talk about some more ancient structures, some more theories on mankind. Let's do it. Yeah, I was excited about the new ancient apocalypse two season coming out, but I thought it would be fun to recap at least this first episode. And so we are going to talk about ancient apocalypse two, season two, episode one, the Americas. And we're going to break down all the juicy nuggets that came out of this episode. But first, I want to remind everybody watching to subscribe to this podcast from wherever you are watching or listening. And hit that subscribe button if you're able.

And also give me a five-star rating, especially if you're on Spotify. That helps me to break through the algorithms, climb the charts, and helps more people find this. And in turn helps us to awaken more minds to our true history. So I really appreciate your help with that. And then last but not least, one more shameless plug. Our 2025, Peru and or Easter Island tour is coming up. This is going to be an epic expedition. I say Peru and or, because you can do either or, or, or you can do either or.

or you can do both. So our Peru tour is May 4th through the 11th. And our Easter Island tour is May 11th through the 15th. And right now you can get $500 off for a limited time by using code Stargate. That's all caps, one word Stargate. Get 500 off, which brings the Peru price down to 2399. And it brings the Easter Island price down to 2899. Steven, since you went with me to Peru,

Is there something quick you want to share that might make people think about joining us this year? It's not a, you know, kind of a typical sightseeing tour. You are diving into a curated experience directly involved with megalithic ruins and kind of the mysteries and anomalies of our ancient history. So Rumi, who is your Peru guide, is... incredible. He has such a foundation of knowledge of the area and of each site that, I mean, it just blows your mind. But you got to go. You got to go see it. You got to put your hands on it. And experience it for yourself. So I think tack it on Easter Island is going to be absolutely

incredible. What a mysterious place that is. So how exciting. Yeah. So if you've ever dreamed about seeing the Nazca Lines or Machu Picchu or the colossal walls of Kusko like Soxse Waman or the great Moai of Easter Island, this is your shot. Go to Stargatevoyager.com slash tours for all the info or click the link in the show notes for to be redirected there. Ancient Apocalypse 2 came out yesterday. It was much anticipated. very controversial. In fact, if you scour the internet and the Twitter exverse, so many people in the mainstream camp literally hate this show.

They hate Graham Hancock. Hate might be a strong word, but it kind of seems like that's true. But the show came out on Netflix. Again, season one was groundbreaking last year, and it's really served in a way to, if I can say it, Red Pill so many regarding our ancient past, and that there's so much more than we've been led to believe.

So season two came out, ancient Apocalypse 2, the Americas, and Graham talked about, he was in White Sands, New Mexico, and then that was the first part of the show, and then the second part, he went to the Amazon. And so let's start with you, White Sands portion. give me your first takeaways, your first thoughts. Yeah, well, have you been out to Wise Sands, Derek? Have you seen it?

I've never been there. Yeah, so I've only, the last time I was there was with my family as a kid. But it is an odd little place. And he's speaking with experts that are working out there, doing some archaeological digs and observing that they're finding footprints of ancient people. kind of along the same timeline as the megafauna that we found evidence that have been walking the earth in that area in North America. I mean, giant sloths, you know, there's evidence that they're there and that's kind of what was uncovered.

Yeah, and he starts out asking at the beginning of this episode one, could the key to discovering a lost civilization of the Ice Age lie here in the Americas? Quite a fantastic question, right? And then I loved the point he made next. I took a note on. He said, the quest for our origins is fundamental to what it is to being, to be a human. Every single person learned that we got to North America by crossing over from Russia, cross the Bering Strait when it was all connected together up there,

and then made their way. kind of you just you can imagine it in your mind that that people just started moving south from from Alaska and Canada and then found themselves just kind of in the great plains and and would go from there but you know what's being suggested is that they're starting to find evidence that this you know there's evidence of people in this area when the ice caps were completely covering that area and so there was no way for them to get there from there, or that the timeline just doesn't fit

and the people have been around on North America longer than it would have made sense for them to cross at the Bering Strait. So yeah, great point. Up until the 90s, we were taught that deep in the Ice Age, humans migrated from North Asia to Alaska across that Bering Strait. And then about 13,500 years ago,

walked south through the ice-free corridor before spreading across the Americas. And like Graham points out in the video, this is a scenario held so firmly for so long that few archaeologists went looking for traces of an earlier human migration. And so it's crazy they find the footprints of these massive mammals, sloths that vanished. But then all these thousands of human footprints. And actually when he asked the one archaeologist how old they were. He actually said, I think it was as old as 23,000 years old, which is crazy to consider. And then Graham makes the point that this area that long ago was a lush area, you know, with a massive lake. And in 2021, when the team of scientists who found the

print and had been studying them for a decade, published them in the Journal of Sciences, like I said, they faced all this blowback. What was your thoughts on, Graham talked about how, you know, when it comes to all the megafauna, you know, that vanished rapidly, you know, the mainstream theory that, well, it was the hunter gatherers that just wiped him out. Yeah, well, he makes a good point that, that, you know, if you were a sustained group of hunter gatherers, that the last thing you would want to do is extinct your food source, you know. And we're starting to kind of unpack the fact that a lot of the bones and fossils that we find are the remnants of this megafauna. It hits kind of a moment in time where they all go away.

And so either the humans wake up one day and just decide to ruin everything or something external happens that no one expected and changes. the face of the area, you know, changes, changes everything for them. You know, you've got to kind of factor in a little bit more than humans just kind of going haywire, you know. I like the point Graham made that the white sands discovery of these footprints of the humans with the animals, he believes helps solve one of the most perplexing mysteries of prehistory, which is what happened, the extinction of all the megafauna. and again mainstream says well the hunter gatherers wiped out their food supply but again why would

they exterminate their food supply um graham obviously finds that notion bizarre and makes the point that the tracks at white sands prove that humans and the ancient animals overlap for at least 10,000 years long time yeah so they weren't wiping out their food supply and then again his main point that he brings it to at the end is the white sands discovery he believes proves the better explanation for the extinction of the Ice Age megafauna is that a global cataclysm took place around 12,800 years ago known as the younger Dryas. So fascinating first part of the first episode of season two. You know, I purposely didn't read up at all on this season. I just wanted to be surprised and just watch it, you know, not knowing anything. And so I had had it in my head that the first season

was going to take place in Peru or something or Easter Island, but here we were in New Mexico. So that was kind of cool. When we speak about the Younger Dryness Impact Theory happening kind of in, you know, you happening in the in the ice caps in the Arctic, right, up in kind of northern Canada, it would make North America ground zero for any sort of the most massive of flooding and whatever kind of residual damage that would happen. And I think there's a direct correlation with the lack of evidence of any sort of human presence or advanced, you know, advanced, advanced technology found in ruins like we saw in Peru and that we see kind of. in all the other continents, North America is starkly lacking in, you know, megalithic walls, that sort of thing. We're just working with mounds. We're working with kind of just the most minimal of human, you know, of human remnants. So I find that kind of, it's a nice correlation to work off of

where, you know, if the impact happened up north in North America, that it's going to wash away. It's going to destroy everything. And then, you know, the remains we go and visit are outside of that. So in between and in the middle of the show, he brings on Keanu Reeves. What were your thoughts on that? I'm sure a lot of people that will be watching and listening to this have already binged the entire thing. I watched it just a few hours ago.

So I just watched the first episode. But he made an appearance. He seemed like somebody that, you know, they tapped on his shoulder and was like, hey, you may have shown interest in this. But just like the first, just like Joe Rogan's participation in the first season, he was kind of just a, you know, like a cheerleader for what Graham is working on. you know i kiano didn't provide a lot of his own insight so he was just kind of like you know adding to the to the to the hype right and it was a real short little part where he was in there but what he did bring was genius by graham were the creators of the show he brought credibility right yeah even though he's you know a movie star uh he brought credibility in the sense that this is a

big time movie star who says hey i'm asking the same questions and i've always wondered about this since a kid and and basically saying yeah i'm on board with there's way more to history than we've been told right and so genius moved to kind of squeeze him right in the middle and then it got to the good part uh my favorite part was the second half of this episode which was the amazon and so it shows graham flying down to Brazil, an area of 6 million square kilometers of land, still under dense canopy rainforest. And for decades, the dominant view of archaeologists was at the Amazon, only had historical inhabitants that were small semi-nomadic tribes of hunter foragers, right?

But Graham states that he believes the dominant view is wrong. and as the show starts to uncover with use of LiDAR for people who haven't seen it, Stephen, tell us what they discovered. There's, I mean, some of the researchers that have been out there have discovered thousands of geoglyphs. They're called geoglyphs. They're shapes that are basically mounted up using Earth.

But yeah, what they're revealing is, is kind of these complex shapes that could only be put together using advanced mathematics, some pre-planning, some organization. But they're clear-cutting a lot of the Brazilian rainforest, Amazonian rainforest in order to have ranches and livestock grazing. And so they're clear-cutting a lot of the forests and just, I mean, this guy, Dr. Ransy, I haven't written down, but he was saying he was flying in an airplane and just looked out the window and was like, oh, what are these shapes in the ground? There shouldn't be anything out here. This is remote rainforest that was just cleared, you know, maybe a year or so before.

And all of a sudden there's obviously evidence of humans doing stuff out here, making shapes in the ground. and added mystery to an already a mysterious place. So, you know, it's kind of one of the only perks of clear, it is, in my opinion, the only perk of clear cutting these rainforests. Because I think in the same breath, he said, you know, it's not long until all of these rainforests are going to be gone. But think of the NASCAR lions, in a sense. Geoglyphs like that.

But I would say these ones are even, to me, more, intriguing because they're raised. It looks like earthworks you even see in England. I was just there this summer. And you see these massive ancient earthworks. And when you look at the video footage they have in this episode, these are multi-layered. I mean, shapes.

You've got the circles. You've got, they had the massive square ones. But if you notice, there was like four layers, indentions in these squares. And then there was circles within squares. And so very intriguing. And it's crazy that this Dr. Ranzi is just flying over. I think he said back in 1986, looks out the window and sees them. But again, when you see them, they look 3D multi-layered. and Graham asks, what size of workforce could have made these and what skills were required to direct the work successfully?

And Graham says, obviously, whoever did this, these were scientists. They had profound mathematical knowledge because it looks like they were meant to be viewed, kind of like the Nazca Lines again from up in the air. Fascinating. Big Da Vinci fan. and just watched Robert Grant

talk about the Vitruvian man like squaring the circle and you see kind of those shapes out there you see a square with a circle in it you see kind of what could be kind of advanced mathematics

that are that are hard to put together on the ground yet when you're up in a plane and like you said just like the NASCAR lines it's like oh I see what they were working on but how would they ever see it, you know? But yeah, just like that Peru trip, Derek, just it just encowers more questions than answers, you know,

to know that some of those sites that we saw out there, especially Saxo-Wamont, it's like, no, those walls go 20, 30 feet down deeper than we think. And that's using light penetrating radar, that's kind of using this modern technology that we see that they're using the same stuff in the Amazon that just uncover like, okay, like, I just want to know everything. I just want to know everything. That was the greatest discovery of all in this episode was the roads. And why is that fascinating?

Because these massive geoglyphs are connected by raised roads. And hunters and gatherers do not build roads. Primitive cavemen do not build roads. So again, why were they building roads? This points to sophisticated ancients. There was something else they discovered, Stephen. I'm going to test you. What was that? What else did they discover inside the glyphs when they dug? Yeah, the polychromatic ceramics, which, you know, they dove into the comparisons of what they've found in ancient Greece, right? And we've all studied those in school, but lo and behold, here we got them in a different

hemisphere. And, you know, that style of ceramic making is advanced. I don't see, I can't, I'm having trouble picturing cavemen, you know, in the caves, like putting together, you know, this sense of kind of early alchemy. and an understanding of the chemical processes that go into this complex style of ceramics. Yeah, they found 40,000 ceramics, I believe they said, just in the areas they dug. And they dated the shards to be at least 2,000 years old. So that means that the geoglyphs, they said, they dated those to be at least 2,500 years old.

The 2,500-year-old dating, that's older than the nashire. Nazca lions. So these geoglyphs in Brazil are older than the Nazca lions. And again, it's not like these are just archaic ceramic shards, right? They were highly detailed. Like you said, they were sophisticated, they were colorful, they had geometrical patterns on the shards. And so Graham asked the question, how is it that this ancient Amazonian culture was building pottery and building these geoglyphs at the same time the ancient Greeks were on the other side of the world. Fascinating question to consider, right?

Well, and as you kind of dive deeper, and Derek, you know this pretty well, is that there's so much correlation all over the world with these similar, you know, architectural and cultural artifacts. hopefully these findings kind of push these experts to keep

going I would love to see kind of some of the what's on these ceramics and if we see it would be neat to see if there's some of the same

iconography that's found in the NOSCA lines you know what if we see the monkey what if we see the spider on some of these ceramics and that it ties some of these civilizations together would be super fascinating. But yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting how, again, you were in Peru with me recently.

And, you know, again, the Inca get credit for building almost everything you see in Peru. And here we've got these geoglyphs and pottery that's at least 2,000 years old. Again, much older than the Inca. and again, just now being talked about when we were told our whole lives that there was really nothing to see in the Amazon, it was just Hunter Gatherers. So again, that's why this is so cool. At the end of the episode, they talk with this helicopter guy who's doing the LIDAR scans. And like you said earlier, with this groundbreaking technology, they can now scan the entire dense forests,

rainforest without cutting down a single tree. And I think they said, just from the one Lidar scan, the guy was doing for the show, what was it? They found nine new glyphs. They gave that answer in the next episode. I cheated a little bit and watched them.

Oh, I was left at the cliffhanger. Like Derek's saying, like that's just the camera crew and all this, you know, they filmed that, just to kind of, you know, build some, you know, some excitement around the technology, but they've made discoveries, you know, where it was just kind of like for the cameras, and it's like, well, it turns out we found some stuff flying the drone around, almost aimlessly, you know.

And so that, I mean, that's just, it, it, it just speaks to the density of these findings that, thousands of geoglyphs were found just kind of in these clear-cutted areas, and now they're just scratching at the surface of what's underneath the actual rainforest, and you just close your eyes and fly a drone out, and you're going to make discoveries. It's that concentrated.

So your guide, Rumi, has a fantastic Instagram page, Peromalithico, I believe is what it is. Peru megalithical. Yeah, but he's been posting just kind of these little megalithic walls that are in the dense jungles of eastern Peru, which is kind of like the far west edge of the Amazonian jungle. But there's just remnants of ancient mystery tucked into the forest for just. somebody to come across. I mean, it's not like these are tourist destinations. These are just

areas that you can just kind of, oh, there's mortalist, megalithic stones out here. And so, yeah, I just, I mean, for us to start to kind of, you know, just dip our feet into what can be found out there, I mean, it's, I mean, it's kind of equivalent to like, you know, if, if we, you know, had an understanding, a better understanding of what was going on in what is now the Sahara Desert, which is a, you know, the swath of land is the sides of the United States. And if we could just get a big vacuum and start to vacuum up all that sand and find what was underneath, I mean, who knows what we would find? I mean, you know, there's just meters and meters and meters of sand.

And yet we have the greatest. and most fascinating, you know, archaeological remnants, which is the great pyramids of Giza, right on the edge there. Right. And so it's kind of the same thing. It's just this untapped and the ocean.

I mean, don't get me started with the ocean, you know? So these untapped areas that were shaped with time, the Amazon rainforest just got overgrown and covered up all of the stuff that we're just uncovering now. And almost by accident, you know, that we're clear cutting these rainforests to make way for livestock. And it's like, oh, wow, people used to be here. Okay.

Graham, he made a great point at the very end of the episode. And he asked a question, could both of these civilizations, the ancient Greeks, because he references them like you did, comparing them in their pottery to this Amazon culture. He said, could both of these civilizations perhaps have shared a legacy of knowledge inherited from a vastly older civilization? Ooh, yeah. It was a great question. Well, and they were speaking with that kind of the, they spoke to that, they said he was the caretaker of one of those sites, one of those. Like a knowledge keeper. Yeah, a member of kind of the indigenous community out there.

I think he was... The Uperina people. Yeah. So he was speaking that, you know, they kind of, they have kind of myths and stories that are passed down of these shapes being able to assist the soul and kind of the journey through death, you know, that these kind of had a ceremonial purpose.

and and but there's a lot of them there's a lot and they're different shapes you know so so how does you know the different shapes kind of assist in different levels of the journey you know it's it's it's interesting to kind of start to speculate what these shapes are for you know were there were buildings on top of them at one point and and does the function lie in the precision of the shape or you know it would be more utilitarian to have a less precise shape if you were kind of building a building you're just kind of like oh this works you know kind of for the thatched walls and roof but they're kind of seeing that they're a little bit more complex than that that their their form and precision do settle into into its function as well.

And I'll be honest, I had canceled my Netflix account. Both of us, right? And I think you might have too. And then it's like, dang it, I've got to resubscribe to watch this show. But I'm telling you the show is that good. And wouldn't you agree, Stephen, that this is a high, budget, high quality documentary? Right, and it's not just

kind of Graham just sitting around and kind of talking sideways. I mean, he's out there in the field interviewing and speaking with experts that are out there doing the work, the archaeologists, the cultural leaders,

the people that are on the ground, he's meeting these people where they're already doing the work instead of kind of kind of kind of the other way where, you know, he may be out there just like, I've had these ideas and, you know, called my friends to check it out. He's like, so you guys are on, you've been uncovering stuff here for a decade. Tell me what you found.

Yeah. Educate me on, on, you know, what the public should know about this area. So, yeah, so it's, it's, and yeah, the music great, cinematography is great. I mean, yeah, they've got, they got Netflix money throwing out. it, don't miss it. Steven, you know a little bit about building because you are by trade, aside from your passion for history and travel, you are a building inspector. So tell people where they can find you on Instagram.

You have a pretty cool account. You have two accounts, but tell them about where they can find you. Yeah, so I run my own residential home inspection company here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called Stable Gables Inspection Services. You can find me at Stable Gables on Instagram. You can find me on Facebook. I dabble around on TikTok too. But I put together informative videos that kind of just,

tell a story of how complicated the building systems can be and kind of add a little bit of humor and finesse to the work. Hey, you better be the best building inspector after getting to see in touch from Magnolithic Foundation. So yeah, for sure. Follow the inspector, Stephen at Stable Gables on Instagram. Stephen, man, thanks for your time. And we'll hopefully do this again in the future.

And to everybody watching, listening, thank you for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed this episode of Stephen and I, sharing our ramblings of ancient apocalyptic, the Amazon and or the Americas. And until next time, exploring.