Megalithic Marvels - Ancient Apocalypse 2: Episode 2 Review

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

The second season of the much anticipated and highly controversial Ancient Apocalypse docu-series has been released on Netflix featuring author and explorer Graham Hancock. This season focuses on ancient sites located in the Americas, and Graham opens episode 1 asking “Could the key to discovering a lost civilization of the ice age lie here in the Americas?” In this episode, friend and explorer Ben Pospisil joins me to recap episode 2 which finds Graham on mysterious Easter Island (Rapa Nui) where he unlocks several enigmas concerning the colossal Moai statues. What did we think? What was our favorite parts? Watch to find out! 2025 PERU &/or EASTER ISLAND TOUR

Stargate Voyager. Well, I am super excited to be joined by one of my best friends in the whole world, a guy who's a fellow traveler and a fellow ancient history enthusiast. Give it up for Ben Pospisal. Ben, how you doing, bro? Great. So happy to be on the most famous megolithic show in the world. Oh, stop. I didn't pay him to say that, people. No, I'm super pumped, man. So stoked to be talking about these...

crazy, crazy facts and so much to unpack and uncover in such a little time. Yeah, Ben and I go way back. I used to live in Nashville way back like in 2008, so that's where we connected. And we want an adventure together. We now live in different states, but Ben, like is often traveling to Sardinia and these exotic places. And in the last few years, I think he's really gone down the ancient alternative history rabbit trail so that's been fun and so i'm super pumped to talk with him about ancient apocalypse season two episode two we're going to review it we're going to get ben's thoughts we're going to go deep into

his vortex and find out kind of what what blew his mind but first i want to remind everybody watching or listening to this to subscribe to this podcast from wherever you are hearing this or sing this and give us a five-star review if you can especially if you're on spotify five-star review really helps us to break through the algorithms, climb the charts, and awaken more minds to our ancient history. And one other shameless plug. Our 2025 Peru and or Easter Island tour is coming up May 1st to the 15th. And right now you can get $500 off for a limited time. So you can click the link in the show notes below to go find all the details or go to stargatevojure.com slash tours and the 500 off discount code is Stargate. Ben, tell me just real quickly,

kind of about your journey that kind of led you to this place of realizing there's more to history than I've been told. The history that we've been told are of these cavemen, stupid people that don't know what they're doing. They're chiseling with their copper tools. And, you know, as a contractor, the one thing I know is diamond blades, you know, in order to cut through some some super hard stone, you've got to have diamond blades to, you know, welded into these pieces of metal. And that's, and you're still having to do it aggressively. And sometimes these blades burn out to get the perfect edge that we're talking about on some

of these megaliths, you know, you would have to have massive blades. or some type of melting tool or something to get this perfect edge. And so when I started hearing what they were saying about these different tools and these different techniques that they're using, and I started referencing back to my experiences as a contractor, I realized it's impossible. There's no way. There's got to be another story.

There's got to be another civilization possibly that is lost that we don't know about. And so I started diving into that. And obviously, Derek, as I was traveling, I referenced to you and say, hey, I'm going to this location. Where do I need to go to go see these different megalith sites? And so, Derek, you'd give me all these amazing sites to go to. And I think the one that was one of the most jaw-dropping sites that I've ever been to was on the island of Sardinia, the Santa Christina well.

This well is at a perfect triangle, but it goes at like a 22 and a half degree angle with perfect assemblage of all the rocks. everything's on an angle going, I mean, you're taking a triangle and you're going at an angle like this. And so when I saw that and I started thinking back to the tools that they're saying that they used for this, that's kind of what sparked my journey to be like, you know what, there's got to be more of this. There's got to be a bigger story than just some cavemen over here chopping with their wood and their copper bits. I'm so glad you brought up the site at Sardinia. So it sounds like you're saying that was kind of a red pill moment for you because I remember that was several years ago.

You guys were out traveling and I saw one of your Instagram posts. You were in, you know, Italy's Sardinia. And I said, bro, one of the greatest megalithic marvels is literally on this island. And so you go there. And again, with your builder construction mindset, you had to just be blown away descending into this trapezoidal vortex that is mortarless, right? And it goes straight down into the earth. straight down in a 22 and a half degree angle.

And I remember it was out in the middle of nowhere. And my wife was like, where are we going? I was like, just trust me. I was like, my boy Derek knows what he's talking about. We're going to go see this thing. And it was out in the middle of the farmland, countryside. And there was this little ranger station set up where you go and you can kind of check in. But when you walk into this thing, it's like it pierces through this like,

like shapeless desert into this like beautiful. magical, I can't even explain it. It was beautiful. And you walk into that and you realize whoever built this had tools that we've never seen before, they had to have some type of technology that we can't explain yet because there's no way that you can get these mortarless joints as perfect as they are at this angle. It just goes into this massive, kind of like a cave of just more mortarless stones stacked perfectly to create this hollow shaft that goes up to the small hole at the top, and I'm assuming it's to pull water up from. But that's what sparked my interest into all this and started calling BS and a lot of these different theories that we're hearing.

Right, because the mainstream message regarding this site is that, you know, it was just the ancients with their chisels and hammers wanted this real nice well. And so they just had a lot of time and they went at it. And they usually refer to it as the neurotic culture, but I believe this goes way before the supposed neurotic culture. Because you see the neurotic towers all over the island as well. Those aren't as precision as the well. I think the well might be the oldest thing on the island.

And it's crazy when you dig into the legends of Sardinia, you have the tombs of the giants. They're called all over as well. and all these legends of giants. And so a very interesting place. But that is so cool that you went there, got to see it. I haven't even been there yet. But Ben did.

I have to plan a trip there. Yeah, we need to do a Stargate Voyager, Sardinia tour in a few years. Doesn't that sound fun? Oh, man. Go see all the gravesites and the different structures out there. That'd be great. So let's get into this, Ben. So ancient apocalypse season one came out last.

Last year it was epic and you and I did an episode recapping that. And then season two just came out last week. A couple days ago, I recapped episode one with another friend. And now I got you on. We're recapping episode two of season two of ancient apocalypse featuring Graham Hancock. Bro, the first part of the episode two was in Brazil still. What were your thoughts as Graham took us to this massive,

rock outcropping that rises over the jungle and what you saw there? The hill? Yeah. With the covered with the covered paint. Right. Man, that was that was crazy. Obviously, we know, I mean, they're thinking they found carbonated wood, seed, evidence of fire dating back to 13,000 years ago.

And I think the most interesting thing that I found watching that was they, They took time doing it. They didn't just slop up some paint like we imagine these cavemen dwellers doing. These guys actually take, they took time. I mean, they used, they used ochre, yellow and red ochre, which is just an earth pigment. But they treated, they actually treated these surfaces with resin. And they think it might have been like an amber resin to actually last. I mean, these things have been sitting out in front of the sun for thousands and thousands of years.

And they have not faded. They're still as bright as they originally put them on. That's something that blew my mind. These guys were obviously experienced painters. Well said, it was stunning art out in the middle of, I think it's northeast corner of Brazil, in this jungle dense area, these rock outcroppings rise up above the trees, and there on one of them are the most colorful red and yellow pigmented pictographs, basically, that feature these zoomorphic figures.

Some were snakes, animals, others look like humanoids with strange faces. I saw it look like eyeballs. Some might say entities. And then complex geometric patterns. But yeah, I was dumbstruck by how colorful they were after all this time. And like you said, the archaeologist on the scene there, I think who has been researching in the most, says they're 13,000-plus years old. old crazy. So that would take us back to the last ice age, right? Right. And the other thing is some of those geometric shapes and images that you're talking about,

one of them is the sun. They have an image of the sun with what they believe to be a comet. And, you know, the question lays is what exactly did they see that caused them to paint this image? It takes so much time to paint this image. What did they see at that time that they wanted to record? and they use their hands, the handprints on the wall, almost like they're reaching back in time touching us, letting us know something that happened. And this comet, it's right below the sun. And it gives the impression that there could have been,

the only time you see comments is when the sunset. So why did they actually put a sun up there with a comet at the same time? And what they're lending to believe is that the comment was during the daytime. And the only time that there is a comet during the daytime that's been recorded at that time, which kind of goes back through all of history, was the catastrophic event that happened. Right. So Graham is theorizing, right, that is this a depiction of the comets that were coming that fell apart in space, hit the earth causing the younger dryness impact? And it's crazy to think about because the dating seems to line up. You know, there was a time people didn't believe that anybody occupied that rainforest.

I mean, it was almost, it was disbelieved that there was any type of civilization that could have ever withstood that environment. Yet we have these pigments and these paintings going back 13,000 years. You mentioned the handprints. Graham stated in the episode that this was the most compelling part there that he saw, and I liked how he stated it's almost as if the ancients were touching the wall and through the wall, touching us and sending us a message to the future. And then Graham shared this interesting legend of the indigenous Toreo people,

I believe it's pronounced, the ancient locals there, which states that long ago, the sky spirits told the shaman that a terrible flood would soon be unleashed. this was a punishment for the people's wickedness. Some heeded his warning and fled to safety atop Mount Kintani, but most perished in the flood. Eventually the flood receded leaving the survivors to start over. So isn't that interesting that the very ancient oral tradition legends of the locals talk about this ancient flood, this cataclysm, which then Graham pointed, sound as a tradition all over the world, right, Ben? You look back at any religion and every single religion talks about some type of

cataclysmic, catastrophic event that happened. So, Graham then ends with the point is of the global distribution of this shared myth can't be a coincidence, right? And do these stories, are they surviving memories of very real events that occurred all of the world, again, as he would say at the end of the last Ice Age. So that was fascinating to see these pictographs. I purposely, as I said the last episode, didn't watch this season at all. I didn't read up on it. I just wanted to be surprised and enjoy it. And I had never even seen these pictographs in Brazil. So it was fascinating. Had you seen them before? Never seen

him never seen them but they almost put them up on top of an elevated surface so that everyone in the area can see them like they made it intentional to almost be like a billboard and and the mess is there obviously there's some some some grid patterns with some x's in the grid possibly a calendar who knows but they they put them up on this high point so that way people in the area could also see them I don't know. Interesting point. Yeah. Well, so that was the first half of the episode in Brazil.

Ben, tell everybody where Graham goes in the second half of episode two. So Graham ventures out to Easter Island, and he goes out and visits the Moai. And I think one, you know, obviously we can unpack this as we go. but the moai rocks are cut from tough the volcanic ash but the platforms are from some organic matter and one question he had is they're dating the moai back 300 to 800 to 300 years in the past before present but the platforms are different from the the moai and you know you look throughout history and there's all they always have these statues or these different columns transferred and brought all over the world and kind of re-erected.

And so one of the theories is, did they re-erect these statues? Did they bring these, you know, were these around when, when that civilization arrived at the island, which they say is around 1100 years? Yeah, it's crazy to consider, especially when you look at the map and you see the drone footage of Easter Island, right? And it's like Graham says, it's this tiny dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, way so far remote. And here you find these megalis scattered all over this tiny island, over a thousand of these Moai statues on a rock smaller than Washington, D.C. And many of them stand lining the coast and they face inward.

And then like Graham states, many of them are just seemingly in random places. places as if a massive project had suddenly been abandoned and they're just stuck in the mud. Then Graham interviewed a historian there, Leo Poccarati, and he was sharing oral traditions that the real name for the Moai are the living faces of the ancestors, right? And that these important ancestors were memorialized in the Moai with distinctive features according to their rank. So I found that interesting. What other takeaways did you have, bro?

Well, when they started, you know, so you've got the sediment, the question of the sediment, which we can go into that. But one of the interesting things that I thought was amazing was the formations of the hands on these statues. Some of them that were uncovered,

they show the folding of hands at the waist level, which are right in line, with some of the ones that you find in Turkey, in Venice. You've got the Urfa Man hands, which are across his belly. You've got the... Yeah, his hands are also crossed. And so you have this similarity across these completely remote locations.

You've got Indonesia, you've got Turkey, and then you have South America. Yeah. And we're talking 11,000 years ago. These hands were folded with a similar style, and there wasn't a land crossing. How do you explain that? I mean, these things are very close to similar. Great point. And as Graham pointed out, these other ancient statues, like you mentioned, Erfaman in Turkey, and there's statues in Indonesia. Gobeckli-Tepe has those pillars that have arms on them, and they're all holding their bellies in the same way the MoI are on Easter Island, right, with the fingers almost down below. And you've got to ask yourself, is this a coincidence or was there a shared knowledge, right?

Okay, yeah, so Graham asks, you know, if the similarity of these designs of the statues across time and space reveals evidence of a single common ancestor, a culture, that let this legacy of ideas for later people to express. So really interesting. And then Graham points out that according to the Rappanui oral traditions, the Moai statues could channel a sacred spiritual power from their ancestors, which they called mana.

Anything you want to share about the mana part, Ben? One takeaway from that was they didn't cut the eye, holes out until they were fully erected. And so once they were fully erected, that would release the power from the ancestors to, you know, the local people. So I thought that was pretty interesting is, is, is they believe that once they carve the eye holes out and situated the statue, that it would release this presence or this power and, and the, the people there would receive it.

And then Graham asks one of his first big questions regarding Easter Island, did the Rappanui who hold these statues to be so sacred, did they originally carve them or might they have already been there way before the Polynesians arrived? And again, this is where a lot of people in the mainstream camp will get upset when these kind of questions are even asked, but we've got to ask them, right? One thing you said is, did they carve them or were they there when they arrived? And when you compare the platforms that they're set on, you know, we're dealing with organic matter,

which is very hard to gauge. But when you're looking at the platforms, did they re-erect these things? Did they restructure them and do they rebuild them? One thing to think of is, you know, if they're dating this civilization, you know, three to 800 years back, how did they have so much time? had they have enough time to create these things in that small amount of time. And we're talking hundreds, if not thousands of these statues on this island. And you want to talk about a 500-year-old civilization that built all these?

And you make such a great point about the platforms. So the platforms that some of the Moai stand on are called Ahoo platforms. And when you look at the sophistication of the Moai statues, now again, these things, I believe, are very ancient, they're severely weathered, that you can still see the precision shaping of these volcanic tough statues. However, the platforms they stand on look more archaic, right? They look more inferior. And you can see, Graham pointed out on one of them even, there's a Moai head that's fit in with

the blocks. It's been recycled, which proves right there that platform came after. the statues were created. And so I think Graham's 100% right. I think you are too and what you're hinting at that these statues are older than the platforms

but this later culture built these platforms and then propped up the statues on top of them, right? Well, and the other question to ask is, where did the sediment come from that surround these buried statues? What how much erosion,

I mean, we're talking thousands of years of erosion to bury some of these 30, 40 foot tall statues. So where did that come from? If they truly are 300 to 800 years, you know, 800 to 300 years from present. In the episode, Graham shared another legend, this oral tradition that speaks of this primeval homeland called Heva, where a large island was destroyed by a global flood that forced the ancestors to flee. And in this account, the king's name was Hatumatua.

And he was warned that his island nation would suffer from this terrible flood and be submerged forever. And so guided by a vision, he sent out seven chosen men on canoes heading towards the rising sun in search of a new home. And they eventually land on Easter Island or Rapanui. and were later joined by their civilization to reestablish their civilization. So again, another ancient narrative speaking of a flood and cataclysm, right? The legend is that this civilization with these seven men happened 1100 years ago.

It was one of the last islands that they say that they inhabited. But I believe there was one there before. You know, obviously locals don't believe that. The local tradition said that that was the first inhabitants were 1100 years ago. Yeah, I think it's pretty amazing that all of these stories talk about a flood, a few survivors, people going out venturing and going out and surveying the land once the water's receded. Wasn't it fascinating to see the images of the 400 plus MoI that are. scattered around the volcano and the ones that are still partially cut in that quarry just laying down.

Again, it's like this massive project was just halted suddenly, right? Yeah, there were some of the statues were laying down and just carved, just the sides and the tops were carved, but they hadn't got to the backs yet. They were still stuck in the stone. So something stopped them in their tracks. and, you know, could it have been a cataclysmic event? And then at the end of the episode, Graham interviews, I think her name was Dr. Sonia Cardinali.

She was an archaeologist that spent nearly five decades researching the island's lost history, and she's focused her investigation through its plant life. They found in the bowl of one of the islands, volcanoes, the earliest evidence of non-indigenous plants, and it was a banana, that's right, from 3,000 years ago. And her point is, these bananas didn't just appear. They were brought here.

And the bananas had to be planted by other human beings. Therefore, there was an earlier epoch of people that arrived on the island. So she's saying, at a minimum, 3,000 years ago, there was people on this island bringing bananas. They planted the bananas and therefore this pushes the date back of the people arriving to the island to 3,215 years ago. So right there, if you look at the mainstream timeline, it's pushing it further back, meaning Polynesians reached the island long before the mainstream timeline. Yeah, 1100. That's the tradition is 1100 years. And so Graham, ends the episode, you know, making the point that in light of all this new research, Rappanoi's

prehistory must be revisited. And I've done some deep dives on Easter Island in the past. I wrote a three-part series on Stargatevojury.com that you can find. But man, I really read through the books from Thor, Tor, Hyrdall, that Graham referenced in the show, the great explore and just the stuff he wrote about and he discovered there's so much more to Easter Island than we've been told and I think it's in the next episode they're still on Easter Island for a bit and they feature the megalithic walls there which look just like the walls you'd see in Kusko Peru did you see those walls Ben yes well Ben I know we got to get you out of here any closing thoughts

regarding ancient history or this ancient apocalypse season two episode two? There's definitely a lost civilization, 100%. Now, obviously, don't take it for me, take it from Graham, but I know there's a lost civilization. You can see it. There's DNA that travels all across the southern hemisphere from Brazil, all the way over to Indonesia. They all share same DNA characteristics,

but they don't share them in North America. It's only in the southern part. So why is that? If they came from the north and went down to the south, why don't the people in the north have the same DNA? So there is a culture and a civilization that was lost that are connected all along the southern hemisphere that have built these amazing structures and painted these amazing images and these geoglyphs that there's no other answer. There's got to be something lost there. And hopefully we'll find it. Well stated, my friend. If people want to follow you, Ben, you're on Instagram. Tell us your handle. Yeah, it's Ben Pospisal. So at Ben Pospisal, B-N-P-O-S-P-I-L.

Follow at Ben Pospisle for some occasional ancient history posts, travel posts, construction posts. He is a fun guy to follow up. Ben, thanks for your time, and we'll do this again soon. Thanks, Derek.