Megalithic Marvels - Hugh Newman: Olmec Origins Part 1

Episode Date: January 31, 2021

Megalithic Marvels founder Dee Olson sits down with author & explorer Hugh Newman to hear about his latest travels to Mexico & the mystery surrounding the Olmec civilization. SHOW NOTES Albania Megaliths Youtube Channel  Song “Space Log” is by iMovie and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...) and is provided in the iMovie App from Apple, Inc." http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/doc...

Welcome, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. Dee Olson of Megalithic Marvels here to reconstruct the prehistoric past with you. So in this episode, I feature part one of a recent interview that I did with author and explorer Hugh Newman regarding the origins of the mysterious Omec civilization. But before we get to the interview, I want to tell you about a rare collage of photos that I recently posted to our megalith. Marvel's Instagram account of a relatively unknown megalithic site near Boot Rint, Albania, of all places. Now, when you see this, the first photo is a vintage black and white taken, I believe, around the 1930s. And I think it shows what looks like a team of guys excavating this huge wall and entryway that features mortarless architecture. It's amazing.

And then the next couple of photos after that are modern day captures. And they show other angles of this incredible wall and entryway. And some of them are polygonal. It's amazing. So just search for Megalithic Marvels on Instagram or you can also click the link below in the show notes of this podcast to see these incredible photos. Well, let's get to part one of Omec Origins with Hugh Newman now. Well, I am excited to be joined by author and researcher Hugh Newman. Today, Hugh has written several books such as Stone Circles,

Megalithic Studies in Stones, and Giants on Record, among others. He's CEO of Megalithomania, where he hosts various conferences and tours and produces really countless videos regarding ancient megalithic sites on the Megalithomania YouTube channel. So make sure and subscribe there. Hugh, thanks so much for joining you. me today. Yes, thanks for having me on, I appreciate it. It seems like you have been

traveling all over last year and even into the new year. Tell us a little bit about your travels and where you've been. And then I want to jump into asking you about the Omec culture. Sure thing. Well, currently we're, you know, we're doing some traveling in Mexico. We're currently up in the Yucatown. We've been

through Mexico City. been to Baja, California because I was investigating giant accounts out there. We all through Olmecland, Puebla, Tabasco, Palanke, all these kind of areas, even down to the Guatemala border to see Calac Mall in the Rio Beck sites.

So we're kind of been busy for the last few months doing that because we wanted to get away from lockdown in Britain which has got worse and worse, to be honest with you. Yeah, we try and explore as much as we can. And it's just a passion, the obsession to kind of go and see these sites. There's so many as well everywhere that we just kind of can't help ourselves. Yeah, well, I've really been enjoying your recent video series regarding the history of the Omex.

And I mean, whether it's the colossal statue heads that have been on earth, to all the strange artifacts you've been showing in the museums, to some of the strange features they seem to possess, the more I learn about the Omec culture, really the more fascinated I become. And so from all the research you've been doing recently about the Omecs, can you kind of give our audience a brief synopsis of when the Omec might have arrived on the Gulf Coast of Mexico and what were the things that characterized their civilization? Yeah, there's the dating that goes back to 1800 BC, 1,800 BC.

That's the oldest dating that got Omec presence on the Gulf Coast area. is all around. Viracru's going into Tabasco. So centered really around coastal cocus. If you look on a map, that's kind of where the river comes in. And there's real evidence of construction taking place from at least 1,400 BC.

The earliest dating they've got in that area is San Lorenzo, which is a major, that was the major first Olmec capital. That's not too far from Epo, you can, which you're a town in the area. And kind of developed from there. There was different phases over a few hundred years that moved to Leventa. Capital moved to Leventa, which is another major Olmec site, which you can actually still visit.

That's one of the ones you can still visit. And then eventually Tresophotas, but there were other sites, smaller sites all around the area. One of these was Laguna delaceros, which I discovered the location of us here last two years ago. This year we went back there again. I managed to get some aerial photography. in film of it, because although it's just mounds and earthworks, it's all that's left, the shape of them you can see from the air. And this really specific kind of geometry, orientation and landscape kind of engineering that many of these Olmex sites possess, but no one really knows about this,

because everyone goes to the big Mayan sites, or they've got a Tiore to Khan in Mexico City, because they're impressive. Obviously, Olmec sites is not much left, and you have to be an obsessive researcher like me to kind of go there constantly. I've been to these sites several times now, all of them. We've been to pretty much every known Olmec site there is. There's some south of Mexico City now because it's now thought that they diffused away from the Gulf Coast, headed southwards in different directions. One of the areas they settled was Morales and Guerrero Estate.

They're just south of Mexico City. And also into Puebla as well near Chalula, the Great Pyramid of Chalula. But there's very interesting artifacts and sites below town of Mexico, see them myself. I've been visiting them for a decade pretty much. And I know Marco Vergado's fellow research, we met up with him. We looked at a couple of sites. I hadn't been to.

One of them was called Chimalakadlan. And there's another one in Guerrero, which is, I can't even pronounce it. It's such a long name, which we couldn't get to because it's so dangerous down there. And there's little kidnappings going on. really want to take JJ and other people into any situation. But yeah, for the Olmex really, they're characterized by the megalithic stone heads, precision engineers stonework with 3D relief carvings, and representations of jaguar, different animals, and very unusual features that appear

to be non-kind of Native Mexican, Native American in this area, which has caused much controversy, because they looked like, almost like African or Samoan or something like this. There's other statues that look like they've got beards with long noses, almost European or Caucasian. So it's caused a lot of controversy about who these people really were. Yeah, the statue heads are just like, I think you said,

the largest one's 40 tons. And all of them are basically wearing these helmets. Tell us a little bit about the helmets. And then you also mentioned that the Olmec might have you, magnetism in their building, could that help explain how they might have carved the heads or some of their structures? Yeah, there's 17 of these major colossal omic heads that be found. They range from about 18 tons, up to 40 tons.

Most of them, 10 of them were on display, sorry, 10 of them were found at San Lorenzo. Many of those are on display at the museum in Halapa, which is currently open. That's up in Bira Cruz. There's two on display in the National Museum in Mexico City. There's one at San Lorenzo site. There's more at Lamenta Park in Villa Homoza, which is currently closed, I think. We went there a few weeks ago and it was closed. We've been there several times already.

And there's one in the Carlos Pelican Museum, in Villa Hamosa, which is well worth visit. That's open. We fortunately turn up on the day it reopened. It was perfect timing. There's a whole bunch of stuff in there. which is mind-blowing. But they, yeah, all the heads appear to be wearing the helmets or their kind of cloth or leather caps kind of thing.

Some I've been just in discussions about this actually on YouTube on one of the recent videos with people. And they say actually it looks like it's almost like Polynesian hairstyles with certain things placed within the hair because you find braids down the back like plants down the back as well, which is also a Western African tradition from a certain. era. So, but when I was in Columbia back in 2011, I was in the Bogota Gold Museum, and I saw this gold Olmec looking helmet on display. I was like, whoa, this was like 2,000 years old. And I thought,

my God, that just looks like one of the Olmec helmets. So it could have been gold. No one really knows anything. There's no, there's no writing, there's no good legends or stories that come down describing what they were doing. There's vague kind of stories and traditions, but that's about it. So we don't really know what they were. All we've got left is the stone heads to look at and decipher. And you asked about magnetism as well. Yeah, one of the things about the heads is that often at the temple area, this area here, some of the heads. And you get this in the ones in southern Guatemala as well. There's some Olmec style heads, which are a bit later down the cycle Monte Alto and also the democracia. And they've got in the temples here, and sometimes in the belly button as well,

they've got like magnetic orientation. So your compass would go crazy at these particular spots. And it's now thought that not only did they, they must have understood magnetism to choose these spots when they were carving the stone. But San Lorenzo, they found like a lodestone compass, which could have been used to orientate the sites and it goes to magnetic north rather than rather than true north. And so this magnet they found would have been and it kind of goes slightly off north

and most of their sites were aligned in the same way slightly off north like seven or eight degrees off north. We see that clearly at Leventa for instance if you look at the maps. And so they were using this to orient but they were also using magnetism. I think they understood it so well that they were using it to enhance an alter consciousness and they may have been using it even to levitate stones.

I know this sounds crazy, but if you can oppose magnets, you can get things to float. And so the fact that they were moving these up to 40-ton blocks up to 60 kilometers across swamps, rivers and mountains may give a clue as to how they could have done it. Well, this has been a fascinating interview, Hugh. Thanks so much for your time today. And for those listening or watching, make sure and follow Hugh. He's on Instagram at Hugh Newman 1, I believe. We just posted a couple of his photos from Mexico.

There's an incredible picture of him standing in front of a massive lost pyramid. Do you call it Tamuchan? Is that how you say it? Yeah, Tamo. Yeah. Chan is like the site is called Chimalakad Land, that's the official name, but the site myself and Marco Bagata and a couple of authors from the 1800s believe it's Temo Chan. Tamo Chan in certain dialect of Maya means the land of the bird serpent. So this is like plume serpent. And that's

the origin point of all these cultures before the Olmex. There's a theory that the Olmex may have emerged near Jim Malatalan, down in Morellis, and emerged out from there. And this may be that site, this origin site. It's in all the early Mexican traditions. We're going to write about it in our book eventually. I think, you know, and we explain it as best we can in the video, but it's very, very interesting. Well, I hope you enjoyed my interview with Hugh. Be on the lookout for Part 2 coming very soon.

And please subscribe to this podcast and give us a good rating on iTunes. which will help others through the algorithms to find it easier. Also subscribe to our YouTube channel linked in the show notes below or you can watch the video version of this interview. And until next time, keep exploring.