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Camp Gagnon
Ancient Computer Program Found in Inca Temple & More Evidence Of Lost Civilization | DeDunking
02:59:25
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- [00:03]
Mark
What's the best time of day to get a deal? All day with Jack in the box's all day. Big deal meal. You get to choose from four entrees like the supreme croissant and five tasty sides, plus a drink starting at $5. So hurry in or take your time. You've got all day at Jack. Every bite's a big deal.
- [00:25]
Dan Richards
There is some truth to the idea that there was a lot going on before the flood. It seems like that there was a flood that thumped on us a little bit and drove humanity back instead of forward.
- [00:36]
Mark
I know people probably are gonna immediately jump to Atlantis when they hear that. Do you think that there's any type of credibility to this idea of an Atlantis type place that exists?
- [00:45]
Dan Richards
I do definitely think that Plato believed Atlantis was real. Like, there's a lot of little things in there that are very. That line up well. Like the king of the region was the same name as King Atlas. Not only does it have the concentric circles, but it's got gold in the hills like it's supposed to. And there's the water. Looks like it drained out the right. It was supposed to. There's a lot of little things, but to be clear, the sea peoples weren't the good guys. Personally, I think that Easter island is our best place to look for an ancient lost civilization. Its name in the indigenous language means naval of the world. I was surprised that it's not spoken of more. To be honest with you, Mark, I was kind of blown away that because it's. To me when I saw it was just like, well, holy de guy guys doing.
- [01:32]
Mark
Dan Richards.
- [01:33]
Dan Richards
Hi.
- [01:34]
Mark
How are you, sir?
- [01:34]
Dan Richards
Good to meet you. Thanks.
- [01:35]
Mark
Thank you so much for being here, man. Thank you. I know this is your first time in New York City.
- [01:39]
Dan Richards
It is, yeah. It's been crazy. It's a lot of fun.
- [01:42]
Mark
You got to see the Met.
- [01:42]
Dan Richards
I did. I get to see the Met. Took so many pictures. I had to buy a charger to make sure that I could get a. Get the Uber and not have the phone crash on the hour, I hope. Wow. A lot of pictures. But there's a lot of things that I had. I had seen worse images of online was the best that I'd found. So I was. When I saw that. Oh, oh, oh, oh.
- [02:01]
Mark
You got to update the catalog. Oh, that's awesome.
- [02:03]
Dan Richards
Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
- [02:04]
Mark
I first heard you on Rogan with Jimmy Corsetti and it was an excellent episode.
- [02:10]
Dan Richards
Thanks.
- [02:10]
Mark
And I found your approach to archeology and alternative history are you okay with that term?
- [02:17]
Dan Richards
I'm fine with any of that pseudoscience even. I'm fine. Who rolled it.
- [02:22]
Mark
I find your approach really fun. This is what I was mentioning before is like your, your bio on on X is videos that are too skeptical for the kooks and too kooky for the skeptics. I really like your approach to alternative history. You are not this woo woo, aliens built the pyramids guy, but you do take a very serious and scientific approach to trying to understand where did these ancient artifacts come from? How were these things built? And I think you have a really nice slice with a lot of this stuff. And the videos you post on your channel D. Duncan are just great.
- [02:57]
Dan Richards
Oh, thank you. Yeah, I find that it seems that there's like so many other things right now. There's a lot of polarization here and it's either people either want it to be completely fantastic and it's easy. Like an example would be the stones in Peru where a lot of guys say, well, these were definitely made with geopolymers. These were cast with some sort of primitive concrete. And they look like that. Right? Well, okay, on the one hand you got the guys that are true believers on that and then the other guys you got, on the other hand you have guys that will say, there's no way that these were made by geopolymers, but we know the Romans had concrete, so it's not like a stretch to say that these guys could have had it. And so in between the two, let's, let's test the rocks, guys. Yeah, that's to me, that's where I look at it. And so it's funny to me that a lot of these things, they don't even both sides seem kind of uninterested in the actual testing. Not always, but a lot of times it's just like one group we know what this is, and the other group is like, we know that's not what it is. And a lot of times the scientists are lazy or they don't know as much. Like I've read a paper that's a peer reviewed, published paper on how they laid out the groundwork for the Great Pyramid. And for any of your viewers who aren't aware, the Great Pyramid is about 756ft on each side and it's about 2 inches deviation at its most, 3 inches deviation, something like that, which is really, really accurate. So you're not getting that with ropes. And if you do measure a foundation, the standard operating procedure is to measure out the four Sides and then to measure across the corners. And if all of those measurements are the same, then it's square. So a lot of these papers would cite that they measured across these corners, but you can't. Because the ancient Egyptians put big. They left a mound of bedrock to emulate their primeval mound from their mythologies, the first thing to come through the flood. So anyway, there's a big mound of bedrock. It's like 9 meters or like 3 meters tall, like 9ft tall in the middle. You can't run a rope across the center. But they write like, oh, yeah, they just ran a rope across the center. It's like.
- [04:59]
Mark
And the mound is where? In the center.
- [05:01]
Dan Richards
In the center of the foundation of the pyramid. Before they started laying the stones, when they leveled the bedrock, they left a big mound in the middle. And I'm pretty sure it's not just the Great Pyramid. I'm pretty sure this was a ubiquitous feature in the pyramids because it's a. The Egyptian myth of creation has this primeval mound erupting through the flood waters, and that's the first place. Right. So that's all these resurrectory type of things or parts of necropolises. Whether the pyramid was or a tomb or not, it was definitely in a necropolis. There's no question. There were a lot of things buried nearby. So it could have not been a tomb and still been a resurrection machine. Right. But anyway.
- [05:42]
Mark
And if they had drawn like ropes or something over the mound.
- [05:45]
Dan Richards
Yeah. Well, it would have obviously skewed the measurements. You know, you can't even measure 756ft. You're not getting that within 2 inches of accuracy with ropes, period. The gravity's. I mean, there's. I worked as an electrician for a long time. There's cable sag as an equation you can do, but that doesn't account for wind or humidity or anything like that. But just at a distance, rope sags. And so 2 inches of. There's no way they got that with ropes. So it's funny because since ropes would be the tool the most commonly used for that, you see, the Egyptologists and the scientists involved generally just say, well, you know, they come up with different ways of them using ropes to do it, but they're always. These guys don't have. They don't really work construction. Right. So they don't. It's not. There's some of these guys that mess around with this stuff, but they clearly don't have a good grasp on it because that kind of distance Again, there's no way you're getting that with ropes. You have to have come up with a different way. So I look into those mysteries. I came up with, like the idea of them using the concave mirror. And how do you like a concave mirror or is like a magnifying glass that will. In the fact it'll have a focal point and where you can make a fire even with it. Right. And that focal point is a round circle that's always the same size at the same distance. So we know the ancient Egyptians had like, these. In the Cairo Museum, there's a plate that's got coincentric rings. It's a stone plate, the kind that Ben would hold up. And it's got concentric circles in it. And if you were to take and calibrate a mirror, that and that throwing the circle of light, because it's a concave mirror, at a certain distance, it's going to fill one of those circles up. At a certain distance, it'll fill another circle up. So they could have actually measured it with light that way. Hypothetically. I haven't tested it, so maybe I'm missing something there. But the point is that it weren't ropes. So let's try something else, boys. That's where I'm getting at.
- [07:41]
Mark
Interesting. So this concave mirror theory, is this something that you had kind of proposed.
- [07:46]
Dan Richards
Or is this something I cooked up in my own little noodle?
- [07:49]
Mark
Oh, that's interesting. And did they have early mirrors? Yeah. That's conclusive.
- [07:53]
Dan Richards
Yeah, we know that the Egyptians had copper mirrors. We don't know for sure that they had concave mirrors, but we know that the Greeks had concave mirrors. And that's not. It's not a stretch to assume that it's possible for them to have figured it out. It seems it's more likely than them having made magic ropes anyway. So, yeah, it is a little speculative, but we do know they had mirrors.
- [08:15]
Mark
Interesting. Yeah. I'm curious, what is your greater theory when it comes to the construction of the Egyptian pyramids?
- [08:23]
Dan Richards
Well, honestly, that one's. I sometimes frustrate my followers with this. But I need more evidence. I need more information. I think that how they built it is a bit of a mystery. Why they built it, in my opinion. I think that it was part of a. Part of a funerary, not. Not a tomb, but part of a ceremony, one stop among many. You know, they've only found one body in a sarcophagus in a pyramid ever. Excuse me. They only found one mummy in a sarcophagus ever in a pyramid. And then they opened it, there was no body inside. It's like they. Or one sealed sarcophagus, rather, no mummy in it. They never find actual bodies in these pyramids. They find things that could hold a body and history for granted on YouTube. I'm not sure if you've seen him, but he really. He's really into. He's really into breaking down the pyramids and stuff. And he talked about the portcullis doors and how they're designed to be opened and closed. They're not designed to be dropped as a security feature. They're designed to be opened and reused. So he's speculating maybe there was, you know, they came and went. Maybe there was some reason for that. And so having seen that and looked into it, you know, the ancient Egyptians had, like, these long things, 42 gates or something like that, that you would go through different stations of the afterlife. And part of it everybody's heard of, like, the weighing of the feather, but there's your heart against the feather, but there's a whole bunch more. And I wouldn't be surprised if they popped up and down the Nile river reenacting all of these different things at different spots. And that's what some of the pyramids were for. I do think that these places were sacred for a very long time. I think the Sphinx, in my opinion, that outcrop of rock that the Sphinx came from is probably that primeval mound that I was telling you about earlier. I think that's what they venerated it as. I think that the original Benben stone, the original pyramidion that they cut, I think it probably came from there.
- [10:25]
Mark
And that's true for many of these sort of pyramidic structures and ziggurats around the world that they're. You know, typically there's a mound structure that is sort of beneath it that kind of acted as a, you know, an early ritual site that then they built on top of. And then ostensibly another group built on top of that and built on top of that. And how far that regress goes, no one's really sure.
- [10:46]
Dan Richards
That's absolutely right.
- [10:47]
Mark
Yeah. So I think that that makes sense. I mean, churches did this, you know, even in Catholicism.
- [10:51]
Dan Richards
Right.
- [10:51]
Mark
Like, it'd be sort of like a. An early worshiping site, maybe someplace high up on a hill, and then they build a church on top of that. So that's something that seems pretty, in my mind, reasonable throughout the historic record. Now, I guess I'm curious with the pyramids, I think the theory that they had different uses over time I find interesting. You know, some people have suggested that they were built for some purpose that's unknown, and then later were used as funerary sites or even burial tombs. But perhaps they were not initially built as burial tombs. Do you think that theory has credence?
- [11:24]
Dan Richards
That is possible. I talked to Landa Khem on my channel not too long ago where he's got the idea that the pyramids were different chemical manufacturing facilities. Basically. Nothing too crazy, but basically to make fertilizer at the end of the day. And I didn't find it extremely compelling. There were parts of the electricity, parts of this stuff. I worked as electrician, so whenever I hear a lot of the electricity stuff, I'm always like, my BS meters quicker than most people's on that one. So a lot of. And a lot of people, like, piezoelectricity is when you stress a quartz crystal, it discharges electricity. Right. That's how.
- [12:02]
Mark
When you say stress, what do you mean?
- [12:03]
Dan Richards
Like, physically move it. Like. Like cause it to be compressed. So like you're. If you got a long lighter for lighting a grill, when you press a button, it's stressing a piece of quartz to create a spark. Now that has to have a metal plate on each side so that to separate the polarities and to make it a harnessable charge, as opposed to it just dissipating in, like most electricity around us just, you know, it's there, but we just don't see it. It's just. It's not harnessed. So when they talk about all this big limestone block has all these crystals of quartz inside, and so if the limestone was stressed, it would create this massive electric charge? No. Kind of, sort of. Not really. So a lot of those things I'm not. I always end up bumping my head on that part of it. But there's a lot of the things that are interesting and there's no. There's no question. The pyramids look extremely mechanical in nature. They don't look like a funerary thing as much as they look like to our modernize, as much as they look like something that it would be a machine. So I do get that aspect of it, and I'm not opposed to it. It's just as a guy who's a little bit of a skeptic, you got to get there, buddy. You can't just say, looks like that. It sure does. Cool, right?
- [13:22]
Mark
So ancient power plant theory you find pretty extraordinary, but requiring more extraordinary evidence.
- [13:29]
Dan Richards
Yes. Yeah. Me and Christopher Dunn talk pretty regularly. And he's the guy who, in the modern times, anyway, really kicked that one off with his Giza power plant book. And that's back by the time I was born. Right. But yeah, I'm not opposed to the idea, but it's going to be. I'm going to want the pieces laid out pretty good, or at least some solid evidence of it. Again, when I get skeptical about these things, I feel like I have to explain it because so people are just used to cynics. I'm skeptical of it because I need more evidence. I'm not saying, to hell with this idea, just throw it in the trash pile. I'm saying, do your work, boys. And there's a great example of this is Ben Van Kirkwyk and the whole vase project. People know Ben is the, the face of it. But there's, you know, there's Adam Young and there's Matt Bell and there's Christopher Dunn and there's his son Alex Dunn. And these guys have worked to look into, scan the vases and see how accurate they are and all that. And so a lot of people say this still doesn't prove ancient high technology. I'm of the opinion it doesn't. They're. They're accurate, but they're not accurate enough to have been like to be machined on a modern lathe. They're not even close to that.
- [14:42]
Mark
Could you explain the claim of these thousands of vases and what makes them extraordinary and then maybe some of your scrutiny as to why they might not be as extraordinary.
- [14:51]
Dan Richards
Absolutely. There was a bunch of these vases. Most of them were found at the bottom of the step pyramid in Saqqara when they first excavated it. And there are like a bunch of them, like so many, it was ridiculous.
- [15:03]
Mark
Yeah. Gabe, can we get a picture of these while he's pulling that up?
- [15:06]
Dan Richards
Yeah, I just saw a handful of them at the Met, handful 100 of them at the Met yesterday. But they, the. Some of these vases are extremely precise as far as what I mean. They're made of a solid piece of stone. Right. And they'll be translucent because they're so thin. Quite frequently where you can shine light through them, the measurements will be within a hair or two of each other, literally a human hair or two width of each other. They've done like a lot of laser scanning type of stuff and whatnot. Like metrology, actual, the science of looking into it and seen and proven that these faces are a lot better than you would expect to be, than what you would get by some guy in a room polishing them with his, you know, sandpaper or whatever primitive tools that they were supposed to have had. But to me, the. When I looked at the measurements, they're. They're close to. They're. They're really good, but they're not as high as. They're not even close to the machine level tolerances. Like, they're more akin to something you would get on a more primitive lathe. But this is where that's actually really valuable to me. Their work is valuable to me, even though, in my opinion, they're wrong about how high the tech was. Yep. There's. There's a great example of. That's the one. I handled that one at Matt Bell's place when I was on his podcast, which was absolutely amazing. That. That vase right there, like, just touching it, it was. I don't think. I think both of us wanted me to put it down real quick.
- [16:35]
Mark
So, I mean, they're. They're described as being, you know, as thin as eggshell.
- [16:39]
Dan Richards
Oh, yeah.
- [16:40]
Mark
And is it. Is it fragile?
- [16:42]
Dan Richards
Yeah, that's. It's. That vase is about ye tall and it's really small. And yet you would. It. You get the impression that it would be fragile, like as thin as it is. It's granite, so I'm not going to drop it. But you get the impression that if you threw it, it would break.
- [16:58]
Mark
Yeah. And obviously, ancient pottery is not, you know, a mystical thing to us. Right. We have pottery that spans back thousands and thousands of years. And typically, the old way of doing it is you'd almost have, like, this primitive potter's wheel like you would see today, you know, if you've ever seen ghost. Right. You know, and then there'd be this big stone feature underneath the table that the potter would then kick with his foot. We kind of spin this wheel and then he would have clay and kind of mold it. But I guess what makes these so exceptional is one, you know, how many of them there are, how thin they are and how precise they are to each other.
- [17:29]
Dan Richards
And. Well, also, they're not pottery. They're stone. So these were. They had to take a block of stone, hollow it out, carve the shape, and then get it all down to that. And that's what makes it exceptional, is that it's a lot of work. It really is a lot of work to make one of these. There's. There's no two ways about it. And when you get it down to that level of it's almost done. You. You Know you're, it's like any statue or any piece of art that last little bit. Boy, I bet the guys are sweating, right? Because you probably, you know, there's probably tens of thousands of hours into one of those if they were made by hand.
- [18:05]
Mark
Yeah, I mean it seems exceptional to me.
- [18:07]
Dan Richards
Yeah, it's very exceptional.
- [18:08]
Mark
So, so what raises a little bit of skepticism that it's not necessarily indicative of, you know, some type of ancient dremel or something else.
- [18:16]
Dan Richards
The, the thing is, is the tolerances are a machine age tolerances. Like if you look at what a lathe does when it, when you a modern lathe, it's so it's butter smooth. You watch it cut metal unless they've got something set up or I. It just. It's butter smooth. It does not vary at all. But if you watch even a vase that's made to the same tolerances nowadays, you can get them without the handles. You can get them made pretty easily to the same tolerances. And that lathe's got some, some play in it. And these are all in that same, same neck of the woods where instead of it being, you know, 0.01 type of tolerances, it's like 0.05. And it's not, it's still very impressive, but enough where it's like. But what makes their work still invaluable in all honesty, what makes makes me feel like archaeologists are really missing the boat on this one. Historians and whatnot. The lathe is only supposed to have existed in ancient Egypt, like I want to say like 800 BC or something like that. But this drives the dating of it all the way back to before the fourth dynasty. So that's like you're adding like 1500 years to the end. Not the modern lathe, but just a primitive wooden base, but something where they went out of their way to make it as accurate as they possibly could. And there is still features about the vases that are impressive. Like when they get up under the lip and whatnot. I mean you can put your finger in inside of some of them and reach. You're just. I could see us doing that with modern tooling, but that'd be kind of tricky back in those days.
- [19:46]
Mark
Yeah. So what is the mainstream archaeological explanation for these vases? Like if I were to sit here with just a, you know, standard issue, you know, you know, Ivy League, you know, archeologist, what would they say?
- [19:58]
Dan Richards
That they used a copper tube and abrasive like quartz or flint and put it on with a slurry with water. So you would constantly wet the thing. So you're not actually cutting it with the copper tube. You're cutting it with the abrasive. You're just using the copper to drive it. And that that's how they would hollow it out. And that they would use that same abrasive to polish it and everything else. And that all the cuts were made with flint chisels and the things like that. Which is hypothetically feasible, but by hand, you're talking so many hours. I mean, absurd amount of hours. So I can see where there's a lot of skepticism from the alternate history community because it would be, I mean, just a spitball. Maybe a great craftsman who lived to be 40 could make 3 of those in his life. Maybe. I mean, the amount of energy that would go into these things is absurd.
- [20:54]
Mark
And how many of them did they find under this?
- [20:56]
Dan Richards
Thousands. I mean, literally thousands. Now, some of them are not nearly as as accurate. And some of them were made of alabaster and things like that. So they're not. But there were thousands of these vases down there to the point where, like, the ones that guys like Matt Bell and Adam Young end up with, these are on the market because they were like, gifted around basically, like a dignitary show up in Egypt, he'd be like, hey, bro, take this home with you. Thanks, man. Have a nice day. Wow. And so like a lot of the. That. That really fancy one that just saw the image of the kind of the infamous or the super famous one that Matt has, that one is, if I remember right, the provenance on that was. It was supposedly given to, like, a ambassador from somewhere in Anatolia. I forget what country it is. There was a big old pissing match about what country. Details. But it's a funny thing to me because the skeptics always attack the provenance of these things, right? They always say we don't know the history of these. Well, clearly, because the states, England, all these countries, we repatriate things to Egypt. So if we had solid providence, if we knew 110% this belongs, unless it was in the Met, it's going back to Egypt, right? If it's in private hands. So clearly there's going to be a Providence issue. But then if you turn around and say this guy owns 30 ancient Egyptian vases, they'll complain about it like he's, you know, keeping things from the public. It's like, well, just a minute ago you said they weren't real. Which is it?
- [22:24]
Mark
Have they done any analysis as to what was inside these vases?
- [22:29]
Dan Richards
They have a little bit. But it's. There's a problem with that, in my opinion is that they're so old and they've been. They're so old and they've been passed around so much. Even the ones in the Cairo museum and stuff, all this stuff was found when archaeology was in its cowboy days. Right. So I mean, guys could have been stored. I'm certain that somebody grew a flower in one of these things after that, you know, some dudes carrying around beer and one check it out, I'm just like an ancient Egyptian drinking. There's just so he of contamination, a lot of contamination.
- [23:01]
Mark
Even contamination in the 1700s which we would consider, you know, history is still contamination from when these things were initially.
- [23:08]
Dan Richards
That's exactly it.
- [23:09]
Mark
Oh, that's interesting.
- [23:10]
Dan Richards
But they do have like, there was talk of some like, metals, some like heavy metals in one of the ones that they had investigated. Like I think it was one of the ones Matt Bell has that they were digging around some of the dust out of the corners and stuff. And it's interesting, but it's ultimately the kind of thing it's not going. Certainly won't convince a skeptic because they're going to tell you what I just did.
- [23:28]
Mark
Interesting. Now, given your background in, you know, electrical work and being an electrician, do you have any theory as to the Ark of the Covenant's supposed electrical charges?
- [23:41]
Dan Richards
Well, the idea that you could make fundamentally the, the very basic thing that you always hear about that the gold, the conductive material and non conductive insulating material and a conductive material stacked. That's how you, that is how you make a trans. If you've ever been in an old house and you've seen the doorbell, you can look at the bottom of the transformer and you'll see stacks of plates, but it requires stacks of plates. You can't do it with just gold, wood, gold. That's not going to cut the mustard. Now the Ark of the Covenant is an interesting one because the stories that surround it are very. To a modern eye, they are very enigmatic. I mean they're very uncanny, I should say. They just the. It's like this does sound like radiation sickness, what happens to Moses. It does sound like this thing shoots lightning out at people and stuff. The fact that Moses goes up Mount Sinai once, comes back down with some rocks and then he's like, I have to go back up there again and come back down. Then it gets recorded as the ten Commandments being smashed and him having to. But it could also be, as Graham pointed out in Fingerprints of the Gods, it could also be that like he was trying to find some special rock that would make this thing tick. He thought he had the right one, comes down, sees it at any dammit, goes back up the hill to find another. These are, it's, it's interesting. That's to the, to the limit of basically this stuff. It's going to require some evidence. Right, right, but, and I know that people have replicated making the Ark of the Covenant and been talking about things for years, but you never see any actual evidence of it. So I'm a little skeptical of those claims because nowadays, I mean it would, wouldn't be, you could argue 20 years ago that the man's hiding it, but the man don't get to hide nothing no more. Right. If I pull out my phone right now, I can live stream you your feet under table and there ain't a damn thing you can do about it. Right.
- [25:29]
Mark
You should charge a lot though, you know, I'm not letting you put, put my dogs on the Internet for free.
- [25:33]
Dan Richards
You know, smash some beans with them.
- [25:37]
Mark
There's just, just interesting accounts obviously within the Bible and you know, the Torah that you know, seem, you know, obviously it's, it's recorded as, you know, acts of, of divine will, but you know, having to carry this ark of the covenant with acacia wood, you know, because of the divine power and that if anyone had touched it even as it was tipping over to stop it from falling, you know, ancient Hebrews touching it and then immediately dying. And I've heard people speculate like, oh, obviously there's some type of electrical charge and that when they touch it, you know, they're some way, you know, electrocuted or you know, suffering radiation sickness and so therefore they die. I just hear these stories and go, that's an interesting theory.
- [26:21]
Dan Richards
Yeah, well, it is, it is an interesting idea.
- [26:24]
Mark
But the idea of ancient electricity is also obviously, you know, controversial.
- [26:28]
Dan Richards
Well, it is. The Baghdad batteries are kind of an interesting one. You know, this is a funny one. As far as the skeptics things go, this is a great example of how they can go overboard. Milo Rossi many minute man, he did a video on the Baghdad battery debunking. It's stupid. Right? And then an archaeologist come along, a real archaeologist that's actually worked in the field. And Milo, he's a good guy and he's got a degree in archaeology, but he's not a professional archaeologist, He's a professional YouTuber that he hasn't even been on a dig. Except for going through school and stuff. He's never worked as an archaeologist. So this guy, now he's got like 25 years in the field. I forget his name, but he debunked Milo on YouTube soundly and was like, no, this is. You're wrong. There's very well could have been. We don't know for sure that they were batteries, but all the things that, like the people say, no, they're not because of X, Y or Z. This guy went through. He's like, well, no, actually that. So it. Now they wouldn't generate much electricity. Right. So you're not going to be doing a whole lot with them.
- [27:32]
Mark
Yeah. Could you explain sort of these Baghdad batteries, how they. They work? And Gabe, could we just get a cross section of what these look like?
- [27:38]
Dan Richards
Yeah, they're. They're just these pots, these clay vessels, but they've got copper and lead inside of them. And they believe that they would put a little. Put a little like orange juice in there, something with some sort of acid, and that the reaction between those two elements and the acid would create a minor electrical charge. And that is, you know, that's hypothetically possible. And, you know, even if the. The jar would just. If you could make it just zap somebody when they touched it, it would be a pretty cool novelty. But it didn't generate very much electricity.
- [28:12]
Mark
But if you could string up a couple thousand of these things together.
- [28:15]
Dan Richards
Yeah, it's. There's a thing called voltage drop that makes that kind of tricky. It's like. It's another equation. But the longer around a line of electricity is, the faster it dips, the more you lose. So like, like if you got a hydroelectric dam, the guy's right next door to it. They're getting. They just get a little trickle because that's really all they need because. But the guy that's a thousand miles away, they have to send him a big old chunk of juice to give him the same thing. Because by the time it gets there, it's stepped way down. Like, if you have to run bigger wire for this to keep it from doing that, it's a very complicated mess.
- [28:50]
Mark
Because there's just energy loss over distance.
- [28:53]
Dan Richards
You could almost, almost just think of it as using it, the electricity to push it. That's not actually what happens, but that's a good thought tool to understand it. So you stringing a bunch of those together, it would be. Even then you're going to lose juice. It's not going to be a Very effective thing. At the end of the day, you could electroplate a statue. I think was about the most that they figured you could do with it. And even then it's not going to be a very good electroplating. But so there is possible, it is possible that they had uses for these things. And that's, you know, that's the thing. I think like a lot of people, that's not just a Baghdad battery, like the Aopile, I believe it's pronounced. You heard of that one? The Greeks had this having Christos pull that one up too. Or is it Gabe is doing. Gabe, sorry. Yeah, Gabe, if you could pull up that one. The, the A E L O P H I L E. I believe it is. It's written about in the ancient Greeks and Romans. That was a. Basically a sphere with a jet on either side, like a metal sphere. And they had a hole on either side with just a tube coming out. And they suspended on a platform on an axle. They fill the sphere with water underneath it. They light a fire as the water steam comes out of either side of those jets and it made the thing spin, right? So this thing, you know, 2,000 years ago or so they had a steam engine. Now history says that this was only ever used as a novelty. And you know, there's not gonna. It's gonna have. For torque, let's be clear. You're gonna, you're gonna have to gear it, right? It's, it's. You're gonna have to use gears to step things up. Now we do know the Greeks had the Antikythera mechanism, so they were at least good with gears, right? But history says this was only ever used as a novelty. And personally I find that a little hard to believe because, I mean, these were the same guys. It's like, like he has to spin sticks to start a fire. He spins a stone to make his bread. But he's not going to recognize the power of something just spinning faster than he's ever seen in his life. I just don't see that a lot of people will argue and say that there's no reason for them to advance that technology because they had slaves and whatnot. But then by that thinking, why would they create it to begin with?
- [31:04]
Mark
Right? I mean, we've seen obviously modern parallels to this, that even despite slavery existing in the United States with the invention of know faster ways to process things, they still employed slaves just to make things at a, you know, a multiplier. So, you know, just, you know, they might. They had slaves back then and they developed new technology to then, you know, enhance the slave output. So that doesn't seem, you know, that doesn't seem compelling to me that, oh, just because they had slaves, they wouldn't have explored new technology.
- [31:31]
Dan Richards
I agree. I think a lot of it is the idea that there's a very. The idea that the ancients had technologies that we say that they didn't have is really, I think it's. It's one of those things. It's almost like saying that aliens, aliens have visited Earth. It's the kind of thing that a lot of people just find really, really hard to wrap their head around. And it's a little goofy to me in a lot of ways. I can understand why with some things, if you don't see evidence of it in the record at all, I see that. But when they're quick to something like that, it's like, come on, man. There's. The Greeks were messing around with chemistry and had Greek fire. They were messing around with the concave mirrors. And I mean, there's. According to myth, they used them to, to start a fire on like burning enemy ships. They would get a bunch of concave mirrors together and ignite the boats on the way. And I don't know if that's feasible or not, but it's tells you how you, it tells you how much people knew about them in ancient Greece. Right. If they're writing about them like that. So these guys weren't just, you know, they weren't just crunching numbers and philosophizing. They were also, you know, advancing things.
- [32:36]
Mark
What's up, guys? Let's take a break really quick because you're nostalgic. You remember in your childhood, sitting down, watching cartoons, having a big old bowl of cereal. I tried doing that now as a 28 year old father, okay, I sat down with my little baby. I bought cereal from the store. I sat down and I looked at the box. Immediately was like, this is the craziest thing ever. It's so sugary. I tried taking six bites. I felt nauseous afterwards. I mean, it's insane that I used to be able to eat this stuff as a kid. And then I found out about this company called Magic Spoon. Yes, Magic Spoon is an amazing, wholesome, high quality alternative to some of the, you know, cereal brands you used to eat as a little kid. I mean, they have amazing flavors. They got fruit ring circles. No idea what that could be. They have cocoa. Not the P word. They got cocoa loops. And I wonder what that is. And you already know what it is. Okay. And here's the crazy thing. It tastes as good and has less sugar and is actually great if you're someone that's counting carbs. If you're a carb conscious connoisseur, Magic Spoon is a thing for you. It's absolutely amazing. It tastes great. And I mean, in every, every serving, you're gonna get 12 grams of protein on the go. When you get the Magic Spoon cereal bars, you remember these cereal bars from when you were a kid, you would sit down, you would crush, like, a whole box of these. But now Magic Spoon has the alternative that is gonna taste as good, if not better, with 12 grams of protein on the go. So if you're interested in trying out some Magic Spoon, specifically the cereal bars, you can probably go to Amazon or find them at a grocery store. But if you wanna be frugal, you wanna, you know, save some money, use the promo code camp. That's right. Secret for all the people listening to this program, the promo code camp, C A M P. When you go to magicspoon.com camp, you're gonna save $5 off off your next order. So have some fun. Feel like a kid again. Sit down with your kids and enjoy a nice big old bowl of cereal without all the guilt. Let's get back to the show. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because you need more time. It is the most valuable commodity that exists. And Huell is going to help you do that. All right? If you're like me, you're constantly on the go. You're constantly running late. I mean, every time I'm leaving my house, I'm going out the door and I'm like, I forgot to eat today. And then I find myself just eating garbage, like, throughout. I'm like, going to the bodega corner store, just grabbing, like, sug sugary nonsense. Or even if I'm trying to eat good, oftentimes it's packed with stuff that's terrible for me. And that's why I love Huel. All right? Huel is everything you need. It is a complete, balanced meal, all in this convenient, beautiful little bottle. In this bottle, I'm telling you right now, you're going to get everything you need to power you through the day. 35 grams of protein, 25 vitamins and minerals, 7 grams of dietary fiber. I mean, omega 3, omega 6, everything that you need. I mean, it is a scientific process to put all the nutrients packed into this bottle. Not only is it extremely convenient and you can take it on the go with you, anywhere you need. It's extremely healthy. It's going to give you all the energy and good vibes to get through the day in order to tackle everything, whether it's going to the gym, going to work, you know, going on a date with your girl, whatever you need. And most importantly, it's extremely affordable. That's right, it is. You know, you're going to see these in your corner store, in your bodega and your 711 gas station back home. Pick up a Huel, try it for yourself. It tastes great, it's easy, it's convenient, it's good for you, and it's very affordable. And it actually just got a little bit more affordable for the people that listen to this show. That's right, because when you go to Huell.com and use a promo code Camp, that's Huell H U E-L.com Camp, use the promo code camp. And the listeners of this program are going to be getting 15 off and a free gift. What is that gift? No one knows. But if you want to find out, check it out. Huell.com, use the promo code Camp. Get 50% off your order and try it for yourself. Get some time back. Stop eating garbage all day. Get something that actually nourishes your body, empowers you for all the tough things that life might throw at you. Let's get back to the show. Yeah. Are there other historical examples, even cross cultures that indicate some type of primitive use of electricity that you find, you know, compelling in any way?
- [36:42]
Dan Richards
I haven't seen of any others that I'm aware of, but. But I'm sure that somebody in your comments will let me know that that idiot.
- [36:50]
Mark
Now, you did just publish a video that I found fascinating of old Incan ruins that a researcher effectively was able to use the language that was sort of imprinted in these ruins on the walls. Perhaps you can expound on that. And he was later able to use it as a computer language. This is bizarre to me. Can you just lay it out from front to back, sort of how these discoveries were made and how this researcher eventually was able to create computer code with it?
- [37:22]
Dan Richards
Yeah, his name, no crap, anyway, Guzman. His name is Ivan de Guzman and he was a mathematician and he was working with the Aymara children, teaching them in the late 70s, teaching them to speak Spanish.
- [37:42]
Mark
And this is in Peru and in Peru.
- [37:43]
Dan Richards
Correct. And he noticed that. And teaching them mathematics. And he noticed that they had a there that for some reason, all the Imara children, if the number was 2, 3. They would expect it to have a different answer than three times two. But everybody else got that this was the same thing, just inverted. They weren't seeing that. So he recognized there was something unique in the culture of the language. So he started studying it. Now what he realized was there was a few key features that made the language uniquely suitable for what he ended up making was a computer language translator. It was the very first multi language translating program available. It would translate like Spanish and English and Portuguese and Aymara and a few others, but it used Aymara as the bridge language. And this was in like 83 that this verse was made. I mean this competed with Google Translate all the way to like 2010, 2016, something like that. It was, and, and this had very little money put into it by comparison. And you still have to add words to the dictionary, to the lexicon of the thing. But basically the language had a few key features. One of them was it never varies its syntax. So it always is subject, object, verb, and that never changes. Even if they incorporate a saying from another culture. It's subject, object, verb, always. The language is like three point logic. @ the end of each sentence there is the suffix that denotes whether or not it is yes for sure or maybe, or if it's for sure or maybe. So it gives you three points where you have either yes for sure, no for sure or maybe. The language has a lot of puns in it and that allowed for it to have some ambiguity. And it was a long lived language that hadn't very, very little change over a long period of time. So when he plugged all that in together and he started working on the language, it's called Atamari A T A M A R I is the computer language or the computer software. And yeah, it was the premier multi language software translating software for quite a while. CompuServe messed around with it in the late 90s and Stu and he had funding issues and whatnot and it still ended up being oddly uniquely capable of working with the computer, which was really, really weird to me.
- [40:13]
Mark
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, obviously doing, you know, linguistic translation is difficult cross cultures because obviously, as you were mentioning, you know, the syntax of these sentences are structured differently that you couldn't just take, you know, an English sentence and then convert into Japanese because the way that the, you know, subjects and verbs and nouns are all reorganized, you couldn't just do a one to one translation because even though you'd have the words that line up, the sentence wouldn't have the same meaning because it's all out of order. And so you would have to have some type of unique algorithmic mechanism in order to reorder things. And for whatever reason, this specific root language was able to organize the sentences way more effectively. I mean, I think you had even mentioned in the video was able to do 700 words a second.
- [40:59]
Dan Richards
Yeah, that was what they. And that was like, like, I forget the megahertz of the hard drive, that other processor he's talking about, but it was like a Pentium 3. We're talking like 20 years ago, man, at 700 words a second was not yesterday. That was like early 2000s.
- [41:12]
Mark
And they found inscriptions of this language in like all of these.
- [41:16]
Dan Richards
I don't know about inscriptions of Imara, to be honest with you, but it is the locally spoken dialect of the people that are descended from the Inca. And it's been in. In the mountains of Peru and in Bolivia. It is the native times. And it's all. I mean, there's one other interesting thing about. There's like half a dozen different regional dialects, right? And like, you go to China and you got a bunch of different regional dialects too. You got a. You have a. Even in here in the States, you have a bunch of different regional dialects. And if I go down to the deep south, sometimes I have a hard time understanding people, right? All of their regional dialects are easily understood by other people over there. It's. And you know, as an. As a quick aside, what's interesting is those same people have had to go through quite a bit. All the foods that they eat are really high in alkali. Almost all of the tubers that they eat, the potatoes and stuff, and they've had to have all kinds of little kooky ways for them to process their foods. Now it's normal for people to figure that stuff out, but it's just weird. It's like there's all this, like, proto science things that are happening up in the hills of Bolivia that just seem a little out of place. And then you start looking at places like Tiwanaco, which the water and stuff. In some of these places, the way that they worked with water, there's a thing called a hydraulic jump. If you take a slow moving body of water and a fast moving body of water and pour them into each other, the one that comes down, the faster one will lose momentum and use that to gain altitude. So you can. Then there's places in Tiwanaco where they've got a hydraulic jump where one water will jump over the other. And they flow. One's flowing to the left and one's flowing to the right. And they've got two opposing streams with their rock over the top of them and one jumps on top of the other rock. It's very impressive. And they're not the only ancient people to figure out hydraulic jumps, but. And they also had some metallurgy, and they also use those same iron clamps, the same metal clamps to bond their masonry that we see in the old World. It's just a whole lot of little things. Bolivia, Easter Island. That part of the world's my most. The parts that I'm most interested in when I start looking just besides Egypt. Egypt is almost just duh. Right.
- [43:26]
Mark
Well, that's interesting. And what would these hydraulic jumps have been used for?
- [43:29]
Dan Richards
Just to make water go different directions and stuff. Just the. They were that that area is a. Not only is it a water temple, basically, but it's also a water reservoir. There's a lot of. There was a study. I. I wish I had it on me off the top of my head, sorry. But there was a study that they did where there. There's a lot of water that would get locked in the bedrock that was. Or in the loose fill that was put underneath one of the pyramids there. I forget which one. Sorry. And anyway, that gets channeled into a whole bunch of water, and a lot of that got channeled into neighboring areas where they've done some looking into it and found where this was basically a starting point for feeding water into a lot of the farmlands in the surrounding area. So it's possible the hydraulic jumps were part of that. More likely it was just for ship that it's like. Because they could have just had the water go whatever direction they wanted, but it's like, hey, we. Or it's symbolic or, you know, the old archaeological excuse it was religious. But for some reason they did it when they could have just put them going side by side next to each other, it would have been less work. But. So to me, there are reasons to use hydraulic jumps, but there's none that I saw there that makes sense as, like on a functional level level.
- [44:49]
Mark
Oh, that's interesting. And I don't want to loop back too far, but I thought this was an interesting point on the linguistics element, that this was something that was not apparent to me, that linguistics and the way that a language is actually structured changes sort of the epistemology of a culture that the way people can understand knowledge and information is so much bound by the language. And obviously there's little examples of words existing or not existing. And that's just kind of like a surface level example that different cultures will have words for things that we may not have. And as a result, they have sort of a connection with these ideas that we might not have in the same way. But an interesting one that just kind of came up as you were saying it. I remember reading that the judicial system in Japan actually has different sentencing very often. And the way that they view crime, according to one linguist, was dependent on, on sort of how the language structured sentences when it came to crime. So in the United States, human beings do crime. You know what I mean? Like, you know, you have been convicted of this crime, like you stole from someone and it was the, you know, having you as like sort of this, this subject doing a, an action of, you know, an offense. Whereas I believe, and someone can correct me if I'm wrong, the way that the Japanese language is set up, it will be the verb that is then carried out by a facilitator. So it'll be, you know, a crime was done and this person happened to be the person that had carried it out. And obviously they understand it, you know, intellectually is, you know, this person did the crime, of course, but in the way that judges will be sentencing people, this linguist hypothesizes that they have a different judicial system because they see crimes as almost existing, you know, ontologically. And then people carry out the crimes, so they almost see the people as, as secondary to the offense happening. So as a result, they get sentenced comparatively more mercifully. Whereas in the United States it's like you did something wrong and so they get sentenced with harsh repartance because the person carried out this act.
- [46:52]
Dan Richards
That's interesting.
- [46:52]
Mark
Which is just an interesting way when looking at how languages possess knowledge and how even in this example, the language is able to extract and deduce a lot of information for other translations. It is interesting to think how much information and knowledge was even lost in the sort of dithering of ancient languages. It's just a fascinating sort of case study and this is kind of a modern example of the way it can be applied.
- [47:21]
Dan Richards
No, that is really interesting. I hadn't really put a whole lot of thought into that aspect before, but as you're talking about it, one of the things that crossed my mind immediately is in Japan and in Korea, the family is like a big deal, right? Like you, you're. You're being a part of a family that will dictate what, what you can and can't do in life, you will. If your family is garbage men, you're going to be garbage men forever. If your family's fishers, you watch a Korean soap opera, the girl's always. It's always a hot guy. That's family's fishermen. Or she's, she's. Her family was all fishermen, so she's royalty. Some. Exactly, exactly. But both in Korea and Japan, you go by your last name first, right. You're referred to as my friend. Lee Seung Ho. Was Lee Seing Ho, not Sinho Lee.
- [48:10]
Mark
Right, right. That's a great point. Yeah. And you could see how you prioritize your sort of family obligations because that is the thing that precedes you quite literally.
- [48:18]
Dan Richards
And if you go to North Korea and they have that three generations of punishment that's kind of attached to that same mentality, you screw up and, well, your whole bloodline's bad. Your dad was bad and your kids are bad.
- [48:29]
Mark
Oh, that's fascinating.
- [48:31]
Dan Richards
Scary, but. Yeah. But like you're saying, it's funny how language kind of informs that on a subconscious, just base level. It is what it is. That's how you see the world.
- [48:40]
Mark
Yeah, interesting. Okay, back to. Back to Bolivia. What else do you find from this region that you find so compelling in your research and why is that the place that you're so drawn to?
- [48:50]
Dan Richards
Well, that I mentioned that those metal clamps, have you seen those before? There's.
- [48:54]
Mark
I would love to see him.
- [48:55]
Dan Richards
Yeah, Gabe did pull up a picture. Gabe. If you look up megalithic metal clamps, you should find like eye shaped or bow tie shaped impressions in stone and stuff. They're pretty ubiquitous on the alternate history stuff. But they're. You see a lot of them in Egypt. You see a lot of them in ancient Rome. You see a lot of them in places. There were the Greeks where. You see a lot of places where in Asia. Asia, Korea and Japan and China. And some of these are really old, some of these not so old. But the ones that, the ones that really get me are like in Puma Punku, you know those H blocks that they have there that just kind of look like a bunch of eight letter H. That's. There's a bunch of these H blocks in Puma Punku that look like it was one of the ones a lot of guys will say were cast because they are very. They look like the letter H. There's, there's. Yes, there's your, your clamps. And now, okay, you see, you got Peru and Bolivia, but you have Ethiopia, Egypt, Russia and Cambodia. And they're all. This is the same idea there, right? We're using a piece of metal to bond the two stones together. And where, I mean, look at the, the similarity between the Ethiopia one and the Bolivia one right next to it. You know, those are extremely close to each other in design and theirs are long ways apart. But what's really interesting to me about it is that you only see it in a couple of sites in South America, in Peru and Bolivia, Right. And they're real close to each other and you don't really see any. Like, there's no learning curve. It's not like you see it show up and they did it in a couple of places. Like those H blocks. They're bonded with these things. Like as a guy that worked construction, it just reeks to me of just standard operating procedure. Like you've got the studs in your walls are on 16 inch centers, the same kind of thing. So this is how we do this. And so it looked like these gu had done this before.
- [50:53]
Mark
Can we pull up these H blocks?
- [50:55]
Dan Richards
Puma Punku P U M A P U N K A How old are these? They're old. They're not as old. History said. I think I want to say like 900 to 12 to 1200 years old. They're not nearly as old as a lot of the other things in the air. A lot of the other Atlantis stuff is. But a lot of these things, the, you know, they'll excavate and they'll determine like the site was occupied here, but they've only excavated in that one spot. Like, unless they're digging under rocks and stuff, you know, you can't really say for sure. Now they do dig under rocks, so when they do that, I tend to, you know, believe the dating a whole lot more.
- [51:34]
Mark
And so how would these be used for, for the build? Like, what is the advantage of these?
- [51:39]
Dan Richards
Oh, the, the, the metal ties, these H's. Oh, I'm not sure, to be honest with you. They, they've got a few different theories as to how they were set up and whatnot. And the sites, these sites have been re organized so much over time that it's, it is difficult to know exactly how they were even organized to begin with, but clearly they had some reason for them. And it is interesting that they made multiples. And a lot of, again, a lot of the guys that believe in geopolymers think these are the ones. And I, I believe they've been tested, but the testing was, some guys say that it was inconclusive. Some guys say that it wasn't. So, again, yeah. Need more evidence?
- [52:17]
Mark
Sure. Oh, that's interesting. Now, as far as these metal clamps go, what do you make of these stark similarities despite disparate cultures?
- [52:28]
Dan Richards
To me is pretty clear evidence. To me, it's good evidence of a cultural connection across the ones that's not supposed to exist. And we already know that's another reason I'm focused on Easter Island a lot. We already know that. You've heard of Thor Haredahl, the Kon Tiki voyages in the 50s. He's the dude who proved basically that you could cross the ocean on a crappy raft, right? And he did this a long time ago, and he was focused on Easter Island. He believed that the big, the old stand, the found. What's the name of the thing, the base that the oldest moai are on that has this type of masonry that's very similar to what you see in Peru. And he believed the two were connected. And now he was an archaeologist or anthropologist 1, and he was just blasted for it, Right? He was picked on all the time. And, and. But just recently, when they go to Easter island, they've done some digging and stuff, right? And they found some pretty interesting stuff. One of them is the oldest habitable layer. That's the oldest evidence they found of human occupation on that place. They have both breadfruit and sweet potato from South America and ginger from Asia. So they showed up with stuff from both sides of the world in Easter island when they showed up right off the bat. So that is a big deal. Like that's putting. That changes the narrative right there. It vindicated Thor Harridol right off the bat. There was a connection between Bolivia, There was a connection between South America and Easter island in some point in prehistory. There's no question the evidence is in. We also see that with genetics. There is a Native American genetic flow from Easter island heading west into the Pacific. Now, it's not through Polynesia, now it's not like some major one, but you can find it. And they find it in Easter Islanders where they tested bones from around the world. Because the Easter island bones are in different collections all across the globe. But they tested all a bunch of bones, like 17 of them, I think, and it was all of them had, or almost all of them had minor amounts of Native American DNA in them. And this is from before the colonies.
- [54:44]
Mark
Interesting. So as far as, like these early seed records and different food records in Easter island, what would the mainstream archaeological explanation be for where these people came from. How does it challenge the mainstream narrative?
- [54:59]
Dan Richards
Well, it overturned it at first in that regards, I mean, archaeologists would be mad that I use that word. But excuse me, the reality of it is it did. They had fought Thora for a long time saying there was no way that there was a connection between. Their belief was that the Polynesians settled Easter island and that was basically as far east as they'd ever made it. And South America was something they didn't find. Which, let's be frank, if they can find that little pinprick in the middle of the ocean, I'm sure they can find the big ass chunk of land a little bit further to the east. But they assumed they couldn't do that. They also assumed that the people on Easter island were basically isolated after a point and didn't really have any contact with the rest of Polynesia and stuff. And that doesn't seem to be the case.
- [55:47]
Mark
So the mainstream story is that you had ancient Polynesians, they get on boats, they find Easter island, they settle there and they form a civilization and then they never leave.
- [55:57]
Dan Richards
Yeah, well, some of them left, but then eventually they, they log all the logs and they can't make boats anymore and so then they're stuck there and then their society collapses and then European explorers come and do slave raids and that's the end of that. But it's quite clear that when they first showed up, the legends even say, the legends that they had that say that the first people to show up, looked around, went back and then they came back with a bunch of people to settle and it kind of looks that way. I mean, they had foodstuffs from two different places. Places. Another thing that's interesting about it, why I think, personally, I think that Easter island is our best place to look for an ancient lost civilization that we could maybe find a solid trace of nowadays, because that part of the world hasn't been just trounced like Europe has, that'll be underwater, but that's probably better than being raged on by wars for 10,000 years. But Easter island, its name, which I won't even bother trying to butcher, but its name in the indigenous language means navel of the world. And they've got a place of like four stones that is their navel of the world. And that's weird because they're Polynesian culture and you go anywhere else in the world and they have their world navel, their axis mundi, or if you've heard that term before, it's a world Navel that connects the underworld. It's like the world tree Yggdrasil, kind of thing, connects the heavens, the earth and the underworld world. The Oracle at Delhi in Greece was said to be a world Naval. They had a naval stone there. There's. In Tiwanaco is supposed to be the world naval. In India, there is a temple that's supposed to be the world Naval. The Wailing Wall or the. Yeah, I think the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem is supposed to be the world naval. It's always. There's the stones I was talking about. About. It's always stone and it's always the center of the world. The idea is like, it's the umbilical cord. Everything grew out from there. This was the origin point to creation. Now, for every other culture that I mentioned, it's right smack dab in the middle of their neck of the woods. In Jerusalem, it's right in Jerusalem. And in Greece, it's in the Oracle at Delhi. And in South America, it was in Tiwanaka, it was in places where people went all the time. But in Polynesia, it their eastmost, farthest flung little thing out in the middle of nowhere. To me, that implies that that was something from before. This was a navel of the world long ago. And as these islands sunk and became isolated, there's a reason that people went there because it was their old holy land, it was their Wailing Wall. Right.
- [58:37]
Mark
Is it possible that the Polynesians went to Easter island and then over generations said, this is our homeland, not Polynesian, that they lost connection with that root land and then settled on. On this new place being the navel of the world?
- [58:51]
Dan Richards
That is a absolute possibility. But it would be weird that the name of the island itself would have that name and they wouldn't have just picked a spot. But, you know, you can never discount something like that. Right. The funny thing about religion and stories is they tend to erase the stuff that came before and just be like, oh, that's interesting.
- [59:10]
Mark
The Oracle of Delhi is fascinating. I was just reading about that recently, that it exists on a fault line.
- [59:14]
Dan Richards
Line, Yeah.
- [59:15]
Mark
I had never heard this before.
- [59:17]
Dan Richards
Sniffing the vapors.
- [59:18]
Mark
Yeah, I had never heard that. This woman, this priestess, would sit there and she would tell these merchants and travelers and royalty, at times, prophetic messages and visions of their future. And it's been speculated now that sitting on this fault line, you would have this vaporous gas that she was basically sniffing and then hallucinating, and then in this trance was sharing these messages. And then there would be other People that would decode the messages and then send people on their way with this newfound wisdom.
- [59:50]
Dan Richards
Fascinating is fast. Those guys doing the decoding, the people that had the real power in that.
- [59:55]
Mark
Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. They're like, oh, yeah. When they said you were, you know, having sex with a zebra, that actually means, you know, you got. You got to take care of the people.
- [60:04]
Dan Richards
All right.
- [60:04]
Mark
I guess so.
- [60:05]
Dan Richards
The ladies were like, oh, man, I'm doing a zebra.
- [60:10]
Mark
Oh, that's.
- [60:12]
Dan Richards
Go sniff some more fumes.
- [60:13]
Mark
Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's fascinating.
- [60:15]
Dan Richards
Oh, it is so interesting to me. But they had. If you look up Omphalos O M P H A L O S it is there. That's the. That's the World Naval Stone in. In Delhi. That was. That was there. And you notice it's covered with this net that Graham Hancock hypothesized in heaven's mirror that this was part of, like, it was part of a geodetic network, that all of the different places on the planet that were world navels were part of an old mapping system, an old way for them to map the globe. And that's why this is covered in a lattice, is to signify this mapping of the planet, which is an interesting idea. He talks about how a lot of these places have a certain distance from each other, and it corresponds to the 72, 54 numbers of procession of the equinoxes, if you've heard that stuff before. No, vaguely. Do you see these numbers show up in a lot of different myths. It was first popularized, first written about, that I'm aware of, in the book Hamlet's Mill. And it's basically that the idea is that there was astronomical knowledge encoded in myths and that he did it in myths, because myths are the kind of thing that people either discard or they cling too heavily. So, like the number 72, the Earth wobbles on its axis like a top. You spin it in one direction and it wobbles the other way. That wobble is measured, and it changes what constellation rises every. It's like. It's like 2100 years. It'll change which constellation is at the cardinal points of the year for solstices and equinoxes. And it's 72 years per degree, so 71.6 years, but they round up to 72. So, like in Norse myth, there's all these warriors coming out to fight in Valhalla, and there's like 72 doors and a certain number of guys that come out, and you see these numbers crop up. In ancient Egyptian myths. And just all around the world you'll see these 72. If you go to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, there's 54, which is 2/3 of the 72. Right. There's 54. Asura and demons both pulling back and forth to do the churning of the sea of milk, which is quite possibly an astronomical type of thing. So there's a lot of these all over the world with the numbers tend to be 54, 72 and 108 weight and larger exam larger expansions of that. So that does get a little. You can really run with that and go down. Because it's a number thing. Right. So you can really go down the rabbit hole. Right. But it's. It also when it does show up and it's kind of just like cut and dry and point blank, it's pretty interesting. Like some. Some of those old myths do have. Some of those old myths do have things that are very, very talented. It's hard for me not to see it as an astronomical thing. So that's where that whole number thing comes from. Sorry.
- [63:28]
Mark
Oh, that's fascinating. So could we just get a map of these sort of world navels as they show up?
- [63:33]
Dan Richards
That picture there with the tree and the world in the center, there's the idea of an Axis Mundi. It connects the entire underworld to the heavens. But yeah, I'm not seeing a map of them on there of all of them, but there's a list on Wikipedia, I do know that. Like a list of world Navals or Axis Mundi or something like that.
- [63:55]
Mark
Yeah. It's interesting that it persists through all these different cultures that they have this thing that tends to have a similar.
- [64:01]
Dan Richards
Word and a similar idea. The concept of, you know, of a baby, a baby being born and the seed of that birth being where the navel attaches to the fetus and it grows out from there. The first point where. And that same concept just popping up all around the world is a little bit weird. It's, you know, one or two places make sense, but consistently it does seem odd.
- [64:26]
Mark
Yeah, I find it interesting. Like, for example, you know, things that I find less compelling. Like, you know, people obviously point to, like pyramid structures existing all over the world. And that to me, you know, I kind of follow to reason. Like, you know, it's possible that that is just the easiest way to stack up stones. And if you're trying to build something tall, you know, the bigger the base, the higher it can be. So you just kind of by reason can sort of intuit that not necessarily with cross cultural information, even a little bit with the metal joints that you had mentioned before. That to me again, it obviously is compelling how similar they look, but also it might fall to reason like if we need to join these stones and we have access to metal at this time, this might be the best way to do it. But something like this, where the mythology is the same, same, I find that pretty unique because as far as creating technological advancements, those things are going to sort of follow the same laws of physics. But mythology doesn't need to follow similar rules in any capacity.
- [65:27]
Dan Richards
That's true.
- [65:28]
Mark
So I find the idea of this navel, the center point of the world, to be so interesting why it exists across every culture.
- [65:36]
Dan Richards
Yeah, it's pretty wild that it is something that exists almost everywhere. Yeah, it's, it's very, very ubiquitous.
- [65:42]
Mark
Yeah. And Easter Island's naval, the one that exists there, is it in the center of the island?
- [65:47]
Dan Richards
No, it's off, it's off overlooking the ocean like you saw in the picture there. You could see the sea from it. Like the center of the island is not a very, if I remember, at the very center of the island's kind of a crappy spot. Easter Island's a weird spot. It's like part of it's this big cratery lake, part of its caves and then part of it's just like green grass gas. And where they, where they've got their, their hill, their moai half carved and hanging out in the rocks and stuff.
- [66:12]
Mark
Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. What else from Easter island do you find that challenges the, the archaeological record?
- [66:17]
Dan Richards
Well, one of the things that's maybe challenges the archaeological record might be the wrong way of putting, but one of the things it's, it's part of Easter island is the idea of these world naval statues. The, these naval holding statues. You know how the statue on the Easter island has, they're holding their tummies, right. All this, all the statues on Easter island, their, their hands, if you look at them, they're on their stomachs and this was, let's see if we. I'm sure. Yeah, you see there with the one with the rock on his head there and.
- [66:49]
Mark
Oh yeah.
- [66:49]
Dan Richards
Okay then. And when they've got hands, they're on their tummies. And there's a lot of statues like this around the world. The T pillars that go Beckley test. They look like kind of like, and somewhat like humans. Then they have hands and their hands are down on the navel. You see these all over the world actually, like all over the world. You can find them in South America. Statues where these guys are holding their tummies. Now that's not crazy. But what's funny is, what's interesting is when they show up, they tend to frequently show up with metallurgy. I'll send you a link. The guy's name is Graham and I'm forgetting his last name and I'm so sorry, Graham. He wrote a book about. And it's really, really good. And I'll send you a link when we're done so that you can make sure to put it on the screen or however. But the book goes into a lot of detail, whether he traveled around the world. But there's hundreds of these statues that, you know, I was taking a bunch of pictures of them yesterday at the Met and there were statues from like ancient Greece. And these guys are holding their stomachs. And what's interesting is this is like from the early days of ancient Greece. Right. And what's interesting is these statues tend to show up about the same time that low end metallurgy does. They're smelting copper, they're smelting gold, they're smelting silver, they're not getting into iron or anything. But it's almost like it was part of this package of ideas that was traveling around the world with. You have these statues and you do metallurgy.
- [68:17]
Mark
And just to be clear, metallurgy is just the act of sort of manipulating these metals.
- [68:23]
Dan Richards
Yes. Like you get a rock that's got copper in it and you have to extract the copper and then work the copper into something. Something. So it's, it just, it takes some heat and some know how and you have to recognize what copper is and. But it's, it's not, it doesn't take a whole lot, but it does take knowledge.
- [68:40]
Mark
Right.
- [68:40]
Dan Richards
And so it seems, it seems like this package of ideas was going around and things like copper, I mean that's, you know, we're always pushing things, like Graham Hancock loves to say, things keep, just keep getting older. We're always pushing the dates on things back further and further. And copper does the copper smelting, gold smelting and stuff. Man, this stuff gets old, you know, it starts getting old and it was 20 years ago now, but you never hear him talk about it. I brought it up in one of my videos. But the Iron Age, I mean, they found shit in anatolia that's like 800 years before the Iron Age even starts. That's worked iron, lots of it. But this Whole entire community was making iron goods, was smelting iron. It wasn't very good. Sometimes it was. They weren't very good at it. Sometimes it was really good, sometimes it wasn't. Was hit and miss iron iron, but they made a lot of it. And they've even got little microspheres and stuff from it up there. And this was like almost a thousand years before the Iron Age is said to have started. It's just as we dig into these things, the dates keep getting pushed back. But because a lot of people were taught in school, and this is where a lot of that mental barrier, like when we're talking about language, even type of thing, if you're taught in school that the Iron Age starts on this date, well, this random little iron find over here doesn't really change that, because this is really when the Iron Age starts. This is just an outline outlier, but it's like, well, is it an outlier? What. What dictated when we started it here, some other outlier. Right. It should just be. Keep getting pushed back. But they draw these. I read a historian a long time ago that said that they like to put things in very neat drawers and the world doesn't work that way.
- [70:12]
Mark
Right, Yeah. I mean, is it commonly accepted amongst mainstream archaeology that the Iron Age started across the world roughly around the same time?
- [70:20]
Dan Richards
Yeah, I mean, there's different places that didn't have it at the same time, but, yeah, in the old world, basically, that thanks to things like the Silk Road, that it didn't take long for these ideas to spread around that it.
- [70:30]
Mark
Exists in Western Europe, it exists in China, it exists in North Africa roughly around the same time. I see. And then you find things in Anatolia that predate that by a thousand years.
- [70:41]
Dan Richards
Yeah, I covered that because where I found that was there's a metal plate that they said that they found, an iron plate that was supposedly found in the Great Pyramid back in the 80s, 1800s. Howard Weiss's team, he's the same guy that found the cartouche that says it was Khufu. Right. His team found one of his guys, using dynamite, found a metal plate, and he says that he pulled it out from between the courses of the pyramid. They tested it in the 30s and they tested it again in the 90s, and they determined it's not meteoric iron, and that's a big deal. Well, that means it's smelted iron. Right. But the pyramid was built. Even if you go by the mainstream narrative, pyramid was built firmly in the Bronze Age, but over in Anatolia, not far away they have these guys smelting metal. So smelting iron. So to me it seems pretty obvious. Like my hypothesis is this, yep, there's the iron plate. My hypothesis is this, if these guys over in Turkey are making tick ass iron, sometimes that they can use for a knife, other times they make iron that's so shitty that they, it's like I can't, you can't even do anything with it. Now the Egyptians, they write about iron in stuff a lot. They call it the metal from heaven and whatnot. They were aware of meteoric iron a long time ago.
- [71:59]
Mark
And how does meteoric iron work? There's a meteor that strikes, it possesses iron in it.
- [72:04]
Dan Richards
Oh very. Usually it's like all iron or really close. So it's like a very high content of iron. Like there were meteoric iron daggers and King Tuts tomb for example. But they're like Egyptian mythology, like I was telling you about the different stages of going through heaven and stuff. Like one of the things that they say is the king will throw open the iron gates and ascend to the stars and things like that. When these are old myths. So before they were working iron. So my theory is that, you know, these guys, they make iron, sometimes they get a good one, sometimes they get crappy ones. And when they get crappy iron, the Egyptians will still pay us really, really good for this because they're going to use it to see God or whatever, right? So go trade it to them for all kinds of good stuff and then we'll just keep making iron. We get good ones, we make swords and we get bad ones, we, they make doors. Right. So that to me explains the existence of the iron plate. But it does require pushing back the date of the Iron Age a tiny bit. But at the same time, science already did that. They just didn't relabel it. The Iron Age, they were just like, we just found some iron in the Bronze Age, boys. Nothing to see here.
- [73:08]
Mark
Yeah, it's strange that they would just write it off.
- [73:10]
Dan Richards
They didn't exactly write it off. They just don't. But they don't change the. I was surprised that it's not spoken of more, to be honest with you, Mark, I was kind of blown away that because it's. To me, when I saw, I was just like, well, holy, they got guys doing iron thousand years before the irony. Well that's noteworthy, ain't it? Why is nobody talking about this?
- [73:27]
Mark
And what would an archaeologist say if asked? They would just say, oh, it's now. Liar.
- [73:30]
Dan Richards
No, well, they would say that there's no reason to reclassify the Iron Age because it's a whole body of things that come along with it. It's not just iron, it's just a generic thing. They, they've, it's, there's a lot attached to these ages nowadays and stuff. It's not just the, you know, the end of the Bronze Age, for example, really has nothing to do with iron. The end of the Bronze Age, the collapse of the Bronze Age has to do with the sea peoples and the ending of, you know, this cultural disaster at the time. So that's where they would basically come at it from is, you know, these, these different ages have to do with more than just the metal that was worked.
- [74:05]
Mark
Interesting.
- [74:06]
Dan Richards
But, but that's to me indicative of their inability to communicate well with the public. They really, really need a Carl Sagan type of guy in their camp bad, I mean bad. They're so bad at communicating with the public. And this is a perfect example. It's like if you call it the Iron Age, call it the collapse of the old world and the beginning or the Greek world or the pre Greek world and the beginning of the Greek world or something and then, then the lay people will understand. But if you call it the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, people are going to walk around thinking that that's a firm line pretty much where the two were separated. And you know, they might laugh and say that that's. I know that they'll laugh and say that that's, you know, that's just their own ignorance and stuff. And it's like, well, that's why you're not doing a good job of communicating to the public. If they're ignorant and you're trying to tell them something, whose fault.
- [74:57]
Mark
Yeah, that's interesting. Interesting. So could, could we look up some of the, the iron fabrications from Anatolia that predate this?
- [75:05]
Dan Richards
You want to look up, you will go to, you're going to want to go to all because you're not going to find on images first, but you're going to look for earliest iron smelting. And I, and it, it pops right up. It's just.
- [75:20]
Mark
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- [78:52]
Dan Richards
Yeah. Which is quite a bit before the Iron Age started.
- [78:56]
Mark
Yeah. We couldn't find it in our original Google, but then after directly searching it, now we've pulled it up. Exactly.
- [79:02]
Dan Richards
And again, this is so weird to me that this isn't spoken of more because that age is just so far back there. It's like, you know, it's just weird to me that this doesn't get spoken of more. And you look at how long, how long ago this was discovered. Look, I mean, look at that. 1994 revealed that some of them were carbon steel. 1994. I mean, come on, man. That was 19 years old then.
- [79:24]
Mark
Yeah. Not meteoric iron. That they were made from smelted terrestrial iron.
- [79:28]
Dan Richards
That's huge.
- [79:30]
Mark
Yeah. It's bizarre that this isn't talked about.
- [79:32]
Dan Richards
That's completely bizarre to me that this isn't talked about.
- [79:35]
Mark
I mean, it says even here. Some people believe that whoever brought the iron making technologies to Anatolia may have destroyed the ancient city, city at command. Kellyohu. Kellyoke.
- [79:44]
Dan Richards
Something like that. Yeah. I mispronounce everything where it just become a running gag.
- [79:51]
Mark
And so what are these things? Are they weapons or are they just sort of like, you know, unnamed fragments they found?
- [79:57]
Dan Richards
Just little pieces, mostly like leftovers, basically, but proof that the job was being Done. Right. So there's a handful of beads. I want to say that they might have found a couple of artifacts too, but for the most part it was all just, just like small stuff, beads and leftovers. But the fact of the matter was they clearly were working it there. So it's wild to me that, it's wild to me that it's that far back. And to me also is very unlikely that they were the only ones that knew that and that it just died off at that point or something. I mean, they probably, that could well be the starting point of the iron working for the Old World.
- [80:38]
Mark
And then they're now selling this to the Egyptians and, you know, perhaps using that in some of their, you know, early ritual ceremonies, things like that.
- [80:47]
Dan Richards
Yeah, I mean, we would have to, to we could know. I mean, we've got, this is where again, I, I, I always want more evidence. We've got, they've done, we've got iron there from, from Carmen. We've got, we've got iron from the Great Pyramid. Museums have all these pieces. Give us some chemical analysis, boys tell us, does this iron come from the same region or not? Shouldn't be difficult. And then we could know. But that's my reasoning behind why we find iron in the Great Pyramid. I don't think that did you find it there because it was built with so much further back in prehistory, these people were smelting iron all the time in this higher technology world like some guys would take it to. I don't think that the iron plate's a hoax, which some archaeologists believe that it was just they found it on the ground, he didn't really find it. Between the two things, he's lying, which to me, by the way, this is a little hilarious bit of horseshoe theory. Howard Weiss's team finds that iron plate. Archaeologists say, I don't think so, man. I'm not so sure about that. We'll just think he's probably lying. Howard Weiss's team also finds the cartouche that confirms that the Great Pyramid was built by Khufu. Alternate historians. Howard Weis guy, I think he was lying. He's probably lying about this. He's probably just coming up with this a way to make his expedition not be a big fat loser. They both have the same explanation, basically for the thing that they don't want to accept was found by the same team. To me, that's hilarious.
- [82:15]
Mark
Interesting. Yeah. They take one and they say, well, this one's true. But this other discovery, we don't know.
- [82:20]
Dan Richards
And the reasons are the same, but we can't trust those guys. Wow. They were trying to get funding, man. They were investigating the pyramid and hadn't found a whole lot.
- [82:29]
Mark
And it's really fascinating when I consider these types of things. I always keep in mind that the progression of human history in terms of technology is obviously going upwards in terms of complexity and sophistication, but it's not linear. It's going up. And we develop some type of iron smelting technology, and then that technology gets lost and then it restarts potentially, and then it gets lost again and restarts, and it kind of, again, sort of moves upward, almost like a stock market graph. It's always trending up, but it has these periods of dips. And I think, at least for me, I always kind of assume these things are fairly linear. It's like, okay, we developed this. We developed iron smelting, metallurgy, and then we developed this new thing, and then this new thing, and then this new thing, and then it's just constantly progressing. But I don't know. For me, it's very reasonable to suggest that things get lost over time and that they have to be rediscovered. And some of these things perhaps are never rediscovered. It doesn't mean that they're alien and mystical and da, da, da. It's just a way of doing things that we never rediscovered. How to do it despite. It feels like there's a little bit of modern hubris to think that everything we're doing now is the only way it could have ever been done.
- [83:45]
Dan Richards
I completely agree with that. If you think about stone working, if you accept evolution, which I'm sure some of your viewers don't, but if you accept evolution, that's millions of years, literally millions of years of hominids using stone as the premier tool. It was what you'd used to cut, clean, cook.
- [84:11]
Mark
Even non homo sapiens.
- [84:12]
Dan Richards
Yes, that's what I'm saying. Hominids in general, all this. So by the time the Iron Age rolls around, by the time of the Bronze Age, by the time we've got metallurgy halves happening, the skills that have been passed from father to son to build these things are going to be deep and thick and very nuanced. And then almost overnight, like the automobile kicking horsemanship in the ass, Same kind of thing. All of a sudden it's like, overnight you've got metal. Why would. I don't need to do all this goofy shit my grandpa taught me with stone. I'm just gonna go make a metal knife. Life it's way better. It holds up better. It doesn't break. If it bends, I smash it back into shape. This was. I think in one generation, we probably lost a ton of information.
- [85:02]
Mark
I mean, look at, look at this right here. Right. My buddy Donnie Dust made this for me. Okay.
- [85:06]
Dan Richards
Nice.
- [85:07]
Mark
I couldn't make this.
- [85:08]
Dan Richards
No, I couldn't.
- [85:09]
Mark
You know what I mean?
- [85:10]
Dan Richards
Yeah.
- [85:10]
Mark
And I like to think of myself as much smarter than, you know, the average Native American. You know, I know more things. I. I can tell you some capitals of different countries, you know what I mean? They couldn't do that. So obviously I must be more intelligent. I look at this and I go, they just had a specific sort of compartmentalized knowledge set that, you know, after a couple generations of the better version, I mean, dude, I can't even use a floppy disk. You know what I mean? I'm sorry, I don't even really know what that is, you know, so like, even just in my lifetime, right, so much information, I couldn't use a map. Like, I've never navigated with a map before in my life.
- [85:44]
Dan Richards
If you watch me walking around New York with my phone, I'm like, oh, am I going the wrong direction? Like.
- [85:49]
Mark
Like, if you just drop me off in the middle of someplace with a map, I could probably figure it out, but it's very, very foreign to me. So I could see the similar thing happening, that as technology is advancing, you're losing the old technology, and then if there's a cutoff, you know, you lose everything because you don't necessarily carry on the old traditions that were, you know, 5% more difficult to. To work with.
- [86:09]
Dan Richards
I feel like I mentioned horsemanship. I mean, 100 years ago, if me and you both weren't like adept horse riders, we would. There'd be something wrong with this. Yeah, I. I have shit riding a horseman. I don't. I don't like to yell at them and they just want to eat. So I just feel like it's going to sit here, huh?
- [86:24]
Mark
Yeah. Yeah, it is really interesting. So I guess kind of, you know, we're dropping some different pieces that kind of challenge the historical record, you know, to say that, you know, we have metallurgy earlier than we thought, and we have, you know, these world navals that are popping up all over. I'm curious, how does this paint a broader picture for you and understand ancient civilization and pre civilization as you know it?
- [86:50]
Dan Richards
Well, I think personally that there is some truth to the idea that there was a lot going on before the flood. And by the flood. Yeah, I know a lot of people. You mean the biblical flood. Okay, yes. In the regards. It's not. I don't mean that every aspect of what says in the Bible about it, 40 days and 40 nights and covering everything and blah, blah, blah. That's. No, but I believe that those myths, the shared myths around the world, that stuff do have a kernel of truth to them. That there was this flood that messed up some societies and really thumped them back into the Stone Age cultures that were moving forward and that would get remembered a lot through different cultural lenses. Like the Greeks remember them as being democratic and having their temples magic. Well, you know, they covered their temples with the same magic metal we like to cover ours with. And they valued the same altruistic things that we do. And then. And when Moses writes about it, it's got more of a little bit of a tinge of the Egyptian stuff still to it, because that's where he learned. Right. But it also has a very Israeli, for a lack of a better way of putting it, angle to the whole thing. It's very much about, you don't mess with God. You do the right way, not the wrong way. It's a very monotheistic for the time. So every culture has their own little lens that they view it through. But at the end of the day, it seems like that there was a flood that thumped on us a little bit and drove humanity back instead of forward. And that I think that we see. I think we see signs of that all across the world. In myth in particular, like you were saying is one that's interesting because you don't have to. There's no reason for them to be shared. Right. It's just two guys come up with the same idea is the only argument you can make. Take there. And you've got things like the master of beasts, if you've ever seen that image before. Gabe, could you pull up Master of beasts, please? Like, and you might want to. You might have to look up, like, image or something like that. Like the word imagery. Okay. You see, she's got. On both sides of her, she has animals that she's clearly, like, dominating. Right. And you will see these kinds of images all the way into ancient Turks, Turkey. Like, not Gobekli Tepe, but Karan Tepe has an image of a guy with a beast on both sides of him, like a lion on both sides of him, and he's got his arms outstretched. You'll find this kind of symbol in the New World as well. And a lot they Won't always be the same animals. A lot of times it'll be cats. A lot of times it'll be a woman sitting on a chair with a cat with her hands on both heads. But it's this very, a symmetrical image of usually a woman dominating two animals and one on each side. Very symmetrical. And it's. You see it at a lot of places in Turkey also we see the same kind of imagery we see from Orion and the Great Hunt. There is an image of a bull and coming towards a guy and he's got a stick raised and he's standing between him and the bull and it very much looks like Orion and torture Taurus and that's, you know, I mean we're talking 12,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago. So that's long before we were supposed to have had Orion and Taurus according to most historians. Now there are some guys that will accept that the constellations are probably older than. Some of them are probably much older than written history. I'm of the opinion that they're probably the oldest esoteric knowledge humans had. Constellations were probably the first thing that somebody figured it out and was like, when the sun rises into that little group of stars, it's time to plant. When the sun rises into that group of stars, the buffalo will be when the sun rises. And that dude could tell the future with the stars. And that same zeitgeist is found in your newspaper today when you go and see what my day is going to be like.
- [90:47]
Mark
That's really interesting. So these masters of beasts or masters of animals shows up cross culturally.
- [90:53]
Dan Richards
Yeah. If you go back down, if he clicks out of this and then scroll down there and look at the other image, the other images are underneath and it's always, always, always the same. And it regards that there's the symmetry involved and this looks like it's. The animals are being dominated. Not completely, but like they're, they're some type of domestication. Yeah, they're subservient to the person.
- [91:15]
Mark
And you're suggesting this is. You're saying around 10, 12,000 BC seems.
- [91:19]
Dan Richards
To show up around then. Yeah, it's old. Like the first ones that we see are in Turkey, the Karan Tepe. If you K A R A N I think. Oh, K a H A R a N. That one right there has got the girl sitting in the. It's not the same the one I was looking for, but that's. You get some of them there? Yeah, there's a bunch of them listed here. You got Babylonian you got Assyrian, you've got just all over the damn world. And it's very, very similar iconography, geography.
- [91:53]
Mark
And what does this indicate to you?
- [91:55]
Dan Richards
Maybe the domestication of animals, Maybe the fact that humans were starting to recognize that we were like. Every animal views itself as like dogs versus everything else. But I think humans were starting to realize that we're something special. We know more than the animals. We're not just one of them. We can.
- [92:14]
Mark
We possess a superior consciousness in some capacity.
- [92:17]
Dan Richards
Yeah.
- [92:18]
Mark
And then the art starts to reflect that.
- [92:19]
Dan Richards
Yeah. And I think that probably is going to go hand in hand. Hand with two things would be farming and metallurgy. Because those would be the two things that you could really say we are way different. And you can't argue. There's no philosophical argument to be made about it. It's like, yeah, we do things way different.
- [92:37]
Mark
Interesting. So with the advent and I mean, agriculture is not far off from this time.
- [92:42]
Dan Richards
No, that's when it starts really.
- [92:43]
Mark
It's dated around like 1500, 1200 BC, something like that.
- [92:47]
Dan Richards
Right, well, the proto agriculture or 12,000 BC yeah, I was going to say. Yeah, that's about when it starts. Proto agriculture is right around the time right when Gobekli Tepe is built, is right around the time they start farming, which Graham Hancock's hypothesis is that that was a transfer of old skills from the lost civilization. They land there and they're like teaching the locals that survived. Because he makes a really good point that if you use our culture today as an example and say that the world was to be hit by some terrible disaster that dropped us back into the third, they have cross the globe. Well, the Third World ain't doing so bad now, is it? Because they already know how to survive. But me and you now, we're in a different boat. So his hypothesis is the guys came there and was looking for a means of survival. They teach the locals. It's an exchange. Basically. We'll teach you guys how to farm and stuff and help us eat, would you? And so you see that kind of civilization, God's story, come across all over the world. You see the Quetzalcoatl type of Seven Sages on Easter Island. The people that they show up and they kind of civilize things and change things and make it right. So it's possible that this is a shared cultural or shared thing, that there was a lost civilization and it went and dropped a bunch of places. And farming is one of the things that taught.
- [94:16]
Mark
Interesting. And you find Easter island to be the most compelling Example of this type of lost civilization.
- [94:22]
Dan Richards
Yeah, for some of the reasons I mentioned, a lot of it, because its isolation coupled with the things that we see is the fact that it was clearly traded with and stuff. It wasn't isolated. It was isolated, but it was. Wasn't treated as isolated. It was traveled to. It was visited. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a place of pilgrimage as the World Naval. Right. Wouldn't be surprising to me at all. And there's so many little weird things. Like that's the only place in Polynesia we see this kind of. Even anything close to those moai. We see, like, basalt monoliths and like, Nan Madol and stuff like that. That. But nothing like these moai. And it's also the only place that we see in Polynesia them having a written script. They had that rongorongo, I believe it was. Now, we can't translate it now, but they had a language that was a written script that we don't see anywhere else in that part of the world.
- [95:24]
Mark
Oh, interesting. And what does the script look like?
- [95:27]
Dan Richards
You can look it up. Easter island script. It looks. It's similar to ancient Egypt. I mean, it's hieroglyphic. Yeah, it's. But, yeah, there you go.
- [95:36]
Mark
Oh, wow. And it's almost cuneiform in a way. It's, like pressed into, like, a soft clay kind of thing.
- [95:42]
Dan Richards
Yeah. Or carved into wood.
- [95:44]
Mark
Oh, interesting.
- [95:46]
Dan Richards
Like, there was a wood block that's got a bunch. They used to be they would put these wood books, I think it was. They would bind together. But a lot of this stuff, like the slave raids took nobles. One of the slave raids basically took all of their educated people, all of their upper class from Easter Island.
- [96:07]
Mark
And what year is that? Right.
- [96:08]
Dan Richards
I want to say the 1800s, but I could be wrong.
- [96:11]
Mark
It's pretty late.
- [96:11]
Dan Richards
Yeah, it wasn't very long ago, but we lost, basically after that the ability to read their language. Script was lost. Pretty much everything about their culture, like, took a. They cut the head off of it for a time there. The survivors were said to have hid in caves to avoid the slavers. So. And.
- [96:29]
Mark
And who went to Easter Island?
- [96:32]
Dan Richards
Portuguese, I want to say. But this is. I feel bad for not knowing this, but not the part that I focused on, but, yeah.
- [96:37]
Mark
Good. I'd be so curious to know if they, like, took any record. Right. Like, we have other examples of, you know, colonists and settlers going into people groups and, you know, kidnapping, but also sometimes documenting what the people had, you know, shared of, like, their cultural myths.
- [96:52]
Dan Richards
No, no, there was very, very little written of it, from what I understand. As a matter of fact, most of what we know is from people that are descended from the Easter Islanders that live there now that talked about what their grandparents told them and whatnot. It's fascinating. It's sad, really. That culture really, really took a. There never was a whole lot of people there, it looks like. At least not in modern times. Right. But that really just decimated them.
- [97:16]
Mark
Yeah. And it is interesting that these moai don't exist really anywhere else.
- [97:19]
Dan Richards
No, not nothing. There's plenty of other statues. Like. Like, check out. Could you look up the Gobekli Tepe T pillar, please, Gabe? Look at where the hands end up on that thing where it's like it's grasping and kind of in the same kind of position. A lot of them, the fingers are even in the stomach. And they hypothesize. Most archaeologists believe that these are supposed to be people because of the inclusion of the arms on a bunch of them. But the interesting part of that is that similarity showing up. I mean, this is like some of the earliest. The earliest megaliths that we know of, and then that same kind of imagery, that same iconography showing up all the way over in Easter Island. And I think it's Cadonia, I think it was that I saw yesterday at the Chalcedonians, that I saw yesterday at the Met. But there's these statues and they had their hands clasped, had their arms like this, actually, with their arms over their navel and their hands off to the right, off. But these are the same thing where it's like they could put their arms in 100 different positions, but they seem to. Just crossing the stomach seems to be extremely, extremely common.
- [98:26]
Mark
And what does that indicate to you? Or do. Do other people have theories as to, like, the mythos of having, you know, hands over the stomach?
- [98:32]
Dan Richards
I don't know. You know, I've.
- [98:34]
Mark
Fertility seems like a pretty obvious fertility.
- [98:37]
Dan Richards
Hunger or lack thereof, Right? It could be. It could. It could. Either one of those could be some of the ones that car on test. There's one that's a guy's like, emaciated. Like, he's got. You can see his ribs and. And he's holding his stomach, but he. You could see his ribs and, like, his shoulder blades. If I remember right, one of these statues that we see. Yep. That guy right there.
- [99:04]
Mark
Oh, wow.
- [99:07]
Dan Richards
H. And he's got. He's grabbing. Grabbing his wean. But you can see what I mean, though, it's still very similar Maybe that is what that means. Maybe, maybe that's the censored version of it. If that they're not grabbing your stomach, you're grabbing your junk.
- [99:23]
Mark
Interesting.
- [99:24]
Dan Richards
But you can see again, that guy's definitely starving. Right, Right. Maybe that's what the image is. Maybe if you're holding your tummy, you're full and you're holding your junk, you're starving.
- [99:34]
Mark
I mean, that's, that's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I wonder if, you know, holding your stomach because you, you said there's a connection with, with the metallurgy Right around this time, these statues with cultures that are doing some type of proto metallurgy.
- [99:48]
Dan Richards
Correct.
- [99:48]
Mark
And what do you make of that connection? That it just happens to occur at the same time?
- [99:54]
Dan Richards
Well, I don't think it's. Personally, it seems pretty enigmatic to me that they would show it at the same time so many times. So I don't think it is a coincidence. I don't know what the iconography would be to associated with that. Perhaps it is a combination of things and perhaps that's what this symbol is, is a full belly. And we're just. This, this set of tools will keep your tummy full.
- [100:18]
Mark
It's interesting.
- [100:19]
Dan Richards
Could be just that simple. I.
- [100:20]
Mark
Have you, have you heard anthropologists talk about the, the stomach brain flywheel effect?
- [100:25]
Dan Richards
No.
- [100:26]
Mark
I'm sure you've heard a version of this. This is a anthropological idea that as, you know, we develop greater ways of like cooking, for example, you know, like, you know, cooking meats and able to tenderize meat and things, things like that our stomach and digestion required specifically a long time ago, a ton of energy. And when we're able to now cook food, it actually requires less energy. And that, that reallocated energy is able to go to our brains and cause basically like encephalization. So our brains are actually able to grow larger as our stomachs grow smaller.
- [100:59]
Dan Richards
Interesting.
- [101:00]
Mark
And this I'm pretty sure is a pretty well documented anthropological theory that over time our brains have grown and our heads have grown even from early hominids and our stomachs have shrunk because it requires less energy and less power to digest our food because we're able to cook and that this created almost a flywheel that as our stomach shrunk and our brains got bigger, we got smarter and we're able to cook even more effectively and more effectively. More effectively. And they believe this trend will continue to go on and that will continue to, you know, get smarter and potentially have, you know, larger heads even into the future. It's an interesting theory, but again, I'm looking at sort of the symbolism. I wonder, like, you know, if they even had this understanding that, you know, as we're cooking food and, you know, developing agriculture, that we're getting more intelligent, we're able to develop tools, you know, like, you know, iron smelting and things like that. I don't know. I mean, this is my crackpot theory.
- [101:48]
Dan Richards
No, that's pretty interesting, to be honest with you.
- [101:52]
Mark
Yeah, I just don't know. I find that interesting. And it's more peculiar to me that modern archaeologists or not, I guess this is, I guess, just a greater problem in modern archaeology that I recognize. And I'm curious what you think of this as well. You know, reading from, you know, well established sort of, you know, I guess you could say by the book archaeologists, they exist with very strict scientific parameters. And because of this, they're able to look at things, you know, based only off of prior evidence and using a very strict scientific method, saying that if there is not direct evidence, we cannot not assess that there's some type of causal relationship between these two pieces of evidence. One of the examples, I think, is even in Ancient Apocalypse where Graham's talking about tooth records of an indigenous group that don't exist on a specific island, but for whatever reason, they're able to find fossil records of them on that island. I don't remember this exactly. And Graham's hypothesis is very reasonable that there was a time where these islands were connected through land and that they followed animals down to this region and then some of them stayed there. But because these archaeologists are dealing with such a strict method of scientific scrutiny, they're not able to draw these sort of narrative connections between scientific findings. And when we're dealing with ancient history, prehistory even, dating back to some of the earliest pieces of recorded human history we have, the evidence is going to be so sparse and so disparate that they can't draw any narrative conclusions, but they can only assess the evidence as they exist within these little mines, micro vacuums. And it is kind of, you know, someone like Graham and yourself that draw sort of these narrative conclusions that I think make way more sense to people because they can say, yeah, that obviously makes sense. Right. It's not some type of mystical, you know, conspiracy that early humans are following, you know, animal migrations down to these little islands and then, you know, water levels rise, and then now these islands are actually islands. So I guess it's just like an issue with archaeology that's not able to appeal to the masses because. Because they're dealing with such strict scientific parameters to preserve I guess this scientific process.
- [103:56]
Dan Richards
Yeah, it's funny that way. They do speculate in some ways, but they get like the Sea Peoples, you know, the Sea Peoples at the end of the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age collapse was basically brought about by the Egyptians wrote about them the most, these raiding barbarians from the sea. This tribe of band of desperate tribes that went around and just destroyed all kinds of different places. Egypt was one of the few places left standing but they completely decimated some of the cities that were like city states that were big from the time like Babylon I believe was completely laid to waste by Assyria and stuff. Anyway, I forget all the cities, but they, they, they, they. The very basic broad brush argument is that the Bronze Age collapsed because the sea people went in there and beat the crap out of everything. And then a few other factors added up and then the Bronze Age collapse collapsed. Now the Sea Peoples are a hypothetical group of people by and large. Now some, some guys would get really upset that I even said that, but they don't know what tribes made them up. There's like a few tribes that they're kind of pretty sure. But you have to ask the guy, the archaeologist and historian as to. And you'll get, you know, varying degrees of answers where some of these guys will be like oh yeah, this guy's a sea people. These guys are see. And other guys will be like, we can't say, like you were just saying, very scientific, scientific, very scrutiny. And so they fight about these things, they get into arguments about it and the kind of attacks that Graham gets are even worse. But I've seen the same thing with anthropologist Lee Berger did this thing Cave of Bones, which is really interesting about Homo in the deli going into this cave and you happen to use fire and looking like they deliberately buried their dead and pre human species. Really interesting stuff. And he was just blasting casted by his colleagues for. We don't know for sure that this is that and blah blah blah. You're pandering to the public stuff that's very reminiscent to the kind of stuff Carl Sagan would get told. And at the end of the day it's like I think archaeology, let's be clear, archaeology is a soft science informed by hard sciences. When they say this arrowhead was made by X, Y or Z Z, that's an. That is a educated opinion. Now when they say the leather strap on that arrowhead is X thousand years old, that's not an educated opinion. That's science, bruh. But the where does this, does that master of beasts related to that master of beasts? We can speculate about that all we want, but that's archaeology in a nutshell. This type of architecture is reminiscent of this type of architecture. Ergo, I believe that. And so because it's so flimsy, because there's two things there, in my opinion, that we see. One is that people are very attached to their hypotheses because it's their little fiction or whatever, they wrote it. And the other one is they are very. They try almost overzealously to try to pretend to be real scientists. Our data is just as hard as a physicist's data at it. No, it's not, man. Come on.
- [107:04]
Mark
Yeah, and I wonder if it's counter reactionary to, you know, a relative recent history of bad archaeology. You know, I wonder if, you know, the late 1800s, you have these archaeologists that are kind of going rogue. They're destroying, they're, you know, not preserving these sites. They're, you know, taking stuff and selling them to sideshows and, you know, doing bad archaeology. Of course, there are good archaeologists as well around the time, but because like you had mentioned, it is the cowboys, I wonder if there is a sort of modern reaction that is very much trying to counteract that historical behavior.
- [107:38]
Dan Richards
You're absolutely right. They write about it, they'll openly say it because it's unquestionable. I mean, they won't talk about it as much as I will. I'll put my finger right on their sins for them. But like, there was a Native American woman that in, I want to say, 1940s, she reported that she saw at the Smithsonian Incident Institute the grave goods of her grandfather that she watched him get buried within about 50 years before. That kind of bugged her. Right. So the Kachina dolls of the Hopi, these were basically just, they're collectibles now, right? These were gathered up like mad by anthropologists in the late 1800s when it became clear that sea to shining sea was going to happen and there was not going to be a single untouched tribe on this continent. The anthropologists went batshit crazy going after every little bit of pottery and every little thing that they could get and started scrounging artifacts. I mean, the origins of archaeology as a study, a school is antiquities theft and dealing. The guys that were in the 16, 1700s, 1800s, that were big into their Roman and Greek crap, eventually they, they started cataloging it. Well, I think this came from this time. And this came from this time. And so that was the origins of the whole thing. It was, you know, so they, they know that their whole. It's, it's almost, it's rooted in sin, basically. I mean, I was walking around the Met, but to get a little, you know, crazy about it, I was walking around the Met and there's almost nothing there that came from the United States, man. It's all, it's all that they grabbed open. Okay. Well, again, now if I'm holding that same vase that's sitting there, the Egyptian government's going to have it yesterday. But they have these big repatriation programs. Oh, we're going to repatriate these things.
- [109:30]
Mark
In the box and shipping.
- [109:31]
Dan Richards
Yo, what's the problem?
- [109:32]
Mark
Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. Yeah. So I'm curious with some of these sites, do you know why there's so much confidence that these are Homo sapien? Because I do wonder. Sometimes we look at these very, very old, old pieces and I wonder if some of them are per. Perhaps even older. Yeah. And they're non Homo sapiens. Like, is that, is that a crazy theory?
- [109:56]
Dan Richards
That's not a crazy theory. It's one that they would definitely balk at. But I think the reasoning is kind of. Well, there's a few things. One is that we're, you know, centric, right. We're going, we're going to always think that we're, we're better. Another one is we don't really see that, that it falls into the whole. It gets into the realm of fantasy. Right? Now, what are we going to talk about? JRR Tolkien. And we're running around with hobbits and elves and blood giants and the Bible. And so it gets scientists to just knee jerk and they're just like, I don't believe any of this. This is all just, you know, they always lump everything together as woo.
- [110:32]
Mark
But we do know, like Homo florensis is, you know, they seem like they're seafaring in some capacities. Like they're using tools, you know, obviously primitive tools. But that is documented by anthropologists to suggest, suggest that, you know, these are, this was a real thing and that there are tools that we were discovering and even like pieces of art in, in certain cases. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong here. No, you're right. My layman understanding.
- [110:56]
Dan Richards
I'm just a layman too. Just a YouTuber.
- [110:59]
Mark
Like, hey, bro, imagine this. You're 30ft underground, digging through frozen earth with spoons and mess hall plates. Nazi Guards patrol overhead. One wrong move, one loose pebble, and it's over. But on this night in 1944, 76 Allied prisoners would attempt the impossible, tunneling their way to freedom in the largest prisoner of war escape of World War II and centuries earlier. In a cold stone chamber, a teenage girl in armor stood before her accusers. Her crime leading armies, speaking to angels, and daring to challenge the most painful, powerful men in Europe. Joan of Arc's trial would become one of history's most infamous moments. These are just two stories from Today in History, the newsletter that brings you the most fascinating events from the past delivered fresh to your inbox. From epic wars to religious rebellions, ancient mysteries to modern marvels, don't miss another piece of history. Scan the QR code now or click the link in the description to sign up for Today in History. I'm curious, are there any sites that you've come across in your research that you say, like, huh, maybe this is non.
- [112:07]
Dan Richards
That's. I had never actually really thought a whole lot about that because Centric. But to be honest. But yeah, there's. Looking at it, I suppose there were. It's probably the first candidate, the one that all of your guys that are typing in your comment section right now are going to be saying, Dan was just talking about Peru and they got all those goofy skulls down there. And that is true. They have those really goofy. You've seen them, the elongated skulls down in. Right, right. So that's probably one place that people would want to look first. But myself, I would think more like that the cave of bones thing was pretty interesting where it did show like Homo nadelli, probably using fire. So the. I think we would look in Africa or Anatolia and I think odds are we would find wood for a very long time because the stone is stone that's big enough to move and leave in a certain spot like that. That does take a different degree of organization than just one or two. Because if me and you can pick up the rock and move it, then our kids can pick it up and put it back. Right. But if it takes a hundred of us to do it or some complicated block and tackle or whatever, well, 10,000 years later you might still be looking to think.
- [113:18]
Mark
Interesting. Yeah. You had mentioned the sea people. Mm. I know people probably are gonna, you know, immediately jump to Atlantis when they hear that. I'm curious, do you think that there's any type of, you know, credibility to this idea of an Atlantis type place that exists in the region that is described by Plato, or do you think it is something completely different.
- [113:40]
Dan Richards
Well, I think that there's a great chance that it isn't. Would be in the region described by Plato. It could well be that he was just referring to, you know, a culture that was all across the world at that point or that had touched different spots here and there. You know, if. If a culture was remembered to be a seafaring culture, right, Then you might only have one or two islands that Greece was familiar with them for, but the rest of the world saw them in other different places and whatnot. I do definitely think that. I do definitely think that Plato believed Atlantis was real. A lot of people say that he wrote it as an allegory or just, you know, as an argument. And that doesn't really work well to me because I can't imagine making an argument with you. And I'm like, you know what, man? Well, in Super Mario Brothers 3, it's like, well, no, you wouldn't do that. You would be like, well, in World War II, right in the Battle of the Bulge, blah, blah, blah. You don't just make up some bullshit, oh, Luke attacked the Death Star. Well, now you just lost all credibility, man. Right. You're just talking. So I don't see Plato. He was a smarter orator than that. I don't see him just breaking it out as an allegory or. I think that he. Not only did he believe it, I think his contemporaries believed it. I think the people he was talking to believed it. That's why he used it.
- [114:56]
Mark
And have you heard any plausible theories as to what the location is? I know people speculate. Like the Azores Plateau. I know people have talked about the Richat structure there. Yeah, exactly. In West Africa. I'm curious if any of those jump out to you.
- [115:10]
Dan Richards
There's a lot. When I talked to Jim about the reshot stuff, that was pretty interesting. There's a lot of little things in there that are very. That line up well. Like the king of the region was the same name as King Atlas. And not only does it have the coincentric circles, but it's got gold in the hills like it's supposed to. And the water looks like it drained out the right side that it was supposed to. There's a lot of little things.
- [115:36]
Mark
Really?
- [115:37]
Dan Richards
Yeah.
- [115:37]
Mark
I never heard that.
- [115:38]
Dan Richards
Yeah. Check out one of Bright Insight's videos on the reshot stuff. He does a good job of making it more than. Well, look, it's coincentric rings. Coincentric rings. It does a good job of making a lot more than that, but it's tough to say for sure, again, that's the one problem with this stuff is that the cultural lens is going to be so heavy. There's no question. On the flip side of it, there's no question in my mind that Plato embellished things to make his case. Right. There's no question in my mind that he was just like, add a detail or two here, because it works. So to me, it's. We're always going to have that problem with something that far back, especially when you're talking about, like, proto culture. I mean, what culture is first? Who started things is such a big deal that, like, the. Was it the Egyptians and I forget the other culture, but they got their. Their. They. Both of them. They took a kid of each culture and, like, didn't raise them. Were not allowed to be raised. This is probably a myth, but they didn't let these kids be spoken to by anybody. They weren't allowed to hear language. And then they wanted to see which word they would ask for bread first. And whichever language that was the first culture. Right. So if he says it in Egyptian, that means the Egyptians were first or whatever. So it's kind of a silly idea, but just to give you an idea of how important it was to have that we were first thing. So I think because of that whatever lost civilization, everybody and their brother would be like, that's our dad right there, buddy. Not your dad. That's my dad. And then all kinds of little bells and whistles. Attached to that were people. You ever heard of the cargo cults? Okay. And you know how fast that went from American soldiers dropping off knives and blankets and landing airplanes there into some Jesus type of cult where this American soldier is going to come back and save them all from blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all this.
- [117:36]
Mark
Imagine pretty quick 20 years.
- [117:38]
Dan Richards
By the time anthropologists went back in the 60s, that had already happened.
- [117:41]
Mark
Wow.
- [117:42]
Dan Richards
One generation. And it was spread multiple islands in the region.
- [117:46]
Mark
Do you have specific examples by chance.
- [117:48]
Dan Richards
Of the cargo cult?
- [117:49]
Mark
Yeah, that's because I've heard, like, different stories of like, you know, like a specific people group. I don't even remember where. Just, like, deifying.
- [117:57]
Dan Richards
Yeah.
- [117:57]
Mark
You know, like some. Some guy.
- [117:59]
Dan Richards
Look up cargo cult. I want to say John should be cargo cult. I believe the guy's name is John and.
- [118:07]
Mark
John.
- [118:08]
Dan Richards
John Fromm. Yes.
- [118:10]
Mark
Oh, wow. So he's a figure of the John Fromm cargo cult, a cult in Vanuatu that originated during World War II, and that they believe that John Fromm is a God who will bring wealth and prosperity to the people of Tanna.
- [118:23]
Dan Richards
Have you seen images of the cargo cult stuff?
- [118:25]
Mark
I mean, I've only seen like a handful of pictures just randomly on Instagram. Just like some white guy with like a thousand of these indigenous people around him. Or like pictures of them.
- [118:34]
Dan Richards
Remove the word. Okay, there you go. Look on the bottom there. There's a radar dish, binoculars. Now scroll down and look at the airplanes. And like that one right there. You've ever seen Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. And they got those kids that are playing around with the record player and stuff and all the broken tech this 20 years and they're trying to call the airplane planes back. Their religious ceremonies look like military marches.
- [119:07]
Mark
And how does this develop? So this guy goes down there in World War II, drops off like a.
- [119:11]
Dan Richards
Bunch of the Americans and the Japanese both during World War II. One of these islands, because they're air bases, right? So the Japanese would come in and just kick ass and take names. The Americans would come in and trade. We'd show up with metal and metal knives and blankets. Was our standard and chocolate standard operating procedure. And. And that is why they call them cargo cults, because they're waiting for us to come back. They can't make metal knives on their own. They can't make tightly woven machine made blankets on their own. So these are gods. They came from the air, they came down here, they gave us these crazy crap and then they left. So it became. When they didn't come back anymore, it was maybe we did something wrong. Maybe there's. So we're going to start all these rituals and we'll reenact what we saw them do. And so I always use this a lot as a touchstone to kind of look at how what might have happened, you know, 10,000 years ago and how things would have quickly escalated. But a kernel of the truth is still there. Enough that you could recognize an airplane, right. You could recognize a radar dish. But if you listen to the stories attached to it, boy, oh boy, you need more than a grain of salt. So.
- [120:18]
Mark
And I can see how people draw the sort of ethnocentric lens when it comes to like sea peoples, because they say like, oh, you don't think they could imagine made. It's like, it's not. Not what I'm saying. Okay. I think they could have made it. They just didn't.
- [120:29]
Dan Richards
Yeah.
- [120:29]
Mark
And they didn't have the resources, the geography, or like the, you know, natural goods around them in order to create these things. And someone else just so happened to have it. And when they Brought it over. They were like, oh, wow, look at this.
- [120:40]
Dan Richards
Yeah.
- [120:41]
Mark
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah. It makes you wonder about, like Easter Island. Like, could there have been a people group that was there? You know, sea peoples come over and they're able to, you know, give them some type of, you know, look at this, you know, sweet potato and try this. And then they go, oh, wow, this is. We need more of this because this really nourishing and, you know, create some type of deification in that way.
- [121:01]
Dan Richards
Impossible. But to be clear, the sea peoples weren't the good guys. They were the. They were the ones that went around tearing everything up. So it would be different peoples at sea. But when you say the sea peoples, generally speaking, it's the Bronze Age marauders.
- [121:13]
Mark
Right.
- [121:14]
Dan Richards
So just, just to make sure that your viewers don't go, what the hell? But yes, people, that. I almost certainly, like you were saying, almost certainly in my mind, whatever lost culture was there, even if it was just real basic things, I mean, like, they would have been spreading around the globe and we do have some. And it would have gotten twisted out of proportion. And there's. There's a lot of things that, like, to me, like a bow and arrow even, like if you think about what goes into the construction of a bow and arrow, it's more than one person's mind at work. It's there. Somebody figures out that, you know, you get this tension here and that you can use a piece of wood to really harness that tension attention. And maybe they shoot stuff with it. But in order to make an arrow that's weighted and with flights and it's accurate and, and this is a, this is technology and it takes time to. And yet there's not one place in 10,000 years ago on this planet you don't see people throwing those things around. It's like, well, how did that happen? Now you can say that they independently develop that everywhere. But we also see things like the autolatl, that big spear thrower that's just like a long bar. You seen that? It's just. Could you look that one up? It's just atl Space Atlanta atl. This is like a primitive big game weapon. They just extended spear thrower gives your arm an extra 8 inches and you can. Somebody throwing a spear with one of those things can really punch a hole. It's what they would kill mammoths with. You, we're killing the bow and arrows. You're. This, this gets into that mammoth.
- [122:43]
Mark
Oh, wow, that's really, really interesting. But now you have Like a double, a double leverage point.
- [122:48]
Dan Richards
So you can increase the velocity way by, by exponentially. Right, because it's, it's the velocity that's a, the equation. It gets exponentially longer. So adding that extra three feet is huge.
- [122:59]
Mark
Yeah. Like those tennis ball throwers for your dog.
- [123:01]
Dan Richards
Yes, exactly.
- [123:02]
Mark
You can launch a tennis ball.
- [123:03]
Dan Richards
Yes, you can, you can knock somebody's teeth out. But my point here is that the discovery of a bow and arrow isn't necessarily the only way you're going to go down that road. As a matter of fact, I dare say that's way less complicated. So in my opinion, the bow and arrow is kind of a little bit of a smoking gun for this prehistoric connection. The same one that gave us the master of beasts, potentially. In my opinion, there was almost certainly a time from long, long ago that a lot more humans were in contact with cult around the globe than they are now. Now, to play devil's advocate, I'm sure that the skeptics are typing or have already typed. What about genetic evidence? Why is there no DNA from all these different things? And that's where things actually do get kind of funny. Because not only do we see DNA showing up in things like the genetic drift from South America into Polynesian stuff, but we see things that are, that are enigmatic all around the world. And DNA is, DNA is happening so fast that I made a mistake once in a video because I, I just went with what I learned 15 years ago and 10 years ago and that's rong wrong now, but that with the DNA we are, we are able to suss certain things. But if you start from a ground point, like say for instance, you assume that this is the DNA of this culture, right? And then you start looking for other ways that, that, that they bred out into other places and stuff. You're starting from an assumption that that is the way that these people worth, they can only go back so far with what they test. The margin of error gets wider and wider and the world's been in contact for a long time. Like one of the things that is true, it's not as inaccurate now as it was years ago, but one of the things I put in that video that was true was when they test a, say they test a Native American today and they find European DNA, they assume that that's, that's post Columbian DNA, for obvious reasons. But that does also say that if they were to test Native American and find pre Columbian DNA that was the Old World, they would assume that it was not pre Columbian. They would Assume that it was post Columbian. So when they look at these things, there's already a framework, already a worldview attached to it. And so the margin of error on some of these things can be thousands of years. But they'll slide it into where it fits because this is where it fits. And that's not to pick on them about that. There are places I will pick on them all day long and I won't pick on them about this because this is a new science and they're trying to reconcile it with what we already know. But to use it as a stick to beat Atlantis off the table, it's a little premature. There's so many things at least get the margin of error down into a couple hundred years before we can really get too crazy with it. And then again, there's a lot of just degradation. We can't even test those Easter island heads that I told you about. When they tested the Easter Islanders for DNA, they had to go around the world into all these different museums. And this is assuming that the providence and all this stuff is good. You know, at the Met, again on the museum, a lot of the things would say reportedly found at this place in 1842. Reportedly found, psych. Not was found. So they didn't trust their source. Right. Obviously.
- [126:36]
Mark
Interesting. So yeah, you got to trust that the place that things are claimed to have been found are actually where they were found. And when we're dealing with specifically, so much has happened in the last five, 600 years. Right. A thousand year margin of error is the decisive point to rewrite all of history.
- [126:53]
Dan Richards
Oh yeah, it's huge.
- [126:54]
Mark
And if we go back, even looking at Gobekli Tepe, people will be like, yeah, maybe it's around 10,000 to 12,000 years old. And we're looking at a 2,000 thousand year margin of error. And that 2,000 years is like from the time of Christ to now, you.
- [127:07]
Dan Richards
Know, so yeah, that's huge.
- [127:08]
Mark
Like as we go farther back, our we're much more liberal with, you know, those ranges. And then you go to dating the Earth and people be like, yeah, the earth is 2 billion years or maybe 4 billion years. You're like, what? That's, what the hell, you can't have that big of a window. Especially when, you know, as we get closer to modernity, we're looking at these very, very thin, thin lines. And yeah, I guess the DNA evidence just doesn't exist in that same way. I mean, is it possible to look at like animal migrations or like animal DNA?
- [127:37]
Dan Richards
They do a lot of that as well. That one can get tricky because of human intervention. We're pretty good at the animals that we mess with. We're pretty good at messing with. We can influence their migration pretty fast and we can influence their genetics pretty easily as well. But that could be some of what that whole masters of the animals thing was about, was about the beginnings of animal domestication for food. You know, dogs obviously were. I know, I know, I'm going to make some people mad. But dogs were eaten and back in the day, guys, sorry, they were your friend. That was also your food, right? You don't eat your kid. First eat your dog, then your kid. But the. As we domesticated more and more things, like we would find that most of them weren't nearly as useful as dogs, for example, but they would still be good for food. We just had to kind of put them in a corral and keep an eye on them. And so the genetics there would also be a little bit. It all gets dicey. I looked into rice pretty hard and it's so convoluted because there's so many different things that go back and forth and make it look like it could have been domesticated and then went back to the wild and domesticated again, but maybe not. The DNA stuff is interesting, it's compelling and it's a good science. So I don't want your viewers to hear me saying these stuff and say, he's thinking it's a junk science, it's great science. But the problem is it's still very much in its early days. We're still not there yet. And some guys are just trying to use it as a stick to just be like, no, you can't have anything that the DNA doesn't account for. And it's like, dude, you guys even come close to testing everything yet. We're not even close to being at accurate enough with us to make those kinds of statements. It's honestly, if I may quickly side with that, that's one of the things that I look for when I look for a scientist that is not being. Not acting as a scientist. It's not complicated, it's not tricky. But it's a simple tell. Scientists say it like this. You know, all the evidence currently indicates that this model is accurate. We don't know for sure, but we think that this is what the sea peoples consisted of. And we think that they came and this is what. Why we think that when a scientist says we can know for a fact that this did not happen, we know for certain that this is what happened at that point. They're not being a scientist, they're telling you a story. Now there might be a thousand one reasons they're telling you a story, but they're telling you a story. It's no longer scientific. They're no longer putting it in a scientific pill. So when I hear that, I immediately realize that I'm not being talked to by a scientist anymore. I don't care what his credentials are. He's just put his lab coat on the ground and he's standing on a soapbox for whatever reason.
- [130:25]
Mark
Yeah. And I think the inverse is also true. Right. Like if you have like, you know, alternative history, researcher that's saying, you know definitively the pyramids were made for this reason, the same type of skepticism should jump up.
- [130:36]
Dan Richards
I completely agree.
- [130:37]
Mark
You can't say it's a power plant just because you looked at something da da da da da. It's an interesting theory and hypothesis to explore, but yeah, I'm, I feel the same way. I sort of have a general aversion to certainty and this for regard with.
- [130:50]
Dan Richards
You know, I'm with you there. I, I get on. I have a lot of followers that say exactly that sort of thing. Do we know for a fact that it was. I've got a video on those, the stone nubs. Right. And yeah, one of my best. It's my most watched long form videos.
- [131:05]
Mark
Which is a great theory. I, I thought, I thought it was, I thought it was really, really interesting. Would you mind just, you know, I don't want to detail.
- [131:11]
Dan Richards
You're fine, you're fine. Yeah, we got time. It's basically that they were just used as like a fish fixing points for a framework for them to build a frame to cut the stones at a certain thing.
- [131:22]
Mark
Sorry. Before getting to the, to the explanation, what are these nubs? Where do they exist and why are they significant?
- [131:28]
Dan Richards
These nubs are all over the world. Egypt, South America, China, North America, but northern Europe, on a megalithic wall, you'll see a nub. Like there's a yo. There's just a protrusion on the wall that looks. Some of them look like they may well have been shells, but some of them really don't have any functional use. And then you look at it and you're like, unless you're leaving this there for somebody to be able to break into the castle at night, I'm kind of worried, wondering what's going on here. But.
- [132:02]
Mark
And to add to the mystery they're typically found with, you know, on these structures that are perfectly, perfectly linked together. Like, you know, some of these structures, like even people have hypothesized that they're geopolymers, like you had mentioned before, some type of early primitive concrete, just because of how perfectly these sort of shapes lock in together. And so despite that perfection, there are these weird aberrations and protrusions that exist for some unknown reason.
- [132:28]
Dan Richards
For some unknown reason, yeah. And so my thinking is that these were used as basically anchor points for them to carve their stones, that they would carve each stone to fit so that it's perfectly fit like that, and that this would be basically a guide. There's a thing called a pointing machine that sculptors use. And it's just. It's complicated little armature with a stick and stuff. But it's used to measure depth, and it's used to mark to copy statues. So they'll take this and they'll attach it to a big wooden frame, and they'll put it where they want to mark the thing, and then they'll bring it back. So I think that they were doing something like that with this framework or with those nubs and those. They would make a framework to cut a rock to. But then every time you pick it up and bring it back, it's going to be slightly different, unless you have a couple of points to fix it to. And that's why these nubs frequently show up in pairs together. The two of stabilize it. And now you've got a way to move this framework back and forth interest.
- [133:28]
Mark
So you can almost think of it as, you know, two puzzle pieces on either side, and there's an empty space space in the middle. You got to cut out a stone to fit between these two puzzle pieces. And you could eyeball it and go over to a stone, and that's some quarry somewhere that might be 10 miles away. And you can cut the stone out and just hope you get it right. You can take exact measurements and then hope that your measurements are exactly right. Or you could create literally a wooden frame and get this wooden frame in between your two puzzle pieces, sketch out exactly what the stencil should be, and then you take that wooden frame with you, lay it on the stone, and then you have a perfect cookie cutter of how to make the stone. But how do you make sure that that frame doesn't move even a centimeter? You have to fix it down. And how do you fix it down is you carve down these little. These nubs and use that as a type of, you know, tent pole to make sure that your. Your stencil doesn't move.
- [134:18]
Dan Richards
Exactly. Yeah. And just to be clear. Yes. To the people in the comments, I know that this wood moves and stuff. If you look at how they make a pointing machine, they glue the piss out tons of effort into nailing and making sure that that wood will not move. And so it's, it's part of the thing. But it's. This is, this is a technology they use. The Romans copied a ton of Greek statues. As a matter of fact, if you go into a lot of museums and you see a Greek statue, odds are it's a Roman statue. That's a reproduction of a Greek statue. And they did it with pointing machines.
- [134:53]
Mark
So technology is old.
- [134:55]
Dan Richards
This technology is ancient. Yeah, I mean, they got a lot better in the. They got a lot better in the middle ages, the 1700s, I think it was when they made the, like the what the modern pointing machine is during the Renaissance. But hell, even it's one of the things I was happy to get a picture of at the Met was there's a picture of an Egyptian head and it's got little red lines where they're graphing it out like an old kid's coloring book. And it tells you to copy each square to copy an image. They have that on this drawing with those red lines that they were going to erase and they never did on this one when you. Pretty obvious they would be doing that kind of stuff on statues and whatnot as well, you know, it's. So it was interesting to see. I was happy to get a better picture of the one online.
- [135:41]
Mark
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, it's a fascinating theory. These, these nubs. And so you had brought this up specifically because you were making a point.
- [135:48]
Dan Richards
Yeah, well, the stone nubs, despite my video being named the true purposes of megalithic stone. But stone nubs, totally not. Not clickbait. I'm clear that I don't know for sure. Right. But the comments are full of people that are like, you can tell by looking at it. It's. This is a geopolymers. This is. You could tell by looking at it. These were poured and this is the bl. You can tell by looking at it. And I mean, okay, but like, there's an image I should. I wish I would have sent it to you. There's an image that, that I've got for this I'm going to use in an upcoming video. I posted it on my. My community tab a while back because it's hilarious. It's one of those Egyptian eyes with like this, the kind of sad look underneath it. And they got two up on the top of a Stella, right? And then it's got this little square down a little ways below that kind of looks like a mouth and somebody's holding up their phone next to it with some picture of some anime girl. And it's just, it's uncanny. They look so much the same. But it clearly. Just because it looks the same doesn't mean that it's the same thing. Guys, come on.
- [136:51]
Mark
That's funny, that's interesting.
- [136:53]
Dan Richards
But yes, this, the certainty drives me nuts on if you are certain of something, you're not going to be any good to an investigator. Sorry. I mean that's, that's like the first time I ever heard that mentality brought up was with an atheist said that said I don't care if you're religious or not, but if you say God did it in the lab, you're no longer a good researcher. And it's like, yeah, I didn't take that as stuff. Step further. Anytime you say I know where this came from, you just declared research time is done, buddy.
- [137:26]
Mark
Right? Yeah. I think verisimilitude exists on a spectrum, right. And you can say this is 99 and this is 1 and percentages out of 100. And there's very few things that I'm willing to say are 100% and I reserve those for greater moral, ethical, esoteric type universalities. But no, I think it's fair to exist on the spectrum. So speaking of the the spectrum, which way do you lean in terms of your greater hypothesis? Right. We talked a little bit about this flood myth that exists and permeates every culture, some type of sea peoples that are coming around. Obviously Graham and many other people have touted this younger Dryas impact theory. Do you see that as a higher likelihood above 50% in terms of your spectrum of problems, probability when it comes to understanding what happened to this pre.
- [138:21]
Dan Richards
Civilization, I would put that younger Dryas one, that's a tough one. If I would go over 50 or not on that. It's. So I did. Very compelling and very interesting. There's a lot of arguments against it that I've seen, but it usually seems to be coming from a bad place.
- [138:41]
Mark
Could you explain briefly just kind of what it is for people that might not.
- [138:43]
Dan Richards
Sorry. Yeah, no problem. Basically it's the idea that a comet or meteor or air burst occurred over the northern ice sheets like 12,000 years ago and created the great flood. Now in Spokane, I actually took my son through the Channel Scablands, there's a. In the middle of the state of Washington, there's a huge. They call the Channel Scablands. And it's just this huge gully of these massive floods. According to mainstream geology was like 100 times the glacial Lake Missoula filled and then it burst and it flooded through there. According to Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, this mostly came about from one big impact. But this water came rushing through there and just tore. And it is insane when you're in the area, I mean, you're like, just think that it was once at the bottom of water and you look up and it's so, so, so high. Yeah. Channel Scablaz in Washington. And you can see like that little metal in the middle of that. That little piece of ground in the middle between those is about two miles across.
- [139:47]
Mark
Wow.
- [139:48]
Dan Richards
It just looked like something you would see at the beach where water just went up and then came back out. Right, but that looks like a little.
- [139:55]
Mark
Tide, but it happens to be miles and miles long. And if you stood in the middle of that, I mean, you're probably standing down what, like a couple hundred feet or something?
- [140:02]
Dan Richards
Oh, yeah, Very, very deep. It's. Yeah, it's. It's insane. Like how deep it is is really insane. But so anyway, the water just came through there, torn everything up as a. And drained out to sea. And this created. This was basically the great flood. Right.
- [140:19]
Mark
Do they, do they put a date.
- [140:20]
Dan Richards
On this around 12,500 years or 13,000 years ago? Right. In that area.
- [140:24]
Mark
Modern archaeologists accept that that was around that time.
- [140:27]
Dan Richards
Yeah, they accepted the flood. They don't accept the young. Modern archaeologists did not accept the Younger dry.
- [140:32]
Mark
Right, but they accept that there was a flood in this region around 12,000.
- [140:35]
Dan Richards
Yeah, they would accept that. They don't accept that it was one. They accepted, they think that it was 100 smaller flood. But that's not what the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis says. Now they found, they found some evidence of. There's a black matte layer. That's the first one is there's like a layer of ash that they find in certain places in the Northern hemisphere. Skeptics say that it's no big d. Just nothing to see here. The, the comet research group says that this is indicative. Indicative of a impact. They found nano diamonds in Greenland ice cores. But that's been challenged by the skeptics. But that challenge kind of. I investigated that that challenge was kind of bullshit. Basically the idea that the great flood came from a comet. And this is so heavily fought against by mainstream academia that they even wrote like this comprehensive refutation paper like a year and a half ago. And it's so weird because the majority of names on that paper are not like geologists or, you know, have nothing to do with this. Comets or space. They're anthropologists and archaeologists for the most part. It's like, well, what do you even know about this? What are you doing with this? This isn't your field of study. Man may as well have me over there as the electrician telling you what's going on. It has nothing to do with it, but they all sign their names to it and make their good little attaboys. So it seems like a very polarized field. And I have trouble. I know a couple of the guys in the comet research group and I get along with them and I trust them, but I have trouble at the end of the day trusting the data that I get from either side very. Enough to hang my hat on it because it's so clearly contentious. They're so clearly arguing with each other, much like a. A recent freaking pandemic that we had. I just ended up being like, I don't trust any of you guys. It's just when two people. It's just like watching two parents argue over which kids danced better at the dance recital. Of course we know who you think and we know who you think. Shut up. Yeah, and that's kind of where I end up. I tend to lean towards. Towards the comet impact, I guess, but not by a lot. I would need. I need more dev. I need more, More data.
- [142:56]
Mark
So when you sort of speculate this flood and you're talking about not necessarily a global flood, but just many, you know, of the known land masses getting covered in water in some capacity, what do you think caused that?
- [143:08]
Dan Richards
That may be a comet. Maybe not. Honestly, that's something that is. I can't say for sure, but it's almost incidental because it's. If the flood happened and it wiped out an old civilization, and what we're talking about is a civilization, say they were even able to smelt copper 15,000 years ago. That really is just. That's the story. Now, how they got wiped out is interesting and I would want to know, but I'm way less concerned with that than whether or not that stuff was real. And you see that with other guys too. Graham originally had Earth crust displacement theory in his fingerprints of the guy gods. And that's the idea that the Earth is like, if you envision an orange with a peel detached from the core. And if you're swinging it on a string and then eventually the peel slips a little over the core, that's Earth crust displacement theory. That's why the idea is that the north pole and south pole aren't where they used to be because the crust shifted and they used to be located in different, different areas. And that's junk science. Now, it's been disproven, but Graham leaned on it in the 90s. But when the younger driest impact hypothesis came along, he was quick to jump on that instead because it was already junk science in the 90s, but it fit his hypothesis. And that's really a lot of what it comes down to is the people that believe that this flood happened is usually trying to. To find a thing to make it fit, like any researcher, right. If you have a hypothesis, you look for evidence to support it and evidence against it.
- [144:52]
Mark
Why is it not equally as likely that all of these cultures experienced a flood at some point in history? That might not have happened simultaneously, but, you know, the people that live in Judea and sometime they had a flood and it, you know, wiped out their crops and killed thousands of people. And the people in, you know, Peru or, you know, south Central America, they had had a flood. And, you know, everyone just has a flood story that then gets sort of codified into their, you know, local mythos.
- [145:22]
Dan Richards
There's that. That's definitely a thing. So that. That is one of the things you have to take into account when you're looking at these things. But I think the big. The big differences are in particular when they talk about the destruction of civilization. And I don't mean their civilization. I mean another one, like one usually, if it's one that was supposed to be like, even in the biblical. Biblical events, it's vague, but it talks about man pissing off God basically, and doing things wrong. The Atlantis version is the same kind of thing. Humanity had gotten bad with our hubris, and we started just not doing things right. When that part of it becomes part of the story, and I don't mean that we did things wrong, so we got it flooded. I mean, this civilization was destroyed because of that, and some other civilization reports it. That's when I tend to feel like we might. Might have something there. But, yeah, there are numerous accounts, I mean, numerous accounts throughout the world of floods, of course. And if it wipes out, I mean, look at what happened in Haiti not too long ago, something like that. How would that be recorded by those people? Right, Right, Yeah, absolutely.
- [146:29]
Mark
Especially if they have no contact with, you know, anyone else. The world ended.
- [146:33]
Dan Richards
Yeah, exactly, exactly. We, we were, we were all killed and only two of us survived. But if you were to say to that that, you know, there was no before that there was this and after that there was that, that's kind of where it seems a little bit different. Like you see a lot of stories in South America that have floods involved, but they also deal with the El Nino down there. And so the El Nino flood causes a flood. It destroys, generally speaking, destroys all of their irrigation canals and shit. So it's a big deal. And so it shows up in their mythology. But those floods tend, tends to specifically talk about the destruction of crops and not about the destruction of all society. And they don't. Those are the ones that don't seem to have like the two people hiding in a log, which you do see in some of the South American things of flood. So what you're saying is definitely accurate. And that's why when they. Well, there's over 200 flood myths in the world. I'm always like, let's roll that one back a little.
- [147:32]
Mark
Interesting. And now if you're kind of leaning more towards this, this kind of spectrum, etc, that there was much more global communication through trade and sailing and things like that after this kind of flood moment or civilization disruption. Why did it not resume in the same way after that? Or do you think it did?
- [147:53]
Dan Richards
I don't think it did. I think for a few reasons. One, you would have losses of some of the land masses and stuff. Two would be the biggest power would have drastically shifted. You could draw parallels with this potentially with the fall of Rome and how it kind of cast all of Europe into messed up times there for a while because there was just this power vacuum and people vying for their own little areas. A lot of it would be about survival too. So if you imagine all of Polynesia being connected, all these islands trading with each other and then flood comes and swallows up a bunch of them. And so some of them are gone, some of them are much smaller. The ones that used to be the one that you would fish at is probably not the best place to fish anymore. The one we used to catch crabs. There ain't no crab there now.
- [148:41]
Mark
And the local leadership dies potentially.
- [148:44]
Dan Richards
So if you're on a place where things are working good, why would you leave, Right? So to me it seems like there would be. The world would have been cast into a bit of a survival mode and a lot of warlordy type of things probably popped up in those Days and stuff. But that's just, you know, you're pretty speculative, but we can draw, again, parallels with, like, the fall of Rome to see some of the same kind of things happening.
- [149:09]
Mark
Now, in your research, are there any other sites that exist now that you feel like are not discussed or are underappreciated?
- [149:17]
Dan Richards
Not discussed, I would say, as far as sites go, there's one place that is. It's been investigated and stuff. But the story attached to it is what really gets me. Namelap is N a Y M L A P. It was a group of indigenous people in South America, and they built a couple of pyramids. But what's interesting was their story. They showed up on boats with this giant green statue idol thing, and it was really hard to move this big rock, but they moved it and they built a pyramid or two for it to house the thing. And it would be like there was. They established their little community, and they set up this pyramid. And then generations go by, and one of the kings decides he wants to relocate the statue, but he doesn't know how to move it. That's one of the first things that's always interesting is you get these reports of, my grandpa moved this big rock, but I can't. Can't do it. That always makes me perk up a little bit. What are we talking about? Why are we talking about that? How did that come to be?
- [150:27]
Mark
It's called namelap.
- [150:29]
Dan Richards
Yeah. N A Y M L A P. There's some of their artifacts, and, yeah, the legend, they're pretty underspoken of. Like, I made a video about it, and if you look up name lap on YouTube, most of it's a band that carries that name from. That's like a Peruvian flute band, like, south park style. Right. But they. The thing about the story that I found the most fascinating was that he couldn't move that Couldn't move the rock. So he wants to, but he ends up, like, being seduced by a demon. And then the demon helps. Instead of helping him move the rock, she makes it flood and everything. And then they end up throwing him into the water and killing him. Now, I think that that flood that they reference, I do think that that is an El Nino flood. And I'm not the only one that thinks that. There's a lot of reasons. It talks about the crops being wiped out and they threw the guy into the water. Well, if the whole world was flooded out, you couldn't really throw your keen into the water. He'd be underwater already. But the Story incorporating that. It's the same thing you see with Sacsayhuaman, those big rocks there. There's a story from a guy, Garcileso de la Vega. His dad was a Spanish conquistador, his mother was an Inca noblewoman. So he had a little access that other people didn't have on both sides of the fence. And one of the things that he wrote about was them moving the rock, trying to move a big rock to match the fortress up there. And it took like 30,000 people and it fell and killed like 3,000 of them, which, the story seems a little outlandish, but they're moving a rock that's the same size as a bunch of the other ones that are already at that fortress. And that didn't get recorded as a bunch of people being smashed, each rock they put there. So it's twice in South America where you have these stories of people trying to move a rock that their ancestors could have done and they can't do.
- [152:25]
Mark
We have these rocks still to this day.
- [152:28]
Dan Richards
We do. The Stone of Many Tears, they call the one or something, but it's a big one. I forget the exact name. But yeah, Stone of Many Tears maybe. Hopefully it's. Yeah, crap. But yeah, it's in Sacsayhuaman. I think it's this one. One right there on the far right there.
- [152:48]
Mark
But I mean, these are huge. There's no person for scale here, but.
- [152:52]
Dan Richards
No, those are gigantic. Yeah, those are.
- [152:54]
Mark
I mean, even this one in the middle there.
- [152:56]
Dan Richards
Yeah, many, many.
- [152:57]
Mark
You can see a person. Wow. 125 stone ton stone, perfectly placed.
- [153:04]
Dan Richards
Yeah, it's pretty. Sacsay woman is an amazing site. It really is. There's not. It's enigmatic when you look at the size of those stones, how well they're fit together and everything. I mean, know they can say, well, this is something you could easily do. But the amount, the sheer amount of labor involved in that would have made that so. So ridiculously, even going through what I said with the stone nub thing and stuff, you, you know, you talk a hundred hours to carve each one of those rocks, minimum, then you got to move them. And then, you know, it's just this is a lot of work.
- [153:36]
Mark
Do they know where the quarry for Saxe Humanis?
- [153:39]
Dan Richards
I believe that they do, but I could be wrong there. I believe that they, that they, that they do, but there's a lot of these things are under tested down there. Sadly, this is a real big problem in that part of the world is the science is just not done nearly as Thorough as it. As it wants to be and it. As we would like to see it. And what does get done, generally speaking, is not at all catering to the alternate history crowd. They give zero shits what we want to know.
- [154:02]
Mark
So could you keep scrolling here? I'd be so curious to see like, other. Other views of it. And they're suggesting it was a fortress.
- [154:09]
Dan Richards
Oh, yes, The Sehuaman was almost certainly a fortress. The Inca held up there at the end. This is in Cusco. Right. And the Inca royal family held up in Cusco at the end there was. The siege of Cusco was basically the end of it. The Spanish took up the fortress and the Inca surrounded them and were sieging them, and they eventually just gave up and walked. Walked away. And most historians say that that was the. The last chance that they had to oust them. Wow. Because the Spanish, they didn't just give them walk away. The Spanish, like busted a hole through and were like trying to. But the Inca pretty much confined him and stuff. They got a little resources, but the Inca had confined them. But then eventually they just gave up and moved to a different city. And when they did that, it was pretty much the end of it.
- [154:58]
Mark
I mean, that's. It's just stunning how big these stones are.
- [155:01]
Dan Richards
Oh, man. And this is the place where they just found those tunnels. One of them connects the Temple of the sun with Sacsahuaman and the Temple of the Sun. If you read about the Inca being looted, that was the one where they were ripping the gold off the walls. That's the one that was just covered in gold and they were just peeling gold off the walls. So those tunnels, man, like we were talking before we filmed those tunnels, people have known for a long time, but just in the last five minutes, literally this year, January of this year, archaeologists announced that they found the things. And it's like, well, 15 years ago, you could have had a guided tour of that place by a freaking local guide. He'd have took you down there. And 500 years ago, that same Garcia Leslie de la Vega guy wrote about running around in those tunnels as a youth. We played in them. We were scared. We tied a rope to our tummy, we played in the tunnels, and just now we find them. And the reason is because the same time that the 1930s, 1920s, when archaeology was just becoming a strong science, this part of the world where people were just starting to do a lot of digging and stuff, and people like Edgar Cayce and Madame Blavatsky were like, oh, those tunnels down there that's part of Atlantis. So archaeology just kind of turned up a nose at it. We have a guy in the 2000s that did ground penetrating radar found those tunnels. But he believes in a lost mother culture, a lost ancient mother civilization. He believes in hyper diffusionism, which is a fancy word for Atlantis. Right? Diffusionism. Cultural diffusion. Right. Hyper diffusionism means one culture spread out to everything. Since he believes in that, they rejected his findings. And so again, the Temple of the sun was connected to Sacsayhuaman by tunnels. So while they're alluding that, you. You know, these tunnels were being used to hide things, and, you know, people were hidden there and anything that they could get that they wanted to save from the Spanish, and they've had 450 freaking years to loot that thing. And the last hundred, there's no excuse for that. First 350, okay? But the last hundred years, there is no excuse for it except for hubris. Archaeologists did not want to accept that some crackpot could be right about anything.
- [157:15]
Mark
Wow. And I imagine now these tunnels probably don't have anything in them.
- [157:18]
Dan Richards
Well, we'll find out when they excavate them, because they haven't done. Done that yet. But I'm pretty sure that all the good. I'm sure all the good stuff's gone. I mean, long 100 years ago, 50 years ago, there were people that wanted the shit from those tunnels. There's. There's alternate historians that were interested in this stuff. There's locals that knew it existed. All it takes is a local figuring out there's a market, and that stuff's just gonna.
- [157:40]
Mark
Wow. And how long are these tunnels? Like, do you know how extensive, huge.
- [157:46]
Dan Richards
If you look, look, look up. If you got Sac Se who Aman still up there. Just look up. Tunnels.
- [157:52]
Mark
Wow.
- [157:53]
Dan Richards
That shows one of the. One of the shots of. Of the tunnels. And look at how. I mean, that's. That's ridiculous. Look at how huge that is. And there's. There's other ones. There's a network that's like. It's there. It connects the, like, the three biggest places there, but it also connects a whole bunch of sports, smaller places too. And the fact that they were afraid to go in without tying a rope to themselves tells me it's probably not just a straight shot from one spot to the next. It's probably a labyrinth down there. It's probably all kinds of cool. It's probably one of those sites like we were talking about, where it's been sacred for a long time, built on over and over and over and over.
- [158:32]
Mark
Wow. I mean, this must be miles. Like, we're looking at a city here. And assuming these blocks are similar to, you know, a New York City block, again, I don't know know, but I mean, you're looking at probably 10 blocks even just on, like, the mainland, you know, and then going off into the countryside, probably another couple. I mean, this looks like maybe a couple miles long. Two, three or something big.
- [158:52]
Dan Richards
Yeah, I think three miles is. It sounds about right.
- [158:55]
Mark
Wow.
- [158:55]
Dan Richards
But yeah, it's.
- [158:56]
Mark
And you could stand up straight in these tunnels. You gotta, like, crawl.
- [158:59]
Dan Richards
I think you. I. At least the ones that Garcia Lesso de la Vega spoke of, you could stand up. And he said that they didn't have arches, that they had wooden cross beams and that they would run through them as kids and stuff. So.
- [159:09]
Mark
Wow.
- [159:10]
Dan Richards
Yeah, it's crazy, and it's sad to me to think, like, we lose so much of that part of the world to history because of the conquistadors. They just destroyed things, like, willy nilly and deliberately. And then the little bit that we get to save, the tiny little bit that we get to save, it's like an extra hundred years of seeing it looted, of seeing it lost for no reason. You know, the Society for American Archaeology, when it started its bylaws, one of the things that it said was that they are interested in helping interested amateurs when they request it. So that's when interested amateurs get involved and they're told, basically, we don't. We're not interested. We don't care what you're interested in. They're missing the boat. And not just in. We lose tunnels, we lose finds. But they're also missing the boat in their own damn funding, man. I mean, like, Carl Sagan took a lot of flack for going around and talking to lay people about astronomy, especially when he would cater to the UFO guys, right? The guys would be like, well, so what kind. If there's a civilization near Alpha Centauri, what kind of technology could you assume them to have? And you can see in Sagan's face, he's, oh, God, I know, man. But he'll say, well, you know, that star's been around about another 1.4 billion years than ours, so therefore we could expect them to have much better technology, assuming that they hadn't destroyed themselves or falling prey to a natural disaster. He catered to the son of a bitch. And then he feeds them a little science. He's like, here's your little alien pill. Put a little science in there. Go ahead and Eat that. And funding went up for a bunch of things for astronomy. And he became super freaking popular when I was a kid, man. Star wars and space and all that shit was like. That was the stuff stuff, right? Well, that a lot. Carl Sagan was part of that reason, not the only reason. He was part of that. He rode the cultural zeitgeist, helped form it. And as a result, the public today knows a lot more about astronomy than we did 30 or 40 years ago compared to what science does. Like, we are more educated on modern astronomy than we used to be. He generated interest. But archeology, despite the fact that they'll go on Joe Rogan with the freaking fedora on their head, knowing that this is Indiana Jones that I'm catering to, you guys like to think of us as Indiana Jones. They don't want to look for lost Arks of the Covenant. They don't want to look for anything cool. They want to keep it lame and boring. And archaeology is not lame and boring. Okay, maybe not to you, Mr. Scientist, but stratigraphy is fucking boring. I'm sorry, I do not. That's fun. When I'm reading, doing research, I know what to look for. As far as a lay guy goes, it does a YouTube zone on this stuff. It's. I'm not. Not versed in it, but it's not exciting.
- [161:59]
Mark
We want to be in the tunnels, dude.
- [162:01]
Dan Richards
I want to be in the tunnels that. Show me the stratigraphy of the tunnels. Now we're talking. Yeah, but it's. Instead, they want to. They want to keep a real archaeologies, as Flint likes to say. And it's like, I mean, that's all fine and good, but now you're. They're crying about funding being lost all across all these different things right now. And it's like, you are killing the interest in this. If you guys said, hey, man, let's go check out these tunnels. Let's finance. Let's finance. You guys want to talk about Gobekli Tepe? Let's finance an expedition over there and we'll see if we can dig up another spot. We'll do this instead. It's. It's a complete. When Jimmy Corsetti asked why they hadn't dug more at Gobekli Tepe and why they were putting concrete on places and why they were planting trees on places, John Hoopes, the archaeologist, that is the one that Graham Hancock originally wanted to debate. John Hoopes posted on Twitter. And I'm sure it was supposed to be tongue in cheek, but this is the kind of PR nightmare these guys are. I think Gobekli Tepe has been excavated enough. Archaeologists have plenty to work with. I wouldn't have a problem with them encasing the entire site in concrete and building a visitor center like they have for the caves in France. It's like, dude, you got an. So in the modern social media world, we have pseudoarchaeologist Jimmy Coretti advocating for digging more, doing more archaeology, and we have real archaeologist John Hoop saying, we don't want to do any more archaeology.
- [163:30]
Mark
Yeah, yeah. It doesn't bizarro land. It doesn't play well. I mean, and actually, I mean to, to give credit, I know you've made a couple videos about him, but Milo, many Minutemen, I, I actually enjoy watching his stuff because I do think, you know, he comes from a more mainstream archaeological perspective. But I like that he's going to go back to Tepe and he's talking about it and he's looking into it and he's giving his assessment as someone that, you know, studied archaeology. And I like getting his perspective as well as other perspectives. So in that regard, I'm like, yeah, I kind of like. And I like that there's discourse and that, you know, you can challenge his ideas, he can challenge your ideas, and that it can exist in a, you know, in sort of a diplomatic way. But I guess to suggest, suggest that less archaeology be done, that seems to go in the face of good faith.
- [164:13]
Dan Richards
Researcher. Yeah, it's sad. Me and Milo used to get along a lot better, actually, before the whole Flint Dibble thing, the whole debate, for those of your viewers who aren't aware, Flint Dibble and Graham Hancock had a debate, and I exposed Flint for lying a bunch on that debate. And after that, archaeologists don't like me anymore. None of them. I used to have a lot of them that were my friends, but none of them like me anymore. The ones that do will not tell me, not tell anybody in public. I feel like I'm on Blazing Saddles. We'll talk to you in private. Further. We'll take it, buddy. But it's funny, but I used to get along pretty good with Milo Rossi. But it was actually when he, his response to that whole thing, when he was like, basically said that Flint's defending himself against a bunch of lies. And it's like, well, I'm the one saying those words. You're calling me a liar. And then when I, when I, I reached out to him about that a little bit and he got, he got a little upset and then he decided he didn't want to follow me anymore. It's like, all right, well, I guess that is what it is. It's fine. But I, I like have. Being able to have conversations with people that are disagree with me and have an open mind. But that's honestly, it's kind of a sad thing, man. It's like I, like I mentioned you before we shot like Christopher Dunn, who. For those of you who aren't aware, Christopher Dunn is a, He's a pyramidiate of the old school genre. He's the first guy to really talk about electric pyramid hypothesis and he's the first guy to really talk about those vases being symmetrical and precise. And he's really the guy that kicked off the ancient Egypt had high tech stuff and in modern times anyway. And when me and him, like, we've talked once on my channel and we talk on the phone a few times and we've had a few discussions and basically he's happy because I don't agree with him on everything. But I'm. I will give him an honest challenge, honest discussion on this stuff and not just knee jerk into you're stupid because you believe this and not just be like, oh yeah man, great idea. I love what you just said there. This is great. Chris. Instead of. And he's the fact that I have a GED and then I'm a construction worker by trade and I have to deal. I mean, that he has to wait for somebody like me to come along because he can't find a fair shake from academia is grotesque. I mean, if he could easily be. If his stuff is just all bullshit. Woo. It should be very easy for an academic to spit down and spend six months of their life having a discussion with the guy on YouTube or in through correspondence of some sort and prove it. But instead they just mock him. They just point and laugh. This is clearly stupid. Well, okay, fine, let's talk about it then. Nope, that's. And this is where they'll get mad and say, you know, if it looks like a duck. But that's, that's a great idea to have if you're talking to somebody on the street. But science doesn't get that privilege. Science has to investigate every single effing avenue. Or it should be quiet about that avenue. So when they haven't investigated it and they say this is how it is again, I just ain't science, man. It's just, that's just ideology masquerade. An ideology in a lab coat.
- [167:20]
Mark
Yeah, I'll be interested to See what happens from these, these findings in the tunnels. And I wonder. I wonder if they do discover more tunnels and. And what comes of. Of this specific. This is an exciting site. This is cool.
- [167:30]
Dan Richards
It is, thanks. Yeah, I love that site. I'm. They did lidar, so they know a lot of the tunnels, but if they got tunnels going underneath, tunnels and stuff down there, who knows? Yeah.
- [167:40]
Mark
And this gian. That they don't know how to move.
- [167:43]
Dan Richards
That they didn't know how to move. Yeah. They recorded as dropping, like I said, killing a bunch of people. And Cusco was like where the Temple of the sun used to sit. Now is a Catholic church on top of. Or maybe it was a Jesuit church, but anyway.
- [167:58]
Mark
And that makes sense, right? Like you take the old sites and you build new sites on them.
- [168:02]
Dan Richards
Exactly. But it is one of the most. One of the coolest places down there. Peru, Bolivia, that part of the world, that Aymara part of the world. That's just an interesting, interesting place to me.
- [168:14]
Mark
You've given us enough. But I'm curious, are there any other sites that you'd want to talk about before we sign off?
- [168:19]
Dan Richards
Baalbek.
- [168:20]
Mark
Yeah.
- [168:20]
Dan Richards
You talked about Baalbek much before.
- [168:21]
Mark
No, no, but I listened to you and Jimmy talking about it with Joe.
- [168:25]
Dan Richards
All right, cool.
- [168:26]
Mark
Baalbek is fascinating. Can we pull this up, Gabe?
- [168:29]
Dan Richards
Baalbek, Trilithon will be the ones you want to see.
- [168:34]
Mark
This is a site that is in modern day Lebanon that many people believed was built by the Romans.
- [168:41]
Dan Richards
Yes, well, the Romans definitely did a lot of building there. But this platform here is underneath all these temples and stuff. And those are the three biggest stones installed in a wall, like, ever. Those are so doggone big. The one there where the guy's standing on a stone. The Wikipedia won the second one over, where it's just a stone in the ground. That gives you an idea of just how big those stones. Stones are. They. We have three more that were carved to that were in the ground that haven't been installed, but that's how big those stones are.
- [169:16]
Mark
And we do have an estimated weight.
- [169:18]
Dan Richards
I forget the numbers, but it's. It's absurd. It's like a thousand, fifteen hundred tons, something crazy like that. It's it. But what's really not. What's the most interesting about it to me, the trilithon is there's 30ft off the ground, right? Those stones are 30, 30ft up. Now, these ones that are in the ground, the three. There's three that they quarried and left in the ground. That are huge like that. Now, the Romans always built things symmetrically. So if you had three stones here that were gigantic, they would want three stones here that were gigantic. But that wall didn't have it. So my thinking is that the Romans came to this site and that this buildings were already there. The platform, that base building, now they're going to build on it. And they can't have the locals thinking that their great grandfather was better than the dang Romans. So they're going to steal this platform, they're going to make it theirs. In order to do that, they're going to put those three big stones in there to make it match and to make it look Roman. So they have them quarried. And then guy shows up and is tasked with moving the stones and he's with what? We can't move them this big. Cut these in half. Dude, you're crazy. So I think that's what happened as a little bit more evidence for that. The three stones that are in the wall do not use the Roman unit of measurement, the Roman foot, but the three stones on the ground do. So to me, that's the smoking gun for these were made by two different cultures.
- [170:40]
Mark
Interesting. So the Roman foot is a specific unit of measurement done by the Romans.
- [170:44]
Dan Richards
Exactly. Like if you were to go to, like I said earlier, we have 16 inch bases on our studs. If you went to a house in Germany, they would be not 16 inches, it would be centimeters. Right. So you could use the unit of measurement and determine was this built by a European builder or by an American builder?
- [171:00]
Mark
Interesting. And so but the stones are roughly the same size.
- [171:04]
Dan Richards
Yes, they're almost exactly the same size.
- [171:06]
Mark
And so are there markings on the stones to indicate that one is with Roman foot and the other one is with a different unit of measurement?
- [171:11]
Dan Richards
No, it's by. By. Those are done, Those markings were done by. By the person. By Photoshop. That's the word. Sure. No, there's no markings on them to show that, but it's can just be deduced by. By measurements, measuring them out. You know, it's like so many Roman feet and then you look at the Roman units of measurement. I don't remember all the specifics, but they were specific. Like we use quarters and eights and halves and they had specific things like that that they would use. And I think one of them was like a third. But there were specific ones that they would use and they show up in the one set of measurements.
- [171:46]
Mark
So the three that are in the. In the quarry are. Hypothetically, let's say, you know, 50 Roman feet, and the three that are, you know, actually placed would be, you know, 48 and a half Roman feet.
- [171:56]
Dan Richards
Exactly.
- [171:57]
Mark
You're like, oh, they're almost exactly the same, but. But for whatever reason, these are shorter or longer in some way.
- [172:02]
Dan Richards
You know, this one looks like it was measured with millimeters, and this one looks like it was measured with inches for a metaphor. Right.
- [172:08]
Mark
And so the ones that are. That are actually in here, they're. They're elevated.
- [172:13]
Dan Richards
Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. That's 30ft off the ground to the bottom of them, off. Off of where the original ground layer level was.
- [172:20]
Mark
Wow. And what is this place? Like, what is the.
- [172:23]
Dan Richards
That is where Baalbek's a city out in Lebanon. And it was. It's kind of enigmatic. It has the largest Temple of Jupiter out of any Roman city. It has some of the biggest temples, period. I mean, it's the biggest architecture. But not only are there no real written records of those massive constructions, it's not. It's not a backwater, but it's certainly no cultural. Cultural center. It's no Cairo. It's kind of off in Lebanon and not even in, like, Beirut or. Yeah, it's not a cultural center.
- [172:55]
Mark
Is it near a port?
- [172:56]
Dan Richards
I don't believe so. I'm pretty sure it's just kind of there. Yeah, it's not. I'm pretty sure, almost certain it's not near a port, but yeah. There was a trade city back in the day, but not a big one. It wasn't one that was well known for being. Being. It's not well written about. We don't have records of it for a reason. You know, it's. It's. If it was in any other city, almost any other city, we would probably have some records. But again, having the largest temple of Jupiter, having those kinds of things, to me, that just reeks of that Roman. You are not going to have. Nobody's better than us. Your dad built bigger rocks. No, he didn't. We did it. And that's. That's. I very much think that's what's at work there. And that's speculative, but I think Jimmy.
- [173:39]
Mark
Was even saying that these stones are in the back of this kind of area. They are, despite being the three most significant stones of the site and maybe even of the region and maybe even of the known world at that time, they're kind of positioned in a pretty innocuous, pedantic kind of place.
- [173:56]
Dan Richards
Another reason to say that it probably wasn't Romans, if You just look up what basic Roman architecture, what signs to look for. One of the things they'll tell you is to look for, for the most impressive features right smack dab in your face when you walk in, for obvious reasons, we want you to feel same as a cathedral. You feel small when you walk in here. If that was Romans that built that stuff, those stones would be dominating the entryway and you would be staring down at. You would be feeling tiny and you would feel the power of Rome when you walked in there by looking at those stones. But instead they're put on the backside where nobody goes and nobody would have gone back then even it's not, it's the ass end of the building, there's no reason to be back.
- [174:43]
Mark
And do they possess some type of important structural feature? Do they hold up something? Are they some type of keystone?
- [174:49]
Dan Richards
No, no, they're just, they're just three. I mean, if you could look at, if you look at the wall, you can see that the ones below them are even smaller.
- [174:58]
Mark
Yeah, I don't see the point. Like why.
- [175:00]
Dan Richards
Yeah, it's weird. There is no point. It's almost like they just did it because they could or just because it wasn't that big of a deal or something. It's so weird to have it there.
- [175:10]
Mark
So what do you think, giants?
- [175:12]
Dan Richards
No, I don't think giants, but I do think it's that we had means to do things like that. That was a lot somehow. And I don't know what the means would be, but somehow we were a lot better at moving big rocks back in the day than we are now. And again, that makes sense to me. I mean, we don't really try to move big rocks much nowadays, landscaping and shit. Right. But back in the day, man, it seems like they were pretty damn good at that stuff. They could stack a whole mess of them or they could move ones so big that like the Romans had a problem with it, in my opinion. And we see a lot of sites like that, you know, like we were just looking at Sacsayhuaman. Well, you look at that and you're like, how many? And then it's not just one rock, man, it's over and over and over and over and over and over.
- [175:57]
Mark
Now, are we crazy to think, you know, in the way that the, the, the Easter island heads, what are they called again?
- [176:03]
Dan Richards
The Moai.
- [176:03]
Mark
The Moai. So I mean, you know, we've seen kind of images of them kind of walking the Moai with ropes and things like that, which I, it seems plausible to Me?
- [176:10]
Dan Richards
Absolutely.
- [176:10]
Mark
I mean, could they have done a similar thing with these giant stones and sort of walked them over and then dropped them on?
- [176:15]
Dan Richards
Not with these ones are too. You. I don't think you're going to be able to elevate them. Right. They're really long. Like we saw the one on the ground. It's just a really long rectangle. So standing it up would be like standing in obelisk and walking it. I don't think that's feasible as much as, I mean like the way they move obelisks is encase them in something round and roll them. But that. And that could be how they would do something like this would be. But the problem is becomes down to the, to the weight and with the materials available to move it with. Like we talked about when I was on Joe Rogan with me and Jim talked about a little bit the metallurgy involved. And during Catherine the Great's time in like the late 1700s, they moved a stone called the thunderstone. And it's a tiny bit bigger than those rocks at Baalbek and not much, I mean like maybe 20 tons, which is. Isn't much when you're talking a thousand tons. But they, when they moved it, they had to use iron jacks, iron screw jacks. So you would screw them up and they would also use brass bearings and iron rails to roll this all on. And they constantly were having trouble with the. The bearings breaking and they would have to retool them better. Better metallurgy. And this was the time of the first iron bridges, the first iron real. It was being used structurally like structural steel was becoming a thing. And even then, barely were they able to pull it off with metallurgy. So I don't see him doing it with wood. I don't see them doing it with. With the crappy metal that they had available to them at, at the time during the Roman era. So I don't think we can look to that. As for our solution, it was something different than what they were doing.
- [177:57]
Mark
Do you have any unsubstantiated hypothesis?
- [178:01]
Dan Richards
I do not. I wish that I could say, but I really don't. I know it sucks. I wish I could give you a better answer, but I need more evidence. That's what I want, more information. I want them to send the people out there with the letters next to of their name to go out there and be serious with this shit. Instead of being like, well the Romans did it. Back it up and call home. No, no, go out there and do your damn job, boys. Come on.
- [178:23]
Mark
So, giants until further notice. That's what I'm going.
- [178:26]
Dan Richards
Okay.
- [178:27]
Mark
Thank you so much, Dan. I really appreciate it. It was great. This was a lot of fun.
- [178:30]
Dan Richards
I enjoyed it.
- [178:31]
Mark
Yeah. Yeah. This was awesome. Thank you so much. Hopefully this sparks an interest in people looking more into history with an open mind and having good faith exploration to get to the truth, whatever that may be.
- [178:41]
Dan Richards
Yeah, you know that's right.
- [178:43]
Mark
If it's some type of lost technology, then so be it. And if it's something innocuous like, you know, the Romans figuring it out, then let it be the case. But yeah, the pursuit of truth is admirable and I appreciate you doing that.
- [178:53]
Dan Richards
Well, thanks. I really appreciate you bringing me out here, Mark. This has been great, man. I really appreciate talking to you. This has been fun.
- [178:58]
Mark
Awesome. Let's do it again. If you've made it to the end of this episode, you are clearly someone who understands that beneath every historical event lies a deeper truth waiting to be uncovered. You're the type of person who knows that real history is more fascinating than any fiction. And we deeply appreciate that about you. I'll be honest, that's exactly why I personally invite you to sign up for Today in History, our free newsletter that goes beyond the surface of historical events. We dive into the stories that textbooks never told you, the secrets that challenge the course of nations, and the forgotten tales that deserve to be remembered. Let's continue, continue this journey of discovery together. Take the conversation from your headphones into your inbox. Sign up now through the QR code or link in the description Today in History. Because every day holds a secret waiting to be revealed. Thank you for being part of our historical journey. We'll see you next time.