The Basement: Luke Caverns | LiDAR Is Revealing Ancient Cities the Amazon Was Hiding

Summary

The Why Files: Operation Podcast

Episode: The Basement – Luke Caverns | LIDAR Is Revealing Ancient Cities the Amazon Was Hiding
Date: May 27, 2026
Host: The Why Files: Operation Podcast
Guest: Luke Caverns, Anthropologist, Explorer, and YouTuber

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Brief Overview

In this episode, the host dives deep with anthropologist and explorer Luke Caverns, whose research and expeditions are rewriting what we know about ancient civilizations hidden in the Americas and elsewhere. Central topics include the revolutionary use of LIDAR scanning in the Amazon (and the American Southeast), the remarkable rise and collapse of the Minoans, the mysteries (and realities) of the Olmec civilization, and lost stories of exploration and conquest from Luke’s own family history. The conversation also journeys into philosophical questions about spirituality, the afterlife, and how ancient people’s belief systems informed their greatest achievements. The tone is conversational, passionate, and full of storytelling and insight.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. LIDAR Technology and Hidden Civilizations ([00:34], [02:10]–[09:41])

• LIDAR ("Light Detection and Ranging") is enabling the mapping of ancient ruins, cities, and even entire civilizations hidden under dense jungle canopies, especially in the Amazon and American Southeast.
• Luke is working on the largest proposed LIDAR scan of the Amazon, in partnership with Basemap and Terra Incognita Research Institute.
  • “If, if, if we get the funding to do it, it could be done…This is the largest LIDAR scan ever done in the Amazon.” (Luke Caverns, [09:17])
• LIDAR has already revealed:
  • "Ancient highways" and massive mound complexes in the US (e.g., Hopewell Road).
  • Dozens of 'lost' archaeological sites, some on private land and previously unrecorded.

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2. The Mound Builder World ([05:13]–[08:55])

• Luke’s work includes virtually reconstructing prehistoric mound cities in the Southeastern US.
• By using high-resolution LIDAR drones, his team can build 3D models of mound builder cities, “down to like a golf ball size resolution.”
• These reconstructed models, partnered with AI, are used to help understand civilizations that spanned thousands of years in North America.

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3. Personal Family History: Treasure Hunting & Exploration ([09:41]–[39:56])

• Luke’s passion for anthropology was influenced by his family’s tradition of exploration, treasure hunting, and stories about lost gold mines in New Mexico and West Texas.
  • “Treasure hunting, which actually means looting and all that good stuff.” ([10:07])
• Family legends of gold mines, lost Spanish treasures, and cattle driving inspired Luke’s explorer spirit.
• He discusses inheriting hand-drawn mining maps, retracing lost sites, and the emotional journey of connecting with family history—alongside practical challenges of exploring and mapping ancient mines.

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4. Academic Journey & Becoming a Storytelling Explorer ([49:09]–[62:01])

• Luke failed out of his original college path but found purpose switching to anthropology—a decision catalyzed by writing a paper on “How 2 Million People Disappeared Overnight in the Amazon.”
• Inspired by Graham Hancock, Ed Barnhart, and the film "The Lost City of Z," Luke shifted to independent, public-facing research. He ultimately formed a mentorship with Dr. Ed Barnhart.
  • “Maybe all this stuff that I've been influenced by, like, maybe. Maybe that's what I should do and I should tell stories and go on adventures and film it.” ([60:46])

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5. Fieldwork Realities: Expeditions, Risks, and Hardships ([70:00]–[85:19])

• Field expeditions are often slower, harder, and more dangerous than expected: mosquitoes, venomous snakes, trench foot, supply shortages, and extreme logistics.
  • “Mosquitoes…Amazonian mosquitoes are unlike anything that most people have experienced.” ([70:18])
• Team recently undertook an expedition in the Gila Wilderness, encountering over 200 river crossings and severe calorie shortages.
  • “We moved at 30% the pace I expected…things are going to get like a wrench is going to get thrown into your plan.” ([75:49])

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6. The Mysteries of Alexander the Great’s Tomb & Alexandria ([85:51]–[145:12])

• Luke tells the epic story of Alexander’s rise, his body’s fate, and how Ptolemy used Alexander’s mausoleum, the Lighthouse, and the Library to legitimize his rule and restore Egyptian pride.
• Alexander’s body was entombed in a golden sarcophagus, then replaced with alabaster/given a “crystal” sarcophagus when the dynasty fell into debt.
• The final fate: Most likely, Alexander’s tomb and body were lost during the devastating 365 AD tsunami that destroyed much of Alexandria.
  • “His body was pulverized by the Mediterranean and doesn't exist anymore.” ([140:01])
• Notable anecdote: Cleopatra’s emotional response to the burning of the Library of Alexandria and Augustus’s relatively respectful handling of Alexander’s tomb.

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7. The Enigma of the Olmecs & Werejaguars ([145:37]–[218:39])

• The Olmecs, the oldest known civilization in North America, seem to appear on the archaeological timeline “fully formed.”
• The Olmec Heads: 17 known massive basalt heads (portraits of rulers), but thousands of depictions of “werejaguar” figures.
• Luke’s theory: The “werejaguar” represents a shamanic, possibly genetically-selected priest class, possibly associated with ectodermal dysplasia (a condition leading to fangs and distinctive facial features).
  • “Over the course of thousands of years of this happening, you get these people that are like, selectively breeding and engineering a whole population that...are people to be born with ectodermal dysplasia...[they] became the, were jaguars.” ([202:49])
• Suggests an internal, perhaps political struggle between the shamanic class (werejaguars) and the royal class (Olmec heads)—evidenced by monuments showing effaced heads and ritualized damage.

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8. Dragons, Feathered Serpents, and Native American Worldviews ([164:54]–[179:00])

• Discussion of the feathered serpent (Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan) motifs in Olmec and later Mesoamerican societies.
• Explores differences in myth and symbolism between ancient American, Asian, and European traditions—raising questions about universal archetypes, shared experiences (such as through psychedelics), and spiritual visions.

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9. Spirituality, Death, and the Afterlife ([38:39]–[45:56], [176:36]–[182:41])

• Luke shares a powerful personal story of synchronistic dreams and a final goodbye with his grandfather, linking personal experience to broader questions of the afterlife and the spiritual beliefs of ancient people.
• Explores intersections of psychedelic experiences, dreams, and encounters with “other realms,” tying back to the beliefs of the cultures he studies.

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10. The Minoan Civilization and the Atlantis Debate ([218:49]–[262:25])

• Minoans were contemporaries of Egypt and the Near East, built over 100 palaces, had advanced plumbing, and a “consumer society” possibly without kings.
• Akrotiri (Santorini) was the richest city of its time; the Thera eruption (largest volcanic eruption in human history) wiped out the entire city, yet the population escaped.
  • “Every living thing on the entire island of Akrotiri was evacuated. And then they were all brought probably to Crete.” ([240:07])
• The eruption and subsequent chaos (including a mysterious “burn layer”) led to the civilization’s downfall, followed by Mycenaean takeover.
  • “If they didn't burn down the island accidentally right after the eruption, then it had to be some kind of skirmishing across the island.” ([252:11])
• Connects the Atlantis myth (via Plato’s Timaeus) to echoes of Minoan collapse, including potential errors in Egyptian chronology (e.g., 9,000 “years” as lunar months, i.e., 900 years).
• Debates the metaphorical/allegorical use of Atlantis and how Plato’s purpose was likely to illustrate warnings against societal greed.
  • “If we were talking to Plato, Plato might go…guys, that's—no, I was talking about…what destroy[s] them. Why are you ignoring that?” ([260:52])

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11. The Trojan War and the Unfolding of the Bronze Age Collapse ([262:25]–[265:58])

• Hittite clay tablets appear to confirm events around Troy; Aeneid, Iliad, Odyssey all possibly chronicle a shared era of civilizational collapse.
• Emphasizes the interconnectedness and real historical foundations embedded within the myths—often overlooked when stories are dismissed as mere legend.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the Power of LIDAR Discoveries

• “We're going to start visually rebuilding the mound builder world and we're going to do this with dozens of sites.” – Luke Caverns, [06:14]

On Family Influence and Inheritance

• “My family probably has more connection to this one specific place than anybody else on the planet ever has, because it's out in the middle of the wilderness.” – Luke Caverns, [36:19]

On the Mystery of Lost Civilizations

• “The Olmecs emerge on the archaeological timeline as a fully fledged and organized civilization. From the very beginning…the civilization is formed. We don't have…a formative period.” – Luke Caverns, [147:59]

On Olmecs & Genetic Traits

• “There’s a disproportionate amount of indigenous children born with ectodermal dysplasia…You see underneath the lips, how gummy that is…My wife has worked on children with ectodermal dysplasia. The Olmec people, when these babies were born, they knew something was special about them.” – Luke Caverns, [202:46]

On Alexander’s Tomb & the Destruction of Alexandria

• “I think that most likely his body was pulverized by the Mediterranean and doesn't exist anymore…what could really survive that?” – Luke Caverns, [140:01]

On the Enduring Mystery of Atlantis

• “Plato's whole [point] is about the consequences of greed. It's just ironic that people run with the story of Atlantis just to make money sometimes and ignore all the evidence…it's actually exactly the opposite of why Plato even brought the story up.” – Luke Caverns, [261:19]

On the Tenacity of Lost World Myths

• “People don't forget cataclysms…that's why the flood myths exist for all of time.” – Luke Caverns, [254:10]

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Important Timestamps

• [00:34] – Introduction to LIDAR, Amazon projects, and discoveries
• [09:41–30:00] – Family history of exploration and lost gold mines
• [39:56–45:56] – Intimate story of goodbye to his grandfather
• [49:09–62:01] – Luke’s path to anthropology and self-made explorer/educator
• [70:00–85:19] – Fieldwork, Gila Wilderness expedition, the realities of exploration
• [85:51–145:12] – Alexander the Great, the fates of Alexandria’s wonders, Cleopatra, Roman politics, and catastrophic earthquakes/tsunami
• [145:37–218:39] – The Olmecs, werejaguars, ancient priesthood, theories of selective breeding for priestly classes, Olmec heads, and inter-civilizational myth parallels
• [218:49–262:25] – Minoans, Akrotiri/Thera eruption, the mathematical debate on Atlantis dating, collapse of the Bronze Age, and the syncretism of Greek/Trojan/Etruscan myth-history
• [268:43–271:59] – Luke’s current projects, how to support, and closing remarks

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Conclusion & Where to Find More

Luke Caverns’s work bridges field exploration, public storytelling, and cutting-edge technology, helping reconstruct the hidden chapters of humanity’s past—from the Amazon’s cities, the Olmec enigmas, to the lost palaces of Crete. Whether or not you agree with every theory, the discoveries and debates on this episode spotlight how ancient myth, modern science, and personal adventure can come together in extraordinary ways.

Find Luke Caverns at:
YouTube: youtube.com/lukecaverns
(Follow for updates on LIDAR projects, lost civilizations, and more.)

Host’s final words:
“Be safe, be kind and know that you are appreciated.”

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a deep, richly textured guide through the episode’s major topics and insights. For additional context or more details, check the referenced timestamps.

Transcript

[Luke Caverns]

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[Podcast Host]

Today I'm talking with Luke Caverns, an anthropologist and explorer who. Who's flagged over 100 archaeological sites that aren't on any map. He's planning the largest lidar scan of the Amazon ever attempted.

[Luke Caverns]

What is he trying to see?

[Podcast Host]

Jeff Bezos naked? Not that Amazon. The Amazon jungle. Ah, that makes more sense. Lidar fires laser pulses from aircraft through the jungle canopy and maps what's buried underneath. And over the last few years, it's been revealing megacities and ancient highways. A civilization battle buried under the Amazon that nobody knew was there. Today we're covering that. The Minoans of Crete as Plato's Atlantis and the Olmecs and their jaguar priest cult.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, cult based on cats hot piss.

[Podcast Host]

He also has a theory about what happened to Alexander the Great's body that I hadn't heard before. It's pretty interesting. As always. After the episode, I'll come back in and do a breakdown of what we covered, what I can't prove and what I can't. Until then, let's go down to the basement. Luke, welcome to the basement.

[Luke Caverns]

Hey, man, thanks so much for having me here. This is amazing.

[Podcast Host]

I'm so excited. I got a whole so much to talk to you about. We're gonna go all over the ancient world. I'm not a professional. It's chaos. Just bear with me.

[Luke Caverns]

It's all right.

[Podcast Host]

So I. I just want to start with. Of all the sites that you've looked at, what was the one or the one that sticks with you that goes. That makes you go. That is not natural. That's man made.

[Luke Caverns]

You have one favorite one that's. Now. You mean as far as like. Like a natural formation that I think looks man made?

[Podcast Host]

Yes. Or something that you saw in lidar that maybe someone else.

[Luke Caverns]

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's.

[Podcast Host]

Someone made that.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, there's. I'm running a project right now that I. I guess I'm announcing it right here for the first time. I don't have a name for the project, but it's a. It's a lidar project that I have been working on for about three years now across the southeastern US and now it just expanded to The Amazon, which is crazy. Um, so I was given access a few years ago to a LIDAR data set that a team put together when they were trying to map comet impacts across the the United States. And anybody can get access to LIDAR of the. Of the US that the difficulty there is having a, like a map that's been processed and the information has been condensed. Otherwise your computer will just shut down. It's crazy.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. They're just like giant raw images.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. You know, it's. It some. It could be like hundreds of gigs of data. It'll just shut down your computer. So it has to be processed by a professional who really knows what they're doing. And so I was just lucky to be given that sort of data set. And so what they realized was while they were looking for these common impacts, they were finding mound sites. And they weren't. Anthropologists didn't know anything about ancient history. But they're like, oh, you know, Luke. I was friends with one of them, his name's Chris. He, he sent it over to me and so I started searching through it. And there was a lot that I had to teach myself about analyzing lidar and having to figure out what's natural and what's not or what's modern and what's ancient. That, that can be a big thing.

[Podcast Host]

And false positives with like, flood zones

[Luke Caverns]

and with dredging so they'll try to clear up the sides of rivers and they'll make what looks like just hundreds of mounds string together over time you start to realize, like, oh, okay, you know, these things are too sharp. There's so many of them together, you know, so you learn how to process all that, all that image data. And all in all, I've. I've mapped at least like 82 archaeological sites in the United States. Probably a lot of them. Probably so many of them are on private property that are not officially documented in books or papers that I could find or maps that I could find. Now that said, you know, there's probably some. There may be some obscure papers out there that are aware of some of these. Whatever. They're not popularly known. Some of them are massive, man. I've mapped sites that are way out in the forest in Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas. That's not just. Single structures that are 250 yards long. Yeah, yeah. 250 yards long by 100 yards wide. And there's probably five or six of the structures all together. Some of them have. For anybody listening, you could look up something called the Hopewell Road, which look like these highways.

[Podcast Host]

Huge, right?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, huge. And, and I found structures that have those in them and, and I have a friend who, he's about my age and he's more of like an open minded archaeologist and more accepting to I guess like outlaw archaeology, which is kind of what I do, you know. Now I'm working with my team at basemap. They are providing me, going to be providing me and we've already scanned like some sites near Moundville. We discovered an ancient site near Moundville on private property. Just amazing stuff. And so I'm working with them now. But essentially what we do is all these sites that I have mapped using USGS and charted, you know, that's probably the resolution is very, very low. And these guys can go out there and scan something that's so precise that it's down to like a golf ball really in resolution and then they can build 3D models of, of, of the ancient city.

[Podcast Host]

That's with satellite lidar or is that with, on the ground?

[Luke Caverns]

No, no, no, it's their lidar. It's, it's. They, they have these LIDAR drones. They've got like a full on bus. They brought it to my house a few weeks ago. It's cool. So I haven't announced this at all. This is the first time I'm talking about this. I've been working on this for a long time. But essentially what it, what we're going to do is rebuild the mound builder world. And like all these cities that people aren't aware of, I find it using USGS lidar. Then either they go out there or if I can go with them, I go with them. And we send a drone up, map it, you know, it doesn't matter what property it's on because it's legal to map things with your drones. And then we can reconstruct the ancient city down to like a golf ball size resolution. And so I can have this huge 3D model of the city and then I can virtually rebuild it using AI. Now you have to get very particular and you have to make sure it's historically accurate according to the sources. But we're going to start visually rebuilding the mound, the mound builder world and we're going to do this with dozens of sites and well, the mound builder

[Podcast Host]

world that spans thousands of years.

[Luke Caverns]

Are you targeting thousands of years? No, not targeting any one thing in particular.

[Podcast Host]

Just mounds.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, we're not targeting like what we were talking a minute ago. We're not targeting Adena or Hopewell or you know, the Moundville sites or anything like that. It's just the sites that I have found and mapped and so each one of them will have to be researched within the context of that, of that site. So yeah, so that's, that's what we're working on now. And then we've got another LIDAR project that we're trying to get the permission for eventually, which is going to be an American Samoa. The Polynesian world is so untouched and LIDAR can completely change that. And then we are, I'm working with the Terra Incognito Research Institute. It's a group that's put together by a couple, couple of archaeologists and they are, you know, it's, it's sort of like independent archaeology, you know, but these guys are credentialed, very, very well credentialed, like full on, you know, very professional academics and they're working on a project in the Amazon. And I can't say too much about this yet, but if we can complete this project and we can get the permits, myself, I'm going to go down and document it and essentially publicize it. The base Map team will be the one who scans everything using their LIDAR technology. And then Terra Incognito Research Institute, they're the ones who will actually go out to the site, process the data. They're, they're, they're the guys who get all the permissions and everything. It'll be the largest LIDAR scan that's ever been done in the Amazon.

[Podcast Host]

I can't wait for that.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. Ever been done.

[Podcast Host]

Ever been done.

[Luke Caverns]

And we put together a. I don't know how much I can get into this, but we're putting together a proposal of just, it's, at least, it's, it's myself and Base Map, we just played around with this idea, but of what it would cost to get the entire Amazon lidar and how long it would take.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. And they can, they can do it. If, if, if, if we get the funding to do it, it could be done. And so we're just putting that together just to throw it out there to give people. It won't actually happen probably, but just to give people an idea that it is possible and you know, how much would it take for that to be possible? But if this goes through with Terra Incognito Research Institute and Base Map and myself, it'll be the largest LIDAR scan ever done in the Amazon.

[Podcast Host]

I can't wait for that. You come from a long line of treasure hunters, cattle rustlers, outlaws. When do you realize that you were carrying on the family tradition in a method using methodology. Not so much pirate. You're actually a scientist.

[Luke Caverns]

No, no. Yeah, yeah, I'm not stealing anything anymore.

[Podcast Host]

But when I first heard you talking about cattle wrestling, I'm like, does he know that means stealing?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, they were, they were. They did. You know, some of those guys did a little bit of both. Right. Like you would. Your day job would be cattle driving. Your night job would be cattle rustling. You know, right there I got. And treasure hunting, which actually means looting and all that good stuff, you know. So it started my love for anthropology began when actually listening to my other grandpa, my mom's dad, he was a pastor and a missionary and he loved the ancient world. And I would be, you know, they would drag me to their, like, down home, east Texas little church and I listened to my grandpa preach and they would have these old Bibles and at the front and the back of the Bibles would be these watercolor paintings of like, you know, the. Some ancient Mesopotamian city. Sometimes it would be Egypt or something like that, and there might be a little map there and it's all kind of watercolored and very sort of romantic looking. And during the whole time that I would listen to the sermon, still to this day, my favorite thing if I listen to a sermon is when they actually talk about the ancient biblical world and you get to sort of hear what that would have been like. And then, you know, it always gets dragged off into something else. But the coolest part is the history. And so I'd sit there looking at the maps, I'd look at the watercolor paintings and stuff. And I would just. Every Sunday I would just imagine what were ancient times like, what were ancient times like. And over time, I began becoming dissatisfied with the way a lot of sermons would be told. Not my grandfather, but like, you know, going to church with my parents or something. And I would be like, well, you know, I wish that they would actually tell us more about what was life like for those guys.

[Podcast Host]

What were they telling you that you were uncomfortable with?

[Luke Caverns]

Just, you know, it. Yeah, a lot of sermons in church end up becoming like a, A motivational speech about like, you know, let me, let me take this one verse and extrapolate it on a way and pull it totally out of its ancient context to make it relevant to like, you know, the Bible's a masterfully written and put together book. You can actually just tell me that story and I will be able to get the meaning out of it. Yes, you will, you know, or if they want it to be more profound, Educate the people that are in the church on the context of the ancient world, in the world that those people are living in, and teach us the Bible in the way that they would have understood it. Because that'll be much more profound than you trying to extrapolate this one verse and make it fit to me, you know, I don't care about. About all that. And it never resonated with me. And so I remember I'd talk to my parents, I'd be like, yeah, but, you know, what was that like? What was that like? And that was. Anthony. That was the beginning of me being an anthropologist, wanting to know what is that life like? Just day to day life, being an ancient person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are the struggles that you live with? Because I remember saying, I had this, what I thought was a profound thought when I was like a teenager, and I was like. I was like, you know, the Bible is actually like a horror story. All those people's lives are awful. You know, nobody, you know, it's like,

[Podcast Host]

I guess, Old Testament for sure.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I mean, you look at the disciples, the things that they went through, the way that they all ended up, the struggles that they had, they're all impoverished. It's a. That's a really hard life. But that gets glossed over, you know, with the modern church and everything. And so it was me really trying to dig into the ancient world and get a sense of what that was like. And once that started happening, I started realizing, well, my whole life, perception, the way that I'm being taught about this, isn't. Isn't reflective of the ancient world. And so that was when my love for wanting to know what the ancient world was really like came from the idea of wanting to be an explorer along with that, because that could just go into being an archaeologist or an anthropologist or a historian, you know. And so it was that coupled with my dad's side of the family going back to the 1890s. Those guys are cattle, cattle drivers. They were. They were, you know, the Parkers that are running cattle up and down. So. So they would take cattle to the Parkers in San Antonio. And so it was like West Texas to San Antonio. That's where they're operating. And, you know, hearing their stories of the search for the. The gold of these lost mines of Reagan Canyon and this huge debacle that happens when they're trying to find that gold and so many of the Reagan brothers die and.

[Podcast Host]

Well, tell us that story real fast.

[Luke Caverns]

Well, I loved it. There's so many. There's not a lot that's known about that, but this is sort of a, sort of a synopsis and a lot of it. Like if you go to, especially here in the Southwest, like if you go to a used bookstore and you find a book called the Sons of Coronado or Lost Lost Spanish Treasure or something like that, there will be a chapter in there about my family. And this is the Reagan family. Yeah, yeah. And so essentially what happens is, so they own these big ranches that are on these plateaus above Reagan, in and around Reagan Canyon. And Reagan Canyon back in the 1500s was one of the places where the Spaniards would come through as they're, you know, exploring the American Southwest and in the 1600s as well. And there would be bandits that would sit up in, well, I guess all the way up to the 1800s really, there would be bandits that would sit up in those, set up in those hillsides and they would sack these Spanish caravans coming through, kill everybody, drag the gold up in, up into the crevices in these riversides or I should say little canyon size. It's all dried up. And so there's all these legends of this lost gold that's out there.

[Podcast Host]

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[Luke Caverns]

And so, you know, in your free time you just dream of, of, you know, they, they probably weren't wealthy. Even though they own this land, it's still tough life. They dream of. Of have, you know, having some big apartment in San Antonio and having a. A wagon or something like that, you know, and so. So they spend their time walking around in the hills looking for gold, and they never really find anything. Well, there's this young boy named Bill Kelly who arrives on. Arrives on a horse, or maybe he's on a mule. I think he's riding a mule. And he was. He was an African Mexican boy who probably was a slave in Mexico, and he's. He's fleeing to the United States. And so when he arrives, he doesn't have anywhere to go, so my family just takes him in and he starts working for the. He starts working for my family on their. On their ranch. And he is driving some of the cattle around to new grazing spots. And it was actually him and one of the other brothers that are out there. They see a crevice in the mountainside, and they go over and explore it. And it's this open mine that had. Nobody knows when the mine was. Nobody even knows where the mine is today. Something I'd like to do is go back out there. There's two places where my family is heavily involved in the American Southwest. One is in New Mexico, one's in West Texas. I fully mapped, remapped the one in New Mexico. You did? Yeah, I could tell you that story.

[Podcast Host]

You went out there, right?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I've been out there three times. And so, yeah, it's on my grandfather's. Oh, I could tell you. I'll tell you about that in just a second. But so staying in the 1890s, they find that mine and they pull out all the gold. But there's no specifics of like, okay, well, what was in there? They just know that it was. It was treasure, it was gold, it was know wealth, whatever.

[Podcast Host]

But they found gold.

[Luke Caverns]

As the story goes, I have no idea where this gold is today. But yes, they found. They found gold. They found. They found treasure. And so essentially it launches into this huge Game of Thrones of like, well, who really. Who really found it? Bill Kelly tries to run away with. With some of the gold. Some of the brothers try to run away with some of the gold. Anyways, this old story. Yeah, yeah, it's. It's this old story. And there's so many different ways that the story is told. I've never read a book that actually, I've never read two books that tell the story the same way, but essentially only one of the brothers makes it. Makes it out of this huge debacle. You don't even know if he actually made it with some of the money. But. And then. And the story just ends. But my family lineage somehow disappears from West Texas and reappears in East Texas, and they're now involved in oil. And so. Yeah, exactly. So that's it. So there's this. There's this gap of maybe like a decade or more, and all of a sudden, my family is in East Texas, and now they're involved in oil and very wealthy and everything. And so. So they're involved in. In oil in East Texas. And that would be my great grandfather. His son, Leslie Reagan, has this idea of also wanting to be an explorer and a treasure hunter and everything. And I should say, just as a preface, none of this money exists today. I. Nothing that I do is bankrolled by my family lineage or anything like that. But so my grandfather, Leslie Reagan, he has this dream of also being an explorer and so doing instead. Well, he was just. He was just managing the family oil business like they had. They had a private airport and private jets and all kinds of crazy stuff. And so. Yeah, it's wild.

[Podcast Host]

Where's your trust?

[Luke Caverns]

I know. I know. I wish. I wish we had. I wish we had. I wish we had any of this today because, man, I could. All this LiDAR stuff I'm talking about, I would have done this years ago, of course, but. But so he goes off to New Mexico to try to find this legendary place called 7 Coronado's 7 Lost Gold Mines, or the 7 Lost Gold Mines of New Mexico. And this is written about in. I think it's True west magazine. They did, like, three magazines on my. On my grandpa. I should have brought this for you.

[Podcast Host]

This would have been cool.

[Luke Caverns]

Next time I'll bring you something. Yeah, you can buy these on ebay for, like, $2. Yeah. Yeah. And so he. He tries to go out there to find these legendary lost gold mines, and he wants to get into gold mining in general. So this police officer that lives in this town. I won't say what town, but this police officer, officer that lives in the town essentially knocks on his trailer door. You know, they all lived in the chrome trailers and everything, and. And said, hey, you know, I know you're out here looking for such. Such. I've been doing this for years as well. You should come with me. We don't really know how long the time period is between them beginning to look for these lost gold mines and actually finding them, but they do find them. And by 1955, 1956, ish, they, they found the gold mines, these old Spanish gold mines and expanded them and turned it into. I shouldn't say the company name either, but.

[Podcast Host]

Well, in the 50s, this is somebody's land, right?

[Luke Caverns]

This is my grandpa's land. Yeah. Well now he bought it. Yeah, yeah, but, but it was actually, it's actually state land.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So he buys it from the state. He has like a claim on it. But then, but I think he actually owned the land rather than just having a claim. And so he expands this and turns this into a full blown gold mining company. And the way that it got its tough because if I say the name you can just go, you can go find it. But you know, and I don't want people like walking around out there. But one of the legends that he would tell my family was that at night when they were camping out at the gold mines, you could hear these bells ringing like ding, ding, ding, ding. And they were very, very faint. And he never actually found the source of the bells, but what he thought it was was that when the Spaniards were mining out these in their gold mines, they would have canaries, but they would also have bells. And if the bells are moving, you would know that the air is moving. You're getting clean air through the mines. And, and so that's like one of the main legends around, around these mines. And I've been out there, I've listened, I can't hear the bells. They probably rusted away since he opened them back up. But. So he found this place called the Seven Lost Gold Mines of New Mexico or Coronado. Seven Lost Gold Mines. Ultimately he expanded it to between 38 to 42 different mines.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

It was, it was a really, really profitable operation. And a, and a smelter ended up exploding. One or two guys died during this. And this was in a time, this is 1962 or 63. This was in a time where like if you were in a business partner with somebody, especially out in the middle of nowhere, they could run away with the money and never see it again. Never see them again. And so my grandfather's business partner ran away with everything and my family was financially destitute. I mean like no money at all.

[Podcast Host]

Nothing Were dry?

[Luke Caverns]

No, they weren't dry. They, they, they had to close in most of them. There's a few of them that were still open. Like at least three of them are still open. Yeah, I'm pretty sure.

[Podcast Host]

Still mining three.

[Luke Caverns]

No, no, no, no. But, but the whole the portal is there. He closed in everything. And he, at least in the 1960s when this was more easy, more easily done, he still, he still owned the land, I believe, still had a claim on it, closed all the mines and all of, and he made new maps and none of the maps have the actual location of the property on them. So he thought one day he'd be able to build up the money to go back and reopen them so that he kept a claim on him. And I don't think the claim was relinquished until like 1989. So you know, several years after he passed.

[Podcast Host]

And he didn't mark the mines, I

[Luke Caverns]

guess not on, not on the maps exactly, to protect them. And so I inherited these maps four years ago and I inherited everything that, that he had found. Oh, I should also say that when they were down in these mines, he would discover like Native American threads and pottery and, and you know, like textiles and stuff. And so he'd bring them back up and then when the wind would hit them, they would disintegrate in his hands. So there's pottery and things that he's found and I found, I found Native American pottery when I was, when I was out there too. He find all these artifacts and they would all disintegrate. Of course he didn't know how to preserve them. You know, he wasn't an archaeologist, but he's fascinated about, about all this. And you were able to hold on

[Podcast Host]

to some of that stuff.

[Luke Caverns]

We have, we have them in boxes at my parents house in North Carolina

[Podcast Host]

to show those to the public at some point.

[Luke Caverns]

No, no, no, this, this wasn't, yeah, this wasn't that kind of thing. This was like, this is like those were his personal treasures. You know, he was, he was in it for the gold money.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Luke Caverns]

And the, in the excitement and the adventure and I think the local fame, like he was known in Texas. Right. And I guess the magazines like he, he liked that. So this is treasure hunting. Yes, full on treasure hunting for notoriety and wealth. Right.

[Podcast Host]

And Americans were crazy for these stories then.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So yeah, I don't think he had any intentions of like putting them in a museum in Albuquerque or anything like that. So now they just sit at my parents house and so, so I got these maps and I was just like, I asked my dad, I said dad, when's the last time somebody went out here? And he goes, well, you know, I don't, I don't really know, but I bet you I know, I bet you I know the last time that it happened and he told me he had a vague memory of sitting in a car with his mom out in the middle of the desert while his dad and some other guy that he was with got out of the car. And they were gone for, like, hours until. Until nightfall. And he just remembers sitting in this car for hours with my mom. And he was like, I bet you I was there. And my dad and some other guy went to go look at the mine. So he's like that. I think he told me that was the 70s. He said that was probably the last time that anybody was. Was ever really out there. And he didn't know where it was. He didn't have the first. My dad didn't have the first idea. Now, my dad, I should say, he's a lover of history. My dad was a. Was a. Was a cave explorer. Like, when he was probably about my age and younger than me in Missouri, he explored and mapped caves. He was like a spelunker or speleologist, I should say sort of amateur. Speleologist loves America.

[Podcast Host]

That's the word for spelunker.

[Luke Caverns]

Now, speleologist, maybe so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think so. And so he has this sense of adventure in. In his own unique way that wasn't based on, like, lost Spanish gold or anything like that. Loves American history. Just obsessed with American history. And. And then my dad had to climb his way out of this, like, financially destitute place that my family ultimately ended up in. And then it was me. I was kind of more able to inherit what my grandfather and other grandfathers had, that. That sort of spirit that they had. But. So anyways, I was obsessed with finding the location of these mines and where they were at. So they're all drawn by hand by my grandfather. And of course, he's drawing it by walking around and he's doing it by eye. Right. So it's not exact. Not even close to being like, what you could see on. On satellite imagery. And so I had to spend. I had to spend. The only thing I knew was the city that they were based out of. So they're based out of this one tiny little town. And I have this vast open wilderness around it that I have to map. And so it took me nine months.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

To find the location on Google Earth. And he didn't even have north south marked on the maps either. Took me nine months.

[Podcast Host]

What did you find?

[Luke Caverns]

So I knew that I found the location. It was just like I could tell

[Podcast Host]

these are the mines. You found the seven gold mines?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I did, yeah. I found. Yeah, so it's like weird. Like he found them and then he made sure that nobody would. Knew no where the location was. So then I found them. Yeah, it was cool. So. So I took a friend of mine and a couple months later we drove out to New Mexico and you know, we cut a bunch of locks and drove through a bunch of private property straight out into the middle of nowhere. And we found. I confirmed it on the. On the ground. And I'm walking around out there and picking up these like, old bottles and cans that are out there. It didn't look like anybody had been there. There's no, you know, from, From. From the map and from Google Earth you can see where these paths are, where these old cars would have been driving around there. But you can't see anything when you person. There's no remnants left of the little roads and. But there's old, like, pocket whiskey glasses and. Could you feel it, though?

[Podcast Host]

I mean.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, you had to be thinking, it's a.

[Podcast Host]

It's grandpa's whiskey.

[Luke Caverns]

Well, I looked into that. So. So there was a. I forget what the name of the brand was, but I. One of my buddies had a. He's got grok, like satellite. And so we would ask Rock a bunch of questions and he would tell me about it. And we found this one really expensive pocket whiskey. It was the bottom half of the glass that was broken, and it still had the label, the brand name on it. And so we looked it up and it was a very expensive pocket whiskey. It must have been his. Yes. And so I kept every little thing I could put in like a plastic bag. I kept all of it with me. I even had like, rusted cans and, you know, just stuff that I know must have been his.

[Podcast Host]

I would have done the same thing.

[Luke Caverns]

Just gather it all up. Yeah, yeah. And there's more out there too. There's so. There's so much more. Like, every time I've gone back, I find more laying on the ground.

[Podcast Host]

What about the mines? Did you get in there?

[Luke Caverns]

I. I'm. I want to go back, but I want to go back and do it properly. That means mines. No, no, no, no, no. Well, I. I don't want to admit to do anything illegal, but. No, I want to go back in. Yeah, I want to go back in with something that can monitor the air quality because it only takes a couple seconds to die from toxic air in a mine.

[Podcast Host]

You did see the openings.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, yeah, yeah. I. I went really close to going down in one. I I, I, I went probably 20, that there is one of them that's like as open as this room is and it just goes back forever. In fact I saw a very endangered species in one of them, the black footed. Black footed ferret. They're, they're critically endangered in New Mexico. And there was one sitting up on a ledge, it was looking at me and I didn't realize it was there until it started moving and it ran off. And I was like that wasn't a rat. That wasn't what, what was that? And so I was like going through species that live in mammals that live in New Mexico and I found a black footed ferret. And I was like, oh, I actually found where it live, where one of them live. And obviously because it's like 25 miles out in the wilderness, right. It's not around humans at all. So that was cool. But there's a main shaft opening. There's two other ones that was kind of like a periphery mine that's way off to the east, the main central area. There's two. So basically you would have like one shaft that descends down at 45 degrees. So it descends down at 45 degrees, it heads west and then there is a refuge shaft that comes straight up. That's probably like 150ft up. So it's just this hole. You walk out in the middle of the desert and there's just a massive 15 foot by 15 foot wide hole. And it's so deep that no matter how close you get to the edge you can never see the bottom. And you can feel the air like shooting out of the of it. Like you can feel the air hitting you as you walk up to it.

[Podcast Host]

So there's no structure, platform, nothing, just hold.

[Luke Caverns]

Well I threw a rock down there and you can hear it go ding ding and it hit, hits all this metal. So there's structures down there. And so my dad went, and one of my other family members must be, must be like a cousin of mine but a niece of my dad. She had five other maps that we didn't have and so we got those from her and they were actually of the mine layouts. And this was after I had been to the sites. So I was now able to actually see how the mines worked and interconnected with each other under the ground.

[Podcast Host]

Who drew those maps?

[Luke Caverns]

My grandfather. Yeah, so he was a cartographer, he drew all this stuff.

[Podcast Host]

Where did she find those?

[Luke Caverns]

Those would have been, she, she inherited them. Yeah, yeah. So like two different, you know, my uncles and my dad inherited some Some of the maps and, and I think all the artifacts. And she, because her father was my dad's brother, right, she ended up getting some of the interior maps. So it's kind of split up. So now I have everything other than the artifacts of my grandpa's gun. Everything is in my office. Like all the maps, everything. I've got them all like framed up. And some people online, there's sometimes there's photos of my office that get post that I've posted and you can see the maps. But yeah, all drawn out by my grandpa. And so much of it went unexplored. There are these huge shafts and these are diorite mines. So super. They're probably still stable. I just have to know that the air quality is good enough to go in them. But these massive shafts that he'd shine a flashlight down and there was no end to it. And so he has written on the map it would say. It would say, it would say dug out by Spanish unmapped. Dug out by Spanish unmapped.

[Podcast Host]

That's crazy.

[Luke Caverns]

So they'd been there for hundreds of years and he never, he never got to explore everything. And down at the bottom of this 150foot shaft, there's this massive open room with these other tunnels that take that, that head off. But they had collapsed and he hadn't explored them. And you know, it's very expensive to go in and like shore it all up to make sure it's safe. And so it's just this massive sprawling mine complex. And I would very much like to get lower down into, into them to be able to explore them. But I've got to do it with the right equipment. It's expensive to put together, but I definitely want to monitor air quality now.

[Podcast Host]

So what would be the bad air down there? What would cause that?

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, I don't know if I can explain it like a geologist does, but essentially, you know, if there's not enough ventilation, the oxygen will get sucked out of a room and it'll be, I guess you could say it's filled with, with toxic gas. But sometimes it's just like. It's like when people are sitting in their car in a garage and the garage fills with carbon monoxide and then they die, you're out, you're gone. And sometimes there's some, there's some gases that can build up in mind that there's tons of people who, they're walking around in the desert, there's this big mine opening. They go, oh, what's. They fall asleep immediately. One Inhalation of that, it interacts with your brain. Basically shuts your brain off. You fall unconscious and people just fall straight into a mind. Now my grandpa, what he always wrote about them was that they were clean aired minds. Like if you read the magazines their granite and diorite mines and so something about that makes them SAFER inherently. I'm not 100 certain on that but I just didn't, I didn't want to take their, take their risk. So, so, but I am going to go down in, in them with like a, a full on team and everything and we're going to explore them. But I was just there a few months ago and yeah, when I'm there I, when I'm there it's one of those things where it's like, ah, this is a special place. It really is. This is, you know, there, there's probably this one specific place on the planet. There's. My family probably has more connection to this one specific place than anybody else on the planet ever has because it's out in the middle of the wilderness.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Luke Caverns]

And, and yeah, I sit there and even though I don't own the property, it's like spiritually I'm like, yeah, this is my, this is my place. You know, my grandfather's dreams lived and died here and my grandpa thought about this place for the rest of his life.

[Podcast Host]

Do you think he'd be proud to know that you took up the mantle?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, man. I just went on this expedition in the Gila wilderness recently and so I'll give up a little bit of a teaser of where this is.

[Podcast Host]

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[Luke Caverns]

the. The mines are also in the Gila Wilderness and.

[Podcast Host]

Too much.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I won't. I won't. But the mines are also in the Gila Wilderness and. And one of those magazines describe him as a Gila explorer. And it's cool because it's our country's first designated wilderness area and there's some history there. And I don't know if people realize this, but my connection to my grandfather on my dad. Yeah. My connection to my grandfather on my dad's side is only through stories and through spirit.

[Podcast Host]

You didn't know him?

[Luke Caverns]

No, I never actually. Never actually knew him. It's all. It's this. This. It's this shadow that looms over my life.

[Podcast Host]

Doesn't it drive you crazy? Don't you wish you can just sit with him and ask him questions?

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I. I was. Yeah, I was. The night before I left, I went on the expedition. I. I always listened to these old, like, 1950s. One of my favorite songs is Cattle Call and these old 1950s Western music. And I just imagine, like, I know that this is what he was listening to. And I'm packing for the expedition and it just, like, it was. I. It hit me this hard and I was like. I went up and I sat on the edge of my bed and my wife was, like, going to bed, and I just, like, started crying and I was like, I, like, like. I just can't believe I don't know him. I was like. Like, I was like, I know him because he. I am so much like him. And in everything that I do, it's like, embedded in me. Like, I look at my hands, you know, I. I probably have ticks and little weird things that I do that are him. But for sure you do. And. But I don't. But I. But I don't know him in person, you know, and that's kind of one of those things is I. My dad, he told me one time, he's like, you know, maybe you'll be out in New Mexico or on an expedition at some point. You'll have a dream and he'll visit you or something and that stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had an experience like that with my other grandfather.

[Podcast Host]

We're not getting to my outline because I need to hear this story.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So with my other grandfather, the one who was A missionary and an ancient historian. You know, love the ancient world. So he passed away a couple years ago and he had had Alzheimer's for about eight years and. Which is quite a long time to survive.

[Podcast Host]

That's a shame.

[Luke Caverns]

Actually, one of his friends, one of his friends got, got diagnosed with it about the same time he did. And he was gone like a year and. But my grandma got on it and he was taking all the right vitamins and stuff and apparently there's a lot you can do to kind of stave it off or maybe vent it, whatever. But he lived for a long time. And there was one night, it was a Tuesday night, I don't know why exactly, I remember that. But I woke up around 1:30 and I had just had this very profound dream where I was in a hospital room sitting in front of a bed. Just like I'm sitting now. I'm on like the left side of the bed. My grandpa's right here and I have my arms over him and I'm crying and I'm telling him, I love you, I'll miss you. And I kissed him. And I'm not like, only person I kiss is my wife. Like I don't kiss my family members, right. It was just like not normal for me to behave like that in a dream. And I woke up at 1am and I remembered that and it was like, I just remember that. Well, I'm at work, 9am, I get a call that my grandpa has been transferred from his nursing facility into the hospital because he died, his heart had stopped and so they went into his room. But by the time they got into his room, his heartbeat had come back, he was alive. But they transferred him to the hospital so that they could monitor him more closely. And he was getting close. He basically needed to be on hospice. And so. So I'm about to go to the Olmec Realm for three weeks and I live like seven hours away, like a seven hour drive. But I know I knew that if I didn't go see my grandpa, I wasn't going to see him when I got back from Mexico. So I drove from, I drove from San Antonio back home and went to go visit him. And I was there with my grandma. And you know, there were nurses and doctors and people coming in and out and you know, my grandpa's there and he's like sentient. It was funny, he could not remember anything in the short term, but he could always talk about his past and he knew who you were. Like he didn't forget you. But if he if you showed him a picture, it wouldn't connect, but if you were there in person, he would. He would remember you. And so there's all these nurses and people coming in and people wanting to, like, talk to my grandma and talk to me. And, like, I never really got this quiet moment with them, but we're there for a couple hours, and we're never left alone. So we're about to leave, and I'm getting on the elevator, and I'm just like, nah, it's not enough of a goodbye. Like, I didn't get a moment with him. So I hand my grandma my jacket and I walk back in there. And it's just. It's just he and I there, and. I haven't, like, really told the story, you know? Golly, man, I. You know, I just knew that, like, that was my last moment with him, you know, And I was lucky that I got that.

[Podcast Host]

What did you talk about? You are lucky. You got that.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So many of us don't. What'd you talk about?

[Luke Caverns]

I just told him. I just asked him. I said. I said, you remember all those Westerns that you made me watch with you? Like Gunsmoke? Gunsmoke was on the TV behind me. He was like, yeah. And I said. I said, you remember all the times you'd, like, talk to me about the Bible and the ancient world and everything? He said, yeah. And I said. I was, like, looking him in his eyes. I was like. I was like, I'm never gonna forget that. It's so important to me. And I said. I said, I love you. And he said. He said, I love you, too. And I said, do you know who you're talking to? And he looked at me and he said my full name to me. And so I knew he was there with me. And I leaned over him and I was just, like, crying.

[Podcast Host]

You leaned over him crying? Just like a dream.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I leaned over him. I was on the left side of the bed, and I kissed him. And I told him. I said, I'm gonna miss you so much. And I don't know how many people actually, in their last moment, have their loved one acknowledge the fact that they're about to die. But I just. I just had to actually be real, you know? I think we try to be, like, subtle for some reason, you know, and not just acknowledge the reality. But I just had to. I just had to actually tell him goodbye. And so. And so I was.

[Podcast Host]

Was he aware of what was going on?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, he must. He must have known that, like, I am actually Saying goodbye to you. You know, I know that I'm not gonna ever see you again. And, and so, and so I'm hugging him for like a long time. Like a really long time. By the time I, by the time I, I lift my head up, I think that he had kind of fallen asleep a little bit. But he was there with him, with me while I was talking to him. And so I walked out of the room and my grandma and I went and got something to eat. And then by the time we got home, she got a call from the hospital that he passed away. And I always wondered if that was the moment where he could let go. Somebody actually told him that I know you're dying and that I'm going to miss you and that I loved you and acknowledge his existence. Right. He knew that his existence was, was witnessed and loved and appreciated and he could go. And I've spent a lot of time, like looking into that and, and apparently that's a, that's a common phenomena. Like sometimes when people, when they, when they have an actual heart to heart conversation in their last moments, it makes them feel complete. They don't feel the need to hold on anymore. And you're okay.

[Podcast Host]

They come to grips of where they are.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So, so that was like a, that dream that I had a week earlier when he died. His heart stopped at like one o' clock in the morning. That's when I had that dream. When I woke up, man, there's no, you know, I am a Christian, I'm like an unorthodox Christian, but even if I was an atheist, that would change everything for me. Like, it was, it was that profound of an experience. And so I went to the Olmec world. I was there for the week. I had to like plan his funeral and everything. And that was tough. And then I went to Mexico and then right after that I turned around and went to Peru. And the very first time I ever saw Machu Picchu was in this coffee table book called Lost Cities. And it was a collection that was produced by Barnes and Noble, published and printed in August of 1997. That's when I was born. And, and so my grandpa, he, that was his book, he would always read that to me. And you know, gosh, from the, from the time I was a young kid, he would, he flipped through the pages and what's funny is I still have that book. I stole it from him when I was a teenager. I still have that book. And if I go, it's, it's cool now, flipping through all those. I was. Maybe a year ago, I was going through it with my wife and I was like, I've been there now. I've been there now. I've been there now. There's only a few places in that book I haven't been now, but the one I was always captivated by is Machu Picchu and right where all these iconic photos are taken. I'm standing there and I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, this is the only place I've ever been other than Hawaii. That actually looks like the photos. You go to Egypt, there's this massive metropolitan city behind you. You're not in the desert, Right. This is the only place I've ever been to that actually looks and feels like all the photos that you've seen. And it lives up to the photo. It's actually way better. That's why I always. I'm always like, yeah, if you can only go to, like, Peru or Egypt, I'd go to Peru because it's amazing. But I'm standing there and I'm like, wow, this is really, really amazing. Reaching. I reach in my pocket and pull out my phone and it's opened up to icloud email. And I don't use icloud email. I've got 4,500 emails I haven't opened up here that are all just spam. And it's already selected a recipient and the little thing is blinking for me to start typing. And the recipient was my grandfather, 43ahoo.com it was his email. I never sent him an email, but it really, really was his email. Somehow. It was in my phone and it was like he would. It was like he was. Yes, he was touching me from the next world, you know, and letting me know that he was there. And I was just. I was in the place where the photo was taken that's printed in that book. Yeah. And, yeah, it was profound. Profound, man. And, you know, that's like all the confirmation I need that there's something more beyond all of this. You know,

[Podcast Host]

I heard you say that you were going to go to grad school in Athens and something in the jungle made you change your mind.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I was. You know. You know what's interesting is. Me starting my career and being independent from, like, the very beginning. I never worked for a university or anything like that. All of my flaws and missteps and things that I said when I was. You know, I'm 28 now, but things I said when I was 25, when I'm still trying to figure out it's all publicly documented. People get to watch me progress over time. I feel like just now I'm kind of getting it all together. Right. And so, you know, I would go through these phases where when I first started this journey, I was so heavily influenced by. I saw you had a Graham Hancock book around here somewhere. So heavily, so heavily influenced by Graham Hancock. That's as far as actually reading. I'd say Fingerprints is probably like the first book I read where I remember I had this big old book in front of me and my mom would be like, what are you reading? And I was like, I was like, I'm reading something like a historical textbook because you know, the verbiage is very up there for me at 16 or something. And as far as reading and really putting effort into diving into the ancient world started with Graham Hancock and it gave me this idea of like this wide open ancient world of all these possibilities and mysteries and the wonder of, of these ancient sites.

[Podcast Host]

That's the big board possibilities. That's what he created.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I know that there were people that came before him, but I don't think anybody did it as well as he did. And I may, I may step on toes by saying that, but I. Graham Hancock captured and presented things in a way that was plausible. You know, it didn't, wasn't filled with like fantasy. You're not reading his books necessarily. And journalists telling the story. Yeah, exactly. And so it filled me with this wonder of the ancient world, the possibility. And so I devoured Graham Hancock's book. I even read Underworld, which is a great book. And so from there, ancient history is kind of like a, like a pastime. It's like my side thing where I'm just watching videos about it on YouTube or reading about it. Never really, never really thought I could actually do this as a job.

[Podcast Host]

What was your main thing?

[Luke Caverns]

Marketing. My mom is a creative. She was a, she was like a marketing. Yeah, she was like a high ranking creative at a place called Brookshire's grocery store. It's. I don't even know what, what to equivalent to out here, but yeah, so she, she was like creative. And I think actually history and the creative world, they kind of go together. Like people who are historians are more artistic than they are like numbers oriented. Right. Like a lot of people who are numbers people, they don't really. History doesn't really click with them because history is not as defined or it's not as neat.

[Podcast Host]

Right. It's a story. History is a story.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. Exactly. And so, so yeah, history and art went together, but to be honest with you, I didn't, I wasn't in love with marketing. It was just kind of one of those things where I would Google like how much does such and such job pay? You know, like, oh, okay. And so I'm getting my, this marketing degree in school and I don't love it. And everything that they're teaching in school I already know is like, well, you know, I actually use this other, I actually use this other platform which I think is better and I already know how to do what you're teaching me to do. And I just didn't care. And so I'm flunking out all my classes. I've got like a 1.7 GPA in junior college. They're putting me on academic suspension. I don't have the will to like actually continue school. And all the while my, my girlfriend at the time, who's my wife now, she's like a pre dental student. So she's like this high achiever crushing it. I'm like way down here, right? And so I end up realizing like it all kind of comes to a head and my, my dad is like, my dad's like, I'm have to let you go. Like I can't, I can't financially help you anymore because you're not even, you're not even doing anything, you know. And so it all sort of came to a head.

[Podcast Host]

Well, did you agree?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was, I was like, I get it. I was like deeply ashamed. Like I told my dad and what's funny is like a lot of times my dad, he can be like a lecturer. Like he'll really lay it on thick and that I was funny this time he didn't because he knew, he could tell how I just was like, God,

[Podcast Host]

he did you a favor.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. And so, and so I told my girlfriend at the time is my wife now. I was like, I was like, I'm actually not going to get a degree or graduate college if I don't do something that I like and that I'm good at, even if it's just to get the degree. So I, so the closest thing to it was, was anthropology. And so I, I appealed to the dean and I'm about to be on. So first they put you on semester suspension, then they put you on a year, so you gotta take a year off of school. So they had put me on a year and I wrote something to the dean and I was like, I was like, listen, I don't even try because I feel like. Cause I'm just not invested in anything. I want to pursue anthropology and I wanna study these ancient cultures. And they had like, ancient cultures of Mexico and Central America because we're in Texas, so Texas breeds Mesoamerican archaeologists. There's tons of them there. And so the dean's like, okay, well, I want you to write this such and such paper for me and let me read it. And so I had all these guidelines, so I wrote it in, like one day and I sent it back to him. And the paper was called how to How. It was how 2 million people disappeared Overnight in the Amazon. And it was basically like a breakdown of everything I had already known of how the Amazonian people were just dead, estimated over the course of a couple of centuries.

[Podcast Host]

And all writing good YouTube titles back then.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I guess so.

[Podcast Host]

That's a clicker.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. Long before I ever thought I'd be a YouTuber.

[Podcast Host]

When you were writing that paper, did you feel it coming through you?

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I'm supposed to do this.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, absolutely. And one of the things. It was around that time. I don't remember if it was before or just after this, but my wife and I, we were in my college dorm room and we were on my laptop and we watched the movie the Lost City of Z and. And I closed my laptop after that. And my life was never the same after I watched that movie. It was just. It was like the final domino had been pushed over. And something about that guy's journey about, you know, the only reason he took on those expeditions was to reclaim. His family name is Percy. Percy Fawcett. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Had you heard about him before?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I guess, but. But I hadn't read David Grant's book or anything like that.

[Podcast Host]

You know, he was such a badass.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. I didn't really know too much about him. I didn't really know anything about the story. I just thought it was cool. I actually know more about Hiram Bingham, the discoverer of Machu Picchu. And. And something about that guy's story just kind of being an underdog and like wanting to. To. To prove himself. And I guess he had this. He was a dreamer and he was reaching for something that. That almost didn't exist. Right. And. And something about that story just really resonated with me. And I was never quite the same after I watched that movie. So after. Or right before I switched my major, that. That happened. And anyways, they. He reluctantly let me into the anthropology program and I just smashed the last Year and a half of school. Yeah, I had like a 4.0. It was like nothing. I mean I didn't, I didn't even study. I did, but yeah, so, so I made it through school and then it was my last semester. Yeah, no, it was my second to last semester. I, I was thinking about grad school at that point. Yeah, a little bit. A little bit. It was my second to last semester and I, I was on YouTube and I saw an interview with, with Professor Dr. Ed Barnhart and I was like, I was like, oh, I really like this guy. So I had listened to his Lost Worlds of South America while I was. Maybe it was right before I switched my major or it was right afterwards, but he has this great lecture series called Lost Worlds of South America produced by the great courses. And I had only listened to the audio of it. I think later on I listened or I watched the actual watch the video. But it was the way that he told the stories, the way that he pulled you in and made it personal and then he would put his own personal opinion in the episodes and actually, actually it was my only real exposure to academics because I got my degree during the whole like Covid thing. So I never had a personal relationship. My personal relationship with a professor was one sided and it was this, there was this 24 lecture series thing on South America. And then eventually I found Maya to Aztec, his other one that's on Mesoamerica and just devoured both of those. And actually that was my exposure to academia. I did not know, and this may be the way I am, why I am the way I am. I did not know the cold, sterile, jaded side of academia. You didn't? I was never exposed to it. I was only exposed to, you know, just kind of like doing school virtually, which was cold in nature, but, but granted it would be that way. But really the, my main exposure was through Ed Barnhart which was so warm and romantic. Right. And I still listen to those lectures today just because it kind of takes me back to this like happy place and sometimes I want to brush up on stuff and I think, just think like this 30 minute synopsis will kind of get my brain back into it. And so I'm in my second to last semester and I start thinking about like, okay, you know, maybe I don't think I'm going to go work for a college because you don't get to pick the projects you work on. You're like an actor. You kind of just take what, take what comes to you, you know. So if I. So if I'm passionate about the Maya or the Inca, I'm actually probably going to be working on, like, the Caddo people in East Texas, which not my passions. And. And I don't want to be forced to do stuff that's not my passion. So I start thinking about, like, well, maybe I can get into YouTube and what's funny, I've never said this before. I used to love the Brave Wilderness YouTube channel back during this time. And, you know, it's made for kids, but it's cool. And I was like. I was like, you know what? There needs to be like a Coyote Peterson of history. And. And then my sister was watching Extinct or Alive on Animal Planet, which is Forest Galante. She was like, you have to watch this show. I'm watching the show and I'm thinking, there's not a history version of this. There's not like a history guy that does this. And so one day I was. I was kind of. I started tinkering with the idea my last semester in college, where I was like, well, this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Make another Smart Choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates for multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance and affiliates not available in all states and situations. Prices may vary on how you buy. Maybe I should be, you know, the History Coyote Peterson or something like that. Maybe it's me, you know, maybe all this stuff that I've been influenced by, like, maybe. Maybe that's what I should do and I should tell stories and go on adventures and film it. Of course, I did not know what I was getting into.

[Podcast Host]

This story says, very familiar, my friend.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

You're looking for a show that doesn't exist. You just created.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, It's. You don't realize how my wife. My wife has a great saying. She. She always says to me, sometimes she'll be like. She'll like, it was you all along. Like that thing you were looking for, it was you all on. And she's a good one.

[Podcast Host]

So then what does happens have to do with this?

[Luke Caverns]

So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So I am. Well, Dr. Barnhart and I get very close. I start working with him. I reach out to him. I send him an email. He agrees to have. He agrees to have a breakfast with me.

[Podcast Host]

What is that like when you. When he's like, let's get a bite. Are you freaking out?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, it was pretty surreal. Yeah. Yeah. And. And so we Meet up and we, we get like tacos outside this, this grocery store. Yeah, it was great. And he had an hour for me and we ended up being there for like four hours. And that's how you knew. Oh, yeah, he likes me.

[Podcast Host]

And.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, he, he liked me and. And so a month and a half later, I'm in Mexico with him at Palenque. The very first pyramid I see is the Temple of Inscriptions at the city of Palenque. And I'm standing with Dr. Barnhart and he and I have been like, thick as thieves for, I don't know, like four years now.

[Podcast Host]

Since then, he's considered him a mentor.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, he's probably my only mentor, I'd say. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Does he watch your channel?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I don't know if he. I don't know if he's actually. I mean, I guess when it has stuff to do this not, not the Americas, he might learn something.

[Podcast Host]

But I'm just wondering if he ever pushes back on some of your theories.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, well, I don't think that he and I agree on. And we could get into this later. I don't think that he and I agree on what the, where jaguars are when it comes to the, the Olmecs. I think he and I disagree there. That might be the only thing that we disagree on. But yeah, but, yeah, I mean, we're two different people, you know, whatever. And. But it's fine. We don't argue about it. But yeah, we chat almost every day. And he's become a very close friend of mine now. And. And so I had this period where when I was with. When I first started working with him that I was like, oh, wow, you know, I'm working with this guy who's like a world class archeologist, very well known, and. And so I started becoming exposed to other academics as well, and academics that I still like and still talk with today. But maybe I should have just kept my exposure mostly to Dr. Barnhart because I started getting this idea in my head of like, you know, being Dr. Luke might be kind of cool, or maybe I should specialize or maybe I should do this and that. And I was, I was very in. I was becoming very influenced in my early days of my channel of these highly credentialed people around me and constantly talking to them. There's like this hierarchy. Right. It's like I'm like appealing to that and it makes you want to become equals to them. Right. But the more I did that, the further away I was getting from this Adventurer spirit that my grandfather had and then my, you know, my family had had and that first spirit I had from reaching, from reading, like Fingerprints of the Gods. This idea of, like, I want to travel around the world and see all these places. I want to be, I want to do all of it. I want to be like Indiana Jones and go everywhere and know all this stuff. So, so I had, I had this period of time where I had become really fascinated with the Greeks again. When I watched Troy as a kid, like, like the ancient Greeks were the first civilization that I really sunk my teeth into and learned a lot about the Bronze Age Greeks. And so I had this period just over a year ago where I was thinking, like, you know, maybe I, you know, I was, I was teaching myself Ancient Greek and, and I was like, just, I was deep into it and, and I was just, you know, I was too influenced by academics that were around me. Way too influenced by it. And the day I was supposed to pay the tuition, it's one of the few, it was one of the two times in my life that I, I prayed for a clear answer. Not a, not like, oh, maybe I should do this. I, I remember, I remember in both times, I'd have to sit down on the shower floor and I'd pray like, God, I don't want you to show me what to do. I need you to tell me. I need you to make it very obvious. So this is the second time. And it happened the day I woke up to pay the tuition. Everything in me was like, if you do this, you betray who you are and you betray your whole family. You felt that. And it was, I opened up. It was like God telling me, I allowed you into that anthropology course to study the Americas, not to study the Greeks, not to, not to go around the other world. The Americas opened itself up to you. That's what your grandfather explored in the American Southwest. Of course, we're Americans. But, you know, it was like, no, that's the world that opened up to you and that's your, that's who you are. It chose you. And I just knew, like, oh, that's, I can't, I can't do this. And somewhere in there I was, oh, yeah, I say that. I, I do say that I had a, a mind opening experience in the jungle, but that's actually not the jungles in America. I was in Cambodia. Okay, but I was in Cambodia. And some of my buddies and I, we were, we were having some very good Cambodian devil's lettuce. And it was potent, man And I'm sitting there talking with them and I just, I just while, while I was talking with them, it was even more confirmed in my mind that, that I had to stay with you. This is a little bit afterwards. Yeah, but, but I knew, I really, really knew after spending a lot of time with some of my friends and kind of hearing some confirmation bias like, that they were all like, you had to stay with the Americas. And that's what everybody thinks because it's so natural. But the difference is, like, sometimes when people watch you, they can see you more clearly than you can see yourself. And so I have always struggled with the fact that the Americas opened itself up to me. Like, people see me as the Americas guy. He's a guy that knows a lot about the Maya, the Olmecs, the, you know, ancient Peru, this, that and the other. And sometimes you have this identity crisis where you're like, whoa. But no, my first love was the Greeks and I like the Egyptians too, but that's not the plan that, you know, the universe has for me. And so anyways, so that's. That was kind of my struggle with, with ancient Greece. But, you know, it's. People have seen sort of this arc over time where I had some ideas I thought I was going to do it, didn't end up doing them. But, you know, ultimately I'm at this place now where I have this, I have this self awareness now that like, you know, the Americas is where I belong. It's my bread and butter. And, and there's so many stories here that need to be told that nobody else is telling. And there's so many lost worlds here that like, you know, what's funny is, is I spend so much time studying a topic before I ever talk about it in a. On an actual video and produce something about it. I haven't even slightly scratched the surface of the things that I will make videos on. You know, so, like, sometimes things slip out in podcasts or people will be like, you talked about this in a podcast for an hour before you never even made a video on it. I'm like, well, you. I, I just really want to know something before I. Right, but. And it's so. It's taken me a long time to form the direction I'm going, but, you know, now I kind of realize, like, there's so much in the Americas that people know about, they should talk about. Man, I just did. I just did the first, the world's first, as far as I know, historical breakdown, basically, according to the sources, proving the fact that jaguars were in the east coast of the US 300 years ago. Nobody else did anything like that. And so the Americas just need that one thing I'm working on right now. And we're going to offer to go down there and lidar scan it with base map is a team down in southern Chile. They just found one of the lost colonies of Magellan down in Chile. Yes, they just found it and they're going to try to find the second one because it's twin colonies. But I don't know how good their lidar stuff is. But we can lidar map like they sent me, they sent me something. But I think we can LIDAR like 13,000 acres in like five days. So we're gonna, we would help them find that. But there's so many stories in the Americas that.

[Podcast Host]

But you don't mind if we travel a little bit around the world?

[Luke Caverns]

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I should say that said, it's not like I'm just gonna stick to the, stick to the Americas forever. But I know that that is something that really needs to be like my main focus, if that makes sense. But I, man, I love ancient Egypt, I love the Greeks, I, I love ancient China, you know, so that, that will always be an aspect of mine I'll never niche down again. That was kind of one of the other things is being around so many academics, they're so geared towards hyper niching and that invades your way of thinking. And so I'm always going to be like a global general historian. But I, I really, especially now with these new lidar projects, like I'm really going to hone in on expanding a lot of the things that most people don't know about the Americas.

[Podcast Host]

Well, that brings me to something. Before we go to break, if you could just tell us what it's really like when you're in the field. Not the, not the glory. I want to know about the mosquitoes and the logistics problems and when things go wrong. What is that like?

[Luke Caverns]

Well, mosquitoes, man. The worst I ever had them was at Machu Picchu.

[Podcast Host]

Really.

[Luke Caverns]

I made a mistake of wearing a short sleeved shirt out there in the summer. Amazonian mosquitoes are unlike anything that most people have experienced. Their stings, I don't know, I don't know exactly what's in them, like the venom or something that's in their stings that makes your skin inflame and cause these bumps. But it's so contagious that I would scratch myself and I would actually spread it across My arms and across my body. Three weeks after I'd gotten back from Peru, the bumps are still spreading around me everywhere I would scratch. Luckily, I avoided getting on my face, but they were still new bumps would pop up on my arms every day. And so when you would read through the journals of Percy Fawcett and you see how his arms were scarred from the field. So I don't know if you can. You probably can't tell because you don't stare at my arms every day. But like every little dark spot that you see where you're like, oh, is that a dark spot? Yeah, that's a mosquito bite from two years ago.

[Podcast Host]

Mosquito scar.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. Yeah. And then these, these straight lines. These are from thorns from. From the Gila expedition I just did.

[Podcast Host]

What else is out there? Snakes.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. Well, so in. In Mexico, Central and South America, you have to worry about the fer de lance. It's the. It's the most dangerous snake. I've gotten corrected before by saying it's the deadliest snake in the Americas. I still think that it is. Maybe it's not the most venomous. They say it's the coral snake, but the problem is that to get a coral snake to bite you, you have to shove it up against your hand or something. But a fer de lance will go out of its way. Oh, no, it won't go out of its way, but it won't run away from you. It'll stay coiled up and. You know, a lot of animals have fight or flight. It's all fight and they. And they. And they repeat strike, too. So they'll bite you once and they'll bite you again. And they'll bite you again. And they'll bite you again. They don't. They don't retreat. So they're really, really dangerous. And they're brown, so you don't see them. You're not. Yeah, you're not going to see them. You have any snake bites yet? No, no, no. I've never. I've never been bitten by a snake. Yeah. And I've seen. I've seen two fer de lance in person. One was a baby. Which are like, extremely dangerous because they'll give you all their venom. And then the other one was actually at the hotel. They. They'll come up close. Yeah. See these guys?

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

So they come up close to the hotel because there are rats around where humans are, you know, so they try to kill the rats. So what they'll do is they'll, like. When you walk around, you know, I don't know if you go to. Sometimes there are hotels that you go to where you have to go out at night to go to the restroom. And so sometimes the restrooms are built up on, like, a stilt. And that little area between the ground and the floor of the restroom, they'll sit right there and they bite people on the ankles as they're going to the restroom in the middle of the night. Yeah, it's wild. It's wild stuff. So. But I would say you're no armchair explorer. You're out there, I would say. So. I just did a. I just did an expedition on training wheels, as I call it, to the Gila. And this was basically myself and a group of guys. We got ourselves equipped. We bought all the equipment that you need for an expedition pretty much anywhere, anywhere around in the world. And. And I, I planned this route through the Gila, which I got a lot of pushback for, because a lot of people were like, oh, you know, I've been hunting out there since forever. That place isn't uncharted. Blah, blah, blah. Like, I don't even think. I'm not sure if you know what charted means or whatever, but. Or what exactly. I'm talking about whether it's archaeologically charted or explored or not. And so. But it was. It was like an expedition on training wheels. I got to see and feel what it. What it was like to invest so much into all the equipment and getting everybody prepared and developing a plan and trying to see what does executing this plan feel like. And just to give you an idea of just how hard it is to go through, even just the Gila Wilderness, which is pretty fairly dry, and you think that it's open, it's way more dense and hard to get through than you think, especially with river crossings. Like, I went in thinking we'd have to do a few river crossings. And by the time the expedition was over, we had done over 200. Oh, wow. So. And, and, you know, one of the other problems is, like, I had. I had a very nice pair of crispy boots. And people are hunters. They'll know what those are. But they're. They're mostly. They're waterproof. If you can keep your, you know, the boot above. Above the water level. But, you know, if you get. If you get water in your. In your boots, your socks get wet. You can only bring so many socks. By the time you get to the camp, it's going to be nighttime. It starts getting cold. You're not drying out your socks over a fire. A Fire is not hot enough to, to dry out your socks. That happens two days in a row. You have nothing but wet socks and wet boots. The skin, you know, you're walking so much that the skin on the bottom of your toes is like, peeling back. Especially if they're wet. The skin on your toes is peeling off.

[Podcast Host]

This is like trench foot.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. My, my, my. Both of my big toes, I, I don't know if I didn't sever the nerves on them, but I, I compressed them so much that now, six weeks after we've gotten home, my. Both of my big toes, half of them are still numb just from how much I, My toe had to be pressed. And you know, they, they say like, oh, well, your boot's not big enough, but when you're going downhill, you're going to be pressing your, your toes against side of your boot. So we were, we went at 30% the pace I expected that we would go.

[Podcast Host]

30%.

[Luke Caverns]

30%, yeah. So we had that. We had this map in front of us, and we thought that we were going to be able to get from this lake, down this river valley, across this other river valley, and then over the top of this mountain all. And I don't know why I thought we could do all this in one day. I mean, you're looking at it on satellite and you can't see what the terrain is like. So you go down there to find out. And this is why we did an expedition in the States. I did it to a place that's historically and I guess nostalgically or sentimentally significant to me, right in the Gila Wilderness. And so I. There's this place called the Mogollon Cliff Dwellings, which is really cool. And mostly like, it's like a little hidden gem. Most people don't, don't go to the Gila Cliff dwellings. They'll go to, like, Chaco Canyon or something. And up that river, about 25 miles up, there's a place where it gets much more green. And all of the, and the canyon is very, very dense. So, like, flash floods are super dangerous. And all of the trails through the Gila Wilderness go around this area. So it's this area that doesn't get a lot of traffic. And you would watch videos and people would say, the river continues this way, but we have to stop here because there's no more trails going through there. They say that's where all the wildlife fled to in these tight canyons. So they think like cave or bears and mountain lions and stuff are living in that One area.

[Podcast Host]

That's where the food is.

[Luke Caverns]

And so that's where the expedition. That's where we went. We, we went straight down this area that there, that there are no trails. Went straight down and then back out. And you put this online yet? Yeah, yeah, it's like, it's like a two hour documentary thing that we did. Okay. And so, yeah, so, you know, I just, I did this to see. I did this because I knew that if something ever went wrong, we could get, we could get help. You speak the same language as everybody, right? So that, that's a, that's a big thing. Like if you're in Mexico, you know, my Spanish isn't that good. And you know, you have Spanish speaking people with you, but it's cliffs.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, these are amazing.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, but it's just, it's just more complicated to get help in a different country. In the US it can happen just like that.

[Podcast Host]

So in like 10 years, you're going to be with a junior explorer who's going to look at a map and say, yeah, we could do this in two days. You're going to say 10.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly. Exactly. I, I know, exactly. And so that's why I'm glad that we did this first expedition. I had some comments. People are like, oh, man, this really. Blah, blah, blah. I'm like, man, I'm just read the comments. I'm like, I'm like, I'm just learning how to. You know, you guys just wait till you see what we're about to do because now we're planning this one in American Samoa. That's gonna be a big deal. And then we're doing this one in the Amazon. If it goes through, it'll be the biggest scan that's ever been done in the Amazon. So. But yeah, as far as being in the field, everything is so much more difficult and it takes so much longer than you anticipate it's going to. Like I said, we moved at 30% the speed that I thought we would and. Oh, and then there's, there's food issues. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Like I was just gonna ask, did you bring enough supplies?

[Luke Caverns]

We did bring enough supplies. We had, we had one hiccup with the food where one person did not have food. So we had to divide the food amongst everybody.

[Podcast Host]

This is how stories begin.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. So we had to divide the food which took our calories from. You know, we had planned for about 1800 calories a day and that took that from 1800 to 900 calories a day.

[Podcast Host]

That doesn't sound like Enough to do this work.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, man. So on the last day I was like, I was like wobbly. I was pushing through. You know, everybody was wobbly by the last day and I lost. So. So I wear a size 32 pant and those pants were falling off of me. By the last day I'd probably go down like a, like a 30 or something. And. Yeah, man, it's, you know, there's so many things and what's cool is I talk about this in, in the expedition documentary. I basically say that, you know, most expeditions the most dramatic part of it is never the discovery because one, most expeditions don't find anything.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Luke Caverns]

You read through Percy Fawcett, he found a lot of cool stuff. Never found what he was looking for.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Luke Caverns]

Ernest Shackleton, greatest explorer of all time. Also the most unsuccessful explorer of all time. The only reason he's famous is because he's a failure. Right? But he's actually such a successful explorer because he was able to protect all of his men. Nobody died on his expedition.

[Podcast Host]

I just covered him. He was a great, great.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, did you really? Okay, yeah, yeah, they just. An amazing man. I'll tell you a great book to read is Shackleton's Way. It's, it's a, it's a guy who's a, I think he's a psychologist and he studied Shackleton story and wrote this book that it's maybe like a six hour audible listen to and writes. It basically encapsulates his whole philosophy. Shackleton was writing a book on the philosophy of being explorer before he died. And it was never published. He never, he never finished it. I'm pretty sure that's right. And so this guy kind of writes that book and it's fascinating hearing a psychologist go into why Shackleton would have made the decisions that he did. But getting out of there was the most dramatic. Getting out of the Hilo was the most dramatic part because we were running low on food. Everybody was starting to get the wobbles and, and so we're at this point where we've gotta, we've gotta cross 12 miles in a single day. And then the next day we can decide if we want to go back through Iron Creek, which was hell to get through. It was so difficult to get through Iron Creek that most of it wasn't filmed because we all needed both hands to be able to hold on to the cliffsides and like all the rubble is falling beneath you and everything. And so we would go back through that and then that would take us all day, and then we'd have to camp again, and we'd have another day. Why? I told the guys. I was like. And nobody thought that it was possible until the morning of. And I was telling the guys. I was like. I was like, guys, I can take us. If we can climb up this mesa that's right in front of us, we can get out of here in half a day rather than two more days of the expedition. And I don't know if. If. If everybody believed. I think that. I think on the last day, everybody was ready to go. And they're like, it, let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. So. But I can't. I was telling the guys for days leading up to that. I was like. I was like, I think we can go over that mesa and get out of here. I think we can. I think we can. Of course, you never know for certain. And in my mind, I'm like, if. If I'm wrong, everybody's gonna be fed up because you think, like, oh, it's not that big of a deal. You just go back down, blah, blah, blah. No, when you're seven, eight days in, and you've been walking and walking and walking and walking and walking, and you're low on calories, you're not in normal life anymore. You're now out in the field. Your. Your vision's much more, like, dialed in.

[Podcast Host]

You're surviving now and exploring.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. And the small things that happen to you are more significant. You don't think about the fact that, like, oh, well, it's just a walk down there, and it's another day. You're like, I got to do this another day. And especially when maybe, like, like, if you're not the leader of the expedition, I'm emotionally, financially as invested. Check off everything. I'm that invested. So, you know, my thought process is different than the guys that I'm looking out for. Right. And so there's a lot of psychology there of, you know, being a leader. And did you get over that mesa? Yeah, we got over it. And we were out in half a day. So I was. Luckily, I was right. And so that was the coolest part of the expedition, was just getting everybody out way faster than we expected and getting to the nearest gas station, which was like two and a half hours away.

[Podcast Host]

What did that feel like?

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, man, we got a raid. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah, yeah. So we got. We got Gatorade, we got Ruffles, we got beef jerky, we got Skittles, we got ice cream sandwiches.

[Podcast Host]

Had to be so good.

[Luke Caverns]

Chocolate. Oh, my buddy's truck was just filled with trash and, and so we gorged after that. And, and that was, it was, it was great, man. Ultimately the expedition, we, we didn't even find any artifacts like on the rivers. Now we could have spent more time like looking for arrowheads and stuff, but we, we just didn't have time to do that. And, and, and the river was like brutal cold even sitting next to the river, the wind coming off of it. Dude, your body's ever dropped so fast even in the day. And we found, we found a site that really looked like it would have been an archaeological site. And had I spent a week there dedicated, sleeping at that site, serving it and looking around for just any kind of ground artifacts, we could have confirmed it was a site. But we just weren't able to, especially not with like the calorie restrictions. Like we lost probably two days of survey just because we were so short on food. So we had to get back out of there. But all in all the, the main thing I learned was that it's not going to go the way you think and you're going to be a lot slower than you think that you are and things are going to get like a wrench is going to get thrown into your plane. And yeah, that, that's probably the biggest thing is, is the same, listen you hear from every other explorer is that, is that it's going to be a lot longer and a lot harder than you think and all the things you think are going to happen are not going to happen that way and it's going to go wrong. So you know, I probably, I probably am a fraction of a step closer to being more well prepared for the next expedition.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, things are still going to go wrong.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's basically where I'm at now. And so the three expedition projects I'm planning now are across the American Southeast, rebuilding the Mound Builder world, working with Terra Terra Incognito Research Institute and Base Map. We're trying to get the permissions to.

[Podcast Host]

We're going to cover all this.

[Luke Caverns]

Can we take a quick break?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah, we'll cover all that. And when we come back, I want your take on one of my favorite ancient stories that it all starts with a corpse.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh really? Okay, Cool, cool, cool.

[Podcast Host]

Hey, have you ever heard about this city called Alexandria?

[Luke Caverns]

I've heard about it once or twice, so been there once or twice.

[Podcast Host]

So I, I showed you earlier that I wear a. It was a gift for my wife. It's a, it's a tetradrocma. It's her heracules that was stamped just about 10 years after Alexander the Great died. So I'm a fan of his. Could you tell us his life story really quick? But I really, really want to know where his body went.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. Well, Alexander probably, I mean, probably the most exceptional person that lived in the ancient world. Like, I think the only guy who really comes close is probably Julius Caesar. But even Caesar not, not the, I don't know, the kind of crazy enigma that Alexander was. He's this kid that's born and northern Greece in this fringe Greek kingdom. You know, at this, at this point, a lot of the Greek world, I don't know if they're, you know, platonic, but they're heavily influenced by, by Athens and Sparta and they have this different way of life than the Macedonians do up in, up in northern Greece. And in fact, if you're Athenian, you might not even see the Macedonians as being Greek. You might see them as like barbarian Greek. Right. So he's born in this fringe place and you know, actually Philip, his father is also maybe just as miraculous a story because he's a king in northern Macedonia that is so intelligent. He manipulates all of the Greek world to falling under his control. He becomes the king of Greece. I'm no expert really on Philip. I just know that. I know that the story is so impressive and nuanced because I have stayed away from diving into it because I know it's going to be a huge rabbit hole. But essentially the Greek world is just a collection of city states. And most of these city states are not. They don't have a. Maybe all of them, other than Sparta, do not have a government that's set up with a monarch or an emperor in charge. Right. And so Philip is able to unite all of the Greek world under his power in Macedonia. So in one lifet, all of the Macedonian Greek kings born before Alexander are like minor rulers that aren't very powerful. Macedonia is not even on the map. If you ask most Greeks where's Macedonia, they're like, God, I don't even know what that is. One lifetime, this guy is born in an obscure kingdom and becomes basically emperor or king of all of Greece. Unites the entire Greek world underneath him. It's like Game of Thrones, the way he's able to do it.

[Podcast Host]

And this. There's probably a thousand city states.

[Luke Caverns]

It's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And they're constantly fighting with each other.

[Luke Caverns]

So powerful that he, I believe, basically had control of Athens and told Aristotle, you are going to come up to Macedonia and tutor my tutor, my son.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Luke Caverns]

So that guy's story to be able to conquer the Greek world in itself is mind blowing. And then his son turns around and, you know, so we don't really know why Philip died or why he was assassinated. You know, there's all these stories about like his lover this, that and the other. There's. But the reality is nobody really knows. One of the popular ideas is that Alexander thought that Persia had sent assassins to, to assassinate Philip. But that may or may not be true. But he certainly uses it to gather the Greek armies and turn his sights towards, towards turn sites, towards Persia. Because I believe that Philip did want to do a run across the Turkish coast and free some of those Greek cities that are living there. And so that's what Alexander starts out doing. Well, within just a few battles between like age 23 and 25, he, he has some of these key decisive victories. And you know, ancient wars are not like they're fighting every single day. They're doing this, that and the other. It's just a few battles in one war and sometimes they can be months or years apart from each other, but if they lose that battle, their territory is just crippled, you know. So in a few decisive battles, he essentially pushes the Persian Empire all the way back to Babylon. They don't have Anatolia anymore. And then he moves down to Egypt

[Podcast Host]

and he never loses.

[Luke Caverns]

He never loses. Never loses the battle.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Luke Caverns]

And he, at least not yet in India, he kind of, they kind of keep him out of India. I think he vastly underestimated how big India was. But rather than pushing into Babylon and conquering Babylon, his advisors tell him that he needs to turn around and head west to go secure the breadbasket of the Persian Empire, which what fed the Persian Empire, what fed their whole army is the grain that's coming, coming from the Nile. It's the most fertile place in the ancient world. So he, he goes in, he shows up to Egypt and the Egyptians basically welcome Alexander with open arms because the Egyptians hated Persian pharaohs the very first. We don't really know if this happens, but this, one of the stories that's passed down is camp Isis, which is the first Persian ruler who becomes pharaoh in Egypt. When he shows up at Egypt, he kills, I think he stabs the sacred APIs bull together. He stabs it to death. Death. And at this point, probably from about a thousand BC to the end of Egyptian culture like 325 BC, that's when Constantine shuts down all the temples and everything. The APIs bull is basically the main deity at this point. And so the story is that camp isis in like 525 BC, stabs the. Stabs the APIs bull to death, which is just a massive middle finger to the Egyptian culture. They can't stand the Persians, so they essentially welcome Alexander with open arms.

[Podcast Host]

And Egypt has a diplomatic relationship with Greece at this point anyway. Right. Pythagoras is going back and forth.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. They had known each other for a very long time and they had always, you know, the. The Egyptians, as far as we know, had always been open and kind to Greece. Coming down, Herodotus comes to visit. Solon comes to visit. I can keep going on. So.

[Podcast Host]

So he doesn't necessarily. Alexander, conquer Egypt as much as shows up and secures it.

[Luke Caverns]

As much as the Egyptians know that they have no standing army, they're not gonna be able to stop Alexander from coming in. But they know that maybe if they welcome him with open arms, he'll be a better ruler over them than the Persians had been. Which. Which probably would have been the case. It actually was the case. I mean, really, what happened from Alexander coming into Egypt and the Ptolemies later becoming. That was a lot better for Egypt than. Than the Persians, but. But they essentially welcome Alexander with open arms as much as they can. You know, there's nothing they're going to do about it. And so Alexander comes to Memphis. He probably sees the pyramids. I wish that we had surviving records of that We. There would have been. Ptolemy, his best friend is with him this whole time. He wrote an account of all this, either during his life or later in his life. Those were lost probably with the library being destroyed so many times. But all of these accounts that we have, like from Plutarch and what is it? Is it Arius, one of the. All these accounts of Alexander's lives of his life, they're drawing on Ptolemy's writings, which they had access to, but we don't. So there's. So who knows how many small details Ptolemy wrote. That's, you know, for whatever reason, ancient authors were like, oh, well, I'm not going to repeat that part, but, you know, whatever. So. So Alexander, to become officially pharaoh of Egypt, they have to make this pilgrimage to the Siwa oasis. So they cross this vast desert out and out into western Egypt, and he meets with the oracle of Zeus Amun, which is basically a fusion of Amun Ra and Zeus and so this oracle goes and performs this ritual or whatever where they, where they become overcome with the presence of this God and they come out and they essentially give this confirmation to Alexander. And to the Egyptians, he is the literal or adoptive son of Zeus Amun. Right. So it's this. The oracle has said that you now have the blessing of the gods to become pharaoh. So he. So Alexander, in that moment, becomes a God, which is kind of one of the interesting things. One of the only places in the ancient world, like a Roman emperor is a politician, a Greek king is a king. Roman emperors get assassinated and killed all the time. You know, Roman emperors, like, I believe it's the deadliest job in human history. Have you ever seen this stat before?

[Podcast Host]

I haven't, but I believe it.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, it's, it's something crazy. It's like if you became a Roman emperor, you had a, like a 47% chance of dying on the job. Something like that, you know, being. Being assassinated. So Roman emperors get killed. They're not seen necessarily. They try to show themselves as divine beings, but they're not seen that way. Kings get assassinated. But pharaohs are something different. They're. They're godly, right? They're. They're part deity.

[Podcast Host]

And Alexander played into that role.

[Luke Caverns]

He played. He played into it and probably he was. We don't really know if it's. He's definitely knows that it is advantageous for him to play into it. The real question is how much did he believe it? You know, he probably did believe. He probably did believe it. He was enamored by the stories, you know, Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. He loved the legends of the Greek world. Because of Aristotle. Maybe. I mean, I don't know if we, if we know, you know, why his fascination happened. I mean, definitely Aristotle influenced him. But, you know, that's interesting because Aristotle is a, you know, he's in that Platonic, like philosophy heritage. And Plato and Socrates are not really big believers. And so, you know, there's a lot of things playing here. And Alexander is very different. Like, you know, a lot of people try to go Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander, as if Alexander is a descendant of those guys. Not really Alexander. He's much different than Aristotle. So we don't really know exactly what he believed or really what he saw himself as. Probably he saw himself as a God or more than a God because his generals would, like, challenge him. And I think that they would say something like, they would say they would compare him to Hercules or they would say, like, like, you shouldn't compare yourself to Hercules. And he's like, he's like, why not? I've done more in my lifetime. He was more than a. He's greater than a God was.

[Podcast Host]

What would any 22 year old who conquered half the world be like?

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly. What would they be like? And so essentially he becomes, he becomes crowned pharaoh of Egypt and he heads up north and one of the last things that he. We don't know if he did this before he went to the Siwa oasis or if it was right after, but he went up north and one of the things he always carried around with him was Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey. And in the Odyssey, which I hope that we see this in this new Christopher Nolan movie, Odysseus, one of the places that he finds refuge at as he's being bounced around the Mediterranean is this little island on the coast of Egypt. And when he arrives there, the locals tell him, he asked them where they're at and they say, pharos. This is Pharos. We don't know if that's supposed to mean this is the Pharaoh's land or what or what that means, but he called it Pharos P H A R O S in English.

[Podcast Host]

Which is a real small island.

[Luke Caverns]

It's a real island. Yeah, yeah. And so that, so he landed there and he stayed there and then he ended up leaving. Well, Alexander being 24, 25 years old, and he's like, I'm gonna go find that place, I want to go see it. Well, he, he arrives and it's a little fishing village called Rokotis, I believe. And, and while he's there, he realizes that, that the land itself is actually kind of advantageous. So the Greeks like to build on water. The Egyptians aren't water people. They're also not desert people. They don't, they don't like the water. They were called the Mediterranean, the great green. So they, that's why you don't see Egyptian expeditions going out to conquer places across the ocean. They will bounce around the coastline to get up to like modern day Lebanon because that's where they would get their cedar wood from. Or, or the, the cedars of Lebanon. Yeah, and they get their wood from Lebanon and they bounce around and do trading expeditions, but they're not launching full on seafaring expeditions. They never really had military boats in the way that the Phoenicians or the Greeks did.

[Podcast Host]

They like to be downriver, guard the delta.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. And they want to be right there. They want to be right there in the green that's next to the river. They don't even go into the desert. They avoided the desert because it was a place for the dead. Right. They would send their dead out into the desert, but they didn't live out there. If you went out there, the people living out there were marauders and barbarians and raiders and they'll kill you, you know.

[Podcast Host]

Well, we think of ancient Egypt as this giant world, but it really was

[Luke Caverns]

just the delta, this tiny little place. And, and actually get this dude. So this is one of these anthropology things. All right, so this, so this is ancient Egypt in a nutshell. You've got, let's say after the unification of Egypt, so after the pre dynastic era, around 3100 BC. And then we will get back to Alexander. But you know, you've got north and south Egypt, which south is upper, north is lower. We don't have to get into that. It's just the way, the direction it flows.

[Podcast Host]

Weird.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, the way that, the way the river flows. But you've got these three different places in Egypt. Essentially you've got southern Egypt, which is, you know, a collection, a collection of cities along these, in this fertile valley. Then you have this vast area that's not really very fertile. And then you get to northern Egypt at the bottom of the delta, and that's where Memphis and some other. And some other cities were. And then you have the delta, which there were. There were some cities living out there because it's a much more lush area. But the Egyptians that were living in the north, they saw the delta as being a good defensive place. So you would hear if people ever tried to invade, they would have to navigate through the waters of the delta and messengers could go back to the city that's at the bottom of the delta, which is Memphis. Right. So you're defended in the north and no one's going to attack you from the south because they're also Egyptian. But they're not like unified with us. But they live really, really far up the river, but far south. And so it's a, it's a defensive place, but really you have some villages in the delta. You got these main. A few cities in that northern area and a few cities in the south. Well, over time there, over time there was a pharaoh called Narmer, or Menace, and he was from the south and he marched north and conquered the north and then unified them and started dynastic Egypt.

[Podcast Host]

Can you boys throw the delta up there so we can take a look at how small it was?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, Tiny. And so you have these two main places. But you know what's really crazy is they call it, they call it the two lands because they're so heavily separated. People don't realize how separated that they are. The distance, I'm almost certain about this. We should measure it right now. The distance between Memphis, which across the river is where the pyramids were being built.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Luke Caverns]

The distance between Memphis and southern Egypt, where people were living is farther than the distance between northern Egypt and Athens, Greece.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

It's farther. Yes. We should measure that. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is though. So think about that. They were moving those, those Aswan blocks. When they're moving into the pyramids, those are traveling further, hundreds of miles than it would take, than it would take to get from the pyramids to Athens. That's wild.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Luke Caverns]

That's why I've never, I, I actually figured that out just like in the last week or so. But so, so then you have to think like, oh, that's how big Egypt is. You think about like, Greece is so far away. No, it's not actually. Actually, as one is further.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Luke Caverns]

So it kind of plays into like, oh, well, how big did the Egyptians think see their world? Like, they must have known their world was actually, actually absurdly large anyways, that, that's kind of one of those cool anthropology things. It changes the way that you think about Egypt when, when you're studying it. So Alexander, he's up at, he's up at Aswan and he, he sees this good defensive posture that the later city of Alexandria would have. There's this little strip that the north side of it is connected to the Mediterranean. On the south side is a lake called Mariotis. I think Lake Mariotis, it's just this little strip of land that's only exposed on the east and west sides. And right out in front of that is that little island of Pharos that's nearby this, this fishing village. So he pulls up with his convoy into this little strip of land and, and he, he doesn't have chalk or anything, so he grabs like some grain out of the saddlebag, throws it down onto the sand, and he marks out the way the city is going to be built.

[Podcast Host]

So he's thinking, I'm going to build a city here.

[Luke Caverns]

He's going to build Alexandria. Now I don't think this is the first Alexandria.

[Podcast Host]

Probably not.

[Luke Caverns]

I think that this is, I think this may be one of the last ones. There's a funny joke in the classics that's like, if Somebody asks you to name 10 cities of the ancient world, just say Alexandria, because there, I think there were 10 of them, or there were more than 10, but Alexandria, Egypt is the one that stuck. So he grabs this. The grain out of this saddlebag, throws it out, throws it on the ground, and he marks out that the city is going to be built around these two major roads. And they're each going to be something like a hundred feet wide, absurdly wide, and lined with stone, which is very rare in ancient times. Most of the time it's just packed dirt roads. And. And they're going to line up with the Mediterranean winds so they could determine which way the winds come from. And both the roads are going to be pointing towards the wind so that the winds will sweep down the city and cool the people down living in Egypt or living in the city. So he maps it all out and then he leaves. One of his architects, he says, you're going to stay here with, you know, who knows how many men are with him. And we have this idea that it's just like this caravan of like maybe a couple dozen people, but probably it's like hundreds thousand people with him, you know. So after he gets done laying it down, this flock of seabirds come and they just devour all the grain right in front of him. Now, he's very superstitious, and he looks at one of his. Looks at one of his guides that are with him, and he thinks that this is a bad omen and maybe they shouldn't build the city here. And the guy says, no, no, no, no, no, this is a good omen. This means that this city is going to feed many nations for many years to come or something like that. So. So Alexander ends up leaving Alexandria, he leaves his architects back, and they start building the city immediately.

[Podcast Host]

Right. Then does he plan the lighthouse in the library at that point or no?

[Luke Caverns]

I don't think so. I mean, if he did, never comes back, right? If he did, we don't know. We don't know. That's the thing. So he leaves Alexandria and he goes on to conquer Babylon and he tries to move into India. It doesn't really work out. Goes back to Babylon, ultimately dies. We don't know why he dies. Some people think that he could have been assassinated, that he could have been poisoned to death. His. His death certainly seems a bit like poison or maybe it's alcohol poisoning, you know, just living a very, very rough life. I don't know.

[Podcast Host]

But he's not injured in battle?

[Luke Caverns]

Well, he gets injured, but not like not mortally wounded. Right. And I think he takes an arrow to, to the, to his chest at some point or to his stomach. I think he does. But, but it's not, it's not life threatening. So a lot of people think that it was alcohol poisoning, just, just living a very like rambunctious life and ultimately poisoned himself. And some people think that it could be some form of cancer that obviously is not able. So anyways, when he's on his deathbed, his, all of his men come to him and they say, they say, Alexander, you don't have, you don't have an old enough heir. He's got a, he's got a son with either a Persian woman or an Indian woman. But the, but the son is like an infant and they're not going to be heir. They want a Greek. Right, Right. So there's no, there's no obvious heir to the throne. And he says, he says to the fittest. That's essentially what he says. And so what does that mean? So the fittest. Yeah. So initially they divided up into around half a dozen different territories. They divide up the mast the Macedonian

[Podcast Host]

empire, which is how big at this point?

[Luke Caverns]

Well, it's, it's the Persian empire plus Greece.

[Podcast Host]

So it's all the way east to India, west to through Europe, down the entire Mediterranean.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I mean, we don't really know beyond, well beyond Greece as you go west. Like maybe Syracuse is part of the empire, but I don't think he, he didn't have Italy. The, the attack like the early Romans are around. He probably would have set his sights west and gone and conquered Italy. But I think maybe they had Syracuse, but they didn't have Italy.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, there you go. Yeah, they didn't have it. So it stopped at Macedonia. So this is still, I think, the third biggest empire in history behind England and the Mongols.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so, yeah, he dies, he dies in Babylon at 32 years old and to his empire goes the fittest. They divide it up into, I think it's just a little bit more than a dozen different territories. And Ptolemy like Alexander, because they bonded over their, their fascination with the Egyptian world. The Egyptians were seen as like being otherworldly, ancient to the Greeks.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Luke Caverns]

Like they were this civilization that had still existed and been around since the beginning of time and they were still around like the Greeks at the, at the fall of the Bronze Age. They lose their, they lose their memory. One of the things that the Egyptians say about the Greeks is that there's no old Greeks. They don't remember anything.

[Podcast Host]

And we're going to cover that later with the Minoans. It's fascinating.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So much they. They remember so little to the point that this is probably one of the, one of the slight problems I take with, with when we look for Atlantis that we treat like we hang on every word that's. We think that Solon said. But Solon is alive. He's alive in the 600s to the, to the early 500s.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it's like 300 years.

[Luke Caverns]

And even that is semi mythical to the classical Greeks. Like they have a really hard time remembering their past.

[Podcast Host]

Right. And Solon even says, I'm telling the story from. I learned it from magician priests. I never.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly. So. And that gets passed down orally we think to Plato. So anyways, so even to those guys.

[Podcast Host]

Sorry to interrupt. Ancient Egypt is still ancient.

[Luke Caverns]

It's still ancient and still continuing the Manetho's history of ancient Egypt. Which he, I think that Manetho, he was an Egyptian and he wrote it in Alexandria, I'm pretty sure in one of the latter three centuries bc and that history of ancient Egypt has stood up with the archaeology. So The Egyptians, from 3100 BC all the way down to the time of Alexander, they remembered their history. Now there is their prop there we do see myths come through. Like Herodotus says that the Herodotus says that the Egyptians told him that Khufu hoard out his daughter to be able to build the pyramids or something like that. Well, the Egyptians say all kinds of crazy stuff when you go get a tour guide there today. Like there's a massive difference between a tour guide and a historian living in Egypt. Right. Like you can't take both of, you know, both of them. You can't put the same amount of weight behind their opinions. But the. There's definitely legends and stuff that get twisted up. But as far as the broad history, like the Egyptians, even thousands of years later, they still understood their history and they look at the Greeks as being like little children that don't know anything. So. So Ptolemy goes to Egypt and he's basically a governor of Egypt living out of Alexandria. They've now built up the city much more. I think another decade has gone by.

[Podcast Host]

What about Alexander's body?

[Luke Caverns]

So Alexander's body is kept in Babylon for a while. For a while.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Luke Caverns]

And, and so I forget who one of Alexander's heirs were, the general that wanted to bring his body back to Greece. I forget his name. But as told me, is. Is rising in power and kind of consolidating and getting everything going in Egypt. He at least my interpretation and in the agreement of private conversations I've had with other historians. Ptolemy has a huge dilemma here because he's not a warlord, semi divine God, mythical being that Alexander was. And the Egyptians know that they're not stupid. You know, like, even though they're. This is really interesting. I was, the other day, I was just reading the writings of Ptah Hotep, which was written around 2400 B.C. and he's the world's first philosopher and I think it's the world's first book. Actually it's the oldest book that we know of. A collection of writings. Yeah, he was a vizier living under one of the pharaohs. That comes shortly after Khufu, Khafra, Minkara, I think sixth dynasty or fifth. No, it must be fifth dynasty. Anyways, it's this, it's this book of like 60 some odd lessons of how to live your life correctly and how to interact with other people and treat them is just mind blowing. You will read. He has very specific scenarios that he'll mention and you're like, oh, I've been in a situation like that. It's freaking crazy. But one of the things that he says in the book is, is that the, it's, it's something like, like listen to what every person has to say because often the wisest words you'll hear will be spoken from the women at the fountain or something. It's something like that. And basically what he's saying is that these poor peasant women, women have obviously no rights that no, no high standing, no nothing. They're, they're a lower class citizen than, you know, men. Oftentimes these normal peasants will have, well, will have the most intelligent things to say that you've ever heard of. So thousands of years earlier, he's telling us that even the peasants in Egypt are very intelligent people, right? So Ptolemy is not fooling anybody by just posturing like he's this great ruler. He actually has to appeal to the Egyptian people because the Egyptians will revolt. I mean they tried to revolt against the Greeks, they tried to revolt against the Romans. They still want independence even though they, they like the Greeks more than they like the Persians. They still want their own independence. And you can't fool these peasants. And if you can, you can't do it forever, you know, you, if anything. And these and these rulers knew this. You can't rule with an iron fist. You will get your head chopped off. So you actually have to live up to the expectation and that. And that is the expectation of a ruler. In ancient Egypt, they were supposed to live in accordance with Ma'. At. They had to be philosopher kings that were focused on morality and keeping justice in the way of the universe, the divine order of the universe together. If you were not legitimately a good person as the ruler of Egypt, Egypt would be cursed. That's crazy to me.

[Podcast Host]

So, so Ptolemy obviously got through to them.

[Luke Caverns]

He did, but he had, but he had, he had a dilemma. He had to figure out a way to do that. He had to. This normal guy who's just a politician in the Greek world had to figure out a way to break through. So he does, let's say like three and a half things. He builds the lighthouse of Alexandria. Essentially, it's a symbol of Egypt's. Well, he's, he's got to do a lot too. He has to appeal to the Egyptians because he's now their, their governor. He's. Soon, he's gonna, he's just gonna proclaim himself Pharaoh because the, the whole, all these governors that are now ruling over Alexander's empire break up and start warring against each other. The lines become cut. Right. He's now not aligned with the Greeks anymore. He's a Greek family that ended up stranded in Egypt and in control of Egypt. So he has to become like, Greek Egyptian now because he can't go back to Greece.

[Podcast Host]

Right. And didn't his empire stop in Turkey or so, like.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, I think that they, I think that they control a little bit of that.

[Podcast Host]

There's the lighthouse. That was over 300 fe call.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, well, it's, it's actually. Well, I'll tell you in a second.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Luke Caverns]

So he's got to do two things. One, he wants to send a big middle finger back to Greece. He's gonna say, look at what I'm gonna build. So he. So he's worried about impressing the Greeks. I was told this by a Greco Roman historian as well. He was like, I'll also think about the fact that he's trying to impress the Greeks and make a statement to them. And I was like, okay, that's true, that's true. So, so that was told in stone that told it to me. He's a, he's a great guy. So he's trying to impress the Greeks and he has to impress the Egyptians. So he builds the lighthouse of Alexandria, which is a calling back to Odysseus, finding refuge basically at Alexandria because they build the lighthouse on the island of Pharos. And essentially what that lighthouse is, it was burning 24 hours a day and it was a welcoming to the Mediterranean world. You're welcome here. This beacon is a safe refuge. This is the first lighthouse in history. But that's what it meant. It was a safe refuge calling back to, to that like primordial Greek world. But it's also built within just a few feet of being the same height as the Great Pyramid. Oh, and it's built. And it, and according to the sources, it's built out of like 65 ton red Aswan granite stones. Which architecture like that had not been produced in Egypt for more than 2,000 years? It depends on, on how old you think that the Osirion is. If you're familiar with the Assyrian, a lot of people try to date that to. Oh, I think, I think it's established, dated to 19th dynasty under Seti the first. I don't agree with that. I think it's, I think it's definitely contemporaneous with the Valley Temple.

[Podcast Host]

You do?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

It goes back that far?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. I mean, however old, however old the pyramids and the Valley Temple and the Sphinx is, I think the Ocerian is the same age built by the same architect.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, I would agree.

[Luke Caverns]

Architecture. Yeah. I mean the original excavators of the Osirion thought that. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty, it seems, it's pretty, seems pretty obvious. So.

[Podcast Host]

And they weren't really using Aswan granite and they. So there's some Aswan in the king's chamber, there's some Syrian and that's it.

[Luke Caverns]

Right? Well, it's, it is, it is always incorporated like the obelisks are raised and those are read as one granite. But the, the way the granite is used just changes. It becomes more like. We don't have statues made out of red Aswan granite during the Old Kingdom, you know, made out of any of the Old Kingdom pharaohs at all. But we do have massive statues made out of single pieces of red Aswan granite that come from all periods of the New Kingdom. But the granite's being used in a totally different way. We even have some of the largest single standing statues actually come from the time of Alexandria. But So they're using Aswan stones. They're bringing them now like 700 miles. Like people always say, the stones From Aswan came 500 miles. Well, in Alexandria they went 700 miles to be used for the lighthouse. The lighthouse is built within just a few feet of being the same height as the Great Pyramid. So Ptolemy is telling The Egyptians, we're going back. We're going all the way back. Those pyramids that have loomed over your civilization for the last 200 years that you always say you wish you could go back to the golden days. Like in the Middle Kingdom, there are these things that are called the laments, which are these writings that come out of. That come out of the Middle Kingdom. And it's basically these people, like, lamenting over, like, how crappy early Old Kingdom or early Middle Kingdom was. And they wish that they could go back to the time of their great, great, great grandfathers. And so they would call it the golden age, the golden days or golden age of Seneferu, which is supposedly he lived before the great pyramids, but it was. It was a time of, like, immense wealth in Egypt. And so the Egyptians, throughout all their history, they. They look at those pyramids and they're like, man, like, you know, Egypt, after the 19th Dynasty, kind of becomes a backwater of the Mediterranean. Everyone around Egypt becomes just as powerful as them, and then they eclipse the Egyptians and the Egyptians just. It's just this backwater dump that all these people live in in the shadow of the pyramids. And so Ptolemy goes, no, we're going back now. So he fuels Egypt with all this money that came from Alexander's empire. And now the. And now the grain that comes from Egypt is not being extorted by the Persians or anyone else, or the Assyrians. I think they were conquered by the Assyrians shortly. They're not being extorted. Even though it's a Greek in power, it's now like the old days, because that Greek lives solely in Egypt, just as the capital moved north and Sorrento

[Podcast Host]

brought back national pride.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly, exactly. It's actually the second time that happened in Egypt. The Nubians did that, too. The Nubians came north and they conquered. Conquered Egypt. And there's the saying that the Nubians were more Egyptian than the Egyptians. So the Nubians restored Egypt to the way of the old.

[Podcast Host]

Did they rule for a couple hundred years as well?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, five. Five generations, I think.

[Podcast Host]

That's. That's a long time.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So, you know the Egyptians. Yes, it's a. It's a fascinating history. So he brings. So Ptolemy brings back, like, national pride. And. And he, you know, he also has nowhere else to go, so he's got to make this thing work. So then he builds the library of Alexandria. Now, when I say three and a half things, the half is that the museum is connected to it. So it's actually a university, not Just a library. And so in that library, everybody's heard the way it operates. You would, you would be going down the Mediterranean, you see the lighthouse off in the distance. You come into the main harbor, opens up massive city made out of gleaming tura white limestone, which is the same casing style stones on the outside of the pyramids. Marble that would be imported from, I think there's some marble in Egypt, but they were also importing marble from Greece through the markets and all kinds of Egyptian granite. Like it just would have been a priest, would have been crazy city. Greatest city, greatest city ever built up to this point. Far more impressive than Athens and, and way more impressive than Rome. Rome is nothing at this point. And so you pull in, you come up to the dock and then officials would board your ship and they would want to see your writings, like what you had. And they wouldn't take everything you had, but they would take the things that were important or things that they would like to have a copy of. So they'll say, we're going to transcribe this, copy it all down, and then upon when you leave, we'll have these ready to give back to you. But actually they would keep the original and give you back the copy of what you had. So they're collecting this massive archive of all the known literature of the ancient world. And people are studying things. I'm pretty sure it's a scientist that's living in, or scholar that's living in Alexandria who has the realization that the Earth is a sphere. Eratosthenes. I'm pretty sure he's living in Alexandria when he performs this experiment.

[Podcast Host]

And you mentioned that it's more than a library because it was, it was kind of like, like DARPA back then, experiments in science and all kinds of things going on.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. And you had, you know, people showing up to the library to learn about a number of things. I mean, they're studying sacred geometry, they're studying the pyramids. We have a surviving piece of a papyrus that's like the geometry of the pyramid that they're writing down. And you got these Greeks trying to figure out the way that the, you know, why the pyramids were built the way that they were. It's, it's really, really interesting. Interesting. Manetho is writing his history of ancient Egypt probably in the library or associated with it at some point. And all the archaeology has backed up that he was correct. There's even some particulars that I'm forgetting right now, but there were particulars that archaeologists disagreed with. And then later on realized that they were wrong by disagreeing with him. So it's, It's. It's really cool. So. So Alexandria is like this amazing beacon, but it needs one more thing. It needs Alexander's body.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Luke Caverns]

And so he launches this expedition and intercepts Alexander's body on the way back to Macedonia. And I think there's a little skirmish over it, but essentially Ptolemy's army is much more powerful. They confiscate his body, they bring it down to Memphis. They hold it in Memphis for a very short period of time. I think it was temporarily held in a tomb in Memphis, and we might actually know what tomb that was. I saw, like. I saw like, a lecture, a presentation on this a few years ago, but they decided to move his body north, and they built this mausoleum for him. And he was buried in a solid gold sarcophagus with all of his, you know, treasures in the sarcophagus with him. And so the idea of the mausoleum, what we think, was that it set in the center of the city. It was right across the street. So you had Soma Road and Canopic Way. Those are the two main roads of Alexandria. And it sits right across the street from the library of Alexandria and the museum. So if you're walking to work in the morning, you got to walk underneath this huge mausoleum with a statue of Alexander on top of it. And then to the right is the library and the museion as you're going, wherever it is that you're going in town that day. And so every day people would have walked by and seen, you know, seen right in the center of town, Alexander's mausoleum.

[Podcast Host]

They must have been so proud to live there.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly.

[Podcast Host]

There's just glory all around.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly.

[Podcast Host]

There's nothing like this in the world.

[Luke Caverns]

And so by Ptolemy securing Alexander's body, he's much more able to then declare himself the heir to Alexander. He's now going to be. He's now not just the Governor of Egypt, which is what he was for a long time. Let me. Let me see. He becomes governor of Egypt. When does Alexander die? Like.

[Podcast Host]

Like 323bc or so.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, because he visits Egypt in 331 and then he leaves and never comes back.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

And I think it's not until about 310 BC. So it's more than 10 years later that Ptolemy finally is in a place where he declares himself Pharaoh. And we have, like, these Diorite busts of him as a pharaoh. And so he declares himself Pharaoh, and now the Ptolemaic dynasty begins. And that's going to go on for 300 years. And so at the beginning of that dynasty, we have what's called the, the three good Ptolemies. And so Ptolemy one, he's the one that really expands Alexandria. He gets the, we don't actually know when the light that, when the, when the library, the museum and the lighthouse were done with their construction or we don't know if they were done during his lifetime. But Ptolemy 2, they are complete during, during his lifetime. And then Ptolemy3 is born. And they're just constantly expanding Ptolemy as the pharaoh. Yeah, yeah, it's really, really cool. So they're just constantly expanding Egypt's wealth during this time period. Egypt is filthy rich now.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

Probably the Egyptians were like, well, I wish our pharaoh was Egyptian, but, but things are going pretty good for us right now. Then we have Ptolemy 4, that's born, and Game of Thrones begins. And I don't know exactly when he's born. It must be, it's probably sometime around 250 BC, I would guess maybe a little bit after that. But things start going south right here. These Ptolemies don't really care about being involved with Egyptian culture at all. They don't really care about being invested into the Egyptian world. None of them speak Egyptian. None of them can read Egyptian hieroglyphs. They're like disconnected. They live in their palace and they're kind of like, let them eat cake. You know, that's, that's sort of, it's

[Podcast Host]

kind of like Nepo babies.

[Luke Caverns]

It's. Yeah, exactly dismissive to say that, but

[Podcast Host]

that's really what they were, spoiled brats.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. And it all starts falling apart. And then by about 150. Yeah, I think it's about 150 BC, Ptolemy the 10th is born and Alexandria is so far in debt that things are so bad. Actually think about how, think about how far Egypt has fallen in 150 years that they're so far in debt that Ptolemy the 10th has no choice but to go down into the mausoleum of Alexander. They exhume his body from the gold sarcophagus and they build him what they call a crystal sarcophagus, which is probably alabaster, which is like, you know, some mid level people throughout Egypt could afford an alabaster sarcophagus. So it's really not a high honor to be put in alabaster sarcophagus.

[Podcast Host]

And he just wants the gold.

[Luke Caverns]

They melt down all of the gold that Alexander was born with that he had been resting in for the last 170 years. And that is gone. You know, it gets melted down and it probably gets sold off to partly pay the debt. So Ptolemy the 11th is born. And he's not a very good pharaoh. Ptolemy the 12th is born.

[Podcast Host]

Now we're getting close to Cleopatra Mark Antony time.

[Luke Caverns]

Ptolemy XII is. Or Ptolemy XII is Cleopatra's father, I believe. Or maybe it's Ptolemy xiii, but I think Ptolemy XIII is her brother. So long story short with Cleopatra, and we're getting to like, what happened? Alexander's body.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

So long story short with Cleopatra, she, for some reason I, I heard Dr. Bob Breyer, like, imagine this one time, and he was like. He was like, you know, we have, we have a record of Cleopatra's family going on a family vacation down to Memphis. Probably they spend the vast majority of their life in Alexandria. And there was something about Cleopatra that just made her curious about her world. She was clearly invested in the library. Judging by when the library gets attacked and part of it gets burned down, she's like devastated by that. Mark Antony gives her a gift to repay her by donating like 200,000 books to the library, which is.

[Podcast Host]

This was Caesar who burned it that first time.

[Luke Caverns]

First time, yeah. Yeah. And then it's burned again by Augustus later on, so. And then it's burned again by Aurelian and it's burned by Caracalla. Yeah, it's. It actually gets destroyed like five times. But most people just, just only remember the. The first. But.

[Podcast Host]

And I think the first is probably the least damaging.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, the last one is. The last one is the most. We'll. We'll get there. So there's this family, there's this record of them going on a family vacation. They go on a. Not a family vacation, a royal visit to Memphis. And one of the things she would have definitely been taken to is to go see the pyramids. But at this point in time, like we were talking about earlier, the APIs bull is the central deity of the Egyptian world. Well, from what we know the Egyptians interpreted, whether people agree with it or not, the Serapeum, which is that labyrinth that's under the ground where these massive, you know, bull boxes are. They call them the Serapeum boxes, the bull sarcophagi, whatever. They would have definitely gone down in there. There's no question that Cleopatra walked those halls as a little girl. And she probably was mystified by the mystery of this underground place that's super ancient. And she's hearing Egyptian being spoken next to her. And, you know, it's kind of like one of those people who break out of some kind of family cycle. Some, something is ticking in their brain differently than everybody else. And she's, she's captivated by all that. Well, she becomes like a polyglot and starts learning like every language. I think they, they say she could speak like seven language flu, seven languages fluently or maybe more, but she could, she could speak, read and write Egyptian and she loved that culture. And through, by hook or by crook, she finds herself as Pharaoh. Whether or not she had her siblings killed, all of them killed on purpose. Whether or not she had her brother killed, we don't really know. They say he drowned, you know, so we don't, we don't really know. But she becomes Pharaoh and everybody knows the, the famous story. But ultimately at the end of Cleopatra's life, the Romans have fully sunk in their claws into Alexandria. And the way that this started was the original Ptolemies. So the Romans built up their power throughout the Mediterranean world by being mercenaries for other people. So they have this great standing army that nobody else has. But the city of Rome is just mud and bricks. It's nothing special at all. It's just, it's literally a dump. There's no amazing public architecture, there's no Coliseum, there's no Circus Maximus. I don't think the Circus Maximus is there, at least not in the way that it later would be. Even while Cleopatra is alive, which is, you know, let's call it roughly 40 B.C. rome is just a city of mud brick and, and the only reason it has power is because it's got this amazing, well trained standing army. So when the Ptolemy's power is waning over these last few hundred years following Ptolemy3, what they do to keep the rebellions down in Egypt is they hire Roman mercenaries to come in. So all of a sudden Egypt gets politically invaded. Like, like the Romans are basically performing espionage inside the, inside Alexandria they're sinking their claws in and becoming more powerful. And Alexandria slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly over time until the Ptolemies are so weak that all the Pharaoh's got to do is walk in and, or all that Roman emperor or, or a wealthy Romans are going to walk in and be like, well, what are you going to do now? Right? And that was that. In Cleopatra knew that that's why she seduced Julius Caesar. Because rather than being conquered by him, if she could marry him, she could pull the Roman capital down to Alexandria instead. And that's what Julius Caesar wanted to do. That's why he, that's Ultimately, why he got killed.

[Podcast Host]

There's still a rumor that they had a child together.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, they definitely did. Caesarion.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. Augustus killed him for sure.

[Podcast Host]

What is there to the story that Augustus knocked off Alexander's nose when he went to visit the body?

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, is that Augustus or is that.

[Podcast Host]

I thought it was Augustus. Octavian could be wrong. I talked to a fish.

[Luke Caverns]

I think. I think you might be right. It's one. It's one of those. It's one of those Roman emperors. And I bet that's true. He bends down to kiss him, and the nose. Like, the nose disintegrates. Yeah. But there was another. There was another guy who was more obsessed with Alexander. I believe it may have been Caligula, or it may have been Caracalla, who comes to Alexandria and wants to see Alexander's tomb and puts on Alexander's breastplate.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my goodness.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. Takes it off of his body and puts it on. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Some of those Roman emperors, they're. They're. You should have. On a guy who's. Who's an expert in Rome stuff, because those emperors are crazy.

[Podcast Host]

That sounds like a calligram move to me.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, it does sound like something Caligula would do. But it could be Caracalla, too. Caracalla is a crazy guy also. But. But Augustus was very respectful. Augustus is like. You know, a lot of people hold Julius Caesar up as being, like, the truest Roman. I don't know. It might be Augustus, because Augustus is ruthless but respectful. So I think it's the story of Augustus, or it might be Julius Caesar. When he shows up to Alexandria, he wants to see Alexander's tomb. So they bring him down into the mausoleum. But also buried there were the sarcophagi of all the other Ptolemaic kings. They're all buried around Alexander. So it's this huge mausoleum, and they're all buried in it. Right. So it's like a museum. You could see, well, here's Alex. Here's Alexander in the center. Over There is Ptolemy 1, all the way to Ptolemy 13. And it might be Augustus. Or it's. Julius Caesar has this funny thing where they ask him, okay, do you want to see the other guys? And he's like, no, I came to see a king or something. Something like that. And he basically just, like, shits on all the other, you know, Ptolemies. And so anyways, Cleopatra knew that the Romans were on the doorstep of Egypt, and the only thing she could do is seduce the Most powerful man in Rome. Because you gotta keep in mind Julius Caesar was never a Roman emperor. He was just a very wealthy warlord and he controlled a vast portion of the Roman world. And so she knew, if I can get this guy on my side, I can pull him down here and we can be co regents together. And Egypt won't be conquered. Right. Egypt will still have its autonomy. It'll just be fused with a new civilization. Or maybe she would. Maybe she was thinking that Julius Caesar would break off from the Romans altogether and bring all his men down there.

[Podcast Host]

And he's happening before Crassus and Pompey or after.

[Luke Caverns]

During. Yeah, yeah, during all of that. Yeah. So anyways, I think that Pompey has perhaps already died at this point. And there are some people that Julius Caesar, for some reason, for years I had thought that Pompey was in Alexandria and to prevent him from fleeing, Julius Caesar had the docks burned. But I think it was part of his army, something like that. Julius Caesar doesn't want this group of guys leaving, so he burns the docks and destroys their ships so that they can't even escape. So he's going to find them and kill them all. Well, when that happens, the. You know, you can imagine, like the docks connected by ropes and wood. And you know that the library itself is built out of stone, but the floorboards are all made out of wood. And the. So think about the. Imagine like a wine cellar, the little diamond slots that you put the wine bottles in. That's how the. That's how the papyri were stored. And those were all made out of wood. So the interior of the library burns up, but the stone architecture survives. Right. And so a massive portion of the library is destroyed. And I don't know why. You know, you hear a lot of story historians, they. They repeat the pop. The popular, like, debunk that's like, oh, well, it's not really that bad. The library had already been in decay. Well, that's not really supported by the fact that it devastated Cleopatra so badly that Mark Antony feels compelled later on to gift her like 200,000 books back to the library. So that tells us that this was something that was so detrimental that it actually affected Cleopatra on an emotional level that Mark Antony had to make up for that later.

[Podcast Host]

So they may have made the library great again.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I mean, I'm guessing so that she invested. She poured a whole bunch of money back into it because clearly she's very, very well educated and must have spent a lot of time there.

[Podcast Host]

And the lighthouse is still, this beacon,

[Luke Caverns]

the lighthouse is still there. The lighthouse. Get this man. The lighthouse is so well built that it was standing within just a few years of Columbus arriving in the Americas. It was still standing.

[Podcast Host]

That's crazy. I know. A couple of earthquakes hit it pretty

[Luke Caverns]

bad over the years. Yeah. And then they decided to tear it down to build, to build a new. I forget there's some citadel that's there today, but some of those blocks are still there. And the blocks are still like laying in the water around that. It's just tumbled and fallen into the water. But you can see these massive granite Aswan blocks laying there.

[Podcast Host]

Well then give me your take. Where's the body? Is it Saint Mark's?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So I'm sorry, this is the most long winded answer of all time. No, I love this stuff. So, so, long story short, Julius Caesar is killed before he can move Rome's capital. Augustus is essentially becomes the son, the adopted son of, of Julius Caesar's empire. He wages war on, on his rivals, kills them all. Comes down to Alexandria and basically Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, they know that if they go back to Rome with Augustus, they're going to be paraded around and then they're going to be executed. So they kill themselves. And Augustus being actually a classy guy, when he visits Alexander's tomb, he's respectful, very respectful of the tomb he looks up to. Alexander sees him as like this mythical hero and he, and he allows, as far as we know, he allows Cleopatra and Mark Antony to be buried where they wanted to be buried. Nobody's ever found their bodies. And he gave the Egyptians one year to mourn Cleopatra. And most people don't realize this. Augustus just became pharaoh. It wasn't like the pharaohs ended. There's still another 325 years of pharaohs to go.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Luke Caverns]

Like most people don't realize that that's crazy. Most of the time we, we look at Egypt's history from 3100 BC to 30 BC. But no, it goes on, it keeps going on. So.

[Podcast Host]

But Augustus was a great politician because he would have had a revolt if he didn't allow that.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly. He knew that. And he never calls himself emperor. He doesn't ever call himself king. He calls himself the first citizen. And he's one of the few emperors that gets to live a full life. He dies of old age and yeah, just a cunning, merciless, but smart and respectful guy. Really interesting story. So Alexandria continues on from there. Mostly business as usual. Like the average guy, his life is like, oh wow, that Was dramatic right back to, you know, back, back to work. And so is the body.

[Podcast Host]

Alexander's still there. The lighthouse is still there.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, so. So when, when Augustus invaded, he burned down Alexandria's library. Part of it, we don't know, you know, how much Caracalla. There are all these Alexandrians that are telling these jokes about Caracalla in the theater in. In town and, you know, making all these jokes at his expense or whatever. Well, he pays Alexandria a royal visit and lines up 25, 000 people and slaughters them and burns down and burns down the Palisades. Now the Palisades are connected directly to the library. So the library gets. Gets damaged during this time. Kirk hall doesn't care. Aurelian has to come and squash a. This isn't Marcus Aurelius. This is Aurelian. He has to come and squash a revolt where an Egyptian rises up and declares himself Pharaoh of Egypt. And. And there's also. There's also another attack. There's a. There's an eastern empire that rises up, but I can't think of the name. I can't think of the name of it. But there's another two battles that take place in Alexandria. And they, and they reference again, the Palisades burn down. The Palisades are connected to the library, so the library gets affected. Then in 365 AD, there is a massive tsunami off the coast of Crete or Cyprus. And it's so enormous that by the time, like the seismic activity reaches Alexandria and the waves hit Alexandria, the devastation was so dramatic that all of the boats and the docks had crashed onto the roofs. And of the ruins of the toppled cities of Alexandria, there was another historian that arrived, another name that you would recognize, you and I would recognize. And he arrived and, and he reports that there were 50, 000 people that he knew of from the city that were missing, that were. That were, you know, that had gone unreported. People looking for the bodies of these people throughout the city. And the city is completely demolished, completely devastated. The waves came up and crashed over the walls that surrounded the city and toppled everything. And it's from that exact moment, that day in the historical time period that we do not know where I believe we don't know where the library is anymore. We don't know where the museum is anymore. We don't know where the mausoleum is anymore. And with his body, it's gone. And myself and Tolden Stone, we were talking about this while we were in Alexandria and we were thinking probably during that time Period. There were people. So his mausoleum is underground. Well, probably, you know, that water floods in and just like when that, when that, when his body in this crappy alabaster sarcophagus, he's left with, thank you ptolemy10. When that gets flooded with that, with that salty water, I think it's salt water. Is it fresh water? But when he gets flooded, his body just turned into just mist, you know, it's turned into nothing. All those bodies, all those bodies just turn, all those bodies just turn into nothing. And think about the chaos that had broken out throughout the last centuries. Of all the things we talked about, this war, this, that and the other. Well, how many 17 year old kids do you, do you know that were like, I bet you there's not any guards at the mausoleum. Let's go. Of course. So little by little it gets picked away and picked away and picked away and picked away. And then when that city is destroyed, all the blocks from his mausoleum and all of the, you know, glorious Alexandrian architecture that, that Augustus used to model Rome. By the way, the, the whole model of Rome is pulled from Alexandrian architecture and Greek architecture. But those projects didn't begin until Augustus went back home, when he got back home from, from Alexandria. And one of the last things he says is I, when I was born, I found the city a city of mud brick. I leave it a city of marble and, and he, what a great line. He thinks, a lot of historians think that he was inspired by what he saw in Alexandria and that's why he starts the building projects as soon as he gets home. But I think that most likely his body was pulverized by the Mediterranean and doesn't exist anymore. That's what I think. Yeah, I, I, there may be some other, some other ideas to the story.

[Podcast Host]

Like there's a lot of theories. There's St. Mark's that it's in, what's the, the Daniel Mosque. That's, there is that theory.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I, I've, I haven't looked into that in years, the other theories. But I think that the main thing that you have to grasp with is the flooding of the city because it's like several hundred years later when Christianity is much more widespread that you hear about the supposed place of Alexander's body again. But you have to grapple with, well, what happened when Alexandria was flooded and the whole city is destroyed.

[Podcast Host]

I'm with you. So I don't think anything survives that. Yeah, you know, boats on the roofs are crazy. I mean you're talking 30, 40 foot

[Luke Caverns]

waves yeah, Boats landing on the roof. You know, it's, it's wild that, that the lighthouse even survived that. But it shows you how well built that thing really was. Yeah. You know, crazy.

[Podcast Host]

I'm gonna take a quick break and come back and talk about. We got a lot to talk about still. We got to talk about where jaguars and we have to get to the Minoan culture somehow.

[Luke Caverns]

Let's do it.

[Podcast Host]

Back in a minute. I want to hear about the Almacks and solve for me how those giant 10, 20 ton heads get moved down a river on a raft.

[Luke Caverns]

Man, I wish I could solve that. I'd be.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, is there a solve for that

[Luke Caverns]

somewhere? If you were to ask an ancient Olmec how it was done, I'm sure that they, they could explain it. Yeah. So the Olmecs, man, they're, they're one of my favorite ancient civilizations.

[Podcast Host]

Why?

[Luke Caverns]

They're, they're. Well, they're, they're the oldest known civilization in North America. And, and actually the very first ancient monument that I ever saw that wasn't in the United States was an Olmec head. If you look up the. It's actually at the bottom right of the screen right here. The, the second, the one that's just the left of that, that guy right there, that's the main head at la venta. And Dr. Barnhart and I are walking around the city of Villa Hermosa and we're walking on the outside of this park and there's this opening where you can see into the park and we're talking about the Olmecs. And, and, and he said, he. I'm, I'm looking at him to the right and there's this lake next to us and the park is right here. And Dr. Barnard goes, Look. And I look right in. And the very first ancient monument I ever saw outside of the United States was that guy right there. And from that moment, that civilization. Like I saw the size of the heads. I saw the size of that head and you know, it was like a silent witness to time.

[Podcast Host]

How big is that? How. You can't really tell from the picture.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, enormous. I mean, 12ft high. My, my head probably comes up to that ridge where the helmet is like just above his eyes. That's probably, I'm, I'm probably like at eye level with that. And that guy there probably weighs 15, 20 tons or so in a solid gray like basalt. Comes from the Sierra de la Tushla volcanic belt, probably like 90km away as the crow flies. But it's not like moving something through Egypt where all you got to do is you got to get on the river while the, while the tide is high and, and, and float that baby down the river. These guys have to go through rivers and swamps and valleys and, you know, over hills to get to the next river. It's just, I mean, it's crazy. But the Olmecs, they emerge on the archaeological timeline as a fully fledged and organized civilization. From the very beginning, the civilization is formed. We don't have like a, we don't have a formation period.

[Podcast Host]

That's very strange. I know all the ancient astronaut people are going nuts right now.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, they are.

[Podcast Host]

Well, it's one of the civilizations that just appears.

[Luke Caverns]

And you know, this thing gets, this thing gets thrown, that idea gets thrown towards ancient Egypt a lot. But in reality, that, that's actually not the case. I mean, if the pyramids are around 24, 25, 2600 B.C. well, we have about 800 years of known history leading up to that point. Now the technology kind of just appears out of nowhere, but the civilization is there. They're forming for a long time.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Luke Caverns]

We don't have any evidence of anything that's in any sort of formative period at all whatsoever before these heads arrive.

[Podcast Host]

Where, where was the center of the

[Luke Caverns]

Olmec society that like that. It's weird how Mexico is broken up because southern Mexico is actually like in the east. And you know, it's, Mexico is a weirdly shaped country, but south central Mexico, like Veracruz and Tabasco and a little bit of Oaxaca. So, you know, kind of where Mexico comes down and it gets thin at this point right there. So this, it's like this swampy, hot, humid, flat area. It's, it's not the most appealing place to live, which is funny because that's actually the place where most civilizations form. It's like the least likely place. But when you think about it, it makes sense. Isolation. There's nobody that's vying for their land. There's nobody that's going to try to come kill them for their land, for their lands. They get to live in this quiet, isolated existence and build and build and build and build and build their wealth until boom, you know, they've arrived. But they arrive at about 2000 BC and we don't have anything before that. I mean, we don't have like bodies, we don't have sites, we don't have archeology, pottery. We've got nothing before that. They just boom, they're there.

[Podcast Host]

And then do they just disappear? Just as quickly.

[Luke Caverns]

So they, they increase in power, we think from, from 2000 BC and then somewhere between about 1600 to 900 BC is like the peak of their power. They. We don't. But we don't know if they're city states. We don't know if they are an empire. We don't know if they're clusters of kingdoms. We have no idea. We just know that they had, let's call it like a dozen sites, three major sites, but in all, probably about a dozen sites.

[Podcast Host]

And we don't even know what they call themselves. Right?

[Luke Caverns]

We have no idea what they call themselves. We don't know what language they spoke.

[Podcast Host]

So when the Aztecs found those sites, were they already ancient?

[Luke Caverns]

So the Aztec. Well, we don't know that the Aztecs ever found the sites they found. We know that the Aztecs had, had artifacts that come from the Olmec world. Like you have these Olmec jade little pendants that we think would have been worn as like a necklace around the chest. That's the idea. The Aztecs had those. We found those in Tenochtitlan. But we don't know at all that the Aztecs actually found these Olmec sites. It's very possible because there are some. So the, the first Olmec, the first major Olmec cultural center that rises up is called San Lorenzo. The full name of it is San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan. Because way out in these fields, so like, way out here in this field, there's this, the ancient city, the ancient Olmec city. And then like a 15 minute drive away, there's this modern Mexican city called San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan that's built in the ruins of the Aztec city. So they're not that far apart from each other. But we just don't know if the Aztecs knew that the origins of Mesoamerica itself was like, you know, I don't know, an hour walk away out into the, out into the bush, because it would have all probably been grown over and forgotten. So, and you have to keep in mind the Aztecs, the height of their, their empire is 3,000 years later. So.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

It's possible that the Aztecs never knew that the Olmecs had ever existed or known anything about them at all. It's possible. One of the interesting things is that we know that the Aztecs found the city of Teotubulcan and that Teotubulcan had been abandoned for about a thousand years at this point. And they thought that it was the city of the Birthplace of the gods, you know. So, yeah, it's crazy how much stuff gets, like, abandoned and forgotten in Mesoamerica and rediscovered later. And the history and the density of Mesoamerica is unlike anywhere else in the ancient world. It is vast and dense. There's nowhere in Mesoamerica that that was. That went uninhabited. But again, the Olmecs are the origins of that whole world. But the interesting thing about the Olmecs is you look through all the Mesoamerican cultures that come later, and they all have, like, vaguely similar pantheons of gods. You know, you've got Chak, the rain God, and Chak, you also have the rain God in so many different other cultures. And you've got Kukulkan, which is the serpent God, and Quetzalcoatl, which is this God. And, you know, the only one that actually. Of this massive pantheon of Mesoamerican gods, the only one that we can see in the Olmec world is actually the feathered serpent. Kukulkan or Quetzalcoat is depicted on Monument 19 in the Olmec world. But it seems like the Olmec religion is more based on shamanism and everything. So it's like a. It's almost like a pre Mesoamerican civilization.

[Podcast Host]

They see feathered serpent later anywhere.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

That's very random to put feathers on a snake.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, well, it plays into this whole dragon fascination that I have. And so it is. So it is such an odd thing. So the first time we see it is around a thousand BC Olmec monument 19. It was found in the city of La Venta. It's on display in Mexico City today. Probably my favorite Olmec monument. Such a particular depiction. And.

[Podcast Host]

And it's monument 19. What do you like about it? What's so special?

[Luke Caverns]

Is that it right there? No, no. So that's. That's Quetzalcoat at Teotihuacan, which is interesting because at Teotihuacan, we don't actually know Quetzalcoat has an Aztec word, but the Aztecs adopted the feathered serpent. The Teotihuacanos also had it. But we don't know what the Teotihuacan was call it. Just like we don't know what the OLMECS Call it 2,000 years earlier. Right. So think about this. The Aztecs find Teotihuacan been abandoned for around a thousand years. Okay, that's two. Teotipukan was abandoned 2,000 years after the Olmec Period. Like, the. The stretches of time we're talking about are enormous.

[Podcast Host]

I don't think people really fully grasp how much time that is.

[Luke Caverns]

Well, and that's kind of the thing is. Is one. As one of the things as I've.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, there's the monument.

[Luke Caverns]

There we go. Yeah, yeah. So look at the. Look at the art style of its face, how proportional it is and how aesthetically pleasing it is. This is like professional artistry, even by today's standards. Right. How does this appear out of the ether of time?

[Podcast Host]

And this is made with stone tools somehow. Yeah, that precision. And there's the omnipresent curse.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. You got the handbag guy. And it's fascinating. He's being carried by. You can. Like the serpent is wrapped around him and the serpent's carrying.

[Podcast Host]

I see that. Yep.

[Luke Caverns]

So where does this. Where does this come from? Like, how do ancient people first come up with this iconography and, you know, this kind of art style? The ability to be able to. Let's say, to have the economy developed, to be able to commission things like this? Because the Olmecs don't have this kind of stone in their land. It's being exported from outside. From outside of their land.

[Podcast Host]

And that's been traced. We know where that stone is from.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. The Sierra de la Tushla volcanic belt. And so I. It's a. It's a peripheral, obscure culture that was in control of that area. But the Olmecs are paying to have that quarried, and then either the Olmecs are bringing it or that other culture is bringing it. I mean, we don't really know.

[Podcast Host]

And this is supposed to be pre agriculture, which just doesn't work because the society would need to be separated at this point.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, no, this. This here is well into agricultural. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So the Olmecs, they are getting to. So the. The Coetzkalcos river is one of the largest rivers. Like, it goes from.

[Podcast Host]

I.

[Luke Caverns]

I could. I could be wrong here, but it might connect the oceans. Okay. You know, between the. Or I should say the Gulf. Like you may be able to. At least I know that it cuts down that massive, narrow area because you have. You have olmec sites that.it all the way from the Gulf coast all the way to the Pacific along that coast Calcos, these really fertile river valleys. And so the Olef.

[Podcast Host]

I didn't know they went that far west.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, yeah, yeah. We have. We have Olmec cities on the. On the Pacific Ocean right next to the beach.

[Podcast Host]

I didn't know that this is a.

[Luke Caverns]

An empire, probably. My guess. My guess is it's an empire. Nobody calls it that. We. We just call it a culture because we don't even know. We don't even have the slightest understanding of how their government operated. Right. But we know that they're super powerful. And that power, my guess, must have come from how lush the. How lush the valley is, because I've stood over it before, and I've taken a picture, isolated, of just the Coetzkal Coast Valley at the base of the city of San Lorenzo. And one of my buddies who was there with me, who's also been to Egypt, I showed him that picture. I said, if I told you that was in Egypt, you would think it was, because it looks just like Egypt. You look at photos of the Mesopotamian Valley of, you know, the Fertile Crescent, looks exactly the same. It's just that fertile valley where things can grow just at a level no one else can. So the Olmecs, they're profiting off of all that, and they become the first emergent civilization in Mesoamerica. But again, it's like instant, just more than any other culture in the ancient world. Far more. It's not even comparable because by definition, the Olmecs appear on the historical record fully formed. Not like, oh, well, you know, it was super fast. Like, I just. I'm just saying that. No, I'm not just saying it. That's actually the way it is in the archaeological record. There's no formative period. They just boom, they're there.

[Podcast Host]

Do we know genetically who they were?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, well, I mean, all you can do is you can go to the most. And they've done this. You can go to the most isolated, like, indigenous villages in Mexico today. You've got these little. Little tiny towns where people still live in huts in the same way that ancient people have been doing for thousands of years. There's Maya people still living in the traditional Maya huts. So you get their DNA, and, yeah, it's. It's like ancient American DNA connected to. Connected to the people who came across the. The Bering Strait. It's the same sort of DNA, Asian.

[Podcast Host]

And.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, you know, what's interesting is, like, it's. It's actually Southern Chinese. It's not even northern Chinese. It's Southern Chinese DNA. That's a whole mystery. Like, what caused people from southern China to migrate. And not people from northern China or north of that, but it's Southern Chinese DNA that's at the root of Native Americans. Yeah, it's Interesting. And the Olmec people are born with. With birthmarks that come from. That come from Mongolia. They got these little. The babies will have birthmarks, like, on their butts, and then the birthmark will disappear. That's a Mongolian trade. It happens to Mongolian babies, too.

[Podcast Host]

I never heard that.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure that that's right. Dr. Barnhart, he documented this. It is a birthmark that disappears, but I think it's on their butt. And. Yeah, so they are, you know, they're just the descendants of the people that came across either with the Clovis or after them or, you know, at some point in far distant past. But they. As far as we know, they are Native American. But what's really interesting about Mexico is the genetic diversity is just crazy. You can actually look at people from different parts of Mexico and you can tell a difference. And, you know, we think of Native Americans as being this monolithic people. They all sort of look the same. But the deeper I've gone into it, the more I've realized, like, no, no, Comanches look a lot different than Cherokee. The Cherokee look a lot different than the Iroquois people. The Iroquois people. Natives from California look a lot different.

[Podcast Host]

Well, it's half the planet.

[Luke Caverns]

I know, but you just don't. You know, you don't think about it. Right. We have, like, these implicit biases where we kind of oversimplify other places for it to make sense in our mind. You know what I mean? And. And in Mexico in particular, man, Maya people look so much different than Zapotex or Oaxacans. And those all look different than the Olmecs. The Olmecs are. So. The Olmecs have the roundish, puffy faces, and they actually legitimately have that. They don't really look like they have these skinny. The Maya had these skinny, long, angular faces. The Olmecs are exactly the opposite of that. And there. I should have gotten a photo of it, but I. I didn't want to ask the guy. I was on a flight into Veracruz, and the guy sitting next to me was an Olmec. I don't know if he knew that, but he was an Olmec. Like, if I turned his face into stone, it would be an Olmec head. He was this just this big sort of Samoan looking guy, you know, real puffy, puffy face, big nose, big lips, big eyes. And he's sitting there, and I just was like, I want to sneak a photo of this guy. So I would have. So I'd have proof, but they still look that way today.

[Podcast Host]

What do we think that hat is, that helmet that the heads are wearing? I mean, I don't buy the ball court thing.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, that is. That is the depiction of ball court players crown.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Luke Caverns]

I think. I think it's a fusion of that because we know that the ball game is at the center. It's at the center of Mesoamerican mythology. Like, you know, you got the hero twins that are playing the ball game, and, you know, the ball game goes. Goes to the center of their primordial worldview. It's tied to the very essence of the universe itself. And I think that it's more than just like, oh, they're ball game players, and it's about the game. I think it's about, like this. I think it's about, like, the order of the entire universe itself, and probably also about looking tough. What's the most. Do you know. Do you know the most common way that communist depicts himself as a gladiator? Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's. I think it's a similar thing to that.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, that. That's interesting.

[Luke Caverns]

I think it's a similar thing to that, that they're. They depict themselves because people, you know, you know, normal Roman people would actually glorify the gladiators because it was so cool. But there was a weird paradox there because it was like this show of physical display, but yet the people are slaves. Right. So you're, like, idolizing a slave. Right. So inherently, we can't help but idolize athletes or, like, physical competition or whatever. So I think that if those guys really are kings, and I think that they might be. I think that they are.

[Podcast Host]

Well, it's a lot of resources.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I think that it's. I think that it's more than just the game. It's. It's the fact that the game is infused with the culture and their. And their religion altogether, and also by proverbially presenting yourself as a gladiator. You look cool. You do. So. So. So that's my thought, is that maybe it's all of these things put together in. In our Western way of thinking because we're so platonic, like, we. You and I, the way that we think comes from the Athenians. They. They're categorical in nature. Well, so we've got these categories here. Either when you're thinking of Native Americans, either you have to, like, comprehend the fact that, like, we're either getting rid of those categories, or we are inverting the categories where they're complete. They're the actual opposite of ours. And the way that they compute and merge things together is totally different than the way that we do. So it's like.

[Podcast Host]

What do you mean?

[Luke Caverns]

It's like we're. The feathered serpent is a perfect. Is a perfect example here. They know. Native Americans know that the feathered serpent is not real. It is an amalgamation of different esoteric, spiritual, almost like philosophical parts of their world. And what the feathered serpent represents. Native Americans don't have any problem with taking multiple elements of their natural world and fusing them together in a way that wouldn't traditionally make any sense to us, but in a different it in a way that makes sense to them. And so what that feathered serpent, probably what I think that it represents, there's no real academic consensus on this. It's just me and Dr. Barnhart bullshitting for years about these ideas. I think it. I think it's an esoteric symbolism of the conquering of the three realms. A snake is born underground.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Luke Caverns]

It rises up. So it's born in. It's born in the underworld. It rises up and conquers the mid realm. And what I think that Mesoamericans maybe they originally were seeing, but they knew that these were actually two separated things because we can see on The Olmec monument 19 that they knew, I'll tell you, probably like 10,000 years ago, Mesoamericans are seeing what's called the quetzal bird fly around.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

And it's this bird with this little bitty body and these two wings that come off of the body and this massive tail. So what it looks like is a snake because you have this long tail and this little body here looks like a snake. And you add the wings onto it and so. And you could look up something. You could look up like a quetzal bird flying. And so it looks like a snake that's flying with wings coming out of its head. That's why these wings come out on Monument 19. That's why the wings come out of the head. It's actually the same thing in the mound builder world. They also. There's also a dragon up here and like the United States and what I. Yeah, so there you go. So that tail is actually much, much longer than that. You just can't tell by this angle. But it looks like wings coming out of a. And I've seen one quetzal bird in per. In. In person. I walked into a temple in the Yucatan and a quetzal bird flew straight over my head out the. Out of the temple, but it looks like a snake with wings. But we know that they didn't actually think it was a snake with wings. Because if you go Back to Monument 19, there are two quetzalbirds depicted on the monument. So they weren't being fooled. What I think it is is. It's a. The feathered serpent is a symbol of the fact that whoever this person is, whoever the ruler is, this person that is essentially summoning the power of the Quetzal bird or of. Of Quetzalcoatlat or the feathered serpent. It's. It's like a. It's symbolic of the fact that. That this person is fully awakened and they have conquered all three levels of existence. They've been born in the underworld, they came to the midworld, and they ascended, probably through hallucinogenic practices or something like that. They ascended to where their soul is able to fly like. Like this dragon, which is basically what this feathered serpent is. So they never. They knew that that thing didn't actually exist, but they created it as a symbol of almost like awakening its itself. If that makes a spiritual awakening, conquering all three levels of existence, maybe conquering death, that might be what it is. Flying in the air. It's really hard to. It's really hard for us to try to like, get in their mind and understand what they were thinking. But that's what I say, that their. Their ways of categorizing things and understanding the world is inverse to the way that we think in a lot of ways. And it's. It's not. It's not natural to us to think like a. Like a Native American does, you know?

[Podcast Host]

Well, you brought up dragons. And what makes it hard for me to try to define a winged serpent is because it shows up everywhere. So, yeah, it does. Was it really a thing?

[Luke Caverns]

I don't know, man. I don't know. You know, I've seen the argument. It's like we have these massive. I've seen the argument before that that not all the times do wings and fossils, not all the times that they are they preserved in fossils and that the wings, the cartilage that they're. That they're made out of, could disintegrate. And so we could be finding animals that existed anytime between 50,000 years ago to 50 million years ago or more definitely, but 250 million years ago, maybe before the time of the dinosaurs, that there could be fossils that we've had and we've created an entire animal around it. But actually that animal had wings at one point. Point in time, you know.

[Podcast Host]

And feathers, right?

[Luke Caverns]

Feathers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So many of the dinosaurs had. Had feathers, which seems obvious because we. We paint them all as being, like, fully reptilian. But birds are reptiles, too, and they also have feathers, you know, so, yeah,

[Podcast Host]

the serpent I can get around flying is a little harder, but you. I can see it. But the breathing fire, that's. So I don't know where they got that from.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. And. And I did a little tracing of the. Of the dragon through some parts of the ancient world recently. And I think that the. I think the breathing fire thing comes in the Middle Ages a lot. And so I wonder if the Middle Ages are, like, very far removed from the pure dragon. Like. Like, if we. If we. If we wanted, like, a pure example of the dragon, I would probably point to ancient China and Mesoamerica, maybe ancient India, too. And I wonder if, you know, the other thing I wonder is there are so many people who go down to the Amazon and they'll take an ayahuasca and they'll have a vision of a snake, like an anaconda swallowing them. I have a buddy who told me that an anaconda swallowed him while he was on ayahuasca, and it wrapped around his body and whispered in his ear, and it told him to be quiet, and it told him, I'm going to kill you. I love you, though, or something like that. I love you now. I'm going to kill you. And it would swallow him. And it was almost like. It was like spiritual awakening. Sometimes I wonder, maybe dragons are real, but there's only one way to access them. And dragons. And dragons are always.

[Podcast Host]

Maybe they're real, just not real here.

[Luke Caverns]

Maybe dragon and dragons are always associated with. With rulers like the Chinese emperor, he wore the dragon pendant. He was a representative of the dragon. It seems like in Mesoamerica, you know, in later Maya world, that Kukulkan is. The Maya ruler is the human embodiment of Kukulkan, and the Aztec ruler was the human embodiment of Quetzalcoatl. It was probably the same thing in Teotihuacan, too, which is where the Aztecs get that from, because probably the Teotihuacano still live, but, like, dispersed and their mythology carries down and the Aztecs absorb it and kind of reinvigorate it. But was it a positive symbol like

[Podcast Host]

it was in ancient China? Because dragon was a positive symbol.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

But not in Norse mythology or everywhere else.

[Luke Caverns]

No, no, no, it wasn't. Norse mythology is. Yeah, that's it. Because the dragon is eating the entire universe in Norse mythology. Yeah, it's. It's interesting. No, but it. Yeah, I mean, it was a. It's funny to say a positive thing in Mesoamerica. Dr. Barnhart and I were in. We're in Mexico City at the museum, and we're looking up at this, you know, so they have. They'll have, like, modern indigenous people who, you know, still carry on the artistic traditions, but they'll have these massive murals painted. And so there's. There's this mural that's like a modern interpretation of the whole pantheon of Maya gods interacting with each other. And. And Dr. Barnhart, he's like. He's like. He goes. He goes, you know what's interesting? Where's all the love in Mesoamerica? Because it's all about, like, death and war and destruction. And he goes. He goes. Their. Their whole religion, their whole culture is so macabre and dark and about killing people and sacrifices and war, and he's like, where's all the love? There must. And, you know, he's. He's alluding to the fact that there are levels of their culture that are invisible to us. It was definitely there. You know, these weren't, like, dark, brooding, evil people. But when you say, was it positive? It's like, that's funny. In Mesoamerica, it's hard to know if anything's positive. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I would say it's a positive thing for the civilization itself. Like, if your ruler is the human embodiment of a freaking dragon. Yeah. You know, you. You. You would like to think you're being ruled over by somebody who's extremely powerful. Right? But the dragon, especially in China, the dragon is not a foe. It's not a monster to be slayed. It's. It is an embodiment of.

[Podcast Host]

Of.

[Luke Caverns]

Well, in China, it's actually. The dragon is actually in an amalgamation of all the animals of their world. So it's like. It's like a tiger and a camel and eagles and all these animals brought in together into this strange creature. But, yeah, you know, I. I often wonder how many times in the ancient world the answer to so many of our questions can only be acquired by leaving this world. You know, you can only answer the question by going through the. By going through the mysteries. To be honest with you, that's actually what I think it is. Like the cult of. The cult of Eleusis, the Egyptian mysteries that Herodotus writes about. He writes about it all the time. And then when he gets initiated into the mystery mysteries, he doesn't write about it anymore because he can't reveal it. And so, you know, the Chinese had the mysteries, you know, the Maya had them. I've stood in the chambers where they're performed, and it all starts with the Olmecs. There's actually a depiction of one of the. And when I say mysteries, for people watching, it's different than like, how are the pyramids built? A mystery is almost like the religious organization that, that safe holds sacred cosmological, scientific, astronomical, astrological knowledge. It's all fused together. And these are the people who preserve and safekeep and try to uphold the very universe itself by carrying out these rituals. And, you know, we don't exactly know what they were doing, but.

[Podcast Host]

No, but you're describing like a familial, shamanistic culture that you're passing down the

[Luke Caverns]

secrets of the universe. So, so those are called the mysteries, right? And every ancient culture has them. And rather than most archaeologists who look back and, you know, no archeologist is going to like, openly say, oh yeah, that's the way I feel. But I think so many of them just implicitly think that ancient people were naive and that their ancient religions were just like, hokey and they were a way to manipulate the common man. And that it was all sort of like a, you know, people coming and leaving offerings to dead people, like leaving food. They say that the priests would just take the food just to feed themselves. Like it was all, it was all hoax. But man, look throughout the entire ancient world at a thousand bc, the entire ancient world is populated with massive civilizations all doing roughly the same thing.

[Podcast Host]

That's true.

[Luke Caverns]

And, and I don't think that that's just because all those people are dumb. I think that they. One of the, One of the coolest quotes I ever heard was from the professor, Jeremy McInerney, and he was talking about the temple of Apollo at Delphi. And he was. He's like, I'm not going to get overly into this in this lecture. And, and he's like, he's like. But I'm just going to say this. I don't mean this in any sort of metaphorical way or I don't mean it in a symbolic or. He said, he said, I don't mean this any sort of symbolic or metaphorical way. I mean this in a literal way. And I'll just leave it at that. When the oracle of Delphi was possessed by the essence of Apollo, she was actually possessed by the by the essence of Apollo. He just leaves it at that. This is like a credentialed world class Greek archaeologist and he just leaves it that. I've never ever heard him extrapolate on that before. And I, I don't know what, I don't know what exactly he's getting at there. I don't know if he means that.

[Podcast Host]

So you mean the gases within the mountain that gave her visions?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, I think he just means. Yeah, I think he just means that. That. I don't think he, he's saying that he actually believes that Apollo is real. I think he's just saying that the oracle is actually. There's something real. There's a real element to that. He just kind of leaves it at that.

[Podcast Host]

I think that's a psychedelic experience.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and the question is, when you, when you're taking part in psychedelics, are you actually interacting with something or are we all wired the same way to interact with plants the same way? Or when you interact with that plant, are you stepping into something else?

[Podcast Host]

What do you think? Have you taken the journey?

[Luke Caverns]

No, I mean, not. I, not I, I have a. I'm a very low tolerance to like cannabis. And so, you know, in, in extremely strong doses that, that's been enough for me.

[Podcast Host]

You know, you're gonna have to walk the walk at some point.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. See, the thing for me is I don't want to go visit the serpent until it calls me. I feel like if I do that, I'm gonna like, mess up my brain in some way. I gotta.

[Podcast Host]

Really smart.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I gotta wait till. I gotta wait till it calls me. But I will do it. I will do it at some point, but it just has to be the right, the right time. Right now I don't feel the need to do it, but yeah, I've, I've. My friends and I talk about this a lot and I need to, I need to put together a presentation, like really putting my thoughts together on this too, because I've juggled it around for so long, but I'm comfortable saying it. I think that, I think that, like, when people go down to the Amazon and they say that they meet some kind of female Amazonian goddess, or they interact with the snake that coils around them and speaks to them, I think in some way that is two things at once. Like, in the same way that, like, are we all just. Forrest Gump has a, has a great line, a deep, profound line where he says. He's like, he's like, I wonder if we're all just out here on this, you know, rock, kind of like floating through the air or if it's all destined to be. And he's like. I think maybe it's both in some way. That's what I think. I think that. I think that the cosmos is so much more intertwined and so much more purposeful and larger, and then we can possibly fathom. And I think that when people are interacting with things like that that are on the other side, I wouldn't be surprised if it's real. I wouldn't be surprised if these things live if they're conscious beings that exist in some kind of other parallel dimensions that you're able to interact with. And maybe those beings are the universe itself or it's a reflection of us. But. But.

[Podcast Host]

Well, do you believe in God?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I do. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

How do we square both?

[Luke Caverns]

I think that God is. I think that God is a lot more. I think that God's a lot more complicated than, like, a man floating on a white cloud and in, you know, some Renaissance painting. I think that when the Bible talks about, like, angels being cast out of heaven and everything, you know, we always have this idea of, like, demons being this antithesis being that's just pure evil. Well, I mean, I don't feel like it's unlikely that some of these ethereal beings exist in this gray zone that want to be, like. Maybe they want to be moral or they want to. I'm really getting way off on this. But, you know, maybe. Maybe they. Maybe they want to be moral, and maybe they want to be actually worshiped as a moral God. And so you go down to the Amazon, you can interact with those. You can interact with those things, and they're. They're really there. But I think that I. I agree with, like, the Greek philosophers. They thought that Logos was at, like, the core of the universe and that even with all these other gods, there was something that existed before that, which was logic itself. It was. It was. It was. It was reason. And that reason itself may have. Had they personified it or we personify it, but they see something at the core of all of existence that actively made decisions that were logical, that created everything. And is that thing conscious or not? It's probably not conscious in the way that you and I think about it being conscious, but it's. I think it's real, and that's what I think that God is. But, yeah, you know, I wrestle with. With, like, you know, what do I think of interdimensional beings? I'm not talking about aliens, but like, you know, spiritual beings and how people interact with them. I sometimes I, sometimes I wrestle with that and like Christianity, but.

[Podcast Host]

Well, people are seeing the same things under DMT experiences and they are seeing the same things. Maybe it's because our brains are the same or maybe they're seeing something.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, well, and then, you know, when I, when I have a straight up vision about my grandfather's death and my last moment with him, where was that? You know, that's not, that's not a coincidence of me being wired like a human, you know, that's.

[Podcast Host]

No, that's. You connected to something bigger.

[Luke Caverns]

That's. That's me connected to something larger. All ancient people felt this way. All ancient people, you know, were. I don't know if religious is the right word, but spiritual. They. I think that ancient people were very open and connected to something that we're so like calloused and cut off from these days our world has. For all of the benefits that modernity has brought to us with science, everything has also become so sterile. And I think that there's a, there's a great quote. I don't know who, who said it, but he says, he's like, he's like, the first sip from the glass of science will make you an atheist, but at the bottom, God's waiting for you. And, you know, you. There's so many people like Stephen Hawking. I don't think he admitted at the end of his life that, that, that God was real. But one of the last. Something he talks about in one of his last publications was that he could. It was something along the lines of like, he couldn't see any other way other than the fact that the universe was able to consciously make decisions on its own. That's God to me.

[Podcast Host]

Prove him wrong.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's God to me. So, yeah. But it's tough to juggle these things and rationalize them together.

[Podcast Host]

But I think you're right. I think native people, especially in the Americas, just were much closer to whatever that realm is.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, yeah, they respected it. You know, there's a great book that's written by. Oh, I'm forgetting his name, but it'll come to me in just a moment. But he was a Spaniard that was born in Cusco in the mid early 1500s. He was the daughter of a wealthy Spaniard and. I'm sorry, he was the son of a wealthy Spaniard and the son of an Inca princess. Very famous book, but it's called A Royal Account of the Incas. And it's basically him in his early 20s, he left and went back to Spain to like reclaim his family's wealth and everything. And when he's an old man, he writes about his experiences growing up in Cusco and all the things that he learned. And man, Cusco is an amazing place. Have you been? No, just thinking about it right now. I'm going back in the summer. I just can't wait to go back. It's one of the greatest cities on the planet.

[Podcast Host]

Is it? That's. And that's the heart of the Incan empire.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. It's the navel of the Inca world. And you know, they thought it was like the center of the universe itself. You know, there's no place that's like Cuzco. It's amazing. And the people there are so nice. The Inca people and like, just really, really amazing place.

[Podcast Host]

But Peru is very open to excavation and their history and all that.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, for a little bit there, I was the. I was the American representative to. To get funding for the excavation of the Chinkana tunnels.

[Podcast Host]

When. With. When you. The mec.

[Luke Caverns]

Not through them, it was just me working directly with Cusco's Ministry of Antiquities. So we were able to. We were able to secure some of the funding for. For the excavation that they have for the tunnels that's there. And we kind of got that off of the ground. And so I was like the English speaking ambassador for them, just trying to get funding to come in to get the project off the ground. And now it's going. So we're gonna. I'm gonna go in and check in with them this summer. But. So, so this. So this guy who had grown up in Cusco late in his life in Spain, he's writing about all the things that he learned about. He's one of the sources for the, for the legendary tunnels that are underneath the city as well. He's got, he. He alludes to them. I've never heard of these.

[Podcast Host]

This is. The Mysterious Encounters are subway tunnels. Wow. So they.

[Luke Caverns]

Wow. I've never heard it referred to as subway tunnels, but. Clickbait. Yeah. Yeah, probably it was, it was, it was connected to the, to the, to the Inca mysteries. You know, you would. They would probably go under the tunnels and who knows what would be. Go on down there. And then they. You could emerge up at Sacsay Woman. Like you could go down in Sacsay Woman. You go down into the mountain and you would emerge inside the city. We don't know if they're if they're natural tunnels that were modified or if the Inca themselves made it, but we know that they were real. But anyways, so he writes about these tunnels and he also writes about, he tells us how the Incas. Which Inca is actually the term of the ruler, you know, that's the name for the Inca emperor. Right. So you had like Manco Inca goes on and on and on.

[Podcast Host]

I didn't know that.

[Luke Caverns]

But when it talks about when the emperor himself would consult with the Sun God, kind of like the pharaoh, the teachings that the Sun God instructed the Inca emperor to have to be a good and moral emperor, which was such an important thing. And all these ancient civilizations and it's such an important thing to be a good immoral person. That's in line. Garcia Laso de la Vega. There we go. Royal commentary of the Incas. Yeah, I know, it's a, that's a big one. So. But he gives us an account of, of what he was taught from his mother's side of the family about, you know, the, the early philosophy of the Inca kings. And I, about a year ago when we got back from. No, for my birthday, my wife got me the original printing of that book. Like hardback copy? Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Original.

[Luke Caverns]

Well, well, I don't know why I said original. They were brought to the US in like the early 1900s and there was a printing of them. Yeah, yeah, so, so the original American one, they were made in New York. It's really, really cool. It like deteriorates in my hands every time I hold it. But so I'm flipping through the pages and I read the philosophy of, of, of like the founding of the Inca world and, and I'm reading this to her and I, I tell her, I'm like, I'm like, how similar does that sound to Christianity? How similar does that sound? And she was, she had just come with me to, to, to, to Cusco. She loves the Peruvian people and you know, you could just see how kind that they were and it's almost like, you know, it was like they were connected to, to goodness. They're just good hearted people. And, and I was telling her, I was like, I was like, I was like. It just doesn't make sense to me that if, if God's real, that he didn't have a relationship with these people, if, if these, if these teachings seem so similar to everything we know, you know, what goodness is, you know, what it means to be good. You can, you can feel it when, when like there's a reason that all these Philosophers come up with these rules of life and ways to treat each other because inherently we know what's good and what's not and have this and if you're connected to that, that's what I feel like you being connected to

[Podcast Host]

God is because we don't need the ten Commandments. We already know.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. And you know, and you know, the reality is there's no sense in even trying to have an argument for morality. If you don't believe in something higher than just humanity, you, there's no, there's nothing you can come up. There's no actual argument, philosophical argument you can come up with for why anybody should even care about how we treat each other. If you don't believe anything higher than in this three dimensional realm.

[Podcast Host]

That's true.

[Luke Caverns]

You know, there you can, you can try and you. And the only reason they try is because they feel it too. We all feel the pull to be, you know, the pull to be good. We know what that means. And I believe very few atheists are truly atheists.

[Podcast Host]

Down deep, I think everyone believes something. I don't want to speak for everybody, but I think there are a lot of people who say I don't believe in God.

[Luke Caverns]

You kind of believe in something. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's all of my interactions I've had with, with people who don't believe in God. But then you really start talking to them about it. They're like, well, okay, well, yeah, I mean I, yeah, I recognize there's, there's gotta be something that's like more than all, you know, you'll get that. But I think that's how everybody is because we all recognize it. There's so many things about our existence. I actually think it feels. A few years ago I had this, I had this thought that I was like, it feels so much more likely that you and I were always intended to exist and that our, and that our existence is not accidental. That feels so much more likely than you and I just being some of the luckiest beings to ever exist. You know what I mean?

[Podcast Host]

I do.

[Luke Caverns]

It's actually more likely that we were always supposed to exist. And I think that that could be explained as simply as when the universe erupts and you know, like at the beginning of time, say the Big Bang, there's this massive explosion, vast expanse of nothing. I think that all the threads of time already existed in that moment. Time can't exist without light. Those two things work together. We were all touching.

[Podcast Host]

We were all together at some point.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. Matter can't be created or destroyed. And so all of time was compressed into the size of a pinhead. And those threads already existed, and now they're just. They're expanding out across the universe. But everything that was already going to happen was born in that moment. There's nothing that's. That's up to chance. It all existed from the very beginning of time. That makes so much more sense to me than this idea that, like, the things that happen just happen and whatever. Whatever. I think everything that happens was already determined from the very second creation existed, if that makes sense.

[Podcast Host]

It does, yeah. Yeah. Because we're all connected. Tell me your theory about the were jaguars. I don't want to forget that one.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. So. So this is actually where.

[Podcast Host]

And then we'll see if we can get to Atlantis.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. So this is where Dr. Barnhart and I, we probably. I don't know, we might disagree with each other on this, but it's. It doesn't really matter. Wow.

[Podcast Host]

It's actually called a were jaguar.

[Luke Caverns]

Were jaguar, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So we're like a werewolf.

[Luke Caverns]

Yep. Yeah, man. We've got werewolves and were jaguars and were tigers. Tigers. And I think there's a werehipo out there somewhere. Okay. I. I gotta do a video at some point on. On all the wares and these different human, you know, fusions with these creatures. But. So my first introduction to the were jaguar was. Well, it was. It was actually the day before I was at Palenque for the first time with Dr. Barnhart. If you go to see Palenque, the likelihood is you'll have to land in Villa Mosa. And there is where you can go to La Venta park, where a bunch of these. Where a bunch of these Olmec monuments were, like, rescued when I think it was Pemex was taking over the oil company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was. Was taking over a lot of Mexican land. And one of them was the archaeological side of Lenta. They thought they were just going to pulverize the whole thing. So one of the wealthy patrons of the city of Viermosa bought all of those. Or maybe he bought them or he did something. He. He paid for them all to be transported to Villa Mosa and put in this huge park. So he's like a. It's like a local. Local. Local hero.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

And it's an amazing park. One of my favorite parks in the world. And it's also a little zoo as well. It's really cool. So he and I visited that before Palenque, and I've been Back like, four or five times now. I've been across the Olmec world, like, maybe. Maybe four times now. And. And what's really interesting, and I tell people this every time. I. I'll take, like, we'll have students who sign up to go on a Maya Exploration Center. That's our organization, mech. We'll have students that'll sign up to go on, like, these educational tours. And so I'll tell them at the first day, I'll be like, what do you think of when you think of the Olmecs? They say, hey. They'll say, the heads. I'll say, by the time you leave this, when you think of the Olmecs, you'll think of a. Were jaguar. It won't even be close. You'll think, where? Jaguar. Yeah. Because there are 17 known basalt Olmec heads, and there are three more that are sandstone that Dr. Barnhart and I, we publicized to, like, the popular audience just a few years ago because no one had ever seen them. He and I hadn't even seen them in person. There was this little. There's this little museum that has been, like, closed at La Venta for years because I guess, like, rain damage. And they reopened it back up, and the floor was, like, still covered in water. And so we're walking around this museum, like, inch deep of water. He and I open up these doors, and there's these three massive sandstone Olmec heads standing in front of us that are far larger in size, not weight, but in size compared to all the other Olmec heads. And he gotta look at each other. And we go, what the hell are these? We'd never seen them before. And they're larger than what's in the park? Yeah, yeah. They're. Yeah. Oh, it's crazy. It's really crazy. And they're. Oh, my head spread throughout Mexico. But all the ones from La Venta, almost all of them are. Are at that park. But they're larger than all the Olmec heads throughout all of Mexico. Almost like twice as big in size.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

And. But what's funny is those heads are not humans. They're Were jaguars, but they're not basalts. So there's. There's some. There's so. So this slowly started eating away at me where I. I just. What's really cool about Mesoamerican archaeology, or I should say American archeology, is that it's under. Published, underfunded. It's not quite as popular. You know, Egypt vastly overshadows so much of the ancient world as far as popular interest. Right. And there are so few people professionally studying it that an outlaw like myself or Dr. Barnhart can come in and look at the stuff that's on display, read the academic literature of what's been. Of what's been discovered, you know, like 100 years ago or more 80 years ago. When it comes to the Olmecs, that's another thing. You know, the Olmecs are an American discovery. Americans discovered and made the major exploration or the major expeditions in the Olmec world. Matthew Sterling and the Smithsonian.

[Podcast Host]

When was that?

[Luke Caverns]

It was. What was the first year? 19. It was mid-1930s to just after World War II. 1946, I believe, was the last Sterling expedition to the Olmec world. But yeah, it was. It was American teams that did that. It's kind of cool. It's an exclusive. It's like a. It's like a specifically American story where, where we went down into Mexico and. And launched these major expeditions with Smithsonian. Obviously working with their government, but fully American teams. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, we talked earlier about the early Smithsonian was very racist against indigenous people.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Because they believe that there's no way savages could build these. Which I think is one of the reasons why we don't hear those stories as much as we hear about Egypt.

[Luke Caverns]

100% true. Yeah. Yeah. There's. There's a lot of. Of weird, complex, like, dark stuff that the Smithsonian has gotten up to. I haven't done a whole lot of looking into it, but I will. I will feed the. The giant skeletons community. There were three massive skeletons that were discovered at the Olmec side of San Lorenzo in the early 1900s. And an old man that. Doctor. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

How big are we talking? Are we talking giants?

[Luke Caverns]

More than six and a half feet tall. Okay, that's. That's what the guy. That's what. But this old man who was probably in his 80s, Dr. Barnhart and I met him, he came out with the archaeological team to the site of San Lorenzo, got talking to us, and he told us he saw three massive skeletons get erect or get excavated from the Red palace. And they were taken to Mexico City and never seen again. Wow. Never published. There's no photos of them. That guy said he was 16 years old and he saw it, and there are other people who saw it as well. And this was a known thing, that giant people were found in these mounds and taken away.

[Podcast Host]

You're not really a giant.

[Luke Caverns]

And this was. And this was the Smithsonian doing this?

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have Them documented hiding things, man.

[Luke Caverns]

I don't know if I'm. I don't know if I'm a giants guy.

[Podcast Host]

I'm not really. I kind of want to believe, but I kind of don't.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. I mean, I don't know if. I don't know. I mean, I don't know if giants are a race or if they're just venerated because they're. Because they have. Was it gigantism or. Gigantism. Right.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, I think your theory is the first I heard of someone talking about a cleft palate as being a positive trait in a culture.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, yeah? Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Can you tell us about that real fast?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

So this. So this is. This is the. The way that this started for me was I was actually just playing around with. I was putting together the ways that. That Star wars is inspired by the Mesoamerican world.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Luke Caverns]

People don't realize that. That there actually was something called the Star Wars. It was the Maya Civil wars, and that so much of George Lucas. Star wars is actually pulled from the Mesoamerican world, even though they don't publish it. Like you would think he would write that in a book. It's so obvious to me.

[Podcast Host]

But this audience knows what Yavin 4 is.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. So Yavin 4 Tikal. Well, Jabba's palace is actually pulled from Moctezuma's palace when the Spaniards arrived. This is the beginning of me thinking about this, and I don't know if there's any other modern scholars out there that agree with me on this, or it might all think I'm crazy for thinking this, but this was. This is what got me thinking about this. I had known that the Aztecs had Olmec artifacts, even though they may have never known who the Olmecs were or knew about any other sites. I knew that they had Olmec artifacts and probably knew it came from a time before time. Right. And then I got thinking about when the Spaniards arrived at Moctezuma's palace in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. They go up into his palace and they see that surrounding the emperor are all these people with weird deformities. And he saw them as being touched or blessed by the gods and that they could be clairvoyant, that they could be. You know, they were valuable people, and so they were all spoiled and they were kept up in the palace, and they were venerated. They weren't discarded like the. You know, if you're born deformed in ancient Greece, you're going to get left up on top of a mountaintop. Bye. And so that's another reason that I say that their way of thinking is inverse to ours. They're so much different than us. So they see these people as being touched by the gods or blessed by them. Well, you know, one of the things that we talk about a lot in Mesoamerican archaeology is the continuity of cultures, that they're very traditional at the top of their. Of their stone pyramids. If you look at the architecture in the Maya world, the top of the stone pyramid in stone will be a stone recreation of a wooden and thatch hut that the normal people would live in. So the top of the pyramid is just an architectural recreation of a wooden and thatch hut. It's the same way within Egyptian temples. The pillars themselves are actually just bundles of reeds and lotus flowers that are all wrapped together. That's what the pillar itself represents. And so they really care about staying with tradition. That's why these people for so long, even as wealthy as they were, they always lived in huts because it's a way of honoring the ancestors and honoring tradition itself. You know, they're like conservative people. They hold on to these traditions and carry them with them. And so I thought, well, you know, The Aztecs are 1400 A.D. you go back just a thousand years, you can see that the Maya are venerating dwarves. They say that the, that dwarves built the pyramid of Uxmal in a single night. If you go up to Temple 33 at the city of Yashilan, there's like depictions of dwarves and the ball game all the way around the temple. The Maya people venerated dwarves as being special and being touched by the gods. You see that Pakal's son at the city of Palenque, he had six fingers and six toes. And that was something that they, that they saw as being significant about him, that he was blessed by the gods. Well, let's go back to, let's, let's take that just one step further back to the Olmec world, where we have even more deformity. We have, you know, you have, you have all these depictions of where Jaguar people who, you know, they look like they have the downturn mouths and cleft lips with fangs coming out.

[Podcast Host]

They do.

[Luke Caverns]

And then you also see a lots of depictions of they. Some people call them like downs babies, but they're babies that you can tell are not. You know, they're born with some kind of deformity. There's there's something. There's something, you know, wrong with them. That's a werejaguar baby. But if you go to, like, a regular baby, that guy, he's actually a little bit different. So I think he has ectodermal dysplasia. But if you look at a different baby statue, you'll see that. That they do look like. Like children with down syndrome. And so I think that the reason that we have thousands of these little statues and, and they're. They're like life size. They look just like a baby. You could put a real one next to them. They're the same size and everything. It's a portrait of a literal baby. And I think that. What I think is happening is that when these babies are being born, the Olmec people know that something is special about them. They're blessed by the gods and they're not going to make it through childhood. And so they venerate these babies by making all these statues for them because they know these children aren't going to survive. And I think they're. They're venerating their lives and the babies that are born with these cleft lips. In the 1970s, there was a survey that was done in Veracruz, like a medical survey. And one of the things they documented, this didn't have anything to do with, like, research in the Olmecs. It was just something that they documented, was that there's a disproportionate amount of indigenous children born with ectodermal dysplasia.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, there's no question that's what this is. We're seeing this over and over.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. You see underneath the lips, how gummy that is.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. There's no question.

[Luke Caverns]

So my wife has worked on children with ectodermal dplasia. My wife's a dentist. I refer to her about this stuff. So I feel a little more, you know, free to talk about this. But she'll have kids come in with ectodermal dysplasia. They got a couple of fangs. Like, sometimes it's two fangs in the front, or sometimes it's wide. Two fangs. They have no learning disability, just normal, really. Yeah, just totally normal kids. But they. But they are. Their mouths are gummy, and they'll have two fangs on the top and maybe sometimes fangs on the bottom, or they won't have teeth that grow in the bottom nowadays. They'll get implants, you know, dentures, whatever. They have different ways of helping kids with this, but it doesn't come with learning disabilities. And she had a whole period in college where she learned about this, which was actually at the same time that I was researching this, when I first started researching it. And so what I think is that these people are interacting with the most ferocious animal in the jungles of the Americas, the jaguar. All of a sudden you have kids that are born with jaguar fangs. You start taking DMT and ayahuasca and peyote. And just like you hear people who take these hallucinogenic drugs in the jungles of Central America, Mexico and South America, they will wake up looking through the eyes of a jaguar. They will be inside a jaguar going through the jungle. And I think that all of these things, over thousands of years, fuse into this culture that venerates the most ferocious beast in the forest that is taking hallucinogenic psychedelics and looking through the eyes of a jaguar. Whether or not it's really happening, I don't, I don't exactly know. And then you have children that are being born with fangs that people are looking at. Like this person is a human jaguar. How did, how did this happen? And you see depictions in the city of Chow Kat Singo of jaguars and people like, interloping with each other, like having sex with each other. Some people think that they're dancing, but they do look like they're having sex with each other, and they're like human jaguars. And so I think you get this. I think over the course of thousands of years of this happening, you get these people that are like, selectively breeding and engineering a whole population that of people to be born with ectodermal dysplasia. And that's why throughout the, the Olmec world, you only see 17 depictions of colossal Olmec heads, but you see thousands of depictions of were jaguar people. Thousands, thousands, thousands. And what I think it is is just like in ancient Egypt, where you had this, this is. I mean, I. I just feel so certain saying this. In ancient Egypt, you have. We know that the pharaoh and the priests were warring against each other. The priests had risen up. They become so powerful that they start to challenge the pharaoh's power. And it's almost like the pharaoh has to obey the, the priests. And, you know, that's not the cosmic order of, of things. And they, they have this huge feud. Well, I think that there's a priestly class of shamanic people in the Olmec world that are the, were jaguars. And it's this whole breed of people. They're not kings, but they're the, the religious leaders. They're the religious guides in this civilization. And the king himself is separate from, from that. And we can see all throughout the Olmec world of the Olmecs actually. And I actually think that it's, it's a totally one sided thing. As far as I can remember. So many of the Olmec altars which are. It's basically like this huge stone table and inside of the table you see a man who's clearly a were jaguar with what looks like an elongated skull. And I'll have this big hat thing on top of him with a uraeus just like. This is crazy. Just like the Egyptian Uraeus with.

[Podcast Host]

Really.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, he has a, he has a, he has a. It's either a fer de lance or it's a rattlesnake. Right here on the, on the front of his headdress. You could look up a La Venta. La Venta Olmec or Olmec Laventa altar and, and it'll pop up and he's emerging from a cave and he's carrying a baby with him. The man has downturned lips and so does the baby. And on the sides of the, on the sides of the monument you have other grown people. Okay, so it's going to be one of these. It's the, it's the photo right below this one. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, that's no question.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So he's got, so he's got a. If you look really, really closely there, there is a snake that's coming out of the top of his hat. That. And so he's got downturn lips and he's holding a baby while emerging from the cave. And next to him you can see other people who also have the downturn lips, also holding babies who have the downturn lips. Now what I think that this actually is. And one day I gotta make, I gotta make something like this is let's unwrap the monument where you have a scene here on the front, scene here on the side. Let's unwrap it and flatten it out. What I think it is is it's a procession of these children because we found, we know where the caves are that these people were making pilgrimages to in Guerrero, Mexico. They're going inside the caves, they're performing these mysteries inside of them. There's depictions carved into rocks at Chow Catzingo of a man sitting on a throne inside a cave. You can see the opening of the cave and you can see the wind like billowing out of it. He's also holding a Baby. So what I think that they're doing is there's this rite of passage that a baby born with ectodermal dysplasia, a Were jaguar, has to go through as a baby to be. Oh, I mean, it's like. It's like having a. It's like having a Christian king being baptized as a baby. Right. You have to go through the rights. And so they're going through their mysteries, their rights as. As children. And what I think that these altars are, is. I think that that is a snapshot in time of when the shaman were jaguar, who's going to sit on top of it, that baby being carried by the man. The baby is him. It is a snapshot of when he was given the right of the power of the Were jaguar as a baby. Right. And, and we know that they're. That they're sitting on top of it because there's a rock art painting of a. Of a. Of a Were jaguar ruler sitting in this, like, yoga pose on top of one of those altars. So we know that they're sitting on top of them.

[Podcast Host]

What is the quote, unquote, mainstream view

[Luke Caverns]

of those of man? I. I don't. I don't think that there really is one. I saw it. Yeah, I saw. I saw. Well, I mean, I know that it's kind of like they, they mostly, mostly what they do is they. They call it ancestor veneration. It's all these broadly vague terms. I saw a guy recently who. He's like a really mainstream sort of academic, and he did a video on the Olmecs. And I was curious what he was going to say about these monuments. And I saw like, his little part where he's standing in front of it and explaining it. And I was like, no, no, it's not even. It just. It's missing all of the nuance. It's fine, but it's missing all of the everything. So anyways. But I think that. I think that as you go throughout the Olmec world, you can see that it's two different groups of people. You've got these royal families that are headed by these Olmec heads. Those guys are probably kings. They're. Each of them are portraits. And there's just no other way to explain it other than the fact that the most powerful guy around had to have commissioned that. But you also have massive monuments, never really heads that are made out of basalt, but you got these big altars like we were looking at that are made for the Were jaguars. But you know what's really interesting is if all those altars are typically smaller than, like, the average Olmec head. And you can tell on some of them that there's an ear on the back side of it. It was a head that used to exist that was carved down in a way and turned into a Were jaguar wow monument. And there's even a. There's even an Olmec head that was never actually a head, but it. But it was a smaller piece of. Smaller, flat, like, rounded piece of stone that they carved a face into it, and then they carved these. These jaguar claw marks across the head and just. Just like, maimed and destroyed the face on.

[Podcast Host]

On it.

[Luke Caverns]

And I think that it's. I think this public architecture that's showing that the were Jaguar priest class is warring with the Olmecs.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. That's telling a story.

[Luke Caverns]

And they often say that this is. It's kind of like. It's kind of like the mystery of Gobekli Tepe. We don't know what was intentionally buried and what wasn't. Like, if it was intentionally buried. They. They call it ritual deactivation, where it's like taking away the power from it. Now, we don't know if it's the Olmecs doing it themselves or if it's warring factions inside the Olmec world.

[Podcast Host]

Meaning the heads were intentionally buried.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. Yeah. And we don't know if it was other civilizations that came and buried them, like, if they got conquered and the civilization that conquered them buried their. Buried their monuments, which I don't think that that's. I don't use any evidence behind that at all. And then they think that the Olmecs may have done it themselves, but not out of the official narrator. The official idea is that it was. They were. It was done themselves, but not out of confrontation. It was like ritual deactivation. So maybe at the end of the ruler's life, they bury the head. I don't. I don't agree with that either, because at the top of all the heads, the thing that's ignored here is the only claw marks that you actually see on top or the only claw marks that you will see on the Olmec heads. We could look them up. Right now, they're on the top of the head. And I think it's. I think it's probably at certain points throughout the civilization, the Were jaguars topple the control of the Olmec kings. Bury it down. Maybe the head is. Maybe the top is exposed, and they claw up the whole top of the helmet where the symbols are. They claw those away. But it's. It's actually a carving of a claw mark because you can put all five of your fingers in it and follow it. Like, it's, like it's a deep claw mark. So they're carving, they're taking the time to carve.

[Podcast Host]

This is in vandalism. This is sculpture.

[Luke Caverns]

Sculpture. Sculptural vandalism.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Luke Caverns]

Right. It's like this was. This sculpture was created 150 years ago or something. Well, now we're going to bury it and we're going to carve claw marks into it to make. To make it known that this is what happens when you challenge the cult of the Werejaguar. Right. You know, something. Something like that. And all over the Olmec world, you can see it's not just claw marks. Like they scratched into it with something. They took the time with tools to chisel. Long, deep, five finger claw marks throughout. Throughout these monuments. This happens hundreds and hundreds of times

[Podcast Host]

on hundreds of these.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. Hundreds of different monuments throughout and. And several different. Like a dozen different times. Like, like you can imagine. Yeah. You know, that a Werejaguar clawed at a monument and they make it look like that. Like a Werejaguar just mauled this. The top of this guy's helmet, took away his whole insignia, you know, just. Just disgraced his power. And then they buried him. Freedom. That's what I think that I'm seeing. Especially when you see the monument of what looks like an Olmec head face and his whole face is just torn to shreds.

[Podcast Host]

Could it be possible that the Were Jaguar is a later culture and they're just. The heads are there and they want to bury these and dominate that earlier culture, or do you think it's just. I think they're contemporaries.

[Luke Caverns]

That's a good question. I don't know. I think it all happens at the same time because.

[Podcast Host]

Well, I mean, I love stuff that.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

That we just find.

[Luke Caverns]

See the top of his head?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that's. That's vandalism sculpture. That's clearly intentional.

[Luke Caverns]

That's an interesting question about. Can. Can both these be happening at the same time? I think that they're happening at the same time because it's. You see the similar art styles between the heads and. And everything else, they're also using the same trade routes like we. We have found some of the roads where the, where the. All the monuments are being transported across land and everything. So I think it's all interacting with each other, happening at the Same time. But what I think it is is that the, let's say the royalty versus the shamans, these rise, these fall, you know, it's like this. So at certain points times there, there might be not be a king at all. It's just the. Were jaguars dominating everything and burying all these people. And so I think this is going on for like almost 2,000 years. And, and I actually, I'm. I believe I'm standing out on an island by myself with this theory. I don't think there's. I don't think there's a single other academic that that would, that would back this up. But it seems obvious to me that it. That it's two different factions, like, warring against each other. Ultimately, though, the last main Olmec cultural center is a place called Tresipotes, and that rises somewhere around 250 BC. So like almost been around for 2000 years at this point. And when that cultural center takes hold and they build this massive city, they've got a few heads there, a bunch of, bunch of stone monuments, nowhere jaguars. So somewhere between about 500 BC towards the latter part of La Venta and the rise of this next cultural center called Tres Potes, the were jaguar just disappears into time. That's interesting. From that point on, dominating Mesoamerica will be the pantheon of gods that's worshiped by the Maya and the Zapotex, later the Teotihuacans, and this shamanistic culture that's like supremely shamanistic, where people are almost like transforming into other beings, becomes secondary, if not completely disappears. We see in some places in the Maya world, like out in Belize, where Belize was connected to the Olmecs in a way, in a particular way. The Maya people of the Belize. Of Belize were connected to the Olmecs in a particular way that the rest of the Maya world was not. And I just learned when I was in Belize, like a couple months ago, from Belize is so overlooked and so underfunded and understudied in archaeology that I learned that There are only five active PhD archaeologists in the entire country of Belgium. Belize.

[Podcast Host]

What?

[Luke Caverns]

Only five? Oh, I should say, no, no, there's only five of them. And like two or three of them are active. Yeah. How crazy.

[Podcast Host]

It's crazy.

[Luke Caverns]

So you have this whole massive world there, but the. We know that the Maya of Belize were interacting with the Olmecs because way early on, before the rest of my world even even accepts or adopts divine kingship, there was a kingdom in the. There was a kingdom on the coast. There that had trade connections all the way back with the Olmec world because we can see that they had, that they're sharing things like, like the Olmec people have artifacts that you'd only find on the coast of Belize and vice versa. And so these people on the city called Saros, they try a kingdom and it works for like 150 years and collapses. But surviving there throughout the rest of the Maya world, just in Belize. And you have to think the Maya world is not a monolith. They're not like when one guy makes a decision in t call, it doesn't, you know, become law for everybody else. It's like, it's like the Greeks. They have city states. But the Were jaguar survived in Belize for all the way until the classic period, like two, 3,000 years later, where

[Podcast Host]

for thousands of years the Werejaguar continues survived in Belize.

[Luke Caverns]

And I didn't, I did not know that. And I, I, I was. That was shown to me by an archaeologist named Raphael. And he took us on it. He took us on a tour through ATM cave, which is really, really cool. And he showed me on the side of this pot a, a werejack jaguar made in like classical Maya form, but it was a man who was actually a jaguar. Yeah. And it doesn't exist anywhere else in, in the Maya world, but of course it exists in the one place that was actually connected to the Olmecs thousands of years earlier. So that influence that the Olmecs had on those people of the Were jaguar stuck with them for a thousand years after the Olmecs had fallen. Yeah. That's amazing. Really cool.

[Podcast Host]

Can I keep you for one last quick second?

[Luke Caverns]

Sure. Let's do it.

[Podcast Host]

So we were talking about half man, half jaguar. When we come back, can we talk about half man, half bull?

[Luke Caverns]

Half man, half bull. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

All right. Thanks for hanging out for one more. I appreciate it. I had so much.

[Luke Caverns]

I know. Did we get to most of it?

[Podcast Host]

Almost. I was really excited to hear you talking about the Minoans because I don't think they get enough love.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Can you tell us a little Minoan story? Who were they?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So the Minoans are, you know, they're another one of these civilizations, sort of like the Olmecs. They're a. If the Olmecs are a pre Mesoamerican society, well, the Minoans are like a pre Greek society. The Minoans really might not even be Greek at all. We don't quite understand their racial composition or where they came from or what. Or what culture they subscribe to. They're like their own people, but.

[Podcast Host]

And we don't know what they call themselves.

[Luke Caverns]

Themselves. We don't know what they. We don't even know what they call themselves. How crazy is that? We don't even know what language they spoke. Same. Same sort of thing. But the Minoan society is. Man, I. I love the Minoans. It's. I got fascinated with the Minoans. The. The movie of Troy. All the architecture that's pulled from that is mostly from kenosis. And so this was so.

[Podcast Host]

Kenosis, the.

[Luke Caverns]

On Crete kenosis, which is, which is. They call it the Minoan capital, but we don't even know if that's what it was. But so the Minoans, they arrive, we start seeing their culture form, whether coincidentally or not coincidentally, on the island of crete on around 3100 BC, same century, same century as when, as when Egypt arises. My guess, not a coincidence. My guess. The ancient world's much more interconnected with each other than we could possibly understand. Oh, my gosh. I gotta tell you this. What did we talk about? I don't know if I told you this yet or if I was talking with your brother about this. What happened? No, you and I were talking about the other room when I told you about the, the. That Roman city in the Dockloasis, way out in the middle. Way out in the middle of Egypt. Egypt. So in southern Egypt, you follow the Nile 700 miles after you get into Egypt, and then you go, you head west for. Who knows? It probably takes a week to get out there from, from the Nile itself. But you reach this place called the Dakla Oasis, which are these huge reservoirs that create fertile land just next to the reservoirs. Ancient people have been living there since 12,500 BC, and they eventually were consumed into and wrapped into the dynastic Egyptian world. Well, when the, when the Romans, as we were talking about when they took over Egypt, they built a Roman colony down there. And the ancient world was so interconnected, news could spread so quickly that even during this period of like 70 emperors and 70 days or something in Rome, they changed the inscriptions on one of the temple walls to reflect an emperor that was only alive as emperor and on the throne for 90 days.

[Podcast Host]

That's crazy.

[Luke Caverns]

So they were able to, Able to change the. Yes, there's. There's Doclo Oasis. So they were. They were able to change the inscription of the emperor that quickly. So that's 1200, 1200 plus miles right. That's unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. So they're so. Information gets around just like that. And my guess is it always had been. And. And we just. It's invisible, but it's hard. We can't see it. But when you see the fact that Mesopotamia really starts kicking off around 30, we can push it back a little bit. But maybe 3,300. 3,200. 3,100 BC. The Minoans kick off in 3,100 BC. The Egyptians kick off in 3,100 BC that's not a coincidence. These people all know each other. And when. When these little revolutionary ideas spark people who are trading in those areas, they go immediately back home and say, you're not gonna believe what I just saw. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And that's why they all progress next to each other, right? They all rise sort of at the same time. And. But the Minoans are the ones that. That get overlooked because we look at Mesopotamia and Egypt as being the origins of civilization itself. But the Minoans were right there, too. I mean, I think you could say Crete is one of the birthplaces of civilization.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, it's the first written language in Europe. Europe.

[Luke Caverns]

I got to start saying that more often.

[Podcast Host]

What, Linear A? No.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

First written language.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. Linear A. And we don't know what it says. Yeah, yeah. Well, first written language, at least in the Greek world, like, you know, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and. And there's Egyptian hieroglyphs, and then there's. Then there's Mesopotamian writing, and there's the Phoenician writing, and they think that linear A is pulled from the Phoenician writing. But. But. Yeah, that's fascinating.

[Podcast Host]

Well, hang on a second. You have linear A undecipherable, then you go linear B, which is like proto Greek. Then language goes away for 400 years, and then Greek reemerges based on the Phoenician Alphabet.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, is that what it is? Okay, okay. I'm sorry. Because of Homer, for some reason, I was thinking that linear A, that they thought that linear A was pulled from. I could be wrong. They don't even know.

[Podcast Host]

It's like, pictures of cats.

[Luke Caverns]

It is. Yeah. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's pictographic and logograms, which is. Which is loosely, probably inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs, because Egyptian hieroglyphs are logograms and pictographs. And I think that early Chinese is sort of the same way. It's like pictures. And the pictures, like, fuse Symbols, you know, but yeah, so they, their culture, they arrive there. I think, I think that the earliest that we see their culture emerging is like 4000 BC, which is the same time Mesopotamia and Egypt. And then the actual civilization fully existing is about, is 3100 BC. There's a lot of different things that check boxes for civilization. One of the things they're starting to take off of that is writing though. You know, it's, it's like, you know, that used to be, that used to be one of the boxes you'd have to check to be a civilization. Now they're realizing it like that's not really. If you have all the other tenants of a civilization, you don't have to be writing because you don't have to write to have a civilization. A lot of civilizations survive off of oral history. So taking that one off, which I sort of agree with, but nonetheless, the Minoans are riding so, man, they are so much more ancient than, than the rest of, than the rest of the Greek world. So between 3000 BC and 2000 BC, they start building these towns and cities across the island of Crete. They say it's, it's a, it's like the island of, the island of 100 Cities or the island of 100 Palaces. And so you have all these, you have all these cities that are being built that are in ordinarily wealthy compared to other people that are living in, you know, between 2000 and 3000 BC around the Mediterranean world.

[Podcast Host]

Well, explain how big these palaces are because.

[Luke Caverns]

Well, well, so right now we're in the pre. Palatial period. We start entering palatial when we get to about 2000 B.C.

[Podcast Host]

that's when the big buildings go up.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So the Minoans, they realize that the Mesopotamians, they make a lot of their wealth from, I believe a lot of it is gold mining and valuable resources as well as it is farming. The Egyptians, it's farming straight up. They don't even have gold in Egypt. All their gold comes from, comes from Sudan and Nubia, but massive, massive amounts of farming. And so the, the Minoans, they make their money in the copper trade and copper. Yeah, yeah, so, so one of their most valuable, one of the places that was able to, to mine the most copper was their city of Akrotiri. Akrotiri, it's modern day Santorini, just north of the island of Crete. They're able to mine a lot of copper there and on the various islands. And the island of Crete itself does have some copper. It does have silver as well, so it's metals. Once that, once the metal starts kicking off, that's why like Egypt and Mesopotamia, kind of, they all emerge at the same time, but these two guys grow way faster. But once these guys, once everyone else starts realizing that they want copper, boom. The Minoan civilization explodes. And so about 2100 BC to let's say 1900 BC that's kind of when this massive. It probably goes back further than that because we know that the Egyptians are buying copper from them like in the fourth dynasty. There's all that copper that they've got. So much of that comes from the, comes from the Aegean. But the Minoans are slowly building up that wealth to about the point by 1700 BC the whole island is covered in like 99 of these. I think it's like 99 to 100 of these massive palaces.

[Podcast Host]

That many. Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

I think that's right. Yeah, yeah. No, there's, there's about a dozen of them that are absolutely enormous. But in all it's like, it's like a hundred palisade towns. You have this big town and you have this massive public architecture center in the middle of it. But there's 12 of them, I believe, that are just absolutely enormous. I wish I had a measurement of the acreage. That's something I should know. But they were so enormous and so strange to visitors that this is sort of where the labyrinth myth, myth comes from. There there was no actual. That we have found no labyrinth of the Minotaur. And the Minotaur is their cultural creature. It's this man bull. So kind of like the Olmecs, you know, you got this, this man jaguar. So you had a wearable. And so the labyrinth of the Minotaur, it's possible that it's actually just rep. Referencing the palaces because the palaces are these labyrinths of like four floor palaces with all these winding hallways. You know, in ancient times, people don't think about this. There are no wide open rooms in ancient times because they. The technology to create a roof that would still hold up to be large, it just, it just hadn't, it hadn't been invented yet. They hadn't figured out how to do that with the architecture. So you would have small rooms and winding hallways. And so these palaces are labyrinths within 1300 rooms. Yeah, exactly. With like 13, 13, 1400 rooms. Yeah, it's something, it's something insane. Especially at Knossos and we call them palaces.

[Podcast Host]

But it's possible that everybody lived there. No, like shopping malls.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, that, that would Be more so what I would say you have these, you have these, you have these villas that are built right up on the walls on the outside. And from those villas that surround the palaces, it starts out at this really high, high level, super expensive homes. And it gradually descends out as you get further away. You know, you got thousands of people living here and then you've got these other nicer areas that are way out in the countryside. People that are, you know, have like wine vineyards and, and farms and everything. And I should keep, keep in mind, even the lower class people, their homes are much larger and much more well built than anybody's homes in Egypt. Like in Egypt, if you're not born royal, even a priest, granted some of the, some of the wealthy, some of the high ranking priests were like mob bosses. But in general, by principle in Egypt, if you weren't born royal, you lived in a dump, you lived in a shack. So even the normal people in the Minoan world are far more wealthy than the average Egyptian. There is not any sort of normal circumstance where the average Minoan person would ever even dream they would laugh at the idea of trading places within Egyptian. And when you know that, it kind of changes your perspective of the ancient world. Like yeah, these temples were amazing, the pyramids are amazing, they're, they world is amazing. But you know, the average life of a note of a Minoan was considerably better than anybody else in the Mediterranean world. Considerably better. They had flushing toilets and water that's flowing through their city. And they've got fountains in the center of the city which was something that you know, people always look at like the Roman aqueducts bringing fresh water into the cities already existed. The Minoans already had this, but it was all underground underground plumbing. Yeah, they had ceramic pipes. Underground plumbing, ceramic pipes. They had marble toilets on the fourth floor of palaces with you know, that could flush, they could on, on the island of Akrotiri, specifically your bath, you could choose between cold and hot water.

[Podcast Host]

That's amazing.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. So it just, just mind.

[Podcast Host]

So they're, what are they drawing from? 2 different, like a hot spring and

[Luke Caverns]

a, so one is coming from a spring that's next to the volcano and the other one is coming from a cold spring.

[Podcast Host]

That's amazing.

[Luke Caverns]

And, and you could, you could cut off where the water is coming from to fill up your bath. And you know, the baths are made out of like alabaster crystal. Some of them are made out of polished marble. It's like crazy and it's just an unbelievably wealthy society. And as much as we've studied this, the societal makeup, like how the structure of the culture, there's no sign of kings, there's no sign of lords, there's. These aren't kingdoms, they're the way I've seen them describe is consumer societies. So it was a capitalistic enterprise society. So, you know, it's a dog eat dog world based on what you provide and having connections inside the business realm. So what makes sense to me is that those palaces are actually malls. It's not a palace, it's public architecture. And in the center you'd have a big courtyard, so there'd be festivals that were played there. All the depictions you see of the guys jumping over the bulls. Yeah, that all happened, it must have happened in that central courtyard. So you'd have parades there and then the cubbies on the sides, you'd have people selling things. And as you went up, maybe, you know, who knows, maybe the copper salesmen are up at the top floor and that's where the aristocrats are really trading. And down on the bottom you got like, you know, hey, do you want to buy, you want to buy these, you know, these olives, you want to buy these seeds, this grain, this, this cheap wine, you know, and then you probably have, you probably have like on the third, you know, on the top, I'm guessing it's going to be like copp. You're going to have this, you know, thousandaire that's going to come in like a millionaire, a billionaire back then. But you know, he's going to come in and he, he's got to go to the top floor where all the copper salesmen are, the super rich people with the finest wine being brought to these businessmen. And just below that it's probably like, oh, you know, well, while I'm visiting Kenosis, I want to buy this really nice, I want to buy this really nice cup that I can drink with, you know. So you go up to the third floor where all the faience is being sold and, and you know, that's probably what I think it was, is a big mall.

[Podcast Host]

I think you're right. Ryan's showing the heracleion right now. You don't see architecture like this for

[Luke Caverns]

a thousand years when this falls. Yeah, you don't see anything like the, actually I should say on a, on a, on a scale that size. No classical Greeks are ever building anything that big. All of their buildings are like single buildings that are clustered together. That is one massive building. The only time you'll ever see anything like that is, I would say, 2,000 years later, height of the Roman Empire. That's the only. Like. Like the Forum and all the temples that are not clustered together, but they're, like, built on top of each other. That's the only time you ever see anything like this again. Especially with the running water, with the flushing toilets, with the aqueduct systems, with the public bathrooms, with the public fountains. All of that is height of the Roman Empire, you know, so when people say, you know, a lot of people will. Will conflate Atlantis like, you. You out. You'll ask people, okay, well, I mean, you don't actually think Atlantis was like. Like spaceships and lasers and aliens and stuff? Like, what do you think it was? People will go, well, I'm not saying I think Atlantis was on par with what we had today, but maybe more like the Roman Empire. Well, there you go. You know, There you go. The Minoans are right there. Are right there with. With the Romans, maybe not as powerful, but sophistication and technology, for sure. Yeah, it's really right there.

[Podcast Host]

That's a great segue. So what happened to the Minoans?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, this is a huge mystery, man,

[Podcast Host]

because they're gone, right?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. Greatest archaeological mystery of all time, really. The most famous one. So one of the central core aspects to the Minoan world, which we touched on a little bit earlier, is the copper trademark trade. Well, that copper trade comes out from this little Minoan colony of Akrotiri. Akrotiri was settled around 4000 to 3000 BC. It's. It's just like right after Minoan culture really appears on Crete, you got some people who move up there, and it's. And when they start mining their resources that are found on the island, it becomes important. So they kind of get absorbed by Minoan society and. And Akrotiri, or Santorini becomes a part of the Minoan world. And so copper trade is coming out of there. And so Akrotiri controlled the copper trade from the Minoans going out to the rest of the Mediterranean world. It also controlled the copper trade going from the Minoans to the Greek mainland. So think about Mycenae out in mainland Greece, all the way up to Macedonia, all the way around the Turkish coast. They all want to come down to Crete. All the travel that comes down to Crete, whether it's for copper trade or it's. Whether it's for anything, would go through Rakatiri.

[Podcast Host]

So this is a wealthy, important place.

[Luke Caverns]

Very wealthy. Very important. Probably it's possible. Yeah. I mean, it's not possible. It's. It's probably a fact that in 1600 BC, 1650 BC Akrotiri was the wealthiest, greatest city on the planet at that time.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

And wow. Yeah. At that very moment.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

And. And it makes sense with why the. So think about the story of Atlantis that's told. One of the things that we're told about Atlantis is that they were very, very wealthy and that they were greedy and that their civilization was destroyed as a result of that. Well, Minoan society itself is a consumer society based on money. From what we can tell, the whole society is based on money. Kind of like, you know, the US like in some ways it's a consumer society. Filthy rich.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Luke Caverns]

Well, that idea of Atlantis, I think that, that. Well, we should get into that in just a moment. But I'm telling you what happened to, to, to the Minoans. So Akateri in 1650 BC is the wealthiest city, I shouldn't say a wealthy city. The best place to live on the entire planet per individual wealth. Wealthiest city on the planet. Now, you know, you compare that to like Babylon. It's not gonna. Or you compare it to Memphis and Egypt. Memphis has more wealth, but the quality of life is so much lower.

[Podcast Host]

Fishermen in a criteria is living a great life.

[Luke Caverns]

That's exactly right. And, and so, and so you have all these other Greek civilizations in the mainland looking at the Minoans, like, look at these wealthy guys, especially Mycenae. Mycenae is chomping at the, the bit to get a piece of that, a piece of that wealth. And Mycenae is. Mycenae is the civilization that's depicted in the movie Troy, the king Agamemnon. So the whole rise and fall of the Minoan world actually happens long before the, the story of Troy.

[Podcast Host]

Well, we could detour for a second there if you want to talk about the Trojan War, because it's one of my favorite things ever.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. Well, it happens after this. Yeah, let's go to that after this because I think it'll make more sense chronologically. Okay.

[Podcast Host]

Because I have a question.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, absolutely. So what's crazy is at the height of Minoan power, this island of 100 palaces or 100 cities, far more wealthy and well to do per person on a one to one scale than the rest of the ancient world, controlling the copper trade, which is the most widely used metal in the ancient world, around the year 1650 B.C. or 16. I should say around the year 1600 B.C. maybe, maybe 1550 B.C. they're still kind of playing with the dates there. Around then, Akrotiri starts having these earthquakes that are going off and they're rattling the city and they're rattling the city. And it starts happening on a regular basis. And we know that it knocked down large parts of the. Large parts of the buildings there. They built. They rebuilt the buildings and put them back together. We can see that in some of the buildings that still surv.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

And it's not known how long this period of time is between the earthquakes beginning and people realizing that these earthquakes aren't going to stop and they have to leave the city. This is what I'm about to get to is one of the most amazing things about. About these people, how sophisticated and how smart and capable they were.

[Podcast Host]

Go ahead.

[Luke Caverns]

They, they. They ultimately decide that you. That this island that they're living on, Santorini, Akrotiri, they can't live here anymore. The buildings are shaking, they're falling apart. It must have been so bad because every single person, not an elderly person, not a child was left behind. Not an animal, not an animal, not a pet, not nothing. Every living thing on the entire island of Akrotiri was evacuated. And then they were all brought probably mostly to Crete. They must have been. I mean, there are some other Minoan islands. And shortly after that, the entire sky over Crete just completely turns black. And the fourth largest volcanic eruption in the history of planet Earth just erupted from the core of the island of Santorini. And the Minoans were so capable that they prevented every single person, it's amazing that. From perishing. Not a single casualty of the fourth largest eruption on planet Earth, and I think the largest one during the time of humanity. I'm pretty. I think that that might be right. The largest volcanic eruption during the time of humanity. Just take us through the day.

[Podcast Host]

What. What it would have been like.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So it's because it's three or four stages of hell. Yeah, yeah, it's. It. It is.

[Podcast Host]

And this is the Thera eruption, I believe.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, Thera. Yeah. Yeah. So. So it's the. So the city is called Akrotiri. The island is Thera, and today it's known as Santorini. So, you know, geologists have gone through. Obviously, there was no. We don't think there's anybody there to witness it. Who knows, maybe there were people out in the water that saw this. Maybe they didn't survive, but I don't know. So the island. I forget the chronological order of the different stages, but you have this initial eruption that causes this, like, I think it's a. It's a 20 mile high column. It's a column that's three times the height of Mount Everest. That's what they estimated the eruption to be. And it sends this huge plume over the entire island of Crete, which we'll get to in just a moment as well, because that causes some havoc on Crete. And. But what's, what's fascinating is that when it sends this rubble into the city of Akaturi, it knocks down. It knocks down some of the buildings. And this all happens over the course of just like 48 hours, 72 hours, and sends rubble and shrapnel onto. Onto Akateri, knocks down some of the buildings, but not actually too many of them. They think that it's the shaking of the island because most of the shrapnel actually gets launched into the island of Crete itself. Like, there are boulders. Wow. That smashed. Oh, yeah, there are boulders that smashed into the island. But mostly it was this white pumice that would. That would kind of like fall down like snow. And it covered the city in 20ft of volcanic ash and pumice and. Which eventually packed and became like this solid rock.

[Podcast Host]

20ft in a. Probably in a day. Right?

[Luke Caverns]

20ft in a day. So imagine it's just, just, you can't see anything. There's no, if you were there, there's no visual at all. It's just black.

[Podcast Host]

This is Vesuvius, just without the people.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And so if you were there, there would be no sunlight coming through the sky. That's how dense the pumice and ash falling from the volcanic eruption. It's just straight up blackness. And. But there were, there were parts of the city that were not actually, for some reason. You know, maybe it has to do with the wind or the way that the, the way that the air is circulating inside the explosion. There are places where that air is not blowing the ash onto certain corners of the city. So there's a part that geologists estimate that happened later in the eruption where when the caldera fell, there's like all of a sudden there's this bubble. There's this huge, like, vacuum, I guess, in the, in the island. And so the caldera sinks in after it erupts. But the caldera is superheated and you have this cold water from the Aegean that spills into it. And what it does, it causes these steam explosions.

[Podcast Host]

Explosions.

[Luke Caverns]

And those explosions that are, I mean, who knows, like as hot as the sun are coming up and sweeping over the city and just scorching the sides of the buildings and knocking them down. So you can find the buildings where they're knocked down. They have, like, these burn marks all on one side. And when they somehow investigate the, the burn marks or take samples of it, they can tell that these came from. Somehow they can tell that it came from steam that had burned it, because it's not the same sort of, you know, the same kind of burning. I don't know how these guys do the things that they do, but, yeah, I mean, just, just devastating. But what's. So it erupts and completely throws an entire wrench in the core island. That sort of facilitated the wealth in and out of Crete, especially with the, with the mainland. And there's so much copper coming from Akaturi back to Crete to be sold into the Mediterranean. It's. It's disrupting their economy. But also the waves are just like, just like Alexandria getting hit with that massive wave. The whole northern side of Crete, all their docks that so many other palaces were built on, the docks are just uplifted and thrown into the mainland. And we have, we have archaeological evidence of parts of the docks. And I'm not sure how they do this, but they're able to find evidence that the water came up like 50ft or 50 meters. It's something like that in like 500 yards inland. So it went, went and just covered the, you know, the, that northern part of Crete and went way up into the hills. We have no idea how many people died during this. I mean, we just. We just don't know. So at some point between right then during the time of this eruption and the carbon dating, it kind of goes back and forth like one decade or one half century. They think that it happened immediately after the eruption. And right now, just as of like the last couple of years, they think that this happened like 100 years later. I don't know. Happening immediately after the eruption. Makes sense to me. But immediately after the eruption, the entire island of Crete becomes covered with this thin burn layer. And it's not a thick burn layer, it's a thin burn layer. And nobody could explain why that is. And the only theory I've heard proposed that makes sense is when that plume covers the, Covers the country or covers the island of Crete. Actually, it was so significant that I think it was one of the. No, I think it was almost the first, the founder. Either the founder of the. Of Egypt's new kingdom, or he's the, or he's the first pharaoh to Use the Valley of Kings. But he writes about personally witnessing himself this massive storm that covered all of Egypt.

[Podcast Host]

Some of. Some people link this to the lakes,

[Luke Caverns]

to the plagues of the Exodus.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Luke Caverns]

It's possible. I think it's possible. And because, I mean, gosh, you can only imagine what that would cause in. In a country. And what's interesting is those plagues are also naturally occurring phenomena. If something is a catalyst that starts it. Right. So that's kind of interesting. And also that story can be like an amalgamation of different things that actually did happen in Egypt and they're condensed into a story like. Like, I think it's. I think that. That they try to say the Exodus began being written in like 900 B.C. something like that. But. So the, the best theory I've heard of, of why Minoan civilization collapsed is not only is the copper trade being disrupted by the eruption of Thera, the destruction of a. The wiping out of the copper trade, at least most of it, and the pummeling of all these northern shore docks where the palaces are at, which obviously erupts the trade. People arrive on Crete, like, what happened to this place? You know, the other cascades throughout the entire world.

[Podcast Host]

This is the collapse of the Bronze Age.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. The. The other thing is that the. The whole island of Crete itself is covered with this thin burn layer. And it doesn't look like. Some archaeologists look at it and they don't think that it's consistent with an attack because you can see what burn layers look like in attacks like, like the, like the city of Troy when they finally found it and they excavated it, they see, they've seen what those burn layers look like, and they're more intense, they're more spotty. And so the theory I actually like is this idea that the whole island would have been night for a day, two, three days at most. Think about how quickly chaos erupts and even more candles and torches are lit than ever before. Everybody has them. Everybody has them lit and chaos erupts. And crime is probably rampant. People start going hungry. Right. Like within. Within 12 hours, people start going hungry and doing. Doing crazy things for food. Crime is probably rampant. And the best idea, I think, is that the Minoans burned down the island. Wow. In the chaos of the darkness.

[Podcast Host]

I have not heard that theory.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. That they, you know, they kick over. They kick over lance and lanterns and they burn down their own cities by accident because there's so much chaos. Nobody can see anything. Nobody's showing up for work you know, it's just you. You can't even imagine. It's like the end of the world. You know, it's literally the end of the world. So they accidentally burned down everything because you think of how many fires you have to light just to be able to see.

[Podcast Host]

Wasn't Knosis the only city to even survive that?

[Luke Caverns]

Well, it only survived because when, beyond this point of this burning, the Minoan world is gone. It's gone. It's gone because when Kenosis comes back, it comes back with linear B. Mycenae.

[Podcast Host]

Mycenae.

[Luke Caverns]

The Mycenaeans. Whether they saw the declining of like, again, archaeologists don't necessarily know if that burning happened immediately following the eruption or if it happened 50 to 100 years later. If it happened 50 to 100 years later, that means it was a massive invasion of the Minoan mainland by Mycenae on a scale that makes the Trojan War look like this.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Luke Caverns]

Literally. The Trojan War is nothing compared to the scale of the invasion that it would have taken to conquer Crete. Nothing. Not even close. Troy is only significant because it gets told in that story. Right? But all it is is a tiny little port city that controls the entry to the Black Sea.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Luke Caverns]

Troy was not a significant. It wasn't like an overly wealthy place. The. The artifacts that come out of Troy aren't really that impressive.

[Podcast Host]

Maybe 10,000 people.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Minoan world, you're talking about. You're talking about World War zero to conquer that place. You know, couldn't.

[Podcast Host]

The Mycenaeans just went. The island was basically empty, and they just rolled over there. There's no evidence of war, is there?

[Luke Caverns]

No. No. Other than the burning. No other than the burning, no. And so the other thing is, is if they went over and conquered, there was a little bit of fighting. That's why the burn. That's why the burn marks are there. Something had to have happened if that. If that wasn't a direct result of. Because it's across the entire island. It's a thin burn mark. So there had to have been conflict. And that's why people say if. If that doesn't. If that didn't happen as a direct result of the Minoans accidentally, one of the other things they thought was that it was shrapnel from the volcano landing on the island and causing fires. But that's the island's massive. I don't think that that stacks up.

[Podcast Host]

So it's like 160 miles wide, rises.

[Luke Caverns]

I think that's right. Yeah. It's 160 miles wide and 300 yards, like north to south or. Yeah, I'm sorry, 300 miles, right. It's 30 miles north to south. Yeah. So, yeah, that. That doesn't really stack up. So if. If they didn't burn down the island accidentally right after the eruption, then it had to be like a light, some kind of skirmishing across the island. But regardless, the only palace that reemerges is Knosis, which is the biggest and most lavish one. And the Mycenaeans must have known that. And so they rebuild the palace and put it back together. But the art style has changed, the architecture has changed, the pottery changes, and that official language that's used to kind of log trading coming in and out changes from linear A to linear B, which is Mycenaean, you know, writing language that they were also using. So.

[Podcast Host]

So now they're speaking Greek.

[Luke Caverns]

Now they're speaking Greek. And so. So the Mycenaeans just permeate. Permeate throughout the entire island of Crete and take. And the Minoan civilization just like, disappears into time. And I think that when Plato is talking about, you know, in his writings in the Republic and. And all the times he mentions Atlantis,

[Podcast Host]

I think the dialogues.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I think he's drawing on at least two different things. Maybe there's a third thing. But, you know, the city of Hiliki had just been. It's a Greek city on the western coast or on the eastern coast of mainland Greece, and it was sunk in by a tsunami just 10 or 13 years before he even mentions Atlantis. So I wonder if that got him thinking. But then also, oral traditions survive. Nobody had forgotten about the Minoan world being destroyed. People don't forget cataclysms, you know, that's why the flood myths exist for all of time.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Luke Caverns]

And. And I think that even though it's invisible to us and we can't really see it, and we can't see the connections, I think that Plato is drawing on these early fuzzy myths that survived from the Bronze Age when he's. When he's telling the story of Atlantis. And I'm not sure what to think of necessarily of. Of the Solon story. I. I just. I just don't know.

[Podcast Host]

Have you heard the theory about how they may have got the math wrong?

[Luke Caverns]

No.

[Podcast Host]

Ancient Egyptians weren't great at math, so their symbol for a hundred could have been misinterpreted as a 10.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So Plato's saying that this happened 9,000 years ago. If that theory is correct, it would have happened 900 years ago. And that would place it right at the 12th century BC right at the collapse of the Bronze Age, like, right dead there, If. If that theory is correct.

[Luke Caverns]

So Plato's 400 BC now. Now, you know what's interesting is, is that works in two different ways. Because if it's. If It's. If it's 900 years before Plato, it's the collapse of the Bronze Age, but if it's Solon saying that it's 900 years earlier instead, then that's the collapse of the Minoans.

[Podcast Host]

That's true.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So either way, I like it. So either way, it works. It works, yeah. Because I think it might be Solon that's saying. I think it might be. I think it's Solon saying that in his. I think it's Plato saying that Solon said in his time it was 9,000 years earlier.

[Podcast Host]

I think you're right.

[Luke Caverns]

So. So if that's. Instead 900, Solon is. Let's say around. Is he. Is he late 600-bc. So if that's 900 years before, that's about 1600 BC.

[Podcast Host]

Yep. That works.

[Luke Caverns]

It works. It's the. The. You know, those. Those numbers are there now. What's really interesting is, okay, the story of Atlantis itself is Athens conquering Atlantis. That's what they say. People forget that part. Well, Athens didn't exist in 11,000 BC or whenever you can excavate down to the bedrock, there's just no evidence that there were people living at that specific place up on the plateau where Athens, you know, up at the Acropolis where Athens was. Because originally the Acropolis was not that. That was not that political, religious sort of center. It was actually a castle. It was walled off during. During the Bronze Age. But here's what's really interesting is, you know, you know the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Of course, Theseus kills the Minotaur. Well, during the time of Mycenae conquering Crete, which. Crete is the Minotaur. The Minoans are the Minotaur. Well, Athens is just a vassal of Mycenae itself. So Athens is part of the greater Mycenae world. So Athens was a part of that conquering of the Minotaur. So when they talk about Theseus killing the Minotaur, Athens being a part of Mycenae did kill the Minotaur.

[Podcast Host]

That's true.

[Luke Caverns]

That actually is what happened. So when he's talking about Athens killing Atlantis and Theseus killing the Minotaur, those two things are parallel. To each other.

[Podcast Host]

That's interesting because you've got King Minus at odds with the Mycenaeans, and that happens with the Minotaur. Then his grandson is Idomeneus, and they actually team up with the Mycenaeans to go and invade troy with the 80 black ships. So that all lines up. The Iliad becomes a historical document. Yeah. And then have you read about the Hittite tablets regarding the Trojan War?

[Luke Caverns]

No.

[Podcast Host]

It's recorded in Hittite clay tablets about this diplomatic situation that's happening in this city. That's. I forget what they call it. I have it written down somewhere, but it's ilium. And there's a war with Ilium that finally gets resolved with the Treaty of Alexandria. And Alexandru is of course, Alexander, which is the other name for Paris in the Iliad. So the Hittites have documented the Trojan War, so now we have it from the other side.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, that is one of those things where there's so many times that academics and archaeologists blow something off as being totally myth, and it's not myth. The myth is based on something that really did happen. Happen. You know, what's. You know what's really funny is I will catch some flack sometimes for my Minoan Atlantis theory. There's no archaeologists that even. That even slightly agree with the Minoan Atlantis theory. Well, I mean, I say slightly agree. It's less common now. It used to be more common.

[Podcast Host]

Well, what are some problems with the theory? Well, let's. We can do steel man. Straw man.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, gosh, I don't know if I can. If I can come up with some on the spot like. Okay, well. Okay, well, one of Hercules. Yeah. Okay. Pillars of Hercules. Elephants. The type of stones that are there. This, that and the other elephants we can solve. How so?

[Podcast Host]

Because they're dwarf elephants found.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, I can't believe. You know, that. I was gonna. I was gonna see if that's what you're gonna say. Yeah, there are.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, they are the pillars of Hercules bother me, though. I can't square it.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I know. I agree. I agree. It's. When he describes the location of it, it's. It's not describing a location. That's in. That's in the Greek isles. One of the ways that I try or attempt to rationalize that is, is that the Greeks are. Are pretty bad historians and. And they're not very good at telling their history, especially even something that, you know, Plato's living in 400 B.C. and, and, and you know, between 40350 B.C. and he's talking about something that Solon went and did over 200 years ago or around 200 years ago. I don't know, you know, man, I don't know if I. It's funny, like in our modern day culture we hold Plato and Solon's word as being biblical, but it's like, okay, let's, let's be real, like it could just be wrong.

[Podcast Host]

You know, Plato enjoyed a metaphor.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly, exactly. And in Plato's, his whole. Everything that he did was putting words in other people's mouths and playing metaphors. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Literally in the dialogues is what he does.

[Luke Caverns]

That's literally what he does. And so if some of those little facts are wrong or he just pulls it out of his ass because it's more important for him to get the point across.

[Podcast Host]

Exactly. Right.

[Luke Caverns]

We tie Plato just right now in this blip in our time, we tie Plato and Atlantis together because that's what's important to us. But if we were talking to Plato, Plato might go, Plato might look at the last 2000 years or everybody right now obsessing over him with Atlantis and be like, guys, that's. No, I was talking about, I was, I was talking about, you know, this phenomena of ancient civilizations that, that rose and fell in our time, you know, in, in our civilization. And I'm talking about the symptoms of those civilizations and what destroy them. Why are you ignoring that? I think you're right. That's probably what he would think. You know, the other thing that I think is pretty funny is that the whole allegory, even if he is really drawing on something important, he is telling an allegory that is all about the consequences of greed. And what I think is so funny is that there's probably. It's just ironic that, you know, people run with the story of Atlantis just to make money sometimes and ignore like all the actual evidence. Ignore, you know, empirical review or whatever, whatever, whatever. And it's like exactly the opposite of the, of why Plato even brought the story up to begin with.

[Podcast Host]

You know, so it's almost irony.

[Luke Caverns]

It is ironic, but it actually just proves Plato right.

[Podcast Host]

What do you think about the idea that the Trojan War, Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid is all really part of the same point in history? 10, 20 years, the fall of the Bronze Age, it's all part of one big story. And the eruption,

[Luke Caverns]

the go into that

[Podcast Host]

a little bit where we have documentation now from the Hittites of the Trojan War, but It wasn't like a big thing to them. It was a diplomatic situation. They got a treaty, but then there's another war with Troy 10, 20 years later. I think they're just discovering within the last few years another layer underneath.

[Luke Caverns]

There's. There's. I think it's Troy 6 and 7 or 6. It's something like that.

[Podcast Host]

So it's much. It's much bigger. Not necessarily more populous, but bigger city. And so we've got all these stories coming around the same time. Odyssey happens right after the Iliad.

[Luke Caverns]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

And the Aeneid, essentially, is right after the Odyssey.

[Luke Caverns]

It's supposed to be.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, right. Supposed to be one long story and all centered around. Basically, it's the story of the collapse of everything.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's their way of acknowledging it. And I think it's the end of the world. Yeah, I think that that's so interesting, I tell you. I really think it's fascinating when you get into the Aeneid, too, that's something. So I haven't really got talking about it. I've done a lot on the Olmecs, doing some on the Minoans. I'm going to do more on it, but the next thing I want to get into is the Etruscans and early Rome, because that's. The Etruscans are another overlooked civilization.

[Podcast Host]

They are indeed.

[Luke Caverns]

And we don't know if the Aeneid really comes from the Romans or if it comes from the Etruscans or if it's some other early Italians. We don't really know where that comes from. Is. Is it likely that there was a guy named Aeneas that. That really escaped Troy and went and established Italy? It's possible, but it could be more likely that there were Italians that were. That were living in that area of the world at the time, and when all that collapsed, they had to come back to Italy and restart, you know, who knows? Or. Or that they were a people that were cast out of that Bronze Age world, that came as refugees to Italy. That was a common thing, like. Like refugees getting sent from one place to the other. And I think you're right in that it is their way of acknowledging and telling a story of where they came from. And probably the core of that story is true, the spine of the story is true, and all the ribs that come off of it are, you know, maybe didn't happen, but it's created to tell a story, and the point of the story is more important than the actual historical accuracy of the story itself. But I agree with you that it's a way for the Iliad and the Odyssey are a way for the Greeks to acknowledge what happened to them, that collapse of the whole world, everything. Right, yeah. It's not just about the significance. You're right. Yeah. The significance is not just about the story itself. It's about how everything fell apart and the Greeks ended up where they were at that point in time where they're just like, just farmers. You know, they lost all their power. They lost this whole magnificent world. And that's this thing that ties them back to this earth, early time. And. And I think the Aeneid is the same thing. It's a way to tie the people living in the classical era to the Bronze Age and acknowledge the collapse of just the whole world itself. And it's amazing that the Egyptians were able to escape that. You know, I think it's Ramses III that he says. He says that he repelled the sea people. He drove them out.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Luke Caverns]

And Egypt survived and that. I mean, can you imagine what, what the Greeks and other Bronze Age people thought when they go to Egypt and they're like, these guys survived the end of the world. They were around way before everybody else was, and they still survived all of it. And, you know, that really comes from the Egyptians being the most conservative civilization in human history. They don't change. They don't change the rules. Art itself in Egypt didn't evolve. It may have changed, and they made new forms of it, but the. The art itself was actually an expression of eternity, an expression of divinity itself. And that depiction of the pharaoh smiting his enemy began in 3100 B.C. and never ended throughout all of Egyptian history. Even the Ptolemies present themselves that way. It was so important and vital and crucial to the success of the Egyptian world that everything stayed the same forever. And they never changed. So they were. They were. They're as defensive and aggressive as they needed to be. They really controlled, like, their immigration. I mean, they. They kept the. They kept the percentages of Egyptians like, just right. Like everything was just right from the very beginning. And they never changed any of it because they saw other cultures around them evolving and changing over time, and they would collapse. These people would change over time and they would collapse. Egyptians never changed. And then it. It's a long, slow grind to a halt for the Egyptian Egyptians. And, you know, that's why people looked at them as like, just these giants that loomed over the ancient world. It's really amazing, man. You know, that's. That's the thing is, when you were talking about, when you said earlier, when you were talking about the Olmecs and you were saying, I really don't think people understand this. These vast periods of time, the longer you spend in the ancient world playing around with if, if you spent anybody or anybody watching, if you spend a year intensely studying all the events that happen, let's say between the Bronze Age collapse and like the beginning of, of civilization as we acknowledge it around 3100 BC when all these cultures really pop off, you will realize how long 2000 years is. You'll have a newfound respect for it. Because we spend so much time thinking about like what happened 12,000 years ago when you think about 5 or 6,000 years ago. So you're like, ah, it's not really that if you really get into studying it, you'll realize, oh my God, that's a long time ago. Because you'll have a newfound appreciation for how long a thousand years is.

[Podcast Host]

You know, a person who grew up as an Olmec, those heads had been there forever. Their grandfathers, grandfathers, grandfathers knew they were there forever and as far as they knew, always would be. Yeah, it's that long of a time. What are you working on now before I let you know?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, so, so we got those LIDAR projects we spent some time talking about just going over. It's. We got this LIDAR project working with Base Map. Terra Terra Incognita Research Institute. We want to, we want to perform the biggest LIDAR scan ever done in the Amazon.

[Podcast Host]

Should we join your patreon and support your work?

[Luke Caverns]

No, I don't, I don't have anything like that live yet. But if people want to learn more about it, they can go to Terra Terra Incognita Research Institute. By the time this comes out, I'll have it linked somewhere on, on my social media or on my YouTube or somewhere people can go check out. They can donate if they want. But I think the biggest thing is just being aware and supporting when we, you know, do put out, you know, calls for people to be able to help or put out videos or something like that. So we're doing that in the Amazon and then I'm working with Base Map, we're scanning a bunch of sites in the mound builder world to try to recreate and revitalize civilization in the American east coast. I'm working on, I'm working on, I got two series on YouTube that I do. I do one that's the first explorers where I take people back to like the first time documented explorations happen in certain periods.

[Podcast Host]

Your videos are great. There's Luke Caverns.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, thank you. And so, so I do that and then I had started this one called the, called American Wilds which is. It's like frontier history. So it's all the weird stuff that people didn't know was going on in the Americas. Like when Europeans first arrive in the Americas they get a glimpse of what, of what this world looked like and they ride it down and nobody is making anything about them. So the, so episode one was me basically proving that jaguars were on the east coast. This next one I'm doing one right now on this lost colony of Magellan that was found in Chile. So that's kind of what I'm working on. And then yeah, I got a. Later this year I have been teasing this book called Olmec Enigma that I'm going to write. But actually I think that my time is better spent making a virtual lecture series. So it's going to be like a rather. So the chapters of the books, you know, it's going to be 10 chapters long. They're actually going to be, I don't know, roughly 40 to an hour long videos and it'll be like a series that people can get it in one way or another. I don't know. But that's kind of, that's kind of the stuff I'm working on right now. I love it.

[Podcast Host]

Fascinating conversation. Hopefully the first many.

[Luke Caverns]

And I think that lidar is, I think lidar is the future of, of outlaw archaeology. Archaeology in general. Like people say the age of exploration, died in the age of exploration. But man, lidar and GPR with you know, it's still expensive but I'm just so lucky I'm able that I'm able to work with these guys and they do a freaking crazy job.

[Podcast Host]

Maybe you can come back, we can go through some images.

[Luke Caverns]

Well yeah man, if we want to do this lidar project later this year it's. There's going to be some amazing stuff that, that comes out of that. Especially here in the mound builder world too. I know you have a big respect for the mound builder people, which is, which is key man. There so many people overlook them because I think the mounds aren't impressive because they're hills of dirt. Dude, there's so much more going on in the Mississippian world than people realize. So dude, we should definitely do, we should definitely do some lidar stuff in the future.

[Podcast Host]

We're going to do it. Luke Caverns everybody. Thanks brother.

[Luke Caverns]

Thanks man.

[Podcast Host]

That was Luke Caverns. We covered the Olmecs, the Minoans, Alexander the Great, and what LIDAR is finding underneath the Amazon. Let's break it down. Here's what checks out. The lidar discoveries are real. Published archaeological surveys have confirmed pre Columbian cities in the Amazon. We're talking geometric monoliths, superhighways, settlements far larger than anything anyone thought possible. It is there. The LIDAR is finding it. The Minoan facts are solid. There's no debate about that. Their script, linear A. Their writing still hasn't been deciphered. We don't even know what they call themselves now. Think about this. They built over 100 palaces on Crete. We're talking a thousand rooms, palaces. They dominated the Mediterranean for a thousand years. A thousand years. We don't know what they call themselves. Aperaturi on Santorini was the wealthiest city on Earth before the eruption. Zero bodies, zero valuables. They knew something was coming, but where did they go? I love that story. Ectodermal dysplasia is a real condition that causes fang like teeth and abnormal nail growth like claws. Luke's rare jaguar theory that the Olmecs selectively bred people in this condition as a shamanic priestly class. Well that's his original take, but the ratio is real. There are only 17 Olmec heads. There are thousands of stoneware jaguars. I never heard that one before. The Alanis math, I love this too. Plato's Timaeus puts Atlantis 9,000 years before Solon, so that places it at 9,600 BC. Guess what? That's the Younger Dryas. So that date matches the flood myths. But there's a theory that the Egyptian priests were telling Solon the number of lunar months, not years. Now if that's true, 9,000 becomes 900 years before Solon about 1500 BC. The Minoan collapse happened around 1600 BC. Scholars have made this argument in peer reviewed journals. Either date is cool. The 365 tsunami hit Alexandria. That's documented. Ships were being thrown on top of buildings. It was insane. Now whether it destroyed Alexander's tomb or not is speculation.

[Luke Caverns]

People still debate it.

[Podcast Host]

The mainstream for the most part says the tomb was lost sometime in the 4th century AD. The tsunami gives a mechanism. So Luke is picking the most dramatic explanation from real evidence. I tend to agree. What could really survive that? Luke Caverns is rebuilding lost worlds with technology that didn't exist 15 years ago. Now whether you accept every claim or not, the sites he's flagging are going to produce papers. You can find him at YouTube.com lukecaverns until next time. Be safe, be kind and know that you are appreciated.

[Luke Caverns]

I played Polybius in Area 51 a secret code inside the Bible said I was I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music Some say in the like I should but then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth my friends and it never ends no it never end. I feel the crap God I got stuck inside me home with MK Ultra of being only 2 aware did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set or were the shadow people there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man I'm told and his name was Cold Heart I can't agree. The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come to gather the secret city underground mysterious number stations Planet Circle 2 project stars I gave and what the Do Watchers foundation don't you worry though the Black Knight satellite so I can't believe I'm dancing with the F KE fish on Thursday nights with they J When the weapons I beat up to the. Love to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel and camels love the day dance when the feeling is right always in time.