25 korrents from this recording
Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.
0:00:00 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsFor the vast majority of human existence, we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic region, but they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.
0:05:03 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI don’t think that Atlantis existed. I do think it was one of Plato’s many parables talking about putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school.
0:13:11 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsWe see the traditional 12,500 years ago that there was a migration, but now we’re seeing one that’s almost certainly happening closer to 30,000 years ago.
0:16:44 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsOne of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America, the ones that got separated early and didn’t mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon.
0:27:48 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
Pyramids were being built on the coast of Peru thousands of years before anything in Egypt.
Their wordsIn fact, there’s one that’s now pushing 6000 BCE. That’s thousands of years before the stuff in Egypt. And that one’s called Huaca Prieta. And it was not an Egyptian pyramid, but it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before.
0:28:31 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI think that when people wanted to build a big building without rebar or cement, you end up building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top, and that turns into a pyramid.
0:34:18 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI think religion in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old. Actually, the earliest pottery in all of the Americas, all these places that we have civilizations that grew up, you know where the oldest pottery is? The middle of the Amazon.
0:38:04 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsBut he is the one creator deity, in my opinion, through all of these cultures. And the people in the Amazon still talk about him there. His name is Viho Masse in some groups, but they say that his emissaries on earth are the jaguars and that he is the creator deity.
0:51:36 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIn fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas.
1:00:59 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI do not believe Graham’s idea that a single, now lost ancient civilization seeded the rest of them. I just don’t see that on a number of levels, artifact wise, technology wise, art, historical analysis.
1:04:19 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAnd archeologists, all of our ideas are theories. Very few of them are facts, and we could have the story wrong, but one thing we’re real good at is finding stuff. We find fish scales, so I find it just too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large that we can’t even find a potsherd from.
1:06:18 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAnd as responsible scientists, we’re trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories. That’s one more foot out of the science box that archeology often steps.
1:07:08 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
Every paradigm-shifting idea began as heresy, so outlandish ideas have to be kept on the table.
Their wordsBut I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans have ever had began as heresy and lunacy. That guy was crazy up to the second. He was brilliant. And so we got to keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish, because one of them eventually is going to lead us to the big paradigm shift.
1:08:20 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAnd one thing the Amazon is, once you figure out how not to die in it, it’s a paradise of food. Food’s fallen from the sky all the time there, and once you learn to adapt to that environment, you’ve got very little need. There’s no pressure to make anything else. Things are working.
1:16:10 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsArcheology, in this regard, is the worst enemy of this. So we put these names on cultures, we talk about how they evolve from one to another, we draw these lines where there aren’t any.
1:33:08 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI mean, if that’s right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together, when they thought about, “We need a count of time for us,” they didn’t look up into the heavens, they looked into their bodies. “What’s the first cycle that we actually go through as humans?” and they picked this nine-month thing. It really is our cycle, and no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.
1:40:00 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
The Maya calendar never said the world ends in 2012, and their own texts talk about time after it.
Their wordsIn fact, there’s a handful of dates that tell us that the fourth creation does continue farther on, that that baktun place should have 20 baktuns in it, like their counting system would dictate, not 13.
1:52:23 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsThere must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin. You know how there was a period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin? Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world.
2:01:58 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsBut then we have the interesting case of in the Postclassic, they shed the idea of kings. They don’t like kings anymore. That’s probably a big part of why the Classic disappearance and the abandonment of all those cities happened. People just got sick of kings.
2:07:50 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI think it’s a failing of archeology to properly see what was happening. I think that most of those cities populations moved no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm, and they lived in perishable houses.
2:31:09 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
The Aztec empire could not have lasted, because it ruled by force; the Inca empire could have.
Their wordsThey were not ruling justly. They were ruling by force. And that can only go on so long before revolution happens. The Inca Empire, I think that would’ve gone on forever.
2:42:13 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
The Inca stones were not fitted by patient pecking with hammer stones; they were fused with acid.
Their wordsThe common archeological wisdom that you’d find out of a textbook is that they just kept pecking away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be bullshit, that there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammerstone. I personally think it’s acids.
2:50:40 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
Calling North America's earthworks mounds is a western bias; what those people built were pyramids.
Their wordsbut what they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now, and they didn’t build them out of stone. That’s kind of our just inherent western bias. Something that’s built out of stone is sophisticated, and something that’s built out of dirt is rudimentary.
3:01:49 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what’s been called the Black Legend, that they just marched into America and murdered everyone. That’s not the fact. It was the diseases that murdered everyone.
3:12:22 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI think you have some guys that have their finger on the pulse there. We need to start thinking about how we’re going to survive this, not that we’re going to make it go away.