Luke Caverns
speaker
1,858 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 May
Luke Caverns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And he was like, it may be a while before you hear from me. It could be up to a year or two before you hear from me. I'm about to head into a very dense area. And my trail runners who would go back and forth with his notes, they weren't going to follow him out there because it's too dangerous. And that was the last letter that he had written.
And he was going – he was heading off into what's called the Zingu region, which is like the Zingu River. And it's one of the most hostile regions in the Amazon. Maybe even today. Teddy Roosevelt had trouble when he went there. But the Zingu region is – is where all of the major LIDAR came out within the last 10 years. They found all the ruins of these giant cities.
And there's a city called Kiriguyu, I think. And it had an estimated population of about a million people, which is the size of Rome. And, you know, when you look at the LIDAR images, you can't get a perspective of how big they are. I have access to a LIDAR database of the entire United States, and I've mapped all kinds of huge uncharted mound sites in Florida, all of the southeast.
I have hundreds of sites marked. And when you first look at them on a map, you're like, oh, okay, maybe that looks like it's 50 feet long or something. No, they'll be like 300 yards long, like these giant raised platforms in the middle of the forest here in the US.
And if I had access to LIDAR data like that, where I could measure it down on the Amazon, some of these things are miles long, like raised platforms are a mile long, and they have highways. Maybe we should pull up just an image of a LIDAR scan from the Amazon. But you'll see this central city area. You'll see step pyramids and raised platforms.
Maybe this is where people lived or maybe this is where the market was. And there will be a road that cuts straight through it. And you can see the road just goes off in the distance for miles and miles and miles. And so what they would do. Here we go. Yeah, this is so this is one of these sites in this one of these sites. I believe this is in Brazil or maybe it's in northeast Bolivia.
And is all that area covered completely with jungle right now? Completely covered in jungle. Yeah. So if you went out there- You wouldn't see any of this. You may not realize that you were standing on a mound. You really got to train your eyes.
I filmed this little series about a year and a half ago called Jungle of Stone, where I was going through the jungles in Central America, and we charted this city that had 16 pyramids in it. We were there all day long, and we charted 16 pyramids. And when I put it out, I got all these comments that were like, you're not doing anything but walking on a bunch of hills because it's so hard to see it.
The jungle just claims everything back. So it takes, you really have to sit with seeing these things in person for a while before you start recognizing, oh, that is a mound or that is a pyramid. That is a structure under the jungle. And so Percy Fawcett, where that Lidar came out is one of the places that he told his wife.
This century for sure. This century is going to be insane. It's going to be insane. Like, you're going to have everyone scanning everything. All of the Amazon will be mapped with LIDAR by the end of the century. All of the Sahara is going to be mapped with LIDAR by the end of the century.
Yeah, yeah. Well, those are my two big things. Like when we talk about Atlantis and we talk about lost civilizations, I mean my thing is the Sahara and the Amazon. Both of these things existed pre-Ice Age, especially if we're talking about pre-Ice Age civilization. The Sahara – is an oasis, you know, 10,000 plus years ago. It's an oasis.
You have, what, two or three of the world's largest lake systems on there. You have rivers everywhere. You know, it would have been like a beautiful place to live.
Well, yeah, that's amazing. And you know, whenever I, you know, so growing up, I mean, gosh, I read Fingerprints of the Gods when I was 16. I remember like sitting on the couch after school and reading it. And my dad comes up to me, he's like, that's a big book. And I go, I know. It's like I'm reading a textbook for fun, you know. And it was dense reading for me as a 16-year-old.
And so, you know, I was so inspired by Graham. And then I went off and like got traditionally educated reading. And so I kind of have both of these perspectives. And I'm often shocked and disappointed at how other professional archaeologists and anthropologists explain popular mysteries, you know, like there was an Egyptologist on another popular podcast and
And then the podcast host asked him to properly explain the mystery around the pyramid. And it was just so subpar, I was shocked. And I was like, I'm not even an Egyptologist. I know how to explain these things. And I felt the same way about Zahi. Maybe there's some kind of language barrier there, but it was also like he didn't want to explain these things on a basic level.
But one of the things that I never see talked about is... is the concentration of energy along the Nile Valley. If I had to drop a pin anywhere on the earth where I think Atlantis would be, I would probably put it in the Sahara somewhere, along one of these major lakes where there's a lot of people living at one time.
And then later on, as the Sahara dries up, you know, say beginning around like 800, I'm sorry, 8000 BC, it starts rapidly drying up. It's probably a little bit before that. And then by about 4000 BC, it's completely dry. So your Saharans only have a few places that they can go. They can go to the Mediterranean coast. They can go to the Atlantic coast.
They can go down kind of into the Congo and in the savannas. Or they can go to this fertile valley oasis where it's like 500 yards on each side where it's just completely lush tropical oasis. And so some people went there. And so you have this hyper concentration of energy and all these people living somewhere together for what we know is the first time in history.
Like we can verify it, I guess, if that makes sense. And and so rather than being able to have these huge pieces of property where they can all live separated from each other, kind of like in the Sahara, you have all this space and so luxurious. Now you have to live on top of each other and you have to build up these cities. You know, you're like building cities.
And so all that energy compacted into one place in this fertile oasis is either destined to completely crumble and fall apart or it's New York City. It's this thin strip of highly concentrated, genius, hardworking people figuring out how to extrapolate the most out of their natural world and create some of the greatest things the world has ever seen. Just like New York City, we did it.
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