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
You know, I'm writing a paper about this, but this might be a good place to talk about it. So, you know, the handbag mystery is very fascinating. We have them in Assyria. We have them in Mesopotamia. As far as I know, I don't think one's been found in Egypt. You can see them on the top of those T-pillars in Gobekli Tepe. And there's one in the Olmec realm. Are you familiar with this? No.
Monument 19, if we can look that up. I mean, dude, I think it's the coolest handbag. And when I saw it in person, I, like, jumped. I had been waiting years to see it. That's crazy. It's the same thing? Olmec Monument 19. So this guy, he's wrapped in, he's sitting in Quetzalcoatl. Could you do the one at the top left where we get the full picture? There we go.
So this stone is probably about this big. It's probably about this big, and it sits on a table like this. So he's sitting inside the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl. And so he's sitting inside the feathered serpent, and he's holding this handbag. And I'm not sure – so he has this – and if you see, he has a feathered serpent mask around his head as well. I'm not sure what exactly is above him.
Well, there are actually two – It's really hard to make it out. But what's above him, that little box-looking thing, is some kind of box that's being held up by two birds on each end. But the important thing here is the fact that this is the first depiction of the feathered serpent in all of Mesoamerica that we know of.
And it might be the oldest handbag known as far as what we have official dates for. And so the idea here is that he's some kind of sacred shaman, bringer of enlightenment, bringer of knowledge, something like that. And so I had been on the hunt for another handbag. Everywhere I go, I'm always looking for handbag. I was in Cambodia a couple weeks ago. I'm
going around the temples of Angkor Wat, and there's hieroglyphs and carvings all over the walls. I'm looking for a handbag. I can't find one. But when I was in central Mexico, I was at a site called Cacashla, and I found another handbag person. I've never officially published it. It's on my X if you'd want to look it up. What is the timeline for that one? They don't really know.
When you look at the monument, it says anywhere from 1400 B.C. to 400 B.C. That's just what they think. I mean, the Olmec realm is so uncertain, and we don't have hard dates for almost anything. They appear on this historical timeline as a fully-fledged civilization capable of creating what you're seeing from the very beginning.
Just like so many civilizations, it's like as soon as they arrive, you know, As soon as they arrive in the world, they're doing everything to the fullest capacity. And we don't have any evidence in the Olmec realm of them working their way towards being able to do things like this. It's just from the very beginning they're able to make monuments like this, move these 50-ton Olmec heads.
The largest head is – you'll find this interesting. So – There was a nautical engineer that MEC, which is an organization I'm with. It's the Maya Exploration Center. It's run by Dr. Ed Barnhart. I'm a member of it. And one of the guys that worked with us traveled into the Olmec realm. He's a nautical engineer. He's fascinated with...
He's fascinated with how were the Olmecs moving these huge heads up and down these rivers. So they live in, like, the rivers, swamps. They have to cross some mountain ranges. How are you getting these heads 90 miles away from the Sierra de la Tuxla volcanic belt? That's where they're pulling the basalt from. Because we found unfinished heads, like, at the base of these big basalt quarries.
And they're transporting them 90 kilometers away through, you know, like I was saying, rivers and valleys. 90 miles or kilometers? Yeah. I think it's kilometers. It's kilometers as the crow flies, I'm pretty sure. And so much further when you're actually dealing with the complications of the terrain. And so he was fascinated, like, okay, how do they get them to the river?
And then how do they get them on the boat? And when it's on the boat, how exactly does this work if they're transporting it by boat? And kind of the same mystery in Egypt too, right? Like how do the nuances of these things work?
So he devised this algorithm or whatever where you could put in the hypothetical size of your Olmec raft and put in the hypothetical size of an Olmec head into this database or whatever. And when you made a raft that was too big to go down the narrow stretches of the Coetzcalcos River, which is like the Olmec's Nile River…
When the raft was too big and too wide to actually go down the river and you put a five-ton Olmec head on it, it would sink that raft. But the smallest Olmec head is six tons, and the largest one is 52 tons. So how are they doing it? And this is something that all archaeologists have quietly known, this idea of they're just being transported on these simple balsa rafts must be wrong.
It's unexplained. How are these things being done? And I just find this realm really fascinating.
And do they even know what language they spoke? No, we don't know what language they spoke. We don't even know what they called themselves. The only reason we call them the Olmecs is because Cortes, 1519 to 1521, he's moving through Mexico to conquer Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital.
During this time, you have these Spanish chroniclers that are taking in information, taking in information but not at the rate that everything's being destroyed. All these people are dying from this disease and influenza. And there's a record of what the people who lived in the Olmec region are called at that time in 1520, let's say.
And the Aztecs called them the Olmecs in their language Nahuatl. And those Olmec – the name means the rubber people or the people of the land of rubber. They produced rubber, and that's how the Olmecs were so rich so early on in time. But these were not – the people living in 1519 are not the Olmecs.
There has already – the Olmecs have fallen, and there are other cultures that have risen and fallen in this same region as well. The Olmecs are far, far, far, far into the distant past. Wow. The Aztecs maybe didn't even know who the Olmecs were. Whoa. So are you familiar with Teotihuacan? Yeah.
The three massive – we have the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Moon, and then the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. And they formed this kind of like Orion's Belt alignment similar to Giza. Yeah. Well, you know, when the Aztecs arrived in Mexico, Teotihuacan had been abandoned for almost a thousand years, we think. So when they arrived, Teotihuacan is already gone.
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