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
It turns out, as an adult, when I start researching it, it's this pocket of green, I mean solid, dark green rainforest. In the U.S., we have three rainforests. We have Hawaii, we have Oregon, and we have the Nantahala rainforest that most people don't know about. It's this pocket in the middle of these mountains that has looked exactly the same since before the Ice Age.
It's one of the oldest places in North America. Wow. And it's just an incredibly magical, old, ancient place. And I'm just, like, drawn back there. But anyways, yeah, you should go check that out.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Well, so my wife is, so she's like from South Carolina and she came to Texas when she was younger and then we met in college. And my family, when we first moved to the States, like my family moved to North Carolina in like 1694 or something crazy like that. And so we have some roots up there. Have you ever been to Gatlinburg, Tennessee? No.
So the first name of Gatlinburg was Reagan Town. And so that was where my family were one of the founders of that town. There's an old hotel there called Reagan Motel. So my family's originally from there. And then they moved down to Texas and started cattle rustling in the late 1890s. Um, but I don't know, just drawn back up there. I always love vacationing there.
And so my wife and I are like in the middle of moving right now. And so, uh, two days ago we packed up these two U-Hauls, drove them to East Texas to my in-laws. And then we drove to Austin last night, got a hotel doing this. Tonight we drive back to East Texas and then tomorrow we drive to North Carolina. Wow. Yeah. So what is the history in terms of like human occupation in that area? Yeah.
Man, the people sprouted out of the ground. Yeah, it's that old, man. That's something I'm really looking forward to getting into. And I'm kind of excited in a way to get out of Texas because it's hard to study Native American history in Texas because you've got to travel so far and everything's so arid.
Like, you know, Austin, this was an ancient Native American settlement here that we have built this city on top of. The Alamo in San Antonio was built on top of a Native American settlement. And all of our major cities are just a reskin of an ancient city. And in Texas, it's really hard. We have the Galt site that's here in Austin that proves that Clovis First was wrong.
Maybe you're familiar with this. But up there, you're closer to mound country, where all the mound builders are. I'm a little bit north of that. But in North Carolina, it's one of the places that the Spaniards had a really hard time infiltrating because of the mountain ranges and because of how fierce the Native Americans were.
And so the archeological projects up there are headed up by like two hillbillies that live in the country, and they're the coolest guys. They own this little department store called the Tiger Store in Hayesville, North Carolina. And they have dug up like Spanish armor under the ground and Spanish swords and all kinds of crazy stuff. And I've gone hiking out there. And, oh, we got to look this up.
Jamie, can we please look up Judicula Rock? It's one of the only megaliths in North America. And it's this gigantic megalithic stone that has the same sort of art style as all the Native American stuff that we've seen. And it's some kind of primordial map of western North Carolina. It's massive, dude. You couldn't fit it in this room. It's called Judakula.
If you just try to spell it in some way, you might find it. There you go. And there's an old photo of an archaeologist laying behind it. There you go, to the top left. That one or maybe the one that's colorized there. That one's really, really pretty. So nobody knows what this is.
And the Native Americans who were asked some of the stories about the early Native Americans who were asked how this got here, who moved it there, their stories are that giants placed this and that giants used to live in this land. And that they created these stones.
And I have gone around when I was a little bit younger, I would go through the rainforest and like wandering up these hillsides and you'd find these huge stones laying there with all of these images carved into them. And of course, you know, there's no funding that's out there. There's not even a there's not even a police department out there. So no research is being done out there.
But it's a fascinating place as old as time itself. And all of these people are from like a chapter before contact period. Whoa. Yeah, it's fascinating, man. It's a very ancient, mysterious, mystical place. It's one of those places that kind of gives me the feeling that Peru gives me when I'm out there, that I'm in a very, very, very old place.
And of course, you know, the Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountain range in the world. Is there any theory as to the age of that? Well, I think when you go there, they attribute it to a culture that lived in the area between 100 AD and 1000 AD. But, you know, that's just totally guesswork.
judicula and the cherokee indians yeah now the you know the the hard part about the hard part about studying some stuff with native americans in the u.s is that there's a lot of like you know modern native americans they're very prideful about their culture and and you know a little bit of mythology gets gets mixed in like when you go when i go visit the uh i forget what it what exactly it's called um
But there's a there's a Native American village that still exists in this area of the country. And it's like operated and it's kind of a tour place where they take people through what the cities would have looked like or what the towns would have looked like in the middle of the rainforest. But the hard part is when I talk to the representatives there, which are Native American Cherokee people.
They'll tell me, oh, yeah, you know, the ancient people that were here, they used to be six foot five. They were very tall people or whatever. And there's no evidence behind that at all. And so it's hard to like, OK, we have Cherokee bodies. So are these are these oral memories that are being passed down through time that come down to the Cherokee?
And, you know, as a as like a, you know, a modern day American anthropologist, do I brush off what they say and just be like, well, you know, they're They're carrying on these myths about their people. They want to build it up. Or are they really holding on to something that's true? Because, man, I would love to talk to Graham about this. Okay.
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