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
He was a very nice guy. I know a lot of those guys are the ivory tower types. Not Floyd at all. He talked to everybody. He was such a nice and gentle man. But he used those old ephemerises in the 70s and maybe even as early as the 60s.
To start figuring out some of this stuff, he's the one who really showed us for the first time that there was an 8-19 calendar and that it had something to do with Jupiter and Saturn.
And I might add, you know, when the expeditions of Stevens and Catherwood in the 1830s were happening, as they arrive in Belize and they go all the way up through the Yucatan and they visit various Maya sites, so much of these Maya cities are completely overgrown by the jungle. And the alignments that so many of these buildings have to astronomical bodies are
are completely covered up by the jungle. The evidence of it isn't even there until you clear the trees away and then you have people who are studying archaeoastronomy, which is really still kind of in its infancy.
And, you know, just studying the way that ancient cultures really studied their astronomical world. So much of this couldn't even be observed. Like when I was at this city that was near Calakmul, El Ramonal, which is a pre-classic site, it's impossible to... Without modern day technology, without clearing away all the trees, it would be impossible to actually identify any alignments.
That's kind of what most of my career has been. Getting up on one of these buildings and scanning the entire thing for even one line of stones that I felt was intact. If I could get just one line of stones, I could guess at the alignment. But as you say, a lot of them, I got no stones.
Yeah. And in ancient times, you know, when these cities were at their peak, they're at least, you know, we think that most of these large cities, there are no trees that are growing in the middle of the city. They're clearing all of it down. I mean, they use the wood for everything from construction to stucco. And yeah.
Even in Honduras at Copan, their city began to fall apart because they had no trees left.
Changed the weather pattern. No more trees, no more water dropped on their crops.
Yeah, and so at El Mirador, El Mirador is one of the first cities of the ancient Maya world. You have Nakbe, and then I think Nakbe gets so big that they eventually move over to El Mirador and build another city. So you got to think, you know, these tropical areas that are, or these, you know, jungle areas are constantly getting so much rain. They flood very easily.
They're, you know, these ancient people are constantly exposed to various dangers on the ground, such as the fertile ants, the snake that we talked about last time, as well as other snakes and other dangers. So you want to elevate yourself above the jungle. So they create these platforms that they live on. So they live on these big pyramidal platforms. And there's obviously no trees on those.
So it creates this big, empty, open space where they're analyzing the stars. And, you know, over the course of El Mirador is as far back as 2800 BC, 2200 BC. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. 2200 years ago. 2000 BC. I'm sorry. 200 BC. Good night. 200 BC, 2200 years ago. They are... They're studying the stars, and over the course of the last 2,200 years, the jungle has just reclaimed it.
And when you're walking out there, it's impossible to acknowledge or determine any of these astronomical alignments. So, so much of it becomes the very last things that are determined as archaeology goes on, and you can clear out these cities more and more.
Yeah. I think there was an initial bias looking at these things saying, well, these people aren't really, they're savages. They're not scientific. We weren't even looking for astronomy and really any ruins at all until like the 1960s. And in terms of their ability to do so, they had the number system, which we don't know how old the number system is.
But once they get a number system that they can really do math with, that was an aid. And then writing. When did writing start? When did books start? But one way or another, they were able to take a lifetime of research and hand it to a new generation. That's really what excelled them beyond their neighbors.
Yeah, I jumped the gun on the astronomy. But for the long count astronomy, they're observing the stars over the courses of generations and consistently handing this down for a very, very long time.
Now we're... thinking about 30,000 years ago. We've got the White Sands discovery, which seems to be holding its own. There were detractors at the start, but then there were rebuttals. These are the things... I've seen this happen way too many times. You get an amazing discovery, but then somebody shoots it down, and then it wasn't that way.
But the White Sands thing, which is 23,000, that one's holding pretty strong. So, archaeologically... Our cap is now 23,000. In terms of DNA studies, they're saying that You know how we can, I mean, those people in lab coats can figure out when things mutate. They're saying that the earliest DNA in the Americas started to change and isolate about 33,000 years ago.
And now the weird number that nobody believes is more like 60. Wow. What do you mean when you say change and isolate? We still believe that humans came across the Bering Strait when it was Beringia. And that, over a period of thousands of years, opened and closed and opened and closed. The last time it opened as a corridor that people could walk across was about 12,000 years ago.
Then it melted and it's been water ever since.
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