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
Not necessarily. I mean, I do believe that there was something that happened then. I don't know what humans were doing at that time and how much it impacted them. You know, I'm not a geomorphologist. That Younger Dryas thing has become so hotly contested.
I think it crept up from Antarctica, but places like, you know, certainly things within the tropics never iced up.
It would have a different shape, for sure. There's a shelf that drops off steeply into the Pacific, almost the whole coast.
From Alaska down to South America, there's... There's a shelf. I mean, not a totally flat shelf, but there's parts that we would have to know were land, and then there's a place that's drop-off.
And so that's the story we have to go with as far as our evidence. Is it true that the archaeologists... You know, White Sands just changed everything. I mean, the oldest stuff we have in South America, like the great site of... What's it, Monteverde? Tom Dillehay's site is at like 14,900 years. And for decades, when I was a student, that was the big discovery.
And that changed everything and turned our heads on end and said, you know, wow, is the oldest evidence South America? But now, just in the last year or two, White Sands has clapped back with a 23. Wow.
You have those sites in the eastern Amazon, right, in Brazil, that go back about 10,000 years?
Very old stuff there, but it's not older than Dillehay's site, Monteverde. Am I saying that wrong? I hope not. Actually, the granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt, Anna Roosevelt, has done heroic, great work in the Amazon and found pottery that was 9,000 years old. It's the oldest pottery in the entire Americas, and it's out of caves along the Amazon? How the heck is that happening? So yeah, I mean...
I think we're still very much in the process. We've got to go with the information we have. I don't think we have all the answers. I think there are a lot of sites now that need to be revisited. Again, when I was a student 30 years ago, I would read about things out of the Amazon that were 25, 30,000 years old, but the literature in my archaeology class would always conclude with
That's contested and inconclusive. In the literature. In the literature. So I think there's, I'd like to see us go back to a lot of these sites. and revisit them. Now that 30,000 might not be a crazy number, I'd like to go back to some of those crazy sites and have somebody re-dig them. This is a perennial problem with archaeology, too.
It's really not science because in many cases we can't replicate the study. You excavate something, you destroy it. Can another scientist independently go in there and dig up the same thing? No. You dug it up. And so, you know, I've been on many a dig where we've intentionally said, let's only dig part of this site.
Let's leave the other part of the site for future generations in that kind of effort. But in some cases, like in the case of a cave or something, maybe there's just one part of the cave that's inhabited. If you dug it all up, that's all that the world gets to know about that for the rest of time. And the person who dug its interpretation says, remains the one.
Yeah, I think a perfect example of only being able to carry out a dig or an excavation one time is the temple at Chavin. Chavin de Jontar. Essentially, Chavin de Jontar is where the people of the Corral Supe culture, they get tired of trying to rebuild their... This is on the west coast of Peru. It's like a desert beach.
And they're building, I mean, arguably the very first pyramids on the entire planet, you know, before the official date. Right on the beach? Yeah, pretty close to the coastline.
There's one on the beach, and then they go back in a river valley back, like, another 15 miles.
Yeah, yeah. And they're doing that to escape these storms called El Ninos and La Ninas and just constantly hitting this civilization over and over and over again. Anyways, they get tired of rebuilding their city so many times they go, we got to get out of here. So they go up into the Andes. And this is where Andean civilization, we think, becomes influenced by the Amazon.
And I think maybe the first time we start seeing architecture with four walls and big interiors that you can walk into. I say big, but for ancient people, big interiors that you can walk into, huge stones, and they're being influenced by the Amazon. And I think this is where Andean civilization gets their pottery, right?
This is the first place we see, one of the first places we see some pottery pop up.
They... There's earlier examples that are happening in Ecuador, but it's one of the main corridors where pottery starts being a common wear.
So really, really, really important site. And when archaeologists first discovered it, or the local people always knew that it was there, but when they first get there, they pull all the artifacts out. And so when you pull everything out of its original context, you can't study it anymore, if that makes sense. That is not replicable.
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