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
No, I mean, it's common to say. In fact, it didn't start in pseudo-archaeology. It started with the very first person who was a historian who took a look at them.
In the 1800s, the first one that at that time they were calling the Head of Wayapon, now it's Tres Sapotes Head One, a historian came through and looked at it and said, when he wrote it up after his journey, he said, and that looked very Negroid. And that begins it. But when you look at the faces of the people of the Cozacolcos River Basin, they are like this.
They have these wide noses and thick lips. It's just a local characteristic.
Yeah. I told a story about what was that town that we were in?
Santiago Tushla, the big ass guard who looks.
Yes. Yes. So so I get so I get so I get to this little museum or we get there. I'm knocking on the door and we wait for a couple minutes. The guy was he's probably taking a nap inside the museum.
It was it was early. I mean, we.
Yeah. Oh, that's so true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can see on the visitor's sheet at the front, nobody had been there in weeks or something. So he opens up the door, and I'm looking at this guy's chest, this huge man. And I look up, and it's this guard who's working there. And sure enough, there's an Olmec head sitting on top of this guy's body. He looked exactly like an Olmec.
And he was freaky big for someone in that area.
That happens all the time. I mean, everywhere... There's that famous Chinese basketball player. I mean, he is two foot taller than the vast majority of the people from his country.
Do you remember that 90-year-old man that was there who told us that in the early 1900s, they exhumed those six-plus-foot-tall bodies out of the Red Palace at San Lorenzo?
Yeah, he was pretty tall himself. But that guy, yeah, he did say that. That's true. I did not put that in my... In my Olmec lecture thing, I talked about it with the producers. I said, you know, this is an actual guy who actually said that, but he couldn't produce. I asked him, where did the skeletons go? He said, they went to the lab, and that's the last I saw them.
Well, I can't really work with that, man. I can't just take a guy in cowboy boots' opinion that there were giants. But he was a member of the excavation, and he was a multi-generational archaeologist, too. His grandfather was an archaeologist there. Oh, wow. So he knew what he was looking at. He did say that. Yeah, yeah. He said there were, what, three or four bodies that he didn't say.
He said they were taller than him, is what he said. You're getting the story from me because he was talking in Spanish and I told you on the bus afterwards what this guy said.
Yeah, yep, they depicted themselves differently, but that was, you know, hundreds of years afterwards. There's, you know, we all focus on these ones that look so African. Right. There's a whole other set of them that look totally Chinese. Really? If you dig deep, yeah, especially the baby ones. I do discuss that in the lecture series that I... A lot of these, we call them chubby babies.
And they're so fat, their eyes are like squinted. Like that? No. That one's another thick lips one. Yeah. Look up like Olmec chubby baby. There he is. There we go. Holy cow. Look at that guy. That guy looks pretty Asian, doesn't he? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, part of the reason, or a possible explanation, let me say, is that all of the people of the Americas are Asiatic in phenotype.
You know, DNA is very much confirming that everybody that's an American Indian, their DNA, phenotype-wise, is from Asia. Yeah. And even the Maya themselves have a trait that they don't talk about very often. It's just private business. But their babies are born with what's called the Mongolian spot. This kind of birthmark right above their butt. I've heard of that. It's a very Mongolian trait.
And the Maya... Typically, I've seen a friend's baby with that spot on their back. It goes away, I think, certainly by year two. But they are born on the outside with a very Asian trait. So even today, genetics-wise, they're very Asian. How did the Olmec get there? I think they were homegrown. Homegrown. They developed there from hunter-gatherers into basic farmers.
What's funny, one of the things I'm going to push back on in my series is we have traditionally, we archaeologists have said, It was the advent of intensive corn agriculture that allowed the Olmec to grow in such huge numbers, to feed a population where they could have a city that had 20,000, 30,000 people in it. But it's turning out that the oldest of the cities named San Lorenzo actually wasn't
doing corn farming, only a very little bit. They had created this incredible riverine resource system where they put themselves up on a high plateau with this huge kilometer long platform for the royals. But then there were 20, 30,000 people around it, all fishing, and they would wait for the seasonal inundation to flood all of the floodplains below. And they'd build up these little islands
Showing 1461–1480 of 1,858 · page 74 of 93
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