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
where they would smoke and cook the fish that they were getting out of that and make it kind of less perishable. It would last longer. But that was one of their main resources, that and shellfish. And by the time other cultures influenced them enough to be intensive corn farming, San Lorenzo realized that where they were positioned sucked for corn farming. It was seasonally inundated.
So the civilization shifted To another part of that area and the site of La Venta turns up. La Venta has tons of corn farming around it. They picked a better place to be corn farmers. But the origins of Olmec society are not agriculture. They figured out how to just harvest fish and shellfish out of their region on a whole new level.
I mean – I don't think there is a consensus. I think the commonly accepted story, I will say, is that they did combinations of floating them down rivers and rolling them on rollers. But I don't really see it happening. In fact, for sure, the old idea of a raft does not work.
i had a i had a marine engineer who came on a trip with me one time and as a gift he made me this magnificent uh excel chart that that had formulas in it and i could say okay if my raft is made out of this local wood and it's 50 foot wide how much tonnage can it hold before it sinks right and And we this this formula they made me I was able to plug in.
I couldn't get anything higher than really three tons not to sink a raft that was as much as 100 feet across. And there are places bows in the river where that would just wedge.
so i you know there you can't build a raft big enough to not sink like there's a perfect example of this old theory see that thing that the one that they they show displayed there oh there's the head in the background those are like 15 25 tons there's no way and i had a nautical engineer Do the math for me. That would sink like a rock. Now, he had a really cool alternative hypothesis.
He said, let's use the principles of Archimedes and buoyancy. And instead of trying to make a flat thing that got sunk, what if you put a bunch of logs around it that were vertical? And so like just painted a fence around it and it would act like a bobber.
If all of the logs weren't flat horizontal, but they were vertical, the water displacement won't allow you to put a stick straight down in the water like that without it floating. It's more resistant. So he had this idea that like. Maybe they were like bobbers. They'd just cover them in vertical thick logs and they could float them down the river like that. And it would be a much tighter radius.
Now that's also totally unproven. As unproven as these pretty pictures are right here.
Yeah, kind of just adding on to that. So what he was saying about that formula where he could plug in a theoretical weight of an Olmec head and he really couldn't get... You know, if you put a three-ton Olmec head on a raft that would wedge going down the river system, you know, then it would still sink the raft. Well, the smallest head is five tons. The largest head is the La Cobada head.
And I've seen estimates at least 42 tons. And then now in the last few months, maybe the last six months, I've seen the estimate up at like 50 tons.
From La Venta, 70 kilometers.
That's huge. And so, no, we don't know how they moved them.
No, no. It's pretty hard. Limestone's much, much softer than it. Oh, really? Yeah. Basalt's one of the harder stones in Mesoamerica.
Basalt can be right there with granite. Really? Yeah. Oh, it's 43 miles. In fact, in Sterling's papers, he- Through a swamp. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, you're taking that through all different types of terrains.
But in some of Sterling's earlier papers, he actually describes, he found these huge columns that are, you know, this big around, you know, a few feet by a few feet thick and, you know, six plus feet tall that would have been sitting in the, I think there were some in the Red Palace. They're really basalt. They're extremely, extremely hard.
There are ways to move these things that don't involve modern technology. I'm a huge fan of this guy Wally Wallington. I want to meet him someday, but he built Stonehenge in his backyard in Michigan or Wisconsin single-handedly. He's a retired contractor.
Same size? Yeah. There he is. Oh, this guy. God, I love Wally. I sent him 50 bucks I didn't have because Wally needs more cement. You know, the concepts he's talking about are so... Profound and simple.
He just uses like counterbalances, right? And he moves them by putting two rocks or pivot points underneath them, and he spins them. And every time you spin them, it moves half the distance of the two pivot points. And with that alone, just Wally, not a crew of people, has moved all this stuff. That's a particular one where he's showing how he can mount one up.
And he also shows how he can lift them up, the top stones. He's doing this by himself with nobody else helping. Yeah, those are his brother-in-laws, I think, watching him. Those guys are funny at the end. They were like, call it Wally Hinge. Call it Wally Hinge. No, call it Stonehenge Reloaded. They're so great.
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