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Chapter 1: Who is Luke Caverns?
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. What's up?
How are you, man?
Hey, man.
How are you?
It's great to meet you. Pleasure to meet you. It's a pleasure to meet you as well. I really enjoyed you on the Jesse Michaels Podcast, so I had to have you on. Yeah, well, thank you so much, man. I love it when young people know so much about ancient history. Like, how did you get started in this?
Well, it's quite literally in my blood. Back in the late, well, I should say the 1890s, my family, they were cattle rustlers right here in the hill country, actually, maybe a little bit further, quite a bit further west of San Antonio.
Damn, you come from a lot of criminals? Probably.
Yeah, there's a lot of dark history in here. And so they're cattle rustlers that are out in Dryden, Texas, in Sanderson, Texas. And I mean, right on the Rio Grande. And that's how they made their money. They were fascinated, kind of like everybody, with finding gold, with finding lost Spanish treasure and Native American artifacts. So They're living in this area called the Reagan Canyon.
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Chapter 2: How did Luke get interested in ancient history?
And I don't know how long it took them to find it, but he found the seven lost Spanish gold mines of New Mexico. And he opened up this company called Three Bells Mining and Milling Company. And that was open for about eight years. And they opened up these – They opened up these mines that go back to probably about the 1530s.
So the Spaniards were up all the way in New Mexico in the 1530s, and they were opening up Native American gold mines and expanding them. And so he found these gold mines that go hundreds of feet into the ground as this huge, expansive gold mining operation happened. Well, somebody dies after a smelter explodes, and the company goes under. They lose everything. My family falls into poverty.
My dad's born during that time, and my dad didn't really get to experience all of that excitement. He had to spend his life climbing out of poverty. But he had this love for history. He had this love for American history, really, and he instilled in me the importance of history growing up.
And that fascination of exploration and kind of ancient American history, hearing those stories carried over into me during my childhood. And so I've just – I have always been fascinated by this. And I guess getting to where I am now, I was halfway through my marketing degree in college. And I'm sitting on my bed in my dorm room with my girlfriend at the time who I'm married to now.
And we watched the movie The Lost City of Z about Percy Fawcett. And something about that guy's journey reminded me so much of my family, kind of reminded me of my dad, reminded me of my grandpa. And it changed something in me like that day. I could not ignore. I was probably 20 at the time. I could not ignore this love that I always had for ancient history. But, you know, archaeologists are poor.
You know, they're there. It's an extremely hard life and it's really hard on on your family, too. Um, and I just knew I had to, I had to create a life for myself where I could do what I loved because I had like a 1.7 GPA in college and I was not going to, to make it through my classes. And so I changed, I got a degree in cultural anthropology.
Uh, I wrote like we had a mock thesis statement and I wrote it on the Amazon and the lost, uh, lost civilizations and you know, how they were wiped out from, uh, from, uh, Spanish influenza. And, uh, yes, that's where I'm at today.
Wow. Wow. I think everybody, when you start looking at the history of the human race and you start looking at the history of civilizations, everyone gets fascinated because we kind of like woke up. in this life, you know, we didn't choose to be born during this timeline. We woke up in this timeline and we're like, how did collectively we get here?
And then you have this narrative of how collectively we got here. But then you see there's holes in this narrative and it's real weird. And then you find out about asteroid impacts and super volcanoes and then there's people like Zahi Hawass who are in charge of telling you what they know and this is the only answer and you're like, well, that guy's not right.
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Chapter 3: What dark history does Luke's family have?
That went about as well as I thought it would when you told me.
I was hoping it was going to go a little better, honestly.
He had a great opportunity to win over the popular audience and come in and make a really good impression, and he did exactly the opposite of that.
Well, I think there was a bunch of problems there, ego being one of them, but another one being a language barrier. Yeah, I think so. Also, years of battle. If you're in conflict with people about this very thing that we're talking about, For years and years and years and these people that you're in conflict with keep winning.
Yeah, you know like I remember there was an old Documentary that was narrated by Charlton Heston. He was the host of it. I don't know if you ever saw us the mysteries of the Sphinx Yes, I've seen it.
I've seen it on YouTube. Yeah.
Yeah, I believe it was on television at the time and one of the the things in that was they were trying to talk about Robert shocks work and with the water erosion around the Temple of the Sphinx. And there was this very arrogant archeologist, I don't remember his name, but I remember he had a smackable face. He was just so arrogant.
He's like, where is the evidence of this civilization that existed 10,000 years ago? Well, now we have evidence. Like Gobekli Tepe threw a giant monkey wrench into the gears of this narrative. And now they're forced to reckon with this. Like, Zahi didn't even know what Gobekli Tepe was, which was insane.
There was a lot of things that he wasn't familiar with, like Zep Tepe. It's either the Turin or the Turid Kings List, which talks about the pre-dynastic, like, semi-mythological kings going back, you know, tens of thousands of years.
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Chapter 4: What are the mysteries of Texas history?
It just shows you how vulnerable knowledge is. I really think about that today because obviously we have a lot of books. And most things that are like most physics work, most work on archaeology, most work on history is available in book form. But how much of what we have is on hard drives? And if there was a power outage, just a global worldwide power outage that lasted six months, we're fucked.
We don't know anything anymore. It's a small amount of time for an enormous cataclysmic disaster to completely erase tens of thousands of years of understanding of everything. Everything. We would have no knowledge. One generation removed from electronics would have no knowledge of how to recreate it, what steps need to be taken. You have to build a chip plant? Where are they right now?
They're in Taiwan? What the fuck are you? talking about? How are we going to do this? Hard drives? That's a precarious place for them to be. Starting from scratch, starting from scratch today would be very similar, I think, to probably what starting from scratch was post the Great Flood, post the great comet impacts, all the younger drives impacts, serious stuff.
Civilization, if that stuff is correct... If Graham's position and Randall Carlson's position is that there was probably a much more advanced civilization than just hunter-gatherers that lived 10,000 plus years ago, how many thousands of years would it take before we started calming down again? Well, it seems like it took about five, four or 5,000 years before civilization emerges.
A really long time. A really long time. I think about that with foraging. Yesterday I was reading Exploration Faucet. Have you ever read this before or listened to the audio book? It's Percy's personal diary. Oh, wow. There's an audio book of that? Yeah, it's on Audible. Dude, you'll get wrapped up in it. You won't be able to stop listening to it. He just has these amazing experiences and
ah, man, he would be like your best, like your all-time guest, you know, if you could have him on. Sure. He had a great accent, too. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so you listen to his audio book, and the way he talks about meeting the indigenous people that live deep in the Amazon, you know, it would take him weeks to get to these little villages.
And while he was out there, he would see like the systematic mathematical structure with which they would set up these giant villages and how they would build these huge like thatch wood homes with foundations that are stones. And these people were – he said that they had like beautiful skin. They spoke elegantly. They sang songs.
And he was like – he's like this isn't – he's like these people in the Amazon are not – primitive savages, like my colleagues at the Royal Geographic Society in London believe that they are. These are people who are the descendants of a fallen great civilization. He was like, the way they interact with each other is so sophisticated.
Why did he think they were the descendants of a fallen civilization and not the people that were currently living in the most modern version of this civilization?
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Chapter 5: How does Luke's anthropology background influence his work?
And some of the mysteries you pointed out along the way are valid. Yeah. The idea of the artifact record of the tools that we have that the Egyptians in the old kingdom were using does not fit the megalithic architecture that they then produced. Okay, what's the answer to this mystery? Could it have been that we're missing a chapter?
uh of of history that's before that where a different civilization did it or is there uh for some reason there's an artifact record that's lost to us today and so you have you know guys like graham who will come in and pause it well there could have been a lost civilization that that did this and then an archaeologist the young archaeologist may disagree with the lost civilization but they say but graham you really pointed out the fact and made it well known that
You know, the artifact record that we have of how they built the pyramids, that's a big mystery. And how they built the pyramids, that's a big mystery. This is worth considering. And they like Graham. You know, so a lot of young archaeologists, at least I say a lot, it's really just the ones I talk to in my spare time that are my age. They're fascinated by these ideas.
And my hope is maybe these people become leaders someday. But at the same time, like, I don't know, to get ahead in that world, man, you got to be a dog.
The world's poisoned. And the people at the top are not going to let go. They're going to stay in there until the Noam Chomsky's age. I just think it's never going to end in that way. I think it's got to become some sort of an independent branch, like a break off.
Zahi is a really good example of what I think goes on in archaeology in Egypt. You know, you have a lot of different missions from different countries working in Egypt. You have like a German mission. You have the American mission, you know, different people working at different sites. And I can't speak to every country that's working there.
You have Australian missions that are working in Egypt, digging at certain sites. But yeah. But, you know, when I watch Zahi, I'm like, yeah, this is the what you're seeing. This is the attitude that has been at the spear point of Egyptology for the last lifetime. And and you can just imagine what goes on. Like, I mean, think about being on a dig site with him.
Think about working in his industry underneath him. Think about all the people that were a part of the discoveries that he made that feel so disrespected and so overlooked. You know, not once during that podcast did he ever acknowledge all the hardworking archaeologists that were actually there in the dirt doing all this hard work. He just took all this limelight.
And so, you know, clearly his identity is tied into what's in his coffee table book. And, you know, for him to act like that's the Bible of Giza is insane. I own the book and I and I've read it and it has half of a page about the subterranean chamber in Khufu's pyramid. So it's it's you can write a whole book about that. What is your... I don't mean to interrupt. Keep going.
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Chapter 6: What are the challenges of modern archaeology?
As cliche as it might be. My second one would be like if I could be like, okay, take me to the height of Amazonian culture. Just let me see just how amazing it is. Right. You know, it really seems like stone architecture comes out of the Amazon. Now, where Paul lives, it's all clay on the ground. But when you get halfway through the Amazon, you start reaching like granite and limestone bedrock.
And that's on the eastern side. So you're in like Guyana, French Guyana, Brazil. And it's treacherous places to go through in the middle of the Amazon. But I think that that's where cities in the Amazon are going to be found one day. And it was towards the end of Oriana's expedition. So that's about where he would have been. And, man, I bet you there's stuff out there that would just amaze us.
I think the Amazon is the origin – just me personally – I think the Amazon is the origin of American – pre-Columbian American, the height of their civilization. I think it's the origin of their religion and shamanic practices. I think it spread out all the way up to Mexico itself. And, you know, later on, the ancient Americans have a corn god, which they call the maze god.
But I think before that, they had this were jaguar religion where people are taking hallucinogens and psychedelics. And so I think that all the evidence points towards that the origin of civilization in the Americas begins in the Amazon and spreads out from there. And I would love if a time machine could pull back that canopy and show me what the actual height of that was like. Yeah.
it's just so interesting it never stops being interesting and it's one of those things it's a mystery that will never truly be totally solved because it's not possible to go back in time so we're always going to have this thing in our mind like i wonder and it's such a fascinating inclination to sit and just wonder about the past and to look where we are now and how ridiculous life today is this was undeniable like humans are fools
Particularly today.
For sure. And I think one of the reasons why we're fools is we're denied these experiences that these people probably had. We've outlawed them.
Yeah.
Just like they did in ancient Greece. Just like they did, I'm sure, throughout history and all these different cultures.
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