#2528 - Cassie Coppersmith
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What are the mysterious Liangzhu jade B-discs and cong tubes and why do they look machined?
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
How are you?
Great. How are you doing, Joe?
Very nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
I've enjoyed your content online.
Thank you.
I got first introduced to you by a video you did with his channel's Megalithic Marvels. Yes. And it was about ancient Chinese artifacts that don't make any sense.
Yes.
And it was so fascinating. The moment I saw it, I reached out to my guy. I was like, I got to talk to her because this is crazy. So please explain to people what these artifacts are and what's so bizarre about them.
I first saw these artifacts in the British Museum. So they have an entire whole wall full of them. And they're made of nephrite jade, which is an extremely hard stone. And they just look machined. They look way too precise for the tools that they say built them. So I started doing some research. I haven't been to the site in China yet. It was built by the Langeau culture, so archaeologists say. But it's two different kinds of artifacts that are really famous. One is called a sung tube, which is a tall tube that's circular in the middle and square on the outside. and extremely precise geometry. The other one are these big round B disks that almost look like a giant flat donut that are perfectly flat on top.
You know, there's the precision versions of these, just like you see all over the world. And there are versions that are much cruder. So it almost seems like This civilization had this, my theory is that these were not unlike the hard stone vases in Egypt. So it was something that this culture either was gifted or found. And it turned into a very cherished object, like a grave good for them. So you find these tombs in Lanzhou, China that have literally thousands of these jade artifacts in them. And it's not unlike the hard stone vases that you see in Egypt where you find those in the graves as well.
So what's the timeline where these pieces are attributed to?
So these are really old. I mean, the earthworks and the... The community around the Liangzhu culture is securely dated by archaeologists to like 3400 BC. And then, you know, just so it's about the same actually as the graves that were in Egypt with the hard stone bases. So it's very, very old.
And at the time of this culture, what were their tools? Like, do we know?
Well, the archaeologists say that it was made with strings. So they would take strings with sand or some sort of an abrasive, and they would cut the jade that way. And then they would use copper tools, stone hammers, those kinds of things to shape it. So the explanation doesn't make a lot of sense. And even, you know, the hole down the middle of the B disc is a perfect, I mean, you can see the drill marks on the inside of the B disc. Do we have some images of these things? Yes. Jamie, I have a China folder.
Because the images on, and by the way, that channel, Megalithic Marvels, Derek's channel, excellent. Really fun.
So great.
Great stuff.
Yeah. Derek is the one that got me into all this. Shout out to Derek. Shout out to Derek.
So this is, how do you say it? How do you pronounce that? B-disc. B-disc, B-I-disc. Yep. And how big is this?
So that thing's about nine inches across. Perfectly circular, perfectly flat surface on the top.
Like measured to what tolerance?
I don't know the answer to that, and I don't know that there have been a lot of deep scientific studies on the precision of these. The archaeologists assume that this culture made them with bamboo and strings.
Okay.
So, yeah, that picture, Jamie, you can see the inside of the actual artifact in the bottom right. That's drilled.
Yeah.
Right? And the one on the left is an experiment these archaeologists ran with a bamboo core down the middle of the jade. And you can see the difference between the two.
How far did they get down with the bamboo experiment?
Oh, all the way through.
They got all the way through. How long did that take? Yeah.
I don't know the answer to that. There was an archaeologist that did an experiment in the 1930s, and they used these strings with the abrasives to cut off a piece of jade that was the size of a basketball, and it took them a week to cut the string all the way through that piece of jade.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What are the mysterious Liangzhu jade B-discs and cong tubes and why do they look machined?
0:00–21:20
2
How do ancient Indian lathe‑turned pillars and the Kailasa temple challenge conventional tool explanations?
21:20–1:21:31
3
Why are Cambodia’s largest temples older and how did later kings “claim” them?
1:21:31–1:23:18
4
What makes the giant mountain statue (Gomateshwara) so mysterious and could it have been moved?
1:23:18–1:28:44
5
Could AI and remote sensing prove a second buried Sphinx and reshape timelines?
1:28:44–1:34:39
6
How might cataclysms, myths and global megaliths reveal a lost advanced civilization?
1:34:39–2:33:49