Oh
Welcome to Duality Check, the podcast where two brothers embark on a thrilling journey
through the realms of scientific inquiry, the enigmatic mysteries of the past, and the uncharted
territories of spirituality. Join us as we explore the wonders of our world and beyond, all while
embracing the roles of curious bystanders rather than experts. Together we'll unravel the intricate
tapestry of existence, blending the dichotomies of knowledge and wonder. Get ready to question,
ponder, and delve into the dualities that shape our understanding of reality on Duality Check.
I'm Drew. And I'm Dean. Welcome back for episode seven. Yeah, man. This is woo. Man, I remember
when it was episode one. I know. So far, so good. I'm enjoying myself. It's been fun. Yeah.
Today we're going to be talking about the Amazon. Yeah, and just some... There's so many interesting
things tied to the Amazon forest and the region of the world. So much interesting history,
so much evidence of lost and advanced civilizations. Right. Beyond how cool it is, just... being
the Amazon rainforest, you know? Right, right. So we're going to go into some of that stuff
today. Yeah, we wanted to start today, though, and do a little segment we haven't done before.
We've gotten a few emails and some correspondence from family, friends, and just some other random
people as well. We want to start off by reading and talking about. Cool. So. Let's start off
with an email we just got. Yeah. This person did not say we could use their name, so thank
you. True. They didn't say we couldn't, though. Yeah, but. No, I know. Anyway, he says, you
guys should check into something called old world buildings. The theory is that many of
the great buildings, like some state capitals and great cathedrals, were built thousands
of years ago. and we're here when the human race settled different parts of the world.
My lunch break is a cool YouTube channel where I came across the subject. Just thought it
was an interesting topic you guys could look into. Thanks. Right on. Yeah. Thank you, Anonymous.
Thanks for the email. I just browsed the YouTube channel here a little bit. They got some cool
titles. Oh, yeah. Finding Old Money. Buildings Hold. Old world gold. Yeah. That's a tongue
twister. Yeah. This one is a building that's apparently been closed to the public for 80
years. I like that one. Oh, wait. Where'd it go? Which one? Up here? Oh. Yeah, yeah. 1800s,
giants, orphans, and two asylums. That's a lot of different types of things on one thing.
This is cool, I'm gonna watch some of these. They're like, they're like what? 10 to 15,
10 to 15? Yeah, they're relatively short. Yeah. Many videos. I did a quick sample of a couple
of these. And. Giants. It sounds fun. It seems like just a guy sitting in his car on his lunch
break showing some crazy old pictures of architecture. And like, yo, this crap is old. Melted buildings
are mountains. I'll have to check that out. Sounds interesting. Cool. Yeah, thanks for
the email. We'll have to check that out. We'll check it out. We'll look into it. I've got
one here. A message we received on Facebook.
Basically this person did ask to remain anonymous.
However, they are from Canada, not that is any significance. Yeah, he wanted to share, he
shared a few clips and a few articles and a person named...
Greg Vazina. And this person apparently, Mr. Vazina said, the clean ammonia made from sunlight,
water, and air with a hydrogen-cracked form, it on demand. Yeah, so this whole thing is
about clean cars. Yeah, it's like an engine made to run on ammonia. Yeah, the hydrofuel
NH3 ammonia car. It's a 1981 Chevy Impala that was retrofitted to work on ammonia. Yeah. And
then...
Yeah, apparently the Canadian Prime Minister met with this Vizina person, and they never
talked about the ammonia car.
Yeah, you sent us some newspaper articles and stuff. So that'll be a fun one to dig into.
I actually... We talked about that before. Did we have that written down on our show notes?
I'm sure we did. But like alternative energy devices? I know we've talked about it. There's
like a whole world we can go into with like clean energy devices. That's definitely going
to be a show in the future. Absolutely. We'll definitely include some of this stuff too.
Yeah, thanks for the message. And then we got a third one from our older sister. Oh, yeah.
You got it up? Yeah, I got it. Uh... This is in reference to the last episode. you guys
heard anyway when we're recording this one. Yeah, the Secret History of the World, part
one. And yeah, she says, love the latest episode. I'm all about the lion. Had my own little Leo.
Our nephew. She's like, love the artwork you picked. The lion symbol's special to me. Why
my sweet son bought me this necklace, and I wear it always. It's a little photo of a little
lion necklace that she wears, which is cool. She says, I feel a strong connection to the
sun, totally a sun worshiper, and I need it. Winter months are really hard for me. I get
outside every day though. I know the sun is hidden behind those clouds, still there for
me. You mentioned the Vedas, maybe an episode on that. I resonate so much with Vedic knowledge.
I've been studying it for years and practice the diet as best I can for my dosa. I don't
know what that means. Oh, I'm sure it means something. She'll tell us. I am a Pita all
the way baby. I don't know what that is. either or what she means by that. I know what a PETA
is. Right. Yeah, what does she mean by that? She says, you also ask for people to share
experience with the flow state. She says, she's been in that state many times. It feels like
time doesn't seem to exist. You encounter no pushback. Whatever you're doing or experiencing
is effortless and easy and feels like a quote, unquote flow state. You're at ease, happy,
not a worry in the world. People are drawn to you. From my experiences, those things that
evoke the flow state do change over time. Take for example, my crystal jewelry business. When
I first discovered them, I was researching and creating and running a business with them.
It all worked out. It was easy. I was happy. I made money, connections. I knew it was meant
to be at the time. I never lost interest in it, but I paid attention to how it became less
and less. part of my flow and there was less and less connections being made or good feelings
being had. The money was there but it wasn't why I was doing it. I always trust my flow
and it has guided me always in the right direction. I've successfully ran two businesses now letting
the flow state guide me. I feel it now with my current clients which I easily have found
new clients and families to help. on my own without working for a company because I believe
I'm doing what I'm supposed to and in my flow. She says, Drew, I feel it when I'm with your
boys. I could spend hours with them and it's like a blink of the eye and it's over. They
bring such joy and love and that flow state I'm trying to describe to you. I know you've
both experienced that. You're welcome for the long rant. Love you both so much. Keep up the
good work. Yeah, I know exactly what she's talking about, the way she's describing that. Yeah.
And then she suggests some show topic ideas, synchronicities, archetypes, and personalities.
That would be fun. I've done some looking into that, at least in one system. Numerology, I
would be very interested in looking at that. Astrology. She says she wants to learn Vedic
astrology Astrology I've gotten a lot bigger interest in Since I have been like following
well numerology and astrology. I've gotten bigger interested in since following Randall Carlson
Yeah, you were doing the sacred geometry class. Yeah, I did his sacred geometry intro course
But I also bought some of the recommended reading he suggested but I haven't read them yet So
I would like to probably do it suggested. Yeah Not required. She talks about maybe during
the cleanse, I'm about to start talk about diet and cleansing. Yeah, I'm planning on doing
a keto and probably intersperse that with like some fasting and stuff and maybe experiment
with even longer if I feel that it works for me. Yeah, I'd be down to do a show on that
once. Yeah, especially while you're in the middle of it. You know, like while you're feeling
the feelings and doing the things and explaining what you're feeling and all that kind of stuff.
Talk about all the stuff that led me to the decision. And then in future episodes, I can
report on my progress or whatever. Absolutely. She wants, she asked for Mushroom, CBD, psychedelics.
That would be totally. We're on top of that. Totally. Afterlife, spirits, ghosts. I don't
know if we have like a ghost episode planned. I haven't personally looked into ghosts or
like poltergeist activity much I've always like taken it with a grain of salt But I would be
interested in looking into it more because I am actually open to it Yeah, I'm not thing
that we have planned on this one is a reincarnation episode. Yeah Yeah, I'm not like super into
guy like I like a good ghost story video like if it's really well, you know like a good story,
but I'm not like a I'm not like a disbeliever either it's just I'm not it doesn't like something
that's like resonates with me like when I'm looking through and like Reading stuff like
mm-hmm if I come across something like that. I'm just yeah But I am down to look into it
a little bit more said meditation crystals manifesting
Meditation for well, we kind of covered a little bit of that with consciousness with the consciousness
episode and talking about the shamanism. But it would be, personally, I haven't done a lot
of research into different meditation practices. I'd be interested. I might need someone, maybe
we could bring Amy on to talk about crystals. I think we bring Amy on for that whole thing.
I don't know anything about that. I think that whole suggestion there is her trying to say
she wants on the show. Yeah. All right, Amy. You got us. All right, you're in. She suggests
one on protecting our Earth, being eco-friendly and mindful of our planet's health and well-being.
I think that's actually a really good idea because I find that super valuable and important, but
not in the way it's sold to us by the mainstream these days. No, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, talking
about it from a more realistic point of view. Yeah, and not focusing around carbon dioxide,
which is plant food. Right? Yeah, just like the bullet points that are spewed out, man.
There's a lot of really important ways that people can be involved in.
Thanks, Amy. We appreciate all the feedback. Heck, yeah. You're definitely our number one
fan so far. Totally. Yeah, we get the most feedback from her. And I love it. And don't stop. No,
please don't. Yeah, we need to start sending you early access so you can give us some feedback
even before we post an episode. And anyone else listening, send us a message. If you have show
ideas. Yeah, we want to keep doing this kind of stuff where we do segments on. people interacting
with us. We're very much interested in, you know, because there's, you guys obviously probably
have a feel so far for the types of stuff we're into. And if you think there's something that
might be up our alley, like just because we're into this weird stuff doesn't mean all the
weird stuff is on our radar. So. Exactly, yeah. Like we are so open to a lot of this weird
stuff, but. doesn't mean that's the stuff that we're naturally consuming or looking into on
a day-to-day basis. So we'd love to hear from you stories, suggestions. If you're an expert
in one of these types of fields, we'd love to talk to you. Yeah, absolutely. That would be
fun. Yeah, we do plan to get some guests on the show at some point and talk about the stuff.
Like Amy will probably be our first one. Yeah, she might be. We also have a like a, I got
a. close friend of mine whose mom has been part of a move on for a long time. That's right,
you're telling me that. It would be cool to get her on. I need to just buy her dinner and
pick her brain one night just to get a feel for all the stuff she knows. Definitely. Yeah,
you should probably tell him before just so it's not weird that you're taking his mom out
on a date. Yeah, I don't care. Just kidding. I think it would be funny if he thinks I'm
moving in on his mom. Yeah, that's true. That is funny. I'll message him and be like, hey,
did you know Dean started your mom house, right? Now that would be fun. So yeah, thanks for
all the feedback, people. Keep it coming. Also, if you're interested in getting involved in
the show, we could use some people to send us a message letting us know, like, hey, this
little moment here from one hour to an hour and 10 minutes I think is really great. You
guys should consider sharing that as a little clip. We're looking for like. little five,
10 minute clips, 30 second clips to share on like TikTok and YouTube shorts and stuff like
that. And actually on, I believe on YouTube specifically to you can actually clip it yourself
and send it to us. So you can actually create your own clip of a time segment and then, you
know, write a message to us, send it to us and be like, Hey, I really like this. Anyone who
uses an iPhone, I don't know if you're the overcast podcast app is really great. It also has the
ability to like when you share, hit the share button, you can actually like clip out a section
and share like a little snippet from the audio podcast player, which is really cool. Oh yeah.
Yeah, we would love if anybody or everybody would do that. It helps us out. You know, we're
doing all of the recording, editing, all that stuff ourselves. So anything to get people
involved. Any help is helpful. And getting people involved and on board. And you know, that's
what we're looking for. Create a little community around this stuff. Totally. Yeah. Anything
else? Do we have any other messages? I think that's all for the messages for now. Keep them
coming. Let's get into the topic for today, which is the Amazon.
Alright. So, do you want to start out or do you want me to start out? I'm interested to
hear a little bit about the book you read. Okay. So, I'm going to be reporting on a couple of
books here tonight. The first one is called River of Darkness, Francisco de Oriana and
the Deadly First Voyage through the Amazon. So it basically covers this, the first complete
trek across the Amazon River by Europeans. Yeah. So it was done by the Spanish conquistadors
in the 1500s and the 1530s. Right. So they started out in Peru, in Quito, and went over the Andes
Mountains. They walked over the Andes Mountains? They marched over the Andes Mountains because
they had been hearing rumors of El Dorado, of all these wealthy civilizations inside the
Amazon. They had heard they were up at the headwaters. And so they thought if they go over the Andes,
that's a better route than coming in from the West, where people had tried, or from the East,
where people had tried before and going up the Amazon. I see. So they thought. If we start
in Peru, we go over the Andes, maybe we can find the headwaters there and find El Dorado
that way. I'll read some different snippets here. So this was Francisco de Oriana. He was
second in command. The first in command was a guy named Gonzalo Pizarro. Oh, yeah. His
older brother, Francisco Pizarro, was the one who conquered the Peru area. He was like the
Cortez of the Peru area. Where did they, how did, I mean, how did they get to that side
of the, did they go through the country, through the continent? I don't know the answer to that.
I haven't studied that part of the history. Yeah, I'm curious. Or did they sail all the
way around South America? Sails, yeah, curious. Anyway, I don't know in those early years if
they necessarily had the technology to sail all around. But by that point, Cortez had already
conquered Mexico. So it's conceivable that they could have like ships on the West Coast and
then sailed down the West Coast from there. Oh, good. So I don't know. That's possible.
Yeah. OK. That makes sense. So. This is, it was Gonzalo Pizarro was the one who was in
command. Francisco de Ariana had already wanted to do the same thing. And he had heard that
Gonzalo was doing a expedition basically the same as he had planned. And so, so he hopped
on board. He hopped on board. and was told by literally yeah well they walked over the andes
they had to get down to peru though he was told by gonzalo to uh he had to go like tend to
some stuff and then he said that i i'll go tend to this stuff i'll gather whatever men and
resources i can and then i'll meet you so the plan was to go over the andes and meet at a
camp basically and so gonzalo took an army of 220 soldiers, including harco basiers, crossbowmen,
and infantry. Harco basier is like the Spanish, is like a Spanish, early Spanish rifle. Oh
really? Yeah, firearm. Okay. Nearly 200 horses armored and fitted for battle. Great stores
of ammunition and powder. A herd of some 2,000 to 3,000 stinking, snorting swine for consumption.
Island llamas as pack animals, snarling horde of nearly 2,000 war hounds, trained not only
for battle and intimidation of hostile Indians, but also to herd the swine, and about 4,000
Indian porters chained and shackled until the moment of departure to preclude escape. These
unfortunates would bear the brunt of the expedition's enormous loads. including tons of material
for building bridges or vessels while the Spaniards carried nothing but a sword and a shield and
a small sack of food beneath it. Among the 4,000 porters were a good many native women brought
to cook tortillas for the Spaniards and to serve as sex slaves." Geez. So we're not, we're talking
about 220 soldiers that bring thousands of thousands, like thousands of animals, thousands of dogs.
thousands of slaves and a bunch of materials that all of those, you know, aforementioned,
you know, animals and people are gonna carry for them. Yeah. Jeez. So it's not just a small
220 group of people looking to explore. No. They're looking to conquer. And the slaves,
they didn't give them any sort of like material preparation or gear. Right, so they're just
barefoot probably. Barefoot hiking over the Andes, which are some of the tallest mountains
in the world. These high passes with like snow peaks and glaciers. And actually by the time
they get to the other side of the Andes, which basically like most of their slaves are dead.
Of course. And... Because they're just from the elements. Just from the elements. And then
Francisco de Oriana finally meets up with them there and they're like tending to trying to
like figure out like what to do next. They survived. Yeah. They've burned through a giant chunk
of their food stores already. And then from there they move on and it's like not long until
they run out of food and all their slaves are dead. And they've got like a handful of like
of the pigs and dogs and horses left. Wow. And then they start freaking out and trying to
figure out what they should do next and they consider going back. But the route back is
what put them in that condition. Right, I was gonna say they lost that much just doing that.
I mean, they're all dead if they go back. Yeah. And so they come up on the idea of building
a boat instead. And so they find the first rivers on the other side and they construct a ship.
Because these rivers are pretty wide, yeah? I know I had watched a few videos and read
a few articles that talked about it being like three quarters of a mile wide. That's at like
some places. biggest places, but we're talking at the headwaters where some of the tributaries
are forming and stuff. So not quite as big at the start, but still big. And it's dense jungle
and they can't find any people. They can't find, they get attacked. They do get attacked at
some point. And then later on, they can't find people. They can't find resources. They're
scattered and broken. They had taken... For some of the people they did find and attacked,
they kept a bunch of, they kept capturing these chiefs of whatever tribe they would come across
as slaves, and they would use those people's knowledge to navigate, and those people would
be telling them about, you know, up ahead, you'll find this and that, until those people escaped.
They found a moment and they were able to escape. And they know the terrain better. And so they
lost all their local guides. And while, so Francisco de Ariana, he actually studies languages. And
so during the time while they do have those guides, he figures out how to communicate with
them. He's the translator. He actually figures out all the local languages there and translates.
But he doesn't have the forethought to like, discuss like survival and like survival tactics.
Cause he's just trying to like figure out where the hell to go. Yeah. So, uh, while he could
have been spending all that time before they ran away, like figuring out like what tree
you eat, what's edible, how to process things, like where to find certain animals. Yeah, exactly.
So they don't have any of that information. They're almost out of food and then they run
out of food. Time's ticking. Clock's ticking. And so they don't want to slaughter all their
horses yet because they think they'll need them. So at some point, they get to such a sorry
state that they're making gruel out of shoe leather and any herbs they can find. And people
are getting sick and losing their mind a little bit from eating plants they don't know about.
Right, yeah. So it gets really bad. And so Oriana proposes to Pizarro that he take a detachment
of people and go down the river. Because the boat they build isn't big enough for the whole
expedition. So he takes about 50 people and a bunch of the resources, the weapons, the
ammunition and gunpowder and all that. they take off, the deal is that he's supposed to
come back in like 12 days, supposed to go down, find whatever he can and then come back. Cause
before the navigators, the chiefs had escaped, their next destination, they were told that
they were basically a few days away from a big tributary coming in and joining the river.
And that if they go up that, they can find like a bunch of food. Civilization or food or whatever.
And so their plan was to go ahead because when they had built the ship, they would use the
ship because most of their slaves had died to carry a bunch of the heavy stuff while they
would try and like walk along it or something. But that was, I mean, you got like creeks coming
in all the time. They're having to build bridges. They're having to swim their horses. Like it's
like treacherous terrain. It sounds like dead. What's his name? DeOriana? DeOriana. It sounds
like he knew the only way to survive was to get away from the mass group and to take a
few people down and go and find some resources on his own. Well, that's not who he claims.
And he like very officially claims not to. Well, of course, because that's treason. Yeah, so
he's got a friar with him and his crew as well who takes like... meticulous notes. He's the
one that recorded all this. Yeah. History is written by the victors, though. Yeah, well,
they survived. But did all of them survive? Because I don't, I bet. Actually, Pizarro's
crew did survive as well. Oh, OK, they did. OK, OK. So they go forward, and he thinks they
missed whatever tributary that they were supposed to find. And then the river just gets bigger
and bigger and faster and faster. And they realize that there's no way they'll be able to paddle
back up a river and They hit the point of no return and keep their deal of the 12 days.
And so they just kind of keep going for a little while. Hmm. And then they come across a civilization.
They come across some natives there who are able to be spoken to by Oriana, he figures
out how to communicate with them and they get a bunch of food and just at the nick of time
they were starving themselves. They're basically about to be gone. So they rest there for a
while and... These people were nice, huh? They let them live, huh? And then after the 12 days
came and went and then a little beyond that, then Pizarro... send some people to try and
find them or any sign of them and Those people don't find them. They find a little bit of
signs that they were Moving forward because they would pull off to the side of the river
and camp at night So they find a little bit of evidence of that But then they find what
they think was that tributary and they go up river and they find this big plan day plantation
So that's the next section I want to read from because it's pretty interesting So.
Yeah. On the 10th day, they arrived at the abandoned plantations, famished beyond reason once again.
They staggered through the fields of umbrella-shaped plant leaves as all came in an exhausted state,
reported one chronicler. Not having eaten anything for so many days, they did nothing but pull
up yuccas, with the earth still sticking to it, the roots, and began to eat them at once.
One's panniered a man named Villarejo. sat chewing on a root of white color and rather thick.
According to his comrades, he had hardly even tasted it when he stood and became delirious
and unintelligible, then lost his reason and became mad. Not long after, other compatriots,
including some of Pineda's men, started falling sick. Their bellies distended grotesquely,
some flopping about on the ground and moaning in agony. Nevertheless, Pizarro ordered camp
made. They would stay for a time where there was guaranteed food source. I'm not going to
read the rest of that, but essentially they find this yucca farm. And yucca is a, there
was another term for it, manioc. Manioc.
So this is a staple resource that is very popular in the Amazon tribes. It's a root vegetable,
kind of like potatoes. Right. But it contains a substance. There we go.
So, yeah, I'll read this part. Certainly throughout their stay in El Barco, the Spaniards had seen
the villagers coming from Manioc fields burdened by large carrying baskets strapped to their
backs, the baskets brimming over with tubers. Once the Manioc was harvested and collected
and brought back to the village, the women-loaded baskets full of the tubers took them to the
river, submerged them, shaking them vigorously to clean the Manioc tubers of dirt before peeling
them of their outer skins, cutting the sweet Manioc into chunks or slicing them. and leaving
the poisonous manioc hole. Then began the essentially never-ending process of grating using ingenious
hardwood boards studded with either stone or hardwood or animal-based teeth, palmwood thorns
or flecks of hardwood or fish bones or bonesplinters. The women bend over these graders, sit on the
ground with a grader between their knees and then holding a tuber in each hand, grate viciously
back and forth until the tuber is mashed into a pulp. Then they take the pulp or mash. It's
transferred to a thing called a tapete, a long tubular woven basket that closes that one in
about six or seven feet long. The tapetes hold the watery Antioch mash with stone or heavy
log tied to one end. They compress it to leach out all the poisonous Prusik acid, making the
Manioc safe for consumption. And then they also roast it. So there's this whole process you
have to go through with the manioc and make it safe to eat. And it's consumption and use
and domestication goes back thousands of years, but the Spaniards didn't know the process.
So Pizarro's crew, they end up at this manioc plantation, and they just start eating and
they get super sick. Because they see a plantation, they assume everything's edible. They just
started eating it, they're so hungry. Right, so some of them just ate it raw, some of them
had the sense to like cook it, but some of them were impatient. And so I think they did lose
a couple people due to this. Even if you just cook it, it sounds like there's a whole process
you gotta do. Right. Just even just cooking it. So Pizarro's people end up hiking back
over the Andes. After this? Yeah, they go back and they actually make it. But they lose a
lot of people. But they did make it. It must be just Pizarro and one other person he's eating
or something. Cannibalism. Uh, yeah. So. then Oriana, he just starts the process of heading
down the Amazon. It's real quick, I want to say, I looked it up and it says, the derivative
of that is cassava. Cassava. And if it is prepared properly, it can contain chemicals that are
converted to cyanide in the body. Yeah. So they were getting cyanide poisoning. and led to
certain paralysis. Yeah, OK. This is modern science saying this. Yeah. So Oriana and his
crew, they hang with these friendly Indians. I'm only using them. I don't like the term
Indian. I'm using it because that's what they use in the book. That's how they describe them.
Anyway. They're hanging out with them and then they kind of get the lay of the land for the
next bit of the river and they're warned that after about a couple hundred miles of this
kingdom that is friendly to them, then the next kingdom down is not friendly and they will
be attacked. And so they get to that area and sure enough, they're attacked. And so starts
this process of them. essentially going down the river and then when they run out of food,
they have to like pick a place to with civilization where it's not too much of people attacking
them, where they can like crash their boat aboard on the shore and invade the village, steal
a bunch of food and take back off. And so they do this over and over and over again. Um, but
anywhere where possible, he does try to like reason with people. So Orianna is not like
Pizarro. He's a little less warlike. He prefers to talk and to be friendly before, uh, using
violence, but he does resort to violence. Seems like that's why he was able to make friends
with this first village. Yeah. I mean, if he wasn't that way, they probably wouldn't have
made it. Yeah. No, they wouldn't. Yeah. If they had to fight literally the entire way. They
would have died. Probably would have been screwed. Well, they wouldn't have made it past that
first village if they were immediately trying to attack the people they saw. Yeah, so they
stayed there for like a month, though, in that first village. Oh, wow. They actually make
another boat. Oh, wow. Yeah, or at least they, it talks about them, because they actually
don't have, with the only 50 people or so they have, they don't have all the specialties needed.
They call it a brigantine. I don't know the difference, but. Yeah, they're the person,
the boat master kind of person. Yeah, so they said the hardest thing for them to figure out
was how to make nails. But the villagers actually would assist them in gathering resources and
would keep them fed. Until he started getting the vibe that they were outstaying their welcome.
And so they took all the materials and all the nails they made and they kept sailing down.
Started moving on. they found a place to stop and finish a second boat. Anyway, so this next
part I want to read is from one of their raids. So they go on, they land and they crash, and
they go on one of these raids. What I found interesting about this, I'll point it out afterwards,
but so they had just done battle and they're retreating back to the brigantines. So this
intense battle over, at least for the moment, Orianna led the fittest of his men to find
Maldano if they could. By good fortune, they met on the same path. Maldano had been returning
with his beleaguered men and Orianna could see that Maldano himself and all the rest were
bludgeoned and bleeding. One of these men was so badly injured that he died of his wounds
eight days later. Remarkably, Maldano had managed to get away with many turtles. That was one
of the food. Maldonado. Oh, I was saying it wrong. Looking over his troops and assessing
the situation, Oriana ordered that 18 injured men receive immediate medical treatment back
at the huts before they got to the brigantines. The number of wounded was devastating, constituting
a full third of his force. The two priests were charged with their care, though they could
offer little in the way of medicine, along with them, no other remedy but a quote unquote certain
charm. Friar Karvahal. Doing magic. Yeah, was who helped attend the wounded does not specify
what this certain term was exactly, but it's possible that the men had learned something
of Amazonian medicine having to do with the plants and herbs or even connected to sorcery
and shamanism during their long months in Aparia. That's what it sounds like to me, magic. It's
conceivable that they had learned and acquired some of the botanical or spiritual treatments
for injuries while there. Carvajal would have been well aware that the Holy Inquisition in
Lima, Mexico City, and Cartagena established charges against acts of superstition and charms,
but under the circumstances this far removed from civilization without any of their own
medicines, the rules and rites could respectfully and of necessity be ignored. Carvajal employed,
he believed it had positive results for within two weeks, all were cured except for the one
who died. Wow. Which is pretty interesting. Yeah.
So, yeah, that kind of ties back to like our talk about shamanism. Yeah. And they have a
elevated, it's magic. I mean, yeah, for all intents and purposes, it's magic. Yeah. Whatever,
whatever was going on in these days. Yeah. Well, everything but you know, the shamans knew.
That's interesting. Then this is a little bit later on. They're still kind of fighting through
this hostile territory. These people called the Amagwa.
They were hardly underway, having traveled only five miles or so when they reached an impressive,
powerful river pouring into the Maronon from the south bank. The size of the new river appeared
remarkable, even wider or so it seemed than the Maronon itself. So wide was it, Oriana's
priest remarked that at one place where it emptied in, it formed three islands in view of which
we gave it the name Trinity River. They had reached the confluence of the Jarura River,
which appeared to flow through an abundant and prosperous land with numerous houses and buildings
dotting a swath of green shoreline. Oriana ordered men to remain on higher alert, but not to provoke
any of the local population. He hoped to avoid any fresh confrontations. So They're like,
it's crazy because, all right, so. So they're seeing civilization, civilization. Yeah. Really,
like as they go along these rivers. And I want to step back and explain, if you are unaware,
why this is so important. So for most of history, so what happened is after this specific account
of this expedition, this account got lost for hundreds of years. It wasn't discovered until
the late 1800s. At which point, the general view was that there was no civilization in
the Amazon. Other than a few scattered tribes here and there of hunter-gatherers. And usually
they were on the edges of the Amazon. They specifically believed that there was no civilization. And
so these people keep coming across huge civilizations of people with farms and like. amazing like
building abilities and like a wealth of knowledge and like military tactics and yeah, there was
a description that I that I heard when I was watching a YouTube video on this topic Where
they describe like where or Leona or Rihanna? Described as they went along this river they
were seeing like the buildings along the river were so tightly there was no space in between
these buildings and they could see if they were going for miles. Mm-hmm. For miles on end,
they were seeing these buildings that were so tightly packed together that there was no space
in between them and like just what that indicates, right? Yeah. The amount of people, the amount
of resources that this area supported. Yeah. Fascinating.
And Norliana, he ended up eventually wanting to come back, right? We might get to that part
eventually, but he eventually went back to Spain. After he sees all this. Yeah. That that's definitely
towards the end, but like. after he, like the process of him seeing all this along the Amazon
and all of these people and all of this wealth, and he does actually see a lot of gold and
a lot of like, he's convinced, and like he wants to be a conquistador like Cortez, he wants
to be able to like have a whole domain assigned to him from the crown. And so he finds this
place and he sees all these resources. And his intent after he discovers all this is to go
back to Spain and get that appointment, another expedition funded to go and conquer these lands,
which fails for him. Of course. No, he gets the funding. But there's a bunch of weird political
stuff. And he doesn't get as much funding as he needs to. And then by the time he gets out
there, they have such like losses by sea on their way back west. They just don't have the
strength or the power once they arrive to be able to do anything. They're not going to conquer
anything, but they, yeah. Yeah, so anyway. Right there, yeah, this chapter, Encountering the
Amazons, chapter 14. So this is the other reason why I find this book so fascinating. So. the
Amazons. Oh yeah, you were telling me about that. Which is interesting. And this is, I
think, where the Amazon jungle got its name from is because of these women that were encountered.
That's right. That were gigantic. And I'll find the thing. But let me.
What's the name of this book by the way? This is called River of Darkness. Francisco Orioles
and the Deadly First Voyage. Through the Amaz- So this section here is chronicling. This is
much later down the river. But it's after all the initial stuff that we had already covered
here? I mean, the river is huge. This whole thing took them 18 months. When they're crossing
the entire continent, right? So they get into this battle because they're once again out
of food. And so they're going to do another one of their raids.
So the landing. is more difficult than Orianna anticipates. As he approached, he saw numerous
well-organized fighting squadrons of Indians, knots of men formed up around the houses and
buildings, and the village center teeming with warriors too numerous to count. All animated
and well-armed, the spectacle was daunting. At the same moment, there came out many armed
with bows and arrows from among the trees. Along the shore of the river, take talking very loud
and as if vexed, going through all sorts of contortions with their bodies, indicating thereby
that they looked upon the Spaniards with scorn. Nevertheless, the Briggs closed in, rowing
at breakneck speed, but as the Spaniards came within range, the Indians at intervals fired
well-aimed and well-timed volleys of arrows into the sky, the darts whistling through the
thick tropical air, like the wing beats of Scarlet Macaws. Oriana and his men were in their armor
and still suffering. in their metal breastplates. Others had adopted the thickly padded cotton
variety of Spaniards under Cortes had leaned about from the Aztecs. That they had learned
that Cortes had learned about from the Aztecs. Given the accuracy of the native bowmen, they
would need all the protection they had. The arrows fell from the sky, driving deluge, skewering
about the Spaniards. So anyway, so then he counters with his own gunfire. And. then they land on
shore. Um...
Yeah, so they get they land on shore they ram into the beach They jump off the wolf and into
the water to get on shore and they start fighting their way on shore
But the warriors kept swarming in from all sides. Far more than an hour, the Spaniards waged
close and hazardous hand-to-hand battle, but no matter how many Indians they slew, more
came to replace them. These urging their fellows with on with rekindled energies. According
to Friar Carvajal, who watched the gruesome battle with an arrow sticking from his side.
These Indians had more than just their homes to defend, they were fighting as subjects and
allies of the Amazons. For what Carl Vajal and the others witnessed next was mystifying. Amid
the throng of warriors there appeared 10 or 12 extremely tall women warriors with pale
white skin and long hair twisted into braids and wound about their heads. They are very
robust, reported Oriana's priest, and go about naked but with their privy parts covered. with
their bows and arrows in their hands, doing as much fighting as 10 Indian men. And indeed,
there was one who shot an arrow a span deep into one of the brigantines. And others less
deep that our brigantines look like porcupines. Damn. You know what that makes me think of
is the idea that Vikings had settled and had come to the Americas before the Europeans did.
It almost seems like a group of Viking women had gone through and just terrorized and took
it for their own, basically. There was a couple spots earlier in the book that I couldn't bookmark
properly because I was listening on audio, where they describe. the legend because they had
heard the legends of the Amazons before they got to this point and actually witnessed them
themselves. Oh, okay. And essentially they got the legend that like there was like a whole
kingdom in the Amazon that was their territory and that they had an island that they lived
on and that they would allow men to come in to breed with basically and then they would
only keep the women, the girl children. Yeah. And then once the man had bred, they would
kick him out. And then they ruled this whole area. Yeah. And they were saying they were
subjects of them. And that they were gigantic, large women. Wow. And according to this account,
shooting arrows that penetrate deep into their ship, compared to all the other arrows, doing
the fighting of 10 men. Damn. But they did end up killing a handful of them. Oh, really? They
weren't invincible. Right. And it wasn't the only time they encountered them either. They
did encounter them earlier on as well, or later on. It goes on here, right? There was another
section I want to talk about. Yeah, that goes on with the battle, but the details of that
aren't as. I think we're ready for a break though. We're way over. We're almost ready for two
breaks here. Ha ha ha. So let me find a little bit of the next section. We'll take a quick
break and we can move on from there. So yeah, Amazon rainforest and the Amazons themselves.
You know like where the Amazons come from? Like they come from like Greek mythology. Yeah.
So yeah, I think that's where like the whole name of the place came from is from that legend
of finding them there Curious to see what they to know what they called them like what they
call themselves. Yeah, I know I'm so curious about like all of it. Man, we'll talk about
it too, because I've got some other stuff to come up. But yeah, thanks for listening. We'll
be right back.
Thanks for watching!
Bye!
And we're back again
so uh the computer crashed we came back from the break we did and we started recording i
think we're maybe 23 minutes in and then we just had a hard crash our computer crashed
so to figure out what the heck's going on with that. But for the meantime, we're going to
give it another shot, and hopefully it won't crash again on us this time. Yeah, so episode
7.2. I may have had too many things open. Episode 7.2. Yeah. Anyway. We'll keep going here. We'll
go over the stuff that we had already talked about. But just be aware. If you sound a little
weird or less enthusiastic about going over this stuff again, just be aware. It's because
this is our second time doing it. Yeah. All right, so you had pulled up. Yeah, so we were
finishing off the last bit of River of Darkness that I wanted to cover. And the last bit that
I wanted to cover was this like incredible, like the most advanced, one of the most advanced
areas that they had landed on in the travel.
So at sunset, they arrived at a small and intriguing series of well-kept buildings set very high
and exposed on a bank. And although the place was inhabited, its diminutive size and apparently
limited population convinced Oriana that he should try and land and investigate. As he
drew near, Oriana. could see that it was very orderly and well maintained, so pristine that
he suspected it might be a pleasure palace or a place of recreation or leisure for the local
overlord. Enticing him yet further, the few natives, or enticing him yet further, he was
interested in the pleasure palace. Yeah, it caught his eye. The few natives resisted as
well as they could for about an hour, but in the end, they relinquished the village and
retreated into the forest. The Spaniards took control of the perimeter, tied up the boats
and went about investigating, armed and ready. The bounty of food once again pleased Oriana
and he ordered much of it to be confiscated and prepared for travel. Most interesting though
was a certain building the Spaniards described as a villa, a kind of warehouse or storehouse.
bursting with all manner of pottery of varying quality and sizes. Some small, but other pieces
very large with the capacity of more than 25 aerobas and you had looked that up. That's
about 25 pounds. An aeroba is about 25 pounds. So 25 of 25 is about 625 pounds. Yeah, so this
is big part or big pottery. Oriana and his men marveled at the workmanship running their hands
over the finely made wares which included jars pitchers and also Other small pieces such as
plates bowls candelabra of porcelain of the best that had ever been seen in the world For
that of Malaga, which is I guess in Spain is not equal Because this porcelain which we found
is all glazed and embellished with the colors and so bright that they astonish. And even
more than this, the drawings and paintings which they make on them are so accurately worked
out that one wonders how with only natural skill they manufacture and decorate all these things
like Roman articles. Oriana had good reason to be impressed by the excellence of pottery
and the skill of the craftsmanship. The sheer volume discovered in the storage rooms suggested
that this small village must be the center of the vast pottery manufacturing region. perhaps
employed for its distribution and trade up and down the river. The immensity further suggested
that the region confirmed by their observations of continuous settlement along both banks supported
a significant population base, perhaps on the order of hundreds of thousands of people. They
nicknamed this place Chinatown or Pottery Village. You like the pottery village one. I like the
Chinatown. You like being called Chinatown? Well, yeah, because it's China. Oh, well, I
actually didn't even think about that. Sorry about my hiccups, people. He's got crazy hiccups.
They keep coming back. Tonight has been nuts.
The first time we attempted, we came back. He had to spend a bunch of time with the boys.
And then we had to wait like another 10 minutes because he just had crazy hiccups. And I had
my eyes closed and I was doing some breathing things to help myself. And then all of a sudden,
I feel a smack on the top of my head. And Dean hit me on the top of my head and it helped,
it made it better. And we got through that whole segment. I didn't, I saw that coming. Yeah,
dang it. I was trying to be sneaky, but I wasn't sneaky enough. Anyway. This has been an episode.
Yeah, this one is a bit full. Man. I would have to edit out a lot of e-cops. So yeah, Oriana
was eager to learn even more about these people. He ordered his men to round up those few who
hadn't fled. These people, through difficult and painstaking sign language, told Oriana
that if he thought the pottery was notable, there was an equivalent amount of gold and
silver in a village nearby in the interior. These few friendly locals even offered to take
Oriana and his men there if he wished to see it. Yeah, that sounds like they're leading
him into a trap. Yeah, that's what it sounds like to me. Yeah. They're like, hey, yeah,
let's go over here. I got, yeah, we got gold. Come on. Come on over here, dude. Well, I don't
know that they necessarily valued the gold in the same way that the Spaniards did. But the
thing is they knew that the Spaniards valued it. Yeah. And they knew that they could lead
them somewhere. Maybe that's what they were trying to do. But Oriana didn't want to go
just because going inland was too dangerous because he wouldn't be able to skip away on
the river if something went bad. Yeah. Apparently later on in the journey, and I hadn't gotten
to that part in this review of it, but later on he does go inland at some point. Oh, really?
Yeah. A little bit. Is it with another? like civilization that he finds? Or does it just
land somewhere and he decides to go and investigate? In going over America before, Graham talks
about it. And I just hadn't found the part of the book on reviewing it this time where they
do that. So I wasn't able to find that snippet. But anyway, so yeah, this place has crazy fine
pottery. Yeah, we had talked about it a little bit. And it just seems like it was. Definitely
like if it was all like confined in some kind of like warehouse or storehouse like it definitely
seems like it's some sort of Store It definitely seems like it was some sort of like hub of
trade like it was their reason their resource of trade You know yeah like that town Happened
to specialize in it, you know and so for that that whole region, that kingdom of that section.
Was wealthy. That town, their specialty was the pottery. Well, and that was, it also goes
to show why they were so well-kept.
Why they were so well kept, why they were so rich, it seemed to them, right? They were much
more better off than all the other places. If they were the hub of this, this could be their
currency in some sort of fashion, right? It could be their way of showing some sort of
status in other places. would pay anything to get that. Sure, yeah. Maybe that's why they
had all this gold. Well, maybe. Yeah, I mean, gold was just abundant in the region. And yeah,
that's true. They could have just plated everything with gold because it looks cool. Yeah, I mean,
it is pretty. And you can guild with it. That's true. All right. transition over to Graham's
book here. So this is from America Before. And if you're, I'm sure a lot of you are familiar
with Graham Hancock, but if you aren't, definitely check him out. A good starting place would
be his Netflix series. What's it called?
Um, it was, um, no, it was ancient. Ancient. Apocalypse. That's it. Yeah. I, the only reason
I know that is cause I didn't like the name of it. And it was, it was too much like ancient
aliens. Yeah. Ancient aliens or something like that. Yeah. Which I kind of like ancient aliens.
It definitely has inspired some stuff in my head, but for sure. Yeah. It also goes way
far out there sometimes. Well, and initially like. The general population when they see
ancient aliens are like, okay dude. Yeah.
My problem is the dude with the big hair. He just looks too crazy to me. Yeah. I agree.
That's a terrible reason to not take it seriously, but some people, they just look like they're
hard to take seriously. They don't make it easy to take them seriously. That's true. He's not
doing himself any favors. Anyway, so Graham's specialty is talking about lost ancient civilizations
and trying to show different evidence for it. His first book on that topic, Fingerprints
of the Gods, was kind of what got me into all this stuff. But he's had tons of books on it
and he covers all this evidence from all over the world. But this book, America Before, is
specifically about all the evidence in the Americas. So he's got a big chunk on North America, a
big chunk on... South America and the Amazon. And so I'm gonna pull from some of the Amazon
sections. But before that, there's a section that's talking about like the DNA origins of
the people of America. And so there's been the long held theory, which the DNA does bear out
in some aspects that we all know the story that During the ice age, there was a land bridge
between Russia and Alaska, the Bering land strait, and that people came across that into the Americas.
The ice bridge. And the ice age ended, and it was actually land, yeah. Well, debatable. Well,
the sea level was 400 feet lower. That's right. Yeah, that's true. Anyway, so people come in
through Russia into America. And so there's genetic relation to a lot of the Native Americans,
to like the Eastern Asians, Siberians, the Denisovans. There's a bunch of Denisovan DNA found. Well,
not a bunch, but a little bit. Yeah, there's a good percentage. Just like Neanderthals,
there's a certain percentage of Neanderthal DNA. In the Americans, there's about a percentage
of... Denisovan DNA. Right. But what's interesting is that the South Americans actually show a
percentage of. Yeah, they show. So some of the Amazon tribes. Here, I'll read this part. Here
we analyze genome-wide data to show that some Amazonian Native Americans descend partly from
a Native American. founding population that carried ancestry more closely related to the
indigenous Australians, New Guineans, and Andaman Islanders than to any present day Eurasians
or Native Americans. This signature is not present to the same extent or at all in present day
Northern and Central Americans or in a 12,600 year old Clovis associated genome, suggesting
more diverse set of founding populations. of the Americas than previously accepted. And
then there's like a little map here that shows, it's like a world map showing Africa and Europe
and Asia and the Americas and it's got like dots showing the relation areas between like
Australia and Guinea. And it always shows like the bigger dots are like the higher percentages,
maybe. or maybe where they find, yeah, maybe the higher percentages or maybe the larger
numbers of the population. Right. But yeah, so that's interesting because it doesn't have
any of the dots up in North America. I was going to say, yeah, so like you don't see a lot of
the Asian or the not Asian, you don't see a lot of the Australian or the Papua New Guinea
or the Indonesian DNA popping up anything or any. Any further than like southern Central
America. Right. So basically two different DNA sources into the Americas, which maybe there's
more though, because like where the heck do those freaking Amazons come from? What is their
DNA? Vikings. Maybe. Or the Giants. Or the Giants, yeah. Which we're gonna have to do an episode
on Giants. Yeah, definitely.
And then he starts covering this really cool phenomenon found in the Amazon jungle called
terra preta, which is a special type of soil. So the rainforests in general, like the Amazon,
have notoriously infamously bad soil. And actually, a bunch of the Amazon keeps getting clear cut
for soybean farms and stuff. But the soil is so bad that the farms are typically only viable
for a couple years before the soil gets depleted. Whether they fail or they just redo the soil
or whatever, yeah. Oop! They don't last very long. Yeah, and so... But there's this special
soil that gets found in the Amazon called terra preta that's black in color versus a lighter
brown that is the normal soil. Yeah, like a tan clay looking color. Yeah. But like, yeah,
this terra preta is like black. They call it the black earth or whatever. Right. What was
the number you quoted as to how much they found? It was about 3%. Okay. So, so the Amazon is
2.5 million square miles and they find terra preta. and up to 3% of the Amazon soil. Which
is pretty incredible. That's a lot. Yeah.
Uhhh...
Then there's questions of how it's made, the type of stuff that you find in it. You find
charcoal. Sorry, just real quick. 75,000 square miles is about the estimated amount. That's
3% of 2.5 million. That's 3% of 2.5 million. Yeah, so this is a man-made soil. That covers
75,000 square miles of the Amazon rainforest. And it's going to be centralized where the
civilizations are, most likely. So there's a section in here where they talk about how the
instances of finding
civilization or finding like archeological finds of people that you can basically almost guarantee
that anytime you find terra preta, you can also find like artifacts from humans. Yeah, like
a lot of the time they're finding pottery shards and yeah, part of pottery shards and the microbial
life inside of it is like incredibly diverse. It's super diverse to the point where they
think that something about the mixture of the charcoal and the microbial life in the terra
preta allows the soil to hold on to nutrients and to also regenerate nutrients that get taken
out.
it starts to deplete those nutrients and you have to keep fertilizing it, keep fertilizing
it to put nutrients back in the earth to then keep growing. Whereas terepreda, the idea is
that like the, whatever the composition of it is, it somehow replenishes the nutrients that
you're pulling out by growing. And so you're able to keep. growing in it over and over and
over without generations and without needing to let a field fallow without needing to rotate
crops. Yeah, without having to rotate anything. And as far as what the terrapin is, is composed
of, it says that it's abundant in organic material like plant and animal parts and tiny, tiny
pottery shards, usually high concentrations of low temperature charcoal residues. Nutrients
like nitrogen, phosphorus, and zinc and high levels of micro organic activity is found.
So right. And then the conventional explanation is that basically they would keep these midden
heaps where they throw out garbage and powdery and compostable material and that they sort
of accidentally came up with this terra prata. It's essentially an accident. But if it's an
accident, how does that explain there being 75,000 square miles of it? Exactly. look at
River of Darkness and Francisco de Ariana and all the other following expeditions and the
reports of the population sizes in the Amazon of some estimates of like the entire Amazon
being peopled by like tens of millions of people at that time. Yeah, millions. I'm telling you,
I know a few people in NorCal that could really use some terra preta. If you know what I'm
saying, wink, wink. Right. It would save them a lot of money. But yeah, still to this day,
no one really knows how to exactly make it and duplicate it. But it's highly sought after.
People will go and find it and then use it to mix into their soil. This is interesting. So
I found an article from David Bennett. He's a biochemist from Cornell University. university.
He was talking about terra preta and this is in farm progress.com on their website. There
are few factors that contribute to the to this sustainable fertility. There are only a few
factors. Remember, these soils were created 1000 to 5000 years ago, and were abandoned
hundreds or thousands of years ago. Yet all Over all those hundreds of years, the soils
retain their high fertility in an environment with high decomposition, humidity, and temperatures.
In this environment, according to textbooks, the soil shouldn't exist, is what he says.
And he's a biochemist. Right. Because something organic like that should just die off. Should
eventually dissipate. need to be recycled. But that something about it allows it to sustain
itself for like for a long time. And he goes on to say, another interesting aspect of terra
praetis high fertility is the charcoal content of the soil. This was deliberately put into
the soil by Indians, quote, unquote, and doesn't only create doesn't only create a higher organic
matter and therefore higher fertility through better nutrient retention capacity, but this
special type of carbon is more efficient in creating these properties. It is also true
that terra preta is widespread almost anywhere in central Amazon. You can step out of the
car and ask a local, is there any terra preta around? And they'll show you it's everywhere.
That's what he says. Yeah. So, I mean, to me, that seems like evidence of some sort of like,
you know, science. some sort of understanding of the mixture of and the process of creating
this stuff. And like the point that Graham Hancock makes, because like the conventional explanation
is that, yeah, like the midden heaps, and that it's an accident, and that it just kind of
came about. But Graham's point is that you need the terra preta in order to have large population
bases in the Amazon in the first place. Because if you, sorry. You're distracting me. Get out
of your head. I can't, man. These hiccups are killing me, man. Jeez. I apologize for the
distraction. Yeah, I'm sorry. I cannot help it. I'm trying to keep some weight to lose,
too. I cannot help it. I've been dealing with this. Literally, I took a first sip. Might
as well. Let's take a little break. Right. OK. We're drinking. The reason I've got this these
hiccups is this damn beer I'm drinking. Oh, yeah. We did the very first sip I took of this
beer started this entire that you didn't have hiccups at all today before that. No. Wow.
The very first sip I took. And this is a Dust Bowl Brewing Company. It's called Therapist.
No appointment necessary.
No appointment necessary, Imperial IPA. Oh my God. And it's 10.4% dad. Yep. I know you're
listening. That's a strong one. Oh my gosh. I can't, I can't blame the percentage, but
whatever happened, I took a sip and I got, I got hiccups. So if you like, if you, if you
are, you have a thing for hiccups, drink this beer. Yeah. Alright, we'll take a quick break.
Yeah, let's see if Drew's hiccups, we can get those to go away and then tell him he's not
allowed to have any beer for the rest of the show. I'm gonna chug this and then I'm not
having any more. Alright. We'll be right back.
And we're back. We're back. We rushed back in as soon as Drew stopped having hiccups. Oh
my gosh. That was rough. That lasted quite a while. That was like 40 minutes straight, man.
One has been throughout this whole podcast, but we've been able to stop it a few times.
So we're going to rush back, get some content in here, and see if we can maintain this. I
put my beer out of sight so I can't see it. I don't want to drink it. He doesn't trust
it. No, I don't trust it anymore. And you know why? You know why? It's not a hazy. Yeah, right.
I'm just saying. Maybe you just can't handle a high alcohol content beer. You're a lightweight.
I know. I'd be asleep right now if I was a lightweight, because it's 10.4%. I've already had two of
these. Well, 1.75%.
So where were we? Let's keep going here. OK. Cool. So this next chapter in the book is really
cool. It's called Gardening Eden. And here he is. Oh, yeah. This is one of my favorite parts
of the book. Yeah. This is one of my favorite parts. This is where he lays out the argument
that Amazon is essentially a man-made garden. So I want to read a couple snippets here. Yeah,
let's hear it. Further intriguing hints that some sort of intelligent guided project was
mounted in the Amazon thousands of years ago are to be found in recent studies of the species
of trees that populate the rainforest. These studies demonstrate that far from being a pristine
natural environment, the Amazon is largely a human creation. When that research is done,
it turns out that while Amazonian forests in different regions differ significantly from
one another. In topography, climate, geology, hydrology, structure, seasonality, history,
they nonetheless often resemble each other in showing a pattern of unexpected dominance and
density of a small group of plant species. This pattern has been found wherever Amazon forests
have been inventoried and has yet to be explained by natural factors. Yeah, that's I know. I
know Graham's talked about the Brazil nut tree, but there's other trees that are just like
the palm tree even. Yeah, so the best current estimate is that the Amazon is presently home
to about 16,000 woody tree species. That's it. Out of this total, however, only 227 hyperdominant
species dominate Amazonian forests. These so-called oligarchs from the Greek. for rule by a few
make up only 1.4% of all the Amazon forest species, but almost half of the trees in any given forest.
Wow. Even 16,000 woody tree species doesn't seem like a lot. Yeah, well, that's specifically
the vastness of. Woody trees versus all plant life. All plant life, you're talking hundreds
of thousands of species. But even still, you're talking about 2.5. 2. more than 2.5 million
square miles of Amazon rainforest. And you're only talking about 16,000 woody tree species.
That doesn't seem like a lot. That doesn't surprise me. I mean, it doesn't strike me as super low.
It seems low to me. But also if you go back, go back real quick. Yeah. You can. But it says
that only 227 are hyperdominant. Right. So out of 16,227 trees, make up 50% of the trees in
most of the forest. Right. Right, right, right. And we know how the trees pollinate and spread.
It's all wind and animals. They take it and they move it. Yeah. Right. But the. The crazy
thing is not just that it's a few amount of trees, it's which trees they are. They're trees
that are fruiting trees. They're trees that are crops. And a lot of them show DNA evidence
of domestication. Which also brings to account naturally, right? Naturally, the things that
are going to spread are the fruity, the nutty, the things that spread. Because those are the
things that the animals are going to spread around. So in 2017, a large international team
of ecologists and archaeologists led by environmental research, environmental science researcher
Carolina Levis of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Wageningen. OK, keep going. Sorry
to you, uh. Netherlandians. Uh. Norwegians? No. That's Norway. Yeah. I think the Netherlands
is the Dutch. Yeah, that's right. Okay. There's only two things I hate in this world. People
who are intolerant to other people's cultures and the Dutch.
We got both here. You got me and the Netherlandians. That's a quote from Oscar Powers. If any of
you are too young to have seen it or just for some reason haven't seen it.
Okay, okay, okay. Anyway, so those people from the Netherlands, that crazy Wageningen University
completed a study looking at the peculiar pattern of distribution. What immediately stood out
in their data was that among the oligarchs, domesticated species are five times more likely
than non-domesticated species to be hyperdominant. So of those 227, five times more of those are
domesticated species. So there are other domesticated species. There are non-domesticated species
that have become hyperdominant, but most of the hyperdominant, five times more of them
are domesticated. OK. All right. Which is crazy. So
whether they're hyperdominant or not, there's still five times more of the 227 species that
are domesticated. The 227 are the hyperdominant. No, right. But five times more than that are
domesticated. So there's still more than the 227 species that are. No, no. It's saying within
that 227. Oh, gotcha. You get a certain amount of them that are undomesticated, natural, and
some of them that are domesticated. But there's five times more of the domesticated ones. I
see. Within the 200-plus. I got you. OK. I'm with you. OK.
So among the favored species mentioned that are hyperdominant includes the Brazil nut,
the ice cream bean tree. I'm not saying the scientific names. The Amazon grape. a be you
and the cocoa tree chocolate. Other prized Amazonian species domesticated in ancient times include
the Acai palm, the Tukuma palm. Tukuma. The peach palm, the Kupuaco tree, cashew tree and
the rubber tree. There you go. So indeed, although often overlooked, Amazonia has rightly been
described as a major center of crop domestication on a global scale. Prior to the European conquest,
according to Charles R. Clement of Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, at
least 83 native species were domesticated to some degree, including manioc, sweet potato,
cacao, tobacco, pineapple, hot peppers, as well as numerous fruit trees and palms, and at least
another 55 imported neotropical species were cultivated. So not only did they cultivate
and domesticate a bunch of the species that were already found in the Amazon, they imported
species into the Amazon. Interesting. Once they've, once they conquered. No, the Amazonians imported
species. Oh, they imported them. So they're not natural to the region then? Yeah, they
originate outside of the Amazon. Mm, OK. That's a pretty crazy fact, I think. Umm...
bit.
Unlike the Amazon itself, large parts of which remain inaccessible to archaeologists, these
two coastal Peruvian valleys have been well studied, yielding as well as manioc, evidence
for radiocarbon dated human cultivation of squash, 9,240
and 7,660 years before present, peanuts. 7,840 years before present. King Wah, 8,000 and 7,500
years before present. And cotton, 5,490 years before present. What is notable, however, is
that all of these crops had already been domesticated elsewhere before being grown in coastal Peru.
Interesting. So. Wow, so that means that their trade network was vast. Yes. was widespread
up into the Americas, most likely, and possibly by boat to other places, right? Right, so basically
these people are masters of agriculture. They come up with terra preta that can make anything
grow over and over and over again. They domesticate a bunch of- Generations. Yeah, and they specifically
had a big focus on domesticating tree species. There was a lot of- domestic trees. Yeah, it
seemed like they liked the... Domesticated trees. It seems like they liked the tree cover, the
trees. Yeah, and that's probably because like... So they saw. This sounds to me like a civilization
who was living with the earth, right? Like they weren't fighting against it to like dominate
it and subdue it. They had learned to live in harmony and they live in this rainforest. And
so they... found the species natural to it and cultivated the ones that were beneficial to
them. Mm-hmm. And they create the soil that makes the rainforest even more plentiful. Right.
Yeah. Well, and that gives me a little bit of a segue into some more modern time research
that's been done. Right? So we've talked about the, you know... the, what was it, 1500s when,
um, when the Spanish, when the Spanish went through there. Yeah. Um, and this pretty much
does Oriana's expedition. Yeah. In the 1530s or 1540s, 1541, 1542,
I believe. Right. Um, it brings me into like the idea of like, like Luke Caverns and he's
a more, he's a, he's a much more modern, um, anthropologist. That's interested in looking
into a lot of these Amazonian ideas and like dude, I love him I've heard him on a couple
interviews and apparently his origin story is that he got inspired by like Graham Hancock
and all this and He wanted to like look into it all and yeah in Indiana Jones. Yeah And
instead of going like the Graham Hancock route, being like the renegade journalist who writes
about science, he was like, you know what? I'm going to go get my degree in archaeology. That
way people can take his name seriously. Right. Apparently, Luke Caverns is a synonym. Is a...
well, it's a false... Not a synonym. Not a... I mean, it's a false name. No, no, not synonym,
but pseudonym. Yeah. It's a fake name that he goes by. Yeah. Sounds that way. Anyway, I think
he's actually confirmed it. Oh, okay. Yeah. Anyway, Luke Caverns talks about the idea that
I lost my train of thought a little bit here.
I'm going to have to pause it for a second. Yeah, no worries. I wanted to point out one
more sentence of the gardening stuff. So an authoritative study published in Science suggests
that these cultivated Peruvian squash plants may have been from a line that originally had
been domesticated not in Mexico, but in southwestern Ecuador and the Colombian Amazon as early as
10,000 to 9,300 years ago. Whoa. Yeah. And especially with the yucca plants we were talking about,
those plants we were talking about earlier that you have to process in a certain way or else
it's poison, those go back like six, seven, 8,000 years ago. And that's the time of domestication.
And why would you spend the time domesticating a plant that you couldn't process? So they
have to have had an even longer history with the plant to figure out. how to process it
in order to even be motivated to domesticate and produce it. Wow. So basically there's a
lot of evidence that the Amazonian culture goes well. It's deeper. Way back into the ice age.
I mean, none of these dates specifically go to the Ice Age, but... Well, yeah, because
a lot of times they're dating things that are relevant, but they're not necessarily... They
can't specifically date the civilization. They can only date the things that they see, but...
Or the organic materials, but... Did you find what you wanted to talk about? I can keep going.
Keep going. Yeah, keep going. Um, yeah, so this is the part where he talks about, uh, yeah,
that exact thing. Uh, Francisco de Oriana 16th century voyage down in the Amazon, eight unprocessed
maniac roots, uh, survived became mightily sick. Anyway, there, that's where he makes the point
that we have evidence of the cultivating cultivation of domesticated maniac by 8,000 or perhaps
as much as 10,000 years ago. follows that the ability to process it must have already been
developed by then. Yeah. So it's even older than that. So we're talking about like older
than 10,000 plus years ago that they figured out how to cultivate the plant. Right. So that,
because the timeframe of the domestication doesn't mean... that that's the timeframe of figuring
out because you, there's a lot of processes that go into figuring it out to year, like
hundreds of thousands, hundreds of years or thousands of years of practices to figure out
how to work this plant into a thing that you can use because it might've been something
that easily grows, right? It's a root. It's something that grows in the ground, something
that with a terra preta is easy to grow probably for them. But the problem gets even more complicated.
So the same problem looms on an even larger, more complex scale with other plants in Amazon,
and the uses to which they are put and the processing they require. Anthropologist Jeremy Narby,
author of The Cosmic Serpent DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, draws attention to curare, the
blowgun and arrow poison.
Invented, we do not know when, in the ancient Amazon, it produces paralysis and death by
asphyxiation in the muscles required for breathing when they cease to function. It is used, Narby
explains, because it kills tree-born animals without poisoning their meat while causing
them to relax their grip and fall to the ground. So monkeys, when hit with the untreated arrow,
tend to wrap their tails around the branches and die out of the archer's reach. So if you
shoot a monkey without poison up in the tree, their tail's gonna stay wrapped. Right. In
death. But with this curare poison, if you hit them with a blow dart of curare, it causes
them to relax and it poisons them, kills them and it doesn't poison the meat. Wow. So it's
a very useful hunting aid, therefore, and one, moreover, that has been adopted into modern
medical anesthesiology. Whoa, okay. But the real mystery, as Narby goes on to show us,
is how it was ever invented in the first place. The consensus among scholars is that curare,
of which there are 40 types in the Amazon, made from 70 plant species, was stumbled upon by
chance experimentation. Narby doubts this scenario, so this is Narby. To produce it, it is necessary
to combine several plants and boil them for 72 hours while avoiding the fragrant but mortal
vapors emitted by the broth. The final product is a paste that is inactive unless injected
under the skin. If swallowed, it has no effect. It is difficult to see how anybody could have
stumbled upon this recipe by chance experimentation. Yeah, that doesn't seem likely. So? So they
were, they, I mean, obviously they had some sort of experimentation. Some sort. Right.
Whether it be there was an arrowhead that accidentally got dipped in this thing, and they got hit,
and then somebody got hit by it, and they saw the effects of it, and they were like, OK,
that makes sense. Let's. now we're just going to tip everything in that, you know, or at
least try it more, right? Experiment with a little bit. But it doesn't suggest that it's
going to be a chance. Right. You don't just like stumble upon a combination of dozens of
plants that you have to boil for 72 hours and then inject under the skin in order to cause
death. No. Like, there's some. What I see is, I mean, I do see some kind of experimentation
to refine it. Yeah, experimentation, but not just like wild experiment. Not just like guess
and check. You don't just like, let's catalog all 150,000 species of plants in the Amazon
and try a combination of one after the other after the other. No, that would take millennia.
Right. You have to have some sort of science or theory or guidance. And so that leads into
the similar thing, which is that the same issue for ayahuasca. Mm-hmm. Ayahuasca itself is
out of the 150,000 species of plants, two plants, a vine and a different plant, and either of
them on their own are ineffective, don't do anything. But only when you mix the two of
them together do you get the ayahuasca brew, which can create like sustained visionary states.
So that's another one of those things you don't just stumble upon. And when people ask the
Amazonians, like the natives, how do they come up with this stuff? They say that the plants
told them. So essentially what they're claiming here is that they're using shamanism to commune
with the spirits of the forest, of nature. And it's those spirits that instruct them. how
to create these concoctions. Yeah, that goes back to our previous episode on consciousness
and how the shamanism, the layers of the onion, and how there's this animal and plant consciousness
that they're tapping into when they go into these states of shamanism. So fascinating,
man. You got more? I got a little bit more on this. All right, let's keep going. Across much
of the Amazon, the nexus that facilitates such interaction is the extraordinary visionary
brew ayahuasca, a plant medicine that has been in use among the indigenous peoples of this
vast region for unknown thousands of years. Its active ingredient derived from dimethyltryptamine
DMT, an immensely potent hallucinogen.
It is from the other ingredient, however, derived from Bannisteriopsis. Capyvine. The Capyvine,
yeah, I've heard that. That the brew gets its name. The function of the ayahuasca vine in
the brew is to transmit a monoamine oxidase inhibitor into the bloodstream of the recipient
so that he or she may gain sustained access to the extraordinary effects of DMT, a substance
that is normally neutralized in the gut by the enzyme monoamine oxidase. Right, so the...
So it was the ayahuasca. It's or it was the can't even itself is the active ingredient
is the active ingredient But the can be just it gets destroyed in your gut, right? But the
capy vine creates the environment within your gut that allows you to oxidase inhibitor that
inhibitor yeah that allows the DMT to continue to enter your system and not be destroyed,
right? Okay There are other ways of accessing the visionary power of Amazonian plants, wrench
and DMT, notably by snorting them as snuff, but the effects are short-lasting. Taken orally
in the form of ayahuasca brew, however, the experience can last up to six hours, permitting
a much more sustained and immersive trance journey. It is, in my view, a remarkable scientific
that such a highly effective combination of just two out of the estimated 150,000 different
species of plants, trees, and vines in the Amazon was discovered by mere trial and error. Nor
if you ask Amazonian shamans, as I have done, how their ancestors made this discovery, they
will admit to trial and error. Will they admit to trial and error at all? Or indeed to any
other method that Western science would recognize as rational? What they claim very simply But
unanimously is that a variety of plant spirits among which Ayahuasca is paramount have taught
them everything important they need to know about the properties of other plants in the
jungle, thus allowing them to make powerful medicines to heal the sick and in general to
be good doctors. And remember that passage out of River of Darkness where Carvajal was able
to use magic curiosities or what was the term. I can't remember the term he used. To cure
everyone other than the one guy who was mortally wounded. Right. Man.
And it's also important to note that the reason we don't have a lot of this knowledge in our
normal textbooks and stuff is when the Spanish came and did their conquests of this area,
they burned so much of these codices and all of this knowledge that these Amazonians and
even in Central America, they burned all of the knowledge that these people had. You know,
same as like, you know, similar to the fact that like... That's part of what interests
me so much about the Amazon, because that was like the Spanish's MO, right? They come in,
they try and convert you to be a docile population that they can use to take advantage of. And
in order to do so, they take over your religions, convert you to Christianity, burn all your
knowledge. Yeah. Right. But... That didn't happen in the Amazon. That happened in Mexico and
Peru and a lot of the places that they did take over. That they settled, yeah. Right. But what
happened in the Amazon was a little bit different because remember what also came with the Spanish
to flu was all the diseases. Diseases, yeah. So it wasn't actually the Spanish just killing
everyone that caused all the deaths and die-hards. It was smallpox. It was flu. It was measles.
It was all the. plague even, all the stuff that had been established in Europe that these people
had immunity to, that they were bringing over with them. They hadn't had any kind of defense
for. Right, and so all the Americans didn't have a defense for it, right? And so the interesting
thing about this whole Amazon thing is that you get Oriana's,
excursion. What's the expedition? Expedition. And then there's a couple other expeditions,
like within the next 10 or 20 years. And they report less and less populations. And then
finally, later on, when Oriana came back, right? No, when Jesuit priests, they actually did
finally come through and like, fully do a sweep. Convert people and all that. They reported
that there was just small hunter gatherer tribes. There was no civilization according to them.
And that was another 100 years later. That was hundreds of years later. And that's part of
why when the Carvajal's account of Oriana's expedition finally resurfaced in the 1800s,
that people didn't believe it. Right. Is because when they finally did go back, there wasn't
anyone there. But now that we know that there was people there, not just because of Carvajal's.
Because of these new findings that we got. Because of all of the LIDAR scans of the forest. Yep.
Yeah, that's what we're going to get into next. And the terra preta. And so there was a significant
population. Yep. That kind of gives us a good segue into what is it nowadays that we're finding
that leads people like us to believe in these ancient civilizations, like the Amazonian.
you know, civilizations of the Amazon forest, right? And it's these LIDAR scans that are
now being done. Like before these LIDAR scans though, there were a few researchers that in
the late 1800s in the early 1900s that did go and they did do research there physically.
They went and they saw these geometric mounds. And also these just built up mounds on top
of these plateaus that they built up. And then there was these structures, right? There was
this remnants of these structures. But because in the Amazon, what they were building with
was mud and they were building with, they were just building with the materials they had there.
They weren't building with stone. It's not something that, stone is not something that they had
a lot of there. They had mud. Right, because, Yeah. It would just be the entire Amazon canopy
falling down year after year after year. All the like it's just going to be a huge layer
of sentiment. Right. And they were just using all that to build up these structures, which
are considered pyramids. You know, when you reconstruct a lot of these things and there
are layers of stone, like they use stone is almost like facing blocks. Like they use them
as like a like a protective thing, but they're not all that protective when you're only using
like, you know, three foot stones. Yeah. I mean, maybe they favored. And they had no mortar.
Yeah, maybe they favored wood as their building. Right. And they had lots of access to where
they live in a forest. It was basically wood and mud. They used wood and mud. And over time,
when you get rains, you're in a rainforest. When you got rains and all these different
elements. And you got farms surrounding your city with terra praida. Yeah. That are just
going to overgrow. And then all of a sudden, oh yeah, and then in here it talks about like
the estimate is that 99% of the population was wiped out by disease inside the Amazon. And
so if you lose 99% of everyone who knows anything, then what's gonna be left? The lucky survivors
are not gonna have the same capabilities. They're not gonna be able to maintain these big cities,
these big farms, this big knowledge base. Yeah. and they're going to turn, revert back into
hunter gatherers. So I want to read this quote from Science Magazine. It's from Lizzie Wade
in the Science Magazine. It's titled Laser Mapping Reveals Oldest Amazonian Cities Built Twenty
Five Hundred Years Ago. And I was going to go to this.
Although researchers don't yet know how many people lived in the Apano Valley, the settlements
were large. The core area of the Kilimope, for example, covers an area comparable in size
to the pyramid-studded Giza Plateau in Egypt, or the main avenue of the Teotihuacan in Mexico.
Apano's landscape modifications reveal garden cities of the ancient Maya, of the classic
Maya. The authors say, and what's been discovered so far is just the tip of the iceberg of what
could be found in the Ecuadorian Amazon magias. So yeah, and then they go on to say, there
was a network of roads connecting the Apontosites, suggest that they all existed at the same time,
because these roads connect all these different places. That's what our- A lot of these are
like- That's what Oriana and Carvajal reported too, is these huge roads. There was the one
point where he finally, like there was one point where he went inland. Oh, and- Yeah, I forgot.
That was the bit that spooked him. So they decided to take a road inland. And they said it wasn't
more than a couple leagues. And then all of a sudden, the road widened into what they called
a highway. Like four car lengths in our modern. I mean, I don't know. But it was huge. And
they were super impressed by it. But that's what freaked them out. And they were like,
well, any civilization that has done something this impressive is gonna be very powerful.
We can't just stroll in there. Walt in there, we may never come back. Yep, yeah, so it says
the roads connecting the sites suggest that they all exist at the same time. They are a
millennium older than other complex Amazonian societies, including Lano's de Mojios, Mojos,
it recently discovered ancient urban system in Bolivia. The Apano Valley cities were denser
and more interconnected than sites in Llanos Mojios, or Mojos, sorry. Rostane says, we say
Amazonians, but we should say Amazonias, to capture the region's ancient cultural diversity,
he says. So that's just a little bit of word play, a little bit of. The other point I wanted
to make when you were talking about how the Spanish would come and burn everything is because
the people in the Amazon mostly died to the disease and not to Spanish violence, the Spanish
never had to come through and burn everything. That's true. And so, depending on how they
wrote, if we actually go and excavate a bunch of these sites, we might find some writing
still.
The codices are like, well, not the codices specifically. The Mayan codices were like these
like zigzag folded, you know, text, but what- I think there's like, Caverns talks about-
Two of them left, right? What Luke Caverns talks about is these like, almost high relief images,
like hieroglyphs. And they're like these like square looking images that- Each of them have
like a four quadrant thing and their images, like their faces and their like the image of
a wind or like a cloud or like whatever it might be. And each of those is four words. So there's
four quadrants in a, in a, in a thing. And each of those is four words. Oh, interesting. So,
and they've discovered some of these and some of the sites, but they haven't gone to discover
as much as they could discover if they were to actually go deeper and deeper into it. And
he also talks about like these like faces you see in, when you're walking around inside the
jungle there, like they just, not just faces, like an image, like we're talking about like
a whole rock cut face, right? So what we're talking about like, Oh, you're talking about
like the Olmec heads? No, no, not even just the Olmec heads. We're talking about like the
side of a temple, like almost like if it was like a lookout post, like imagine like, like
a World War II bunker, right? You see this little slit where you could look out of, but it's
a concrete bunker. Imagine that, but you have two eyes that have like defined eyebrows. Once
you peel away a lot of the jungle, you have these defined eyebrows that right underneath
are eyeballs. And then right underneath that, there's stone that create part of the face.
And then there's a giant slit for a mouth. So it looks like a face. You're just walking through
this path through the jungle, and all of a sudden you see this giant face looking at you. But
all you can see is the eyes and the mouth. But once you start peeling that away, you start
seeing the eyebrows. You start seeing the different defining features. But on top of those is what
he assumes is going to be temples. It's what he assumes is going to be like higher, like
not like. more to be discovered basically, but all you see is trees and foliage. That's all
you see is, and then a face. I got to catch a little bit of the Luke Caverns interview.
That's very good. And he talked about a bunch of the pyramids that are found in Central and
South America. And how a bunch of them, if, all right, so like if you grant the Egyptologist
dating of, the Egyptian pyramids, all the Egyptian buildings, then these would be hundreds of
years, if not thousands in some cases, before the Egyptians. And so, like the first big pyramid
building is not from Egypt, it's actually from South America. Right, and they even talk about,
some of them are wider footprint. Like they have more footprint than even the Giza, like
the pyramids of Giza have. Granted, they are made of mud. And it's not all of them. Some
of them are made of stone. Some of them. Yeah, but a lot of them are just they're like terraces
that are made like and a lot of these are made like you're talking about the one's in the
Amazon rainforest. I'm just talking South America in general. So like the Inca and the Aztec.
Oh, right. Right. So like the ones that are survived on the west side of the Andes where
like the Inca were like the pre Inca civilizations. There's buildings there. where they show seismic
resistant building techniques. Right, that's true. He talks about evidence of, so roadways
coming out of Peru, that area of Peru, into this area where there's these acids that are
naturally found, and that these acids are hypothesized, like they're, supposedly able to like fuse
granite. Oh, shit. And so like the theory being that they're like how they're doing this like
polygonal weird shape combination of building techniques is that they're using this acid
to like fuse these granite blocks together, which is how they're able to build these crazy
things without any mortar.
When a lot of the building techniques in Peru are also the similar, like when you talk about
like, if you look at like the Brothers of the Serpent unfinished series like that they do
or the. I don't know what you would call it, but the, the unfinished podcast that they had,
and they also do it in the, oh my gosh, what is the name of the,
was the thing they're on recently? No, it was just the Cosmic Summit. When they do their
presentation, when Russ does his presentation at the Cosmic Summit, it's the unfinished thing.
They talk about the similarities between Peru and ancient Egypt and how a lot of these, like
the scoop marks they talk about and a lot of these fusion of the stone itself. And there's
no. There's no. We haven't talked about any of this yet. So people, if you have not seen
this, Google search. And we'll show some photos here. If you're watching on YouTube, they'll
just be there. If you're listening on podcasts, if you don't know this, you can look at your
podcast player while we're talking. If you're using the podcast app or Overcast, I'm not
sure what other ones support it, but we put in chapter art. And YouTube will have it too.
We can actually show you images. Anyway, so look at your phone. Look at your YouTube. Right
now. These are scoop marks, quote unquote, scoop marks. When we look at the ancient Egyptian
quarries that they're quarrying all the stone from, the really old stuff, in some of the
stuff you do see evidence of copper chiseling and stuff, and you see all this copper dust
that shows evidence of copper chiseling. But then in other areas, there's these like, what
looks like ice cream scoops out of the rock. And we have no clue what can do that. But Luke
Caverns just shows some of the stuff in South America, Central America, where there's scoop
marks, over here too. And so like clearly- And megalithic stones. We're talking two civilizations
roughly- A world apart. Roughly around similar time frames, a world apart. using what seems
to be similar technology. Or techniques or whatever it might be, yeah. Like either they're in communication
with each other, they're like able to talk and travel and communicate. Or if you don't want
to grant that, which maybe you don't, maybe they come from a singular voice. Maybe they
both have inherited knowledge from a previous source civilization that both contributed to
both of them. Right. back into our Younger Dryas episode and like whatever that source civilization
was getting wiped out by the Younger Dryas event. And then some of them be surviving and settling
amongst different civilizations around the world because if you were if you were to grant the
fact that these were world traveling technologically in their time or for whatever technology they
had, they were technologically advanced. And maybe it was the same person, maybe it was
multiple people that just spread out amongst the world to try to survive. Right. Yeah. And
they spread their knowledge is whatever knowledge they could provide to be able to survive with
different tribes or different peoples around the world. They would they would share whatever
they could to be able to survive. Yeah. Right. And that could be why you're seeing all these
similarities around the world and their building practices and their. um, religions and all
these different things that, you know, and that might be why you speaking of the religion.
So like what you mean by that, there's a another chapter in America before by Graham Hancock
where he talks about, there's some really weird eerie similarities between some of the native
American, um, uh, religions revolving around like what happens when you die and the process
of like entering the afterlife. as well as with the Egyptians. So there's similarities as far
as you die and you go see a god that tests you and judges you, and you have to travel across
the Milky Way, and they have certain stars that you stop at that are the same between the two.
Really weird details to have in common. Yeah, we're going to. Which ties into that like Y
Files episode where they're talking about the Egyptians in the Grand Canyon. Yep. I'll link
to that because that one's super fun. I love that episode. I don't know what to think about
it, but man, is it, if it's not good, like food for the imagination. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've looked
into it a little bit, and there's a lot of people that say that it's not true. But until you
go and find out for yourself, we can never know. So. You know, like, obviously this isn't great
proof. But. When you hear him, as part of that episode, he actually calls the Smithsonian
and asks the lady about it. Oh, yeah. And you hear her tone, you hear how short she is with
him about it, she is pissed that he is calling about it. Yeah. Like, she's heard it before,
and she's like, I'm touchy. So maybe there's just a bunch of wacky, ancient civilization
researchers that end up calling the Smithsonian all the time. But maybe she doesn't like having
to talk about it. Yeah. Anyway. Man. I can't believe it's been two hours already. Yeah.
I hope you didn't mind the hiccups too much. We'll try to eliminate them as much as possible.
20 minutes straight of hiccups. Hope you enjoyed. Yeah. You know, things happened. Duality check
this week. Man.
And we did a whole segment without being recorded, technically. Yeah. So it's been an eventful
episode. Totally. You know, it's now 1 AM. So we're going to call it soon. We're going to
put out a call to you guys. Riotous, do you have any hiccup remedies? Because Drew's classic
remedy didn't work. Yeah, it didn't. I hit a vape and it worked, which I don't recommend.
His normal remedy. What's your normal remedy? Describe it. Yeah, it's basically like taking
a giant gasp of air and holding it for a few seconds and then swallowing it. while holding
and then take as much more air as you can possibly take, swallowing that, and then take as much
more air as you could possibly take, swallow that, and then hold, hold until you just can't
hold it anymore and then you let it out. And it's worked for me many times. But tonight,
the beer got the best of me. There's too much bubbly, too much gas, too much. And with all
the air swallowing, he was burping for going away. I was burping, yeah. It was a mess. But
we got through it, and I hope it wasn't too annoying. We'll definitely edit it so it's
not so annoying. Give us your hiccup remedies. Let us know what you think about the Amazon.
If you have any extra details on any of this stuff that you'd like to share, please do.
Write us at host at dualitycheck.net. By the way. I am currently working on the show notes.
When we first launched the show, I spent days changing the show note structure, and then
republishing, changing, republishing, until I got them just how I wanted. And now I just
went back and looked, and it just shows half of our summary paragraph, and it cuts off.
So in the podcast player, you don't get all the links and stuff that I spend so much time
working on. I'm going to try and figure this out, but until I do, If you want all of our
links and all of the images and everything, go to dualitycheck.net and just click episodes
and go to the episode that you're listening to. I spent a lot of time actually cultivating
recommended reading, all the books we talk about, all the different articles. It's not showing
up, huh? Not at the moment. I will figure it out, but it may take me a while. I'm not sure
how long it'll take me to solve it. But I'll figure it out. If you already know, let us
know too. So we can expedite this process a little bit. Yeah, actually, yeah. Maybe I'll
have to ask our cousin Jake. He might know. He's offered a couple times to help at the
website. Well, we're open to help. We're still new to this thing. And we love to interact
with people who have interesting things and points of view on life. And If you're willing
to help us in any shape or form, and I know we talked about it in the beginning of the
episode, but if you want to listen through and you hear some kind of snippet that might sound
good on social media or it might sound good as far as alerting the masses to what kind
of content we've got, let us know. Also, if you're enjoying the show, if you can go on
Apple Podcasts and give us a review, that actually helps us be discovered by other people. If
you're on YouTube, leave us a comment. Leave us a like. Subscribe. Give us a subscribe.
That helps us with the algorithm. We're just like a couple dinguses chilling here, trying
to figure out how to do a podcast. And we could use all the help you guys could offer us. So
we appreciate anything you're willing to do. And if you're not, that's fine. If you're just
a lurker, that's fine too. 30 minute straight to burping. I want to hear that in the comments
too, how annoying that was. We're going to do our best to make it not so annoying in the
editing, but I don't know how much we can do for that. We'll see how it turns out. I should
be able to duck it. Like, you'll hear the echo of your burps in my microphone. There's not
much I can do when you're like in the middle of a sentence and you're like, something, something
in the Amazon. That is unfortunate. But this has been a challenging and very worth it, though.
I think this conversation was great. Thanks for joining us. I appreciate you guys' time.
And we'll see you next week. Adios. Later.
Thanks for watching!
I said, blue Blue
Thanks for watching!
you
Bye!