Archaeological Mysteries by Albert Yu-Min Lin

hi my name is Albert Lin and I'm here to talk about where the diversity in cultures really come from you know I've I've had the honour of traveling the world from jungle the jungle from desert to desert from Mountain to mountain and I think the thing that really gets me is the enigma of what are the origins in imagination so good evening and welcome so tonight we've this is the last of this year's series of Darwin College lectures over the last two months our lecturers have been exploring many aspects of the theme of enigmas exploring well explorers are a fairly rare species today I think one day someone may set forth for the Moon or Mars or to peek under the cloud veil of Venus but for now we can simply view a satellite image online and see almost anywhere on any continent or on some of the planets it wasn't always so they're discovering what is out there has always been a driving almost enigma for human society what is discovery is it informing the collective human mind so that we can all know it's to add to the collective human knowledge you think about explorers in history they set out to go beyond the known or they're known further south north east west higher deeper across mountains over oceans through deserts to see what was there but today you know we have better maps of the surface of the Moon or Mars than we do at the bottom of the ocean the ocean depths may remain largely incognito the French under sea explorer Jacques Cousteau sparked my childhood interest ultimately that led me to be on a small search ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean putting instruments down on the seabed in three kilometers of water in order to find the postulated magma chamber beneath the plate boundary that separates Europe and North America guess what it wasn't there a new hypothesis required now back in the fourth century BCE the written shared community of knowledge was really searching out from Greece and Persia and India and China and one individual pytheas set sail from the Mediterranean and he went Northwest to discover an island he called Britannica and even further past the land of darkness its CATIA to discover the Orcas islands and then probably on to Greenland so he added Britain to the collective knowledge effectively our Discoverer but why did he go maybe he sought riches tin in Cornwall perhaps but maybe his reason was more like George Mallory's the climbing Everest because it's there so what what is an explorer to do now our explorers teetering on extinction are they a new Red List species how does technology bring new insight and questions can we explore the essence of humanity so tonight please welcome the explorer and broadcaster so dr. Albert linen who is going to talk to us about no title archaeological mysteries I think it's archaeological mysteries anyway Albert [Music] [Applause] thank you master that was I think you should do the whole thing actually because I was thank you all for braving braving coronavirus to be here I know it was I was actually saying it's it's it's been ironic considering this is the Darwin lecture series and it might not be serving our deepest survival interest to be in this room right now but we're here we're here so let's do this and I promise I'm not gonna talk about Crona anymore you know I have to say it was a lot more terrifying for me to come here then I think most other talks it's been a bit of a challenge trying to think about how to compose this I'm not an archaeologist as may have been mentioned I'm a I'm an engineer I'm an engineer and somehow over the last decade I've had this incredible experience where the projects that I've done and then the things that that have led to have combined engineering and storytelling to the point in which I've had this incredible honor of just bouncing around the globe non-stop meeting people that are doing some incredible things and then applying technology maybe you to see if we can push the frontier just a little bit further you know just for example maybe it was about three weeks ago that I was standing at the base of this pyramid in Mexico which rises out of the jungle you know like like like an arm reaching for the sky if anybody's been in the jungle it's a hard place to be yeah you really you really do feel the presence of everything trying to kill you it's it's snakes its killer bees it's a wasp that if it stings you it'll paralyze your lungs it's just the the pounding heat and humidity that that I think you either hate or you love yeah there's a bit of you that loves it and I was there with these two archaeologists dr. Francesco Estrada Bali and the site director Sandra Allen's REO and what they've been doing there for the last couple of years has been pretty remarkable finding things within these pyramids that you you wouldn't quite expect that might shift your understanding of how a civilization like the Maya might have operated they let me go into the top of this pyramid there's only two pyramids that have been found so far which have ancient Maya channels I enter in through the top of these pyramids and when you pull back the little grate at the top you end up going down deeper into they send you down into this hole and as as I'm descending into the hole Francisco mentions that there's not so many pleasant things down there possibly and just to watch out for there the possibility of a fair to land snake because they hadn't been in there in about a year does anybody know about the fair land snake you've got a 50-50 chance of living even with the anti-venom and they try not to give it to you because the anti-venom itself is sometimes more dangerous than the bite so it's not good as we're heading in feels like mini whip school I'm coming this my sound recordist Simon who's going further and further into the channel as we're descending down ancient Mayan staircases and and if you could hear what he's saying I was he's identifying a mini whip scorpion oh good right this is why I feel so the hottest mug is the place I've ever been everyone's party scorpions in parts awesome that's exploration right yeah I mean it was it was rough you're down in a tiny little cramped corner and all of a sudden you're sitting there face-to-face with the ancient chamber of a Queens burial you know surrounded by scorpions of course but but it's remarkable the feeling you get when you're when you're just past the veil when you're when you're there in a moment where you feel like you're you're you're touching something sacred at the very limits of human imagination we were using technology like lidar interior lidar to try to scan the inside of those chambers and then come out and build a 3d model where you can imprint the interior structure of the pyramid inside the exterior model that we've created and try to see whether or not we've hit bedrock and we hadn't which means that there might be another tomb further down beneath and then that was what that was maybe I think less than three weeks ago that I left there and then and then I headed off to Peru so just last week I was at a site that's called Chan Chan which means Sun Sun it's on the coast of Peru in a desert it's a remarkable place it's they think it's actually one of the largest Adobe cities or cities in general in in the pre-columbian world and it's just this place that sort of has melted away over time but once housed a vast empire before the Inca and I was there you know and this at this time was something like around I think it started around 850 ad and got to right before the Spaniards arrived and then the Inca took it out but at its height it had 40 to 60 thousand people in it and at that time that was more than were here in London at the time so when you go around and you walk through those city halls you start to feel something you started to see this sort of image of what daily life might have been like what are those weird little things down there they're not fish they're actually they explained to me that they're they're images of little pelicans you can see the nose sticking on the eye in the middle and these very kind of strange shapes and then the walls have just sort of crumbled away with the rains right outside of of Qian Qian which is supposedly the 6th driest city in the world or near there the neighboring city is something is something quite gruesome actually you know the world there was one that was imagined out of a connection to the natural world everything was about the natural world right they're living in an incredibly arid dry place there's these really intense anomaly anomalies these possible rains you know everything is based off of their understanding of their relationship to what's happening around them they're using what they see around them to try to connect to nature there's a deep culture that was based and still is based in in using plant medicines to try to connect to the spirits of the natural world plants like San Pedro cactus which is a entheogen term that's been coined by group people I mean not more than 20 or 30 years ago called ruck and others from Brown to describe the use the cultural use through time of hallucinogenic plants you know to try to understand our how we've used those as human beings through time and still today everywhere you go people are talking about a connection to the San Pedro in Peru it's been described as something that sets you free from matter and for the chimú they would drink it out of a drink that they called shamora and and during every full moon it was a full moon thing because they worship the moon and when their lives change for whatever reason they had to try to figure out how to stop the change because they needed to try to figure out how to turn balance to their world and just recently right side right upright right outside of the walls of chan chan they found the remains of what they think to now be the world's largest child human sacrifice you can see the skull of a young child that I'm holding it's actually not a regular shaped skull it's been it's been modified as is the tradition in the Amazon actually where they've put you know a metal board on top of this child's head over time and created this shape that might have been more culturally freezing but these kids came from all over the place there's this one moment they weren't they weren't necessarily well we don't know if they're brought by force or not but apparently based off of what they've been able to study from the bones and from the matter around their bellies is that they were all eating the same thing for about three months before they're led to their death and then there was a systematic killing there was a this incredible knife that was found this blade that they showed me where where it still has the beads inside it at the end of its rattle and the rattle signifies a sign of death and as this archaeologist was showing me the sound of this rattle you could actually hear the sound the last sound that those children heard before their chest was cut open and their hearts were ripped out because you can actually see there's systematic cut marks on all 137 skeletons that were found in this one pit in this one moment now what was that for why did they why did they all go to that end what do we do in the human the extreme ends of our human nature it's it's hard to say but there's a theory by anthropologist named Hagen Klaus that it might have had something to do with the changing weather El Nino events you know they couldn't deal with these massive floods that came through and if anybody's been following the news about Peru right now just a week after actually two days after I left that lab massive floods with an alanine you rushed through and and caused incredible havoc I think it killed actually four people in neighboring streets of southern Peru where can you find evidence for this two days later we're at seventeen thousand two hundred feet of elevation that's roughly five thousand two hundred fifty meters which is a fast jump my my father's friend Pharaoh a climber would know that you're not supposed to go that high that quickly it's not a good idea but up there high up in those mountains you see those lines in the glacier this is the fastest we're treating well it's one of the fastest between glaciers in the world but it's one of the only tropical glaciers or a handful of tropical glaciers that still sort of exist they say it's retreating at a rate of almost 20 meters per year but with its retreat is a book of knowledge because within each one of those tiny layers might be a clue about an ancient climate there's ice coring that's been going on for several years there's a Lonnie Thompson from Ohio State who's been leading these ice core initiatives way up high up in the Andes actually around the world and you know it's hard this is my my colleague and director Jim who upon getting up there just all of a sudden couldn't take it anymore and had to you know really had read the oxygen as he did that our mountain guide handed him a bunch of coca leaves which you're supposed to chew to deal with the altitude and then he blew three times into the wind in every direction these coca leaves laid out in a pair of three as an offering to the OP whose the mountains around him this is ancient traditional knowledge from you know from his parents and his parents before them and before them and before them you know spoken in words that are spoken by the Inca the Quechua but as we're up there we get little bits of ice and if you look at the little bubbles those bubbles were trapped there when those layers of ice were formed and you know as you go further down those layers you go further down in time and that bubble might have not been released for 5,000 years when you crack it open it smells fresh it's nice but within that is knowledge information chemical information that they could use to glean what it was like in that area and sure enough right around the time of that massacre there was these massive El Nino events that would wipe through and possibly wipe out that city this has been I would say an incredible month but over the last year it's been even crazier I've gone all over the world this is my crew and I on top of a mountain in Jordan a place called Wadi Rum has anybody here been to Wadi Rum yeah it's a enchanting place it's hard to describe it in any other way but people have lived there for thousands of years Bedouin you know eventually the Nabataeans that would go on and build something like Petra but the Bedouin they still live there and there is a researcher Mohammed omean who together with a group of GIS scientists around the world from Arizona from Queens College from others have been using something they call the rock art Sustainability Index or Rossi to try to start to go and catalog what they're seeing on the walls from their ancient ancestors using a crowdsourced approach just using simple cell phones everywhere they go because they live out there with with the GPS on the cell phone and creating a big catalogue of this library written on the rocks this library of information traces of human thought maybe early developments of the alphabet this the mudak alphabet which some of these markers they still make sounds that are used today like that little triangle is actually branded on the side of the camels that sat in the camp next to us they may decided made it sound like an honorary sound or some others but it's this is stuff from an inhabitation across the region that dates back 10,000 years or more and now today with cell phones these better ones running around catalogue and where they all are including a map of ancient knowledge crowd-sourced out of low-tech devices already in their pockets these same people would go on to become the nepo teens that would build Petra amazing Petra and at first you see Petra man that's amazing really is but imagine it when I was there it was blue and yellow it was painted in different colors it was influenced from interactions they had from all around the world and then what you don't see until you get up on top which you're not allowed to do unless you're filming there which is what we've been able to do is get this crazy access is that on the top of each of those rooms are these little catchments it's all catchments it's all a bunch of pools the whole thing looks pretty but actually it's this incredible network of water catchments and they all feed down into these underground cisterns that still fill with water today so the whole thing has these channels that run through the sides of it fated the faces of this stone wall and and they feed down into these underground pools and that's how these in fact if you look at the whole city of Petra it's just one huge bowl feeding down into these cisterns in the middle and it's remarkable it's beautiful but it's remarkable as an engineering feat incredible not so far away I was in I was in the Rift Valley with dr. Roberto Bookman a geologist from Xavier University and she's looking at these settlements the same way that Lonnie Thompson was looking at the glaciers using it as a record but not only a record of what God deposited there but but the geological violence across the region these deposited layers were created with these flash flood events through the desert and then you can see those swirling patterns she calls them last spring sediments and and they're related to specific earthquakes that she can then use way to carbon dating to see where's in the settlements and see when earthquakes happened across the region and if anybody knows the Rift Valley in Jordan it's where the tectonic plates are literally ripping themselves apart earthquakes massive earthquakes you have you have the whole thing sitting on this salt diet per so when you look at the Dead Sea you actually had these moments where bits of tar big chunks of tar would float up to the surface at random times because there's tar trapped underneath dead sea in fact that's what the Nabataeans used to trade a lot of actually there was these descriptions of taking like black cows of tarred fishing them out of the out of the Dead Sea back in the day that's imagine that but also imagine the stories that were generated out of a series of phenomena that you couldn't quite explain thousands of years ago imagine why how you would come up with explanations for that think about where many of the stories that led to the three monotheistic religions today are really originated from they originated out of one of the most geologically violent places in the world something there right maybe there's some part of that that had to do with how we explain the phenomena around us not so long after that I was up in the Arctic Circle with yad magnus looking at 6,000 rock carvings a date from around 500 BC to 420 BC he used that this process is called shoreline dating to figure out how old they are it's a site called Alta and what he explained to me here was that that they would use the grooves of these stones and the movement and the actual pools that you see around us to create a three-dimensional topographical map but then they would place their existing world on top of kind of like he described it as a Google Earth but from ancient times you see a bear there you see reindeer you see these images now first you think well what is this is this a procession in the line what is that and then you look a little closer and you describes me you see that man up there with the arrow a bow and arrow and it's pointing straight up and it looks like that man right in the middle the third person over gets hit with something yawns theory is that this is this is a creationist story where we come from the reindeer we live our life we die and we become reindeer again you know that's that's quite remarkable what really struck me was this image I mean what's going on there you've got a boat a really really really long fishing line and then what looks to be like a massive halibut at the bottom and you're talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago we're talking about them mezzo lithic era first of all how did they figure out how to make a line that could hold a huge massive halibut well they might okay they could figure it out maybe sinew that sort of thing it's like well how did they just sort of stumble across the idea that there was gonna be this monster fish at the bottom of the ocean that they could then figure out how to trick onto biting this line that they would pull up with a huge fight and then feed their family how did all that just sort of come about that knowledge that savvy is this thing that at first I thought was remarkable and then I just realized that it's only remarkable because I take for granted how much I learned from what I have around me now you know I see the world that I have around me now but but what really struck me was who came up with the first idea to do that where did that idea come from somebody came up with that that person was a genius then from the Arctic down right in the middle of the Pacific this is the island of Pohnpei in Micronesia has anybody been to Micronesia it's a long trip tell you that it's in the middle of the ocean there's no direct flights there's like a it's like a whole catalog of flights you gotta take to get there but there people have moved and lived over over a landscape that they don't describe as a landscape actually it's they called Oceana a connected peoples connected by the ocean and there you still see people living in this Polynesian sort of oceanic lifestyle this Micronesian lifestyle and you find these really strange pieces of rock art that are sort of similar speckled across island island covering a massive massive distance dating back maybe 2,000 to 3,500 years old these pieces of rock art that I found on this island are found all the way out in similar ways out in New Caledonia which are literally on the other side of the Pacific well pretty much Wow who imagined a voyage when they set sail possibly from the Philippines often to the horizon with their people and then said you know what follow me we're gonna go try to find a new plot of land out in the middle of the ocean maybe a an island we'll fish this island out of the sea they call it fishing another see these wave finders and there would be this there's this story that Wade Davis talks about where you have a captain and then a Wayfinder and the wayfinder literally had to do nothing else but just sort of sit there and meditate on where they had been remembering all the moments and chart the the points of the sky as it passes over you through time and knowing where the stars are across a series of quadrants and having that entirely memorized in their mind as they're moving forward so they can know where they're going their entire belief system is one which is built upon knowing where you've been to describe where you're going and when I ask anybody on that island about their origin story about where that all began they don't have an answer they just say we came from somewhere which is actually the only place I've ever heard that because everybody else says we came from you know a cave or we came from the mountains but did just say we came from another island somewhere and not really have a story before that is pretty remarkable so where am I going to with all this this is about enigmas right and I'm getting behind here already what I've seen in my travels been that from ocean to ocean from desert to desert from jungle 2 jungle from Mountain to mountain there is a remarkable diversity in human culture I mean remarkable there's a lot of similarities you know ecological conditions the weather what you have access to that certainly drives similarities but there's incredible diversity to just look at jungle cultures for example they're very different from one to the other I'd say so different that it it it inspires a sense of you know a similar memories to what might have inspired Darwin looking around saying what's where does all this diversity come from and it's pretty remarkable too because it comes it comes at a much faster rate I mean really we all left Africa as we all I'm sure have heard many times in this series only roughly 60,000 years ago or so maybe a little more but at that point we annealed down to a very very small number of people there was something that was going on they think that it might have gotten down to less than 10,000 humans that were really around at the time and maybe the group that left Africa is even as small as 150 humans based off of a sweeping genetic study that that Spencer Wells and others at the Genographic product did now from all that we go around we travel around and then all of a sudden we experience the world around us and yet boom there's this massive amount of diversity like I said I think that similar to biology it reflects an evolutionary process see this is where I got tricky for me because I had to figure out how to speak to this incredible audience about something to do with Darwinism and actually it it forced me to really reflect on my entire experiences in life and it the meaningful way because it's true that that the things that I saw or through all my travels did reflect an evolutionary process now evolution is driven in part by some replicator criteria I spend a lot of time this last week reading about evolution I know the big debate now is is there is there you know like the true aesthetic maybe that might be universal that could lead to certain understanding about things like sexual selection in a story that bowerbirds and other things like this well we don't know you know I don't know it's some combo of it all there's also natural selection you know this concept of survival of the fittest that sort of thing which we're not practicing right now but being in this room but that's only one part of it because the other part is this kind of magical thing it's like we is taboo to say the word magic but actually there's a bit of magic this whole be shuffling this mutation of a gene it happens all the time it's random supposedly it's it's what causes that philosophically what causes that so that's where I get to this big question if cultures genes like Richard Dawkins says with means and that sort of thing are just ideas and of course we can talk about whether they get copied because they're they're sexier or because they're more functional all those different things or interesting things to look at but if cultures genes or ideas then what's the magic that creates original ideas that first person to fish for the massive halibut what gives birth to the diversity in culture around us today the enigma what are the origins of imagination where does that come from well if you forgive me I've spent way more time than I thought I would on that original that was supposed to be like five minutes as an interim so I'm gonna try to go fast now through my own personal story I started out my own inspiration my own imagination was probably born out of being the son of astrophysicist and a musician I spent a couple of years here at Cambridge even my father Douglas Lynn was a you know postdoc here there's PhD here then did sabbaticals here and I just take things apart all the time stare stare at microscopes and you know just get interested in science and before you knew it I had a PhD in material science nothing to do with being an explorer but just a PhD in material science because it was fun it was exciting I was really interested in looking beyond the veil but at the same time I was so curious about my own ancestry and I was so curious about the world at large and what I meant to be human that I got super enamoured with these specific individuals that to me at the time were so inspiring because they inspired some idea of charisma I got really kind of crazy about this story of jenga's Khan and I decided right out of grad school I was gonna launch this project to try to find jenga's Khan's tomb using an engineering approach and at the time I was literally living on you know ramen and out of the back of my car and I had a PhD and that's it but but sometimes it's just like that big bold moment that actually leads you out into the thing that will shift your world and and my friends and my family they all supported me to just be as crazy as I could be and to follow those dreams and I just started building this project one by one I built that base off of an inspiration from a man I had met early on in my grad days when I've been traveling around Mongolia this man named Umrah who became my sworn blood brother when I traveled to Mongolia he started telling me about the story of jenga's Khan but not through the story through the lens that I had read about in school the one that describes his life through the lens of his enemies which is actually the only real historical record that still exists today because he didn't really even have it written right his own life at his own time it was just written by his enemies but he tells this completely different story of an individual jenga's Khan I'm using this image to describe jenga's Khan but this is actually an image of a friend of ours as we stand on top of a sacred mountain at the edge of the desert - at sunrise - try to ask for Kimura or windhorse the sacred power that has been something that's influenced the understanding of an individual in Mongolian history perd for thousands of years Genghis Khan on one hand could be thought of as a intensely violent warrior but on another hand you got to imagine here's a person who had absolutely nothing I mean really his father had been murdered his wife had been stolen by the enemies of his father his horses have been taken from him his own tribe had turned their back on him and then he was sent off to die into the into the forbidden what is now the forbidden precinct but into this mountains where you can't heard where you can't really raise any cattle or sheep and then he was sent off to this to this place chased by his enemies and he found solitude in a mountain according to the one almost like poetic version of Mongol history that survives where apparently he stood on top of that mountain and that absolute low point of his life for some reason felt connected to a bigger destiny and from that point forward shifted the entire world that we know today because in a single lifetime not only did it he unites all the tribes that he had been living near they've been fighting for thousands of years but he also turned that tribe outward and created the largest contiguous empire in human history with nothing more than a hundred thousand soldiers and it's max I mean we're talking about taking down the million-man armies of Persia we're talking about Kragen empire that went all the way from you know from the coast of Japan to Poland we're talking about a spread that far out beats Alexander the Great or the Roman but in a single lifetime with nothing more than what maybe charisma what is that charisma that to me that's remarkable that is very remarkable I would also note that at that time you know that globalization that occurred did lead to and this is my only other mentioning of a plague again the the possible trade they think that the bubonic plague which happened here obviously in the years that followed was because of this opening a trade from east to west and you know that killed like half of Europe so it's all the little cautious about that we don't know what happened to him we don't know what he looked like we don't know where he's buried we don't know anything about him because there's never been actual physical artifact founded related to jenga's Khan so I decided to look in the one place that was forbidden to go to this area in the northern part of Mongolia and the border of Russia and Mongolia called the aquatic and and it's been forbidden to go to you by decree bengis khan himself because any disturbing of this tomb would cause a curse they said right so i decided to try to use something that i wouldn't you technology i decided to try to sift the massive amounts of satellite imagery data as we mentioned satellite imagery allows us to look at the world in an interesting way from above but I had so much data I didn't know how to even make sense of what to look for so I at the time it was I was getting inspired by things like this company called folded this was building a video game to pull proteins there is this lost Explorer named Steve Fossett and then and he died in a plane crash they're looking for his plane crash using something called Mechanical Turk and those things really inspired me so we built a video game to get lots of people to help us search where we would get the saddle him interviewed we'd cut it all up into little bits here and there and then we'd asked lots of people online in parallel to look at the data and then the only feedback they got wasn't what I said was right or wrong because I didn't know what to look for it was what they said to themselves so they would see something they'd put a mark on it they would commit their answers and then the next thing they would see would be what everybody else had said about the same image and over time you get these trends that would emerge out of the statistical agreement across the board and then we'd go out and we'd ride out on horseback and we'd go and try to find what they were looking for and sure enough we start to find things this is a 3,000 year old Bronze Age burial now Wow people working together at scale we had 18 doubt it was I think the added time online was 18 years of human effort just volunteered to sift through all that data but the thing that got me then was that and kept on being brought up was that this was all about agreement because whoever randomly tagged the first image or that first bit of the data would then be the training data set for the next person so over time what people learned to agree upon collectively was really driven by who was there first it wasn't driven by some true understanding what it was possibly in the image it was it was almost like if we started all over again would we get totally different data every single time this has to do with that question of where do new ideas come from in culture but we use the statistical analysis we followed it to those anomalies as they presented themselves and on the top of a mountain in the center of the forbidden precinct we found this huge shaman shrine shamans are the only ones that are allowed to still go to this one area and in the roots of the trees around the the base of that mountain on the southeast side of that mountain where the historical records indicate there should be something related to dingus Khan's death trees that had fallen down in the storms around me I found the remains of something staring at me in my my hand what is this thing as I ran from tree root to tree root you could you could almost hear your feet crunching under you on the grass like it's like nothing I've ever experienced before this is my first time in the field I've never I just did a PhD in engineering now I'm on the side of the mountain in Mongolia and I'm running around and I'm finding things in the roots of trees and my feet are crunching underneath me and we pulled the grass just a little bit and right under the grass roots you see the remains of what looks like this roof a series of roofs buried in the roots of trees right underneath us right where that anomaly had sent us in the center of a forbidden precinct now the remaining results of that find you know were mostly embargoed but we did find bits of horse bone that date to exactly a time of jenga's Khan's death lots of horse lots of lacquer and a little bits of ceramic and things like this but we didn't dig because that's not what we were supposed to do we're just supposed to you know identify it and then we use ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry know these other tools try to sift through it but what really got to me was the individual story I learned something about a person who went to their lowest point and we've all experienced those moments right those moments where you you got nothing left I mean there's there's been one or two in my life for sure well you're at the very very very very very bottom of your existence and it might be that in those moments we get to some kind of euphoric state who knows something the breakthrough I mean this whole thing about memes I read a lot about Richard Dawkins and memes I also talked to my friend and colleague a good friend envious Ramachandran a neuroscientist does anybody know that name you phantom in the brain remarkable individual he says that you know there's some basic instincts that we pull from more than just what we find attractive around us but but what creates those moments where we don't care about that anymore we don't care what people say around us we don't care what's expected of us anymore we just don't care to the point in which we can change our fate it might be those low points I found another individual I got to go a little faster here in the jungles of Mexico recently this is a guy by the name of sky Witness and dr. V rat is lair from ena is showing me his skull where he's got two big marks on the top of his head where they've been depressed from some kind of battle and then he's looking at she's looking at the his femur on his left leg where he's survived some kind of major injury and she tells me she knows who this person's name is Lord sky witness because this was found in his burial does anybody know what this is it's pretty brutal this is a bloodletting device that was found next to his crotch this you can see it's five meters as five centimeters as a marker there that was used to experience pain through his penis it was this thing where he would let blood out in a public ceremony it's it's well documented in the Maya glyphs to show this relationship to some other state whatever it is in extreme pain and in this relationship to the spirits to gods whatever it is and then they would burn in the blood but this would go through his body in the most sensitive place but that one person would go on we think based off of some early findings of other glyphs I that have been decoded by my name is Simon Martin that this guy Lord witness said that truly is him might have been the guy who took down T call you know and basically shut them down for about a hundred years t call is the capital of the of what was once the sort of epicenter of the Maya world and and it's an amazing place but it's only becoming truly understood even in the last couple of years although this place has been one of the most excavated sites or well surveyed sites in Maya archaeology it's just in the last few years that a group of incredible archaeologists have commissioned a huge dataset of lidar to be flown over this over this jungle and commissioned it through a group called Pakenham and what they do with the lidar data is that you can shoot a laser beam over the sky and a million points per second flying around in a circle and you can see that most of the laser hits the top of some of the trees but a lot of it you get to the ground and you can just take that bottom layer and delete the rest and all of a sudden you get a map of the world as you never saw before as once was so you can go from trees to no trees with a snap of a finger this is completely changing how archaeology is done in the jungle at least all of a sudden you see the world in fact just as last year they found two pyramids at T call I was there I was there with the map and their machete you can literally throw a rock almost well not almost it's almost like a core like you feel like you've you throw a rock but you're right next to the main pathways that she called they didn't even know it was there over the last couple of years I've had this incredible honor of going around with this group of just true explorers led by these maps on their phones on their iPads on whatever they are looking to see where they are and then bushwhacking through the jungles to try to see what's really there sometimes to take helicopters sometimes we take boats I mean it's really we are in a river in a storm it is soaking wet you got a guy [Music] [Applause] [Music] like my favorite way to live right that's going up a river a river between Guatemala and Mexico with archaeologist from Brown University Omar al Kivar on the right there and his crew and the rain just opens out of nowhere all the time I mean the conditions are intense you're really on the edge you know you get the places like this the jungle is and it's going straight up and very steep again and we're going machetes we have that totally useless mostly useless anti-venom and then we have this digital map created from lasers in the sky and over the last couple of years these archeologists have found so many things they found over 60,000 new mine structures the last time I checked and I've been there to be the first at a new pyramid you know a pyramid that might have been looted or may not have been looted for one reason or another but you find them for the first time known to science these pyramids inside them they're like onions and you go inside these pyramids and all of a sudden you see that each layer of the pyramid is built upon the other representing a different time you know and then and this would have been the outside of a pyramid at one point and then it gets covered it gets covered and it gets covered through time to build the next dynasty but what's also interesting is that every time the archaeologists do their survey they have to go and backfill them so a lot of times you'll never see them again other than the drawings well we use things like that's a Xbox Kinect sensor and or photogrammetry or other types of low-cost tools and we can create these 3d models these virtual reality models of the insides of these pyramids and bring them out out of the jungle one of the coolest things I ever saw was discovered in 2005 now has a building around it in this totally totally nondescript building you've got you've got inside there the only mole to the Maya art that you see in the world is is stuff that represents the lifes of the kings and queens what they really wanted to show as their world but inside that is the only known image of daily life and they gave us access to this just last week a couple of weeks ago and we're in there and you can see you know a woman with tattoos around her ankles a big earring that would have created this almost a gape in her ear carrying something that they think is a pull day or a maize drink and you can see the difference between her and the person that is working for her she's got a smaller bracelet she doesn't have any tattoos you start to get the sense of like what you know that's sort of like the experience of culture is not that different than it was you know some thousand years ago maybe more like this this is pretty remarkable they think this was this was created sometime around 600 or 700 AD and yet when I walk around the streets of Mexico today I see the same thing a woman selling tamales well a man eats them tamales yeah tamales actually the Creator God for the Maya was the maize God who came out with tamales that's it's still true today the but one thing that's really cool is that they're just finding out more about the actual spirit world of the Maya and there's a man named Guillermo deonda who's a good friend of mine he's been leading this charge to go dive down into these holes that just pop up around the Yucatan right around all these Maya pyramids you see these random holes and you drop down into these holes you descend about 30 meters off the surface you're hot you're so hot because you're in the jungle but you're wearing a wetsuit and the next thing you know you're in this other world the system of rivers that winds its way through the Yucatan and Guillermo and his team have just connected what they think to be the world's largest underground cave system that runs over 215 miles or roughly 350 kilometres as a connected cave and they think that this cave goes right down to the very center of Chichen Itza under the main pyramid there but haven't been able to find the the portal to that hole yet so they're right at the edge or searching for it but as are going there risking their lives because underwater cave diving is literally the most dangerous thing I've ever done and right when we were there the guy who is my safety diver said just the day before he had pulled two bodies out of the cave had died 24 hours earlier but the little shrimp that were in there had basically taken those divers down to bone in what in 24 hours now the ancient Maya used those caves also as these portals and what we find down there are captured in the suspended moment a world of belief because they believe that from those caves emerged life and so that go back down into those caves is to go back to the spirit world I do think that this is another great frontier of Maya archaeology I got to go faster now we might skip the island of Micronesia [Music] this is my director totally passed out because it's exhausting as you can see we start to get to these beautiful islands around the islands of Micronesia are more than just those little stone carvings I saw something there that completely boggled the mind emerging out of the jungle is this world that that makes you almost imagine a different human experience look at those stones those massive basalt stones were on water how did those stones get there how could they moved him in mass to build this world called nan Badal what are those stones these mysterious stones it's actually just now in the last couple of years been named a world heritage site but it's been barely really known it was a place that was occupied by somebody known as the saudeleur dynasty somewhere around 1200 to 1600 ad they think but this place is intense I mean we're in the middle of the ocean it rains 325 inches a year it is brutally hot how did they move those stones into place and from where I mean without anything other than willpower this is where they are you can see this is a map from NASA of the weather currents through the year Micronesia is and Pompeii where the island is right in the middle that dot when explorers first found this they famously thought like well they must have come from Chile and populated Oceania because there was a whole string Islands cross there but it was it was Captain Cook who cook Island who who started listening to the languages that were spoken around the region and realized that that people really they think originating from the Philippines and that somehow they had figured out how to sail with incredible precision against the wind to populate this world across the oceans island island island island now not only is that skill but talk about bravery because they think that some at least half of them didn't make it anywhere well imagine just sailing into the sunset with hope constantly as your culture that's remarkable I wanted to get to this site but to follow the traditions of the Pompeians I had to go through the ritual rights to even get access to the site which is still overseen by the specific tribe of what are called the nan marques who took over the who actually conquered the the settlers and that right involves a crazy drink built out of something called kava plant so here's just I'm gonna play a video so it might be loud so I want to talk anybody again so this is our archaeologist Gus Kohler who's directing the conservation preservation effort and for the island of or for the Federated States of Micronesia getting me ready so what does language support what does I mean once a piece you return to the idea but there because we believe they're in position they're always you talked to them in floor as we're talking to two people this is got a spirit the most - Lee - not my keys but because he's the chief you always we have an honorific language you always refer to them in the floor let's give it a go okay can I get some I'll point it out big guy with the machete a chief weird ceremony this is like you know themes are made of I get oiled up and I meet with the chief who's in a trance-like State and I have to drink this thing called Sekou which is pounded by a rocks the the first person to drink it after me is our sound recordist I mean it makes your whole face numb it really does and if you have as much as I had it literally makes you cross-eyed like you can't see anything you're essentially blind but this isn't just for TV I mean it really is part of the tradition and and it's something that happens by pounding this kava root over stones on these specific stones that they that they describe is almost bells ringing in this society the group around them and they would everybody in the neighborhood would hear these bells and as you walk through the island of Pompeii you hear these bells sort of chiming all over the place because every single thing that happens on that island begins with a Sekou ceremony and after those roots are pounded into that pulp they're put through this hibiscus leaf and that's what you get and that's what you have to drink otherwise you're rude you know but you go for it go for it and it's not it's do not that it's some sensational thing this is their deep culture the point in which the state flag of Pompeii has a Sekou cup at its center it is the center part of every decision they make as a government as a people whether or not we're allowed to go to that Island or not on the far reach of islands that neighbor Pompeii we find other evidence of these same Sekou stones this is Rosa the chief of a small antal called aunt aunt Ethel and he knows from his own childhood and he directed us to this this Sekou stone one of many that were in that little plot area there those stones didn't come from that Island they all came from this one Center place because they all originate in something quite remarkable this big volcanic plug and they were brought all around the region we take our our technology this is a group called visual skies incredible group of guys that that go out into the world with me and build the most incredible scanning models of these different locations this is us getting ready with our little lidar drone I want to show you the lidar drone real quick you can see there the spinning blade underneath that little spinning thing that's shooting millions of points right now of lasers through the jungle and as you punch through the jungle you you're looking for things like this this ancient world lost in the undergrowth and through removing the trees you can start to pull together a bigger map of what's there and the whole point of this is that when you build that all together you can sort of just brush away the trees and see what was once there trying to go through this mangrove so to identify bit by bit by bit how big this world really really was and it was enormous it was enormous a feat of engineering a feat of imagination I don't know how to quite describe this but it just boggles the imagination to think that those stones were placed there but not were they only placed there the only place where they occurred naturally on the island is a volcanic plug on the other side of the island and that's about 22 kilometers or 20 kilometers in distance as the crow flies how did they get those huge stones over there why did they do it I don't know why did they do that why does that happen but they built a world that we think looked like this once that leadership is that imagination curiosity charisma is that is that insecurity what is that whatever it is it's something that you don't see as an anomaly alone you see those that tradition of of culture spread across she and not just in those I mean there are other big buildings like that built out of Sekou out of basalt stones but that that culture of kava root or Sekou that sort of tradition of pounding the stones and then drinking this hallucinogenic or narcotic we're sort of pollution genetic drink to make decisions with that exists all the way out in Fiji across the whole region given that we don't have time I'm going to have to skip this section which is which is really fun I'll just show you this one section this is Columbia this is what it feels like in the jungles of Colombia and I'm there with this incredible archaeologist Santiago Gerardo who's been at a site called Ciudad perdida we use the same technology we map through the the jungle and we're able to delete the trees and find these pathway pathways of a group known as the tyrona all through the jungles hiked to those different locations and find these little bits of ceramic lost up in the mountains that are these signs that somebody wants to live there nobody's been there for hundreds of years maybe more at least since the time of the Spaniards probably the Spaniards again came through and wiped it all out with their disease actually not just their disease but their but their their greed they saw these little bits of gold you know these these these these fragments of imagination again built by the tyrona with these incredible details I mean look at that look at that work that's my finger there so you can see how tiny that is and they thought this was gold but actually it was even more sophisticated because the tyrona had figured out had a gold plate through this chemical process and they had little bits of gold and they were able to craft these things and gold plate these things so while the the spanish were like oh we're gonna go get all this gold they actually just were disappointed because i did only got these like very lightly gold-plated things but it was their greed that led to the diseases that spread and really wiped these people out of which they're still our descendants there's these people known many couple of three-year tribes or so this is a Kogi priest known as M amo who describes his world as coming from Mother Earth that he is elder brother were the little brothers and that every part of that earth has some kind of relationship to the spirit world what's remarkable for this guy is that he lives in one of the most diverse ecological climates in the world going from sea level to the base of essentially the altitude of the base of Everest is base camp you know with these snow-capped mountains over the matter of very very few miles and like and when you look at his hat on the top the little white hat it actually represents the snow caps and the one thing he had for me to say to the rest of the world I asked him what do you only to say to the rest of the world he says the snows melting now I thought that was interesting because I've been looking at like all those cultures and the things that have happened the expansion contractions of different moments in time this is the climate data and you can see a drop in temperature around this period here some historians actually believe this has to do with mass depopulation that came out of plagues so you get like this world order a globalization and then you get you know jenga's khan bubonic plague and then you get the Spaniards over here and boom boom boom and the decrease in population isn't small I mean we're talking cornered a half of the population of any place that this stuff happens to so I mean huge numbers of people die in these plague situations and it's not to be taken lightly it's a it is not jokingly aside a timely warning for us but it also talks about these these different annealing moments like I said jenga's Khan had that moment crushed and then came through I had one of those and this is maybe where I really wanted to get to about three and a half years ago I found myself crushed under a vehicle this was my leg it's gone they cut it off it was Halloween so my kids and I made a costume out of it see I have a prosthetic leg right it's been incredible it's been a great joy actually because I've got to see the world you could see you again as a as a part future part past you know it's been it's been a it's been a wonderful experience and it's weird to say I mean all those travels I just taught you about happened after I lost my leg and except for the jenga's Khan part and and it's been an expedition into both my physical nature but also my mind I had this moment where I I started feeling incredible pain and a part of my body that didn't exist anymore and that's how I met this man named Ramachandran PS Ramachandran who had discovered this thing where you could you he calls it Mir therapy where you could stick a mirror between your arms and you can release the sensation of a clinching feeling in the in the phantom part of your body that doesn't exist physically but fully exists mentally the pain that I was feeling in my leg was so significant that I literally at one point thought I rather would have died then continue on with this much pain and yet there was nothing I could do about it there's no opioids or anything like this I mean literally there's nothing there can't scratch it you can't pound it there's nothing the only things I started feeling was through meditation and then truly just like welcoming the pain that's what it kind of helped to leave it a little bit in these flash moments it was this understanding of the mind we started looking around at all these different things I couldn't even a yoga this other stuff to try to get my mind to release and as we use those mirrors every time he'd pulled a mirror away the pain would come back the mirror would go you put it there and then between my legs and I would see the leg again the pain would go away pulls the mirror away pain would come back so we start looking at what makes the brain look what makes the mind where does the body and and begin and and he started thinking about well what what has been done in other areas where reality is shifted depression PTSD these sorts of things and there was a study going on at Johns Hopkins where they're using a magic mushroom to try to get people that were suffering from terminally terminal diagnosis and cancer to rethink their world so we tried that and sure enough one heavy dose of magic mushrooms with the mirrors and it was gone it's gone forever I think what happens is that the mind in that state frees itself in fact there's there's a lot of research here now this was published actually in the journal blow society interface where by Giovanni Petri not me this is another researcher and a well-known group that did fMRI brain scanning of 15 people under the effects of psilocybin and they found this concept of hyper connectivity connecting parts of the brain that were no longer connected increasing the increasing the activity of the brain to a point in which you might imagine something new a colleague of mine at UCSD now in a group that we've launched called it's called the PHR eye or the psychedelic health research initiative has been doing this work with Buddhist monks where he thinks that you're actually he's a neuroscientist where and he directs the Center for mindfulness but under a deep mindfulness meditation they've been finding that there's a regulation of the of pain through the thalamus which isn't the same thing as your opioid receptor it's something completely different than how we truly treat pain today but I'm not a neuroscientist I'm an engineer so I started getting all excited about what kinds of sensors I could wear while I was experiencing these different types of meditation or these different kinds of things we're coming up with experiment this is two people wearing accelerometers and heart rate variability sensors as they're moving around we're seeing if we can start to build experiments where we can start to see and visualize and measure people in their other states you know these states that might be induced by some kind of thing like chanting or or or or psilocybin or other things this is my colleague who's now at the University of Arts London directing an effort there Sheldon Brown and we're we're wearing a bunch of sensors looking like dorks but having a good time with a drum and as I get into a trance-like state by trying to get really into the music maybe some visualizations that Sheldon built that react to my my brainwaves go deeper and deeper into that model building so I get this affective deeper and trance state now what am I saying here altered states of consciousness provided these construction of ego what is ego ego is this understanding of where I am who I am and how the world relates to me and I think that just like for jenga's Khan just like for that guy 'lord sky witness who would feel that pain or just like for really anybody that has imagined something new these altered states whatever they are a deep meditation of prayer a song a chant a kiss that moment where you've forgotten yourself you don't care about the meme you don't care about what you copy you're in a free state that might be what we call the the destruction of ego in neuroscience are calling it the end of the default mode Network is this an imagination lever that we have stumbled across just by accident and they started building in all the different things that we have around us today like this lecture is this a technology that we came up with to try to get into that kind of state the the chanting of a gospel choir the singing of a gospel choir before the sermon comes is that to get them into that state you know the idea of a Hodari or the the whirling dervish is that is that to get us into those states before some other message can maybe hold on more tightly or if there is no other message if there is no other mirror then is that where the new ideas are born have the Ecology's of altered states influence the diversity of culture that we see today everywhere in the world that I've been there's been these kinds of experiences that have been rooted in the history of those landscape they've also been rooted in the types of plants that grow you got fly agaric as a mushroom that grows up in the North a bit by the reindeer people you've got you know ayahuasca and San Pedro that has been deeply connected to the cultures of the south do those somehow influence the world that we see today is that have we taken for granted that the visual effects or the mental effects that have been associated with the ecology and the access of different kinds of plants in that and the things that we've stumbled across of as technologies to those altered states might have actually influenced in some small way or in some way the art that we have around us today you know I went to Varanasi in India where the men and women of the Hindu religion go deep deep deep into their innermost self to try to let go of pain this is where they they've weighed into the banks of the Ganga river and they and they bring their dead to burn their dead because I think that if you burn your dead there and then then they'll they'll skip the processes of reincarnation go to enlightenment there you'll find sadhas' and and others that have given up all worldly things and in the ancient Vedic traditions you have stories of the soma drink you know this in fact the ninth mantra is is is is entirely dedicated to this god of this hallucinogenic drink essentially which they don't quite know what it what it's made of but it's described as something that rules over the mind and actually releases you to this otherworldly blissful state is that what created the kind of sort of visual effects of the art that we had today are there some characteristics of the art in India that might reflect the types of things that were in that drink early on and the things that people had access to when I was up there and Peru and that man was my mountain guide was blowing on the coca leaves this is an ancient ethnic tradition this is this is something called bouquet this act of spirit reciprocity to the mountain where he blows it to this guy but he also was saying I am praying to San Pedro when I was standing at the at the side of Machu Picchu with the director of archeology for Machu Picchu oh is a bus and he described to me that this whole landscape he believes it was a ritual center and that each one of these terraces was covered in wrap a certain type of plan medicine San Pedro the psychedelic cactus ayahuasca and other types of plant medicines that have been deeply connected to those cultures through time you go to the very heart of Machu Picchu and there is this thing that nobody has access to anymore because apparently something like ad company broke part of it I'll try to shoot a commercial but we got access to it and it's and it's this this rock that they think is the top of the bedrock carved is this portal possibly nobody really knows what it is you know Hiram Bingham called it a hitching post to the Sun and and Johan Reinhard said that it was as connection to a mountain the the main mountain off to the side well he knows that Machu Picchu is surrounded by this river and it and it's an assist in the same way that Varanasi is surrounded by the server and it's this central almost like a spiritual portal for the people of the ancient mountains there in the Andes and that the world that they had is one that they still feel today this is another site not too far away where this local shaman is performing a San Pedro ceremony around this semi destroyed piece of archaeology there that's on the side of this Inca staircase and it's been blown up by miners in the last hundred years but he described it as a as a portal to the next dimension I go back to Qian Qian I look at those that was really there was really kind of geometric weird I don't know how to describe this other than as trippy Peng what are these seagulls I mean they little trippy to me and and you think about what happened here from this exact room it was the central internal spiritual space for Chan Chan from that room most likely the procession to lead towards the sacrificing of those children that's where it started in this little like inner sanctuary and then they go out to the main plaza and then they would lead the procession now their eventual death their traditions were tied a hundred percent to the changing of the moon in the relationship to the plants and cactuses they had around them I'm gonna fly through here a little more and I'm just gonna show that this is the kind of thing that we see today does this have some influence do these types of Arts and types of culture have some influence and types of drugs that people had around them at the time or ethnic entheogens and I go back to this idea of the world that we see when I was in Micronesia the decisions that were made were made purely by a altered state every decision in that government is made during this Sekou ceremony from you know whether or not you're gonna allow me to get married or whether or not you're gonna start a new farm and then you go back in culture all the way to the time of you know the Oracle of Delphi and you think about the kinds of historical context that that tells you know an idea that the most powerful woman in the Greek world was a woman who was ruling for about a thousand years as a priestess who would get chosen out of the public would sit on a golden tripod look into a gold bowl filled with water holds some leaf they think it was bay leaf and smell the fumes that would emerge out of a crack in the earth and go into a trance-like state to answer yes or no questions from the public one day a month nine months out of the year that would define the fate of the Greek world what I'm saying here and why I bring this stuff up is that I don't think that we remember that these altered states have been such an important part of our human imagination through time it's not saying that they're good or bad they could lead to bad things too it could be brainwashing that leads to war all these other things too but they have been ingrained into the randomness the magic that might be related to you know or similar parallel to the idea of the mutations and reshuffling in genes but the reshuffling and mutations of ideas and society and that the society that we see around us the technologies that we see around us they get us into those as as a psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it flow states those things might be very well trying to touch upon that same feeling of ecstasy that might be where we get all of our craziness from so what's next where the cultures go we're going towards this kind of monoculture people say there is 7,000 languages as of a couple of my friend brought as of 10 years ago and of which one dies every two weeks we're shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and each one of those cultures as they die they take away with them this deep experiment in the human condition because each one of those languages carries an understanding of who we are how we could exist the kinds of perceptions that we have I had a chance to talk to actually he's a friend of mine Vint Cerf he's credited as one of the three people that founded the Internet if you can make sense of that enigma on the board then let me know because I don't know what that means but but he he told me that the thing that he fears most is not that we lose our necessarily you know our humanity but that we forget it he called it information decay that the process of slow decay of our knowledge is like the burning of Alexandria but we don't even remember it we don't even realize it's there imagine right now trying to open a computer from 15 years ago and get a file out of it that you can do something meaningful with imagine a hundred years from now trying to find someone who can open a JPEG or remembers what that even means so with time we have this loss of knowledge and the only thing we can do is try to remember to be inspired the last thing I wanted to do and this is the very last thing I'm 15 minutes over so I wanted to play you the sound of the drums that I heard in Mongolia after my very first expedition oh no my very last expedition there in 2011 it was a very end of this four year process and these seven shaman pulled up on the side of this mountain and they were there for their own reasons and they didn't know why we were there you know nobody's supposed to be there and my colleague feci Storch from the International Association for studies comes up to me says Albert the hedge Simon wants to see you okay he goes he wants to judge your soul man you know you got to go to him at sundown if to save these words and then you have to sit at this shrine while he talks to you he would be there to translate from English to Mongolian and then there be another guy to translate from Mongolia into ancient proto Mongolian and the sounds and this is the sounds [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I'm sitting there on the ground petrified waiting for this moment and it gets more and more and more intense as the beating grows and speeds so does my heartbeat I am transfixed in his heartbeat I am sitting there in a moment of total awe and then he just hits this climax and then collapsed and and you can't see his face because the dreadlocks are covering his eyes and his attendant hands him something that he drinks under under the veil of these this face shield and he starts talking in tongues and he's asking me who you know why I'm there what what I'm there for he's trying to know my intentions it was hard because I was translating back and forth so I would give these long-winded answers and there'd be translated two times over and then it'd be like one word back I knew it wasn't making its mark finally he said that I was sent to that mountain for a purpose that he thought was okay that I've I followed my intentions and they were meaningful to the survival of the culture and to try to bring knowledge to the world and then those intentions were okay that he accepted it but to me that moment that he found himself completely in a state of total trance and had taken me to that same moment I reflect upon now when I wondered about the future of our planet and I wonder about the process of our cultural diversity evolving from different things I think about that one central concept of imagination the wonder the magic the mystique the enchantment the things that go beyond what we can really truly explain and we can just sort of call imagination and I think that the things that we've stumbled across over that we call culture the art the chanting the sound of that drum they reflect that magic in all of us so thank you very very much [Applause] I want to say one that sick I've got a lot of people to think my mother my father and most of all my two little kitties who this whole imagination thing is for thank you very much indeed for fascinating images and insights and journey and for coming to Cambridge here with us tonight now a lot of people have been you know this is the last lecture in this series on enigmas it's a 35th series of Darwin College lectures it's not quite the end yet because many of you have been asking me over recent weeks what's the theme for next year what is 2021 going to bring now the first theme was origins and think since then we've had color and time and plagues and migration and what so what's next year so I've been saying of course I couldn't possibly say but tonight I can so you've all been really interested week by week and if you want to see any of these again the mostly are on online they're on YouTube and I gather as of today there have been over a hundred three hundred thousand viewings of this in this last over these last two months so see them online again if you want to so next year what is it is it diversity endings well we have some pretty bloody things today and we've had bloodletting but that's not what it is next year it's actually blood next year until next January thank you everyone [Applause]

Channel: Darwin College Lecture Series

Views: 40,178

Keywords: darwin college, darwin college lectures, darwin college lecture series, university of cambridge, Albert Lin, Albert Yu-Min Lin, Archaeological Mysteries, archaeology, UC San Diego, National Geographic Society, United States Geospatial Intelligence, Lowell Thomas Medal, Nevada Medal, Enigmas

Id: -18qzVt_t3g

Length: 85min 11sec (5111 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/easilypersuadedsquid]

Modern technologies have given birth to a new “golden age” of exploration, allowing us to go further, digitally stripping away the vegetation, and peer into the earth to reveal stories hidden beneath layers of time. What emerges is a catalog full of the various experiments in human understanding, expression, and imagination. If you remove the concept of linearity in our timeline, the rise and fall of collective knowledge exposes something deeper in our human nature, the unpredictability of our imagined realities. This talk will discuss the enigmas of our individual and collective imaginations.

Dr. Albert Lin is an Associate Research Scientists at UC San Diego and an award winning Explorer of the National Geographic Society. An Engineer by training he has spent the last decade developing and applying technologies towards the exploration of our shared humanity. This journey has taken him from the Arctic Circle to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and from the deserts of the Middle East to the jungles of Central America. For this work Lin has received numerous recognitions including National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year, the United States Geospatial Intelligence Academic Achievement Award, the Explorer’s Club’s Lowell Thomas Medal, and the Nevada Medal (as the youngest ever recipient). An avid science communicator Lin has created nearly two dozen National Geographic and BBC documentary films, and currently hosts a National Geographic Channel series titled Lost Cities with Albert Lin.

[u/emberday]

Indeed, a remarkable lecture that ends with speculation on the influence of altered states.