Graham Hancock Explains the Mystery of the Olmecs | Joe Rogan

the Joe Rogan experience do you have anything in this book about the omics no not really I I mentioned I mentioned them briefly I explored the Olmec mystery in considerable depth could you explain that to people maybe in fingerprints of the gods yes so it's considered to be the earliest high culture of Central America everybody's heard about the Aztecs everybody's heard about the Maya but before the Aztecs and before the Maya there were a culture who are referred to as the Olmecs again we don't know what they called themselves that's what the Aztecs called them they called them the Olmecs and it means the rubber people because they rub a producing area of Mexico they worked in giant megalithic constructions that what they're most famous for is these huge carved human heads which can be on a scale of up to 20 to 25 tons in weight and and which have curious features which have been interpreted variously as Polynesian African don't look like classic Native American features but one of the things one of the things I've realized is that there is no classic Native American feature that Native Americans are a very have a very complex genetic story with very many different elements brought into it and we shouldn't be necessarily surprised by the supposedly non-native American look maybe we think those helmets were that they were wearing nobody knows because no physical example of such a helmet has ever been found just like no physical example of an Egyptian pharaohs helm a crown has it has ever been found all we see is the stone the stone reproductions of them do they universally were these helmets Israel there's pretty much all wear these helmets in in in in the Olmec stonework there's another fascinating figure from La Venta one of one of the Olmec sites which is the earliest ever image of a plumed or feathered serpent the feathered serpent is a famous icon in Central America Quetzalcoatl who's the the god of peace the bringer of civilization who is associated for example with the famous pyramid of kukulcan which is just another name for Quetzalcoatl at Chichen itzá where on the spring equinox a shadow effect creates the image of a serpent coiling down the stairway and joining with the carved head of the serpent at the Bears the the image from La Venta that's the earliest image of a plumed serpent in the Americas and sitting in the middle of it and I made a big deal out of this because I think it is a big deal in magicians of the gods sitting in the middle of it is this human figure who's holding this strange bag in his hand and it's just a fact that those identical bags are found in ancient Sumer in the hands of individuals who were considered to be civilization bringers and they also show up on pillar 43 at gobekli tepe I call them man bags and in that case it go back Lee Tepe we know there at least eleven thousand six hundred years old so I wonder if we're looking at a sort of badge of office of a group of civilizer z-- who traveled around the world trying to bring back to life a lot um when I interrupted you to talk about Quetzalcoatl when what were you about to say I can't remember I'm in California I've been smoking dope yeah we were talking about different things in the Amazon should we rewind the serpent God you were talking about before Quetzalcoatl before that I have another question the Olmecs did you you were talking about the genetics of these people that live and Native Americans that it they vary widely but the Olmecs seemed to have very similar features the thick lips the big noses why do we think that is well this is part of a curious mystery that is not unconnected to the genetic mystery it's been known by archeologists for quite a long time that there are anomalous skulls in parts of Brazil which appear to show very strongly Polynesian or African features very much like the features that we see on the on the Olmec heads and a number of archaeologists who got into trouble with their colleagues for this have used that to argue many years ago 3040 years ago that the settlement story of the Americas is much more complicated than we've you know then we then we've realized and and what the what the DNA is doing is it's telling us that there was something really weird happened happened with settlement they you see what happened with those African or Polynesian looking skulls was that they were tested for DNA when DNA technology was not as advanced as it is today and what that DNA showed was that they were more closely related to modern Native Americans than they are to any other people in the world so the notion that there was some connection with Polynesia or Africa was dismissed but now that we have very firm evidence of an Australasian genetic signal of Australian Aborigines Papua New Guinea Melanesians with those kind of features now that we have the genetic evidence that that is found in the Amazon we have to go back to that old evidence and and reconsider it Wow yeah I would love to find out what that is that they've always fascinated me then the Olmecs it's always been such a strange image the the large heads with new helmets on them and how do they universally look like that I mean although all of the features are very very similar very very very similar always with a helmet and almost always I won't claim that every single Olmec head has a helmet on because I think I've seen one that didn't it's quite a while ago since I explored the the Olmec area but what's fascinating about them is they are they are supposedly the first high civilization of Central America that they create structures on a massive scale that you can see connections between them and the later the later Maya that whole mystery of the Mayan calendar was clearly inherited from the Olmecs it wasn't something the Maya made up the Olmecs used that same symbolism so the Mayan calendar is actually an Olmec calendar and if we then consider the possibility that the Olmecs may just be the latest the earliest surviving manifestation of that calendar it could go back much further than that [Applause]

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Id: qP0veW9gBxI

Length: 6min 41sec (401 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/wipeitonthecat]

Say what you want about Hancock, the bloke knows his stuff. Always a pleasure listening to him talk about ancient cultures.