Joe Rogan | The Amazon is a Colossal Mystery w/Graham Hancock

the Joe Rogan experience some of the more fascinating pieces of evidence in South America have come out recently about these channels and pathways that they've found in the Amazon that could not have been created any other way but by humans today creating irrigation humans creating like it peers like grids like a city grid definitely the Amazon is a colossal mystery and it's one of the subjects that I explore in depth in America before first of all to give some basic figures the Amazon basin is huge the Amazon basin is 7 million square kilometres in area and within it five and a half million square kilometres remains almost entirely unstudied by archeologists and that's the five and a half million square kilometres that is still covered by dense rainforest and to put that into perspective five and a half million square kilometres is the size of the entire Indian subcontinent so it's like saying we've done world archaeology but we've just ignored India you know we've done world archaeology but we've just ignored the Amazon it's the same in the same migrant five and a half million square kilometres the view was again there was a dogma there was a preconception human beings couldn't have flourished in the Amazon it's a it's not a resource-rich area the soils are poor it's a difficult area challenging to get to very far from the bering straits so the view was that humans hadn't entered the Amazon until about a thousand years ago and then gradually little by little that view has begun to change and it's begun to change because of the tragic clearances of the Amazon because the Amazon rainforest is literally being cut down and turned into soya bean farms and and cattle ranches and in that cutting down process has emerged things that shouldn't be there at all for example evidence that large cities flourished in the Amazon enormous cities which were larger than the there was a Spanish explorer who went down the Amazon River system in 1541 to 1542 he was the first European to cross the entire length of South America from west to east along the Amazon he reported seeing incredible cities advanced arts-and-crafts millions of people a thriving culture and hundred years later when other Europeans got into the Amazon they couldn't find these cities so they said oh Francisco or IANA that was his name made it all up it was just a it was just a fantasy and then in the last decade as the clearances of the Amazon have proceeded we've begun to see the traces of those cities what happened was that the Spaniards brought smallpox into the Amazon smallpox devastated the local population because there was no immunity to it there was a massive die-off the cities were deserted within a 50 years they were completely overgrown by the jungle and that's why they were not seen by the explorers who came in a hundred years later but now the junk is being cleared those cities are emerging and we can say that a city like London which had a population of roughly 50,000 in the 16th century there were cities of that size all over the Amazon huge numbers of them and a possible total population of the Amazon that exceeded 20 million people what yes 20 million this is the the latest evidence from the Amazon and then you ask yourself how did they do that how did they feed 20 million people in the Amazon because it's a fact rainforest soils are poor is one of the reasons these soya bean farms a really stupid idea because once you clear the rainforest the land is largely unfertile and you can't grow stuff on it for very long so how did they feed all these people the answer was they invented a soil and that soil has a name it's called Terra Preta archaeologists refer to it as Amazonian dark Earth's or Amazonian black earth it's a man-made soil it's thousands of years old it's full of microbes that are not found in adjoining soil it's based around biochar and you can take a handful of eight thousand year-old para prater and you can add it to barren soil and that soil will instantly become fertile it's highly sought-after in the Amazon and it explains how they fed these people there was science in the atmosphere how to create this well this is something that's not understood it's still not understood by soil experts to this day as to how that was done but it's one of many intriguing evidences pieces of evidence of much higher development in the Amazon that it has been given credit for and of a kind of science India Jamie's got an image of it up there so this is it Wow exactly and so was that done by burns did these controlled burns they did they one way that it was achieved was was to do wet burning of middens they would be they would be burned and smolder they wouldn't burn fiercely which just produces charcoal they would they would burn and smolder and and that but what is called biochar would result and that's part of the fertility of the soil but the mystery is the microbial content of this soil which is completely different from the microbes in neighboring soils and that's remains unexplained so did they what are the theories composting some sort of advanced compost is some sort of some sort of advanced composting but again what has not been explained is the mud is the microbial content of these soils so they're there first of all is an issue of how two things how large populations get fed in the Amazon and evidence that there was a culture in the Amazon that was capable of manipulating the environment in such a way that it could support large populations with the invention of Terra Preta secondly new evidence previously not recognised the Amazon is basically a garden the Amazon is a man-made rainforest there are certain trees like Brazil nut trees or the ice cream bean tree which are food crops which are very very valuable and they dominate the the tree regime in in the Amazon there was what referred to as hyper dominant species in other words people living in the Amazon over thousands of years selected certain trees which they then cultivated and grew so the whole thing is not simply a wild pristine rainforest it's a very ancient man-made environment and emerging from that man-made environment as well as evidence of large cities large populations and this mysterious dark earth are huge geometrical structures and again I go into this at length in America before because I love this mystery we have in the UK structures that are called henges I live in the city of Bath and about 30 miles away there's a beautiful site called Avebury and another more famous site called Stonehenge and what a henge is is a ditch which has been dug deep and then an embankment has been pushed up outside the ditch when people first saw these structures they wondered if they'd been built for defense but then it became obvious they hadn't been built for defense because if you want to create a moat you put it outside your embankment not inside your embankment so a henge is an earthwork which consists of a deep moat with a large embankment outside it that it can be circular it can be square and in the UK and other parts of Europe it often contains stone circles megalithic stone circles as well but the henge itself is entirely an earth work what we find in the Amazon are thousands of henges that are now beginning to emerge from the cleared area of the jungle and others that have been identified for the first time with lidar lidar technology is being employed in the Amazon it's non-destructive you can see what's under the trees what is lidar light imaging and detective radar they mounts laser beams down into the jungle is a whole pattern of them you need helicopters and they they but it doesn't damage the rainforest and you can strip away and see what's see what's there if this isn't too much about their version let me give you the example of Guatemala Guatemala is a small country if I remember correctly it's not much more than a hundred thousand square kilometers in size it is filled with intriguing Mayan ruins everybody has heard of Tikal what archaeologists didn't know was that literally within walking distance of Tikal surrounding that whole area were more than 60,000 structures that they hadn't identified and these have all been identified by lidar in a country that's just a hundred thousand kilometres in area so you have to ask yourself in that five and a half million square kilometers of the Amazon if lidar technology could be applied comprehensively what would we find beneath there and the evidence already is extremely tempting and extremely tantalizing and I'm intrigued by these huge geometrical figures which involve primarily circles and squares and they are classic henges in the sense that they are deep ditches surrounded by huge embankments they're extremely geometrical for example you can find an octagon surrounding a square a place called jocose are in the Amazon you can find a square perfectly enclosing a circle now that is an exercise called squaring the circle that are Archaea are our academics have given to the Greeks they said the Greeks were the first person people who perform that exercise but now we find in dated sites in the Amazon that this was being done in the Amazon long before the Greeks what are the dates the earliest dates that have been found in these sites now are about three and a half thousand years old about three and a half thousand years old but the evidence is that the sites have been constantly remade and what intrigues me is what remains in that five and a half million square kilometers that has not been investigated yet we are just I think looking at the edges of a mystery the archaeologists involved who are mainly from Finland and also from Brazil feel the same there their estimate is that there are thousands of these structures remaining in the jungle and they're open as to how old they may ultimately prove to be the investigation needs to be done but what's fascinating about them is this very powerful geometry and astronomy so a number of the sites are perfectly aligned to true north true south true east and true west I'm not talking about magnetic north I'm talking about true astronomical north to do that there's only one way to do it and that's with with astronomy so that tells us that astronomers were at work in the Amazon the geometry is very complex and very precise that tells us that people with geometrical skills were at work in the Amazon and thirdly the scale of the sites of hundreds of meters gigantic earthworks on the scale of hundreds of meters tells us that this was highly organised project that was undertaken on a very large scale or by very large numbers of people it's a wonderful mystery and and it deserves much further much further attention and I'm yeah that's Jaco saw exactly the squares squaring the circle so you can see the outside embankment and then inside it is the square ditch and then there's another embankment inside that and a circle and a circle inside that crazy they made a road right through that modern Road yeah you know because because there's no respect for there's no respect for the ancient for the ancient world unfortunately there's another one look at that wow that's incredible so they found the stuff that they found in the Amazon what imaging technology were they using to find initially initially it was entirely found because areas of the rainforest had been cleared economic interest said we want to make a cattle ranch here or we want to make a soya bean farm here so we're gonna clear the rainforest in the process of clearing the rainforest they start discovering these earthworks that had previously been completely overgrown by the jungle then the next step was to say what can we what could we do to find out more about this obviously they don't want to destroy more jungle and luckily we have a technology which is which is lidar as I mentioned which uses radar and using lidar they've been identified able to identify many more of these sites and then to get to the sites without destroying the jungle and to begin excavations on them and to find that they go back in the cases of the ones that have been explored so far at least 3,000 years this is an intriguing development completely unexplained in our understanding of the Amazon and what it suggests is a heritage of extremely ancient knowledge you don't wake up one morning and you know create a perfectly geometrical square or circular earth work that's perfectly aligned to true north south east and west on an enormous scale there has to be a background to that that's been reason for doing it and the evidence says none of these sites were lived in there's no habitation refuse found in them whatsoever they were they we don't know what they were used for I make the case in America before that they're connected to a system of ideas which is found all around the world which wishes to do with death and the afterlife destiny of the soul [Applause]

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 3,932,213

Rating: 4.8892179 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of

Id: Cn1MugPalaA

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

He's full of approximation and some things are blatantly false.

As an introduction to Amazonian Dark Earth, I much recommend 1491, which is a much more serious book and has a great chapter on the Amazon (including dark earths) and other great chapters.

And obviously, scientific literature if you have access to it.

[u/10101010101111]

Posts here are getting more and more off topic

[u/DomingoShaw]

Graham Hancock’s work is amazingly fascinating. I know this is a permaculture sub but check out some of his writings on ancient advanced civilizations from before the younger Dryas impact event. Fascinating. The truth is stranger than fiction.

[u/stefanlikesfood]

I'm on the sustainability council at my college and we're thinking on working with a company on biochar. It probably won't happen, because we really don't need it in Oregon and companies are the enemy of sustainability and all that, but it's interesting. Might help with desertification?