Hey, Hi, come on here and have a seat if you're doing okay today, Hey, we're we're covering Mexico this week. We're gonna speak on the Omec, which is a civilization I'm fascinated in learning more about. We don't know a great deal about the Omec. We know more about dynastic Egyptian civilizations and sumer and Babylonians. Then even the Dogon people of Africa. We know more about them than we know about the Omec. And I had a chance to visit in our last two this past November in Tabasco, Mexico.
We flew in and did a tour with doctor Ed Barnhardt. And Ed is a Miyais, but as a Miamis, he has a huge interest in the Omic civilization. And I've always been curious because as an artist, I've studied the sculptures, not only the big basalt heads that everyone's familiar with. But my big question is and has been, it really looks like the Olmec. We're a multi racial civilization and what does that mean? Well, racial types.
We have this African American African centric sculptural appearance, facial structure on these gigantic twenty ton basalt carvings, most of them, if not all of them, have headgear or helmets on. And then there's also an Aga or Asian look and description that you can see on a lot of the statuary, the figurines, and even on the pottery. And then we get into this other segment of racial types, which can only be considered Caucasian or European or Eurocentric.
And in many cases a lot of these figures have beards and mustaches, and they look like somebody you would see in the United States, a white boy with a beard and a mustache. And you know, I have studied this, and I have questions. And there's a number of turn of the century scientists, anthropologists, I guess you could even call them early archaeologists who
are puzzled by this. And a number of books came out, most notably by a guy named Alexander van weather No or he was known as Professor weather No who came to Mexico in the early nineteen hundreds and began studying and teaching there in Mexico and came out with two books, and the most well known of his books is called Unexpected Faces in Ancient America fifteen hundred BC to fifteen hundred AD, and he began going and collecting artifacts and checking out museums,
and in his book he highlights these racial types and wonders where they came from. In fact, the sculptures that you see in his book are identical to sculptures you see and racial types you see in Africa, in Europe and China, in Japan and so forth and so on. And you know we're gonna hear from Ed today on his take on it, but I'll tell you right off, they just don't go for the diffusion. They don't go for a
traditional archaeologists, university archaeologists believe that this is the typical racial type. The Native Mexicans are are of this, they have these features. So I don't know what to do on that one. I tend to disagree simply because and
of course I'm not an expert. It's just my point of view. When I was first going to when I was first going to Mexico, and I was in the Yucatan Peninsula because it's so close to northern California, I remember in a museum in Cankun, it's the can Kun Historical Museum, History museum. They had a number of figurines wearing kimonos, and that is that direct lineage to Japan. And we don't see those sculptures because in America those are
edited out of the narrative. But in Mexico, and this is why I urge you to either join Earth Ancients tours because we go to these museums, or when you're visiting Mexico, locate these museums and look at the figures, look at the pottery, look at the sculpture because it's not edited. They haven't taken artifacts out of the museum that are questionable that lead us to wonder,
wait a minute, this is something's going on here. So you know, as much as I appreciate the archaeological perspective because they're giving us some groundwork, I think they need to look at the details of these racial types a little closer, and specifically the OMEC, because they were really capturing these racial types in their sculptures and their statuary, even in their altars. Their altars are wonderful and I'll be posting a group of altars on the Earth Ancients Facebook
page a few days after this is this air. So I want to play a short clip from an interview Graham Hancock did on the on the strange civilization known as the Omech. I have a quick listen. 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 Olmechs. 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 that rubber 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 honest scale of up to twenty to twenty five tons in weight 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 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 stonework. There's another fascinating figure from Laventa, one of the Omech 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 god of peace, the bringer of civilization.
Now, if you don't have Gram's first book, Fingerprints of the Gods, if you're new to Earth, the Ageans, if you're new to the different perspectives on our history or the alternative or the anomalies of ancient Earth, that first book, Fingerprints of the Gods, is one for your library. It's huge, it's over I think it's about five hundred pages. But it gives you a hint of what was of interest to Graham over twenty years ago.
And I remember here in northern California when he came to Berkeley, when it was a little bookstore. He came and did a talk. It was wonderful, it was refreshing because a lot of us have questions about our history. We don't believe the narrative or the narratives incomplete. That's the bigger problem. And in my writing in this new book to my controversy, I have a
chat on what we see, how we interpret things. And my belief is if you are going to school, if you are forced to read one hundred, one hundred and fifty year old books as the foundations of an anthropologist, you are getting trained to see things in a particular manner, and it's very, very hard to see that outside of the box unless you're an independent Now.
I do appreciate Ed Barnhardt and other archaeologists who are on our program because for the most part, not all, they don't have to follow an academic perspective. They can have the training, they can get their credential, and then they can go out and independently do research, do work. There's a lot of very well known archaeologists who are not affiliated with any college or school
or institution who are making some significant discoveries. One of these is doctor Paulette Steves, who's a Canadian archaeologist who's redating settlements in the United States North America to tens of thousands of years much earlier. It's opening up a whole new field of study, and this is what we need. So today's program is the Mystery of the Omic and my guest is doctor Edwin Barnhardt. We do a lot of different tours each year, and each of them is designed for
a different experience. But one of my favorite tours and one that we haven't done in a few years, is the Sacred Temples of Mexico. This is going to be held November eighth to the seventeenth. It is an opportunity not only to experience some of the oldest Mayan ruins in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, but also we have special permission not only to walk through these sacred temples, but also climb pyramids. And there's a number of unique locations where we
can do this. One is Mayapan ushmo Ekbalam, and there's a few others that will add to the itinerary. To learn more about this tour, go to Earthancients dot com forward slash Tours you'll get all the information. Again, it's November eighth through the seventeenth, one week of an amazing experience and very very special. I hope you'll join me. I was fortunate to be with
doctor ed Barnhard this past November to visit Tabasco, Mexico. This is the home of the Omec a place called Levanta, And not only was I pleasantly surprised by the sculptures, which are fabulous, but there are a lot of artifacts or a lot of other things regarding this very odd culture that came to light during that tour. And I've invited Ed back to talk a little bit about the Olmec. Of course, Ed is the classic Mayanist, and I
always love this term Mayanists. What does that mean? Well, not only is the miserable American focus, but under the tuolage of Linda Sheeley, he's z rode in on these unusual cultures. So Ed, we're gonna twist in the screws a little bit today and get you to spill it on the on the Olemec. So I hope you don't mind too much. Ready, ready and willing. There's a lot to talk about. There's a lot we don't
know about the Olemech. They appear and I just looked at this around seventeen hundred BC, and that's the very remote rudimentary discoveries, right is that? What do we know about that early date? It is interesting when you look at just you know, textbooks or Google. That's I mean, that's absolutely
right. I'd say, you know, probably eighteen hundred, but it's a question of scale, like how much Olmec stuff so at that date, really what what's indicating that date is a much smaller community that's found at the bottom levels of what become larger Olmec communities. So we've got San Lorenzo that has definitely you know, eighteen hundred BCE is probably the start. And then very nearby that we have a fascinating place called Elmanate. And Elmanate was kind of
a bog so everything preserved there. There are stone there are wooden statues, and there are skeletons, which is very rare in the Olmec world, but those all date from the earliest of those date to seventeen hundred or so, So we definitely have an Olemec presence. If not for Elmanate, we some people, most conservative folks, would say like, well, are we sure they're Olmec or not, But Elmanate has preserved wooden statues that are clearly Olmec.
So they have the Olmec's style of carving as that you're suggesting Omec style, and the people they Olmec tend to show males as bald with kind of elongated, like uh, deformed heads, and that's exactly the statues from there
are that weird. Hey, you know you just said something that I have not heard in this one of my questions, which is, have we found an Olemechs skeleton of a king, of a queen, of a ruler or someone noted like we find in some of these Maya toombs, We actually have, you know, I thought, and I was under the perception that we had very few Olemechs skeletons. But I'm right now working on a lecture series
for the on the Olmec for a company. That's another thing. But I've really done a deep dive into not just you know, the coffee table books, but the reports from these sites. Yeah, and I am both excited and frustrated by how many Olemechs skeletons there actually are. Whoa and uh not analyzed. I mean I just took a trip through the area and there are places they're on display, they're not hidden away, but the reports talk about where they're from. There are like in that sight Almanite, I was just
talking about, there's something like a dozen baby skeletons. They thought at first that they were monkey skeletons, but no, they're they're human babies, and that all these big sites Leventa, Uh, there are definitely burials, but some of those the bones have been dissolved from the acidic soils, but not all of them. There are a couple of bundles that have there. There was one in complex A in Leventa that had two bundled individuals good enough where
they could say that they were adult males. So there actually are a lot of skeletons, and I want people to analyze those with some of our modern techniques. Yeah. I was curious when you said that, because in a lot of their sculptures they portray there are people with these elongated heads and very asiatic features, and I would love to see the cranium of an adult male
or female to see if that's something that is typical for their culture. Of the things that I've seen so far, I didn't see any skulls that were elongated like that. There's one on display at the museum in Trecepote's, but it had a normal head. I'm pretty sure I've got the pictures of it. So not everybody in ol Mech society had that elongated head. In fact,
the famous colossal heads that are you know, signature Olemech stuff. If you look at those, maybe one of them from Leventa looks like he has an elongated head, but the rest of them are very round and normal. So those that we presume are kings, they didn't have elongated heads. It may well be that that was a practice restricted to the priestly class I mean headbinding to yeah, yeah, okay. The Omech, to my mind and you as who have probably obviously have studied it a lot more, seem to
me one of these very strange cultures that appear almost complete. In other words, they have a mathematic, a clindrical system, perhaps, a science, science, and medicine that all appear fairly well established. Now, if I talk to Richard Hanson and Elmador and I say that to him, he'll take me way back to some diggings and say, well, yes and no. But at the same situation with the Olmec that, I mean, how do
you see them as an emerging people? Well, I do think that there's an evolution, and I think that it's a very very common misconception that the books on the internet give us that they showed up with that whole package as you just described. But actually we have an Olmec period which goes basically from eighteen hundred to four hundred BC, and in that period there is no writing,
there is no calendar. There is excellent art, and you can see the evolution of architecture getting bigger and bigger, but the art or the writing and the calendar really don't start until about four hundred BC, and by then archaeologists call them a different culture, we call them epi Olmec. I think they're putting hairs there. I think they're still fully omech people that just all
of a sudden learned writing and calendar. But even that, we see kind of an interplay between the Maya region and the Zapatec region and the Olmec region, where they're all kind of playing around with more more complex iconography and symbolism, and that seems to coalesce into the writing system and the calendar. I'm not sure how long it was around, but you know, once you start
carving it in stone, you've been thinking about it for a while. Yeah, But do we see the astronomy in the same manner that we see the emergence of astronomy in Maya culture. In other words, there's no observatories that we know of in anything in Omec world, is there not that we can detect. The trouble is that the Omec, for whatever reasons, built all
of their buildings out of packed earth, and that is weathered terribly. So you know, a lot of the buildings that were up on top of these massive platforms they built have have eroded, or another weird thing about them is that they've been buried. The stuff at San Lorenzo is ridiculously deep. It's meters deep up over the current platform, so it got you know what, the Olmec must have buried that. So in the process they probably destroyed a
lot of the buildings that were there. So we have, like we have a big palace at the top of San Lorenzo, but it's actually also five meters down or so, so that preserved, but we don't have a lot of Olemec buildings to go on. That's another question that's very odd to me because I've seen and I think Sterling, who was one of the guys that was digging up the heads and digging into some of their cities, found these
extensive sewer and waterways that were underground that were very sophisticated carved in stone. But we don't see stone buildings or pyramids. I mean, do you know of a location where there's a true mctemple? Not really, I mean no. We have ideas that the earthen ones functioned in that way, but they didn't preserve because they weren't of stone, and they certainly could have built them
in stone. So this was this was a conscious choice they made. I mean, through the research I've been doing over the last couple of months, I can now confidently say that the Olmec transported hundred, you know, thousands of tons of stone material, both from the volcanoes, but also tons of greenstone from the mountains to the south of them. So they were they were absolutely capable of getting the stone to build the buildings in stone. They chose
not to. Okay, that was my next question is do we have noted Quarries and Leventa San Lorenzo or any of these major sites where they're extracting stone for stone masonry. They are actually all of those sites have there. Their local stone is sandstone, and there's an abundance of it. They can use it in fact they do. It's that's another one that just never shows up in books because they're all salt licks now. But if you actually go to
the museum at the site of Leventa. You and I went to Park Leventa where they took the nice basalt ones to that part. But when you go to the site itself, there's another three things that might be more heads. They're gigantic, they're like three four meters tall, but they're made of sandstone, and they're they're unreadable. They're so eroded you can you I'm not even sure whether it's a steeler or ahead. They're they're strange that they're standing right
there in the museum. So they they had sandstone, they could have built things out of sandstone and stuff goed over them to protect it from erosion,
but they didn't. I read a couple of years ago that there was a great need, and I think it was in San Lorenzo for some serious ground penetrating radar studies, because as you have alluded to, most of their buildings are either partially or completely underground, and these waterworks are very sophisticated, but they're they're not really visible unless part they're partially shows so as a society, as a culture at their height, and you're saying around four one hundred to
five hundred BC, they were really fairly sophisticated, aren't weren't they? Absolutely, that water management technology is very sophisticated, and it goes on for hundreds of meters. There's a whole system of it that's mostly centered around that Red Palace and it was all buried. There's you know, I also had a misconception that once the Olemech left that nobody ever showed up again. That's not true, and it's part of our problem. There are classic period cities sitting
on top of the pier of the huge platform at San Lorenzo. This gigantic platform that stands fifty meters tall, is over a kilometer long, But on top of it, a classic period community came and they buried all of that Olemech architecture and put their own city on top of it. So that's part of the challenge of excavating the olemechs stuff at San Lorenzo, that there's this huge classic period community that buried it and built on top of it. Oh,
that's a real problem. That's not only is it a problem because we don't know is what, but there's probably a lot of or has been confusion as to what's what they're well and it's a worry to me because they could have moved all of the Olmec stuff, probably did, so where we think these heads are is it's it's very possible that they're not where they started. It seemed at first, I think, you know, early archaeologists like Matt Sterling made you know, blanket assumptions that well, no, I mean,
it's a twenty ton monument. Nobody moved that. Well, A they moved it to there, and B if they moved it once, they could move it again. If they could move it an inch, they could move it a mile. There are two that the three big classic Olmec sites with heads are Leventa, San Lorenzo and tray Seppotees. Right, And I was just looking at tray Cipotees. It's a fascinating site that it's actually mostly Epiolmec. A lot of the texts and calendars come from Tracippotees, but it was buried
by a flood and by ash and by humans. The Olemec layer is like twenty feet down, but twenty feet down, and so magnetometers helped to find the basalt stuff, but it doesn't help with the sandstone stuff. But anyway, the two heads that come from tracippotees, they were clearly moved by the epiol Mech people. The Epiolmech people made four groups at the site, and
they all look almost identical. There's a big pyramid on the west side, and there's a long platform on the north side, and two of those four have an Olmec head on a stone platform in the middle of those plazas. But the Epiolmec built those plazas, not the Olmec, which means clearly the o Neck people that came in centuries after a volcano kind of closed the ole Neck one for business, and like a century or maybe three later at bi
ole Neck reinhabited the site and they moved those two heads. They took them up and put them in new plazas, both facing north. So that's sagnifying the ancients. They're saying, yeah, that's the conclusion is that it was you know, it's an image of our ancestors and it'll be right here in this elite complex. But the disturbing thing is they moved it and if they moved it, where did they move it from the assumption is that they moved
it from the lower levels of tray suppotees. But since we know that that San Lorenzo and Leventa moved heads, you know, seventy eighty kilometers away, who's to say those heads aren't from Leventa. When Leventa fell at four hundred and and tray suppote starts up again right about then, who's to say they didn't actually just pack up two heads and haul them over there. Mm hmm. It's it's disturbing, I mean, we we it's things like that that
you know. Once again, I think archaeology might just be very, very wrong about the assumptions we're making. Well, you need to get more bodies there to scan and to use equipment. This I think you said, was it? What did you just say that it was four hundred BC or there was a war that wiped out the prevailing Ulmec. We don't know that it was the war. We just know that, uh, you know, the primal city at that time was Leventa, and at Leventa it's a band.
The whole city's abandoned at four hundred BCE and why do we think it was. But I mean, why would they leave the city. We don't really know. I mean, you know, it could be climactic, it could be religiously founded, it could have been you know a number of things. There's no sign of attack, there's no sign of rebellion, and those things were pretty good at you know, when a city burns, that's good for
archaeology. We can see the ashes. I think I mentioned this to you when I first met you, that we've had Richard Hanson on a number of times. His belief was that the early Maya were contemporaries of the OMEC. That's number one and the other thing, and he's still I don't know. I haven't seen any papers written by him on this theory. And you may know what I'm talking about, but it's his belief that the these Maya ward
against the OMEC and were fairly destructive in their campaigns against them. So but he doesn't I don't remember the specific date that he gives in that war. And I'm just curious about your feelings on his hypothesis on this big war and the high level Maya culture living at the same time, because the reason I say that is that everyone believes that the Omec are the mother culture of the Maya, and this is changing now, this whole idea of that is changing.
So I do agree with the first half of that that the Maya and the Olmec were contemporaries and grew up in parody along with the people of the Valley of Mexico and the people of the Valley of Wahaka. Now Hansen works in El Mirador, I don't really see those guys fitting into the puzzle so
much. The interaction that we see between Olmec and Maya people is the Maya people of what the region called the Silka Nusco, which is the Pacific coast between Guatemala and what's now Chiappus. The whole lot of evidence that those ones are interacting back and forth. I don't know whether you know it's high civilization
at that point down in the Maya area, but they're definitely interacting. But as far as a war, you know, unless the Olmec just rolled over and showed showed their belly every time, I don't think that we can say that because I've again, I've just taken a deeper dive than ever into the art and the artifact record of these Olmec sites, and a fascinating thing is that there are no show, no signs of any kind of war depicted on any of their monuments. And I went through the whole corpus of I've got
this big thing here, I'll show you. I've been lugging this stupid book around for this. Look, my god, twenty pounds. This is the whole artifact records of Co's digging at San Lorenzo. Oh, Michael Cole, Yeah, oh okay, volume thing. And it's got pictures of all the artifacts they found and everything. You know how many possible uh spearheads are in that whole corpus? Five wow? Five the Omec. We're not fighting with anybody, not with themselves, and they certainly didn't exalt it in any of
their monuments. I have been looking and looking and looking for any image of the Olmec holding a weapon or a shield or wearing armor. Nothing. The first time it shows up is it trace Suppotda's when they turn epi Olmec. That's the very first monument. But what is this part of the world. What's the definition of Epiolmec? Is that meaning that the they're restarting. Is that a term to restore? Aren't? Or you don't know what happened before
that? It's uh, it's a weird term. I wish that someone whoever coined it it picked something else. It makes them sound lesser or but it is the it's post Olmec. The division line is really about the writing and the calendar. All of a sudden, the monuments of that region start involving hieroglyphs and calendar glyphs. And they had never meant they had never shown that
at all. There's a little bit there that you and I saw in Leventa Park, those couple of glyphs on the traveler that look like they might be glyphs oh three in front of him that say there's that that hang ten footprint behind him, and then the ones that might say lord and rain, oh God. But those are the I mean, you know, we can't say
that they they were literate with lifts total. We're coming back to your quote that I use with a lot of different people, which is we only have one percent of these places excavated, if that, and it's like total guesswork. That's why I've always I've always challenged when I read a book about the Maya. It's like, well, how accurate is this data? Well, you know, I think that you know, I've ceased losing sleep over that matter that you know, we just what we have to do is responsibly remind
ourselves that all of this is theoretical. It's not just made up. You know, the best theories are based on the evidence we have at our disposal, but none of it should be couched as truth at this point. It's all working theories. That's so refreshing to hear from you, Ed, And I wish more in the archaeological community would be as upfront and is open about the fact that, you know, we're just still working at figuring this stuff
out. You know, well, you know, my colleagues and I are compelled to make up good stories so that people give us money to continue our work. All right, here's one for you that I find totally fascinating. I don't think we've had a conversation about it. And this is what I believe is the multi cultural, actually multi racial attributes that we see in the artwork of the OMEC. I see African centric, I see Asian centric, I see Caucasian. I also see and we see more of this in the
Maya. We see long heads that appear to be naturally this way and not necessarily headbound. But we're focusing on the Omech. Do you believe that the Omec were multi racial? No? No, I do not, Jesus Christ, Okay, you got why not? Well, because the people who live in that Region's let's separate it out. We got African looking guys, we got Asian looking guys. Right, Let's start with the African looking guys.
Right, Let's give the example the basalt heads, the basalt heads, the ones that they call the colossal heads, seventeen of them that we have. They look very African. They have wide noses and thick lips. And I mean, I agree they look African. The reason I do not believe they're African is because I travel through that region and meet people who live there today,
and they have wide noses and thick lips. There was just this last I guess it was March, so yeah, last month, I brought a group to this little visited museum in Santiago Tousche in the Tushla Mountains, right in between where San Lorenzo and Leventon and Trace Ponte Sorr it's that those mountains are where the stone was quarried. Oh and I got our, I got us there a little early. We were kind of hanging around in the plaza looking at the biggest of the heads, called lach Corbata. And when the
museum finally opened, it was the guard who opened the door. And he was a big guy for the region. He was like six foot tall, a little bit taller than me. But his face was absolutely the faces on those those colossal heads. He had the wide nose and the thick lips. I mean, he was an absolute picture off of those heads. And there's a lot of people in that region who look that way. It is a it is a physical trait of the folks that live in the isthmus of Tauantepec
that they look that way. But as an anthropologist, when do you say this is a possibility of migration from Africa at the very earliest part, and that these individuals that you're looking at are descendants from this African race that came well, you know, not just by their facial characteristics. I would also strongly need that tawny hair, you know, that that kind of curly hair that that Africans and also to a lesser degree Aboriginal Australians have. Yeah,
none of that is anywhere there. We have, of course, you know, the modern DNA database. A lot of people in that region have been tested, the modern people, and they are clearly American Indian. And we do have, you know, even though we don't have many skeletons, we do have two skeletons that were actually DNA studied from San Lorenzo. They were found, you know, less than a decade ago. Yeah, and both
of those came back really strongly Native American. But really, I mean honestly, yes, okay, we have two skeletons, but it would be nice to have a whole volume of data that would pin this to local Oh. Absolutely agreed. Though, you know, let me let me counterpoint you of you know, you cannot take a stone image carved by a person as proof good enough to suggest something as amazing as colonization from Africa. I mean,
we need more to go on than a pretty face, obviously. Yeah, we're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guest today, doctor Edwin Barnhardt. We'll be right back My guest today is field archaeologist doctor Edwin Barnhardt. We've been with ed now for over a year. He's a regular contributor to Earth Ancients. We just got back from a tour of Tabasco, Mexico, and
got a chance to see some of these amazing Omec sculptures. But there's so much we don't know about this civilization, and Ed's helping us understand this culture a little bit better. Let's go to the Asian side of it. Now I see it from I mean this is with Maya too, and I've been visiting there for over twenty years, Mexico and seeing the Maya insights in the museums. It's almost a dominant racial characteristic to have these Asiatic individuals in their
pottery and the sculpture and the figurines. It's everywhere, and when it comes to the Omech, it's I've had people that we've had on the show say that there are a group of scientists in China who say that the Omech come from an early race in China. Now, I haven't gotten any I haven't found I'm not a researcher, so I haven't gotten in I am a researcher, but I haven't gotten in and found white paper that conclusively states this fact.
But when I hear this, I have to wonder, is it just someone just spouting off or do you have any evidence of an early voyage from mainland China into the Americas and then a migration that eventually turns into the Olemec. Well, I do not have any any evidence of a migration like that, and we'd be targeting I guess, you know, four thousand years ago,
not forty thousand years ago. I know, I know there's some some talk about, you know, in China's more recent history, they had a huge fleet of ships, and it's definitely in the possibility that they hit California or even Mexico at that point, but that would be later than the Olmec. But we can say again, you know, it's a brave new world. With these DNA studies. We used to just be able to say, well, we'll agree to disagree, But with the DNA studies, we now
know that Native Americans are definitely of Asian phenotype. We know that the DNA is backing up the idea that the migrations of people into the Americas be they you know, we used to think it was twelve thousand years ago. Now it's more like thirty thousand years ago. And now the nutjobs are the ones that say that it's sixty thousand years ago. And we'll just wait for the other shoe to drop for those not be as crazy as they sound right now.
But we've got all of the lines of evidence point to a migration, regardless of its time period, from Asia. So we have a deep, you know, genetic link to all Native American populations to Asia and Maya. I know, you know, I have friends that I've grown up with around there, and I've seen their babies. And interesting thing that you've got to be a friend with Amaya to see is that their babies are born with the Mongolian spot at the base of their spine. It's this kind of birthmark that
that is very very typical in Asia. All all the cultures of Asia and the Maya also have it. The spot goes away within like the first year or two of life. That's a spot, a spot that's a rudimentary it's right at the base of their spine and it's kind of it looks like a birthmark. It's not like you know, a perfect circle. It's kind of like a splat. That's a you know, a snout like a snowflake. No, no, two kids, Mongolian spot is the same. But it's
there. It's a little discolored piece right at the base of the spine. And you got to see, you know, some you gotta be good enough friends with the Maya for them to show you their babies take it. But but but it's there, and uh, and so there is Asian stock.
And that makes me think I'm gonna challenge you, uh, Cliff, go back through all those cool books behind you and look at all the places that it looks the most Asian to you in olmec art And I bet you what you're gonna find is the ones that you think are the most Asian are the ones we call chubby babies. They're mostly the baby ones. And their eyes are kind of slanted like their Chinese and their lips are downturned, and but
they are fat babies. And to my mind, to my my theory on that is that the omech A showing this kind of you know, opulent, welve fed baby look and their sculpture. You talk about their sculptures, right, sculptures, the sculptures, and not just the sculpt more the the the ceramics, the ceramics of people that are chubby and sitting there with their bald
head. Those are the ones that I mean, if you look at the arguments for the Asian thing, they're they're all they're always focused on those those babies and uh and again very fat Maya babies look very Asian when they get when their faces get fat, it they're they're They're Asian phenotype comes out.
So I I think it's all. I think it's all very explainable. So are you saying that with this Asian migration it was just through the Baring Strait, that you don't have any belief of any migrations through waterways like the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean. No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying I'm saying that it's from Asia for sure. Yeah. I do not see enough evidence
to say that they island topped across Oceania. But I do think it makes the old idea of the ice corridor that they slipped through this little place in Canada and came down to North America by foot. Yeah, it seems silly and overworked to me. I think the logical thing would be that they had canoes. They were coastal people, they had boats, and they made much faster progress down the coast all the way into South America than this ice corridor
theory. That is pretty much. I mean, I think probably more than half of my colleagues now have put the ice corridor theory bed or at least not the only way that people made through. Sure, maybe some people walked, but I think that they shot down the coast. I think these were seafaring people that they vast progress down the coast and then filtered inland in the places that they stopped. So, if they're coming down to the coast front
to Mexico to Pacific side, where are they originating from? Are they coming up from South America or down from North America? The original ones are coming down from Alaska from that crossing in the Bearing Street. Oh they're coming, that's a Oh, that's the hell of a boat. Right, those are
the first ones. But if now we can see that you know, it's thirty thousand years ago, not twelve thousand years ago, then we've got enough time depth to say, you know, the first groups came down starting thirty thousand years ago, and they made it all the way to South America, and then ten thousand years later those guys to go north, and so you know, you could see, I could see where the migration overall patterns are much more complicated than just a one off and then they entered the Americas.
There could have with the time depth we now believe, there's plenty of time for a culture to have grown up in South America for ten thousand years and then moved back north up into Mexico to influence them. Yeah, you made a good point earlier in our discussion a Chinese coming to California. I think they found anchors off of the coast of the Catalina Islands that are attributed to or they had the same style as early Chinese mariners, so that may have
been a starting point and then coming down further. I'm curious about diffusion, and this is a real problem when we start talking about the high level of high degree of advancement when it comes to astronomy, mathematics, and clindical studies, which the OMEC were brilliant at. Do we think they had their own R and D development where they came out of nowhere and just started putting out calendars or did they inherit because their calendars are pretty sophisticated, you know,
we see them on their steely the standing markers. But where do we think that originates. I think they invented them. When they invented them is a question, and whether the Maya did or whether the zapitect did. I think that there was a there was an R and D, and there was probably you know, annual conferences too with guys that were the you know, the top thinkers of those societies getting together and talking about things. It's you know,
it's a hard thing to get at. The Mesoamerican calendar is so different than the calendars of like the Phoenicians or even the Chinese, that there's not a lot of logical A to B thinking that we can do about, you know, suggesting that they got their calendar from either, you know, the either the side of the Atlantic or the Pacific. I think it was an original thought and that it began with this two hundred and sixty day calendar that
involves twenty day names in thirteen numbers. There's an interesting thing that just that Takeshi and Omada is doing with the Olmec, you know, he just did that incredible lidar study where he found the PLU two hundred platforms. But the another part of that study, that same study that I was keyed in on, was the rec ignition that a lot of these long north south oriented platforms
have twenty small buildings on top of them. He's seen the pattern in a couple of them, and his suggestion is that that twenty is about the twenty day names, and that it's an indicator that even back in those Olmec times, even though they weren't putting it on monuments, they were still functioning. They were still using that two hundred and sixty day calendar. Yeah, I mean a mata is not what is he suggesting? Those are omech or are
they Mayasyites? Well, the one Aguada phoenix he's been saying is a Mayasite for a while. But I just saw a lecture from him on the Internet where he looks like he's coming around. I mean, he's getting just it's just too much. After he found, you know, exactly the same platform two hundred times to the west in the Omec area, he's beginning to finally
come around that that's that's not Maya, that's all. You know. The one thing that's funny about his research is when he did a ground study where he dug into one of the platforms and the different layers go way way way back. But the funny thing about it is they look like load bearing layers, like they were made for heavy weight of some kind. Has he come up with any any follow up theories on why they would do that. I
haven't heard of anything like that. I mean, I know, if you want your building to stand, you're going to have to build it well. And the testimony is that it's still there, so they did do the job well. But he has found one of the things that make him resistant to name Aguada Phoenix, which is very much east of any olemic thing we knew previously. He's found absolutely no basalt statues, in fact, no big statues
of any kind at that site, which is admittedly a disconnect. And the ceramics he's found in the excavations are much more strongly Maya, which I find more explainable because it's on the border between the old Mech lands and the in the Maya lands, so that having Maya ceramics at a Maya border does not make you know that's no more strange than all the Mexican ceramics at the Texas border. But they're all dated around pre Dynastic. MAYA correct that? Oh
yeah, yes, before the Classic period. Sure, it's it's pre Classic and in fact contemporaneous with the transition between right about a thousand BCE, Lorenzo San Lorenzo falls and levent A rises and a Guada Phoenix starts right in that time period. Okay, have we found any steely of the ole Mech that lists a noted king, ruler, queen, or anyone of importance in the recent history? Well, I'm keen on the word list, in other words, describing a ruler. No, we have, no, we have.
That's a that's a misunderstanding that we should put to bed right here. There is no Olmec writing. There is epi Olmec writing that starts about four hundred BCE, really, but from eighteen hundred to four hundred we have zero, zero Olmec writing. There is none. So you're saying it's a development period up until four hundred BC. Well, if you consider them undeveloped until they start writing, yes, but I mean they did make you know, a
couple of platforms that were a kilometer long. That's that's that's fairly developed, in my opinion. Don't we have any writing, not writing, but carving of notation on astronomical events from the Olmec prior to for litally not? I think that, you know, and I don't. I think that probably certain
things that we can read lump in Olmec and epiol Mac. But archaeology makes a clear division between Olmec and EPIOLMC, and it's only Epiolmec that are making texts of any kind, be them textual or calindrical, ok, mathematical. So we could say that from one thousand BC to four thousand BC it was a development period. And up until very recently the decade ago, everybody thought that the Omech were the mother culture to the Maya and handed over their clindrical
studies, their sciences and whatever. So that's a hell of a fast appearance of sophistication. Do what you say, it's certainly an invention. It's certainly an invention, and we are probably almost always missing pieces of the puzzle, you know. I'd say, in general, what frustrates me about Mesoamerica versus say, Egypt or Mesopotamia is the environment only preserves certain things, and by the time something's carved in stone, that is a well thought out project.
You know, the in quneiform. We have those those clay tablets that lasted forever, So we have the you know, the vital information of the development process. We have like people who wrote crappy poems and people who are bad mathematicians who actually put things in quneiform, and we have them. So we see a progression of people getting better and better and then perfecting things. We're in Mesuo America. All we have are the perfected project. The development stuff
was probably on more perishable medium that we don't have. So you're saying that in the Olmec world, we haven't found any part of me with writing, any kind of a language or even early symbology in any of their artifacts. No, well, there's symbolism. There's certainly, you know, iconography there. It's it's a it's a rich corpus and we debate on you know,
what these things mean. In fact, there are some of some of my colleagues believe there's a whole Olmec pantheon of gods that we can identify through this kind of iconography. It's not writing per se. You know that there's a bit of a snobbery when it comes to defining writing. For linguists, it has to reflect human speech. So if it's not reflecting the human word, if it's not something I can look at and sound out, then it's an
Then it's iconography. If it's something that I can read and actually speak as I'm looking at the symbols, that's writing. If it's not that, then it's iconography or symbolism. But there's a rich body of Olmec symbolism that art history thinks we know all sorts of things about. You know, it was so great to go to Leventa to see these sculptures up closer for personal One of the things I didn't get a chance to ask you one of the other
guests probably did. But what form of tool would they have to cut basalt stone, one of the hardest stones in the world, and to make it so smooth and rounded to uh sculpture these faces in these these rocks. I mean, well, they weren't using still right, they weren't using copper. What were they using? Harder stone that's or stone that's of an equal hardness,
But they've created it properly. We believe it's a lot of a lot of hammer stones and a lot of like jadeite is a very hard stone, and you could there's lots of axe heads and kind of thick owls that we find in the artifact record, So we think they're doing it with just harder stone. And the fine work is actually probably done with obsidian. I know, hard obsidian is is very brittle, but it's also very hard. If you use it nice and slow and you're an expert, you can cut into
basalt fairly easily. But you just got to know what you're doing. You got to make the tool right, and they do exhaust you'd have to go through a lot of tools. But yeah, and for this, so the for the finer work, like you know that the actual pupils of the eyes of those those colossal heads, those those are probably finished off with obsidian. Did Sterling ever find like what you could consider an artist's studio with these artifacts
and heads and stuff? I mean, I've seen pictures of him, you know, standing over the partially exposed head of one of these basalt heads. But did he find something more tangible, like a like a studio with those artifacts and things? Sterling never did. No. Sterling was very much involved in the city center and crafting romantic stories for National Geographic who was paying his
bills. But we do have there there is what they call a recycling artist workshop at on the top of San Lorenzo, right next to the Red Palace. There's a place where they're obviously recycling old, older basalt monuments into smaller, newer ones. We've also identified a couple of quarries at the at the Tuschela Mountains and we find some half made statues there, so that's actually really
interesting. There's there's ones that it's the evidence there points to both the big altars and the heads are being kind of rough made without their details there at the quarry and then transported and final details are created at the sites. Okay, as we get to the end of this, do we have any decipherment that gives us a sense of this as to the almoss yearning to know about
the stars, astronomy and calendars and cycles and things like that. Is there any idea that we have found where someone's saying, Okay, we need to look into this constellation, or we need to look into this star system or something. Oh you know, we are still struggling to figure out a lot of olmec astronomical knowledge. I do. Actually, there there's a there's a
wave that's coming through right now that's about the Milky Way. And I really like this research, and it's it's pairing up with stuff that's happening in North America. There's a there's a colleague of mine named William Romayne who's been doing some really fascinating work about Mississippian sites lining up to the Milky Way in its north south orientation. Oh, you mean the mountain mound builders. Yeah, the mound builders. He's at Kahokia and Angel Mound and he's still going it
might also be in the Hope. Well, there are these things. There are these alignments that are just slightly off north south, which I've always ignored because they're you know, east west is where things are rising and setting. But he's come up with this idea that kind of based on an idea that I had thirty years ago. My research is coming back around about how important
the Milky Way is to everyone in the New World. But all those OLEMC platforms are oriented about six to eight degrees off north south, and the Milky way in its north south formation is the road to the other world. It's it's the road the dead travel, our spirits travel it when we're dreaming. It's the road between this and the other world. And so with all of these, when we just had a couple of Olmec platforms, it was it
was not enough of a pattern to really argue it. But now we're getting more and more of these north south oriented platforms, and with Bill's latest ideas about Mississippian orientations that have the same orientation, I at least am beginning to think that these big Olmec platforms are lined up as the path between this world and the other world. And what are all the shamans on top of it
doing. They're contacting the other world. So I think they've kind of like the the orientation is opening the portal to the other world that's up in the sky to them, so that handset possible freests, astronomers using the platforms for ceremony. I guess, yeah, yeah, And I you know, we we divide a priestly class and a political class. They didn't, so probably the Kings participated in that as well. But this this orientation, which has
so far been unexplainable. I think that Bill Romayne's research is actually giving us some hope that we might have an actual meeting. Now, Cliff, I know you said we're near the end. I've been holding back on something to blow your mind with. Go ahead, we're all you know, I know you, I know you love the whole ancient machines thing. There is a crazy artifact group in the Olmec that that you may may or may not know
about. Have you heard of the uh Ill Mennite cubes. They're they're they're magnetite ilemnite, and they're found in uh Omecville, but not just some that's that's My last question to you was was that there are strange magnetic anomalies and some of the sculptures that the Omec are are attributed to the Omec, but I'm not sure about these. Tell me about them. Okay. They are all cubes. They're made out of a magnetite that's specifically called i Ill mennite.
They're about this big, and they all have three holes drilled in them, and so they're you know, they're a little larger and not exactly square, but they're you know, about the size of a of a big dice they have found and they're in all of the reports, but nobody ever mentions them. They have found over six metric tons of them in big caches on top of San Lorenzo, but also at all the other sites, and sometimes little just individual ones show up in house mounds. But there are six metric
tons. Actually I think I just found more. I think I'm up to like ten metric tons, because it's also at another part of San Lorenzo called Loma Sapote, and they're overall, there's like one hundred and forty thousand of these cubes and they are buried in a pit right next to the Red Palace on top of San Lorenzo. And they're magnetic, and you know, I looked up like, why the hell would anyone they're weekly magnetic, but they are magnetite, And I looked it up, like what is ill mennite?
And why would anybody care? The biggest stash in the world of it is in Russia, and you know why they mine it because it's the best source of titanium. So the best source of titanium, there are cubes of it, one hundred and forty thousand of them buried right next to the palace in
San Lorenzo is like that. The theories are, oh, they're probably fishing weight nets, or maybe they're pieces of jewelry, or an Ceipher's thinks that they were part of drills that you would like drill into stone using them, that their holes inside would allow them to be one of those like spin hilled. But one hundred and forty thousand of them buried next to the palace,
what the heck? And there's the last head that was found at San Lorenzo, has this really weird head helmet and all of it's these little beads. I thought they were jade beads, but uh, but apparently an Cipher's thinks that it's a hat made of those im night cube. I know the sculpture
you're talking about. It's got little squares all through it. And I was just there and asked a man who runs a museum in another town nearby, Ayukon, and he was there at the excavation, and he said that about ten of those cubes, those little cubes were in the matrix around head ten from San Lorenzo. Now I'm really stepping out on a limb here, but you know what the heck is that Why are these metal cubes in hue like by the ton in these Olmec sites And nobody people are like that. My
colleagues are like, oh, they're probably fishing. Wait fish if they're magnetic magnetic those I mean they're not wrongly magnetic. I mean for a moment I thought like, you know, because they all have the holes in them too, so they're weave together. They're probably weave together in something maybe like a
net. But I mean, you know, for a brief moment, I thought like, well, if you pile them all right together and you put them magnetically, you know, north south, could you actually levitate something with a net made of this ship? But I was like, no, you're crazy. I don't even say that out loud. Don't say it on the Earth Ancients podcast. You can say it here, but watch out. If you got university funding, you rights public. I already discounted that idea.
Do not credit me with that idea. No, we welcome, they'll look it up. It's insane there. I mean, six tons of a material that modern people get titanium out of. What's it doing there? I wonder if there's any sculptures or any platform, Uh what do they call it? Structures that are used that they that they plug into somehow. You know, it'd be very interesting to see if they plug in different I knew you'd love this. You know, you're always looking for the machine parts. I don't
know what the hell those things are. But you know, you know you may not admit this, but you're also an anomaloist. You're you're a master anomalist. I'm That's what I'm in it for, to find something that we never even thought we'd possibly find. Well, it's funny because we were talking about this is a couple of a year ago where we were talking about this under ground tunnel at Tiatia Con and I was like, how's this water coming
in? And you went out and found an amazing underground delivery system that they didn't even really talk about, no one talks about. I mean, thanks for crediting me, but it was pretty low hanging fruit. It was just on on an old Google thing. It was just I actually I actually quote you on that. So we'll have to make sure you don't get in trouble. So oh, I'm I'm not worried about I'm my own boss. Nobody
can that's true. That's true. And as always, Ed, doctor Ed Barnhardt always great to speak with you, and I think really you bring us up to date on some of the latest discoveries of the OMEC. And as always, if if you want to check out Ed and his schedule, you can go to what's the what's the website for your upcoming tours? Oh they're all full. Oh they are, but that's my exploration dot org. And then the other one that I'm always wanting to plug. That's why I'm you
know, doing the podcast thing is my podcast our k o ED. Yeah. I would love for people to go there. It's a funny spelling, it's you know, a eo ed at the end. So sometimes I did that archaeology thing where I think everybody knows how to spell archaeology. Yeah, check that out. His podcast is excellent. So yeah, Hey, so your tours are all filled up for this year? Yeah? Yeah, you know, it's taken twenty years, but apparently I'm popular this year. So
you're going are you going to be going to Levente again this year? Already went that was my first one in March, and then I'm going to Wahaka totally full then I'm going to Machu Pichu totally full. In fact, I've got to take my dad and his girlfriend. So now it's now I've broken my my cap, but I can't sell my daddy can't come. Yeah, and there one last one to the patent again to go see Day of the Dead. There excellent. Yeah, for those of you listening, Ed will
be taking us on a couple of tours in twenty twenty five. I'll be posting that it will come up with more information. So it's great to have him on as a tour leader. And as always, it's great to have you on the podcast Ed. Thank you, my friend, and we'll be in touch absolutely. Thanks for having me, Cliff, have a good one. You know. I need to mention that I've been traveling to Mexico since nineteen I think the first time I actually did a personal trip down there was
nineteen ninety five with a girlfriend. We were in Cancun. I was actually invited by a native elder that I had featured in a conference here in San Francisco. I actually mentioned this in the book, this new book that my own controversy, and I was pleasantly surprised at the size and the sophistication of the ruins, but I was with an elder, and that's one perspective.
And I have to say this, when you travel with an archaeologist, especially a Mayanist like Ed, they have a whole different take on it because they've analyzed it from a scientific point of view using the scientific methods. So although I don't always agree on a lot of the conclusions they reach, it's kind of fun to have a archaeologist with you. And this is why I really urge you to join an Earthy Agin's tour or your own tours within archaeologist somebody
who's part of the tour to get their perspective. And I want to mention this. We have a tour coming up in twenty twenty five where it is going to be the Day of the Dead in October, and I just spoke to Ed. He's working on the details right now. But if you can join us on that tour, he has added a special dimension which I am overjoyed to learn about. We'll get to climb a number of the peers at Tea Call and most notably the World Pyramid that John Burke tested uh for frequency
for energy. This thing is just pulsing with toleric energy, we get a chance to claim to the top of it. We'll do a meditative ceremony for a Day of the Dead, and we're gonna be plugged in and I don't know what to expect, but I think it's going to be just amazing. When you said an intention, anything you any access to these ancient places is opened through the key known as intention, So stay tuned for that. If you want to join us in uh In, that's Guatamala, by the way.
We'll be there just for a week, but it's going to be very intense. We're going to be into call two days. We're going to be in a number of other locations for a period of time, including the world class museums there, plus a lot of of food and delicacy and interaction with the locals which makes it really, really fun. So send me an email if you're interested. It's going to be in October twenty twenty five. Send it an email to Earth Ancients dot no, excuse me, Earth Ancients for
you at gmail dot com. And that's probably going to fill up pretty quickly. So all of our tours are available, by the way, all the details on all of our tours are available at Earth Ancients dot com Forward slash Tours. Always fun to have Ed on the program. His perspective is excellent. You don't forget the upcoming Cosmic Summit June fifteenth and sixtieth. What a world class lineup they have, Randallcarlson, Scott Walter, our good friend Pravin
Mohan, and on and on and on. They got like twenty keynotes that are really really great. For more information and details, go to Cosmicsummit dot com, Forward slash Earth Ancients. If you can make it, it's in North Carolina, and they got great accommodations a lot of it's very reasonably priced. If you can't make it, the two day is now one hundred bucks. The two day streaming audio video. You get to keep everything, and
if you can't make it, do the streaming. It's the best way to see a live presentation from the comfort of your laptop or your computer or your TV. So again, Cosmic Summit June fifteenth and sixteenth. It's going to be in North Carolina. For more information, go to Cosmicsummit dot com, Forward slash Earth Ancients. I do want to mention that our Turkey Tour is
still filling up or about halfway full. That is going to be the ancient sites of Turkey, including some of the new discoveries they found at Go Beckley Tepi. And what's fun about this tour is we get a little bit access that isn't typical for the general public. And this tour is twelve days, includes darren Kuru, the underground City Cappadocia, and a number of unique sites that have recently been discovered and partially discussed, but not a great deal.
Turkey is extremely old, extremely old, and I haven't been there. I'm looking forward to it again. It's going to be August fourteenth to the twenty fourth. For more information, go to Earth Ancients dot com forward slash Tours and check it out. The entire itinerary is there, but just know that we are updating it constantly and as new things open up, we will definitely be there. So Earth Ancients dot com Forward slash Tours any questions whatsoever.
So we got two tours left. We got after Egypt. We have Turkey in August and then we have the final tour of the year, which is in November. It's the Sacred Temples of Mexico. That's November eighth through the seventeenth, and that's going to be a classic because a lot of new stuff has opened up because of this new train. They've discovered new sections of ek Baalam and we're with me Me Wile Gonzales, who's very very attuned to what's
happening with excavations, and we'll get to see a lot of stuff. So whatever you're interested in, come out and join us Earth Agents dot com, forward Slash tours. If you have questions, send me an email at Earth Ancients for you at gmail dot com and I'll get right back to you. Our tours are great and they're very reasonable, and I make sure they're reasonable, so check it out. All right, that's it for this program. I want to thank my guest today, doctor Edwin Barnhardt, coming from Colorado,
United States. Has always a team of Gil Tour, Mark Foster and everyone who makes this thing happen. You guys rock all right, take care and be well and we will talk to you next time.