YouSaid · the spoken record

Ed Barnhart

lines on the record: 262
first: 2024-09-30
most recent: 2024-09-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Right. Like, I'm Keeb. I'm 13 Keeb, and it says it's funny how accurate a lot of them are. Mine is basically an irresponsible husband and parent, but people like me, so my family still prospers. Like, well, God, that's horribly.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Maya collectively call them the mom, the grandmother grandfather spirits. And they talk to each one of those days and they pray to them. There's now an association of some 8,000 people that are called A Ki that are daykeepers who are keeping the days. And they're also like... Community psychologists almost. People come to them and say, you know, my life is mixed up. What's wrong here? Well, let's ask the mom. Like, okay, well, it looks like you're not doing this or that. Or, you know what? You're an accountant. You're not supposed to be an accountant. You're supposed to be, you know, a midwife. What are you doing? You're living your life wrong. You're a keeb. You need to start being a keeb.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's neat how obsessed they were really math nerds. It wasn't good enough for them to just make one cycle to describe time. They had all these cycles that interlocked into each other, like cogs in a machine, though they never thought of it like that. But the Sulkines, their oldest one, and the one that still endures today, there are millions of Maya people that are living their lives based on a 260-day count, no weeks, no months. It's just 13 numbers combined with 20-day names for a total of two hundred sixty days, and then it goes again. Everybody in the highlands knows what their birthday is in that calendar, knows what it means about their personality and the kind of jobs that they're supposed to do. Each one of those days has their own spirit in what's supposed to happen in those days.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do this just to show the world that that calendar system is evergreen. It can go into the future or the past for billions of years in the system they made, just like our system is.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we absolutely could. And that's actually one of the things that I'm hoping to move the needle on in my generation with my career is to give these cultures the respect they deserve as standing toe to toe with the rest of our ancient civilizations we respect. There are things that should be called science that are not being called science at the moment. Their math is incredible. Their hydraulic engineering is incredible. Their chemistry is incredible. And so I hope to talk about these things differently as a way to get people to recognize the achievements in a different way.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Calculation based on where it should be in the ancient past. And they're using constellations. They're showing us they know by saying Planet's in this constellation right now, and thirty three thousand years ago, it would be in this constellation.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and they did it really well. Now, of course, they are the only ones to develop a fully elaborated writing system in all of the Americas. South America had the Kipu, but it's so different than our writing. We're still trying to figure out what the heck it is. We know there's math there too. But they had the ability to take a lifetime worth of measurements and hand it to the next generation who would then do it more and do it more. That's how they figured out kind of the holy grail of ancient astronomy. How good were they was whether they could see the procession of the equinoxes. The fact that we're just barely wobbling and there's a 26,000 year period where the stars as that backdrop will spin all the way around and come back. It's 26,000 years. But the Maya were able to figure out, wait, it's moving one degree every seventy two years.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes down to the earth like three times as fast. All of a sudden it just shoots down and hits the earth. And so the people of post-classic Maya civilization saw that as the gods shooting a spear into the earth. And that was a good time to attack your neighbors. That was like war time when the spear is going to hit the earth.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was important in and of itself. But the planets, we can see them coming up with ideas, definitely doing the math and seeing that there is a repeated cycle. And then coming up with mythology around them, like Venus for them was associated with war. And they had very ritualized times to go to war that had something to do with Venus. Sometimes in the classic period Maya, it was the first appearance of Venus as the morning star. That was a good time to go to battle with your neighbors. And when it became the post-classic with Chichinitsa being the capital of the Yucatan, then it looks like if you watched Venus day after day, it goes slowly up every day, and then when it hits its highest point, as Morning Star in the morning.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a question I've spent my entire career trying to answer. I think that they saw it as proof of the cyclical nature of life. And certainly they saw like every ancient group did, like, are those the gods? Why are those things so far away? But I think that the Maya especially looked at it with a much more mathematical mind than most did. And so they watched these things move every night. And if you do that even today, you notice that all the stars move in tandem. They're just this blanket. They're like this curtain behind me. They're the stage upon which some very important players are dancing. And that's the moon, the sun, and the planets. There's five planets we can see visibly. So they started watching, like, why are just those seven moving differently than the rest? And those are the things that they keyed on mathematically. The sun, of course, was also involved in the agricultural cycle.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, the fang deities nowhere in Central America and Mesoamerica. That's why there's jaguars. There's Jaguar iconography. But it's not the same thing, this whole... Jaguar Transformer deity does not exist there. They do have a pantheon.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been doing a deep dive on this for my course that I just did, and it really does seem like these other cultures that have jade and hematite and obsidian, the Olmec had none of that stuff. They were living in a swamp and building things out of dirt, but they were importing those materials from those areas, carving them into all sorts of religious iconography, and then exporting them back to them”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And actually, we have one that's, I think. 2,000 years older now, just a couple years ago, again in Yucatan in a cave, they found a woman they named Naia now. And she's like twelve thousand years old.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can date that charcoal and it comes from 10,000 years ago. And the hands are all small. It's typical old Mexico. I walked right up to these things and could put my hand. I didn't mess with them, but I put my hand next to these hands. And they're all smaller than my northern European hand. And so either it was a bunch of kids who were in this cave ten thousand years ago, or it was people of Maya stature who did it.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Joking, but you know, that could be something to that. I think there's some truth to it. I mean, the pygmies are small and the people on the plains in Africa are big. North American Indians are tall and the Maya are small. There is definitely a pattern of smaller people in the forests. But anyway, there's a cave in the Yucatan called Loltun Cave that has handprints in the cave. It's somebody who put their hand on the cave and spit charcoal around their hand like a negative print.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're still piecing it together. I don't think I'd be lying if I told you I had the answers, but we do have evidence of Maya stature people. They're a small people. Generally speaking, people that grow up in the forest are smaller and people that grow up in the open plains are taller. Probably about just generations of people that hit their head on a branch or not.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that archaeology can prove, but it's almost certain that they interacted with each other. Number one, it's just, you know, it's biased to think that these people couldn't travel as widely as people on the other side of the planet did. But there's all sorts of hints like that first ceramics I was talking about that the Maya made. They show up strangely, uh... Sophisticated technologically already, and down in Ecuador they had them for a thousand years before. So a lot of people, myself included, think that the idea of ceramics actually came from South America to the Maya.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Modern Mexico ends, right? You know, you see the name Maya there with the white line around it, that's Guatemala. So, Guatemala cuts off most of Mexico from Central America. But Mesoamerica only goes about halfway through Honduras. And then it's really kind of a no man's land. Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, they really, they're neither. They're not Mesoamerica. They're not South America. They're more South America because they've got some gold there. But then basically, you get on the other side of Panama and you're fully in South America, with two distinct groups too. You've got the ice that are on the Andes, on the west coast, and then you have the Amazon.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the time period we're talking about where the Olmec are there, a thousand BC is a great midpoint of it. I'd say it starts about 1800 BCE and by 500 BCE the Olmec are gone. and a whole new wave of civilization and population increase happen. In terms of Mesoamerica, looking at your map here, I'd tell you about halfway through the Chihuahua desert up there in the top left, that's about the boundary of... Mesoamerica. There's this big desert where almost nobody lives. And once you get north enough, you get into the ancestral Pueblo people of what's now America, the Four Corners area. They're not Mesoamerican. They have different lives.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you've got the Maya to the east of them. Then you have the Valley of Oaxaca where the people call the Zapotecs there rising up. And then you have the Valley of Mexico, which will eventually become the Aztecs, but not for millennia. All those areas are interacting with each other.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We put these names on cultures, we talk about how they evolved from one to another, we draw these lines where there aren't any, we make these time periods that a culture magically transforms into somebody with another name where I'm pretty sure they didn't care about any of those names. But the Maya and the Olmec are two parts of a larger interaction sphere that's happening in Mesoamerica, a very dynamic time. The Olmec are really bringing the religion part. But the other areas are bringing technology, ceramic technology, making hematite mirrors, making tools out of obsidian and other stone types. So you've got the Olmec in the middle where Mexico gets skinny and it gets swampy down there. That's called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. That's the old...”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just finished filming a whole thing on the Olmecs and their interaction with the Maya for the great courses. I'm thrilled for it to come out next spring. I think they co evolved archaeology in this regard is the worst enemy of this.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the religion that's being created by the Olmec, who are to the north of them, in the swamps of what we call the Isth of Tuant”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But seriously, the Maya, the first hint that we see people who are culturally Maya, very close to where the time period for that Shavin culture is, about 1800 BCE, there's a culture that some call the Mokia, not Maya. But they're on the Pacific coast where Guatemala and Mexico connect. It's called the Soconusco. And those are the first people that are really going to be culturally Maya. And they're interacting with the culture that has traditionally been seen as Mexico's mother culture, which is the Olmec. They're kind of the same thing as we were talking about in South America where the Maya, the original Maya, are not, there's not a whole lot to indicate that they have a religion. But the Olmec have this religion they develop, and they start exporting it. And you see the Maya become more and more.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's another complicated one. Another group living mostly in a jungle that we have barely begun to explore. You know, the truth is a lot of the questions in the Amazon and what we're talking about now is the paten and the mountains there. Those aren't places archaeologists want to live. They're horrible. I mean, I've been there. I don't want to live in a tent and eat rations. I want to live in a nice town, so a lot of the places where the answers are, we still really haven't gotten there because it takes a special person to be educated enough to know what they're looking at and tough enough to want to be there. I've done my tour of duty. I'm now in a nice little podcast studio.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our sports are really based on taking those kinds of urges and channeling them positive where somebody's not dead at the end of it.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know everybody's got it, I think. I think we. Need to listen to our better angels because if we don't, we as a human species can easily devolve into just using violence and against others to get what we want. It's a daily choice we make not to be savages.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, you know, there was a fascinating story in Peru, I guess it was probably like eight years ago or something, but there was a ranger from one of the biology stations who just in the by and by of protecting his area met one of these uncontacted tribes and befriended someone, not the whole tribe, but he made some friends who would meet him in the woods, not in their community. And he started to learn their language over a couple years. And so he was this kind of important guy who actually could be the first translator to talk to these people. And one day a couple of them just came out of the woods and just plugged him with arrows and just killed him. And then they went back in the woods like, that's the one guy who understands what we're saying. We should kill him and move our village.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seen as a biological thing. It was a spiritual thing. So if somebody in your village gets sick, the question is asked, well, what spirit is menacing him and who called it out on him? And then the rumor starts Well, I bet you it was Joe over there in that other community still pissed off for that time when we stole his daughter. And we ought to go over there and kill Joe. And then he'll get better. And so this round of never ending violence, like Hatfields and McCoy's had that thing. And the people of New Guinea also do that. So it's not, you know, there are certain areas. Mostly wooded areas now that I think about it where people just hide out and they attack each other as a cultural institution”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know I'm a relatively peaceful person, but I've got, you know, I've got the monster in me like everybody does. And I think that these, you know, it's cultural norms that become institutionalized for the Yanamamo, they really, part of the rite of passage to be a man is to go kill or maim somebody from an outer village. And they go in there, they oftentimes the way they don't let inbreeding set in and ruin everybody, not that they think of it scientifically, but they typically go and steal women from far off communities. And that starts a big fight. Another thing that starts fights when nobody even fought is illness. Illness in the Amazon and all of the ancient Americas wasn't”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not just foreigners, they attack each other. The Yanamamo are famous for just having never ending feuds with each other.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one thing the Amazon is once you figure out how not to die in it, it's a paradise of food. Food's fallen from the sky all the time there. And if once you learn to adapt to that environment, you've got very little need. There's no pressure to make anything else. Things are working.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a lot of them are. By uncontacted, we mean we don't know anything about these guys. We know roughly where they are, but places like Ecuador have very responsible policies where no one's allowed to go contact them. So we have a dearth of information. If they walk out of the jungle and talk to us, that's one thing. But we don't go out and they are looking for them. But they do seem frozen in time, and I don't think any of us have a good estimation of how long they've been like that. But you know, we were saying earlier that humans change based on pressures of their environment. It's a mother necessity is oftentimes how we invent things or why we change. It's pressure.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's job security like that part. You know, but I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans has ever had began as heresy and lunacy. You know, that guy was crazy up to the second he was brilliant. And so we got to keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish because one of them eventually is going to lead us to the big paradigm shift. And if we, you know, if we're busy burning books of ideas that we don't like, that's where we close our minds to the possibility of advancing things.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the bottom line. Everything's theories. And as responsible scientists, we're trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories. That's one more foot out of the science box that archaeology often steps. We're supposed to be disproving what we think is happening, not proving it.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of our ideas are theories. Very few of them are facts. And we're not, you know, we could have the story wrong. But one thing we're real good at is finding stuff. I mean, we find fish scales. So I find it just too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large that we can't even find a potshird from.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he believes that that civilization was destroyed, but that members of it escaped this cataclysm and then spread out all over the world to cede all of the world's civilizations for the next revival. There's where I disagree with him. I think these were independent civilizations that grew up in their own ways, that they were not seeded by some more advanced civilization from the past and that they all hold things in common because they have this common ancestry of a, you know, in his early books he suggested it's the Atlantis. I don't think he suggests that anymore, but he still hangs on to the single advanced now completely lost civilization. And archaeologists, we don't have, you know, we're...”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My main point of disagreement is that his and his ideas evolve like everybody's, you know, no scientist or researcher in anything has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds it till the day they die. His ideas are evolving, but his ideas remain, a core of them are that there was a very advanced single ancient civilization that was utterly destroyed by climactic conditions and the younger Dryus hypothesis is part of that most recently. He used to not say that. Now he's into this meteor thing.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frankly I agree with him. I mean it's just like what I was just talking about. It's the conclusion part that we differ from. But the facts that he's basing that on are that terra preta, are the huge geometric earthworks, are the ever increasing evidence of them they are now from the bottom of Bolivia to Guyana. They're everywhere. Every time we open up the jungle, we find these big works. So yes, there was a vast civilization that was there. How advanced they were is a question and also, you know, a perspective thing. Graham really focuses in on what we don't know and what could be.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've met Graham, and personally I like him. He's a nice guy, got a nice sense of humor, and I think he's smart. And I also think he is a very good researcher. He and I are working on the same set of facts. The differences are interpretations. I do not believe Graham's idea that a single now lost ancient civilization ceded the rest of them. I just don't see that on a number of levels artifact wise, technology-wise, art historical analysis. So I think his research is great. I think that he's very well read, in fact, better read than a lot of my colleagues. But his conclusions I disagree with. And he and I have talked about this and had a very civil and normal conversation about it and agreed to disagree without spitting any venom at any point in the conversation. That was”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's so many of them. You know, a thing that excites the world about archaeology right now is Gobekli Tepe and this 10,000 now Quran Tepe is 11,000. The whole area is called the Tas Tepler. We only found it a couple of decades ago. It was just, you know, an archaeologist rowing through the area and ask a sheep herder, hey, you know, you guys know where anything ancient is? Oh yeah. Let me show you this. And then all of a sudden we've got a lost civilization and the shepherds always knew where it was. Just nobody asked them.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I took a trip into the Amazon, I went from Manaus up the river, the Black River a couple of days, and went and met some different communities. And I asked them about this Black Earth. And they were like, yeah, that's why we're here. Sometimes we move our village, but when we move, we look for the Terra Preta, and that's where we're going to put our village because that's a place that all of our gardens work, the other places they don't.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It happened for sure in the Amazon. One of the ways that we're trying to push the frontier of where people were in the Amazon, because yes, the trees and just the biomass have eaten so much evidence. But they're finding more and more of these places that they call Terra Preta, which is black earth. And they're huge swaths of it. So I guess the anthropology term is anthropogenic landscapes. And what they're saying is that that really dark earth couldn't have just got that way through natural forest processes, that sometime in the distant past, that forest wasn't there and there was major farming and human activity to the point where they totally turned the soil black. And it's much more enriched.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's been under the forest forever, so it's very torn up. But it's there. Now, you know, Brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now. And a thing that I think is completed now is Brazil and Bolivia partnered together and built a highway all the way across and opened up a whole bunch more land, which has found a more of these what we call like geometric earthworks. So there's more and more evidence of these civilizations. It's not a could be there. It's there for sure.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“City of Z and El Dorado are in pretty different places. El Dorado, the ideas of where it is kind of center around towards Colombia. And the city of Z is named after a region of Brazil called the Shingu. And so those are an America worth of distance apart. The entire, people don't really think about it on the map, but the entire United States would fit inside the Amazon. That's how big that place is. And these two are on either end. But both of them have evidence of civilizations, these big, you know, it's lowland and it floods all the time. So what they did is they'd make these big mounds and then they'd make huge causeways between mounds so they could walk through their cities while they were seasonally inundated. And a bunch of that stuff has been found in the Shingu area, like huge areas that would support tens of thousands of people. Again, you know, it's not stone built”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just from the bus on the highway, I could see, like, that's a pyramid out there. Oh, there's another one. And I know how old the stuff we have studied there is. It's again 3000 BC. We're just barely beginning to understand them. Corral frustrates me to no end, the lack of art there. We've got, you know, stones and bones and not even ceramics to go on. And they didn't have the courtesy to leave me a bunch of art I can interpret, so I don't know what those people believed.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That picture is evolving. I mean, forever, it was just the Shavin people that we've been talking about, the ones with all the first depictions of religious art were the mother culture. And they certainly did transmit a lot of stuff. But then all of a sudden we find chorale. The next one that we've barely even begun looking at, but it's probably older than corral is Sachin culture. I was just poking around there last year.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting to, you know, it's hallucinogens are poisoning us, they're killing us. It's a near-death state. And people of the Americas believed sleeping was entering that other world, death you entered this other world, and that when you took this mighty dose of poison, it was helping you enter that other world for a period of time.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think in terms of South America, they Really work. In North America, where we're in a more northern climb here and there are less of them, not so much, at least in terms of psychedelics, things like tobacco was always a big part of it. But a lot of, you know, there's more than one way to reach a hallucinatory state. The hard way is starvation, sleep deprivation, and for the Maya, for example, would go sleep deprivation, starvation, and then they'd cut themselves very badly. And that loss of blood, we believe, triggered hallucinations and visions. Nothing to do with drugs. I would much prefer the drugs for.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Americas, yes, I do, though, you know, hallucinogens are not part of every ancient tradition in the world. In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas. Of course, now they're global. They can be grown all over the place. But originally speaking, very, very few were outside of the Americas. So they were part of the experience here in a way that they just couldn't be in other places.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source