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

“There's this wall on the backside that faces the Amazon side. So if you're entering the city from the Amazon path, you see this wall first. And it's a bunch of faces that some of them are human, some of them are total jaguar, and some of them are trans, forming in between. But there's a group of them that are midway through transformation, and they show their nostrils leaking out this snot that's coming like down their face. San Pedro doesn't do that to you, but ayahuasca does. Ayahuasca, traditionally, they'd take a blowgun and just shoot it up your nose or up your ass. But a lot of times up your nose and when it shoots up your nose, the first thing that happens is just this gush of snot comes out of you. And there are stone depictions of people uncontrollably. Snotting on the back side of this temple from 3,000 years ago.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think longer than anybody can remember. But I mean, it's a natural plant that's been there forever. I think that it's thousands and thousands of years. That's another thing Shavine de Juantara was talking about where I think the things came, the religion came from 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
“That's bringing those spirits in. And people don't see them unless they imbibed the San Pedro cactus juice, which is the hallucinogen, which is in the Amazon side, it was ayahuasca. On the coast, it was San Pedro Cactus. That's what allows you to actually see that other world”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They call spirits down. There's this whole spirit world. There's the ancestors and the people that drink San Pedro cactus juice kind of, they don't talk about the fang deity anymore. I think Christianity in 500 years has somewhat put him in the back. You know, it was unpopular to have a pagan deity. So they don't talk about him much anymore, though he's still around. There in around Trujillo, they call him IAPEC. But, um... Music play in the Amazon. They play flute, sometimes a chorus of women sing, and that's supposed to bring the spirits down into the ceremony. There's a spirit that's hurting the person that's sick, and then the priest or the shaman or the corindero, whatever you want to call him, has his own posse of spirits that are going to help him figure out what's going on. So when the music starts...”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has a little puppy. He has a puppy that's like just dancing around his feet and like jumping up on him in various scenes. They see him again and again. Sometimes he's in these healing sex scenes. In fact, I tracked that puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where a priest was having sex with somebody in a house. And there's a puppy just scratching at the door, like, hey, you forgot me. And then finally, one day I found one with the puppy having sex with the woman instead of the fang deity. I was like, no, he really is very involved in this. What is this weird puppy? Yeah, he likes to take heads off, but he also has a puppy he adores.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he had two sides of the coin, like a lot of the Hindu gods are one aspect is terrible, the other aspect is lovely. I think he had that same sorts of qualities because we do see him as a fierce warrior taking people's heads off. And he is a jaguar, which in and of itself implies a certain power and ferocity. But then there are other funny things about him, like he is definitely involved in a lot of healing ceremonies and a lot of those healing ceremonies are involved with sex acts when it comes to the moch. There's this whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with women or men. And some of them show their faces transforming into that fang deity. Like he is acting through them. But the thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fangdi.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people walked and proselytized and places like Shavine, there's a later one in Inca times called Pachakamak that are pilgrimage places where people come in to be healed if they're sick, but also just to pay homage to the powers that be. So Shavine was a place where people from the Amazon and people from the coast were all coming together. In fact, we saw it in the archaeology there. There's these interesting labyrinths under the pyramids with the fang deity all over them that have like one labyrinth will have all pottery. The next labyrinth will have a bunch of animal bones. The next one will have a bunch of things made out of stone. So people are showing up and giving this tribute. And they're learning and then they're going back to their community. So I think it dispersed from certain pilgrimage spots and became...”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then they have these other like, oh, here's the crab deity and here's the fox deity. But if you look at them, like the crab deity is just that guy's face coming off of a crab. And the fox deity is that guy's face coming off of a fox. So I think on that particular instance, I explain it similar to what Zeus did. You know how Zeus was able to like, you know, turn into whatever animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted and he showed up in all sorts of forms, but he was always Zeus. I think that the fang deity manifests himself through people and animals throughout the art and that there are missing stories of mythology that we don't have anymore.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where are the deities here? And what I see is that same guy with not just one or two traits, but a whole package of them that shows up again and again and again for thousands of years in each one of these cultures. He's got circular eyes, he's got a fanged mouth, he's got claws on his hands and feet. He's a humanoid, but he also has snakes coming off of his head like hair and snakes coming off of his belt. And then not so much in Shavine, but as it goes forward, he starts carting around severed heads, human severed heads. So they're like in the old literature, the Moche will call him the decapitator deity.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, certainly without the advent of writing. Depictions in art have all sorts of meanings encoded in them. And there are certain what we call diagnostic elements. We can pull apart the same sort of thing in the Greek pantheon. You know by their dress and what they're holding, what the different gods are. You can tell Hades from Zeus by the different things they're holding, you know, lightning bolts or tridents or whatever it is. So they all have these diagnostic elements to them. So that's how art history goes about analyzing art over time. Once we can put it in a chronological sequence, then we can say, okay, here's a deity here in Shavine culture. Now we move forward 500 years. Now we're in mochay and nazca culture.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Islamic thing where they say you can't understand the face of Vera Cocha. So when they do put him in a cosmogram, they'll make him just a blob, like he's just unknowable. But he's at the very top. I think we're misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to say were deities as just supernatural beings. If we flipped the mirror on Christianity and take a look at it, which of course Christianity's monotheistic, right? It would be heresy to say otherwise. But who are all these other characters? Who are all these angels and demons? And Jesus Christ, and I mean, I don't even know who the Holy Spirit is, but he's some sort of supernatural being, but it's that monotheistic system has lots of things that have supernatural powers that are not God. That's where I think the crux of us misunderstanding ancient Andean art is.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clause on his hands and feet, and snakes coming off of his head and off of his belt. He's got really identifiable traits. He also likes to sever people's heads off and carry them around. But he's the fanged deity and he's there he shows up in Shavine de Jointar, the capital of that Chavine culture. And he keeps showing up through every culture, even thousands of miles away throughout the next two millennium, right up to the Inca. The Inca have a creator deity they call Viracocha, but Vericocha is the fang deity. When we do see him by the time you get to Inca, they do this kind of like almost, uh,”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there are bona fide pantheons. Greece had one, Egypt had one, Mesopotamia had one. Lots of the early religions of the Old World were pantheons. And I think that was part of the problem. The earliest archaeologists walked in there with a preconceived notion that ancient cultures have pantheons. And so they went to the art looking for them. And they came up with things like the shark god and the moon goddess and the sun god and all these things. But when I look at the art and I was trained by a person right here in Austin, Texas as an art historian, you follow certain diagnostic traits through art to see the development over time. And when I look at it and use that methodology, there's a single face with goggle eyes and fangs and”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is exactly what I think. And I think it's all about this Vang deity who somewhere thousands of years. A religion took hold that could have been kind of a combination of ideas from the coast and the Amazon, but he is the one creator deity, in my opinion, through all of these cultures. And the people in the Amazon still talk about him. There, his name is Vihomase in some groups. But they say that his emissaries on earth are the jaguars and that he is the creator deity.”
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 really what I'm in it for trying to understand these people and it's real detective work and we know we're dealing with uh Totally flawed record. We only have what could preserve the test of time. You know, if we look around this room here, if two thousand years of weathering happened in this room, what would be left? And what would we think happened here?”
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. I do think it did. And you're right, ideas are more powerful than weapons, but archaeology can't see them at all. We can see... Sometimes we can see ideas manifesting in the things they create and lead to, but there's an interpretation problem. Are we right about what idea created this? Those are things that archaeology just can't get at.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This culture called Shavine starts up and they, their main temple is up in the Andes in this place of least path of least resistance between the Amazon and the coast. It's about three days walk either way from this place where this temple is. That's where we start seeing the very first religious iconography and it's all over the temples. There are things that are definitely from the coast but the iconography are all jaguars and snakes and crocodiles and those don't come from the coast. All of those things are coming out of 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
“In South America, Corral and Aspero that I was just talking about, it's weird what a dearth of art and any evidence of religion we have. We have those pyramids and things that we call temples, but we don't really know what went on in there. And there's no hints of religious iconography, ceremonies, nothing like that. The first stuff that we get is right when that culture ends about 1800 BCE.”
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 think so. I think religion in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there very old. There's actually the earliest pottery in all of the Americas, of all these places that we have civilizations that grew up, you know, where the oldest pottery is, the middle of 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
“Connected to another city on the coast called Aspero. An Aspero starts about the same time, but they're all about fishing. They have no farming. And Corral, who's upriver from them is farming, but funny enough they're not really farming food. They're farming cotton, and they're making nets, and they're trading the nets with the people on the coast for the fish. So it's not as simple as it's just agriculture anymore, but it is, I think, still rooted in how can we feed more people than just our family? How can we together create a food abundance so we're no longer scared about running out of food?”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have in the Americas this long period of time that we call the paleo-Indian time where they were hunting megafauna. And then when those went away, we get into this even longer period of time called the archaic, where they're just hunters and gatherers. Sometimes somebody's coming up with a cool, different kind of arrowhead. They go back and forth with different hunting tools, but really nothing changes for thousands of years. And then finally they start developing into these larger groups, which for the most part has to do with agriculture. It used to be archaeology, that was just the end all be all. Civilization starts with the invention of agriculture. And we can't have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm. But that's been discounted. Peru was a big part of that, that area of corral.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I think we're still piecing that together. Coming back to the first things we talked about, I think we're still missing a lot of stuff, especially in South America. It just keeps getting older and older. Part of the reason it's hard to answer that question is, at what point do we consider people a civilization or a culture?”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pyramid was built in Ohio area by the Adena people, it was built out of dirt, but it's full of bodies. And I think it's an echo of a old thing where they used to be putting bodies in shell mounds.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not to jump ahead, but in North America, you know, where they also made pyramids, there's this interesting evolution where there were these piles of shells along rivers and along the coastlines. People ate a lot of shells. That was an easy thing to collect and eat. So these piles of shells would be near communities and they probably became landmarks, but eventually they started burying their dead inside those too. Probably again about stink and about, well, we don't want the dogs to eat them. I maybe put them in the middle of the shell pile. But then that all of a sudden became this where my grandfather's body is. That's where great-grandfather's body is. And all of a sudden people started being attached to place not just for the resources, but for the shared memories of their ancestors, so when the very first”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, that being said, you remember we were just talking about Wacaeta and this one that's almost 6,000 BC now is the first one. That one's a funny case. We just talked about all these lofty goals, but actually I'm pretty sure that While Caprieta's first pyramid was about capping a smelly pile of trash, I think everybody piled up their trash in the middle of town, and it stunk. It's on the coast. It stunk like fish. And somebody said, if we just bury this thing with dirt, it won't smell anymore. And then it was a big mound where people could get up and talk to everybody and then said, well, it's squishy. If we cap it with clay, then it will really not smell. I really think that the very first pyramids in Peru were about trash management. Talk about blading, huh?”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without rebar or cement, you end up building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top and that turns into a pyramid. You know, any kid who's playing with blocks on the floor builds a couple towers and his brother knocks them down and if he wants one that's going to stay and be tall, he ends up making something with a fat base and a tiny top. And I think that building something big and tall together is one of those human things like we built that. That will be here after we're gone. People remember who we were. We are all, if there's any human commonality, it's fear of our own deaths. And that we were nothing and no one will ever remember us. I think that the first big monuments like that were probably a group of people.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, my root answer is pretty boring, really. A lot of people ask me, why are there pyramids all over the planet? How is that? Is that a coincidence? I mean, who? I think that when people wanted to build a big building,”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one that's now pushing 6,000 BCE. Like that's thousands of years before the stuff in Egypt. And that one's called Wakaprieta. And it was not an Egyptian pyramid, but it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inside these, we've also found a couple of things that were babies, that were human babies that were buried in there. And I don't think there's a lot of people that see that and go, oh, look at that. They were sacrificing babies, these monsters. I think a lot of the things that are interpreted as baby sacrifices, corrals, evidence being one of them, I think it's more about the tragic nature of infant mortality. In the past, it was a lot more common. There were cultures that didn't even really properly name their kid until they got to five because chances were they were going to die. And so I think a lot of these babies that we find in these ceremonial contexts that are interpreted as sacrifices, I think they're putting them in special places because they mourn the death of their kids. And it just happened a lot more frequently then.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing isn't that amazing? That gosh, I mean, it should be some sort of, you know, I'll be a flaky archaeologist like This is a place where rituals took place. So many things we say are so just painfully vague. And that's about what we got. A place like this, I know the one we're looking at here. I've been here a couple of times in the pyramid behind it, the rubbles built in a way where the building won't rock apart. This is a very earthquake-prone place, but the buildings haven't fallen because they make these net baskets of rocks inside that all kind of wiggle around and don't allow the building to fall down.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keral, I think, starts at about 3200 BCE, and it lasts as a major civilization with a lot of other cities around it until about 1800 BCE.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still to be discovered, but there are some things that were discovered a hundred years ago and archaeologists or back then they call themselves antiquarians just kind of passed over. Corral was one of these sites because the coast of Peru has some of those pyramids that were made by the Moche are full of gold and beautiful ceramics and things that you can sell for big money. But corral was found a long time ago, but the archaeologist was like, God, no gold, no ceramics. Forget about it, this place is no good. We can't sell anything here. And then about the 1970s or 80s, somebody said Hey No ceramics Is that older than the invention of ceramics? Shit, we better go take another look at that place.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“for there are so many, Peru has tons that desert gets really ugly quick and it buries things completely. There are so many pyramids out there that are still completely untouched. When people hear the name pyramids, they think of Egypt immediately. But Egypt has got about 140 pyramids, and we have pretty much found them all. Peru has thousands. Thousands of pyramids. And now they weren't built of not all of them were built of stone. Some of them were adobe bricks, which have weathered terribly. So now they don't look, they're not exciting places to visit today. You know what's funny too? We started off talking about whether I think there's a lost civilization out there. There are definitely things that are”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are things, it's all on the Peruvian coast that we have these cradles of civilization. Someday we might start talking about the Amazon more and more. But right now what we've got are things that date back into the 3000 BCE along the coast of Peru. And there are big stone-built pyramids and temples. And they're amazingly isolated. Even now that we found them, some of them like Keral is one of the most famous ones just north of Lima. We've known about it for a couple decades now, how old it is, but every time I visit there it's like I've visited the moon. There's absolutely nobody there not for miles. It's amazing how such a discovery was made, and yet still nobody goes to see it. It's not easy to get to”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have very early stuff in South America. You're right. I mean, you know, especially as an American, our country's so big and we are so far removed from these places. We don't even think about it. But more and more we're seeing things that predate the earliest stuff that we like to talk about, like Egypt and Mesopotamia.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's a case by case thing. I think if we look globally, I lean much more towards the human parallel development. But if I look just to the Americas and we have a shorter time period where the things that become major civilizations now I'll say up to 30,000 years ago, which is still a blip in the time of humans, I think that there were shared things that those people came over with from Asia and that as they got separated that they had core values that then turned into things like religion and cultural customs that we can see. I'm a big proponent that there are commonalities in all the cultures of the Americas that lead back to and point to a single distant origin.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wonder whether the similarities that all those cradles have, it could be a shared, much deeper past that they all have. Or it could be a more kind of Star Trek thing where Captain Kirk was always talking about the theory of parallel human development, that humans across the universe go through certain stages of development and that that could be the answer to it.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there were consistent things that have been coming out for decades about very old carbon-14 dates in the Amazon and in the Andes area that everybody just dismissed as no, you didn't get a date of 40,000 years. But I think we're going to come back around to start readdressing some of these based on new evidence at hand.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of, like, there's an interesting correlate in Europe where today everybody feels like Celtic people are from Ireland. But actually, Celtic people started in Eastern Europe. And it was the entire area. And when Rome kind of swept everything, and Rome was now the ruler of the day, it was only that far edge of the Celtic world, Ireland, that they were like, ah, we're not going to mess with those guys on that island. We'll leave them be. So now it looks like that's the heart of Celtic tradition. But actually, it's the fringe.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next waves came down and did North America and Central America. And the very first wave made it all the way down to South America and got isolated there.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the people in the Amazon, most of those guys have O-Blood type and their haplogroup D, which is the oldest one that entered the US. And what are they doing down there? I do believe they came across the Bering Strait. I don't think it's very, we have no real evidence to say they came in mass across Oceania. So they made it probably by boat along the coast all the way to South America.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was big leaps. Now, this is just mostly guess, I'll admit, but I think that much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models talk about punctuated equilibrium, that there are big moments of change, and then it settles out into a more slow and steady pattern, and then something big will happen again. I do think that the early people went as far as they could go, and there were certain colonies that just got isolated for thousands of years. One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America, the ones that got separated early and didn't mix their DNA.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“DNA is developing science as well, and I think we all need to keep that in mind, that it's not like they just cracked the code and now we know all the answers. And sometimes, like in any science, a breakthrough puts a two steps backwards, not forwards. So I think, you know, we don't need to have too much faith in the models that are now being created through DNA, but they are pointing in the direction of everybody came across from Siberia that all Native American people are of Asiatic descent.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you know, they didn't roll in and immediately make New York, but there were people, and there were definitely not people here before that, which is fascinating. When the bridge closed, DNA mutated. And so we have specific kinds of haplogroups that are here in the Americas that don't exist otherwise. And that same haplogroup game has been showing us more and more that people came across Siberia. It's not Africa, it's not Western Europe. Those are still, you know, they've become kind of fringe theories, but they're not totally eradicated. I have”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“30,000 years ago. And now the thing that seems like madness but might be true is that it could have been as early as 60. A lot of the DNA things are suggesting that the very first migration could have come across as early as sixty. And when I was a younger archaeologist, it was heresy to go beyond this twelve thousand five hundred. You were a wacko if you said that. But now it's really very clear that they came over at least by thirty thousand. And the bridge opened and closed and opened and closed.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The traditional theories are still somewhat valid, or at least on the table, that when that land bridge occurred that nomadic hunters just followed the game like they always had, and the game went across there because there was no barrier and they followed them across. The thing that has changed is how early that happened. DNA has been a total game changer for archaeology. We get all these evolutionary tracks that we could never see before. When I was a young archaeologist, I would have never dreamed we'd have the information we have now. And that information, a lot of it's coming out of Texas A&M. We see the traditional 12,500 years ago that there was a migration. But now we're seeing one that's almost certainly happening closer to.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first off, I agree with you, that was pretty gangster. I mean, that's a hard place to live. I listened to some of your podcasts, that guy, Jordan Jonas. The mustard, but I wouldn't have made a crossing there.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I have an explorer's heart, so I'm kind of, you know, bye, I'm biased. Know, I do think that we have an innate desire to see what's on the horizon. And to impress other people with our achievements, things like that. We're social beings. That's really the edge that humans have, is our ability to work together. So I think that it's much more the carrot than the stick. When things get ugly, the stick comes out. But usually the carrot does the job.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the vast majority of human existence, we've been nomadic and we've done these kind of wider or tighter nomadic circles depending on the geographic region where they'd know, okay, you know, in the mountains, we'll be in the summer in the mountains because there's berries and things and then in the winter we'll be down here and we'll hunt. They'd move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, I think there, that's the initial trigger to what would become civilization.”
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 used to hunting went away and they had to make do with rabbits, the gathering started to be a much more important thing. And I think that led to figuring out, hey, we could actually grow certain things. And gardens turned into crops, turned into intensive crops, and then people were allowed to gather in bigger groups and survive in a single area. They didn't have to roam around anymore. And that's where we get the first sedentary communities, which means they stayed in the same place all year long.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source