November 19, 2024 • 54 mins
In 1982, in Titusville, Florida, construction worker Steve Vandejagt happened across a skull amid the muck and debris of the job site. And this was only the beginning of the mystery. Steve had accidentally uncovered one of the oldest gravesites in the United States, proof of an ancient, mysterious culture that existed more than 7,000 years ago. Join the guys as they dive into the story of the Windover Bog Bodies.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to this evening's classic episode of Folks. Have you
ever been to a bog? Matt and Noll, Have you, guys,
ever been to a bog? A bog standard bog, not
the bathroom, No, no, the bio Ah. Yes, of course no,
I have not, but I am quite fond of bog men.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I found myself in a bog a couple of times.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
That don't make no nevermind to me man. Shout out
to our buddy West Gibvens. In nineteen eighty two Titusville, Georgia,
our story takes place a guy named Steve finds this
skull amid the debris of a job site, and it
turns out that he just may have discovered one of
the oldest grave sites in all of the United States.
(00:47):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Reduction
of iHeart Radios, How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. Noel
is on an adventure.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer team, our good buddy Mission Control is
on an adventure as well. Perhaps you will tell us
about it if you return safe. In the meantime, we're
joined again with our friends Maya and Seth, both of whom,
by the way, spent their respective first days at work
(01:38):
listening to one of our shows and decided to stay on.
So thanks for staying.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I mean, they kind of have to write. This is
part of the job. But still we're glad you're here.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah, and you guys doing all right? Thumbs up, thumbs down,
All right, got some enthusiastic thumbs up. What about you, Matt,
how are you? What's going on? Oh?
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Thumbs decidedly sideways. No, I'm just kidding. No, it's great.
We just launched Insomniac, the Monster Presents Insomniac show that we'
been working on for a long time. So I'm really
excited about that, and I wanted to ask you, by
the way, we haven't talked about it at length. So
you just got back from La on your own adventure.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Yes, that's true, that's true. First, i'd like to shout
out to Insomniac. I'd like to emphasize that is hosted
by my longtime friend, your longtime friend, as well as collaborator,
my writer dies Scott Benjamin, who will be appearing on
this show very soon, hopefully if we can get him
to work us into his busy schedule.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, it might even happen before this episode comes out.
Who knows who knows?
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Time? Time is a wonky controversial thing. So if we
assume that time still works the way it did when
we recorded this podcast. Yes, I was previously in Los Angeles.
I was there for a thing called Alien Con and
I was asked to go there through some friends of ours,
fellow podcasters here in our network, Brent and John who
(03:06):
hosts Hysteria fifty one. Longtime listeners will remember them from
their previous appearances on this very show. Stuff. They don't
want you to know.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
I heard you ran into some of the big names
in the extraterrestrial world.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah. It was weird, man, I'm not going to lie.
It was a It was a trip that became a trip.
English is strange, but you get what I'm saying. Yeah,
So Giorgio Suculos was there, the guy who is responsible
for the fire in the sky story was there. There
were some other There were some other big names, some
(03:43):
of whom maybe most familiar to people who are already
very into the ufology or UFO citing community. Eric Eric Vondanakan, Yes,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Jariots of the Gods.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
That is probably one of the biggest ones for me.
William Shatner was there. I'm not sure if he was
aware that he was there or knew where he was,
but he was definitely there. This is a convention that
seems to take place in numerous cities throughout the year.
There's another one coming up soon in Dallas, but we
(04:19):
went to check it out to represent our show, to
do a panel in UFOs and podcasting, and then through
a series of strange circumstances, I ended up hosting the
costume contest, which was a lot of fun and there
were some great costumes, but probably one of the best
things there was the ability to meet some of our
fellow podcasters. So I'd like to recommend one podcast I
(04:43):
listened to by a guy named Chris Cogswell. It's called
The Mad Scientist Podcast. Chris Cogwell is a longtime vet
of the UFO community. He's got his stripes, but not
just in the world of ufology. He also has his
stripes in the Akad demic towers, the Ivory one's you
remember those, Matt, I do. He has a PhD and
(05:05):
material science, and so he spends a lot of time
looking at the hard science and data behind reports of
anomalous things in the sky or your favorite things in
the water, UFOs and usos alike. Maybe we'll have him
on the show one day. But if you are interested
in looking more into the hard science rather than the
(05:28):
anecdotes that are so ubiquitous in the world of UFO reporting,
then we would highly recommend the Mad Scientist podcast.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Dude. Chris Cogswell has a PhD in chemical engineering with
a focus on nano materials for absorption and separations.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Oh yeah, what I know? Whoosh right? And here's the thing, Matt,
he's the nicest guy and he's incredibly knowledgeable. So I'd
love to get him on the show to talk about
the case pieces that he feels have the most sand,
the cases that he feels are the most compelling. But yep,
(06:07):
that was Los Angeles. Almost wish I had stayed because
it is here in Atlanta, Georgia, where we record the podcast.
It is the weather is best described as tepid soup.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Yeah, that's right, Yeah, running into what do we call it,
a soaking wet blanket that is one hundred degrees and
you're just walking into the blanket at all times when
you're moving forward.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
And it clings to your skin.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Yeah, everywhere, then the mosquitoes.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
And then the mosquitoes arrive. Yes, yes, right on Q.
So if you're listening to this and you are in
the southeast of the United States, good luck. And as
they say on Mitchell and Webb, remain.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Indoors, Remain calm and indoors.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yes, very good. Tell us about your adventures. How has
the weather changed over time, maybe over the year or
since you were a we tyke of your own. You
don't have to wait for the whole podcast and forget.
You can pause and you can call us now to
let us know what you think.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yes, but make sure you pull over before you do
so if you're driving.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Yes, yeah, this is not a This is not a
yolo moment now it is now.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
It is yep, right now is a yolo moment. Now
it's gone so too bad. I hope you caught a
hold of that while it occurred.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Now you're a cursed to live many times.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
That's correct. So what do you say, Ben, Let's let's
give them the phone number. We are one eight three
three s std WYTK. Seriously leave a message. We will
see it. Somebody I'm not gonna name names. Jennifer left
eight messages last night, eight consecutive messages starting around eleven
(07:51):
o'clock in PM.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
That's great. So it sounds like we have another call
in show in the future.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, there's a whole episode of just Jennifer, like addressing
Jennifer's concerns.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Should we call it just Jennifer?
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Yeah, it's just Jennifer.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Jennifer. I hope that you are okay with those messages
being mentioned on air. If not, this is your time
to let us know at the number of Matt and
I already repeated. So we're talking a little bit about
the future. But today's episode is largely centered on the past.
William Faulkner, the author, not just some guy. William Faulkner
was fond of saying the past isn't dead, it isn't
(08:28):
even past. And that's something that's come up on this
show before. Because while it might sound like one of
those clever, glib quips that people say on a late
night talk show, there is serious grit to this notion.
The discipline that we call history is not some pursuit
of static, set in stone events. It's an attempted understanding.
(08:51):
The discipline instead is, at its best, a conversation between
the present and the past, between the living and the dead.
Is alive, and like all living things, history appears to
change over time simply because of our understanding of it.
And I know this sounds abstract, but the effects are concrete,
and they are very real. Research has proven things that
(09:14):
were once considered myths or legends were indeed real people, places,
and events. This is not one hundred percent consistent, but
this happens frequently enough that we can as a species
surmise that we have no real we have no real
(09:34):
standing upon which to base our confidence in the story
of humanity or the story of the planet. In a
lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah, besides the best efforts of archaeologists and historians who
are attempting to track all that stuff down. Again, it's
just the best version that we know at this moment.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Right right, which is how all science should work. So
examples that are going to be very familiar to a
lot to a lot of us longtime listeners out there,
the cilicanth that's living history, that was for a long time,
considered extinct. For a long time, considered a cryptid, very
well known to the people who had lived in the
(10:16):
area for thousands of thousands of years. But then Western
people found it and said, oh, we rediscovered this once
extinct creature.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, again to the knowledge of the people who keep
the records, it was gone.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Right, That's very important distinction. And then the other famous
example we often cite would be the city of Troy,
which is the perfect example. Until fairly recently, you know,
in the past few hundred years, Troy was considered a myth,
an entirely made up thing. There were people who were
(10:47):
creating huge academic research initiatives on Troy as a metaphor
for something, yeah, or what was Troy a code name
for or whatever. It turns out there was a real
city of Troy. This guy is not a professional archaeologist,
found it. People didn't believe them for a while, because
of course we'd all decided Troy was made up.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
That's right. And as we're going to find out a
little later today in this episode, another find that was
not initially discovered by any kind of archaeologist or someone
going out to study it. It was just stumbled upon. And similarly,
we just found a story coming out of the Kurdistan
region of Iraq where there was a brand new palace
(11:29):
that was discovered because of drought there was occurring in
a reservoir.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
There, yeah, the Musil Dam reservoir on the banks of
the Tigris River. As we were coming into record today,
we learned about this. Maya seth. Did you guys hear
about this? Okay, So there's a palace. It's almost three thousand,
five hundred years old. We never would have found it
except for the drought that dramatically lowered water levels. It
(11:59):
appears to be a palace from the Matani Empire, which
is one of the least researched empires of the ancient
Near East. We had no idea it existed. No, we're
not sure we as a species not us recording. We're
not sure when it went to ruin, how it ended
(12:21):
up underwater in this dam, and we don't know exactly
what we will learn about this. This is where this
is interesting because this is where archaeology and folklore may
may come to collaborate, kind of have an avengers assemble
thing you know, happening just like in a Marvel movie,
(12:43):
because this is where some folklorist and anthropologist may be
able to glean some knowledge or leads from oral history,
which I think it's downplayed a lot, but it leads
us to some important things, you know.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Oh definitely, And not to get away from that too much,
but one of the cool things that was found there
were these ten clay tablets that actually had Cuneiform written
on them. They were still preserved after being underwater for
that long, which was somewhat surprising to me. But again,
as we're going to learn in this episode, water and
certain types of water have a way of preserving like
(13:18):
the pH balance of the water, what else is like
inside that water as far as plant life and material go,
can preserve the heck out of things.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
We also learned some very gross things about Florida. Yeah,
just climate wise, not a statement about the state nor
the people living there. And if you're listening, thanks for
tuning in. This may be news to you. In today's episode,
you see, we are going to explore a bizarre example
of hidden history, one not in the Middle East. Instead,
(13:48):
it's going to be in the comparatively speaking, the backyard
of the West. Right our tail begins on an ordinary
Florida day near the intersection of Interstate ninety five and
State Road fifty. This is fairly close to the Cape
Canaveral Air Force Station in the nineteen eighties. This intersection
is this sort of place you drive by without a
(14:10):
second look, especially if you're in the sweltering days of summer,
because we have to remember the air turns to soup
and Florida too.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, it's just it's a huge interstate and a state road. Okay, great, right,
maybe there's a gas station.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Not really a photo opportunity. If you drove by on
the right day in nineteen eighty two, you might note
the construction occurring as crews work to clear the nearby
land and build what would later become the Windover Farm's subdivision.
You might even if you're slow enough, your eyes are
(14:43):
sharp and you're on the lookout for some reason. If
you're a very alert driver, you might even see a
backo operator named Steve Vanderjockt who was working to clear
out an area around a nearby pond.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, he was just on his back hoe doing everything
he was supposed to be doing, uh, clearing out part
of the Again, it's kind of a bog This pond
that we're talking about is it's swamps, marshy, swampy. It's
just that kind of Florida. It reminds me of the
Everglades a little bit, but it's it's a little different.
So anyway, he's just going, he's using his back hoe
(15:20):
and oh, you know what this would be. This would
be a perfect Florida man story.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
This would be a perfect Florida man man's story. Yeah,
let's get.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
It a try. Okay, Florida man's back ho stumbles upon
ancient skull.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
There we go. I also like attributing the action to
the backo because it sounds as if he just left
it running.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah, exactly, something exactly.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
So it's true. In nineteen eighty two, Steve found what
while he was cleaning stuff out, he saw what he
thought was maybe around brown rock, and a rock would
be unusual in this terrain. So he stops working and
he starts digging through through the muck and the mud
and the swampy stuff that you're mentioning. Matt the mucky muck,
(16:04):
the mucky muck. That's the technical term and he picks
up this object. He makes it way over and he
picks it up, wipes off some of the stuff. You
can't see it, folks, but I'm miming his actions here.
And then he turns around this object, this smooth, round rock,
to find too equally round empty eye sockets staring back
(16:24):
at him. And that's when Steve realizes this is not
a rock. This is a skull. And he's not an expert,
but it looks pretty old.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Well yeah, it looks a little old, but again, who
knows how old it is. So imagine you're Steve and
you find a skull while you're working. You have to
call the police and report finding a skull because there's
a possibility that this may be, you know, a homicide
or a missing person or something to that effect. So
that was exactly what he did. Then they continued looking
(16:57):
because they're still working in this area. It's not like
you just immediately stop all the construction there because of
a skull. Now, yeah, you definitely pause for a moment again,
call the police, and then maybe keep going. But they
started finding a lot more skulls, a lot more bones.
Again inside the bucket of the baco where he was.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Working, right. The site supervisor is the first person that
Steve contacts and they say, okay, is this a murder?
We have to call the police. And then they look
in the bucket of Steve's bacco and they find more skulls.
So he had apparently been digging up some remains before
he was aware of it, right, And when they realized
(17:39):
they were looking at multiple bodies, they immediately knew something
was up. Now, this is where two things could have happened,
and it all depends on a fellow named Jim Swan.
Jim Swan was the developer of the subdivision, and he
could he could do one of two things. He could,
like many unscrewed list developers, just pay off the crew,
(18:03):
suppress the news of the find, and carry over with
the construction of Windover Farms. And that is you know,
like that's a plot point in the horror film Poultergeist, right, well,
debatably the horror themed family film Poultergeist.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
There you go, yes, building on top of an ancient
burial ground of sorts.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Right, And that only enters fiction because that has really
happened in multiple instances, not just here in the US,
but many places abroad. Jim, for one reason or another,
hopefully because he's a decent human being. Maybe because he's
afraid of legal action, we don't know. Jim decides to
halt all the work, just like you were talking about, Matt.
He says, Okay, this is not a pause. We're stopping everything.
(18:45):
Shut it down. We have to contact the experts. We
have to determine the provenance of these bones. More importantly,
I have to figure out what we do next. Yeah,
I've got millions sunk in the subdivision. Probably at this point,
you know, I was hoping that I could, you know,
construct it and not go bankrupt.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
But maybe there's another way here, There's something else to do.
So he immediately reaches out to Florida State University to
see if there's anyone on staff there that can come
over and help assist identifying these bones. And they speak
to doctor Glenn Dran d O R A N. And
again he's his staff member of the Florida State University,
(19:26):
an archaeologist. He shows up on the scene and initially
he's looking at these bones and he's thinking, oh, wow,
these are preserved pretty well.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
They are old.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
I can tell they're old. And one of The first
things he sees are the teeth, and he notices that
they've been ground down, naturally ground down, just through wear
and tear, not the way you know, if someone was
going to physically injure you and hurt your teeth or
something or yeah, it was just natural wear and tear
on the teeth. But to the point where he he
(19:57):
realized that from an art cheologists standpoint, these must be
thousands of years old, or at least that's what he.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Believes, right. He surmised initially from his own just on
the scene assessment, that these bones were from a Native
American population, according to him, due primarily to the dentation
and due to what he thought that told him about
the age, So he said, these are perhaps a thousand
(20:26):
years old. He arranged for carbon dating tests. This was
financed by Swan and Swan's company EKS Corporation, and they
were shocked by the results. What were those results? Will
tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Okay, now, when we left you, we were talking about
duran and the carbon dating tests that we're going to
be done on the bones and the teeth and everything
that were found there at the Windover site. And there's
the company Eks Corporation. They are doing this, this carbondating,
(21:08):
and they were shocked when they realized the bones were
indeed more than a thousand years old. In fact, the
human remains uncovered at this site were somewhere between seven
thousand and eight thousand years old. That makes them thirty
two hundred years older than King Tuton Common and two
(21:29):
thousand years older than the Great Pyramids of Giza themselves
in Egypt. It's incredible to imagine in Florida bones of
this age were found and then carbondated to show that yes,
in fact, they are that old.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
And these were also modern human beings. This was not
one of the early mixtapes of humanity like Neanderthal or
something like that. Directus right right right, exactly seven thousand
and eight thousand years old. This is on the east
coast of Florida. Everything that is commonly accepted about the
spread of the human species argues that the human species
(22:07):
by and large arrived at North and South America what
we call those two continents today, by crossing the baring
Land Bridge over what is now the Bearing Strait, and
that in case anyone's not familiar, that is, in the
most opposite corner of the continent that one could imagine.
(22:28):
It is in the far far far northwest and Cape Canaveral,
far far southeast. So what's going on. They spent two
years trying to dig this up. Overall, there were three
archaeological digs conducted there between nineteen eighty four and nineteen
eighty six. They ended up finding more than two hundred
(22:49):
distinct intact burials. And you'll hear you'll hear a couple
of different numbers thrown around. One will be they found
more than two hundred burials. One will be like, they
found more than one hundred and sixty eight bodies. Yeah,
and part of that is because of the extreme length
of time that these folks were literally poor choice of
(23:11):
words on my part, bogged down, you know what I mean.
Things shift, the bones may get jumbled. But the weird
thing is that despite being in there for almost ten
thousand years, the better part of ten thousand years, the
bodies have been ritualistically buried, and with maybe a few exceptions,
they were all placed in the same position. They were
(23:33):
in a fetal position, lying on their left side, their
heads were pointed west and their faces up to the north.
In some cases the necks were broken to get this. Yeah, God,
we don't know why. We can speculate it best that
this shows us some sort of belief in the afterlife
(23:55):
and ritualistic burial. The deceased were also wrapped in what
archaeologists believe is the oldest existing woven fabric in the world,
which is you know, when you think of the oldest
thing in the world, you think of something in Africa
and in the fertile somewhere near the right or maybe yeah,
or maybe a Middle East, right, think of something on
(24:15):
that continent or in the Middle East. You don't really
think and it's not a ding again on Florida, but
you don't think, Oh, yeah, Florida, that's where it is.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah, the oldest fabric ever in Florida. In my mind,
it would just be in an old beach towel, the
first one that was ever used, you know, created in
like Myrtle Beach or Daytona beach or something.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Wouldn't it be amazing if it also had an ancient
drawing of a cartoon mouse. Oh, or it's hurdle or
a turtle. Better, No, no, let's find let's find both of them.
Let's just write this let's just write this story.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
It just says salt life on it.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
It just says salt life. Will write this story, will
bury it somewhere. Yeah, and thousands of years from now.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
A Florida man will discover with his backo boom full circle.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
So well, that's our show, folks, thanks for turning. I
think we did some meaningful work today. Yet we did
find that there were grave goods though, that's what they're called.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Yeah, And it's not even the most odd thing that
was found here, the oldest fabric, because it's the way
that this stuff was used, and it's puzzling to me.
Help me understand this a little better, Ben, because my
understanding is that the bodies were actually submerged into the
water on purpose using some piece of technology, essentially like
(25:38):
a tool of some sort.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah. So they were buried in this fetal position with
certain body parts corresponding to certain directions, and then branches
would be lashed together over them to create a tripod
which kept the bodies in that feel position from floating
up and to prevent them from floating to the top
(26:03):
of that tripod. They had this this woven fabric is
essentially functioning as a funeral shroud, and a wooden steak
would be hammered in or somehow thrust through the fabric
of the shroud which I'm just calling it a shroud,
into the bed of the pond so that they would
(26:24):
they being the bodies would not float up to the
top of the wooden formation that was keeping them submerged.
And the reason they had to do this is because
when the body would decompose, it would begin to float
because it would begin to fill with gas and air.
The practical step here is that it ultimately protects the
(26:46):
bodies from the many many scavengers in the area, mostly animals,
but there would probably be some grave robbers understandably as well,
and it kept them in that intended again, very purposeful position.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yea, seems like a ritualistic, perhaps religious position. Man. That
to me is fascinating, just the concept that that long
ago you would again, maybe this is that thing we
always talk about when we discuss European settlers going to
(27:20):
parts of Africa and discovering these ancient ruins and they think, oh,
there's no way that they could have an understanding about
the certain geometry here or this or that, like terrible
belief the institutionalized racism that has occurred over all those years.
I worry that I'm having a little bit of that
when I'm trying to imagine, you know, people eight thousand
(27:43):
years ago creating an underwater burial almost to preserve the bodies.
Maybe perhaps they had no understanding that they were actually
preserving the bodies by doing this, but that's in fact
what they were doing using all of these tools and mechanisms.
I mean, it's it's baffling, and it's also really really.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Cool, right Yeah. The institutionalized racism that has to a
great degree stifled scientific progress for centuries, exactly, it's still
alive and well at a lot of places, and sometimes unintentional.
I would argue, I saw a little bit of that
at Alien con to be candid with you, but you're
(28:26):
right here. Generally speaking, when people inter or get rid
of the bodies of their dead and their loved ones
or even their hated ones, the thing is that you
don't want to see them forever, Especially if you love
someone or if they're meaningful to your life, you want
to help them into the afterlife. That's the way it's
(28:50):
usually phrased, and that will be like by burial maybe
in some parts of the world there will be a
you'll be consumed by carnivorous birds, which I think is
sky Burial is probably the coolest cremation, right, things like that.
The idea is that you don't want them to come back.
You don't want to see if their software is gone,
(29:12):
you don't want to be haunted by their hardware, which
is why it's such a such an ancient psyop to
take the bodies of dead enemies and display them where
they're living can see them.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
But then others want to preserve the body as much
as they can because the belief is that that body
will have to come back.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Right, Yeah, that's it, and to certain rules. Right, So
that's why we have the preservation of organs in some societies.
That's and also when when we go into a secular world,
a lot of times there's this interpretation, or I would say,
this assumption that burial rituals are all religiously based, which
is not the case. I mean, think about all the
(29:53):
time spent embalming Linen. You know, in the days of
the USSR. It was not really a religion, but it
took the place of a religion because it was a symbol.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
You know, linin, not linen. In my head, I heard linen.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Oh yes, sorry, else and perhaps my Tennessee accent, and
not John Lennon. It was Linen and linen in Linen, Yes,
in Leningrad. That's right. Yeah, all right, we solved the case.
But we're saying all this to give maybe a little
(30:28):
bit more anthropological perspective. One of the most important points
you made, Matt, that we shouldn't skip over is whether
or not the people who were entering folks this way
knew it. What they ended up doing was preserving the
bodies of their loved ones for thousands and thousands of
(30:48):
years because the peat bog is an anaerobic environment, which
means that a lot of the rules of decomposition, which
are air and oxygen dependent will will not play out
the same way. Also, the fact that pete bog means
that there's a pH balance that's tremendously conducive to preserving things.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Yeah, and there's not a lot you know, if it's
in the ocean or something or somewhere that has occurrent,
there's not a lot of physical movement occurring there. And
the biggest variable is the rising and lowering of the
water essentially in these places depending on drought or the
amount of rain, and that pH balance too. Man ah go,
(31:33):
it's so cool to me, Okay, So.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
It feels purposeful, right, it's done something with all those factors, Like.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
We've been doing this for so long. We know that
this is the place to bury people, and this is
how we will do it. And though it's been ten,
twelve thousand, fifteen thousand years.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
At least, the practice right and the site itself, as
will come to find, was active for a very very
long time before it was forgotten and almost became the
non consensual foundation of a suburb. We know that the
(32:09):
environment of Florida was very challenging. It remains very challenging
for preservation. We can explore that in a little bit.
Right now, let's talk about the life of the people
who lived in this prehistoric time. About half of the
remains found at Windover again, that's anywhere from one hundred
and sixty eight to two hundred something people were children,
(32:29):
not all. The oldest people found in the site were
around sixty years old, unlike the human remains found in
European bogs. You know, you might think of something like
Ireland or Scotland or something. Unlike those remains. The bodies
in Florida were only skeletons. There's no flesh on the bones.
(32:49):
And again a lot of that has to do with
the climate of Florida.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
You're gonna say, Yeah, the temperature is going to make
a big difference there.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
And as you get closer to the equator, you'll see
you know, increasingly in hospitable environments for preservation. But also
you know, think of think of how rare these places are.
But if you go back a few centuries when there
was much more forest land and jungle land in the world,
those ecosystems, those biomes are hungry, they eat things. There's
(33:23):
still eating cities. I think a lot of us would
be surprised at how much maintenance goes on into just
keeping even what you think of as a metropolis alive
from one year to the next. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Can you imagine in Atlanta if we didn't have a
kudzoo team going out there every day working their tails off.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
I love the Kudzuo man. I think about it a lot,
and how how quickly it would grow. Yeah, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
I don't think there's an official Atlanta Kudzoo team. Maybe
there is. If you work for the official Atlanta Kudzoo
what do we call it.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Kudzuo task Force? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Yeah, let us know the cats out of everyone.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
I mean yeah, they're definitely they're definitely ongoing wars. Kudzu
is an excellent example their ongoing efforts to prevent the
spread of cuts, which is technically an invasive species, right,
but adapted amazingly well. So we know a little bit
about what these people's lives were like. But the same
(34:25):
environment in Florida, which makes it so difficult to preserve
bodies or buildings, let alone books and so on, also
teaches us about how they were buried because despite the
fact that there was no flesh on the bones, about
half of the skulls ninety ninety one or so contained
brain matter. It's pretty gruesome, but it also means that
(34:48):
they were buried within at the very most, at the
very upper limit, they were in the pond, interred within
forty eight hours of expiring, because if they were out
in the fl Florida environment anytime after that, their brain
would have liquefied. Wow, because that's what Florida does to
dead people.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Mmm.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
It's true.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Well, we also got to look at their stomach contents.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Right, and that's tricky because you're saying, well, there's no flesh. Yeah,
we're approximating because it looked like it was digested. We
learned that for one one corpse, they have been eating
primarily fish and berries, and the ground down teeth that
you mentioned earlier, Matt show us similar to It's the
(35:34):
thing Egyptologists have found before as well. In places where
people live around a lot of sand, the sand gets
into your food and it naturally grits down your teeth. Wow,
they didn't have cavities.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
They didn't have cavities. Well well, and you have to
imagine it's only over a span of sixty years and
there's absolutely you know, no dental work being done. There's nothing,
there's no way to help clean or fix your teeth
when things are going wrong in that sand just takes
it out quickly.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Yeah. We also know that even though their lives were
very difficult, they were also very caring with their community.
And this is this is a big thing that maybe
doesn't occur to a lot of people when we think
of ancient societies, but one of the huge, huge, leaping
points or one of the one of the huge breakthroughs,
(36:27):
a watershed moment in evolution was the idea of caring
for the injured and the dead, which is something higher
cognition entities do so not not necessarily just mammals, you
know what I mean. There's some birds that will care
for the injured, and of course there's cetaceans are still mammals,
(36:48):
but who knows, maybe there's an octopus hospital.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Yeah, maybe, But I see exactly what you're saying. In
an organized humanoid society, a human society, taking care of
someone who's incapacitated, who cannot contribute to, you know, the
the wealth essentially the health and wealth of your tribe,
your group, then you know, for a certain time, there's
(37:14):
no reason to have that person besides to you know,
keep them around because you love them, right, or you
care about.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Them, or because you're a decent.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Well yeah, but if you think about it from the
most basic needs of a human, like a singular human
as well as a group of humans, that's a choice
that what you're saying is it only comes along with
the higher cognition, the really thinking about essentially good like
(37:45):
doing good.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Well, I would say also this is going to sound
very cold. Biologically speaking, an individual human has zero value
unless something can reproduce a sexually. An individual of any
species has zero value in terms of the big picture.
So a group things that can care for one another
in groups may lose a couple checkers games, but they
(38:08):
will win the chess game all you go, right, So
we do know that they were playing this chess game, right.
We found several examples of people who would have died
quite quickly and probably quite painfully had they not have
folks caring for them, and this again is a huge
hallmark of what we would call modern humanity.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
Yeah, there's an older woman and she was perhaps around
fifty years old. It's kind of an estimation there, but
she showed signs of having broken bones, like several of them,
to the point where this person is not going to
survive if it's eight thousand years ago. But she did
for a while at least while she's being taken care of.
The fractures occurred several years before she died, So that's
(38:52):
how you know somebody was doing a lot for this person.
And it really means that there are other villagers, other
humans around her that helped her even when she could
no longer contribute, and that's really what we're saying. There
was another body of a fifteen year old boy, at
least again an estimated fifteen year old boy, that showed
(39:13):
he was a victim of spina bifida, which is something
intense to encounter in modern day With modern day medicine,
you can only imagine what it was like.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Then, right. Spina bifida is a birth defect that occurs
when the cord of your spine and your actual spine
don't form properly. It used to be considered a pediatric illness,
even relatively recently, meaning that if you survive into adulthood,
(39:42):
you would just still continue to see your pediatric doctor.
This kid made it to fifteen, so he was well
on his way to becoming an adult. They also saw
various different tools. Perhaps one of the most heartbreaking things
is that every single child that was buried there was
(40:03):
buried with a couple of toys. Wow, how much more
human can you get? We have to ask ourselves, Okay,
these are people, but who were these people? Where did
they come from, and how did they get there? How,
perhaps even more importantly, did they become lost to time?
For more than seven thousand years, it's a questionable answer.
(40:23):
After a word from our sponsor, here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
First, this was not a mass grave, just a place
where bodies were thrown just because someone had died and
it was done. We've already established that these bodies are
placed there on purpose and in a way that it
is meaningful.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
It's not a massacre, it's not an all die. At
the same time, and.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
We also know that this is likely not a matter
of some kind of sacrifice, some kind of ritual that
was done to put these people out of their misery,
or for worship of some other you know, deity or
being or something like that.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
And we know this because of the way in which
they were interred and because of the the nature of
ritualistic human sacrifice usually indicates, or usually is predicated upon
a similar method of death to someone is you know,
(41:28):
ritualistically strangled by the thugy cult, or someone has is
vivisected right somewhere in mes America or something this or
in the case of bogs in Europe, someone has their
throat cut and then they're tossed in a bog. Right,
this doesn't seem to be the case here. One of
(41:49):
the reasons, one of the biggest. Here's where it gets
crazy moments in this wind Over investigation, which has again
been going on since the early nineteen eighties, not eighteen
eighties as far as we know, hinges on the concept
of DNA, and this goes back a little bit to
what you were talking about, Matt. You'll hear some folks,
including members of academia here in twenty nineteen, arguing that
(42:15):
the DNA tests conducted on the remains indicated that these
people were descended from Europeans rather than the Far Eastern
you know, the Far Eastern groups that migrated out of
Siberia right or through Siberia. This would be a huge discovery,
(42:37):
but the question is is it true. First we have
to remember the only way they could find anything close
enough to try to analyze would be that brain matter
the marrow is probably long gone, and the DNA's rate
of decay makes it a lot like forget trying to
(42:58):
find a needle in a haystack. Trying to find a
lottery ticket in a haystack and hoping that it wins.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Well, yeah, and you have to find multiple lottery tickets
because you can't just test one subject and say, oh,
this whole group of people, they're definitely European.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Right, And in the past people have been way too
quick to do that. There's a geneticist named Joseph Lorenz
from the Quarriel Institute for Medical Research. He was searching
for DNA markers that he thought were typical of Native Americans,
and the DNA samples taken from the bones of five
different people in Windover. So they did let me correct
(43:35):
myself there. They did find at least something in the
bones they could use. He didn't find what he was
looking for. He did not find those common markers he
thought would be extant, and so he compared the wind
Over DNA results. He had to present European populations, and
this is what he said.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
I went back to the screen and looked at the
sequences again. The first person's DNA it looked European. When
I looked at the second one, it looked European. When
I looked at the third, the fourth, and the fifth
it was slightly different from the first two, but they
looked European.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
So there are three common presumptions that are inherent. They're
intrinsic in every interpretation of the wind over DNA. The
first is the assumption that one combination of DNA haplogroups
typifies all Native American populations. It's demonstrably untrue. There's been
well documented Polynesian DNA material found in skeletons in northwest
(44:33):
Mexico as well as southern California. There are early populations
of South America that also don't necessarily fit that assumption. Also,
there are no DNA text markers for a lot of
indigenous people in southeastern US. The research wasn't quite there
(44:54):
at the time. And then there's the Yuchi group, which
has consistently stated, again in folklore and the importance of
world storytelling, that their ancestors crossed the Atlantic to the
Savannah River. These are you'll hear them called the oldest
indigenous peoples in the Southeast. Their migration legend states that
(45:16):
they found evidence of an earlier people who had lived
in the Savannah River basin before them. I think it's
clutching at straws because that's anecdotal, you know what I mean,
But that doesn't mean there's not a grain of truth
to it. And this whole DNA exploration is where things
get so sticky because for some more conspiratorially minded people,
(45:38):
this was seen as a gold mine. It was proof
that there could be some previously unidentified migration patterns in
ancient human history. It's true there are. We're going to
find more as we learn more about the expansion of
the species. But I don't know. There's a thing that
(45:58):
used a lot of Weasley words language that we found
describing this.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
And we've got a quote here, Yes, this comes from
about archaeology. Although scientists believed they had retrieved DNA from
the fairly intact brain matter recovered from some of the
human burials, subsequent research has shown that the mt DNA
lineages reported are absent in all other prehistoric and contemporary
Native American populations studied to date. Further attempts to retrieve
(46:26):
more DNA have failed, and an amplification study has shown
that there is no analyzable DNA left at the Windover burials.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
So let's unpack this quickly. What this shows is that
scientists did at one point get some DNA material from
one or more of the brains, definitely more, one would hope,
and they found that the mitochondrial DNA lineage reported didn't
match what we knew about other Native American populations, right,
(47:01):
So then they said, we've tried or other people have
tried to grab more DNA material and they can't get it,
and we think there's no more left. So we shot
our shot. Basically shot our shot, and we got more
questions than answers.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
However, this thing we just read from about archaeology, well
several people take exception to this, including someone a researcher
named Gary Carson, and we have a quote from him.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
Yeah. Yeah, he unpacks this stuff and he says, I've
read this particular passage two or three times and it's
a masterpiece of hand waving and misdirection. He's a little
steamed about it. Yeah, that last part was me. The
article makes it sound like DNA wasn't discovered after all,
but it goes on to say THEA DNA lineages were
discovered that's mitochondrial DNA and subsequently analyzed, but then dismisses
(47:51):
the analysis because it doesn't match the expected results, specifically
because it didn't connect the wind Over Bog people with
other prehistoric and contemperary Native American populations. In other words,
according to Gary, the DNA results couldn't be accurate because
they didn't show that the bog people were Native Americans.
So he's he's not necessarily arguing some secret migration from
(48:16):
some hitherto unmentioned land, but he is saying that these
people may be committing one of the one of the
big sins of critical thinking, which is throwing out stuff
that doesn't fit a preconceived notion. There's a facial reconstruction
project that you can you can see google wind over
a woman online and they don't they don't appear European.
(48:39):
But a lot of facial reconstruction like that is interpretive, right. Yeah.
I mean, we didn't know dinosaurs had feathers.
Speaker 2 (48:49):
We did for ever, but we figured it out because
somebody just decided one day that they had feathers. That's honestly.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
What happened is that. What happened is like, dude, these
guys got feathers. Was you?
Speaker 2 (49:00):
It was me?
Speaker 1 (49:01):
I should have been on that call.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
When I grew up, dinosaurs were just all green or
brown or gray, no stripes. Yeah, eighties kids, dinosaurs are green, brown, gray,
maybe maybe a little tan light brown. But now they're
just multicolored. They got feathers. I don't believe it. I'm
just kidding. I think it's wonderful what we're learning. Paleontologists
(49:23):
teaching you against some things. No, I love it.
Speaker 1 (49:25):
You think there should be a bright line between pokemon
and dinosaurs.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
No, no, I choose you pach so great.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
So there are there are other opinions here, one that
argues one that bases its argument on the timeline. So
time estimates for the arrival of certain genomes or genetic
material are twelve thou thirty six thousand years ago, depending
on the number of assumed founders, And this supports the
conclusion that people harboring this haplo group, this this weird
(49:58):
one that sticks out right, we're among the original founders
of Native American populations. To date, applogroup X, as this
guy William Holsworth is calling it has not been unambiguously
identified in Asia, which would have been the origin point,
and to this author raises the possibility that some of
(50:19):
these Native American founding populations had ancestors somewhere else so
ultimately came to what we recognize as Florida today through
some other migration pattern. As the Internet likes to say,
big if true, Big if true, Big if true, But
is it true. At this point, it seems experts are
(50:39):
still debating the origin of the ancient windover population and occasionally,
if you read closely, accusing one another of having an agenda,
which is not at all unusual.
Speaker 2 (50:49):
Yeah, I mean, that's pretty darn common when it comes
to things like.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
This, and it's an important debate. It's one we should
treat with extreme seriousness, primarily because of the point you raised, Matt,
which is a fundamental point that is all too often
skipped over. The human species has a long, long, incredibly
unfortunate history of institutionalized racism, attempting to shoehorn insert favorite
(51:13):
group here into so many things, from pyramids to the
ruins of empires to the creation of civilization. You know
what I mean. And this is not just This is
not just a practice of one sect of people from
one part of the world, nor is it the practice
of one discipline.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
And just to take it back to alien con we
see it perpetuated there where. If Europeans or some sort
didn't have anything to do with this, well then it
must be aliens making all of these ancient sites.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
And in the defense of people who will make those arguments,
typically nowadays they're not just arguing something based on that.
They'll also say a stonehenge, how could ancient people have
made that? Those? Look at those the big that's the
biggest rock I ever saw.
Speaker 2 (52:00):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (52:01):
I'm not quoting, I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 2 (52:03):
But true. It is just something we cannot stress enough.
That is, it's highly important and remember it when you
read things.
Speaker 1 (52:13):
And at least it leads us almost full circle here,
mat because what we're talking about is underestimating ancient people,
which we should never do. These are modern human beings.
Human humanity is slowly evolving. But people thousands of years
ago were as smart and as capable of invention and
(52:39):
ingenuity as people are today. So this is where it
gets us to a weird spot and maybe where we
end today's conversation to hear from to hear from you folks.
If you know, if we accept that is absolutely true
that ancient peoples could, through their own ingenuity and their
own maguverness, build things like stone hinge, like pyramids like
(53:02):
Catalahyop and so on, doesn't that mean we also need
to be open to the idea that that same ingenuity
could be applied to migration and travel.
Speaker 2 (53:14):
Absolutely especially over water, especially over water.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. It's right let us know
what you think. You can reach to the handle Conspiracy
Stuff where we exist on Facebook x and YouTube on
Instagram at TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (53:34):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
three STDWYTK. That's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes.
Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say than can fit in
that voicemail, why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
We are the entities to read every single piece of
correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (54:21):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to this evening's classic episode of Folks. Have you
ever been to a bog? Matt and Noll, Have you, guys,
ever been to a bog? A bog standard bog, not
the bathroom, No, no, the bio Ah. Yes, of course no,
I have not, but I am quite fond of bog men.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I found myself in a bog a couple of times.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
That don't make no nevermind to me man. Shout out
to our buddy West Gibvens. In nineteen eighty two Titusville, Georgia,
our story takes place a guy named Steve finds this
skull amid the debris of a job site, and it
turns out that he just may have discovered one of
the oldest grave sites in all of the United States.
(00:47):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Reduction
of iHeart Radios, How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. Noel
is on an adventure.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer team, our good buddy Mission Control is
on an adventure as well. Perhaps you will tell us
about it if you return safe. In the meantime, we're
joined again with our friends Maya and Seth, both of whom,
by the way, spent their respective first days at work
(01:38):
listening to one of our shows and decided to stay on.
So thanks for staying.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I mean, they kind of have to write. This is
part of the job. But still we're glad you're here.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah, and you guys doing all right? Thumbs up, thumbs down,
All right, got some enthusiastic thumbs up. What about you, Matt,
how are you? What's going on? Oh?
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Thumbs decidedly sideways. No, I'm just kidding. No, it's great.
We just launched Insomniac, the Monster Presents Insomniac show that we'
been working on for a long time. So I'm really
excited about that, and I wanted to ask you, by
the way, we haven't talked about it at length. So
you just got back from La on your own adventure.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Yes, that's true, that's true. First, i'd like to shout
out to Insomniac. I'd like to emphasize that is hosted
by my longtime friend, your longtime friend, as well as collaborator,
my writer dies Scott Benjamin, who will be appearing on
this show very soon, hopefully if we can get him
to work us into his busy schedule.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, it might even happen before this episode comes out.
Who knows who knows?
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Time? Time is a wonky controversial thing. So if we
assume that time still works the way it did when
we recorded this podcast. Yes, I was previously in Los Angeles.
I was there for a thing called Alien Con and
I was asked to go there through some friends of ours,
fellow podcasters here in our network, Brent and John who
(03:06):
hosts Hysteria fifty one. Longtime listeners will remember them from
their previous appearances on this very show. Stuff. They don't
want you to know.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
I heard you ran into some of the big names
in the extraterrestrial world.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah. It was weird, man, I'm not going to lie.
It was a It was a trip that became a trip.
English is strange, but you get what I'm saying. Yeah,
So Giorgio Suculos was there, the guy who is responsible
for the fire in the sky story was there. There
were some other There were some other big names, some
(03:43):
of whom maybe most familiar to people who are already
very into the ufology or UFO citing community. Eric Eric Vondanakan, Yes,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Jariots of the Gods.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
That is probably one of the biggest ones for me.
William Shatner was there. I'm not sure if he was
aware that he was there or knew where he was,
but he was definitely there. This is a convention that
seems to take place in numerous cities throughout the year.
There's another one coming up soon in Dallas, but we
(04:19):
went to check it out to represent our show, to
do a panel in UFOs and podcasting, and then through
a series of strange circumstances, I ended up hosting the
costume contest, which was a lot of fun and there
were some great costumes, but probably one of the best
things there was the ability to meet some of our
fellow podcasters. So I'd like to recommend one podcast I
(04:43):
listened to by a guy named Chris Cogswell. It's called
The Mad Scientist Podcast. Chris Cogwell is a longtime vet
of the UFO community. He's got his stripes, but not
just in the world of ufology. He also has his
stripes in the Akad demic towers, the Ivory one's you
remember those, Matt, I do. He has a PhD and
(05:05):
material science, and so he spends a lot of time
looking at the hard science and data behind reports of
anomalous things in the sky or your favorite things in
the water, UFOs and usos alike. Maybe we'll have him
on the show one day. But if you are interested
in looking more into the hard science rather than the
(05:28):
anecdotes that are so ubiquitous in the world of UFO reporting,
then we would highly recommend the Mad Scientist podcast.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Dude. Chris Cogswell has a PhD in chemical engineering with
a focus on nano materials for absorption and separations.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Oh yeah, what I know? Whoosh right? And here's the thing, Matt,
he's the nicest guy and he's incredibly knowledgeable. So I'd
love to get him on the show to talk about
the case pieces that he feels have the most sand,
the cases that he feels are the most compelling. But yep,
(06:07):
that was Los Angeles. Almost wish I had stayed because
it is here in Atlanta, Georgia, where we record the podcast.
It is the weather is best described as tepid soup.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Yeah, that's right, Yeah, running into what do we call it,
a soaking wet blanket that is one hundred degrees and
you're just walking into the blanket at all times when
you're moving forward.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
And it clings to your skin.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Yeah, everywhere, then the mosquitoes.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
And then the mosquitoes arrive. Yes, yes, right on Q.
So if you're listening to this and you are in
the southeast of the United States, good luck. And as
they say on Mitchell and Webb, remain.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Indoors, Remain calm and indoors.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yes, very good. Tell us about your adventures. How has
the weather changed over time, maybe over the year or
since you were a we tyke of your own. You
don't have to wait for the whole podcast and forget.
You can pause and you can call us now to
let us know what you think.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yes, but make sure you pull over before you do
so if you're driving.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Yes, yeah, this is not a This is not a
yolo moment now it is now.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
It is yep, right now is a yolo moment. Now
it's gone so too bad. I hope you caught a
hold of that while it occurred.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Now you're a cursed to live many times.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
That's correct. So what do you say, Ben, Let's let's
give them the phone number. We are one eight three
three s std WYTK. Seriously leave a message. We will
see it. Somebody I'm not gonna name names. Jennifer left
eight messages last night, eight consecutive messages starting around eleven
(07:51):
o'clock in PM.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
That's great. So it sounds like we have another call
in show in the future.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, there's a whole episode of just Jennifer, like addressing
Jennifer's concerns.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Should we call it just Jennifer?
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Yeah, it's just Jennifer.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Jennifer. I hope that you are okay with those messages
being mentioned on air. If not, this is your time
to let us know at the number of Matt and
I already repeated. So we're talking a little bit about
the future. But today's episode is largely centered on the past.
William Faulkner, the author, not just some guy. William Faulkner
was fond of saying the past isn't dead, it isn't
(08:28):
even past. And that's something that's come up on this
show before. Because while it might sound like one of
those clever, glib quips that people say on a late
night talk show, there is serious grit to this notion.
The discipline that we call history is not some pursuit
of static, set in stone events. It's an attempted understanding.
(08:51):
The discipline instead is, at its best, a conversation between
the present and the past, between the living and the dead.
Is alive, and like all living things, history appears to
change over time simply because of our understanding of it.
And I know this sounds abstract, but the effects are concrete,
and they are very real. Research has proven things that
(09:14):
were once considered myths or legends were indeed real people, places,
and events. This is not one hundred percent consistent, but
this happens frequently enough that we can as a species
surmise that we have no real we have no real
(09:34):
standing upon which to base our confidence in the story
of humanity or the story of the planet. In a
lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah, besides the best efforts of archaeologists and historians who
are attempting to track all that stuff down. Again, it's
just the best version that we know at this moment.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Right right, which is how all science should work. So
examples that are going to be very familiar to a
lot to a lot of us longtime listeners out there,
the cilicanth that's living history, that was for a long time,
considered extinct. For a long time, considered a cryptid, very
well known to the people who had lived in the
(10:16):
area for thousands of thousands of years. But then Western
people found it and said, oh, we rediscovered this once
extinct creature.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, again to the knowledge of the people who keep
the records, it was gone.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Right, That's very important distinction. And then the other famous
example we often cite would be the city of Troy,
which is the perfect example. Until fairly recently, you know,
in the past few hundred years, Troy was considered a myth,
an entirely made up thing. There were people who were
(10:47):
creating huge academic research initiatives on Troy as a metaphor
for something, yeah, or what was Troy a code name
for or whatever. It turns out there was a real
city of Troy. This guy is not a professional archaeologist,
found it. People didn't believe them for a while, because
of course we'd all decided Troy was made up.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
That's right. And as we're going to find out a
little later today in this episode, another find that was
not initially discovered by any kind of archaeologist or someone
going out to study it. It was just stumbled upon. And similarly,
we just found a story coming out of the Kurdistan
region of Iraq where there was a brand new palace
(11:29):
that was discovered because of drought there was occurring in
a reservoir.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
There, yeah, the Musil Dam reservoir on the banks of
the Tigris River. As we were coming into record today,
we learned about this. Maya seth. Did you guys hear
about this? Okay, So there's a palace. It's almost three thousand,
five hundred years old. We never would have found it
except for the drought that dramatically lowered water levels. It
(11:59):
appears to be a palace from the Matani Empire, which
is one of the least researched empires of the ancient
Near East. We had no idea it existed. No, we're
not sure we as a species not us recording. We're
not sure when it went to ruin, how it ended
(12:21):
up underwater in this dam, and we don't know exactly
what we will learn about this. This is where this
is interesting because this is where archaeology and folklore may
may come to collaborate, kind of have an avengers assemble
thing you know, happening just like in a Marvel movie,
(12:43):
because this is where some folklorist and anthropologist may be
able to glean some knowledge or leads from oral history,
which I think it's downplayed a lot, but it leads
us to some important things, you know.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Oh definitely, And not to get away from that too much,
but one of the cool things that was found there
were these ten clay tablets that actually had Cuneiform written
on them. They were still preserved after being underwater for
that long, which was somewhat surprising to me. But again,
as we're going to learn in this episode, water and
certain types of water have a way of preserving like
(13:18):
the pH balance of the water, what else is like
inside that water as far as plant life and material go,
can preserve the heck out of things.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
We also learned some very gross things about Florida. Yeah,
just climate wise, not a statement about the state nor
the people living there. And if you're listening, thanks for
tuning in. This may be news to you. In today's episode,
you see, we are going to explore a bizarre example
of hidden history, one not in the Middle East. Instead,
(13:48):
it's going to be in the comparatively speaking, the backyard
of the West. Right our tail begins on an ordinary
Florida day near the intersection of Interstate ninety five and
State Road fifty. This is fairly close to the Cape
Canaveral Air Force Station in the nineteen eighties. This intersection
is this sort of place you drive by without a
(14:10):
second look, especially if you're in the sweltering days of summer,
because we have to remember the air turns to soup
and Florida too.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, it's just it's a huge interstate and a state road. Okay, great, right,
maybe there's a gas station.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Not really a photo opportunity. If you drove by on
the right day in nineteen eighty two, you might note
the construction occurring as crews work to clear the nearby
land and build what would later become the Windover Farm's subdivision.
You might even if you're slow enough, your eyes are
(14:43):
sharp and you're on the lookout for some reason. If
you're a very alert driver, you might even see a
backo operator named Steve Vanderjockt who was working to clear
out an area around a nearby pond.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, he was just on his back hoe doing everything
he was supposed to be doing, uh, clearing out part
of the Again, it's kind of a bog This pond
that we're talking about is it's swamps, marshy, swampy. It's
just that kind of Florida. It reminds me of the
Everglades a little bit, but it's it's a little different.
So anyway, he's just going, he's using his back hoe
(15:20):
and oh, you know what this would be. This would
be a perfect Florida man story.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
This would be a perfect Florida man man's story. Yeah,
let's get.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
It a try. Okay, Florida man's back ho stumbles upon
ancient skull.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
There we go. I also like attributing the action to
the backo because it sounds as if he just left
it running.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah, exactly, something exactly.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
So it's true. In nineteen eighty two, Steve found what
while he was cleaning stuff out, he saw what he
thought was maybe around brown rock, and a rock would
be unusual in this terrain. So he stops working and
he starts digging through through the muck and the mud
and the swampy stuff that you're mentioning. Matt the mucky muck,
(16:04):
the mucky muck. That's the technical term and he picks
up this object. He makes it way over and he
picks it up, wipes off some of the stuff. You
can't see it, folks, but I'm miming his actions here.
And then he turns around this object, this smooth, round rock,
to find too equally round empty eye sockets staring back
(16:24):
at him. And that's when Steve realizes this is not
a rock. This is a skull. And he's not an expert,
but it looks pretty old.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Well yeah, it looks a little old, but again, who
knows how old it is. So imagine you're Steve and
you find a skull while you're working. You have to
call the police and report finding a skull because there's
a possibility that this may be, you know, a homicide
or a missing person or something to that effect. So
that was exactly what he did. Then they continued looking
(16:57):
because they're still working in this area. It's not like
you just immediately stop all the construction there because of
a skull. Now, yeah, you definitely pause for a moment again,
call the police, and then maybe keep going. But they
started finding a lot more skulls, a lot more bones.
Again inside the bucket of the baco where he was.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Working, right. The site supervisor is the first person that
Steve contacts and they say, okay, is this a murder?
We have to call the police. And then they look
in the bucket of Steve's bacco and they find more skulls.
So he had apparently been digging up some remains before
he was aware of it, right, And when they realized
(17:39):
they were looking at multiple bodies, they immediately knew something
was up. Now, this is where two things could have happened,
and it all depends on a fellow named Jim Swan.
Jim Swan was the developer of the subdivision, and he
could he could do one of two things. He could,
like many unscrewed list developers, just pay off the crew,
(18:03):
suppress the news of the find, and carry over with
the construction of Windover Farms. And that is you know,
like that's a plot point in the horror film Poultergeist, right, well,
debatably the horror themed family film Poultergeist.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
There you go, yes, building on top of an ancient
burial ground of sorts.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Right, And that only enters fiction because that has really
happened in multiple instances, not just here in the US,
but many places abroad. Jim, for one reason or another,
hopefully because he's a decent human being. Maybe because he's
afraid of legal action, we don't know. Jim decides to
halt all the work, just like you were talking about, Matt.
He says, Okay, this is not a pause. We're stopping everything.
(18:45):
Shut it down. We have to contact the experts. We
have to determine the provenance of these bones. More importantly,
I have to figure out what we do next. Yeah,
I've got millions sunk in the subdivision. Probably at this point,
you know, I was hoping that I could, you know,
construct it and not go bankrupt.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
But maybe there's another way here, There's something else to do.
So he immediately reaches out to Florida State University to
see if there's anyone on staff there that can come
over and help assist identifying these bones. And they speak
to doctor Glenn Dran d O R A N. And
again he's his staff member of the Florida State University,
(19:26):
an archaeologist. He shows up on the scene and initially
he's looking at these bones and he's thinking, oh, wow,
these are preserved pretty well.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
They are old.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
I can tell they're old. And one of The first
things he sees are the teeth, and he notices that
they've been ground down, naturally ground down, just through wear
and tear, not the way you know, if someone was
going to physically injure you and hurt your teeth or
something or yeah, it was just natural wear and tear
on the teeth. But to the point where he he
(19:57):
realized that from an art cheologists standpoint, these must be
thousands of years old, or at least that's what he.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Believes, right. He surmised initially from his own just on
the scene assessment, that these bones were from a Native
American population, according to him, due primarily to the dentation
and due to what he thought that told him about
the age, So he said, these are perhaps a thousand
(20:26):
years old. He arranged for carbon dating tests. This was
financed by Swan and Swan's company EKS Corporation, and they
were shocked by the results. What were those results? Will
tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Okay, now, when we left you, we were talking about
duran and the carbon dating tests that we're going to
be done on the bones and the teeth and everything
that were found there at the Windover site. And there's
the company Eks Corporation. They are doing this, this carbondating,
(21:08):
and they were shocked when they realized the bones were
indeed more than a thousand years old. In fact, the
human remains uncovered at this site were somewhere between seven
thousand and eight thousand years old. That makes them thirty
two hundred years older than King Tuton Common and two
(21:29):
thousand years older than the Great Pyramids of Giza themselves
in Egypt. It's incredible to imagine in Florida bones of
this age were found and then carbondated to show that yes,
in fact, they are that old.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
And these were also modern human beings. This was not
one of the early mixtapes of humanity like Neanderthal or
something like that. Directus right right right, exactly seven thousand
and eight thousand years old. This is on the east
coast of Florida. Everything that is commonly accepted about the
spread of the human species argues that the human species
(22:07):
by and large arrived at North and South America what
we call those two continents today, by crossing the baring
Land Bridge over what is now the Bearing Strait, and
that in case anyone's not familiar, that is, in the
most opposite corner of the continent that one could imagine.
(22:28):
It is in the far far far northwest and Cape Canaveral,
far far southeast. So what's going on. They spent two
years trying to dig this up. Overall, there were three
archaeological digs conducted there between nineteen eighty four and nineteen
eighty six. They ended up finding more than two hundred
(22:49):
distinct intact burials. And you'll hear you'll hear a couple
of different numbers thrown around. One will be they found
more than two hundred burials. One will be like, they
found more than one hundred and sixty eight bodies. Yeah,
and part of that is because of the extreme length
of time that these folks were literally poor choice of
(23:11):
words on my part, bogged down, you know what I mean.
Things shift, the bones may get jumbled. But the weird
thing is that despite being in there for almost ten
thousand years, the better part of ten thousand years, the
bodies have been ritualistically buried, and with maybe a few exceptions,
they were all placed in the same position. They were
(23:33):
in a fetal position, lying on their left side, their
heads were pointed west and their faces up to the north.
In some cases the necks were broken to get this. Yeah, God,
we don't know why. We can speculate it best that
this shows us some sort of belief in the afterlife
(23:55):
and ritualistic burial. The deceased were also wrapped in what
archaeologists believe is the oldest existing woven fabric in the world,
which is you know, when you think of the oldest
thing in the world, you think of something in Africa
and in the fertile somewhere near the right or maybe yeah,
or maybe a Middle East, right, think of something on
(24:15):
that continent or in the Middle East. You don't really
think and it's not a ding again on Florida, but
you don't think, Oh, yeah, Florida, that's where it is.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah, the oldest fabric ever in Florida. In my mind,
it would just be in an old beach towel, the
first one that was ever used, you know, created in
like Myrtle Beach or Daytona beach or something.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Wouldn't it be amazing if it also had an ancient
drawing of a cartoon mouse. Oh, or it's hurdle or
a turtle. Better, No, no, let's find let's find both of them.
Let's just write this let's just write this story.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
It just says salt life on it.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
It just says salt life. Will write this story, will
bury it somewhere. Yeah, and thousands of years from now.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
A Florida man will discover with his backo boom full circle.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
So well, that's our show, folks, thanks for turning. I
think we did some meaningful work today. Yet we did
find that there were grave goods though, that's what they're called.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Yeah, And it's not even the most odd thing that
was found here, the oldest fabric, because it's the way
that this stuff was used, and it's puzzling to me.
Help me understand this a little better, Ben, because my
understanding is that the bodies were actually submerged into the
water on purpose using some piece of technology, essentially like
(25:38):
a tool of some sort.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah. So they were buried in this fetal position with
certain body parts corresponding to certain directions, and then branches
would be lashed together over them to create a tripod
which kept the bodies in that feel position from floating
up and to prevent them from floating to the top
(26:03):
of that tripod. They had this this woven fabric is
essentially functioning as a funeral shroud, and a wooden steak
would be hammered in or somehow thrust through the fabric
of the shroud which I'm just calling it a shroud,
into the bed of the pond so that they would
(26:24):
they being the bodies would not float up to the
top of the wooden formation that was keeping them submerged.
And the reason they had to do this is because
when the body would decompose, it would begin to float
because it would begin to fill with gas and air.
The practical step here is that it ultimately protects the
(26:46):
bodies from the many many scavengers in the area, mostly animals,
but there would probably be some grave robbers understandably as well,
and it kept them in that intended again, very purposeful position.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yea, seems like a ritualistic, perhaps religious position. Man. That
to me is fascinating, just the concept that that long
ago you would again, maybe this is that thing we
always talk about when we discuss European settlers going to
(27:20):
parts of Africa and discovering these ancient ruins and they think, oh,
there's no way that they could have an understanding about
the certain geometry here or this or that, like terrible
belief the institutionalized racism that has occurred over all those years.
I worry that I'm having a little bit of that
when I'm trying to imagine, you know, people eight thousand
(27:43):
years ago creating an underwater burial almost to preserve the bodies.
Maybe perhaps they had no understanding that they were actually
preserving the bodies by doing this, but that's in fact
what they were doing using all of these tools and mechanisms.
I mean, it's it's baffling, and it's also really really.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Cool, right Yeah. The institutionalized racism that has to a
great degree stifled scientific progress for centuries, exactly, it's still
alive and well at a lot of places, and sometimes unintentional.
I would argue, I saw a little bit of that
at Alien con to be candid with you, but you're
(28:26):
right here. Generally speaking, when people inter or get rid
of the bodies of their dead and their loved ones
or even their hated ones, the thing is that you
don't want to see them forever, Especially if you love
someone or if they're meaningful to your life, you want
to help them into the afterlife. That's the way it's
(28:50):
usually phrased, and that will be like by burial maybe
in some parts of the world there will be a
you'll be consumed by carnivorous birds, which I think is
sky Burial is probably the coolest cremation, right, things like that.
The idea is that you don't want them to come back.
You don't want to see if their software is gone,
(29:12):
you don't want to be haunted by their hardware, which
is why it's such a such an ancient psyop to
take the bodies of dead enemies and display them where
they're living can see them.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
But then others want to preserve the body as much
as they can because the belief is that that body
will have to come back.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Right, Yeah, that's it, and to certain rules. Right, So
that's why we have the preservation of organs in some societies.
That's and also when when we go into a secular world,
a lot of times there's this interpretation, or I would say,
this assumption that burial rituals are all religiously based, which
is not the case. I mean, think about all the
(29:53):
time spent embalming Linen. You know, in the days of
the USSR. It was not really a religion, but it
took the place of a religion because it was a symbol.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
You know, linin, not linen. In my head, I heard linen.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Oh yes, sorry, else and perhaps my Tennessee accent, and
not John Lennon. It was Linen and linen in Linen, Yes,
in Leningrad. That's right. Yeah, all right, we solved the case.
But we're saying all this to give maybe a little
(30:28):
bit more anthropological perspective. One of the most important points
you made, Matt, that we shouldn't skip over is whether
or not the people who were entering folks this way
knew it. What they ended up doing was preserving the
bodies of their loved ones for thousands and thousands of
(30:48):
years because the peat bog is an anaerobic environment, which
means that a lot of the rules of decomposition, which
are air and oxygen dependent will will not play out
the same way. Also, the fact that pete bog means
that there's a pH balance that's tremendously conducive to preserving things.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Yeah, and there's not a lot you know, if it's
in the ocean or something or somewhere that has occurrent,
there's not a lot of physical movement occurring there. And
the biggest variable is the rising and lowering of the
water essentially in these places depending on drought or the
amount of rain, and that pH balance too. Man ah go,
(31:33):
it's so cool to me, Okay, So.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
It feels purposeful, right, it's done something with all those factors, Like.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
We've been doing this for so long. We know that
this is the place to bury people, and this is
how we will do it. And though it's been ten,
twelve thousand, fifteen thousand years.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
At least, the practice right and the site itself, as
will come to find, was active for a very very
long time before it was forgotten and almost became the
non consensual foundation of a suburb. We know that the
(32:09):
environment of Florida was very challenging. It remains very challenging
for preservation. We can explore that in a little bit.
Right now, let's talk about the life of the people
who lived in this prehistoric time. About half of the
remains found at Windover again, that's anywhere from one hundred
and sixty eight to two hundred something people were children,
(32:29):
not all. The oldest people found in the site were
around sixty years old, unlike the human remains found in
European bogs. You know, you might think of something like
Ireland or Scotland or something. Unlike those remains. The bodies
in Florida were only skeletons. There's no flesh on the bones.
(32:49):
And again a lot of that has to do with
the climate of Florida.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
You're gonna say, Yeah, the temperature is going to make
a big difference there.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
And as you get closer to the equator, you'll see
you know, increasingly in hospitable environments for preservation. But also
you know, think of think of how rare these places are.
But if you go back a few centuries when there
was much more forest land and jungle land in the world,
those ecosystems, those biomes are hungry, they eat things. There's
(33:23):
still eating cities. I think a lot of us would
be surprised at how much maintenance goes on into just
keeping even what you think of as a metropolis alive
from one year to the next. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Can you imagine in Atlanta if we didn't have a
kudzoo team going out there every day working their tails off.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
I love the Kudzuo man. I think about it a lot,
and how how quickly it would grow. Yeah, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
I don't think there's an official Atlanta Kudzoo team. Maybe
there is. If you work for the official Atlanta Kudzoo
what do we call it.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Kudzuo task Force? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Yeah, let us know the cats out of everyone.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
I mean yeah, they're definitely they're definitely ongoing wars. Kudzu
is an excellent example their ongoing efforts to prevent the
spread of cuts, which is technically an invasive species, right,
but adapted amazingly well. So we know a little bit
about what these people's lives were like. But the same
(34:25):
environment in Florida, which makes it so difficult to preserve
bodies or buildings, let alone books and so on, also
teaches us about how they were buried because despite the
fact that there was no flesh on the bones, about
half of the skulls ninety ninety one or so contained
brain matter. It's pretty gruesome, but it also means that
(34:48):
they were buried within at the very most, at the
very upper limit, they were in the pond, interred within
forty eight hours of expiring, because if they were out
in the fl Florida environment anytime after that, their brain
would have liquefied. Wow, because that's what Florida does to
dead people.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Mmm.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
It's true.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Well, we also got to look at their stomach contents.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Right, and that's tricky because you're saying, well, there's no flesh. Yeah,
we're approximating because it looked like it was digested. We
learned that for one one corpse, they have been eating
primarily fish and berries, and the ground down teeth that
you mentioned earlier, Matt show us similar to It's the
(35:34):
thing Egyptologists have found before as well. In places where
people live around a lot of sand, the sand gets
into your food and it naturally grits down your teeth. Wow,
they didn't have cavities.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
They didn't have cavities. Well well, and you have to
imagine it's only over a span of sixty years and
there's absolutely you know, no dental work being done. There's nothing,
there's no way to help clean or fix your teeth
when things are going wrong in that sand just takes
it out quickly.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Yeah. We also know that even though their lives were
very difficult, they were also very caring with their community.
And this is this is a big thing that maybe
doesn't occur to a lot of people when we think
of ancient societies, but one of the huge, huge, leaping
points or one of the one of the huge breakthroughs,
(36:27):
a watershed moment in evolution was the idea of caring
for the injured and the dead, which is something higher
cognition entities do so not not necessarily just mammals, you
know what I mean. There's some birds that will care
for the injured, and of course there's cetaceans are still mammals,
(36:48):
but who knows, maybe there's an octopus hospital.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Yeah, maybe, But I see exactly what you're saying. In
an organized humanoid society, a human society, taking care of
someone who's incapacitated, who cannot contribute to, you know, the
the wealth essentially the health and wealth of your tribe,
your group, then you know, for a certain time, there's
(37:14):
no reason to have that person besides to you know,
keep them around because you love them, right, or you
care about.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Them, or because you're a decent.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Well yeah, but if you think about it from the
most basic needs of a human, like a singular human
as well as a group of humans, that's a choice
that what you're saying is it only comes along with
the higher cognition, the really thinking about essentially good like
(37:45):
doing good.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Well, I would say also this is going to sound
very cold. Biologically speaking, an individual human has zero value
unless something can reproduce a sexually. An individual of any
species has zero value in terms of the big picture.
So a group things that can care for one another
in groups may lose a couple checkers games, but they
(38:08):
will win the chess game all you go, right, So
we do know that they were playing this chess game, right.
We found several examples of people who would have died
quite quickly and probably quite painfully had they not have
folks caring for them, and this again is a huge
hallmark of what we would call modern humanity.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
Yeah, there's an older woman and she was perhaps around
fifty years old. It's kind of an estimation there, but
she showed signs of having broken bones, like several of them,
to the point where this person is not going to
survive if it's eight thousand years ago. But she did
for a while at least while she's being taken care of.
The fractures occurred several years before she died, So that's
(38:52):
how you know somebody was doing a lot for this person.
And it really means that there are other villagers, other
humans around her that helped her even when she could
no longer contribute, and that's really what we're saying. There
was another body of a fifteen year old boy, at
least again an estimated fifteen year old boy, that showed
(39:13):
he was a victim of spina bifida, which is something
intense to encounter in modern day With modern day medicine,
you can only imagine what it was like.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Then, right. Spina bifida is a birth defect that occurs
when the cord of your spine and your actual spine
don't form properly. It used to be considered a pediatric illness,
even relatively recently, meaning that if you survive into adulthood,
(39:42):
you would just still continue to see your pediatric doctor.
This kid made it to fifteen, so he was well
on his way to becoming an adult. They also saw
various different tools. Perhaps one of the most heartbreaking things
is that every single child that was buried there was
(40:03):
buried with a couple of toys. Wow, how much more
human can you get? We have to ask ourselves, Okay,
these are people, but who were these people? Where did
they come from, and how did they get there? How,
perhaps even more importantly, did they become lost to time?
For more than seven thousand years, it's a questionable answer.
(40:23):
After a word from our sponsor, here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
First, this was not a mass grave, just a place
where bodies were thrown just because someone had died and
it was done. We've already established that these bodies are
placed there on purpose and in a way that it
is meaningful.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
It's not a massacre, it's not an all die. At
the same time, and.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
We also know that this is likely not a matter
of some kind of sacrifice, some kind of ritual that
was done to put these people out of their misery,
or for worship of some other you know, deity or
being or something like that.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
And we know this because of the way in which
they were interred and because of the the nature of
ritualistic human sacrifice usually indicates, or usually is predicated upon
a similar method of death to someone is you know,
(41:28):
ritualistically strangled by the thugy cult, or someone has is
vivisected right somewhere in mes America or something this or
in the case of bogs in Europe, someone has their
throat cut and then they're tossed in a bog. Right,
this doesn't seem to be the case here. One of
(41:49):
the reasons, one of the biggest. Here's where it gets
crazy moments in this wind Over investigation, which has again
been going on since the early nineteen eighties, not eighteen
eighties as far as we know, hinges on the concept
of DNA, and this goes back a little bit to
what you were talking about, Matt. You'll hear some folks,
including members of academia here in twenty nineteen, arguing that
(42:15):
the DNA tests conducted on the remains indicated that these
people were descended from Europeans rather than the Far Eastern
you know, the Far Eastern groups that migrated out of
Siberia right or through Siberia. This would be a huge discovery,
(42:37):
but the question is is it true. First we have
to remember the only way they could find anything close
enough to try to analyze would be that brain matter
the marrow is probably long gone, and the DNA's rate
of decay makes it a lot like forget trying to
(42:58):
find a needle in a haystack. Trying to find a
lottery ticket in a haystack and hoping that it wins.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Well, yeah, and you have to find multiple lottery tickets
because you can't just test one subject and say, oh,
this whole group of people, they're definitely European.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Right, And in the past people have been way too
quick to do that. There's a geneticist named Joseph Lorenz
from the Quarriel Institute for Medical Research. He was searching
for DNA markers that he thought were typical of Native Americans,
and the DNA samples taken from the bones of five
different people in Windover. So they did let me correct
(43:35):
myself there. They did find at least something in the
bones they could use. He didn't find what he was
looking for. He did not find those common markers he
thought would be extant, and so he compared the wind
Over DNA results. He had to present European populations, and
this is what he said.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
I went back to the screen and looked at the
sequences again. The first person's DNA it looked European. When
I looked at the second one, it looked European. When
I looked at the third, the fourth, and the fifth
it was slightly different from the first two, but they
looked European.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
So there are three common presumptions that are inherent. They're
intrinsic in every interpretation of the wind over DNA. The
first is the assumption that one combination of DNA haplogroups
typifies all Native American populations. It's demonstrably untrue. There's been
well documented Polynesian DNA material found in skeletons in northwest
(44:33):
Mexico as well as southern California. There are early populations
of South America that also don't necessarily fit that assumption. Also,
there are no DNA text markers for a lot of
indigenous people in southeastern US. The research wasn't quite there
(44:54):
at the time. And then there's the Yuchi group, which
has consistently stated, again in folklore and the importance of
world storytelling, that their ancestors crossed the Atlantic to the
Savannah River. These are you'll hear them called the oldest
indigenous peoples in the Southeast. Their migration legend states that
(45:16):
they found evidence of an earlier people who had lived
in the Savannah River basin before them. I think it's
clutching at straws because that's anecdotal, you know what I mean,
But that doesn't mean there's not a grain of truth
to it. And this whole DNA exploration is where things
get so sticky because for some more conspiratorially minded people,
(45:38):
this was seen as a gold mine. It was proof
that there could be some previously unidentified migration patterns in
ancient human history. It's true there are. We're going to
find more as we learn more about the expansion of
the species. But I don't know. There's a thing that
(45:58):
used a lot of Weasley words language that we found
describing this.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
And we've got a quote here, Yes, this comes from
about archaeology. Although scientists believed they had retrieved DNA from
the fairly intact brain matter recovered from some of the
human burials, subsequent research has shown that the mt DNA
lineages reported are absent in all other prehistoric and contemporary
Native American populations studied to date. Further attempts to retrieve
(46:26):
more DNA have failed, and an amplification study has shown
that there is no analyzable DNA left at the Windover burials.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
So let's unpack this quickly. What this shows is that
scientists did at one point get some DNA material from
one or more of the brains, definitely more, one would hope,
and they found that the mitochondrial DNA lineage reported didn't
match what we knew about other Native American populations, right,
(47:01):
So then they said, we've tried or other people have
tried to grab more DNA material and they can't get it,
and we think there's no more left. So we shot
our shot. Basically shot our shot, and we got more
questions than answers.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
However, this thing we just read from about archaeology, well
several people take exception to this, including someone a researcher
named Gary Carson, and we have a quote from him.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
Yeah. Yeah, he unpacks this stuff and he says, I've
read this particular passage two or three times and it's
a masterpiece of hand waving and misdirection. He's a little
steamed about it. Yeah, that last part was me. The
article makes it sound like DNA wasn't discovered after all,
but it goes on to say THEA DNA lineages were
discovered that's mitochondrial DNA and subsequently analyzed, but then dismisses
(47:51):
the analysis because it doesn't match the expected results, specifically
because it didn't connect the wind Over Bog people with
other prehistoric and contemperary Native American populations. In other words,
according to Gary, the DNA results couldn't be accurate because
they didn't show that the bog people were Native Americans.
So he's he's not necessarily arguing some secret migration from
(48:16):
some hitherto unmentioned land, but he is saying that these
people may be committing one of the one of the
big sins of critical thinking, which is throwing out stuff
that doesn't fit a preconceived notion. There's a facial reconstruction
project that you can you can see google wind over
a woman online and they don't they don't appear European.
(48:39):
But a lot of facial reconstruction like that is interpretive, right. Yeah.
I mean, we didn't know dinosaurs had feathers.
Speaker 2 (48:49):
We did for ever, but we figured it out because
somebody just decided one day that they had feathers. That's honestly.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
What happened is that. What happened is like, dude, these
guys got feathers. Was you?
Speaker 2 (49:00):
It was me?
Speaker 1 (49:01):
I should have been on that call.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
When I grew up, dinosaurs were just all green or
brown or gray, no stripes. Yeah, eighties kids, dinosaurs are green, brown, gray,
maybe maybe a little tan light brown. But now they're
just multicolored. They got feathers. I don't believe it. I'm
just kidding. I think it's wonderful what we're learning. Paleontologists
(49:23):
teaching you against some things. No, I love it.
Speaker 1 (49:25):
You think there should be a bright line between pokemon
and dinosaurs.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
No, no, I choose you pach so great.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
So there are there are other opinions here, one that
argues one that bases its argument on the timeline. So
time estimates for the arrival of certain genomes or genetic
material are twelve thou thirty six thousand years ago, depending
on the number of assumed founders, And this supports the
conclusion that people harboring this haplo group, this this weird
(49:58):
one that sticks out right, we're among the original founders
of Native American populations. To date, applogroup X, as this
guy William Holsworth is calling it has not been unambiguously
identified in Asia, which would have been the origin point,
and to this author raises the possibility that some of
(50:19):
these Native American founding populations had ancestors somewhere else so
ultimately came to what we recognize as Florida today through
some other migration pattern. As the Internet likes to say,
big if true, Big if true, Big if true, But
is it true. At this point, it seems experts are
(50:39):
still debating the origin of the ancient windover population and occasionally,
if you read closely, accusing one another of having an agenda,
which is not at all unusual.
Speaker 2 (50:49):
Yeah, I mean, that's pretty darn common when it comes
to things like.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
This, and it's an important debate. It's one we should
treat with extreme seriousness, primarily because of the point you raised, Matt,
which is a fundamental point that is all too often
skipped over. The human species has a long, long, incredibly
unfortunate history of institutionalized racism, attempting to shoehorn insert favorite
(51:13):
group here into so many things, from pyramids to the
ruins of empires to the creation of civilization. You know
what I mean. And this is not just This is
not just a practice of one sect of people from
one part of the world, nor is it the practice
of one discipline.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
And just to take it back to alien con we
see it perpetuated there where. If Europeans or some sort
didn't have anything to do with this, well then it
must be aliens making all of these ancient sites.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
And in the defense of people who will make those arguments,
typically nowadays they're not just arguing something based on that.
They'll also say a stonehenge, how could ancient people have
made that? Those? Look at those the big that's the
biggest rock I ever saw.
Speaker 2 (52:00):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (52:01):
I'm not quoting, I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 2 (52:03):
But true. It is just something we cannot stress enough.
That is, it's highly important and remember it when you
read things.
Speaker 1 (52:13):
And at least it leads us almost full circle here,
mat because what we're talking about is underestimating ancient people,
which we should never do. These are modern human beings.
Human humanity is slowly evolving. But people thousands of years
ago were as smart and as capable of invention and
(52:39):
ingenuity as people are today. So this is where it
gets us to a weird spot and maybe where we
end today's conversation to hear from to hear from you folks.
If you know, if we accept that is absolutely true
that ancient peoples could, through their own ingenuity and their
own maguverness, build things like stone hinge, like pyramids like
(53:02):
Catalahyop and so on, doesn't that mean we also need
to be open to the idea that that same ingenuity
could be applied to migration and travel.
Speaker 2 (53:14):
Absolutely especially over water, especially over water.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. It's right let us know
what you think. You can reach to the handle Conspiracy
Stuff where we exist on Facebook x and YouTube on
Instagram at TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (53:34):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
three STDWYTK. That's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes.
Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say than can fit in
that voicemail, why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
We are the entities to read every single piece of
correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (54:21):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
Good Game with Sarah Spain
Good Game is your one-stop shop for the biggest stories in women’s sports. Every day, host Sarah Spain gives you the stories, stakes, stars and stats to keep up with your favorite women’s teams, leagues and athletes. Through thoughtful insight, witty banter, and an all around good time, Sarah and friends break down the latest news, talk about the games you can’t miss, and debate the issues of the day. Don’t miss interviews with the people of the moment, whether they be athletes, coaches, reporters, or celebrity fans.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Crime Junkie
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.