July 17, 2019 • 56 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:25):
to the show. My name is Matt. Noel is on
an adventure. They call me Ben when you're 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
(00:45):
of whom, by the way, spent their respective first days
at work listening to one of our shows and decided
to stay on. So thanks for staying. I mean, they
kind of have to write that's far of a job.
But still we're glad you're here. Yeah, and you guys
doing alright. Thumbs up, thumbs down, All right, got some
(01:06):
enthusiastic thumbs up. What about you, Matt, how are you?
What's what's going on? Oh? Thumbs decidedly sideways. No, I'm
just ding. It's great. We just launched Insomniac The Monster
Presents Insomnia actually that we're working on for a long time,
So I'm really excited about that. And um, I wanted
to ask you, by the way, we haven't talked about
it at length, but you just got back from l
A on your own adventure. Yes, that's true, that's true. First,
(01:30):
I'd like to shout out to Insomniac. I'd like to
emphasize that is hosted by my long time friend, your
longtime friend, as well a collaborator and my ride or
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. Yeah, it might even happen
(01:51):
before this episode comes out. Who knows who knows? Time is?
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,
(02:14):
fellow podcasters here in our network Brent and John who
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. And I heard you ran into
some of the big names in the extraterrestrial world. Yeah.
It was weird, man, I'm not going to lie. It
(02:36):
was a it was a trip that became a trip.
English is strange, but you get what I'm saying. Yeah,
the so Georgio Sukulos was there. Uh, the guy who
is responsible for the fire and the sky story was there. Uh.
There were some other There were some other big names,
some of whom maybe most familiar to people who already
(03:00):
very into the ufology or UFO sighting community. Eric Vonden,
Eric von Denikin. Yes, that's rights and that's 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
(03:20):
was definitely there. This is a convention that it seems
to take place numerous cities throughout throughout the year. There's
another one coming up soon in Dallas. But we 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 contests,
(03:42):
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 listened to
by a guy named Chris Cogswell. It's called the Mad
Science Tis Podcast. Chris Cogwell is a long time vet
(04:05):
of the UFO community. He's got his stripes, but not
just in the world of ufology. He also has his
stripes in the academic towers, the Ivory ones, you remember those, Matt.
He has a PhD and 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
(04:28):
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 anecdotes that are so ubiquitous in
the world of UFO reporting, then we would highly recommend
the Mad Scientist podcast. Dude. Chris Cogswell has a PhD
(04:51):
in chemical engineering with a focus on nano materials for
absorption and separations. Oh yeah, what I right? And here's
the thing that he's He's the nicest guy and He's
incredibly knowledgeable, so I love to get him on this
show to talk about the cases that he feels have
(05:14):
the most sand, the cases that he feels are the
most compelling. But yep, 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. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, running
into what do we call it, a soaking wet blanket
(05:37):
that is a hundred degrees and you're just walking into
the blanket at all times when you're moving forward, and
it clings to your skin everywhere, and then the mosquitoes
and then the mosquitoes arrive. Yes, yes, right on Q. So,
if you're listening to this and you are in uh,
the southeast of the United States, good luck. And as
(06:01):
they say on Mitchell and Webb, remain indoors, Remain calm
and indoors. Yes, tell us about your adventures. How has
the weather changed over time, maybe over the year or
since you were a wee 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
(06:22):
let us know what you think. Yes, but make sure
you you pull over before you do so if you're driving. Yes, Yeah,
this is not a This is not a Yolo moment.
Now it is now it is yep, right now is
a yellow moment. Now it's gone, so too bad. I
hope you could caught ahold of that while it occurred.
Now you're cursed to live many times. That's correct. So
(06:43):
what do you say, Ben, Let's uh, let's give him
the phone number. We are one eight three three sst
d W y t K. Seriously leave a message. We
will see it. Uh, somebody I'm not going to name names.
Jennifer left eight messages, last eight consecutive messages starting around
(07:03):
eleven o'clock PM. That's great. So it sounds like we
have another call in show in the future. Yeah, there's
a whole episode of just Jennifer, like addressing Jennifer's concerns.
Should we call it just Jennifer? Yeah, it's just a
Jennifer Jennifer. I hope that you are okay with those
messages being mentioned on air. If not, this is your
(07:23):
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. Uh.
William Faulkner was fond of saying, the past isn't dead,
it isn't even past. And that's something that's come up
on this show before, because while it might sound like
(07:46):
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. The discipline instead is, at its best, a
(08:07):
conversation between the present and the past, between the living
and the dead. History is alive, and like all living things,
history appears to change over time simply because of our
understanding of it. I know this sounds abstract, but the
effects are concrete, and they are very real. Research has
proven things that were once considered myths or legends were
(08:29):
indeed real people, places, and events. This is not a
consistent but this happens frequently enough that we can as
a species surmised that we have we have no real
we have no real standing upon which debase our confidence
(08:50):
in in the story of humanity or the story of
the planet in a lot of ways, you know, besides
the best efforts of archaeologists and history orients who are
attempting to track all that stuff down. Again, we it's
just the best version that we know at this moment,
right right, which is how all science should work. So
(09:11):
examples that are going to be very familiar to a
lot to a lot of us long time listeners out there.
The Seely canth that's living history that was for a
long time considered extinct for a long time, considered a cryptic,
very well known to the people who had lived in
the area for thousands of thousands of years. But then
Western people found it and said, oh, we rediscovered this
(09:34):
once extinct creature. Yeah, again to the knowledge of the
people who keep the records, it was gone. Right, That's
very important distinction. Uh. And then the other famous example
we often site would be the city of Troy, which
is the perfect example. Uh. Until fairly recently, you know,
in in the past few hundred years, Troy was considered
(09:55):
a myth, entirely made up thing. There were people who
were aiding huge academic, uh research initiatives on Troy as
a metaphor for something or what was Troy a code
name for or whatever. It turns out there was a
real city of Troy. This guy, who was not a
professional archaeologist found it. People didn't believe them for a while,
(10:17):
because of course we'd all decided Troy was made up.
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 Curdistan region of Iraq where there was a brand
(10:40):
new palace that was discovered because of drought that was
occurring in a reservoir there, Yeah, the most well damn
reservoir on the banks of the Tigris River. As we
were coming into record today, we we learned about this,
my Seth, did you guys hear about this? Okay? So,
so there's a alice. It's almost three thousand five years old.
(11:03):
We never would have found it except for the drought
that dramatically lowered water levels. It 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. We're not sure we as a species,
(11:26):
not not us recording. We're not sure when it went
to Ruin, how it ended up underwater in this dam,
and we don't know exactly what we will learn about this.
This is where this this is interesting because this is
where archaeology and folklore may come to may come to collaborate,
(11:49):
kind of have an Avengers Assemble thing, you know, happening
just like in a Marvel movie, because this is where
some of folklorists and anthropology just 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, definitely, and not to get
(12:10):
away from that too much. But one of the coolest
things that was found there were these ten clay tablets
that actually had Cunea form written on them. They were
still preserved after being underwater for that long, which was
somewhat surprising to me. But again, as we're gonna learn
in this episode, water and certain types of water have
a way of preserving like the pH balance of the water.
(12:32):
What else is like um inside that water as far
as plant life and material go, can preserve the heck
out of things. We also learned some very gross things
about Florida. Yeah, just climate wise, not 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
(12:54):
to explore a bizarre example of hidden history, one not
in the Middle East. Instead, it's going to be in
the comparatively speaking, the backyard of the West. Right, our
tail begins on an ordinary Floorida day, near the intersection
of Interstate and State Road fifty. This is fairly close
to the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in the nineteen eighties.
(13:19):
This intersection is this sort of place you drive by
without a 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. Yeah, it's just it's
a huge interstate and a state road. Okay, great, maybe
there's a gas station, not really a photo opportunity. If
you drove by on the right day in nineteen eighty two,
(13:42):
you might note the construction occurring as crews work to
clear the nearby land and build what would later become
the Windover Farms subdivision. You might even if they're slow enough,
your eyes are sharp and you're on the lookout for
some for some reason, if you're a very alert driver,
you might even see a back ho operator named Steve
(14:04):
vander Jatt who was working to clear out an area
around a nearby pond. Yeah, he was just on his
back ho doing everything he was supposed to be doing,
clearing out part of the Again, it's kind of a
bog This pond that we're talking about is it's um swamps, marshy, swampy.
It's just that that kind of Florida. It reminds me
(14:26):
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 ho and oh you know what this would be.
This would be a perfect Florida man story. This would
be a Florida man man story. Yeah, let's get it
a try. Okay, Uh, Florida man's back ho stumbles upon
ancient skull. There we go. I also like attributing the
(14:49):
action to the Baco because it sounds as if he
just left it running. Yeah, exactly something. So it's true.
In 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
(15:09):
he stops working. He starts digging through the muck and
the mud and the swampy stuff that you're mentioning, Matt
the mucky muck, the mucky muck, that's the technical term.
And he picks up this object. He makes his 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. Uh. And then he turns around this
this object, this smooth, round rock to find too, equally round,
(15:34):
empty eye sockets staring back 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.
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
(15:56):
call the police and report finding a skull because there's
a possibility that this maybe you know, a homicide or
a missing person or something to that effect. So that
was exactly what he did. And then they continued looking
because they're still working in this area. It's not like
you just immediately stopped all the construction there because of
a skull. You definitely pause for a moment again, called
(16:19):
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 bacco where he was working.
Right the site supervisor is the first person that Steve
contacts and they say, okay, it's just a murder, we
have to call the police. And then they look in
(16:40):
the bucket of Steve Spacco 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
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.
(17:03):
Jim Swan was the developer of the subdivision, and he
could do he could do one of two things. He could,
like many unscrupulous developers, just pay off the crew, suppress
the news of the find, and carry over with the
construction of Windover Farms, and that is you know, like
(17:23):
that's a plot point in the horror film Poultergeist, right, well,
debatably the horror themed family film Poultergeist. There you go, yes,
building on top of an ancient burial ground of sorts, right,
and that 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,
(17:46):
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, there's not a pause. We're stopping everything.
Shut it down. We have to contact the experts. We
have to determine the providence of these bones. More importantly,
I have to figure out what we do next. Yeah,
(18:07):
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. 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 Dr Glenn
(18:31):
Duran d O R A. N and UM again. He's
he's staff member of the Florida State University UM and 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. They are old. I can tell they're old. UM.
And one of the first things he sees are the teeth,
(18:52):
and he notices that they've been ground down, naturally ground down, UM,
just through wear and tear and not the way you know,
if someone was was going to physically injure you and
hurt your teeth or something or filing them or any Yeah,
it was just natural wear and tear on the teeth.
But to the point where he he realized that UM,
from an archaeologist standpoint, these must be thousands of years old,
(19:15):
or at least that's what he believes, right. He surmised
initially from his own his own just on the scene assessment,
that these bones were from a Native American population, according
to him, do primarily to uh the dentation and due
to what he thought that told him about the age.
(19:36):
So he said, these are perhaps a thousand years old.
He arranged for carbon dating test. This was financed by
Swan and Swan's company E K. S Corporation, and they
were shocked by the results. What were those results? Will
tell you after a word from our sponsor. Okay, Now,
(20:01):
when 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 E K S Corporation. Uh, they are doing this,
this carbon dating, and they were shocked when they realized
(20:23):
the bones were indeed more than a thousand years old.
In fact, the human remains uncovered at this site we're
somewhere between seven thousand and eight thousand years old. That
makes them thirty two hundred years older than King Tut
in Common and two thousand years older than the Great
Pyramids of Giza themselves in Egypt. It's incredible to imagine
(20:49):
in Florida, bones of this age were found and then
carbon dated to show that yes, in fact, they are
that old, and these were also modern human beings. This
was not one of the early mixtapes of humanity like
uh Neanderthal or something like that. Right, right, right, exactly
seven thousand and eight thousand years old, is on the
(21:11):
east coast of Florida. Everything that is commonly accepted about
the spread of the human species argues that the human
species by and large arrived at North and South America
what we call those two continents today, by crossing the
Bearing Land Bridge over what is now the Bearing Straight
(21:31):
and that in case anyone is not familiar, that is
in the most opposite corner of the continent that one
could imagine. 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,
(21:53):
there were three archaeological digs conducted there between six. They
ended up finding more than two hundred distinct intact burials.
And you'll hear you'll hear a couple of different numbers
thrown around. One will be they found two more than
two hundred burials. One will be like, they found more
than one hundred and sixty eight bodies, right, And part
(22:15):
of that is because of the extreme length of time
that these folks were literally poor choice of 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,
(22:35):
the better part of ten thousand years, uh, the bodies
have been ritualistically buried, and with maybe a few exceptions,
they were all placed in the same position. They were
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 next were broken to get this. Yeah, God,
(23:00):
we don't know why, we can we can? We can
speculate it best that this shows us some sort of
belief in the afterlife 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 Crescent
(23:23):
somewhere nearly right or maybe yeah, or maybe a Middle East, right,
think of something on 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. 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
(23:43):
in like Myrtle Beach or Daytona Beach or something. Wouldn't
it be amazing if it also had uh ancient drawing
of a cartoon mouse, Oh, turtle or turtle better. No,
let's fine, let's find both of them. Let's just write this.
Let's just write this story. It just says salt life
(24:04):
on it. It just says salt life. Will write this story,
will bury it somewhere, and thousands of years from now
a Florida man will discover it with his back full circle.
So well, that's our show, folks. Thanks for turning in.
I think we did some meaningful work today. Uh. Yet
we did find that there were grave goods though that's
(24:25):
what they're called. 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 and
it's puzzling to me. Help 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
(24:48):
piece of technology, essentially like a tool of some sort. Yeah,
so they were. They were buried in this fetal position
with certain body parts responding to certain directions, and then
branches would be lashed together over them to create a
tripod which kept the bodies in that fetal position from
(25:12):
floating up and to prevent them from floating to the
top of that tripod, they had this. This this woven
fabric is essentially functioning as a funeral shroud, and a
wooden steak would be hammered in or or somehow thrust
through the fabric of the shroud I'm just calling it
a shroud into the bed of the pond so that
(25:34):
they would they being the bodies would not float up
to the top of the 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
(25:56):
ultimately protects the bodies from the men any 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, seems like a
ritualistic perhaps religious position. Man. That to me is fascinating,
(26:17):
just the concept that that long ago you would Again,
maybe this is that thing we always talk about when
when we discuss European settlers going to parts of Africa
and discovering these ancient ruins and they think, oh, there's
no way that they could have an understanding about the
(26:40):
certain geometry here or this or that. Um, that like
terrible belief. The institutionalized racism that has occurred over all
those years. Um, I worry that I'm having a little
bit of that when I'm trying to imagine, you know,
people eight thousand years ago creating an underwater burial almost
to preserve the bodies. Maybe perhaps they had no understanding
(27:03):
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 um,
it's baffling, and it's also really really cool. Right. Yeah.
The institutionalized racism that has to a great degree stifled
(27:25):
scientific progress for centuries is still alive and well in
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 right here. Generally speaking,
when people inter or get rid of the bodies of
(27:47):
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 they're meaningful to your life.
You want to help them into the afterlife. That's the
way it's usually phrased. And that will be like by burial.
Maybe in some parts of the world there will be
(28:08):
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. You don't want to be haunted by
their hardware, which is why it's such a such an
(28:29):
ancient psy op to take the bodies of dead enemies
and display them where their living can see them. 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. Right, Yeah, that's a and to
certain rules, right, so that's why we have the preservation
of organs in some societies. That's and also when when
(28:52):
we go into a secular world, a lot of times
there's this interpretation where I would say, this assumption that
burial rituals are all religiously based, which is not the case.
I mean, think about all the time spent embalming lenin.
You know, in the days of of the USSR. It
(29:12):
was not really a religion, but it took the place
of a religion because it was a symbol, you know, Lenin,
not Lenin in my head, I heard of lenin. Oh yes, sorry,
l and I and perhaps my Tennessee accent, and not
John Lennon. It was Lennen and lennen in lenen In
(29:33):
Lennon grad that's right. Yeah, alright, we solved the case.
But but we're saying all this to give maybe a
little 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
(29:56):
the bodies of their loved ones for thousand, some thousands
of years. Because the peat bog is an anaerobic environment,
which means that a lot of the rules of decomposition,
which are air and oxygen it dependent, will will not
play out the same way. Also, the fact that's a
pete bog means that there's a pH balance that's tremendously
(30:20):
conducive to preserving things. And there's not a lot you know,
if it's in the ocean or something or somewhere that
has a current, there's not a lot of physical movement
occurring there in the biggest variable is the rising and
lowering of water, the water essentially in these places depending
on drought or or the amount of rain um and
(30:42):
that pH balance. To man, oh god, it's so cool
to me. Okay, so it feels purposeful, right, it's done
something with all those factors, Like 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 thousand, twelve thousand years at least,
the practice, right and and the the site itself, as
(31:04):
will come to find, was active for a very very
long time before it was forgotten and almost became the
the non consensual foundation of a suburb. We know that
the environment of Florida was very challenging remains very challenging
(31:25):
for preservation, and 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 wind Over again, that's anywhere from a
sixty eight to two hundred something people were children, not all.
The oldest people found in the site were around sixty
years old. Unlike the human remains found in European bogs,
(31:49):
you know, you might think of something and like Ireland
or Scotland or something, Unlike those remains, the bodies in
Florida were only skeletons or no flesh on the bones.
And again a lot of that has to do with
the climate of Florida. Yeah, the temperature is going to
make a big difference there, and as you get closer
(32:11):
to the equator, you will see you know, increasingly inhospitable
environments for preservation. But also you know, think of think
of how rare these places are. But if you if
you go back a few centuries when there was much
more forest land and jungle lands in the world, Uh,
those ecosystems, those biomas are hungry, they eat things. There's
(32:36):
still eating cities. I think a lot of us would
be surprised how much maintenance goes on into just keeping
even what you think of as a metropolis alive from
one year to the next. Can you imagine in Atlanta
if we didn't have a kud Zoo team going out
there every day working, working their tails off. I love
the kudzoo man. I think about it a lot, and
(32:58):
how out quickly it would grow. Yeah, I'm just kidding.
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? Kutzoo task Force? Yeah, yeah,
let us know. I mean, yeah, they're definitely they're definitely
ongoing wars Kudzu is an excellent example their ongoing efforts
(33:22):
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 environment of Florida, which makes it so
difficult to preserve bodies or buildings, let alone books and
(33:43):
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 or so contained
brain matter. It's pretty gruesome, but it also means that
they were buried within at the very most, at the
very upper limit, they were in the pond, interred within
(34:06):
forty eight hours of expiring, because if they were out
in the Florida environment any time after that, their brain
would have liquefied, because that's what Florida does to dead people.
It's true. We also got to look at their stomach contents, right,
and that's tricky because you're saying, well, there's there's no flesh. Yeah,
(34:30):
we're approximating, because it looked like it was the jets
that 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 uh,
it's the thing Egyptologists have found before as well. In
places where people live around a lot of sand. The
(34:52):
sand gets into your food and it naturally grits down
your teeth. They didn't have cavities they have they didn't
have cavities. Well, well, 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
(35:13):
going wrong. Um, and that sand just takes it out quickly. 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
(35:37):
of the um one of the huge breakthroughs, 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 citations are still mammals, but who knows,
(36:01):
maybe there's an octopus hospital, you know, 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,
(36:25):
for a certain time, there's no reason to have that
person besides to you know, keep them around because you
love them, right, or you care about them, or because
you're a decent Well yeah, but if you if you
think about it from the most basic needs of a human,
like a singular human as well as a group of humans,
(36:47):
it's ah, 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 doing good. Well, I would say, also,
there's gonna on very cold. Biologically speaking, an individual human
has zero value unless something can reproduce a sexually. An
(37:08):
individual of any species has zero value in terms of
the big picture. So a group of things that can
care for one another in groups may lose a couple
of checkers games, but they will win the chess game
to 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
(37:32):
painfully had they not have folks caring for them. And
this again is a huge hallmark of what we would
call modern humanity. 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
(37:53):
is not going to survive if it's eight thousand years ago.
But she she did for a while, at least while
she was being taken care of. UM. The fractures occurred
several years before she died. So that's how you know somebody,
somebody was was doing a lot for this person. UM.
(38:14):
It really means that there are other villagers, other humans
around her that helped her even even when she could
no longer contribute. And that's really what we're saying. There's
another body of a fifteen year old boy, at least
again an estimated fifteen year old boy, that showed he
was a victim of UM. Spina bifida, which is something
intense to encounter in modern day with modern day medicine,
you can only imagine what it was like then, right.
(38:35):
Spina bifida as a birth defect that occurs when you're
the cord of your spine and your actual spine don't
form properly. It used to be considered a pediatric illness,
even even relatively recently, meaning that if you survive into adulthood,
you would just still continue to see your pediatric doctor.
(38:58):
This kid made it to fifteen, so he was 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 buried with a couple of toys. Wow, how
(39:19):
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 questionable answer. After
a word from our sponsor, here's where it gets crazy. First,
(39:47):
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 already established that these bodies are
placed there on purpose and in a way that it
is meaningful. It's not a massacre as far as it's
not an all die. At the same time, and we
also know that this is likely not a matter of
(40:07):
some kind of uh sacrifice, some kind of ritual that
was done to to to put these people out of
their misery or for worship of some other you know,
deity or or being or something like that. And we
know this because of the way in which they were interred,
and because of the the nature of ritualistic human sacrifice
(40:32):
usually indicates are usually is predicated upon a similar method
of death. Someone is you know, ritualistically strangled by the
thug cult, or someone has is vivisected right somewhere in
Mesoamerica or something this or or in the case of
(40:52):
bogs in Europe, someone has their throat cut and then
they're tossed and tossed in a bog. Right, doesn't seem
to be the case here. One of the reasons, one
of the biggest here's where it gets crazy moments in
this Windover investigation, which has again been going on since
the early nineteen eighties, not eighteen eighties as far as
(41:13):
we know, hinges on the concept of d n A.
And this goes back a little bit to what you
were talking about, Matt. You will hear some folks, including
members of academia here in two thousand nineteen, arguing that
the DNA tests conducted on the remains indicated that these
(41:34):
people were descended from Europeans rather than the Far Eastern,
you know, the far the Far Eastern groups that migrated
out of Siberia right or through Siberia. This would be
a huge discovery, but the question is is it true?
First we have to remember the only way they could
(41:55):
find anything close enough to try to analyze would be
that that brain matter the marrow is probably long gone
and the DNA's rate of decay makes it a lot
like forget trying to find a needle in the haystack.
It's trying to find a lottery ticket in a haystack
(42:16):
and hoping that it wins. 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, right,
And in the past people have been way too quick
to do that. There's a geneticist named Joseph Lawrence from
the Corey l Institute for Medical Research. He was searching
(42:36):
for DNA markers that he thought were typical of Native Americans,
and the DNA samples taken from the bones of five
different people in wind Over. So so they did, let
me correct 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
(42:58):
the wind over DNA results. He had to present European populations,
and this is what he said. 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
(43:19):
the first two, but they looked European. So there are
three common presumptions that are inherent intrinsic in every interpretation
of the wind over DNA. The first is the assumption
that one combination of DNA haplo groups typifies all Native
American populations. It's demonstrably untrue. There's been well documented Polynesian
(43:42):
DNA material found in skeletons in northwest 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
(44:03):
in southeastern US. The researches wasn't quite there at the time.
And then there's the Ute 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 people's in
(44:25):
the Southeast. Their migration legend states that 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
(44:46):
sticky because for some more conspiratorially minded people 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
(45:08):
I don't know. There's there's a thing that used a
lot of Weasley word language that we found describing this,
and we've got a quote here, Yes, this comes from
about archaeology. All those 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
(45:28):
DNA lineage is reported are absent in all other prehistoric
and contemporary Native American populations studied to date. Further attempts
to retrieve more DNA have failed, and an amplification study
has shown that there is no analyzable DNA left at
the wind Over burials. So let's unpack this quickly. What
(45:51):
this shows is that scientists did at one point get
some DNA material from one uh one or more of
the brains, definitely more one would one would hope, and
they found that the mitochondrial DNA lineage reported didn't match
what we knew about other Native American populations, right, So
(46:14):
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. However, this thing we just read from
about archaeology, well, um, several people take exception to this,
(46:37):
including someone a researcher named Gary Carson, and we have
a quote from him. 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. That last part was me.
The article makes it sound like DNA wasn't discovered after all,
but it goes on to say that mt DNA lineages
(46:58):
were discovered that's might have condrodney and subsequently analyzed, but
then dismisses the analysis because it doesn't match the expected results,
specifically because it didn't connect the wind Over Bogg people
with other prehistoric and contemporary 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.
(47:22):
So he's he's not necessarily arguing some secret migration from
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 your preconceived notion. There's a facial reconstruction
(47:43):
project that you can you can see google wind Over
a woman online, and they don't they don't appear European.
But a lot of facial reconstruction like that is interpretive, right.
I mean, we didn't know dinos stars had feathers. We
did forever, but we figured it out because somebody just
(48:06):
decided one day that they had feathers. That's honestly what happened.
Is that what happens, Like, dude, these guys got feathers.
That was you, it was me. I should have been
on that call. When I grew up, dinosaurs we're just
all green or brown or gray 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.
(48:30):
I don't believe it. I'm just kidding. I think it's
wonderful what we're learning. Uh, paleontologists teaching against some things. No,
I love it. You think there should be a bright
line between pokemon and dinosaurs. I choose you packy cephalosaurs
so great. So there are there are other opinions here,
one that argues one that bases his argument on the timeline.
(48:53):
So time estimates for the arrival of certain genomes or
Janeque material are twelve thousand, thirty six thousand years ago,
depending on the number of assumed founders, and this supports
the conclusion that people harboring this Haplow group, this, this
weird one that sticks out right where among the original
founders of Native American populations to date, Haplow Group X,
(49:20):
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 these Native American founding populations had ancestors somewhere
else so ultimately came to what we recognize as Florida
(49:40):
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 still debating the origin of the ancient wind over
population and occasionally, if you read closely, accusing one another
of having an agenda, which is not not at all unusual. Yeah,
(50:01):
I mean, that's pretty darn common when it comes to
things like this, and it's an important debate. It's when
we should treat with extreme seriousness, primarily because of the
point you raised, Matt, which is it is a fundamental
point that is all too often skipped over. The human
species has a long, long, incredibly unfortunate history of institutionalized racism,
(50:22):
attempting to shoehorn insert favorite 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. And just to
(50:43):
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. And to the in
the defense of people who will make those arguments, typically
nowadays they're not just arguing something based on that the loss,
(51:05):
I say, Stonehenge, How could ancient people have made that? Those?
Look at those the big that's the biggest rock I
ever saw. It's true. I'm not quoting, I'm paraphrasing, but true.
It's just something we we cannot stress enough. That is
um It's it's highly important and remember it when you
read things. And at least it leads us almost full
(51:27):
circle here, Matt, 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 but people
thousands of years ago were as smart and as capable
(51:49):
of of invention and ingenuity as people are today. So
this is where it gets us to a weird spot.
And this is maybe where we end today's conversation and
to hear from to hear from you, folks, if you know,
if if we accept there's absolutely true that ancient people's could,
through their own ingenuity and their own mcgivernus, build things
(52:13):
like stonehinge, like pyramids like Catalahok 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, absolutely especially over water, especially over water. Thank
you so much for tuning in today, folks. I know
(52:34):
that I know that we had some some diversions here,
but but this is a real and unfolding story. We
would love to hear what you think. Have you visited,
uh the wind Over site and if so, what are
your experiences or this doesn't have anything to do with
wind Over ancient sites throughout the world, what do you
(52:54):
visit in your neck of the Global Woods. We would
love to hear your stories, anything from burial side to
cave paintings to any any traces of humanity from from long,
long ago. Tell us about your local your locations. Yeah,
let's say anything older than twelve hundred a D. That's great.
(53:18):
Pick that one because I think that's that's around the
time of the phantom time hypothesis. Right, I can't remember
we have no you're right, it's the middle, it's the
Dark Ages. Right, let me let me correct that phantom
time is uh a D six fourteen to nine eleven
eight to ask what it was. Yeah, so let's just
(53:42):
say any any Let's stick with twelve D said twere
any any time before twelve hundred And you know what
if you visited something that was built in the twelve
hundreds and it is still around and you're like, guys,
I think that was twelve seventy three, that's fine. We
still want to know. We want to hear the story.
Please a right to and if your name is Chris
Cogswell and you have a podcast, right to us too,
(54:03):
because I'd love to. I'd love to interact with you.
Ben got to now and I want to know more.
And also Mary Mayhew, who was the co host of
that podcast that now I can't remember. I remember, Chris
Cogswellings Mad Scientist Something podcast, Matt Sidentist podcast. I'm really interested.
Now I'm gonna have to listen. So you can reach
(54:26):
us at the aforementioned telephone number. We are one eight
three three s T D W y t K. You
can find us on Instagram. You can find us on Facebook,
you can find us on Twitter. We highly recommend hanging
out with our favorite part of the show, your fellow
listeners on Here's where It Gets Crazy. That's on Facebook.
(54:46):
It's a group you can talk about the show, anything
you you've been thinking about with that stuff in particular,
let's go ahead and mention it now. Ben, a lot
of people have been writing to us about the David
Eike interview. If you have thoughts on that, please continue
to write to us. We're going to have some more
discussion internally and with you about it as well. And Hey,
you might be saying I have something that I would
(55:08):
love to tell you. I have a show that my
fellow listeners need to hear, but I hate social media.
Why do you guys still have a Facebook page after
you told me about how bad Facebook is. Yeah, and
we were right. We have to have one. We have
to have it. Uh. And I hate being on the phone.
It's twenty nineteen. Real friends text I don't know how
(55:30):
to get in contact with you. All I use is email. Well,
do we have some good news for you? You can
indeed write us an old fashioned email. We are conspiracy
at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they Don't want
(56:01):
you to Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:25):
to the show. My name is Matt. Noel is on
an adventure. They call me Ben when you're 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
(00:45):
of whom, by the way, spent their respective first days
at work listening to one of our shows and decided
to stay on. So thanks for staying. I mean, they
kind of have to write that's far of a job.
But still we're glad you're here. Yeah, and you guys
doing alright. Thumbs up, thumbs down, All right, got some
(01:06):
enthusiastic thumbs up. What about you, Matt, how are you?
What's what's going on? Oh? Thumbs decidedly sideways. No, I'm
just ding. It's great. We just launched Insomniac The Monster
Presents Insomnia actually that we're working on for a long time,
So I'm really excited about that. And um, I wanted
to ask you, by the way, we haven't talked about
it at length, but you just got back from l
A on your own adventure. Yes, that's true, that's true. First,
(01:30):
I'd like to shout out to Insomniac. I'd like to
emphasize that is hosted by my long time friend, your
longtime friend, as well a collaborator and my ride or
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. Yeah, it might even happen
(01:51):
before this episode comes out. Who knows who knows? Time is?
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,
(02:14):
fellow podcasters here in our network Brent and John who
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. And I heard you ran into
some of the big names in the extraterrestrial world. Yeah.
It was weird, man, I'm not going to lie. It
(02:36):
was a it was a trip that became a trip.
English is strange, but you get what I'm saying. Yeah,
the so Georgio Sukulos was there. Uh, the guy who
is responsible for the fire and the sky story was there. Uh.
There were some other There were some other big names,
some of whom maybe most familiar to people who already
(03:00):
very into the ufology or UFO sighting community. Eric Vonden,
Eric von Denikin. Yes, that's rights and that's 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
(03:20):
was definitely there. This is a convention that it seems
to take place numerous cities throughout throughout the year. There's
another one coming up soon in Dallas. But we 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 contests,
(03:42):
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 listened to
by a guy named Chris Cogswell. It's called the Mad
Science Tis Podcast. Chris Cogwell is a long time vet
(04:05):
of the UFO community. He's got his stripes, but not
just in the world of ufology. He also has his
stripes in the academic towers, the Ivory ones, you remember those, Matt.
He has a PhD and 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
(04:28):
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 anecdotes that are so ubiquitous in
the world of UFO reporting, then we would highly recommend
the Mad Scientist podcast. Dude. Chris Cogswell has a PhD
(04:51):
in chemical engineering with a focus on nano materials for
absorption and separations. Oh yeah, what I right? And here's
the thing that he's He's the nicest guy and He's
incredibly knowledgeable, so I love to get him on this
show to talk about the cases that he feels have
(05:14):
the most sand, the cases that he feels are the
most compelling. But yep, 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. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, running
into what do we call it, a soaking wet blanket
(05:37):
that is a hundred degrees and you're just walking into
the blanket at all times when you're moving forward, and
it clings to your skin everywhere, and then the mosquitoes
and then the mosquitoes arrive. Yes, yes, right on Q. So,
if you're listening to this and you are in uh,
the southeast of the United States, good luck. And as
(06:01):
they say on Mitchell and Webb, remain indoors, Remain calm
and indoors. Yes, tell us about your adventures. How has
the weather changed over time, maybe over the year or
since you were a wee 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
(06:22):
let us know what you think. Yes, but make sure
you you pull over before you do so if you're driving. Yes, Yeah,
this is not a This is not a Yolo moment.
Now it is now it is yep, right now is
a yellow moment. Now it's gone, so too bad. I
hope you could caught ahold of that while it occurred.
Now you're cursed to live many times. That's correct. So
(06:43):
what do you say, Ben, Let's uh, let's give him
the phone number. We are one eight three three sst
d W y t K. Seriously leave a message. We
will see it. Uh, somebody I'm not going to name names.
Jennifer left eight messages, last eight consecutive messages starting around
(07:03):
eleven o'clock PM. That's great. So it sounds like we
have another call in show in the future. Yeah, there's
a whole episode of just Jennifer, like addressing Jennifer's concerns.
Should we call it just Jennifer? Yeah, it's just a
Jennifer Jennifer. I hope that you are okay with those
messages being mentioned on air. If not, this is your
(07:23):
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. Uh.
William Faulkner was fond of saying, the past isn't dead,
it isn't even past. And that's something that's come up
on this show before, because while it might sound like
(07:46):
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. The discipline instead is, at its best, a
(08:07):
conversation between the present and the past, between the living
and the dead. History is alive, and like all living things,
history appears to change over time simply because of our
understanding of it. I know this sounds abstract, but the
effects are concrete, and they are very real. Research has
proven things that were once considered myths or legends were
(08:29):
indeed real people, places, and events. This is not a
consistent but this happens frequently enough that we can as
a species surmised that we have we have no real
we have no real standing upon which debase our confidence
(08:50):
in in the story of humanity or the story of
the planet in a lot of ways, you know, besides
the best efforts of archaeologists and history orients who are
attempting to track all that stuff down. Again, we it's
just the best version that we know at this moment,
right right, which is how all science should work. So
(09:11):
examples that are going to be very familiar to a
lot to a lot of us long time listeners out there.
The Seely canth that's living history that was for a
long time considered extinct for a long time, considered a cryptic,
very well known to the people who had lived in
the area for thousands of thousands of years. But then
Western people found it and said, oh, we rediscovered this
(09:34):
once extinct creature. Yeah, again to the knowledge of the
people who keep the records, it was gone. Right, That's
very important distinction. Uh. And then the other famous example
we often site would be the city of Troy, which
is the perfect example. Uh. Until fairly recently, you know,
in in the past few hundred years, Troy was considered
(09:55):
a myth, entirely made up thing. There were people who
were aiding huge academic, uh research initiatives on Troy as
a metaphor for something or what was Troy a code
name for or whatever. It turns out there was a
real city of Troy. This guy, who was not a
professional archaeologist found it. People didn't believe them for a while,
(10:17):
because of course we'd all decided Troy was made up.
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 Curdistan region of Iraq where there was a brand
(10:40):
new palace that was discovered because of drought that was
occurring in a reservoir there, Yeah, the most well damn
reservoir on the banks of the Tigris River. As we
were coming into record today, we we learned about this,
my Seth, did you guys hear about this? Okay? So,
so there's a alice. It's almost three thousand five years old.
(11:03):
We never would have found it except for the drought
that dramatically lowered water levels. It 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. We're not sure we as a species,
(11:26):
not not us recording. We're not sure when it went
to Ruin, how it ended up underwater in this dam,
and we don't know exactly what we will learn about this.
This is where this this is interesting because this is
where archaeology and folklore may come to may come to collaborate,
(11:49):
kind of have an Avengers Assemble thing, you know, happening
just like in a Marvel movie, because this is where
some of folklorists and anthropology just 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, definitely, and not to get
(12:10):
away from that too much. But one of the coolest
things that was found there were these ten clay tablets
that actually had Cunea form written on them. They were
still preserved after being underwater for that long, which was
somewhat surprising to me. But again, as we're gonna learn
in this episode, water and certain types of water have
a way of preserving like the pH balance of the water.
(12:32):
What else is like um inside that water as far
as plant life and material go, can preserve the heck
out of things. We also learned some very gross things
about Florida. Yeah, just climate wise, not 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
(12:54):
to explore a bizarre example of hidden history, one not
in the Middle East. Instead, it's going to be in
the comparatively speaking, the backyard of the West. Right, our
tail begins on an ordinary Floorida day, near the intersection
of Interstate and State Road fifty. This is fairly close
to the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in the nineteen eighties.
(13:19):
This intersection is this sort of place you drive by
without a 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. Yeah, it's just it's
a huge interstate and a state road. Okay, great, maybe
there's a gas station, not really a photo opportunity. If
you drove by on the right day in nineteen eighty two,
(13:42):
you might note the construction occurring as crews work to
clear the nearby land and build what would later become
the Windover Farms subdivision. You might even if they're slow enough,
your eyes are sharp and you're on the lookout for
some for some reason, if you're a very alert driver,
you might even see a back ho operator named Steve
(14:04):
vander Jatt who was working to clear out an area
around a nearby pond. Yeah, he was just on his
back ho doing everything he was supposed to be doing,
clearing out part of the Again, it's kind of a
bog This pond that we're talking about is it's um swamps, marshy, swampy.
It's just that that kind of Florida. It reminds me
(14:26):
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 ho and oh you know what this would be.
This would be a perfect Florida man story. This would
be a Florida man man story. Yeah, let's get it
a try. Okay, Uh, Florida man's back ho stumbles upon
ancient skull. There we go. I also like attributing the
(14:49):
action to the Baco because it sounds as if he
just left it running. Yeah, exactly something. So it's true.
In 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
(15:09):
he stops working. He starts digging through the muck and
the mud and the swampy stuff that you're mentioning, Matt
the mucky muck, the mucky muck, that's the technical term.
And he picks up this object. He makes his 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. Uh. And then he turns around this
this object, this smooth, round rock to find too, equally round,
(15:34):
empty eye sockets staring back 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.
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
(15:56):
call the police and report finding a skull because there's
a possibility that this maybe you know, a homicide or
a missing person or something to that effect. So that
was exactly what he did. And then they continued looking
because they're still working in this area. It's not like
you just immediately stopped all the construction there because of
a skull. You definitely pause for a moment again, called
(16:19):
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 bacco where he was working.
Right the site supervisor is the first person that Steve
contacts and they say, okay, it's just a murder, we
have to call the police. And then they look in
(16:40):
the bucket of Steve Spacco 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
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.
(17:03):
Jim Swan was the developer of the subdivision, and he
could do he could do one of two things. He could,
like many unscrupulous developers, just pay off the crew, suppress
the news of the find, and carry over with the
construction of Windover Farms, and that is you know, like
(17:23):
that's a plot point in the horror film Poultergeist, right, well,
debatably the horror themed family film Poultergeist. There you go, yes,
building on top of an ancient burial ground of sorts, right,
and that 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,
(17:46):
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, there's not a pause. We're stopping everything.
Shut it down. We have to contact the experts. We
have to determine the providence of these bones. More importantly,
I have to figure out what we do next. Yeah,
(18:07):
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. 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 Dr Glenn
(18:31):
Duran d O R A. N and UM again. He's
he's staff member of the Florida State University UM and 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. They are old. I can tell they're old. UM.
And one of the first things he sees are the teeth,
(18:52):
and he notices that they've been ground down, naturally ground down, UM,
just through wear and tear and not the way you know,
if someone was was going to physically injure you and
hurt your teeth or something or filing them or any Yeah,
it was just natural wear and tear on the teeth.
But to the point where he he realized that UM,
from an archaeologist standpoint, these must be thousands of years old,
(19:15):
or at least that's what he believes, right. He surmised
initially from his own his own just on the scene assessment,
that these bones were from a Native American population, according
to him, do primarily to uh the dentation and due
to what he thought that told him about the age.
(19:36):
So he said, these are perhaps a thousand years old.
He arranged for carbon dating test. This was financed by
Swan and Swan's company E K. S Corporation, and they
were shocked by the results. What were those results? Will
tell you after a word from our sponsor. Okay, Now,
(20:01):
when 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 E K S Corporation. Uh, they are doing this,
this carbon dating, and they were shocked when they realized
(20:23):
the bones were indeed more than a thousand years old.
In fact, the human remains uncovered at this site we're
somewhere between seven thousand and eight thousand years old. That
makes them thirty two hundred years older than King Tut
in Common and two thousand years older than the Great
Pyramids of Giza themselves in Egypt. It's incredible to imagine
(20:49):
in Florida, bones of this age were found and then
carbon dated to show that yes, in fact, they are
that old, and these were also modern human beings. This
was not one of the early mixtapes of humanity like
uh Neanderthal or something like that. Right, right, right, exactly
seven thousand and eight thousand years old, is on the
(21:11):
east coast of Florida. Everything that is commonly accepted about
the spread of the human species argues that the human
species by and large arrived at North and South America
what we call those two continents today, by crossing the
Bearing Land Bridge over what is now the Bearing Straight
(21:31):
and that in case anyone is not familiar, that is
in the most opposite corner of the continent that one
could imagine. 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,
(21:53):
there were three archaeological digs conducted there between six. They
ended up finding more than two hundred distinct intact burials.
And you'll hear you'll hear a couple of different numbers
thrown around. One will be they found two more than
two hundred burials. One will be like, they found more
than one hundred and sixty eight bodies, right, And part
(22:15):
of that is because of the extreme length of time
that these folks were literally poor choice of 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,
(22:35):
the better part of ten thousand years, uh, the bodies
have been ritualistically buried, and with maybe a few exceptions,
they were all placed in the same position. They were
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 next were broken to get this. Yeah, God,
(23:00):
we don't know why, we can we can? We can
speculate it best that this shows us some sort of
belief in the afterlife 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 Crescent
(23:23):
somewhere nearly right or maybe yeah, or maybe a Middle East, right,
think of something on 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. 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
(23:43):
in like Myrtle Beach or Daytona Beach or something. Wouldn't
it be amazing if it also had uh ancient drawing
of a cartoon mouse, Oh, turtle or turtle better. No,
let's fine, let's find both of them. Let's just write this.
Let's just write this story. It just says salt life
(24:04):
on it. It just says salt life. Will write this story,
will bury it somewhere, and thousands of years from now
a Florida man will discover it with his back full circle.
So well, that's our show, folks. Thanks for turning in.
I think we did some meaningful work today. Uh. Yet
we did find that there were grave goods though that's
(24:25):
what they're called. 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 and
it's puzzling to me. Help 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
(24:48):
piece of technology, essentially like a tool of some sort. Yeah,
so they were. They were buried in this fetal position
with certain body parts responding to certain directions, and then
branches would be lashed together over them to create a
tripod which kept the bodies in that fetal position from
(25:12):
floating up and to prevent them from floating to the
top of that tripod, they had this. This this woven
fabric is essentially functioning as a funeral shroud, and a
wooden steak would be hammered in or or somehow thrust
through the fabric of the shroud I'm just calling it
a shroud into the bed of the pond so that
(25:34):
they would they being the bodies would not float up
to the top of the 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
(25:56):
ultimately protects the bodies from the men any 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, seems like a
ritualistic perhaps religious position. Man. That to me is fascinating,
(26:17):
just the concept that that long ago you would Again,
maybe this is that thing we always talk about when
when we discuss European settlers going to parts of Africa
and discovering these ancient ruins and they think, oh, there's
no way that they could have an understanding about the
(26:40):
certain geometry here or this or that. Um, that like
terrible belief. The institutionalized racism that has occurred over all
those years. Um, I worry that I'm having a little
bit of that when I'm trying to imagine, you know,
people eight thousand years ago creating an underwater burial almost
to preserve the bodies. Maybe perhaps they had no understanding
(27:03):
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 um,
it's baffling, and it's also really really cool. Right. Yeah.
The institutionalized racism that has to a great degree stifled
(27:25):
scientific progress for centuries is still alive and well in
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 right here. Generally speaking,
when people inter or get rid of the bodies of
(27:47):
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 they're meaningful to your life.
You want to help them into the afterlife. That's the
way it's usually phrased. And that will be like by burial.
Maybe in some parts of the world there will be
(28:08):
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. You don't want to be haunted by
their hardware, which is why it's such a such an
(28:29):
ancient psy op to take the bodies of dead enemies
and display them where their living can see them. 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. Right, Yeah, that's a and to
certain rules, right, so that's why we have the preservation
of organs in some societies. That's and also when when
(28:52):
we go into a secular world, a lot of times
there's this interpretation where I would say, this assumption that
burial rituals are all religiously based, which is not the case.
I mean, think about all the time spent embalming lenin.
You know, in the days of of the USSR. It
(29:12):
was not really a religion, but it took the place
of a religion because it was a symbol, you know, Lenin,
not Lenin in my head, I heard of lenin. Oh yes, sorry,
l and I and perhaps my Tennessee accent, and not
John Lennon. It was Lennen and lennen in lenen In
(29:33):
Lennon grad that's right. Yeah, alright, we solved the case.
But but we're saying all this to give maybe a
little 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
(29:56):
the bodies of their loved ones for thousand, some thousands
of years. Because the peat bog is an anaerobic environment,
which means that a lot of the rules of decomposition,
which are air and oxygen it dependent, will will not
play out the same way. Also, the fact that's a
pete bog means that there's a pH balance that's tremendously
(30:20):
conducive to preserving things. And there's not a lot you know,
if it's in the ocean or something or somewhere that
has a current, there's not a lot of physical movement
occurring there in the biggest variable is the rising and
lowering of water, the water essentially in these places depending
on drought or or the amount of rain um and
(30:42):
that pH balance. To man, oh god, it's so cool
to me. Okay, so it feels purposeful, right, it's done
something with all those factors, Like 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 thousand, twelve thousand years at least,
the practice, right and and the the site itself, as
(31:04):
will come to find, was active for a very very
long time before it was forgotten and almost became the
the non consensual foundation of a suburb. We know that
the environment of Florida was very challenging remains very challenging
(31:25):
for preservation, and 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 wind Over again, that's anywhere from a
sixty eight to two hundred something people were children, not all.
The oldest people found in the site were around sixty
years old. Unlike the human remains found in European bogs,
(31:49):
you know, you might think of something and like Ireland
or Scotland or something, Unlike those remains, the bodies in
Florida were only skeletons or no flesh on the bones.
And again a lot of that has to do with
the climate of Florida. Yeah, the temperature is going to
make a big difference there, and as you get closer
(32:11):
to the equator, you will see you know, increasingly inhospitable
environments for preservation. But also you know, think of think
of how rare these places are. But if you if
you go back a few centuries when there was much
more forest land and jungle lands in the world, Uh,
those ecosystems, those biomas are hungry, they eat things. There's
(32:36):
still eating cities. I think a lot of us would
be surprised how much maintenance goes on into just keeping
even what you think of as a metropolis alive from
one year to the next. Can you imagine in Atlanta
if we didn't have a kud Zoo team going out
there every day working, working their tails off. I love
the kudzoo man. I think about it a lot, and
(32:58):
how out quickly it would grow. Yeah, I'm just kidding.
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? Kutzoo task Force? Yeah, yeah,
let us know. I mean, yeah, they're definitely they're definitely
ongoing wars Kudzu is an excellent example their ongoing efforts
(33:22):
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 environment of Florida, which makes it so
difficult to preserve bodies or buildings, let alone books and
(33:43):
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 or so contained
brain matter. It's pretty gruesome, but it also means that
they were buried within at the very most, at the
very upper limit, they were in the pond, interred within
(34:06):
forty eight hours of expiring, because if they were out
in the Florida environment any time after that, their brain
would have liquefied, because that's what Florida does to dead people.
It's true. We also got to look at their stomach contents, right,
and that's tricky because you're saying, well, there's there's no flesh. Yeah,
(34:30):
we're approximating, because it looked like it was the jets
that 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 uh,
it's the thing Egyptologists have found before as well. In
places where people live around a lot of sand. The
(34:52):
sand gets into your food and it naturally grits down
your teeth. They didn't have cavities they have they didn't
have cavities. Well, well, 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
(35:13):
going wrong. Um, and that sand just takes it out quickly. 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
(35:37):
of the um one of the huge breakthroughs, 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 citations are still mammals, but who knows,
(36:01):
maybe there's an octopus hospital, you know, 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,
(36:25):
for a certain time, there's no reason to have that
person besides to you know, keep them around because you
love them, right, or you care about them, or because
you're a decent Well yeah, but if you if you
think about it from the most basic needs of a human,
like a singular human as well as a group of humans,
(36:47):
it's ah, 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 doing good. Well, I would say, also,
there's gonna on very cold. Biologically speaking, an individual human
has zero value unless something can reproduce a sexually. An
(37:08):
individual of any species has zero value in terms of
the big picture. So a group of things that can
care for one another in groups may lose a couple
of checkers games, but they will win the chess game
to 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
(37:32):
painfully had they not have folks caring for them. And
this again is a huge hallmark of what we would
call modern humanity. 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
(37:53):
is not going to survive if it's eight thousand years ago.
But she she did for a while, at least while
she was being taken care of. UM. The fractures occurred
several years before she died. So that's how you know somebody,
somebody was was doing a lot for this person. UM.
(38:14):
It really means that there are other villagers, other humans
around her that helped her even even when she could
no longer contribute. And that's really what we're saying. There's
another body of a fifteen year old boy, at least
again an estimated fifteen year old boy, that showed he
was a victim of UM. Spina bifida, which is something
intense to encounter in modern day with modern day medicine,
you can only imagine what it was like then, right.
(38:35):
Spina bifida as a birth defect that occurs when you're
the cord of your spine and your actual spine don't
form properly. It used to be considered a pediatric illness,
even even relatively recently, meaning that if you survive into adulthood,
you would just still continue to see your pediatric doctor.
(38:58):
This kid made it to fifteen, so he was 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 buried with a couple of toys. Wow, how
(39:19):
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 questionable answer. After
a word from our sponsor, here's where it gets crazy. First,
(39:47):
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 already established that these bodies are
placed there on purpose and in a way that it
is meaningful. It's not a massacre as far as it's
not an all die. At the same time, and we
also know that this is likely not a matter of
(40:07):
some kind of uh sacrifice, some kind of ritual that
was done to to to put these people out of
their misery or for worship of some other you know,
deity or or being or something like that. And we
know this because of the way in which they were interred,
and because of the the nature of ritualistic human sacrifice
(40:32):
usually indicates are usually is predicated upon a similar method
of death. Someone is you know, ritualistically strangled by the
thug cult, or someone has is vivisected right somewhere in
Mesoamerica or something this or or in the case of
(40:52):
bogs in Europe, someone has their throat cut and then
they're tossed and tossed in a bog. Right, doesn't seem
to be the case here. One of the reasons, one
of the biggest here's where it gets crazy moments in
this Windover investigation, which has again been going on since
the early nineteen eighties, not eighteen eighties as far as
(41:13):
we know, hinges on the concept of d n A.
And this goes back a little bit to what you
were talking about, Matt. You will hear some folks, including
members of academia here in two thousand nineteen, arguing that
the DNA tests conducted on the remains indicated that these
(41:34):
people were descended from Europeans rather than the Far Eastern,
you know, the far the Far Eastern groups that migrated
out of Siberia right or through Siberia. This would be
a huge discovery, but the question is is it true?
First we have to remember the only way they could
(41:55):
find anything close enough to try to analyze would be
that that brain matter the marrow is probably long gone
and the DNA's rate of decay makes it a lot
like forget trying to find a needle in the haystack.
It's trying to find a lottery ticket in a haystack
(42:16):
and hoping that it wins. 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, right,
And in the past people have been way too quick
to do that. There's a geneticist named Joseph Lawrence from
the Corey l Institute for Medical Research. He was searching
(42:36):
for DNA markers that he thought were typical of Native Americans,
and the DNA samples taken from the bones of five
different people in wind Over. So so they did, let
me correct 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
(42:58):
the wind over DNA results. He had to present European populations,
and this is what he said. 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
(43:19):
the first two, but they looked European. So there are
three common presumptions that are inherent intrinsic in every interpretation
of the wind over DNA. The first is the assumption
that one combination of DNA haplo groups typifies all Native
American populations. It's demonstrably untrue. There's been well documented Polynesian
(43:42):
DNA material found in skeletons in northwest 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
(44:03):
in southeastern US. The researches wasn't quite there at the time.
And then there's the Ute 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 people's in
(44:25):
the Southeast. Their migration legend states that 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
(44:46):
sticky because for some more conspiratorially minded people 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
(45:08):
I don't know. There's there's a thing that used a
lot of Weasley word language that we found describing this,
and we've got a quote here, Yes, this comes from
about archaeology. All those 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
(45:28):
DNA lineage is reported are absent in all other prehistoric
and contemporary Native American populations studied to date. Further attempts
to retrieve more DNA have failed, and an amplification study
has shown that there is no analyzable DNA left at
the wind Over burials. So let's unpack this quickly. What
(45:51):
this shows is that scientists did at one point get
some DNA material from one uh one or more of
the brains, definitely more one would one would hope, and
they found that the mitochondrial DNA lineage reported didn't match
what we knew about other Native American populations, right, So
(46:14):
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. However, this thing we just read from
about archaeology, well, um, several people take exception to this,
(46:37):
including someone a researcher named Gary Carson, and we have
a quote from him. 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. That last part was me.
The article makes it sound like DNA wasn't discovered after all,
but it goes on to say that mt DNA lineages
(46:58):
were discovered that's might have condrodney and subsequently analyzed, but
then dismisses the analysis because it doesn't match the expected results,
specifically because it didn't connect the wind Over Bogg people
with other prehistoric and contemporary 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.
(47:22):
So he's he's not necessarily arguing some secret migration from
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 your preconceived notion. There's a facial reconstruction
(47:43):
project that you can you can see google wind Over
a woman online, and they don't they don't appear European.
But a lot of facial reconstruction like that is interpretive, right.
I mean, we didn't know dinos stars had feathers. We
did forever, but we figured it out because somebody just
(48:06):
decided one day that they had feathers. That's honestly what happened.
Is that what happens, Like, dude, these guys got feathers.
That was you, it was me. I should have been
on that call. When I grew up, dinosaurs we're just
all green or brown or gray 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.
(48:30):
I don't believe it. I'm just kidding. I think it's
wonderful what we're learning. Uh, paleontologists teaching against some things. No,
I love it. You think there should be a bright
line between pokemon and dinosaurs. I choose you packy cephalosaurs
so great. So there are there are other opinions here,
one that argues one that bases his argument on the timeline.
(48:53):
So time estimates for the arrival of certain genomes or
Janeque material are twelve thousand, thirty six thousand years ago,
depending on the number of assumed founders, and this supports
the conclusion that people harboring this Haplow group, this, this
weird one that sticks out right where among the original
founders of Native American populations to date, Haplow Group X,
(49:20):
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 these Native American founding populations had ancestors somewhere
else so ultimately came to what we recognize as Florida
(49:40):
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 still debating the origin of the ancient wind over
population and occasionally, if you read closely, accusing one another
of having an agenda, which is not not at all unusual. Yeah,
(50:01):
I mean, that's pretty darn common when it comes to
things like this, and it's an important debate. It's when
we should treat with extreme seriousness, primarily because of the
point you raised, Matt, which is it is a fundamental
point that is all too often skipped over. The human
species has a long, long, incredibly unfortunate history of institutionalized racism,
(50:22):
attempting to shoehorn insert favorite 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. And just to
(50:43):
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. And to the in
the defense of people who will make those arguments, typically
nowadays they're not just arguing something based on that the loss,
(51:05):
I say, Stonehenge, How could ancient people have made that? Those?
Look at those the big that's the biggest rock I
ever saw. It's true. I'm not quoting, I'm paraphrasing, but true.
It's just something we we cannot stress enough. That is
um It's it's highly important and remember it when you
read things. And at least it leads us almost full
(51:27):
circle here, Matt, 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 but people
thousands of years ago were as smart and as capable
(51:49):
of of invention and ingenuity as people are today. So
this is where it gets us to a weird spot.
And this is maybe where we end today's conversation and
to hear from to hear from you, folks, if you know,
if if we accept there's absolutely true that ancient people's could,
through their own ingenuity and their own mcgivernus, build things
(52:13):
like stonehinge, like pyramids like Catalahok 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, absolutely especially over water, especially over water. Thank
you so much for tuning in today, folks. I know
(52:34):
that I know that we had some some diversions here,
but but this is a real and unfolding story. We
would love to hear what you think. Have you visited,
uh the wind Over site and if so, what are
your experiences or this doesn't have anything to do with
wind Over ancient sites throughout the world, what do you
(52:54):
visit in your neck of the Global Woods. We would
love to hear your stories, anything from burial side to
cave paintings to any any traces of humanity from from long,
long ago. Tell us about your local your locations. Yeah,
let's say anything older than twelve hundred a D. That's great.
(53:18):
Pick that one because I think that's that's around the
time of the phantom time hypothesis. Right, I can't remember
we have no you're right, it's the middle, it's the
Dark Ages. Right, let me let me correct that phantom
time is uh a D six fourteen to nine eleven
eight to ask what it was. Yeah, so let's just
(53:42):
say any any Let's stick with twelve D said twere
any any time before twelve hundred And you know what
if you visited something that was built in the twelve
hundreds and it is still around and you're like, guys,
I think that was twelve seventy three, that's fine. We
still want to know. We want to hear the story.
Please a right to and if your name is Chris
Cogswell and you have a podcast, right to us too,
(54:03):
because I'd love to. I'd love to interact with you.
Ben got to now and I want to know more.
And also Mary Mayhew, who was the co host of
that podcast that now I can't remember. I remember, Chris
Cogswellings Mad Scientist Something podcast, Matt Sidentist podcast. I'm really interested.
Now I'm gonna have to listen. So you can reach
(54:26):
us at the aforementioned telephone number. We are one eight
three three s T D W y t K. You
can find us on Instagram. You can find us on Facebook,
you can find us on Twitter. We highly recommend hanging
out with our favorite part of the show, your fellow
listeners on Here's where It Gets Crazy. That's on Facebook.
(54:46):
It's a group you can talk about the show, anything
you you've been thinking about with that stuff in particular,
let's go ahead and mention it now. Ben, a lot
of people have been writing to us about the David
Eike interview. If you have thoughts on that, please continue
to write to us. We're going to have some more
discussion internally and with you about it as well. And Hey,
you might be saying I have something that I would
(55:08):
love to tell you. I have a show that my
fellow listeners need to hear, but I hate social media.
Why do you guys still have a Facebook page after
you told me about how bad Facebook is. Yeah, and
we were right. We have to have one. We have
to have it. Uh. And I hate being on the phone.
It's twenty nineteen. Real friends text I don't know how
(55:30):
to get in contact with you. All I use is email. Well,
do we have some good news for you? You can
indeed write us an old fashioned email. We are conspiracy
at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they Don't want
(56:01):
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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