August 10, 2025 • 33 mins
They appear in myths, sacred texts, and unexplained archaeology — creatures with the bodies of humans and the traits of animals. Were these symbolic stories, or records of a real ancient genetic program?
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Episode Transcript
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(00:17):
Since time immemorial, humanity has been haunted by the image of
the hybrid creatures of myth andmemory, fusions of man and
beast, of God and mortal, of oneworld and the next.
Some say they were symbols, others say they were real.
The Nephilim, the Anunnaki, halfbreeds born of divine rebellion,
(00:38):
giants, monsters, kings in everyancient culture they appear.
The Sumerians spoke of fishmen and sky serpents.
The Egyptians carved Jackal headed guardians, Falcon gods
and hybrid beasts into stone. The Greeks told of centaurs,
chimeras and monsters created insecret chambers beneath the
(01:02):
earth. In Hindu texts we find lion
headed avatars and Venara, the monkey people of the forest.
In the Book of Enoch, we're warned about giants born from
the union of angels and human women.
Warnings, DNA restructured, repurposed, reimagined across
(01:22):
time. Every attempt to create
something stronger, smarter, more divine ends the same way.
The lines blur, the balance breaks, and the hybrid turns on
its maker. Were they real, these impossible
creatures with the wings of birds, the heads of lions, the
(01:43):
torsos of men? Were they living beings created
by some forgotten science? Or were they symbols, signs
meant to represent power, knowledge, fear?
Chimeras, hybrids posted at the entrances to tombs, temples and
sacred cities, carved into walls, towering over gates as if
(02:06):
standing watch. Did the gods of old control
monsters? Did they create them?
Were these creatures protectors of something deeper, or to guard
something the gods feared? Because if these creatures once
walked the earth, then someone or something put them here.
Hybrid creatures straight out ofa fantasy film.
(02:29):
Welcome to the Anunnaki connection.
(03:03):
The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving story in the
world, written in ancient summer, one of the first
civilizations. We have records from the opening
lines. In those ancient days, in those
distant days, in those nights, in those far off nights.
(03:26):
A reminder that even the Sumerians were looking back,
writing about a time considered ancient even to them.
One of the characters we meet isEnkidu.
Not a normal man, he's wild, hairy, running with animals,
drinking from rivers. Human, but not fully.
He wasn't born, he was made by the gods.
(03:50):
Enkidu is a hybrid. In the epic, Enkidu is created
by the goddess Aruru, the sisterof Enlil.
The gods command her to make a being strong enough to confront
Gilgamesh, someone equal in power.
She begins with clay, the same substance used to create the
first humans in Sumerian tradition.
(04:10):
But this isn't dirt. In Sumerian myth, clay refers to
a mixture of earthly material and divine essence, a way of
describing the fusion of biologybetween God and man.
The text says Nkidu was knitted of Nenurta's essence.
Nenerto was a warrior God often associated with lions and bulls.
(04:32):
He was also a son of Enlil. Nkadu is imbued with the essence
of wild animals, the strength ofa bull, the mane of a lion, the
speed of the gazelle. Strip away the mythic language
and this starts to sound less like magic and more like
selective design, built from rawmaterial, infused with divine
(04:52):
genetics, shaped to be physically superior.
Anunnaki tradition says the godsonce created humans as workers,
mixing their own blood with the clay of the earth, and kedu was
a continuation of that, a targeted experiment, a
specialized hybrid. And he wasn't alone.
The Sumerian world was filled with creatures that didn't fit
(05:15):
into natural categories, beings with mixed features, part
animal, part human, part God, part something else.
The lamasu, body of a bull or lion, wings of an eagle, human
face. Guardians placed at the
entrances of palaces and temples.
Massive stone statues carved with detail, always in pairs,
(05:38):
watching, protecting, blocking whatever wasn't meant to enter.
The Bull of Heaven, sent by the goddess Inanna after Gilgamesh
rejects her. It descends from the sky, causes
earthquakes, kills hundreds. It's so powerful it takes both
Gilgamesh and Nkadu working together to stop it.
(05:58):
The Ugalu. Big weather beast, A lion headed
demon, sometimes winged, sometimes holding a Mace or
dagger, painted on walls, carvedinto amulets, called on to drive
out disease and evil spirits. Despite being labeled a demon,
Ugalu wasn't evil. He was a tool of order, summoned
(06:18):
to protect homes and temples. The Urmalulu Lion Man, a
creature with a lion's lower body and a human upper torso,
armed with a dagger or sword, wearing a horned crown, the
symbol of divinity, also used inprotective magic.
Statues of him were buried at gateways and thresholds, like
(06:40):
the lama Sioux, a guardian. The same pattern again mixed
features. Animal strength, human
awareness, divine origin, specific purpose, physical,
dangerous, sacred, and all hybrids.
If these gods had the power to create humans, then creating
(07:01):
other beings, more specialized ones, wouldn't have been a
stretch. What you are looking at is the
largest known feline on earth, aLiger, the hybrid offspring of a
male lion and a female tiger. The first records of such
(07:24):
hybrids date back to early 19th century colonial India under the
British Empire. It was there that naturalists
first documented the crossbreeding of lions and
tigers. By the mid 1800s, Liger Cubs
were being shown in Europe oddities of science and
spectacle. Later, in private zoos across
(07:45):
Europe and America, ligers became living attractions.
What's truly remarkable is its size.
Most ligers grow to exceed 900 lbs, and some stretch over 12
feet in length when standing. The world's largest known cat, a
Liger named Hercules, weighed inat nearly £1000.
(08:08):
A gentle giant, yet a true colossus, unmatched by any lion
or tiger ever recorded. The science is simple enough.
Each parent's growth limiting genes failed to switch on in the
hybrid, so the Liger keeps growing far beyond normal
limits. A modern example of how mixing
species can produce traits that don't exist in nature.
(08:31):
The Nephilim giants of the Hebrew Bible, towering beings
said to be the offspring of divine and mortal unions.
Could ligers be a small, living echo of that same principle?
If a simple cross between two big cats can create a creature
larger than either parent, what might have happened if ancient
genetic engineers combined humanDNA with something else?
(08:55):
Would we see a similar giant effect, the kind of size and
strength that filled the old stories?
(09:21):
Ancient Egypt had hybrids too. Anubis the Jackal, headed
guardian of the dead. Sobek, crocodile headed.
Thoth, Ibis, headed God of writing, wisdom and time.
Horus the Falcon headed sky God,protector of the Pharaoh,
depicted with fully human bodiesand an animal head.
(09:44):
Were they shape shifters or fixed beings?
And then there's the Sphinx. Human head, lion's body,
sometimes wings. Massive, ancient.
The Great Sphinx at Giza still stands today.
Carved from a single block of limestone, its original purpose
is still debated. Some say it was just a symbol of
(10:08):
royal power. Others think it's far older than
the pyramids, weathered by thousands of years of rain,
possibly predating dynastic Egypt entirely.
In Greek mythology, the Sphinx still has the body of a lion,
but now she has wings and a woman's head, and she isn't a
protector. This time, she's a threat.
(10:30):
According to legend, the gods sent her to punish the city of
Thebes. She sat outside the city and
asked a Riddle. The Riddle was simple, but
deadly. What has four legs in the
morning, 2 at noon, and three inthe evening?
No one could solve it. Those who tried died.
(10:52):
The road near Mount Ficion was littered with their bones.
Eventually the king of Thebes offered a deal.
Anyone who could solve the Riddle would be given the
throne. That's when Oedipus arrived.
He was fleeing Corinth, wandering, and when he heard the
Riddle, he gave the right answer.
Man. As a baby he crawls on all
(11:13):
fours. As an adult, he walks on 2 legs,
and in old age he uses a cane, his third leg.
The sphinx didn't speak. She leapt from the Cliff and
killed herself. The curse was broken and Thebes
was saved. By the late 1400s, artists in
(11:35):
Italy began reimagining her. This version is sometimes called
the French Sphinx. Her head is upright, hair
carefully styled, often adorned with pearls and earrings, her
body a reclining lioness rendered in lifelike detail, a
hybrid that had crossed from myth into ornament.
(11:59):
Hybrid creatures appear again and again in human history,
cultures separated by thousands of miles and in some cases
thousands of years, telling the same kind of story.
Why? The most conventional
explanation is symbolism. Animal traits were chosen to
represent specific qualities. But does symbolism explain why
(12:23):
the same kinds of hybrids appearin unrelated cultures?
Why does the lion man show up inboth ancient Mesopotamia and in
Ice Age European carvings 10s ofthousands of years old?
Why do winged guardians appear from Assyria to Central America?
Some hybrids match constellations, the lion, the
(12:44):
bull, the eagle, and the man. All four appear in Mesopotamian
iconography, in the Book of Ezekiel, and in the Zodiac as
Leo, Taurus, Aquila, and Aquarius.
In many cases, hybrids are placed at boundaries.
The Lamassu stood at the gates of Assyrian palaces.
The Great Sphinx of Giza sits onthe edge of the necropolis.
(13:09):
The Greek Sphinx blocked the road to Thebes.
In Mesoamerica, Jaguar men guarded temples and ceremonial
spaces to protect what lay inside, to keep out the
unworthy. Modern architecture still uses
symbolic guardians, lions outside government buildings,
eagles over doorways, even gargoyles on cathedrals, A
(13:32):
tradition that has lasted for millennia.
But there is another possibility, one that appears in
the ancient texts themselves. If the gods could make humans,
as the Sumerians claimed, could they also have made other beings
beings designed for specific roles?
The Anzu, a lion headed eagle that steals the tablets of
(13:56):
Destiny, is described more like a weapon than a wild animal.
In modern science, we are beginning to explore genetic
engineering. CRISPR technology allows
researchers to edit the DNA of plants, animals, and even
humans. In 2019, scientists in China
created human monkey embryo hybrids for research purposes.
(14:21):
The technology exists. If we can do this today, could
an advanced civilization have done it thousands of years ago?
(17:35):
Hollywood in the early 1900s wasjust a small farming community
outside Los Angeles. A century ago, it was all citrus
Groves and dirt roads. Then the studios came.
The film industry's move West was driven by a need to escape
Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company, which
(17:56):
controlled almost all of the filmmaking equipment and
production on the East Coast. The distance from Edison's base
made it harder for him to enforce his patents, and
California's climate and consistent sunlight made year
round filming possible. In 1915, director DW Griffith
released The Birth of a Nation, considered a landmark and
(18:19):
cinematic technique, but also highly controversial for its
glorification of the Ku Klux Klan.
Facing widespread criticism, Griffith began production on a
follow up. He wanted to surpass his earlier
film and take the heat off. The result was Intolerance,
(18:40):
released in 1916, a 3 1/2 hour epic weaving together 4
storylines, the fall of Babylon,the Crucifixion of Christ, the
Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacrein France, and a modern American
story about social injustice. For the Babylon scenes, Griffith
commissioned what was then the largest and most elaborate film
(19:03):
set ever built. It featured massive ceremonial
gates, winged human animal figures, and the rosette motif
associated with the Tree of Life.
The scale was immense, the wallsrose more than 100 feet, and the
set dominated the Los Angeles skyline for years after filming
wrapped. When the Hollywood and Highland
(19:25):
complex was built in 2001, its designers deliberately recreated
parts of Griffith's Babylon set,including the colossal winged
guardians and the rosette above the central archway.
Millions pass beneath them each year, often unaware they are
walking through a modern reconstruction of Mesopotamian
(19:46):
temple imagery. Hollywood is full of ancient
symbolism. Lionsgate recalls the monumental
Lion Gates of Mycenae in Babylon.
The MGM logo frames a roaring lion in a ceremonial arch.
Hollywood Pictures uses an Egyptian sphinx.
Tristar's Pegasus is the winged horse of Greek myth linked to
(20:09):
divine inspiration. Columbia Pictures depicts A
robed woman holding a torch, an image tied to the Roman goddess
Libertas. And to Isis of Egyptian
tradition in the ancient world, these figures marked a
threshold. Passing between them meant
leaving the human realm behind and entering the domain of the
gods. So what is Hollywood telling us?
(20:33):
That it, too, is a gate guardingA lineage inherited from the
temples of the old World. Hollywood likes to think of
itself as the new storyteller, the keeper of the modern myth.
But these aren't new ideas. They're echoes, the same half
human, half animal forms carved into stone thousands of years
(20:55):
ago in Mesopotamia, painted intothe walls of Egyptian tombs
described in Greek scrolls. And the fact that we still
respond to them, that they stillresonate, might mean we're not
dealing with fiction at all. The cinocephaly dog headed men.
(21:21):
They appear in ancient accounts from Greece, Rome, India, China
and even medieval Europe always described the same way, the body
of a man, the head of a dog or Jackal.
The Greek physician Catisius wrote about them in the 5th
century BC, placing them in distant India.
(21:42):
He claimed they lived in tribes haunted with bows and
communicated with barks. Later, Pliny the Elder described
them in Natural History, echoingKetosia's details, even adding
that they wore animal skins and traded with nearby kingdoms.
Medieval travelers kept the story alive.
(22:03):
Marco Polo placed them on islands off the coast of India,
while the 9th century writer IbnKordadbay claimed they lived in
the mountains of the East. In Christian lore, some Saints
like Saint Christopher were evendepicted as cinocephaly.
Were these purely symbolic depictions of foreign peoples or
garbled reports of an actual hybrid species?
(22:27):
The consistent descriptions overmore than 1000 years raised the
possibility that the story was rooted in something real.
And if hybrids like in Kidu or the Anubis headed gods of Egypt
were based on ancient genetic experiments, could the
cinocephaly have been another creation built for a purpose
we've long since forgotten? When you've all know, A Harare
(23:30):
published his first book, Sapiens, in 2014, about the
history of the human species. It became a global bestseller
and turned the little known Israeli history professor into
one of the most popular writers and thinkers on the planet.
But when we met with Harare in Tel Aviv this summer, it wasn't
our species past that concerned him.
It was our future. Harare believes we may be on the
(23:52):
brink of creating not just a newenhanced species of human, but
an entirely new kind of being, one that's far more intelligent
than we are. It sounds like science fiction,
but you've all know a, Harare says.
It's actually much more dangerous than that.
You said we are one of the last generations of Homo sapiens.
Within a century or two, Earth will be dominated by entities
(24:14):
that are more different from us than we are different from
chimpanzees. Yeah.
What the hell does that mean? That freaked me out.
You know we'll soon have the power to re engineer our bodies
and brains, whether it is with genetic engineering or by
directly connecting brains to computers or by creating
(24:36):
completely non organic entities.Artificial intelligence, which
is not based at all on the organic body and the organic
brain and these technologies of developing at breakneck speed.
If that is true, then it createsa whole other species.
This is something which is way beyond just another species.
(24:59):
Today, scientists are doing something that not long ago was
unthinkable. They can edit the genetic code
of living beings. The tool is called CRISPR.
It works like a pair of molecular scissors.
It can cut DNA at a precise location, remove specific genes
or insert entirely new ones. The technology is less than 10
(25:23):
years old, yet it has already changed medicine and
agriculture. Crops have been made resistant
to disease. Mosquitoes altered so they can
no longer spread malaria. Human embryos edited to remove
inherited disorders In 2019, Chinese researchers injected 25
(25:43):
human stem cells capable of forming any cell type, including
placenta, into 132 macaque embryos.
It seems today scientists are more concerned with whether or
not they can do something, and seldom bothered by whether or
not they should. Don't you see the danger your
scientists were so preoccupied with?
(26:04):
Whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think of this.
Short and now the frontier is merging biology and technology.
Researchers are developing neural implants that can connect
the human brain to computers. Robotic limbs controlled
directly by thought, artificial organs, synthetic eyes that can
(26:24):
see beyond the range of normal vision.
Artificial intelligence is beingtrained to read brain signals,
translate them into action, eveninto speech.
The line between human and machine begins to blur.
For some, the goal is to repair and restore, but for others it's
to enhance, to create a human that is stronger, faster, more
(26:49):
intelligent and perhaps more controllable.
Scientists predict this will lead to a new kind of human
altogether, our own descendants genetically altered and
mechanically enhanced. If we can do this now, with
tools that didn't exist a decadeago, what might have been
(27:10):
possible for a civilization thousands of years ahead of us?
Ancient Sumerian tablets describe the gods mixing their
essence with the clay of the earth to create humans.
Egyptian temples show beings that are part man, part animal.
Indian texts describe deities with multiple arms, animal
(27:34):
heads, or the ability to change form at will.
Was this just symbolic or records of beings who had
already crossed the line? In the Bible, the cherubim stood
(28:06):
watch over Eden's entrance. In Mesopotamia, Lamassu guarded
the palaces of kings. Perhaps these weren't mere
symbols carved in stone, but depictions of actual
bioengineered Sentinels, intelligent, loyal, and built to
deter any threat. But where did they go?
(28:26):
Were they wiped out and the cataclysms remembered as the
Flood, haunted to extinction by the very gods who made them?
Or were they taken back to wherever those gods came from,
leaving only fragments behind? Deep beneath the sands of
Saqqara, Egypt lies the Serapeum, an underground
(28:47):
catacomb carved across centuries, rediscovered in 1850
by Auguste Mariette. When he uncovered it, he found
several massive granite sarcophagi, each weighed between
40 and 62 tons, carved from hardstone like diorite and slid into
place. All empty.
(29:09):
No mummies inside, just enormoussealed boxes buried in the dark.
In the modern age, we found traces that don't fit
comfortably into the story we tell ourselves.
Elongated skulls scattered from South America to the Caucasus.
Bones with proportions that defyhuman anatomy.
(29:29):
And if you go further, much further, could some of the
fossils we call dinosaurs actually be the remains of
ancient hybrids, skeletons pieced together not from
nature's slow evolution, but from deliberate design?
The evidence is scattered, the connection's elusive, but the
(29:50):
pattern is there, in stone, in bone, and in myth.
If the hybrid guardians of the ancient world were erased, it
wasn't by accident, and it may not be forever.
Some doors are locked for a reason.
What happens when we open them again?
(30:10):
TuneIn. Next time to the Anunnaki
connection. Goodnight.
(33:26):
None.
Since time immemorial, humanity has been haunted by the image of
the hybrid creatures of myth andmemory, fusions of man and
beast, of God and mortal, of oneworld and the next.
Some say they were symbols, others say they were real.
The Nephilim, the Anunnaki, halfbreeds born of divine rebellion,
(00:38):
giants, monsters, kings in everyancient culture they appear.
The Sumerians spoke of fishmen and sky serpents.
The Egyptians carved Jackal headed guardians, Falcon gods
and hybrid beasts into stone. The Greeks told of centaurs,
chimeras and monsters created insecret chambers beneath the
(01:02):
earth. In Hindu texts we find lion
headed avatars and Venara, the monkey people of the forest.
In the Book of Enoch, we're warned about giants born from
the union of angels and human women.
Warnings, DNA restructured, repurposed, reimagined across
(01:22):
time. Every attempt to create
something stronger, smarter, more divine ends the same way.
The lines blur, the balance breaks, and the hybrid turns on
its maker. Were they real, these impossible
creatures with the wings of birds, the heads of lions, the
(01:43):
torsos of men? Were they living beings created
by some forgotten science? Or were they symbols, signs
meant to represent power, knowledge, fear?
Chimeras, hybrids posted at the entrances to tombs, temples and
sacred cities, carved into walls, towering over gates as if
(02:06):
standing watch. Did the gods of old control
monsters? Did they create them?
Were these creatures protectors of something deeper, or to guard
something the gods feared? Because if these creatures once
walked the earth, then someone or something put them here.
Hybrid creatures straight out ofa fantasy film.
(02:29):
Welcome to the Anunnaki connection.
(03:03):
The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving story in the
world, written in ancient summer, one of the first
civilizations. We have records from the opening
lines. In those ancient days, in those
distant days, in those nights, in those far off nights.
(03:26):
A reminder that even the Sumerians were looking back,
writing about a time considered ancient even to them.
One of the characters we meet isEnkidu.
Not a normal man, he's wild, hairy, running with animals,
drinking from rivers. Human, but not fully.
He wasn't born, he was made by the gods.
(03:50):
Enkidu is a hybrid. In the epic, Enkidu is created
by the goddess Aruru, the sisterof Enlil.
The gods command her to make a being strong enough to confront
Gilgamesh, someone equal in power.
She begins with clay, the same substance used to create the
first humans in Sumerian tradition.
(04:10):
But this isn't dirt. In Sumerian myth, clay refers to
a mixture of earthly material and divine essence, a way of
describing the fusion of biologybetween God and man.
The text says Nkidu was knitted of Nenurta's essence.
Nenerto was a warrior God often associated with lions and bulls.
(04:32):
He was also a son of Enlil. Nkadu is imbued with the essence
of wild animals, the strength ofa bull, the mane of a lion, the
speed of the gazelle. Strip away the mythic language
and this starts to sound less like magic and more like
selective design, built from rawmaterial, infused with divine
(04:52):
genetics, shaped to be physically superior.
Anunnaki tradition says the godsonce created humans as workers,
mixing their own blood with the clay of the earth, and kedu was
a continuation of that, a targeted experiment, a
specialized hybrid. And he wasn't alone.
The Sumerian world was filled with creatures that didn't fit
(05:15):
into natural categories, beings with mixed features, part
animal, part human, part God, part something else.
The lamasu, body of a bull or lion, wings of an eagle, human
face. Guardians placed at the
entrances of palaces and temples.
Massive stone statues carved with detail, always in pairs,
(05:38):
watching, protecting, blocking whatever wasn't meant to enter.
The Bull of Heaven, sent by the goddess Inanna after Gilgamesh
rejects her. It descends from the sky, causes
earthquakes, kills hundreds. It's so powerful it takes both
Gilgamesh and Nkadu working together to stop it.
(05:58):
The Ugalu. Big weather beast, A lion headed
demon, sometimes winged, sometimes holding a Mace or
dagger, painted on walls, carvedinto amulets, called on to drive
out disease and evil spirits. Despite being labeled a demon,
Ugalu wasn't evil. He was a tool of order, summoned
(06:18):
to protect homes and temples. The Urmalulu Lion Man, a
creature with a lion's lower body and a human upper torso,
armed with a dagger or sword, wearing a horned crown, the
symbol of divinity, also used inprotective magic.
Statues of him were buried at gateways and thresholds, like
(06:40):
the lama Sioux, a guardian. The same pattern again mixed
features. Animal strength, human
awareness, divine origin, specific purpose, physical,
dangerous, sacred, and all hybrids.
If these gods had the power to create humans, then creating
(07:01):
other beings, more specialized ones, wouldn't have been a
stretch. What you are looking at is the
largest known feline on earth, aLiger, the hybrid offspring of a
male lion and a female tiger. The first records of such
(07:24):
hybrids date back to early 19th century colonial India under the
British Empire. It was there that naturalists
first documented the crossbreeding of lions and
tigers. By the mid 1800s, Liger Cubs
were being shown in Europe oddities of science and
spectacle. Later, in private zoos across
(07:45):
Europe and America, ligers became living attractions.
What's truly remarkable is its size.
Most ligers grow to exceed 900 lbs, and some stretch over 12
feet in length when standing. The world's largest known cat, a
Liger named Hercules, weighed inat nearly £1000.
(08:08):
A gentle giant, yet a true colossus, unmatched by any lion
or tiger ever recorded. The science is simple enough.
Each parent's growth limiting genes failed to switch on in the
hybrid, so the Liger keeps growing far beyond normal
limits. A modern example of how mixing
species can produce traits that don't exist in nature.
(08:31):
The Nephilim giants of the Hebrew Bible, towering beings
said to be the offspring of divine and mortal unions.
Could ligers be a small, living echo of that same principle?
If a simple cross between two big cats can create a creature
larger than either parent, what might have happened if ancient
genetic engineers combined humanDNA with something else?
(08:55):
Would we see a similar giant effect, the kind of size and
strength that filled the old stories?
(09:21):
Ancient Egypt had hybrids too. Anubis the Jackal, headed
guardian of the dead. Sobek, crocodile headed.
Thoth, Ibis, headed God of writing, wisdom and time.
Horus the Falcon headed sky God,protector of the Pharaoh,
depicted with fully human bodiesand an animal head.
(09:44):
Were they shape shifters or fixed beings?
And then there's the Sphinx. Human head, lion's body,
sometimes wings. Massive, ancient.
The Great Sphinx at Giza still stands today.
Carved from a single block of limestone, its original purpose
is still debated. Some say it was just a symbol of
(10:08):
royal power. Others think it's far older than
the pyramids, weathered by thousands of years of rain,
possibly predating dynastic Egypt entirely.
In Greek mythology, the Sphinx still has the body of a lion,
but now she has wings and a woman's head, and she isn't a
protector. This time, she's a threat.
(10:30):
According to legend, the gods sent her to punish the city of
Thebes. She sat outside the city and
asked a Riddle. The Riddle was simple, but
deadly. What has four legs in the
morning, 2 at noon, and three inthe evening?
No one could solve it. Those who tried died.
(10:52):
The road near Mount Ficion was littered with their bones.
Eventually the king of Thebes offered a deal.
Anyone who could solve the Riddle would be given the
throne. That's when Oedipus arrived.
He was fleeing Corinth, wandering, and when he heard the
Riddle, he gave the right answer.
Man. As a baby he crawls on all
(11:13):
fours. As an adult, he walks on 2 legs,
and in old age he uses a cane, his third leg.
The sphinx didn't speak. She leapt from the Cliff and
killed herself. The curse was broken and Thebes
was saved. By the late 1400s, artists in
(11:35):
Italy began reimagining her. This version is sometimes called
the French Sphinx. Her head is upright, hair
carefully styled, often adorned with pearls and earrings, her
body a reclining lioness rendered in lifelike detail, a
hybrid that had crossed from myth into ornament.
(11:59):
Hybrid creatures appear again and again in human history,
cultures separated by thousands of miles and in some cases
thousands of years, telling the same kind of story.
Why? The most conventional
explanation is symbolism. Animal traits were chosen to
represent specific qualities. But does symbolism explain why
(12:23):
the same kinds of hybrids appearin unrelated cultures?
Why does the lion man show up inboth ancient Mesopotamia and in
Ice Age European carvings 10s ofthousands of years old?
Why do winged guardians appear from Assyria to Central America?
Some hybrids match constellations, the lion, the
(12:44):
bull, the eagle, and the man. All four appear in Mesopotamian
iconography, in the Book of Ezekiel, and in the Zodiac as
Leo, Taurus, Aquila, and Aquarius.
In many cases, hybrids are placed at boundaries.
The Lamassu stood at the gates of Assyrian palaces.
The Great Sphinx of Giza sits onthe edge of the necropolis.
(13:09):
The Greek Sphinx blocked the road to Thebes.
In Mesoamerica, Jaguar men guarded temples and ceremonial
spaces to protect what lay inside, to keep out the
unworthy. Modern architecture still uses
symbolic guardians, lions outside government buildings,
eagles over doorways, even gargoyles on cathedrals, A
(13:32):
tradition that has lasted for millennia.
But there is another possibility, one that appears in
the ancient texts themselves. If the gods could make humans,
as the Sumerians claimed, could they also have made other beings
beings designed for specific roles?
The Anzu, a lion headed eagle that steals the tablets of
(13:56):
Destiny, is described more like a weapon than a wild animal.
In modern science, we are beginning to explore genetic
engineering. CRISPR technology allows
researchers to edit the DNA of plants, animals, and even
humans. In 2019, scientists in China
created human monkey embryo hybrids for research purposes.
(14:21):
The technology exists. If we can do this today, could
an advanced civilization have done it thousands of years ago?
(17:35):
Hollywood in the early 1900s wasjust a small farming community
outside Los Angeles. A century ago, it was all citrus
Groves and dirt roads. Then the studios came.
The film industry's move West was driven by a need to escape
Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company, which
(17:56):
controlled almost all of the filmmaking equipment and
production on the East Coast. The distance from Edison's base
made it harder for him to enforce his patents, and
California's climate and consistent sunlight made year
round filming possible. In 1915, director DW Griffith
released The Birth of a Nation, considered a landmark and
(18:19):
cinematic technique, but also highly controversial for its
glorification of the Ku Klux Klan.
Facing widespread criticism, Griffith began production on a
follow up. He wanted to surpass his earlier
film and take the heat off. The result was Intolerance,
(18:40):
released in 1916, a 3 1/2 hour epic weaving together 4
storylines, the fall of Babylon,the Crucifixion of Christ, the
Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacrein France, and a modern American
story about social injustice. For the Babylon scenes, Griffith
commissioned what was then the largest and most elaborate film
(19:03):
set ever built. It featured massive ceremonial
gates, winged human animal figures, and the rosette motif
associated with the Tree of Life.
The scale was immense, the wallsrose more than 100 feet, and the
set dominated the Los Angeles skyline for years after filming
wrapped. When the Hollywood and Highland
(19:25):
complex was built in 2001, its designers deliberately recreated
parts of Griffith's Babylon set,including the colossal winged
guardians and the rosette above the central archway.
Millions pass beneath them each year, often unaware they are
walking through a modern reconstruction of Mesopotamian
(19:46):
temple imagery. Hollywood is full of ancient
symbolism. Lionsgate recalls the monumental
Lion Gates of Mycenae in Babylon.
The MGM logo frames a roaring lion in a ceremonial arch.
Hollywood Pictures uses an Egyptian sphinx.
Tristar's Pegasus is the winged horse of Greek myth linked to
(20:09):
divine inspiration. Columbia Pictures depicts A
robed woman holding a torch, an image tied to the Roman goddess
Libertas. And to Isis of Egyptian
tradition in the ancient world, these figures marked a
threshold. Passing between them meant
leaving the human realm behind and entering the domain of the
gods. So what is Hollywood telling us?
(20:33):
That it, too, is a gate guardingA lineage inherited from the
temples of the old World. Hollywood likes to think of
itself as the new storyteller, the keeper of the modern myth.
But these aren't new ideas. They're echoes, the same half
human, half animal forms carved into stone thousands of years
(20:55):
ago in Mesopotamia, painted intothe walls of Egyptian tombs
described in Greek scrolls. And the fact that we still
respond to them, that they stillresonate, might mean we're not
dealing with fiction at all. The cinocephaly dog headed men.
(21:21):
They appear in ancient accounts from Greece, Rome, India, China
and even medieval Europe always described the same way, the body
of a man, the head of a dog or Jackal.
The Greek physician Catisius wrote about them in the 5th
century BC, placing them in distant India.
(21:42):
He claimed they lived in tribes haunted with bows and
communicated with barks. Later, Pliny the Elder described
them in Natural History, echoingKetosia's details, even adding
that they wore animal skins and traded with nearby kingdoms.
Medieval travelers kept the story alive.
(22:03):
Marco Polo placed them on islands off the coast of India,
while the 9th century writer IbnKordadbay claimed they lived in
the mountains of the East. In Christian lore, some Saints
like Saint Christopher were evendepicted as cinocephaly.
Were these purely symbolic depictions of foreign peoples or
garbled reports of an actual hybrid species?
(22:27):
The consistent descriptions overmore than 1000 years raised the
possibility that the story was rooted in something real.
And if hybrids like in Kidu or the Anubis headed gods of Egypt
were based on ancient genetic experiments, could the
cinocephaly have been another creation built for a purpose
we've long since forgotten? When you've all know, A Harare
(23:30):
published his first book, Sapiens, in 2014, about the
history of the human species. It became a global bestseller
and turned the little known Israeli history professor into
one of the most popular writers and thinkers on the planet.
But when we met with Harare in Tel Aviv this summer, it wasn't
our species past that concerned him.
It was our future. Harare believes we may be on the
(23:52):
brink of creating not just a newenhanced species of human, but
an entirely new kind of being, one that's far more intelligent
than we are. It sounds like science fiction,
but you've all know a, Harare says.
It's actually much more dangerous than that.
You said we are one of the last generations of Homo sapiens.
Within a century or two, Earth will be dominated by entities
(24:14):
that are more different from us than we are different from
chimpanzees. Yeah.
What the hell does that mean? That freaked me out.
You know we'll soon have the power to re engineer our bodies
and brains, whether it is with genetic engineering or by
directly connecting brains to computers or by creating
(24:36):
completely non organic entities.Artificial intelligence, which
is not based at all on the organic body and the organic
brain and these technologies of developing at breakneck speed.
If that is true, then it createsa whole other species.
This is something which is way beyond just another species.
(24:59):
Today, scientists are doing something that not long ago was
unthinkable. They can edit the genetic code
of living beings. The tool is called CRISPR.
It works like a pair of molecular scissors.
It can cut DNA at a precise location, remove specific genes
or insert entirely new ones. The technology is less than 10
(25:23):
years old, yet it has already changed medicine and
agriculture. Crops have been made resistant
to disease. Mosquitoes altered so they can
no longer spread malaria. Human embryos edited to remove
inherited disorders In 2019, Chinese researchers injected 25
(25:43):
human stem cells capable of forming any cell type, including
placenta, into 132 macaque embryos.
It seems today scientists are more concerned with whether or
not they can do something, and seldom bothered by whether or
not they should. Don't you see the danger your
scientists were so preoccupied with?
(26:04):
Whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think of this.
Short and now the frontier is merging biology and technology.
Researchers are developing neural implants that can connect
the human brain to computers. Robotic limbs controlled
directly by thought, artificial organs, synthetic eyes that can
(26:24):
see beyond the range of normal vision.
Artificial intelligence is beingtrained to read brain signals,
translate them into action, eveninto speech.
The line between human and machine begins to blur.
For some, the goal is to repair and restore, but for others it's
to enhance, to create a human that is stronger, faster, more
(26:49):
intelligent and perhaps more controllable.
Scientists predict this will lead to a new kind of human
altogether, our own descendants genetically altered and
mechanically enhanced. If we can do this now, with
tools that didn't exist a decadeago, what might have been
(27:10):
possible for a civilization thousands of years ahead of us?
Ancient Sumerian tablets describe the gods mixing their
essence with the clay of the earth to create humans.
Egyptian temples show beings that are part man, part animal.
Indian texts describe deities with multiple arms, animal
(27:34):
heads, or the ability to change form at will.
Was this just symbolic or records of beings who had
already crossed the line? In the Bible, the cherubim stood
(28:06):
watch over Eden's entrance. In Mesopotamia, Lamassu guarded
the palaces of kings. Perhaps these weren't mere
symbols carved in stone, but depictions of actual
bioengineered Sentinels, intelligent, loyal, and built to
deter any threat. But where did they go?
(28:26):
Were they wiped out and the cataclysms remembered as the
Flood, haunted to extinction by the very gods who made them?
Or were they taken back to wherever those gods came from,
leaving only fragments behind? Deep beneath the sands of
Saqqara, Egypt lies the Serapeum, an underground
(28:47):
catacomb carved across centuries, rediscovered in 1850
by Auguste Mariette. When he uncovered it, he found
several massive granite sarcophagi, each weighed between
40 and 62 tons, carved from hardstone like diorite and slid into
place. All empty.
(29:09):
No mummies inside, just enormoussealed boxes buried in the dark.
In the modern age, we found traces that don't fit
comfortably into the story we tell ourselves.
Elongated skulls scattered from South America to the Caucasus.
Bones with proportions that defyhuman anatomy.
(29:29):
And if you go further, much further, could some of the
fossils we call dinosaurs actually be the remains of
ancient hybrids, skeletons pieced together not from
nature's slow evolution, but from deliberate design?
The evidence is scattered, the connection's elusive, but the
(29:50):
pattern is there, in stone, in bone, and in myth.
If the hybrid guardians of the ancient world were erased, it
wasn't by accident, and it may not be forever.
Some doors are locked for a reason.
What happens when we open them again?
(30:10):
TuneIn. Next time to the Anunnaki
connection. Goodnight.
(33:26):
None.
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