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Most Incredible Civilizations Scientists Can’t Explain · Be Amazed

0:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Weed and wonderful artifacts are being found all the time, but it's hard work learning all the secrets of our forefathers when all you have got are two Rusty pennies and a bad drawing on a cave wall.
0:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Really it's no wonder even the white coat wearing buffens get it wrong.
0:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So travel is at the ready, but this is about more than big rocks.
0:22
[SPEAKER_01]: There are also big heads and even bigger heads.
0:26
[SPEAKER_01]: What?
0:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Come on.
0:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go back in time to the most incredible civilization scientists can't explain.
0:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you know the Amazon rainforest houses around 30% of all plant and animal species in the world?
0:53
[SPEAKER_01]: That's tremendous!
0:55
[SPEAKER_01]: However, the history of one native species has eluded scientists for centuries.
1:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Humans!
1:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Human life and the Amazon was assumed to have never been anything more than a few scattered tribes.
1:07
[SPEAKER_01]: However, ongoing deforestation and Brazil's anchor state, which was long believed to be uninhabited, as revealed large unnatural shapes in the ground known as geoglyphs.
1:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Whilst they look like little more than shallow ditches, they're actually the remains of a vassibilization.
1:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Across 5,000 square miles, there are around 450 markings, with some measuring up to 1,300 feet wide.
1:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Damn!
1:35
[SPEAKER_01]: The huge geoglass probably housed some sort of ceremonial buildings where up to a million people could have congregated as recently as 550 years ago.
1:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, look, what a moly!
1:47
[SPEAKER_01]: That's insane!
1:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's much more.
1:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Nowadays, thanks to technological advancements like LightR, we can explore without damaging the rainforest.
1:57
[SPEAKER_01]: By firing a tree-safe laser from directly above the surveying area, a receiver measures the light bouncing back and records at the 3D map of the objects in the scene.
2:08
[SPEAKER_01]: That's so cool, but not as cool as what's been hiding.
2:12
[SPEAKER_01]: In 2019, scans of the southwestern Amazon basin uncovered miles of elevated roads and pathways and even pyramids over 70 feet tall in astonishing 26 individuals settlements were discovered to a which were at least 250 acres each.
2:30
[SPEAKER_01]: That's 330 football pitches.
2:33
[SPEAKER_01]: The mysterious Casarabe people lived here for hundreds of years and then just disappeared around 1400 AD.
2:42
[SPEAKER_01]: The European conquistadors probably drove them out, but we don't know for sure.
2:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Still, building a giant jungle community in the thickets is impressive, right?
2:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Hold up.
2:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I just had a crazy thought.
2:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Think about it.
2:57
[SPEAKER_01]: A huge congregation of people living together would need to cultivate tons of food and plants, right?
3:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, what if the Amazon wasn't originally a jungle?
3:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Then after the Kusarabi people disappeared, their crops grew with a little lot of control.
3:12
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just a theory, but an astounding 95% of this green metropolis is still unexplored.
3:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Who knows, maybe there's something even crazier in there.
3:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Now you and me, we're pretty smart, but we're not the smartest humans ever.
3:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Heck, we might not even be the smartest species ever.
3:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Huh?
3:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Since 1913, partial skull fossils found across South Africa have provided a potential new Brainius contender called the Boscop Man.
3:40
[SPEAKER_01]: This presumed extinct human-like species could have lived as recently as 10,000 years ago.
3:46
[SPEAKER_01]: But compared to us, their skulls imply they had unusually large craniums, meaning our big-headed brethren's brains might have been a whopping 30% larger than ours.
3:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Whoa, their average IQ would have been around 149 putting the average boss camp among the smartest 0.05% of people alive today.
4:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Double whoa, but if old boss camp brandiac here is so much smarter than us, how come we're alive and he isn't.
4:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, this might what my ex said, bigger isn't always better.
4:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Our brains are about fourfold bigger than our ape relatives, but most of this increase happens in a part of our brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is mainly responsible for our highest cognitive function, such as decision making.
4:33
[SPEAKER_01]: working memory and self-awareness.
4:35
[SPEAKER_01]: The actual motor functions of the brain that control our senses and movement don't really change.
4:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's possible that all that extra brain size just translated to bus cops spending more time crying about the past than going out hunting.
4:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Now this is all speculation.
4:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Truthfully, we can't be sure what happened to our clever cousins.
4:53
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, some people argue Boscop wasn't different to us at all.
4:57
[SPEAKER_01]: The only evidence we have are partial skull fragments.
5:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Nevertheless, seeing as the Boscop aren't here to collect their clever species ever award, I guess.
5:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll accept it on their behalf.
5:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd like to think my mom, my dad, and anyone who fell in my podcast and left a five-star rating, it's the only way to stay up to date with all my amazing content.
5:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
5:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, you're too kind.
5:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Now back to the episode.
5:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Bram's the most mysterious ancient civilization as the one we've never found a trace of.
5:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Huh?
5:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm talking, of course, about Atlantis.
5:33
[SPEAKER_01]: The once grand city that ended up sinking beneath the ocean.
5:37
[SPEAKER_01]: The first records we have of Atlantis were written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who spoke of a great city just outside the street of Gibraltar.
5:47
[SPEAKER_01]: However, there was nothing to say, Plato's Atlantis, genuinely existed, from a linear people just assumed he'd created an idealized version of his home Athens.
5:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So why is it that some 12,000 years after allegedly disappearing, we still talk about it like it might be real?
6:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, in 1882, U.S. congressman Ignatius Donnelly published 13 reasons why he believed Atlantis was far more real than previously accounted for.
6:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And no, he didn't scatter them around on little tapes.
6:19
[SPEAKER_01]: He wrote a book called The Entity Lovian World, which proved to be highly influential.
6:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Then in 1965 someone actually found Atlantis.
6:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, some people think they did at least.
6:32
[SPEAKER_01]: They found the reshatch structure, a 25-mile-wide geological dome found in Mauritania, Africa.
6:40
[SPEAKER_01]: It looks like an ominous eye.
6:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Check it out when you have a chance.
6:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not kidding.
6:45
[SPEAKER_01]: This thing is so huge you can only see its full scope from space.
6:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Which is how it was discovered.
6:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Two astronauts flying over the Sahara Desert spotted the giant eyes staring back at them and thought they'd stumbled across the most important archaeological find ever.
7:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Alas, there's nothing concrete linking it to Atlantis.
7:06
[SPEAKER_01]: It's believed the reshatch structure was formed from volcanic activity around 100 million years ago.
7:12
[SPEAKER_01]: But come on, it looks pretty sus.
7:15
[SPEAKER_01]: seems like we're no closer to the truth.
7:18
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think?
7:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it land as real or a bunch of old but loony?
7:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Next up, whether you've got a big one or a small one, we all love our homes.
7:29
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, you'd have to be a loony to wish anything bad on your humble or not so humble abode.
7:34
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you live with the Kukutini tri-pili up people who settled in Eastern Europe around 7500 years ago, home was less where the heart is and more where the earth is.
7:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Why?
7:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Because they routinely torch their own villages.
7:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, what?
7:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, you heard me.
7:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Archaeological evidence shows that every 60 to 80 years they bash out the matches for a spot of accommodation in celebration.
8:01
[SPEAKER_01]: The burning question, of course, is, why?
8:05
[SPEAKER_01]: This was long before home insurance, so they weren't trying to cash in a claim, and it had been way too regularly to be accidental.
8:13
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know for sure, but one of the leading theories is that they were
8:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And once it got to the end of a house, his life, it was proper send off time.
8:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Still, torching a whopping 3,000 buildings to the ground every 60 years just to rebuild them, sounds like a lot of effort.
8:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Last time I felt like changing things up, I just turned my bed around.
8:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, I'm such a scatterbrain.
8:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I lose things all the time.
8:45
[SPEAKER_01]: But even I'd have difficulty losing an entire civilisation of people, like, I don't know, the my sins of ancient Greece, as might being the OGs of ancient Greek society and true pioneers in architecture, engineering, and language, come 1050 BC they'd manage to totally lose themselves?
9:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Seriously, they straight up disappeared.
9:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Poof!
9:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Gone.
9:11
[SPEAKER_01]: How does one of the most developed societies have its time suddenly just ceased to exist?
9:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's one of history's greatest unsolved riddles.
9:20
[SPEAKER_01]: There's lots of possibilities about what could have happened, maybe it was an invasion from a neighboring civilization like the Dorians.
9:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe there was a disturbance closer to home which led to civil war, or maybe there was a big natural disaster like a volcano or a giant flood which wiped them all out.
9:39
[SPEAKER_01]: However unsatisfying it might be, we just don't know.
9:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever it was, it was bad, like real bad.
9:46
[SPEAKER_01]: The period following the Mycinian's disappearance was a total dead zone known as the Greek dark ages, and it's like they vanished and took the next 300 years of history with them.
9:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Ugh, reminds me of that time my dad popped up to the shops for milk and cigarettes.
10:03
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, moving on.
10:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Ever jumped in a puddle and realized it's deeper than you thought?
10:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, me neither.
10:11
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you lived in Cheyenne, back home, village and Jay-Jang, China a few decades ago and did it, you'd have gotten more than a little wet.
10:20
[SPEAKER_01]: That's because in 1992, local farmers drained 5 on assuming ponds and discovered a giant network of 24 cavernous chambers hidden beneath them.
10:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Whoa, and I mean giant, directly beneath the five ponds or five main caves, each dropping nearly a hundred feet underground and averaging a whopping 11,000 square feet.
10:43
[SPEAKER_01]: That's over two basketball courts a piece, and it turns out there are 19 other cavernous chambers too.
10:49
[SPEAKER_01]: now known as the Lum UK's.
10:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Most astonishingly though, all of them appear to be exquisitely man-made.
10:57
[SPEAKER_01]: They're held up by pillars, the walls rise at a perfect 60-degree angle and 23-inch wide bands have been chiseled into all of the surfaces.
11:06
[SPEAKER_01]: On top of this, the entrance holes all face south to south west to draw the most sunlight.
11:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Whoever built these caves must have been highly sophisticated architects, but we have absolutely no idea who they were.
11:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, almost no idea.
11:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Pieces of clay pot were found half submerged in soil that dated back to the western
11:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Aside from that though, there's nothing else to go off.
11:38
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't look like any other Kaves, Quarry's or Serimonyo Caverns yet found in China, and could have served as anything from Mozzolium's de-military encamments.
11:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Man, I'll be waiting with baited breath for any updates.
11:51
[SPEAKER_01]: best gift I ever got, a telescope, learning about the universe is so awesome, but I don't know nearly as much as the doggone tribe.
12:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Despite living largely detached from modern society and the Bendy Agra cliffs between Molly and Burkina Faso, their knowledge of the planets and stars is incredibly advanced.
12:12
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, they may know more about the serious star system than we do.
12:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Series A, the dog star, is the brightest star in the night sky.
12:22
[SPEAKER_01]: It's easily spotted with the naked eye, but in 1862 astronomers discovered a much fainter star just behind Series A, which they imaginatively named, Series B.
12:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So when French scientist Marcel Griello made first contact with the dog on in 1933, he expected to stun them with his knowledge.
12:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead, he discovered the already new every little detail about Sirius B or to them, Port Holo.
12:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Despite owning no telescopes and the starving invisible to the naked eye,
12:53
[SPEAKER_01]: What?
12:54
[SPEAKER_01]: We're still the Dogon claim there's a third even thinker store they call MIA.
13:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Astronomers haven't found any signs of this one, but with the Dogon's track record, that doesn't mean they won't.
13:06
[SPEAKER_01]: So how the heck did they get on this knowledge when they're so isolated from regular society?
13:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the Dogon insists they learned everything from an amphibian alien race called Namos, who come from a distant planet orbiting the serious system.
13:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
13:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Not when I expected.
13:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Most likely, some time between serious BBs discovered in 1862 in Grial making contact in 1933, traditional doggan beliefs in modern astronomy hash together.
13:35
[SPEAKER_01]: How exactly?
13:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't say.
13:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps Gral wasn't actually the first to make contact, but then what happened to whoever was.
13:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, extra terrestrial fishermen from stars we can't be sure exists just isn't quite cutting it for me.
13:51
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think?
13:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Remember the long you gave some earlier?
13:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, they're far from the weirdest historical find in China.
13:59
[SPEAKER_01]: In 1986, construction workers and she swan province stumbled across a giant enormous underground cache of 13,000 eerie artifacts at an ancient site they named Shangjian Dui.
14:11
[SPEAKER_01]: That pits were full of gold, bronze, and pottery unlike anything that country had seen before.
14:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm.
14:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Stranger still, many of the artifacts appeared to have been damaged and burnt before being purposely buried.
14:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Bigger, hmmm.
14:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Who or what could these have belonged to?
14:30
[SPEAKER_01]: While historians reckon their evidence of a mysterious 3000-year-old civilization that existed at the same time as known Chinese civilization, yet was separate from it.
14:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It was called the Kingdom of Xu, and Sanching Dui was one of its cities.
14:48
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the most striking finds a huge 400-pound bronze mask apparently represents Ken Kong, a semi-metrical ruler with bulging eyes.
14:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It could be one of the earliest religious icons in China.
15:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Xu fell when the Ken Dynasty united China around 300 BC so they could be responsible for
15:11
[SPEAKER_01]: But we can't be sure.
15:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, the shoe people didn't have a written language so their history has been lost to the ages.
15:19
[SPEAKER_01]: For now, we'll just have to imagine what's challenging we and ancient northern Chinese culture look like.
15:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Lucky yeah, I've got a good imagination, eh?
15:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Mama always said each of veggies or you won't grow big and strong.
15:32
[SPEAKER_01]: As you can tell, I'm still not keen on the greens.
15:35
[SPEAKER_01]: But some 1,200 years ago, residents of Namadol, an ancient city of Khanpei, Micronesia, must have eaten better than me.
15:43
[SPEAKER_01]: They needed building materials.
15:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Only problem was, it was all on the other side of the island 25 miles away.
15:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet these Polynesian powerhouses tricked all the way there, turned around and somehow brought an astonishing 750,000 tons of heavy basalt rock all the way back.
16:03
[SPEAKER_01]: The heaviest cruise ship in the world, the wonder of the seas is around 250,000 tons.
16:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So imagine looking three of them.
16:11
[SPEAKER_01]: That's unbelievable.
16:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, I've not got a Scooby-Doo clue how they did this.
16:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Holding all that seems impossible and basalt's too heavy to float around the island.
16:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Local legends say great birds or giants move them into place, which is as good as any guess I've got.
16:30
[SPEAKER_01]: and moving it was only the first hurdle.
16:33
[SPEAKER_01]: The inhabitants then had to carve and shape all that rock into 100 tiny islands which they built on top of a coral reef off the mainland.
16:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Non-Modal was where the first organized government of Pompeii resided, so it was turned into a grand capital city.
16:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Even today, you can see the remains of stone palaces, ritual sites, temples, and tombs that were built hundreds of years ago.
16:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Remarkably, it was all achieved without mortar or concrete.
17:00
[SPEAKER_01]: The sheer weight of the stones themselves secured them into position.
17:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Somewhere up to 50 tons.
17:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Chinkies!
17:08
[SPEAKER_01]: It might not look like much now, but in its prime you'd have needed some big stones of your own to go anywhere near this imposingly affluent dynasty.
17:17
[SPEAKER_01]: It blows my mind that farming is only existed for about 10,000 years, and makes any civilization before all the more impressive.
17:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Take the mysterious gobekli tepi.
17:28
[SPEAKER_01]: This vast 11,000-year-old site in South Eastern Turkey has archaeologists stomped.
17:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Somehow people who couldn't grow up at Tato came together and built the world's oldest known stone megalis.
17:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Mason's created 20 circles of tall rock pillars with each pillar weighing up to 50 tons.
17:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Many are almost 16 feet high and engraved with animal carpings and human forms, providing a window into this weird, prehistoric world.
17:55
[SPEAKER_01]: However, the knowledge of math and geometry required to achieve all this is comparable to that of the great pyramids, and they came some 7,000 years later.
18:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything we thought we knew about prehistoric civilization says go Beckley Tappy just shouldn't exist.
18:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet, here it is.
18:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Some people reckon it was used for religious rituals while others insisted with some form of ancient observatory.
18:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Without more solid information though, it's hard to be sure who's right, since it was discovered back in 1994, only around 5% of the site has been excavated.
18:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess we've only seen the Tippy of the iceberg.
18:32
[SPEAKER_01]: If we got to be a real weirdo to hang around gravesides, then or your Indiana Jones looking for treasure, who's this say he's not a Creeperzoid 2, but sometimes are definitely intriguing such as some massive keyhole shaped tombs that exist only in Japan.
18:49
[SPEAKER_01]: They're called Co-Foon.
18:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are staggering 160,000 of them scattered around Japan.
18:57
[SPEAKER_01]: The largest of which is Dyson Roo, Co-Foon, and Sakai, and hits over 1,000 feet wide and 1600 feet long.
19:06
[SPEAKER_01]: That's twice as long as the great pyramid of Giza.
19:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh mama!
19:10
[SPEAKER_01]: What 500 foot monster have they buried in there?
19:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's the confusing or co-fusing thing.
19:19
[SPEAKER_01]: get it?
19:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Ironically, these keyhole-looking cribs are totally locked up, so we're not entirely sure who or what might be inside.
19:28
[SPEAKER_01]: It's assumed Icynru was built for Emperor Nintoku, the 16th Emperor of Japan, who supposedly died in 399 AD at the Grand Old Age of 109.
19:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Cheapers!
19:42
[SPEAKER_01]: But until anyone goes in and checks, can we really be sure?
19:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think so.
19:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Sadly, that's unlikely to change anytime soon.
19:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Many are classified as secret religious grounds and trying to enter them is illegal.
19:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Plus, they send the room is completely isolated by three separate modes.
20:01
[SPEAKER_01]: They used to be a bridge, but it was destroyed by a typhoon back in 1872, and nobody's been on the ground since.
20:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Ah, it's a shut-out.
20:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Still imagine all the untold treasures that might be buried there.
20:16
[SPEAKER_01]: They ever do decide to open old Dyson Rue up, mark my words.
20:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It'll be the historical fight of the century.
20:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I like to respect everyone's ideas about the past, but some historians make that really difficult for me.
20:29
[SPEAKER_01]: In 1936, an iron hammer was found in case in a piece of rock in London, Texas, and it sent some theorist wild.
20:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Despite modern humans only being around for 200,000 years, tests on the rock near where the artifact was founded back to the Cretaceous period.
20:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Wait, so does that mean the hammer is that old too?
20:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, self-proclaimed science was Carlebaw who bought the hammer in 1983 certainly thinks so.
21:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And he also believes its comprehensive proof of an ancient civilization of giants.
21:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I've wasted many hours and precious brain cells trying to decipher Carl's crazy theories.
21:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Here it goes.
21:17
[SPEAKER_01]: As a creation as cumble is, the world as we know it was made by God about 6,000 years ago.
21:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Therefore, if something is older than that, it must come from an unrecognizable pre-god Earth.
21:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Still following?
21:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Test Carl authorized on the hammer, showed it contained iron and chlorine,
21:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Before God, though, he argues the atmosphere would have allowed this godbound to exist naturally, and also, if turned anyone alive at the time, I eat the creators of the hammer, into giants.
21:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, I tried.
21:51
[SPEAKER_01]: As dudes at Incus.
21:52
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no proof the Cretaceus rock near where the hammer was found as the same as the rock encasing the hammer itself.
22:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, Carl won't let anyone else run
22:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Plus, minerals and ancient rocks can dissolve and re-harden around objects that aren't ancient if put under the right pressure.
22:13
[SPEAKER_01]: It's called Concretion.
22:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So even if it was the same rock, it still would be proof of a 100 million year old hammer.
22:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Come on, I'd choose science over Carl's quack of Crapola any day.
22:25
[SPEAKER_01]: The Roman Empire is one of ancient history's best documented civilizations, but that's not to say we know everything, and Lebanon on the outer edges of the old Empire, six hefty puzzles known as the ballback stones still have us scratching our heads.
22:42
[SPEAKER_01]: The Romans carved and shaped these colossal stones from a quarry by hand, which might not sound than a present until you hear about their size.
22:51
[SPEAKER_01]: The smallest is a stalking 800 tons, and the largest is a colossal 1,650 tons, about the weight of 250 elephants.
23:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, for comparison, the largest stone in the Great Pyramids is a measly 80 tons.
23:08
[SPEAKER_01]: As if carving all that isn't impressive enough, that three smallest, which are anything but small, were somehow moved about a mile from the quarry to their current location.
23:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I've certainly you'd need 40,000 people to move just one block, and that many people couldn't conceivably fit around even the biggest of them, so it's been theorized that some sort of pulley system was used.
23:32
[SPEAKER_01]: By chipping a gap and neat the slabs before they were cut away from the quarry rollers could have been slid underneath them, then when they were completely removed from the rest of the stone they'd already be sitting at top the rollers and ready to attach to a
23:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Like this, it could have taken as few as 144 workers to look to their destination as part of the Temple of Jupiter.
23:54
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just a theory, though.
23:57
[SPEAKER_01]: We can't know for sure how the incredible feat was pulled off.
24:00
[SPEAKER_01]: We do know, however, that the three biggest stones proved too heavy even for the Romans and are still lying in the quarry today.
24:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Jeez.
24:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess it's always good to know when you've been beaten.
24:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Man, I've been working so hard lately, I need a vacation.
24:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm, maybe serdenia.
24:20
[SPEAKER_01]: But if I'd been around 3,000 years ago, there's no way I'd want to visit the Italian island.
24:26
[SPEAKER_01]: At least not if you believe the legends.
24:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Local medsate giants once roamed the land and human-like skeletons over 13 feet tall were discovered on the island.
24:38
[SPEAKER_01]: The evidence is kind of sketchy though, and no one's got a big bone to prove it.
24:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Even so, there have been some seriously strange goings on that suggests there might be more to it than you first think.
24:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Back in 1974 over 5,000 pieces of smashed up stone artifacts were uncovered in an area of the island, called Monte Prama.
24:59
[SPEAKER_01]: But suspiciously, when they were sent to a nearby museum, they weren't put on display.
25:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead, they were immediately stashed in an underground vault where they stayed locked away some 30 years.
25:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Seems shady to me.
25:13
[SPEAKER_01]: When they were finally removed in 2005, the pieces were reassembled and turned out to be.
25:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you guess?
25:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Statues of giant men.
25:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Thirty-eight of them to be precise.
25:25
[SPEAKER_01]: At eight feet tall, they're a touch shorter than the rumored skeleton, but still might be impressive.
25:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It's believed they were carved by and represent the Naurak people, who lived on the island many thousands of years ago, as well as the giant statues the Naurak also built over eight thousand of these enormous stone buildings.
25:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm, I'm not saying the Naraga were giants, but these people sure seem to like things a little larger than most.
25:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I wonder what their civilization would've looked like in its prime.
25:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Could even bigger statues have stood guarding the island that have since been lost a time?
26:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Ah, I don't know.
26:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
26:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Unlike the Naraga, they got the head body and everything else of themselves.
26:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'm so dusty, that's enough oldly worldly stuff for me today.
26:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for listening to this episode I'll see you next time.
26:22
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to be amazed