Expert REVEALS Evidence of Super ADVANCED LOST Ancient Technology! with Ben van Kerkwyk

Ben Van Kerkwyk 0:00
In various places you had, you had just incredible flooding, and also incredible fire. There's been tons of different levels of analysis more that there's now more than like 150 peer reviewed scientific papers that really deal with the the nuance and the detail of what is all of the evidence for this period of time. It has has a lot to do with analysis of things like ice core samples, where, you know, we can drill down into the ice in places like Antarctica and Greenland and in Russia and places. Because every year as the as the snow falls, it gets compressed into ice and it contains data about things like oxygen isotopes, we can look at temperatures and particulate matter. And we're getting very good at like drilling down taking these calls out to go back in some cases, hundreds of 1000s of years.

Alex Ferrari 0:43
I'd like to welcome to the show, Ben van Kerkwyk how you doing Ben?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 0:57
Good, good. Thanks. Yeah, Alex, it's, it's great to be here, man. Thanks for the invite.

Alex Ferrari 1:02
Thank you so much for coming on the show man. I'm so excited to talk to you about one of my favorite conversations, ancient civilizations and lost history and all the stuff that the mainstream archaeology community a lot of times, says that's a bug of hog hogwash, but I always like, but always like to, to really dig into these questions. It's all about asking these questions that well, really wasn't made the pyramids made with slaves by you know, like, that doesn't make a lot of sense. And did we really start 6000 years ago? Well, there's this thing called Gobekli Tepe, where they just showed up in the 1940s, for God's sakes, and all these kinds of things are changing our origins, not only about our human origins, but also our spiritual origins, where we're coming from all that kind of stuff. So you are up there, in my eyes with Graham Hancock, and Randall Carlson, and those those kinds of guys who are doing fighting the good fight, taking the arrows in the back, as they say, as, as you're coming over the hills. So I appreciate the work you're doing, brother.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 2:10
Thank you very much. I appreciate it. That's high praise. Indeed. Yeah. And I look, I look up to those guys. Greatly as well, there. I mean, part of the reason I got into this in the first place, but I think you I think you described it well, in terms of a lot of this is really about asking questions. I think the other the other element to this whole field, or this this journey of trying to discover and understand is there, you know, what is our past what we what we've always said it was, I think a big part of that is really embracing and being open minded to a lot of the new evidence that, you know, particularly in the last 20 years, is really shaping and I think having an effect and changing the reality of, of that of our history, and particularly the very earliest parts of our history, like we, we kind of have a pretty good grip on, you know, the last four or 5000 years in terms of what's happened. The problem is kind of what happened before that, what's Where did where did those ancient civilizations start? Where did they get their roots. And you know, what has happened in the potentially in hundreds of 1000s of years before that, because there's been just a tremendous amount of new evidence that comes from adjacent scientific fields, as well as within archaeology, you mentioned Gobekli, tipo. That's a big one that I think should be having a massive impact on the story of our past. And I mean, as is the case with lots of different established scientific fields, change is slow to come right at the very nature of establishment is to resist change and to maintain the status quo. But I do think now, at this point, there's an accumulation of evidence coming from these these, these fields, we know an awful lot more cataclysm, the human timeline, the genetic complexity of the human race, we keep getting older and older, we keep finding older and older stuff. The further back we go, it seems like the more sophisticated the stuff is that we're finding, in a lot of cases. This is, this is true for what you see in South America, but it's true for witches in Egypt, things like that. And I do think it's, we're at the point where it's time to reevaluate those very earliest parts of the history of our civilization and of our race on this planet.

Alex Ferrari 4:17
Now, I've been talking to so many people on the show about this great shift in human consciousness that we're all becoming more awaken to what is right just to where we truly are, and the information that's coming out. And the questions that people are asking, are becoming more and more broad and more and more open, where they wouldn't have 20 10 15 20 years ago. Why do you believe now that a lot of these questions, and it really, I mean, Graham really is one of the forefathers of this, of these asking these deep questions, but when Fingerprints of the Gods came out, which was what the 90s 95 Yeah, it run 95 is when that came came out, it started kind of more people started to ask these questions. Why do you think, in general, people are becoming more and more curious about our origins? And secondly, why are we starting to find stuff that just has no explanation? Like, the evidence that we're starting to find is just just just just like, you could you could argue the pyramids even on a losing argument about, but there's certain things you just like, I'm sorry, man, the caves in, in China, the the underwear on the ground cities and Turkey, that they're finding good to black with Tapley. All of these things are being found and really analyze it at such a deep level. Why do you think it's happening at this point?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 5:40
Well, it's it's, there's a couple of questions in there. I mean, one of the reasons I think that this is this is I do, and I feel the same way. I feel like there's a groundswell of movement, there are more and more people interested in these topics. One of the it's one of the reasons I think is is that this this, this type of information is much more readily available to everybody. Now, as you've had the rise of the Internet, and particularly like video, and new new media platforms, YouTube, things like this, are helping to spread that, that a lot of these topics, because prior to the type of content that we're seeing today, on those platforms, and its popularity, I mean, a lot of this information was out there these concepts and ideas about like, there is a lot of contradictions, there is a lot of new evidence, there is a lot of problems with the established narrative around our history, that type of data was contained in these books, you know, now, though, you have to be really into the field, you got to read these big books. It's guys like Graham and his predecessors as well that have been talking about these, these topics. And if you go back further than that, it's kind of like the discussion and the any of this data and the nuance that's involved in this discussion was really very much limited to the academic halls. You know, like it was the the, the academics, the Egyptologist, it was, it was them and their peers that were discussing this, there might have been some societies and organizations that were into, like explorers clubs, but these are very select and kind of elite organizations, it's not really a public awareness thing. So we've seen this transition into this new media field, we've seen the rise of some of these alternative ideas and the logic and I think the, the, you know, the, the arguments and the cases that they're making from guys like Graham, Robert Duvall, there's so many John Anthony, most of these people that have have written these books. And, you know, and then that's translated then into new media, and we have the internet and these ideas of spreading, and I think they make a lot of obviously, they do make a lot of sense, there is a lot of challenging evidence. And as we've gone forward, particularly in the last 20 years, we've made these new discoveries, we've started to apply our modern technology to some of these discoveries often in you know, this is efforts of people that are willing, truly outside of these fields. They're outsiders, they're engineers, they're, you know, they're just just interested people that typically aren't in his academic fields that are trying to apply him, you know, modern techniques to, to uncover the truth about some of these new finds. And it's very, very challenging for that story. I mean, just, if you just look at Cataclysm alone, I think this is a huge, huge piece of the puzzle. And this, this is not something this is very much in the last 20 years, we've discovered that the Earth has been through this tremendously catastrophic and cataclysmic period, and fairly recently, too, very recently, from a geologic or any other timescale outside of, you know, the time the way that we measure time with our short lives. But in the last 30,000 years, you know, the Earth has been through this cataclysm that was probably one of the worst things that's happened to it in the last couple of million years. And it was a period of time called the Younger Dryas. It marked the boundary between the Pleistocene and the Holocene, which is the era we're in today. It was people you can think of it as the end of the ice age. And it was only 13,000 years ago, but it was a there's a massive megafaunal extinction event, it would have been a civilization ending event it during this period of time, sea levels rose, you know, 400 feet almost, in a very short period of time, it was just a catastrophic event that was most likely caused by a series of cosmic impacts and air bursts, particularly over the northern hemisphere, and it would have ended civilization. So it when you when you look at it, when you look at events like that, that is now being revealed through modern science and new science, not in archaeology, but in other disciplines, paleoclimatology, etc, ice cores, all these all these different sciences are contributing to this knowledge. It should have this tremendous impact on history, because, you know, not only was there a megafauna extinction event where megafauna it would have ended any civilization that was around during that time. It actually corresponds with almost every single ancient origin story, even our own even our own modern day religions and our origin stories in these tales that are passed down through it. generations and generations and often and often are just rehashes and reimaginings of older tales that came from older civilizations like the flood story, the Noah Noah flood story is often people know this comes from the Sumerians and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the flood story, but you can't look at any, any ancient cultural religion and their origin stories and not find it. Just to be not, you'll always find like a great flood story or a great fire story and this idea that, you know, mankind was ended through some giant cataclysm. And there was a, you know, there were people that live before that, but we went through this cataclysm, and then we were sort of forced to start again. And I think there's a grain of truth in that now that's being revealed by a lot of his modern science. And for whatever reason, at this point, it's not really been at not acknowledged, to any great degree by modern archaeology. And you know that the keepers of the tomes of the history books at the universities, but I think it's only a matter of time.

Alex Ferrari 11:00
But also, the other thing is that when people think of like, ohh the comet hit us and, oh, it's civilization Ender. It wasn't the Younger Dryas again, to my rudimentary understanding of it. It did. It was a huge event that took out a lot of humanity, but not all of humanity. Now. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, it's not like the dinosaurs, like the dinosaurs. That was a mutt that's a planet killer. Whatever happened to them. At that point. That was what? Africa how many millions 65 million years ago? 65. That was a whole other conversation, where it really just took over the planet, and almost almost everything died.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 11:41
Oh, yes. Yeah. So you have varying degrees of of extinction level events, you know, the KT boundaries, the one that is often associated with the dinosaurs, and it is six that people think of that when they think of extinction level events. And no doubt that was a much bigger event than the Younger Dryas. And you have even bigger ones that go back in the past where you're talking about, like 99% of all life, basically being exterminated on the planet. And that's crazy. I mean, you end up with just a few microbes and bacteria and then it everything has to start again. From that perspective. That's happened

Alex Ferrari 12:11
And New York roaches and New York, roaches

Ben Van Kerkwyk 12:13
And roaches Of course. Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 12:17
Yes, New York roaches specifically, specifically,

Ben Van Kerkwyk 12:20
Those things probably will find might have thrived in that environment. But yeah, I mean, the outdoors. Look, it was, as I said, probably the the worst thing to happen to the planet in the last sort of two to 5 million years. It was a big event. And if you look at what happened, I mean, it wiped out, essentially half of the megafauna that was here at the time. So people, people, I think a lot of people aren't aware of these extinction events, but people have been generally aware of things like well, you know, mammoths and saber toothed tigers, as you know, the America ain't there. Okay, yeah. Yep, the the short faced bear. There's the American cave bear the American lion, there were armadillos the size of Volkswagens. There was the giant ground sloth that was almost the size of an elephant. These are all animals that existed in North America from basically from two and a half million years ago, up until about 13,000 12,000 years ago, and they all went away. And if you look at the the the total of extinction of species that went extinct in this short period of time, it's a roughly half of the megafauna megaphone of being anything that's I think, over about 40 kilograms of body weight, including us, I guess, certainly me. That's, that's described as megaphone as a half of those species that were around, went extinct in this pretty short period of time, right down to and including a couple of species of birds. And, of course, the mainstream explanation for this is kind of this nonsensical thing that has to do with over hunting with you know, why humans and it's it really is nonsense. If you go, if you look at South America, for example, they lost something like 85% of their megafauna. North America has a similar number, like it's huge numbers of species went extinct, and it's real short period of time. So it was a catastrophic event. It was it was it was in various places you had, you had just incredible flooding, and also incredible fire, there's been tons of different levels of analysis more that there's now more than like 150, peer reviewed scientific papers that really deal with the nuance and the detail of what is all of the evidence for this period of time. It has, it has a lot to do with analysis of things like ice core samples, where you know, we can drill down into the ice in places like Antarctica and Greenland and in Russia and places. Because every year as the as the snow falls, it gets compressed into ice and it contains data about things like oxygen isotopes, we can look at temperatures and particulate matter. And we're getting very good at like drilling down taking these cores out to go back in some cases, hundreds of 1000s of years. And we can look at almost like a year by year layer of what were the conditions what happened to

Like tree rings.

Exactly. Yeah. In fact, tree rings are another. We don't really have tree rings that go back 13000 years. But tree rings have told us some interesting things about the climate, in the history in history as well. co2, stuff like that, but but if you if you go back down, so one of the interesting things that happened, it's not just, you know, you don't just get these massive floods, because what likely happened, you have during this period of time, sea levels rose, three to 400 feet like 100 meters, 130 meters in a short period of time. And it's associated with these, these massive pulses whose melt water pulses. And of course, that's the, that's all of the ice that was on top of particularly the northern hemisphere, being melted quite rapidly, and then finding its way into the ocean. And that's the trigger for it. So you, you have these, these, these impacts, and these air bursts that are probably going into the ice these ice caps are Laurentide and called Arian glacier systems that were pretty much over most of North America, also the European glacier as well. And these things are melting rapidly, tremendous flooding, you also have, you know, the just just these air bursts and impacts are like, they're, they're even they're much stronger events, and even giant volcanoes going off like it would cause almost like a nuclear winter environment on the planet. And in fact, we see this with temperature analysis, there's like an eight 900 year period from 12,800 years to about 11,600 years ago, where the temperature just drops to the it drops dramatically and quickly to like this the depth of of the coldest parts of an ice age. And it stays there for about this 800 year period. And then it just gets jolted back out again. So the modern thinking is that there were two events, there was an event that precipitated this at the start at 11,800 or 900 years ago, and then something at at around 11,600 years ago, which is particularly interesting, because that's the date that coincides exactly with Plato's account of the sinking of Atlantis, like that's, that's a really interesting correlation with that date. But it's not, you know, look, it's just, it's not just flooding. I mean, part of that ice core analysis also shows that at one point, around 9% of the world's biomass was on fire, which is just an astronomical number

Alex Ferrari 17:10
Co2 as well, coming up.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 17:12
Well, just pouring it. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, that's just it's a huge, I mean, look, this this, these are, this is what you would call real climate change, like this stuff that happened within 14,000 years ago. This is real climate, oh, this is rapid, catastrophic and rapid climate change. It's not a runaway event like it Earth is very resilient to these these shifts. But it's pretty rough on the life like in what happens to either you don't get like life doesn't go extinct immediately. Because it's like, under the blast like that. There's evidence for that, too. It's really interesting. Actually, there's, there's different places where mammoths and saber toothed tigers and trees, and everything just like mashed up together where you've got like mammoth hip bones up near their head. I mean, it's just you can tell these things were hit by Shockwave. But what happens ultimately, is that you have this dramatic and rapid climate change that affects the environment that megaphone lives in. And of course, that's, that's what causes that extinction. It's this rapid change to their environment in their food sources, that all goes away and they go extinct. In short, in short order, and we see we see it we've seen the result of that, like Siberia, for example was during this the what you call in the Pleistocene was was much warmer than it is now like Siberia is this Tundra cold wasteland like, you know, this, almost this, this, this frozen landscape and but we have examples of megafauna and the mammoths and mastodons that live there that show that their diets were give us huge plants and green green, a green place like the climate was very different during the Pleistocene, generally colder overall but the climate zones on the on the planet were very different. And they shifted rapidly as a result of the Younger Dryas.

Alex Ferrari 18:52
And aren't they finding now bones and animals who, like were frozen and now they're being defrosted? Because of the climate change that's happening currently. And they're finding them like with food in their mouth and like food in their in their stomach? So it was like a quick scenario was it they froze like in I mean, in almost instant almost flash freezing

Ben Van Kerkwyk 19:19
In some places, Sure. Yeah. In some places it's really interesting like this the guys up in Alaska, if he does a really interesting job I forget his name John, someone or other went on on Rogan's show in fact, I've kind of had some halfway contact when he knows he knows rental cars on a rental cars and there's been some talk about getting up to this Alaskan Boneyard. I mean, he's got they're literally finding just just everywhere these these these mammoth remains and skeletons and flash frozen where you literally have meat. I think the guy's actually eaten some mammoth meat like this. This slide been frozen for 12 13,000 years and they've cooked it up and ate it at one point. I'm like, Oh crap, that brave moves. But

Alex Ferrari 19:57
That was I say that's not the smartest situations You know,

Ben Van Kerkwyk 20:01
What you do, I guess in Alaska right? But yeah, there's there are examples where you have like flesh you have you have these animals that are almost intact like baby mamas with food in their stomach, I mean, in food in their mouth even so they part, you know, they were killed very quickly and then frozen very quickly as well. So I met I mentioned there are some scenarios and and results of this just catastrophic events where you have this kind of massive polar vortex that can happen. I'm not that familiar with that. Not it's obviously it's not everywhere, but certainly in some places as a result of this just, I mean, we have nothing in hell, even the movies that try to simulate this stuff don't really do it justice, it's to me and and you can get a sense for that when you look at things like the floods. And what happened if you ever go out to Eastern Washington State, there's a there's an area of eastern Washington state called the channeled Scablands. And it's it's probably one of the most spectacular environments you'll ever see. Because it is literally where the ground and the this this, the Earth was just tore up, because that was the path that these floodwaters took. And you're talking about volumes of water, like nine cubic miles of water per minute, flowing through some of these environments, that's like to put it this way, it's about 100 times the volume of all the rivers on Earth flowing right now. Like all of the flowing water on Earth, right now you're talking about 100 times the volume of that was at the peak discharge rates of some of these floods. And so in a couple of weeks, essentially, some of these events have carved these coolers that are miles and miles wide. And they'd like 1000 foot deep. And they just rip up this basalt, and they just form these huge scars that are on the landscape. And we'd today we drive through them. They've done these little lakes and stuff. It's all a recreation area golf courses, super spectacular environment. But when you look at it through the context of how did this form, and when did it form? And how quickly did this happen? You just stand back like this is this is something else like this is yeah, I mean, it was cat it was catastrophic. And we have we've never experienced anything like it. Certainly not in our modern memory.

Alex Ferrari 22:07
And so with with the sites that are being discovered now, in your opinion, were there any archaeological sites that we currently are that have have excavated that were around prior to the Younger Dryas?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 22:23
Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think the stuff in Turkey right now Gobekli Tepe is probably the best example. In fact, some of that some of that goes back to during the Younger Dryas like that literally, the carbon dating puts that puts those sites in place during the period of the younger draws. And in fact, Chiron tip and some of the other sides of discovering Turkey are actually older than than Gobekli tipo. What's interesting about Gobekli Tepe I too is and I can, I can give a plug to like the brothers of the serpent podcast, good friends of mine, they just put out an excellent video on YouTube about Gobekli Tepe A, that gets into the details of how they've done the dating there. Because people kind of know that I Gobekli Tepe is carbon dated and pretty much established around that 11,000 years, you know, 11,000 years ago, 9000 to 10,000 BCE. What's interesting about the dating there is that that dating comes from material that are in these these rough walls that are around those classic sort of T pillar shapes is big megaliths. And if you look at the site, what what seems to have happened there is that those walls were built to repair that site, those walls were made that because they encompass some of these two pillars actually cover up features of the two pillars. It's almost like they were restoring and protecting something that was there beforehand. And all of the dating material, and the dates come from that this very rough and primitive cobblestone wall that is built around these enclosures. And it's an it's an entirely different style, to the two pillars and the megalithic work. In fact, I think that's a good indicator that this was probably a later, a later period of occupation and building that happened there, which which tells you that these two pillars and these original enclosures, and this, the more sophisticated work the stuff that is like, you know, the the 20 foot high Megalis than some of them weighing 2030 tonnes was done at some unknown time before that, and probably fell into disrepair and had fallen over and then and then during the Younger Dryas, you had a primitive set of people, Neolithic people, or I guess at that point it was it was Paleolithic or thin, or even Mesolithic that, that that came there and restored those sites and worked on them and did something to them. And that's where the dating comes from. And in fact, this this evidence is, is backed up by the fact that in some of these walls that are built around these two pillars, you actually have broken pieces of T pillars being used as blocks in the wall. So it's as if those two pillars were already broken, they'd fallen over and you know, degraded and then because they couldn't put it back together, took that lump of stone, and they put it in the wall. wall when they built the wall. So it's, it's like it's yeah, people think it's it's, it's it is an old sight. But it seems like it could be far older than that we really don't know. I think it's a similar case for places like Egypt, I do. I do think that some of those places where it's retrieved attribute to the dynastic Egyptian civilization to a place like Giza, secara, Abusir. You know that? Sure, I think there's a very good chance that elements of that infrastructure existed during the Younger Dryas if not before, and then it was later occupied and reused and integrated into the dynastic Egyptian culture as we know it.

Alex Ferrari 25:40
Do you think that that the pyramids themselves, it seems like that, that there was a kind of a pillaging of, like, let's say, the great pyramids, have all three of them have elements to build other things throughout history. But to be honest, if you've just come across that thing, and you're primitive, like, there's only so much you can do, like, you can move those things, lift those things, work those things. So that's, I think, one of the reasons why they're still in the shape that they're in because it was just such a massive, I mean, these blocks are how big each? Well,

Ben Van Kerkwyk 26:18
Well. I mean, it is, it's the not, I mean, it's certainly bigger block blocks of material. If you take the Great Pyramid, for example, it's something like 6 million tons of limestone in that and to to, you know, two and a half to 3 million blocks. So the average block size is around two to three tonnes. Something, which is a lot. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot but you have much bigger stones, obviously, you have like 70 80 Ton, single piece granite stones, and like dozens and dozens of them, that make up the central granite structure inside the pyramid. And as you're going to manage this is also like 150 feet above ground level like these are there's dozens of these massive granite ash laws and beams 7080 tons of pop, you mean you've got foundation tiles around people, often like I love telling people to get sick, because people go there and look up at the pyramid. But but one of the more interesting elements of it is actually looking down at what you're standing on. Because it's not just bedrock. There was preparation work done into the bedrock. And there's actually foundation tiles locked together and locked into the bedrock in this, like this 3d, geometric puzzle, almost, that is just perfectly fit together in some of those stones. You're talking 200 plus tons, single piece stones that were put in there and shaped and placed extremely precisely. In fact, I'm working on video right now about probably what I think is the largest single piece stone that I've that that that he's at Giza that we found only recently. That's around 450 tons. It's kind of insane to think of somebody moving those things around. But yeah, there's there's, it's, the pyramids had been pillaged and used as quarries for stone for literally 1000s of years. This is an activity that began as far as we know, you know, in the middle, a new kingdom of the ancient Egyptian civilization itself. So you're talking about like 2000 1500 BCE, they were already taking stone from these monuments. And that has been an activity that has continued right up until about probably only 6070 years ago, not even that long ago. I mean, it's you know, it's been well reported by, you know, guys like Flinders Petrie, who visited these sites in the late 1800s, early 1900s, that, you know, there's just camel trains of stone leaving these sites every day, which should tell you something like this, because that's how massive and how giant they are, is that people have been taking stone and using these things as cores for literally 1000s of years. Yet again, that's in taking something away and destroying it's much easier than building it. But the claim is that you could build the Great Pyramid inside of 25 years, with nothing more than Bronze Age technology, human horsepower, ropes, and sleds. And it's absolutely nonsense. From a logistical perspective, it's one of the biggest problems I have with I guess the Orthodox story of particularly dynastic Egyptian history is that not only are they saying you could build this thing in a short amount of time, which, if you take 25 years as an example, and the number of stones that are in the Great Pyramid, that equates to one stone being quarried, shipped, finished, taped, taken to the site put in place and perfectly set every five minutes 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 25 years. That's what it would take to finish

Alex Ferrari 29:30
Perfect precision,

Ben Van Kerkwyk 29:31
Like almost all Yeah, I mean, yes and no, that there is more I mean that the superstructure the pyramid isn't as isn't as precise as say the foundation. It's certainly not the size as the internal work. But that figure of five minutes doesn't account for the planning. It doesn't account for the foundation work. It doesn't account for all of the leveling in the tiles that go into it doesn't account for the sophistication of the interior spaces. The digging of the tunnels like it's just it's real nonsense. It's complete nonsense. And not only that, you have to also remember that these are supposedly amongst the very first pyramids ever built. It's, it's like there's no, there's, it's like we started with the space shuttle. And we went backwards to like, you know, the horse and cart, because you don't start with the perfect sort of massive sort of technologically, technologically sophisticated product and then go backwards, which is what seems to have happened in the Orthodox timeline, a pyramid building, because the Egyptians, we all know about the Giza and the Great Pyramid, and the two or three other pyramids that are there. But as you go forward in time, like, you know, the Middle Kingdom, they kept building pyramids, but they got much less sophisticated, they were made from mudbrick. And there, they were much smaller, and they're still they're still still some of you can see today, but they're slowly eroding because, you know, mud brick roads, but yet these giant stone monuments are eternal, and that they're supposed to be the first ones we made. And, of course, there's endless precision when it comes to this precision when it when you look at like how these things are aligned to true north. So it's one of the most accurately aligned and set out buildings that we've ever made. In fact, we didn't, you know, we didn't even match it, I think until the late 1800s, we built we actually could build something that was actually almost as accurate as the pyramid. You know, it encodes all this data it encodes, it's basically a scale model, the northern hemisphere of the planet, to a ratio of I think it's, I'm gonna get this wrong, it's 43,200. So if you take the height of the pyramid, and you multiply it by 43,200, you get the the polar radius of the earth. So from the center of the earth to the North Pole, if you take the perimeter length of the Great Pyramid, and you multiply it by 43,200, you get the equatorial circumference of the planet. It encodes the shape of the planet, the fact that it's an oblate spheroid. So by that I mean that the planet earth not a sphere, right? It's like a little, it's a little, it's a little further east west than it is north south, right? Because of the spinning. So it's slightly eggy slightly, he was just slightly flat on top, a little fatter around the middle. Yeah. And that, that, that difference, like, that translates into a ratio of difference between latitude and longitude. So if you if you draw that grid line across the map, and you, you go down, and you look at like, okay, at the equator, I've got one grid square of whatever one degree or one minute of latitude and longitude, it's slightly longer east west than it is north south. It's not a square, it's a rectangle. So that ratio between latitude and longitude is also exactly replicate, or very precisely replicated in the in the Great Pyramid, it sits on something called a socket, which is this one cubit, wide and high platform almost. So it's like this little ledge that sits on and sticks out. And it gives you two ways of measuring the perimeter length, right? You can measure the perimeter length of the actual pyramid or the perimeter length of the circle. And if you compare the ratio of those two links between the cycle and the pyramid, the perimeter links, it's exactly the same ratio as latitude to longitude on the planet. It's bananas.

Alex Ferrari 33:04
So then why so then how so when mainstream archaeology is confronted with these facts? What do they say?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 33:12
Oops. Well, the answer is it's coincidence. I mean, that's generally generally the response you get is it's coming to end, I think, you know, these things pile up and up and up. There's, there's many more things you could talk about when it comes to precision and aspects of the Great Pyramid. And I think all of them. I mean, doesn't take very many of them to go. Okay. That's not coincidence. There's obviously some more data going on here. I think it's one of the giant contradictions it doesn't really get addressed. Unfortunately. I, you know, I think, I think there's another explanation for this. I think, I genuinely respect the dynastic Egyptians, they did tremendous work. I mean, they were extremely capable civilization that lasted for 3000 years, it was incredible, were we one of the most, the greatest civilization to have ever been on the planet. But they simply weren't capable and didn't have the knowledge set of achieving some of the things that we attribute to them. Like, for all of their capability, we know that particularly the Old Kingdom period, the early periods, I mean, they were very relatively primitive Bronze Age, culture, no use of the wheel. You know, no, no metals other than bronze, literally bronze and, and copper, no steel, no iron, no lapstone with no use of the wheel. That's there's no pulleys, there's no force multipliers. There's no advanced tools. There's no pottery wheel, there's no lathe, there's no nothing. But we have these incredible artifacts and architecture that comes from that period that show all of this sophistication. And all of this encoded data. And nobody's ever demonstrated that you can actually replicate that stuff with this with this primitive, with these very primitive methods of construction, nor do we have any evidence that the Egyptians actually had the data that it seems like are encoded in these artifacts. So you're left I think, with two options, and this is you could spend hours talking about this stuff, the weight of evidence that suggests this, but I think you ultimately left with two options, one is we have to drastically reevaluate what we think that the dynastic Egyptians were capable of. I think that's by far the least likely option i There's no evidence to suggest that they had advanced tools that they had advanced knowledge. We know what they knew that they wrote down what they did, they drew scenes on the walls, showing how they did things. And they, you know, we found their tools that are very primitive. The other option, I think, the one that the evidence supports best. And I think all of the adjacent evidence, Cataclysm genetics timeline is that our is the path of civilization is much longer. There's there's more ups and downs, more cataclysm, and that at some point in the past, there was a much more advanced civilization that existed, that is probably responsible for this knowledge that probably started these projects, even if they didn't finish them. And that probably manufactured a lot of the things that the Egyptians then later inherited, and integrated into their own culture over a period of 1000s of years. And this, this originating civilization, this progenitor civilization, was probably one that spanned the globe that was was highly capable, because we see evidence for it. In Turkey, in Lebanon, in South America, and Easter Island, potentially, in China. All around the world, you have the similar styles of megalithic building, you have a pyramid building culture, you have the works of people like Giorgio von daschund, and dis Antilla, who wrote Hamlet's mill that show that you know, there's astronomical knowledge encoded in all of these cultures all around the world that that reflects a knowledge set that those cultures didn't have. But it is this it does show you things like precession of the equinoxes, these sophisticated movements of the heavens. And it all points to this, this idea that maybe there was a precursor culture that might have been responsible for, you know, that initial set of knowledge that is then spanned out through time and distance and ends up in all these other cultures. There's so much evidence for this, I think, and of course, the Atlantis story with Plato, stuff like that. So I think that's the far more likely scenario, I think that's the one that the evidence best supports. And it's just, you know, it's a battle to kind of get the mainstream academic community to kind of look at the past with a bit more of an open mind. Because I think if if we did that, and we looked at the sights, and we analyze these artifacts, and we used our own technology, we could probably learn something, we'd probably open up these doors, we'd learn a lot more about the origins and the history of civilization.

Alex Ferrari 37:32
Do you think that, that when we say the cat, when you start hearing the Word, or there was an advanced civilization in the past, it's, first of all, the ego of the current man, or the current human doesn't allow that, because this is the one thing I think you would agree with me on? At every moment in time, man has always thought that they had everything figured out every year that goes by, they're just like, No, it's Zeus. That's the way it goes. Nope, it's it's the it's the god Raj, all these kinds of things. So I think that's probably one of the reasons why we can't comprehend it. But also, I think, we're looking at the past through the lens of our technology today, which is, but the ancient civilizations that you're talking about, that might be more advanced, they could have been advanced in ways that we can't really comprehend, because it's a different kind of technology than we are currently using. Yeah,

Ben Van Kerkwyk 38:27
100%. In fact, I talked about this quite a bit. I think this is it's a difficult concept to grasp if you haven't thought much about it before. But I think that's exactly right. I think all you have to do is look at the last 3040 years of our own technological progression, the rise of the Internet, the rise of devices, and think okay, so you know, we didn't you know, if you go back until you only have to go back 30 or 40 years to two lifetimes in our lifetime Allah in our lifetime for people not to have a clue what a cellphone is, like, a modern touch screen, and, and all that stuff. These are new concepts. You know, I often, I like to illustrate it by saying, Yeah, you can, you don't have to go back to Kate. But say you took this back to Neolithic times of cavemen, let alone Victorian era or even 100 years ago. And you show this phone to someone that they're going to, they're going to look at and go Well, it's a it's like a shiny piece of glass or something that the brakes if you smash it, it's powered off. Like it doesn't do anything. You just, you have no context to understand what it is. But you are and I, you and I couldn't build one. But we, but we know how it works. Yeah, we know we know what it is. Because we have context. We know what a wireless wireless networking is. We know what a touchscreen is. We know what the cameras in the internet and all these things that you need to put this thing into context and understand what it is. And in a lot of ways, I think when we look at some of this, the potential sophistication of some of these sites. I think we're in that same position as someone from Victorian era looking at a cell phone we don't have the context to fully understand it, because there may well be parts of science or technology. He's that we're involved in, what the site's how they were made, or what they were doing that we don't understand yet. And as you said, even though we think we've got it all figured out, we know that we're going to know more in 10 years, we're going to explore the boundaries of science and, and learn more about the fundamental nature of reality and technology, and then, you know, principles of the universe in 20 years, 100 years, 1000 years. So that means that there are probably huge domains of technology and science that are currently outside of that of our own perspective. And it's very tempting, and a lot of people do when they usually they look back at the past, as you said, they look at it through the lens of our current understanding of technology. So it's as if everything in the past were that were the were the most superior man that has ever version of man that's ever existed, right? So therefore, everything in the past must be just a subset of what we know. And it's all explainable, and they can only be explainable within the context of what we know. And I just don't think that's the best way to look at it. I think I think we need to be a lot more open minded about the possibilities of what was going on in the past and consider that, and consider the possibility that some of those answers might lay outside of our current perspective and our current knowledge set. And that's why I think also if we, if we actually investigate them with that, with that possibility in mind, and we apply ourselves and apply our technology, we might actually learn something. And we, you know, we're starting to see that with some of the work that's been happening this year that I've been involved in this, this in depth analysis of these predynastic grant advisors, and they're just showing us these degrees of sophistication, and machining and precision that we just it's completely blowing people's minds all around the world. Like it's just doesn't, it's not certainly not possible to have been done by hand. And it's revealing all of these interesting possibilities about their function or how they were made. And we're learning stuff because we're being open minded about how, you know, investigating these things and what the possibilities could be.

Alex Ferrari 42:02
It's stuff I've seen in Egypt to where there's these quarries where there were obelisks left behind, unfinished, unfinished if you were they they were like started to be carved out. And even even like, hieroglyphs were on them. But they were, but they're being almost scooped out of the ground with your scoop marks. And people don't want how do you? How do you? How did you do and there's even if there's even cuts, like a laser cut, or a saw of some sort was cutting through it, and stopped. And then it made a bad cut went back. And you could see that like, how do you work with some of the toughest, you know, destroy the densest materials on the planet? Yeah, I mean, hardness. Yeah, exactly. So hard. That's harder than not harder than diamonds, but it's up there with diamonds. It's insane.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 42:57
Yeah. So that's one of the interesting things about a lot of the artifacts, particularly in Egypt, although this also applies to South America is that yeah, they use some of the most difficult stones, and track the most intractable mediums, if you like that are available, I mean, on the Mohs Scale of Hardness, you know, your fingernails like a two and a half and you know, copper is like a three and a half ions, four and a half steels five, five and a half, you have stones that are in the 6789 range, you know, that are being used and just seem to be no problem in terms of how they're machining diamonds, a 10 Diamond beings that are the toughest stuff out there. I think that's all that, you know, they might have synthesized something these days, that could be harder than diamond. I don't know. But yeah, you have, you know, you have all sorts of evidence that a cat is machining evidence, like you said, this soul cuts this tubular drills, there's evidence for very sophisticated forms of machining that isn't replicate, can't replicate, has never been replicated by any hand method, which is what they say, did all of this stuff. You have the scoop marks in the quarries, which is really interesting. And I have a long investigation, a few videos looking at it on my channel. It's that that stuff is, you know, the conventional explanation for is was pounding stones that is that they took these direct or dollar eyed balls, and they just pounded away at the granite and it's what leaves the scoop marks. And there's all sorts of problems with that theory. Not the least of which is that I think it's a this is like a logical conundrum that you see all over the place in the Orthodox story of ancient Egypt, but it's like, Well, okay, this is the most primitive method. Yet, this is the method you see on the most sophisticated and largest artifacts. It's like how can you correlate this to things like if this is the most primitive method of coring, literally pounding on granite with with another rock. Of course you do progress over time to where we do the wedge and chisel approach where we choose allowed divots in a line and we put wood in and water at and then hammer in these chisel try to split the stone and then you develop stronger materials. like steel and other chisels, where you can actually chisel in to the stone. And there's evidence for that sort of work to in that quarry. But the typically using the getting of little small pieces off these giant, giant, giant artifacts like the unfinished obelisk, which is 1200 tons. 1200 tonnes is the estimate for its mass, you know, but it's also the neck. Troy explained that with the most primitive coring myth is nonsense, plus, that there's all sorts of other inconsistencies with how those skid marks have formed. The fact that they run all the way down walls in a straight line and underneath and then up under the underside of these artifacts. And you wouldn't have these ridge lines in between the skirt marks, I mean, if you, you have a shift change, and the next guy comes along, after 10 hours of pounding, and he picks up the bowl and he starts panning, he's gonna pan down those ridges that are on the in between the skirt marks, I mean, that's where you're going to get the most traction and remove the most material. But that's not what we see. We see everything in the straight lines as if there was a tool that came down and did this in a straight line. We see evidence for articulation, like, like, they start straight in places and they just they they angle over. So you can imagine using like a backhoe arm, you want to use a backhoe, we'll see that you cut when you cut out straight it straight. But as you as you rotate from that fixed point of reference, the angle shifts on the line that you're cutting. And we see evidence for exactly that same sort of thing in the scoop marks that the angle changes as if as if that tool was was fixed in a certain spot. And then it was operating from there and as articulated. And then it was moved later. There's all these just very interesting.

Alex Ferrari 46:35
It goes on and on and on. There's there's a question want to ask you because I've been down to South America. I've been to Machu Picchu. I've been to Machu Picchu, to loom Koba, and you started looking at those structures. And they have they have echoes of ancient Egypt, no question within which was that that's another question How why there's so many pyramids around the world where these civilizations should have never ever had ever had some sort of communication. So there's that one big giant question. But there's some of these South American I think in my knowledge should know, Machu Picchu, and Machu Picchu and I would say Chichen Itza, and Machu Picchu where the stones almost look like they're out of molds. Because they are so there's this like one block and one block like in Egypt. You have a granite stone, granite stone, granite stone, and they're all similar shapes, if not almost exactly the same, give or take, give or take. But this is like apple, orange, banana. And they all seem to fit perfectly so perfectly together. Like they're puzzle pieces, that you can't even stick a piece of paper in between it. How in God's green earth did they do that back then?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 47:57
That is a very good question. And it's one I don't have an answer for. Because I'm as mystified by this as you are i. Yeah, you see. So you see with the megalithic work I think this is one of the indicators of of this sophistication. And you see a similar thing between Egypt in places like Peru, in the in the precision of the work. So in Egypt, you have almost straight lines and this almost linear megalithic work like you say there's a square lot of stuff is pretty square and certainly straight in the joinery. Very precise, you can't even see sometimes you can't see it, you certainly can't fit a razor blade in between it. You see the same type of precision in Peru, and there's this work in the Sacred Valley and a Machu Picchu. But there's no straight lines there. Like it's literally these curved features. And it's one of the mystifying things to me is like how you've got these giant stones as a place called Sacsayhuaman just above Cusco, and you have some of these stones that are 150 200 tons each, these giant hard forms of limestone, you have granite stones that are in the streets of Cusco that are that are multitone stones as well. And they just joined together perfectly, but they have these flowing joints versus this.

Alex Ferrari 49:08
Almost Dr. Seuss stuff

Ben Van Kerkwyk 49:09
Yeah, it's crazy. And it's not. And I've seen in some places, I've actually documented this a few times, where through earthquakes or other processes, the stones have separated. And you can tell like how they didn't just like make them look good on the surface. Like as if they were touching on the surface. That consistent joint surface actually goes the full depth of the stone, like if it goes all the way through that depth, which is incredibly difficult to make those mating surfaces match like that. So a lot of people speculate okay with these, these stones come out of a mold, are they are they somehow like a playdough or a toffee like substance that is part in place and then it sets we don't really have any evidence for that we don't have any process that can explain that. intuition tells you that like you'd look at it and go man because the only other ideas well, you know, there's somehow they're lifting the stone like they're looking at it and they're shaving a bit off it and they're working on it, then they put it back. Okay. And then it just back and forth. And you have to put it in and out 1000 times to get it even close how and how heavy are these stones? Stones are like couple 100 tons. I mean, it's actually one one they are they massive. And certainly multitone times isn't none of this is easy like this is, it's really funny actually it got to Egypt and South American, they're restoring a lot of these sites like cognac and entiende is literally like a two or three ton piece of a statue that, that that will lift it, they had to move at Egypt. And you just you can see how difficult that is how much they had to wrap it in these massive big, strong cables and then the winch and the machine they needed to lift it and stuff. It's just it tells you gives you an idea that this this it's difficult for us to do today a lot of this work, but it seems to have been just much easier for people in the past because they did it endlessly. South America or Egypt, whatever. It's just yeah, when people have very little appreciation for just how difficult some of these tasks are because they haven't done it themselves or haven't seen how difficult it is for us to do and move things around like that that are you know, multitone objects. It's funny shapes and stuff. It's crazy. But yeah, look, I don't know the South American stuff is fantastic. There are it's there is a crossover there. So you do get you do in some places in Egypt. You have some of these these these flowing lines in some places and in some places in South America, you have straight lines and

Alex Ferrari 51:25
Yeah, Chichen Itza is pretty to my recollection of it. It's pretty all the blocks are similar sides. They're not all crazy.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 51:34
No flowing. Yeah. Well, I mean, the quarry cancer in in Peru. Cusco is giant megalithic structure. That's a of course it's a Catholic church today, but it's in. It's in the center of Cusco. And it's it's origins of megalithic 100% But it's much more straight. There's a lot of straight lines in there. In terms of it's very, very similar to Egypt. But then you get into the streets Cusco and you know, they have this megalithic buildings and that is flowing lines these green granite walls just insane. It's just beautiful. Cusco is such an amazing place. So if people haven't been you should go because it's super unique. Like there's literally nowhere else in the world that I know of. Where you have these architectural stalls stacked up on each other like this. You haven't megalithic which we got we don't know how old this is. I think it's it all gets attributed to the inker in the mainstream store. I think this is far older than that because you have the megalithic style then you have Inca building, which is very rough and very primitive like local small cobbles, and you know, mud mortar and things. Then you have Colonial Spanish on top of that, then you have modern and this is you just walk around the streets in the center of Cusco and it's just all stacked up on top of each other everywhere you look. It's it's actually it's it's unique and it's amazing.

Alex Ferrari 52:49
Have you ever heard of Coral Castle?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 52:52
Yes, I have.

Alex Ferrari 52:53
So have you been to Coral Castle?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 52:55
I have not.

Alex Ferrari 52:56
So I'm from South Florida. So I've been there multiple times. And for everyone who doesn't know about Coral Castle, please google Coral Castle in in South Florida because it is megalithic construction in the 50s

Ben Van Kerkwyk 53:13
Yeah. And Edward Leedskalnin

Alex Ferrari 53:16
That's right. Yeah, that was his name. Yes. And he was moving around coral rocks.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 53:22
It's limestone it's a form of limestone.

Alex Ferrari 53:25
Yeah, and it's everywhere down itself. Let me get to my Coral Gables is called Coral Gables is because it was built on the on the foundation of this these rocks. But but he built an entire like town like a little town and giant table up two storey buildings and a five ton door that was perfectly aligned. So he could Oh, you have to with one finger you can move it. And he said when people and he did it by himself

Ben Van Kerkwyk 53:54
Very secretive guy. Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 53:56
And he said, How do you do because I learned the secrets of how they built the pyramids. That's all he would say.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 54:01
Yeah, well, I have a different opinion. Amazing Coral Castle, it is look into it. Look, that was that was one thing I would say about this is least Scallon was. I mean, a savant in this space like he spent in it was his life's work like obviously his passion. He's it's a tremendous achievement any way you cut it. However, there is footage that's emerged, I think, in the last few years that I've seen of him using mass blocking tackles and massive iframes which contain which had no problem lifting the sort of weights that we're talking about. I don't think it's as mysterious as some people put it. That's all I'd say about I don't want to take away from the achievement. It's an incredible achievement. Right. But I don't think it's like people show pictures of his workshop and think he was using some sort of magical Tesla Energy and all this other stuff. I don't think that's what's going on. I think he was he was very dedicated, very hardworking, very secretive and enigmatic, and his answers and stuff, but there is Some footage, you can see him using kind of modern materials and tools to do it. But but, you know, it's a life of lifetime of work. And he's very skilled. And I mean, it's I do want to go see it at some point, I've not had the chance.

Alex Ferrari 55:14
It's pretty remark. It's a pretty remarkable

Ben Van Kerkwyk 55:16
My opinion on it. Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 55:17
Yeah.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 55:18
It's remarkable. But I don't think it's like a natural serious as some people make it out to be right. And

Alex Ferrari 55:24
I'd have to agree with you. I think when you're there, and you start looking at things, and maybe you're trained, I would look at it a little bit differently than mine. But I was there. I've been there probably half a dozen times in my life, and I've really just been fat. I mean, you're fascinated with it when you're there. But when you see the construction of some stuff that he was able to do. I mean, there's a castle, like there's like a two storey castle that he carved out or did something with every hurricane that's hit Florida.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 55:51
Now, that's not going anywhere. Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 55:52
It does nothing like in every category six characters doesn't matter. It just sits there. And it doesn't even think about it.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 56:00
Well, that's, that's sorry. That's the reason why I mean, that people's I want in a pyramid zone and build stuff out of other materials. And like, well, if you want something to last, make it out of stone.

Alex Ferrari 56:09
Hearthstone, on top of that Hearthstone, that's gonna, that's not gonna wear down in five years. Yeah, that's the thing, like a lot of the stuff that we have built today. I mean, if we left the earth today, if we just for whatever reason, humans just left the earth today. What do we got? 1000 years maybe before everything starts turning to dust.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 56:28
Couple things. Give it a couple 1000 use? It's nothing.

Alex Ferrari 56:31
Yeah, like, I mean, the nature will take it over. There was a show. I don't know if you ever saw this show in History Channel. You're not sure I'm talking about like it left. And they would just kind of, they would just take a new city around the world and the episode and just say, after 500 years after 1000 years, the one that really got me the structure that we have built humans have built that will last the longest will before it goes is the Hoover Dam. Yeah. Which I which I was just at the Hoover Dam, like like a few weeks ago on and you sit there and going oh, wow. Like the last place to lose power will be Vegas. Because hydroelectric until they finally they finally cracked them. So yeah. Without maintenance, they'll eventually pop. Yeah, but the machine that they said would take off hundreds if not a long time before it actually before it actually breaks.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 57:24
Yeah, I mean, that's it's interesting, right? I love that theory. Like so say we have a civilization ended we go away like you said, it's Yeah, mean metal and cities. That's all gone with 1002. There's no problem like nothing remains without a catalyst without and without a cataclysm without a catalyst. Just assuming we just leave. Yeah. And all the people are going yeah, it's done. And then yeah, you have the Hoover Dam. I mean, you've got Mount Rushmore that would erode eventually, but you might, people might see that 1000s of years in the future. And because I think it's granite, you know, they're looking at and going, oh, man, these are the gods on the gods on this carved into this mountain. You know, you've got I love this idea. Like, yeah, the Hoover Dam. And then you'd have you'd have some trace of places like the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal. Yeah, there'll be there'll be little things left. Yeah, well, I just those are huge construction project. I think I can imagine an argument in the future like imagine so okay, we go 1000s of years past some other civilization, they rise, and they have their archaeologists and they're digging up the bones of our civilization. There's probably a bunch of people on whatever the version of the internet is the future making this case of like, these people were advanced. They dam they dug a trench between the oceans and then you've got all the mainstream archaeology again. That's no, this is just natural, this is nothing.

Alex Ferrari 58:39
And then people know

Ben Van Kerkwyk 58:40
The evidence is there look at it like this is a straight line between this.

Alex Ferrari 58:44
And then they look at Mount Rushmore, and it really, he barely can see the features. But there's something there that it looks like the human face. Obviously, that's not natural, that's natural. Well,

Ben Van Kerkwyk 58:55
The Hoover Dam is just like a ceremonial space. It was like they built this but it was just so they could worship their gods and they could stand on it and see the stars like that's why they made the technological at all and I had no function because they were just basic simple people

Alex Ferrari 59:10
But what's really fascinating about that this conversation right now is if you started looking at the lens of how another civilization will look at our civilization and argue about things that for you and I are just like, No, that's obviously the Hoover Dam. Obviously, this is a phone, obviously, because we have context. That's right. But you I mean, you bring up you know, a native from a from the Amazon has never seen that, you know, a white man before and you throw me to Vegas. They're gonna be like, You know what, like, they really want it it's essentially another planet so it's all about it's all about context.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 59:47
Yeah, I mean, even if we look even if we survive, like you say we have a cataclysm, but it's a civilization ending cataclysm. We are blasted back to the Stone Age, which is what I think happened to us in the past. Graham Hancock causes of speed He says with amnesia, and it's a great, it's a great way. Because, you know, we have this echoes of the past that come down through these origin stories and these tales and these myths and legends. But say we do survive this, but we're not back into basically a hunter gatherer lifestyle. Within a couple generations, things like plasma TVs and cell phones are going to be these campfire stories, they gotta be, you know, you might find that people have this memory of it. So they so they find Black Rocks, maybe they get some themselves some obsidian, they polish it up, and they shape it up to look kind of like this, and they dance around the fire with it, and try to activate it through ceremony and, you know, and ritual. And I genuinely think that's a lot of what's happened. And when we look at dynastic Egypt, I think they inherited stuff like that they probably had a cultural connection to the precursor civilization, they got a lot from them, they got knowledge and information, but they just didn't have any capability to use it or the context to understand it. So it all became ceremonial, like these sites became ceremonial sites, in the same way that we might go into the cities if we were hunter gatherers, or the Hoover Dam, places like that, and start to worship them. And then our, if we as we grow in the kings, and our warlords, and our people emerge, like I'm gonna write my name on this, this is mine. Now, look, this is this is this is my site, and my name is on this now. And so therefore, I made it and 1000s of years later, that's, that's how we'd look at and say, well, that guy's names on it. He must have built it. He must, it must be man made for him. And that's exactly what we do. That's exactly because we look at the ruins in the mega list of the past and the statues and stuff. And when if there's, if there's a dude's name on it, like then he had it built, for sure. He had a bill. That's, that's how Egyptology works. That's the name. And there's lots of contradictions there too. Like some some artifacts have three or four or five different names on them. Over

Alex Ferrari 1:01:47
A new guy, a new guy came up, he's like, Oh, that's fine. I did that.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:01:51
Yeah, Randy is a sec is notorious for this like Petri called him the great usurper, he would literally erase people's names and dig his own name in really deeply. And, you know, you can think about it with these artifacts. I like the idea that, you know, these vases, these little these precision vases that come from pre dynastic times, like a lot of them are in private collection. Imagine there's some rich private collector that builds himself a mausoleum, and he wants to be buried with his vases. Today, in today's time, yeah. But then we dig him up in the future. 1000 4000 years later, 5000 years later, and he's found with these artifacts, he's like, Well, he obviously he had these made. That's, that's what we do. That's how we look at that. It's and it's, we have no idea whether he had the made or not. And in this case, no, no, those things are probably 10 or 15,000, or 5000 years old already, when they were buried with them. I think that's entirely the case, we should be considering that possibility. When we look at the bones of some of these ancient civilizations like Egypt, that have all these contradictions in them.

Alex Ferrari 1:02:49
And you know, you were saying something about knowledge that, you know, they, you know, like the Incas and the Maya and the Egyptians, they were gifted with some knowledge, and then kind of tried to build upon that. But just in our short, let's just say, 2000 years, okay, let's say, in the last 2000 years or so, how much knowledge has been lost along the way? I mean, the farther back you go, it gets thinner and thinner. You know, but like, look how much information we have right now. I mean, we have a lot of knowledge and information about the way the world works to undermine our understanding that this point, at least, the way the world works, but things like the Vedic text, things like of God, the Alexandria, and then let's not even go into what we lost with the Mayans, when the Spanish burned everything, I mean, terrible. Yeah, exactly. So there's so much knowledge that has been but if everything goes away, all this knowledge goes away. And if a new human is born without another human to teach them, imagine it was you and I were the last two dudes. And there's like a new a new group of people who've never heard were the only ones that know anything about anything. And people are like, we're trying to explain to them, the internet, we're trying to explain to them basic knowledge, through story through story. You wouldn't be we wouldn't be gods, essentially,

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:04:09
You would be and you would probably and that's exactly kind of, I mean, this is a good description of how knowledge is actually passed down before we had like writing and ways of storing it through oral tales and legends. And it's, you know, we, that's, that's what ends up is the origin stories and ends up being put in books. It's the stories that are it's an interesting analysis, like when you look at Vaughn Deshawn, like books, like Hamlet's mill that show you that there's this astronomical data encoded in these legends meta from Norse to like, you know, Inuit traditions, South American traditions like the even our stuff, the Middle Eastern religions. There's all this data that is similar across them, but they're they're tied up in these stories and these myths and legends the same thing, I think with with recollections of events, it's not you don't just tell people here's the data like Oh, In this year, this hap like, like, the sky fell, or like, you know, the planets move like this, that data gets wrapped up in these interesting stories. And there's data, you know, there's, there's figures are created and stories and deified and there's all this information to make it entertaining and make it memorable. And then that's passed down generation to generation through time. That's how that knowledge is kind of preserved. So when we look at origin stories, and some of the myths and legends from the past, you have to understand, okay, you got to sift through the, the embellishment of this and try to get to the core of what is the seed or the truth or the the, you know, the, the part of this that is probably true at its core. And there's a lot of that going on, like we you know, science, more than we'd like to think I think, in science had a bit of an overcorrection with the age of reason, right? Because if you go back before the age of reason, and the rise of science, the literally the explanation for our past and our history, and our place on the planet was biblical, like it was the religions like it's this, it's a 6000 year story. You know, it's the giant floods, it's this cataclysmic story. And that's, you know, that's just take Christianity for for the purpose of this. And then science comes in and says, Okay, no, we actually want to get away from the cataclysm, ducted catastrophism and the cataclysmic nature of religious stories and things like that. And they kind of overcorrected and shifted, and they just just wrote off everything that's included in those in those origins and religions. And the truth somewhere in the middle now, I think we're starting to swing back the other way, which like, okay, they might, you know, does erosion and gradualism, and can we explain stuff through, and the world as it is, through these, you know, through through these gentle sort of processes we see acting on the ground today in terms of geology? Yeah, a lot of it, we can, but there's also other features that are showing us the truth of some of the cataclysm that was maybe contained in these origins, stories and religions. And it were coming back a little bit, but there was a huge overcorrection for a long period of time that we would just dismiss this, this history that we was contained in these origin stories. When I think in reality, there's some grains of truth that are there that, you know, if we pay attention to it, we can, we can find them. By that, I mean, no doubt, endless amounts of knowledge has been lost. I mean, that's the people know about the fire of the Library of Alexandria. But you know, there was literally dozens and dozens of events like that, where we had other repositories of knowledge that went up in flames. That was just one.

Alex Ferrari 1:07:29
And there's, of course, the archives of the Vatican right now who has

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:07:34
Hidden knowledge is is another thing. Yes. 100% is what it was to be able to go there and read everything. Well, you mean, it's probably all in Latin, but a lot of it's probably in other languages and Aramaic and things. But it'd be interesting to know what's in the official.

Alex Ferrari 1:07:48
Well, I mean, look, when I went into the Vatican Museum and you just walking around, like, how much did they steal? I mean, they steal so much. It's obscene. How much stuff is in the Vatican Museum, it's one of the greatest museums have ever walked into. Yeah, in the sense of just the scope of the collection. But as I'm walking through it, I'm like, This is literally 2000 years of raping and pillaging of, of all of these artifacts and knowledge and books and, and stories that they're like, no, no, we can't this can't get out. Let's just put that in. It's very Indiana Jones esque.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:08:21
All for sure. No, I think there's a lot of truth to that. I you know, it's, it's funny, you know, there is if you get approved, it's a weird thing about the Vatican archives that I've heard, like, assuming you even get approved to be on the list to even request access to it. You kind of have to be specific about what you want. So you almost need to kind of have an idea about what's in there before you can even get right like there's no there's no one gets, I don't know. Well, that's the thing. Yeah, you got to have an understanding of a historical document that might be in there. And then get approved to say, Oh, I'm interested in this if you've got it kind of thing, but that no one ever gets approved to just I just want to see what's in there. No, no, no, no, that's not that's not happening. Yeah, I don't know. Man. This is definitely I think, a case to be made for a lot of like hidden knowledge and, and stuff that is is here. It's in very select hands. And that comes to us from the dim dark distant past. I mean, a few bits and pieces get out here and there that are really interesting to me. I'm I've even been fascinated by ancient maps. I mean, I think there's a lot of data encoded in ancient maps, that are typically the ancient maps that we have withdrawn from even more ancient source maps that were that are all lost, but they show massive sophistication. And the fact that we knew where Antarctica was in Australia was well before these were supposedly discovered in our time. They're able to do things like map longitude, very accurately, which is not something we were able to do until, like the turn of the 19th century James Cook's second voyage of discovery it we've got language, meaning it requires sophisticated timepieces to measure longitude and now navigate with longitude, which we weren't able to do until around 1800. But you go back 1000s of years before that, and there's evidence that they were very capable of doing longitude accurately. You know, you've got the coastline of Antarctica, what's beneath the ice today is very accurately represented on some of these maps stuff like this. This is crazy, very, very interesting datasets that can be found with analysis of ancient maps.

Alex Ferrari 1:10:23
When do you think Antarctica was not under ice?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:10:26
Depends on what part of it you're talking about? There's and I'm not. This is not an area that I'm particularly knowledgeable on? For? Sure. I mean, we have we do have glacial records of ice? Well, we can we can drill down to bedrock to go back like three 400,000 years. Some of the I think the ice core records off the top of my head, I might be wrong. But I think some of the, the ice core samples do go back around 400,000 years. So we know there's been ice being laid down for at least that long, in some areas. But in some areas, right. And some may not at all. I mean, that's the thing you see on some of these maps, that that you know, John Hapgood was, was the guy who exposed that the fact that the payrise map depicts accurately depicts the coastline of Queen moldes land on Antarctica. But not only that, it shows rivers and mountains and, you know, territory like this. And then that was that was actually confirmed by, you know, an Air Force reconnaissance Reconnaissance Squadron and these literally guys that spend their lifetime looking at maps and analyzing maps, and they did the comparison. And like, the only conclusion is that yes, this is the coast of Antarctica, that it shows, you know, what's beneath the ice. And this was confirmed by like sonar readings, because today there's ice on top of it. And they use the sonar and rate, I guess, right out techniques or whatever to actually look at the the land and the guy. Yep, this actually matches matches what's on this map. And the payrise maps made by a more purees, I think, in the 1500s that he actually says and writes on there that no no, he most of it, he built from more ancient source maps that are all gone. Now. We don't know how old they are, where they came from, they're probably copies of copies of older stuff, too. But yeah, I mean, it's so I don't know, I mean, I, you know, I that 400,000 years is actually not out of the realm of possibility to me, because one of the other things that's happened in the last 20 years is that we know that the human race has gotten older and older. I mean, you go back, you I mean, obviously, the biblical version is we're 6000 years old, and obviously, and obviously, and then it was for a long time, as long as it was suspected to be around 50,000 years. And then it was, we found some after the advent of like C 14, radiocarbon dating, I think there was some remains found in Ethiopia that put us at around 190,000 years, that was the oldest thing in the fossil record, then, not that long ago, they found some remains in Morocco, that put us back to around 300,000 years. That was the oldest of jawbone that put that was the oldest thing in the fossil record. That still is, I think, the oldest thing in the fossil record. But now we've got DNA evidence and statistical studies into things like teeth morphology, when we can look at like when we split from a common ancestor, like Neanderthals and us being cousins, we split from a common ancestor. And we can look at kind of our genetic past and DNA. And both the teeth morphology studies, and the DNA studies put us in the eight to 900,000 year range. So I think let's set it up a round number and upper limit of around a million years old as a species. So all of a sudden, you know, Antarctica, being free of ice 400,000 years ago, isn't out of the realm of possibility for humans, and not only humans, but you know, where the last humans left, like there's other Neanderthals Denisovans, all these other versions of essentially homosapiens that, you know, we don't know much about Neanderthals, bigger brains than we had, who knows how civilized they might have gotten given time and place and an energy and enough food to eat nice weather. We used to think they couldn't speak. And of course, speech is vital for civilization and for developing abstract concepts and communication. I think that I think the nomenclature that's changed now we do think that they could speak. So maybe they had language, maybe they had communication like this. We just don't know. And I think these are all possibilities. And some of those species go back millions of years.

Alex Ferrari 1:14:25
Do you think that ours our civilizations have been built and wiped out built and wiped out built and wiped out and started from scratch, this kind of cycling system has been around for much longer than we even can even conceive? Maybe even 100 or 200, or possibly even longer? I'm not saying that 500,000 years ago that we were advanced civilizations, right? Hey, as we've been discussing, maybe we were and all the information was lost because there's no way that Any of that stuff would have made it this long. So it's a fascinating intellectual exercise in your head. But it seems to me that there's definitely a lot that we still don't know.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:15:13
For sure. 100% that we that's, and that's I think the eye. I tried to say that I mean, I don't speculate a lot. And I'd like to say, I don't know when I don't know, I think that's what's missing a lot from let's just say that the the mainstream version of history and I think to some extent, that's, that's a that's a product of the rise of the alternative authors and theories that are coming from guys like Graham Hancock, and Bo vile. And John Anthony West, these guys, I think that the response and the popularity of that, and it has led to a much more authoritarian response from the academics who see who see themselves as owning the field, like they think, Well, I'm the gatekeeper of history, I tell you what the history is, and what the history of civilization is, you know, because back in the day, in the Victorian times, when when this discussion was contained to these academic halls of residence, I mean, they were, and you can read it when you read the works of those people. And I have, and it's, you know, they knew when they there was something they didn't know, they were open about, like, well, we don't know. I mean, like Flinders Peter was like, he couldn't explain some of the things he was finding from an engineering perspective. He's like, I don't know. But today, I think because you've got there's a popularity of these of, you know, in the rise of this, I guess, the ultimate history field, you have a much more authoritarian response from the academics, and they're much more likely to say, No, we know the answer, then they're not going to say, I don't know, when I think the reality is that they don't know. And I think that would be better. If we all came to a middle ground of we don't know, let's investigate it with an open mind. In terms of the cycles of civilization. And this is an interesting point, because I think this is one of the most one of the reasons why this is a very important field. And a very important discussion and an investigation is Yeah, I mean, I would say, I think we've been through at least one cycle. You know, I think at least there's evidence for at least one and there may be more, we could have been through a cycle of civilization to Cataclysm and then back again, more than once, but for sure, I think there's evidence for at least once, one decent one where it's like, okay, we were pretty advanced. We got knocked back down to Stone Age, essentially, hunter gatherer lifestyles. And now we've what we termed modern history, our own history, the last six 7000 years. That's our rise from that, from that event. Now, there might have been precipitated by 10, or 15, or 20, or however many 10,000 10s of 1000s of years of just survival mode for humanity, where we're very primitive. I don't know when that fall took place, it could have been, it could have been the Younger Dryas. But it could have also been events that preceded it. And there were many there were we know, there were events preceding that the bowling alley road, there's all sorts of climate upheavals if you go back further in time, but it's an important discussion, because I think I think if we, if if more people understood that this was the cycle that this, that where, you know, our civilization as advanced as we are, isn't the only way of doing it. I think a lot of people we, at some level, you get taught in school. This is civilization, like this is what it means to be a modern human, like we went from the Stone Age to the space shuttle in his 6000 year period, it's almost linear straight path. I mean, it's not obviously not linear. But, you know, we've gone from stone age to spatial and 6000 years, this is what it means to be an advanced civilization. So the only way that civilization is done is the way that we've done it. And you can just put out your mind that there are other alternatives or other possibilities. And so we just go on with our daily lives. And that's just a fundamental tenant of what it means to be a modern human. Now, I think if you if you taught a different message, in schools, if we understood that, no, in fact, rather than this linear path, we're on this, we're on this cycle between civilization and cataclysm. And there are other ways of doing civilization. There are other technologies. There's other ways of living, there's other. You know, there's other there's other possibilities. And on a long enough time scale, we're coming back around to this to this cataclysm part, and that it will end like there is a definite risk of it ending. I think it could help to change our priorities as a species like because you know, people don't think about that sort of long term future. It's just like, what's the next quarterly, quarterly results in the next political or election cycle or whatever. So you know, we're not thinking long term. I'd like to think if you could have this as this change in the zeitgeist word about what it means to be a modern human and this place on this cycle. It might help us in the long term to change our priorities, and spend a little less money on time It's a little bit more money on space exploration, solving some of the longer term problems that face us as a species. And I actually think there's precedent for this too for that for this type of ground shift in awareness, and a new topic and a new awareness, changing our behavior. And the, the example I'd like to use is climate change. Now, whether or not whether you agree with it or not, I mean, it's no doubt politicized. And it's a controversial topic for a lot of people. But my point is, is that in the last 20, or 30 years like that, that word, there's what that what the word climate change means, has has shifted and changed. And it's undeniable that it's changing our behavior, it changes our investment decision that changes our interactions with each other, it changes how we interact with the planet, it changes our behavior. And that's all because this this, there's a it's been a shift in awareness that's happening in the zeitgeist of humanity. It's a new idea that's coming in. And it's altered our behavior in fundamental ways, similar to the internet, and things like that. And I just as altruistic as it is, I do think that if we understood our past, and we taught this at a fundamental level that that we're on this cycle, that it could actually have a similar effect, it could alter our behavior. And I think that's why I think this whole discussion is an important one. And finding out the truth about our history is, is not just an academic exercise, it's actually important for our future.

Alex Ferrari 1:21:24
What is your opinion, of the impact of these kinds of conversations, to our understanding of spiritual, our spiritual side, our spiritual understanding of the grand scheme of why we're even here? Where we have been, where we're going? What is the purpose of this giant video game that we're all playing? You know, you and I are both Mario and Luigi, just trying to save a princess from Donkey Kong, essentially. Yeah. So what is all these conversations are fascinating and intriguing intellectually, but on a spiritual standpoint, what can this do? Or what is this doing these conversations doing for our spirituality?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:22:05
Well, I think it's, it's, it's helping to connect us to it, I would suspect, I think that this is a huge, a huge part in that in that. I mean, there's no doubt been a it's been a disconnection from spirit and from spirituality in our modern civilization, like we've gotten further and further from that type of thing. Although there is does seem to be a renaissance in those concepts and modern shamanism, if you will. And I and I think this exposure to this discussion, and certainly the deeper you get into it, I think the more those elements of it come out like this, there's a huge spiritual connection you find in these ancient cultures and civilizations, the way they operated, were the only were a little different in our civilization, in that we seem to be deliberately shifting away from that, and only valuing this kind of, you know, alert, problem solving states of consciousness, and there's other there's other benefits that come from other states of consciousness that almost every other culture and, and civilization seems to have, have recognized and, and spent some effort developing and looking into, we're a bit different from that. I think, I also think that just personally speaking, that the, I think these types of investigations and this path to trying to find the answer, I think that is part of a spiritual journey, as well, like, you know, being on the path kind of thing, like, finding meaning in your life and finding meaning in your pursuits and in your interests. I think that for a lot of people, this type of a discussion, and these topics, help to serve, to fill that role, because we as I, like, I believe we're spiritual beings as well, we're not just meeting meat and bone, and flesh and, you know, we, we need to find purpose, human beings need something to do, they need to find purpose, if you if you are purposeless, you know, you're not generally very happy, it's not a, it's not a great place to be. And it's hard to find purpose in some of the modern in the modern world, it's, it can be a real challenge for a lot of people. And I think a lot of the distractions, and the business might meet personally speaking with this, I think the distractions and the entertainment and the things that are thrown at you, as you know, just to fill that void in the modern world, celebrity culture and consumerism and things like this, that don't really give you purpose. You know, and and I think a lot of the purpose that we're fed when we go through the education system that sets us up to be this cog in a machine and teaches us consumerism and to get the next thing and to make more money and to just climb the corporate ladder and be a good worker be all these sort of things in ultimately don't really tick tick that box when it comes to purpose and in fact, can be a little destructive. I mean, there's lots of, obviously lots of destructive elements about our society as nice as it is in the West, at least in the first world countries to have. You know, the minute I do believe that it is the best time to be alive still. I I hold that opinion, like, I'm not naive enough to think that hot water and you know, plumbing and the internet's not a good thing. It makes life convenient. But it's, it's in a lot of ways antithetical to finding purpose and achieving something. I mean, that's just, I think that's part of that sort of journey. And for me, at least, and I think for a lot of people, these conversations and this topic helped to fill that because I really do think there's something to being on the path and to try and to get to these answers whether we ever get to them or not, that's not the important part. It's about being on that on that path. And trying to seek that knowledge and, and to understand it.

Alex Ferrari 1:25:33
Now, I'm going to ask you a few questions, ask all my guests because I can't talk to you for another four or five hours. And you will definitely come back on the show, because I haven't, we haven't even touched ancient India, or Japan or China or all these other sites that I would love to talk to you about

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:25:49
Calissaso caves, check them out.

Alex Ferrari 1:25:51
I mean, they're insane. It's there's so much stuff about. So there's tons and tons of we'll have you back without question. But these are questions ask all my guests. How do you define? What is your definition of living a fulfilled life?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:26:06
A definition of living a fulfilled life. Well, we just kind of touched on I think it's finding purpose, I think finding purpose is about the most you can hope for I mean, you and this is beyond. I mean, we all know that look, you have to tick the basic boxes of like food, shelter, you know, the physiological needs of what it means to be human. But beyond that, as a as complex sort of thinking animals, what we are finding purpose, I think is, is about all you can ask, in terms of fulfillment and finding life and at least for me, that's how that's how that's how I see it.

Alex Ferrari 1:26:42
If you could go back in time and speak to a little Ben what advice would you give him?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:26:47
Like, cheer up! It'll be okay. Depends how little we're talking. But then

Alex Ferrari 1:26:50
Five year old, five year old

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:26:53
Man, I barely remember that that guy. Yeah, yeah. Don't take don't take things too. Seriously. would probably be a good one, though.

Alex Ferrari 1:27:03
How do you define God or Source?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:27:06
The universe. Nature. I think I mean, that would be about it. I'd look I do. Yeah, it's hard to. To think that this everything is a giant cosmic accident. I'd say that

Alex Ferrari 1:27:18
Right. Yeah. But regardless if you don't believe

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:27:21
Sources or thing Yeah, I think that's the universe. Like we're expressions of it. In a lot of ways, and

Alex Ferrari 1:27:27
What is the ultimate purpose of life?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:27:30
If you don't you ask the easy questions. ultimate purpose of life, to be lived, as well, I'd say that's what it's for, to be appreciated to be lived. It's a gift I do, I genuinely believe that like, to be born into human body. And to and to have the privilege and experience of life and it looks, you know, and for you know, it can be miserable for a lot of people and short, nasty, but if you if that's not your experience, it's a real privilege. And it should be lived and not wasted.

Alex Ferrari 1:28:04
And where can people find out more about you and the amazing work you're doing?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:28:08
Thank you. Yeah, Unchartedx.com is the main place I publish all my videos are there obviously on YouTube, it's youtube.com/c/Unchartedx I also stream live on Twitch a couple times a week. You can find all those details genuinely below my videos as well as my social medias, Twitter's and Instagrams and things like that.

Alex Ferrari 1:28:24
And do you have any parting messages for the audience?

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:28:29
I could keep an open mind dig into the stuff keep an open mind. And yeah, that would be that would be the main thing is is like just keep an open mind about this stuff. As I tried to and not be fixed in your ideas like I I've, you know, my opinions change data, new data can always change can change what we know the next the next the next spadeful of dirt from the archaeologists might completely change our perspective on history. We don't know so I try to keep try to keep an open mind.

Alex Ferrari 1:28:56
Stay curious, as they say stay curious. It has been a pleasure talking to you, man. I look forward to our next conversation. Thank you for the fighting the good fight.

Ben Van Kerkwyk 1:29:04
Thanks, Alex. Good to talk to you man.