Luke Caverns - LIDAR Is Revealing Ancient Cities the Amazon Was Hiding | The Basement Trailer

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]I'm running a project right now that I I guess I'm announcing it right here for the first time. Today we're talking with Luke Caverns. When he was seven, he got obsessed with the Trojan War. That seven-year-old survived the wedgies and became an anthropologist and explorer.

[00:00:12]He's flagged over 100 sites that don't appear on any map. Now he's using lidar to rediscover ancient mega cities in the Amazon and the highways that connect them. Alexander, I mean, probably the most exceptional person that lived in the ancient world. Like he essentially pushes the Persian Empire all the way back to Babylon. They don't have Anatolia anymore. And then he moves down to Egypt and he never and he never loses. He never loses Never loses a battle.

[00:00:36]>> Right. The Egyptians know that they have no standing army. They're not going to be able to stop Alexander from coming in. So Alexander, to become officially Pharaoh of Egypt, they have to make this pilgrimage to the Siwa Oasis. And he meets with the Oracle of Zeus-Amun. And so this Oracle goes and performs this ritual or whatever where they where they become overcome with the presence of this god and they come out and they essentially give this confirmation to Alexander and to the Egyptians.

[00:01:04]He is the literal or adoptive son of Zeus-Amun. So Alexander in that moment becomes a god. So they're collecting this massive archive of of all the known literature of the ancient world and You mentioned that it's more than a library cuz it was it was kind of like DARPA back then. Experiments in science and all kinds of ex- things going on. So Alexandria is like this amazing beacon.

[00:01:29]And uh so Ptolemy I, he's the one that really expands Alexandria. He gets the um We don't actually know when the light when the uh when the library, the Mouseion, and the lighthouse were done with their construction. But Ptolemy II, they are complete during during his lifetime. And then Ptolemy III is born and they're just constantly expanding Egypt's wealth during this time period.

[00:01:51]Egypt is filthy rich now. The Olmecs, they emerge on the archaeological timeline as a fully fledged and organized civilization. From the very beginning, the civilization is formed.

[00:02:03]We don't have a formation period. That's very strange. We don't have any evidence of anything that's in any sort of formative period at all whatsoever before these heads arrive. And you have to keep in mind the Aztecs, the height of their their empire is 3,000 years later. At the height of Minoan power, this island of this island of a hundred palaces or a hundred cities, >> [music] >> far more wealthy and well-to-do per person, you know, on a one-to-one scale than the than the rest of the ancient world, around the year 1650 BC, Akrotiri starts having these earthquakes that are going [music] off. They ultimately decide that that this this island that they're living on in Santorini Akrotiri, they can't live here anymore. The buildings are shaking, they're falling apart. It must have been so bad because every single person, not an elderly person, not a child, was left behind.

[00:02:59]Not an animal. Not an animal, not a pet, not nothing. Every living thing on the entire island [music] of Akrotiri was evacuated.

[00:03:10]And shortly after that, the entire sky over Crete just completely turned black.

[00:03:15]The fourth largest volcanic eruption in the history of planet Earth just erupted from the core of the island of Santorini. It's funny like in our modern-day culture, we hold Plato and Solon's word as being biblical, but it's like, okay, well, let's let's be real.

[00:03:31]Like it it could just be wrong. Even if he is really drawing on something important, he is telling an allegory that is all about the consequences of greed. I I It's just ironic that um, you know, people run with the story of Atlantis just to make money sometimes and ignore like all the actual evidence.

[00:03:51]And it's like exactly the opposite of the of why Plato even brought the story up to begin with.