Welcome to Mind Escape. Are you ready?
Are you ready to escape your mind?
All right, folks, welcome back to Mind Escape.
I am your host, Mike. It's been a little bit, you
know, it's been a few months. I apologize about that.
Life comes up, had a quick vacation, work stuff, you know,
things pop up. But we're back in action here.
And I'm joined by friend of the show Laura Taboni, who runs the
Megalith Hunter channel on YouTube.
Please go check that out. And you change your name on
Instagram. What's the name on Instagram
now? Mediterranean Mystique.
Mediterranean Mystique, I like that one too.
I couldn't find you for a second on on Instagram.
I was like, where what, what happened to?
Did she take her? And then I'm like, Oh no, she
just changed the name a little bit.
But yeah, go check those out if you're looking for masters of
rhetoric. I have pulled it down from all
the Mind Escape stuff because I'm just creating it as a
separate entity. There is a Masters of Rhetoric
YouTube channel that's separate now.
There's also a Instagram page and a Twitter or X page.
You can go check those out. And I will be uploading episodes
bi weekly. The first one's already up
there. I kind of tweaked things a
little bit as well. And again, the best way to
support Mind Escape is just to click the link tree link and
we've got everything on there. So go check that out.
But without further ado, welcome back on Laura.
How are you? Hi Mike, thanks for having me
back. I'm good thank you.
Also haven't been doing too many videos lately but I'm trying to
make more effort now. I did change my Instagram name,
the reason being I've kind of run out of megaliths to post.
I wasn't travelling very much and I'd pretty much been to all
the ones where I live. So I thought when I do travel, I
take so many other pictures like Roman sites, all sorts medieval
castles. And I thought well, why don't I
make it into more of a travel Instagram.
So the focus of my YouTube is ancient history.
But I tried to make my Instagram into more of a Travel Channel
and focus mostly on the Mediterranean because I travel
around the Mediterranean a lot. But so that's why I call it
Mediterranean Mystique. I'm not sure it's working now.
The Christmas not great at the minute but that's the reason
behind that change so I can still be found there.
No, I, I like it. And like I said, I mean, things
come up. I know you've got a little one
now I've got a little one and you know, it's just life.
Stuff happens. And between that and, you know,
towards the end, before I took a little bit of a break here, I
did a cool episode with Sam Wolfe on, you know, philosophy
and psychedelics and things like that on his new book.
But even previous to that, I was doing more just like critiquing
other stuff and I didn't like where that was going.
I want to get back to just stuff I'm interested in and less focus
on other people and what they're doing and things like that,
because that's not really what Mind Escape was meant to be
anyways. And I've said my piece and all
that stuff. I know you kind of feel the
same. All the drama of the alternative
and fringe sciences and things like that.
And you know, it's fun. We'll continue to talk about
some of this stuff, but at the same time it's like, I think
just the drama is just so played out and doesn't get anybody
anywhere and it's just people making money pretty much.
Yeah, 100%. The the rage bait culture online
is kind of insane. And I think it's there in every,
every kind of sector, let's say. So you have it in alternative
history, but you have it everywhere.
I remember years ago seeing, and I'm sure they still do this, but
it was like some celebrity gossip thing.
And they were like saying, bring the tea, let's talk about
whatever this beauty Blogger said.
And then another beauty Blogger weighed in on the other beauty
Blogger drama. And I thought, do people
actually watch this? But then when I got into
YouTube, I realized it's there in every sector.
There's always drama. Yeah, you got to bring the tea.
If you want that money, you got to bring the tea.
But. We could change that, right,
start these arguments. Obviously the other side have to
respond because they don't want to just get trashed online.
So it turns into quite yeah. And then and then there's the
problem is there's never any resolution to it because when
people get their views from the rage, they're going to keep
raging and baiting and so that they make money.
So I do think it's a bit of a never ending cycle, but it's not
just. It's just exhausting, you know,
like every. Sphere.
Yeah, and, and everybody that I was critiquing kind of got a
little bit of a dose of karma without me even intervening at
all anyway, you know what I'm saying?
So it's like I can just watch it play out as opposed to
participating in it if I need, you know, that kind of a thing.
But yeah, I just. Let's talk about real research.
I mean, there's so much, actually.
The thing is, there's so many really interesting things so
going on in the world. So if we leave Atlantis alone
for a second or whatever else is being chatted about online, the
real research that's going on is always opening up really new
interesting chronologies. So one of the biggest stories to
come out of the Maltese islands where I live in the recent, in
the past couple of weeks is they found a Mesolithic site.
Now Malta up until then was thought to have been inhabited
firstly during the early Neolithic by farmers that
travelled over from Sicily. These farmers stayed on the
island for a while. Then there appears to have been
a period where the island was the islands were empty, called
the 5th Millennium Hiatus. And then another wave of people
came in, probably also from Sicily, judging by the the
appearance of the pottery. And they eventually became the
megalith built as the temple people, the people that built
these enormous megalithic monuments on Malta, of which
there were probably 100 originally.
I mean, the traces of so many that have been found and
obviously several are still extant in pretty good condition
for their age and are UNESCO World Heritage sites.
So it's interesting because they're very unique in their
appearance. And it would appear that it was
people coming by sea from Sicily that originally that developed
this this architecture. What we didn't have in the
archaeological record were hunter gatherers.
There were a few people had put forward the idea before they had
suggested Neanderthals were here.
But the the evidence just really wasn't there.
It did end up becoming a big one of the kind of online dramas and
there was a lot of people saying it was a conspiracy and a cover
up. That the Graham it was in Graham
Hancock's show the 2. Neanderthal 2.
The Neanderthal molas, that's what those, So they found some
molas in a cave and for many reasons it just didn't check
out. But nobody ever thought it was a
weird suggestion per SE. There's no reason to cover it up
because there was a land bridge with Sicily at the time in the
Paleolithic. And there's every reason why
people, there's lots of Paleolithic sites on Sicily.
So there's no reason why hunter gatherers wouldn't have made
their way to Malta, but they didn't.
There's just they didn't at that time.
There's no evidence for that in the Paleolithic.
Moving across, walking across the land bridge.
But so there was the Neanderthal idea.
There was also people saying that these cave paintings, there
was some cave paintings in. So this cave used to be publicly
accessible, but you couldn't go deep into it.
The backs part of it was cut off and the, but there was rumours
that there were cave paintings in it.
Somebody did check it out at some point a long time ago,
maybe 20-30 years ago. And they did an analysis and
they were, I think a scholar from from Italy.
And they said it does appear that they are hung to gatherer
paintings, but with no artifacts or any other information to go
with it, it was hard to say. So recently another
investigation was carried out by another team of archaeologists
and they went to the these this same cave.
They they traced the paintings that had been talked about
previously and they found that they are all modern except for
one. But it was too damaged to really
say either way. Like how modern?
Like 100 years ago, just modern graffiti.
Gotcha. So it was.
Yeah. So there was never any true
evidence. And I have talked on my channel
quite a bit about the Neanderthal controversy and the
molars. And I mean, even if they were
found, so there were the the people that suggested that they
were Neanderthal molars said that, OK, so it wasn't just
about the appearance of the molar themselves.
Weren't they under like layers or connected to like a
stalagmite or something? Like that exactly, it was to do
with the layer as well. They were in a layer where Ice
Age fauna were found. However, and the obviously the
Malta wasn't covered in ice during the Ice Age, but the
land, the sea levels were lower. It was connected to Sicily by a
land bridge. So fauna did make its way here
if even if humans didn't. So it would seem that these
molars were in that layer, but this layer was 10 to 18,000
years ago. So that's still too modern for
Neanderthals. So there's kind of a lot wrong
with it. There's a lot wrong with the
idea and you need more, you need more evidence, right?
So overall, the general consensus was hunter gatherers
did not come here in the Paleolithic, and that's still
the general consensus. But a Mesolithic site has been
found. And during the Mesolithic, the
sea levels were the same as today.
So this means that these hunter gatherers came from Sicily via
boat. And that's also a really big
deal because that is thus far thought to be the longest
Mediterranean journey hunter gatherers made, because in other
islands they were closer to the mainland or to other islands, so
they could island top or whatever.
Here. It would appear that to have
been quite difficult to get here in a dugout canoe at that time.
So we're talking like about 100 kilometers and it would have
meant travelling during the net day and travelling during the
night. So they must have had some
knowledge of navigation by the stars.
Yeah, that's interesting. And as you mentioned too, for
people that don't know you, you did mention it, but you live on
Malta. The first few episodes we had
you out and we discussed a lot of the Maltese sites.
G Gantia, Was it Menagera? Is that how you pronounce?
That Niger, Hajarim Gigantea, that's some of the biggest ones.
The hypogeum, the weird stuff with the hypogeum, all that kind
of stuff. Is there any like updates on?
Because I know one of the first times we had you on, we
discussed like rituals and they think there might be some like
ritual sites and they don't know is it, you know, And I know you
and I were tossing around the idea of possibly like antigenic
stuff happening. Has there been any breakthroughs
on any of that, or have you found anything else on that?
No, I haven't read anything. Any research on that?
I read 1 literally a sentence in a paper that said because some
of the ritual vessels were quite small, you know, there's what
were they for? If it was, maybe it was a
condiment, maybe it was something, some other substance
that, yeah, could only take in small amounts.
But without any archaebotanical evidence for that, it's
difficult to say. Maybe there has been some
research since then, but nothing's come across.
There's nothing that I've come across on that.
Since it's become a more popular topic, I would think too that
maybe there's somebody that would want to look into that and
do like a chemical analysis and just see what's kind of going on
there. I think the problem is though,
that a lot of the excavations were the the vessels were
unearthed like I think late 1800s, early 1900s, when
excavation techniques were not so great.
So a lot of the Neolithic sites were pretty much emptied out at
that point, and I don't know what sort of chemical traces
they would still have in them anyway.
It's much easier if they were to find a Neolithic site now and
excavate it and find something, some pottery or something.
That's yeah. I mean it has has been buried
the whole time. If you have wheat too, you know,
you could get claviceps or ergot from that, you know, and then
mushrooms grow everywhere too. You know, that's a potential, I
mean, I actually, I don't know that Like do you know, is there
any natural species of mushrooms or psychoactive mushrooms on
Malta that you know of? Because it is kind of a dry
climate there. I'm not sure, but there was,
there was a monograph written a few years ago.
So there were three monographs written as part of this project
called the Fraxus project, where a whole new set of excavations
took place on Neolithic sites and settlements as well as
temples. And the three monographs were
temple places, temple landscape and temple people.
So temple people obviously was focused on skeletal remains from
not the hypergeum, but another, the Shara Circle in Gozo, which
was an underground, a stone circle on top.
And then under the ground, burial monument and temple
places was about the temple sites.
And then temple landscapes was about the environment.
And they looked at the idea of So what sort of plants and crops
there were at the time, what sort of environmental
degradation appears to have taken place that might explain
why the temple people abandoned the islands or died out.
Now I would turn to that monograph to see if there's
anything because I wouldn't know what the names of those were.
But if you do like a find and search in that one of those
documents, these are Open Access documents as PDFs, might be able
to find something. I don't know if they found any
evidence for just simply those plants having grown at that
time, which still doesn't mean, you know, they're found with
vessels or cooking materials or anything like that.
But it would mean that when they went to these sites and they
looked at the soil and soil cover and and landscape.
But I haven't really read that one.
I was more interested in the temple places 1 So I didn't
really go deep on the environmental stuff, but we
could have a look through that. That might be.
Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I could look, I
was going to say I could use ChatGPT and just search to see
if there's any white papers on whether they found anything that
could be used in ritual or mind altering.
I mean, because why else would ritual so small tiny vessels
found in a ritual context, we're talking.
OK, so in Malta they're referred to as temples, for want of a
better word. We obviously don't know what
took place in these buildings, but they're not domestic
dwellings and they're not all burial sites, so associated with
the funerary ceremonies so. And some of them are weird,
right? There's like holes that just,
like, look into another room. Yeah.
You know, like, what is it? What's going on there?
Exactly. No one really knows and they
they call this one hole the Oracle hole because they say,
well, maybe there was a priestess or priest talking
through it to an audience outside or something.
But it's really just guesswork. So they are considered to be
ritual sites, even if we don't understand what rituals took
place. And so when you find and you see
them in the museum, there's a whole section of tiny, tiny
vessels. What else could they have been
used for? Mustard maybe?
Yeah, mushroom mustard maybe. I mean, we know that feasting
took place in these places, so, you know, but you expect vessels
to be a lot bigger. I mean, the other thing too is I
don't think people think, and I've speculated about this with
like Easter Island and stuff, there's psychoactive fish that
eat coral and then people eat the fish and they get what's
called fish inebriation. And I know Reunion Island has a
culture of that which Reunion Islands off the coast of Africa,
but I know the Mediterranean. Is it called porgy or porgy?
Or there's a fish that the Romans used to eat that had
psychoactive properties as well. No way.
Yeah. I learn so much from you every
time I come on here. That's brilliant.
I had no. Idea but yeah, I mean and
there's in the Pacific islands, there's called like the ghost
fish or chief ghost or something like that.
So there's all sorts of stuff that, you know, it's not just
fungi and flora and stuff like that.
You know, there's lots of things that have psychoactive
properties. What about, I'm sure I read
somewhere there was like an animal that ate stuff that was
psychoactive and then you could eat the animal.
Was it like a goat or something? I don't know.
Well, I know. I mean, yeah, there's stuff like
that for sure. But you know, dolphins eat
puffer fish too. Puffer fish have some sort of, I
forget what it's called, but it's a type of a toxin that, you
know, inebriates them or does something to them.
You'll see videos and I had a scientist on that wrote this
book, but about like animal altered States and animals that
use plants and fungi for altered states.
And dolphins definitely do this thing where they'll pass around
a puffer fish and you can, there's videos online of it and
stuff like that. And they're, they're definitely
getting something out of it. So.
I mean, I always think as well with the sleeping lady, the
figurine that was found in the house, Safflioni Hypozune, I
always wonder about her. Was she sleeping?
Was she in a trance state? Was she, you know, did she take
something and then was supposed to go on a vision journey or
something? I suppose it's all totally.
Possible and you know it's interesting too.
So the fish inebiation, you go to bed and then have these like
crazy dreams and nightmares and. Like when you eat cheese.
Cheese gives me ready. To treat, No.
There's an episode of Hamilton's Pharmacopio with Hamilton Morris
where he goes to, like I said, Reunion Island and they make him
eat these fish heads and then he has these like, insane visions
and dreams and stuff like that too.
So maybe it's tied to that. I mean, who knows, You know,
It's pure speculation. So the Romans were were having
this fish. Yeah, Porgy or Porgy or it's
like PORGY or something. I.
Had no idea. That's really interesting.
Wow. So if you find those fish bones
at a site, this. Yeah.
I suppose it's like how they've been finding lizard tails and
some of these vats like 1 I think outside of Vesuvia or
what's it called? Where's Vesuvius again?
I'm drawing a blank. That's Pompeii.
Pompeii, yeah. So Pompeii.
And then they found outside of Pompeii these vats with all
these tropanes and psychoactive compounds from, you know, you
know, people, belladonna and all those, those are all like very
brutal compounds. But like they've been
speculating too, that maybe these lizard tails might have
psychoactive properties too 'cause, you know, we know about
amphibians and again, all these creatures.
We talked about the toad and I think last time you were in we
talked about the Olmecs and some of the stuff you were looking
into, the toad iconography with the yeah.
So yeah, I mean, who knows? You know, there's lots to be
found with all this kind of stuff.
You just got to start looking into it.
But has there been any other sites around or any big
discoveries? Cause again, I haven't really
been paying attention. Has there been any big
discoveries around like the Mediterranean area lately?
I mean, I'm just trying to think what I've been.
I haven't really been talking much about the Mediterranean.
Actually, I was talking about recently about a site in England
that was quite interesting. It was so in the in the
Neolithic, linear monuments were in fashion before circular
monuments were so linear monuments like cursus monuments
or rectangular enclosures. They these giant earthworks,
they were kind of in vogue before circular monuments like
Stonehenge. So circular henges, stone
circles, timber circles. And they've now found that
they've done some new dating on a monument in Dorset, half of
which was excavated a long time ago and has been turned into a
road I think, or something. And then the other half has been
buried for future research. And they basically went to look
at the samples that were kept in a museum and re dated them and
found that it's possibly the first circular monument of its
kind and the largest in the whole of the British Isles.
Which means that that was the one that set the the kind of
path, the tradition, the pattern, the trend for the new
circular monuments, which then was copied at Stonehenge.
And where was that? Dorsets were in the South of
England. Because I know the, the, I was
gonna say, have you heard the speculation of the other way?
So like Scarabray and up and like the Orkney Islands and up
there they found all those old, old Neolithic circles and stuff
like that and they thought it like maybe worked its way down.
But you're saying that now they're speculated, maybe went
up? Yeah, it's, it's so they, there
was the research on the old stone, which they're saying came
from northern Scotland. So not Orkney, but northern
Scotland. They, they found out it was from
the Orkadian Basin, which is a geological formation that
stretches from northern Scotland under the sea to Orkney.
And but the rocks that were used for the Orkney monuments are not
the same, are not from the same exact part of that Orkadian
Basin as the alterstone that was then transported down to
Stonehenge. But it would appear there's a
connection between all these people.
So that's obviously quite interesting.
But that was the Stonehenge stuff was all later than this
circular monument. So yeah, I always thought that
because people talk a lot about Orkney and how old they are, it
was thought that they were probably the first circles.
And then we know Groove, where pottery started there and then
moved southwards and westwards. We know that.
So the altar stone was carried down from there.
The actual rock itself brought to Stonehenge at some point in
Stonehenge's long evolution, because it obviously started off
quite early, even in the Mesolithic, probably with some
timber poles, a timber alignment.
So yeah, this would be quite, this is quite interesting to
think that actually the first and largest circular monument
was in the South near enough Stonehenge in a way.
I mean, it would make sense from the standpoint of like climate
or weather, right? Because it's warmer down there
and I can't imagine it was any warmer up there when it was
cooler, you know, in like Orkney.
I would. It's pretty rough.
I don't know if anybody's ever seen like the seas and stuff
like up there. It's pretty, pretty brutal.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's interesting.
I it's, it's hard to say because a lot of sites are always
thought to be on older sites anyway.
You know, they think that Stonehenge followed on from a
Mesolithic timber alignment in Orkney.
There's every possibility there was something there a little bit
earlier. So you know, it's just a matter
of finding it and you're not going to dig up all the stone
circles until you find some scarce artifact that's floating
around that tells you there was something there earlier.
It's, it's hard if there was just like a really simple timber
alignment and then it was removed and then it was that
whole area was reused much more intensively over the next 1000
years with lots of like post holes dug and lots of stones put
up and, and lots of ritual artifacts dropped there.
I, I, I suppose, and obviously I'm no expert and I'm an amateur
looking at this from the outside, but I suppose it would
be quite hard to preserve some of that Mesolithic stuff.
What they found at Stonehenge isn't actually on the Stonehenge
monument. The Mesolithic alignment is in
what was at one point a car park nearby.
So that's why they were able to find it.
But I think sometimes monuments get reused so much, you can't
always find some of the really early stuff.
But even in it's, I think it's in somewhere else in the
northern England or gosh, I've forgotten.
I did a video on this. They found another evidence of
Mesolithic alignment, a timber Mesolithic alignment that they
think may have been a lunar calendar, like a lunar solar
calendar. So what's the?
Prevailing wisdom with like, how does this so like we know the
Neolithic peoples in that area, but like, how does that I know
like Karnak has that the stone and then they've got all these
different like alignments and, you know, just like primitive
circles. And you know, I think they're
the Karnak's lines, right? So like what's, how is that?
Is that connected at all? Or those are just to different
people all together? They're they're really are, I
mean there earlier than the monuments in the British Isles
and the ones along the whole Atlantic Coast, Portugal, Spain
and France are all much older. And yeah, once again, they're
not really sure if there's a connection.
I have read a paper where it's been suggested there was a
connection and a sort of megalith building culture moved
West and then northwards. But then there's also been work
done where they're just the dates and the chronologies and
the connections just don't seem to be there, so it's hard to
say. It doesn't necessarily mean that
the ideas didn't travel though, if even if the people didn't,
there could have been some ideas that travelled.
What's what's So what? What about dolmans too?
Like the, you know, the the two and it's almost like a primitive
lentil, kind of a set up. Yeah, they're just thought to be
burial monuments. So it's kind of like how like a
mastaba evolved into an actual pyramid or structure or
something, OK. Yeah, exactly.
And there's dolmans all over. I mean, there's so many.
I suppose that can be an idea that is created independently by
lots of different cultures because it's literally, you
know, it's difficult to put them up, I suppose.
But it's just three stones. Well, the simplest ones are just
three stones. Obviously there's much more
sophisticated ones in Spain and whatnot, but they are usually,
there are usually skeletal remains found if they haven't
been looted at some point in the past.
And they make sense as funerary monuments.
And sometimes they are astronomically aligned, which
also makes sense in terms of like funerary ceremonies and
worshipping the ancestors and carrying out rituals at them
every year and adding new skeletons to them.
I think I don't find dolmans that odd.
I find monuments where there's no burials attached or very few
burials attached can be a little bit strange.
But actually this circular monument was associated with a
mix of cremation and inhumation burials.
So in the Neolithic there was a a gradual shift as well from
inhumation to cremation. So it could be that all these
monuments did have a funerary role to play in some respects,
even if there wasn't like so you might think that they found
something like 4 burials there and it's a massive monument.
Isn't that a bit big for that? But maybe it was some specific
people that within the society. I mean, I don't know if the
Neolithic is thought to be that stratified, but let's say
potentially it was or maybe they some of it got kind of damaged
over time. Because a lot of these, and I
find this really interesting, a lot of stone circles and henges
and it's so difficult to get decent pictures because they're
like in a housing estate and they just happen to be digging
in someone's garden and they find some traces of something.
And then they have to like re, you know, look at that whole
site. And then they've realized there
was a massive circle there. And then they look, start
looking in neighboring fields and they find other monuments.
So I mean, there's obviously a lot of damage to them over time.
There's no two ways about it. But that says archaeologists are
really good at finding, finding things.
I mean, it astonishes me when you watch Time Team and they,
they're scraping away and they, Oh yeah, we can see that this
was whatever. And I just see loads of dirt and
they can tell all the different shades of dirt and soil patches.
And in England, because a lot of the time we're talking timber or
earthworks, they have to go a lot on crop marks from aerial
photography and geophysics to be able to even work out what was
there or if anything was there. And then they start digging and
sometimes find some artifacts, but sometimes they just find
pits and trenches. But you know, they've been
robbed out at some point. So this I find and you know,
like the the ditches and the banks are not there, but they
know that they were there originally and stuff.
It's amazing what they can figure out, but in a really
damaged monument. But still, when there's a lot of
damage and reuse of a site, I'm sure some things we just can
never know. I mean, even in Malta, because
there's not much soil cover in some areas, they've excavated
around a megalith that's been found and they're like, OK, this
is definitely a worked megalith. It must have belonged to a
temple once. Let's start digging and see what
we can find. And then when I read about it,
they didn't find anything because it's been that much
farming, intensive farming in that area.
And they've laid soil and clouds and whatever.
And the, you know, the anything that they would have been, would
have been lying on the surface so or very with a very light
soil cover. So it's all gone.
So you know, you don't always get get every get any.
Yeah, I was. I was just curious about the
progression too. Like dolmen, If you go from like
a dolmen to like New Grange, like was the dolmen the
precursor to like a new grain? You know what I'm saying?
They're like a dolmen and precursor to Stonehenge or.
But dolmens were in use from Neolithic all the way through to
Bronze Age, so they were. So they were still in.
Use larger monuments. Gotcha.
And I know New Grange is more of like a astronomical observatory,
like they know that there's alignments with the solstice and
everything like that. Yeah.
And and there was a burial associated with it, at least one
wasn't there. And they could even trace from
the DNA the connection between burials in that area, that they
were all relative relatives one another.
So I mean, they do some amazing work with DNA now as well.
It's just mind blowing. Oh, absolutely.
I wish I understood all that a bit better because it's so
complex. But you know, I really enjoy
learning about these connections with DNA, seeing whether a
society was patrilinear or matrilinear.
There's been some interesting work on that.
So and Malta, do they have dolmens?
I know you have like lentil and like building structures that
are similar but are there any dole actual just dolmens on
Malta? Yeah, not many though.
I mean, there's been AI, don't know how many have been recorded
over the years, maybe 10 to 15 maximum, but how many actually
remain? Probably about 6.
So I visited one small cluster. I visited one that's on its own,
some others are on private farmland so you can't get to
them, and another one is on private land.
I don't know if there's any other still extant honestly.
There's a little map in the Museum of them, but they are
thought to be Bronze Age because they were all empty apart from
one's one and this one called Taha Moot, This one is like a
cluster of them actually they found Bronze Age artifacts there
so and it was very similar in design to all the others.
So the thought was that it was a when the Bronze Age people came
to Malta, they were building dolmens and there there's a big
separation between the temple people and the Bronze Age.
The the waves of Bronze Age migration because the island was
practically empty between these phases.
Yeah, we've discussed that on past episodes.
You mentioned the, the, the period where there's like no
building or anything and it, the islands seem to be kind of
empty, right? And then you go back to like the
earliest megaliths and those, what are those, 5000?
Yeah, exactly. They're more than 5000 years or
so. The SO the Dolmans are
megalithic, but they're not connected to the temple culture
at all. Not.
Not here anyway. Gotcha, gotcha.
Well, I mean it's and so like the you mentioned you, you've
mentioned the farmland is, do you think that there's anything
that could be of, you know, interest on any of these
people's farmland? Like how much farmland is there
and how much do you think is still yet to be discovered kind
of a thing? You know, I always wonder this
and not that long ago, maybe 6-7 years, I'm just reaching for
numbers today, sorry, because I don't memorize everything in my,
my head. But there was this on Gozo.
So, you know, there's this, there's this area called to
Trench. It's this like plateau in these
cliffs. And there was some dolmans that
are actually forgot about those, well, one proper dolmen and the
others are kind of like look like collapsed dolmens.
But anyway, on that plateau there is an unexcavated temple
site and it really is just a lot of rocks and modern rubble walls
mingled in. It's quite hard to realise that
it's a temple site, but it is and it's never been excavated.
But not too far away in the nearest village, a few years
ago, somebody was building something in their garden and
they must have needed planning permission for it because there
was it was overseen by archaeologists and they found
they had a temple in their garden like covered in
vegetation, but only a few rocks were left.
Now that to me is crazy because you know, it's, you wouldn't
know. I mean, I've been to sites,
other sites that haven't been excavated and that where they're
really heavy with vegetation, like the prickly pear trees and
stuff. You can barely tell what it is,
but I've read about it. So I've gone there and I've had
a look and I'm like, OK, I can see that.
That's a worked megalith. So you can understand.
Someone just had it in their garden, had no idea.
And I just think that's crazy. I'd love to find that in my
garden. Yeah, that's that is great.
It's like that movie Netflix where the woman's husband dies
and she lets the guy excavate on his and they find the Viking
tombs there. I'm trying to think of the name.
It's a famous British story of a woman whose husband goes away to
war. He dies and she allows them to
excavate on her property. I'm drawing a blank right now
anyways, Yeah, no, I mean, it's a it's a movie on Netflix.
It's I want to say Ralph Fiennes is the guy that digs or
something like that anyways. But yeah, there's probably lots
of sites like that. I know the interesting thing
though, is the, the, you know, the geology of that.
I was, I, I was watching below Deck, oddly enough, with my wife
and they're, they're in Malta for the season.
It was like below Deck Mediterranean.
They were in Malta and they like let the people that work on the
ship like have a day off and they went to the beach, but the
beach wasn't a beach. It was all that like rustic rock
that you see that are, you know, the, the megaliths are made out
of. It's like that, very coarse and
sharp looking stuff, so like that.
I find that very fascinating as well.
Yeah, Oh yeah, there's some, it's all limestone, Upper
Coraline, lower Coraline and Globizarina limestone.
Some of it, the Coraline's, the really rough looking ones, lower
and upper, it's very rough. And then Globizarina's like the
smooth one looks really sandy. But yeah, it's I, I always think
so Sometimes when the cultural heritage unit like, produces an
annual report, you go through it because I like to see what
research they've done on the previous year.
And sometimes they'll say they were doing an doing an
excavation before a construction project and they came across
something that they thought had been destroyed years ago, like a
lost megalithic site and stuff that's happened over the years
as well. And then they make sure that
it's preserved within the new development.
But yeah, it's it just makes me wonder how much else is lost
because you think it's quite a well, there's not that many
trees and it's this bare small rock, but it's not that small in
the sense that it would still take you a long time to walk
from one end to the other. And there's still a lot of land
that, you know, is got a lot of vegetation on it that could be
covering stuff. I mean, it could be.
It would be hard to tell. Yeah, it seems like it's got a
similar geography or geology and all that stuff and and sediment
can it seems like it's very similar to Sicily if I like
based on looking, I've never been there, but just based on.
Well, Sicily, it's actually a lot more mountainous.
We only have a few small hills in Malta.
This is really mountainous, not just Aetna.
It's like a very mountainous country.
But some of the, yeah, the, the geologies you see is similar.
But The thing is, is Sicily is a lot older.
I think Malta emerged from the sea like 22 million years ago or
something. But Sicily was earlier than
that. But Sicily was, you know, at
some point, I think it was three islands or something, and then
Aetna emerged from the end of the sea and then it all became 1
island when it erupted the first time, yeah.
I mean, I'd love to get over there.
I still haven't been to. I'd love to go to Italy and
Greece, maybe even check out Malta.
My family's from Calabria, Italy so I would love to lower.
That's so cool. Lower boot part of actually, and
I didn't realize this, but that's where Pythagoras had as a
seated cult was in Croton, which is like pretty much where
Calabria is now. So I'd like to go check out that
area at some point. Yeah, I haven't actually been
across to Calabria. I would like to.
I've been to Sicily many times. I've been to Italy many, many
times, but all different parts. But I've never been to Calabria.
And I keep saying that I want to go there.
And there's a really good museum in Reggio Calabria that I want
to go to, but just haven't managed it yet.
Well, I'm sure you'll get there. You go, you travel, you get
around there. It's a little bit easier for me
to get there than you, so I really should make an effort.
I could drive there. But you know, I, you know, we, I
keep talking about if I, if the first place we go in Europe is
definitely Italy, probably Greece too.
I'd love to see Greece and some of the temples and stuff, you
know? I've been to Greece before a
couple of times, but it there's so much to see that I mean, my
list is so long. And I'm not even, I'm not even
like so set on like Athens per SE.
Like there's other places like Naxos, the Portara Naxos I'd
love to see and maybe a lusus. And, you know, so we have a
question, Scully asks. Do the Knights of Malta do any
weird Illuminati rituals at any of these megaliths?
But I know that So what the Knights of Malta are a real
thing there and or what is? That yeah, the Knights.
That's similar to like, Yeah. What?
So what are they similar to Like I?
Think it's just a like a religious order.
OK. With historic roots I from,
yeah, the early modern period, I suppose.
But I assume you you haven't seen any of these guys dressed
up like that at any of these megaliths?
No no, it's just lots of tourists with cameras.
Unless they do some weird rituals in the middle of the
night. Maybe they do.
They don't hang around in the samples or the hybrid gym in the
middle of the night. Yeah, I would assume it's
probably similar to what the Masons or some sort of Masonic.
I don't think it's that secret though.
I mean, it's a religious order. OK, So it's, is it part of like
the Catholic Church? Charity work.
Is it part of the Catholic? Oh, it is OK, It's.
Part of the Catholic Church, I think.
I mean, I'm no expert. I think it has roots in that
early, early modern period organization that came from
Rhodes to Malta. The funny thing is though, I'll
tell you one funny thing. I was in Rome once, I've been
many times and I wanted to just see something different.
So I've been to all the sites that many times.
So I, I googled esoteric stuff to see in Rome and I read about
this keyhole. So I went on a little expedition
to find this keyhole and it's basically it's where the Knights
of Saint John headquarters is. And everybody says that when you
go to the keyhole to their like sort of estate and you look
through it, you have a Direct Line to the Vatican and it's
like, like right in the centre of the keyhole.
And it's really interesting. So I went there thinking, this
is really niche, nobody's going to be there.
Oh my God, There's a queue all the way down the street, like
100 people waiting to look through this keyhole.
So I waited. I had a look and you can see the
Vatican, but I don't really know what's so esoteric about that,
because these are all religious orders and they're all in Rome.
And you can see a lot of things from a lot of different places
if you're on a hill. Rome is made-up of.
Maybe it's like one of those like Druid seer circle or seer
stones or whatever, you know, like something like that.
But yeah, so I did. I just got a little day out to
look at that. People were even arriving in
taxis to look through this keyhole.
I always get confused. But the Knights and all that's
different. So the people that guard the
Vatican, those are that's different.
It's like what? Swiss Guard or Swiss?
That's the Swiss Guards. They're the ones in the
colourful out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
OK. Really colourful outfits.
They're all like, yeah, Knights of Saint John or Knights of
Motor. I, I mean, listen, I'm no expert
in this, but there's an there's an interesting history, but it's
relatively modern compared to what I tend to read about.
I want to look into it. I mean, I, I find that kind of
stuff interesting. Obviously, you know, there's a
reason why people ask these questions, whether there's some
secretive Nuggets in there or not.
But you know, I got to look into that.
Yeah, I mean, I think there were some esoteric associations with
them, I suppose because they were had a lot of money and
controlled the islands for a long time and still have, you
know, quite some properties. I mean, the estate in Rome is
really nice with the keyhole. It's lovely.
So you know, anywhere where you have religion and money, there's
always also like an underlying isotope association.
You're like, I'm here for the keyhole.
The person points. It's like the longest line ever.
It's like. I know.
I couldn't believe it. You know, when you just, oh,
really? And I was thinking, well, if
each person looks through it for 20 seconds, how long am I going
to be waiting to see it? And then you see people, I've
seen online Instagram pictures of this keyhole where people
have actually put their phone up to the keyhole to get a good,
good photo of it. I mean, that's of course people
really committed to their Instagram feed, I mean.
See, I'm different. Stuff like that.
Like if I was there at like one of these sites, yeah, I'm sure
I'd take a few pictures, but I wouldn't be like immersed on my
phone while I'm there. I'd be like checking out.
I've been to so many places. I mean, I've been to the Oracle
of Delphi and I lost those pictures because they were on an
iPad that died. And it's like, I don't know, I'm
not, I've never been that bothered because I always live
much more in the moment than needing to record every second.
I'm always enjoying myself too much.
But now, because this has become somewhat my job in a sentence
with my YouTube channel, I have to make a lot more effort.
So I do really do my best to get decent footage.
But sometimes I get back to my hotel and I look and I'm like,
that was rubbish. I made no effort today but I did
enjoy my day so. No, I mean, it look, all that
stuff's cool, you know, definitely check it out.
But it's, it's, yeah, it's like one of those things where you do
want to live in the moment. You don't want to be like a
prisoner to your phone or technology or whatever, and that
there's a reason why you're there to begin with, you know,
So I know you want to wrap it up here in the next 10 minutes.
I'm just trying to think if there's anything we haven't
covered. I don't want to, but I have to.
I have to. I could talk all night.
You. Know, I know, I know.
We'll we'll, I'll have you back on again soon and we'll catch up
on some other stuff. But.
Yeah, I'm going to look up some of the things we talked about.
And now we've given Scully the hypnoschool.
He's going to be Googling the keyhole.
There you go. Yeah, I'm just trying to think
if there's anything I wanted to ask you that I didn't that.
But like I said, we'll have you back on again soon.
And yeah, I mean, I think is in terms of all this stuff, you
know, it's hard, as I mentioned, like you get caught up if you
know, with all the other noise of what other people are doing
sometimes and you kind of get lost on your own.
You get sidetracked or sent on a tangent from your own quest.
And, you know, I'm just trying to get back on on course with my
own stuff and let all that other noise just work itself out.
Like as, as I mentioned, it was, you know, the the last few
months, just watching all the tea, as we called it earlier,
all the drama just kind of like play out.
I saw people get doses of of their own karma and things like
that. So it's just like I've come to
realize I don't need to involve myself in that.
And if I want to take a look and see what's going on, I'll catch
a laugh here and there or whatever.
But yeah, it's not, that's not, you know, I'm not an
archaeologist. It's not my job.
And I'm also not against that. So it's like, you know, I think
you and I are probably somewhat in the middle, like we're open
minded, but we're also like, you know, I use I've been trying to
use philosophy, epistemology, theory of knowledge.
How do we know what we know? Where is your information coming
from? If it's just coming from a
YouTube video, like you have a lot more work to do.
You should be reading books on the subject.
Stuff you don't even it's like stuff you don't like.
Like I read stuff all the time where it's like, I know this is
going to debunk some of the more fantastical ideas I have, but I
have to to look at it like, you can't really be objective if
you're not looking at everything, right?
So exactly. And you know, and I think as
well, you find like sometimes books are written where really
good sources are used and then really with a mix of just
rubbish sources that, you know, and literally just someone's
pulled an idea out of their head and planted it on paper and then
it's being used as a source. That's obviously not a rigid
piece of research, obviously. And no one can argue that no one
can say that's a rigid piece of research.
And yet they will, they will sit in the say that that's a rigid
piece of research and that they've pulled all these amazing
sources together when they haven't.
So it's, you can make something look robust without it actually
being robust. It requires people to sit there
and sift through the evidence. And what I like as amateurs is
that we can take an interdisciplinary approach and
we can pull information from different areas.
So if someone says to me, what do you think about this site in
Italy, for example, do you think it was really this, that or the
other? Well, I'll have a look.
I'll tell you what I think. So like there's this, there's
this natural rock rock formation in Sicily that some people think
is a megalithic stone circle that's astronomically aligned.
And I mean, it really doesn't take long to find out that it's
highly unlikely. This is no artifacts found at
the site. The rocks don't look worked.
There's no tool marks. I mean, the astronomical
alignments are quite rough and coincidental.
You know what I mean? It it doesn't take much and you
could, you know, find some papers on that area and what
sort of cultures and civilization or whatever has
been found there over the years. And you can probably find it
wasn't even inhabited until the medieval period by farmers.
So you pull all that information together and then you tell
people what you think and they say, ah, big cover up.
I mean, I mean, if you think it's a big.
Cover then I can't. Really.
I can't give me the evidence. Don't just keep saying that
because then. You the cover up stuff is for,
for the ancient stuff. It's very bizarre to me because
it's like, what do you, what would these archaeologists have
to gain if anything would make them famous if they found
something insane? You know what I'm saying?
Like that would be the carte blanche for any sort of
researcher that's researching this stuff, you know?
So I don't understand that from like a logic standpoint.
I understand there's real conspiracies from time to time.
I understand that political things get weird and under, but
we're talking about like rocks in the ground that have, you
know, we're part of society at the time or whatever.
So I don't know that. Again, I try and just apply
epistemology. How do we know what we know?
Theory of knowledge? Where is this information coming
from? If you're going to have a debate
with me and your best sources, somebody talking on YouTube,
which is what we're doing now, I wouldn't have somebody take what
I'm saying and be like, see he's the end all be all or see
Laura's the end all be all. No, you read the, you read the
scientific papers. Yeah, you can look at the
mysterious stuff too. Nobody's saying don't look at
the mysterious stuff, but don't pretend like that's the end all
be all solution answer to everything because you've got
to. Take a proper approach.
I mean, and if you want to believe something, then just
accept that you're just believing something too.
You don't have to debate other people about it.
You know, just be like, oh, it's a.
Religion to you? Yeah, when you start fringe
stuff and energies, there's really no proving it.
So then you may as well just say this is quite unique to my kind
of worldview. Well, then we talk about telos
teleology and why, right? So it's like you can have
science is really good at describing how things work, but
it's not good at describing why. And I think the big thing people
want to look at is why. But why might be a human
invention. Why might be, you know, what the
ancient Greeks were fighting about, you know, teleology back
in the day and everything like that.
So it's just it comes, it all comes back full circle.
But at the end of the day, we all just got to do our best.
And if you want to have a dialogue or a dialogue, you
know, dialectic, you should. But just be respectful, be
civil, be mindful. And that's I guess my advice
with these topics. I also think we everyone goes a
bit too broad. I think you have to take one
subject, like for example, this monument in Sicily, and if I
pull out all the data on that site, all of it, and I tell you
it's not to sight, it's a natural formation, then you give
me all your data and then we see what we've got.
But it never goes like that. We know it doesn't go like that.
It it goes around in these rhetoric drama circle.
It's just who shouts the loudest and is the most dramatic.
And that's the problem, I think. Or who paid for the most bots
and trolls online kind. Of yeah, I really think so.
But yeah, that would be the simplest approach is OK, I have
an open mind. Maybe it is an astronomically a
limestone circle like Stonehenge.
Let's have a look. But if I pull out all the data
and there's just not one piece of data and then you're going to
say ah, because the information got lost or they didn't dig deep
enough or they're covering it up.
They whoever they are, I mean, you know, there's thousands of
archaeologists heritage. Aliens, Laura.
Cultural heritage units, I mean, that would be a lot of people
that have to be covering it up. Dude, the the aliens came down,
they pulled out the men in black device, they erased our minds
and then. They went that can be the only
way that they've got the control over thousands of
archaeologists. That's what they did.
They did. Worldwide, I mean.
And look, you know, I've been, I've been critical of both
sides. You know, early on in the
podcast I was very critical of dogmatic academics and I've
been, now I'm being critical of dogmatic alternative thinkers,
you know, like I, it goes both ways, you know, So I mean, it is
what it is, but at the end of the day, you got to do what you
got to do and be honest with yourself, be honest with other
people and that's what it is so. Yeah, exactly.
No, I completely agree. And I think this stuff that
you're doing on epistemology is really interesting.
It really, it gets me thinking in this modern age, what how can
we pull the fact out of the sea of information that's out there
and what do we really consider to be fact?
But what I do like in peer reviewed journals and stuff is
they always have a lot of, as I call it, caveats.
They always say we think this, but this, this and this could
happen. And then we, you know, that
would change this. This is only an estimated date
range. They put tons of caveats in it
that even when you're summarizing it through a video,
it's hard to summarize because you don't you want to summarize
it in a succinct way, but you also want to do it justice and
include the caveats that that particular group of scholars are
mentioning. But so that makes me think, you
know, they're not that dogmatic because they always say there's
room for manoeuvre with this, that and the other.
But it also depends on the area that we're looking at.
Well said. Let's wrap it up here.
Yeah, I think that we'll have you back on again.
Like I said, sometime in the near future we can talk about
all that ritual stuff and entheogens and possible finds on
some of these islands. And yeah, I mean, that's one of
my favorite things to talk about when when it comes to these
sites. I'll do some research and I'll
see not just multi but in generally in the Mediterranean
if anything interesting is being found, like even Sardinia and
stuff like that. Sounds good.
All right, everybody. Well, yeah, go check out Laura's
channel, which is Megalith Hunter and your Instagram
channels. What is it?
Mediterranean. Mystique, All right, so go check
those out. And yeah, I mean, if you want to
support Mind Escape, the best way to do is click on the link
tree link down below. And yeah, we got tons of stuff
on there. As I mentioned before, I
separated Masters of Rhetoric, so it'll just be a separate
philosophy podcast, separate from all this stuff.
So you can go check that out if you want.
And I'll be uploading episodes weekly and then probably bi
weekly once I get to like 6 or 7.
So but I want to thank everybody and it's good to be back on here
after small hiatus. And yeah, look for more episodes
coming up. And yeah, that thank you so
much, Laura again for coming on and sharing your takes in your
research. And that's about it.
We love everybody. Stay safe out there and we'll
catch you next time. Peace.