What is the Human Origin Project? Steven and Stefan discuss the scientific fields that guide our audiences topics. From prehistory and geological earth periods to DNA, evolution and the human brain, we outline the scientific parameters that are defining The Human Origin Project.
In this episode, we’ll discuss ancient civilizations, archaeological sites, and calendar systems that provide the most compelling evidence for the true human story.
When you think of the conditions for an evolutionary leap to happen you would think that resources have to be abundant. Well, that’s not necessarily true, actually, because they can be restricted in order to change and put a restriction on DNA and certain traits, for instance.
But it doesn’t make sense that the rise of, for instance, the civilization which is an organized community. I don’t know, maybe there is an explanation there that the conditions kind of painted the solution where the surroundings where we did find. But for me, 1100 years of almost harrowing condition doesn’t facilitate.
If we were hunter-gatherers before why wouldn’t we just be hunting-gathering and you would just be surviving instead of innovating. When you look at in the context of Göbekli Tepe there is vast technology that needed to be understood and basically implemented in order to build this.
As hunter-gatherers, if you put that much energy into these kinds of efforts, you are taking it away from your survival skills. There’s an argument therefore in the needing of agriculture. But do you just say oh we need to build these stone circles, so we need to build agriculture? I think there’s a missing line and there’s a big line of investigation there.
Here’s the full transcript of this episode:
Stephen: Welcome to The Human Origin Project where we explore The Science of You. To keep up to date, go to our iTunes channel and subscribe. And please leave a review if you enjoyed today’s show.
Hello and thank you for joining us today. Today’s episode is about exploring and explaining the different areas of a scientific field that The Human Origin Project will be focusing on exploring. Our approach is to look at science from a multidisciplinary angle.
We also aim to include in this research field, ancient legacy and what our ancestors knew and talked about and can we interpret that in a modern scientific lens? We cross many different scientific fields, including geology and prehistory to evolution and human DNA, archaeological sites and ancient civilizations, space in the universe, physics and the human brain and consciousness.
These, we feel, are the pillars of our true story. And that’s where we will really be exploring and where the platform and the people that are forwarding this information will be featuring their research into what we really understand about these areas.
What you’ll find is that it becomes a coherent story and the purpose of this platform is to bring it all together. I hope you enjoy today’s show. Please leave us questions and if you are interested in these areas or you are a researcher in these areas, please write to us. We’d love to feature your work. Hey Stef, how are you going, man?
Stefan: Yeah good. How are you doing?
Stephen: [0:01:44] I’m well. I’m looking forward to today because we are really kind of getting into the different categories and of the different research areas that we found many great academics and also people that have written books and all these different banks of knowledge that has become The Human Origin Project.
Stefan: [0:02:06] Yeah, definitely. It’s really exciting to have this podcast up and running now and really get into what it’s all about and sort of going a little bit deeper into the concepts that we were talking about last time.
Stephen: [0:02:18] The problem with a lot of these topics is that you can go really deep in just one of them and it’s never ending. That’s kind of the beauty of the universe is that it’s so complex. If you study one little thing you can just keep going and going and going.
That’s why also what we found with what we’ve done, working on The Human Origin Project is that you really kind of have to ground yourself in your purpose because you can just get lost in one topic. You need to be tied to the context, which really is tracing the evidence of where this knowledge came from, right?
Stefan: [0:02:51] Yeah, definitely. I remember before we had The Human Origin Project going I was sort of going down these rabbit holes of intensity information and learning and not really understanding. Learning something profound and then going back to work the next day, and kind of being a bit fuzzy as to what that means and how to apply that.
But I think to have the context now and trying to understand our place in all of this, it really helps sort of to have as a foundation to build on and to anchor yourself to this information as well.
Stephen: [0:03:25] That’s one thing I’ve really found interesting especially with a lot of the studying of ancient cultures, is that you feeling that these ideas and these concepts coming to life after being buried underground, basically for thousands of years, and these very old notions.
It feels like it taps into a very fundamental aspect of who we are. That’s what I love about it so much is that when I learn about these things, it feels like I’m understanding myself at a deeper level. Really, that’s all we are trying to do is we are all just asking the big question of who we are.
That’s all anyone if you boil it all down, seven billion humans on planet earth, we are all fundamentally asking those big questions. What we’ve really found is that tracing the evidence back is difficult because there are a lot of people with theories on this stuff but who’s got the true story and where does the evidence lie?
That’s been a big part of our discussions and also a lot of the work of many good researchers and scientists around the world is they’ve found ways to build out these pieces of evidence. One thing that really kind of prompted our move into talking about this stuff is our visit to Stonehenge and the idea that we don’t know who built Stonehenge.
And then when you look at the principles that it was built upon you start to see a legacy that links to astronomical understanding is that place the Greeks talked about a lot, and there was a foundation of which we really built upon later. But then there was a fundamental move back to Egypt as well. When you start to follow these lines of where this information comes from things start to get murky, don’t they?
Stefan: [0:05:18] Yeah, definitely, and understanding, seeing Stonehenge but then realizing that Stonehenge isn’t the only stone circle in the world. I think there’s something like 80000 documented stone circles found and most of them are in Ireland.
Stephen: [0:05:33] That’s a crazy number, isn’t it?
Stefan: [0:05:36] Yeah. It starts to sort of boggle the mind a little bit, trying to work out why they are everywhere, what their purpose was. We don’t know. No one builds stone circles now. We don’t know the purpose of them.
Not only those but also pyramids. You learn in school that pyramids belong to Egypt, that the Egyptians built pyramids. And then the more you learn about it there are pyramids everywhere, almost on every continent, they’ve found pyramids.
As you go back and back and back you see that they go deep into our prehistory and so far back that we don’t even know who the original builders were of a lot of these sites and these places.
Stephen: [0:06:19] Yeah, that really sparked my interest, particularly with Stonehenge where we don’t attribute that to a culture or civilization because they didn’t write, we didn’t know who they were. But then you can start to see the principles and as you follow that back, you really kind of follow into Greece to Egypt.
Roughly to 3200 BC, that kind of time range where modern civilization really sprouts up and the Egyptians kind of go through a period of lots of megalithic building and all of the dynastic periods that we know so much about. But then when you go further things get murky.
When you delve into all the sites in Egypt, there’s a lot less than you that attributed to the periods that go back further. But then so when did this modern civilization come? Did it just spring up around this time or was it earlier?
And then you look at anthropological data and really the agricultural revolution which happened at roughly 11600 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age that was probably the starting point of what we would classify as modern humans, where we began to change our environment, eat different things.
Our physiology changed. We began to get dental diseases, which is significant because dental records remain in the dirt for the longest and that’s what builds most of the information about our human ancestors. And so yeah, the agricultural revolution begins to be that last point that we can attribute to being what we would call us in our modern form.
Stefan: [0:07:57] Yeah, definitely and I think one of the really interesting things about looking back to that period is what were we doing? What changed in our minds to start farming? What kicked us into gear to start modern civilization at that time?
You look at the world contextually at that time and there were these huge changes going on at the end of the last Ice Age. A lot of people think that that’s where the original flood myths started from because there’s documented evidence in the geological record of these huge megafloods that swept over the world.
Stephen: [0:08:31] Let’s talk about that because that was something I didn’t know about. I was led into this by the anthropological data on what happens to humans when we go into this agricultural revolution and we start living in settled civilizations, basically.
We attribute it to this rise from hunter-gathering to being settled and manipulating our environment and growing crops and animal husbandry and so forth. But then there’s no explanation as to why that happened. But this geological standpoint really has only come out in the last probably two decades of understanding what was happening on planet earth during that time.
The Younger Dryas period which is the period from 12,800 years ago, which is the borderline of the last Ice Age into the interglacial period that we are in now, that’s also something we don’t often talk about. We are actually still technically in an Ice Age because so much of the planet is covered in ice sheets.
But what was happening during this transition from where there was far less seed volume on the planet earth and what was happening to the geology at the time. And this is really sprung up relatively recently.
Stefan: [0:09:44] Yeah, definitely. I think that was one of the main entry points for me into this was trying to work out why we just started farming and why we started agricultural processes because people don’t just start. I’m trying to put myself in our ancestors’ shoes.
I can’t imagine waking up one day and just inventing agriculture. As you look back at this period in prehistory around 11600 years ago, there were these insane earth changes going on. Not only was it the planet, sea levels rising, eyeshades melting, volcanic activity.
There was also species of extinctions and human population declines and all these crazy things going on across, not just isolated areas, but across the whole planet.
Stephen: [0:10:35] And to put into context so from about 19000 years ago we were exiting the last Ice Age and that slow melt of the big North American ice caps. So, most of North America was covered in an ice sheet or two ice sheets. And at roughly 12800 years ago we saw the disappearance of that Ice Age. There was warming and then there was a big cooling period, wasn’t there?
Stefan: [0:11:04] Yeah, so we are gradually coming out of this Ice Age sort of 20000 years ago, after the peak. Temperatures were warming globally and things were becoming more stable almost to the level it is today which would facilitate things like agriculture and farming and practices like that.
But then all of a sudden something happened that no one can explain what exactly caused it. But something happened around 12800 to 13000 years ago that shut the planet back into the grips of an Ice Age and temperatures dropped right down again.
Stephen: [0:11:39] that was 10 to 15 degrees.
Stefan: [0:11:40] Yeah, in decades which is some of what some of the more recent research is talking about.
Stephen: [0:11:46] Which when you think about modern climate changing and the numbers that we are talking about. And this is one of the points that really got me is when you look at the climate data from the Greenland ice cores.
And these were scientists that meticulously extracted those cores so they get that pure ice to read the temperature fluctuations during these periods and this is where all this data is coming from. It just shocked me that no one puts this into the context of what happens with humans.
Humans are connected to whatever on planet earth, there’s no escaping that. And when you look at the fluctuations of temperature that happened at the borderline of the last Ice Age, just before the agricultural revolution, the modern global warning patterns we are seeing today are very minuscule, aren’t they?
Stefan: [0:12:32] Yeah, definitely. I don’t even know how people survive some of these earth changes. We’ll go into it in more detail in a later podcast about exactly what happened during the Younger Dryas but in a nutshell from its commencement, when that first temperature drop happened, there were around 1300 years of earth changing calamities.
At the end of the Younger Dryas period global sea levels were 400 feet higher than they were at the start of it. Today we are talking about sea levels rise two or three feet, the world will change. We are talking 400 feet which is unimaginable.
Stephen: [0:13:14] The size of China and Europe being developed?
Stefan: [0:13:17] Yeah, being swallowed by the sea, it’s unimaginable. And not only the sea level rising but all of the megafaunas that used to live on the continent of North America just disappeared.
Stephen: [0:13:30] Wooly mammoths.
Stefan: [0:13:31] Yeah, woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, dire wolves.
Stephen: [0:13:35] The earth was a completely different place, wasn’t it? I think this is something that when we think of Ice Age we think of the whole planet just being in ice but realistically there was far more land exposed and potentially inhabitable land during this time.
So basically North America was like this big swampland kind of area where there was this huge megafauna. You think about modern day Africa when you are elephants and this is where most of the megafauna today lives.
But when woolly mammoths and these huge like sabre tooth, tigers and these kinds of things, suddenly disappeared because of this breakage and this warming, the slow warming was happening and then suddenly there was this huge drop 1100 years. That’s over 10 generations potentially of howering cold.
Stefan: [0:14:31] Yeah and when you start there’s evidence of these woolly mammoths which if they were alive today, they’d be the largest land mammals on the planet. They froze so quickly that the food in their stomach, the mammals that have been found today still have undigested food in their stomach.
For something to freeze that big as they have like five times or six times, for something to freezes that quickly, must have been a temperature change astronomical.
Stephen: [0:15:01] And it affected human populations at the time too. There are no records of the Clovis people who populated North America suddenly disappearing around this time as well. All we know about them, there are very few records, but what we know is that they created these very specialist speed tips that are found up until this point.
And then even to the point with our mining materials, and quite a complex culture present in North America which we don’t really understand that suddenly disappeared.
And so it speaks to a geological environment that was very, very disruptive. What really got me when I was finding all this and we were talking about this is how on earth did the agricultural revolution begin after these conditions on earth?
Stefan: [0:15:49] Yeah, and blasting for 1300 years, you can’t compute those sort of numbers. I’m trying to imagine how almost at the end, almost straight away after the Younger Dyas ended and we stepped into this relatively stable period of climate that we are still in today.
How the agricultural revolution started and how we sprung straight back to relatively stable civilization. I remember when we were first talking about Stonehenge and looking into it I was kind of looking, trying to trace it back to the first stone circle.
And that, interestingly enough, pops up around the same time as this Younger Dryas period. For those who don’t know Göbekli Tepe is in modern day Turkey. It’s one of the largest stone circles on the planet. It’s about 50 times larger than Stonehenge although they’ve only excavated maybe 5%.
Stephen: [0:16:54] It’s 12 football fields of stuff, massive 22 foot stone pillars.
Stefan: [0:16:58] I think it’s so old that it predates the stones, they thought could build it. It’s older than the tools, the evidence of tools that could build it. That pops up at exactly the same time as the agricultural revolution, right after these earth-changing events and these huge mega floods and it just doesn’t really make sense.
Stephen: [0:17:18] It doesn’t make sense at all. When you think of the conditions for an evolutionary leap to happen you would think that resources have to be abundant. Well, that’s not necessarily true, actually, because they can be restricted in order to change and put a restriction on DNA and certain traits, for instance.
But it doesn’t make sense that the rise of, for instance, the civilization which is an organized community. I don’t know, maybe there is an explanation there that the conditions kind of painted the solution where the surroundings where we did find. But for me, 1100 years of almost harrowing condition doesn’t facilitate.
If we were hunter-gatherers before why wouldn’t we just be hunting-gathering and you would just be surviving instead of innovating. When you look at in the context of Göbekli Tepe there is vast technology that needed to be understood and basically implemented in order to build this.
As hunter-gatherers, if you put that much energy into these kinds of efforts, you are taking it away from your survival skills. There’s an argument therefore in the needing of agriculture. But do you just say oh we need to build these stone circles, so we need to build agriculture? I think there’s a missing line and there’s a big line of investigation there.
Stefan: [0:18:44] Yeah, definitely, I think that’s one of the main reasons that we’ve been looking into these old sites as one of our main sort of categories with The Human Origin Project, is because understanding these sites is so important.
But also understanding the greater picture and the context of when they were built, understanding that there’s a link between these earth changes and then the rise of civilization and the first documented evidence of stone masonry and building and metallurgy and all these things, coming in a time that it shouldn’t be coming. No one should be able to build that after coming out of these insane of earth-changing events.
Stephen: [0:19:24] Yeah. And especially when you also add the context of what he’s recorded at Göbekli Tepe as he said we’ve barely excavated 5-10% of the site. It’s 12 football fields in the area, huge, T-shaped pillars that are aligned to the cardinal lines of the planet.
So how do you know, for instance, the cardinal elements of the plain? Why is that important in a period? There are a lot of question marks here that come about Göbekli Tepe soon as I saw it and it was really taken on by an archaeologist.
We’ll go into this in more detail because his research is just I think really spearheaded understanding this period a little bit better but he spent 20 years there and he really came from a background of understanding these Neolithic sites in Turkey and that there was this knowledge.
He called it a body of understanding, for instance, of worshipping the fertility goddesses and so forth. There seemed to be this trend that was falling in also in the fertile crescent where we attribute the rise of the Garden of Eden and the start of modern civilization too.
This is all embedded in what we would call our myths and where we came from, as well. So there are lines of evidence that are kind of coming together here that we don’t really understand.
Stefan: [0:20:57] Yeah, definitely. And I think the fact that there are astronomical alignments at Göbekli Tepe from day one of ‘modern civilization’, the fact that astronomy dates back to that time and then you can trace it forward. All these old cultures had astronomy at the base of their ideologies.
It was almost like their lives were governed by the stars, and by movements of constellations and understanding equinoxes and solstices and how that relates to agriculture but also how it relates to themselves personally. A good example of that is looking at the calendars of a lot of ancient cultures. We’ve kind of shifted away from an astronomical basis in our calendar system.
But when you look back to these old cultures like China and Egypt and the Mayan their really advanced astronomical knowledge was encoded within their calendar system so that they would always be on track and always be aligned with what was going on in the heavens.
Stephen: [0:22:01] Yeah, that’s been such an interesting line of evidence because calendar systems really kind of broke my thinking about a calendar when you understand that it’s just a measuring astronomical phenomenon. So we are measuring out the Gregorian calendar which is what we operate on today, which is actually one of the most fundamental aspects of society.
If you talk to anyone across the street that you don’t know or you bump into someone they will understand what time of day it is. It’s intertwined into how our society functions and so calendar systems are the most basic way that you can measure a civilization.
What you find is that from Göbekli Tepe, there is this understanding of astronomical phenomena, equinoxes so forth. But it seems to track and this idea of tracking this evidence back, the bias seems to be a bit of a roadblock and terms of how much we can understand from what we dig up because there was such a catastrophic context.
But then this site pops up with this astronomical knowledge and then it suddenly spreads out. It spreads into Egypt, whether it goes straight into Egypt or there are periods between. But then you find through the calendar systems, and this is why these are so important.
For instance, the Egyptian calendar systems were the foundations of the Greek systems. And they used to measure started the year on the rise of Sirius, the hierarchical rise Sirius where the star would rise at the same time as the sun on the day, and that would be the start of the year.
Their system wouldn’t start on the arbitrary date as the Gregorian calendar does. And the reason why we have leap years today is actually just a fudging method to stop the drift between our solar years and the lunar and the seasonal cycles, which are still drifting.
The studies show that we are drifting off our seasonal cycles on their current system. We know that it is inaccurate. But these ancient cultures had a system to measure it far more accurately than us. The Dogon culture that we mentioned in the first episode that many people have done studies on treasured and understood the calendar system that started with Sirius.
This seems to have connected to a body of knowledge that began or was concurrently used in Egypt. Those calendars systems were a very easy way to kind of follow these understanding and it’s very crucial and that’s been a great tool to really kind of pull.
It’s so hard at these times because we have so little evidence. We are talking about geological research. We are talking about anthropological. Now, when we talk about knowledge and astronomy n these ideas of more advanced levels of consciousness or higher thinking that potentially progresses into agriculture, is that related to this understanding of astronomical phenomena?
Stefan: [0:25:06] Yeah, definitely. I remember learning about the Chinese calendar and how they had this really ingenious way of reconciling the lunar year. So, how many days there are in a lunar year is different from how many days there are in a solar year.
But their calendar was what’s known as a learning solar calendar which reconciles the two. They did that so perfectly, that it drifted far less than our Gregorian calendar does today. The way that they measured their New Year, which we all know is Chinese New Year.
The way that they worked that out is still confusing to so many people. I’ve read so many papers on mathematicians trying to explain the process behind deciding when the Chinese New Year would fall each year and it’s so confusing and it’s so hard to understand. But that was the basis of their culture was this calendar system that they all understood.
Stephen: [0:26:01] There was the second new moon after the winter solstice. And that’s the funny thing too is when you look at out how the celebration of holidays today is usually an ancient astronomical basis to it. So, for instance, Christmas around the time of the winter solstice and also the equinox periods there’s a basis of Easter in the new moon cycles.
So the Chinese New Year’s set on the second New Year after the winter solstice, which is what we call Christmas. But lots of different calendar systems use these multifactorial methods. And so Egypt was set on Sirius, so were so the Dogon, so were the Greeks for a long time. It was last into the Romans where we sit in the Gregorian calendar which is less accurate.
And the reason why is because we don’t measure the astronomical bodies. Remember the calendar is a time measurement and time is just the orbit of a body around another body. Our earth takes we say 365 point something days to orbit the sun but that is affected by other things, the moon, for instance.
That’s why the Chinese would use these other measures. But it seems to get more complex and the Mayans particularly, probably had some of the most masterful calendar systems, up to nine counts and everyone knows the 2012 date because of its focus around being the end of the world.
But that wasn’t the end of the world. And when you look at the Mayan calendar that was just the end of a much larger count so what they were doing was counting much larger spans of time. And so this was a period that was coming to an end roughly 2011, 2012. There are different theories on that.
But what they were potentially counting was different astronomical phenomena. When you think about how complex we understand the universe to me it seems a bit silly that we are just measuring our little rock going around our star, our sun and that that’s in fact of that we contribute in.
The Gregorian calendar is a modified loony solar calendar. You think of the month that’s supposed to be the lunar cycle which is a 28, close to 29-day cycle that changes slightly. But it has to be reconciled because all the bodies relate to each other and if you don’t, you fall out of sync.
Stefan: [0:28:21] And I think that that’s been something that I’ve been really interested in learning and researching about is how these ancient cultures revered their calendar and understood their process or their personal part to play within this greater picture that’s going on.
So they are measuring all these astronomical bodies and they are measuring stars like Sirius and how our earth relates to our sun and how our solar system relates to the galaxy on these huge scales. But then it also relates to on a personal level. But then it also relates to an even smaller level.
There are instances of these ancient cultures talking about things like quantum mechanics and understanding what an atom is and talking about how waves turn into particles in these very complex stories that they tell.
But when you look back at them I think we are talking about Hamlet’s Mill in the first episode, looking back at these old stories, finding that there are this astronomical knowledge and this scientific basis to a lot of their philosophies and ideas.
Stephen: [0:29:30] One idea that really kind of struck me when I was quite young, I used to read a lot of kind of Stephen Hawking’s and a few other physics writers and astronomers. And what really sparked me because I was a Biology major is that when you understand the atom like an electron orbiting a nucleus, it’s just like our solar system.
I was like this is just like our solar system looks like an atom. And then when you kind of consolidate that to how many star systems and galaxies in the trillions of electrons. So when you think about how many potential stars there are in a Milky Way we are talking about billions to trillions.
And then how many galaxies there are, the one Milky Way there are trillions that is a mind-boggling mountain. That’s similar to the kinds of numbers of atoms that fill our body. When you kind of zoom in, you see these little particles rotating each other, zoom out and see these big particles rotating each other. Zoom out you see these big particles rotating each other.
That’s what these ancient cultures seem to be measuring, are these cycles that exist within us, in our atoms, in our fundamental mental particles. What we kind of class as quantum mechanics now is the idea is that when you zoom in enough those little atoms become energy, and they start to behave like your photons and energy.
They don’t behave in the way that we would reconcile with, for instance, of planets and that’s what the divide is between Newtonian physics. With quantum mechanics, we have not resolved that. And maybe it’s because we’ve not resolved this connection between us and the time cycles that are existing everywhere.
The Mayan people talked about this. They said we are connected to all this, we measure this. You look at their systems and it is astounding how mathematically brilliant and connected they were. We’ve got a series of, we’ll be talking a lot about the Mayan people and investigating their systems.
But that they talked about how this related to the human psyche and how civilizations would be based upon. So the day you are born and depending on the astronomical alignments of the day would depend on what name you get. And so each village you would have all these names.
And if you come across a person named Fred, you say Fred was born on this day which means he’s inclined to these certain tendencies. And so people are born into what they are destined to do and everyone else knows, and they help them with that. Can you imagine a society that would be like that? That’s what the Mayan people talked about.
Stefan: [0:32:08] You can’t imagine that. I can’t imagine that in this day and age. I think for us, especially, it’s so hard to even imagine a society that lives that way and works that way and interacts on a daily basis knowing that we are part of a bigger process of creation.
That there are certain things you can do within your life to align yourself to these processes that are going on. Once you understand those, and once you understand those not only on the on a macro scale but also a microscale level it all kind of starts to make a bit more sense in terms of why these old cultures were talking about this stuff and why their calendar system would allow them to be in sync with this and how we’ve strayed away from that path.
It’s really interesting looking at that and how we can pull ourselves back. And maybe by doing so, we can understand a bit more about our purpose here and what it seems like these ancient cultures were doing or been doing for so long.
Stephen: [0:33:14] Yeah, the calendar and the ancient astronomy, I mean, you really do find a lot of instances where ancient cultures had higher astronomical knowledge than we do today. We struggle a bit to attribute that to them but I really feel that in order to really understand things, you have to reference where the information came from.
I really think that without knowing, for instance, in the Mayan calendars, really understanding its undertakings. They say that it was given to them in a way and many ancient cultures to say that, that this was a knowledge that was given to them right across the planet.
They talk about a time where there was a geological catastrophe, which is now scientifically proven. So it’s all kind of spinning into a story that potentially we don’t know the full background of what why our modern society arose in that agricultural revolution period. Principles that we’ve been using clearly during that time, have we lost them? Are we in the sense of amnesia?
Stefan: [0:34:25] Yeah, I definitely agree. I find that talking about those sort of topics, and then going into things like our physiology. We are really good at picking apart the body and the brain and the mind and looking at the very individual aspects of it.
But only now I think there’s an understanding coming together of how it functions as a whole and not only for us but on a bigger picture. But looking at things like the brain and I think we touched on this last time that these old cultures had this hind knowledge of the physiology of the brain and the functions.
They just described these parts of the brain that were the windows to the soul of the seats of the soul and that all seems like kind of primitive ideas and things like that. But now the science is catching up and there’s a lot of research going into a sort of proving that point and sort of changing. It changes the perspective on these old ideas. It’s nice to get that balance between modern and ancient.
Stephen: [0:35:32] Completely and the 20th Century, really I think we went through a process of understanding everything in its parts. And so when you think about the human brain neuroscience we really thought we’d break everything down understand the fundamental neuron or the particle where this consciousness just flows out of, very physical, matter-based way.
But what we found is that as we kind of understand all the different parts of the brain and all its physiological function, certain parts do, do certain things. Left and right side of the brain, or the frontal lobe is where we attribute a lot of our human kind of functioning and a difference between other mammals.
But what we can’t attribute to, and it’s a very uncomfortable question in science now is where does the idea of consciousness come from. And so, consciousness is that sense that goes beyond the brain so beyond your day-to-day thinking, what ancient cultures would refer to, mention the soul.
There are lots of different referrals of this, they call it energy, which does make sense because we know the quantum is energy, and that matter and particles are made up of energy. So is there underlying energy or that underlies our consciousness?
We can’t explain that. At the moment, we cannot pinpoint where consciousness comes from. It doesn’t come from the brain. All of 20th Century neuroscience has directed us away from the brain. We’ve understood more about what the brain does. But it’s more of a tool to use this consciousness rather than a source of it.
But that flipped everything and really what we are exploring is how once you kind of flip this idea. This is what ancient cultures seem to be attuned into that once you flip the idea that we are maybe a little bit more beyond just the body, that there is a sense of the universe.
It’s starting to point towards all of these very scientific fields, like quantum physics and the connection between consciousness and what happens at this energetic level and how we can’t reconcile it with our current laws. And then you think about the biology between.
So we talk about the brain. When we understand the complex city of the human brain and how it still can’t transmit consciousness. We can’t find the spot that goes oh, there it is, there’s consciousness, it just doesn’t happen.
And so what we are now understanding is that when you keep zooming in into your arm into the thousands of thousands of atoms, you get further and further and further, you get these little particles that behave like quanta. They behave in the same manner with quantum mechanics such as they do have entanglement with others.
An atom in your arm will have been tangled with an atom across the universe. And this is a very strange phenomenon that we know is true. We can’t explain. They can tell through things like we can break physical barriers. We can also be in two places at one time in a sense and there’s all these different, we’ll go into further details with this.
But this really kind of stuff to break our very matter of fact way of looking at the world is that there’s a lot more going on and ancient cultures seem to have had a better understanding than we did.
Stefan: [0:39:04] Yeah, and I think that once you do shift your perspective and change your understanding that maybe instead of the matter is at the bottom of everything. We’ve got consciousness that takes hold as the fundamental aspects of existence.
Once you start thinking down those lines it’s very bizarre, and I’m still kind of like wrapping my head around it. You are trying to think about well if all consciousness died, if all humans died out and all animals died out would there still be the matter?
You can’t measure that because there’s no way to know if the matter would be there without consciousness. The more that I’ve been learning about consciousness, it’s sort of this endless question that we are in the kind of now people are starting to look into and people assigned to ask about and talk about.
It’s interesting that the further back you go these were questions that seemingly had been answered or cultures that spend their entire—like Egypt is a great example of a culture that was built upon these questions. Having consciousness at the top of the pyramid was the key. Your world was revolved around consciousness. If you could master that, then that’s all you needed to do.
Stephen: [0:40:23] It’s really interesting. We’ve really re-birthed the idea of accessing consciousness via meditation. Today we call it mindfulness and we know scientifically that there are benefits to quieting the mind and just sitting with your consciousness. That’s what meditation is. The meditation uses principles of ancient cultures.
We go back through the yoga practices and Ashtanga and all of these ancient, their base in the Vedas, these very ancient practices. What they are doing is they are just accessing quieting your mind your brain, to just access consciousness. And we know now that there are benefits to that.
So, our body, our physical biology has benefits when we seem to just sit and access this consciousness. There’s a very strange rebirth thing happening and there’s a disconnect because we can’t reconcile with what ancient cultures seem to use it for.
And why do they know about this and yet we’ve just only in the last 10 years or so began to scientifically understand this. One thing I find about scientific research is that the first criticism will be about a concept of there are no published studies on that.
Well, you need a person that fully understands the concept to be able to design a study in order for a published study to occur. It’s very unlikely you are going to things going to happen by accident. Sometimes they do. You do come up with things by accident.
But first the concept needs to be understood and then you have the community movement. That’s how science moves forward is that we have this growing area of understanding of what influences what and then we have this publishing of research and really understanding the evidence levels of how these things interact.
The idea of mindfulness and meditation was a long time ignored. But as we’ve moved through an understanding of good consciousness doesn’t come from the brain so can we reconcile these two concepts that are a little bit broader, potentially than just a matter-based system?
Stefan: [0:42:32] It’s so important on a personal level, especially for me, understanding this context and this broader picture in that there was there are these things going on that we can’t explain and there are things going on, we can’t see.
But understanding that and bringing that into a meditation session, I found has been so helpful because you are aware of what’s going on, and you are aware of what you are trying to achieve and what is and the fact that if you switch your mind over to thinking that consciousness is more than just your physical body, there’s something else going on that we still can’t really explain.
Once you get that, you kind of get into that mindset things just start opening up, and you realize that there is this bizarre world that you can access without even being able to explain it. That’s one of the things I’m really interested in pursuing. It gets very confusing but it’s very interesting at the same time and there are a lot of people really interesting people talking about this.
Stephen: [0:43:43] Yeah, that totally excites me as well. I’d never thought I’d be sitting here talking about these kinds of things. But once you kind of get cracked there’s no going back and then it’s really difficult to go back to.
I had this same thing in my professional career with understanding, for instance, crooked teeth and seeing that there is a functional model to prevent all dental disease and we can prevent orthodontic braces. It really got me into the idea of looking at context and understanding, I guess, where all these things come from.
Once you start to look at these and break the idea that everything we have today is the highest level of knowledge, then all of a sudden, and the funny thing too is that it all starts to come to you as we start to see things in a different light. Books start to pop up, for instance, that appeal to you in a far different way.
And then all of a sudden, you dive into this book and you realize this huge bank of things you didn’t know. And then adds to your little journey and then that sends out to two other books which send out to four other books, which send out to eight, to 13 to—
Stefan: [0:44:52] Yeah because these conversations are so interesting and they spark something in not everyone but there’s like a huge community of people that are starting to question this stuff because I had never thought about consciousness or anything that we’ve been talking about in depth.
But now that I’ve had an insight into it this is all I want to talk about. It’s so great that there are so many people coming around to these sorts of discussions and feeling like they are ready to talk about this or that they want to know more. I feel like there is this underlying sensation in people, that there is something outside of our daily sort of grind.
There is something more that we just don’t really understand yet. You start talking to people and everyone has an instance of something strange that’s happened or something they can’t explain or they don’t want to talk about because it seems so ridiculous.
But it’s starting to become more common now. And I find that it’s really exciting being part of this movement and having a space to be able to facilitate these conversations.
Stephen: [0:45:54] Yeah, it’s interesting. Fear really comes about from a lack of understanding. Things that I was previously potentially fearful of I see now is from a lack of understanding. As soon as you break open your perception to a problem and you step back and you see where that came from you are like oh, you just see it right.
I kind of think of swimming. If you are dropped in an ocean and you are just swimming in the dark trying to find somewhere. You are basically just thrashing around until hopefully, by chance you hit an island. But if you are dropped it in an ocean and you have a rope and you just pull yourself back on that rope to where you came from that’s going to be far easier journey than just going randomly in nature, isn’t it?
What’s interesting too is that it’s really kind of progressing through all this understanding is showing that potentially everything we know about where we came from, from the idea of DNA. You can argue about different things. We’ve learned a lot about DNA.
But when you boil down to what makes you, you, your DNA is probably the most fundamental way that we can record that. But so what we are understanding about human DNA and what we understand about evolution and all the progression from Mendel to Darwin to the Human Genome Project in 2001 there is this very, very complex story coming out about us.
It’s time to have a conversation about that. These are based in science now and we can talk about these things comfortably without worrying about being too out there or too crazy in a way.
But what I think we’ve really found is that I like having these conversations but I like having them based in fact and so it’s very important to ground things first and to know that the sources and the information you are getting are reliable. That’s really what we created The Human Origin Project for is to give that sound basis as a sounding board, really.
I think overall we covered a lot of the areas that will be talking about. You can go to the website and read articles on all of the areas we are talking about. There is a weekly email that you can sign up to where we’ll give new updates of videos and articles and new research.
If you follow on social media we’ll be covering things that don’t quite make the website. The other thing too is we’ve got lots of contributors from around the world that are writing about these people with an academic background, people with different types of training.
If you’ve studied these kinds of areas we want to hear from you. This is all about building a global conversation about where humans came from, where we all came from. If you’d like to participate please write to us on the website and reach out and follow us on social media.
Stefan: [0:48:55] And as well, if anyone’s got any interesting people they think would be good to get on the podcast and interview and talk about their ideas drop us a line and let us know because we’d love having these conversations and having a place to be able to talk about them with interesting people who are doing interesting stuff. It’s really exciting.
Stephen: [0:49:13] Yeah, we are going to be doing a set of interviews and covering certain topics. We’ll just sit and have a chat on the stuff we researched over the week. But all of the things that the community is researching as well that’s really going to be what drives us forward is your ideas out there, what people are discovering and feeling is important.
That’s going to really guide the conversation. We’ll be interviewing some of the most exciting people in these areas so stay tuned for future episodes because there’s going to be lots of different experts and authors and scientists, people a little bit outside of the conventional realm as well but anyone that with good ideas, we are welcoming to the platform.
Thank you for listening to today’s show. For more information, you can read the full transcript, articles, and discussion on our website humanoriginproject.com. You can visit us on social media at Human Origin Project, on Facebook and The Human Origin Project on Instagram. Follow us on Twitter or join the forum boards and the email list to keep up to date with all the new information.
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