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.