The 5000 Year Old Peruvian Pyramids of Caral!

This is Corral. It's a pyramid site, right? So it's out in the valley, it's to the north of Lima, and it's, it just, it's fascinating. It's 5,000 years old, at least, right? It's Old Kingdom era time frame, so two and a half, 3,000 BC, 2,500 to 3,000 BC, you see these pyramids. It's rough, it's cobblestone, it's not, I wouldn't call it megalithic or necessarily precise, but it is a pyramid culture in Peru that stretches way back to, basically, the time of the Old Kingdom in Egypt. Fascinating site, one of several sites like this in Peru. People don't realize this, most people think about Sacsayhuaman or Machu Picchu when you go to Peru, but, you know, obvious evidence for, like, this ancient, ancient culture that's there, and it has these similarities with, you know, other cultures, other pyramid cultures around the world. But it ain't easy to get to, certainly not for a day trip, and there's nowhere to stay out here, so you end up with, sort of, four or five hours to get out there, and then, sort of, four or five hours to get back, and you include that with two or three hours on site, and it's just a long day, you start early, and out you go. So, this is the structure of these pyramids at Corral, you kind of see it, right? It's not, it's mortared. A lot of this is, this isn't necessarily rebuilt, but a bunch of this has been rebuilt. They keep finding these pyramids, and there are a number of these pyramid sites, but again, nothing you would describe as megalithic or crazy, right? It's obviously not equivalent to Egypt, or even to the other stuff that you see in Peru, and, I mean, I'd suspect some of this has been rebuilt. You can see a lot of the stones that they've excavated out here. It's a fascinating site, nonetheless. There were some interesting blocks here. This is, this looks like limestone, right? This looks like Egypt. This was something that, I hadn't been down here before, and we, and we just all walked down there. I'm like, why not? And we walked down here, but these are some of the biggest mud bricks you'll ever see. So, they basically, they made this out of these multiple bricks, and then they've, then they plastered over the whole thing, and they've basically covered over, and made the whole thing out of bricks, like mud bricks. So, this is a giant mud bricks. Like, I don't know why you make them so big. Maybe, it's, it does make me wonder, like, were they seeing, or had these people known, or seen megalithic construction somewhere, and they're trying to imitate it a little bit with the, with the construction of mud bricks? Because there's no real reason to make mud bricks quite this big, and there's evidently these massive structures. Like, we just looked at these walls here, and you can see this was a huge structure, and there's a ton more of this stuff over there, behind Greg and Kyle, down into this valley. And, uh, there's a lot of this, and this is, probably came after the, the pyramid culture, is, is the, is what I would think. Although, it's in a very stable environment, you just, you never get rain here. Like, this is one of the driest places on the planet, are the coastal deserts of, of Peru, where it almost never, ever rains. Even less so than Egypt. Egypt, you definitely get a couple days of rain every year, but this place is even less. Like, it hasn't, there's been periods of decades where it never actually rains. You do get this heavy sort of fog and dew in the morning in this area, but people don't realize, like, those, the deserts of, like, the coastal areas of Peru are just a crazy desert. Again, these pyramids, I mean, they're impressive, and don't get me wrong, like, humongous amounts of effort go into constructing things like this, and there are some interesting features on these pyramids that I think are worthy of more investigation from, like, a megalithic perspective. It was great to get, I've been here before, it was just great to get back here, out here at least once, and, you know, the cornerstones and some of these are quite big, and some of these larger, like, we got up closer to this construction, like, there's, there's observatories here as well, there's alignments at different structures here. Again, this is another example of, like, a culture that's almost neolithic. They were closely observing the sky, like, there are alignments here, and particular stones that we use for observation, and, uh, and things like that. So it's just, I, I like this place because it does draw this connection to other places that have pyramids. I mean, China, other parts of South America, North America, Egypt, obviously. You know, you, you see pyramids in this culture that emerges about the same time, I mean, at least according to the orthodox time frame. I, I have no reason to doubt the, the dating on this place. I just, I, I think it's just, it does still look relatively primitive compared to, like, the megalithic stonework you see in Egypt and whatnot. Still some big rocks being used, but it's, it is all mortared, it's much rougher, and it's just a huge amount of effort. Like, I don't, I don't discount the tremendous sort of organizational effort that was probably put into. Plus, anytime you get to anything of this scale, it's, you know, you need a population to support it. You need culture, you need civilization, you need specialization, all that sort of stuff. It's, it's one of those reasons why, you know, I look at the, like, things like the Tastepler civilization that's emerging out of Turkey. You go Bekli Tepe and all these other sites, the 30 or 40 other sites now, and it's, the people are still trying to say it's hunter-gatherers. I mean, it's clearly not. It's, it's civilization. You, you can't, you cannot build to the scale relative, it doesn't matter how advanced it is, you can't build to that scale and support and, and require that many people without what you would call civil, all the, all the hallmarks of what you call civilization, right? So, just support, like, social structures that enable specialization. There are people growing food, there are people training in the stonework, there, you know, there's some sort of justice system. It's all these things that go into, like, enabling large groups of people to live together and achieve things like this and, and build sites like Go Bekli Tepe. On its own, it might have, you know, you might have, that argument might have held that in Turkey, you know, you had Go Bekli Tepe, you had Karahan Tepe, now you've got Saberk, you've got 30 or 40 other sites that are all just popping out, and they're all getting bigger and older and older all the time. It's civilization. We just know nothing about it. We just, we, there's no records of it, similar to the Amazon. So, it's just, our past is longer and more complex than we had ever thought.