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The End... Of 2024 - From broken hands to breakthroughs - Aliens 77
362 Plays6 days ago
Welcome to the final episode of Digging Up Ancient Aliens for 2024! Join Fredrik as he looks back on a fascinating year exploring alternative history and ancient alien theories. This episode recaps key highlights, noteworthy discoveries, and the broader conversations sparked by pseudo-archaeology.
What We Covered in 2024:
- Ancient Pyramids: We dove into the mysteries surrounding the Djoser’s Step Pyramid, the Giza Plateau, and Gunung Padang. Learn how archaeological evidence challenges ancient alien claims, including critiques of flawed research papers.
- German Golden Hats: Fredrik explored these fascinating Bronze Age artifacts, possibly used as calendars, and reflected on seeing one in Berlin.
- The Copper Scroll: Is it a genuine treasure map or a symbolic inventory? We unpack the mysteries behind this Dead Sea artifact.
- The Shroud of Turin: Investigations revealed it to be a medieval forgery. Discover how historical skepticism and modern reactions offer insights into public perceptions of archaeology.
- Mayan Civilization: Collaborations with experts clarified Mayan history and debunked myths, including the 2012 apocalypse story.
- History and Politics: A case study on Poland’s Christ of Europe highlights how states and museums shape historical narratives to suit modern agendas.
- Kensington Runestone: A detailed analysis revealed how this hoax offers more about modern history than medieval Scandinavians.
Thank You, Listeners & Supporters!
Your support makes this podcast possible. Thank you for helping us grow and improve throughout the year. If you have feedback, questions, or ideas for 2025, get in touch via diggingupancientaliens.com.
Don’t Miss Out
- Transcripts & Links: Find detailed transcripts, referenced materials, and conference guidelines on the episode page.
- Bonus Content: Learn how to support the podcast and access exclusive extras.
Here’s to a great 2025—let’s keep digging into the mysteries of the past! If you enjoyed this episode, leave a review and share it with friends. 🌟
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Music
The intro music is Lily of the woods by Sandra Marteleur, and the outro is named “Folie hatt” by Trallskruv.
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Transcript
Introduction and Show Information
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to Living Up Ancient Aliens. This is the podcast where we examine alternative history and ancient alien narratives in popular media. Do these ideas hold water to an archaeologist? Or are there better explanations out there?
00:00:33
Speaker
We are now on episode 77, the last episode of 2024, and I am Frederick, your guide into the world of pseudo-archaeology. This time we will look back at the year that has gone by and look at some of the highlights of it. Before that though, I want to thank all of you who support the show. You are really helping out producing this content and I'm humbled and grateful for your support.
00:00:59
Speaker
And if you want to help out, I will tell you how to do that and get some bonus stuff at the end of the episode. Remember that you can find the links and a transcript at diggingupinstantans.com. You can also find my contact info there if you have any any suggestions or any questions. If you like the podcast, I would really appreciate if you left one of those fancy five-star reviews that I heard so much about. Now that we have finished our preparations, let's dig into the episode.
Reflections on Past Year and Ancient Structures
00:01:43
Speaker
So, 2024 is coming to an end and it's been a pretty eventful year. I started down by breaking my hand while skiing in February, so I can tell you that research with only one hand was a little bit difficult. Still, I've been able to get out 25 episodes over the year and it's covered a mixed bag of topics.
00:02:08
Speaker
We started the year by looking at Ancient Aliens top 10 pyramids. This countdown began back in December 2023 and included a structure in Hellenicon that I actually was able to visit in April during a trip to Greece.
Critique of Gunung Padang Research
00:02:24
Speaker
However, the pyramids here in 2024 include the Diosa steppe pyramid and the pyramids on the Giza plateau.
00:02:33
Speaker
to which we dedicated several episodes explaining the construct and how we know what we know about these wonders of the world. I also got to look at Gunung Padang, but this time from the perspective of the Ancient Alien crowd,
00:02:50
Speaker
in opposite to what Graham Hancock claimed about it in his Ancient Apocalypse series. In that episode, I also got to talk about a wonderfully lousy paper on the pyramid itself. While it's retracted by now, it's still up on the publisher's website. The only reason for that, that I can see at least, is that they want to have the cake and eat it too.
00:03:14
Speaker
I mean they should take it down, it was terribly flawed and should not have passed initial peer review. I suspect though that it drives a bit of traffic to their page and it will remain up for people to use as evidence of Gunung Padaim being a 10,000-year-old pyramid, which is not the case. Remember, they did not test anything that they could tie to human activity. They were testing rotting pieces that they found in the among the stones themselves, so to say.
German Golden Hats and Museum Visit
00:03:49
Speaker
Now from the pyramids we went on and discussed some real mysteries. The German golden hats or combs that were made during the European Bronze Age and from what we can tell might have worked as calendar and again I actually got to see one of them this year when I was in Berlin just a few weeks ago It was a great trip with a with a huge disappointment though, the Pergamon Museum. I had completely missed that it was closing for renovations in November, just a week before I came to Germany. The museum has the Ishtar Gate, the Pergamon Altar and a lot of things in its collection. It will however be closed for
00:04:32
Speaker
Well, the next 30 years or so, so I guess it will be something I will see sometimes during my retirement, maybe. Now
Dead Sea Scroll and Shroud of Turin Mystery
00:04:42
Speaker
in episode 58, I also discussed the copper scroll found in the Dead Sea Catch.
00:04:49
Speaker
What I found remarkable about it was it is actually to some extent a real mystery, and even more intriguing, it's a real treasure map. Contrary to what you see in games or movies, archivalries rarely find maps that will take you to a treasure location.
00:05:06
Speaker
The question, however, as I discussed in that episode, is whether or not the values described in the scroll are genuine. Was it a symbolic inventory list, like those we could find in ancient Greek temples? Or was this an actual set of items stored away in times of unrest?
00:05:26
Speaker
And we are not sure, but none of the fortunes described within has so far been found. So again, we have a real mister, but as I discussed in the episode, we don't need aliens to explain the scroll's existence. We have real world evidence that can actually explain this scroll. For example, the Greek temple treasure list.
00:05:50
Speaker
Our journey then took us to the Shroud of Turin in episode 59 and episode 60. And I did enjoy this episode actually while it's pretty apparent that it's a medieval forgery as the people of the time even uncovered. It was refreshing to see that there were, as I said, in skeptical investigations of it back in the Middle Ages.
00:06:15
Speaker
Now, what surprised me the most regarding this episode is not that I could find in my research, but the comments and emails following them. This has been an episode that's generating the most significant amount of angry emails so far. And most of them are from Christians who I assume feel that they attack their faith in some way.
00:06:38
Speaker
Most of those lamenting were doing so solely on their feelings, but some tried to use papers that I was critiquing in those episodes, pointing out that academics wrote them. The thing with higher education alone is it does not protect you from bad ideas. What we see among the ancient alien people, where there are those with actually doctorates who are doing four aliens interfering with the construction of ancient monuments, like the pyramids and things like that, And looking at the papers, the authors often don't ah have a degree in the topics they are discussing, and they are often tied to, in most cases, Catholic think tanks. While some contribute with excellent research outside their initial fields, sometimes it can also be a red flag for that paper. Especially when they start at the wrong end, they think the fraud is authentic and then try to found find
00:07:36
Speaker
evidence to support his claims and I mean let's start the whole paper with the conclusion that the artifact is real and then they test novel ideas trying to prove it and could this idea help us date fabric maybe but as far as from those papers that's not a good good way to do it and they mostly ignore other stuff like the like the herring-type weave that we see on the fabric that was popular in Europe during the Middle Ages, but not around year zero in the the area of Israel and Palestine. And at the end of April, I reviewed Professor Flint Dibble's debate against sc Graham Hancock on the Jovrogan show, and Dibble has since received the Skeptic of the Year from the Merseyside Skeptic Society,
00:08:29
Speaker
It was also involved putting together the hashtag real archaeology online event that I also was a part of. I created a website for example for that event and they did a little video on lake monsters and
Maya History and Historical Narratives
00:08:43
Speaker
vikings. If you missed it the website with all the participations is still online and you can go there to find a ton of great content.
00:08:53
Speaker
And May was dedicated to the Mayans. We had a brilliant Demetrius and Marie from the Maya History Instagram account. And the following episode was dedicated to the uneventful end of the world of 2012 with Andrew King-Kella.
00:09:09
Speaker
As always, it was a blast to have him on. Hopefully we will hear more from him in the coming year. Let me know if there's a specific alien agent in an episode or topic that you want him to tackle. There's a much of weird alien lore out there that we can show him and see how far he gets through it sober.
00:09:47
Speaker
And following this came one of maybe my favorite episodes. While the episode, Silencing History and Memory in The Christ of Yours, doesn't contain any aliens, it does cover something we in Arkaordi will have to tackle more and more.
00:10:04
Speaker
history and especially how states and museums can use it to present a preferred historical narrative. While this topic is far from new in the field of archaeology, it may not be discussed as much as it should be. So this is a short case study on how things can go when a state dictates what can be researched and what can be exhibited in the museum. Poland is far from the um only country using history in this way, but It's maybe not often we think of this going on in countries with the what we would do deem to be a sound democracy. It's easy to believe this is an issue for state under dictatorships or heavy censorship. We're talking in China, Vietnam, Russia. The list can go on on and on. but
00:10:50
Speaker
This is not true. Again, nobody is immune to misinformation and we need to be careful when our government is using history to present ideology or an idea or trying to create a state identity tied to this most often false historical narrative as I go into greater detail in in that episode.
00:11:17
Speaker
And I'm
Kensington Runestone and Nordic Identity
00:11:18
Speaker
going to fast forward a little bit to September and the Kensington Runestone episode. I think this is among the one of the better ones from the year. And it was really fun to research and it turned out quite well. And I got to offer things that are available in Swedish, but not in English.
00:11:37
Speaker
So this makes the Kensington Runestone and the research on it that goes on in Sweden among Swedish experts in Runestones and the Scandinavian Viking and Middle Ages more accessible to people that, well,
00:11:53
Speaker
does not speak English. Again, the stone itself isn't much of a mystery now who found it, and he was probably the one who created the stone. Maybe with two accomplices, at least one of the accomplices' children seems to claim that in later interviews they made with the Minnesota History Museum that was active or is active around Kensington still. And you can still find these interviews online if you want to go and look them up yourself. But what's more interesting is how this stone ties into the Nordic identity in Minnesota. In a sense, to hoax the
00:12:39
Speaker
the
00:12:42
Speaker
Surrounding of the hoax reflects more and more important history about the identity of Nordic immigrants to the area than the stone wood if it was real. As I said, even if it's a real genuine artifact created by, well, Scandinavian people in the Middle Ages, we know that Scandinavians was in the Americas. It's what just proved that they went a bit further than than we initially thought. We know that they were on the newfound land up in the northern Canada, in the Middle Leons, for example. And we know this due to all the archaeological artifacts we find there.
00:13:30
Speaker
We have plenty of them, and we have where they lived, where they stayed. And we know that they imported wood from America to Greenland to some extent. But this stone itself doesn't give us much of anything, just that they went there. But again, we don't find any archelo archaeological google and remains from this expedition, which again is strange. We find it of other expeditions. and I mean, either it's Ninja Vikings or, you know, it's a hoax. But here has been more than just podcasting.
Ethics in Archaeology and BAUBAU Guidelines
00:14:07
Speaker
And I've been to some conferences. And among the favorites of this year is the Theoretical Archaeology Group's 45th annual meeting. And the conference took place here in Dissemble in Bournemouth, England. And while there, I talked about how Asian aliens use human remains online.
00:14:27
Speaker
And the very short version of this is that they used remains as objects rather than approaching these remains as humans, indicating they're not applying any ethical thinking before posting these remains online. To them it's a mere prop, a way to create sensationalism, which should go against how archaeology and historians and Well, media in general should handle human remains online. And the British Association of Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology, or BAUBAU, has developed some very good guidelines for publishing remains online. And I will have a link to these on the episode transcript page if you want to read more about this, if you wonder how you yourself can approach human remains and your social media feed.
00:15:24
Speaker
Now, the highlight, however, was attending the first tech ethics bowl, a concept that has been part of the SIA annual meeting for a very long time. And I entered the room as part of the audience, actually, but I jumped in due to a shortage of contestants in the teams. And it was a really interesting debate regarding ethics in two random scenarios that was based on real events. I'm also delighted to say that my team actually won this. Team Gilder, as we were called, got the honor of taking home the trophy for this first annual tag ethics poll.
00:16:06
Speaker
I believe at the moment it's at the University of Liverpool but I would not have minded bringing it home but I think it will be a trophy that cycles through through the coming year so maybe not great bringing it back home here to Sweden. And if you're interested in the scenarios that was put up to be discussed during this debate. I will also have this link on the transcript page for this episode. And
Supporter Gratitude and Future Hopes
00:16:37
Speaker
last but far from least are, well, you. You who are supporting the show. it's It really does help and it's amazing to have you here in this little community.
00:16:52
Speaker
You all really pushed me to improve the show and helping out building it. And feel free to reach out with thoughts, ideas or or thoughts on what you want to have more of in the episodes or or questions for that matter. Happy to help sort things out that you might encounter online or on TV or wherever you find your strangeness ah day to day.
00:17:18
Speaker
So we with a just few more hours of this strange year of 2024, I want to wish my patrons and listeners a great future 2025. Let's see what the next year has to bring us.
00:17:52
Speaker
And until we meet again on the other side, please spread the word by leaving a positive review on platforms like iTunes, Spotify, or even among your fellow Trench dwellers. For more information about me and the podcast, check out diggingupancientandians.com. There you can often find sources and resources or reading recommendations if you want to learn more about the things I talk about on the show or want to know what the source is for something I say in.
00:18:21
Speaker
On this episode it will be a bit scarce but you will find links to the Baobao recommendations regarding social media and human remains and also the Ethic Balls case studies that you can look at yourself. So if you want to support the show head over to patreon.com slash digging up ancient aliens or If you want another option, then Patreon, you can sign up at the members portal that you find on diggingupinitiatedyans.com slash support.
Support Information and Credits
00:18:52
Speaker
Signing up at any of the those two places will give you early episodes that are ad free. You also get bonus content and extended episodes.
00:19:03
Speaker
Now, if you want to use Patreon, there is a little quirk there. If you sign up as a new member, please do that on the website and not through your iPhone or iPad because Apple wants an additional cut of the fees that you pay there. So for me, it's better if you do it through the website.
00:19:24
Speaker
Now, if you want to contact me, it can be done through most social media sites. And if you have comments, corrections, suggestions, or want to write that email in all caps, you find my contact info on the website. And this show was created with the support of the Archaeology Podcast Network. You'll find a lot of other great shows like the CRM Podcast and and My Travel on their website.
00:19:49
Speaker
Producer of the show is Ashley Arey and I, Fredrik Trusoham, wrote, edited and mastered the episode you are listening to. Sandromark.org created the intro music and our outro is by the Swedish band called Traliskrv, who sings their song, Völyat. Links to both of these artists can be found in the show notes.
00:20:09
Speaker
um Until next time, keep shouting that science!