WEBVTT - Short Stuff: Longyou Caves

0:00:04.240 --> 0:00:06.240
<v Speaker 1>Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and

0:00:06.320 --> 0:00:09.160
<v Speaker 1>there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. Dave's here in spirit

0:00:09.400 --> 0:00:11.800
<v Speaker 1>like Obi wan Kenobi. So let's get started.

0:00:13.200 --> 0:00:16.799
<v Speaker 2>That's right. And you cobbled this together. And this is

0:00:16.840 --> 0:00:18.400
<v Speaker 2>about the long U caves.

0:00:18.560 --> 0:00:20.480
<v Speaker 1>I think cobbled is generous here.

0:00:21.560 --> 0:00:28.800
<v Speaker 2>No, it's fine. These caves in China, specifically the how

0:00:28.800 --> 0:00:32.960
<v Speaker 2>would you pronounce that, Josh, The province, yeah, Jiujiang, the

0:00:33.040 --> 0:00:37.519
<v Speaker 2>Jujiang province in China where in the early nineties and

0:00:37.600 --> 0:00:41.280
<v Speaker 2>nineteen ninety two, specifically, the people that lived in the

0:00:41.360 --> 0:00:46.520
<v Speaker 2>villages near these ponds. There's ponds all over the place there. Yeah,

0:00:46.560 --> 0:00:49.800
<v Speaker 2>but they are all these sort of historical rumors of

0:00:49.960 --> 0:00:52.559
<v Speaker 2>some of them being bottomless, these bottomless ponds kind of

0:00:53.360 --> 0:00:57.480
<v Speaker 2>Chinese lore. And one day this guy and actually found

0:00:57.520 --> 0:01:00.920
<v Speaker 2>his name, and now I can't find it. His name

0:01:00.960 --> 0:01:04.480
<v Speaker 2>was Wu, I do know that. But he said, you

0:01:04.480 --> 0:01:06.280
<v Speaker 2>know what, I'm going to find out what's going on.

0:01:06.400 --> 0:01:09.280
<v Speaker 2>I saw some places say that he caught this enormous

0:01:09.280 --> 0:01:12.480
<v Speaker 2>fish in one, but I think that's not true because

0:01:12.880 --> 0:01:14.560
<v Speaker 2>part of the thing about these ponds is that they

0:01:14.600 --> 0:01:15.480
<v Speaker 2>had no fish.

0:01:15.560 --> 0:01:17.560
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that they were totally devoid of life.

0:01:17.880 --> 0:01:19.679
<v Speaker 2>But I saw two different things that he caught this

0:01:19.800 --> 0:01:22.360
<v Speaker 2>giant fish and was intrigued, but I just think that's

0:01:22.480 --> 0:01:23.240
<v Speaker 2>made up. Bs.

0:01:23.560 --> 0:01:26.520
<v Speaker 1>Okay, that's great that you laid that out there, because

0:01:26.520 --> 0:01:31.199
<v Speaker 1>we should probably say there's a lot of questions about

0:01:31.319 --> 0:01:31.840
<v Speaker 1>all of this.

0:01:32.360 --> 0:01:35.000
<v Speaker 2>There really is. It's surprisingly hard to get a lot

0:01:35.000 --> 0:01:39.440
<v Speaker 2>of stuff on this. So anyway, he was intrigued and said,

0:01:39.640 --> 0:01:41.840
<v Speaker 2>I'm going to buy a water pump and I'm going

0:01:41.920 --> 0:01:45.000
<v Speaker 2>to drain that thing. And as the story goes, they

0:01:45.120 --> 0:01:48.120
<v Speaker 2>ended up investing as a village into several more water

0:01:48.160 --> 0:01:52.880
<v Speaker 2>pumps and after seventeen days of pumping, drained this thing

0:01:52.960 --> 0:01:55.280
<v Speaker 2>to see if it was in fact a bottomless pond.

0:01:56.160 --> 0:01:56.960
<v Speaker 2>What did they find.

0:01:57.680 --> 0:02:01.440
<v Speaker 1>They found not just in that one pod, but five ponds,

0:02:02.440 --> 0:02:06.560
<v Speaker 1>really deep caverns that you'd be like, oh, okay, that's

0:02:06.640 --> 0:02:08.600
<v Speaker 1>kind of a neat thing to find a cavern that

0:02:08.639 --> 0:02:10.640
<v Speaker 1>was filled with water that everybody thought was a pond.

0:02:10.760 --> 0:02:13.480
<v Speaker 1>But wait, all you had to do was peer over

0:02:13.560 --> 0:02:17.079
<v Speaker 1>the surface into this cavern and you would see a

0:02:17.120 --> 0:02:20.760
<v Speaker 1>staircase that had been carved into the rock descending below

0:02:20.800 --> 0:02:21.679
<v Speaker 1>into the darkness.

0:02:22.400 --> 0:02:27.440
<v Speaker 2>Wh yeah, yeah, and these are this is the mystery

0:02:27.480 --> 0:02:30.520
<v Speaker 2>of the long U caves. Because they still don't know,

0:02:31.120 --> 0:02:32.920
<v Speaker 2>and this is what we'll talk about, you know, probably

0:02:32.919 --> 0:02:36.160
<v Speaker 2>in part two. They still don't know why these things

0:02:36.240 --> 0:02:41.640
<v Speaker 2>were built, this amazing system of underwater caverns, or well

0:02:41.680 --> 0:02:45.760
<v Speaker 2>originally underwater but just underground caverns. Now, how many were

0:02:45.800 --> 0:02:47.720
<v Speaker 2>there in total? I think twenty four they ended up finding.

0:02:47.840 --> 0:02:50.400
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, they found twenty four of them, five major ones

0:02:50.400 --> 0:02:52.440
<v Speaker 1>and nineteen slightly smaller ones.

0:02:53.040 --> 0:02:56.840
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, one is a tourist attraction. Now maybe more that

0:02:56.880 --> 0:02:59.040
<v Speaker 2>was even hard to find out for sure, but at

0:02:59.120 --> 0:02:59.560
<v Speaker 2>least one.

0:02:59.840 --> 0:03:02.560
<v Speaker 1>The whole thing, this whole system of what they call grottos,

0:03:02.600 --> 0:03:05.760
<v Speaker 1>of twenty four grottos covers seven and a half acres

0:03:06.840 --> 0:03:10.880
<v Speaker 1>and the biggest one has a ceiling that's one hundred

0:03:10.880 --> 0:03:15.240
<v Speaker 1>feet off of the floor. Yeah, soaring thirty meters plus.

0:03:16.200 --> 0:03:19.320
<v Speaker 1>That's a really tall cave and a really long staircase.

0:03:19.520 --> 0:03:21.720
<v Speaker 1>And also you would say, well, wait a minute, how

0:03:21.800 --> 0:03:24.120
<v Speaker 1>is this thing even being held up? My friend? They

0:03:24.160 --> 0:03:27.240
<v Speaker 1>carved pillars that held this thing up. And that's just

0:03:27.360 --> 0:03:30.760
<v Speaker 1>the very beginning of all the astounding stuff that there

0:03:30.840 --> 0:03:32.240
<v Speaker 1>is to say about these caves.

0:03:32.600 --> 0:03:34.720
<v Speaker 2>Do you carve a pillar or do you carve everything?

0:03:34.800 --> 0:03:36.800
<v Speaker 2>Around what will eventually be a pillar.

0:03:37.160 --> 0:03:42.480
<v Speaker 1>They say that, I think Michelangelo saw, like in a

0:03:42.520 --> 0:03:45.360
<v Speaker 1>slab of marble, like raw marble, what he was supposed

0:03:45.360 --> 0:03:49.480
<v Speaker 1>to chip away to reveal, you know, David beneath or

0:03:49.520 --> 0:03:51.640
<v Speaker 1>something like that. So yeah, I mean, just what a

0:03:51.680 --> 0:03:52.920
<v Speaker 1>great way of looking at things.

0:03:53.280 --> 0:03:56.000
<v Speaker 2>He stared at it, and he could just see that flaccid.

0:03:55.640 --> 0:03:58.000
<v Speaker 1>Penis right, he could hear.

0:04:02.400 --> 0:04:04.200
<v Speaker 2>All right, So let's talk a little bit more about

0:04:04.200 --> 0:04:06.520
<v Speaker 2>these because when you walk down those steps, you're gonna

0:04:06.520 --> 0:04:08.360
<v Speaker 2>find those pillars, and then you're gonna look around at

0:04:08.360 --> 0:04:11.839
<v Speaker 2>these walls and you're gonna be like, hold on a second.

0:04:12.720 --> 0:04:14.960
<v Speaker 2>If I look at all these walls, I will notice

0:04:15.200 --> 0:04:18.279
<v Speaker 2>and the ceilings, mind you, like basically all of the

0:04:18.320 --> 0:04:20.679
<v Speaker 2>surface except for the floor, right.

0:04:21.200 --> 0:04:22.400
<v Speaker 1>I don't think the floor has them.

0:04:22.400 --> 0:04:25.560
<v Speaker 2>Now you will find it is made up of these

0:04:25.640 --> 0:04:29.760
<v Speaker 2>carved out parallel or I saw one sort of poo

0:04:29.760 --> 0:04:35.480
<v Speaker 2>poo or call them parallelish parallel lines that are How

0:04:35.520 --> 0:04:36.360
<v Speaker 2>wide are these things?

0:04:37.080 --> 0:04:39.440
<v Speaker 1>Well, it depends. So if you're talking about the parallel

0:04:39.440 --> 0:04:42.560
<v Speaker 1>lines that go that circle all the way down a pillar,

0:04:42.720 --> 0:04:45.559
<v Speaker 1>they're usually about twenty four inches wide.

0:04:46.160 --> 0:04:47.600
<v Speaker 2>I'm talking about the ones on the walls.

0:04:47.920 --> 0:04:53.920
<v Speaker 1>They vary in length okay, or width both okay, but

0:04:54.320 --> 0:04:57.039
<v Speaker 1>they'll vary in width from like say, this wall to

0:04:57.120 --> 0:04:59.960
<v Speaker 1>that wall in a local area. They're all going in

0:05:00.120 --> 0:05:02.880
<v Speaker 1>generally the same direction, they're generally the same link, they're

0:05:02.920 --> 0:05:03.920
<v Speaker 1>generally the same.

0:05:03.720 --> 0:05:04.680
<v Speaker 2>Width, right.

0:05:04.720 --> 0:05:06.320
<v Speaker 1>But when you put it all together, it has this

0:05:07.160 --> 0:05:12.800
<v Speaker 1>amazing effect of creating a uniform textured background to everything

0:05:12.880 --> 0:05:15.120
<v Speaker 1>that's on these walls and to the walls themselves, the

0:05:15.160 --> 0:05:18.480
<v Speaker 1>pillars themselves, they're adorned with texture.

0:05:18.800 --> 0:05:21.280
<v Speaker 2>That's right. And within each of these sort of carved

0:05:21.320 --> 0:05:28.520
<v Speaker 2>out lines are smaller vertical clearly like chisel marks that

0:05:28.600 --> 0:05:31.920
<v Speaker 2>are chisel at a sixty degree angle to the vertical

0:05:32.000 --> 0:05:35.440
<v Speaker 2>surface of the wall or the pillar or whatever it is.

0:05:35.880 --> 0:05:39.640
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so it's definitely human hands had a big role

0:05:39.720 --> 0:05:40.920
<v Speaker 1>in shaping these things.

0:05:41.320 --> 0:05:43.680
<v Speaker 2>Lots and lots of human hands. And I guess we

0:05:43.680 --> 0:05:46.000
<v Speaker 2>can take a break now and we'll talk about all

0:05:46.040 --> 0:06:16.640
<v Speaker 2>this other good stuff right after this. So first of all,

0:06:17.080 --> 0:06:19.520
<v Speaker 2>how old is this stuff? We should talk about that

0:06:19.600 --> 0:06:20.080
<v Speaker 2>for a second.

0:06:20.200 --> 0:06:21.479
<v Speaker 1>That's a great question, Chuck.

0:06:23.480 --> 0:06:27.040
<v Speaker 2>Well, probably about two thousand years old.

0:06:26.720 --> 0:06:29.000
<v Speaker 1>That's the guess. And the reason that they're saying that

0:06:29.160 --> 0:06:33.719
<v Speaker 1>is that they found pottery embedded in the silt on

0:06:33.800 --> 0:06:36.960
<v Speaker 1>the floor of this thing when they drained it of

0:06:37.000 --> 0:06:41.279
<v Speaker 1>these caves, and that this pottery dated to about the

0:06:41.320 --> 0:06:45.560
<v Speaker 1>reign of Emperor Swan I think the tenth emperor of

0:06:45.600 --> 0:06:49.359
<v Speaker 1>the Han dynasty, and his reign was up to forty

0:06:49.400 --> 0:06:53.880
<v Speaker 1>eight BCE, so over two thousand years ago is when

0:06:53.920 --> 0:06:56.520
<v Speaker 1>these caves would have been dug.

0:06:56.760 --> 0:07:00.960
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly. And another weird thing about this system is

0:07:01.000 --> 0:07:04.920
<v Speaker 2>that usually you would know because the Chinese were great

0:07:04.960 --> 0:07:08.760
<v Speaker 2>about keeping records and documenting stuff like this, like exactly

0:07:08.839 --> 0:07:12.960
<v Speaker 2>like this. Yeah, they have found no documentation anywhere ever

0:07:13.480 --> 0:07:16.600
<v Speaker 2>about how this was done or what these things were

0:07:16.680 --> 0:07:17.000
<v Speaker 2>used for.

0:07:17.320 --> 0:07:19.720
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the closest they could come was a poem from

0:07:19.760 --> 0:07:25.800
<v Speaker 1>the seventeenth century written by Yushun, who was writing over

0:07:25.840 --> 0:07:29.560
<v Speaker 1>fifteen hundred years after these caves were o sensibly carved,

0:07:30.200 --> 0:07:33.160
<v Speaker 1>And that's the only mention they have. And it's really weird,

0:07:33.200 --> 0:07:35.920
<v Speaker 1>like why would it not be documented by a culture

0:07:35.960 --> 0:07:39.360
<v Speaker 1>that documented everything. The other thing about it, Chuck, is

0:07:39.400 --> 0:07:46.120
<v Speaker 1>that it doesn't match any of the other minds quarries, grottos,

0:07:47.000 --> 0:07:52.840
<v Speaker 1>ceremonial sites, palaces. It just as it's they're their own thing.

0:07:53.760 --> 0:07:57.600
<v Speaker 1>There's one other group of grottos called the Hua Shan Grottos.

0:07:58.240 --> 0:08:01.600
<v Speaker 1>They're also build as mysterious, but supposedly they were built

0:08:02.160 --> 0:08:06.480
<v Speaker 1>about fifteen hundred years after the ones in long U,

0:08:06.640 --> 0:08:07.600
<v Speaker 1>the long U Caves.

0:08:08.720 --> 0:08:11.480
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, another couple of remarkable things is that each one

0:08:11.520 --> 0:08:14.160
<v Speaker 2>of these has only one entrance, like you're talking about

0:08:14.200 --> 0:08:20.360
<v Speaker 2>that vertical shaft staircase. So it's not like they're connected together.

0:08:20.520 --> 0:08:24.560
<v Speaker 2>Although they are beside one another, they neighbor one another,

0:08:24.680 --> 0:08:27.080
<v Speaker 2>sometimes to the point where these walls are just a

0:08:27.120 --> 0:08:30.160
<v Speaker 2>couple of feet thick between them, but you can't move

0:08:30.160 --> 0:08:34.920
<v Speaker 2>from one to another while you're down there. And then

0:08:34.960 --> 0:08:37.559
<v Speaker 2>once you get down there, they found that they used

0:08:37.600 --> 0:08:41.120
<v Speaker 2>to have these drainage channels and ways to drain them

0:08:41.480 --> 0:08:44.040
<v Speaker 2>in this like sort of central water pool that would

0:08:44.040 --> 0:08:47.960
<v Speaker 2>collect water. Yeah, but they eventually completely filled with water.

0:08:48.160 --> 0:08:50.840
<v Speaker 2>And a lot of this still is you know, guesswork,

0:08:50.840 --> 0:08:52.840
<v Speaker 2>because they really just don't know much about it, but

0:08:52.920 --> 0:08:55.560
<v Speaker 2>they think that they flooded over time because these drains

0:08:56.000 --> 0:08:56.720
<v Speaker 2>stopped working.

0:08:57.160 --> 0:09:01.760
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and clearly the people who built these were incredibly talented, because,

0:09:01.800 --> 0:09:05.280
<v Speaker 1>like you said, they shared walls, and those walls in

0:09:05.320 --> 0:09:08.840
<v Speaker 1>some cases were only two feet thick, and if you're

0:09:08.880 --> 0:09:12.920
<v Speaker 1>carving out spaces independently and you're using a shared wall,

0:09:13.160 --> 0:09:16.440
<v Speaker 1>you're at a really high risk of carving into the

0:09:16.520 --> 0:09:20.640
<v Speaker 1>other chamber, the other room through the wall. They didn't

0:09:20.760 --> 0:09:24.320
<v Speaker 1>they figured out that precisely how to carve the next

0:09:24.400 --> 0:09:26.920
<v Speaker 1>chamber that shared the wall with the first chamber without

0:09:26.920 --> 0:09:31.080
<v Speaker 1>puncturing that shared wall. That's really tough to do.

0:09:31.480 --> 0:09:33.720
<v Speaker 2>Oh totally. And they didn't just go in there with

0:09:33.800 --> 0:09:37.760
<v Speaker 2>like the biggest tools that were available to them at

0:09:37.760 --> 0:09:41.000
<v Speaker 2>the time. They and you know, it's because we're these

0:09:41.200 --> 0:09:44.559
<v Speaker 2>these little lines that are carved. They've basically settled on

0:09:44.600 --> 0:09:47.560
<v Speaker 2>the fact that like lots and lots of people did

0:09:47.559 --> 0:09:51.720
<v Speaker 2>this with pretty small tools like chisels and hammers, basically

0:09:51.760 --> 0:09:53.480
<v Speaker 2>when they could have used bigger things at the time.

0:09:53.720 --> 0:09:56.679
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I saw that they think that they actually carved

0:09:56.840 --> 0:10:00.920
<v Speaker 1>from the surface of the ground downward, layer by layer,

0:10:01.520 --> 0:10:04.400
<v Speaker 1>that that's how they carved it out. So they're carving

0:10:04.440 --> 0:10:06.559
<v Speaker 1>this pillar over here by you know, along the way,

0:10:06.559 --> 0:10:08.920
<v Speaker 1>they were carving another pillar over here along the way,

0:10:09.280 --> 0:10:12.840
<v Speaker 1>and they just kept carving down with chisels. So there's

0:10:12.880 --> 0:10:16.319
<v Speaker 1>an estimate. I'm not sure who estimated this.

0:10:16.320 --> 0:10:17.920
<v Speaker 2>This is all over the internet the home.

0:10:18.040 --> 0:10:21.719
<v Speaker 1>It was worried for sure. We got it from Interesting Engineering,

0:10:21.720 --> 0:10:23.800
<v Speaker 1>so blame them. We tried to go as legit a

0:10:23.880 --> 0:10:26.360
<v Speaker 1>source as we could, and they said that in an

0:10:26.520 --> 0:10:31.960
<v Speaker 1>estimate with tools at the time, just removing the rock,

0:10:32.960 --> 0:10:35.600
<v Speaker 1>not the like intricate carving or anything like that, but

0:10:35.720 --> 0:10:38.520
<v Speaker 1>just to remove the rock to create the caverns would

0:10:38.559 --> 0:10:42.120
<v Speaker 1>have taken one thousand people six years if they worked

0:10:42.160 --> 0:10:48.480
<v Speaker 1>twenty four straight hours. Yeah, so that's pretty nuts because

0:10:48.520 --> 0:10:52.040
<v Speaker 1>they would have moved a million cubic meters of rock.

0:10:52.559 --> 0:10:55.600
<v Speaker 1>This didn't soil everybody. This is siltstone. It's very hard

0:10:55.679 --> 0:10:56.760
<v Speaker 1>rock that they carved into.

0:10:57.400 --> 0:11:00.600
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and there's no evidence of where all that stuff went,

0:11:00.800 --> 0:11:04.720
<v Speaker 2>that million cubic meters of rock, because it's not like

0:11:04.720 --> 0:11:08.120
<v Speaker 2>there's you know, a big mountain nearby of some stacked siltstone.

0:11:08.679 --> 0:11:12.400
<v Speaker 2>There were no tools that they found. They're they're surmising

0:11:12.440 --> 0:11:15.800
<v Speaker 2>this chisel and hammer thing from how you know, like

0:11:15.840 --> 0:11:17.480
<v Speaker 2>the end result, not the fact that they found a

0:11:17.520 --> 0:11:20.000
<v Speaker 2>bunch of chisels and hammers down there right like after

0:11:20.120 --> 0:11:23.160
<v Speaker 2>some great flood or something. And then you mentioned the

0:11:23.200 --> 0:11:26.080
<v Speaker 2>intricate patterns there. It's not just the carving and the

0:11:26.080 --> 0:11:28.599
<v Speaker 2>walls and the ceilings and these pillars. But there is

0:11:28.760 --> 0:11:32.800
<v Speaker 2>art down there, like bass relief carvings all over the

0:11:32.840 --> 0:11:36.680
<v Speaker 2>place and almost everywhere I found said that this is

0:11:37.040 --> 0:11:39.760
<v Speaker 2>almost certainly came much much later, yea, and was not

0:11:39.800 --> 0:11:40.480
<v Speaker 2>done at the time.

0:11:40.720 --> 0:11:43.400
<v Speaker 1>Well, let's get into it, because I think we should

0:11:43.440 --> 0:11:46.480
<v Speaker 1>finish on skepticism, shall we shall?

0:11:46.520 --> 0:11:47.000
<v Speaker 2>We shall?

0:11:47.920 --> 0:11:50.880
<v Speaker 1>So some people are like that boss relief thing is

0:11:50.920 --> 0:11:55.120
<v Speaker 1>a great example of questioning anything we know about this

0:11:55.240 --> 0:11:59.880
<v Speaker 1>because sources, legitimate sources will be like, this boss relief

0:11:59.920 --> 0:12:04.319
<v Speaker 1>is and shockingly good condition, having been underwater for centuries,

0:12:05.120 --> 0:12:09.880
<v Speaker 1>and skeptical sources say, probably it's because it was carved

0:12:09.920 --> 0:12:14.120
<v Speaker 1>after these things were drained in the nineties to enhance

0:12:14.160 --> 0:12:18.080
<v Speaker 1>their attraction for tourists, and that over here in the West,

0:12:18.160 --> 0:12:20.360
<v Speaker 1>we're like, wow, look at that boss relief. It's like

0:12:20.400 --> 0:12:24.240
<v Speaker 1>it was carved within the last thirty years. Yeah, And

0:12:24.280 --> 0:12:27.800
<v Speaker 1>it's just a misunderstanding. So when you learn about that,

0:12:27.960 --> 0:12:29.840
<v Speaker 1>it starts to make you a question, Well, okay, what

0:12:29.920 --> 0:12:33.120
<v Speaker 1>else is just misunderstanding? What else is just the tourist

0:12:33.160 --> 0:12:36.320
<v Speaker 1>board in China saying something and we're not quite getting it,

0:12:36.360 --> 0:12:39.040
<v Speaker 1>and we think that this is a mystery more than it.

0:12:38.920 --> 0:12:42.400
<v Speaker 2>Is exactly because you do have to keep that in mind,

0:12:42.440 --> 0:12:45.400
<v Speaker 2>like what we're talking about or where we're talking about.

0:12:46.360 --> 0:12:48.599
<v Speaker 2>There have been theories over the years of what it

0:12:48.640 --> 0:12:53.199
<v Speaker 2>could have been. None of them completely make sense. If

0:12:53.200 --> 0:12:55.920
<v Speaker 2>it was like a mine, it wouldn't have been they

0:12:55.920 --> 0:12:57.720
<v Speaker 2>wouldn't have taken so much time to make it so

0:12:57.840 --> 0:13:01.160
<v Speaker 2>sort of precise and intricate. If it was a palace,

0:13:01.200 --> 0:13:03.520
<v Speaker 2>because some people have put that forward, it would have

0:13:03.559 --> 0:13:06.160
<v Speaker 2>had rooms. This is like, I don't know if we

0:13:06.320 --> 0:13:08.480
<v Speaker 2>got it across. Each one is like its own just

0:13:08.679 --> 0:13:12.600
<v Speaker 2>huge room. And that's not how palaces were. They had

0:13:12.679 --> 0:13:16.760
<v Speaker 2>different chambers in different rooms. And another thing was maybe

0:13:16.800 --> 0:13:20.080
<v Speaker 2>it's a garrison for troops, but they wouldn't have taken

0:13:20.160 --> 0:13:21.480
<v Speaker 2>so long to do something like that.

0:13:21.520 --> 0:13:25.640
<v Speaker 1>Probably no, they would have needed garrisons like much more quickly.

0:13:25.880 --> 0:13:28.800
<v Speaker 1>You don't, you know, it's not something that you would take,

0:13:29.559 --> 0:13:33.000
<v Speaker 1>you know, six years, using one thousand people for twenty

0:13:33.080 --> 0:13:33.840
<v Speaker 1>four hours a day.

0:13:34.440 --> 0:13:35.360
<v Speaker 2>It's a heck of a foxhole.

0:13:35.480 --> 0:13:36.480
<v Speaker 1>You exactly right.

0:13:37.720 --> 0:13:43.760
<v Speaker 2>I did see one video of this woman online put

0:13:43.840 --> 0:13:46.920
<v Speaker 2>forward the idea that it's sort of like an Okham's

0:13:47.000 --> 0:13:53.040
<v Speaker 2>razor thing. Wait is Okham's razor. Yeah, that's the simplest explanation, right, Yeah, yeah,

0:13:53.800 --> 0:13:57.240
<v Speaker 2>they were cisterns, and she had a lot of compelling

0:13:57.920 --> 0:14:02.040
<v Speaker 2>reasons why she thinks they were sistern uh. And a

0:14:02.040 --> 0:14:03.559
<v Speaker 2>lot of people in the comments this is.

0:14:03.480 --> 0:14:06.960
<v Speaker 1>YouTube, of course, they're like, I'm gonna kill your family.

0:14:08.000 --> 0:14:09.880
<v Speaker 2>Now. A lot of people are like, that actually makes

0:14:09.880 --> 0:14:11.600
<v Speaker 2>a lot of sense. And she compared them to different

0:14:11.600 --> 0:14:14.000
<v Speaker 2>cisterns at other places in the world that kind of

0:14:14.000 --> 0:14:17.360
<v Speaker 2>had some similar looks, and that, you know, they they

0:14:17.520 --> 0:14:19.680
<v Speaker 2>functioned well as cisterns because they collected a ton of

0:14:19.720 --> 0:14:22.800
<v Speaker 2>water that they had still been using for fresh water.

0:14:22.960 --> 0:14:27.720
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, And I'm sure the ancestors the ghosts were like,

0:14:27.840 --> 0:14:30.560
<v Speaker 1>what are you doing when they saw the villagers pumping

0:14:30.600 --> 0:14:31.320
<v Speaker 1>these things out?

0:14:31.880 --> 0:14:34.240
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? Maybe, but I don't know that. I think there

0:14:34.240 --> 0:14:36.520
<v Speaker 2>are some things that don't quite hold water.

0:14:36.640 --> 0:14:41.040
<v Speaker 1>Well no, oh boy, chuck. The biggest one is I'm

0:14:41.080 --> 0:14:43.840
<v Speaker 1>sorry we didn't finish on that, but that was beautiful.

0:14:44.200 --> 0:14:46.440
<v Speaker 1>The biggest one for me is why would you make

0:14:46.520 --> 0:14:48.800
<v Speaker 1>such intricate carvings in a cistern?

0:14:49.960 --> 0:14:50.440
<v Speaker 2>I don't know.

0:14:50.720 --> 0:14:51.440
<v Speaker 1>That's a great time.

0:14:51.480 --> 0:14:52.040
<v Speaker 2>That makes sense.

0:14:52.480 --> 0:14:54.720
<v Speaker 1>So from what we can tell, there is a pretty

0:14:54.760 --> 0:14:57.240
<v Speaker 1>decent amount of mystery to the Long UK's it's not

0:14:57.320 --> 0:14:58.400
<v Speaker 1>just misunderstanding.

0:14:59.040 --> 0:15:01.040
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and I don't think we're probably ever going to

0:15:01.080 --> 0:15:01.720
<v Speaker 2>find out for sure.

0:15:03.000 --> 0:15:04.880
<v Speaker 1>So Chuck, what do you think about the idea that

0:15:04.920 --> 0:15:05.720
<v Speaker 1>they were cisterns?

0:15:07.400 --> 0:15:08.960
<v Speaker 2>I think it doesn't hold water.

0:15:09.160 --> 0:15:13.760
<v Speaker 1>Beautiful Short Stuff is apt.

0:15:14.360 --> 0:15:17.240
<v Speaker 2>Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For

0:15:17.320 --> 0:15:21.480
<v Speaker 2>more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

0:15:21.600 --> 0:15:23.440
<v Speaker 2>or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.