Basement #007: w/ Hugh Newman on Giant Skeletons, Sumerian Myths, and Megaliths (Transcript)

That fits in with what I’m doing.”

So I think, yeah, I think it’s really important. But I think archaeology nowadays, as you know, with other guests you’ve had on this show, you need to approach it from all these different angles. It really has to be done.

AJ GENTILE: Why do you think there’s gatekeeping?

HUGH NEWMAN: I think it’s just part of the paradigm. I think it’s part of the nature of any discipline like that. They want to keep it within what they’re doing.

But one of the things I have learned — and this is a friend of mine who actually comes to the conference. She is in her 20s and she’s now doing a proper archaeology degree, doing a proper course about it. And there’s actually a thing that she told me. We were having lunch after an event we were doing in Avebury Stone Circle, of all places, because there’s a pub in the middle of Avebury Stone Circle. And she was telling me that now they actually open up and they want information from alternative people, because a lot of the discoveries being made — and this has happened a lot over the last decade or more, several decades — a lot of discoveries are being made by non-academics, non-archaeologists.

And so how do you address that in archaeology when the archaeologists are supposed to be the only ones making the discoveries and talking about them? And she said now there’s an acceptance within that. So that’s just now, though. That’s new. That’s now happening now. It’s not going to probably help us with what we’re doing at Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe, because the archaeologists have their own agenda. They want to be the main voice on it. But now things appear to be changing, at least in England. At least from this one person I spoke to about it.

A Sneaky Visit to the Caves Beneath the Giza Plateau

AJ GENTILE: Speaking of gatekeeping, this reminds me — I just covered Andrew Collins and the Tomb of the Birds. Is it true that you were down in that cave system?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yes.

AJ GENTILE: Were you not supposed to be?

HUGH NEWMAN: Not really.

AJ GENTILE: Is this where you found a gate open? What’s that story?

HUGH NEWMAN: Okay, let me tell you this story. Yes, it’s one of the stories we’re going to get into. We’ve got a few, I’m sure. So this was back in — I think it must be the year before last. And obviously Andrew had discovered the Tomb of the Birds and also what became known as Collins Caves. Zahi Hawass named it.

AJ GENTILE: Wasn’t he banned for a while?

HUGH NEWMAN: Kind of, yes.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, but they’re not that strict with that kind of thing. And this was back in 2008 when he first discovered it. So we went — we were in Egypt doing a tour there. We were with a group, had finished, me and Andrew hanging about for a couple of days, and we just thought, “You know what, let’s go and take a walk over there.”

The problem is I was wearing my shorts and, like, tennis shoes or whatever I was wearing at the time — could have been flip flops. And we thought we’re going to have a quick look. And there was no lock on the gate and we’re like, “Oh, this is interesting.” So we thought we’d just pop in and take a look. Luckily I had my flashlight and my camera with me.

AJ GENTILE: So you didn’t deliberate for one minute. Should we go in?

HUGH NEWMAN: We were deliberating a lot because you can get serious trouble for that now. And so yeah, we got in. At the front part of it, the tomb area is actually kind of carved out. There’s lots of little chambers. But then at the back there’s like a kind of hole in the wall and you walk through there and there’s this huge semi-created chamber, partly carved out. Then it leads through for about a quarter of a mile through these caves. And it’s the most spooky, mind-blowing place I’ve ever been in in my life. I think it really got me. And Andrew had been in there since 2008, so he was overjoyed.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

HUGH NEWMAN: So we did all that, we filmed it, we got out, no one was around, no one saw us, thank God. And then now they bricked it up. Literally the last few weeks, we had reports — Andrew was over there and actually found it being bricked up. So you can’t actually go back in there now.

But the reason that I found that so interesting is because a few months later, in March of last year, they discovered potentially all this stuff under the Giza Plateau, which interestingly the Tomb of the Birds and Collins Caves — or NC2, as it’s called — leads to. So almost in that direction towards the central pyramid.

AJ GENTILE: Is this the research from the Italian group?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: So it kind of correlates with what you found.

HUGH NEWMAN: It does, weirdly. Yeah. And this is what was so interesting. And there’s a lot more going on under the Giza Plateau. I mean, it’s known about — there’s a lot of stuff known about under the Giza Plateau. It’s not just what the Italians have discovered. There’s the Osiris Shaft, there’s chambers underneath the Valley Temple and the Sphinx Temple that Robert Temple had been looking at. There’s a whole kind of Sphinx area obviously under the Sphinx.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right.

HUGH NEWMAN: And so it was just to get under there and have this experience of going into these caves really blew my mind. It really got me. And now no one’s ever going to be able to go in there again.

AJ GENTILE: It’s a shame.

HUGH NEWMAN: It is a shame.

AJ GENTILE: I mean, if you had to guess and date those caves —

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, the thing is, the front part of it is all carved out. This is like a created kind of tomb area.

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

HUGH NEWMAN: But then the back part is mostly natural. And so I think very few people even in ancient times knew about that. I think that was like a very secret — so what Andrew writes about — it’s a very secret, maybe an initiatory area where people go into some initiations or rites of passage and things like this. We really don’t know.

And so there’s something odd going on there. And the fact that they bricked it up suggests they don’t want anyone else going in. It is a safety issue as well. It’s pretty dangerous because right at the end, if you want to go any further, you have to go down this almost — it’s called “the tube.” And I can’t fit down there. Andrew couldn’t fit down there. But a small person could probably squeeze down there. You might be able to get — next time, too claustrophobic.

AJ GENTILE: I can’t do it.

HUGH NEWMAN: And then that leads further along.

AJ GENTILE: Does this connect all the way to Khafre’s?

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, it’s in that direction.

AJ GENTILE: That’s interesting.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. And some scans — there was actually some similar SAR-type scans done back in 2008 and it seems to indicate that it does lead towards Khafre’s Pyramid. So it could be connected with that discovery that was made there.

AJ GENTILE: Has anyone done GPR in that area to confirm?

The Sphinx, Gobekli Tepe & Ancient Mysteries

HUGH NEWMAN: There has been some done, yeah. I think more needs to be done, a lot more, because there needs to be verification of what was going on there. Because we have the SAR scan technology, which is very controversial. This is Filippo Bionde, Armando May and other team members. And they found potentially outrageous depths of these kind of cylindrical chambers going down towards these giant square chambers and other features.

But someone needs to go on that in an official capacity with GPR technology and just go around the Giza Plateau just to verify what they’ve discovered, because they’ve had other people using the similar technology and finding the same things as them as well. That’s come out recently.

AJ GENTILE: I think Tomb of the Birds came up because I was studying the Hawara labyrinth. And it’s — once again, I don’t know why we’re not prioritizing exploring these places. They seem to be the most important discoveries on Earth.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. I think with Egypt, it’s like there’s so many sites — when you go there, it’s overwhelming. It’s hard to cope with. And they’re so magnificent, all of them. Pretty much.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: So I can understand why they’re kind of hesitant. Also, there’s a lot of political stuff there. There’s a lot of kind of issues with permissions. It’s all very — there’s lots of bureaucracy. But when it comes to getting under the Giza Plateau, there’s a lot of water there. You can’t go down that far anywhere. It would be a huge amount of pumping to get it out. Hawara, on the other hand, is interesting, but it’s all collapsed. I mean, you can see the shape of some of the labyrinth when you go there. It’s all collapsed. There’s so much sand on top of it.

AJ GENTILE: And flooded, I think.

HUGH NEWMAN: Flooded as well, because you’ve got the water level there as well. You’ve got canals that have been carved right through it. And so just to get down there again, it’s a huge pumping situation, a huge amount of money and effort. But there are teams now, independent teams, looking at that, connected with the SAR scan people. A gentleman called Trevor Grassy has been focused on that as well.

And so let’s see what happens, because I’m sure it kind of has to be done. That’s the great thing about the Internet nowadays, because you can put pressure into what should be looked at. Partly what happened at Gobekli Tepe, which we’re going to get into.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: And so that’s another place that needs to be — it feels like, why are people going so slow? Why are people kind of digging down, getting on with it? But there’s always reasons why they can’t do everything immediately.

Did the Egyptians Build the Pyramids?

AJ GENTILE: Well, before we go to Turkey, let’s speculate for just a second. Did the Egyptians build the pyramids or did they find those?

HUGH NEWMAN: That’s a good question. That’s one of the big unknowns. I mean, you look at the technology to create that, it’s outrageous. I personally think the people who built Gobekli Tepe were somehow connected with the people who built the pyramids, because Gobekli Tepe has the same kind of quality, the abstract construction — absolutely superb quality of stone working. And I think there’s some connection there, because they found connections between these two areas going back to the time of Gobekli Tepe.

Now, whether they were built at the official dates of around 2,500 to 2,600 BC — that’s a whole other question. Because you’ve got people like Professor Robert Temple, who has done some surface luminescence dating on some of the stones or some of the pyramids on the Giza Plateau and actually found dates of at least a few hundred years earlier. So that discounts those pharaohs who are credited with doing it. That raises more questions — even if it’s just a few hundred years, that disputes the whole thing.

But I think they could be much older. I think the underground areas are much older and the pyramids may have been added slightly later, towards the official date. So that’s just my opinion. More research obviously is being done out there.

AJ GENTILE: So where do you stand on Robert Schoch’s research on the Sphinx? John Anthony West?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. The water erosion around the kind of channels, around the Sphinx pit — which is really, really interesting, actually.

AJ GENTILE: It looks like water to me.

HUGH NEWMAN: It does, it does. And I think that he was pushing for dates going back to the time of Gobekli Tepe, like 11,000 to 12,000 years ago — the Younger Dryas Flood. And it was much more lush back then, the whole area. So you could imagine there was a lot more water. And also there were channels going all the way up to each of the pyramids anyway.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: Water right there, right next to it. So I think it is quite plausible that it’s that old. And I think, again, if anything on the Giza Plateau connects with Gobekli Tepe, it’s probably the Sphinx and what was going on underground as well.

Was the Sphinx Actually a Leopard?

AJ GENTILE: Have I heard you speculate that the Sphinx is maybe a leopard and not a lion?

HUGH NEWMAN: That’s something I have speculated about.

AJ GENTILE: Why would you think that? That’s very interesting. I haven’t heard that before.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, because — okay, there are a few things. This goes back to Karahan Tepe, which is 11,400 years old, in Southeast Turkey. It’s one of the sister sites to Gobekli Tepe. There’s a lot of leopard symbolism there. And it’s the same era potentially as the Sphinx, if we’re looking at these older dates. Because Graham Hancock and others — Schoch and John Anthony West — were saying that the Sphinx faces the rising of the equinox and Leo in 10,500 BC.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: Because that’s what would rise on the equinox. It’s part of the whole precessional cycle. And I thought that was really intriguing, because at Karahan Tepe you have leopard symbolism everywhere. Not lion — leopard. You get it at Gobekli Tepe, literally at all the sites. It’s a very strong symbol found there.

And when we found our winter solstice alignment, we also believe we’ve possibly found an equinox alignment as well. Because the head that we’ve been researching — that has the light fall on it and illuminate it on the winter solstice — actually faces east, looking towards the rising of the equinox and Leo. So we speculate that there could be a leopard connection.

To the people of Taş Tepeler, or the Karahan Tepe and Gobekli Tepe people — also, if you go to Egypt and look at the old gods of Egypt, like Thoth or Tehuti.

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

HUGH NEWMAN: His consort or wife, Seshat, was an architect. She was supposed to be an architect. She was also into metrology, measurements and geometry, things like this. And she was always wearing a leopard skin outfit. She was the leopard lady, almost.

AJ GENTILE: I didn’t know that.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. So you have this leopard connection with ancient Egypt, and possibly then — and it was quite strong back then. There’s other leopard symbolism and lion symbolism back then, obviously. But why does it have to be a lion? Why can’t it be a leopard? It could be an Anubis dog — this is what Robert Temple suggests. So I think it’s possible, but again, we’ve got no clear evidence of that. It’s just speculation at the moment. But it somehow makes it connect with Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe.

The Discovery of Gobekli Tepe

AJ GENTILE: So at Gobekli Tepe, can you just paint the picture for us? 1963 discovery, they think it’s gravestones. And then 1994 with Klaus Schmidt. What was that like?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. So back in the 1960s, we have Peter Benedict and there was a team of archaeologists doing surveys, walking around the landscape, and they found Gobekli Tepe. That’s what’s so strange. They found some stones lying around. They thought they were kind of gravestones — Islamic gravestones or Byzantine ruins. Didn’t think anything of it.

It wasn’t until Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist who was doing work at a site called Nevali Çori and also another site, Gürcütepe, and a couple of other places. He noticed, because of his research at Nevali Çori — which we can get into — that the symbolism was the same, so this was probably the same era.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

HUGH NEWMAN: But when he looked at the hill, he could see it was a huge artificial hill — a mound, a Tepe or a Höyük, as you call it in other parts of Turkey. And he realized there was something significant going on there. The family who owned the site found these two statues there and actually presented them to the museum. One of them was this very fertility — there’s a figure with an erect phallus.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: And they were kind of embarrassed by it. They gave it to the museum. The museum wouldn’t take it. There was all this debate about it. There was another sort of top of a T-pillar, kind of broken, with a lizard coming off it in 3D relief. And when he saw those in the museum, he said, “Where did these come from?” Found out where they came from, got to the site in 1994, and eventually thought, “Right, something’s going on here. We need to get into this.” And this is when they started the excavation — I think 1995.

AJ GENTILE: Why did he not publish or go public with that for a few years?

HUGH NEWMAN: It didn’t come out until the year 2000.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: I don’t know. I think in archaeological circles it was being talked about, but I think they just wanted to make sure what they had was valid. It took a lot of work to get even down to the first layers, because it’s so heavily buried. That’s the thing about these sites — they’re properly buried. That’s why they’re so well preserved.

AJ GENTILE: Right. Why has only a small percentage of Gobekli been excavated all this time?

HUGH NEWMAN: That’s another good point. When it comes to Gobekli Tepe, it’s a huge site. We’re talking a multi-acre site. It’s massive and it’s very deep — it’s buried. So there’s a huge amount of debris and rubble, and they have to do it so carefully. I mean, they’ve removed thousands of tons already. That’s the thing. People don’t realize how much they’ve removed. I can show you a couple of images just so people can get a sense.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

HUGH NEWMAN: We can have a look at a couple of images of Gobekli Tepe.

AJ GENTILE: While you’re pulling that up — how do you feel about the intentionally buried theory?

HUGH NEWMAN: That’s another good question. When it comes to Gobekli Tepe, there was what is known as a slope slide that occurred. So you’ve got the enclosure there at the top of the image — that’s Enclosure D — and all around that, after Gobekli Tepe was constructed in 9600 BC, for about 1,500 years it started growing almost like a settlement. So structures were being built up on the hill just above it. Eventually they caved in at some point and actually filled in some of the larger enclosures. This was then later covered over, rebuilt on, then covered over again. And then when they eventually decided to leave, they covered the whole site. So there is definitely deliberate burial, but also some accidental burial as well — these slope slides that happened.

AJ GENTILE: Were they trying to preserve it at the end of it?

Göbekli Tepe: Excavation, Preservation & The Tepe Civilization

HUGH NEWMAN: Yes, I mean that’s the unusual thing because I think there’s a bit of both. I think ideas changed through this whole time frame, this 1,500 year time frame. And they would accidental burial. They still preserved it though, even before they buried it. They put artifacts, statues in place, they re-erected and repaired two pillars, put everything back and then filled it in. And so it was like, that’s strange.

But other places like Carahan Tepe, they deliberately smashed up parts of it and then buried it, almost ritually decommissioned it. Okay, so you get that as well. You get this broken element to it, then it’s buried. But whereas certain parts of Göbekli Tepe had to have it preserved because that’s what they wanted to make sure people could see. And this is where we get to the winter solstice and we’ll talk about shortly.

But I mean if you look at this image, this just shows you what we got here. Yeah, this just shows you the kind of site. That’s the site there. That’s the main area. This is like the southeast depression they call it, where a few of the other 60ft wide each. And then if you look at the main site here, this is the GPR scan they did at the site. And these are all the other enclosures they haven’t even uncovered yet.

AJ GENTILE: Would that push the date back if they went deeper? Could be.

HUGH NEWMAN: I mean the thing is though, they have got to bedrock already, so. And that’s where they get the 9,600 BC dates. Okay. But before Klaus Schmidt died, he claimed, and he said this to me and Andrew when we were there once, he said that he thinks they’re going to find stuff going into the ice age there.

AJ GENTILE: Wow.

HUGH NEWMAN: 14,000 years ago. And now other sites in the area are older than Göbekli Tepe. Now they’re finding sites like Chakmaktepe, which is actually not too far away. The sites up near the Tigris river, hundreds of miles away, called Bonchoclutela and a couple of other places.

AJ GENTILE: I was going to ask you about that. Tarlo’s older.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yes, some are older, yeah. They don’t have the big T pillars. That’s what distinguishes Göbekli Tepe. So compared to other sites, that’s actually, that’s when I first went there before they built the roof over it.

AJ GENTILE: That’s Murderer’s Row right there.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, you’ve got me, Graham Hancock and Andrew Collins, obviously. And this is like back in 2013 when I first visited there, actually when Graham first visited there as well. And it’s an absolutely fascinating place. And this is just a scan I got of one. This is enclosure D. Relatively recently, a few months ago, they’ve actually cleared more of it now. So these giant T pillars were actually kind of found like this, but with all the rubble around it holding them all up in place. And so they preserve. A lot of it was preserved. That’s what’s so interesting to me. They actually preserved this and the bedrock that they cut down into and created the floors and the curbs around the edge which they would slot T pillars into.

And I think all these walls that you see here, these small brick walls, they were added later, in my opinion. Yeah, because I think everything was balanced. It was kind of held in place maybe by certain types of scaffolding or other stones.

AJ GENTILE: So is that floor level and polished?

HUGH NEWMAN: It is level, yeah, it’s level.

AJ GENTILE: Pre pottery. Yep.

HUGH NEWMAN: And they also, in some of the floors — I’m not sure what the next image — some of the floors, so the astronomy. But some of the floors are actually made of what’s called terrazzo. Now this is like a lime cement. And this is outrageous. You have to heat it up to like 850 degrees, just to kind of get it hot to create this lime cement called terrazzo. And they thought the Romans invented that, because they’re pretty smart, the Romans. But now they found it going back to 9,000 or even actually older than that. Older sites have terrazzo as well.

So some of the floors are a flattened limestone, carved out of solid rock. And other floors, some of the other areas, are actually made of this kind of very waterproof cement called terrazzo. And so that’s insane. So they were doing that and they were making it waterproof, which is interesting. Because like you see on here, you can actually see the curb around the edge, and so they could have had water in here, and it would have stayed in there. It wouldn’t have drained away unless they chose to drain it away through certain holes that they created. So that’s another interesting element of these sites.

Excavation Controversy & The Olive Tree Campaign

AJ GENTILE: Is there controversy right now about Turkey holding up excavation?

HUGH NEWMAN: I’ve heard that there is. There has been some controversy. There’s a gentleman called Jimmy Corsetti of Bright Insight. I know him quite well, actually. I’ve been assisting him with some of his research. He looked into this because they slowed down excavation there dramatically. But when he looked into it, we realized they were building infrastructure. They got funding from the WEF, which is a bit dodgy in my opinion.

AJ GENTILE: It is.

HUGH NEWMAN: And they are focused on building a whole tourism thing there as well. So it’s an investment project as well. They’ve got to monetize it and make it work for them because it costs a lot to excavate these sites. It’s not a cheap process. And when they see how much there is to do now, my God, it’s an outrageous amount you’ve actually got to do.

So technically they have slowed down the excavation because they were doing all these other things, and now they’re going to restart the excavations this year and get back into it. They’ve cleared away the olive trees which were damaging the ruins potentially. This is something that Jimmy Corsetti campaigned against, and potentially he may have even changed their mind on it because he’s full on, if you know what I mean.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah. Jimmy didn’t make a lot of friends there.

HUGH NEWMAN: No, you don’t make a lot. Yeah, he went out there though and got to see and filmed everything and got access to stuff, and it was outrageous.

AJ GENTILE: His video was outrageous.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. And give a shout out to Mike Collins of Wandering Roof as well, because he also was there and he did a lot of the research with him and they kind of looked at all this. And they’ve actually now moved the olive trees, so whether Jimmy made that happen or whether it was their long term plan is still something people are a bit unclear about. But it happened. So it’s a win either way.

And so now they’ve got no excuse not to get down there and start doing some excavation. They’ve now announced they will be doing some. So whether that’s due to the pressure or whether it’s just something they had in mind anyway, I think a lot of the archaeologists were responding to the pressure and so I think they may have caused some changes there. So it’s great, stuff’s happening and I can’t wait to see what else is going on there. Because when you consider how little has been excavated and what has been excavated is mind blowing already.

AJ GENTILE: It really is.

HUGH NEWMAN: So what else are they going to find?

AJ GENTILE: So if they can’t go deeper, because the bedrock is — is it just going to keep getting wider? Is this a whole complex? Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: And this is it.

AJ GENTILE: I mean, what was it used —

HUGH NEWMAN: Let’s jump back to this.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

The Scale of the Site & The “Tepe Table” of Super Civilization

HUGH NEWMAN: This is how big it is. I mean you look at like the bottom right there, that’s what’s kind of being excavated. So we have these enclosures. You’ve got enclosure D at the top. On the right there you’ve got enclosure C which is like a double enclosure. It’s like a double stone circle. And all the other ones, this whole scanned area — places they’ve only just started excavating — and so there’s a lot more to find.

And they’re now finding outside of this as well, because when this was all being built, this is probably like a series of stone circles with no one living up there. And then over time, over a few hundred years, people were turning up going, “Whoa, whoever built this — I want to be around this. This is where to be.” And they built this settlement around it. So there’s all these structures built up around it. It’s like a village, like a small town.

AJ GENTILE: Have they found evidence of dwellings, cooking potentially?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. They’re now saying that this is one of the — there’s a big debate for many years, but now it seems like initially there was no one really there. They were coming in from Chandler. This is where you get a water source. They have rivers and springs there, and caves there people are also living in as well. That’s only half a day’s walk. It’s only a few miles away. You get there in half a day and back in the same day to go to Göbekli Tepe. So it’s not too far.

And then I think eventually they got tired of going back and forth and they started building these smaller square structures which you see kind of around the edge. And they’re the ones that actually collapsed in later. But even they had T pillars inside them, which is odd. And so are they really domestic? Were people actually living there?

One of the theories that we’re developing and kind of looking at as a possibility is that there’s all these sites now. I mean, we can actually look at — if we jump back to — oh, I need to go back to the first one just to show you, just to give you an extent of what is going on here. This is it. These are all some of the sites that are being excavated. So it’s called the Tepe table. I call it the “Tepe table of super civilization.” That’s my kind of term I use.

AJ GENTILE: I love it.

HUGH NEWMAN: And there’s 12 sites potentially, but there’s many more. There could be 38, it could be a hundred. These are the two numbers we’ve heard. So I don’t know if people lived at one site. I think they may have traveled around the different sites through the year and they built a base that anyone could stay in at different times. And it was a kind of carrying on from the hunter-gatherer tradition where you would move around to different sites, because they know they were doing that before Göbekli Tepe in the Levant.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: There were Natufian sites down there going back to 14,000, 15,000 years ago. And they didn’t have permanent settlements, but they built places and then moved to another place for hunting grounds and migrations and plants they were collecting, and then made their way back over the year. So it could have been a pilgrimage route between these different sites, because you have exactly the same symbolism — T-shaped pillars, style statues, even burials. Now they’re finding all are the same style.

And it’s almost like the builders of Göbekli Tepe — the first sites that were put there — everything then was duplicated. Nothing changed. It was almost like they came in perfect. Nothing changed. It’s strange. You’d think there’d be a development of different styles and other such things, but the style maintained itself.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, it’s almost like a TGI Fridays. They just build it. Yeah, like prefab. Yeah, it’s the same.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, it’s almost like a franchise.

AJ GENTILE: It’s like a franchise.

The World’s First Civilization & Secret Societies

HUGH NEWMAN: That’s what it feels like. I mean, it’s very bizarre. A lot of these sites you can actually — we did some analysis of this — if you stand at the top of one site, because often they’re up on top of quite high places, not only that, but some of them you can see the peak of the other hill in the distance and then to another place. So it’s almost like they were aware of each other going across the entire landscape as well.

Which could have been astronomical. They could have been sighting themselves astronomically. They could have been lighting beacons at certain times of year. Everyone could see each other. We don’t know. But it’s really, really intriguing when you realize it’s not just one site. Gobekli Tepe, which has been 5% excavated, all these sites, and a lot of them are now being excavated. Carahan Tepe’s got a lot of excavation being done. Sephir Tepe, you’ve got a few other sites like Birch and others. But why so many sites?

I mean, this is why I believe this was the world’s first civilization, or what I call a super civilization. Because the elements of civilization were different back then. They didn’t necessarily have writing as we know it. They may not have had certain things you class as civilization, but they had other things going on — ritualistic elements, the geometry, the metrology, astronomy — which were highly advanced, especially for this time.

AJ GENTILE: I mean, I know there’s not a lot of writing, but the metrology and the astronomy speaks to engineering. There’s intentional engineering happening at these sites. So clearly they had to communicate that, to pass this information down somehow. Are we finding any of that? Like, here’s how to do this.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, I mean, that’s what I’m writing about at the moment, actually. I’m finding connections that have been made in other parts of the world now — going across other areas.

AJ GENTILE: Right. Like if you look at the food tax and stuff, it’s like, here’s how we built this.

Evidence Left in the Quarries

HUGH NEWMAN: Oh yeah. There’s very little. One of the clues about how they built stuff is the quarries. What we’re finding there a lot is, like in Gobekli and at Carahan, there’s an area where they kind of leave a half-finished T-shaped pillar, actually in situ, which is really, really interesting. That suggests that they were leaving certain things at the site or near the site to say, “Hey, this is how we did it.”

This is where we got the stone from. This is the birthplace of this temple you’re looking at. I’ve actually written a few articles about that, because you have that with, like, the biggest obelisk in the whole area of Egypt was left in the quarry, half finished. You get it on Easter Island — the biggest Moai statue is still in the quarry, half finished. You get it at Baalbek. The biggest stones there, 1,650 tons, still in the quarry, unfinished.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: Same with Gobekli Tepe, same with Carahan Tepe. So there’s almost like a tradition of leaving the biggest stone or evidence of how they did it in the quarry, as a little mark saying, “This is where this came from.”

AJ GENTILE: Like a maker’s mark.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. It’s almost a Masonic thing. You could see it like that, because the masons do that as well, apparently. There are places in Bible lands that have all this kind of tradition as well, when you look at some of the quarries there, and I find that really intriguing.

But also, you’ve got to remember that they mainly built with limestone as well. So it’s relatively — still impossible for me or you to do it, probably — but they were building with limestone, so you could cut it with the tools they had relatively easily. But when you get into the intricate stylings of everything, it’s like, oh my God. How did they come up with this?

It’s almost like it emerged, it blasted out of nowhere right at the end of the last ice age, just after the Younger Dryas, and boom, here we go. But what we’re doing for JJ Ainsworth’s book — JJ Ainsworth, my co-author I’m working with — we’re looking at the kind of lead-up to that, where it all came from.

AJ GENTILE: That’s where the big questions are — how it all came to be.

Elite Hunter-Gatherers & Secret Societies

HUGH NEWMAN: And people aren’t going to like what we say. Because we’re not super out there, we’re not super controversial. I really believe these hunter-gatherers were a different class of people than people realize. There were elite groups within these hunter-gatherers that are often not talked about, but they were the ones who had this higher level of knowledge, and it was passed down generationally. They were super advanced. And they would also, I think, have been taking various substances — you can say psychedelics.

AJ GENTILE: We’re going to get into that. I think in one of your books, don’t you talk about secret societies back then?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, yeah. I’ve written about that in a couple of papers and articles, because when you look into hunter-gatherer societies and go back far enough, even into the Paleolithic times, you can actually find evidence going way, way back of these kinds of societies going back to the Paleolithic era, which suggests that they were very advanced back then.

AJ GENTILE: Oh yeah, the hatch marks.

HUGH NEWMAN: This is Alexander Marshak, and this is like counting, this is like numerology, this is astronomy — counting the moons and things like this. There are certain things they were doing way back in the Paleolithic, going back 40,000 years. Some of these places suggest an advanced understanding of astronomy and the solstices, which is where we get to Carahan Tepe eventually.

They seem to be obsessed by it. They were actually aligning many of their caves. Even at Carahan Tepe itself, they have all these etchings at the top of the hill — you’re not allowed to go up there anymore. And below at Sephiroth as well, you find these etchings very similar to the Paleolithic etchings. So you see this lineage of information coming from Paleolithic Europe.

Hunter-gatherer groups traditionally had secret societies as their ritual adept leaders — different groups within different hierarchical societies. This goes back tens of thousands of years. People don’t realize this. They weren’t just randomly going around hunting and gathering. They were organized. They planned things. They chose specific caves that are aligned so the entrances would have light coming through on the summer solstice morning or the winter solstice sunset. They would build in a certain manner, align and orient things in a certain way, so it would continue their traditions.

AJ GENTILE: Which would take generations just to observe that pattern.

Paleolithic Cave Alignments

HUGH NEWMAN: Exactly. This is actually Lascaux, for instance — the most famous cave in France, in the Dordogne Valley. I managed to go there this summer, where I found a family holiday which turned into a full-on exploration, much to the disdain of my family. But that’s what happened.

This one is aligned to summer solstice sunset. They chose their caves and entrances and put their paintings in specific spots where it would illuminate only on the solstices at that time of year. A lot of research was done on this, and they found that a majority of the caves there, not only did they align to the solstices, they were chosen because they had this passageway that would illuminate the whole passageway on that particular time of year. Paintings were put in spots where they would get illuminated, or carvings were placed there.

This analysis was done by amazing French researchers, and they found — scientifically analyzed, published in academic papers — that more often than not, there’s no way this could be chance. You have the winter solstice mainly, plus the summer solstice and the equinoxes, aligned caves and illuminations taking place. And that really blew my mind, because this knowledge was going on potentially 40,000 years ago, right up until the time of Gobekli Tepe. And now we’re finding it there — very similar ideas, very similar principles.

So you can see that there’s a legacy of knowledge going back into the Paleolithic Europe era. But also there were much older cultures in different areas — coming down from the Russian steppes, coming up from the Levant, even in Egypt. The Natufians and other such peoples who had different types of knowledge. The Natufians, for instance, understood geometry. They even understood standard units of measure and construction techniques, and building into the bedrock — things they weren’t supposed to know about 14,000 to 15,000 years ago.

They were smart people. They were starting to have settlements, but not quite. They were moving around, as I said earlier, like pilgrimage routes, following the different migrations of animals, but choosing sites in specific areas where they could take measurements of the sky. They would build in a certain manner, align and orient things in a certain way, so it would continue their traditions.

That really blew my mind. When you start looking earlier than Gobekli Tepe, you find all these elements in place. And there’s actually a very Natufian site right near Gobekli Tepe — Checkmatepe — that again has got Natufian stylings to it, because it’s got holes around the edge where wooden poles could have had roof supports, like the Natufians used to do.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: So you get things like this going on. The more you get into it, the more you dig into the academic papers, there are nuggets of information in there which a lot of people haven’t heard about.

Derinkuyu and the Underground Cities of Cappadocia

AJ GENTILE: Well, let’s take a quick break, and when we come back, I want to talk about Carahan Tepe Solstice 2021, where you almost got yourself into some trouble. So before we jump into Carahan Tepe and your almost arrest by the Turkish government, I wanted your quick take on Derinkuyu, the underground cities of Cappadocia. Who built those? How long? What were they used for?

HUGH NEWMAN: They’re very interesting. Yeah, the underground cities of Turkey are amazing. The most famous one, as you said, Derinkuyu — this is in the whole Cappadocia area. It goes multiple levels down. They’ve got these huge rooms, all these different floors. It’s quite intricate, actually, some of it. And that’s one of many — there’s at least 200 of that size.

AJ GENTILE: I mean, 20,000 people got in there.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, there’s at least 200. There could be hundreds more. They’re finding them now not too far from Gobekli Tepe, in a town called Midi — it’s kind of in between Gobekli Tepe and the Tigris area, where you get Ktic Tepe and Bonchoclutal, these other sites which are a bit older than Gobekli. They’re finding them there. They find them now in Konya as well, where you have Çatalhöyük nearby, which is a seven-and-a-half-thousand-year-old site.

But these underground cities are officially only a couple of thousand, three thousand years old at most. Some of them are attributed to the Hittites, some to the Byzantine people, even the Christian era. But at Derinkuyu itself, when you go and investigate, you can actually see the first couple of levels are more intricately carved than the lower ones. Because the lower ones are later — as they dig down, it’s later in time. The first ones they carved out are more intricately done. There’s a different quality to them. You can see that they’ve done it all with natural tools. But when you get a bit lower, you start to see metal tools have carved them out.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

Underground Cities, Sumerian Myths & Karahan Tepe

HUGH NEWMAN: So the first layers, it could be super ancient. And one of the primary investigators there many, many years ago tried to work out where all the stone went, where did it all go, where did it end up. And he found a riverbed. We found loads of the limestone had been chucked in there, the rubble, the kind of dust and everything else. And found Paleolithic tools in there.

AJ GENTILE: Wow.

HUGH NEWMAN: And Mesolithic tools. So we’re talking like. And he thinks they could be really old going into the Ice Age. So that’s what’s so interesting about them. And also that it could be with this whole kind of cataclysm event, you know, the whole Younger Dryas and all this, which was, you know, Gobekli Tepe was built within a couple of hundred years at the end of that kind of whole drama. Could these have been places where people were hiding out when major cataclysms were taking place up on the surface, which were known to have been happening in that part of the world?

I think there’s something in both of those ideas. I mean, this is all just discussion at the moment. No one’s really sure. But the fact that some of them are now being found closer and closer to the whole Taş Tepeler super civilization area, I think they’re going to find correlations between them, especially now, because what we’re going to look at shortly is Karahan Tepe. They’re digging into the ground, there are subterranean elements, even in Taş Tepeler itself. And so they were building into the ground right there at some of the sites. We in fact even discovered a tunnel there at one of the sites that we’re not allowed to talk about too much. But we made a video but didn’t give the location away.

AJ GENTILE: An artificial tunnel.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, we’re talking 100 meters. So what, two or 300 feet dug into the ground?

AJ GENTILE: I never heard that.

HUGH NEWMAN: Solid rock.

AJ GENTILE: For what purpose?

HUGH NEWMAN: No one knows. They say it’s a well, but when we looked at it, it was like, whoa, hang on a sec. What on earth is this? And so that’s actually our site. They’re starting to excavate as well, so they’re going to probably find it anyway. But we got to know the locals and the family, and it’s very similar to, like, Derinkuyu. It’s very similar to that idea of underground elements being constructed at these sites. And so there is actually a connection now between Taş Tepeler and the underground cities.

AJ GENTILE: The underground fascinate me because of the intentionality of them. How the giant stones are there for protection, bringing fresh water up, bringing fresh air down. Animal husbandry happening in lower levels. It’s just very intricate.

HUGH NEWMAN: And you have those rolling doors. The big circular doors.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

HUGH NEWMAN: And so they would roll them back and forth into place. They’re like giant stone discs. Now, some of those are being found in caves in Şanlıurfa, right in the center of the whole area of Taş Tepeler. And so there’s actually caves there. They’re quite famous. They’re all along where the river used to run in Şanlıurfa. There’s actually a couple of caves there that have these circular discs. And I was like, hang on a sec. Could these then be as old as this? Is this where the people were living? And is it the same? And the same ideas were then transported to different parts of Turkey as well. So yeah, there’s a lot more going on than people realize in that area.

AJ GENTILE: How many people were living there at the time in Şanlıurfa, in this whole area? I mean, these are thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.

Şanlıurfa: A Lost Civilization Hub

HUGH NEWMAN: I mean, this is one of the big debates about the whole Taş Tepeler region. Because Şanlıurfa itself had not only a river running through it, a very strong river, it was a super lush area. It had all these caves where people were living in just above the river. It had springs there. There’s four sections, sacred springs that now feed what are known as the Pools of Abraham, where all the sacred carp are. You have the Cave of Abraham as well, where he was said to have been born, which is all carved out in a weird way, and it’s all water in it.

And it makes you wonder if all these kind of biblical sites in Şanlıurfa were actually adapted from the whole Taş Tepeler region. Because there was actually a site in Şanlıurfa itself called Yeni Mahalle. This is where the Urfa Man statue was found, or the Balıklıgöl statue. And that’s got obsidian eyes, no mouth. It’s kind of in this sort of pose with a stump for its legs where it would have been placed in a prominent position, with a phallus kind of out with a V-neck motif or insignia. And so there was a major site in Şanlıurfa itself as well as all the big sites like Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe.

So it’s very. Yeah. And I think most of the people were living around Şanlıurfa going back 10, 12,000 years. And then they spread out. They started building these outer sites that then became settlements themselves. So yeah, there’s a lot going on in Şanlıurfa city itself.

AJ GENTILE: I like Andrew Collins’ theory about how the Garden of Eden could have been an actual place there.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. Lots of it lines up because this is the ancient city of Edessa. This is where we have many of the kind of stories of Adam and Eve and things like that kind of emerged from these zones. And there’s a lot of debate about that. I mean, Andrew’s the expert on all this kind of stuff. But Şanlıurfa is a prominent place. People don’t realize that. They think it’s just the city that’s near Gobekli Tepe, but it’s not. There’s something going on there as well.

Sumerian Iconography and the Anunnaki

AJ GENTILE: Where are you with — are you finding Sumerian iconography, Anunnaki, that sort of thing? Are you finding that at these sites?

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, what JJ has been looking at, and I think Robert Schoch and a couple of other people before were looking at, is that some of the symbolism is very similar to Hittite or similar type of symbolism but 7,000 years later, which is odd. And the stories of the Anunnaki — Klaus Schmidt actually wrote about this in his book. He wrote that he believes there’s some connection with what’s called the Duku Mound, and the Anunnaki potentially could have been in and around Gobekli Tepe. Something Andrew’s written about. Something we’re going to be looking at from a different perspective because we found lots of the myths and the stories could actually be talking about what was going on in the Taş Tepeler region as well. And Karahan Tepe being one of the areas we’re focused on, because you have all these fertility myths with Enki and Enlil.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: And there’s lots of fertility symbolism at sites like Karahan Tepe.

AJ GENTILE: Do you subscribe to some of the — I don’t want to say fringe is the wrong word — but some of those out there theories about Anunnaki being alien hybrid programs?

HUGH NEWMAN: I find that fascinating. I mean, trust me, I’ve read Zecharia Sitchin’s books. But I’ve also read the books of Christian O’Brien and Barbara Joy O’Brien — The Shining Ones, Genius of the Few.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

HUGH NEWMAN: Those are more my kind of thing. Because even in them, his translations of the Sumerian text are still pretty mind blowing.

AJ GENTILE: They are.

HUGH NEWMAN: And bizarre. And he — O’Brien’s looked at it more like they were kind of spiritual beings, almost semi-divine. They would almost emerge from the ether and then come into form.

AJ GENTILE: Form.

HUGH NEWMAN: Which sounds as crazy as the alien stuff, really. But that was his idea. It’s the only way he could really explain it because that’s how it’s kind of described. They were kind of semi-divine, that became human into form eventually. Then they were creating humans as well.

AJ GENTILE: This sounds a lot like the Book of Enoch as well.

HUGH NEWMAN: It kind of fits in with all that as well.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: Very odd. Yeah. When you start looking into it.

Karahan Tepe: The December 2021 Visit

AJ GENTILE: Okay, so December 20, 2021.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: Were you incarcerated? Were you in that Turkish prison?

HUGH NEWMAN: So this is — we’re talking about Karahan Tepe. Yeah. Let me just bring up — I wanted to show people this because this is what it looked like before it was being excavated. I think we need to kind of see this. This is like some back — I think this was a film I got in 2018 with full permission from the landowners. So this is this area, the front area there. This is what’s all being excavated now. And now.

AJ GENTILE: Wow. It looks like nothing.

HUGH NEWMAN: This has somewhat changed if we look at it now.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, my goodness.

HUGH NEWMAN: This is what it looks like. Look at this. So a huge amount has been excavated, and a lot of this has been carved into the bedrock as well. We’re not just talking built on the bedrock. A lot of it has actually been carved out of the bedrock. They were working with the bedrock in a way that no one else had really done before this. And this is an epic shot. Like, look at this. It’s mind blowing.

So this is an area of the site. This is called the pit shrine or Structure AA. And the other one there with the serpent tail with all the pillars, that’s Structure AB or the pillar shrine. And then you’ve got the main enclosure it leads into, which is like 70 feet wide, called Structure AD. Now, if you notice on the right there, that’s all carved out of bedrock because it’s going up a hill to one side, whereas all the others — there would have been 18 T-pillars around the edge, five of them carved out of bedrock with those benches. And so it’s a huge amount of work. They’ve got kind of carvings, wells and other such things in it.

But really, what grabbed us was this area here. This is called Structure AB or the pillar shrine. There are 10 of these pillars. This is all carved out of bedrock, which is unheard of at this time. And then one freestanding pillar, which is almost like the shape of a serpent. On the back western wall, you’ve got this head, it’s about this big, emerging out, carved again out of the bedrock. It’s absolutely insane when you kind of look at this. It just absolutely blows my mind.

So this is what we saw when we turned up on December 20, 2021. Myself and JJ, we had this serendipitous series of events — that’s a polite way of putting it. We heard about it all just being exposed. The first time you could visit it was in like September, October 2021. Our friends had been out there, and we’re like, “Christ, we want to get out there.” But we couldn’t get out there till December. That was the earliest we could go. And then we heard that they were going to close down the site around Christmas or January, because we have a sort of a friend who worked at Istanbul University who would give us information and keep us updated quietly.

So we got out there for December. Eventually we made it there, and I kind of turned up there on the evening of the 19th. We knew the landowners because I’ve been visiting there for five or six years previously, before it was excavated, as you saw in the aerial shots there. And they gave us permission to go in there and fly my drone, just briefly, so I could get a view of the whole site. Then the military guys who also worked there called Istanbul because they saw someone flying a drone and tried to get me in trouble. But I kind of had permission at the same time, but he didn’t realize I wasn’t supposed to. And that’s — anyway, this whole series of problems started.

And then I got a call from my friend who owns — the son of the landowner, the guy I flew the drone with — and he said, “Oh, you can’t come tomorrow,” because we had to go tomorrow because JJ hadn’t been there yet. And we’re like, we want to see the site when it’s sunny and everything. He said, “Can’t. All the officials are turning up, and if you turn up, you’re going to get arrested, you’re going to get in trouble.” We’re like, “Really?” He said, “What?” I said, “What time will they come?” He said, “Oh, like, late morning.” I said, “We’ll come early morning.”

AJ GENTILE: Morning.

The Winter Solstice Alignment at Taş Tepeler

HUGH NEWMAN: How about that? So they said he might come early morning. I said, we’ll come earlier in the morning when it’s dark. We don’t care. So we got there just as the sun was rising, not realizing we were going to see anything. And suddenly we walk up to the site and we see this head illuminated. And we’re like, “What the hell?”

AJ GENTILE: So you didn’t plan on a solstice visit? You just happened to?

HUGH NEWMAN: We were thinking about going there one of the mornings, but we didn’t know if we were going to discover anything. We checked all the maps and everything. We couldn’t see anything obvious. But because this happens 10 minutes after sunrise, the alignment’s slightly different to what you’d expect. So we saw this head getting illuminated. That really got us. And this is kind of what happens. The sun shines through that hole. This is all bedrock, remember?

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: And it illuminates the stone head for 45 minutes. The light would move around the head, then sort of move around like this and then go down onto the neck over a foot as the sun moves. So as the light moves around, it goes through that hole and only that hole, and because it’s going at a sharp angle, you actually get this really thin blade of light.

AJ GENTILE: So if it’s bedrock, they had to have planned this well in advance.

HUGH NEWMAN: This was master astronomers, priestly elites doing this. This was outrageous design to come up with this, and then all the symbolism associated with that as well. The sun would rise up over in that direction, the southeast. It would go in between the two T-pillars of the main enclosure, so right in between them, and then through that hole, and then illuminate the stone head. That really blew our minds when we saw that. We couldn’t quite believe it.

This is like the sequence of how it gets illuminated now in the modern era, because we went back there the following year and went back there late last year as well. But back in 9,400 BC, the earliest dates they’ve got for this site — we checked this all out using Stellarium and all these different programs — the sun would be slightly higher on the head, so it would illuminate it even more perfectly.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

HUGH NEWMAN: It was so definitely a deliberate design.

AJ GENTILE: So if we’re dating this 9,400 BC, then the technology has to predate that by thousands of years.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yes. This is what was developed, I believe, in the Paleolithic era, because they were measuring, they were aligning, they were choosing caves that would align to these solstices. So they had an understanding of it coming into Taş Tepeler before anything was even built there. They must have done, because you don’t by chance just come up with this.

If we look at this — this is actually a time lapse, this is fascinating — if you actually look at the head…

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: Speed it up. Actually, this is what happens. We were very fortunate. We managed to get in there. And it actually gets illuminated. And I’ve got archaeologists saying, “No, no, it’s just pure chance.”

AJ GENTILE: Come on.

HUGH NEWMAN: Pure coincidence. And I’m like, man, if this was on like the 18th of April or something, then it might be a bit of a weird coincidence. But this is specifically only on the winter solstice, where the sun is in its most southerly position on the horizon before it starts moving north across the horizon towards the equinox and the summer solstice. So it’s the only time of the year the sun rises at that point where the head gets illuminated. Any other time of year, either the light doesn’t come through or it goes nowhere near the head. So it has to have been designed. And so this is what’s so compelling.

AJ GENTILE: And on that day, aren’t we seeing events like this all over these ancient sites?

Solstice Alignments and Ritualistic Activity

HUGH NEWMAN: Not particularly, really. Well, think about it — so little has been excavated. And we believe there’s something at Göbekli Tepe. We believe there’s an alignment there, but it’s been so built over, rebuilt, damaged, covered up and everything else. But I think as these excavations continue, we’re going to find more solstice alignments over and over again.

There are a couple of other potential ones. There’s Enclosure F at Göbekli Tepe, there’s possibly one in Enclosure D at Göbekli Tepe, which we’re pretty convinced by, but none of it has been as clear as this. Today you can go and turn up on the winter solstice — and we did it, this one just gone — and just watch it happen. And it’s like, “What the hell?”

To me this is massive. Not because we discovered it or anything, but this is a real thing. It proves that they were studying very high level solstice orientations and alignments and phenomena in 9,400 BC. That isn’t supposed to have been happening. It’s not supposed to be happening until like Stonehenge, where you get the precise alignments like this. Obviously the Paleolithic caves are a bit different because they’re natural, and they were choosing places where the light would come in and then they would paint things so it would get illuminated, or carve things. But this is a whole different thing.

AJ GENTILE: And this predates Stonehenge by 5,000 to 6 or 7,000 years. Oh my goodness. So what do you think was happening at this site? What were they doing?

HUGH NEWMAN: This is where it gets kind of interesting. We believe that this was a ritualistic site. We believe there’s all this fertility symbolism. All these pillars are really phallic. You can see it. There’s other symbolism there where there’s men holding their phallus as a large statue, which we can look at in a moment. But they were studying the stars. There are star alignments as well that Andrew’s looked at, and other people have looked at. But really, this is just outrageous. You can’t just design this by chance.

If we look at some of the reconstructions — this is my friend Kevin Esslinger. We’ve been working on putting the site back together to see if any pillars would be in the way. They’re not. We’ve also put a roof over the top of it, because the archaeologists claim there’s no evidence for any roofs. There are only a couple of negatives where they think roof beams might have been found. They think they all had roofs on. So there’d be no looking at the sky, no astronomy, no solstices. It doesn’t happen.

So we’re like, okay, we’ll put a roof on it then. So we did. We put a roof on exactly based on where all the pillars are. And there’s a perfect gap between two of the outer pillars and the two central pillars.

AJ GENTILE: So it still works for the light to come through even with a thatch roof on it?

HUGH NEWMAN: Even with a thatch roof on it. This is a traditional Native American roof design that Kevin’s focused on. And even if you have windows in the roofs — because it’d be pitch black otherwise — if you just put one in a small area, you get a perfect alignment taking place as well. And so this is, to me, like…

AJ GENTILE: They don’t like it.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, they don’t like it. Even though we don’t believe there were roofs, there might have been. And so if evidence turns up — if they find wooden beams or actual evidence of roofs — I’d be interested, because we could then present this. But the fact is it works with and without. So this is what was going on there.

This is just a little 3D AI thing we put together from an illustration by Dan Lish — I want to give him credit. It was originally just a pen and ink illustration, but we turned it into this. But we think there’s something really interesting going on here, because they were obviously developing their astronomical skills. There was ritualistic activity clearly taking place there. They found all sorts of artifacts with bizarre symbolism on them.

Artifacts, Symbolism, and the Vulture Statue

HUGH NEWMAN: We talk about the leopards, we talk about men holding their phallus. We can look at some of them, actually. Oh, this is actually the roof they’re planning to build, which we’ll get into in a little while. Let me just find the right thing, because there’s some very bizarre… Let’s have a look at this one. This is the vulture statue they found in the new enclosure at the top of the hill. This is about 2.5 feet tall, so probably like this.

AJ GENTILE: And the vulture shows up at all these sites, doesn’t it?

HUGH NEWMAN: It does. This is what we get on Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe. Again, this is broken — here, here, and here — in three places. Most of the statues are ritualistically broken. This was found also up in the new enclosure. I’ve got another look at the pillar shrine there.

But let’s look at this. There’s also evidence that these were full of water as well, which we mentioned earlier.

AJ GENTILE: There’s…

HUGH NEWMAN: I think the water symbolism here is really interesting, because if these had water in them, it becomes much more ritualistic. There are things that could have been taking place here.

AJ GENTILE: I think you’re right, because the walls are so smooth that it looks…

HUGH NEWMAN: It almost looks like it. It’s very bizarre when you start looking into it. Yeah, let’s have a look at this. This is again the work of Kevin Esslinger. We were experimenting to see — because they look like pools of water — there’s no natural water here.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: No springs at Taş Tepeler. And yet people somehow may have lived here as well. So we were working out if they could collect rainwater and stay full of water. And they pretty much could. They’re very well sealed. And also, we have this as well. This is speculation about what it may have looked like. I mean, it could have just been a spa. A megalithic spa. That’s something I would quite appreciate, I’m sure.

But here’s some of the artifacts and the symbolism which could explain what was going on here. You’ve got these huge, perfectly cut stone bowls with holes — kind of donut-shaped stones — with animals placed within them, as though they’re going through that porthole stone that the winter solstice comes through. And then they’ve got these maces — stone maces — you can just about see in the top right image, with all these carvings on them and other such things.

To me, this is a ritualistic burial of some artifacts. This isn’t just what they were preparing, like their beef stewing or anything like that. This is something else. I think you can see that.

New Discoveries at Karahan Tepe

HUGH NEWMAN: Here’s some of the other relatively newly discovered statues with 3D reliefs on them. All sorts of symbolism. It’s quite broken. Karahan Tepe. So it’s quite hard to find. This is actually a new room they found at the site. And to me, this looks like something Sumerian or Egyptian.

AJ GENTILE: It does.

HUGH NEWMAN: Utterly bizarre. And so this is brand new. This is like 25 feet wide, something like that. It’s not huge, but it’s pretty big. And a lot of the base there is carved out of bedrock. So this would again be water-sealed as well.

AJ GENTILE: So again, it looks like a level, polished floor.

HUGH NEWMAN: It is, yeah. They were really working that bedrock in a profound manner. Really, really beautifully. And this is one of the statues they found. They originally thought it was a female statue, but then you can actually see it’s got a phallus there as well.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: This was found in the large enclosure at the top of the hill. Look at the haircut though. That’s very similar actually to what you see on some of the goddess statues in Malta and Gozo.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

Ritual Specialists, Sacred Sites & Ancient Psychedelics

HUGH NEWMAN: And then this one. Yeah, the whole San Tsuna stories really blows my mind actually. This is what, this. So this is the big statue they found on the right in the New England. It’s caused a bit of a sensation in late 2023. But notice it’s got like a, almost like a false beard on it.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, look at that.

HUGH NEWMAN: And then they found this smaller statue again with this, what appears to be a false beard. And what do we find in Egypt? What do we find on the Sphinx?

AJ GENTILE: That’s right.

HUGH NEWMAN: We find these kind of false beards. And so what on earth is that doing here? And clearly the man, the gentleman on the right, this is seven and a half foot tall. This is a giant. He’s holding his phallus, he’s got an emaciated body. So you see his ribs, he’s even got a haircut. It’s almost like shaved around here. And hair coming down the back like a mullet, a bit of a kind of Mohawk mullet.

And this is very much when you have shaved heads and things like this, it’s usually associated with ritual specialists. This isn’t like a king or warrior. This is like a kind of ritual specialist. When you have the shaved cranium, like

AJ GENTILE: a priest or a shaman or something.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. And you get that very much.

AJ GENTILE: Could any of these sites have been colored with pigment, painted?

HUGH NEWMAN: There is evidence of that now. Yeah. I mean actually this, if we go to this one, this is the boar statue. That was found at Göbekli Tepe. This was found in the main enclosure at Göbekli Tepe. This is huge. Like a full size kind of boar statue with fangs and everything else. And in his mouth they found black, red and also white pigment on some of the body as well. You can see the red pigment in there. So they had black, red and white.

Now I know that’s interesting to you because you had, I think Tim Hogan was speaking about that being the colors

AJ GENTILE: of Egypt, the colors of the Templars.

HUGH NEWMAN: Colors of the Templars, some people say the colors of Atlantis as well.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah. So they’re the colors of the white files.

HUGH NEWMAN: They’re the three. Yeah, because the white files, of course. So they’re the three main colors they found at this site. They had found it previously on another boar statue in enclosure C many years ago and thought nothing of it, but now there was potentially the whole site might have been painted.

AJ GENTILE: We’ve got to get Kevin on that.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, we’d like to see that.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, because that’s spectacular.

HUGH NEWMAN: That would be interesting actually. Yeah. So that really interests me, the whole idea that they could actually be painted. And the same could be, you know, Karahan Tepe as well.

So one of the things they found inside the main enclosure at Karahan Tepe, which I think could have held sacraments, could prove its kind of ritual, with these giant plates. These are like this big, some of them. These are carved as solid stone. Polished.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: Notice the one, the dark one in the middle there. That is like almost like an indentation smoothed out.

AJ GENTILE: It looks like a beveled restaurant tray.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. And this is like basalt. This is granite. This is extremely hard. Some of it’s diorite, I think.

AJ GENTILE: How could they carve granite, exactly?

HUGH NEWMAN: Exactly. How could they do that? And so this is one of the mysteries. And they found hundreds of these. Now when this was put on display, they only found a handful of

AJ GENTILE: them, because limestone — yes, you can cut that with obsidian.

HUGH NEWMAN: But they’ve got very hard basalt as well. Almost diorite level. It’s really —

AJ GENTILE: Is there volcanic rock in that area?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you have Karakadam Mountain. This is like the big — it was once a volcano to the north. This is where the first Einkorn wheat was growing on the slopes, actually, going back to not long after Göbekli Tepe. But they found lots — there’s lots of volcanic. But some of this stone is from completely unknown areas. They don’t know where it came from.

And so this is why the wider super civilization idea could be a reality at places like Karahan Tepe and Göbekli Tepe. But these are just some of the plates. They found these placed specifically on the benches in between the T-pillars around the edge of the main enclosure. But now they’re finding them in all the enclosures, and placed often in very specific spots under the porthole stone in the kind of almost altar type areas and things like this.

AJ GENTILE: Do we have a guess why?

HUGH NEWMAN: I mean, there was something on these plates.

AJ GENTILE: That lip is there for practical reasons.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, there was something on these plates. So I don’t think they were serving, you know, cucumber sandwiches or anything like that. I think this was serious. They were serving sacraments.

AJ GENTILE: Could there have been human sacrifice, blood?

HUGH NEWMAN: There is some evidence of that. At Çayönü, which is further

AJ GENTILE: to the north, there’s evidence of that.

HUGH NEWMAN: They’ve found human hemoglobin along with animal and human bones all piled up in a place called the Skull Room. And they think it could have been human sacrificing going on there as well. So that’s another interesting place that’s further to the north. It’s around a thousand years after Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe.

AJ GENTILE: Because they can date that hemoglobin.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yes. Yeah, they have done that at these sites. But I think I got this feeling that these were what sacraments were covered — I’m talking about possibly psychotropic plant medicines now.

AJ GENTILE: What do you mean?

Psychedelics, Sacred Brews & Altered States

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, I’m talking about magic mushrooms. I’m talking about potentially other things — henbane and other things that may have grown in the area. Because to me, when you start looking at the whole stylings and design, the 3D relief carvings, the abstract imagery of Göbekli Tepe and all these sites, it’s not a normal human mind coming up with that. This is outrageously abstract. It doesn’t make sense.

If you were just a primitive or relatively primitive hunter-gatherer, you wouldn’t be building and creating these beautiful relief carvings with this abstract symbolism and design, and maintaining that over generations, unless you had a very unusual mind to put that together. So I think there’s something odd going on here.

AJ GENTILE: Does amanita or any of those type of mushrooms grow in the area?

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, yes, you would get that because they were known to have aurochs and different cattle, and so the dung there — it would grow for sure.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: They found quite a lot of mushroom-shaped symbolism in parts of these sites as well. You can actually find that on many of the different statues. And also there’s a type of grass that grows all in the area, which is kind of partly acacia. So if you burn that in high quantities, you’re going to get DMT smoke coming out as well.

AJ GENTILE: Well, interesting.

HUGH NEWMAN: And also they were brewing beer. There’s evidence of calcium oxalate being found on some of the large stone vessels, sort of tubs they found at Göbekli Tepe so far.

AJ GENTILE: And they’re not supposed to have beer yet, are they?

HUGH NEWMAN: No, they’re not. But there’s potential evidence — this hasn’t been 100% proven — that they were brewing beer. Maybe accidentally. It could have just been left to rot and ferment and they realized, “Oh, it made them feel a bit funny when they drank it.” So that can put you into it — more like a gruel, rather than a beer.

AJ GENTILE: Could ergot grow on that?

HUGH NEWMAN: Exactly.

AJ GENTILE: It could.

HUGH NEWMAN: Exactly. This is the point. And so what they found in Rakachek Cave down in Israel, which is older than Göbekli Tepe, is not only evidence of early beer production — we’re talking probably accidental beer — but they found evidence of ergot as well. Wow. And that was usually associated with a skull cult, you know, decapitating skulls, sacrificial kind of stuff as well.

And so was that happening at Göbekli Tepe? Because they found skulls there with holes drilled in them so they could have been strung up. And some of the T-pillars have holes carved on the overhanging T part, holes drilled through. So you could be stringing up skulls and hanging them there.

But this idea of psychedelics in ancient times, to me, suddenly all comes clear. This is like why they were studying all these obscure things — like studying the stars, having these ritualistic practices, these fertility symbols, all this unusual iconography, which is really hard to decipher — because they were kind of off their heads on really interesting substances. And other cultures throughout history after that were known to be into this kind of stuff.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah. I mean, if ayahuasca goes back 10,000 years, how many thousands of years did it take to figure out that process?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, exactly. So it just goes on and on and on. And then they were experimenting — I think when you’re in some kind of altered state, you’re going to get into things like geometry.

AJ GENTILE: You’re going to see the fractals, all of it.

HUGH NEWMAN: Exactly. And so this is why I’m so fascinated by this. The whole of Göbekli Tepe — all of the sites there — are geometrically laid out. And so this one is a very complicated one, actually, which was first — this shape was first discovered by Alexander Thom.

AJ GENTILE: Megalithic yard.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. All that kind of stuff. Yeah. And the stone circles of Britain, all that. Different geometries.

AJ GENTILE: Can you give us just a quick recap?

HUGH NEWMAN: Recap of what? Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: What Alexander Thom found?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, for sure. I’ve actually got a couple of images here. I’ll just show you.

AJ GENTILE: This audience knows the megalithic yard.

Alexander Thom & the Megalithic Yard

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. So this is the man. I absolutely love this guy.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: Absolute legend. So this is Alexander Thom. He was around really — in 1938, he started surveying stone circles. He was a Scottish engineer. He taught at Oxford University. He was fascinated by stone circles and the megalithic sites. So he went around with a theodolite on his own sometimes — surveying hundreds of stone circles.

And he came up with all these geometries he found within them — ellipses, perfect circles mainly, but also these very odd flattened eggs and things like this. And that really got him going. So he proved that they were using very sophisticated geometry to lay them all out.

He also discovered the standard unit of measure called the megalithic yard, which is 2.72 feet or 0.83 meters, which he found over and over again at these sites. And if we go to Göbekli Tepe, this is one of the geometries.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, my goodness.

HUGH NEWMAN: In enclosure C. Are you finding standard

AJ GENTILE: units of measure at these sites?

HUGH NEWMAN: We’re going to, yeah, we’re going to get into that.

AJ GENTILE: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: Here, this is very, very interesting stuff. So this is a perfect flattened circle, modified type B. I mean, this doesn’t really roll off the tongue, but enclosure C — he’s got it down. That’s what kind of gets me. Here’s some other geometries. The middle one there is enclosure D, which is an egg shape based upon 2, 5, 12, 13 Pythagorean triangles.

Ancient Metrology and Sacred Geometry

AJ GENTILE: I understand when I think about that, I think about an orbit. Yeah, because this is like two ellipses merged.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yes, that’s right, yeah. And also on the left there you’ve got some other geometries. You’ve got obviously camera hand on the right there. And so we keep finding these different geometries. And to me, this can’t just be accidental. There’s something odd about this. And then when you start looking a little bit more closely, you feel like Nabta Playa in Egypt has the same geometry as Göbekli Tepe. This goes back to seven and a half thousand B.C. potentially. So what’s going on here? And then there are alignments between them that form geometries.

AJ GENTILE: Nan Madol. Fascinating. I see it’s connected.

HUGH NEWMAN: It’s just all connected. And what about the henges?

AJ GENTILE: Do they fall into the same ellipsis pattern?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yes, you do get that in England. So this is what we’re developing. I’m actually writing about this as we speak. I’m finding so many correlations between Alexander Thom’s work and what we’re finding in southeast Turkey. And as more sites get uncovered, more and more these geometries keep turning up and it’s blowing my mind. So let’s just look at the metrology for a moment. This is insane.

AJ GENTILE: Let me stop you for one second. How the heck is Nan Madol connected to this? That’s Polynesia.

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, what I’ve got here, this is from the little book. So what we did, we started laying out sites around the planet using Google Earth and other such things and just seeing if there are any interesting alignments between Göbekli Tepe sites and others around the world. And there are bizarre ones.

I mean, you look at the alignment here from, say, Birch to Göbekli Tepe to Taşlı Tepe — it goes, and it somehow goes through Karahunj in Armenia. And it reaches Nan Madol, seven and a half thousand miles away. Like, that could be a coincidence. Okay, could be a coincidence. I admit that.

But then you look at the work on the right there — you’ve got Göbekli Tepe and Baalbek at a perfect diagonal of a six-fold square geometry, which is the work of Howard Crowhurst. Then under the triangle at the top left there, Göbekli Tepe, Kurt Tepe, and Harbetsuvan — these are three testable sites that all form a perfect 3-4-5 triangle across the landscape. So we think they were surveying a 3-4-5.

AJ GENTILE: So a Pythagorean triple.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, Pythagorean. Most of it is Pythagorean, actually. And that’s what intrigues me, because that is happening in Britain. We’ve proven that. Robin Heath, Howard Crowhurst, Alexander Thom — all proven that. So now we’re finding it happening here.

And then you think about passages from the Book of Enoch — the angels are taking cords and going to measure the size and shape of the earth. And you realize, hang on a second, this is what they were actually doing at this time. So even the Book of Enoch could be referring back to this Göbekli Tepe era where they were doing this kind of thing.

The Book of Enoch and Ancient Knowledge

AJ GENTILE: That’s right. To catch people up — Enoch traveling above the earth with Uriel and is shown 364¼ days around the sun, lunar cycle, solar cycle, all things that they’re not supposed to know. And I think Enoch was problematic for the church at some point.

HUGH NEWMAN: Definitely.

AJ GENTILE: Was it James Bruce who discovered it in Ethiopia?

HUGH NEWMAN: That’s right. It’s fascinating to me. The Book of Enoch is almost like a kind of — it’s the Book of Göbekli Tepe, in my opinion. I think if people start looking into that more, and as more things get discovered there, they’re going to find more and more correlations between these different elements, these different passages, these texts that were written in ancient times. There are going to be more and more connections.

And one of the other things — they’re talking about going to measure — this is where the ancient metrology gets into it, because all these sites have got specific distances between them. So this is going to hurt people’s brains. But these are some measurements I took of the different parts of Göbekli Tepe.

You don’t need to look at it too closely, but fundamentally what we’re seeing here is not just that we’re finding the megalithic yard — it’s whole numbers as well. It’s all about whole numbers. You don’t have half measures or things like that.

Ancient Measurement Systems and Metrology

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: I’m very influenced by the work of John Michell and John Neal, who wrote Ancient Metrology back in 1980, I think. And then John Neal has written a whole series of books about metrology. And they don’t think there’s one unit of measure like the megalithic yard. They think there’s a whole system of different variations of the foot length, which are based around the British foot, but there are slight differences between them and they’re all harmonically connected.

AJ GENTILE: Harmonically connected — meaning?

HUGH NEWMAN: I think I’ve actually got —

AJ GENTILE: I’m sorry, I’m getting excited. The math gets me excited.

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, look at this, for instance. The top of a T-pillar is two double squares. This is an interesting way of seeing it. So if you’ve got a double square, that’s the fundamental of building things like this. So that measures potentially three megalithic yards across. But the diagonal would measure eight Royal Egyptian feet. And the diagonal of the square would measure 16 Sumerian palms or 5 Royal Egyptian feet.

AJ GENTILE: Feet.

HUGH NEWMAN: So you have all these correlations within one system. So they weren’t just using one unit of measure — they were using multiple units. And each one was like a kind of quality, like a different accent of the builders who were doing that part of the site. And it meant something. So it was like a language.

And this is where the whole idea of number and myth and stories comes from — a lot of it comes from number and measurements. And a lot of these old measurements are subdivisions of the size and shape of the earth. So they must have had an understanding of the size and shape even at Göbekli Tepe. This is what’s so intriguing.

AJ GENTILE: So these numbers are divisible by the circumference? Is that something like that?

HUGH NEWMAN: Various ones are, yeah. And as you can see, it’s a close-up of enclosure D, for instance.

AJ GENTILE: With all this data, how do you know what to throw away?

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, this is when you get into anything like — so I’ve got a few numbers here. I don’t want to burn people’s brains, but we’ve got a few half measures here, like 13.5 or so. I want to just show some examples. But you could put a list of 18 different types of foot measurements or remnants or palms and things like this. But they’re not exact numbers — they’re not 18 or 17 or 12, they’re point something. So remove anything with a decimal point.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

HUGH NEWMAN: And just go with whole numbers. And this is where all the magic starts coming out. Because you realize one measurement could be a whole number of another measurement, and another whole number of another measurement. So you keep finding all these correlations, then you kind of work downwards until you get to a few different ones they were definitely using.

Which really are the Persian foot, which is 1.05 feet. Or there’s also the megalithic yard, which is used all the time at Göbekli Tepe. You’ve also got the Sumerian foot, you’ve got the Assyrian foot, you’ve got the Saxon foot — which isn’t actually Saxon, it’s actually much earlier than that.

These variations of the foot are harmonic fractions different to one another. So you could actually just put them in a table. You can actually calculate it in your head, in arithmetic, really easily. You don’t need to work it out on calculators because it’s like 11 to 12, or 21 to 22, or 58 to 56 — the differences in the slight variations. If you do it just like that in your head, like the ratios, it’s quite easy to understand.

So I think they were using four or five different measurement systems and they’re all based upon the measurements of the earth. So again, we go back to the Book of Enoch — they were going to measure. And I believe that they were doing that. They were sending teams out around the planet and they wanted to understand what was going on with the earth. So the earliest phase of Göbekli Tepe, they were doing this. And this is where the Book of Enoch kind of picked up that story. They’re talking about taking these cords off and going to measure. I’m still into this, I’m still writing about this, I’m still going further into this. But the evidence is there now.

AJ GENTILE: What evidence? The artifacts of people?

HUGH NEWMAN: Just the numbers. You can just work with the numbers. This is what’s so interesting. So this is something that the archaeologists have zero interest in. I couldn’t even get officially any of the measurements of the site. I had to go in and use every old map I could find and work it all out. So some of these may be a tiny bit off — I’m still working on this.

But when you find numbers, you find geometries, you find orientations. They even mark north, south, east, and west accurately as well, using modular geometry, which is the work of Howard Crowhurst. So the modular geometry is like on the right there — we have squares placed upon each other, but always north, south, east, west.

AJ GENTILE: Do we see any of these measurements used by the Olmecs, the Aztecs, Incas, anything on that side of the earth?

HUGH NEWMAN: I haven’t looked at that yet. I’m so focused on this and the British sites as well. But like on the image on the right there, there was some research done by researchers from Tel Aviv University — Avi Gopher, I think, and Gil Haklay. And they found that if you draw a point in the middle of each of the main enclosures, it forms a perfect equilateral triangle. And they’re the same measurements on each side. So they were working with equilateral triangles at least. That’s what they realized.

But then Howard Crowhurst came in and realized that the alignment — the yellow line between the two central T-pillars of two of the enclosures — is actually a triple square diagonal. And suddenly, if that’s the case, then you draw other squares around that, and they knew north, south, east, and west. They weren’t supposed to know that then.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: That wasn’t supposed to happen till the pyramid age, with the Great Pyramid and things like that. Most people take that for granted. They think, “So what?” But they must have known. And we know this is exact.

AJ GENTILE: It’s exact.

Encoded Knowledge and Ancient Calendars

HUGH NEWMAN: It’s perfect. Yeah, it’s absolutely perfect. And so this is what’s — it gets weirder and weirder the more you start looking into it. And so I’m at the kind of halfway point, maybe two thirds into this mega chapter I’m doing on this for the new book. But I think it’s going to turn out — if we can get some exact measurements out of some of these sites, get permission to go in and actually measure them, it’s going to go crazy.

But then you have other sites in the whole region, obviously. This is fascinating to me because you have double square again, the modular geometry base hiding measurements. There was actually an old quote — I can’t remember the quote exactly — from John Michell. He was like my kind of hero. He wrote the book The View Over Atlantis and also Ancient Metrology. He wrote the book Megalithomania. He gave us permission to use a name for our conference, funnily enough.

And what he found was — he said it’s always like a Stonehenge. He said it’s always the top stones, the lintels, that will hide the measurement systems of the priestly elites. It’s not the lower ones. They’ll all get damaged and knocked around. You look at the top stone. So this double square is the top part of the T pillars. So he was right, and he was saying that 20, 30 years ago. And now we’re finding that at Göbekli Tepe, the top part of the site is where the magic is, where the measurements and their kind of knowledge is positioned.

And so this is interesting to me. If these measurements are encoded inside on the T pillars themselves, then we can work out what they were trying to tell us, mathematically at least.

AJ GENTILE: Yes. So if the T pillars — if they leave one in the quarry — then this looks like engineering being passed down.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yes, this is very much science. Yes, a very early science.

AJ GENTILE: And the planning is extraordinary, the advanced planning.

HUGH NEWMAN: It is. And I think there’s a subtlety to it as well, and the abstract nature which makes them feel just so intelligent, these people. So intelligent, but in a different way to us. We think intelligence is all academic. To them, it was a subtle intelligence — understanding the laws of nature, coming in and encoding that within these sites.

Why Were the Solstices So Important?

AJ GENTILE: Why would the solstices be so important to people that aren’t really agricultural yet?

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, this goes way back actually. This goes back to the Paleolithic era. There are a couple of things here. So we’re talking about some of these caves again. This is all the alignments of the solstices in the Paleolithic caves, and the traditions there.

This is anthropological research which has been done on hunter-gatherer societies. There’s a gentleman called Brian Hayden, a brilliant author. He’s written about this — it’s based on his research — and I’ve been reading all this stuff. I just found him basically, and it’s blowing my mind.

Solstices weren’t necessarily about anything to do with growing food or having a calendar. It wasn’t necessarily about food production and things like that. It was more about understanding the laws of nature. But also it was about when to do your tribal feasting, when to time your initiations, the rites of passage, when to have ceremony and things like this. It wasn’t just about practical things — it was spiritual, ritualistic things as well.

The way they worked that out is because he studied hunter-gatherer societies from all over the world. The anthropological data was being picked up from over the last few hundred years, and he found that that was the case. Many of them — a majority of them in fact — even in North America, the Native American groups, they do the same thing. They have caves or they have orientations which get illuminated on certain dates of the year, usually the solstices. Then they know when to do ceremonies, they know when to do their feasting, they know when to do certain things. And only later did it become useful for agriculture.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: So it’s the other way around.

AJ GENTILE: That’s a great point.

HUGH NEWMAN: And so because you look at Karahan Tepe, you have the whole winter solstice alignment there. That would have been a really useful calendar, a really useful marker that everyone

AJ GENTILE: can use and understand. The sun stops.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, yeah, exactly. There’s actually some work by Dr. Martin Sweatman, who I have a lot of time for. He’s done work not only at Karahan Tepe — he’s found a calendrical system in the pillar shrine, counting the different pillars and things like this — he’s also found it on Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe. A perfect kind of lunisolar calendar, they call it.

AJ GENTILE: This is the Vulture Stone. So what’s happening here?

The Vulture Stone and the Lunisolar Calendar

HUGH NEWMAN: This is the Vulture Stone. He’s basically counting the different V’s. One lunar month is one of the V’s. Then there are 11 of these squares, which equals 354 days. And he got 10 more of these upside-down and upright triangles, which equal 10 days, which makes 364 days. Then he believes the vulture, or the sun symbol, would make up the final day. He believes it was a summer solstice, but it could easily be the winter solstice as well. So it’s a basic counting system for a lunar and solar calendar, and the same thing is being found at Karahan Tepe.

And you must remember that within a couple of hundred years of these sites being built, on Karakadag Mountain just north of Göbekli Tepe, the first Einkorn wheat was produced in an agricultural farming manner. That’s where the agricultural revolution kicked off — within 200 years of these sites being constructed.

All the evidence at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe is that they were dealing with wild plants and wild animals. There was hunting, there was collecting, they were doing all these things, but there was no evidence of growing food or agriculture. But within a couple of hundred years, they probably got to a point where they wanted to settle down and hang out at Göbekli Tepe and these other places. And then they said, “Well, let’s grow the stuff ourselves.”

They also created these huge hunting traps. When migrating animals were coming, they coerced them into these giant walls built around them in big keyhole shapes, to funnel the animals into these pens and kill them.

AJ GENTILE: All this is at —

HUGH NEWMAN: During the same time, all around the area, you find loads of these hunting traps. They’re called hunting kites. Some of them have been found in Saudi Arabia and other areas as well. And so they were realizing that they could stop, and then they started breeding the animals and things like this. Then they started growing the food. So this is when the sedentary lifestyle began.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: You know, after these sites were built. Because for a long time people were thinking, “Oh, they must have created agriculture and then decided to build these sites based upon that.”

AJ GENTILE: Well, that’s what we’re taught.

Sumerian Stories and the Missing Chapter of History

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. But also you have some of the Sumerian stories of Enki and Enlil and all this kind of stuff. They talk about giant structures being created. They talk about giant lofty enclosures and things like this being built on hills. There were channels and water was being directed. And you can see all these water channels at Göbekli Tepe now, where they’re harvesting rainwater, and at Karahan Tepe as well. And then after that, the food domestication and animal domestication started taking place. These are all in the Sumerian stories.

So I believe — and Andrew talked about this briefly as well — they were going on about this in Sumerian stories, but they were talking about the Taş Tepeler era in kind of myth and story. I think there’s a lot more to what was going on here than people realize.

You’ve got to remember, until the mid-1990s to 2000, no one knew any of these places existed. They were just a rumor. And you think about all the cultures passing through Southeast Turkey — you’ve got the Sumerians, you’ve got the Hittites, you’ve got the Assyrians, you’ve got the Babylonians, you’ve got the Christians, you’ve got the Muslims — all these cultures walking over the site. But literally they’re digging into the same hill and putting burials in, like at Göbekli Tepe, and seeing it as sacred. Somehow they felt it was sacred, probably because of the myths that had been around for a long time.

So no one knew anything about it, and all this kind of history has been written about — there’s a whole chapter missing. The chapter is now being read and it’s being written. So this is what’s happening in Southeast Turkey.

AJ GENTILE: Before the discoveries, would people look at those Sumerian texts and wonder, “Where is this place? Where is this?” Because they’re talking about places.

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, they assumed it was in Iraq, Iran — all this kind of thing — where the Fertile Crescent was all kicking off. But there’s a lot going on down there as well, long before the Sumerians. Like you have Jericho, for instance. This is famous — everyone knows Jericho. But there was also a summer solstice sunset alignment in Jericho, in the tower itself.

AJ GENTILE: This is the oldest city on Earth.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. This is a bit younger than Göbekli Tepe and all that. But this is the work again of Rampkai and Roy Liran. These are the guys who have found standard units of measure at other Taş Tepeler sites and in Natufian sites. This is a whole different thing to what they’re finding at Göbekli Tepe, but they’re finding the Persian foot and Persian cubit as a standard unit of measure in many of these sites. But that’s another story.

Underwater Sites and Ancient Navigation

This is the alignment in Jericho. So all these stories may have been reflecting into Jericho, they may have been reflecting further north into Göbekli Tepe. But also, all along the coast, you have sites like Atlit Yam being discovered off the coast under the water of Israel. They found semi stone circles, cut marks, stone wall corridors that aligned to the summer solstice. So all that’s in the area of that whole kind of biblical region. It gets weirder and weirder the more you dig.

AJ GENTILE: If you date it to the same time — and why is it underwater?

HUGH NEWMAN: This goes back to about 7,500 BC. It’s underwater because the water levels have just risen 400 feet.

AJ GENTILE: I was trying to get a flood myth story.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, well, there are certain ones that kind of come into that as well. But there’s a lot around the coast there that suggests — especially the Levantine coast, Israel and so on — that there was a lot more going on. And it must be this old because that’s when the water levels were much less, at the end of the last ice age and a little bit after that as well.

But you also have the connection with Malta, which I find interesting, because that whole place was much bigger and connected to mainland Europe in the Mediterranean. And they found evidence off the coast of Sicily of a gigantic 14 to 15 meter long megalith at the bottom of the ocean, which dates back to 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. So there’s stuff going on there as well, all under the water.

There’s also evidence that they were navigating from the Mediterranean edge of Turkey over to Cyprus, going back to at least 12 to 13,000 years ago. And we’re talking quite large amounts of people going back and forth — quite big boats.

AJ GENTILE: So trade merchants.

Ancient Measurements, Sacred Sites & Global Connections

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, and people. Animals. They proved it by animals.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, how do they do that?

HUGH NEWMAN: And obsidian and things like this. Well, no one knows what’s going on here because they found evidence of seafaring go back a hundred thousand years in Crete and Greece because they found obsidian on certain islands that could only have got there by boat. Things like that. So the seafaring nature of history has been deeply overlooked. The whole diffusionism thing as well.

AJ GENTILE: I agree.

HUGH NEWMAN: So even the people of Gobekli Tepe may have been sailing and this is how they could have got around the world to measure the Earth in ancient times.

AJ GENTILE: I mean there’s no denying the DNA is around the planet that’s coming from different places. Diffusionism is a real thing.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, for sure. And I think there’s more evidence that is going to come to light the more we get into this kind of stuff. But yeah, there’s so much. I mean, I want to talk about a couple of other sites because I’ve got a feeling some of your watchers and your listeners —

AJ GENTILE: Well, let’s take a quick break and we’ll get back into this. I’m very excited. We’re back in a sec. I wanted to ask, have you found any correlation with latitude, longitude with these sites? Is there any meaning in that?

HUGH NEWMAN: I’m starting to look at that now. I’ve got most of the geometry work done. I think we’re going to find things. Yeah, I think we’re going to find it. Well, the problem is it’s a very limited area, the whole Tas Tepala area. I mean, there is one thing I found — there’s a connection between Peru and Gobekli Tepe.

AJ GENTILE: Interesting.

HUGH NEWMAN: If you draw a line, for instance — now if you draw a line between the middle of enclosure D and the Coricancha in Peru — I think I should have an image of it here somewhere.

AJ GENTILE: I’d love to see that.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, yeah. So —

AJ GENTILE: And the line is from the middle of the enclosure?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, that’s pretty precise, pretty accurate. Yeah, yeah. Let me just see if I’ve got the image here. If not — there you go. Yeah, here it is.

AJ GENTILE: Oh wow.

HUGH NEWMAN: So this isn’t necessarily about latitudes, but this is quite interesting because it comes back to the canonical numbers. So this is years ago — I kind of spotted this when I was messing about on Google Earth. But if you draw an exact line between the middle of enclosure D and the middle of the Coricancha, which is the sacred center of the Inca — pre-Inca or whatever — this is 7,928 miles. That is the known diameter of the Earth at the equator. But in canonical tradition it’s 7,920 miles. That’s a sort of round number and that’s 8 times 9 times 10 times 11. So this is all the arithmetic that the ancients were doing. I mean, how can they — is that a coincidence again?

AJ GENTILE: I don’t think so. The number 11 shows up a lot in these ancient sites as well.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. Some of the enclosures have 11 stones in them as well. Usually 12, but 11 as well. And also some of the carvings here as well. I wrote this article on Graham Hancock’s website years ago.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: The ones on the left there of that photo there from Katimbo and Silustani in Peru — the 12 on the right are from Gobekli Tepe and they’re almost identical style. I mean, this is a style you’re probably going to find. People are going to do 3D reliefs. Kind of interesting. Even Graham Hancock put that in his book when he went to visit these sites as well. He found that he compared these sites — not necessarily this alignment, but certainly the connection can be found.

AJ GENTILE: Yep, I see it, I believe it.

Easter Island, Polygonal Walls & The Navel of the World

HUGH NEWMAN: Let’s look at a couple of other bits while we’re here then, if you like. Obviously, you’ve got the Gobekli Tepe–Easter Island thing as well. It’s kind of intriguing. You get the same kind of hand signals, you get the same kind of style.

AJ GENTILE: Easter Island has always confused me because it’s in the middle of nowhere.

HUGH NEWMAN: I know. Yeah. It’s such a strange place. They even have polygonal walls there as well, in a place called Vinapu — underneath where the moai stand upon the platforms. And how did that get there? Did that come from Peru? Did it come from another part of the world?

AJ GENTILE: And I don’t think a lot of people realize the moai statues — a lot of them have bodies.

HUGH NEWMAN: Oh, yeah, yeah. All the way down. Yeah, yeah.

AJ GENTILE: I mean, why would you build a 30-foot statue and bury 20 feet of it?

HUGH NEWMAN: And that’s one of the things you get on the island there. Some of them are just sort of torsos, but some of them go much further down, like below the groinal area. But you always have this hands-on-the-navel, and the navel is, traditionally, like the navel of the world.

Easter Island, traditionally — Gobekli Tepe means “navel” or “potbelly hill.” It’s the same name.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

HUGH NEWMAN: Very, very odd. And then you have the navel — the Coricancha, the center of the Inca tradition, was also known as the navel. So you have all these different “navel” references coming up over and over again.

Now, this is an image from the book — obviously this is hand drawn, the kind of stuff we were playing with. And you’re interested in different latitudes and distances and things like this. Now, this is a bit weird because some distances between sites are bizarre. For example, the distance between Stonehenge and Gobekli Tepe is exactly 1 million Persian feet.

AJ GENTILE: Exactly 1 million.

Sacred Measurements & The Persian Foot

HUGH NEWMAN: Yes. It’s so weird. I don’t know what to make of that, but what we know is the exact location of Stonehenge — there used to be a mound at the center, which was part of a system of studying the solstices 10,000 years ago, which we can have a look at in a minute perhaps.

But what is bizarre is that the Persian foot, which is 1.05 feet, is found throughout Gobekli Tepe, is found in Stonehenge — known as the British long foot. And also, the standard English mile is 5,000 Persian feet.

AJ GENTILE: I didn’t realize that.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, yeah. So it just gets weirder and weirder. And then you can find all these other correlations. For example, Delphi — also a navel site.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: The center of the world is exactly 900 miles, which is exactly 5 million Samian feet — another one of the foot variations.

AJ GENTILE: Not 5 million and 1?

HUGH NEWMAN: No, no, no. It just happens to be. Yeah. But it’s just little intricacies like this I find kind of bizarre. We’ve got other ones here. We’ve got symbolism from Australia — aboriginal elders being found at Gobekli Tepe — something that Andrew discovered years ago. From Gobekli Tepe to the Great Pyramid is exactly 1,080 kilometers, which is an interesting number because 108 is a lunar number. It’s also a precessional number we find in distances between sites around the world. And you could just go on and on. I mean, you keep finding correlations here.

And also — yeah, Jericho is interesting. Exactly 2 million Saxon feet away. Now, whether they were counting in millions —

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: — is a whole other story. It’s probably based upon certain mile lengths anyway, which the Saxon foot may have been used within, or the Samian foot in some cases. So yeah, you can go on and on with this. I cover that in the book obviously.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, I see you have the Baalbek stone there. There’s an angle correlation.

HUGH NEWMAN: There is an interesting angle correlation, actually. Yeah, yeah. So that’s the one where we saw in a slightly earlier image. I’ll just sort of find —

Baalbek: The Largest Quarried Stones in the World

AJ GENTILE: This is, I think, the biggest quarried stone ever.

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, the largest one they found relatively recently is 1,650 tons. I think I’ve got some images of Baalbek here — and this is actually it here. Yeah. So we have the one on top, which has none of the text on it. That is the Stone of the Pregnant Woman. That’s about a thousand tons. Yeah, just a thousand tons, that’s all. And the one beneath it they found to be like 1,650 tons — it hasn’t been moved, it’s still in position. So they may not have ever got around to moving it, or they may have been chopped into smaller areas.

But there are other ones in the whole area. We’ve got references to giants building these. Here’s an article I wrote years ago for Atlantis Rising magazine. But this is one of the stones in the temple itself because there’s like a giant platform there. Here’s some other stones — you can see me standing down. These are down the north side.

AJ GENTILE: Any theories on how those big stones got into place?

HUGH NEWMAN: Giants.

AJ GENTILE: Giants.

HUGH NEWMAN: That’s the only theory.

AJ GENTILE: I’m on board.

HUGH NEWMAN: And there’s me as well standing there — this is like the trilith, the three mega stones, which are about 800 tons each. So these are smaller than the ones found in the quarry, but still — my God, it’s a serious operation. You can’t really mess with that.

Geometric Alignments: Gobekli Tepe to Baalbek

And the alignment — this is something that Howard Crowhurst came up with, which absolutely fascinated me and I’ve actually included it in the book as well. This is the Gobekli Tepe to Baalbek three-two square alignment. So this is based upon his system of modular geometry, which uses squares north, south, east, west to the left and right of each other. And then you work out what the angles are between three-to-four, five squares. And they’re always very meaningful angles — very meaningful. And they often relate to solstices, which is where his work is focused on in Brittany and in Britain. But he’s now applying it to Tas Tepala sites as well. We’re starting to look at that. We found golden section angles with the solstice at Karahan Tepe, for instance, which we’re going to look at.

AJ GENTILE: “Golden” — like the golden ratio, like phi?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, it’s really, really odd.

AJ GENTILE: And how about Fibonacci numbers? Do those show up?

HUGH NEWMAN: As far as I’m aware, not yet. But leave it with us. We’re going to keep looking.

AJ GENTILE: I bet they do.

HUGH NEWMAN: So this is fascinating. This is the Gobekli Tepe to Baalbek angle. And the thing about Baalbek as well is that the area it’s built upon is an old tell, or an old Tepe. Yeah, yeah. So this could go back thousands and thousands of years anyway. And it was originally a kind of outpost — no T-pillars or anything, but certainly something was there. It was an occupational mound, that’s what they call them — people living in and around that mound.

And then there’s Phoenician evidence there, there’s Roman evidence. But it’s claimed that the Romans built the whole thing. There’s no evidence of Romans moving thousand-ton stones to create a platform to build their temple upon. It’s almost like they found it like that and then built upon it — that’s more likely.

And so yeah — going to Baalbek was one of the most mind-blowing things I’ve ever seen in my life, I think. But there are so many more sites here. Let me just look at some of the sites in Tas Tepala. I think your watchers — listeners — can’t call them watchers.

AJ GENTILE: Everything goes back to Enoch.

Şeybirç, Nevali Çori & Astronomical Alignments

HUGH NEWMAN: Yes, appropriate in the biblical text there. So this is Şeybirç. Now, we were talking about numbers. We’re getting into all the night. So one of the things about the name Şeybirç, which really caught my attention — I mean I literally worked this out on a bus with a translator when I was in Turkey. What does Şeybirç mean? “Şey” means counting. “Birç” means sign of the zodiac, or “Burç” in Kurdish means tower or watchtower. And we found out — this is like one of the main Taş Tepeler sites they’re now excavating — we found out that there used to be an old Jericho-like tower at Şeybirç that got destroyed and dismantled in the Second World War.

AJ GENTILE: Wow.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. And so that’s actually hidden in the name. And so this is clearly — so this is a scan of the enclosure.

AJ GENTILE: I love these.

HUGH NEWMAN: This is about 30ft wide or thereabouts. 32ft in fact. I’ve actually done some number work on this and found sacred measurements. But if we go on, you can actually see a different view of it here. You see there’s a hole carved into it there.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

HUGH NEWMAN: Now this is — we’d find this in quite a few of the sites now. And there’s good evidence that these may have been early forms of Shiva lingams.

AJ GENTILE: You know what’s a Shiva lingam?

HUGH NEWMAN: This is an ancient kind of traditional Indian or Southeast Asian installation — a stone installation of a phallus type, a kind of lingam, and then the yoni-shaped bowl. And I don’t know — I’ve written a whole chapter about this actually. But Şeybirç is interesting because the geometry of this enclosure is the same as what we’re finding in the British stone circles. Same. We’re finding it at Göbekli Tepe. You can see this — this is one of the egg shapes. Very, very specific.

AJ GENTILE: Do you find these in ancient Indian sites as well?

HUGH NEWMAN: No, I haven’t properly looked just yet. But the whole Vedic connection with this part of the world is very, very interesting. We’re looking into that more and more.

But Şeybirç — this is one of the key sites. And one of the interesting things about this as well is that this is right next to — if you look here, right — see on the left there, you’ve got all the kind of rock-cut, square-cut area that essentially is a Roman quarry. They got that close to this enclosure, but didn’t destroy it or harm it in any way. And so much so that just where that Roman quarry is — we’re talking 2,000 years ago — there’s this little area here which they didn’t touch. And this is an ancient Taş Tepeler carving — this one here. So this is like a serpent head kind of shape with all these dots and kind of symbolism around it. Could be something to do with a serpent or a leopard, we just don’t know. But they left that alone and then stopped quarrying there.

So there’s a theory which I’ve put forward that the Romans discovered Taş Tepeler, the whole —

AJ GENTILE: Wow.

HUGH NEWMAN: Because there’s a Roman quarry very close to Karahan Tepe. On the opposite hill there’s a Roman quarry not too far from another big one right next to Şeybirç itself. And on another hill. And there’s also one near Göbekli Tepe as well. And so this is odd. So there’s a good chance — and I’m sure if I scan through any old Roman Latin text, we’re going to find something. They found certain things.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, they would have documented this. Have you been able to date those quarries so we know when in the empire they happened?

HUGH NEWMAN: No, no, I’m going to — this is something I haven’t looked into yet. But it’s just that this anomaly here at Şeybirç, it’s really caught my attention.

AJ GENTILE: Because you could see someone like Hadrian would have been respectful of these.

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, this is what I mean. There seems to be this respect.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: Because they weren’t destroying anything. They were getting right up close to it and when they saw something, they stepped back and left it alone. Probably just thought, “Leave that, don’t mess with the superstitious spirits,” or anything like this.

So this is what’s happening at Şeybirç. They started excavating this a couple of years ago. Giant megaliths, rock-cut zones, big U-shaped stones as well as T-shapes. This head was found — we knew about this months ago, before it got announced to the public, but we had to keep quiet about it, in respect to the family member who told us about it. Very C-3PO looking. Yeah. And then this is what it actually looks like in full. They’ve actually found the rest of the statue. Very bizarre looking thing.

AJ GENTILE: So we see that V shape quite a bit, don’t we?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. You see the V-neck thing quite a bit. If you look at his mouth, it looks like it’s sort of being sewn up. And his eyes look a bit like what people called mollusk shells.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: This is a tradition in the Levant burial where they would sew the mouth up and put mollusk shells and then plaster the corpse. So is that a representation of that when he looked at Göbekli Tepe?

But there are some other sites here we might want to have a quick look at.

Nevali Çori: Air Conditioning, Terrazzo & the Vedic Connection

HUGH NEWMAN: So we looked at Nevali Çori as well. This is one of the sites that was being excavated way back in the 1980s — actually by Klaus Schmidt.

AJ GENTILE: Schmidt.

HUGH NEWMAN: This is what inspired him and made him realize there was something significant at Göbekli Tepe from the original discovery there in 1963. But when he was excavating this place, it was by the river — by the kind of Euphrates river, or a stream coming off it. It’s called the Kantara Stream. And they found these square enclosures and they found this building on the bottom right here. Really, really bizarre. I’ve done a whole thing about this in the upcoming book about innovations of the Taş Tepeler.

AJ GENTILE: This is a strange building.

HUGH NEWMAN: So there was an actual 16-meter-long building. So what’s that, like 50-odd feet?

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: And underneath it, it had these kind of carved channels. So what would happen is — and inside the building it would have these little stones you could move and you could open them up. And so the water from the freezing cold stream would come in.

AJ GENTILE: Oh my goodness.

HUGH NEWMAN: And they would open up the little things and it would cool the whole air down.

AJ GENTILE: This is a central air system.

HUGH NEWMAN: This is the first air conditioning in the world.

AJ GENTILE: Wow.

HUGH NEWMAN: And this is 8,500–8,300 BC. So little innovations like that that get overlooked, but if you look into it — hang on a sec — there’s a reason they’re doing these little things.

AJ GENTILE: Of course.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. This is the terrazzo. This is where terrazzo was first discovered in this region. It became — even though they found older versions of it — now this is kind of what some of it looks like. They have larger stones within the cement-type mix.

And this is the Vedic connection. This is a very large stone head, probably about this big, that was found at Nevali Çori. It’s a shaved head with a serpent on the back of it. It looks like a sikha ponytail of a Vedic priest. This is where the Vedic connection really began — people kind of thinking, “How on earth could this design motif be here? What’s going on?”

We have other things like this as well. This is like a kind of wing — this is what Andrew calls the first kind of angel, because it’s got a winged robe coming around this very strange-looking figure. Only about a foot tall. And again, that’s from Nevali Çori. And we have this totem pole as well from Nevali Çori. Again, another 3D scan. So you have like a vulture on top, you have a human figure, you have other kind of serpentine elements to it. Much of it’s been broken off, but you can see almost — it shows the different kind of hair and everything else, and the wings.

Cygnus, Sirius & the Astronomical Alignments

AJ GENTILE: What’s your take on the vultures? The Cygnus connection with the constellation.

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, that’s actually something that Andrew’s very much into. He believes that the different orientations of the enclosures at Göbekli Tepe significantly mark the different movements of Cygnus as they change over the centuries. And he believes that there was like a kind of portal into the Milky Way where the soul would travel after death.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: Because often these holed stones at Göbekli Tepe at least are in the north, where the soul would go to and then into the Milky Way, into the Dark Rift. And he discovered all these traditions that may be associated with that. So there’s a Cygnus alignment certainly with these temples. And I think that’s very profound. In my opinion, there’s also a southern alignment that other archaeo-astronomers have put towards Sirius as well.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

HUGH NEWMAN: And they’re now finding that in Malta. And a woman called Lenie Reedijk — a brilliant author — thinks that the Maltese temples could be almost as old as Göbekli Tepe because they’re all aligned to Sirius as well. And with the solstice alignments as well, it proves these guys are star watchers. For sure, you can’t deny that.

And so the problem I have is that the archaeologists are very strongly stating these people weren’t looking at the sky because they had roofs over them. And I’m thinking, well, a solstice alignment works with a roof.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

HUGH NEWMAN: Even the Sirius and Cygnus alignments could work with the roof, because you’re looking on the horizon. So you’d be below the roof.

AJ GENTILE: That’s where you would measure it. You wouldn’t measure it up in the —

HUGH NEWMAN: Sky, between the T-pillars in the gap there. So that’s one of the issues. And so all our research gets pushed aside as fringe research.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: Because they had roofs. But there’s no actual evidence for roofs over the main enclosures. Over the smaller enclosures, the later ones, people may have lived in. But they haven’t found any actual physical evidence for roofs. None. All they found is two negatives of where wood may have been — only a couple or three meters, like what, maximum 10ft long each.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: But that isn’t even long enough to go between two T-pillars in some cases. And so it’s a big question mark — like, what is going on here? Why are they forcing this narrative into our brains, onto Wikipedia, into all the academic history books and things like this?

AJ GENTILE: Good luck editing the Göbekli Tepe page. They won’t let you do it.

HUGH NEWMAN: Tell me about it. Yeah. So I’ve not even bothered to think about that.

We don’t know if there are roofs or not, but if evidence comes forth, we’ll accept it and we’ll work it out. We think the astronomy — a lot of it can still work with certain gaps in a roof, certain windows. Even if you’re looking high up in the sky at stars, if you’ve got just one window, you get a really precise view. You’re sitting on this specific stone bench which is carved out of bedrock, looking up at a certain spot — you can watch the movement really clearly. This is how Native Americans did it in their kivas, things like this. It’s the same principle.

So I think people have got to look at that again and accept that there could be something going on. And I think Martin Sweatman’s work has really pushed the idea in the academic world, because he got peer-reviewed scientific papers.

AJ GENTILE: Didn’t he really struggle to get that published, though?

HUGH NEWMAN: He did, but he did get it published — that’s the thing. And it went ballistic all over the world. So that’s opened up our research, it’s allowed our research to have a bit of leeway. And actually we’re working with Martin. I’m kind of working on him, trying to get him to incorporate our winter solstice alignment into his Karahan Tepe research, because we think it all fits. We think it’s the same — his calendar he’s found there — we think it’s the winter solstice sunrise alignment. The stone head getting illuminated would be the marker to begin the calendar every year, if it was a calendar. And so, yeah, there’s a lot to come in the future.

The Astronomical Significance of Gobekli Tepe

AJ GENTILE: It must be because the Sumerians were so calendar focused that they had to get that information from somewhere. And their knowledge of the circle and 360 degrees and all of that.

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, they also had a lunar solar calendar as well. We know that. So this is what was being found in the Carahan Tepe’s Pillar shrine. It’s also being found on Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe. And so it’s highly likely that influences came forth from this particular area.

AJ GENTILE: You sure?

HUGH NEWMAN: I’m just going to pause for a second. Let me just check this.

AJ GENTILE: Take your time. I interrupted you. I apologize.

HUGH NEWMAN: That’s cool.

AJ GENTILE: I just get excited.

HUGH NEWMAN: Let’s just check this. I want to find this couple of these other. I just want to kind of cover this. Yeah, this is actually. This is probably quite useful actually, because we were talking about the astronomy. I want to just cover this. So this is the alignments we’re talking about. This is on the left, you’ve got the northern sky. That’s the main strip image there. On the right, you’ve got the southern sky. And you’ve got some of the symbolism we’re putting here as well, which may be astronomical.

For example, the H and the O and the moon symbol on the right, that’s on one of the central T pillars, like the neck kind of insignia area where the V neck is. And they could represent, according to BG Siddharth and JJ, that that could represent the Gemini twins. Because these aren’t just nature symbols. It’s two figures facing each other holding kind of hands or dancing or something.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: Below that you’ve got a lunar and a solar symbol as well, which is really, really interesting. You’ve also got at the bottom of the pillar, on the base there, seven flightless birds, which could represent Pleiades, some people say.

AJ GENTILE: Right, the seven sisters.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. And also you’ve got this little artifact, about this big, three inches tall, carved on bone. It looks like a person looking between two T pillars at the night sky, possibly with Cygnus carved on the bone plaque as well. And so you get all these little symbolism, all this little sort of symbols on these pieces of stone. And yet, according to the archaeologists, there’s nothing going on there to do with that.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, they say there’s no astronomy at these sites.

HUGH NEWMAN: Absolutely.

AJ GENTILE: So in the southern sky, looking at Gemini, then Orion would also factor in as well.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. And you get Taurus as well and other such things. In fact, JJ’s done a lot of research on what’s called the Golden Gate of the Ecliptic and how she thinks the whole north to the southern sky were moving along this certain path. She’s actually very smart and got this all down. She’s going to be putting a whole chapter in the book about it. And so it incorporates all these different elements and also into earlier myths from different areas. We’re doing this and later cultures as well. And so the astronomical side of it, I think really needs to be properly examined.

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

Goddess Figurines and Nearby Sites

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, I want to show you a couple of these other sites in the area before we. I don’t want to miss these. So this is a really interesting little figurine from Gertepe. This is the last site in Taş Tepeler in the whole region. And they found the first place they started finding. They kind of found one at Gobekli Tepe, but they’re not sure. A goddess figurine, like a kind of full bodied woman figurine, which were later like in the Maltese temples, as you can see here.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

HUGH NEWMAN: These are from Malta. These are from Heyam. And on the right, that’s the one from Gertepe, which later developed really strongly in places like Malta, which could be just after Gobekli Tepe. The new dating is now being put forward. But Sephy Tepe is another site here. This is a very recent discovery of these two stone faces carved on this giant megalithic bench.

AJ GENTILE: I was again obsessed with the polish on that.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. I mean, the stonework is just. It gets really, really bizarre. Then you have this like a mace head carved out of volcanic basalt, two sides to it as well.

AJ GENTILE: So it’s like a ring shape. What do you think? Do you think that a staff went in there?

HUGH NEWMAN: I think so, yeah. It looks like it’s the top of a kind of staff. It really does. You’ve got two faces, one on either side, one kind of open. And then you’ve got Sayburç as well, which we looked at already. But there’s so many sites now being uncovered in this area. It just gets more epic the more you look into it.

AJ GENTILE: How many Tepe sites do you think there are?

HUGH NEWMAN: There’s officially 12. This is like the Taş Tepeler super civilization, I call it. But there’s a lot more being excavated. There’s more that even on this official map that came out.

AJ GENTILE: What does your gut tell you how many are going to be found?

HUGH NEWMAN: I think there’s going to be hundreds.

AJ GENTILE: Hundreds?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, I think so. Because I don’t think this is limited to this area. I think they’re going to start finding them in other areas of Turkey. They’re going to find them in the Levant. They’re going to find them off the coast underwater, which they’ve already started doing. There’s going to be more and more found. I think this is going to really, in the process of rewriting an entire history of the planet.

AJ GENTILE: Well, look at the resources that are required here. These are clearly very important places. Very important places.

HUGH NEWMAN: And this shouldn’t have been happening back then. This is the end of the last ice age. It was actually in the ice age, a lot of these sites.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: That’s what’s so baffling.

AJ GENTILE: Boncuklu goes back to when the ice shelf was there, no?

Pre-Gobekli Tepe Sites Along the Tigris River

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, you’ve got much further to the east. You’ve got Boncuklu Tarla, you’ve got Kortik Tepe, you’ve got Gre Filla Höyük as well. These are a whole series of sites. There’s even Çayönü up in the area as well. These are fascinating places. These are some of the pre-Gobekli Tepe sites. So there’s a whole. And these are all along the Tigris River. So you’ve got the Tigris River where all these sites are going back a thousand or more years before Gobekli Tepe. And all the Taş Tepeler sites are closer to the Euphrates River. The two rivers of Paradise, Biblical tradition. And they both go right down into the Levant, into Iraq and other places as well, where traditionally those rivers are more famous for being there.

But these sites over in that area are really interesting because at Kortik Tepe, for instance, you actually find quite small stones, like this size, you know, hold them in your hand or two hands. And they have 3D relief carvings of abstract animals and figures. And they’re 500 to a thousand years older than Gobekli Tepe. Showing 3D relief carving, abstract forms. So what’s going on there? I mean, so this could be where that idea came from and then blew up in the whole of Taş Tepeler. So the jury’s out on what is going on. Were they trading between each other? Were they kind of against each other? Did they start blending and bringing their ideas together? And I think there’s a bit of everything in there. I think it’s all going to come to light eventually when more excavation is done.

AJ GENTILE: Because we don’t have any records. Right. We don’t get anything until, I guess, the Phoenicians.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. What you’ve got really is Sumerian. Sumerian, Venetians, you’ve got even the Hittites, in some respects. You’ve got the Hatians before them keeping records. Yeah. And that’s it, really. Egypt as well.

AJ GENTILE: Well, Gilgamesh, they say, is much older than when it was written down. Could be. It could be this old.

HUGH NEWMAN: Actually, I think Graham Hancock wrote an article about that.

AJ GENTILE: Did he?

HUGH NEWMAN: That the narrative scene at Sayburç is actually could be a representation of the whole Gilgamesh story, which is really intriguing.

AJ GENTILE: I need to read that.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, that’s really. So there’s lots of these. I mean, so little has been excavated. That’s the problem. We need more. When more is excavated, suddenly it’s all going to come into view. We’re going to know what’s going on.

AJ GENTILE: Does the government cooperate?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of work now. There’s Japanese teams coming in, there’s teams from Germany, England and other parts of the world all coming in and working on this project. So many of these sites are starting to get excavated. The most recent one is going to be Yandel Höyük. Got a Japanese team, just started on that, like two months ago, and it’s a new discovery.

Well, we’ve known about it. In fact, let me show you this. This is going to interest you. This is very interesting, actually, because Yandel Höyük was one of the sites that was announced as one of the 12 Taş Tepeler sites when it was all put out there in 2021. And so we went to have a look at it ourselves, I think, in like 2022. Let me just see if I can find this, because this is pretty cool. And we actually found ourselves. This is a fascinating place. A T pillar lying on the ground in a field.

AJ GENTILE: There’s no question that that’s a T pillar.

HUGH NEWMAN: It’s got a carving on it as well. You can’t really see it in this image, but there’s actually a small 3D relief carving on one side of it. I mean, it’s been, like, plowed over.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah. But there’s the plates again.

HUGH NEWMAN: There’s plates. And we got to know the locals. They showed us all these artifacts. And they’ve just started excavating. We discovered this, me and JJ, in 2020. We were just driving. We were just going to look in this field. I’ve got a feeling there’s something in there. Just found a T pillar on the floor. What the hell? And so that really got us. And then every year, we go back just to check in on our little pet T pillar. Yeah, it’s still there every time. No one’s taken it. It hasn’t been put in a museum, hasn’t been collected.

AJ GENTILE: Well, where there’s one, there’s got to be 11 more.

HUGH NEWMAN: Oh, my God. Yeah, there’s going to be a lot more. The thing with Yandel Höyük is this is going to blow people away. This is going to be bigger than Gobekli Tepe.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, this is going to be huge. And I think that, you know, on this map here, you can see there’s six, possibly seven large mound areas. Gobekli Tepe has got, like, four of those possibly. And so that’s going to open things up quite dramatically. And that actually means “giant that eats.”

AJ GENTILE: That’s what that means.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. That’s the translation, which I think is pretty cool.

AJ GENTILE: The giants keep coming up.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah.

Giants: A Fascinating and Controversial Subject

AJ GENTILE: Where are you on giants? Are you a giant believer? What were they?

HUGH NEWMAN: I’m a bit of a giantologist, you could say that.

AJ GENTILE: Okay. All right.

HUGH NEWMAN: With my good friend Jim Vieira, we’ve written a couple of books. One on the giants of North America called Giants on Record, and also another one called The Giants of Stonehenge and Ancient Britain. And we are, you know, a little bit skeptical. We debunk tons of the giant accounts that we’ve come across. We’re not just trying to sell a book for a story. We genuinely find it a fascinating subject.

AJ GENTILE: I do too.

HUGH NEWMAN: Really fascinating.

AJ GENTILE: It’s got to be something to it because it shows up in every culture, every myth.

Giants, Stonehenge, and Ancient Mysteries

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. And you look at North America — it’s profound. This is profound here because it was the work of Ross Hamilton who wrote the book A Tradition of Giants that got me into all this. He’s an absolute legend. We call him the Godfather of Giantology. That’s his nickname, or the Gog Gog, and he’s based in Ohio, so he’s in that whole area. And it was his book that really blew my mind because he uncovered hundreds of accounts, but we’ve uncovered thousands of accounts. Now we feature only 250 in our book. 250. But even then we knew of

AJ GENTILE: a thousand accounts from newspapers, from—

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, newspapers, academic journals, doctors, reports, people who just dig them up, send them to the Smithsonian, never to be seen again.

AJ GENTILE: They disappear. Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: And even the Smithsonian’s own annual reports — they published every year or two — some of them are in there, up to 7ft, 8ft tall.

AJ GENTILE: I didn’t know that.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. Actually we’ve done a whole chapter called “The Smithsonian Files” in the book just to cover that. Obviously Nevada has a whole load. We’ve looked into Lovelock Cave.

AJ GENTILE: Right. The red-haired giants.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. The Winnemucca petroglyphs and things like that, which are 14 or more thousand years old, which are pretty mind-blowing.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: But really it’s the mound culture where the real giants are, and the Adena people especially. But up in New York state we found loads, up in New England, all the megalithic chambers you have up there. It is mental. It’s mind-blowing. I cannot quite understand — maybe you can correct

AJ GENTILE: me if I’m wrong, but I thought the ancient word for Stonehenge was something about giants in the earlier—

HUGH NEWMAN: It was called the Giants’ Dance.

AJ GENTILE: It was called—

HUGH NEWMAN: That’s what it was in Welsh — the Choir Gigantum. Chorea Gigantum.

AJ GENTILE: A lot of coincidences. And Malta — we talked about giants building that.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: Enoch has the Book of Giants.

HUGH NEWMAN: You’ve got the goddess Sansuna in Malta. But with Stonehenge though—

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: So you have this giant myth story that the giants built Stonehenge. This is all from the History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a 12th century document. The stones were originally taken to Ireland and placed there at a site called Killerus. And then much later, King Ambrosius — who was the king at the time — sent Uther Pendragon over with a 15,000-strong army to go and collect the stones of Killerus, the Giants’ Dance, and bring them to the Salisbury Plain to raise these stones in honor of the slain victims of a war that had taken place. But they couldn’t do it. The 15,000-strong army couldn’t move one stone. So they had to send Merlin the Magician over there.

AJ GENTILE: I love this story.

HUGH NEWMAN: He went and got them by using sleight of magic in some stories, or pulleys and technology in other stories. And so somehow he did it on his own and brought them over to Salisbury Plain. That’s the story. But originally the stones had come from the furthest reaches of Africa and were brought over by a race of giants at the very first phase of this.

AJ GENTILE: Has that geology been confirmed?

Giant Burials and Stonehenge Legends

HUGH NEWMAN: Well, they’ve actually found trilithons in Libya. Actual trilithons — actual megalithic structures that look like Stonehenge — which is bizarre. There are myths of giants in the area as well. But there are more stories of giants around Stonehenge.

One of them is a book written in 1666 called A Fool’s Bolt Soon Shot at Stonehenge by Reverend Robert Gay. He lived in Somerset and was a bit of an anarchist for his time. He wrote this book and uncovered all these old legends of Stonehenge — that it was actually built by a tribe of giants called the Kangik giants. It’s all in the book. Yeah, we cover all this in the book as well. And that they had built it as a place to honor their dead. But also there are actual giant accounts — actual giant burials found near Stonehenge.

AJ GENTILE: Skeletons of large scale. Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: In 1719, just in a mound called the Giant’s Grave in Salisbury, which is a few miles south of Stonehenge, they found a nine foot four inch skeleton. And it was reported in numerous newspapers at the time.

And before that, in the early 1500s, Sir Thomas Elyot — he was the gentleman who wrote the first Latin dictionary, a well-known scholar educated at Cambridge and places like this — he discovered a 14 foot 10 inch skeleton in a log coffin in the grounds of what became known as some kind of abbey in the area. But it was obviously a much earlier burial, very, very deep in the ground. And it had this strange metal disc with all these inscriptions on it, and also a book with these inscriptions on it.

AJ GENTILE: Where is this? Is that—

HUGH NEWMAN: This is near Stonehenge.

AJ GENTILE: I mean, do these artifacts still exist?

HUGH NEWMAN: No, they disappeared within a few years. But this was reported on by very famous people — Thomas Elyot is a well-known figure. Lots of people went and witnessed this and reported on it. But the range of height went from 12 foot 10 inches to 14 foot 10 inches — it changed with different accounts. But this was documented. And I was like, how can this be ignored? No one knows about this, and it’s in all these old books.

The inscriptions on it — no one knows what they were or what happened to them. They call it a tin and lead disc. Somehow they knew it was made of tin, with all these descriptions on it. But the skeleton crumbled to dust, and that was the end of that.

The Giant of Salisbury and St. Christopher

HUGH NEWMAN: But very odd. And then, if you actually go to Salisbury now — this is the city near where I live — in the museum there, they have a giant on display. Not a skeleton. This is like a papier-mâché giant.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

HUGH NEWMAN: But the thing is, this is part of an old tradition where, since the 1400s, the secret societies in this area — the Taylor’s Guild and other such groups — they would parade this giant around the town just after the summer solstice on St. John the Baptist Day, and then have this hobby horse following it around, clearing the path so it wouldn’t fall on people. And this was going on since the 1400s. He became known as St. Christopher.

Now, for those who know their biblical saints, you’ll know that St. Christopher was a Canaanite giant from the Bible lands.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right.

HUGH NEWMAN: Who carried Jesus over on his shoulder across a river when Jesus was a baby, and turned away from this whole warrior caste that he was involved with among the Canaanites, and became a Christian, if you like. But how is all this connected — all these weird stories? We go into it in great detail in the book. We uncover all these old texts and piece it all together, because it seems to be this Canaanite biblical story connected with Stonehenge.

AJ GENTILE: Could this be Nephilim? Were there Nephilim actually on earth?

Stonehenge’s 10,000-Year-Old Origins

HUGH NEWMAN: Could be, who knows? I mean, it gets weird. There are a lot of accounts in Wiltshire and the southwest of England when it comes to that.

But while we’re on the subject of Stonehenge, I want to just mention this because it’s really interesting — it fits back in with what we were talking about. So we have Stonehenge here. This is an aerial photograph on the summer solstice. You can see the way that the light from the stone on the far right there — it’s like a phallic shadow penetrating the feminine circle — it’s all symbolic. But this solstice alignment, the famous summer solstice alignment at Stonehenge, there’s a much older one there. It goes back 10,000 years.

This is why I think the Göbekli Tepe explorers were coming to this part of the world. Because they found these 10,000-year-old large pine post holes where the car park used to be. There used to be three blobs of paint in the car park as an artist’s impression of what they would have looked like — could have been up to 30ft tall. And they know it was pine. They found charcoal and dated it. They estimated the height based upon the width and depth. And these were oriented east-west, more or less, and they were within 30 yards of where Stonehenge is now.

But also inside Stonehenge — I have to explain this a little bit. Right at the bottom there, you’ve got the Stonehenge circle. But in there they found a mound which was 5,000 years older than Stonehenge itself. And they found Mesolithic material inside there — which basically means the age before the Neolithic. But then from there, going to the northeast, they found these parallel ridges called periglacial strips. These are natural features. But if you were inside at that mound, looking down these natural features, it aligns with the summer solstice sunrise. Which is really interesting.

At the far bottom of the hill, there’s another mound that was constructed, called Newell’s Mound, named after the guy who found it. But then later, when — so that was all happening 10,000 years ago — they may have been looking at the solstice in the opposite direction. It’s the winter solstice sunset.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: But then later they create Stonehenge around this mound. And where these periglacial strips are, they carve out an avenue going in exactly the same direction. And now that’s the one everyone celebrates for the summer solstice.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: So this was happening 5,000 years earlier. They were probably studying the summer solstice at Stonehenge before any stones were put in place. And it’s now known that Amesbury — right where I live — this whole area is the oldest continually inhabited area of the whole of Britain.

There’s a site just down the road from there which was a known gathering site. There’s a spring there. Dr. David Jucks is a brilliant archaeologist — I know him personally, I’ve been to a few digs. They found evidence going older than that now. In the area of Amesbury they found evidence going back 12,000 years ago, not just 10,000, so that puts it right into the frame. So they were doing the solstice here 10,000 years ago at least — possibly earlier. Now they found these earlier dates because

AJ GENTILE: we keep running up against — it almost feels like a hard limit of the Ice Age. Yeah, it feels like we can’t get too far beyond that.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, that is because especially in the northern climate here, you’re going to have a lot of ice.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

HUGH NEWMAN: But the thing is, you have — I forget the name — but you have the warm strips of heat coming over from the Atlantic, warming things up in Britain, which is still what happens today. And so a lot of England would have been clear of ice by the end of the last Ice Age, and so they could have got to Stonehenge easily. Because it would have been joined to Europe because of Doggerland.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right.

HUGH NEWMAN: So they could have walked there. And

AJ GENTILE: that was fringe theory for a long time. I know they found habitation evidence there—

Ancient Calendars, Latitudes & Cosmic Alignments

HUGH NEWMAN: But what they found as well is — I’m not sure if I’ve got it here. Yeah. So this is — now this is actually one of my photos from the summer solstice. That’s the alignment going, it’s all covered in mist, the avenue. But it’s pretty beautiful. Yeah, beautiful experience doing that.

Okay, let me just find this one image because what they found is, if you go even further north, much further north than Stonehenge, you can go all the way up to Aberdeenshire. And this area here would have been just free of ice at the end of the last ice age, you know, towards the end of the last ice age. Yeah.

And Professor Vince Gaffney — he came and spoke at our conference partly about this. They found another site there called Warren Field. This goes back to 10,000 years ago as well. And they found again these giant post holes all in this arc, all in this arc going across this field. And they found, to their surprise, that it aligned not only to the winter solstice sunrise, but it also marked the different moon phases. So it was like a lunar-solar calendar. And somehow they encoded that. They call it the Warren Field Time Reckoner, which is pretty cool.

AJ GENTILE: It is.

HUGH NEWMAN: And they were doing that 10,000 years ago. They were measuring the moon and the sun on the winter solstice. And so to me, I have to question who would be doing this unless there was a project in place — yeah, to go and study this.

AJ GENTILE: This is ancient knowledge, tens of thousands of years.

HUGH NEWMAN: So this goes back at least 10,000 years ago. And you’ve got it also happening at Stonehenge. And the thing is, the further north you go, the more you realize, when you’re studying the movements of the sun and the moon — especially because the moon literally doesn’t go below the horizon when you get to a certain latitude north, like Orkney and places like that — that you would have easily been able to know this. You could have worked out the size and shape of the Earth by these observations and measurements quite easily.

AJ GENTILE: Right. Just from the shadows, I think.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. At certain times of year, as long as you stick to the same date, you can get different shadow lengths and things like this. So that is fascinating to me. These are little clues that I think the people of Göbekli Tepe were a scientific research project moving around the planet, all in different directions. They wanted to go as far north as they could — that was the primary thing, I think.

And then you have the Book of Enoch. Not only do they talk about taking cords and going off to measure, they describe horrific weather which would have been appropriate for Scotland.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right. It talks about the winds being born and things like that.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, really extreme weather, and also really short days and long nights, which you would get the further north you go. Things like this. Lots of little clues you keep finding.

And so, I mean, we can’t prove this yet — or ever, I don’t know — but hopefully one day. But it’s an interesting idea because why were they making all these detailed measurements at all these different latitudes?

The Stonehenge latitude is quite interesting as well. The summer solstice sunrise alignment, which is also the winter solstice sunset alignment, is marked at a specific latitude to go at a certain angle. But it’s also got what’s called the four station stones — like a rectangle around the edge of Stonehenge. And each of the alignments between these four stones mark the different extreme moon cycles, the 18.6-year Metonic moon cycle. And they perfectly form this rectangle. And then directly adjacent to that, perfectly perpendicular, is the summer solstice limit. It’s all just — boom — it works. But if you were to go 20 miles south or north, that whole rectangle would warp to get the same results.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: So it’s almost like they chose that latitude because it was important to them to make certain measurements of the moon combined with the solstice.

Howard Crowhurst and the Science of Latitudes

So when you start looking at different latitudes, you find these different things. I really have to credit the work of Howard Crowhurst. He’s a great guy to talk to as well — he’s a minefield of information. He’s English but he lives in Brittany. He found all these different latitudes very much focused on — they would mark where the sun would rise at the solstices, and it would mark exactly the 3-4-5 triangle and things like this. Then when you go up to different latitudes in different parts of the world, it might mark different angles like the golden section, or the triple square, or something like this. So all these different ideas started emerging.

He’s written a lot about this. He’s done it in England, he’s done it in Britain. He started applying it to Taş Tepeler as well. And I think we’re going to find more and more of that — that there was this scientific, very ancient project to go measure the Earth and study what was going on.

And it was probably to do with the aftermath of the last ice age. A cataclysm had taken place, things had changed. Probably a lot of stuff got lost, a lot of sites destroyed, a lot of information went astray.

AJ GENTILE: Well, clearly there’s technology that’s gone. Yeah, that just disappeared.

HUGH NEWMAN: But even with these, you don’t need that much technology. You just need to be at the place and actually make the observations, keep the records — usually encoded in myths and stories.

AJ GENTILE: Do you think there were practical reasons for this? Not so much ritualistic, but — we need to measure this stuff so we don’t go through that again?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, quite possibly. They wanted to — maybe it was a way of studying the sky to see if anything else like that might occur in the future. And actually you did a video about this based on Martin Sweatman’s research about the cataclysm and how Pillar 43 may encode that.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

HUGH NEWMAN: And it was like a warning and a concern. They wanted to get something down in stone so they could warn their future descendants and things like this. So it could be the same principle. Maybe the information that eventually ended up in places like Göbekli Tepe may have been collected from these people going around and collecting it from these different areas of the planet. So it’s pretty epic when you get into it.

AJ GENTILE: Did you study any of the Venus cycles?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, only a little, because that often works alongside the winter solstice.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

Venus Cycles and Ancient Alignments

HUGH NEWMAN: So we found that — yeah, we do find that. Sorry. At Karahan Tepe. And this is really fascinating because in a book called Uriel’s Machine by Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight — it’s a fantastic book, I don’t know if you’ve read it, absolutely brilliant piece of work — they found that Newgrange and even Bryn Celli Ddu, another burial chamber in Wales in Anglesey, had this potential Venus alignment which would occur around the time of the winter solstice every eight years.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: And it would be bright enough to illuminate the inside of the chamber, like the sun does on the winter solstice at Newgrange. So we applied that to Karahan Tepe. The same thing occurs there — the starlight at certain times every eight years, if the conditions are correct, would be bright enough before sunrise to shine through the porthole stone and illuminate the stone head.

AJ GENTILE: That same stone?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, the one we were talking about earlier. Possibly. We haven’t — we tried to do that in December. But the problem was this part of the cycle is that Venus was too close to the sun. You couldn’t really see it — it’s hidden behind the light of the sun. But another few years, you might be able to catch it a couple of hours before the sun, and then it’s going to come up bright and you could catch a slight illumination exactly the same place as the sun a few hours later.

AJ GENTILE: I love the theory that the Star of Bethlehem could actually be Venus, which makes a lot of sense.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah. And I think this is a calibration — it’s not a star, it’s a planet — but it’s a calibration of calendars as well, because it repeats a cycle every eight years and has longer cycles where it returns to its exact position, which can calibrate a longer cycle as well. Which is what we know the Mayans, and possibly the Olmecs, were doing as well. So there’s a lot going on in this part of the world, potentially.

AJ GENTILE: I think there is. Any more slides you want to show us before we let you go?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, for sure. Why don’t we have a quick look at this?

AJ GENTILE: I mean, I’ll keep you here another hour if you want.

New Olmec Discoveries

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, well, while we’re talking about the Mayans and the Olmecs — I wanted to mention this because this is just — it’s actually a new discovery in Olmec land. Not many people know about this.

This is quite a well-known Olmec head — this is the largest Olmec head at La Cobata, in the Santiago Tuxtla town square in Mexico. They found 17 of these heads. But a potential 18th has been found, which I want to just quickly show you now.

This one’s actually from Tres Zapotes — this is one of the known ones. But you like the 3D scan, so I just thought I’d show you this — it shows some really beautiful little detail on it. These are gigantic. I mean, some of these are up to 40 tons.

AJ GENTILE: 40 tons.

HUGH NEWMAN: Some are. Most of them are about 15 to 20 tons.

AJ GENTILE: Would they have been resting on the ground back then? What was the purpose of these?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yes, these would have been rested on the ground. Yeah. They wouldn’t have had necks or bodies or anything like that. But yeah, these are fascinating to me. This is one of them. I mean, this is much later — this is like 1500 BC at the earliest.

AJ GENTILE: Really. What do you think that hole is there for?

HUGH NEWMAN: That I’m not sure about. You get a lot of this kind of obscure carving on these. But what I really wanted to show you is this new discovery from Levanto there. This is only discovered less than a year ago and it’s not been documented by anything academically.

A couple of friends of mine — Luke Caverns went there, I visited it as well, and we kind of reported on it. And this is the one remaining Olmec site you can visit — it’s 1500 to 1200 BC in Tabasco State. There’s high-level cartel activity there now, it’s very dangerous. When we were there, actually — but this is a very bizarre statue that was found. It’s like a female statue. It’s kind of got this feminine, yoni kind of look to it. And it’s beautifully shaped and carved. It’s got an interior with carvings inside it. It’s partly broken.

But what on earth is this? This is so bizarre. I just have to look at this again. Look at this — I mean, you’ve got an entrance into it. It’s almost like a female labyrinth. It’s very, very interesting. And nothing like this have I seen in Olmec land. I’ve been going to Olmec land for 15-plus years. So there are new discoveries still being made in places like this as well.

AJ GENTILE: Now the phallus you see all the time, but rarely do you see something like that.

The Olmec Quarry Discovery

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, something like the opposite really. Then I had a chance, which is I’ve been wanting to go here for literally over 15 years. This is the quarry of the Olmecs. This is called Bureau. And I’ve been, I didn’t know the location is hidden. No one knew the location. Only one archaeologist who we happened to bump into in a museum that he happens to be the curator of — Alfredo Degardo Jalapa Museum. Doesn’t speak any English. We speak very little Spanish. But we still managed to work out, “Can you take us to the quarry?” And he said yes. We were like, “Ah.”

So we got to go. And the thing about this quarry is that it’s still used, used to relatively recently as a sacred place, like where offerings are still made on some of the stones. And there’s loads of megaliths still there. Like this one here, for instance. It’s a half carved megalith.

AJ GENTILE: So no one knows where this is?

HUGH NEWMAN: No. I mean, even if I had the location of it, the GPS of it, and I went there, I wouldn’t be able to find it. Because it’s scattered around like several acres in private land. But it’s boiling hot. It’s like you can’t see the stones unless you clear away the grass and everything.

But what he thinks is found there is another Olmec head. This one here is literally sitting beneath me there. And this is like a big discovery, but no one’s interested. It’s like it’s not really been documented at all. And this is a 3D scan I got. You got to remember this has not been carved yet. This is the first phase of them digging this Olmec head out of the ground.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

HUGH NEWMAN: And so, yeah, not much to look at now, but it’s the first piece of the puzzle. And so I just want to put this on here because you people got to realize there’s stuff still being found, there’s stuff still hidden, places like this. And when it comes to Göbekli Tepe and sites like that, there’s going to be a lot more coming out of there as well.

I’m just absolutely fascinated by what is coming out of the ground.

Closing Remarks & Where to Find Hugh Newman

AJ GENTILE: Hugh Newman, thank you so much for coming in today. This has been a joy.

HUGH NEWMAN: My pleasure.

AJ GENTILE: This has been a treat. Thanks, thanks again.

HUGH NEWMAN: Really appreciate it.

AJ GENTILE: Buy his books, and where can we find you online?

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, sure. They could just Google my name — Hugh Newman. Pretty easy to find. Also we have the megalithomania.co.uk website and we have a Megalithomania YouTube channel.

AJ GENTILE: Which is brilliant.

HUGH NEWMAN: Yeah, we have a thousand plus videos on there and other such things. Yeah, they can just contact us through there. I mean, we do, obviously, the conference every May. It’s our 20th anniversary. You can come along if you want to come. Fancy town called Glastonbury. And we do another conference called the Origins Conference sometimes in November in Wiltshire. We go much more into the deep origins of civilization — that kind of vibe. A bit less megaliths but more super ancient stuff. And that’s a collaboration with Andrew Collins as well.

And we do take groups out as well to many of these sites we’ve been talking about. We take tours out there, and that really helps us because it helps fund our projects, because we’re completely independent. This is like a full time thing. We really want to have time to focus on our research and getting the books out and getting the research put in place. And it takes a lot of time and energy, as you know, with this kind of thing — when you’re researching your shows, it’s pretty intense.

We encourage people to check out what we’re up to and maybe join us in Turkey or in some other part of the world where we take groups. We have a lot of fun.

AJ GENTILE: We’ll take you up on that. And next time you’re in, we’ll talk about the Haunted House you live in.

HUGH NEWMAN: Oh, my God. Yeah, that’s a whole other story, everybody.

AJ’s Breakdown: What We Can Verify

AJ GENTILE: So Hugh Newman — that was dense and we covered a lot, and I could have talked to him for another two hours. So let’s break it down.

Here’s what we can verify. Hugh is the real deal. He’s been running the Megalithomania conference since 2006. You’ve seen him on Ancient Aliens and all kinds of TV shows. He’s published multiple books. I have the books — Giants of Stonehenge, Giants on Record. These are great books on giants he published. Earth’s grids, stone circles, and Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe, the world’s first megaliths. It’s good.

He’s been to these places dozens of times and he’s not speculating from his couch. He’s out there measuring T-pillars and flying a drone while dodging the Turkish military.

Now, the sites themselves are well documented. Göbekli Tepe dates to around 9,600 BC and Karahan Tepe is dated to roughly 9,400 BC. These are accepted dates from the German Archaeological Institute and ongoing Turkish excavations. The terrazzo floors, the 3D relief carvings, the bedrock engineering — that’s all confirmed.

We talked about Dr. Martin Sweatman at the University of Edinburgh. He published a peer reviewed paper in 2017 arguing that Pillar 43 — that’s the Vulture Stone — encodes a date corresponding to the Younger Dryas impact. That took them like two or three years to get through because it’s controversial, but now it’s published science, so things may be coming around.

Alexander Thom — I’ve talked about him before. He’s the guy who came up with the megalithic yard: 2.72 feet. He found it all over ancient sites, and he came up with that number from surveying over 500 stone circles across Britain. He published Megalithic Sites in Britain in 1967. It’s controversial, but it’s fun.

The Big Claims

AJ GENTILE: Now the big claims. Hugh says he’s finding those same measurement systems — the megalithic yard, the Persian foot, the Sumerian foot — at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe. Now that would push back standardized metrology, which is the study of measurement, back 7,000 years earlier than mainstream archaeology accepts. I like annoying them.

He also suggests the builders were measuring the Earth itself, encoding its dimensions into the distances between sites — 1 million Persian feet from Göbekli Tepe to Stonehenge. Even the diameter of the Earth encoded in the distance to Peru’s Qorikancha.

Now, these are huge claims and I couldn’t independently verify those specific distance calculations. And his measurement work at the Turkish sites hasn’t been peer reviewed yet, and he acknowledges that. But the numbers are interesting enough to keep watching.

Now, the winter solstice alignment at Karahan Tepe — Hugh and JJ Ainsworth witnessed sunlight passing through a carved porthole and illuminating a stone head, only on the solstice. They’d gone back multiple years and it keeps happening. You can go see for yourself.

Now, if that’s engineered — and it sure looks like it is — then these people understood precision astronomy 6,000 years before Stonehenge. Now, that’s a problem for the conventional timeline, and it’s the kind of problem I like.

Final Thoughts

AJ GENTILE: Look, Hugh is a guy who shows up. He measures things. He puts his data out there for everyone to check out. He’s not trying to sell you aliens or lost continents. He’s just saying the math doesn’t add up with the story that we’ve been told. And I think he’s right that we need more disciplines at the table — like acoustics, astronomy, metrology — not just guys who study pottery.

Now, if you want to go deeper — and you should — check out his books. Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe: The World’s First Megaliths — that’s the one to start with. Start there. His YouTube channel — I’ll probably link it down below — it’s Megalithomania UK. I think he’s got over a thousand videos on there. I’ve been a subscriber of his for a long time. And if you ever see him talking to Andrew Collins, definitely watch those. His website is megalithomania.co.uk.

Now, if you’re feeling adventurous, he runs tours to these sites. I’m thinking about taking one because he has access to places that most people can’t get. Tim Hogan, who we had on here a couple of weeks ago, is the same thing. I guess we have a lot of tours coming up now.

I’ve done episodes that overlap a lot with what Hugh covered — Derinkuyu, the Megalithic Yard, Proving Atlantis, Book of Enoch. I kept going back to Enoch because I’m obsessed with it. Giants of Malta is an episode all worth a rewatch after this conversation.

Did I get all of it? I think I did. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

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