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Stuart Mason: The Long Man of Wilmington Decode artwork

Stuart Mason: The Long Man of Wilmington Decode

Earth Ancients

September 5, 2026

The "mysterious" Long Man of Wilmington, one of Britain's most recognizable chalk figures, sits proudly on the steep slopes of Windover Hill in East Sussex.

Speakers Cliff Dunning, Stuart Mason

TopicsSociety & CultureScienceSocial Sciences

Cliff Dunning (0:20)

Oh, my God, did I get a good one today. I should say the last 10 days. There you go. And this is, this is the revolution of artificial intelligence, and I'll tell you what I'm talking about. So I have a chapter on agriculture in this new book, The Maya Controversy.

And whenever you're talking about food, grain foods, fruits, vegetables, or whatever, you got to talk about where they came from. And years ago, seven years ago, we had the engineer Jim O'Connor on the program. If you go through the archives of Earth Ancients, you can see he's written a number of books. One of his most famous, which is used by colleges and universities, Mayanists, is Ancient Maya Technology. And then he wrote another book on cotton, chocolate, and Maya cultivation. That's not the title. I'll give it to you some other time. But what he discovered is they were horticulturists. They grew and developed vegetables and fruits. And my whole thing is that I don't believe they necessarily came from the Bering Strait, which is Asia.

And in my research, and this is what's so amazing about AI, I said, I wrote a prompt. I said, trace the earliest development of fruits and vegetables in the Mayan community, and locate archaeological records and research that ties this into the Mayan people. Well, what comes back is a number of very, very detailed research papers by Mayan archaeologists. And some of these are the 1950s, 1960s before I was born. And what they traced is migratory foods from South America. They were coming through with very special types of maize, which is corn, and squash, and certain types of small apples and other vegetables. And they were taking them with them as they migrated and moved to warmer climates. Now, this is amazing, because here we are, and I'm talking to these different archaeologists and say, where did they come from? They didn't come from the Barrety Strait. It doesn't make any sense because they're too sophisticated. The earliest Maya are building the largest pyramidal complexes in the Americas. That's not a startup. That's not somebody who's going, how do you build a pyramid? How do you build a large temple? How do you spot the cosmos? I mean, these are very much advanced people and somewhat complete when they arrive. This is Cliff, your host of Earth Ancients, and right now, I'm having a little bit of a dilemma. And I think, and it may be that when I talk to friends like Ed Barnhart or Richard Hansen or whoever else I have on the program who are Mayanist, maybe they're not getting the data that I'm getting. And I'm beginning to think it's true. And when I had Ed on the program a few months ago, I was like, I really believe the Maya migrated, trans-oceanic migrations. And he says, well, I don't believe that's possible. They weren't that sophisticated. I need proof. All the proof shows Asiatic DNA. Well, in the reports that I found, they have actually found other DNA coming from parts of South America. And remember, if we look into Ralph Eisenman, who's a field researcher in Santiago, Chile, he was working with turn of the century scientists and wrote about them, who believes that early man came from Antarctica.

So it gets really kind of confusing, but I have supporting evidence for my theory that the earliest Maya, and these are not necessarily paleo, 6,000 to 10,000, but could be paleo, what archaeologists call paleo-Indians, which eventually morphed into Maya. I think that this is much sooner. I'm thinking six, seven, eight thousand years through migrations. We can't date temples and pyramids because you can't date stone or rock. But they may be able to date earlier versions of the temple or pyramid, which they've done in a number of other locations and get very much earlier dates. So really exciting news, really having fun with it. And this is all archaeological digs. Now, the other thing I want to mention real quickly, I took a study found with AI of a very early excavation of El Caracol, which is the observatory at Chichen Itza. And there was a couple of years study, 1930, where they went in and they consolidated the building, so it had to collapse. So they reinforced it and started inspecting it. And they found not only a circular stairway, but they found a much larger tower and features of an original structure. I was able to recreate that in a schematic and in a rendering. And it's got an extra five to eight feet on top of what we know now as the sightings or the tubular section in the middle, which is where these sky holes are, where they appeared out. It's looking more and more, and I have to be careful what I say, but I'll tell you what I believe, that the Maya may have certain types of optics. What I say that is, if you look at the Dresden Codex, which is one of the only four remaining texts that we have on the Maya, there is the Dresden Codex, and then there's the Venus star maps in that codex, and they're claiming various phases of the Venus planet, that you can't really look at with the naked eye. Now, you can mathematically do some calculations, but AI is saying, well, this is a little bit of a stretch if you're saying that.

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