00:00Every major museum is quietly hiding one kind of statue
00:02A reptile head, on a human body
00:04One of them cradles a baby, as if to feed it
00:06They are 7000 years old, and more than 100 have been dug up
00:10Not one archaeologist has dared to say publicly what they are
00:13And it gets stranger
00:15The human skulls found beside them have been reshaped into the same long, alien form
00:18Some say this is hard proof of an ancient alien civilization
00:20Others say it is serpent worship
00:21But in 2006, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania
00:24put forward a hypothesis that made everyone's blood run cold
00:27These reptile faces were not invented by the sculptures
00:30They were seen, directly, deep inside the mind
00:32By ancient shamans, after they swallowed a hallucinogen
00:35And this same image turned up in dozens of unconnected ancient cultures
00:38All around the world
00:39So what are these statues?
00:41To understand that, we have to go back more than a century
00:441919, a British archaeologist named Harry Reginald Hall
00:48Sank his spade into a low mound in southern Iraq, at a site called Al Abade
00:52He was only looking for ordinary pottery shards
00:55What came out of the earth stopped the entire excavation team cold
00:58A batch of tiny clay figurines, 5 to 10 centimeters tall
01:02Smaller than your palm
01:03But not one of them had a human head
01:05Elongated skulls
01:06Slit eyes set in a face like a split coffee bean
01:08Narrow, flattened noses
01:09And their shoulders were etched with dense, tiny patterns
01:12That looked like the scales of a reptile
01:14The most unsettling of all was a female figure
01:17She is holding an infant
01:17The pose is unmistakably a nursing mother
01:19But her face is the face of a reptile
01:21And the baby at her breast has a reptile head too
01:24A reptile mother
01:25Feeding a reptile child
01:27Put that image in a film today and it would belong in a horror movie
01:31Archaeologists gave these figures a scientific name
01:33They called them the lizard figurines
01:36The word comes from the shape, the elongated skull, the reptilian face
01:40Some of the patterns on their bodies were interpreted as scales
01:44But here is the problem
01:45That is only what they look like
01:47Nobody can prove that the people who made them, 7000 years ago, meant to carve a snake
01:51These figures belonged to a culture called the Abade
01:54It existed between 6500 and 3800 BC
01:59Older than Sumer itself
02:01They built mud brick houses, irrigated their fields, and raised the first temples
02:06But they had no writing
02:07No writing means everything they left behind
02:10Has to be guessed it by us
02:12And these lizard figures are the hardest riddle of all
02:14You might think this is only an Iraqi puzzle
02:16Wrong
02:18Archaeologists found the same type of figure at Uruk, at Aragut, at UR
02:22The core cities of the later Sumerian world
02:24And then something more unexpected
02:26In the Samara region of central Iraq, they found even older versions
02:29These date back to 5500 to 4800 BC
02:34The same elongated skulls
02:35The same coffee bean eyes
02:37Only the pose changed, from standing to sitting
02:39What does that mean?
02:40It means this reptile image was not the odd habit of one village
02:45It spread across all of Mesopotamia, and lasted for millennia
02:49So where were these statues kept?
02:50The answer is, everywhere
02:52Some were found near temples
02:55Some were under the floors of ordinary homes
02:58And some were taken by later civilizations and used as building material
03:01Fragments of them were mixed into the mud
03:02That became the bricks of later temples and pyramids
03:07But the most important clue came from a place called UR
03:11At UR, archaeologists opened 49 of 8 period graves
03:14In 6 of them, a lizard figure had been placed
03:16In one grave, there were 2
03:18And here is the strange part
03:20Those grave figures were far more finely made than the ones found in the open
03:22The same object
03:24So why were the buried ones so much more refined?
03:26Some researchers suggest the grave figures were not placed there at random
03:29They were the personal possessions of the dead
03:31What kind of person
03:32Would carry a reptile figure as their most treasured object?
03:35The answer may be, a shaman
03:37In Ubaid culture, the graves are almost identical in every detail
03:41Graves with a figure and graves without one show no difference in wealth or status
03:44So the people buried with these figures were not important because they were rich
03:47Then why did they have one?
03:49Some scholars believe these objects were not trophies at all
03:53They were power, acquired by a shaman during a ritual
03:56And when the shaman died, the figure went into the ground with him
03:58Not as a gift to the dead, but to stop that power from being stolen and misused
04:01But others offered a completely different explanation
04:04Every one of these statues looks almost exactly the same
04:06That is deeply unnatural
04:07A personal portrait or a keepsake
04:10Would always show individual variation
04:11These do not
04:13They look as if they were pressed from a single mold
04:15Which means they do not represent a specific person
04:17They represent a specific thing
04:19A concept
04:19A spirit
04:20Or a rank
04:22One theory says these statues depict an elite class
04:25The Ubaid had a practice that archaeology has already proven
04:28They deliberately deformed the skulls of infants
04:32Binding the head so that it grew long and narrow
04:36Archaeologists found these artificially reshaped skulls in graves at Arbakiya, at Eridu, and at other sites
04:42Men and women both
04:45And the evidence shows these people were related by blood
04:47A 1995 Cambridge study concluded that in the Arbakiya graves
04:50The owners of those deformed skulls very likely belonged to one intermarrying family
04:55And that reshaping had one practical effect
05:00A reshaped skull cannot carry weight on top
05:02In that age, all heavy loads were carried on the head
05:04In other words
05:05These people were designed, from birth, to be a class exempt from labor
05:09The shape of their skull was their identity card
05:11Strip them naked, take everything they own, and that long head alone would still tell you who they were
05:17And those coffee bean eyes on the statues
05:19One scholar gave an explanation that is genuinely chilling
05:22The eyes were deliberately enlarged, because these elites were always watching you
05:25The statues sat in the house like an eye that never closed
05:29Reminding ordinary people that the rulers were everywhere
05:31But the most extreme theory is the hallucinogen theory
05:34In many ancient cultures, shamans took natural hallucinogenic plants
05:37To enter a trance state
05:39And many modern test subjects who took large doses
05:42Reported one strikingly common experience
05:46They saw reptilian beings
05:47A snake-like face
05:48An elongated head
05:50Slid eyes
05:51Those descriptions match the obeyed statues almost exactly
05:55If these figures truly record what shamans saw in a drug-induced state
06:00Then we have to face something deeply unsettling
06:03Why would people from different eras, different lands, with no contact at all
06:07All see the same creature once their consciousness was altered?
06:11That question still has no answer
06:13And then, at the end of 2024, came a bombshell from Kuwait
06:16A joint Polish-Kuwaiti team excavating a site called Barra 1 in northern Kuwait dug out a brand new Ubaid
06:22lizard figure
06:24It was the first of its kind ever found in the Persian Gulf
06:28Only a small head survived
06:31But the features were unmistakable
06:32Elongated skull
06:34Slanted eyes
06:35Flat nose
06:36And more importantly, analysis showed the clay came from Mesopotamia
06:40Not from local Kuwaiti material
06:43What does that mean?
06:44It means that 7000 years ago, the Ubaid people treated these figures as a sacred symbol
06:49And carried them thousands of kilometers, from the Tigris and Euphrates all the way to Arabia
06:53They were not toys made on a whim
06:55They were a faith worth crossing deserts and seas to spread
06:57The excavation director, Agnieszka
07:00Said the discovery stunned the whole team
07:02Among 1500 artifacts from Barra 1, nothing like it had ever appeared
07:06That is what makes the Ubaid lizard figure so disturbing
07:10It is not isolated
07:11From Iraq to Kuwait, from temples to graves
07:14From nobles to commoners, it is everywhere
07:17And yet no written record tells us what it was
07:21Archaeologists admit that after a century of study, we still understand almost nothing
07:24It could be a snake god
07:27In later Sumerian myth, the god Enki is tied closely to serpents
07:30Perhaps the Ubaid were worshipping the original Enki
07:33It could be a mask
07:34Ritual masks have been found in Turkey, in Israel
07:37And even in Britain
07:40Maybe the reptile face was not their true face, but a costume worn in ritual
07:44It could be a trophy
07:47The slender bodies look strangely like today's Oscar statuette
07:51Perhaps it marked some rite of adulthood, or a reward for a spiritual trial
07:55It could be a warning
07:56In a home, it says someone is watching
07:59In a grave, it guards the power of the dead
08:02At a temple, it tells everyone, some forces you should never disturb
08:06But one thing is certain
08:09From the feathered serpent of Mesoamerica to the serpent gods of India
08:13From Nuwa and Fushi in China to reptile totems in African tribes
08:18Dozens of civilizations left records of serpent-like intelligent beings
08:20They had no shared language, no trade routes, oceans and deserts between them
08:24And yet they all shaped the same image
08:28Is that coincidence?
08:31Or did they all genuinely see something?
08:35That question may never have a final answer
08:36But every new discovery pushes the answer somewhere stranger
08:40The 2024 Kuwait find proved these figures traveled further than anyone imagined
08:45The excavators say work at Bar 1 is still going on
08:48There will be more discoveries
08:50Maybe one day something will come out of the ground
08:52That completely rewrites what we think we know about the origin of civilization
08:56But until that day, these 7000 year old lizard statues stay silent
09:00They stare at us with coffee bean eyes that never close
09:02What are they waiting for?
09:03What are they waiting for?
09:03I mean, the 그래ms of the American age
09:04The future of human beings
