In 1933, a crew of young men from the Civilian Conservation Corps descended into a limestone cave high in the walls of the Grand Canyon. They weren’t looking for anything in particular. What they found — hundreds of tiny figurines made from split willow twigs, shaped into deer and bighorn sheep, some pierced with miniature spears — had been sitting in the dark for roughly four thousand years. Nobody had lived in that cave. Someone had walked into the blackness, placed these offerings on the stone floor, and walked back out. The question that should have ended there, but didn’t: why did ancient people keep going underground?

The Worlds Below This One

The Hopi, whose mesas rise from the high desert of northeastern Arizona like the spine of something half-buried, have an answer. It’s not an archaeological answer. It’s older than that.

In Hopi cosmology, humanity has passed through multiple worlds — each one destroyed when people lost their way morally. The First World, Tokpela, ended in fire. The Second, Tokpa, in ice. The Third, Kuskurza, drowned. Each time, the righteous were guided downward, into the earth, where they survived until a new world could be made. The present world — the Fourth World, Tuwaqachi, meaning “World Complete” — is the one we’re standing on now. But the Hopi didn’t arrive here from across an ocean or a land bridge. They came up. Through a hole.

That hole has a name: the sipapuni. And it has a physical location. About four miles upstream from where the Little Colorado River meets the Colorado, just outside Grand Canyon National Park, there’s a travertine dome roughly ten meters across and seven meters high. Mineral-laden water bubbles up through a recessed opening at its top. The Hopi identify this as the place of emergence — the actual mouth through which humanity climbed into daylight. Every kiva, every underground ceremonial chamber on every Hopi mesa, contains a small hole in the floor that represents this same passage. You can see them today, if you’re invited in. A depression in the earth. A reminder of where we came from.

This is not metaphor the way Western listeners tend to assume. Or if it is metaphor, it’s the kind that insists on a street address.

The Ant People

Within the broader emergence narrative sits a story that gets less academic attention and more fringe enthusiasm than it deserves: the Anu Sinom, the Ant People.

According to Hopi oral tradition — recorded most prominently in Frank Waters’ 1963 Book of the Hopi, drawn from his collaboration with Oswald White Bear Fredericks and reportedly thirty Hopi elders — the Ant People were beings who already lived underground when catastrophe struck the upper worlds. During the destruction of both the First and Third Worlds, the sky god Sotuknang guided the virtuous Hopi to these subterranean dwellers. The Ant People took them in. They shared their food, to the point of going hungry themselves (which, the story goes, is why ants have such narrow waists — they starved so humans could eat). They taught the Hopi food storage techniques. They sheltered them in their tunnels until the surface world was habitable again.

The story has a structural logic that’s hard to dismiss as mere fantasy. It describes a survival strategy — go underground during catastrophe — and attributes it not to the Hopi themselves but to a separate people who specialized in subterranean life. It’s a story about refugees being taken in by an indigenous underground population.

A caveat here matters. Waters’ Book of the Hopi is the most widely read account of these traditions, but it is also the most contested. Harold Courlander, whose 1971 The Fourth World of the Hopis is generally considered more methodologically careful, noted “a Hopi reticence about discussing matters that could be considered ritual secrets or religion-oriented traditions.” This raises an uncomfortable but important question: are the stories outsiders receive the real stories, or are they the ones safe to tell strangers? Ekkehart Malotki, the German-born linguist at Northern Arizona University who spent decades documenting Hopi language and oral literature in bilingual volumes — working directly with Hopi collaborators like Michael Lomatuway’ma — has produced the most rigorous textual records of Hopi narrative traditions. But even his work can only capture what tellers chose to share.

Waters himself has been criticized by scholars and some Hopi for blending traditions from a particular political faction — the self-declared “Traditionalists” who split from the broader Hopi community in the 1930s and ’40s — into a synthetic whole that may not reflect the full complexity of what different villages actually teach. Roxie McLeod’s Dreams and Rumors: A History of “Book of the Hopi” examines how a single book shaped (and distorted) outside perception of an entire people’s cosmology.

So: the Ant People tradition exists. Multiple sources confirm its broad outlines. But how central it is to Hopi sacred knowledge, versus how much it’s been amplified by non-Hopi interpreters, remains genuinely unclear.

The 1909 Story That Won’t Die

On April 5, 1909, the Arizona Gazette ran a front-page article claiming that a Smithsonian-funded explorer named G.E. Kinkaid had discovered an enormous cavern system deep in the Grand Canyon walls. Inside: mummies, hieroglyphics, artifacts of “Oriental” or Egyptian origin, passages stretching for miles. A Professor S.A. Jordan of the Smithsonian was said to be leading the excavation.

This story has become a permanent fixture of alternative history. It gets cited in YouTube documentaries, conspiracy forums, and books with titles that include words like “forbidden” and “hidden.” It shows up in discussions of the Hopi Ant People as supposed corroboration — see, there really are underground cities down there.

There’s a problem. The story is almost certainly a hoax.

No records of G.E. Kinkaid or S.A. Jordan exist in Smithsonian archives. The Smithsonian has repeatedly stated it has no documentation of any such expedition. No subsequent explorer, park ranger, or geologist has located the described cavern system. Jason Colavito, a skeptical researcher who has written extensively on pseudoarchaeological claims, traces the likely origin to Joe Mulhattan, a traveling salesman famous in the late nineteenth century for planting fake stories in newspapers for his own amusement. The Coconino Sun in Flagstaff fingered Mulhattan at the time.

This doesn’t mean the Grand Canyon lacks caves. It has over 660 documented ones, with more than a hundred kilometers of mapped passage, primarily in the Redwall and Muav limestone formations. Northern Arizona University researchers have used mobile lidar scanners to create three-dimensional models of cave systems connected to perennial springs, publishing their findings in Scientific Reports. The geology is real and extensive. But geology and mythology are different claims, and a hoaxed newspaper article from 1909 does nothing to bridge them.

What’s Actually Underground

Strip away the hoaxes and the fringe amplification, and what remains is still remarkable.

The ancestral Puebloans — the archaeological predecessors of the Hopi, Zuni, and other Pueblo peoples — built extensively underground. Not tunnel cities, but something arguably more interesting: a civilization that deliberately chose to put its most important spaces beneath the surface.

Kivas are the most obvious expression of this. Semi-subterranean circular chambers, masonry-lined, accessed by ladder through a hole in the roof. They evolved from earlier pithouses — earth-walled dwellings dug into the ground — that date to at least AD 500. By the Pueblo III period (roughly 1150-1300 CE), settlements like those at Mesa Verde had one kiva for every six to nine surface rooms. Archaeological evidence increasingly suggests these weren’t purely ceremonial; families lived in them. Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon contained forty kivas among its six hundred rooms.

Each kiva contained a sipapu hole. The architecture was cosmological. You climbed down into the earth and sat in a space designed to remind you that humanity’s origin was below.

Then there are the cliff dwellings — Betatakin and Keet Seel at Navajo National Monument, the Mesa Verde complexes, Canyon de Chelly — built into alcoves and overhangs of canyon walls during that same Pueblo III period. These aren’t underground in the strict sense, but they represent a people who sought enclosure within rock, who built their homes inside the body of the earth rather than on top of it. The Hopi identify Betatakin and Keet Seel as ancestral sites, consistent with specific clan migration narratives.

And the migration narratives themselves are proving surprisingly durable under archaeological scrutiny. Patrick Lyons, director of the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona, used chemical sourcing of ceramics and analysis of painted pottery designs to trace large-scale population movements from the Kayenta and Tusayan regions of northern Arizona — movements that align with Hopi oral accounts of clan migrations. At Homolovi, near Winslow, Arizona, pottery styles show a clear transition from Kayenta-region traditions to Hopi Mesa traditions across a settlement occupied from roughly 1250 to 1425 CE. The Hopi say their clans stopped there during their migrations. The pottery says the same thing.

Over 4,800 archaeological sites have been documented within Grand Canyon National Park alone. Across the Mesa Verde region, more than 18,000 Ancestral Puebloan sites have been mapped. The evidence for a civilization deeply engaged with underground and rock-enclosed space is not speculative. It’s overwhelming.

The Space Between Story and Stone

What we have, then, is a layered situation. At the bottom: hard geology — hundreds of caves, carved by water through limestone over hundreds of millions of years. Above that: twelve thousand years of human presence in the Grand Canyon, from Clovis points to split-twig figurines placed in dark caves for reasons nobody alive can fully explain. Above that: a building tradition that insistently moved sacred and domestic life underground. Above that: an oral tradition that says humanity itself came from below, sheltered by beings who already lived there.

And floating above all of it, untethered to evidence but magnetically attracted to the real mysteries underneath: hoaxes, Anunnaki theories, claims of Egyptian tombs in Arizona.

The fringe material is easy to dismiss. The harder question is what to do with the convergence of the real evidence. The Hopi didn’t build underground because it was convenient — the mesa tops are easier to defend, easier to build on. They built underground because their cosmology demanded it. And their cosmology told a story about underground people who saved humanity. And their migration stories, the ones that sound like myth, keep getting confirmed by ceramic chemistry and settlement patterns.

So here is what I keep circling back to: those split-twig figurines, four thousand years old, left in absolute darkness in a cave no one lived in. Someone walked into a hole in the earth, placed a tiny deer made of willow on the ground, and walked out. Were they leaving an offering for something they believed lived down there? And if so — what had they seen, or heard, or remembered, that made them believe it?