Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Speaker 3: Hey, good to see you, brother.
Speaker 4: What's going on?
Speaker 1: Good, man. It's been a wild year for me.
Speaker 2: I bet it has been.
Speaker 1: Since I was last here, I mean, I've seen my
Speaker 1: YouTube growth in numbers I couldn't have imagined before. I've
Speaker 1: met so many cool people. I've managed to get to
Speaker 1: a point where it's now my job to research and
Speaker 1: investigate ancient history and the vast mysteries of our past.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean, that's something I was doing for
Speaker 1: free before. So the fact that I'm now able to
Speaker 1: do that full time is just an immense privilege. And
Speaker 1: I'm so grateful to everyone that's helped me get there,
Speaker 1: including you.
Speaker 2: Well, you're putting out fantastic content.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: And it's such an interesting subject. And the giant blind
Speaker 2: spot that the mainstream archaeologists have left has allowed all
Speaker 2: these people to go through and get a much larger
Speaker 2: audience even than them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's, it's really important when someone like you does
Speaker 2: it because you're so thorough and you're so objective and
Speaker 2: you're so, you're so measured in the way you describe
Speaker 2: these things and talk about these things. There's no fantastic claims,
Speaker 2: no hyperbole. It's all very well laid out. And even
Speaker 2: when you go to like extreme possibilities of these things,
Speaker 2: it's very measured. So I really appreciate that.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you. I appreciate you saying that.
Speaker 2: And, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm always trying to make it as good
Speaker 1: as I possibly can. And I try and listen to
Speaker 1: what people say and try and improve. And I don't
Speaker 1: think I've reached like the peak of where I could
Speaker 1: possibly be, but you know, I'm trying my hardest, but
Speaker 1: it's not just that. I mean, as you say, I
Speaker 1: think there are so many people out there and now
Speaker 1: that I'm in this position, I've seen it firsthand. There
Speaker 1: are like millions and millions of people around the world
Speaker 1: that are deeply fascinated by these questions, by the vast
Speaker 1: mysteries of our past.
Speaker 2: So As well they should be. And they also know
Speaker 2: that we're getting a very narrow version of it from
Speaker 2: mainstream academics. And they're so determined to cling to their
Speaker 2: timelines and cling to this notion that anything new that's
Speaker 2: discovered by people outside of their little circle can't be accurate.
Speaker 2: And I think that's so silly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think someone like me has the kind
Speaker 1: of advantage of the fact that because I, you know,
Speaker 1: didn't continue my career in academia or I wasn't in academia,
Speaker 1: but that was the pathway that I was on. Because
Speaker 1: I've gone independent now, I kind of have the freedom,
Speaker 1: if you like, to talk about these ideas in a
Speaker 1: much more open way than maybe I would have been
Speaker 1: able to if I was, well, wouldn't have been able
Speaker 1: to if I was still in academia, because, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not restricted by funding or I'm not restricted by,
Speaker 1: Even the pressures of, you know, people working in academia
Speaker 1: hating on me. I mean, I get a lot of
Speaker 1: hate anyway. But I mean, I think I have that
Speaker 1: freedom to almost come at things from a completely open
Speaker 1: minded perspective and speak about these ideas without any restrictions.
Speaker 1: And I think that is the advantage that I have
Speaker 1: that academics perhaps don't. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm in a great place.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So let's get into it.
Speaker 2: So in the last year, a lot of wild stuff
Speaker 2: has been discovered, which is really exciting.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's so interesting how quick this stuff is moving.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's wild.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's been, I think, two papers in particular
Speaker 1: that have come out in the year since I was
Speaker 1: last here on the show that I think have huge
Speaker 1: ramifications for how we view history. So, I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know where to start. I mean, I think we
Speaker 1: should start like this. I think As things currently stand,
Speaker 1: there are three huge questions that archaeology cannot answer. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting because these three questions we used to think
Speaker 1: we had an answer to, but in light of new discoveries,
Speaker 1: in light of new evidence coming up, we no longer
Speaker 1: have the answer to these questions. And I think that's
Speaker 1: fascinating because it's almost like the rug has been pulled
Speaker 1: out from underneath our understanding of human history, but on
Speaker 1: the surface, it's kind of like business as usual. Do
Speaker 1: you know what I mean?
Speaker 5: So what are these questions?
Speaker 1: So, I mean, and this is just coming from me, right?
Speaker 1: So the caveat on the whole conversation, I'm not an academic,
Speaker 1: I'm not a professional archaeologist. I'm just, I mean, I
Speaker 1: have a degree in ancient history, but I think my
Speaker 1: main qualification is that I'm a super nerd for all
Speaker 1: this stuff. And I spent my whole life researching it.
Speaker 1: So that's the caveat on everything. So don't take what
Speaker 1: I say as gospel. And I always encourage people to
Speaker 1: go and look at the actual archaeology, go and read
Speaker 1: the journals, read the papers and go investigate what yourself,
Speaker 1: for yourself, like listen to what I say, but, don't
Speaker 1: take what I say as gospel because at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, I'm just a YouTuber, you know? So
Speaker 1: that's the caveat I want to put on it. But
Speaker 1: from my mind, these are the three questions that I
Speaker 1: think archaeology can no longer answer, but used to think
Speaker 1: it had an answer for. So the first question is,
Speaker 1: and we spoke about this a little bit last time,
Speaker 1: is the fascinating question of why after hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of human
Speaker 1: beings like us being on this planet, Why did it
Speaker 1: take so long for civilization to emerge? And then why,
Speaker 1: when it did, did it emerge in all these different
Speaker 1: unconnected locations all over the globe at pretty much the
Speaker 1: exact same time? So we see civilization flourishing in Mesoamerica.
Speaker 1: We see civilization flourishing in South America, in Egypt, in
Speaker 1: the Indus Valley, in Mesopotamia, in ancient India, in ancient China,
Speaker 1: all around about the same time, give or take a
Speaker 1: thousand or so years. But compared to the time span
Speaker 1: of human beings on this planet, you know, 300,000 years
Speaker 1: plus for modern humans. And I would argue some of
Speaker 1: these papers are showing that it could be a lot
Speaker 1: longer than that. Why after so long did civilization suddenly
Speaker 1: crop up all over the place? And we no longer
Speaker 1: can answer that question in light of new discoveries. So
Speaker 1: that's question one. Why does civilization emerge everywhere all at
Speaker 1: once after so long of not doing so? Question two
Speaker 1: is how old is human intelligence? how long have humans
Speaker 1: been intelligent? How long has a mind like ours really
Speaker 1: inhabited this planet? And I think two papers in particular
Speaker 1: that have come out in the 12 months since I
Speaker 1: was here have huge ramifications for that question. And also
Speaker 1: combining to that is the question of other human species.
Speaker 1: How intelligent were other human species? Because we used to
Speaker 1: think that we were the smart ones. I mean, our name,
Speaker 1: Homo sapiens, literally translates to wise man, which is a
Speaker 1: incredibly humble thing for us to say about ourselves. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's question two, how old is human intelligence? And again,
Speaker 1: I think the answer is, we don't have the answer anymore.
Speaker 1: So that's really fascinating. And then question three is, when
Speaker 1: did humans first reach the more isolated landmasses? So that's
Speaker 1: the Americas where we are right now. And also Australia,
Speaker 1: which is perhaps less important, but still interesting. And again,
Speaker 1: we don't have the answer for that anymore. And I
Speaker 1: think whatever the answer is to these three questions, why
Speaker 1: does civilization appear everywhere all at once? How old is
Speaker 1: human intelligence? And when did humans first reach the more
Speaker 1: isolated parts of the world? The answer to those questions,
Speaker 1: whatever it is, I think is fundamentally important because whatever
Speaker 1: the answer is, is the reason we're all here, right?
Speaker 1: It's the reason we all live in this civilization. It's
Speaker 1: the reason we all enjoy the fruits of everything that
Speaker 1: we exist in today. And yet we don't know the
Speaker 1: answer anymore. But As I said, on the surface, everyone's
Speaker 1: kind of carrying on like it's business as usual, but
Speaker 1: we no longer know the answer to the most fundamental
Speaker 1: questions of how we got here.
Speaker 2: So, yeah. So for question number one, why did all
Speaker 2: of these civilizations emerge roughly the same time?
Speaker 5: What do you think?
Speaker 2: Do you think that this is incorrect? And that these
Speaker 2: civilizations probably existed far earlier than that, but there's no
Speaker 2: evidence of them because of time and just erosion and
Speaker 2: natural catastrophes and fill in the blank, all the factors.
Speaker 2: And or we have not discovered some of these yet,
Speaker 2: like some of the weirdness of the Amazon, you know,
Speaker 2: as they find these things. what would appear to be
Speaker 2: the grids of ancient cities that are hidden in the
Speaker 2: jungle that they're discovering with LIDAR and these other technologies
Speaker 2: that were unavailable until fairly recently. So we know that
Speaker 2: not only was the Amazon filled with people, but it
Speaker 2: was filled with millions of people. And that's crazy. That
Speaker 2: is a crazy shift in the way we used to
Speaker 2: look at the Amazon just a few decades ago. And,
Speaker 2: We don't know who these people were. We don't know.
Speaker 2: Like if you go really far back, like the Olmecs
Speaker 2: is just a word. We gave them that word. We
Speaker 2: don't know what the fuck they were doing. We have
Speaker 2: no idea what they looked like. We know some of
Speaker 2: the heads look roughly either Polynesian or perhaps even African.
Speaker 2: It's very strange. Very strange. Big giant heads that are
Speaker 2: left behind and that's like the cornerstone of what we
Speaker 2: understand about the civilization. Okay. What?
Speaker 5: How long?
Speaker 2: 6,000 years we think? Who knows? Who knows? It's just
Speaker 2: a rough guess. Like there's really nothing to go on.
Speaker 2: Do you think that this is just like as far
Speaker 2: back as we can find stuff? Or do you think–
Speaker 2: what do you think?
Speaker 1: Well, I think in terms of the civilization question, I
Speaker 1: think it's just– I think it's an old idea that
Speaker 1: we kind of drew this line. And the line is
Speaker 1: the invention of writing, right? So it's around 3000, 4000 B.C.
Speaker 1: was the invention of writing or supposedly was the invention
Speaker 1: of writing. And that in the 20th century was kind
Speaker 1: of given as the marker of civilization. We were finding
Speaker 1: all these civilizations in the 20th century. like ancient Sumer.
Speaker 1: And so that was kind of given as the start
Speaker 1: of civilization. But I think in terms of like more
Speaker 1: recent stuff, so 3000 BC back to like 12,000 BC,
Speaker 1: I think the answer is that clearly civilization is older.
Speaker 1: I mean, considering we see things like Tashtapella, Gobekli Tepe, 12,000
Speaker 1: years ago. I think that is a civilization. I think
Speaker 1: over time that will come to be accepted as a civilization.
Speaker 1: And I think whatever you want to define civilization as,
Speaker 1: I think we can now clearly say that it did
Speaker 1: exist 12,000 years ago rather than 6,000 years ago. So
Speaker 1: that's a kind of doubling of the timeline. In terms
Speaker 1: of going back much further than that, I think then
Speaker 1: you get into kind of like purely hypothetical scenarios, like
Speaker 1: is it possible? And that's when I think things like
Speaker 1: the history of human intelligence start to come into play
Speaker 1: because It was incredibly recently that we thought humans were
Speaker 1: only got intelligent. We thought humans were young, like only 100,000
Speaker 1: years old, only a few decades ago. And now we
Speaker 1: know we're much older than that. And so this is
Speaker 1: how what I mean about everything kind of being back
Speaker 1: on the table again, because we now have a incredibly
Speaker 1: increased time span of human intelligence that I would argue,
Speaker 1: and I'll come to this later, stretches over a million years.
Speaker 1: And yet the old idea, which is still sort of
Speaker 1: in place, but I think is breaking, I think, Most
Speaker 1: archaeologists would accept that it's breaking, but the old idea
Speaker 1: was that humans only became intelligent around 50,000 years ago.
Speaker 1: And so because that idea kind of was in hold,
Speaker 1: it almost made sense, right? So humans only existed from 100,000
Speaker 1: years ago, then got smart 50,000 years ago. Then the
Speaker 1: climate got good around.
Speaker 2: 14,000 years ago.
Speaker 1: We see the agricultural revolution and the emergence of the
Speaker 1: first civilizations. Like it was very neat, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean? But now in light of new evidence and
Speaker 1: in light of new discoveries, suddenly everything's back on the table.
Speaker 1: Suddenly the whole time span of prehistory, or not the
Speaker 1: whole of prehistory, but I would argue, and I'll get
Speaker 1: onto why I think this later, I would argue that
Speaker 1: the time span of human intelligence has increased by 20
Speaker 1: times from 50,000 to over a million years. And I'll
Speaker 1: explain why in a minute, but I think that puts
Speaker 1: everything back on the table. I think that the possibilities
Speaker 1: of prehistory are so vast now because our understanding has
Speaker 1: shifted so dramatically in the last few decades. And I
Speaker 1: don't think anyone's really talking about it. And that's kind
Speaker 1: of why I do what I do because I really
Speaker 1: want to bang this drum. If you like the, everything's
Speaker 1: back on the table, as I say. And so, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I kind of got a bit sidetracked
Speaker 1: there from the original question.
Speaker 2: Well, that's a, no, you, it's a great start. Um,
Speaker 2: Jesse Michaels was here yesterday and he had a really
Speaker 2: fascinating theory. I don't know if it's, is that his
Speaker 2: theory or is it someone else's theory? The, the ergot theory,
Speaker 2: his theory was that, um, He believes that agriculture and
Speaker 2: that as they started agriculture wasn't just significant in that
Speaker 2: you could like stay in one place and you would
Speaker 2: have food and you always had a reliable diet. You
Speaker 2: didn't have to worry about starving to death. And then
Speaker 2: you– because you had that sort of relaxation that came
Speaker 2: with that, you could start inventing things and building things
Speaker 2: and civilization would advance. He thinks it's also because ergot
Speaker 2: grows more. on these different wheats and barleys and grains,
Speaker 2: and that these people, whether knowingly or unknowingly, were probably
Speaker 2: ingesting this psychedelic substance, which is akin to LSD, and
Speaker 2: that this was a key part of what Brian Murarrescu
Speaker 2: talked about in the Eleusinian Mysteries, in his great book,
Speaker 2: The Immortality Key, and that this was probably what led
Speaker 2: to a lot of invention, a lot of innovation, a
Speaker 2: lot of alternative thought. A lot of creativity and a
Speaker 2: lot of like whatever the wild advancements of the time were.
Speaker 1: Did you see that they just– not proved it but
Speaker 1: they just did a study on the Eleusinian mysteries where
Speaker 1: they kind of showed that they were doing– they did
Speaker 1: have ergot. Because when Brian wrote that book, they hadn't
Speaker 1: proved that but something just came out.
Speaker 2: Did you see the– it was a puma bone pipe
Speaker 2: that they found that tested positive for DMT?
Speaker 1: Where in– I do not know.
Speaker 2: I think it was– I don't– it might have been
Speaker 2: in the– no. Where was that? Peru.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 2: Really? Yes.
Speaker 5: How old is that, Jamie?
Speaker 2: See if you can put that in a perplexity if
Speaker 2: it knows what this is all about because it's a
Speaker 2: fascinating subject. Because not only does it imply that they
Speaker 2: were willingly taking psychedelic drugs, it's somehow or another they
Speaker 2: knew how to make DMT. Like, OK, what? What? Because
Speaker 2: that's a complicated process when you have to separate the
Speaker 2: molecule from whatever plant it's in. And then you have
Speaker 2: to figure out that you need to freebase it or
Speaker 2: smoke it. Like, what?
Speaker 6: This is actually in northwestern Argentina.
Speaker 2: Aha.
Speaker 6: So it's still the Andes.
Speaker 2: The Inca Cueva, a high-altitude cave site in Jujuy, northwestern Argentina.
Speaker 2: The tubular smoking pipes were made from the long bones
Speaker 2: of a puma. They were found alongside anadenanthra seeds, including
Speaker 2: the plant commonly associated with Vilca Sibyl snuff traditions. Residue
Speaker 2: testing detected tryptamine alkaloids in the pipes. So they were
Speaker 2: figuring out how to take these seeds and smoke them.
Speaker 2: The material has been dated to roughly 2130 BCE, over 4,000
Speaker 2: years ago. That makes the find amongst the oldest direct
Speaker 2: archaeological evidence for intentional use of psychoactive anadenanthera. Sorry, scientists
Speaker 2: in the southern Andes. That's fucking crazy. The careful answer
Speaker 2: is DMT was detected in pipe residues. But anadanthera colubrina
Speaker 2: is not simply a DMT plant. Its psychoactive chemistry can
Speaker 2: include bufetinin DMT and 5-MeO DMT in varying quantities. Depending
Speaker 2: on plant material and preparation, the archaeological interpretation is that
Speaker 2: the pipes were used in a ritual context involving– one
Speaker 2: more time– anadanthera. rather than proof that people were using
Speaker 2: modern purified DMT. Either way, they're smoking whatever the fuck
Speaker 2: that stuff is. They're getting DMT from it. So they
Speaker 2: had figured out somehow or another that ingesting it through
Speaker 2: smoke– now, one of the reasons why this is particularly
Speaker 2: significant is there are scholars out of– I think it's
Speaker 2: the University of Jerusalem that believe that the burning bush
Speaker 2: that Moses encountered– Some kind of psychedelic. That's exactly what
Speaker 2: they think. They think the translation was, they believe it
Speaker 2: was possibly the acacia tree, which is apparently rich in DMT.
Speaker 2: So that Moses has Moses trips balls and gets some
Speaker 2: really good solid rules to live by and comes back
Speaker 2: with them and said, hey, this is what God said. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's clearly the case that ancient cultures,
Speaker 1: not just in South America, but across the world, were
Speaker 1: using psychedelic substances. And yeah, that's interesting. I mean, the
Speaker 1: theory of whether that caused agriculture, whether that led to
Speaker 1: civilization or anything like that, I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 1: But it's certainly interesting that human beings seem to have
Speaker 1: been experimenting with psychoactive substances for a long, long, long, long,
Speaker 1: long time. And yeah, that's fascinating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and much like in our culture today, and, you know,
Speaker 2: especially what happened in 1970, where all that stuff was
Speaker 2: demonized and put on schedule one. Back then during the
Speaker 2: Eleusinian Mysteries, the reason why those mysteries stopped is because
Speaker 2: the powers that be were like, hey, these guys are
Speaker 2: a fucking problem. These trippy dudes with their weird ideas
Speaker 2: who invented democracy, they're going to fuck this whole thing up.
Speaker 2: We're not going to be able to run it and
Speaker 2: tell everybody what to do and force them into going
Speaker 2: to war.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know. The powers that be always want to
Speaker 1: restrict any kind of like thought that's outside of the–
Speaker 1: What they want people to think. They don't want people
Speaker 1: to think as freely as they can.
Speaker 2: Well, anything that limits their control. Yeah. You know, because
Speaker 2: everybody wants control. And there's always new groups that say,
Speaker 2: you don't know what the fuck you're doing. Let me
Speaker 2: take the realm. And that's always been the case. Which
Speaker 2: is probably good for people. It probably is what leads
Speaker 2: to– I mean not the war part of it but
Speaker 2: probably these new ideas is what leads to an advancement
Speaker 2: of civilization rather than stagnation that we find in some
Speaker 2: places in the world where they haven't had a chance
Speaker 2: to do that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And that's how they've always done it. And they live
Speaker 2: this weird nomadic lifestyle in the mountains and it's not
Speaker 2: much different than the way it was thousands and thousands
Speaker 2: of years ago. Very clan-like. Yeah. And if you don't
Speaker 2: have– if that guy and these groups just stay in
Speaker 2: control forever, like it's like there's no motivation for them
Speaker 2: to change and evolve and grow.
Speaker 1: There's no innovation.
Speaker 2: Or anything like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Nothing's happening. Also, they're stuck in the mountains. So it's
Speaker 2: like you're just trying to live. But when we think
Speaker 2: of these places, these very fertile places on earth where
Speaker 2: like particularly Turkey, Turkey is fascinating. And many people are
Speaker 2: now speculating that that– if there is a singular place,
Speaker 2: but that might have been one of the birthplaces of
Speaker 2: true civilization.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think it undoubtedly is. I think Taştapela,
Speaker 1: which is in modern day Turkey, is the earliest evidence,
Speaker 1: in my view, of something akin to civilization. And now
Speaker 1: archaeologists will say it's not civilization because it doesn't quite
Speaker 1: tick off every part of the checklist. But I think
Speaker 1: that's neither here nor there. I think it's clearly a
Speaker 1: very sophisticated culture. I mean, you have like 14 sites
Speaker 1: there that are now clearly shown to be interlinked, shared symbolism,
Speaker 1: shared religious traditions, same architectural styles. Very impressive architecture, clearly
Speaker 1: organized labor, stratified society, because how do you achieve that
Speaker 1: without someone at the top and someone below? And these
Speaker 1: are all things that we used to think were civilization, right?
Speaker 1: And yet people aren't happy with us calling Tashdapella a civilization,
Speaker 1: but I think it will get there.
Speaker 2: But don't you think that's just because of them trying
Speaker 2: to protect their timeline that they've been teaching?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it will change. I think it
Speaker 1: will change.
Speaker 2: I don't think there's any other explanation other than that.
Speaker 2: I mean, it fits, as you said, all the criteria
Speaker 2: for a civilization that we used to apply. And the
Speaker 2: fact that they were moving the goalposts just because they
Speaker 2: didn't know it existed.
Speaker 1: And they're finding residential buildings at Gobekli Tepe now. And
Speaker 1: that was always one that used to say, look, people
Speaker 1: didn't live there. They must have migrated there. But now
Speaker 1: they're finding that people did live there, like, I guess,
Speaker 1: permanently or at least semi-permanently. Yeah, there's all the sites
Speaker 1: and quite a vast area all connected and So the
Speaker 1: only ones they haven't got now is writing. And there's
Speaker 1: an interesting discovery regarding writing at Gobekli Tepe and agriculture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we talked about that yesterday.
Speaker 1: The Irving Finkel thing.
Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah, really interesting. So are those, where you see
Speaker 2: those pillars, are those sites where you have like those
Speaker 2: concentric circles?
Speaker 1: I assume so. Those are the famous ones anyway. Callahan Tepe,
Speaker 1: Gobekli Tepe, Seyfer Tepe. Those are the biggest ones.
Speaker 2: And only 5% of Gobekli Tepe currently has even been excavated, right?
Speaker 2: Which is pretty crazy when you think like, well, okay,
Speaker 2: how many of them are also still underground? Like how
Speaker 2: many do we know only exists because of ground penetrating
Speaker 2: radar and all the other techniques? Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's wild. Like Gobekli Tepe, if all of
Speaker 1: it was excavated as something like 50 times larger than
Speaker 1: Stonehenge and Stonehenge is obviously an incredibly famous site and
Speaker 1: yet it's so much bigger and To be clear, it
Speaker 1: is standard archaeological practice to not excavate too much of
Speaker 1: a site.
Speaker 2: What are we looking at here?
Speaker 1: That's Gobekli Tepe.
Speaker 2: And what are we looking at in terms of these grids?
Speaker 1: I think maybe that's the kind of archaeological pit.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: I'm not 100% sure.
Speaker 2: It seems like it, right? Because it seems like the
Speaker 2: grids go on top of these circles, which doesn't make
Speaker 2: any sense.
Speaker 5: So, obviously, they have to go very slowly. The risk of.
Speaker 2: Destroying some incredible find some beautiful ancient thing because you're
Speaker 2: using tractors or something like that.
Speaker 1: Is too valid it is valid but i would argue
Speaker 1: and i've said this before is that gobekli tepe is
Speaker 1: a site that has such important ramifications for our understanding
Speaker 1: of civilization and the origins of civilization that it should
Speaker 1: receive special treatment right because it is the oldest site
Speaker 1: that looks like civilization so i always think that maybe
Speaker 1: we should not, obviously you want to be careful when
Speaker 1: you go in and you want to follow correct archaeological procedure,
Speaker 1: but at the same time, what if a relic, like
Speaker 1: equivalent to the Rosetta Stone, the one stone that we
Speaker 1: found that completely translated Egyptian hieroglyphs and opened up ancient
Speaker 1: Egypt to our understanding, what if some kind of equivalent
Speaker 1: artifact is hiding in the unexcavated 95% of Gobekli Tepe?
Speaker 1: That could be waiting for us to find.
Speaker 6: Have we talked about this boar before, Joe?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't remember ever seeing it, but It's not new,
Speaker 3: but it was also found at Gobekli Tepe.
Speaker 6: It was painted. I think some of the mouth was
Speaker 6: painted red.
Speaker 2: It's crazy looking.
Speaker 6: It's pretty close to life-size.
Speaker 2: The whole thing is really fascinating because it's also, I
Speaker 2: think it's the first evidence of 3D carving in stone too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, raised relief I think is called. Or not a statue.
Speaker 2: What we're saying about that is like these boars and
Speaker 2: snakes and all these different animals that are on these
Speaker 2: incredible pillars, they're not carved into it. The stone is
Speaker 2: carved around it, which is advanced. It takes sophisticated use
Speaker 2: of tools. And an understanding of how to work stone
Speaker 2: to be able to do something like that.
Speaker 1: And crucially, specialization, right? That's someone's job. They're not out
Speaker 1: there gathering food. That's their job. That's how they spend
Speaker 1: their time.
Speaker 2: And it's also, hey, how did you move those? Those
Speaker 2: stones are huge. The biggest ones are like how many?
Speaker 2: I think most of them are like 10 tons.
Speaker 1: But I think they found one that hadn't been moved
Speaker 1: by the quarry that was something like 50 tons. And obviously,
Speaker 1: they would have... assumed that they would have had a
Speaker 1: method to move that or else they wouldn't have carved
Speaker 1: it out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, 50 tons is high and stubby little peckers.
Speaker 6: It says clutching.
Speaker 2: Clutching their peckers. Yeah. Okay. Whatever you're into, bro. Must
Speaker 2: have been a weird world back then. And then the
Speaker 2: real question is, is this the oldest civilization or is
Speaker 2: this the oldest reboot of civilization that was destroyed by
Speaker 2: the Great Flood? And by the younger Jairus impact and
Speaker 2: whatever the fuck could have happened to whatever civilization previously existed.
Speaker 2: That's when things get real squirrely. Yeah, well, exactly.
Speaker 1: Because if that is a civilization, which I think it's
Speaker 1: becoming clear that it is, then it doesn't really matter
Speaker 1: how you define civilization. It's clearly incredibly sophisticated. Like, it's
Speaker 1: a very sophisticated culture.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that word is a problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Just, like, who cares? It's clearly a very sophisticated culture.
Speaker 2: It's like when Fauci was talking about gain of function. Like, hey, fucker.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know what we're talking about. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 3: But.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that means that, you know, the timeline of civilization,
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it, has doubled from 6,000
Speaker 1: years to 12,000 years. So then the question becomes, how
Speaker 1: much further back does it go? Because clearly, Tashtapella, Gobekli Tepe,
Speaker 1: it's not the first thing these people built. They weren't
Speaker 1: starting from scratch. They weren't just hunter-gatherers that thought, let's
Speaker 1: try something new and build this. There's clearly a long
Speaker 1: procedure up to that point. So how far back does
Speaker 1: that go?
Speaker 2: And for people that don't know, we should probably explain
Speaker 2: that One of the reasons why they're able to accurately
Speaker 2: carbon test Gobekli Tepe is because– and this is where
Speaker 2: it gets really weird. The dirt is uniform in that
Speaker 2: it was intentionally covered. So these sites weren't covered just
Speaker 2: over time like maybe the Sphinx was in Egypt. They
Speaker 2: were covered intentionally and they were covered 11,600-ish years ago.
Speaker 2: So how old were they before they were covered? Yeah,
Speaker 2: of course.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's only the earliest date we have, but
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean it's the date that they were constructed.
Speaker 5: And why were they covered?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, there is debate over that, but that's
Speaker 1: what Klaus Schmidt thought.
Speaker 2: What is the debate?
Speaker 1: Well, some people say it wasn't intentionally covered, and it
Speaker 1: was just kind of like a landslide.
Speaker 2: Like a crazy landslide that'll happen at once?
Speaker 1: Because, I mean, it's really hard to prove.
Speaker 2: What an amazing landslide that covers everything. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I would still lean towards the original interpretation from the
Speaker 1: original archaeologist, Klaus Schmidt.
Speaker 2: And why did he think they covered it? I don't know.
Speaker 2: Like a conquering civilization where like, fuck these people and
Speaker 2: their beautiful pillars.
Speaker 1: No, I think he thought the people that built it
Speaker 1: covered it.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess you can't tell, can you? And that's
Speaker 1: the thing with so much of this stuff is that
Speaker 1: no one knows. And especially the further back you get
Speaker 1: in time, anyone that talks with any confidence around the past,
Speaker 1: and this is one of my main bugbears with archaeology. Like,
Speaker 1: I love archaeology and I have a huge respect for
Speaker 1: archaeologists and I think they do amazing work, but one
Speaker 1: of my main bugbears is the confidence in which people
Speaker 1: talk about the past and ruling out other possibilities, because
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, none of us know
Speaker 1: what happened in the deep, deep past, especially when you
Speaker 1: start getting back to these crazy timescales. It's all speculation.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't matter if you're a YouTuber like me,
Speaker 1: or if you're a professor, we're all just speculating based
Speaker 1: on the very limited evidence that we have. And so
Speaker 1: I don't like it when people say definitive things. I
Speaker 1: always try and say, maybe this is the case, or
Speaker 1: maybe that's the case. We don't know. And I think
Speaker 1: everyone should approach history with that mindset. And that's kind
Speaker 1: of If I can get any message across to people,
Speaker 1: that is the message. Like, we don't know, and here's
Speaker 1: a possibility, and here's a possibility, and here's the evidence
Speaker 1: that we think is true, but, you know... it's really
Speaker 1: hard to.
Speaker 2: Tell but it also does stand to reason that biology
Speaker 2: and archaeology as they expand the timeline as biology has
Speaker 2: expanded the timeline archaeology should probably tag along.
Speaker 1: Well yeah that's what i mean about the fact that
Speaker 1: the rug's kind of been pulled out from underneath us
Speaker 1: yeah What on purpose means here? There's good reason to
Speaker 1: think humans intentionally deposited at least some of the fill.
Speaker 1: Enclosure D alone contained roughly 500 cubic meters of rubble
Speaker 1: and cultural debris and particular items including broken anthropomorphic sculpture
Speaker 1: heads appear to have been deliberately placed near pillars during refilling.
Speaker 1: But archaeologists do not have definitive evidence for the often
Speaker 1: repeated popular claim that its builders intentionally buried the entire
Speaker 1: site at once to hide it, preserve it, or mark
Speaker 1: a single ritual closure. The mound is man-made in the
Speaker 1: sense that it consists of accumulated archaeological deposits, but its
Speaker 1: formation involved both human actions and natural sediment movement, ending
Speaker 1: around 8,000 BCE.
Speaker 2: Yo. That's a long fucking time ago. I don't think
Speaker 2: people even really can wrap their head around how long
Speaker 2: we're talking. You know, especially, that's the other thing. One
Speaker 2: of the things that I loved about your whole video
Speaker 2: series was the one where you were talking about what
Speaker 2: would be left if there was a human civilization 100,000
Speaker 2: or more years ago. And that's not unreasonable if this
Speaker 2: biology assessment is correct, is that there have been humans
Speaker 2: far longer than we used to think. So that's the case.
Speaker 2: Because if we used to think it was 50,000 years,
Speaker 2: I think when I was in high school, they were
Speaker 2: saying the Homo sapiens were like 50,000 years old or
Speaker 2: maybe 100, right? And now the conventional estimate is like, what, three?
Speaker 1: So the oldest fossils we have of anatomically modern humans
Speaker 1: are 315 to 360,000 years old. I mean, it's the
Speaker 1: same fossil set from Jebel Aroud in Morocco and But
Speaker 1: this obviously is really hard to date accurately, but it's
Speaker 1: between 300 and 350,000.
Speaker 2: And then I think it's really important to note that
Speaker 2: the fossil record is incredibly incomplete because most people don't
Speaker 2: leave a fossil.
Speaker 1: It's so hard to like, it's so unlikely that you'd fossilize.
Speaker 1: It's something like one in a million.
Speaker 2: So it's such a crazy metric to like try to
Speaker 2: figure out what the past is from these tiny scraps.
Speaker 2: It's like trying to read a book. By a single
Speaker 2: shard of a piece of paper with a half a
Speaker 2: sentence in it. And you're like, what do you think
Speaker 2: this book was about? Like, fuck. Exactly. There's not much evidence.
Speaker 2: That's the problem. But the evidence that they do find
Speaker 2: is pushing the timeline way back, way back. And that alone,
Speaker 2: you would think archaeology would go, well, hey, guys, in
Speaker 2: light of this new evidence, maybe we should consider the
Speaker 2: possibility that civilization is quite a bit older than we think.
Speaker 2: They are the same exact animal. What would take them 300,000
Speaker 2: years to develop complex civilization and agriculture and all these
Speaker 2: different things? Like why would it take so long? And
Speaker 2: is it possible that given the– I mean the incredible
Speaker 2: possibilities in terms of like what kind of natural disasters
Speaker 2: took place, just asteroid impacts that we know, we find
Speaker 2: them all over the earth. All over the earth and
Speaker 2: some of them are 20,000 years old, 50,000 years old.
Speaker 2: We find them everywhere. What kind of an impact would
Speaker 2: that have had? What would be left of those civilizations?
Speaker 2: And all those questions, again, guys like you are the
Speaker 2: ones proposing them and putting them out there. And it's
Speaker 2: a really good question. It's– especially in light of what
Speaker 2: we understand about humans biologically. Like wouldn't– doesn't it make
Speaker 2: sense that these people, these just as– anatomically completely like us. Like,
Speaker 2: why would it take them hundreds of thousands of years
Speaker 2: to figure out a roof?
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. But I think we have clear evidence now
Speaker 1: that what we call modern intelligence, behavioral modernity, goes back so, so,
Speaker 1: so much further than we think. Like, I would argue
Speaker 1: back over a million years in light of a couple
Speaker 1: of papers that have come out. in the last 12 months.
Speaker 2: What are these papers?
Speaker 1: So, I mean, there's been two really significant papers, I think,
Speaker 1: since we last spoke. One of them, I think, has
Speaker 1: really big ramifications for human intelligence. And that's a paper
Speaker 1: that came out regarding the island of Sulawesi, which is
Speaker 1: in Indonesia. And this is in relation to human seafaring.
Speaker 1: So Seafaring was always thought to be an exclusively sapien strait,
Speaker 1: exclusively modern human strait, because it's a really hard thing
Speaker 1: to do, right? You need to be quite clever to
Speaker 1: build a boat, to build something that's sophisticated enough to
Speaker 1: be seaworthy, to get across ocean boundaries and to reach
Speaker 1: isolated landmasses. And we always thought that was only sapiens
Speaker 1: until very recently. But a paper came out in August
Speaker 1: last year. You actually sent it to me. You sent
Speaker 1: me a post that was about stone tools that was found.
Speaker 1: And I was like, that's interesting. I clicked on the paper.
Speaker 1: And then I was like, oh, wow, look where these
Speaker 1: stone tools were found. And it was really, really interesting
Speaker 1: because they were found on Sulawesi. And Sulawesi is an
Speaker 1: island that crucially sits east of something called the Wallace Line,
Speaker 1: which is a biogeographic boundary, which means that it has
Speaker 1: been an island and separated from the mainland for tens
Speaker 1: of millions of years and separated by deep ocean channels
Speaker 1: that are between, depending on the fluctuating sea levels at
Speaker 1: the time, between 50 and 100 kilometers across. So it's
Speaker 1: always been an island. And yet, in August 2025, archaeologists
Speaker 1: at a site called Callio found stone tools on Sulawesi.
Speaker 1: And that means that some type of human, probably not sapiens,
Speaker 1: but I guess you never know, some type of human
Speaker 1: managed to cross that ocean boundary and reach Sulawesi. And
Speaker 1: that's fascinating. But it's worth saying that it's not the
Speaker 1: only piece of evidence in the region. There's also a
Speaker 1: decade or so ago, we found stone tools on Flores,
Speaker 1: which is just below Sulawesi. It's another island and crucially, again,
Speaker 1: east of the Wallace line. So again, you have to
Speaker 1: cross an ocean boundary to get to Flores. And they
Speaker 1: found stone tools there that are 1.02 million years old.
Speaker 1: And I didn't even say the Sulawesi tools are 1.04
Speaker 1: to 1.4 million years old. So Over a million years ago,
Speaker 1: some type of human was crossing ocean boundaries to get
Speaker 1: to these islands. And there's also Luzon, which is just
Speaker 1: above Sulawesi, same region. And they found stone tools there,
Speaker 1: which are 700,000 years old. Now, the theory always was
Speaker 1: that this was an accident. When we just had Flores,
Speaker 1: the theory was that it was accidental drift. So a
Speaker 1: couple of humans were swept out to sea and somehow
Speaker 1: survived the the stormy ocean and the tropical sun cling
Speaker 1: to some driftwood and made it to Flores and somehow
Speaker 1: survived and colonized the island. But now that we've got Flores,
Speaker 1: Luzon and Sulawesi, three islands all in the same region,
Speaker 1: all separated by this ocean boundary, I think it's starting
Speaker 1: to point less towards accident and more towards behavior, right?
Speaker 1: More towards a deliberate sea crossing because to colonize, I
Speaker 1: was doing some research because of these discoveries and There's
Speaker 1: actually been a few papers from NASA on how many
Speaker 1: humans you need to colonize an isolated landmass because NASA
Speaker 1: were doing it for like, if you were going to
Speaker 1: Mars or something and you need a certain amount of
Speaker 1: humans of breeding age to not have like genetic problems
Speaker 1: in the population. So you need a certain amount of
Speaker 1: humans of a breeding age to ensure viability, right? Because
Speaker 1: otherwise you're going to inbreed and you're all going to
Speaker 1: die out because of genetic issues. And they said it
Speaker 1: was something like you need 160 people at least. And
Speaker 1: that is with strict breeding controls and genetic testing. We
Speaker 1: can probably assume they weren't doing genetic testing on themselves.
Speaker 1: And so then the number somewhere near 500. So what
Speaker 1: are the chances that 500 individuals were all swept out
Speaker 1: to sea at the same time, all survived the crossing
Speaker 1: and all landed on an island and colonized it? That's
Speaker 1: a huge amount of humans for an accident. Do you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? And then three times in three
Speaker 1: separate islands, all in the same region. At what point
Speaker 1: does accident start looking like behavior? Do you know what
Speaker 1: I mean? Because what are the chances of 500 individuals
Speaker 1: all being swept out to sea, all surviving, all reaching
Speaker 1: these islands and all colonizing in three separate occasions, all
Speaker 1: around about a million years ago?
Speaker 2: Not good.
Speaker 1: It's not a high chance, is it? And I think
Speaker 1: if we apply Occam's razor to it, which is the
Speaker 1: simplest explanation wins, I think the simplest explanation is that
Speaker 1: these humans were intelligent enough to build boats, right?
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And that is a controversial opinion. That's not accepted. It's
Speaker 1: accepted that the humans reached these islands. That's not controversial.
Speaker 1: Humans were on these islands a million years ago, 700K.
Speaker 2: It's just not accepted that it was intentional.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not accepted that they built boats.
Speaker 2: That seems silly. But I think it's– It doesn't make
Speaker 2: any sense if it's not. 500 of them make it
Speaker 2: over by floating and surviving?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: What?
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 2: All at the same time? Exactly.
Speaker 1: And this is what I mean about taking data points
Speaker 1: from different kind of science.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Because I'm looking into what NASA is saying about humans
Speaker 1: colonizing somewhere, and I'm saying, well, look, 500 people or
Speaker 1: more than 500 people of breeding age as well, not
Speaker 1: just people, all reaching an island on three separate occasions,
Speaker 1: all in the same region. Are we sure this wasn't deliberate?
Speaker 1: So I think that has huge ramifications for human intelligence
Speaker 1: because that was always thought to be exclusively Sapien's thing,
Speaker 1: building a boat, because that's really hard to build a boat.
Speaker 1: You have to have planning. You have to have foresight.
Speaker 1: You have to be good enough at carpentry to construct
Speaker 1: something that's seaworthy.
Speaker 2: You have to Trial and error.
Speaker 1: Yeah, trial and error. And you have to have the
Speaker 1: imagination as well to dream about what's on the other
Speaker 1: side of the horizon.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: And the bravery and the incredible reckless courage to go
Speaker 1: for it and to go out there across the horizon
Speaker 1: and reach an island.
Speaker 2: And possibly navigate through the stars. Like they knew how
Speaker 2: to do that. Maybe.
Speaker 1: Otherwise, why would you set out, you know?
Speaker 2: Right. And how would you repeat it? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Do you remember which way you went?
Speaker 5: Tower. It's a fucking dude with a giant brow ridge.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Furry face is telling you, I remember going this way. Like,
Speaker 2: are you fucking sure? How are you doing? Are you
Speaker 2: using the stars? Like, what are you doing?
Speaker 1: But humans weren't even meant to have complex language by then.
Speaker 1: They weren't meant to be capable of this.
Speaker 5: That's crazy.
Speaker 2: We're seeing these things. There has to be some sort
Speaker 2: of organization. If you're getting a group of people to
Speaker 2: agree to get in the boat. If they can't communicate
Speaker 2: with each other, that seems ridiculous. It seems even more ridiculous.
Speaker 2: Because let's say at the minimum of 50 kilometers, how
Speaker 2: long does it take you to row 50 kilometers? It
Speaker 2: seems like it would be days.
Speaker 1: It would be tough, wouldn't it? And an ocean as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right. If you even survive, how long is it
Speaker 2: going to take before you get across? I mean, maybe
Speaker 2: they figured out when the stormy season was and they
Speaker 2: time it for when it's not so stormy. But, I mean,
Speaker 2: how are they doing that? Do they have a calendar
Speaker 2: a million years ago?
Speaker 1: Whatever they were doing– If it was deliberate, which I
Speaker 1: think the evidence points towards, it's a clear sign of
Speaker 1: what we call modern intelligence.
Speaker 2: And organization and most likely communication.
Speaker 1: Which we always used to think only emerged 50,000 years ago.
Speaker 2: That's crazy.
Speaker 1: And so now, if it's over a million years old,
Speaker 1: you know, that's like a 20 times.
Speaker 1: And it could be 1.4. The Sulawesi tools are dated
Speaker 1: to 1.04 to 1.4. So that's, I don't know, what's that,
Speaker 1: like 25 times older than we think?
Speaker 2: That's so funny, that 0.4. That's a lot.
Speaker 5: It's huge.
Speaker 1: It's absolutely gigantic.
Speaker 5: Hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is what you were saying about, like,
Speaker 1: people can't get their heads around the sheer enormity of
Speaker 1: these timescales that we're talking about.
Speaker 2: Like, it's so long. Yeah. It's so long. Well, another
Speaker 2: weird one that's come up fairly recently that I know
Speaker 2: you've talked about is the copper mining in North America.
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2: That one blew me away. Just the volume of copper
Speaker 2: that was removed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they had a whole copper industry in North America 9,000
Speaker 1: years ago.
Speaker 2: Just listen to that again. Say that one more time.
Speaker 1: A whole copper industry in North America 9,000 years ago.
Speaker 1: And that's the same as the earliest day anywhere else
Speaker 1: in the world.
Speaker 5: And the volume.
Speaker 2: This is what's going to freak people out. Tell them
Speaker 2: how much copper was removed.
Speaker 1: I don't know off the top of my head, but
Speaker 1: it's a lot. And to be fair, there's lots of
Speaker 1: natural copper. I think it's in the kind of northern
Speaker 1: parts of the United States as it is now. I
Speaker 1: don't know how much they removed off the top of
Speaker 1: my head, but it is a lot of copper.
Speaker 2: Like a commercial copper mine volume.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why I said industry.
Speaker 2: Like it's big. It's so crazy. And I don't understand
Speaker 2: how they determined the amount of copper that was removed.
Speaker 5: But if that is correct.
Speaker 2: That seems to indicate that there was some sort of
Speaker 2: sophisticated metallurgy going on in North America 9,000 years ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is as early as anywhere else in the world.
Speaker 1: And that completely flies in the face of what we
Speaker 1: used to think about people in North America. And it's
Speaker 1: interesting because what the evidence appears to show is that
Speaker 1: they did this for a few thousand years, but then
Speaker 1: they dropped it and they stopped doing it. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't know what that suggests, but Either it suggests something
Speaker 1: happened to them or they decided they didn't want to
Speaker 1: do it anymore. But either way, it kind of goes
Speaker 1: against this idea that we've always kind of assumed that
Speaker 1: technology is like an escalator, right? We always assume that
Speaker 1: technology is an escalator.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1: 1.5 billion pounds of copper.
Speaker 5: What?
Speaker 2: So wrap your head around this, folks. Archaeology and date
Speaker 2: mining and copper tool use, but it generally cannot calculate
Speaker 2: annual or century-specific production 9,500 years ago. One older broad
Speaker 2: estimate puts a total archaic period extraction in the Lake
Speaker 2: Superior region at up to about 1.5 billion pounds of copper,
Speaker 2: roughly 680,000 metric tons. But that covers many millennia, not
Speaker 2: the century 9,500 years ago. So that means that they
Speaker 2: were doing it for thousands of years. They're saying it
Speaker 2: covers many millennia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were doing it for, yeah, as it says,
Speaker 1: the peak between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago.
Speaker 5: That's crazy. That's crazy.
Speaker 2: So at least 9,500 years ago, they started doing this
Speaker 2: somewhere around there. And they did it for thousands of years.
Speaker 2: They removed copper for thousands of years.
Speaker 6: A bunch of it was just sitting on the top.
Speaker 6: They called it float copper, I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Like that.
Speaker 2: That's probably how they first started finding it. And then
Speaker 2: they probably started digging. Isn't it interesting how like precious,
Speaker 2: what we call precious metals, just they exist in weird deposits.
Speaker 2: It's like erratic. It's all over the place. It's like,
Speaker 2: come find me.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And these people use this stuff for weapons. They use
Speaker 2: this stuff for jewelry. They used it for all kinds
Speaker 2: of things. Arrow points, I'm sure. They probably used it
Speaker 2: for all sorts of things. They had to use it
Speaker 2: for weapons, right?
Speaker 4: Probably, yeah.
Speaker 1: I think they found like spear points and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe that makes sense.
Speaker 1: But then they dropped it and then they just, they
Speaker 1: stopped doing it. And we don't know why they did that.
Speaker 1: But as I was saying, it kind of.
Speaker 2: There's the copperhead arrow.
Speaker 1: It goes against this idea that we have that technology
Speaker 1: is like an escalator and you just take one level
Speaker 1: of technology and you keep going up. It shows that
Speaker 1: people can invent something or discover something and then stop
Speaker 1: doing it and forget about it. And I think that
Speaker 1: has implications for how we look at prehistory as a
Speaker 1: whole because it suggests that people You know, rather than
Speaker 1: just going straight line this linear path upwards, we can
Speaker 1: go up and down and forget things and rediscover things.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: And that's what the– this is the alternative theory is
Speaker 2: that we're a reinvention of civilization currently and that we're
Speaker 2: the most advanced reinvention that we're aware of. But it
Speaker 2: doesn't mean that there hasn't been some sort of a
Speaker 2: civilization before us that perhaps reached heights where we are
Speaker 2: or greater in a completely different direction. And I think
Speaker 2: when you look at some of the stone structures that exist,
Speaker 2: those are the best evidence because they're so perplexing. The
Speaker 2: stones in Lebanon, what are they called? The Trilithon stones?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Baalbek.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Those are crazy. Like what happened there?
Speaker 1: How?
Speaker 2: What? How did you get them up there?
Speaker 1: It's weird because they're attributed to the Romans, right? But
Speaker 1: there's no Roman records of them doing that. And that's
Speaker 1: not particularly weird in itself until you realize that it's
Speaker 1: a bigger engineering project than anything the Romans did anywhere.
Speaker 1: I mean, the Colosseum is obviously an incredible thing, but
Speaker 1: the blocks aren't as big as these blocks at Baalbek.
Speaker 1: And yeah, they don't mention it anywhere. And you'd think that,
Speaker 1: you know, a civilization that documented as much the Romans
Speaker 1: would at least mention their biggest engineering project somewhere, you know?
Speaker 1: And I mean, that doesn't mean it wasn't the Romans,
Speaker 1: but it's just a weird thing.
Speaker 2: It's very weird. It's very weird. And it's also weird
Speaker 2: that like many places, The structures that are on top
Speaker 2: of it are not as sophisticated, not as difficult to do.
Speaker 2: That's how it is over and over and over again.
Speaker 2: That's Sacsayhuaman. That's a lot of these places. You see
Speaker 2: the base, the oldest stuff. It seems like they find
Speaker 2: stuff and they build on top of stuff that was
Speaker 2: already there. And then you're dealing with thousands and thousands
Speaker 2: of years of civilization where people don't even remember who
Speaker 2: built it. You know, like the gods. The gods put
Speaker 2: these rocks here.
Speaker 1: It happens all over the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: People build on old sites because often the sites are
Speaker 1: the best site in the region because that's why someone's
Speaker 1: built there originally. So it makes sense to reuse them.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that the latest civilization that used
Speaker 1: it was the first. I mean, it could be, but
Speaker 1: it also doesn't mean that they are definitively. But often
Speaker 1: that's how we take it. And, yeah, that's not necessarily
Speaker 1: the best way of looking at them, I think.
Speaker 2: I think what you said earlier is really important that–
Speaker 2: We can't possibly know. And to make these definitive statements
Speaker 2: about things where you just don't have enough evidence, you
Speaker 2: don't have enough facts, you can't really say definitively we know.
Speaker 2: And that drives experts crazy because they don't like to
Speaker 2: do that. They don't like to let that go, especially humans,
Speaker 2: especially men. They love the ego that comes with being
Speaker 2: the one who has the information, the expert opinion. That
Speaker 2: appeal to authority. That I'm the one who could tell you, oh.
Speaker 5: This is nonsense.
Speaker 2: These Michael Buttons on YouTube with their bullshit, their archaeological bullshit.
Speaker 2: They love doing that. But no one's listening to them.
Speaker 2: That's what's cute. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And, yeah, I mean, I'm grateful that a lot of
Speaker 1: people listen to me.
Speaker 2: Well, like I said, you're really good at it. And
Speaker 2: it is undeniably, just based on what we've said so far,
Speaker 2: this is undeniably strange. It's undeniably weird and it's undeniably,
Speaker 2: at least to me and you, interesting. And that's why
Speaker 2: the subject will– hopefully it will continue the pathway that
Speaker 2: it's on because there's so many people like you now
Speaker 2: that are looking at this stuff and they're very credible
Speaker 2: people who are very objective. The Ben Van Kirkwick. of
Speaker 2: the world and Jimmy Corsetti, all these people that are
Speaker 2: looking at stuff and go, hey, there's a lot going
Speaker 2: on here, people. There's a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's interesting that– like the more we uncover,
Speaker 1: the more we discover, the more new evidence that comes out.
Speaker 1: I think what we're starting to realize is that the
Speaker 1: limits on our own knowledge– vastly bigger than we ever
Speaker 1: used to think. We used to think we kind of
Speaker 1: had it figured out, and this is what I'm talking
Speaker 1: about with those three questions I mentioned at the start.
Speaker 1: We used to think we had the answer to these
Speaker 1: big questions, but with each new discovery, we're starting to
Speaker 1: realize just how vast the unknown is. I think there's
Speaker 1: two subjects where this kind of applies. I think the
Speaker 1: first is physics, and obviously I'm not smart enough or
Speaker 1: clever enough to talk about physics in any meaningful capacity,
Speaker 1: but I think it's fair to say that the more
Speaker 1: we learn about the nature of reality and the universe,
Speaker 1: the more we realize just how big it is and
Speaker 1: how crazy it is and how little we understand about
Speaker 1: our place in it. And I think the other subject
Speaker 1: is history. I think the more we learn about history,
Speaker 1: the more we realize how huge the amount of time
Speaker 1: humans have been on this planet is, how long a
Speaker 1: mind like ours has been on this planet, how long
Speaker 1: humans that are very similar to us have been on
Speaker 1: this planet is. And I think it's a vital thing
Speaker 1: because it's, physics is kind of the question of where
Speaker 1: are we, but History is kind of the question of
Speaker 1: who are we and where did we come from? And
Speaker 1: that's why I'm so interested in it because it's a
Speaker 1: fundamental question to civilization and to who we are. And
Speaker 1: I think it's really important. And so that's why I
Speaker 1: talk about this stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And also it's cool.
Speaker 1: It's very cool. It's so fascinating.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: And I know you love it too.
Speaker 2: And it's great. Well, it's so weird. It's so weird
Speaker 2: to think like what was it like thousands and thousands
Speaker 2: of years ago? What did they know? Where did they
Speaker 2: learn it? And are these stories, these flood myths that
Speaker 2: exist in all these ancient cultures, is this an echo
Speaker 2: of a historical record of people trying to keep track
Speaker 2: of this event that took place that crushed us and
Speaker 2: brought us down to a few thousand people all over
Speaker 2: the world and we had to rebuild? And that's– also
Speaker 2: when you go back, thousands of years in the conventional timeline,
Speaker 2: people were so barbaric. They were so horrible just a
Speaker 2: few thousand years ago. If they were capable 5,000 years
Speaker 2: ago of building ancient Egypt, probably earlier than that. But
Speaker 2: why were they so brutal 2,000 years ago? Because I
Speaker 2: think those are the people that survived. I think the
Speaker 2: people that survived were probably fucking terrible.
Speaker 5: They had to be.
Speaker 2: We know that the Toba volcano, which was like is
Speaker 2: that Indonesia 70,000 years ago got us down to what
Speaker 2: just a few thousand people globally yeah imagine that life
Speaker 2: imagine what you had to do to stay alive imagine
Speaker 2: even the thought of raising children in a world where
Speaker 2: there's only 7,000 people left and limited amounts of food
Speaker 2: and you know most of the population of earth is
Speaker 2: dead what This is crazy.
Speaker 1: We've been through some crazy things as a species.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: You did it.
Speaker 2: Didn't you do a video of there's some evidence that
Speaker 2: at some point in history, most people were killed off
Speaker 2: in war?
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 1: That is related to what you were just saying about.
Speaker 1: So just after the agricultural revolution, the theory is that
Speaker 1: because humans then had like property. And we're kind of
Speaker 1: defending things that people got a lot more violent. And
Speaker 1: there's a lot of evidence that around 6,000 years ago,
Speaker 1: basically all the men died. There's like evidence that 95%
Speaker 1: of male bloodlines were removed. And we can see this
Speaker 1: from the Y chromosome in genetics. And there's a massive
Speaker 1: drop off of the diversity, the genetic diversity in male bloodlines.
Speaker 1: And something like 95% went. And no one quite knows
Speaker 1: why this is, but we see lots of mass graves
Speaker 1: around this time and violent graves and like all these
Speaker 1: people were killing each other. And it might not have
Speaker 1: been that, but it's weird that it only affected men
Speaker 1: because if it was a natural disaster, it would, you know,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be specific to either gender, but it's only men.
Speaker 1: So some people think it's like a big amount of
Speaker 1: violence and that no one really knows, but it's really interesting.
Speaker 2: Well, doesn't it make sense though? I mean think if
Speaker 2: you go from hunter and gathering where you're constantly moving,
Speaker 2: nomadic tribes, people– a bunch of people that stick together.
Speaker 2: You're in tents or whatever. And then all of a
Speaker 2: sudden you're stationary and you've developed agriculture and you stay put.
Speaker 2: And then there's hunter-gatherer tribes that still exist because guess what?
Speaker 2: They still exist today. So it's not like it was
Speaker 2: a uniform discovery of agriculture. Everybody adopted it and there
Speaker 2: was no more hunter-gatherer tribes and there's no more tribes
Speaker 2: of wandering marauders.
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2: So there's still these tribes of wandering marauders. And so
Speaker 2: now you have to defend this spot because you're stuck
Speaker 2: there because you're dumbass built a house. Like the Mongols
Speaker 2: used to make fun of people that lived in houses.
Speaker 2: They thought they were fools and they lived in felt tents, period.
Speaker 2: That's how you're supposed to live. You keep moving. And
Speaker 2: this idea of staying put, like, look at these idiots. Like,
Speaker 2: we're just going to go sack their city. Like, they
Speaker 2: really had no respect for people that were so stupid
Speaker 2: that they stuck themselves behind walls. Like, you assholes can't
Speaker 2: even run away. We're going to launch lit human beings
Speaker 2: on fire with catapults onto your thatched roofs and set
Speaker 2: everything ablaze. You know, it turns out people are really
Speaker 2: good at starting fires when you light them on fire
Speaker 2: because we're fatty. Mongols figured out a lot of cute stuff. But.
Speaker 2: You know, it makes sense that that's when war would
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Speaker 1: Yeah, once we settle down and once we owned.
Speaker 2: Just stay put. You've become a target. Exactly.
Speaker 1: And you have something to defend, be it livestock or
Speaker 1: crops or houses, as you say. And so, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: quite a lot of evidence that violence did increase massively
Speaker 1: as we entered the kind of agricultural age that we're
Speaker 1: still in. So that is interesting.
Speaker 2: It's very interesting and it also is logical. It's a
Speaker 2: logical progression of how people would behave given the fact
Speaker 2: that now all of a sudden they have resources that
Speaker 2: they've accumulated. They have a very specific location. They have
Speaker 2: to defend that location. That's when people figure out walls
Speaker 2: and that's a bigger– whatever. The weird thing is the
Speaker 2: Great Wall of China. Like the arrow turrets are facing
Speaker 2: the wrong way. Really?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of it. A lot of the Great Wall,
Speaker 2: the arrows– Are facing inward.
Speaker 1: To try to keep people in rather than out?
Speaker 2: Or try to keep people from China. Escaping. Going to wherever,
Speaker 2: whatever's on the other side. It might have been some
Speaker 2: sections of it weren't constructed by the people that we
Speaker 2: think were constructed it. You ever seen that?
Speaker 1: No, I've never seen that.
Speaker 2: It's very weird. Like people have pondered like why are
Speaker 2: the arrow? Because there's these slots where they can be
Speaker 2: protected but shoot arrows through. But they're facing towards China.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They're not like China defending the wall against the Huns.
Speaker 2: It's weird.
Speaker 1: That is strange. That is strange.
Speaker 2: See if you can find some of that.
Speaker 1: I'm looking it up.
Speaker 6: It's not a really great answer in this.
Speaker 2: So part of it is and part of it isn't.
Speaker 2: Mostly the Great Wall's defensive features face north outward towards
Speaker 2: the steppe, the usual direction of major raids and invasions,
Speaker 2: but many surviving sections have arrow slits and parapets facing
Speaker 2: both north and south, including seemingly inward towards China. Why
Speaker 2: face inward? Defense after a breach. If attackers crossed the
Speaker 2: wall or captured a tower, so they prepared to be invaded?
Speaker 2: Chinese garrisons needed to shoot and counterattack from the south
Speaker 2: side as well. Control of movement both ways. The wall
Speaker 2: was a network of forts, gates, signals, roads, not just
Speaker 2: a one-sided barrier. Also regulated border crossings, trade, and movement.
Speaker 2: It is crazy that they've invented a wall that you
Speaker 2: could see from space. I know, it's wild.
Speaker 1: It's like one of the biggest engineering projects ever.
Speaker 2: Like, how long is that? Is it like a thousand
Speaker 2: miles or something crazy?
Speaker 1: I have no idea, but it's big.
Speaker 2: How long is the Great Wall of China? Take a guess.
Speaker 2: I say a thousand miles. It's probably more. Easily.
Speaker 1: China's so big in itself and the fact that it's
Speaker 1: the whole, like.
Speaker 2: Yeah. What do you think, Jamie? Take a guess.
Speaker 3: 6,000 kilometers. 6,000?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: Jesus, Jamie.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: You would be really good on The Price is Right.
Speaker 6: Oh my god 21,000 kilometers.
Speaker 2: Holy shit oh my god oh my god 13,171 miles
Speaker 2: motherfucker that's crazy have you ever.
Speaker 5: Been there no.
Speaker 6: I've been there.
Speaker 1: It's crazy. It's amazing. It's so beautiful. The whole region
Speaker 1: around there, I mean, obviously it's really long.
Speaker 2: The famous continuous-looking Ming-era wall that most visitors picture is
Speaker 2: much shorter, still 8,850 kilometers. When associated structures and natural
Speaker 2: barriers are included, UNESCO describes the overall Great Wall complex
Speaker 2: as more than 20,000 kilometers long. So at the very least,
Speaker 2: the part that you visit The Ming era wall, 8,850 kilometers,
Speaker 2: which is fucking wild. That is so much wall. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like what were they doing? So it was built over 2,000
Speaker 2: years from early walls in the 5th to 3rd centuries
Speaker 2: BCE through major work in the Ming dynasty, which ended
Speaker 2: in 1644. Have you ever seen some of the stuff
Speaker 2: that Cassie Coppersmith– has uh talked about in regards to
Speaker 2: uh ancient technology evidence from china.
Speaker 1: Not specifically her stuff but there's lots of weird lots
Speaker 1: of weird things in ancient china.
Speaker 2: Yeah weird stuff like jade artifacts that seem to be
Speaker 2: machined that don't make any sense that are like super
Speaker 2: old and that seem to be artifacts that were passed
Speaker 2: down from generation to generation and the Thousands of years ago,
Speaker 2: the civilization that was in possession of them, their current
Speaker 2: ability to make artifacts was much cruder. So it seems
Speaker 2: like this was older stuff that they had somehow or
Speaker 2: another acquired.
Speaker 1: And they lost their knowledge of.
Speaker 2: … Like wafer-thin jade, highly polished, seemed to be machined,
Speaker 2: like weird stuff.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen that specifically, but yeah, that's interesting. I
Speaker 1: don't know about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems like a really clear pattern that exists everywhere,
Speaker 2: that there was something like these ancient vases that they
Speaker 2: find in Egypt, that they find these in these old sites,
Speaker 2: and that these things that were carved out of diorite,
Speaker 2: which is insanely hard stone, and carved to, you know,
Speaker 2: within less than a human hair of variance, not only that,
Speaker 2: If it was on a lathe, how do you account
Speaker 2: for the fact that it has these handles on the side?
Speaker 2: How the fuck did they do this? And this was
Speaker 2: all stuff that was like really, really old by the
Speaker 2: time these people had it. And that these people, their
Speaker 2: current state of pottery and sculpture is much cruder than
Speaker 2: this stuff. So it seems like these are like really
Speaker 2: old things that are artifacts of a time where things
Speaker 2: were more sophisticated. So it's more evidence of this …
Speaker 2: Up and.
Speaker 1: Down nature of technology.
Speaker 2: Up and down nature.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's logical, right, that people learn things, discover things,
Speaker 1: excel at them, and then later people forget them.
Speaker 2: Of course, especially when you take into consideration natural disasters.
Speaker 2: Natural disasters, wars, things along those lines. You know, like Baghdad,
Speaker 2: before the Mongols got there, was like the center of
Speaker 2: science in the world. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The Arabs, yeah, they were incredible at science. And then
Speaker 1: … It's just the natural cycle of civilizations. And we
Speaker 1: see that throughout recorded history. So why would it not
Speaker 1: be the case for human beings in the much, much, much, much,
Speaker 1: much larger period of time, which is prehistory? But it's
Speaker 1: not just thing is it's not just like natural disasters
Speaker 1: and things. And obviously that plays a part. But it's
Speaker 1: also just the sheer nature of preservation.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Such a long amount of time that we've been around
Speaker 1: human beings on this planet. It's just almost impossible for
Speaker 1: things to survive when we talk about these 100,000 years, 200,000 years.
Speaker 1: It's so hard for things to survive that long.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Any objects, any things that would be left over, like
Speaker 2: I'm sure you've seen those AI depictions of what New
Speaker 2: York City would look like in just 1,000 years. It's
Speaker 2: like nothing. Everything is crumbling, gone.
Speaker 1: It's mental.
Speaker 2: No buildings, no glass. Everything gets absorbed in the earth.
Speaker 2: You've got a jungle where Manhattan is. And maybe you
Speaker 2: would stumble upon a piece of metal one day. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But even then, like, I mean, I've done quite a
Speaker 1: lot of research on material degradation and almost all our
Speaker 1: modern materials other than stone are gone in a few millennia.
Speaker 1: And a few millennia is a long time, but not
Speaker 1: compared to these timescales that we're talking about.
Speaker 2: No, if these timescales are accurate in terms of the
Speaker 2: human brain, in terms of the ability to logically like
Speaker 2: view the world, invent things, creativity, if they possess this 300,000
Speaker 2: years ago Like, why wouldn't they have figured a lot
Speaker 2: of this stuff out?
Speaker 1: They definitely did. That's the thing. Like, the seafaring thing
Speaker 1: over 1 million years ago, okay, you can debate it.
Speaker 1: It could have been an accident, I suppose. I don't
Speaker 1: think it is, but you can debate it. But I
Speaker 1: think that we have completely undisputable evidence that human beings
Speaker 1: were this intelligent 500,000 years ago with the Colombo structure,
Speaker 1: which we spoke about a lot last time. But that
Speaker 1: is undeniable evidence that some kind of human was unbelievably smart. 476,000
Speaker 1: years ago?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was building houses.
Speaker 1: Or building something.
Speaker 2: Some sort of structure.
Speaker 1: Whatever that is requires incredible levels of intelligence. It is
Speaker 1: clear evidence of what we define as modern behavior.
Speaker 2: Right, and it probably wasn't a one-off.
Speaker 1: Definitely not.
Speaker 2: And so this is what you found. So then it means,
Speaker 2: were they teaching each other? So, okay. So if they
Speaker 2: were teaching each other, what kind of language did they have?
Speaker 2: What kind of concepts could they grasp?
Speaker 1: You're not doing that without abstract thinking without symbolic intelligence
Speaker 1: right and.
Speaker 2: How far did it go because if it's very rare
Speaker 2: that we find a piece of wood from that long
Speaker 2: ago that we can carbon date and that we can
Speaker 2: test so how much how much do we not find
Speaker 2: most of.
Speaker 1: It almost all of it because the chances of that
Speaker 1: surviving is so unbelievably unlikely.
Speaker 2: I'm a moron but uh i had a thought uh
Speaker 2: my thought was if AI can get so intelligent that
Speaker 2: it can do an accurate account of all of the
Speaker 2: objects on Earth, all of the people on Earth, all
Speaker 2: of the things on Earth, essentially every molecule that exists
Speaker 2: on Earth, and then extrapolate back to how they got
Speaker 2: in that position in the first place, whether through natural
Speaker 2: ore deposits, natural disasters, volcanoes, all these different things like
Speaker 2: I wonder what kind of a version of a timeline
Speaker 2: we would be able to construct with like a super
Speaker 2: advanced artificial intelligence. I wonder if it's possible to get
Speaker 2: a framework that is much more definitive than what we're
Speaker 2: looking at now. I don't know if it's possible. I mean,
Speaker 2: you'd have to have enough technology that you would be
Speaker 2: able to literally like scan the entire outer crust of
Speaker 2: the earth, which seems daunting today. But ground-penetrating radar seemed
Speaker 2: ridiculous 500 years ago, right? So as we continue to
Speaker 2: expand– I mean AI is solving math equations that have
Speaker 2: perplexed mathematicians for 50 years. They're solving it like that.
Speaker 2: So this is a new thing. It's a very rapidly
Speaker 2: emerging thing. I wonder what kind of a version, what
Speaker 2: kind of a map of history, at least in terms
Speaker 2: of like Rough timelines of things we'll be able to get.
Speaker 1: That's the great hope for archaeology, right? Is that modern
Speaker 1: technology allows us to discover things that we previously would
Speaker 1: not have been able to discover. And as you say,
Speaker 1: LIDAR is the current example of that. But if you
Speaker 1: just extrapolate forward, what else could we possibly use to
Speaker 1: discover things that we haven't?
Speaker 2: And of course, something like that will emerge. Because nobody
Speaker 2: even considered LIDAR. Again, 500 years ago, what are you
Speaker 2: talking about? 500 years from now, who the fuck knows?
Speaker 2: Who knows? We literally can't imagine what kind of breakthroughs
Speaker 2: are available.
Speaker 1: That's the hope. But again, I think part of what
Speaker 1: makes me think that perhaps we're not going to discover
Speaker 1: stuff is this preservation problem because so much of it
Speaker 1: is just gone. I mean, I guess if like what
Speaker 1: you say, if we can like somehow extrapolate.
Speaker 2: Or time machines.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2: They could figure out a time machine that'll throw the
Speaker 2: whole monkey wrench right into the gears.
Speaker 1: Well, I think that whatever happens our current understanding of
Speaker 1: history that's that cannot be the the kind of end
Speaker 1: point that what we currently think about history is is
Speaker 1: there's no way that we've like reached.
Speaker 2: No there's no way we're done and.
Speaker 1: That's why it frustrates me so much when people are
Speaker 1: so definitive about it because it's like you really think
Speaker 1: that we're not gonna because i mean that's the science
Speaker 1: is always advancing in every single field all the time
Speaker 1: are we We're never at the point where we've discovered everything.
Speaker 1: And yet there's always people in every period of history
Speaker 1: that think this is the kind of upper limit.
Speaker 2: What would be around from 300,000 years ago? Other than
Speaker 2: what we've found so far, stone tools, shit like that,
Speaker 2: like that'll would all be gone.
Speaker 1: Well, that's the thing. Everything would be gone unless it's
Speaker 1: like incredibly unlikely preservation, like the Colombo structure, like incredibly
Speaker 1: unlikely for it to happen. But I mean, there could
Speaker 1: be other things like that out there and there almost certainly.
Speaker 2: Is, but yeah. Most things will be gone. That's what's exciting.
Speaker 3: It's like, God, you don't want to dig up the
Speaker 3: whole world, but you kind of do. It's not that old,
Speaker 3: but this is a jade.
Speaker 6: Sword.
Speaker 3: Sorry, the handle's jade. The sword would have been probably metal.
Speaker 3: That's why the metal's all fucked up, but the handle's not.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 6: So anything with cool rocks or crystals or diamonds.
Speaker 2: Right, because the handle is kind of all that's left.
Speaker 2: The sword is... A rotten piece of shit.
Speaker 6: There's a few other old.
Speaker 2: Let's.
Speaker 4: See.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the ones, these disks are really weird.
Speaker 3: 3000 B.C. to 2000 B.C. But they have, I was
Speaker 3: just doing the research. Up until the Ming Dynasty, I
Speaker 3: think it was like 1660, they have a book someone
Speaker 3: wrote about how they were doing this.
Speaker 6: But that's in 1600. 1600.
Speaker 2: What did they do?
Speaker 6: I mean, various things.
Speaker 2: In 1600. Yeah. But some of these are 3,000 years
Speaker 2: older than that, which is weird.
Speaker 6: Jade artifacts.
Speaker 2: Wow. This is the cooler shit, though. Nephrite.
Speaker 6: Ooh.
Speaker 3: But the description on how they did this, I'm almost not...
Speaker 3: I have to take it as they say it, but
Speaker 3: the description on how they did it was like they
Speaker 3: would put abrasives on string and.
Speaker 6: slowly wear away the jade.
Speaker 2: How did they do these three-dimensional little carvings yeah it
Speaker 2: says like they would put they'd get this slurry of
Speaker 2: water and that kind of makes sense that one that
Speaker 2: you just showed.
Speaker 3: How old is that one i don't i don't even
Speaker 3: know what it is that's fucking weird it says how
Speaker 3: did ancient chinese carve what's the word that's the question
Speaker 3: i asked without metal tools this is the link i
Speaker 3: think what is that image.
Speaker 2: That's crazy, man. What's that from? Where's that from?
Speaker 6: Carving.
Speaker 2: What year is that? Oh, that's a modern master. Okay.
Speaker 2: That makes sense. That makes sense. Because I was like,
Speaker 2: how could you do that? That's like the flower petals
Speaker 2: and everything like that. That seems like you need metal tools. Oh,
Speaker 2: so this is just an article on the evolution of
Speaker 2: Chinese jade carving.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 5: So this is a modern.
Speaker 2: Okay. That's why it's confusing.
Speaker 6: That's older. That's older. A griffin. Obviously older. Some of
Speaker 6: these are drilled.
Speaker 3: Like these little holes, if you look and zoom in
Speaker 3: real close, you can see evidence of drills.
Speaker 2: But that's not, you know. You could have hand drills.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, you could have harder stone that you've
Speaker 2: figured out how to work into a position. You could
Speaker 2: have sand. And there's a bunch of things they could use.
Speaker 2: Pretty wild.
Speaker 6: Something like this. I mean, it's very crude.
Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean all that is like you could attribute
Speaker 2: that to ingenuity and craftsmen with years of learning how
Speaker 2: to work these different things. It's when you get to
Speaker 2: large stuff that you're like, okay, how did you get
Speaker 2: these stones from Aswan? How did you get a 50-ton
Speaker 2: block of granite and move it through the mountains with
Speaker 2: no roads? Help me out. I just get hundreds of them,
Speaker 2: thousands of them, millions of them. How'd you do it?
Speaker 2: It's too wild. Yeah, it is very wild. And like
Speaker 2: some of these things, I'll send you the Cassie Coppersmith
Speaker 2: episode that I did with her because some of the
Speaker 2: stuff is like, it's very confusing because the timeline is
Speaker 2: pretty clear that this is older stuff and the older
Speaker 2: stuff is more complex, more difficult to create and seems
Speaker 2: to indicate the use of machinery. You know, one of
Speaker 2: the things she pointed out was this statue of a
Speaker 2: Buddha is that in India where the guy achieved enlightenment
Speaker 2: by standing still and it's how tall was it is
Speaker 2: it 90 feet tall the largest individual standing statue thousands
Speaker 2: of years old looks like it's machined like really weird
Speaker 2: like really weird statue there's so much weird stuff and
Speaker 2: how did they get it there Did you guys, did
Speaker 2: you move it there? Or was it a stone that
Speaker 2: you said, hmm, wouldn't it be dope if we just, yeah,
Speaker 2: look at that fucker with a big giant hog. But,
Speaker 2: I mean, it's really detailed. It's like, see if you
Speaker 2: can find a good image of it, young Jimmy. There's some.
Speaker 6: Her photo is still on my computer.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's really wild. And she said you see it
Speaker 2: from a long way away. Somebody put their watermark right
Speaker 2: over his dong. How rude. They knew you were going
Speaker 2: to be looking right there.
Speaker 1: Me?
Speaker 2: No, everybody. Humans. There's also like the Kaliasa.
Speaker 1: Temple, I think the one where they carve right down somehow,
Speaker 1: hammer and chisel apparently.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Who knows? It's an incredible sophistication.
Speaker 2: That's the one where an army went to try to
Speaker 2: destroy it and they tried for years and they gave up.
Speaker 6: Really?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: They barely put a fucking dent in it. They scratched
Speaker 2: a few things up, but they worked on it for
Speaker 2: years to try to destroy it. Why? Because some new
Speaker 2: guy came along and said, fuck these people in the temple.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this isn't my, like, religion. This doesn't suit my story.
Speaker 2: Like what the Taliban did to those ancient Buddhists.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they blew them up.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's over a thousand years old and they're like, no.
Speaker 1: An ISIS to Palmyra.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Sad, man. I know. It's really sad. And if that's
Speaker 2: human inclination to do that kind of stuff, like, how
Speaker 2: long have we been doing that? Well, yeah. Probably always. Yeah.
Speaker 2: How much stuff is not around anymore because some asshole
Speaker 2: came along and wanted it removed?
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it doesn't suit your narrative.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Because everyone's always building a story. Humans have always done that,
Speaker 1: built a story around to legitimize power and rule. And
Speaker 1: if it doesn't suit your story, you destroy it. And then, yeah.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Would I be able to have some of that coffee?
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, dog. Get on in there. Thank you.
Speaker 1: I've got to wake myself up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're jet lagged. Trip across the pond.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: Here he is. This is what it looks like. Isn't
Speaker 2: that wild, dude?
Speaker 1: That's incredible.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What's the, um, date on this, the conventional date? Do
Speaker 1: we know?
Speaker 2: That's a good question. They're going to have to carbon
Speaker 2: date his dong. We don't know, but I'm sure it's known. Uh,
Speaker 2: there's a guess, right? Like what is the guess of
Speaker 2: the timeline? Whatever it is, it's very perplexing. It's a
Speaker 2: 57 feet tall monolithic statue of Lord Bahubali, uh, Okay,
Speaker 2: so 983 CE. That's what they believe. That's AD, yeah. Yeah, AD,
Speaker 2: current era. Regard as the tallest Jain statue until 2016.
Speaker 2: Construction of the statue was commissioned by the Ganga dynasty minister. Okay,
Speaker 2: so how? How did you make that? Where did you
Speaker 2: get it? How did you get it there? You did that, what?
Speaker 2: You did that over a thousand years ago? And how
Speaker 2: do we know that that's the timeline? I mean, it's weird.
Speaker 2: It's weird because it looks machined. When you look at it,
Speaker 2: go back to some of the images, please. When you
Speaker 2: look at the detail of the fingers and the toes
Speaker 2: and the uniformity of the face, it's fucking weird, man.
Speaker 2: It's like these people had a lot of fucking resources.
Speaker 2: Look at the size of that dude standing next to it. Like,
Speaker 2: for real, how do you get that? If that's not
Speaker 2: a big, giant, contiguous block that was sitting there, what
Speaker 2: is it made out of?
Speaker 1: Granite, I think.
Speaker 2: So that's not just a giant, perfect slab of granite
Speaker 2: that happens to be roughly in the shape of a guy.
Speaker 2: And you're like, wouldn't that be dope if we made
Speaker 2: a dude out of that with a giant dong and
Speaker 2: just had him just staring over our kingdom?
Speaker 1: But we don't do that anymore. That's what's weird. No
Speaker 1: one's building things like this anymore.
Speaker 2: Certainly not out of stone.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because we like to make money and it takes
Speaker 2: too much time to do a fucking pyramid when you
Speaker 2: can make a nice skyscraper in just a couple of
Speaker 2: years and put a big Trump on the roof.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No surviving technical manual records records rather the exact construction procedure.
Speaker 2: Archaeological and art historical understanding is that the artisans shaped
Speaker 2: the statue in situ, removing stone around the intended figure.
Speaker 2: roughing out the body, then refining the face, limbs, hair,
Speaker 2: and distinctive vines, climbing the legs. Imagine if you fucked
Speaker 2: that up. This approach avoided the near impossible task of quarrying, transporting,
Speaker 2: and raising a 17 meter finished sculpture onto a hill. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So if they moved it, if there was definitive proof
Speaker 2: that it was moved there, then there's another monkey wrench
Speaker 2: gets thrown into the whole thing. And then you have
Speaker 2: to go, okay, how? But it does make much more
Speaker 2: sense if you just carved it out. But also like,
Speaker 2: How long would that take? What kind of tools are
Speaker 2: we talking about? What kind of shitty-ass tools do people
Speaker 2: have at 900 CE?
Speaker 6: Well, then here's the rest of the stuff they did
Speaker 6: in India.
Speaker 2: They did weird stuff in India where they just carved
Speaker 2: stuff right out of the stone. Like what? What was
Speaker 2: the motivation to build these temples, just carve them right
Speaker 2: out of volcanic stone?
Speaker 1: It's insane.
Speaker 5: Crazy.
Speaker 1: So detailed as well.
Speaker 2: Insanely detailed. And also, some of the sculptures are three-dimensional. Like,
Speaker 2: how did you get behind them and carve that out?
Speaker 2: And how did you make all these, like, weird things?
Speaker 2: Have you ever seen some of them where they go
Speaker 2: over it with a light and you can see how
Speaker 2: three-dimensional it is? Yeah, and the Barabar Caves.
Speaker 1: Do you know about them? Also in India, where there's, like,
Speaker 1: completely mirror-polished surfaces. And yet the conventional explanation for that
Speaker 1: is that they were just shelters.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: But why are they so precise? They're, like, completely precise.
Speaker 1: And they've got this weird mirror polishing yeah you don't
Speaker 1: need that if you're just building a shelter and how
Speaker 1: about those pillars that look like they were cut on
Speaker 1: lathes yeah like what how did you what's.
Speaker 2: Going on guys I know what did you we're missing
Speaker 2: so much We're missing so many details about the past.
Speaker 2: It's so frustrating if you're really interested in it because
Speaker 2: it's like how much do we know versus how much
Speaker 2: are we just assuming? Well, that's the thing.
Speaker 1: We're assuming so much. And that's why it bugs me
Speaker 1: when it's presented as fact or presented as we have
Speaker 1: all the answers because we clearly don't.
Speaker 2: Yeah. What are the other papers that have come out
Speaker 2: that have been.
Speaker 1: So there was the paper about the one million-year-old skull,
Speaker 1: human skull that was found in China last year. And
Speaker 1: this is super interesting because this is a human with
Speaker 1: a modern size brain, but that was found a million
Speaker 1: years ago. And so again, that has implications for what
Speaker 1: was really going on a million years ago. And if
Speaker 1: you link that to the, what I would argue is
Speaker 1: modern behavior with the seafaring in Southeast Asia, then you
Speaker 1: have a million year old skull found in China in
Speaker 1: Northeast Asia. You know, you put those two things together
Speaker 1: and you suddenly got human beings with Modern brains doing
Speaker 1: modern things a million years ago. And I think it's fascinating. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, the paper came out, I think, in October
Speaker 1: last year. And what they did was they took these
Speaker 1: fossils from a place called Yongshan in China. And they
Speaker 1: were discovered actually in the 1990s. I think it was
Speaker 1: 1989 and 1990. There's two skulls, Yongshan one and Yongshan two.
Speaker 1: But they were badly deformed. Yeah, there you go, Jamie,
Speaker 1: right on cue. Badly, badly deformed. And they were always
Speaker 1: thought to be Homo erectus because of where they were found, China,
Speaker 1: and how old they were, over a million years old,
Speaker 1: because that was the only type of human that should
Speaker 1: have been in China or in that area at that time,
Speaker 1: at that age. They were always assumed to be Homo erectus,
Speaker 1: but a few researchers from a university in China, along
Speaker 1: with the Natural History Museum in London, a professor named
Speaker 1: Professor Chris Stringer, They applied modern reconstruction techniques to Yungxiang II,
Speaker 1: the second skull. And so they used something called CT
Speaker 1: scanning to reconstruct it. And what they discovered was that
Speaker 1: they think it's actually a Homo longi skull, which is
Speaker 1: this part of the same clad as Denisovan, Denisovan. And
Speaker 1: why that's important is that Denisovan is kind of like
Speaker 1: a cyst.
Speaker 2: How do you say it? Do you say Denisovan or Denisovan?
Speaker 2: I don't know. I say Denisovan, but I keep hearing Denisovan.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to change it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What would the scientists say?
Speaker 2: Denisovan.
Speaker 1: But the cave is Denisovan cave. So it should be Denisovan,
Speaker 1: you would think.
Speaker 2: Fuck the scientists.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter. Denisovan, Denisovan, whatever. Either way, these scientists
Speaker 1: think this skull is Homo longi, which is a cloud
Speaker 1: of Denisovan, which is crucially a sister species to Neanderthal
Speaker 1: and us, sapiens. Which means that if this skull is
Speaker 1: a million years old, and if it is Homo longi,
Speaker 1: that means that the divergence of our species must have
Speaker 1: happened before then. So when humans split into Neanderthal, Denisovan,
Speaker 1: and Homo sapien, if this human was already walking around
Speaker 1: 1 million years ago, that means that whatever became us
Speaker 1: had already diverged at that point. So we were already
Speaker 1: a distinct species, Homo sapiens, 1 million years ago, which
Speaker 1: is a staggeringly long amount of time and so much
Speaker 1: older than what we thought before. We used to think
Speaker 1: this was around 500,000 years ago. So it's like a 400,000
Speaker 1: or more than that jump from what we thought before.
Speaker 2: Have you heard the theory about Neanderthals that they believe
Speaker 2: that Neanderthals were not just a separate group of human
Speaker 2: but were actually created by humans interbreeding with other ancient primates.
Speaker 1: How do you mean?
Speaker 2: So instead of Neanderthals existing previously, that Homo sapiens predate
Speaker 2: Neanderthals and that Homo sapiens breeding with some other ancient primate,
Speaker 2: some other one of these, created Neanderthals. Maybe.
Speaker 1: I haven't heard that.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Yeah. I don't know if it's right.
Speaker 2: I read it and I was like, what? I was like, okay,
Speaker 2: this is a crazy theory. And it's– because the thought
Speaker 2: is that Neanderthals were bred out with– that there was
Speaker 2: interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals. But that might have actually
Speaker 2: like predated Neanderthals themselves. Like it might be the cause
Speaker 2: of Neanderthals is that humans, Homo sapiens bred with something else.
Speaker 1: Well, we definitely bred with Neanderthals. and probably Denisovans and
Speaker 1: Neanderthals and Denisovans bred together as well. We're all so similar.
Speaker 1: The fact that we can have kids together is incredible.
Speaker 1: And they actually recently found evidence of humans and as
Speaker 1: in sapiens and Neanderthals actually coexisting for a long, long
Speaker 1: time in the same place and like living in the
Speaker 1: same place. And because you could always argue before that
Speaker 1: perhaps it was, you know, non-consensual breeding between like a
Speaker 1: Neanderthal male, a sapien woman. But now we have evidence
Speaker 1: that we did live like alongside each other cooperatively. I
Speaker 1: can't remember where the site is, but. that was found
Speaker 1: recently so yeah that's interesting as well because see.
Speaker 2: If you can find any whatever the hell i found
Speaker 2: about um neanderthals possibly a result of humans breeding with
Speaker 2: other primates.
Speaker 1: With other primates so is it not even i mean.
Speaker 2: Not other other humans we're not created by modern humans
Speaker 2: they're closely related extinct branch of the human family this
Speaker 2: is a very recent proposal.
Speaker 6: I might have asked the question too in a different way.
Speaker 2: How did you ask it?
Speaker 6: I said Neanderthals are created by humans, which isn't.
Speaker 2: Really what you said. No. See if you search, is there,
Speaker 2: put this in. Is there a theory that Neanderthals were
Speaker 2: a result of human, maybe you see Homo sapiens? Homo sapiens.
Speaker 2: Homo sapiens breeding with other primates. I guess you wouldn't
Speaker 2: say primates, though, because that's a monkey. Other... Homos? Other homos.
Speaker 2: Other ancient humans. Write that, ancient humans. Ancient human species.
Speaker 2: Let's see what perplexity has to say about this. I
Speaker 2: wish I'd saved that because it was really interesting. It
Speaker 2: says no, not as the main scientific explanation. That's that
Speaker 2: I don't mean the main scientific explanation. I'm saying, is
Speaker 2: there a theory? I want to know if there's a theory.
Speaker 3: Uh, well then that has to now, I mean, that's
Speaker 3: about how we're using this actual thing is I'm using
Speaker 3: it in a general way.
Speaker 2: Right. But not as the main scientific explanation. Absolutely. But
Speaker 2: is there a theory? Has anyone, has anyone theorized that
Speaker 2: this is possible? Ask that. Theorized that this is possible.
Speaker 6: It's going to have to crawl.
Speaker 3: If it's new, it has to crawl the websites to
Speaker 3: find that information.
Speaker 2: I want it to crawl. I know.
Speaker 6: We can't make it crawl.
Speaker 2: Crawl, bitch.
Speaker 1: They're going to take over, man.
Speaker 2: Yes. Here it goes. Researchers have proposed hybridization-based ideas, but
Speaker 2: generally not the exact claim that Neanderthals originally formed from
Speaker 2: Homo sapiens plus another species. What has been proposed? Paralytologists
Speaker 2: propose that particularly late Neanderthal or early modern human fossils
Speaker 2: are might be Neanderthal-Homo sapien hybrids or descendants of populations
Speaker 2: that mix repeatedly. No, this is not quite what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: This is what's fucked up when you watch too many
Speaker 2: videos and you read too many articles and you don't
Speaker 2: save them. This was quite a few months ago too.
Speaker 2: The Denisovan thing is weird because there's recent proposals. I
Speaker 2: think this is a paper I sent in. I sent
Speaker 2: you a podcast where they're discussing this paper that as
Speaker 2: of August, like this month, there's some speculation about the
Speaker 2: height of the Denisovans and that they think they might
Speaker 2: have been much larger than Homo sapiens at the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they found a bone. They found a bone, a
Speaker 1: thigh bone, I think, under the sea and suggest the
Speaker 1: … Denisovans. And everything we found about Denisovans is that
Speaker 1: they were bigger than us. So the teeth we found,
Speaker 1: we haven't got much from them, but the tooth is bigger.
Speaker 1: The jawbone is bigger. The dragon man skull, which has
Speaker 1: been classified as very similar to Denisovan, is bigger. And
Speaker 1: then they found this thigh bone that suggests that they
Speaker 1: were considerably over six foot tall. Now, obviously that's not
Speaker 1: like a massive giant, but compared to, you know, the
Speaker 1: average height of a human today is something like A
Speaker 1: male human is something like 5'8 or 5'9. And so
Speaker 1: a Denisovan being over six foot is like quite a
Speaker 1: considerable jump from that. So it's not like a mythical giant,
Speaker 1: but it's still bigger than you'd expect an ancient human
Speaker 1: to be.
Speaker 2: And it's also we're going with a limited amount of fossils.
Speaker 1: So limited. So limited.
Speaker 2: So just from what we know, they existed with larger skulls.
Speaker 2: recent genetic research confirms that modern humans, Homo sapiens, and
Speaker 2: Neanderthals repeatedly interbred a course of period spanning roughly 200,000
Speaker 2: to 250,000 years ago. While it's long believed that interbreeding
Speaker 2: occurred during a brief window of about 50 to 60,000
Speaker 2: years ago, advanced genomic mapping shows multiple waves of contact
Speaker 2: occurred much earlier. 200,000 to 250,000 years ago, an early
Speaker 2: wave of Homo sapiens migrating out of Africa encountered and
Speaker 2: mated with Neanderthals in Eurasia. So what this guy was
Speaker 2: saying was that it might not have been that, but
Speaker 2: that even earlier than this, Neanderthals were a result of
Speaker 2: human beings interbreeding with others. Or Homo sapiens interbreeding with others.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Thank you, though. what were we just at? Oh, Denisovans.
Speaker 2: So just that one alone was way bigger than most
Speaker 2: humans at the time. And just given the size of
Speaker 2: the head, the bones are bigger. It's a bigger brow.
Speaker 2: It seems like a more robust, larger version of a human.
Speaker 2: And then when you take into account the range and
Speaker 2: size of human beings, given the correct amount of resources
Speaker 2: and food and protein, we got seven foot plus humans
Speaker 2: that are all over the place today. And imagine if
Speaker 2: these Denisovan skulls, which seem to be like a completely
Speaker 2: different structure than a Homo sapiens, we might, they might
Speaker 2: be the giants of the Bible is the point. Like
Speaker 2: this might be what they were talking about. Like there
Speaker 2: might've been a race of much larger people that were
Speaker 2: physically dominant over Homo sapiens.
Speaker 1: They could have been they could have been considerably bigger.
Speaker 1: They don't even need to be that big for the
Speaker 1: myths to kind of perpetuate. I mean, like just someone
Speaker 1: to be a little bit bigger and you encounter a
Speaker 1: group of them and you're like a homo sapien community.
Speaker 1: You're going to remember that.
Speaker 2: Well, whenever I do the UFC weigh ins, I'm standing
Speaker 2: next to massive fucking, you know, these huge heavyweights like
Speaker 2: some of these guys are just gigantic humans, you know.
Speaker 2: Six foot seven, six foot nine, 265 pounds and they
Speaker 2: have to cut weight to make 265. These are giant people.
Speaker 2: And then you think this is whatever percentage of people
Speaker 2: that are around today that are that big. If the Denisovans,
Speaker 2: if we just have a limit, we might have caught
Speaker 2: just a few small ones. I mean that's what we
Speaker 2: don't know. I mean I wonder what the fuck would
Speaker 2: happen if they found some bones that indicated there was
Speaker 2: a man that was nine feet tall.
Speaker 1: And we know that primates can get that big. And
Speaker 1: obviously we're a primate. I can't remember what it's called,
Speaker 1: but that's the one.
Speaker 2: Gigantopithecus. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely gigantic as per the name.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So they can, primates are kind of line of animals
Speaker 1: can get really big.
Speaker 2: And that along the same lines of like the timeline
Speaker 2: of discovery of that is fascinating too. Because I think
Speaker 2: it was in the 1920s, an archaeologist was in an
Speaker 2: apothecary shop in China and he found molars. They were
Speaker 2: from a primate that didn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: They were really big.
Speaker 2: Yeah, huge. He's like, where did you get this? And
Speaker 2: he went there and then that's where they found jawbones
Speaker 2: and things. So there's some– we used to think that
Speaker 2: they were bipedal because I've read that before. But now
Speaker 2: they're thinking that not necessarily and that they might have
Speaker 2: been– because like a lot of people thought that's Bigfoot.
Speaker 2: There's this myth that persists throughout Native American cultures, everywhere else. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they think it might have been an enormous orangutan. Look
Speaker 2: at that movie. What was it, The Jungle Book?
Speaker 1: Jungle Book, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So a 10-foot-tall orangutan, like what? I mean, it just
Speaker 2: makes sense. If there's the people– you brought up florists before.
Speaker 2: Now we also know about those little hobbit people that
Speaker 2: lived on the island of Flores that were these three-foot-tall
Speaker 2: tiny little people. Mm-hmm. So the island dwarfism and then
Speaker 2: there's– they're a totally different version of human beings, of
Speaker 2: the human chain, the human tree. Who knows? Who knows
Speaker 2: what these Denisovans look like?
Speaker 1: And island gigantism is also a thing in nature. We
Speaker 1: see that and we see island dwarfism.
Speaker 2: With reptiles, right? So it could apply to primates and
Speaker 2: to humans. Sure, as long as they had enough food. Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's just the idea of a Denisovan. I mean, they
Speaker 2: only discovered them in 2010, right?
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, Sony. And we have hardly anything about them.
Speaker 2: How many are we missing? You know what I mean?
Speaker 1: We literally have like a tooth, a jawbone, and this
Speaker 1: thigh bone, and a few other things.
Speaker 2: Right, and how many other versions of humans are we missing?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's ghost populations in our DNA. We know we're
Speaker 1: missing humans. There are other types of humans that we
Speaker 1: just have nothing for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's weird.
Speaker 1: That's so weird.
Speaker 2: That show, Human, have you ever seen that show? It's on... God,
Speaker 2: is it a BBC show?
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. No, I watched that.
Speaker 2: Very interesting. It's good. But she was on a podcast
Speaker 2: recently talking about this ghost DNA and how weird it
Speaker 2: is that a few hundred thousand years ago something happened
Speaker 2: and there's this DNA that's in there that's like, what
Speaker 2: is this? What's this stuff?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's so many populations of humans that we think
Speaker 1: existed because of our DNA, but we don't know who
Speaker 1: they were. We've never found them. And they could be,
Speaker 1: you know, Very close to us, but also with significant
Speaker 1: differences and it's just, it's all up in the end.
Speaker 1: Same with so much of prehistory. We just, we don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I wonder like what kind of a society, what
Speaker 2: kind of, if do, do they find stone tools? With Denisovans?
Speaker 2: Do they know that yet?
Speaker 1: It's really hard to attribute stone tools to anything because
Speaker 1: if you just have the tools, you don't know what
Speaker 1: human used them, what human made them.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: Because you have to find like a skeleton and it's
Speaker 1: so hard to find a skeleton next to the tools.
Speaker 1: And even then you don't actually know if it was
Speaker 1: that that made the tools.
Speaker 2: We don't know. Yeah. What else has been fascinating for
Speaker 2: you recently?
Speaker 1: So I think. the question that i mentioned at the
Speaker 1: start the one like when did humans reach isolated land
Speaker 1: masses such as uh america and australia is a really
Speaker 1: interesting question because again the old ideas we have have
Speaker 1: proven to be incorrect and i think especially in the
Speaker 1: case of the americas i think it's super interesting because
Speaker 1: obviously as you know we used to think it was
Speaker 1: clovis first 13 000 years ago but So many sites
Speaker 1: now seem to be pushing that back much, much, much, much,
Speaker 1: much older into the past. So, yeah, that's a really
Speaker 1: interesting question. I mean, obviously, now we know that humans
Speaker 1: have been in the Americas for at least 22,000 years
Speaker 1: with white sands footprints, which I'm sure you've heard of that.
Speaker 2: Yes, 22,000 years. It's crazy.
Speaker 1: So that's the oldest accepted evidence. But I think there's
Speaker 1: loads of interesting sites that potentially push it quite a
Speaker 1: lot further back than that, which are a bit more controversial.
Speaker 1: But when you take them all together, they're kind of, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's white sands. So that's now accepted, I think, by
Speaker 1: most archaeologists. And why that's important is because it kind
Speaker 1: of opens it all up again. Because of when the
Speaker 1: glacial maximums happen, kind of the opening of the corridor,
Speaker 1: because that's pre that. It means that we now don't
Speaker 1: know how long humans have been in the Americas. It
Speaker 1: could go back way further. And then you start looking
Speaker 1: at these other sites and you think maybe it's a lot,
Speaker 1: lot older. So there's one in Mexico called Chicoita Cave.
Speaker 1: apologies for the pronunciation is probably wrong but this is
Speaker 1: a 33 000 years old and high in the mountains
Speaker 1: of northern mexico they found like 2 000 stone tools
Speaker 1: um and they did like 50 separate dates and the
Speaker 1: date isn't controversial what's controversial is if they were human-made
Speaker 1: tools um but the scientists working at the site think
Speaker 1: that this is evidence of humans in the americas 33
Speaker 1: 000 years ago then there's a site in brazil called
Speaker 1: pedro ferrada which is 50 000 years old um is
Speaker 1: that chica chica yeah yeah exactly so i mean it
Speaker 1: looks just like a tool but i mean people argue
Speaker 1: that they're natural um so it's up in the air
Speaker 1: it's not accepted yet but i think that's the probably
Speaker 1: the most uh the least controversial um 26 000 years
Speaker 1: ago yeah but it goes up to it's like 30
Speaker 1: to 33 000 years i think um but yeah there's
Speaker 1: a site called pedro furada in brazil where they found
Speaker 1: a hearth like structure so people making fire they found
Speaker 1: charcoal they found blackened stones uh heated stones rather uh
Speaker 1: and that they dated that to like 50 or 60
Speaker 1: 000 years ago so that's like a lot older than
Speaker 1: than white sands obviously um so that's a really interesting
Speaker 1: site again not fully accepted by archaeologists but the people
Speaker 1: working there are quite convinced that it's evidence of human
Speaker 1: presence in Brazil, which is obviously quite far South, um, 50,
Speaker 1: over 50,000 years ago. Um, but the thing is you
Speaker 1: can't prove it because you haven't, they need so many
Speaker 1: things to say it for sure. They need like a
Speaker 1: fossil of a human basically, because otherwise you can say
Speaker 1: it's natural.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh, I don't know what those paintings are. I'm assuming
Speaker 1: they're more recent because always that would be pretty clear evidence. Um,
Speaker 1: But I think the hearth-like structures and the heated stones
Speaker 1: and the charcoal are dated to over 50,000 years ago.
Speaker 2: That's crazy. Go back to that last one, please. Right there.
Speaker 2: That is wild. That is wild.
Speaker 1: I'm assuming that is much more recent because otherwise that
Speaker 1: would be very clear evidence of human presence. But I
Speaker 1: think the oldest layers go back. I think it's been continuously,
Speaker 1: or they think it's been continuously inhabited for thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of years with the oldest being over 50,000 years old. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Are they the tools? They might be the tools. So
Speaker 1: critics say that it's natural, right?
Speaker 2: That those are natural things, not tools?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But a paper came out in 2023 that really made
Speaker 1: the case that it's human presence.
Speaker 2: Napping. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think it's leaning that way, but it's
Speaker 1: just so hard to prove it, right?
Speaker 3: So it's not accepted.
Speaker 2: Yet but jamie uh i just sent you a link
Speaker 2: that i found yesterday i thought it was pretty bizarre
Speaker 2: a completely different part of the world but also really
Speaker 2: interesting it's a link to an instagram video there's so
Speaker 2: much of this stuff now that's what's so cool it's
Speaker 2: like and if you're in a good algorithm You get inundated.
Speaker 2: Give me some volume on this.
Speaker 4: Algerian Sahara with 5,000 rooms, and we still haven't seen
Speaker 4: all of them.
Speaker 5: It's called Sefar.
Speaker 4: No roads lead to it. No vehicle can reach it.
Speaker 4: The only way in is on foot through a maze
Speaker 4: of stone pathways that all look identical. On the walls inside,
Speaker 4: there are 15,000 paintings, animals that no longer exist here,
Speaker 4: rivers that dried up thousands of years ago, and then
Speaker 4: things no one can identify. Floating figures with no faces.
Speaker 4: Beings with round heads wearing what looks like suits. A
Speaker 4: figure over three meters tall that the man who discovered
Speaker 4: it simply called a god. Most of Sephar is still unmapped.
Speaker 4: Whatever else is in there, no one's seen it yet.
Speaker 2: I could do without that guy's voice. He's a little ridiculous.
Speaker 6: I'm going to take the radio head out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, settle down, buddy. It sounds like an AI voice, right?
Speaker 2: Like a super enthusiastic AI voice? Is that what it is?
Speaker 6: Well, it could be. It very well could be. It
Speaker 6: definitely is going to be in the future, but.
Speaker 6: What was it called?
Speaker 2: I don't... I don't remember. Sephar? It's just... Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 6: Let's try to look it up.
Speaker 2: See if we can look it up. Sub-Saharan Africa is
Speaker 2: another weird one, right? Because especially the Sahara itself, that
Speaker 2: used to be vast, green, grassy trees, jungle. Who knows
Speaker 2: what it was? And now, no one's really has really
Speaker 2: any understanding of what's under that sand.
Speaker 1: Yeah but it was fertile and green right up until
Speaker 1: literally right up until the point that the conventional timeline
Speaker 1: has civilization starting like around 4000 bc is when it
Speaker 1: flipped to to desert um so yeah i mean i'm
Speaker 1: sure there's there has been archaeological work done in the
Speaker 1: sahara but compared to the size of the sahara right
Speaker 1: there's there's just got to be loads of stuff under
Speaker 1: there that could potentially change our understanding of origins of
Speaker 1: civilization for sure um very interesting region but yeah extremely
Speaker 1: hard to excavate for many reasons such as the climate
Speaker 1: and also political instability a lot of those countries are
Speaker 1: pretty fucked up so it's hard to like go in
Speaker 1: there and do archaeology but very interesting region of the
Speaker 1: world and obviously that is where egypt emerged just after
Speaker 1: this period so you know what were the people that
Speaker 1: kind of went to the mal river doing before there's
Speaker 1: many interesting things there's um What's it called? There's an
Speaker 1: interesting site. Napta Playa, I think it's called.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's going to be a little hard to get to.
Speaker 6: It's in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
Speaker 2: Boy.
Speaker 6: In Algeria.
Speaker 2: Jeez.
Speaker 5: Buried.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2: I have heard of this, actually.
Speaker 6: Somewhere in there.
Speaker 2: Fuck. Imagine you're an archaeologist. You're tasked with, you know,
Speaker 2: someone gives you some funding. Hey.
Speaker 1: Sahara Desert, bro.
Speaker 2: We want you to get in there. And go look around. What?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's probably not the ideal place to go.
Speaker 2: You can't even go without getting killed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you don't want to get shot.
Speaker 2: You could literally die. So, no. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Just imagine if you found something cool. Imagine you found
Speaker 6: a bunch of cool shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you go. Good luck. Just good luck taking it out.
Speaker 6: Just like, oh, where'd you get that?
Speaker 2: Exactly. Thank you. Exactly. They'll kill you.
Speaker 5: That was also my thought.
Speaker 2: I was going to bring that up about Gobekli Tepe,
Speaker 2: about if they bring in more archaeologists, more people to dig,
Speaker 2: if they really, truly expand. They really have to keep
Speaker 2: track of what they find because the amount of money
Speaker 2: that someone can get for an artifact on the black
Speaker 2: market is pretty incredible. This is an issue with Egypt, right?
Speaker 1: And South America.
Speaker 2: Yes, and South America. But Egypt in particular, there's some inconsistencies.
Speaker 2: With Zahi Hawass's versions of like what was discovered in
Speaker 2: some places, whether or not a skeleton was in a
Speaker 2: sarcophagus versus what he said later. Like in the older versions,
Speaker 2: there was a skeleton. And the newer versions, they didn't
Speaker 2: find anything. So did you sell a skeleton? Because people
Speaker 2: sell– I'm not saying he did. But did somebody sell
Speaker 2: a skeleton? Because people sell skeletons. And if you are
Speaker 2: some rich guy who lives in some other country and
Speaker 2: you're a billionaire from oil– And you're like, you know
Speaker 2: what I'd like? You got a guy. He's like, you've
Speaker 2: got everything. You've got all the Ferraris. He's like, you
Speaker 2: know what I want? I want an Egyptian skeleton. Get
Speaker 2: me that. Go get me a mummy. I want a
Speaker 2: fucking mummy.
Speaker 1: Or any kind of artifacts or anything. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Especially something gold, some ancient gold. All that stuff was
Speaker 2: stolen out of there. So was it melted down? For
Speaker 2: grave robbers, that must have been an incredible place to
Speaker 2: be before everybody discovered all those things. tombs because we
Speaker 2: know like with King Tut, which was preserved, but luckily
Speaker 2: nobody got into that until what year was that? They
Speaker 2: found it. Two-ton commons.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but within the last couple of decades,
Speaker 1: I think. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: Whatever it was, it was, I think it was a
Speaker 2: little longer than that. But the point is, it's like
Speaker 2: fantastic gold sarcophagus cover and massive fucking treasure trove of
Speaker 2: jewels and things like how much of that stuff is
Speaker 2: scattered in private collections in the world, you know?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in South America, like, because they spent, like, underneath Cusco,
Speaker 1: there's all these tunnels, right? And people have known about
Speaker 1: them for a long, long time. But it took a
Speaker 1: long time for archaeology to kind of accept that they
Speaker 1: were there. But people have been going in, like, people had, like,
Speaker 1: tours and stuff down at the tunnels before it was, like,
Speaker 1: widely accepted. And back then, it's just rife for people
Speaker 1: selling off to the black market because there's no control
Speaker 1: over it.
Speaker 2: There's no kind of institutional.
Speaker 1: control over it so people could just kind of do
Speaker 1: what they want until it actually finally got like uh
Speaker 1: you know controlled by the authorities so yeah who knows
Speaker 1: what went and all over the world as you say
Speaker 1: uh yeah there could be stuff that is really interesting
Speaker 1: that is just out there.
Speaker 2: And then there's the elongated skulls the weird fucking skulls
Speaker 2: and a long history of people discovering those like how
Speaker 2: many people got the good ones how many of them
Speaker 2: were removed a long time ago and sit somewhere mhm
Speaker 2: It's almost like you have to go raid all the
Speaker 2: rich guys in the world.
Speaker 1: See what you got hiding in your basement.
Speaker 2: Just find some guy. Like, what's your Google search like?
Speaker 2: Let's find out who's got the stuff. Because, I mean,
Speaker 2: if you're a person with a private museum, if you've
Speaker 2: got that kind of money. And, like, there's people in
Speaker 2: the world that have private zoos, right? So they have
Speaker 2: so much money in other countries that they've, you know,
Speaker 2: they have basically the wild kingdom in their backyards. And
Speaker 2: that guy's like, well, I got that.
Speaker 1: Now I want– I want something even more weird.
Speaker 2: I want you to build– like I went to the
Speaker 2: Cairo Museum once and I like the way it looks.
Speaker 2: I want that in my house. There's got to be
Speaker 2: people like that in the world.
Speaker 6: This guy. He's one of them.
Speaker 2: Here he goes.
Speaker 3: 91-year-old Don Miller from Indiana.
Speaker 6: He had thousands of artifacts removed from his house.
Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
Speaker 6: I think he had Egyptian mummies.
Speaker 2: Whoa.
Speaker 6: I'm trying to find the good pictures.
Speaker 2: In the list of what he had. So they seized
Speaker 2: his stuff. How'd they find out about it? Was he
Speaker 2: on Instagram?
Speaker 3: A delegation from China went to Indiana to claim their stuff.
Speaker 2: Whoa. A delegation from China. I wonder if they showed
Speaker 2: up with guns. Give me your shit back. FBI raided
Speaker 2: a 91-year-old missionary's home and found thousands of stolen Native
Speaker 2: American bones. Whoa.
Speaker 6: Amazon River canoe.
Speaker 2: Wow, Ming Dynasty jade, an Egyptian sarcophagus, and a dugout
Speaker 2: canoe that had traveled down the Amazon River. Wow.
Speaker 6: It was just in his house. There's a picture of
Speaker 6: his house in another thing I had. I mean, it's
Speaker 6: just all.
Speaker 2: How'd this guy get the scratch? Where's he getting the
Speaker 2: money for all this? What'd this guy do?
Speaker 6: I don't know why there's not a movie about him.
Speaker 2: After 10 years, FBI returned 7,000 rare artifacts... Looted by
Speaker 2: Indiana grave robber. Oh, he's a grave robber.
Speaker 3: That's what they call him? So it's just a dude
Speaker 3: who's a collector. He might not necessarily be a grave robber.
Speaker 3: I don't think this is the same guy. FBI found 42,000
Speaker 3: relics and 2,000 human bones in a man's home.
Speaker 6: What is that?
Speaker 5: Whoa, what the? What is that, a horse?
Speaker 6: Maybe like a pangolin or something.
Speaker 2: A sloth? Yeah, it looks like a pangolin, right? 42,000 relics. Oh,
Speaker 2: same guy. No. Don Miller.
Speaker 5: Whoa.
Speaker 2: It is the same guy. That's crazy. This guy's a nut.
Speaker 2: He died in 2015. Too bad. He was 91 when
Speaker 2: agents first knocked on his door in 2014. Wow, he
Speaker 2: only lived a year later. The 42,000 artifacts hoarded by
Speaker 2: Miller represent maybe the largest ever seizure from a private collection.
Speaker 2: So this was interesting. It's like, are they saying that
Speaker 2: he's not allowed to acquire them? Do we have rules
Speaker 2: in terms of like, say, if you found some stuff?
Speaker 2: I know we have rules about Native Americans, right? FBI
Speaker 2: became involved when they learned thousands of items were obtained
Speaker 2: in violation of antiquities laws and federal and state statutes.
Speaker 2: According to the FBI, Miller went on digs around the
Speaker 2: world and illegally brought his finds home to the United States.
Speaker 3: I think Nick Cage had to give back that skull
Speaker 3: he bought because it was stolen from somewhere or something.
Speaker 2: He bought a skull? Like a T-Rex skull.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 6: You ever hear about that?
Speaker 2: Oh, he had to give back his T-Rex skull? I
Speaker 2: think so because.
Speaker 6: They found out that it was like stolen. So he
Speaker 6: gave it back. I don't know what happened with the money, but.
Speaker 2: Whoa. How much is the T-Rex?
Speaker 6: Also, I was thinking, this guy got.
Speaker 2: He got fucked.
Speaker 1: They found this guy.
Speaker 6: There's got to be... I brought him up because I
Speaker 6: knew about it. He probably talked about it at the
Speaker 6: bar and all that.
Speaker 2: Kind of shit.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: What about the people who don't?
Speaker 2: He's on Facebook.
Speaker 6: Yeah. What about the people who don't?
Speaker 2: Those old dudes are all on Facebook. Have you seen
Speaker 2: the dinosaur that Ways to Well has? Yes. Ways to Well...
Speaker 2: legally purchased a dinosaur.
Speaker 4: What, like a.
Speaker 2: So they have a, like a dinosaur bone, some aquatic
Speaker 2: dinosaur that they have suspended in their ceiling.
Speaker 4: Really?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can buy dinosaur bones. Um... He bought a
Speaker 2: skull for $ 276, 000.
Speaker 1: Whoa, he got fucked.
Speaker 2: Stole it from the Mongolian government. Wow.
Speaker 6: Smuggled it out of the Gobi Desert.
Speaker 2: He voluntarily returned the fossil to the Mongolian government after U.S.
Speaker 2: authorities found it was smuggled.
Speaker 3: Oh, no.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Um.
Speaker 2: See if you can find the ways to weld dinosaur. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you can buy dinosaur bones. That's pretty cool. There's a
Speaker 2: lot of people that don't believe in dinosaurs lately. Really?
Speaker 2: This is very confusing.
Speaker 3: Why?
Speaker 2: What's their reasoning? Oh, just they've been lied to about everything.
Speaker 2: Maybe dinosaurs too. And there's people that think that dinosaurs
Speaker 2: were actually the dragons of ancient history. And that's all bullshit.
Speaker 2: It's the dumbest theories. I mean, look, you know, we
Speaker 2: have– there's the ways to weld dinosaur. That's what it
Speaker 2: looks like.
Speaker 1: That's pretty dope.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty sick. Some sort of an aquatic dinosaur.
Speaker 2: How much of that is actual bone and how much
Speaker 2: of it is replica? I don't know. Some of them
Speaker 2: are replica. I think that's actual bone. But, like, they
Speaker 2: have T-Rexes. I think the most complete T-Rex is, I
Speaker 2: want to say 80%. What is the most complete T-Rex
Speaker 2: skeleton ever found?
Speaker 6: That one just sold recently.
Speaker 2: At an auction.
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was 62% complete.
Speaker 2: Is that the most complete one ever?
Speaker 6: I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 2: I thought there was a.
Speaker 6: Oh, there's one that's 90%. Oh, there you go. Well,
Speaker 6: discovered with 90% of its skeleton recovered.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we know a lot, folks. This idea that dinosaurs
Speaker 2: aren't real is really silly. No, it's definitely real.
Speaker 6: Sue.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Whoa.
Speaker 2: Okay. So that's real. Guys, stop. That's a real skull.
Speaker 2: The problem is there's been deception. And one of the
Speaker 2: big pieces of deception is when you go to a
Speaker 2: lot of museums and you see a dinosaur skeleton, you
Speaker 2: assume that's how they found it and they put it
Speaker 2: back together again. Whereas a lot of the pieces of
Speaker 2: those bones are not real. A lot of the pieces
Speaker 2: are recreations and some entire skeletons that are in museums
Speaker 2: are all a recreation. There's no actual bone that you're
Speaker 2: actually looking at. And so then people are like, hey.
Speaker 1: It's the same with ancient sites, though.
Speaker 2: 67 million years old, 80% intact. So, like, just that alone,
Speaker 2: 80% of that is real. That's amazing.
Speaker 5: They're real.
Speaker 2: It's a fucking real thing that existed just like fucking
Speaker 2: crocodiles are still real today. There was a real group
Speaker 2: of large reptiles that roamed the earth.
Speaker 1: For a long time. But the crazy thing, I think
Speaker 1: dinosaurs really highlight the kind of fragmentary nature of the
Speaker 1: fossil record, right? Because they existed for 160 million years
Speaker 1: or something like that. But we only have like a
Speaker 1: few thousand fossils from that huge amount of time. And
Speaker 1: it just shows how little survives, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And the fossil record is just really weird.
Speaker 2: It takes a lot to make a fossil. So we
Speaker 2: have a tiny fraction of the actual data.
Speaker 1: And we have to extrapolate out from that. And just
Speaker 1: that's our understanding. And that's why we do not know
Speaker 1: what happened in the deep past.
Speaker 2: Isn't it fucking cool?
Speaker 1: It's so cool.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: That's why I do what I do, man.
Speaker 2: I fucking love it. Yeah, I don't know anybody who
Speaker 2: when you first learn about this, anybody that I want
Speaker 2: to talk to, when you first learn about this stuff,
Speaker 2: you don't go, whoa. Because it is so interesting. and
Speaker 2: um that's why to me the um reaction to graham
Speaker 2: hancock's netflix series was so strange like so unhinged like
Speaker 2: why why are you guys freaking out about this and
Speaker 2: calling it the most dangerous show.
Speaker 1: Yeah i mean i've experienced this firsthand now because i
Speaker 1: mean last time i was here i wasn't really known
Speaker 1: about but now i'm a kind of people know who
Speaker 1: i am and I get so much hate. It's weird
Speaker 1: because people paint me out to be something I'm not like.
Speaker 1: And it's just so strange because I'm me and I
Speaker 1: know what I think and I know what I believe. Obviously,
Speaker 1: you've experienced that on a whole different level.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've experienced it from the government. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: But it's just wild. It's so weird when people paint
Speaker 1: you out to be someone that you're not and put
Speaker 1: words in your mouth. It's strange.
Speaker 2: You'll get used to it. The key is just don't
Speaker 2: read it. That's the key. Like you're going to be
Speaker 2: aware of enough of it peripherally. People will bring it
Speaker 2: to your attention if it's really important or if it's
Speaker 2: like significant. None of it is going to really be important.
Speaker 2: But as long as– and you're a very conscientious guy
Speaker 2: and you do a really good job, like I said,
Speaker 2: of being objective and measured and that's all you need
Speaker 2: to do. Just keep doing that. Just don't read the
Speaker 2: comments because there's a bunch of people out there that
Speaker 2: are just very– unhappy period, no matter what. And when
Speaker 2: someone is getting a lot of attention, they're very angry always.
Speaker 2: And there's whatever that number is, one out of a hundred,
Speaker 2: one out of a thousand, it doesn't matter when they
Speaker 2: reach you, that negativity is never good for you. It's
Speaker 2: only bad.
Speaker 1: And it sits with you a little bit more. Like
Speaker 1: you get all the positive comments, but you don't really fuck,
Speaker 1: you know, like the negative ones sticks in your brain.
Speaker 1: But you know, what's really interesting is like, uh, people
Speaker 1: have done like hit pieces on me and shit, but
Speaker 1: And obviously loads of negative stuff comes through. But also
Speaker 1: I've had like actual archaeologists and actual people working in
Speaker 1: actual institutions reach out to me and say like, you know,
Speaker 1: these are like actual archaeologists. And they're saying like, Michael,
Speaker 1: we value your work and we actually think you're an
Speaker 1: important voice and stuff like that. And I find that
Speaker 1: really encouraging because these are, you know, it's easy for
Speaker 1: us to think about archaeologists as like a kind of bogeyman.
Speaker 1: They're like. want to suppress all this stuff, but they're
Speaker 1: not all like that. No, I think.
Speaker 2: Particularly the young ones, particularly people that are coming up
Speaker 2: that really the reason why they got into this in
Speaker 2: the first place is because it's such a fascinating subject.
Speaker 2: And like you, when you've spoken on this, when you
Speaker 2: were in school and you were getting your degree, you
Speaker 2: were confused as to why these alternative perspectives weren't entertained.
Speaker 2: And I think there's a lot of young people that
Speaker 2: feel confined by the gatekeepers they can they feel confined
Speaker 2: by the career academics that are sort of in charge
Speaker 2: of who gets tenure who gets jobs who gets grants
Speaker 2: and it's a very confusing thing you don't want to
Speaker 2: ruffle any feathers step on any toes and so you
Speaker 2: feel constrained in your ability to be you know curious
Speaker 2: and that's that seems insane for something that is so
Speaker 2: Inherently curious. Curiosity driven.
Speaker 1: So inherently unknown as well. We do not know as
Speaker 1: we keep saying.
Speaker 2: Right, right, right. We're not talking about stuff that's like
Speaker 2: established science where you can clearly– it's not mathematics. This
Speaker 2: is something like weird. You're looking at hints of the past.
Speaker 2: And the more we look, the more we find older stuff.
Speaker 2: It's like Graham always says. Stuff just keeps getting older. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: crazy well it's just so cool that you're out there
Speaker 2: making videos and that you could do that for a living.
Speaker 1: Now i know it's wild i feel i feel so
Speaker 1: lucky that i get to uh do something i'm so
Speaker 1: interested in and talk about these topics and also to
Speaker 1: like create not to kind of like inspire this thinking
Speaker 1: and other people that's really what i want to try
Speaker 1: and do is to get people thinking about history from
Speaker 1: this different perspective and to think about the unknown and
Speaker 1: think about the potential that what humans could have been
Speaker 1: doing now that we know that a mind like ours
Speaker 1: could have existed for a million years, that humans like
Speaker 1: us could have inhabited this planet for such a vastly
Speaker 1: longer length of time than we used to believe and
Speaker 1: all the possibilities that throws up. More than anything, that's
Speaker 1: what I want people to think about when they watch
Speaker 1: my work. I don't want to tell them to believe
Speaker 1: this or tell them to believe that. I just want
Speaker 1: them to kind of think about it themselves and open
Speaker 1: their minds to the possibilities that could have occurred. And
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that, like people always say that I
Speaker 1: like saying that there's like advanced civilizations in prehistory. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that I'm just saying there's a lot more
Speaker 1: on the table than we used to think. And I
Speaker 1: think that's really fascinating. I wish more people would kind
Speaker 1: of take that possibility seriously. And that's why I get
Speaker 1: encouraged when I get these emails from people that actually
Speaker 1: in the institutions, because they're the people that are going
Speaker 1: to rewrite the textbooks. Like I can say what I want.
Speaker 1: Like I'm just a YouTuber, but we need the people
Speaker 1: that actually work in, in the institutions to think in
Speaker 1: this way. And then, then I think we, we might
Speaker 1: update our thinking on these things.
Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of those young folks that
Speaker 2: are coming up now in archaeology that do have alternative perspectives.
Speaker 2: Whether or not they're being suppressed. And it's also very
Speaker 2: encouraging for them to see a pathway outside of academics, academia,
Speaker 2: like what you're pursuing. And to see like not only
Speaker 2: is this viable, but you can do … do it
Speaker 2: with the proper approach, like the way that you're doing it.
Speaker 2: Where you're not making crazy claims, not saying the aliens
Speaker 2: did it. You're not saying anything nutty. You're just saying, hey,
Speaker 2: there's a lot going on here. And to pretend that
Speaker 2: we have an accurate map of the territory seems silly. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I just think there's so much more on the
Speaker 1: table now than there used to be only a few
Speaker 1: decades ago. And I think that's so exciting when we
Speaker 1: look at our past because, as I say, it's the
Speaker 1: reason we're all here, right? It's the reason we live
Speaker 1: in this civilization is the answer to these questions. And
Speaker 1: we don't know the answer to these questions anymore. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about it.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: What else have you found recently that's interesting?
Speaker 1: Um yeah so i mean i was still there's still
Speaker 1: um there's older american sites so um so there's obviously
Speaker 1: the saruti mastodon site which is 130 000 years old
Speaker 1: which is controversial but i think people.
Speaker 2: That's the mastodon bones where they appear to be it
Speaker 2: appears signs of human smashing the bones to get the marrow.
Speaker 1: Yeah just after like fresh freshly smashed after the animal
Speaker 1: had died and they found like these anvils like these
Speaker 1: things that look like tools next to the bones and
Speaker 1: It's controversial because we can't prove that that was human activity,
Speaker 1: but it looks like human activity. It was even published
Speaker 1: in Nature in 2017. So, you know, it's another little
Speaker 1: data point that pushes back human presence in the America
Speaker 1: potentially to over 100,000 years ago. And there's even more.
Speaker 1: There's a site called Calico where, I think this one's
Speaker 1: a little bit, I don't really buy this one, but
Speaker 1: a very famous archaeologist called Louis Leakey, who was like
Speaker 1: one of the top names in the archaeology in the
Speaker 1: 20th century, he believed that The Calico showed evidence of
Speaker 1: human presence in the Americas over 100,000 years ago as well.
Speaker 1: So it's another data point. And then there's Way at Larco,
Speaker 1: which I think you've heard of. Have you heard of
Speaker 1: Way at Larco? It's this site in Mexico where they
Speaker 1: had this volcanic ash over these human tools, and they
Speaker 1: dated the ash to crazy numbers. I'm talking like 300,000, 400,000, 500,000
Speaker 1: years ago, and the tools were below this layer.
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so.
Speaker 1: I'm not aware of that one.
Speaker 3: So....
Speaker 1: In the 1950s, there was a Mexican archaeologist who was
Speaker 1: doing some work in the Vasco basin in Mexico near
Speaker 1: the city of Pubella. And he was finding all these
Speaker 1: extinct Pleistocene animal remains there alongside human activity. So he
Speaker 1: called in some American archaeologists and they did some work
Speaker 1: and they identified this site called Huayatlaco, which is an
Speaker 1: archaeological site there. And they found these very sophisticated stone tools.
Speaker 1: They're like bifacial stone tools, which means they've been worked
Speaker 1: on on two sides. And it's quite a sophisticated level
Speaker 1: of tool. And so they found this and they were like, OK,
Speaker 1: this is an interesting site. Let's bring in some geologists.
Speaker 1: So the geologists came in and they were expecting to
Speaker 1: date the kind of sediment around the tools to around 8,000
Speaker 1: to 10,000 years ago because they knew about a volcanic
Speaker 1: eruption that had happened at that time. And so they
Speaker 1: expected the volcanic ash to be from that. So they
Speaker 1: did all this testing. But then they found that the
Speaker 1: ash was giving these crazy dates, like 200,000, 300,000, up
Speaker 1: to 600,000 years old. And that was completely mental because
Speaker 1: the tools were below this layer of ash. And then
Speaker 1: they dated a camel pelvis, I think, that was in
Speaker 1: situ with the tools. And that camel pelvis came back
Speaker 1: to 250,000 years old as well. And that was in
Speaker 1: the same layer of the tools. So they kind of
Speaker 1: brought all their different dating methods together. And there's multiple
Speaker 1: kind of geological dating methods on the sediment, the ash,
Speaker 1: and also the camel pelvis. And they kind of collected
Speaker 1: all this to a date of 250,000 years ago for
Speaker 1: this site, for where these tools were found. And yeah,
Speaker 1: and so they tried to publish this and they received
Speaker 1: like immense pushback because obviously this was the time of
Speaker 1: the Clovis first paradigm. And, you know, people weren't ready
Speaker 1: for Clovis to be broken, let alone by such a
Speaker 1: huge margin, like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years old.
Speaker 1: And they couldn't publish for like 20 years. And by
Speaker 1: that time, many of the artifacts had gone missing and
Speaker 1: they didn't know where they were and the site actually
Speaker 1: got raised, like it got kind of removed. And I'm
Speaker 1: not trying to say that's like some conspiracy or anything,
Speaker 1: but it just means that you can't really prove it.
Speaker 1: But they did eventually publish and the geologists have always
Speaker 1: stuck by this date and there's multiple lines of evidence
Speaker 1: that suggests that the tools were found below this layer
Speaker 1: of roughly 250,000 years old. And that's obviously like hugely
Speaker 1: older than we think humans have been in the Americas.
Speaker 1: So It's a very interesting site. I want to give
Speaker 1: a shout out to Will Brown, who's got a channel
Speaker 1: called Incredible History. He's actually been to the site and
Speaker 1: he kind of like nudged me in the direction of
Speaker 1: looking into this one. He's got a great channel. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's super interesting because we can't prove it because the
Speaker 1: tools have gone missing. The site no longer exists, but
Speaker 1: there's a paper out there written by serious scientists saying that,
Speaker 1: you know, there could be human presence in the Americas.
Speaker 1: over 200,000 years ago, potentially even older than that. And
Speaker 1: that would just radically change our understanding of humans in America.
Speaker 1: So then when you put all these sites together, so
Speaker 1: obviously White Sands is the earliest at 22,000. But then
Speaker 1: when you add that to Chicoete Cave, as I mentioned earlier, 33,000.
Speaker 1: Pedra Furada in Brazil, over 50,000. Cerruti Mastodon, 130,000. I
Speaker 1: don't really think Calico is.
Speaker 1: I think that's natural. But then we had Larko at 250,000.
Speaker 1: You know, it only takes one of them to be
Speaker 1: right for our understanding of when humans reached America to
Speaker 1: radically shift. And I think it's only logical that humans
Speaker 1: were in America a lot longer than we think. Because,
Speaker 1: you know, when we're talking about the vast span of
Speaker 1: time that we've been on this planet, why couldn't we
Speaker 1: have reached these places?
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And then the question is, how did we reach them?
Speaker 2: And from where? You know, from where? Exactly. That's the
Speaker 2: weird thing is some of the When you look at
Speaker 2: like pyramid structures, for instance, like where did that idea
Speaker 2: come from? How did that idea make it to the Aztecs?
Speaker 1: All over the world we find pyramids.
Speaker 2: Weird. It is weird.
Speaker 1: I mean you could say that it's just like a
Speaker 1: logical way of building things, but maybe. Who knows?
Speaker 2: Well, there's also the weirdness in the fact that the
Speaker 2: Aztecs themselves didn't build the pyramids.
Speaker 1: Oh, with some of them.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like, uh, Teotihuacan was there before and they said it was,
Speaker 1: the name literally means place where the gods lived and
Speaker 1: they found it there. And, uh, so it was before
Speaker 1: them and they don't know who built it.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: They give us lots of our names. They get, they
Speaker 1: gave us the name Olmec. Olmec means, uh, the rubber people, uh,
Speaker 1: because they knew about the Olmecs. They knew they existed
Speaker 1: before them, but they didn't know, really know who they were,
Speaker 1: but they just called them the rubber people.
Speaker 2: Is it because they lived around rubber trees?
Speaker 1: I think it's because they use rubber or something. I'm
Speaker 1: not 100% sure.
Speaker 2: So what's the conventional theory about who built these Aztec temples?
Speaker 1: I think the theory is that it was a culture
Speaker 1: that came just before the Aztecs that we don't have
Speaker 1: a name for. But they don't know.
Speaker 2: Imagine you don't know anything about them. You don't have
Speaker 2: a name for them. But they made insanely sophisticated architecture
Speaker 2: with stone.
Speaker 5: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2: That mirrored the cosmos.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no one knows who built the Pyramid of the Sun.
Speaker 1: I think that's what it's called at Teotihuacan. But it's
Speaker 1: ginormous and it's incredible. And there's all these different layers
Speaker 1: to it and incredibly sophisticated. But we don't know who
Speaker 1: built it. We don't really know when they built it.
Speaker 1: I mean, we think we know kind of the region,
Speaker 1: but we don't know. As is the case with so
Speaker 1: much of this stuff, we do not know.
Speaker 2: Is there a conventional timeline?
Speaker 1: For Teotihuacan?
Speaker 2: Yeah. And what are they basing it on? If they
Speaker 2: think it came right before the Aztecs? Because I had
Speaker 2: read as long as 1,000 years before them. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean that's kind of what I mean by right
Speaker 1: before because I'm thinking in these big– That's a long time.
Speaker 1: It's a long time, yeah.
Speaker 2: The United States is not even 300 years old.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course. But yeah, what I'm trying to say
Speaker 1: is I don't think it's like way, way, way old.
Speaker 2: Right, right, right, right. So somewhere around 1,000 years before.
Speaker 2: But that's the thing. It's like how many of these
Speaker 2: things happened where there was some sort of a civilization
Speaker 2: and then it collapsed? and then new people came along.
Speaker 2: The idea that you would have a civilization that was
Speaker 2: capable of building something as fantastic as some of those
Speaker 2: Aztec constructions, and then they would just go away.
Speaker 1: We just lost all memory of it, all memory of it.
Speaker 1: And then people just wandered up there one day, the Aztecs,
Speaker 1: and they're like, whoa, what is this?
Speaker 2: And it was probably covered with jungle, right?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, how many of those things were just absorbed?
Speaker 2: by you know the just the just nature and.
Speaker 1: It's no wonder that they think it was built by
Speaker 1: gods right because you see it and you're like that
Speaker 1: is incredible who built this it must have been the
Speaker 1: gods and there's no one living in it mark and
Speaker 1: just so it shows how easily human civilizations can reach
Speaker 1: a really high peak level of sophistication and then go
Speaker 1: down again and collapse and just all memory of them is.
Speaker 2: Gone yeah um any other cool things you've discovered recently Well.
Speaker 1: There's also the question of when humans reached Australia, which
Speaker 1: I think is another really interesting question because the conventional
Speaker 1: time is 65,000 years ago. And there's a site called
Speaker 1: Majed Bebe in Northern Australia. And that's the earliest accepted
Speaker 1: site in Australia. And that's right in the north of
Speaker 1: the country. And it makes sense because you have to
Speaker 1: cross water to get to Australia. You have to build
Speaker 1: boats and cross water. But there's another really interesting site
Speaker 1: that's right in the south of Australia where archaeologists found...
Speaker 1: Blackened stones again and charcoal and hearth-like structures. And they
Speaker 1: dated this site to 120,000 years ago, which is double,
Speaker 1: just about double the time that we think humans were
Speaker 1: in Australia. And it's in the very south of the country.
Speaker 1: And the archaeologists that are working there actually wrote in
Speaker 1: their paper that the evidence supports a cultural origin over
Speaker 1: a natural origin so they think that it's cultural as
Speaker 1: in human rather than natural but they can't prove it
Speaker 1: because there's no associated artifacts and no associated skeletons but
Speaker 1: they think that it it kind of leans towards being
Speaker 1: a cultural origin. And obviously if that's correct, that means
Speaker 1: human beings were only in Australia twice as long as
Speaker 1: we thought, but also had inhabited the entire continent or
Speaker 1: not inhabited, but had gone through the entire continent right
Speaker 1: down to the very south of the country, twice as
Speaker 1: old as we thought. And it's just another thing that's
Speaker 1: like pushing it older and older and older. And it's
Speaker 1: not accepted, but it's so hard to prove these things
Speaker 1: because we can't find skeletons or we can find skeletons,
Speaker 1: but it's extremely rare. So The bar is so high
Speaker 1: for proof, but this site called Moygill 120,000 years ago is,
Speaker 1: I think, very strong suggestive evidence that human beings have
Speaker 1: been in Australia twice as long as we think. And
Speaker 1: obviously that means that they had to have got there
Speaker 1: by boat. And yeah. That's another interesting one.
Speaker 2: Wasn't there something that was done on the genetic connection
Speaker 2: between Australian Aboriginal people and Denisovans?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. They think that maybe there was different migration
Speaker 1: pathways and different human species potentially also reached Australia. And
Speaker 1: it's not that wild because if you think back to
Speaker 1: the seafaring thing we were talking about earlier, if people
Speaker 1: were reaching islands over a million years ago, then why
Speaker 1: couldn't they have reached Australia much earlier than we think?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Because if we had that capability for so long,
Speaker 2: Why not? When they do this, is this– I mean
Speaker 2: because obviously they didn't even know about Denisovans until 2010.
Speaker 2: So is this like genetic analysis? And if so, like
Speaker 2: do they have genes? Like how do they get genetic
Speaker 2: material from these Denisovan skeletons? I think you can take
Speaker 2: it from– Like a tooth or something? I'm not quite sure,
Speaker 2: but I think you can. I think they know the
Speaker 2: kind of genetic makeup of the different human species. So
Speaker 2: I think you can tell that way if you've got, like,
Speaker 2: a trace of the DNA. Yeah, that's what I was saying. Like,
Speaker 2: if it's fossilized, do they have actual DNA from Denisovans?
Speaker 2: And if they do, like, how are they guessing that people,
Speaker 2: Aboriginal people in Australia, have some traces of it? Just
Speaker 2: like Europeans have traces of Neanderthal.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And also people in.
Speaker 1: I think like Nepal and these high-altitude places, they have
Speaker 1: quite high traces of Denisovan DNA, and that's what they
Speaker 1: think allows them to live in high-altitude environments. They think
Speaker 1: that Denisovans are more robust than modern humans and can
Speaker 1: live in more extreme environments. And they think that people
Speaker 1: that live in those kind of high-altitude regions of the
Speaker 1: Himalayas and stuff have that kind of gene, if you like.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that's the science behind it, but they
Speaker 1: think they have the traces of that, and that's what
Speaker 1: allows them to live in these more isolated places. high
Speaker 1: altitude environments.
Speaker 2: So they think Denisovans lived in high altitude, mostly?
Speaker 1: Maybe.
Speaker 2: They don't know. Well, there's only a few bones, right? Exactly.
Speaker 1: So it's really hard to tell.
Speaker 2: So fucking interesting, man.
Speaker 1: And also in that region, they found recently the oldest
Speaker 1: evidence of advanced surgery, which is like way older than
Speaker 1: we think. It's like 31,000 years ago. They found some
Speaker 1: surgery in Borneo, which is again in this same region.
Speaker 1: I think Indonesia is such a fascinating region because It's
Speaker 1: the place of where the Sunda Shelf was, where obviously
Speaker 1: the sea level's risen, have covered a huge expanse of
Speaker 1: land that used to be land, but now no longer is.
Speaker 1: And so many interesting discoveries here. But yeah, this surgery
Speaker 1: thing is, they found the skeleton of a child that
Speaker 1: had had his leg amputated, but had lived for many, many, many,
Speaker 1: many years afterwards. And his whole lower leg had been
Speaker 1: amputated off and but like healed like completely and he
Speaker 1: lived like or she i think as a girl lived
Speaker 1: like a lot longer after that and obviously that's quite
Speaker 1: an advanced thing to to do right because you have
Speaker 1: to understand how to prevent infection you have to it's
Speaker 1: a very humid place as well so it's very hard
Speaker 1: to survive probably was very painful for that individual but
Speaker 1: this pushed back our understanding of surgery by like 20
Speaker 1: 000 no maybe not quite that long i can't remember
Speaker 1: i think it was like 7 000 years ago so
Speaker 1: yeah by a long way because this is 31 000
Speaker 1: years ago So again, it's showing prehistoric humans to be
Speaker 1: far more sophisticated than we think. They were performing surgery 31,000
Speaker 1: years ago and surviving and living for years afterwards.
Speaker 2: That is insane. I wonder if they had any pharmacological
Speaker 2: interventions to deal with the pain.
Speaker 1: Well, I think they would have used wild plants because
Speaker 1: we've got so much evidence now of other human species
Speaker 1: and our human species using wild plants to– For medicinal purposes.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: We see Neanderthals doing that a long, long time ago,
Speaker 1: like cultivating wild plants and using them as painkillers and
Speaker 1: stuff like that.
Speaker 2: What's going to kill the pain of a fucking amputation?
Speaker 1: Well, probably not much.
Speaker 2: Of a bone saw. I know.
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 2: And they're like, what kind of tools do they have? Like,
Speaker 2: what were they doing it with? How did they stitch
Speaker 2: people up? Did they have needles? Did they have thread?
Speaker 2: Did they just leave the wound open? Like, what did
Speaker 2: they do?
Speaker 1: But whatever they did, it worked. And they were sophisticated
Speaker 1: enough to keep that person alive and to care for
Speaker 1: them and for them to live years afterwards. Excuse me.
Speaker 2: It's wild. It's wild.
Speaker 1: So it's yet more evidence of people being super sophisticated
Speaker 1: so much longer in time than we thought. And it
Speaker 1: all points in one direction, man, which is humans have
Speaker 1: been here longer. They've been more intelligent than we thought
Speaker 1: for a long, long time.
Speaker 2: If you had to guess, what do you think is
Speaker 2: the oldest... real true civilization how long when do you
Speaker 2: think it started.
Speaker 1: So i think in terms of like what we call
Speaker 1: civilization in terms of our current like cycle of it
Speaker 1: if you like i think it is and whatever came
Speaker 1: before that but i don't think it would probably been
Speaker 1: that far further before that but i think that from
Speaker 1: the onset of the holocene i think we basically started
Speaker 1: right away all over the globe and you know develop
Speaker 1: civilization because it happens everywhere right back to question one
Speaker 1: why did it happen everywhere all over the time because
Speaker 1: i think that's what humans do i think once we
Speaker 1: get a stable period of climate we we innovate because
Speaker 1: agriculture and civilization can't have been a very hard invention
Speaker 1: to do because everyone did it it happened everywhere all
Speaker 1: over the world so it's not like a really unique
Speaker 1: hard thing to do because people did it everywhere so
Speaker 1: that makes me think of what about all the other
Speaker 1: periods of stable climate that we've had and now that
Speaker 1: we know that human beings have been around for so
Speaker 1: long we've had It's something like four stable warm periods
Speaker 1: in the time that we have modern sapient fossils, so 300,000 years.
Speaker 1: But then if you extrapolate that out to this million
Speaker 1: year timescale of modern sized brains and modern behavior with
Speaker 1: the seafaring, it's something like 11 warm periods that we've
Speaker 1: lived through of stable climate conditions that have lasted for
Speaker 1: over 10,000 years. So you look at each of those
Speaker 1: warm periods and you think, if agriculture and civilization isn't
Speaker 1: that hard seismic of an invention to do, Why couldn't
Speaker 1: it have happened in those previous warm periods, 11 of
Speaker 1: them going back to a million years and possibly beyond?
Speaker 2: There's also that very weird phenomenon when someone somewhere figures
Speaker 2: something out. Even if people aren't connected, other places in
Speaker 2: the world, people figure it out at the same time.
Speaker 2: We know that to be the case today. Rupert Sheldrake
Speaker 2: has a term for it. I think it's called– is
Speaker 2: it morphic resonance? So his term is also based around
Speaker 2: theories that they've done with rats and mazes. That if
Speaker 2: you teach a rat a maze on the East Coast,
Speaker 2: rats on the West Coast learn it quicker.
Speaker 6: Really?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's got lots of interesting work, hasn't he? About
Speaker 1: kind of almost telepathic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, weird stuff. Yeah, very weird stuff. There's probably some
Speaker 2: sort of Akashic record. There's probably some sort of shared
Speaker 2: field of information that whether or not it's tangible and
Speaker 2: you can write it down verbatim or whether or not
Speaker 2: it's some sort of implied concepts and ideas that are
Speaker 2: transmitted online. through the species that like creativity itself is
Speaker 2: almost like something that we tap into like uniformly as
Speaker 2: a species.
Speaker 1: It's like you can like almost like we're in an antenna.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah and that like when michael button figures something
Speaker 2: out someone on the other part of the world's like
Speaker 2: oh i feel it yeah it's just very weird it's
Speaker 2: a very weird idea yeah you know and it's It's
Speaker 2: impossible to prove or– you can imply it. And the
Speaker 2: rat thing is very interesting. I think they've done them
Speaker 2: with some other things as well. So it's interesting because
Speaker 2: like if that's not the case, then what do you have?
Speaker 2: A seafaring civilization that travels the entire globe? Do you
Speaker 2: have something that's so advanced they figured out how to
Speaker 2: traverse continents and they're bringing all this information with them?
Speaker 2: Is it one group? No, it seems like they all
Speaker 2: kind of figure it out at the same time or roughly.
Speaker 1: But it is pretty much the same time in comparison
Speaker 1: to the amount of time that we've been on the planet, right?
Speaker 1: It's not a coincidence.
Speaker 2: It's an explosion. Exactly. Yeah. So why?
Speaker 1: Because the reason given is the climate. That's the old reason.
Speaker 1: But I think that is the reason because, you know,
Speaker 1: the climate got warmer. So agriculture, civilization. And yeah, that
Speaker 1: makes sense. But then why not before? Why not in
Speaker 1: all of these 11 warm periods where humans have been
Speaker 1: here and been smart? If it's such a common invention,
Speaker 1: why didn't it happen before?
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Maybe it did. Maybe it did. It's also interesting how
Speaker 2: much stuff, like, if you think about the global temperature, like,
Speaker 2: where is it always warm? Well, it's always warm around
Speaker 2: the equator. It kind of always stays warm around there. And, well,
Speaker 2: what's around there? Well, the Amazon.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And even in periods of, yeah, like... the fully glaciated
Speaker 1: periods some places on the earth were perfectly habitable right
Speaker 1: so who knows but then i mean and that goes
Speaker 1: back into the like you say the amazon it goes
Speaker 1: back into the question of how long have humans been
Speaker 1: in america because if we've been in america and the
Speaker 1: america's for a lot longer than we think then people
Speaker 1: have been in the amazon a lot longer we think
Speaker 1: and then you look at the discoveries in the amazon
Speaker 1: and how there's been civilizations there a lot further back
Speaker 1: in time than we thought. Well, how far back in time? Obviously,
Speaker 1: the evidence we've seen so far doesn't point like crazy
Speaker 1: back in time, but we don't know.
Speaker 2: Well, there's so little evidence. That's the problem. I mean,
Speaker 2: they're just recently discovering these grids, right? And so how
Speaker 2: much archaeological work has been done on all these grids? Oh, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: It's so hard. And also the rainforest is such like
Speaker 1: an extreme recycling kind of natural machine that it's going
Speaker 1: to destroy anything that's older than... than uh right a
Speaker 1: few thousand years.
Speaker 2: Ago so it doesn't mean there's not stuff that's older
Speaker 2: than a few thousand years ago it just means there's
Speaker 2: nothing left.
Speaker 1: And they could have built in organic materials that have
Speaker 1: just decayed and you would never see it and they
Speaker 1: could have been done with doing that hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of years ago and who knows so it's wild man
Speaker 1: it's so wild i think there's the potential is all
Speaker 1: enormous just absolutely enormous and that's why i do what
Speaker 1: i do because i think it's so fascinating and i
Speaker 1: love talking about it and i love uh getting other
Speaker 1: people to think about it. And that's the great privilege
Speaker 1: of me being able to do this job.
Speaker 3: So, yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, it's an important job. It really is. Because those videos,
Speaker 2: although they are, you know, just YouTube and they're entertaining,
Speaker 2: they're just, you know, something that anyone can digest. There's
Speaker 2: so much valid, fascinating information on them and so many
Speaker 2: valid questions that we really can't quite answer. And it
Speaker 2: expands the, like, when people watch them you get this
Speaker 2: understanding like oh wow this is a big puzzle this
Speaker 2: this thing is really complicated like it's a lot more
Speaker 2: complicated than we've been told especially by you know people
Speaker 2: that want you to believe that they have they have
Speaker 2: the answers.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's why i just hate it i hate the
Speaker 1: certainty that people talk about the past because i never
Speaker 1: talk about with certainty i'm not saying this is necessarily
Speaker 1: true i'm just saying you know possible possibilities everywhere so
Speaker 1: many different possibilities And yeah, everything we seem to discover
Speaker 1: pushes it in one direction that's older and more intelligent
Speaker 1: back in time. And yeah, there's so many interesting things.
Speaker 1: And we barely scratched the surface today.
Speaker 2: I know. We could do this for days. Before we
Speaker 2: wrap it up, though, is there any other really interesting
Speaker 2: ones that you'd like to talk about?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was something interesting that came out in regards
Speaker 1: to writing. There's a couple of interesting things regarding writing.
Speaker 1: So obviously writing is the kind of marker of civilization.
Speaker 1: Like writing began, civilization began. but we're starting to see
Speaker 1: evidence of symbolic meaning being transmitted through symbolic notation, like
Speaker 1: way back further in time than we believe. So obviously
Speaker 1: the earliest writing is still thought to be about 4,000
Speaker 1: BC with the ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: But as you mentioned, Irvin Finkel, the kind of idea
Speaker 1: regarding Tashdapella having a similar thing, and that's 12,000 years ago,
Speaker 1: but there's much, much older evidence of humans conveying information
Speaker 1: in a symbolic fashion. So there's... An archaeologist called Genevieve
Speaker 1: von Petzinger, I believe she's called, and she found evidence
Speaker 1: that on all these Ice Age paintings that we find
Speaker 1: in Europe with all these incredible like bulls and bison
Speaker 1: and stuff, and you've probably seen them, but next to
Speaker 1: them is like this kind of symbol of notation that
Speaker 1: people have kind of overlooked for years. But she found
Speaker 1: 32 recurring signs across a period of 30,000 years all
Speaker 1: across the continent. And these signs, she thinks, are like a,
Speaker 1: not a language as such, but a kind of a
Speaker 1: system of encoding meaning. Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2: They're the signs.
Speaker 1: And she kind of makes the argument that these signs
Speaker 1: are not a language as such, but a kind of
Speaker 1: tradition of conveying information that lasted for 30,000 years. And
Speaker 1: that is such a long length of time. Like if
Speaker 1: you think about the oldest language Today, I think it's
Speaker 1: ancient Chinese and that's only a few thousand years old.
Speaker 1: And yet these signs appear all across the continent of
Speaker 1: Europe across a time span of 30,000 years. Pretty much
Speaker 1: exactly the same and just these signs. And they also
Speaker 1: find them in other continents as well. And she doesn't
Speaker 1: say there's any connection there. I'm not sure there is
Speaker 1: any connection there.
Speaker 2: The spirals are really weird. They find spirals all over
Speaker 2: the place, right?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They find these signs all over the world. Jamie, you
Speaker 1: might be able to find a.
Speaker 2: All over the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's like a cool map where they kind of
Speaker 1: point where it's found. If you scroll down a little
Speaker 1: bit on the left, that one, yeah.
Speaker 2: You see this. That's really blurry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, once it loads. But it's all over the world.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 1: And it's the same signs. Wow.
Speaker 2: That's crazy. So the same signs in Europe, North America,
Speaker 2: Central Africa, South America. Southern Africa, Australia, Malaysia, East Africa,
Speaker 2: New Guinea. Wow. Borneo, Myanmar.
Speaker 1: And she thinks it's like a much older symbolic tradition
Speaker 1: that humans have kind of carried with them in the
Speaker 1: kind of migratory routes. And it actually goes back much
Speaker 1: older than the Ice Age art date of like 40,000 years,
Speaker 1: but actually comes from when humans first reached Europe out
Speaker 1: of Africa and spreading across the world. And we've kind
Speaker 1: of kept the same tradition of conveying information. And again,
Speaker 1: this has massive implications for human intelligence, because even though
Speaker 1: it's not a full language, the ability to convey information
Speaker 1: in a symbolic way is a marker of really sophisticated intelligence.
Speaker 1: And so it's another really interesting discovery that kind of
Speaker 1: points towards intelligence. And also to maintain that tradition over
Speaker 1: such a long length of time is really interesting, because
Speaker 1: we don't really do that. As I say, the oldest
Speaker 1: language is ancient chinese and it's only a few thousand
Speaker 1: years old and yet these people somehow managed to pass
Speaker 1: on this language quote-unquote for 30 000 years.
Speaker 2: Have you ever heard anybody discuss the concept that human
Speaker 2: beings might have had some sort of some sort of
Speaker 2: telepathy that atrophied when we started using language and writing
Speaker 2: and communicating with words.
Speaker 1: What's really interesting is the human brain size has decreased
Speaker 1: since Civilization began.
Speaker 3: Uh-huh.
Speaker 1: Which is strange. And it makes sense because if everything
Speaker 1: was oral before, you need more of your brain to
Speaker 1: hold all the information. But once you can kind of
Speaker 1: outsource it to physical objects, you don't need so much brain, like,
Speaker 1: size and space.
Speaker 2: How much has it decreased?
Speaker 1: I can't remember off the top of my head. But
Speaker 1: I don't think that's even controversial. I think there's quite
Speaker 1: a lot of evidence that the human brain size has
Speaker 1: decreased a little bit in the last 10,000 years or whatever.
Speaker 2: Well, what... Weren't like there was some ancient people that
Speaker 2: thought writing was a bad idea and that you should
Speaker 2: you should remember everything and that writing and writing things
Speaker 2: down was actually going to degrade your memory.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it certainly does, because you don't need
Speaker 1: that brain like part of your brain anymore if you're
Speaker 1: not memorizing all the information you have. It makes us
Speaker 1: smarter as a whole, as a civilization.
Speaker 2: And then if you extrapolate, so do hard drives. Exactly.
Speaker 1: It's happening on an even bigger scale now with AI and.
Speaker 2: Stuff like that. Yes, exactly. Same process, though. People talk
Speaker 2: about chat GPT decreasing people's intelligence.
Speaker 1: Well, because it outsources thinking itself, which is a crazy step.
Speaker 2: And we're going to just go like a raisin. Exactly.
Speaker 1: So, I mean, maybe we're regressing. But I think as
Speaker 1: a civilization, we're learning more.
Speaker 2: Yes, collectively.
Speaker 1: But as the individual.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Maybe we're aggressive.
Speaker 2: And our potential to learn and just to remember things.
Speaker 2: Just from when I was a boy, I knew everybody's
Speaker 2: phone number.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And now I know anybody's. I know like three people's
Speaker 2: phone numbers.
Speaker 1: Because we don't have to memorize anymore.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: It's wild.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And there was also another paper that came out regarding language,
Speaker 1: which is they found over 200 objects. And it's around
Speaker 1: the same date, around 40,000 years ago. And they basically
Speaker 1: found like a proto-writing script that had the same level
Speaker 1: of complexity as the early Sumerian scripts from 3000 BC,
Speaker 1: but from 40,000 years ago in Ice Age Europe. Again,
Speaker 1: so it's like another kind of proto-language symbolic thinking and
Speaker 1: conveying meaning through symbols. I don't know if, I can't
Speaker 1: quite remember off the top of my head, Jamie, but
Speaker 1: if you type in like, it was this year. So
Speaker 1: if you type in P-N-A-S proto-writing script, 40 000 years
Speaker 1: ago or something they found it like loads of like
Speaker 1: symbols engraved on bones and they argued that it was
Speaker 1: the same level of complexity as the early sumerian scripts
Speaker 1: and again this was the marker of civilization 3000 bc
Speaker 1: but now it's this capability is so much older now
Speaker 1: because of these new discoveries yeah i.
Speaker 2: Saw that it's really weird like when you're looking at
Speaker 2: the writing like okay what are they like the little
Speaker 2: scratches on the bones and clay and whatever it is
Speaker 2: Like what are they conveying? Do we even understand what
Speaker 2: they're conveying or just assume they're conveying something?
Speaker 1: Well, I think they categorized it and they seem to
Speaker 1: think it is a kind of proto-script.
Speaker 2: Fucking weird, man. Like that's a script?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, like a proto-script. So like the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that became language, but.
Speaker 2: Right, so there had to be a precursor to language.
Speaker 1: A written language. But if it existed 40,000 years ago,
Speaker 1: it's so much older than we used to think this
Speaker 1: capability emerged.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And what does that what does that kind of entail?
Speaker 2: Can I see that again, Jamie, the images? How weird.
Speaker 2: And so at the bottom, that looks a lot like cuneiform.
Speaker 1: I think the, I think these ones are examples of
Speaker 1: more advanced, but they're saying it's at the same level
Speaker 1: as this, but 40,000 years.
Speaker 2: Ago, which is vastly older than cuneiform. It's so interesting.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you've seen the, we talked about this yesterday
Speaker 2: as well, the Italian guy who came up with this
Speaker 2: concept of erosion dating. Oh, on the pyramids. Yeah. That's
Speaker 2: another weird one. It was like at the high end,
Speaker 2: he thinks it might be 20 plus thousand years old.
Speaker 2: It's like, okay, what?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because he compared the erosion. Because there was an
Speaker 1: earthquake like 500 years ago that kind of shook all
Speaker 1: these casing stones off.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And he compared the erosion. with the blocks that had
Speaker 1: always been exposed, with the ones that had recently become exposed. And, yeah,
Speaker 1: he got this date. I mean, I'd like to see
Speaker 1: that method, like, tried and tested on sites we know
Speaker 1: the age of and, you know, proven that way before
Speaker 1: I take that too seriously. But, you know, it's interesting.
Speaker 2: It's all interesting. Listen, your show is super interesting. I'm
Speaker 2: so glad you're around. I'm so glad there's someone like
Speaker 2: you that's willing to do that kind of work because, obviously,
Speaker 2: Jamie and I are not going to do it. Not
Speaker 2: this week. but we're super happy to have you in
Speaker 2: anytime you've got some new stuff you want to talk about.
Speaker 2: And I'm really excited that your channel just keeps growing
Speaker 2: because it's really good, man. It could, you could really
Speaker 2: tell you put in so much work and so much
Speaker 2: effort and research and it's just excellent. It's super entertaining
Speaker 2: and it's right up my alley.
Speaker 1: So I appreciate it, Joe.
Speaker 2: Thanks for being the fucking man. Thank you, man.
Speaker 1: We'll straight back at you. And I really appreciate all
Speaker 1: the support you've shown me. Like it doesn't go unnoticed, man.
Speaker 1: Like it, it really means a lot. And, uh, Yeah,
Speaker 1: if I could just do a little self-plug real quick.
Speaker 1: I've got my channel, Michael Button, search it up, everyone,
Speaker 1: and check me out. But also, I just started a
Speaker 1: second channel called Patterns of History because I'm really interested in,
Speaker 1: once we move into recorded history, it's really interesting to
Speaker 1: see how when the silence lifts and we have these
Speaker 1: ruins we can cross-check and these dates we can kind
Speaker 1: of match to different civilizations. It's so interesting how civilizations
Speaker 1: seem to follow the same patterns all over the world
Speaker 1: of rise, collapse, fall, things like that and it applies
Speaker 1: today i think we see the same patterns happening and
Speaker 1: civilizations always think that they're more advanced and there we
Speaker 1: go thanks and better than the ones before but right
Speaker 1: i mean it's another fucking i could go on for
Speaker 1: another three hours on that but it's so it's so
Speaker 1: interesting how we see the same recurring patterns happen throughout
Speaker 1: civilizations across recorded history as well so that's like another
Speaker 1: little project that i'm i'm working on but i'm still
Speaker 1: a I'm still going to go as hard as I
Speaker 1: possibly can on the kind of archaeological lost history side
Speaker 1: of things.
Speaker 2: Well, it's beautiful that you have so much time to
Speaker 2: do two different channels too. It's awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I'm trying my best.
Speaker 2: Well, you're kicking ass, dude. Congratulations. It's awesome. Always great
Speaker 2: to have you. Thank you for being here. One more time,
Speaker 2: people want to see your channel. They want to find you.
Speaker 2: What's the best place? I know you're on Spotify now
Speaker 2: as well, right? So just audio?
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it's the videos as well.
Speaker 5: The videos as well?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I just put them up there so people can,
Speaker 1: if people, some people prefer to listen, they let me
Speaker 1: know that.
Speaker 2: So I put it out there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I've got both my channels. I'm also about
Speaker 1: to make some music.
Speaker 2: People should check out my music. Yeah. I'm in a band.
Speaker 2: This is my band. Oh, that's the alien head.
Speaker 1: That's why I keep wearing the alien head.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, what's the name of your band?
Speaker 1: We're called headache.
Speaker 2: Uh, if people get it, it's like the headache. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um, so people want to check that out.
Speaker 2: What kind of music?
Speaker 1: Punk rock.
Speaker 2: Oh, you're a fucking punk rocker.
Speaker 1: I used to do that all the time. And then
Speaker 1: COVID kind of fucked us up and we couldn't perform
Speaker 1: live and our drummer moved to Australia. Um, But we're
Speaker 1: going to try to make some music again in the
Speaker 1: near future.
Speaker 2: That's awesome.
Speaker 1: This is Headache.com if people want to check that out.
Speaker 2: Check it out. All right. Michael, thank you. Appreciate it, Joe.
Speaker 5: Look at that.
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 2: Get us on. Moody-looking motherfuckers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the boys.
Speaker 2: Get your hair out of your eyes, bro. Can't see
Speaker 2: you like that.
Speaker 5: Bye, everybody.