#2546 - Michael Button

Michael Button is a YouTuber who explores ancient mysteries, lost history, and societal collapse.https://michaelbutton.substack.comhttps://www.youtube.com/@MichaelButton1 Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Visit https://ketone.com/Rogan for 30% OFF, or find Ketone-IQ at Target nationwide. Use code ROGAN at https://BlueChew.com to get 10% OFF + Free Overnight Shipping on your first order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Hey, good to see you, brother. What's going on?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Good, man. It's been, um, it's been a wild year for me.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  I bet it has been.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Since, um, since I was last here. I mean, I've seen my YouTube growth in numbers I couldn't have imagined before. I've met so many cool people. I've managed to get to a point where it's now my job to research and investigate ancient history and the vast mysteries of our past. And yeah, I mean, that's something I was doing for, for free before. So the fact that I'm now able to do that full time is just an immense privilege. And I'm so grateful to everyone that's helped me get there, including you.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Well, you're putting out fantastic content.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  And so, and it's such an interesting subject. And the giant blind spot that the mainstream archaeologists have left has allowed all these people to go through and get a much larger audience even than them.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  And it's, it's really important when someone like you does it because you're so thorough and you're so objective and you're so, you're so measured in the way you describe these things and talk about these things. There's no fantastic claims, no hyperbole. It's all very well laid out. And even when you go to like extreme possibilities of these things, it's very measured. So I really appreciate that.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. I appreciate you saying that. And yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm always trying to make it as good as I possibly can. And I try and listen to what people say and try and improve. And I don't think I've reached like the peak of where I could possibly be. But, you know, I'm trying my hardest. But it's not just that. I mean, as you say, I think there are so many people out there. And now that I'm in this position, I've seen it firsthand, there are like millions and millions of people around the world that are deeply fascinated by these questions, by the vast mysteries of our past. So.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  As well as should be. And they also know that we're getting a very narrow version of it from mainstream academics. And they're so determined to cling to their timelines and cling to this notion that anything new that's discovered by people outside of their little circle can't be accurate. And I think that's so silly.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think someone like me has the kind of advantage of the fact that because I, you know, didn't continue my career in academia, or I wasn't in academia, but that was the pathway that I was on.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Because I've gone independent now, I kind of have the freedom, if you like, to talk about these ideas in a much more open way than maybe I would have been able to if I was, well, wouldn't been able to if I was still in academia. Because, you know, I'm not restricted by funding or I'm not restricted by even the pressures of, you know, people working in academia hating on me. I mean, I get a lot of hate anyway. But I mean, I think I have that freedom to almost come at things from a completely open minded perspective and speak about these ideas without any restrictions. And I think that is the advantage that I have that academics perhaps don't.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  So yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm in a great place.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. So let's get into it. So in the last year, a lot of wild stuff has been discovered, which is really exciting.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  It's so interesting how quick this stuff is moving.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's wild. I mean, there's been, I think, two papers in particular that have come out in the year since I was last here on the show that I think have huge ramifications for how we view history.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I don't know where to start. I mean, I think, I think we should start like this. I think as things currently stand, there are three huge questions that archaeology cannot answer. And it's interesting because these three questions, we used to think we had an answer to. But in light of new discoveries, in light of new evidence coming up, we no longer have the answer to these questions. And I think that's fascinating because it's almost like the rug has been pulled out from underneath our understanding of human history. But on the surface, it's kind of like business as usual. Do you know what I mean?

• 4:12Speaker 00

  So what are these questions?

• 4:13Speaker 01

  So, I mean, and this is just coming from me, right?

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  And caveat on the whole conversation, I'm not an academic, I'm not a professional archaeologist. I'm just, I mean, I have a degree in ancient history, but I think my main qualification is that I'm a super nerd for all this stuff. And I spent my whole life researching it. So that's the caveat on everything. So don't take what I say as gospel. And I always encourage people to go and look at the actual archaeology. Go and read the journals, read the papers and go investigate what yourself, for yourself, like listen to what I say. But don't take what I say as gospel because at the end of the day, I'm just a YouTuber, you know? So that's the caveat I want to put on it. But from my mind, these are the three questions that I think archaeology can no longer answer, but used to think it had an answer for. So the first question is, and we spoke about this a little bit last time, is the fascinating question of

• 5:00Speaker 01

  why, after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of human beings like us being on this planet, why did it take so long for civilization to emerge? And then why, when it did, did it emerge in all these different unconnected locations all over the globe at pretty much the exact same time? So we see civilization flourishing in Mesoamerica. We see civilization flourishing in South America, in Egypt, in the Indus Valley, in Mesopotamia, in ancient India, in ancient China, all around about the same time, give or take a thousand or so years. But compared to the time span of human beings on this planet, you know, 300,000 years plus for modern humans.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  And I would argue some of these papers are showing that it could be a lot longer than that. Why, after so long, did civilization suddenly crop up all over the place? And we no longer can answer that question in light of new discoveries. So that's question one. Why did civilization emerge everywhere all at once after so long of not doing so? Question two is, how old is human intelligence? How long have humans been intelligent? How long has a mind like ours really inhabited this planet? And I think two papers in particular that have come out in the 12 months since I was here have huge ramifications for that question.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  And also combined into that is the question of other human species. How intelligent were other human species? Because we used to think that we were the smart ones. I mean, our name Homo sapiens literally translates to wise man, which is an incredibly humble thing for us to say about ourselves. But, but yeah, so, so that's question two. How old is human intelligence? And again, I think the answer is, we don't have the answer anymore.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  So that's, that's really fascinating. And then question three is, when did humans first reach the more isolated land masses? So that's the Americas where we are right now and also Australia, which is perhaps less important, but still interesting. And again, we don't have the answer for that anymore. And I think whatever the answer is to these three questions, why does civilization appear everywhere all at once? How old is human intelligence? And when did humans first reach the more isolated parts of the world? The answer to those questions, whatever it is, I think is fundamentally important because whatever the answer is, is the reason we're all here, right? Is the reason we all live in this civilization. It's the reason we all enjoy the fruits of everything that we exist in today.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  And yet we don't know the answer anymore. But as I said, on the surface, everyone's kind of carrying on like it's business as usual. But we no longer know the answer to the most fundamental questions of how we got here. So, yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  So for question number one, why did all of these civilizations emerge roughly the same time? What do you think? Do you think that this is incorrect? And that these civilizations probably existed far earlier than that, but there's no evidence of them because of time and just erosion and natural catastrophes and fill in the blank, all the factors. And, or we have not discovered some of these yet, like some of the weirdness of the Amazon, you know, as they find these, what would appear to be the grids of ancient cities that are hidden in the jungle

• 8:33Speaker 00

  that they're discovering with LiDAR and these other technologies that were unavailable until fairly recently. So we know that not only was the Amazon filled with people, but it was filled with millions of people. And that's crazy. That is a crazy shift in the way we used to look at the Amazon just a few decades ago. And we don't know who these people were. We don't know, like, if you go really far back, like, the Olmecs is just a word. We gave them that word. We don't know what the fuck they were doing. We have no idea what they looked like. We know, uh, some of the heads look roughly either Polynesian or perhaps even African. It's very strange. Very strange. Big, giant heads that are left behind, and that's like the cornerstone of what we understand

• 9:18Speaker 00

  about the civilization? Okay. What? How long? Six thousand years, we think? Who knows? It's just a rough guess? Like, there's really nothing to, to go on. Um, do you think that, uh, this is just like as far back as we can find stuff? Or do you think, well, what do you think?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Well, I think-

• 9:39Speaker 00

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• 11:11Speaker 00

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• 12:09Speaker 01

  Well, in terms of the civilization question, I think it's just, it's, I think it's an old idea that we kind of drew this line. And it's, the line is the invention of writing, right? So it's around 3,000, 4,000 B.C. was the invention of writing, or supposedly was the invention of writing. And that, in the 20th century, was kind of given as the marker of civilization. We were finding all these civilizations in the 20th century, like ancient Sumer. And so that was kind of given as the start of civilization. But I think, in terms of, like, more recent stuff, so 3,000 B.C. back to like 12,000 B.C., I think the answer is that clearly civilization is older. I mean, considering we see things like Tash Tapela, Gabeckli Tepe, 12,000 years ago. I think that is a civilization. I think

• 12:50Speaker 01

  over time, that will come to be accepted as a civilization. And I think, whatever you want to define civilization as, I think we can now clearly say that it did exist 12,000 years ago rather than 6,000 years ago. So that's a kind of doubling of the timeline. In terms of going back much further than that, I think then you get into kind of like purely hypothetical scenarios, like, is it possible? And that's when I think things like the history of human intelligence start to come into play, because it was incredibly recently that we thought humans were, only got intelligent, we thought humans were young, like, only 100,000 years old, only a few decades ago. And now we know we're much older than that. And so this is how, what I mean about everything kind of being back on the table again, because we now have a incredibly increased time span of human intelligence

• 13:34Speaker 01

  that I would argue, and I'll, I'll come to this later, stretches over a million years. And yet, the old idea, which is still sort of in place, but I think is breaking, I think most archaeologists would accept that it's breaking, but the old idea was that humans only became intelligent around 50,000 years ago. And so, because that idea kind of was in hold, it almost made sense, right? So, humans only existed from 100,000 years ago, then got smart 50,000 years ago. Then the climate got good around 14,000 years ago. We see the agricultural revolution and the emergence of the first civilizations. Like, it was very neat, do you know what I mean? But now, in light of new evidence and in light of new discoveries, suddenly everything's back on the table. Suddenly, the whole time

• 14:16Speaker 01

  span of prehistory, or, not the whole of prehistory, but I would argue, and I'll get on to why I think this later, I would argue that the time span of human intelligence has increased by 20 times, from 50,000 to over a million years. And I'll explain why in a minute. But I think that puts everything back on the table. I think the, the possibilities of prehistory are, are so vast now because of, our understanding has shifted so dramatically in the last few decades. And I don't think anyone's really talking about it. And that's kind of why I do what I do, because I really want to bang this drum, if you like, that everything's back on the table, as I say. And, so yeah, I don't know, I kind of got a bit sidetracked there from the original question.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  Well, that's a, no, you, it's a great start. Jesse Michaels was here yesterday, and he had a really fascinating theory. I don't know if it's, is that his theory? Or is it someone else's theory? The, the ergot theory? His theory was that, um, he believes that agriculture, and that as they started agriculture, wasn't just significant in that you, you could, like, stay in one place, and you would have food, and you always had a reliable diet, you didn't have to worry about starving to death, and then you, because you had that sort of relaxation that came with that, you could start inventing things and building things, and, and civilization would advance. He thinks it's also because

• 15:40Speaker 00

  ergot grows on these different wheats and barleys and grains, and that these people, whether knowingly or unknowingly, were probably ingesting this psychedelic substance, which is akin to LSD, and that this was a key part of what Brian Mirarescu talked about in The Illusinian Mysteries, in his great book, The Immortality Key. And that this was probably what led to a lot of invention, a lot of innovation, a lot of alternative thought, a lot of creativity, and a lot of, like, you know, whatever the wild advancements of the time were.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Did you see that they just, um, not proved it, but they just, they just did a study on the Illusinian Mysteries where they kind of showed that they, they were doing, uh, they did have ergot? Because when Brian wrote that book, they hadn't proved that, but something just came out that-

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Did you see the, um, it was a puma bone pipe that they found that tested positive for DMT?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Where? In Eleusis?

• 16:41Speaker 00

  I do not know. I think it was, I don't, it might have been in the Ameri-, no, where was that? Peru. Peru, yes.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Really?

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Yes. How old is that, Jamie?

• 16:54Speaker 00

  See if you can put that into perplexity, if it knows what this is all about. Because it's a fascinating subject. Because not only does it, not only does it imply that they were willingly taking psychedelic drugs, it's somehow or another, they knew how to make DMT. Like, okay, what? Because that, that's a complicated process, when you have to separate the molecule from whatever plant it's in, and then you have to figure out that you need to freebase it or smoke it? Like, how, what?

• 17:22Speaker 03

  This is actually in northwestern Argentina.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Aha.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  The Andes, so it's still the Andes, but, um-

• 17:28Speaker 00

  The Inca Cueva, a high-altitude cave site in Jujoy, northwestern Argentina. Uh, the tubular smoking pipes were made from the long bones of a puma. They were found alongside, uh, Anadenanthera, Anadenanthera? Anadenanthera seeds, including a plant commonly associated with, uh, Vil-, Vilka Sibyl snuff traditions. Residue testing detected tryptamine alkaloids in the pipes. So they were figuring out how to take these seeds and smoke them.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Um, the material's been dated to roughly 2,130 BCE, over 4,000 years ago. That makes the find amongst the oldest direct archaeological evidence for intentional use of psychoactive Anadenther- Anadenanthera, Anaden- sorry, scientists in the southern Andes. That's fucking crazy. The careful answer is DMT was detected in pipe residues. But, uh, Anadentherera, uh, Colubrina is not simply a DMT plant. Its psychoactive chemistry can include, uh, Bufatin- Bufatinin DMT and 5-MEO DMT

• 18:54Speaker 00

  in varying quantities. Depending on plant material and preparation, the archaeological interpretation is that the pipes were used in a ritual context involving, one more time, Anadenanthera, rather than proof that people were using modern purified DMT. Either way, they're smoking whatever the fuck that stuff is, they're getting DMT from it. So they had figured out somehow or another that ingesting it through smoke. Now, the, one of the reasons why this is particularly significant is there's scholars out of, um, I think it's the University of Jerusalem, that, uh, believe that the burning bush, the Mo- that Moses encountered.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Some kind of psychedelic.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  That's what, that's exactly what they think. They think the translation was, it was, they believe it was possibly the acacia tree, which is apparently rich in DMT. So that Moses has, Moses trips balls and gets some really good, solid rules to live by and comes back with them and said, hey, this is what God said.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think there's, it's clearly the case that ancient cultures, not just in South America, but across the world, were using psychedelic substances. And yeah, that's interesting. I mean, the theory of whether that caused agriculture, whether that led to civilization or anything like that, I mean, I don't know, but it's certainly interesting that human beings seem to have been experimenting with psychoactive substances for a long, long, long, long, long time. And yeah, that's fascinating.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, and much like, uh, in our culture today, and you know, especially what happened in 1970, where all that stuff was demonized and put on schedule one. Back then, during the Illusinian mysteries, the reason why those mysteries stopped is because the powers that be were like, hey, these guys are a fucking problem. These trippy dudes with their weird ideas who, uh, invented democracy, uh, they're gonna fuck this whole thing up. We're not gonna be able to run it and tell everybody what to do and force them into going to war.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. Yeah, but the powers that be always wanna restrict any kind of like thought that's outside of the, uh, what they want people to think. They don't want people to think, uh, as freely as, as they can and I.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Well, anything that limits their control.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Um, you know, cause everybody wants control and there's always new groups that say, you don't know what the fuck you're doing. Let me take the realm. And that's always been the case. Um, which is probably good for people, you know? It probably is what leads to, I mean, not the war part of it, but probably these new ideas is what leads to an advancement of civilization, rather than stagnation that we find in some places in the world, where they haven't had a chance to do that.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  You know, like my friends that have been to Afghanistan, um, they had to serve over there, they're essentially saying that like, this, they're living like people lived thousands of years ago. There's warlords and they, they control regions and, uh, that's how they've always done it. And they live this weird nomadic lifestyle in the mountains and it's not much different than the way it was thousands and thousands of years ago.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Very clan-like, uh, when you live in, yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  And if you don't have, if that guy and these, these groups just stay in control forever, like, it's like, there's no motivation for them to change and evolve and grow.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  There's no innovation or anything like that.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, nothing's happening. Also, they're stuck in the mountains. So it's like, you're just trying to live.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  But, you know, when you, we think of these places, these very fertile places on earth, where like particularly Turkey, Turkey's fascinating, you know, and, um, many people are now speculating that that, if there is a singular place, that, but that might have been one of the birthplaces of true civilization. This episode is brought to you by BlueChew. Man, let's talk about BlueChew. They're already the number one brand for better sex, but what they're doing with BlueChew Gold is completely next level. Gold is a four-in-one formula designed to make your bedroom noisy again. Obviously, it gets you hard, like you're back in your twenties, and everything

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• 23:40Speaker 00

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• 23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it undoubtedly is. I think Tashtepele, which is in modern day Turkey, is the earliest evidence in my view of something akin to civilization. And now archaeologists will say it's not civilization because it doesn't quite tick off every part of the checklist, but I, I think that's neither here nor there. I think it's clearly a very sophisticated culture. I mean, you have like 14 sites there that are now clearly shown to be interlinked, shared symbolism, shared religious traditions, same architectural styles, very impressive architecture, clearly organized labor, stratified society, because how do you achieve that without someone at the top and someone below? And these are all things that we used to think were civilization, right? And yet, people aren't happy with us calling Tashtepele a civilization, but I think it will get there.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  But don't you think that's just because of them trying to protect their timeline that they've been teaching?

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think it will change. I think it will change.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  I don't think there's any other explanation other than that. I mean, it fits, as you said, all the criteria for civilization that we used to apply. And the fact that they were moving the goalposts just because they didn't know it existed.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  And they're finding residential buildings at Gobekli Tepe now, and that was always one that used to say, look, people didn't live there, they must have migrated there, but now they're finding that people did live there, like, I guess permanently, or at least semi-permanently. And look, yeah, there's all the sites and.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Quite a vast area all connected and, so the only ones they haven't got now is, is writing and there's an interesting, uh, discovery regarding writing at Gobekli Tepe and agriculture.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, we talked about that yesterday.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  The Irving Finkel thing.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, really interesting. So are those, where you see those pillars, are those sites where you have like the, those concentric circles?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  I assume so. Those are the famous ones anyway. Kalahan Tepe, Gobekli Tepe, Sayfitepe, those are the biggest ones.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  And only 5% of Gobekli Tepe currently has even been excavated, right?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Which is pretty crazy. When you think like, well, okay, how many of them are also still underground? Like, how many do we know only exist because of ground penetrating radar and all the other techniques?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's wild. Like, Gobekli Tepe, if all of it was excavated, is something like 50 times larger than Stonehenge, and Stonehenge is obviously an incredibly famous site, and yet it's so much bigger and, like, to be clear, it is standard arche- um, archaeological practice to not excavate too much of a site, but.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  What are we looking at here?

• 26:07Speaker 01

  That's Gobekli Tepe.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  And what are we looking at in terms of these, these grids?

• 26:12Speaker 01

  I think maybe that's the kind of archaeological.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  I think, I'm not 100% sure.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  It seems like it, right? Cause it, it seems like the grids go on top of these circles, which doesn't make any sense. So, obviously, they have to go very slowly. The, the risk of destroying some incredible find, some beautiful ancient thing because you're using tractors or something like that is too great.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  It's valid, it is valid, but I would argue, and I've said this before, is that Gobekli Tepe is a site that has such important ramifications for our understanding of civilization and the origins of civilization, that it should receive special treatment, right? Because it is the oldest site that looks like civilization. So I always think that maybe we should, not, obviously you wanna be careful when you go in and you wanna follow correct archaeological procedure, but at the same time, what if a relic, like equivalent to the Rosetta Stone, the, the one stone that we found that completely translated Egyptian hieroglyphs and opened up ancient Egypt to our understanding? What if some kind of equivalent artifact is hiding in the unexcavated 95% of Gobekli Tepe?

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  That could be waiting for that, for us to find and.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  We talked about this bore before, Joe.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  I don't remember ever seeing it, but it's not new, but it was also found at Gobekli Tepe. It was painted.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  Uh-huh.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  I think like some of the mouth was painted red.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  It's crazy looking.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  It's life size, I'm pretty close to life size.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  The whole thing is really fascinating because it's also, I think it's the first evidence of 3D carving in stone too.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, raised relief, I think it's called, yeah. Or that's a statue, but.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  What we're saying about that is, like, these boars and snakes and all these different animals that are on these incredible pillars, they're not carved into it, the stone is carved around it, which is advanced. It's, you know, it takes sophisticated use of tools and an understanding of how to work stone to be able to do something like that.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  And crucially, specialization, right? That's someone's job, they're not out there gathering food, that's their job, that's their, how they spend their time.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  And it's also, hey, how'd you move those?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  What, those stones are huge, the biggest ones are like, how many, how heavy are they?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  I think most of them are like 10 tons, but they, I think they found one that hadn't been moved by the quarry that was something like 50 tons, and obviously they would have assumed that they would have had a method to move that, or else they wouldn't have carved it out.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, 50 tons is high, and stubby little peckers.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  They're high light. It says clutching.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Clutching their peckers, yeah. Okay.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Whatever you're into, bro. Must have been a weird world back then. And then the real question is, is this the oldest civilization? Or is this the oldest reboot of civilization that was destroyed by the Great Flood? And by the Younger Dryas Impact, and whatever the fuck could have happened to whatever civilization previously existed? That's when things get real squirrely.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, exactly, because if, if that is a civilization, which I think it's becoming clear that it is, and it doesn't really matter how you define civilization, it's clearly incredibly sophisticated, like, it's a very sophisticated culture.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, that word is a problem.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, just like, who cares, it's clearly very sophisticated culture.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  It's like when Fauci was talking about gain of function. Like, hey fucker, you know what we're talking about.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. But, but yeah, that means that, you know, the timeline of civilization, whatever you want to call it, has doubled from 6,000 years to 12,000 years, so then the question becomes, how much further back does it go? Because clearly, Tash Depela, Gebekli Tepe, it's not the first thing these people built, they didn't, they weren't starting from scratch, they weren't just hunter-gatherers that thought, let's try something new and build this, like, it's clearly, there's clearly a long procedure up to that point, so how far back does that go? That's.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  And for people that don't know, we should probably explain that one of the reasons why they're able to accurately carbon test Gebekli Tepe is because, and this is where it gets really weird, the dirt is uniform in that it was intentionally covered. So these sites weren't covered, you know, just over time, like maybe the Sphinx was in Egypt, they were covered intentionally, and they were covered 11,600-ish years ago. So how old were they before they were covered?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, I mean, that's only the earliest date we have, but that doesn't mean it's the date that they were constructed, right?

• 30:34Speaker 00

  And why were they covered?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there is debate over that, but that's what Klaus Schmidt thought, the original.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  What is the debate?

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Well, some people say it wasn't intentionally covered, and it was just kind of like a landslide over.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Like a crazy landslide that'll happen at once?

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Because, I mean, it's really hard to prove.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  But what an amazing landslide that covers everything.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I would still lean towards the original interpretation from the original archaeologist, Klaus Schmidt, but obviously I'm not.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  And why did he think they covered it?

• 30:59Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Like, conquering civilization, or like, fuck these people and their beautiful pillars?

• 31:04Speaker 01

  No, I think he thought the people that built it covered it.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Well, I guess he can't, you can't tell, can you? And that's the thing with so much of this stuff, is that no one knows, and especially the further back you get in time, anyone that talks with any confidence around the past, and this is one of my main bugbears with archaeology, like, I love archaeology and I have a huge respect for the, for archaeologists, and I think they do amazing work, but one of my main bugbears is the confidence in which people talk about the past and ruling out other possibilities, because at the end of the day, none of us know what happened in the deep, deep past, especially when you start getting back to these crazy timescales. It's all speculation, and it doesn't matter if you're a YouTuber like me, or if you're a professor, we're all just speculating based on the very limited evidence that we have, and so I don't like it when people say definitive things.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  I always try and say, maybe this is the case, or maybe that's the case, we don't know. And I think everyone should approach history with that mindset, and that's kind of, if I can get any message across to people, it's that, that is the message, like, we don't know, and here's a possibility, and here's a possibility, and here's the evidence that we think is true, but, you know, it's really hard to tell.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  But it also does stand to reason that biology and archaeology, as they expand the timeline, as biology has expanded the timeline, archaeology should probably tag along.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, that's what I mean about the fact that the rug's kind of been pulled out from underneath us, like.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  Uh, what on purpose means here, there's good reason to think humans intentionally deposited at least some of the fill, enclosure D alone contained roughly 500 cubic meters of rubble and cultural debris, and particular items, including broken anthropomorphic sculpture heads, appear to have been deliberately placed near pillars during refilling. But archaeologists do not have definitive evidence for the often-repeated popular claim that its builders intentionally buried the entire site at once to hide it, preserve it, or mark a single ritual closure. The mound is man-made in the sense that it consists of accumulated archaeological deposits,

• 33:05Speaker 00

  but its formation involved both human actions and natural sediment movement, ending around 8,000 BCE. Yo, that's a long fucking time ago. I don't think people even really can wrap their head around how long we're talking, you know, especially, that's the other thing about, one of the things that I loved about your whole video series, was the one where you were talking about what would be left if there was a human civilization 100,000 or more years ago. And that's not unreasonable if this biology assessment is correct, is that there have

• 33:47Speaker 00

  been humans far longer than we used to think. So if that's the case, because if we used to think it was 50,000 years, I think when I was in high school, they were talking, they were saying the Homo sapiens were like 50,000 years old, or maybe 100, right? And now, the conventional estimate is like, what, 3?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  So the oldest fossils we have of anatomically modern humans are 315 to 360,000 years old. I mean, that's, it's the same fossil set from Gabelarude in Morocco, and, but this obviously is really hard to date accurately, but it's between 300 and 350,000 years.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  And then I think it's really important to note that the fossil record is incredibly incomplete, because most people don't leave a fossil.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Oh, it's so hard to, like, it's so unlikely that you'd fossilize, it's something like 1 in a million.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  So it's such a crazy metric to like, try to figure out what the past is from these tiny scraps, it's like trying to read a book by a single shard of a piece of paper with a half a sentence in it, and you're like, what do you think this book is about? Like, fuck.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  There's not much evidence, that's the problem, but the evidence that they do find is pushing the timeline way back, way back. And that alone, you would think archaeology would go, well, hey, guys, in light of this new evidence, maybe we should consider the possibility that civilization's quite a bit older than we think. If they are the same exact animal, what would take them 300,000 years to develop complex civilization and agriculture and all these different things? Like, why, why would it take so long? And is it possible that, given the, I mean, the incredible possibilities, in terms of

• 35:32Speaker 00

  like, what kind of natural disasters took place, just asteroid impacts that we know, we find them all over the earth, all over the earth, and some of them are 20,000 years old, 50,000 years old, we find them everywhere, and like, what kind of an impact would that have had? What would be left of those civilizations? And all those questions, again, guys like you are the ones proposing them and putting them out there, and it's a really good question. It's, especially in light of, you know, what we understand about humans biologically, like, wouldn't, doesn't it make sense that these people, these, just as, like, anatomically completely like us?

• 36:14Speaker 00

  Like, why would it take them hundreds of thousands of years to figure out a roof?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But I think it's, it's, I think we have clear evidence now that what we call modern intelligence, behavioral modernity, goes back so, so, so much further than we think. Like, I would argue back over a million years, in light of a couple of papers that have come out in the last 12 months.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  And what are these papers?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  So, I mean, there's been two really significant papers, I think, since we last spoke. One of them, I think, has really big ramifications for human intelligence, and that's a paper that came out regarding the island of Sulawesi, which is in Indonesia, and this is in relation to human seafaring. So, seafaring was always thought to be an exclusively sapien strait, exclusively modern human strait, because it's a really hard thing to do, right? You need to be quite clever to build a boat, to build something that's. Sophisticated enough to be seaworthy to get across ocean boundaries and to to reach isolated land masses. And we always thought that was only sapiens until very recently. But a paper came out in August last year. You actually sent it to me. Yeah, I don't think

• 37:27Speaker 01

  you sent me a post that was about stone tools that was found. And I was like, that's interesting. I clicked on the paper. And then I was like, oh, wow, look where these stone tools were found. And it was really, really interesting, because they were found on Sulawesi. And Sulawesi is an island that crucially sits east of something called the Wallace Line, which is a biogeographic boundary, which means that it has been an island and separated from the mainland for tens of millions of years, and separated by deep ocean channels that are between depending on the fluctuating sea levels at the time, between 50 and 100 kilometers across. So it's always been an island. And yet, in August 2025, archaeologists at a

• 38:06Speaker 01

  site called Calio found stone tools on Sulawesi. And that means that some type of human, probably not sapiens, but I guess you never know, some type of human managed to cross that ocean boundary and reach Sulawesi. And that's fascinating. But it's worth saying that it's not the only piece of evidence in the region. There's also a few, a decade or so ago, we found stone tools on Flores, which is just below Sulawesi. It's another island, and crucially, again, east of the Wallace Line. So again, you have to cross an ocean boundary to get to Flores. And they found stone tools there that are 1.02 million years old. And I didn't even say the Sulawesi tools are 1.04 to 1.4 million years ago

• 38:48Speaker 01

  to years old. So over a million years ago, some type of human was crossing ocean boundaries to get to these islands. And there's also Luzon, which is just above Sulawesi, same region. And they found stone tools there, which are 700,000 years old. Now, the theory always was that this was an accident. When we just had Flores, the the theory was that it was accidental drift. So and a couple of humans were swept out to sea and somehow survived the the stormy ocean and the tropical sun clinging to some driftwood and and made it to Flores and and somehow survived and colonized the island. But now that we've got Flores, Luzon, and Sulawesi, three islands, all in the same region, all separated by

• 39:29Speaker 01

  this ocean boundary, I think it's starting to point less towards accident and more towards behavior, right? More towards a deliberate sea crossing, because to to colonize, I was I was doing some research because of these discoveries. And there's actually been a few papers from NASA on how many humans you need to colonize an isolated landmass, because NASA were doing it for like, if you're going to Mars or something. And you need a certain amount of humans of breeding age to not have like genetic problems in a population to so you need a certain amount of humans of a breeding age to to ensure viability, right? Because otherwise, you're going to inbreed and you're all going to die out because of

• 40:12Speaker 01

  genetic issues. And they said it was something like, you need 160 people at least. And that is with strict breeding controls and genetic testing. We can probably assume they weren't doing genetic testing on themselves. And so then the number's somewhere near 500. So what are the chances that 500 individuals were all swept out to sea at the same time, all survived the the crossing and all landed on an island and colonized it? That's a huge amount of humans for for an accident, do you know what I mean? And then three times in three separate islands, all in the same region. At what point does accident start looking like behavior? Do you know what I mean? Because that is how what are the chances of 500 individuals all being swept out to sea, all surviving, all reaching these islands,

• 40:56Speaker 01

  and all colonizing in three separate occasions, all around about a million years ago?

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Not good.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  It's not. It's not a high chance, is it? And I think if we apply Occam's razor to it, which is, you know, the simplest explanation wins. I think the simplest explanation is that these humans were intelligent enough to build boats, right?

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  And that's, I mean, and that is a controversial opinion. That's not accepted. It's accepted that the humans reached these islands. That's not controversial. Humans were on these islands a million years ago, 700K.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  It's just not accepted that it was intentional.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not accepted that they built boats.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  That seems silly.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  But I think it's it's

• 41:30Speaker 00

  It doesn't make any sense. If it's not, 500 of them make it over by floating and surviving?

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  What?

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 41:37Speaker 00

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• 43:05Speaker 00

  payment options. That's better H E L P dot com.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. And this is what I mean about taking data points from different kind of science. So because I'm looking into what NASA are saying about humans colonizing somewhere. And I'm saying, well, look, 500 people or more than 500 people of breeding age as well, not just people, all reaching an island on three separate occasions, all in the same region. Are we sure this wasn't deliberate? So I think that has huge ramifications for human intelligence, because that was always thought to be exclusively sapiens thing, building a boat, because that's really hard to build a boat. You have to have planning, you have to have foresight, you have to be good enough at carpentry to to construct something that's seaworthy. You have to

• 43:48Speaker 00

  Trial and error.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, trial and error. And you have to have the imagination as well to dream about what's on the other side of the horizon.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  And the bravery and the incredible reckless courage to go for it, and to go out there across the horizon and reach an island and

• 44:02Speaker 00

  And possibly navigate through the stars. Like, they knew how to do that?

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Because otherwise, why would you set out, you know?

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Right. And how would you repeat it?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. How are you? Do you remember which way you went? Tower!

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  It's a fucking dude with a giant brow ridge.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Furry face is telling you, I remember going this way. Like, are you fucking sure?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  How are you doing? Are you using the stars? Like, what are you doing?

• 44:27Speaker 01

  And but humans weren't even men to have complex language back then. They weren't men to they weren't men to be capable of this.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  And yet, we're seeing these things.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Organization. There has to be some sort of organization. If you're getting a group of people to agree to get in the boat, if they can't communicate with each other, that seems ridiculous. That seems even more ridiculous. Because let's say at the the minimum of 50 kilometers, how long does it take you to row 50 kilometers? Seems like it would be days.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  It would be tough, wouldn't it?

• 44:53Speaker 00

  It'd be days.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  And an ocean as well, like a

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. If you even survive, how long is it going to take before you get across? I mean, maybe they figured out when the stormy season was, and they time it for when it's not so stormy. But I mean, how are they doing that? Do they have a calendar a million years ago?

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Whatever they were doing, if if it was deliberate, which I think the evidence points towards, it's a clear sign of what we call modern intelligence.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  And organization, and most likely communication.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Which we always used to think only emerged 50,000 years ago.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  And so now, if it's over a million years old, you know, that's like, that is a 20 times. And it could be 1.4. The Sulawesi tools are dated to 1.04 to 1.4. So that's, I don't know, what's that, like 25 times older than we think?

• 45:35Speaker 00

  That's so funny, the the point four. That's a lot.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  It's huge. It's absolutely gigantic.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  Hundreds of thousands.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is what you were saying about, like, people can't get their heads around the sheer enormity of these timescales that we're talking about. Like, it's so long.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  It's so long.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  Well, another weird one that that's come up fairly recently, that I know you've talked about, is the copper mining

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  in North America.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  That one blew me away. Just the volume of copper that was removed.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, they had a whole copper industry in North America 9,000 years ago, which is

• 46:10Speaker 00

  You just listen to that again. Say that one more time.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  A whole copper industry in North America 9,000 years ago. And that's the same as the earliest date anywhere else in the world.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  And the volume.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, huge.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  This is what's going to freak people out. Tell them how much copper was removed.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  I don't know off the top of my head, but it's a lot. And to be fair, there's lots of natural copper. I think it's in the kind of northern parts of the United States, as it is now. I don't know how much they removed off the top of my head, but it is a lot of copper and

• 46:38Speaker 00

  Like a commercial copper mine volume.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's why I said industry, like, it's big.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  It's it's so crazy. And I don't understand how they determined the amount of copper that was removed. But if that is correct, that seems to indicate that there was some sort of sophisticated metallurgy going on in North America 9,000 years ago.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is as early as anywhere else in the world. And that completely flies in the face of what we used to think about people in North America. And it's interesting because what the evidence appears to show is that they did this for a few thousand years, but then they dropped it and they stopped doing it. Now, I don't know what that suggests, but either it suggests something happened to them, or they decided they didn't want to do it anymore. But either way, it kind of goes against this idea that we've always kind of assumed that technology is like an escalator, right? We always assume that technology is an escalator. Yeah, there you go.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  Here it is.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  1.5 billion pounds of copper.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  What? So wrap your head around this, folks. Archaeology and date mining and copper tool use, but it generally cannot calculate annual or century specific production 9,500 years ago. One older broad estimate puts a total archaic period extraction in the Lake Superior region at up to about 1.5 billion pounds of copper, roughly 680,000 metric tons. But that covers many millennia, not the century 9,500 years ago. So that means that they were doing it for thousands of years.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  They're saying it covers many millennia.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were doing it for, yeah, as it says, the peak between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  That's crazy. That's crazy. So, at least 9,500 years ago, they started doing this, somewhere around there. And they did it for thousands of years. They removed copper for thousands of years.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  It's a bunch of it was just sitting on the top. They called it float copper, I think.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  Like that, like float.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  That's probably how they first started finding it, and then they probably started digging. Isn't it interesting how, like, precious, what we call precious metals? Just they exist in weird deposits. It's like erratic. It's all over the place. Like, come find me.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  And these people use this stuff for weapons. They use this stuff for jewelry. They used it for all kinds of things. Arrow points, I'm sure. They probably used it for all sorts of things. They had to use it for weapons, right?

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Probably, yeah. I think they found like spear points and stuff.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe that makes sense.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  But then they dropped it, and then they just, they stopped doing it. And we don't know why they did that, but as I was saying, it kind of...

• 49:29Speaker 00

  There's the copper head arrow.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  It goes against this idea that we have that's, that technology is like an escalator. And you just take one level of technology and you keep going up. It shows that people can invent something or discover something and then stop doing it and forget about it. And that, I think that has implications for how we look at prehistory as a whole, because it suggests that people, you know, rather than just going straight line, this linear path upwards.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  We can go up and down and forget things and rediscover things and...

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Right. And that's what the, um, this is the alternative theory. Is that we're, we're a reinvention of civilization currently. And that we're the most advanced reinvention that we're aware of. But it doesn't mean that there hasn't been some sort of a civilization before us that perhaps reached heights where we are or greater in a completely different direction. And I think when you look at some of the stone structures that exist, those are the best evidence. Cause they're so perplexing. The, the stones in Lebanon, what are they called? The trilithon stones?

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Baalbek, yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Those are crazy. Like, what happened there? How? What? How'd you get them up there?

• 50:34Speaker 01

  It's weird because they're attributed to the Romans, right? But there's no Roman records of them doing that. And it's, and that's not particularly weird in itself, until you realize that it's a bigger engineering project than anything the Romans did anywhere. I mean, the Colosseum is obviously an incredible thing, but the blocks aren't as big as these blocks at Baalbek. And yet they don't mention it anywhere. And you'd think that, you know, a civilization that documented as much the Romans would at least mention their biggest engineering project somewhere, you know? And I mean, that doesn't mean it wasn't the Romans, but it's just a weird thing, like...

• 51:06Speaker 00

  It's very weird. It's very weird. And it's also weird that, like many places, the structures that are on top of it are not as sophisticated, not as difficult to do. That's, that's how it is over and over and over again. That's Saksay Waman. That's a lot of these places. You see the base, the oldest stuff. It seems like they find stuff and they build on top of stuff that was already there. And then you're dealing with thousands and thousands of years of civilization where people don't even remember who built it. You know, they're like, uh, the gods. The gods put these rocks here.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  It happens all over the world.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  People build on old sites, because often the sites are the best site in the region, because that's why someone's built there originally. So it makes sense to reuse them. But that doesn't mean that the latest civilization that used it was the first. I mean, it could be, but it also doesn't mean that they are definitively. But often that's how we take it. And yeah, that's not necessarily the best way of looking at them, I think.

• 52:00Speaker 00

  I think what you said earlier is really important, that we can't possibly know. And to make these definitive statements about things where you just don't have enough evidence, you don't have enough facts. You, you can't really say definitively, we know. And that drives experts crazy, because they don't like to do that. They don't like to let that go, especially humans, especially men. They love, you know, the ego that comes with being the one who has the information, the expert opinion that appeal to authority, that I'm the one who could tell you, oh, this is nonsense. These Michael Buttons on YouTube with their bullshit, their archaeological bullshit.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  They love doing that. But no one's listening to them. That's what's cute.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, um, yeah, I mean, I'm grateful that a lot of people listen to me rather than them.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  Like I said, you're really good at it. And it is undeniably, just based on what we've said so far. This is undeniably strange. It's undeniably weird, and it's undeniably, at least to me and you, interesting. You know, and that's, uh, that's why the subject will, you know, hopefully will continue the pathway that it's on. Cause there's so many people like you now that are looking at this stuff, and they're very credible people, who are very objective. The Ben Van Kirkwicks of the world, and Jimmy Corsetti's, all these people that are looking at stuff and go, hey, there's a lot going on here, people. There's a lot.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's interesting that, it's like, the more we uncover, the more we discover, the more new evidence that comes out. I think what we're starting to realize is that the limits on our own knowledge are vastly bigger than we ever used to think. Like, we used to think we kind of had it figured out. And this is what I'm talking about with those three questions I mentioned at the start. Like, we used to think we had the answer to these big questions. But with each new discovery, we're starting to realize just how vast the unknown is. I think, I think you, I think there's two subjects where this kind of applies. I think the first is physics, and obviously I'm not smart enough or clever enough to talk about physics in any meaningful capacity. But I think it's fair to say that the more we learn about the nature of reality and the universe,

• 54:11Speaker 01

  the more we realize just how big it is and how crazy it is and how little we understand about our place in it. And, but I think the other subject is history. I think the more we learn about history, the more we realize how huge the amount of time humans have been on this planet is. How long a mine like ours has been on this planet, how long humans that are very similar to us have been on this planet is. And I think it's a vital thing, because it's, physics is kind of the question of where are we? But history is kind of the question of who are we and where did we come from? And that's why I'm so interested in it, because it's a fundamental question to civilization and to who we are. And I think it's really important. And so that's why I talk about this stuff.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and also it's cool.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  It's very cool. It's so fascinating, man. I love it. And I know you love it too, and it's just great.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's, it's so weird, you know? It's so, it's so weird to think, like, what was it like thousands and thousands of years ago? What, what did they know? Where did they learn it? And was, are these stories, these flood myths that exist in all these ancient cultures? Is this an echo of a historical record of people trying to keep track of this event that took place? That crushed us and brought us down to, you know, a few thousand people all over the world, and we had to rebuild? And that's, it's also when you, you go back thousands of years in the conventional timeline.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  People were so barbaric. They were so horrible, just a few thousand years ago. If they were capable 5,000 years ago of building ancient Egypt, or probably earlier than that. But if, why were they so brutal 2,000 years ago? Cause I think those are the people that survived. I think the people that survived were probably fucking terrible. Cause they had to be, you know? If there's only like, we know that like the Toba volcano, which was like, um, is that Indonesia? Um, 70,000 years ago, got us down to what? Just a few thousand people globally?

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Imagine that life?

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  Imagine, imagine what you had to do to stay alive. Imagine even the thought of raising children in a world where there's only 7,000 people left and limited amounts of food? And, you know, most of the population of Earth is dead? What?

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  Like, this is crazy.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  We've been through some crazy things as a species.

• 56:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. You did it, didn't you do a video of, um, there, there's some evidence that at some point in history, most people were killed off in war?

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Yes, that is related to what you were just saying about, so just after the agricultural revolution. The theory is that because humans then had like property and were kind of defending things, that people got a lot more violent. And there's a lot of evidence that around 6,000 years ago,

• 57:11Speaker 01

  basically all the men died. There's like evidence that 95% of male bloodlines were removed. And we can see this from the Y chromosome in, in genetics. And there's a massive drop off of the diversity, the genetic diversity in male bloodlines. And something like 95% went. And no one quite knows why this is, but we see lots of mass graves around this time, and violent graves. And like, all these people were killing each other. And it might not have been that, but it's weird that it only affected men. Because if it was a natural disaster, it would, you know, it wouldn't be specific to either gender. But it's only men, so some people think it's like a big amount of violence, and, but no one really knows. But it's really interesting.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  Well, doesn't it make sense, though? I mean, think, if you go from hunter and gathering, where you're constantly moving, nomadic tribes, people, a bunch of people stick together. You're in tents or whatever, and then all of a sudden you're stationary. And, uh, you've developed agriculture and you stay put. And then there's hunter gatherer tribes that still exist, because guess what? They still exist today. So it's not like it was a uniform discovery of agriculture. Everybody adopted it. And there was no more hunter gatherer tribes, and there's no more tribes of wandering marauders. So there's still these tribes of wandering marauders. And so now you have to defend this spot, because you're stuck there. Cause you're, you're dumbass build a house. Or like, the Mongols used to make fun of people that lived in houses. They, you know, they, they thought they were fools.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  And they, they lived in felt tents, period. That's how you're supposed to live. You keep moving. And this idea of staying put, like, look at these idiots. Like, we're just gonna go sack their city. Like, they really had no respect for people that were so stupid that they, they stuck themselves behind walls. Like, you assholes can't even run away. We're gonna launch lit human beings on fire with catapults onto your thatched roofs and set everything ablaze. You know, turns out people are like really good at starting fires when you light them on fire, because we're fatty.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  Mongols figured out a lot of cute stuff. But, you know, it makes sense that that's when war would become ubiquitous. This episode is brought to you by Ketone IQ. I've tried a lot of supplements, but for years it's been one thing that I've been obsessed with to keep my brain locked in, and that's ketones. An energy molecule our brains naturally create when pushed to our limits. Ketones used to cost thousands of dollars a shot and were only used by super elite people. But now, thanks to a $6 million research contract with the military, Ketone IQ had a breakthrough and you can finally get ketones online on Amazon or at Target for $5 a shot. They don't taste good, but damn do they work.

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• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, once we settled down and once we owned...

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  You stay put. You become a target.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. And you have something to defend, be it livestock or crops or houses, as you say. And so, yeah, there's quite a lot of evidence that violence did increase massively as we entered the agricultural age that we're still in. So that is interesting.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  It's very interesting, and it also is logical. It's a logical progression of how people would behave, given the fact that now all of a sudden they have resources, that they've accumulated it, they have a very specific location, they have to defend that location, that's when people figure out walls and that's a bigger, you know, whatever. The weird thing is the Great Wall of China, like, the arrowed turrets are facing the wrong way.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Are they?

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of it, a lot of the Great Wall, the arrows are facing inward.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  Trying to keep people in rather than out?

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Or try to keep people from China...

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Escaping.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Going to wherever, whatever's on the other side. It might have been, some sections of it weren't constructed by the people that we think were constructed it. You've never seen that?

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  No, I've never seen that.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  It's very weird. Like, people pondered, like, why do the arrow... Because there's these slots where they can be protected but shoot arrows through. But they're facing towards China.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  They're not like China defending the wall against the Huns. It's weird.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  That is strange. That is strange.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  See if you can find some of that.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  I'm looking it up. It doesn't, it's not a really great answer in this.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  Hmm. So, part of it is and part of it isn't. Mostly, the Great Wall's defensive features face north outward, towards the step, the usual direction of major raised innovation, but many surviving sections have arrow slits and parapets facing both north and south, including seemingly inward towards China. Why face inward? Defense after a breach, if attackers cross the wall or capture a tower, so they prepare to be invaded? Hmm. Chinese garrisons needed to shoot and counter-attack from the south side as well. Control of movement both ways. The wall was a network of forts, gates, signals, rows, not just a one-sided barrier. Also regulated border crossings, trade and movement.

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  It is crazy that they've invented a wall that you could see from space.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  I know, it's wild. It's like one of the biggest engineering projects ever.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  Like, how long is that? Is it like a thousand miles or something crazy?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  I have no idea, but it's big.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  How long is the Great Wall of China? Take a guess. I say a thousand miles. It's probably more.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Easily. China's so big in itself and the fact that it's the whole, like...

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. What do you think, Jamie? Take a guess.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  Six thousand kilometers?

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  Six thousand?

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  Wow. Jesus, Jamie. You would be really good on The Price is Right.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not...

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  21,000 kilometers! Holy shit! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! 13,171 miles. Motherfucker, that's crazy!

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Have you ever been there?

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  I've been there, it's cra... It's amazing. It's so beautiful. The whole region around there, I mean, obviously it's really long, but...

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  The famous continuous-looking Ming-era wall that most visitors picture is much shorter. Still, 8,850 kilometers. When associated structures and natural barriers are included, UNESCO describes the overall Great Wall complex as more than 20,000 kilometers long. So, at the very least, the part that you visit, the Ming-era wall, 8,850 kilometers, which is fucking wild. That is so much wall.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  Like, what were they doing? So it was built over 2,000 years, from early walls in the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE through major work in the Ming Dynasty, which ended in 1644. Have you ever seen some of the stuff that Cassie Coppersmith has talked about in regards to ancient technology evidence from China?

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Not specifically her stuff, but there's lots of weird, lots of weird things in ancient China.

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, weird stuff, like jade artifacts that seem to be machined, that don't make any sense, that are like super old, and that seem to be artifacts that were passed down from generation to generation. And, you know, thousands of years ago, the civilization that was in possession of them, their current ability to make artifacts was like much cruder. So it seems like this was older stuff that they had somehow or another acquired.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  And they lost their knowledge of...

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  Like, wafer-thin jade, highly polished, seemed to be machined, like weird, weird stuff.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  I haven't seen that specifically, but, yeah, that's interesting. I don't know about that.

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's, it seems like a, like a really clear pattern that exists everywhere, that there was something like the, these ancient vases that they find in Egypt.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  That they find these in these old sites, and that these things that were carved out of diorite, which is insanely hard stone, and carved to, you know, within, less than a human hair of variance. Not only that, if it was on a lathe, how do you account for the fact that it has these handles on the side? Like, how the fuck did they do this? And this was all stuff that was like really, really old by the time these people had it. And that these people, their current state of pottery and sculpture and so, much cruder than this stuff. So it seems like these are like really old things that are artifacts of a time where things were more sophisticated. So it's more evidence of this...

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Up and down nature of technology.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  Up and down nature.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's logical, right? That people learn things, discover things, excel at them, and then later people forget them.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Of course, especially when you take into consideration natural disasters. Natural disasters, wars, things along those lines. You know, like Baghdad, before the Mongols got there, was like the center of science in the world.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. The Arabs, yeah, they were incredible at science. And then, it's just the natural cycle of civilizations, and we see that throughout recorded history. So why would it not be the case for human beings in the much, much, much, much, much larger period of time, which is prehistory? But it's not just, thing is, it's not just like natural disasters and things, and obviously that plays a part, but it's also just the sheer nature of preservation, right? Such a long amount of time that we've been around human beings on this planet, this is just almost impossible for things to survive when we talk about these 100,000 years, 200,000 years.

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  It's so hard for things to survive that long.

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

  Right. Any objects, any things that would be left over, like, you know, I'm sure you've seen those AI depictions of what New York City would look like in just 1,000 years. It's like, nothing. Everything's crumbling, gone.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  It's mental.

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  No buildings, no glass, everything gets absorbed in the earth, you got a jungle where Manhattan is. And maybe you would stumble upon a piece of metal one day.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. But even then, like, I mean, I've done quite a lot of research on material degradation, and almost all our modern materials, other than stone, are gone in a few millennia. And a few millennia is a long time, but not compared to these timescales that we're talking about.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  No. If these timescales are accurate in terms of the human brain, in terms of the ability to logically, like, view the world, invent things, creativity, if they possessed this 300,000 years ago, like, why, why wouldn't they have figured a lot of this stuff out?

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  They definitely did. That's the thing, like, the seafaring thing over 1 million years ago, okay, you can debate it, it could have been an accident, I suppose. I don't think it is, but you can debate it. But I think that we have completely undisputable evidence that human beings were this intelligent 500,000 years ago with the Colombo Structure, which we spoke about a lot last time. Like, that is undeniable evidence that some kind of human was unbelievably smart 500 or 476,000 years ago.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, was building houses.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Or building something.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  Some sort of structure.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Whatever that is requires incredible levels of intelligence. It is clear evidence of what we define as modern behavior.

• 1:08:47Speaker 00

  Right, and it probably wasn't a one-off.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Definitely not.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  And so this is what you found, so then it means, were they teaching each other? Would, did, so, okay. So if they were teaching each other, what kind of language did they have? What kind of concepts could they grasp?

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  You're not doing that without abstract thinking, without symbolic intelligence.

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  Right. And how far did it go? Because if, it's very rare that we find a piece of wood from that long ago that we can carbon date and that we can test. So how much, how much do we not find? Most of it?

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, almost all of it. Because the chances of that surviving is so unbelievably unlikely.

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  I'm a moron, but I had a thought. Uh, my thought was if AI can get so intelligent that it can do an accurate account of all of the objects on Earth, all of the people on Earth, all of the things on Earth, essentially every molecule that exists on Earth, and then extrapolate back to how they got in that position in the first place, whether through natural ore deposits, natural disasters, volcanoes, all these different things like, I wonder what kind of a version of a timeline

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  we would be able to construct with like a super advanced artificial intelligence? I wonder if it's possible to get a framework that is much more definitive than what we're looking at now? I don't know if it's possible, I mean, you'd have to have enough technology that you would be able to literally like scan the entire outer crust of the Earth, which seems daunting today, but ground penetrating radar seemed ridiculous 500 years ago, right? So as we continue to expand, I mean, AI is solving math equations that have perplexed mathematicians for 50 years. They're solving it like that. So this is a new thing. It's, it's very, very rapidly emerging thing.

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  I wonder what kind of a, what kind of a version, what kind of a map of history, at least in terms of like rough timelines of things we'll be able to get.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  That's the great hope for archaeology, right? Is that modern technology allows us to discover things that we previously would not have been able to discover. And as you say, LIDAR is the, the current example of that. But if you just extrapolate forward, what else could we possibly

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  use to, to discover things that we haven't?

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  Of course, something like that will emerge because nobody even considered like, again, 500 years ago, what are you talking about? 500 years from now, who the fuck knows? Who knows? We, we literally can't imagine what kind of breakthroughs are available.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  That's the hope.

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  But again, I think part of what makes me um, think that perhaps we're not going to discover stuff is this preservation problem because so much of it is just gone. I mean, I guess if like what you say, if we can like somehow extrapolate back.

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

  Or time machines.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  They could figure out a time machine. That'll throw the whole monkey wrench right into the gears.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think that whatever happens, our current understanding of history, that's, that cannot be the, the kind of endpoint. That what we currently think about history is, is there's no way that we've like reached.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  No, there's no way we're done.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  And that's why it frustrates me so much when people are so definitive about it because it's like, you really think that we're not gonna, because I mean, that's the, science is always advancing in every single field all the time. And we, we're never at the point where we've discovered everything. And yet there's always people in every period of history that think this is the kind of upper limit.

• 1:12:31Speaker 00

  What would be around from 300,000 years ago?

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  Other than what we've found so far, stone tools, shit like that, like metal would all be gone.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing. Everything would be gone unless it's like incredibly unlikely preservation, like the Colombo structure, like incredibly unlikely for it to happen. But I mean, there could be other things like that out there and there almost certainly is, but.

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  Most things would be gone.

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  That's what's exciting. It's like, God, you don't want to dig up the whole world, but you kind of do.

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not that old, but this is a jade sword with, or sorry, the handle's jade. The sword would have been probably metal. That's why the metal's all fucked up, but the handle is not.

• 1:13:10Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  So anything with cool rocks or crystals or?

• 1:13:12Speaker 00

  Hmm, right, right.

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  Diamonds and?

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, the handle is kind of all that's left. The sword is a rotten piece of shit.

• 1:13:20Speaker 03

  There's a few other old uh,

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the one, these, these discs are really weird.

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  3000 B.C. to 2000 B.C. Uh, but they have, I was just doing the research. Up until the Ming Dynasty, I think it was like 16, they have a book someone wrote about how they were doing this.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  But this was, that's, that's in 1600.

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  What did they do?

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

  I mean, various, various things.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  In 1600?

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  But some of these are 3000 years older than that, which is weird.

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  Jade artifacts.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  Wow. Isn't weird how?

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  This is the cooler shit though, nephrite.

• 1:13:59Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  But the description on how they did this, I'm almost not, I'm, I'm, I have to take it as they say it. But like the description of how they did it was like they would put abrasives on string and slowly wear away the jade.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  How did they do these three dimensional little carvings?

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it says like they would put, they'd get this slurry of water and tiny abrasives.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  That one that you just showed, how old is that one?

• 1:14:27Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't even know what it is.

• 1:14:29Speaker 00

  That's fucking weird. It says, how did ancient Chinese carve? What's the word?

• 1:14:35Speaker 03

  That's the question I asked.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  Without metal tools?

• 1:14:37Speaker 03

  This is the link, I think.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  What is that image? That's crazy, man. What's that from?

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  Where's that from?

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  Carving.

• 1:14:48Speaker 00

  What year is that?

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a modern master. Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. Cause I was like, how, how could you do that? That's like the flower petals and everything like that? That seems like you need metal tools. Oh, so this is just an article on the evolution of Chinese jade carving?

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  Okay, so this is a modern, okay, that's why it's confusing.

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  Amongst other stuff. That's older.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  A griffin. Um, obviously older.

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  Some of these are drilled, like these little holes, if you look and zoom in real close, you can see evidence of drills. But that's not, you know.

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  You could have hand drills.

• 1:15:26Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:15:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you could have harder stone that you've figured out how to work into a position. And you could have sand and there's a bunch of things they could use. Pretty wild.

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  Something like this, I mean, it's very crude.

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, all that is like, you could attribute that to ingenuity and, you know, craftsmen with years of learning how to work these different things. It's when you get to large stuff that you're like, okay. How'd you get these stones from Aswan? How'd you uh, how'd you get a 50 ton block of granite and move it through the mountains with no roads? Help me out.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  They rolled it all apparently.

• 1:16:06Speaker 00

  How'd you get hundreds of them, thousands of them, millions of them? How'd you do it?

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  It's too wild.

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is very wild and uh, it, and like some of these things, I'll, I'll send you the Cassie Coppersmith episode that I did with her. Cause some of the stuff is like, it's very confusing because the timeline is pretty clear that this is older stuff. And the older stuff is more complex, more difficult to create and seems to indicate the use of machinery. You know, one of the things that she pointed out was this crazy statue of a Buddha. Is that in India?

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  Uh, where the guy achieved enlightenment by standing still? And it's, how tall was it? Is it 90 feet tall?

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I remember the one sticking out of the.

• 1:16:51Speaker 00

  Largest individual standing statue, thousands of years old. Looks like it's machined, like really weird, like really weird statue.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  There's so much weird stuff in India.

• 1:17:04Speaker 00

  And how did they get it there? Did you guys, did you move it there or was it?

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  They carved it out of the?

• 1:17:08Speaker 00

  Right. Or was it a stone that you said, hmm, wouldn't it be dope if we just?

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  Oh wow.

• 1:17:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, look at that fucker with a big giant hog.

• 1:17:16Speaker 00

  But I mean, it's really detailed. It's like, see if you can find a good image of it, young Jimmy. There's some uh.

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  I have her photos still on my computer.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really wild. And she said, you see it from a long way away. Somebody put their watermark right over his dong. How rude.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's insane.

• 1:17:35Speaker 00

  They knew you were going to be looking right there.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  Me?

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  No, everybody. Humans.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  There's also like the, the Kallasa temple, I think the one where they carved right, yeah, carved right down somehow.

• 1:17:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Hammer and chisel apparently.

• 1:17:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  Who knows? It's incredible sophistication though.

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  That's the one where they, an army went to try to destroy it and they tried for years and they gave up.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, they barely put a fucking dent in it. They scratched a few things up, but they, they worked on it for years to try to destroy it.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Why?

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  Cause some new guy came along and said, fuck these people in the temple.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, this isn't my like religion. This doesn't suit my story.

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  Like what the Taliban did to those ancient Buddhists.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, they blew them up, yeah.

• 1:18:14Speaker 00

  I mean, there's over a thousand years old and they're like, no.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  An ISIS to Palmyra.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

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• 1:18:58Speaker 00

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• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  Plus get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only. I know, it's really sad. And if that's human inclination to do that kind of stuff, like, how long? How long have we been doing that?

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:20:44Speaker 00

  How much stuff is, yeah. How much stuff is not around anymore because some asshole came along and wanted it removed?

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it doesn't suit your narrative.

• 1:20:52Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Because everyone's always building a story. Humans have always done that, built a story around to legitimize uh power and rule. And if it doesn't suit your story, you destroy it and then, yeah.

• 1:21:03Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Would I be able to have some of that coffee?

• 1:21:05Speaker 03

  Hell, yeah, dog. Get on in there.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Thank you. I've got to wake myself up.

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're uh jet lagged. Trip across the pond.

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:21:15Speaker 00

  Uh, here he is. This is what it looks like. Isn't that wild, dude?

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  That's incredible.

• 1:21:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  What's the um date on this, the conventional date? Do we know?

• 1:21:26Speaker 00

  That's a good question. They're gonna have to carbon date his dong.

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  We don't know, but I'm sure it's known.

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  Uh, there's a guess, right? Like, what is the guess of the timeline?

• 1:21:37Speaker 00

  Whatever it is, it's very perplexing. It's a fifty-seven feet tall monolithic statue of Lord Bahubali.

• 1:21:47Speaker 03

  One thousand six, nine eighty-three?

• 1:21:49Speaker 00

  Okay, so ninety-three C E. That's what they believe.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  That's A D, yeah.

• 1:21:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, A D, current era. Uh, regarded as the tallest Jain statue until two thousand sixteen, construction of the statue was commissioned by the Ganga Dynasty Minister. Okay, so how? How'd you make that? Where'd you get it? How'd you get it there? You did that, what? You did that over a thousand years ago? And how do you, how do we know that that's the timeline? I mean, it's weird. It's weird because it looks machined. When you look at it, go back to uh some of the images, please. When you look at like the detail of the fingers and the toes and the uniformity of the face, it's fucking weird, man.

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  It's like these people had a lot of fucking resources. Look at the size of that dude standing next to it. Like, for real, how do you get that's, if you, if that's not a big, giant contiguous block that was sitting there, what is it made out of?

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Granite, I think.

• 1:22:56Speaker 00

  So that's not just a giant, perfect slab of granite that happens to be roughly in the shape of a guy? And you're like, wouldn't that be dope if we made a dude out of that with a giant dong? And just had him s- just staring over our kingdom?

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  But we don't do that anymore. That's just weird. We don't, no one's building things like this anymore.

• 1:23:15Speaker 00

  Certainly not out of stone.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:23:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, because we like to make money and it takes too much time to do a fucking pyramid? When you can make a nice skyscraper in just a couple of years and put a big Trump on the roof?

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Speaker 00

  Uh, no surviving technical manual records, uh, records rather the exact construction procedure. Archaeological and art historical understanding is that the artisans shaped the statue in situ, removing stone around the intended figure, roughing out the body, then refining the face, limbs, hair, and distinctive vines climbing the legs. Imagine if you fucked that up. This approach avoided the near impossible task of quarrying, transporting, and raising a seventeen-meter finished sculpture onto a hill. Yeah, so if they moved it, if there was definitive proof that it was moved there, then there's another monkey wrench gets thrown into the whole thing. And then you have to go, okay, how?

• 1:24:11Speaker 00

  But it does make much more sense if you just carved it out. But also, like, how long would that take? What kind of tools are we talking about? What kind of shitty-ass tools do people have at nine hundred C E?

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  Well, then here's the rest of the, you know, other stuff they did in India.

• 1:24:27Speaker 00

  They did weird stuff in India where they just carved stuff right out of the stone. Like, what? What was the motivation to build these temples, just carve them right out of volcanic stone?

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  It's insane.

• 1:24:39Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  So detailed as well.

• 1:24:41Speaker 00

  Insanely detailed. And also, some of the sculptures are three-dimensional. Like, how did you get behind them and carve that out? And how'd you make all these like weird things? Or have you ever seen some of them where they go over it with a light and you can see how three-dimensional?

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the Barabah caves, do you know about them, also in India, where it's like completely mirror polished surfaces?

• 1:25:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  And yet, the conventional explanation for that is that they were just shelters.

• 1:25:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  But why are they so precise? They're like completely precise and they've got this weird mirror polishing.

• 1:25:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  You don't need that if you're just building a shelter.

• 1:25:11Speaker 00

  And how about those pillars that look like they were cut on lathes?

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Like, what? How did you, oh, what's going on, guys?

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:25:21Speaker 00

  What did you, we're missing so much. We're missing so many details about the past. It's, it's so frustrating if you're really interested in it, because it's like,

• 1:25:32Speaker 00

  how much do we know versus how much are we just assuming?

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing, we're assuming so much. And that's why it bugs me when it's presented as fact. Or presented as we have to all the answers, because we clearly don't.

• 1:25:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, what are the other papers that have come out that have been?

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  So there was the paper about the one-million-year-old skull, human skull, that was found in China uh last year. And this is super interesting, because this is a human with a modern-sized brain, but that was found a million years ago. And so, again, that has implications for what was really going on a million years ago. And if you link that to the, what I would argue is modern behavior with seafaring in Southeast Asia, then you have a million-year-old skull found in China, in Northeast Asia.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  You know, you put those two things together and you suddenly got human beings with modern brains doing modern things a million years ago. And I think it's fascinating. So, I mean, the paper came out uh, I think in October last year, and what they did was they took, there are these fossils from a place called Yungshan in China. Uh, and they were discovered actually in the nineteen nineties. I think it was nineteen eighty-nine and nineteen ninety. There's two skulls, Yungshan one and Yungshan two. Um, but they were badly deformed. Yeah, there you go, Jamie, right on cue. Um, badly, badly deformed. And they were always thought to be Homo erectus because of where they were found, China, and how old they were, over a million years old. Because that was the only type of human that should have been in China or in that area at that time, at that, at that age.

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  They were always assumed to be Homo erectus, but a few researchers from a university in China, along with the Natural History Museum in London, a professor named Professor Chris Stringer, they applied modern reconstruction techniques to Yungshan two, the second skull. And uh, so they used something called C T scanning to reconstruct it. And what they discovered was that they think it's actually uh a Homo longi skull, which is this part of the same clad as Denisovan, Denisovan. And why that's important is that Denisovan is kind of like a sister species.

• 1:27:33Speaker 00

  Do you say Denisovan or Denisovan?

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:27:35Speaker 00

  I say Denisovan, but I keep hearing Denisovan. Like, I'm trying to change it.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the scientists say Denisovan. But the cave is Denisova cave. So it should be Denisovan, you would think.

• 1:27:47Speaker 00

  Fuck the scientists.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter. Denisovan, Denisovan, whatever. Either way, that, these scientists think this skull is um is Homo longi, which is a clad of Denisovan, which is crucially a sister species to Neanderthal and us, sapiens. Which means that if this skull is a million years old and if it is Homo longi, that means that the divergence of our species must have happened before them. So when humans split into Neanderthal, Denisovan, and Homo sapien, if this human was already walking around one million years ago, that means that whatever became us had already diverged at that point. So we were already a distinct species, Homo sapiens, one million years ago. Which is a staggeringly long amount of time and so much older than what we thought before. We used to think this was

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  around five hundred thousand years ago, so it's like a four hundred thousand or more than that jump from what we thought before.

• 1:28:36Speaker 00

  Have you heard the theory about Neanderthals? That they believe that Neanderthals were not just a separate um group of human, but were actually created by humans interbreeding with other ancient primates?

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  Um, how do you mean?

• 1:28:50Speaker 00

  So instead of Neanderthals existing previously, that Homo sapiens predate Neanderthals? And that Homo sapiens breeding with some other ancient primate, some other one of these, created Neanderthals?

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Maybe. I haven't heard that. I don't, I don't know.

• 1:29:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, I don't know if it's right. I, I read it and I was like, what? I was like, okay, this is, this is a crazy theory.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:17Speaker 00

  And it's um, you know, because the thought is that Neanderthals were bred out with, you know, that there was interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals. But that might have actually like predated Neanderthals themselves. Like, it might be the cause of Neanderthals. Is that humans, Homo sapiens, bred with something else?

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  Well, we definitely bred with Neanderthals.

• 1:29:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  Probably Denisovans and

• 1:29:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  Neanderthals and Denisovans bred together as well. And we're all so similar. The fact that we can have kids together is incredible. And they actually recently found evidence of uh humans and, as in sapiens and Neanderthals, actually coexisting for a long, long time in the same place and like living in the same place. And because you could always argue before that perhaps it was, you know, non-consensual uh breeding.

• 1:30:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  Between like a Neanderthal male, a sapien woman. But now we have evidence that we did live like alongside each other cooperatively. Yeah, I can't remember where the site is, but that was found recently. So, yeah, that's interesting as well, because.

• 1:30:12Speaker 00

  See if you can find any, whatever the hell I found about um Neanderthals possibly a result of humans breeding with other primates.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  With other primates? So is it not even?

• 1:30:23Speaker 00

  I mean, not other, other humans.

• 1:30:25Speaker 03

  That's what it said.

• 1:30:26Speaker 00

  Were not created by modern humans. They're a closely related extinct branch of the human family. This is a very recent proposal.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I might have asked the question too in a different way.

• 1:30:36Speaker 00

  How'd you ask it?

• 1:30:37Speaker 03

  I'd said, boy, that Neanderthals created by humans, which isn't really what you said.

• 1:30:41Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:30:44Speaker 00

  See if the, if you search, is there, put this in.

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  Is there a theory that Neanderthals were a result

• 1:30:59Speaker 00

  of human, of, maybe you see Homo sapiens? Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens breeding.

• 1:31:12Speaker 00

  With other.

• 1:31:15Speaker 03

  Primates?

• 1:31:15Speaker 00

  Primates. I guess you wouldn't say primates though, because that's a monkey. Other.

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

  Homos?

• 1:31:22Speaker 00

  Other homos.

• 1:31:25Speaker 00

  Other ancient humans, write that, ancient humans. Ancient human species.

• 1:31:33Speaker 00

  See what perplexity has to say about this. I wish I'd saved that.

• 1:31:40Speaker 00

  Because it was really interesting. It says, no, not as the main scientific explanation. That's, but that don't mean the main scientific explanation. I'm saying, is there a theory? I want to know if there's a theory.

• 1:31:55Speaker 03

  Uh, well, then that has to now, I mean, that's about how we're using this actual thing is I'm using it in a general way.

• 1:32:00Speaker 00

  Right, but not as the main scientific explanation, absolutely. But is there a theory? Has anyone, has anyone theorized that this is possible? Ask that.

• 1:32:15Speaker 00

  Theorized. That this is possible.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  It's gonna have to crawl, if it's new, it's gonna have to crawl the websites to find that.

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:24Speaker 03

  You know, it might not have.

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  I want it to crawl.

• 1:32:26Speaker 03

  I'm out, we can't make it crawl.

• 1:32:27Speaker 00

  Crawl bitch.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  They're gonna take over, man, they're gonna ruin the.

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  Yes, here it goes. Researchers have proposed hybridization based ideas, but generally not the exact claim that Neanderthals originally formed from Homo sapiens plus another species. What has been proposed? Paleontologists propose that particularly late Neanderthal or early modern human fossils might be Neanderthal Homo sapien hybrids or descendants of populations that makes repeatedly. No, this is not quite what I'm saying. This is what's fucked up when you watch too many videos and you read too many articles and you don't save them. Because this was quite a few months ago, too.

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  Let me ask.

• 1:33:06Speaker 00

  The, the Denisovan thing is weird. Because there's recent proposals, I think this is a paper I sent, sent you in a podcast where they're discussing this paper. That as of August, like this month, there's some speculation about the height of the Denisovans. And that they think they might have been much larger than Homo sapiens at the time.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, they found a bone, they found a bone, a thigh bone, I think, under the sea and suggests the Denisovans. And everything we found about Denisovans is that they were bigger than us. So the teeth we found, we haven't got much from them, but the tooth is bigger, the jawbone is bigger. The dragon man skull, which is being classified as very similar to Denisovan, is bigger. And then they found this thigh bone that suggests that they were considerably over six foot tall. Now, obviously, that's not like a massive giant, but compared to, you know, the average height of a human today is something like. A male human is something like five eight or five nine. And so a Denisovan being over six foot is like quite a considerable jump from that. So it's not like a mythical giant, but it's still bigger than you'd expect an ancient human to be.

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  And it's also, we're going with a limited amount of fossils, right?

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  So limited, so limited.

• 1:34:17Speaker 00

  So just from what we know, they existed and with larger skulls. Recent genetic research confirms that modern humans, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals repeatedly interbred a course of periods spanning roughly 200,000 to 250,000 years ago. While it's long believed that interbreeding occurred during a brief window of about 50 to 60,000 years ago. Advanced genomic mapping shows multiple waves of contact occurred much earlier. 200,000 to 250,000 years ago, an early wave of Homo sapiens migrating out of Africa encountered and mated with Neanderthals in Eurasia.

• 1:34:57Speaker 00

  So what this guy was saying was that it might not have been that, but that even earlier than this. Neanderthals were a result of human beings interbreeding with others. Or Homo sapiens interbreeding with others.

• 1:35:16Speaker 00

  I don't know, thank you, though.

• 1:35:20Speaker 00

  Where we just at? Oh, Denisovans. So just that one alone was way bigger than most humans at the time. And just even the size of the head, the bones are bigger, it's a bigger brow. It's, it's, it seems like a more robust, larger version of a human. And then when you take into account the range and size of human beings, given the, the correct amount of resources and food and protein. We got seven foot plus humans that are all over the place today. And imagine if these Denisovan skulls, which seem to be like a completely different structure than a Homo sapiens. We might, they might be the giants of the Bible, is the point.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:02Speaker 00

  Like this might be what they were talking about, like there might have been a race of much larger people that were physically dominant over Homo sapiens.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  Mm hmm, they could have been, they could have been considerably bigger. And they don't even need to be that big for the, the myths to kind of perpetuate, do you know what I mean? Like just for someone to be a little bit bigger and you encounter a group of them and you're like a small Homo sapien community. You're gonna remember that as.

• 1:36:23Speaker 00

  Well, whenever I do the UFC weigh-ins and I'm standing next to massive fucking, you know, these huge heavyweights. Like some of these guys are just gigantic humans, you know? Six foot seven, six foot nine, 265 pounds, and they have to cut weight to make 265. These are giant people.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:43Speaker 00

  You know, and then you think this is, you know, whatever percentage of people that are around today that are that big. If the Denisovans, if we just have a limit, we might have caught just a few small ones.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:56Speaker 00

  I mean, that's what, we don't know. I mean, I wonder what the fuck would happen if they found some bones that indicated there was a man that was nine feet tall.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  And we know that primates can get that big. And obviously, we're a primate, I can't remember what it's called, but.

• 1:37:10Speaker 00

  Chagantipethus.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  That's the one, yeah. Absolutely gigantic, as per the name.

• 1:37:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  So they can, primates are kind of line of, of animals can get really big, so.

• 1:37:21Speaker 00

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• 1:39:31Speaker 00

  And he found molars that were from a primate that didn't make any sense.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  Were really big.

• 1:39:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, huge. He's like, where did you get this? And he went there and then that's where they found jawbones and things. So there's some, we used to think that they were bipedal, because I've read that before, but now they're thinking that not, not necessarily. And that they might have been, because like a lot of people thought that's Bigfoot, you know? There's this myth that persists throughout Native American cultures, everywhere else. Yeah, they think it might have been an enormous orangutan. Like in that movie, what was it, The Jungle Book?

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  Jungle Book, yeah.

• 1:40:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:11Speaker 00

  So a 10 foot tall orangutan, like what?

• 1:40:18Speaker 00

  I mean, it just makes sense. If there's the people, you brought up Flores before. Now, we also know about those little hobbit people that lived in the island Flores that were these three-foot-tall, tiny little people. So, the island dwarfism, and then there's they're totally different version of human beings, of, you know, the human chain, the human tree. Who knows? Who knows what these Denisovans looked like?

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  And island gigantism is also a thing in nature. We see that and we see

• 1:40:45Speaker 00

  With reptiles, right?

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. So, it could apply to primates and to humans.

• 1:40:49Speaker 00

  Sure, as long as they had enough food. Yeah. It's just the idea of a Denisovan. I mean, they only discovered them in 2010, right?

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, only. And we have hardly anything about them, so.

• 1:41:02Speaker 00

  How many are we missing? You know what I mean?

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  We literally have like a tooth, a jawbone, and this thigh bone, and a few other things.

• 1:41:08Speaker 00

  Right. And how many other versions of humans are we missing?

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's ghost populations in our DNA. We know we're missing humans. Like, there are other types of humans that we just have nothing for.

• 1:41:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's weird.

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  That's so weird.

• 1:41:19Speaker 00

  That show, Human, have you ever seen that show? It's on, um, god, is it a BBC show?

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. No, I watched that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:25Speaker 00

  Very interesting.

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  It's good.

• 1:41:26Speaker 00

  But she was on a podcast recently talking about this ghost DNA, and how weird it is that a few hundred thousand years ago, something happened, and there's this DNA that's in there, and it's like, what is this? What's this stuff?

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's so many populations of humans that we think existed because of our DNA, but we don't know who they were. We've never found them. And they could be, you know, very close to us, but also with significant differences. And it's just, it's all up in the air. Same with so much of prehistory, we just, we don't know.

• 1:41:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I wonder, like, what kind of a society, what kind of, if, do they find stone tools with Denisovans? Do they know that yet?

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  It's really hard to attribute stone tools to anything, because if you just have the tools, you don't know what human used them, what human made them.

• 1:42:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  Because you have to find like a skeleton, and it's so hard to find a skeleton next to the tools. And even then, you don't actually know if it was that that made the tools. We don't know.

• 1:42:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. What else has been fascinating for you recently?

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  So, I think the question that I mentioned at the start, the one, like, when did humans reach isolated land masses such as America and Australia is a really interesting question. Because, again, the old ideas we have have proven to be incorrect. And I think, especially in the case of the Americas, I think it's super interesting, because obviously, as you know, we used to think it was Clovis first, 13,000 years ago. But so many sites now seem to be pushing that back much, much, much, much, much older into the past. So, yeah, that's a really interesting question. I mean, obviously, now we know that humans have been in the Americas for at least 22,000 years with white sands footprints, which I'm sure you've heard of that.

• 1:43:15Speaker 00

  Yes, 22,000 years. It's crazy.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  So, that's the oldest accepted evidence. But I think there's loads of interesting sites that potentially push it quite a lot further back than that, which are a bit more controversial. But when you take them all together, they're kind of, yeah, there's white sands. So, that's now accepted, I think, by most archaeologists. And why that's important is because it kind of opens it all up again. Because of when the kind of, the glacial maxims happen, it kind of the opening of the corridor. Because that's pre that. It means that we now don't know how long humans have been in the Americas. It could go back way further. And then you start looking at these other sites, and you think maybe it's a lot, lot older. So, there's one in Mexico called Chicoite Cave. Apologies for the pronunciation's

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  probably wrong, but this is 33,000 years old, and high in the mountains of northern Mexico, they found like 2,000 stone tools. And they did like 50 separate dates, and the date isn't controversial. What's controversial is if they were human-made tools. But the scientists working at the site think that this is evidence of humans in the Americas 33,000 years ago. Then there's a site in Brazil called Pedra Furada, which is 50,000 years old. Is that Chicoite? Yeah.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, it looks just like a tool, but I mean, people argue that they're natural. So, it's up in the air. It's not accepted yet. But I think that's the, probably the most, the least controversial.

• 1:44:50Speaker 00

  26,000 years ago.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it goes up to, it's like 30 to 33,000 years, I think. But, yeah, there's a site called Pedra Furada in Brazil, where they found a hearth-like structure. So, people making fire, they found charcoal, they found blackened stones, heated stones, rather. And that, they dated that to like 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. So, that's like a lot older than white sands, obviously. So, that's a really interesting site. Again, not fully accepted by archaeologists, but the people working there are quite convinced that it's evidence of human presence in Brazil, which is obviously quite far south, 50, over 50,000 years ago. But the thing is, you can't prove it, because you haven't, they need so many

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  things to say for sure. They need like a fossil of a human, basically, because otherwise you can say it's natural. Yeah. I don't know what those paintings are. I'm assuming they're more recent, because otherwise that would be pretty clear evidence. But I think the hearth-like structures and the heated stones and the charcoal are dated to over 50,000 years ago.

• 1:45:55Speaker 00

  That's crazy. Go back to that last one, please. Right there. That is wild.

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  That is wild. I'm assuming that is much more recent, because otherwise that would be very clear evidence of human presence. But I think the oldest layers go back, I think it's been continuously, or they think it's been continuously inhabited for thousands and thousands of years, with the oldest being over 50,000 years old.

• 1:46:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, are they the tools? They might be the tools. Because so critics say that it's natural, right?

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  But...

• 1:46:30Speaker 00

  That those are natural things, not tools?

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but a paper came out in 2023 that really made the case that it's human presence, so.

• 1:46:37Speaker 00

  Napping. Yeah.

• 1:46:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think it's, I think it's leaning that way, but it's just so hard to prove it, right? So, it's not accepted yet, but...

• 1:46:47Speaker 00

  Jamie, I just sent you a link that I found yesterday. I thought it was pretty bizarre, a completely different part of the world, but also really interesting. It's a link to an Instagram video. There's so much of this stuff now. That's what's so cool. It's like, and if you're in a good algorithm, you get inundated. Give me some volume on this.

• 1:47:11Speaker 04

  Algeria and Sahara with 5,000 rooms, and we still haven't seen all of them. It's called Sephar. No roads lead to it. No vehicle can reach it. The only way in is on foot, through a maze of stone pathways that all look identical. On the walls inside, there are 15,000 paintings, animals that no longer exist here, rivers that dried up thousands of years ago, and then things no one can identify. Floating figures with no faces, beings with round heads wearing what looks like suits, a figure over three meters tall that the man who discovered it simply called a god. Most of Sephar is still unmapped. Whatever else is in there, no one's seen it yet.

• 1:47:53Speaker 00

  I could do without, I could do without that guy's voice. He's a little ridiculous.

• 1:47:58Speaker 03

  I'm gonna take the radio head out.

• 1:47:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, settle down, buddy. It sounds like an AI voice, right? Like a super enthusiastic AI voice? Is that what it is?

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  Well, it could be. It very well could be. It definitely is gonna be in the future, but. What was it called? I don't...

• 1:48:14Speaker 00

  I don't remember.

• 1:48:15Speaker 03

  Sephar?

• 1:48:17Speaker 00

  It's just, yeah.

• 1:48:18Speaker 03

  Okay, let's try to look it up.

• 1:48:20Speaker 00

  See if we can look it up. And Sub-Saharan Africa is another weird one, right? Because especially the Sahara itself, like, that used to be vast, green, grassy, trees, jungle, like, who knows what it was. And now, no one's really, has really any understanding of what's under that sand.

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it was fertile and green right up until, literally right up until the point that the conventional timeline has civilizations start in like around 4,000 B.C. is when it flipped to desert. So, yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's, there has been archaeological work done in the Sahara, but compared to the size of the Sahara, there's just got to be loads of stuff under there that could potentially change our understanding of the origins of civilization, for sure. Very interesting region. But, yeah, extremely hard to excavate for many reasons, such as the climate and also political instability. A lot of those countries are pretty fucked up, so it's hard to like go in there and do archaeology. But very interesting region of the world. And obviously, that is where Egypt emerged, just after this period. So, you know, what were the people that kind

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  of went to the Nile River doing before? There's many interesting things. There's, what's it called? There's an interesting site, Nap Suplia, I think it's called.

• 1:49:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's gonna be a little hard to get to. It's the middle of the Sahara Desert.

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  Boy.

• 1:49:39Speaker 03

  In Algeria.

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  Jeez.

• 1:49:42Speaker 03

  Buried.

• 1:49:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I have heard of this, actually.

• 1:49:46Speaker 03

  Somewhere in there.

• 1:49:48Speaker 00

  Fuck.

• 1:49:52Speaker 00

  Imagine you're an archaeologist, you're tasked with, you know, someone gives you some funding. Hey, we want you to get in there and go look around. What?

• 1:50:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's probably not the ideal place to go.

• 1:50:06Speaker 00

  You can't even go without getting killed.

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't want to get shot.

• 1:50:08Speaker 00

  You could literally die, so, no.

• 1:50:13Speaker 03

  Just imagine if you found something cool. Imagine you found a bunch of cool shit.

• 1:50:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, you go.

• 1:50:18Speaker 03

  Good luck. Just good luck taking it out, because they're like, oh, where'd you get that?

• 1:50:22Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:50:22Speaker 03

  Thank you, thank you.

• 1:50:23Speaker 00

  Exactly, they'll kill you. That was also my thought, I was gonna bring that up about Gobekli Tepe, about if they bring in more archaeologists, more people to dig, if they really, truly expand. They really have to keep track of what they find, because the amount of money that someone can get for an artifact on the black market is pretty incredible. This is an issue with Egypt, right?

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  And South America, yeah.

• 1:50:45Speaker 00

  Yes, and South America, but Egypt in particular, there's some inconsistencies with Zahi Hawass's versions of like what was discovered in some places, whether or not a skeleton was in a sarcophagus versus what he said later. You know, like in the older versions, there was a skeleton, and the newer versions, they didn't find anything. So, did you sell a skeleton? Because people sell, I'm not saying he did, but did somebody sell a skeleton? Because people sell skeletons. And if you are some rich guy who lives in some other country, and you're a billionaire from oil, and you're like, you know what I'd like? You got a guy, he's like, you've got everything, you got all the Ferraris, like, you know what I want? I want Egyptian skeleton, get me that.

• 1:51:29Speaker 00

  Go get me a mummy, I want a fucking mummy.

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  Or any kind of artifact or anything like?

• 1:51:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:35Speaker 00

  Especially something gold, some ancient gold. All that stuff was stolen out of there. So was it melted down? Like, for grave robbers, like, that must have been an incredible place to be, before everybody discovered all those tombs. Because we know, like, with King Tut, which was preserved, luckily, nobody got into that until, what year was that, they found it? Tutankhamens?

• 1:51:59Speaker 01

  I'm not sure, but within the last couple decades, I think. I'm not sure.

• 1:52:03Speaker 00

  Whatever it was, it was, I think it was a little longer than that, but the point is, it's like, fantastic gold sarcophagus cover and massive fucking treasure trove of jewels and things like, how much of that stuff is scattered in private collections in the world? You know?

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and in South America, like, because they spent, like, underneath Cusco, there's all these tunnels, right? And people have known about them for a long, long time. But it took a long time for archaeology to kind of accept that they were there. But people have been going, like, people had like tours and stuff down into the tunnels before it was like widely accepted. And back then, it's just rife for people selling it off to the black market, because there's no control over it. There's no kind of institutional control over it, so people could just kind of do what they want, until it actually finally got like, you know, controlled by the authorities, so.

• 1:52:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:54Speaker 01

  Who knows what went, and all over the world, as you say. Yeah, there could be stuff that is really interesting that is just out there.

• 1:53:02Speaker 00

  And then there's the elongated skulls, the weird fucking skulls. And a long history of people discovering those, like, how many people got the good ones? How many of them were removed a long time ago and sit somewhere? It's almost like you have to go raid all the rich guys of the world.

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  See what if you got hid in your basement?

• 1:53:21Speaker 00

  Find some guy, like, what's your Google search like?

• 1:53:25Speaker 00

  Let's, let's find out who's got the stuff. Because, I mean, if you're a person with a private museum, if you, if you've got that kind of money, and like, there's people in the world that have private zoos, right? So they have so much money in other countries that they've, you know, they have basically the wild kingdom in their backyard. You know, and that guy's like, well, I got that. Now, I want.

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  I want somebody even more way.

• 1:53:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. I want you to build, like, I went to the Cairo Museum once, and I like the way it looks. I want that in my house, you know? There's gotta be people like that in the world.

• 1:54:02Speaker 03

  He's one of them.

• 1:54:04Speaker 00

  There he goes.

• 1:54:04Speaker 03

  Ninety-one-year-old Don Miller from Indiana. He had thousands of artifacts removed from his house.

• 1:54:11Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:54:11Speaker 03

  I think he had Egyptian mummies.

• 1:54:14Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 1:54:15Speaker 03

  I'm trying to find the good pictures in the list of what he had.

• 1:54:18Speaker 00

  So they seized his stuff? How'd they find out about, did he, was he on Instagram?

• 1:54:25Speaker 03

  A delegation from China went to Indiana to claim their stuff.

• 1:54:27Speaker 00

  Whoa, a delegation from China? I wonder if they showed up with guns, give me your shit back. FBI raided a ninety-one-year-old missionary's home and found thousands of stolen Native American bones. Whoa.

• 1:54:41Speaker 03

  Amazon River canoe.

• 1:54:43Speaker 00

  Wow, Ming Dynasty jade, an Egyptian sarcophagus, and a dugout canoe that had traveled down the Amazon River.

• 1:54:52Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:54:52Speaker 03

  It was just in his house. There's a picture of his house and another thing I had, I mean, it's just all.

• 1:54:58Speaker 00

  How'd this guy get the scratch? Where's he getting the money for all this? What'd this guy do?

• 1:55:03Speaker 03

  I don't know why there's not a movie about him.

• 1:55:04Speaker 00

  After ten years, FBI returned seven thousand rare artifacts looted by Indiana grave robber. Oh, he's a grave robber?

• 1:55:13Speaker 03

  That's, you know.

• 1:55:13Speaker 00

  That's what they call him? So he's just a dude who was a collector, he's might, might not necessarily be a grave robber.

• 1:55:22Speaker 03

  I don't think this is the same guy.

• 1:55:23Speaker 00

  They found, FBI found forty-two thousand relics and two thousand human bones in a man's home.

• 1:55:31Speaker 03

  What is that?

• 1:55:32Speaker 00

  Whoa, what the, what is that, a horse?

• 1:55:35Speaker 03

  Maybe like a pangolin or something.

• 1:55:36Speaker 00

  A sloth? Yeah, it looks like a pangolin, right? Forty-two thousand relics.

• 1:55:43Speaker 03

  Oh, same guy.

• 1:55:44Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:55:44Speaker 03

  Don Miller.

• 1:55:45Speaker 00

  Whoa, it is the same guy? That's crazy. Oh, this guy's a nut. He died in two thousand fifteen, too bad.

• 1:55:57Speaker 00

  He was ninety-one when agents first knocked on his door in two thousand fourteen. Wow, he only lived a year later. The forty-two thousand artifacts hoarded by Miller represent what may be the largest ever seizure from a private collection. So this was interesting, it's like, are they saying that he's not allowed to acquire them? Like, do we have rules in terms of, like, say, if you found some stuff? I know we have rules about Native Americans, right? FBI became involved when they learned thousands of items were obtained in violation of antiquities laws and federal and state statutes. According to the FBI, Miller went on digs around the world and illegally brought his finds home to the United States.

• 1:56:40Speaker 03

  I think Nick Cage had to give back that skull he bought, because it was stolen from somewhere or something.

• 1:56:45Speaker 00

  He bought a skull?

• 1:56:46Speaker 03

  Uh, like a T-Rex skull?

• 1:56:48Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:56:50Speaker 03

  You know about that?

• 1:56:51Speaker 00

  Oh, he had to give back his T-Rex skull?

• 1:56:53Speaker 03

  I think so, because they found out that it was like stolen. So he gave it back, I don't know what happened with the money, but.

• 1:56:59Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 1:57:02Speaker 00

  How much is a T-Rex skull?

• 1:57:03Speaker 03

  Also, I was thinking, like, this guy got, they found this guy, there's gotta be, we just, I brought him up because I knew about it.

• 1:57:11Speaker 03

  He, you know, probably talked about it at the bar and all that kind of shit.

• 1:57:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:15Speaker 03

  What about the people who don't?

• 1:57:15Speaker 00

  He's on Facebook.

• 1:57:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, what about the people who don't?

• 1:57:18Speaker 00

  Those old losers are all on Facebook. Have you seen the dinosaur that Ways to Well has?

• 1:57:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:24Speaker 00

  Ways to Well legally purchased a dinosaur.

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  What, like a?

• 1:57:28Speaker 00

  So they have like a dinosaur bone, some aquatic dinosaur, that they have suspended in their ceiling.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:57:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can buy dinosaur bones.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  He bought a skull for two hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars.

• 1:57:40Speaker 00

  Whoa, he got fucked.

• 1:57:42Speaker 03

  Mongolian government.

• 1:57:43Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  In the Gobi Desert.

• 1:57:45Speaker 00

  He voluntarily returned the fossils to the Mongolian government after US authorities found it was smuggled.

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:57:52Speaker 00

  Wow. See if you can find the Ways to Well dinosaur.

• 1:57:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can buy dinosaur bones.

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:58:00Speaker 00

  There's a lot of people that don't believe in dinosaurs lately.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:58:03Speaker 00

  Very confusing.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  Why, what was their reasoning?

• 1:58:06Speaker 00

  Oh, just they've been lied to about everything, maybe dinosaurs too. And there's people that think that dinosaurs are actually the dragons of ancient history, and that that's, that's all bullshit. It's the dumbest theories, I mean, like, you know, we have, there, there's the Ways to Well dinosaur, that's what it looks like.

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  That's pretty dope.

• 1:58:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's pretty sick. Some sort of an aquatic dinosaur.

• 1:58:29Speaker 00

  How much of that is actual bone and how much of it is replica? I don't know, some of them are replica, I think that's actual bone. But like, they have T-Rexes, I think the most complete T-Rex is...

• 1:58:44Speaker 00

  I wanna say eighty percent. What is the most complete T-Rex skeleton ever found?

• 1:58:50Speaker 03

  No one just sold, um, recently, uh, at an auction.

• 1:58:54Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:58:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was sixty-two percent complete.

• 1:58:56Speaker 00

  Is that the most complete one ever?

• 1:58:58Speaker 03

  Pretty sure.

• 1:59:00Speaker 00

  I thought there was a-

• 1:59:01Speaker 03

  Oh, there's one that's ninety percent, sorry.

• 1:59:02Speaker 00

  Oh, there you go.

• 1:59:03Speaker 03

  Well, discovered with ninety percent of its skeleton recovered.

• 1:59:06Speaker 00

  Hmm. Yeah, we know a lot, folks. This idea that dinosaurs aren't real is, is really silly.

• 1:59:12Speaker 01

  No, they're definitely real.

• 1:59:13Speaker 03

  Sue.

• 1:59:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, whoa, okay. So that's real. Guys, stop. That's a real skull. The, the problem is, there's been deception. And one of the, one of the big pieces of deception is when you go to a lot of museums and you see a dinosaur skeleton, you assume that's how they found it and they put it back together again. Whereas a lot of the pieces of those bones are not real.

• 1:59:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:38Speaker 00

  A lot of the pieces are recreations and entire, entire, um, some entire skeletons that are in museums are all a recreation. There's no actual bone that you're actually looking at. And so then people are like, hey.

• 1:59:55Speaker 01

  It's the same with, uh, it's the same with ancient sites, though.

• 1:59:57Speaker 00

  Sixty-seven million years old, eighty percent intact. So like, just that alone, eighty percent of that is real.

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 2:00:04Speaker 00

  They're real. So fucking, a real thing that existed, just like fucking crocodiles are still real today. There was a real group of large reptiles that roamed the earth.

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  For a long time, but the crazy thing, I think dinosaurs really highlight the, the kind of fragmentary nature of the fossil record, right? Because they existed for a hundred and sixty million years or something like that. But we only have like a few thousand fossils from that huge amount of time. And it just shows how little survives, right?

• 2:00:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And that, the fossil record's just really weird. It's a, it takes a lot to make a fossil, so we have a tiny fraction of the actual data.

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  And we have to extrapolate out from, from that and just, that's our understanding. And that's why we do not know what happened in the deep past.

• 2:00:53Speaker 00

  Isn't it fucking cool?

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  It's so cool, I love it. That's why I do what I do, man, I fucking love it.

• 2:00:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know anybody who, when you first learn about this, anybody that I wanna talk to, when you first learn about this stuff, you don't go, whoa. You know, 'cause it's, it is so interesting. And, um, that's why, to me, the, um, reaction to Graham Hancock's Netflix series was so strange. Like, so unhinged, like, why, why are you guys freaking out about this and calling it the most dangerous show?

• 2:01:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I've experienced this firsthand now, because, I mean, last time I was here, I wasn't really known about, but now I'm a, kind of, people know who I am and I get so much hate. Like, so much hate and it, it's weird because people like paint me out to be something I'm not like. And it's just so strange because I'm me and I know what I think and I know what I believe and yet-

• 2:01:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  Obviously, you like experienced that on a whole different level, but-

• 2:01:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've experienced it from the government.

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  But it's just wild, it's so weird how, when people like paint you out to be someone that you're not and put words in your mouth and like, it's strange, but-

• 2:01:55Speaker 00

  You'll get used to it. Um, the, the key is just don't read it.

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:01:59Speaker 00

  That's the key. Like, you're gonna be aware of enough of it peripherally. People will bring it to your attention if it's really important or if it's like significant. None of it's gonna really be important. But as long as, and you're a very conscientious guy and you do a really good job, like I said, of being objective and measured, and that's all you need to do. Just keep doing that. Just don't read the comments.

• 2:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:19Speaker 00

  'Cause the, the, there's a bunch of people out there that are just very unhappy, period, no matter what. And when someone is getting a lot of attention, they're very angry, always. And there's, whatever that number is, one out of a hundred, one out of a thousand, it doesn't matter. When they reach you, that negativity is never good for you. It's only bad for you.

• 2:02:40Speaker 01

  And it sits with you a little bit more, like, you get all the positive comments, but you don't really, you know, like-

• 2:02:44Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  The negative one sticks in your brain. But you know what's really interesting is like, uh, people have done like hit pieces on me and shit, but, and obviously loads of negative stuff comes through, but also I've had like actual archaeologists and actual people working in national institutions reach out to me and say like, you know, these are like actual archaeologists and they're saying like, Michael, we, we value your work and like, we actually think you're an important voice and stuff like that. And I, I find that really encouraging because these are, you know, it's easy for us to think about archaeologists as like a kind of bogeyman. They're like, wanna suppress all this stuff, but they're not all like that.

• 2:03:15Speaker 00

  No, I think-

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  Some of them are open to these things.

• 2:03:16Speaker 00

  Particularly the young ones. Particularly people that are coming up that really, the reason why they got into this in the first place is because it's such a fascinating subject. And like you, when you've, you've spoken on this, when you were, um, in school and you were getting your degree, uh, you were confused as to why these alternative perspectives weren't entertained. And I think there's a lot of young people that feel confined by the gatekeepers. They can, they feel confined by the career academics that are sort of in charge of who gets tenure, who gets jobs, who gets grants. And it's a very confusing thing. You don't wanna ruffle any feathers or step on any toes.

• 2:03:59Speaker 00

  And so you feel constrained in your ability to be, you know, curious. And that's, that seems insane for something that is so inherently curious.

• 2:04:10Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:04:10Speaker 00

  Curiosity driven.

• 2:04:11Speaker 01

  So inherently unknown as well.

• 2:04:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:13Speaker 01

  We do not know, as we keep saying.

• 2:04:15Speaker 00

  Right, right, right. We're not talking about stuff that's like, you know, established science where you can clearly, you know, it's not mathematics. This is something like weird.

• 2:04:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:26Speaker 00

  You know, you're, you're, you're looking at hints of the past. And, um, the more we look, the more we find older stuff. It's like Grandma always says, stuff just keeps getting older.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:04:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 2:04:40Speaker 00

  Well, it's just so cool that you're out there making videos and that you could do that for a living now.

• 2:04:44Speaker 01

  I know, it's wild. I, I feel, I feel so lucky that I get to, uh, do something that I'm so interested in and talk about these topics. And also to, like, create, not, to kind of like inspire this thinking in other people. That's really what I wanna try and do is to get people thinking about history from this different perspective and to think about the unknown and think about the potential that what humans could have been doing now that we know that a mind like ours could have existed for a million years, that humans like us could have inhabited this planet for such a vastly longer length of time than we used to believe and all the possibilities that throws up. More than anything, that's what I want people to, to think about when they watch my work. I don't want to tell them to believe this or tell them to believe that.

• 2:05:26Speaker 01

  I just want them to kind of think about it themselves and open their minds to the possibilities that could have occurred. And that doesn't mean that, like, people always say that, I like saying that there's like advanced civilizations in prehistory. I'm not saying that, I'm just saying it, there's a lot more on the table than we used to think. And I think that's really fascinating. I wish more people would, uh, kind of take that possibility seriously. Um, and that's why I get encouraged when I get these emails from people that are actually in the institutions, because they're the people that are gonna rewrite the textbooks. Like, I can say what I want, like, I'm just a YouTuber, but we need the people that are actually working in the institutions to think in this way. And then, then I think we, we might, uh, update our thinking on these things.

• 2:06:05Speaker 00

  I think there's a lot of those young folks that are coming up now in archaeology that, um, do have alternative perspectives. Whether or not they're being suppressed. And it's also very encouraging for them to see a pathway outside of academics, academia, like what you're pursuing. And to see like, not only is this viable, but you can do it with the, the proper approach, like the way that you're doing it. Where you're not, you're not making crazy claims, not saying the aliens did it, you're not saying anything nutty. You're just saying, hey, um, there's, uh, there's a lot going on here. And to, to pretend that we have a, an accurate map of the territory seems silly.

• 2:06:43Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think, I just think there's so much more on the table now than there used to be only a few decades ago. And I think that's so exciting when we look at our past, because, as I say, it's the reason we're all here, right? It's the reason we live in this civilization, is the answer to these questions. And we don't know the answer to these questions anymore, so let's, uh, let's talk about it, you know?

• 2:07:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. What else have you found recently that's interesting?

• 2:07:04Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, so I mean, I was still, there's still, um, there's older American sites, so, um, so there's obviously the Saruti Mastodon site, which is a hundred and thirty thousand years old, which is controversial, but I think people spoke about that.

• 2:07:16Speaker 00

  That's the mastodon bones where they appeared to be, it's, appeared signs of human smashing the bones to get the marrow.

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, just after, like, fresh, freshly smashed after the animal had died. And they, they found like these anvils, like these things that look like tools next to the bones. And it's controversial because we can't prove that that was human activity, but it looks like human activity. It was even published in Nature in, uh, twenty seventeen, so, you know, it's another little data point that pushes back human presence in the America potentially to over a hundred thousand years ago. And there's even more, there's a site called, uh, Calico, where, I think this one's a little bit, I don't, I don't really buy this one, but a very famous, uh, archaeologist called Louis Leakey, who was like one of the top names in the archaeology in the twentieth century. He believed that Calico showed evidence of human presence in the Americas over a hundred thousand years ago as well. So, so another data point.

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  And then there's, um, then there's Wayatlaco, which, um, I think you've heard of, have you heard of Wayatlaco? It's this site in Mexico where they had this volcanic ash over these human tools. And they dated the ash to like crazy numbers. I'm talking like three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, five hundred thousand years ago, and the tools were below this layer.

• 2:08:24Speaker 00

  What?

• 2:08:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so-

• 2:08:25Speaker 00

  No, I'm not aware of that one.

• 2:08:26Speaker 01

  So, in the nineteen fifties, there was a, a Mexican archaeologist who was doing some work in the Vascilo Basin in Mexico, near the city of Puebla. And he was finding all these extinct Pleistocene animal remains there alongside human activity. So he called in some American archaeologists and they did some work. And they identified this site called Wayatlaco, which is a, an archaeological site there. And they found these very sophisticated stone tools. They're like bifacial stone tools, which means they've been worked on, on two sides. And it's quite a sophisticated level of tool. And so they found this and they were like, okay, this is an interesting site, let's bring in some geologists. So the geologist came in and they were expecting to date the kind of sediment around the tools to around eight thousand to ten thousand years ago,

• 2:09:09Speaker 01

  because they knew about a, a volcanic eruption that had happened at that time. And so they expected the volcanic ash to be from that. So they did all this testing. But then they found that the ash was giving these crazy dates, like two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, up to six hundred thousand years old. And that was completely mental because the tools were below this layer of ash. And then they dated a, a camel pelvis, I think, that was, um, in situ with the tools. And that camel pelvis came back to two hundred and fifty thousand years old as well, and that was in the same layer of the tools. So they kind of brought all their different dating methods, methods together. And there's multiple kind of, uh, geological dating methods on the sediment, the ash and, and also the camel pelvis.

• 2:09:52Speaker 01

  And they kind of collected all this to a date of two hundred and fifty thousand years ago for this site, for where these tools were found. And, um- Yeah, and so they tried to publish this and they received like immense pushback because obviously this was the the time of the Clovis first paradigm and you know, people weren't ready for Clovis to be broken, let alone by such a huge margin, like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years old. And they couldn't publish for like 20 years. And by that time, many of the artifacts had gone missing and they they didn't know where they were. And the site actually got razed, like it got kind of removed. Yeah. And I don't and I'm not trying to say that's like some conspiracy or anything, but it just means that you can't

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  really prove it. But they did eventually publish and they the geologists have always stuck by this date. And there's multiple lines of evidence that suggests that the tools were found below this layer of roughly 250,000 years old. And that's obviously like hugely older than we think humans have been in the Americas. So it's a very interesting site. I want to give a shout out to Will Brown, who's got a channel called Incredible History. He's actually been to the site and he kind of like nudged me in the direction of looking into this one. He's got a great channel. But yeah, it's it's super interesting because we can't prove it because the tools have gone missing, the site no longer exists. But there's a paper out there written by serious scientists saying that, you know,

• 2:11:17Speaker 01

  there could be human presence in the Americas over 200,000 years ago, potentially even older than that. And that would just radically change our understanding of humans in America. So then when you put all these sites together, so obviously, White Sands is the earliest at 22,000. But then when you add that to Chicoete Cave, as I mentioned earlier, 33,000, Pedro Furada in Brazil, over 50,000, Saruti Mastodon, 130,000. I don't really think Calico is, I think that's natural, but then Huertlaco at 250,000, you know, it only takes one of them to be right for our understanding of when humans reached America to radically shift. And I think it's only logical that humans were in America a lot longer than we think, because, you know, when we're talking about the vast span of time that we've been

• 2:12:01Speaker 01

  on this planet, why couldn't we have reached these places?

• 2:12:04Speaker 00

  Right. And then the question is, how did we reach them? And from where?

• 2:12:07Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:12:08Speaker 00

  You know, from where?

• 2:12:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:12:12Speaker 00

  That's the weird thing is some of the, when you look at like pyramid structures, for instance, like, where did that idea come from? How did that idea make it to the Aztecs?

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  All over the world, we find pyramids.

• 2:12:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, weird.

• 2:12:25Speaker 01

  It is weird. I mean, you could say that it's just like a logical way of building things, but.

• 2:12:30Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 2:12:31Speaker 01

  Who knows?

• 2:12:32Speaker 00

  Well, there's also the weirdness in the fact that the Aztecs themselves didn't build the pyramids.

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  Oh, with some of them, yeah, like Teotihuacan was there before. And they said it was, the name literally means place where the gods lived. And they found it there. And so it was before them and they don't know who built it.

• 2:12:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:12:52Speaker 01

  They give us lots of our names. They gave us the name Olmec. Olmec means the rubber people. Because they knew about the Olmecs, they knew they existed before them, but they didn't really know who they were, but they just called them the rubber people.

• 2:13:03Speaker 00

  Is it because they lived around rubber trees?

• 2:13:05Speaker 01

  I think it's because they use rubber or something. I'm not 100% sure.

• 2:13:09Speaker 00

  So what's the conventional theory about who built these Aztec temples?

• 2:13:14Speaker 01

  I think the theory is that it was a culture that came just before the Aztecs, that we don't have a name for. But they don't, I mean, they don't know, they don't know.

• 2:13:25Speaker 00

  Imagine you don't know anything about them, you don't have a name for them, but they made insanely sophisticated architecture with stone that mirrored the cosmos.

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no one knows who built the Pyramid of the Sun. I think that's what it's called at Teotihuacan. But it's ginormous and it's incredible. And there's all these different layers to it and incredibly sophisticated. We don't know who built it. We don't really know when they built it. I mean, we think we know kind of the region, but we don't know. As is the case with so much of this stuff, we do not know.

• 2:13:56Speaker 00

  Is there a conventional timeline?

• 2:13:58Speaker 01

  Like for Teotihuacan?

• 2:14:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, did they like, and what are they basing it on? If they think it came right before the Aztecs? Because I had read as as long as 1,000 years before them.

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I mean by right before, because I'm thinking in these big, big.

• 2:14:13Speaker 00

  That's a long time.

• 2:14:14Speaker 01

  It's a long time, yeah.

• 2:14:15Speaker 00

  The United States is not even 300 years old.

• 2:14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. But yeah, but what I'm trying to say is I don't think it's like, you know, way, way, way.

• 2:14:22Speaker 00

  Right, right, right, right. So somewhere around 1,000 years before. But that's the thing. It's like, how many of these things happened where there was some sort of a civilization and then it collapsed? And then new people came along? Like, the idea that you would have a civilization that was capable of building something as fantastic as some of those Aztec constructions, and then they would just go away?

• 2:14:47Speaker 01

  We just lost all memory of it, all memory of it. And then people just wandered up there one day, the Aztecs, and they're like, whoa, what is this? You know, like?

• 2:14:55Speaker 00

  And it was probably covered with jungle, right?

• 2:14:57Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 2:14:58Speaker 00

  I mean, how many of those things were just absorbed by, you know, the, just the, just nature?

• 2:15:06Speaker 01

  And it's no wonder that they think it was built by gods, right? Because you see it and you're like, that is incredible. Who built this? It must have been the gods.

• 2:15:13Speaker 00

  And there's no one living in it.

• 2:15:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:15:15Speaker 00

  Fuck.

• 2:15:16Speaker 01

  And just so it shows how easily human civilizations can reach a really high peak level of sophistication and then go down again and collapse and just all memory of them is gone.

• 2:15:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Any other cool things you've discovered recently?

• 2:15:30Speaker 01

  Well, there's also the question of when humans reached Australia, which I think is another really interesting question, because the conventional time is 65,000 years ago. And there's a site called Majed Bebe in Northern Australia, and that's the earliest accepted site in Australia. And that's right in the north of the country. And it makes sense because you have to, you have to cross water to get to Australia. You have to build boats and cross water. But there's another really interesting site that's right in the south of Australia, where archaeologists found blackened stones again, and charcoal and half like structures. And they dated this site to 120,000 years ago, which is double, just about double the time that we think humans were in Australia. And it's in the

• 2:16:11Speaker 01

  very south of the country. And the archaeologists that have working there actually wrote in their paper that the evidence supports a cultural origin over a natural origin. So they think that it's cultural, as in human, rather than natural. But they can't prove it because there's no associated artifacts and no associated skeletons. But they think that it it kind of leans towards being a cultural origin. And obviously, if that's correct, that means human beings were only in Australia twice as long as we thought, but also had inhabited the entire continent. Well, not inhabited, but had gone through the entire continent, right down to the very south of the country, twice as old as we thought. And it's just another thing that's like pushing it older and older and older.

• 2:16:55Speaker 01

  And it's not accepted, but it's so hard to prove these things because we can't find skeletons. Or we can find skeletons, but it's extremely rare. So the the bar is so high for for proof. But this site called Mojil, 120,000 years ago, is, I think, very strong suggestive evidence that human beings have been in Australia twice as long as we think. And obviously, that means that they had to have got there by boat. And yeah, that's another interesting one.

• 2:17:22Speaker 00

  Wasn't there something that was done on the genetic connection between Australian Aboriginal people and Denisovans?

• 2:17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. They think that maybe there was different migrationary pathways and different human species potentially also reached Australia. And it's not that wild, because if you think back to the the seafaring thing we were talking about earlier, if people were reaching islands over a million years ago, then why couldn't they have reached Australia much earlier than we think?

• 2:17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  Because if we had that capability for so long, why not?

• 2:17:52Speaker 00

  When they do this, is this, I mean, because obviously, they didn't even know about Denisovans until 2010. So is this like a genetic analysis? And if so, like, do they have genes? Like, how do they get genetic material from these Denisovan skeletons?

• 2:18:13Speaker 01

  I think you can take it from fossils, I think.

• 2:18:16Speaker 00

  Like a tooth or something?

• 2:18:17Speaker 01

  I'm not quite sure, but I think you can. I think they know the kind of genetic makeup of of the different human species. And so I think you can tell that way if you've got like a trace of the DNA.

• 2:18:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what I was saying. Like, if it's fossilized, do they have actual DNA from Denisovans? And if they do, like, how are they, how are they guessing that people, Aboriginal people in Australia have some traces of it? Just like Europeans have traces of Neanderthal?

• 2:18:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also people in, I think, like Nepal and these high altitude places, they have quite high traces of Denisovan DNA. And that's what they think allows them to live in high altitude environments. They think that Denisovans are more robust than modern humans and can live in more extreme environments. And they think that people that live in those kind of high altitude regions of the Himalayas and stuff have that kind of gene, if you like. I'm not sure that's the science behind it, but they think they have the traces of that. And that's what allows them to live in these more isolated high altitude environments.

• 2:19:16Speaker 00

  So they think Denisovans lived in high altitude mostly?

• 2:19:19Speaker 01

  Maybe. They don't know. They don't know.

• 2:19:21Speaker 00

  Well, there's only a few bones, right?

• 2:19:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. So it's really hard to tell.

• 2:19:25Speaker 00

  So fucking interesting, man.

• 2:19:27Speaker 01

  And also in that region, they they found recently the oldest, the oldest evidence of advanced surgery, which is like way older than we think. It's like 31,000 years ago. They found some surgery in Borneo, which is again in this same region. And I think Indonesia is such a fascinating region because it's the place of where the Sundas shelf was, where obviously the sea levels risen have covered a huge expanse of land that used to be land, but now no longer is. And so many interesting discoveries here. But yeah, this surgery thing is, they found the skeleton of a child that had had his leg amputated and but had lived for many, many, many, many years afterwards. And his his

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  whole like lower leg had been amputated off and but had like healed like completely. And he'd lived like, or she, I think as a girl, lived like a lot longer after that. And obviously, that's quite an advanced thing to to do, right? Because you have to understand how to prevent infection. You have to, it's a very humid place as well. So it's very hard to survive. Probably was very painful for that individual. But this pushed back our understanding of surgery by like 20,000, no, maybe not quite that long. I can't remember. I think it was like 7,000 years ago. So yeah, by a long way, because this is 31,000 years ago. So again, it's showing prehistoric humans to be far more sophisticated than we think. They were performing surgery 31,000 years ago and surviving and living for years afterwards.

• 2:20:48Speaker 00

  That is insane. I wonder if they had any pharmacological interventions, like to deal with the pain?

• 2:20:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think they would have used wild plants because we've got so much evidence now of other human species and our human species using wild plants to, as for medicinal purposes.

• 2:21:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:21:07Speaker 01

  We see Neanderthals doing that a long, long time ago, like cultivating wild plants and using them as painkillers and stuff like that.

• 2:21:12Speaker 00

  What's going to kill the pain of a fucking amputation?

• 2:21:15Speaker 01

  Well, probably not much, but.

• 2:21:17Speaker 00

  Of a bone saw.

• 2:21:18Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:21:20Speaker 00

  Right, and they're like, what kind of tools do they have? Like, what were they doing it with? How'd they stitch people up? Did they have needles? Did they have thread? Did they just leave the wound open? Like, what did they do?

• 2:21:30Speaker 01

  But whatever they did, it worked. And they were sophisticated enough to keep that person alive and to care for them and for them to live years afterwards. Excuse me. It's wild, it's wild. So it's yet more evidence of people being just super sophisticated so much longer in time than we thought. And it all points in one direction, man, which is humans have been here longer. They've been more intelligent than we thought for a long, long time.

• 2:21:52Speaker 00

  If you had a guess, what do you think is the oldest real true civilization?

• 2:22:00Speaker 00

  How long, when do you think it started?

• 2:22:02Speaker 01

  So I think in terms of like what we call civilization, in terms of our current like cycle of it, if you like, I think it is Tash Depela and whatever came before that. But I don't think it would probably been that far further before that. But I think that from the onset of the Holocene, I think we basically started right away all over the globe and, you know, developed civilization because it happens everywhere, right? Back to question one, why did it happen everywhere all over the time? Because I think that's what humans do. I think once we get a stable period of climate, we innovate. Because agriculture and civilization can't have been a very hard invention to do because everyone did it. It happened everywhere, all over the world. So it's not like a really unique hard thing to do because people did it everywhere.

• 2:22:47Speaker 01

  So that makes me think, what about all the other periods of stable climate that we've had? And now that we know that human beings have been around for so long, we've had it's something like four stable warm periods in the time that we have modern sapien fossils, so 300,000 years. But then if you extrapolate that out to this million year timescale of modern sized brains and modern behavior with the seafaring, it's something like 11 warm periods that we've lived through of stable climate conditions that have lasted for over 10,000 years. So you look at each of those warm periods and you think, if agriculture and civilization isn't that, you know, hard seismic of an invention to do, why couldn't it have happened in those previous warm periods? 11 of them going back to a million years and possibly beyond.

• 2:23:29Speaker 00

  There's also that very weird phenomenon when, when someone, somewhere figures something out, even if people aren't connected, other places in the world, people figured it out at the same time. We know that to be the case today. Rupert Sheldrake has a term for it. I think it's called, is it morphic resonance? So his, his term is also based around theories that they've done with rats and mazes, that if you teach a rat a maze on the east coast, rats on the west coast learn it quicker.

• 2:23:59Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:24:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's got lots of interesting work, hasn't he? About kind of like almost telepathic.

• 2:24:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, weird stuff.

• 2:24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, very weird stuff.

• 2:24:07Speaker 00

  There's probably some sort of a Kashuk record, that there's probably some sort of shared field of information that whether or not it's tangible and you can, you know, write it down verbatim, or whether or not it's some sort of implied concepts and ideas that are transmitted through the species. That like creativity itself is almost like something that we tap into like uniformly as a species.

• 2:24:35Speaker 01

  It's like you can like almost wear an antenna.

• 2:24:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that like when Michael Button figures something out, someone on the other part of the world's like, oh, I feel it.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:45Speaker 00

  It's just very weird. It's a very weird idea.

• 2:24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:48Speaker 00

  You know, and it's, it's impossible to prove. Or I mean, you can imply it. And the rat thing is very interesting. I think they've done them with some other things as well. You know, so it's, it's, it's interesting. Cause like, if that's not the case, then what do you have? A seafaring civilization that travels the entire globe? Do you have something that, that so, so advanced, they figured out how to traverse continents? And they're bringing all this information with them? Is it one group? No, it seems like they all kind of figured it out at the same time. Or roughly.

• 2:25:22Speaker 01

  But it is pretty much the same time in comparison to the amount of time that we've been on the planet, right? It's not a coincidence.

• 2:25:27Speaker 00

  It's an explosion.

• 2:25:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:25:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:25:29Speaker 01

  So why, because the, the reason given is the climate. That's the old reason. But I think that is the reason, because you know, the climate got warmer, so agriculture, civilization. And yeah, that makes sense. But then why not before? Why not in all of these 11 warm periods where humans have been here and been smart? If it's such a common invention, why didn't it happen before?

• 2:25:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:25:47Speaker 01

  Maybe it did.

• 2:25:48Speaker 00

  Maybe it did. It's also interesting how much stuff, like if you think about the global temperature, like where is it always warm? Well, it's always warm around the equator. Kind of always stays warm around there. And well, what's around there? Well, the Amazon.

• 2:26:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And even in periods of, yeah, like the fully glaciated periods, some places on the earth were perfectly habitable.

• 2:26:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:26:10Speaker 01

  So who knows? But then, I mean, and that goes back into the, like you say, the Amazon, it goes back into the question of how long have humans been in America? Because if we've been in America, in the Americas for a lot longer than we think, then people have been in the Amazon a lot longer, we think. And then you look at the discoveries in the Amazon and how there's been civilizations there a lot further back in time than we thought. Well, how far back in time? Obviously, the evidence we've seen so far doesn't point like crazy back in time, but we don't know.

• 2:26:35Speaker 00

  Well, there's so little evidence. That's the problem. I mean, they're just recently discovering these grids, right? And so how much archaeological work has been done on all these grids?

• 2:26:45Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, exactly. It's so hard. And also the, the rainforest is such like an extreme recycling kind of natural machine that it's going to destroy anything that's, that's older than, than a few thousand years ago, so.

• 2:26:57Speaker 00

  It doesn't mean there's not stuff that's older than a few thousand years ago. It just means there's nothing left.

• 2:27:02Speaker 01

  And they could have built in organic materials that have just decayed and you would never see it. And they could have been doing that hundreds of thousands of years ago. And who knows?

• 2:27:11Speaker 01

  So it's wild, man. It's so wild. And I think this, the potential is enormous, just absolutely enormous. And that's why I do what I do, because I, I think it's so fascinating. And I love talking about it and I love getting other people to think about it. And that's the great privilege of me being able to do this job. So, yeah.

• 2:27:31Speaker 00

  Well, it's an important job. It really is. Cause those videos, although they are, you know, just YouTube and they're entertaining, they're just, you know, something that anyone can digest. There's so much valid, fascinating information on them and so many valid questions that we really can't quite answer and expands the like, when people watch them, you get this understanding like, oh, wow, this is a big puzzle. This, this thing is really complicated. Like, it's a lot more complicated than we've been told, especially by, you know, people that want you to believe that they have, they have the answers.

• 2:28:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's why I just hate it. I hate the certainty that people talk about the past. Cause I never talk about it with certainty. I'm not saying this is necessarily true. I'm just saying, you know, possibilities everywhere, so many different possibilities. And yeah, everything we seem to discover pushes it in one direction that's older and more intelligent back in time. And yeah, there's, there's so many interesting things. And we haven't even, we barely scratched the surface today.

• 2:28:30Speaker 00

  I know. We could do this for days. Before we wrap it up though, is there any, any other really interesting ones that you'd like to talk about?

• 2:28:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was something interesting that came out in regards to writing. There's a couple of interesting things regarding writing. So obviously, writing is the kind of marker of civilization, like writing began, civilization began. But we're starting to see evidence of symbolic, meaning being transmitted through symbolic notation, like way back further in time than we believe. So obviously, the earliest writing is still thought to be about 4,000 B.C. with the ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform and stuff like that. But as you mentioned, Erwin Finkel, the, the kind of idea regarding Tash Depela having a similar thing, and that's 12,000 years ago. But there's much, much older evidence of humans conveying information in a symbolic fashion.

• 2:29:16Speaker 01

  So there's an archaeologist called Genevieve von Peitzinger, I believe she's called. And she found evidence that on all these Ice Age paintings that we find in Europe, with all these incredible like bulls and bison and stuff, and you've probably seen them. But next to them is like this kind of symbol of notation that people have kind of overlooked for years. But she found 32 recurring signs across a period of 30,000 years, all across the continent. And these signs, she thinks, are like a, not a language as such, but a kind of a, a system of encoding meaning. Yeah, there you go. There are the signs. And she kind of makes the argument that these signs are, not a language as such,

• 2:30:01Speaker 01

  but a kind of tradition of conveying information that lasted for 30,000 years. And that is such a long length of time. Like, if you think about the oldest language today, it's, I think it's ancient Chinese, and that's only a few thousand years old. And yet, these signs appear all across the continent of Europe, across a time span of 30,000 years, are pretty much exactly the same, and just these signs. And they also find them in other continents as well. And she doesn't say there's any connection there. And I'm not sure there is any connection there, but.

• 2:30:31Speaker 00

  The spirals are really weird. They find spirals all over the place, right?

• 2:30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. They find these signs all over the world. Jamie, you might be able to find a.

• 2:30:42Speaker 00

  All over the world?

• 2:30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's like a cool map where they kind of point where, where it's all found. If you scroll down a little bit on the left, that one, yeah. You see this, that's really blurry.

• 2:30:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, once it loads, but it's it's all over the world. There you go. And it's the same signs.

• 2:31:00Speaker 00

  Wow. That's crazy. So the same signs in Europe, North America, Central Africa, South America, Southern Africa, Australia, Malaysia, East Africa, New Guinea. Wow. Borneo, Myanmar.

• 2:31:21Speaker 01

  And she thinks it's like a much older symbolic tradition that humans have kind of carried with them in the kind of migratory routes. And it actually goes back much older than the the Ice Age art date of like forty thousand years, but actually comes from when humans first reached Europe out of Africa and spreading across the world. And we've kind of kept the same tradition of conveying information. And again, this has massive implications for human intelligence. Because even though it's not a full language, the ability to convey information in a symbolic way is a is a marker of of really sophisticated intelligence. And so it's another really interesting discovery that kind of points towards intelligence and also the the kind of the to maintain that tradition over such a long length of time is really interesting.

• 2:32:05Speaker 01

  Because we don't really do that. Like, as I say, the oldest language is ancient Chinese, and it's only a few thousand years old. And yet, these people somehow managed to pass on this language, quote unquote, for thirty thousand years.

• 2:32:18Speaker 00

  Have you ever heard anybody discuss the concept that human beings might have had some sort of some sort of telepathy that atrophied when we started using language and writing and communicating with words?

• 2:32:33Speaker 01

  What's really interesting is the human brain size has decreased since civilization began.

• 2:32:39Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 2:32:40Speaker 01

  Which is strange, because because and it makes sense, because if everything was oral before, you need more of your brain to hold all the information. But once you can kind of outsource it to physical objects, you don't need so much brain like size and space.

• 2:32:56Speaker 00

  How much has it decreased?

• 2:32:57Speaker 01

  I can't remember off the top of my head, but it's I don't think that's even controversial. I think there's quite a lot of evidence that the human brain size has decreased a little bit in the last ten thousand years or whatever.

• 2:33:07Speaker 00

  Well, what weren't like, there was some ancient people that thought writing was a bad idea and that you should you should remember everything and that writing and writing things down was actually going to degrade your memory.

• 2:33:20Speaker 01

  Well, I think I think it certainly does, because you don't need that brain, like part of your brain anymore. If you if you're not memorizing all the information you have, like it makes us smart as a whole, as a civilization, but.

• 2:33:31Speaker 00

  And then if you extrapolate, so do hard drives.

• 2:33:33Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Exactly. Well, it's happening on an even bigger scale now with AI and stuff like that.

• 2:33:37Speaker 00

  Exactly. Same process, though. Like, people talk about ChatGPT decreasing people's intelligence.

• 2:33:42Speaker 01

  Well, because it outsources thinking itself, which is a crazy step and.

• 2:33:46Speaker 00

  And we're gonna just go like a raisin.

• 2:33:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, it's, yeah. So, I mean, maybe we're regressing. But I think as a civilization, we're we're learning more and.

• 2:33:55Speaker 00

  Yes, collectively.

• 2:33:56Speaker 01

  But as the individual, maybe we're regressing.

• 2:33:59Speaker 00

  And our potential to learn and just to remember things like when I just from when I was a boy, I knew everybody's phone number.

• 2:34:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:06Speaker 00

  And now I don't know anybody. I know like three people's phone numbers.

• 2:34:09Speaker 01

  Because we don't have to memorize anymore.

• 2:34:10Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 2:34:11Speaker 01

  It's wild.

• 2:34:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:34:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there was also another paper that came out regarding language, which is they found

• 2:34:19Speaker 01

  over two hundred objects, and this around the same date, around forty thousand years ago. And they basically found like a proto writing script that had the same level of complexity as the early Sumerian scripts from three thousand B.C., but from forty thousand years ago in Ice Age Europe. Again, so it's it's like another kind of proto language, symbolic thinking and conveying meaning through symbols. I don't know if I can't quite remember off the top of my head, Jamie, but if you type in like, it was this year. So if you type in PNAS proto writing

• 2:34:51Speaker 01

  forty thousand years ago or something, they found it loads of like symbols engraved on bones. And they argued that it was the same level of complexity as the early Sumerian scripts. And again, this was the marker of civilization, three thousand B.C. But now it's this capability is so much older now because of these new discoveries.

• 2:35:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I saw that. It's really weird. Like, when you're looking at the writing, like, okay, what are they like the little scratches on the bones and clay and whatever it is, like, what are they? What are they conveying? Do we even understand what they're conveying or just assume they're conveying something?

• 2:35:24Speaker 01

  Well, I think they they categorized it and they they seem to think it is a kind of proto script.

• 2:35:30Speaker 00

  Fucking weird, man. Like, that's a script?

• 2:35:34Speaker 01

  Well, a pro, yeah, like a proto script. So like the kind of thing that became language, but.

• 2:35:38Speaker 00

  Right. So there had to be a precursor to the language.

• 2:35:41Speaker 01

  But if it a written language, but if it if it existed forty thousand years ago, it's so much older than we used to think this capability emerged.

• 2:35:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:35:48Speaker 01

  And what does that? What does that kind of entail?

• 2:35:51Speaker 00

  Can I see that again, Jamie? The images? How weird.

• 2:35:55Speaker 00

  And so at the bottom, that looks a lot like cuneiform.

• 2:35:57Speaker 01

  I think the I think these ones are examples of the.

• 2:35:59Speaker 00

  More advanced.

• 2:36:00Speaker 01

  But they're saying it's at the same level as this, but forty thousand years ago, which is vastly older than cuneiform.

• 2:36:11Speaker 00

  It's so interesting. Look, I'm sure you've seen the, we talked about this yesterday as well. The Italian guy who came up with this concept of erosion dating.

• 2:36:22Speaker 01

  Oh, on the pyramid. Yeah, you sent me that. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:24Speaker 00

  That's that's another weird one. It was like at the high end, he thinks it might be twenty plus thousand years old. It's like, okay, what?

• 2:36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, because he compared the erosion, because there was an earthquake like five hundred years ago that kind of shook all these casing stones off. And he compared the erosion with the blocks that had always been exposed with the ones that had recently become exposed. And, yeah, he got this day. I mean, I'd like to see that method like tried and tested on sites we know the age of and, you know, proven that way before I take that too seriously. But, you know, it's interesting and.

• 2:36:55Speaker 00

  It's all interesting. You're listen, your show's super interesting. I'm so glad you're around. I'm so glad that someone like you that's willing to do that kind of work, because obviously Jamie and I are not gonna do it.

• 2:37:07Speaker 01

  This week.

• 2:37:08Speaker 00

  But we're super happy to have you in anytime you've got some new stuff you want to talk about. And I'm really excited that your channel just keeps growing, because it's really good, man. You could really tell you put in so much work and so much effort and research. And it's just excellent. It's super entertaining. And it's right up my alley, so.

• 2:37:25Speaker 01

  I appreciate it, Joe.

• 2:37:26Speaker 00

  Thanks for being the fucking man.

• 2:37:28Speaker 01

  Thank you, man. Well, straight back at you. And I really appreciate like all the support you've shown me like it doesn't go unnoticed, man. Like, it it really means a lot. And, yeah, if I could just do a little self plug real quick. Like, I've got my channel, Michael Button, search it up, everyone, and check me out. But I've also I just started a second channel called Patterns of History, because I'm really interested in, once we move into recorded history, it's really interesting to see how when the silence lifts and we have these ruins, we can cross check and these dates we can kind of match to different civilizations. It's so interesting how civilizations seem to follow the same patterns all over the world of rise, collapse, fall and things like that. And it applies today. I think we see the same patterns happening.

• 2:38:11Speaker 01

  And civilizations always think that they're more advanced and, there we go, thanks. And better than the ones before. But, I mean, that's another fucking, I could go on for another three hours on that. But it's so it's so interesting how we see the same recurring patterns happen throughout civilizations across recorded history as well. So that's like another little project that I'm I'm working on, but I'm still a I'm still gonna go as hard as I possibly can on the kind of archaeological lost history side of things.

• 2:38:38Speaker 00

  Beautiful that you have so much time to do two different channels, too. It's awesome.

• 2:38:42Speaker 01

  Well, I'm trying my best.

• 2:38:44Speaker 00

  Well, you're kicking ass, dude. Congratulations. It's awesome. Always great to have you. Thank you for being here. One more time, people want to see your channel. They want to find you. What's the best place? I know you're on Spotify now as well, right? So just audio?

• 2:38:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's the videos as well. It's exactly the same. Yeah, I just put them up there so people can if people, some people prefer to listen. They let me know that. So I put it out there. So, yeah, I've got both my channels. I'm also about to make some music. If you should check out my music.

• 2:39:07Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 2:39:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm in a band. This is my band.

• 2:39:09Speaker 00

  Oh, that's the alien head?

• 2:39:10Speaker 01

  That's why I keep wearing the alien head, yeah.

• 2:39:12Speaker 00

  Oh, what's the name of your band?

• 2:39:13Speaker 01

  We're called Headache. If people, you get it? It's like the the headache, yeah. So people want to check that out.

• 2:39:20Speaker 00

  What kind of music?

• 2:39:21Speaker 01

  Punk rock.

• 2:39:21Speaker 00

  Oh, you're a fucking punk rocker.

• 2:39:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, punk rocker, bro. I used to do that all the time. And then COVID kind of fucked us up and we couldn't perform live and our drummer moved to Australia. But we're gonna try to make some music again in the near future, so.

• 2:39:33Speaker 00

  That's awesome.

• 2:39:34Speaker 01

  This is headache dot com if people want to check that out. But, yeah.

• 2:39:38Speaker 00

  Check it out. All right. Michael, thank you.

• 2:39:40Speaker 01

  Appreciate it, Joe.

• 2:39:41Speaker 00

  Look at that.

• 2:39:41Speaker 01

  There you go. Get us on.

• 2:39:43Speaker 00

  Moody looking motherfuckers.

• 2:39:44Speaker 01

  The boys, yeah, the boys.

• 2:39:45Speaker 00

  Guy in the back, get your hair out, yeah, bro. Can't see like that.

• 2:39:50Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.