Joe Rogan Experience #2546 — Michael Button Transcript

Transcript

0:01 Joe Rogan podcast, checking out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Good to see you, brother. What's going on? Good, man. It's been a wild year for me. I bet it has been. Since I was last year, 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 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. Well, you're putting out fantastic content. Thank you.

0:50 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. Yeah. And it's really important when someone like you does it because you're so thorough and you're so objective and you're so measured in the way you describe these things and talk about these things.

1:32 I'm always trying to make it as good. as I possibly can and I try and listen to what people say and trying to 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. As well, they should be. And they also know that we're getting a very narrow version of it from mainstream academics.

2:05 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. 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. Right.

3:14 So in the last year, a lot of wild stuff has been discovered, which is really exciting. Yeah. It's so interesting how quick this stuff is moving. 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, the show that I think have huge ramifications for how we view history. So, I mean, I don't know where to start. I mean, 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

4:35 read the papers, and go investigate 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 why after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of human beings like us being on this planet,

5:08 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 pretty much the exact same time? So we see civilization flourishing in Meso America. We see civilization flourishing in South America, in Egypt, in the Indus Valley, and Mesopotamia and ancient India and 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.

5:42 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 discovery. So that's question one. Why does 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?

6:11 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. And also combining to 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 yeah, so that's question two. How old is human intelligence? And again, I think the answer is we don't have the answer anymore. So that's really fascinating. And then question three is, when did humans first reach the more isolated land?

6:57 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 it's fundamentally important because whatever the answer is is the reason we're all here, right? It's the reason we all live in this civilization. It's the reason we all enjoy the fruits of everything that we exist in today. And yet we don't know the answer anymore. But as I said on the surface, everyone's

7:40 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. 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.

8:21 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 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 Olmex is just a word. We gave them that word.

9:01 We don't know what the fuck they were doing. We have no idea what they looked like. We know 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 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 go on. Do you think that this is just like as far back

9:33 as we can find stuff? Or do you think? What do you think? Well, I think, in terms of the civilization question, I think it's just, I think it's an old idea that we kind of drew this line. And the line is the invention of writing, right? So it's around 3,000, 4,000 BC 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 BC back to like 12,000 BC, I think the answer is that clearly civilization is older. I mean, considering we see things like Tashtepe, Quebecly-Tepa, 12,000 years ago,

10:19 I think that is a civilization. I think 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 purely hypothetical scenarios, like, is it possible? And that's when I think things like the history of human intelligence,

10:44 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 what I mean about everything kind of being back on the table again, because we now have an incredibly increased time span of human intelligence that I would argue, and 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 it is 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

11:27 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. 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 span of prehistory or not the whole of prehistory, but I would argue, and I'll get onto 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

12:06 The possibilities of prehistory 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. So, yeah, I don't know. I kind of got a bit sidetracked there from the original question. Well, that's a, no, 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 ergot theory?

12:39 His theory was that he believes that agriculture and that as they started agriculture wasn't just significant in that 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 civilization would advance. He thinks it's also because ergot grows on these different wheats and barley 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 Merrill Rescue talked about in the Illucinian Mysteries, in his great book, The Immortality Key.

13:34 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. Did you see that they just not proved it, but they just did a study on the Elysinian mysteries where they kind of showed that they were doing, they did have ergot. Because when Brian wrote that book, they hadn't proved that, but something just came out. Did you see the, it was a Puma bone pipe that they found that tested positive for DMT? Well, in Elysis. I do not know. I think it was, I don't, it might have been in the America. No, where was that?

14:18 Peru, yes. Really? Yes. How old is that, Jamie? See if you can put that in a perplexity if it knows what this is all about. Because it's a fascinating subject. Because not only does it imply that they were willingly taking. psychedelic drugs, it somehow or another they knew how to make DMT. Like, okay, what? Because 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, what? This is actually a northwestern Argentina. Aha. So it's still the Andes, but. The Inca Cueva, a high altitude cave site in Jewjoy, northwestern.

15:04 in Argentina, the tubular smoking pipes were made from the long bones of Apuma. They were found alongside and adanthra, anadanthra, anna denanthra seeds, including the plant commonly associated with Vilca-Sibyl-Snuff traditions. Residue testing detected tryptamine alkaloids in the pipes. So they were figuring out how to take these seeds and smoke them. 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 anadenthera. Anadetanthra, sorry scientists in the southern Andes. That's fucking crazy.

16:05 The careful answer is DMT was detected in pipe residues. But anadantherera colubrina is not simply a DMT plant. Its psychoactive chemistry can include bufatinin DMT and 5 MEO DMT 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, and then-anthra,

16:38 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, one of the reasons why this is particularly significant is there's scholars out of, I think it's the University of Jerusalem, that believe that the burning bush that Moses encountered.

17:06 Some kind of psychedelic. That's what, that's exactly what they think. They think the translation 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. Yeah, I mean, I think it's clearly the case that ancient cultures, not just in South America, but across the world,

17:36 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 time. And yeah, that's fascinating.

17:57 Yeah, and much like in our culture today, and, you know, especially what happened in 1970, where all that stuff was demonized and put on Schedule 1. Back then, during the Illesinian 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 are their weird ideas who invented democracy. They're going to fuck this whole thing up. We're not going to be able to run it and tell everybody what to do and force them into going to war. Yeah, I know. The powers that be always want to restrict any kind of like thought that's outside of the, what they want people to think.

18:32 They don't want people to think as freely as they can. Anything that limits their control, you know, because 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. Which is probably good for people. You know, it probably is what leads to, I mean, not the war part of it, but, but, you know, 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.

19:05 Yeah. You know, like my friends that have been to Afghanistan, they had to serve over there. They're essentially saying that, like, they're living like people lived thousands of years ago. There's warlords and they control regions and 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. Very clan-like when you live in. And if you don't have, if that guy and these groups just stay in control forever,

19:39 it's like there's no motivation for them to change and evolve and grow. There's no innovation. Yeah, nothing's happening. Also, they're stuck in the mountains. So it's like you're just trying to live. But, you know, when we think of these places, these very fertile places on, earth where like particularly turkey turkey's fascinating you know and many people are now speculating that that if there is a singular place that but that might have been one of the birthplaces of

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20:46 Gold is three times stronger, five times faster, and eight times longer lasting than old school methods. Blue Chewold is the real deal. Right now, buy two months of Blue Chewold and get the third free with my code Rogan. You will also receive free overnight shipping. Head over to BluChu.com for details and important safety information. Check it out. This ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience. Yeah, I mean, I think it undoubtedly is.

21:18 I think Tash Depella, 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 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.

21:43 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 Tash Depeller a civilization. But I think it will get there. But don't you think that's just because of them trying to protect their timeline that they've been teaching? Yeah. And I think it will change.

22:07 I think it will change. I don't think there's any other explanation of them 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. And they're finding residential buildings at Gubeckli-Tepa 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. Yeah, there's all the sites and quite a vast area all connected. So the only ones they haven't got now is writing, and there's an interesting discovery regarding writing at Gaubeckle-Tepa and agriculture.

22:41 Yeah, we talked about that yesterday. The Irving-Inkel thing. Yeah, so interesting. So are those where you see those pillars, are those sites where you have like those concentric circles? I assume so. Those are the famous ones anyway. Karahan Tepe, Gebeckley-Tepe, Safer Tepe, those are the biggest ones. And only 5% of Gobeckley-Tepe currently has even been excavated, right?

23:06 Mm-hmm. 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. Yeah, I mean, it's wild. Like, Quebec Lepa, 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 archaeological practice to not excavate too much of a site. What are we looking at here? That's Quebecli Tepe. And what are we looking at in terms of these grids? I think maybe that's the kind of archaeological pit.

23:45 I think I'm not. 100% sure. It seems like it, right? Because 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 risk of destroying some incredible find, some beautiful ancient thing because you're using tractors or something like that is too great. It's valid. It is valid. But I would argue, and I've said this before, is that Gebekli-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

24:25 not obviously you want to be careful when you go in and you want to follow correct archaeological procedure, but at the same time, what if a relic like equivalent to the Rosetta stone, 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 Quebecle-Tepi. That could be waiting for us to find. I've talked about this bore before, Joe. Yeah.

24:53 I don't remember ever seeing it, but it's not new, but it was also found at Quebec-Tepie. It was painted. Oh. I think like some of the mouth was painted red. It's crazy-looking. It's life-side. I'm pretty close to life-size. The whole thing is really fascinating because it's also, I think it's the first evidence of 3D carving in stone too? Yeah, relief, I think, is good. Yeah. Or that's a statue. 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.

25:28 The stone is carved around it, which is advanced. It takes sophisticated use of tools and an understanding of how to work stone to be able to do something like that. And crucially specialization, right? That's someone's job. not out there gathering food. That's their job. That's their, how they spend their time. And it's also, hey, how did you move those? Yeah, of course. What, those stones are huge. The biggest ones are like, how many? I think most of them are like 10 tons, but 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

26:04 that they would have had a method to move that or otherwise they wouldn't have carved it out. Yeah, 50 tons is high and stubby little peckers. It says clutching. clutching their peckers. Yeah. Okay. 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 giant's impact and whatever the fuck could have happened to whatever civilization previously existed? That's what things get real squirrely. Yeah, well, exactly. because if that is a civilization,

26:45 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. Yeah, that word is a problem. Yeah, exactly. Just like, who cares? It's clearly very sophisticated culture. It's like when Fauci was talking about gain of function. Like, hey, fucker. You know what we're talking about. Exactly. Exactly. But yeah, that means that, you know, the timeline of civilization, whatever you want to call it,

27:07 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 Depella, Quebecli Tepe, it's not the first thing these people built. They weren't starting from scratch. They weren't just hunter-gatherers that thought, let's try something new and build this. Like, there's clearly a long procedure up to that point. So how far back does that go?

27:27 And for people that don't know, we should probably explain that one of the reasons why they're able to accurately carbon test Quebec Lepepe 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? 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.

28:04 And why were they covered? Yeah. I mean, there is debate over that, but that's what Klaus Schmidt thought. What is the debate? Well, some people say it wasn't intentionally covered, and it was just kind of like a landslide over. Like a crazy landslide that'll happen at once? I mean, it's really hard to prove. What an amazing landslide that covers everything.

28:20 Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I would still lean towards the original interpretation from the original archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, but obviously... And why did he think they covered it? I don't know. Like a conquering civilization or like, fuck these people and their beautiful pillars. No, I think he thought the people that built it covered it. Interesting. Well, I guess you can't tell, can you?

28:39 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 bug bears with archaeology. Like, I love archaeology and I have a huge respect for the archaeologists. And I think they do amazing work. But one of my main bug bears 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.

29:09 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. 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.

29:32 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. 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. Yeah, that's what I mean about the fact that the rug's kind of been pulled out from underneath us. Yeah. 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.

30:17 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 manmade in the sense that it consists of accumulated archaeological deposits, but its formation involved both human actions and natural sediment movement, ending around 8,000 BCE. Yo, that's a long fucking dime 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 been humans far longer than we used to think.

31:22 So 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 saying the homo sapiens were like 50,000 years old. Maybe 100, right? And now the conventional estimate is like, what, three? So the oldest fossils we have of anatomically modern humans are 315 to 360,000 years old. I mean, it's the same fossil set from Jabelarud in Morocco. But this obviously is really hard to date accurately, but it's between 300 and 350,000 years. 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. It's so unlikely that you'd fossilize. It's something like one in a million.

32:03 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 was about? Like fuck. Exactly. There's not much evidence. That's the problem. But the evidence that they do find is pushing the timeline way back.

32:29 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 is 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 would it take so long? And is it possible that given the, I mean, the incredible possibilities in terms of 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.

33:17 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 what we understand about humans biologically. Like, doesn't it make sense that these people just as anatomically completely like us? Like why would it take them hundreds of thousands of years to figure out a roof? Yeah, exactly.

33:51 But I think we have clear evidence now that what we call modern intelligence, behavioral modernity, goes back 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. And one of these papers? 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 sapient trait, exclusively modern human straight, 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,

34:46 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. 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.

35:06 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.

35:32 So it's always been an island. And yet, in August 2025, archaeologists at a 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 decade or so ago we found stone tools on Flores, which is just below Siloasi.

36:02 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 old. So over a million years ago, some type of human was crossing ocean boundaries to get these islands. And there's also Luzon, which is just above Siloasi, same region. And they found stone tools there, which are 700,000 years old. Now, the theory always was that this was an accident.

36:37 When we just had Flores, the theory was that it was accidental drift. So, and a couple of humans were swept out to sea and somehow survived the stormy ocean and the tropical sun clinging to some driftwood and made it to Flores 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 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 colonize, 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 were going to Mars or something, and you need a certain amount of humans of breeding age to not have genetic problems in the population.

37:35 So you need a certain amount of humans of a breeding age to, to ensure viability, right? Because otherwise you're going to imbreed and you're all going to die out because of 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 somewhere near 500. So what are the chances that 500 individuals were all swept out to see at the same time, all survived the crossing, and all landed on an island, and colonized it? it. That's a huge amount of humans for an accident, do you know what I mean? And then three times

38:13 in three separate islands, all in the same region. At what point does accident start looking like behaviour? Do you know what I mean? Because that is how, what are the chances of 500 individuals all being swept out to see, all survive and all reaching these islands and all colonising in three separate occasions all around about a million years ago? I think 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? Right. And that's, I mean, and that is a controversial opinion.

38:48 That's not accepted. It's accepted that the humans reach these islands. That's not controversial. Humans were on these islands a million years ago, 700K. It's just not accepted that it was intentional. Yeah, it's not accepted that they built. That seems silly. But I think it's, it doesn't make any sense. It's not a 500 of them make it over by floating and surfing. surviving? Yeah. What? Exactly. All the same time. Exactly. And this is what I mean about taking data points from different kind of science. So yeah, because I'm looking into what NASA is 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 a exclusively sapiens thing, building a boat, because that's really hard to build a boat.

39:40 You have to have planning. You have to have foresight. You have to be good enough at carpentry to construct something that's seaworthy. You have to trial and error. Yeah, trial and ever. And you have to have the imagination as well to dream about what's on the other side of the horizon and the bravery and the incredible reckless courage to go for it and to go out there across the horizon and reach an island.

40:00 And possibly navigate through the stars. Like they knew how to do that. Maybe. Maybe. Otherwise, why would you set out, you know? Right. And how would you repeat it? Exactly. Yeah. How are you, do you remember which way you went? That were! It's a fucking dude with a giant brow ridge. Furry face is telling you, I remember going this way. Like, are you fucking sure? How are you doing? Are you using the stars?

40:25 Like, what are you doing? But humans weren't even men to have complex language by them. They weren't men to be capable of this. That's crazy. We're seeing these things. 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 even more ridiculous. Because let's say at the minimum of 50 kilometers, how long does it take you to row 50 kilometers? It seems like it would be days. It would be tough, wouldn't it? And no, an ocean as well. 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.

41:04 But, I mean, how are they doing that? Do they have a calendar a million years ago? But whatever they were doing, if it was deliberate, which I think the evidence points towards, it's a clear sign of what we call modern intelligence. And organization and most likely communication. Which we always used to think only emerged 50,000 years ago. That's crazy. And so now, if it's over a million years old, you know, that's like a 20 times.

41:27 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? That's so funny. that point four. That's a lot. It's huge. It's absolutely gigantic. Hundreds of thousands years. 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. Yeah. It's so long. Well, another weird one that's come up fairly recently that I know you've talked about is the copper mining in North America. Yeah.

41:57 That one blew me away. Just the volume of copper that was removed. Yeah. They had a whole copper industry in North America 9,000 years ago, which is... Just listen to that again. Say that one more time. The whole copper industry in North America 9,000 years ago. And that's the same as the earliest day anywhere else in the world. And the volume. This is what's going to freak people out. Tell them how much copper was removed. 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. Like a commercial copper mine volume.

42:40 Yeah, that's why I said industry. It's big. 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. 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.

43:10 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 estimate. Yeah, there you go. Here it is.

43:34 1.5 billion pounds of copper. 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.

44:12 So that means that they were doing it for thousands of years. They're saying it covers many millennia. Yeah, they were doing it for, yeah, as it says, the peak between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago. 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 It was just sitting on the top They called it float copper I think Like that like float here you go That's probably how they first started finding it And then they probably started digging Isn't it interesting how

44:52 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. Yeah. 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? Probably, yeah. I think they found like spear points and stuff. Yeah, maybe that makes sense.

45:21 But then they dropped it, and then they stopped doing it. And we don't know why they did that. But as I was saying, it kind of, there's a copperhead arrow. It goes against this idea that we have 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 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, we can go up and down and forget things and rediscover things. Right. And that's what the, this is the alternative theory is that we're a reinvention of civilization currently, and that we're the most advanced re-advention that we're aware of.

46:05 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 because they're so perplexing. the stones in Lebanon, what do they call the Trilathon stones? Yeah, Balbeck, yeah. Yeah, those are crazy. Like, what happened there? How, what? How did you get them up there?

46:33 It's weird because they're attributed to the Romans, right? But there's no Roman records of them doing that. 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 Coliseum is obviously an incredible thing, but the blocks aren't as big as these blocks at Balbeck. And yet they don't mention it anywhere.

46:55 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. 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 how it is over and over and over again. That sucks at Waman. That's a lot of these places.

47:21 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, like the gods. The gods put these rocks here. It happens all over the world. Yeah. 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.

47:46 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. 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 can't really say definitively we know.

48:15 And that drives experts crazy because they don't like to do that. 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. They love doing that. But no one's listening to them. That's what's cute. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I'm grateful that. A lot of people listen to me. Well, like I said, you're really good at it.

48:53 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 why the subject will, you know, hopefully will continue the pathway that it's on. Because 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 this stuff and go, hey, there's a lot

49:24 going on here, people. There's a lot. Yeah, I think it's interesting that 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. 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 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, the more we realize just how big it is and how crazy it is and how little we understand about our place in it. But I think the other subject is history.

50:16 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 mind 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. Yeah. And also, it's cool. It's cool.

50:54 It's so fascinating, man. I love it. And I know you love it too. And it's great. Well, it's so weird. You know, it's so weird to think, like, what was it like thousands and thousands of years ago? 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 also when you go back thousands of years in the conventional timeline, 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, probably earlier than that, but why were they so brutal 2,000 years ago? Because I think those are the people that survived. I think the people

51:56 that survived were probably fucking terrible because 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? 70,000 years ago got us down to what just a few thousand people globally Yeah Yeah Imagine that life Imagine what you had to do To stay alive Imagine even the thought Of raising children In a world Where there's only 7000 people left And limited amounts of food

52:28 And you know Most of the population of earth is dead What? Yeah This is crazy We've been through some crazy things as a species. 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? 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, basically all the men died.

53:11 There's like evidence that 95% of male bloodlines were removed. And we can see this from the Y chromosome 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,

53:36 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, but no one really knows, but it's really interesting. Well, doesn't it make sense, though? I mean, think if you go from hunter and gathering where you're constantly moving, nomadic tribes, a bunch of people to stick together, you're in tents or whatever, and then all of a sudden you're stationary, and 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.

54:07 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. Because you're dumb-ass built a house. Like the Mongols used to make fun of people that lived in houses.

54:29 They thought they were fools. And they lived in felt tents, period. That's how you're supposed to live. You keep moving. And this idea is staying put, like, look at these idiots. Like, we're just going to go sack their city. Like, they really had no respect for people that were so stupid that they stuck themselves behind walls. Like, you assholes can't even run away.

54:48 We're going to launch lit human beings on fire with catapults onto your thatched roofs and set everything ablaze. You know, it turns out people are, like, really good at starting fires when you light them on fire because we're fatty. 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. And energy molecule our brains naturally create when pushed to our limits.

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55:55 I have faster memory recall and I'm more productive. Your brain thrives on ketones. Go to ketone.com slash Rogan for 30. percent off your subscription order or find ketone IQ at Target stores nationwide in the protein and electrolyte aisle and get your first shot free. They're so confident in it that they even offer a 60-day money-back guarantee. So go ahead and take your shot. Yeah, once we settle down and once we owned you stay put. You've become a target. 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

56:32 violence did increase massively as we entered the kind of agricultural age that we're still in. So that is interesting. 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.

56:52 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 arrow turrets are facing the wrong way Yeah Yeah and a lot of it A lot of the great wall The arrows are facing an inward To try to keep people in rather than out Or try to keep people from China Escaping 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 never seen that? No I never seen that now

57:28 It's very weird Like people have 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. Yeah. They're not like China defending the wall against the Huns. It's weird. That is strange. That is strange. See if you can find some of that. Not a really great answer in this. So part of it is and part of it isn't.

57:55 Mostly the Great Wall's defensive features faced north outward towards the step, the usual direction of major raids of innovation. But many survive. driving sections have arrow slits and parapets facing both north and south, including seemingly inward, towards China. Why face inward? Defense after a breach for attackers crossed the wall or captured a tower, so they prepared to be invaded? Hmm. Chinese garrisons needed to shoot and counterattack from the south side as well. Control of movement both ways. The wall was a network of forts, gate signals rose, not just a one-sided barrier, also regulated border crossings, trade and movement.

58:33 It is crazy that they've invented a wall that you could see from space. I know, it's wild. It's like one of the biggest engineering projects ever. Like, how long is that, is it like a thousand miles or something crazy? I have no idea, but it's big. How long is the Great Wall of China? Take a guess. I say a thousand miles. It's probably more. Easily. China is so big in itself and the fact that it's the whole, like... Yeah. What do you think, Jamie? Take you guess. 6,000 kilometers. 6,000?

59:02 Yeah. Wow. Jesus, Jamie. you would be really good on the prices right oh my god 21,000 kilometers holy shit oh my god oh my god 13,171 171 miles motherfucker that's crazy have you ever been there? No I've been there it's crazy it's amazing it's so beautiful the whole region around there I mean obviously it's really long but The famous continuous-looking Ming-era wall that most visitors picture is much shorter, still 8,850 kilometers.

59:44 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. Like, what were they doing? So it was built over 2,000 years from early walls in the 5th to 3rd century's 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? Not specifically her stuff, but there's lots of weird, lots of weird things in ancient China. Yeah, weird stuff like jade artifacts that seem to be machined, that don't make any sense, that are like super old.

1:00:47 And that seemed to be artifacts that were passed down from generation and generation. And thousands of years ago, the civilization that was in possession of them, their current ability to make artifacts was like much. So it seems like this was older stuff that they had somehow another acquired. And they lost their knowledge of wafer thin, jade, highly polished, seemed to be machined, like weird, weird stuff. I haven't seen that specifically, but yeah, that's interesting. I don't know about that.

1:01:20 Yeah, it seems like a really clear pattern that exists everywhere, that there was something like these ancient vases that they found. in Egypt, that they find these in these old sites and that these things that were carved out of diarite, 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.

1:02:01 And that these people, their current state of pottery and sculpture and much cruder than this stuff. So it seems like these are like really old things that are artifacts of a time where things are more sophisticated. So it's more evidence of this up and down nature of technology. Yeah, I mean it's logical, right, that people learn things, discover things, excel at them and then later people forget them. Of course, especially when you take any consideration natural disasters. Natural disasters, wars, things long. those lines. You know, like Baghdad, before the Mongols got there, was like the center of science in the world. Yeah, yeah. The Arabs, yeah, they were incredible at science. And then it's just the natural

1:02:42 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? a long amount of time that we've been around human beings on this planet, it's just almost impossible for things to survive when we talk about these 100,000 years, 200,000 years. Yeah. It's so hard for things to survive that long.

1:03:14 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 a thousand years. It's like nothing. Everything's crumbling. Gone. It's mental. No buildings, no glass. Everything gets absorbed in the earth. You've got a jungle where Manhattan is. And maybe you would stumble upon a piece of metal one day. 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 millennias a long time, but not compared to these timescales that we're talking about. No, if these timescales are accurate in terms of the human brain,

1:03:52 in terms of the ability to logically, like, view the world, invent things, creativity, if they possessed this 300,000 years ago, like, why wouldn't they have figured a lot of this stuff out? 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. But that is undeniable evidence that some kind of huge. was unbelievably smart 500 or 476,000 years ago. Yeah, it was building houses. Mm-hmm.

1:04:37 Or building something. Some sort of structure. Whatever that is requires incredible levels of intelligence. It is clear evidence of what we define as modern behavior. Right. And it probably wasn't a one-off. Definitely not. And so this is what you found. So then it means were they teaching each other? Did, so, okay. So if they were teaching each other, what kind of language did they have? What kind of concepts? Could they grasp? You're not doing that without abstract thinking, without symbolic intelligence. Right. And how far did it go? Because 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.

1:05:13 So how much do we not find? Most of it? Almost all of it. Because the chances of that surviving is so unbelievably unlikely. I'm a moron, but I have a thought. 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 order, deposits, natural disasters, volcanoes, all these different things. I wonder what kind of a version of a timeline we would be able to construct with like a super advanced artificial intelligence.

1:06:12 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 a very, very rapidly emerging thing. I wonder 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.

1:07:02 That's the great hope for archaeology, right? Is that modern technology allows us to discover things that we previously would not been able to discover. And as you say, LIDAR is the current example of that. But if you just extrapolate forward, what else could we possibly use to discover things that we haven't? And of course, something like that will emerge. Because nobody even considered LIDA, again, 500 years ago, what are you talking about?

1:07:25 500 years from now, who the fuck knows? Who knows? We literally can't imagine what kind of breakthroughs are available. That's the hope. But again, I think part of what makes me 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 what you say, if we can somehow extrapolate. Or time machines.

1:07:50 Yeah, I mean. They could figure out a time machine. That'll throw the whole monkey wrench right. to the gears. Well, I think that whatever happens, our current understanding of history, that's, that cannot be the kind of end point. What we currently think about history is, is there's no way that we've like reached. No, there's no way we're done. 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 going to, because I mean, that's the science is always advancing in every single field all the time. 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. What would be around from 300,000 years ago? Other than what we've found so far, stone tools, shit like that. Like, metal would all be gone.

1:08:40 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 most things would be gone. That's what's exciting. It's like, God. You don't want to dig up the whole world, but you kind of do. Yeah, it's not that old, but this is a jade sword with, or sorry, the handles jade. The sword would have been prime metal. That's why the metal's all fucked up, but the handle is not. Wow. So anything with cool rocks or crystals or diamonds? Right, right. Yeah, the handle is kind of all that's left.

1:09:16 The sword is a rotten piece of shit. There's a few other old, let's see. Yeah, that's the one. stuff. These discs are really weird. 3,000 BC to 2000 BC. Yeah. 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. Ooh. But that's in 1600. What did they do? I mean, various, various things. In 1600. Yeah. But some of these are 3,000 years older than that, which is weird. Jade artifacts.

1:09:52 Wow. Wow. This is the cooler shit, though, nephrite. Ooh. But the description on how they did this, I'm almost not, 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. How did they do these three-dimensional little carvings? Yeah, it's just like they would put, they'd get this slurry of water and,

1:10:23 That kind of makes sense. That one that you just showed. How old is that one? I don't even know what it is. That's fucking weird. It says how did ancient Chinese carve? What's the word? That's the question I asked. Without metal tools? This is the link, I think. What is that image? That's crazy, man. White nephrite. Where's that from? Carving. What year is that?

1:10:49 Oh, that's a modern master. Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. Because I was like, 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. Yeah, that aside. Okay, so this is a modern. Okay, that's why it's confusing. That's older. Yeah. A griffin. Obviously older. Some of these are drill. Like these little holes, if you look and zoom in real close, you can see evidence of drills.

1:11:21 That's not, you could have hand drills. Okay. 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. Something like this, I mean, it's very crude. 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.

1:11:48 It's when you get to large stuff that you're like, okay. How'd you get these stones from Aswan? How'd you get a 50-ton block of granite and move it through the mountains with no roads? Help me out. But I rolled it all apparently. How'd you get hundreds of them, thousands of them, millions of them? How'd you do it? It's too wild. Yeah, it is very wild. And like some of these things, I'll send you the Cassie Coppersmith episode that I did with her. Because some of the stuff is like, it's very confusing because the timelights pretty clear. that this is older stuff and the older stuff is more complex and more difficult to create and seems to indicate the use of machinery you know one of the things she pointed out was this crazy statue of a Buddha is that in India where the guy achieved enlightenment by standing still and it's how tall was it is it 90 feet tall the largest individual standing statue thousands of years old Um, looks like it's machined.

1:12:56 Like really weird. Like really weird statue. There's so much weird stuff in India. And how did they get it there? Did you guys, did you move it there? Or was it a stone that you said, hmm, wouldn't it be dope if we just, yeah, look at that fucker with a big giant hog. But I mean, it's really detailed. It's like, see if you can find a good image of it.

1:13:19 Young Jimmy. There's some, uh, her photos still on my computer. Yeah. 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. They knew you're going to be looking right there. Me? No, everybody. Humans. There's also like the Kaliasa temple, I think, the one that they carve right, yeah, carve right down somehow, hammer and chisel, apparently. Yeah. Who knows, it's incredible sophistication. That's the one where an army went to try to destroy it,

1:13:53 And they tried for years and they came up. Really? Yeah, they barely put a fucking dent in it. They scratched a few things up. But they worked on it for years to try to destroy it. Why? Because some new guy came along and said, fuck these people in the temple. Yeah, this isn't my religion. This doesn't suit my story. Like what the Taliban did, those ancient Buddhist... Yeah, they blew them up, yeah. I mean, there's over a thousand years old. And they're like... An ISIS, a palmyra. Yeah.

1:14:17 Sad, man. 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? Like how much stuff is... Yeah. How much stuff is not around anymore because some asshole came along and wanted it removed. Yeah, because it doesn't suit your narrative. Exactly. Because everyone's always building a story. Humans have always done that, built a story around... To legitimize power and rule. And if it doesn't suit your story, you destroy it. And then... Yeah.

1:14:45 Exactly. Would I be able to have some of that coffee? Hell yeah, don't. Get on in there. Thank you. I'm going to wait myself up. Yeah. You're jet lagged. Trip across the pond. Yes, exactly. Here he is. This is what it looks like. Isn't that wild, dude? That's incredible. Yeah. What's the date on this, the conventional date? Do we know? That's a good question. They're going to have to carbon date is dong. We don't know, but I'm sure it's known. There's a guess, right? Like, what is the guess of the timeline? Whatever it is, it's very perplexing. It's 57 feet tall.

1:15:23 monolithic statue of Lord Bahubali. 983. Okay. So 983 CE. That's what they believe. Yeah, AD, current era. Regard as the tallest Jane statue until 2016 construction of the statue is commissioned by the Ganga Dynasty Minister. Okay, so how? How did 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 we know that that's the timeline? I mean, it's weird.

1:16:06 It's weird because it looks machined. When you look at it, go back to 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. 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

1:16:37 granite i think 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 them just staring over our kingdom. But we don't do that anymore. That's what's weird. We don't, no one's building things like this anymore. Certainly not a stone.

1:16:59 No. 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. Yeah. No surviving technical manual records records, records rather the exact construction procedure, archaeological and art historical. understanding is that the artisans shape 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 fuck that up. This approach avoided the near impossible task of quarrying, transporting, and raising a 17-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? But it does make much more sense

1:17:54 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 that people have at 900 C.E? Well, then here's the rest of this, you know, other stuff they did in India. They did weird stuff in India where they just carved stuff right out of the stone. Like, what was the motivation to build these temples just carve them right out of Vulcan? volcanic stone. It's insane. Crazy. So detailed as well. Insanely detailed. And also some of the sculptures are three-dimensional.

1:18:27 Like, how did you get behind them and carve that out? And how did 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 about three-dimensional. Yeah. And the Barabar caves, do you know about them? Also in India, where it's like completely mirror-polished surfaces. Yes. And yet the conventional explanation for that is that they were just shelters. Right. But why are they so precise? They're, like, completely precise, and they've got this weird mirror polishing. Yeah. You don't need that if you're just building a shelter. And how about those pillars that look like they were cut on lathes?

1:18:57 Yeah. Like, what? How did you... What's going on, guys? I know. What did you... We're missing so much. We're missing so many details about the past. It's so frustrating if you're really interested in it, because it's like... How much do we know versus how much are we just assuming? 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 all the answers because we clearly don't. Yeah. What are the other papers that have come out that have been? So there was the paper about the one million-year-old skull, human skull, that was found in China last year.

1:19:37 And this is super interesting because this is a human with a modern-sized brain 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 the seafaring in Southeast Asia, then you have a million-year-old skull found in China in Northeast Asia. You know, 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, I think, in October last year. And what they did was they took, there are these fossils from a place,

1:20:17 called Jung Shan in China. And they were discovered actually in the 1990s. I think it was 1989 and 1990. There's two skulls, Jung Shan one and Jungshang two. But they were badly deformed. Yeah, there you go, Jamie, right in Q. 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 age. They always assumed to be homo erectus, but a few researchers from a university in China, along with the Natural History Museum in London,

1:20:53 a professor named Professor Chris Stringer, they applied modern reconstruction techniques to Jungshang II, the second skull. And so they used something called CT scanning to reconstruct it. And what they discovered was that they think it's actually a homo longi skull, which is this part of the same clad as Denisovan, Denisovan. And why that's important is that Denisovin is kind of like a cystic. How do you say it? Do you say Denisovan or Denisovan?

1:21:17 I don't know. I say Denisovan, but I keep hearing Denisovan. I'm trying to change it. Yeah, all the scientists say Denisovan. But the cave is Denisovar cave. So it should be Denisovin, you would think. Fuck the scientists. It doesn't matter. Denisovin, denisivin, whatever. Either way, these scientists think this skull is Homo Longi, which is a cloud 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 homolongy, That means that the divergence of our species must have happened before them. So when humans split into Neanderthal, Denisovan, and Homo sapien,

1:21:56 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 around 500,000 years ago, so it's like a 400,000 or more. than that jump from what we thought before.

1:22:18 Have you heard the theory about Neanderthals that they believe that Neanderthals were not just a separate group of human, but were actually created by humans interbreeding with other ancient primates? How do you mean? 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

1:22:49 Maybe, I haven't heard that I don't know Yeah I don't know if it's right I read it and I was like what I was like okay this is this is a crazy theory Yeah And it's 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

1:23:15 is that humans, homo sapiens, bred with something else. Well, we definitely bred with Neanderthals. Right. And probably Denisovans and DeNeyovans bred together as well. We're all so similar. The fact that we can have kids together is incredible. And they actually recently found evidence of 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.

1:23:38 Because you could always argue before that perhaps it was, you know, non-consensual breeding. Right. Between like a Neanderthal male, the sapiens. woman, but now we have evidence that we did live alongside each other cooperatively. I can't remember where the site is, but that was found recently. So yeah, that's interesting as well because See if you can find any, whatever the hell I found about Neanderthals possibly a result of humans breeding with other primates. With other primates? I mean, not other humans. We're not created by modern humans. They're a closely related extinct branch of the

1:24:13 human family. This is a very recent proposal. Yeah, I might have asked the question, too, in a different way. How'd you ask? Yeah, I said, boy, that Neanderthals are created by humans, which isn't really much she said. No. See if you search, is there, put this in. Is there a theory that Neanderthals were a result of human, maybe see, maybe you see,

1:24:45 Homo sapiens? Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens breeding with other primates. I guess you wouldn't say primates, though, because that's a monkey. Other... Homo's? Other homos. Other ancient humans. Write that, ancient humans. Ancient human species. Let's see what perplexity is to say about this. I wish I'd save that because it was really interesting it says no not as the main scientific explanation that's but I don't mean the main scientific

1:25:31 explanation I'm saying is there a theory I want to know if there's a theory 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 right but not as the main scientific explanation absolutely but is there a theory Has anyone theorized that this is possible? Ask that. Theorized that this is possible. It's going to have to crawl. If it's new, it's mean it has to crawl the websites to find that information. I want it to crawl. I'm out.

1:26:08 We can't make it crawl. Crawl. They're going to take over, man. They can't ruin the book. 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? Paralyntologists propose the particularly late-Neanderthal early modern human fossils might be Neanderthal Homo sapiens hybrids or descendants of populations that mix repeatedly. No, this is not quite what I'm saying.

1:26:37 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 it was quite a few months ago too. Let me ask the Denisovan thing it's weird because there's recent proposals. I think this is a paper. I sent you in a podcast where they're discussing this paper that as of August, like this month,

1:27:03 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. 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. So the teeth we found, we haven't got much from them, but the tooth is bigger, the jaw bone is bigger. The dragon man skull, which has been classified as very similar to Denisovin, is bigger.

1:27:31 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 58 or 5.9. And so a Denise of them being over 6 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. And it's also, we're going with a limited amount of fossils. So limited, so limited. So just from what we know, they existed with larger skulls. Recent genetic research confirms that modern humans, homo sapiens, and neonatiles repeatedly interbred,

1:28:12 of course, a period 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 and 250,000 years ago, an early wave of Homo sapiens migrating out of Africa encountered and mated with Neanderthals in Eurasia. 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. I don't know. Thank you, though.

1:29:02 What we were 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 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 correct amount of resources and food and protein, we got seven foot plus humans that are all over

1:29:31 the place today. And imagine if these Denisovan skulls, which seem to be like a completely different structure than a homo sapiens, we might be the giants of the Bible, is the point. Yeah. 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. They could have been, they could have been considerably bigger. They don't even need to be that big for 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

1:30:02 a small homo sapient community, you're going to remember that as 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 human. You know? Six foot seven, six foot nine, two hundred sixty five pounds and they have to cut weight to make two sixty five. These are giant people. 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. 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. And we know that primates can get that big. And obviously, we're a primate. I can't remember what it's called, but that's the one, yeah. Absolutely gigantic as per the name.

1:30:56 Yeah. So they can, primates are kind of line of animals can get really big. And along the same lines of, like, the timeline of discovery of that is fascinating too. Because I think it was in the 1920s, an archaeologist was in an apothecary shop in China. and he found molars that were from a primate that didn't make any sense. They were really big. Yeah, huge. And he's like, where did you get this?

1:31:23 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 necessarily and that they might have been, because a lot of people thought that it's Bigfoot. You know, there's this myth that persists throughout Native American cultures, for everywhere else. Yeah, the thing it might have been an enormous

1:31:48 arragatine. Look at that movie. What was it, the Jungle Book? Jungle Book, yeah. Yeah. So, a 10-foot-tall orangutan, like, what? I mean, it just makes sense. If there's the people, you brought up Floris before, now we also know about those little Hobbit people that lived on the island floors that were these three-foot-tall, tiny little people. So the island dwarfism,

1:32:15 and then there's a, they're totally different version of human beings, of, you know, the human chain, the human tree. Who knows? Who knows what these Denisovans look like? An island gigantism is also a thing in nature. We see that and we see reptiles, right? So it could apply to primates and to humans. Sure, as long as they had enough food. Yeah. Yeah. It's just the idea of a Denisovin. I mean, they only discovered them in 2010, right? Oh yeah, Sony. And we have hardly anything about them. So how many are we missing? You know what I mean?

1:32:48 We literally have like a tooth of jaw bone and this thigh bone and a few other things. Right. And how many other versions of humans are we missing? 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. Yeah. That's weird. That's so weird. That show, Human, have you ever seen that show? God, is it a BBC show? Oh, yeah. No, I watched that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very interesting. It's good. But she was on a podcast recently talking about this ghost DNA and how weird it is that a few hundred

1:33:17 thousand years ago some something happened and there's this DNA that's in there that's like what is this what's this stuff 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 end same with so much of prehistory we just we don't know 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? It's really hard to attribute stone tools to anything because if you just have the tools,

1:33:56 you don't know what human used them, what human made them. Right. 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. So we don't know. Yeah. What else has been fascinating for you recently? 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. 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. Yes, 22,000 years. It's crazy. 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 it because it kind of opens it all up again.

1:35:20 Because of when the kind of ice, the glacial maximums happen, 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 Chicoita Cave. Apologies for the pronunciation is probably wrong. but this is 33,000 years old

1:35:48 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 as 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 Pedro Ferrada,

1:36:12 which is 50,000 years old. Is that Chiquotay? Yeah. 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 probably the most, the least controversial. 26,000 years ago. Yeah, but it goes up to, it's like 30,000 to 33,000 years, I think. But yeah, there's a site called Pedro Furada in Brazil where they found a hearth-like structure, structure so people making fire they found charcoal they found blackened stones heated stones rather and that they dated that to like 50 or 60,000 years ago so that's like a lot older than 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

1:37:08 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 things to say it 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 always that would be pretty clear evidence. But I think the half-like structures and the heated stones and the charcoal date it's over 50,000 years ago. That's crazy. Go back to that last one, please. Right there. That's

1:37:44 wild. I'm assuming that is much more recent because of ways that would be very clear evidence of human presence. But I think the oldest layers go back. I think it's been continuously, oh, they think it's been continuously inhabited for thousands and thousands of years with the oldest being over 50,000 years old. Yeah, are they the tools? They might be the tools that because so critics say that it's natural, right? But those are natural things, not tools? Yeah, but a paper came out 2023 that really made the case that it's human presence. So napping. Yeah.

1:38:23 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. 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.

1:38:44 That's what's so cool. It's like, and if you're in a good algorithm, You get indented, give me some volume on this. Jury 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 Sephard is still unmapped. Whatever else is in there, no one's seen it yet.

1:39:37 I could do without that guy's voice. He's a little ridiculous. I got to take the radio head out. Yeah, settle down, putty. It sounds like AI voice, right? Like a super enthusiastic AI voice. Is that what it is? Well, it could be. It very well could be. It definitely is going to be in the future, but... What was it called? I don't remember. Sephard? It's just, yeah. Okay. Let's try to look it up.

1:40:04 Just see if you look it up. 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. Yeah, but it was fertile and green right up until, literally right up until the point

1:40:29 that the conventional timeline has civilization starting like around 4,000 BC 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.

1:40:50 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 of went to the Mal River doing before there's many interesting things there's a what's it called there's an interesting site Napta Playa I think it's called yeah it's gonna be a little hard to get to It's the middle of the Sahara Desert.

1:41:22 Boy. In Algeria. Geez. Buried. Oh, yeah, I have heard of this, actually. Somewhere in there. Fuck. Imagine you're an archaeologist. You're tasked with, you know, someone gives you some funding. Hey, Sahara Desert, bro. We want you to get in there and go look around. What? Yeah, it's probably not the ideal place to go. You can't even go without getting killed. Yeah, you don't get shocked. You could literally die.

1:41:54 So, no. Yeah. Just imagine if you found something cool. I imagine you found a bunch of cool shit. Yeah, you go. Good luck. It's just good like taking it out. They're like, oh, where did you get that? Exactly. Thank you. Exactly. They'll kill you. That was also my thought. I was going to bring that up about Quebecli Tapi, 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...

1:42:20 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? And South America. 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?

1:42:56 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've got a guy. He's like, you've got everything, you've got all the Ferrari. He's like, you know what I want? I want an Egyptian skeleton. Get me that. Go get me a mummy. I want a fucking mummy. Or any kind of artifact or anything. Yeah. Yeah. 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. Tutankham Commons. I'm not sure, but within the last couple decades, I think. I'm not sure. whatever 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

1:44:00 stuff is scattered in private collections in the world, you know? Yeah, and in South America, like, because they spent like, underneath Kusko, there's all these tunnels right and people have known about them for a long, long time, but it took a long time of archaeology to kind of accept that they were there. But people had like, people had like, uh, 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.

1:44:27 There's no kind of a institutional control over it. So people could just kind of do what they want until it actually finally got like, uh, you know, controlled by the authorities. So yeah. 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. And then there's the elongated skulls, the weird fucking skulls.

1:44:51 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. See, what if you go hide in your basement? Find some guy like, what's your Google search like? Let's find out who's got the stuff. because I mean if you're a person with a private museum

1:45:15 if you 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 something even more way of 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 got to be people like that in the world This guy He's one of them

1:45:47 There he goes 91 year old Don Miller from Indiana He had thousands of artifacts removed from his house Oh wow I think he had Egyptian mummies Whoa I'm trying to find the good pictures In the list of what he had So they seized his stuff How'd they find out about Was he on Instagram A delegation from China I went to Indiana to claim their stuff Whoa, a delegation from China. I wonder if they showed up with guns. Give me your shit back.

1:46:17 FBI raided a 91-year-old missionaries home and found thousands of stolen Native American bones. Whoa. Amazon River canoe. Wow, Ming Dynasty, Jade, an Egyptian sarcophagus, and a dugout canoe that had traveled down the Amazon River. Wow. It's just in his house. There's a picture of his house and another thing I had. I mean, it's just all. How'd this guy get the scratch? Where's he getting the money for all this? What'd this guy do? I don't know whether it's not a movie about him. After 10 years, FBI returned 7,000 rare artifacts looted by Indiana grave robber.

1:46:56 Oh, he's a grave robber. That's what they call him. So it's just a dude who was a collector. He might not necessarily be a grave robber. I don't think this is the same guy. They found FBI found 42,000 relics and 2,000 human relics. bones in a man's home. What is that? Whoa, what's the... What is that? A horse? Maybe like a pangolin or something. A sloth? Yeah, it looks like a pangolin, right? 42,000 relics. Oh, same guy. No.

1:47:28 Don Miller. Whoa, it is the same guy. That's crazy. This guy's a nut. He died in 2015. Too bad. He was 91. when agents first knocked on his door in 2014, while he only lived a year later. The 42,000 artifacts hoarded by Miller represent with maybe 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?

1:48:00 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 fines home to the United States. I think Nick Cage had to give back that skull he bought because it was stolen from somewhere or something. He bought a skull? Like a T-Rex skull. Oh. You know about that?

1:48:35 Oh, he had to give back his T-Rex skull? I think so because I found out that it was like stolen. So gave it back. know what happened with the money but whoa um how much is the T-Rex also I was thinking like this guy got fucked they found this guy there's gotta be we just I brought him up because I knew about it he you know probably talked about it at the bar and all that kind of yeah what about the people who don't he's on Facebook yeah about the people who don't those old dudes are all on Facebook um have you seen the dinosaur

1:49:05 that Waste To Well has yeah Ways to Well legally purchased a dinosaur So they have like a dinosaur bone, some aquatic dinosaur that they have suspended in their ceiling. Really? Yeah, you can buy dinosaur bones. He bought a skull for $276,000. Whoa, he got fucked. The Mongolian government. Wow. He voluntarily returned the fossil to the Mongolian government after U.S. authorities found it was smuggled. Oh, no. Wow. See if you can find the ways to well dinosaur. Yeah, you can buy dinosaur bones. That's pretty cool.

1:49:44 There's a lot of people that don't believe in dinosaurs lately. Really? This is very confusing. Why? What's that reasoning? 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's all bullshit. It's the dumbest there is. I mean, like, you know, we have, there's the waste-to-willed dinosaur. That's what it looks like. That's pretty dope. Yeah, it's pretty sick. Some sort of an aquatic dinosaur. how much of that is actual bone

1:50:14 and how much of his 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 I want to say 80% What is the most complete T-Rex skeleton ever found? No one just sold recently at an auction Oh yeah? Yeah it was 62% complete Is that the most complete one ever? Pretty sure I thought there was a Oh, there's one that's 90%.

1:50:46 Oh, there you go. Well, discovered with 90% of a skeleton recovered. Mm. Yeah, we know a lot, folks. This idea that dinosaurs aren't real is really silly. No, it's definitely real. Sue. Yeah. Whoa. Okay. So that's real. Guys, stop. That's a real skull. The problem is there's been deception. And 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. A lot of the pieces are recreations, and some entire skeletons that are in museums are all a recreation.

1:51:32 There's no actual bone that you're actually looking at. And so then people are like, hey. It's the same with ancient sites, though. 67 million years old, 80% intact. So, like, just that alone, 80% of that is real. They're real. It's a 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. For a long time. But the crazy thing, I think dinosaurs really highlight the kind of fragmentary nature of the fossil record, right? because they existed for 160 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? Yeah, exactly.

1:52:21 And the fossil record is just really weird. It takes a lot to make a fossil. So we have a tiny fraction of the actual data. And we have to extrapolate out from that. And just that's our understanding. And that's why we do not know what happened in the deep past. Isn't it fucking cool? It's so cool, I love it. That's why I do I do, man. I fucking love it. Yeah, I don't know anybody who, when you first learn about this stuff, anybody that I want to talk to, when you first learn about this stuff, you don't go, whoa. You know, because it's, it is so interesting. And that's why, to me, the reaction to Graham Hancock's Netflix series was so strange. Like, so unhinged. Like, why are you guys freaking out about this and calling it the most dangerous show?

1:53:07 Yeah. I mean, I've experienced this first hand 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. It's so much hate. 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 I believe and yeah. Obviously you like experienced that on a whole different level, but yeah, I've experienced it from the government. Yeah, exactly. But it's just wild. It's so weird 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... You'll get used to it. The key is just don't read it. That's the key. You're going to be aware of enough of it peripherally.

1:53:47 People will bring it to your attention if it's really important or if it's like significant. None of it's going to 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. Yeah.

1:54:03 Because 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 100, 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. And it sits with you a little bit more, like you get all the positive comments but you don't really, like, exactly. And the negative one sticks in your brain. But you know what's really interesting is like,

1:54:32 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 value your work and like we actually think your important voice and stuff like that. And I find that really encouraging because these are, you know, it's easy for us to think about archaeologists as like a kind of bogey man that like want to suppress all this stuff. But they're not all like that. No, I think some of them are open to these things. 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

1:55:06 such a fascinating subject. And like you, when you've spoken on this, when you were in school and you were getting your degree, you were confused as to why these alternative perspectives weren't entertained. I think there's a lot of young people that feel confined by the gatekeepers. They feel confined by the career academics that are sort of in charge of who gets 10 years. who gets jobs, who gets grants. And it's a very confusing thing. You don't want to ruffle any feathers, step on any toes.

1:55:43 And so you feel constrained in your ability to be, you know, curious. And that seems insane for something that is so inherently curious, curiosity driven. So inherently unknown as well. Yeah. We do not know, as we keep saying. Right, right, right. We're not talking about stuff that's like, you know, establish science where you can clearly, you know, It's not mathematics.

1:56:08 This is something like weird. Yeah. You know, you're looking at hints of the past. And the more we look, the more we find older stuff. It's like Grandma always says, stuff just keeps getting older. Yeah. It's crazy. Well, it's just so cool that you're out there making videos and that you can do that for a living now. I know. It's wild. I feel so lucky that I get to do something that I'm so interested in and talk about these topics. and also to like create, to kind of like inspire this thinking and other people, that's really what I want to try and do is to get people thinking about history from this different perspective

1:56:46 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. 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 people always say that I like saying that there's like advanced civilizations in prehistory.

1:57:22 I'm not saying that. I'm just saying 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 kind of take that possibility seriously. And that's why I get encouraged when I get these e-mails. from people that actually in the institutions because they're the people that are going to rewrite the textbooks. Like, I can say what I want, like, I'm just a YouTuber,

1:57:42 but we need the people that actually working in the institutions to think in this way. And then then I think we might update our thinking on these things. I think there's a lot of those young folks that are coming up now in archaeology that do have alternative perspectives. Whether or not they're being suppressed. And it's also very encouraging for them to see a pathway

1:58:02 outside of academics, academia. you know, like what you're pursuing. And to see, like, not only is this viable, but you can do it with the proper approach, like the way that you're doing it, where you're not making crazy claims, not saying the aliens did it, you're not saying anything nutty. You're just saying, hey, there's a lot going on here. And to pretend that we have an accurate map of the territory seems silly. Yeah, I just think there's so much more on the table now than there used to be only a few decades ago.

1:58:32 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 talk about it, you know? Yeah. What else have you found recently that's interesting? Yeah, so, I mean, there's still, there's older American site. So there's obviously the Surruti Macedon site, which is 130,000 years old, which is controversial.

1:58:59 But I think people spoke about that. That's the Macedon bones where they appeared to be. it appears signs of human smashing the bones to get the marrow. Yeah, just after, like, freshly smashed after the animal had died. And 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 2017.

1:59:22 So, you know, it's another little data point that pushes back human presence in the America, potentially to over 100,000 years ago. And there's even more. There's a site called Calico where I think this. This one's a little bit, I don't really buy this one, but a very famous archaeologist called Louis Leakey, who was like one of the top names in the archaeology in the 20th century. He believed that Calico showed evidence of human presence in the Americas over 100,000 years ago as well.

1:59:48 So it's another data point. And then there's, then there's Wayette Larko, which I think you've heard of. Have you heard of where 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 300,000, 400,000 years ago, and the tools were below this layer. What? Yeah, so. I'm not aware of that one.

2:00:10 So in the 1950s, there was a Mexican archaeologist who was doing some work in the Vasquilo basin in Mexico near the city of Pubella. 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 Weyatlako, which is 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 two sides. 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 geologists

2:00:47 came in and they were expecting to date the kind of sediment around the tools to around 8,000 to 10,000 years ago because they knew about 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 they found that the ash was giving these crazy dates like 200,000, 300,000, up to 600,000 years old. And that was completely mental because the tools were below this layer of ash. And then they dated a camel pelvis, I think, that was in situ with the tools. And that camel pelvis came back to 250,000 years old as well. And that was in the same layer of the tools.

2:01:26 So they kind of brought all their different dating methods together. And there's multiple kind of geological dating methods on the sediment, the ash, and also the camel pelvis. And they kind of collected all this to a date of 250,000 years ago for this site for where these tools were found. And yeah, so they tried to publish this. And they received like immense pushback because obviously this was 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.

2:02:06 And by that time, many of the artifacts had gone missing. And they didn't know where they were. And the site actually got raised. Like, it got kind of removed. Yeah. And I'm not trying to say that's like some conspiracy or anything, but it just means that you can't really prove it. But they did eventually publish. And 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.

2:02:43 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 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 series, scientists saying that, you know, 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 Chiquete Cave, as I mentioned earlier, 33,000, Pedro Furore in Brazil, over 50,000, Surruti Mastodon, 130,000. I don't really think Calico is, I think that's natural, but then we're at Larko 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.

2:03:37 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 on this planet, why couldn't we have reached these places? Right. And then the question is, how did we reach them? And from where? You know, from where? Exactly. That's the weird thing is some of the When you look at like pyramid structures for instance

2:04:02 Like where did that idea come from How did that idea make it to the Aztecs? All over the world we find pyramids Yeah weird Yeah's weird I mean you could say that it's just like a A logical way of building things but Maybe Who knows Well there's also the weirdness in the fact that the Aztecs themselves Didn't build the pyramids Oh some of them yeah like Teotu Hwakan was there before and they said it was the name literally means place where the gods lived and they found it there and uh so it was before them and they don't know who built it right they give us lots of our names they gave us the name olmec elmec means uh the rubber people uh because they knew about the

2:04:42 olmecs they knew they existed before them but they didn't really know who they were but they just called them the rubber people is because they lived around rubber trees i think it's because they use rubber or something i'm not 100% sure um so what's the conventional theory about who built these Aztec temples? 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 know.

2:05:09 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. 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. Is there a conventional timeline?

2:05:43 Well, Fiteau-Walkan. 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 long as 1,000 years before them. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I mean by right before. because I'm thinking in these big big big big. That's a long time. The United States is not even 300 years old. 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, way. Right, right, right, right. So somewhere around a thousand 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 a civilization,

2:06:24 building something as fantastic as some of those Aztec constructions and then they would just go away 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 and it was probably covered with jungle right yeah I mean how many of those things were just absorbed by you know the just the just nature and it's no wonder that they think it was built by gods right because you see it and you're like that's in incredible who built this it must have been the gods and there's no one living in it muck and just shows how easily human civilizations can reach a really high peak level of sophistication

2:07:05 and then go down again and collapse and just all memory of them is gone yeah um any other cool things you've discovered recently well there's also the question of when humans reached australia which i think is another really interesting question because the conventional time is is 65 000 years ago. And there's a site called Majad 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 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

2:07:50 ago, which is double, just about double the time that we think humans are in Australia, and it's in the 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 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,

2:08:27 but also had inhabited the entire continent, or 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. And it's not accepted, but it's so hard to prove these things because we can't find skeletons, but we can find skeletons, but it's extremely rare. So the bar is so high 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.

2:09:07 Wasn't there something that was done on the genetic connection between Australian Aboriginal people and Denisovans? 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 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? Yeah. Because if we had that capability for so long, why not? When they do this, is this, I mean, because obviously they didn't even know about Denisovans until 2010.

2:09:44 So is this like genetic analysis? And if so, like do they have genes? Like how do they get genetic material from these Denisovan skeletons? I think you can take it from fossils. Like a tooth or something? I'm not quite sure, but I think you can. I think they know the kind of genetic makeup of the different human species. So I think you can tell that way if you've got like a trace of the DNA.

2:10:10 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 guessing that people, Aboriginal people in Australia, have some traces of it? Just like Europeans have traces of Neanderthal. Yeah. And also people in, I think, like Nepal in these high-outitude places, they have quite high traces of Denisovan DNA, and that's what they think allows them to live in high-outitude environments. They think that Denisovans are more robust than modern humans than can live in more extreme environments.

2:10:44 And they think that people that live in those kind of high-outitude 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. So they think Denisovans lived in high altitude, mostly? Maybe. They don't know. They don't know. Well, there's only a few bones, right? Exactly. So it's really hard to tell.

2:11:10 So fucking interesting, man. And also in that region, they found recently 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. I think Indonesia is such a fascinating region because it's the place of where the Sunda shelf was where obviously the sea level's 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. found the skeleton of a child that had had his leg amputated and but had lived for many, many, many,

2:11:50 years afterwards and his whole like lower leg had been amputated off and but had like healed like completely and he 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 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. It 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.

2:12:18 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. That is insane. I wonder if they had any pharmacological interventions like to deal with the pain. 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, uh, as medicinal, for medicinal purposes. Right. We see Neanderthals doing that a long, long time ago, like cultivating wild plants and using them as pain killers and stuff like that.

2:12:56 What's going to kill the pain of a fucking amputation? Well, probably not much, but... Of a bone saw. I know. Right? And they're like, what kind of tools do they have? Like, what were they doing it with? How did they stitch people up? Did they have needles? Did they have thread? They just leave the wound open? Like, what did they do? But whatever they did, it worked, and they were sophisticated enough to keep that person alive and to care for them

2:13:19 and for them to live years afterwards. Excuse me. It's wild. It's wild. So it's yet more evidence of people being 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. If you had a guess, what do you think is the oldest real true civilization. How long, when do you think it started? So I think in terms of like what we call civilization, in terms of our current like cycle of it, if you like,

2:13:53 I think it is Tashtepella and whatever came before that. But I don't think it would probably have been that 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, develop 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.

2:14:13 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. So that makes me think of 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 sapient fossils, so 300,000 years.

2:14:44 But then if you extrapolate that out to this million year time scale of modern-sized brains and modern behaviour 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 oven invention to, 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? There's also that very weird phenomenon when someone somewhere figure something out, even if people aren't connected, other places in the world, people

2:15:22 figured out at the same time. We know it to be the case today. Rupert Sheldrake has a term for it. I think it's called, is it morphic resonance? So 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 really yeah yeah he's got lots of interesting work hasn't he about kind of yeah almost telepathic yeah weird stuff yeah very weird stuff that there's probably some sort of a cacic 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.

2:16:10 That, like, creativity itself is almost like something that we tap into, like, uniformly as a species. It's like you can almost be like wearing an antenna. Yeah. Yeah. And that, like, when Michael Button figures something out, someone on the other part of the world is like, oh, I feel it. Yeah. It's just very weird. It's a very weird idea. Yeah. You know, and it's impossible to prove. Or, I mean, you can imply it. And the rap thing is very interesting. And I think they've done them with some other things as well. Mm-hmm.

2:16:42 You know, so it's, it's interesting. Because, 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 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 figure it out the same time. or roughly. But it is pretty much the same time

2:17:08 in comparison to the amount of time that we've been on the planet, right? It's not a coincidence. It's an explosion. Exactly. Yeah. So why? Because the reason given is the climate. That's the old reason. I think that is the reason because 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?

2:17:27 Right. And been smart. If it's such a common invention, why didn't it happen before? Right. Maybe it did. 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. It kind of always stays warm around there. And, well, what's around there? Well, the Amazon. Yeah, exactly. And even in periods of, yeah, like the fully glaciated periods,

2:17:51 someplace on the Earth were perfectly habitable. Right. 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 as a human's been in America. Because if we've been in America and the Americas for a lot, lot longer than we think than 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

2:18:13 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 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 oh yeah exactly so hard and also the rainforest is such like an extreme recycling kind of natural machine that it's going to destroy anything that's older than than a few thousand years ago. It doesn't mean there's not stuff that's older than a few thousand years ago. It just means there's nothing left.

2:18:46 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? So it's wild, man. It's so wild. And I think the potential is enormous, just absolutely enormous. And that's why I do what I do, because I think it's something. fascinating and I love talking about it and I love getting other people to think about

2:19:09 it and that's the great privilege of me being able to do this job so yeah well it's an important job it really is because 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 and expands the, like, when people watch them, you get this understanding like, oh, wow, this is a big puzzle. This thing is really complicated.

2:19:43 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 the answers. Yeah, that's why I just hate it. I hate the certainty that people talk about the past. Because 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.

2:20:02 and yeah everything we seem to discover pushes it in one direction that's older and more intelligence back in time and yeah there's so many interesting things and we barely scratched the surface today I know well you could do this for days um before we wrap it up though is there any any other really interesting ones that you'd like to talk about yeah there was something interesting that came out uh 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 so 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 BC with the ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform and stuff

2:20:48 like that. But as you mentioned, Irvin Finkel, the kind of idea regarding Tashdapella 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. So there's, there's a... an archaeologist called Genevieve von Petzinger, 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 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,

2:21:31 are like a, not a language as such, but kind of 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, 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, 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 the time span of 30,000 years,

2:22:05 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... The spirals are really weird. They find spirals all over the place, right? Yeah. They find these signs all over the world. Jamie, you might be able to find a... All over the world. Yeah, there's like a cool map where they kind of point where it's... If you scroll down, a little bit on the left that one yeah you see this that's really blurry yeah once it loads but it's all over the world there you go and it's the same signs wow that's crazy so the

2:22:49 same signs in europe north america central africa south america southern africa australia Malaysia, East Africa, New Guinea, wow. Borneo, Myanmar. And she thinks it's like a much older symbolic tradition that humans have kind of carried with them in the kind of migratory roots and it actually goes back much older than the Ice Age art date of like 40,000 years,

2:23:16 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. 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 marker of really sophisticated intelligence. So it's another really interesting discovery that kind of points towards intelligence. And also to maintain that tradition over such a long length of time is really interesting because we don't really do that. As I say, the oldest language is ancient

2:23:53 Chinese and it's only a few thousand years old. And yet these people somehow managed to pass on this language, quote unquote, for 30,000 years. Have you ever heard anybody discuss the concept that human beings might have had some sort of telepathy that atrophied when we started using language and writing and communicating with words? Well, what's really interesting is the human brain size has decreased since civilization began. Uh-huh.

2:24:24 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. How much is it decreased? I can't remember off the top of my head. But it's, I don't think that's even controversial.

2:24:44 I think there's quite a lot of evidence that the human brain size has decreased a little bit in the last 10,000 years or whatever. Well, 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. Well, I think it certainly does because you don't need that brain, like part of your brain anymore. If you're not memorizing all the information you have.

2:25:12 Like, and it makes this smart as a whole, as a civilization. Of course. And then if you extrapolate, so to hard drives. Exactly. Well, it's happening on an even bigger scale now with AI and stuff like that. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Same process, though. People talk about chat GPT, decreasing people's intelligence. Well, because it outsources thinking itself, which is a crazy step.

2:25:30 And we're going to just go like a raisin. Exactly. So, I mean, maybe we're regressing. I think as a civilization, we're learning more. Yes, collectively. But as the individual, maybe we're regressing. And our potential to learn and just to remember things. Just from when I was a boy, I knew everybody's phone number. Yeah, yeah. And now I don't know anybody's. I know like three people's phone numbers. Because we don't have to memorize anymore. Exactly. It's wild. Yeah. Yeah. And there was also another paper that came out regarding language,

2:26:00 which is they found over 200 objects, and it's around the same date, around 40,000 years ago. And they basically found like a proto-writing script that had the same level of complexity as the early Sumerian scripts from 3,000 BC, but from 40,000 years ago in Ice Age Europe. Again, so it's like another kind of proto-language, symbolic thinking and conveying meaning through symbols.

2:26:26 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 PNAAS proto writing 40,000 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, 3,000 BC. But now it's this capability is so much older now because of these new discoveries.

2:26:54 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 conveying? Do we even understand what they're conveying or just assume they're conveying something? Well, I think they categorized it and they seem to think it is a kind of proto script. Like that's a script? Well, a pro, yeah, like a proto script.

2:27:20 So like the kind of thing that became language. Right. So there had to be a precursor to language. But if it, a written language, but if it existed 40,000 years ago, it's so much older than we used to think this capability emerged. Yeah. And what does that kind of entail? Can I see that again, Jamie? The images? How weird. And so at the bottom, that looks a lot like cuneiform. I think these ones are examples of the... More advanced. But they're saying it's at the same level as this, but 40,000 years ago. Which is vastly older than... cuneiform. It's so

2:27:55 interesting. 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. Oh, on the pyramid. That's another weird one. It's like at the high end, he thinks it might be 20 plus thousand years old. It's like, okay, what? Yeah. Yeah, because he compared the erosion, because there was an earthquake like 500 years ago that kind of shook all these casing stones of. 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 date.

2:28:29 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. It's all interesting. Listen, your show's super interesting. I'm so glad you're around. I'm so glad there's someone like you that's willing to do that kind of work because obviously Jamie and I are not going to do it. Not this week. 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 it could you can really tell you put in so much work and so much effort and research and it's just excellent it's super entertaining

2:29:07 and it's right up my alley so I appreciate it Joe thanks for being the fucking man thank you man well straight back at you and I really appreciate 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. 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

2:29:40 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. And civilizations always think that they're more advanced and, there we go, thanks. And better than the ones before. But I mean, it's another fucking, I could go on for another three hours on that.

2:30:07 But 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 working on. But I'm still going to go as hard as I possibly can on the kind of archaeological lost history. Well, it's beautiful that you have so much time to do two different channels, too. It's awesome. Yeah, well, I'm trying my best. Well, you're kicking ass, dude. Congratulations.

2:30:30 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. Yeah, well, it's the videos as well. 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 out there. So, yeah, I've got both my channels. I'm also about to make some music. If people should check out my music. Oh, really?

2:30:51 Yeah, I'm in a band. This is my band. Oh, that's the alien head. That's why I keep wearing the alien head, yeah. Oh, what's the name of your band? We're called Headache. Uh, if people, you get it, it's like the headache. Yeah. Um, so if people want to check that out. What kind of music? Punk rock. Oh, you're a fucking punk rocker. Yeah, punk rocker. 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. Um, but we're going to try to make some music again in the near future. So that's awesome. This is headache.com if people want to check that out. Um. Um. Um. Um. But yeah. Check it out. All right. Michael, thank you. Appreciate it. Look at that. There you go.

2:31:26 Go on. Moody-looking motherfuckers. Yeah, the boys. Yeah, the boys. Yeah, the boys. Get your hair there you on, bro. Can't see you like that. All right. Bye, everybody.