Latest / The Joe Rogan Recap / Michael Button (2025) - Rewriting Ancient History

Transcript

Michael Button (2025) - Rewriting Ancient History · The Joe Rogan Recap

• 0:00
  Welcome to the Joe Rogan recap here on The Dunk Dive.
• 0:03
  Our mission is, well, pretty straightforward.
• 0:05
  Cut through the noise. Connect the dots on complex
• 0:08
  ideas. Yeah, basically give you a
• 0:10
  shortcut to being genuinely well informed.
• 0:12
  And today, Wow, we're diving into a conversation that really
• 0:15
  shakes things up. It challenges some pretty
• 0:18
  fundamental ideas about human history, ancient civilizations,
• 0:23
  you know. That's right, our source
• 0:25
  material for this deep dive comes straight from the powerful
• 0:28
  JRE YouTube channel. Uh huh.
• 0:30
  Specifically Joe Rogan Experience Hashtag 2368
• 0:33
  featuring Michael Button. Michael Button.
• 0:36
  He's a YouTube right? Relatively new channel but
• 0:38
  getting a lot of attention. Yeah, less than a year old, but
• 0:41
  he's gained serious traction. He he really digs deep into
• 0:45
  ancient history rigorously. OK, so our mission for you today
• 0:48
  is to unpack these huge questions he's raising about our
• 0:51
  timeline, humanity's past. We'll look at evidence
• 0:54
  suggesting, well, that our past is maybe far older and
• 0:58
  definitely more mysterious than the standard story you usually
• 1:01
  hear. The conventional narrative.
• 1:02
  So let's get into it. Let's unpack this.
• 1:04
  OK, so Michael Button's own journey here is pretty key.
• 1:07
  He actually studied ancient history at university, spent
• 1:10
  four years on it. Right, so he has an academic
• 1:12
  background. Exactly.
• 1:14
  But even with that grounding, he talks about this core
• 1:17
  disagreement he developed. Not with specific facts though.
• 1:20
  No, not the individual facts necessarily, but more what he
• 1:23
  calls the high level macro perspective, the the accepted
• 1:27
  timeline, the big picture of our ancient past.
• 1:30
  And what was the specific hang up?
• 1:32
  What didn't sit right for him? It was this idea, he says, that
• 1:35
  it seemed like nothing happened for vast stretches of time in
• 1:39
  human history. Like long periods of just
• 1:42
  static. Yeah.
• 1:44
  And that seemed while counterintuitive, especially
• 1:46
  when you look at discoveries like Jebel Earhode.
• 1:49
  The Jebel Earhode discovery, Morocco, right?
• 1:52
  That was a big one. Tell us about that.
• 1:53
  Huge. Around 20/17/2018 they found
• 1:56
  modern Homo sapiens remains there.
• 1:58
  OK, but the age. This is the kicker.
• 2:00
  Estimated at 315,000, maybe even 360. 1000 years old. 300,000
• 2:05
  Wow. Right, they were actually
• 2:07
  mistaken for Neanderthal at first, just because, well,
• 2:10
  anatomically modern humans weren't supposed to be around
• 2:14
  that early according to the old models.
• 2:15
  So that discovery alone pushes back the age of our species by
• 2:20
  what, 100,000 years? Roughly, yeah, from the previous
• 2:23
  sort of 200,000 year estimate, which is massive.
• 2:27
  So if we've been, you know, anatomically modern for that
• 2:30
  long, it really makes you wonder, as Button puts it, why
• 2:34
  did this discovery kick up more of a fuss?
• 2:37
  Exactly why does the conventional story still kind of
• 2:40
  stick to this idea that nothing really happened until the last
• 2:44
  10,000 years? You know, until the Neolithic
• 2:46
  Revolution and farming popped up.
• 2:48
  It's a really fundamental question.
• 2:49
  It is, and it connects to something else.
• 2:51
  Button studied a university module on cataclysms, natural
• 2:55
  disasters, basically. Cataclysms.
• 2:57
  How does that tie in? Well, it looked at how these
• 2:59
  events in recorded history totally reshaped societies.
• 3:03
  The classic example is the Late Bronze Age collapse.
• 3:05
  Right. The Bronze Age collapse.
• 3:07
  This was like multiple major civilizations hitting the wall
• 3:10
  at almost the same time. Pretty much think about it
• 3:13
  around. Well the source is 10,000 BC
• 3:16
  which seems a bit off maybe for Bronze Age, but the point is
• 3:20
  these powerful civilizations, Hittites, Assyrians, Mycenaean,
• 3:24
  Greece, Egypt's New Kingdom. All seemingly at their peak.
• 3:27
  Yeah, peak of human progress, as the source puts it.
• 3:30
  And they all crashed pretty much simultaneously within just 20 to
• 3:34
  40 years. Just gone.
• 3:36
  What's the theory there? The leading theory is, well, a
• 3:40
  combination of climate factors, even a tiny shift like half a
• 3:42
  degree Celsius. Half a degree, that's it.
• 3:44
  Apparently enough to disrupt trade routes, cause shortages,
• 3:48
  societal unrest, a domino effect.
• 3:51
  OK, so if a minor climate change could wreck advanced societies
• 3:54
  in recorded history? Then Button asks the crucial
• 3:57
  question, What about the much worse climate episodes way back
• 4:00
  in prehistory? The big freezes?
• 4:02
  The mega drought. Could sophisticated human
• 4:04
  cultures have risen, say, 20,050 thousand maybe 100,000 years
• 4:08
  ago, or even more? And then just been wiped out by
• 4:11
  climate change or massive volcanoes or maybe even comet
• 4:14
  impacts, leaving almost nothing behind.
• 4:16
  It completely flips the script on this idea of smooth linear
• 4:21
  progress for humanity. Absolutely.
• 4:24
  And, you know, this kind of thinking leads directly to a
• 4:27
  critique of what some might call, well, academic arrogance,
• 4:31
  meaning the idea that some mainstream historians or
• 4:34
  scientists sometimes talk as if they have the absolute truth
• 4:37
  about what happened hundreds of thousands of years.
• 4:39
  Ago, when really it's inherently unknowable to a large degree.
• 4:43
  Right Button's point is that a lot more possibilities are
• 4:46
  possible than what many people appreciate.
• 4:48
  We should be more open. And probably the biggest piece
• 4:51
  of physical evidence supporting this idea, this older, more
• 4:54
  complex past, it has to be Gobekli Tepe.
• 4:57
  Oh, Gobekli Tepe. Undeniably a game changer.
• 5:00
  The biggest smoking gun, as Button calls it.
• 5:02
  Remind us, how old is it 12? 1000 years old and it's got
• 5:05
  these just incredible massive megalithic pillars, intricately
• 5:11
  carved, arranged precisely. So its existence flat out proves
• 5:15
  that sophisticated human culture was present way earlier than the
• 5:18
  conventional timeline suggests. No question.
• 5:21
  None. It shows the toolkit for
• 5:23
  civilization. You know, complex organization,
• 5:26
  abstract thinking, serious engineering skills.
• 5:29
  It was all there 12,000 years ago.
• 5:31
  Which then makes that 6000 year gap until summer the traditional
• 5:35
  first civilization seem really strange.
• 5:38
  What was happening in between? Exactly, and it's not just
• 5:41
  Gobekli Tepe and isolation, it's part of this wider Tash Tepe
• 5:44
  culture. There are like 14 or more
• 5:46
  connected sites sharing symbolism megalithic stuff.
• 5:50
  But they're still classified as built by hunter gatherers.
• 5:53
  That's the paradox. If they built this, then our
• 5:55
  definition of hunter gatherer needs a, well, a massive update.
• 5:58
  It challenges everything. And we've only uncovered a tiny
• 6:01
  fraction, right? It's like 5%.
• 6:02
  Only 5%? Imagine what else is down there.
• 6:04
  There's speculation about Pillar 43 maybe being some kind of
• 6:07
  cosmic calendar or even predicting an impact event that
• 6:10
  that's debated. It just blows the lid off the
• 6:12
  old models and it makes you question that narrow definition
• 6:15
  of civilization itself. The 1 based mostly on
• 6:18
  Mesopotamia on summer. Totally.
• 6:20
  Humanity can and clearly did flourish in lots of different
• 6:24
  ways, different places, different environments.
• 6:26
  Which brings up another puzzle. Agriculture.
• 6:29
  Ah yes, farming the cornerstone of the Neolithic revolution.
• 6:33
  It seems to appear almost simultaneously all over the
• 6:36
  world around that same time 12,000 years ago.
• 6:39
  South America, Mesopotamia. Ancient China.
• 6:42
  OK, so here's the question Button raises If farming was so
• 6:46
  crucial, such a game changer, why did nobody invent it for the
• 6:50
  first, what, 310,000 years that homo sapiens were around?
• 6:53
  Right, only for it to suddenly pop up everywhere at once as the
• 6:56
  source says, it just doesn't make sense.
• 6:58
  The usual explanation connects it to the Holocene, our current
• 7:01
  stable warm climate period. Yeah, but then you have to ask,
• 7:04
  why didn't agriculture start during other warm periods?
• 7:07
  There were like 4 distinct warm periods, each lasting over
• 7:10
  10,000 years while modern humans were definitely around.
• 7:13
  Why not then? Good question.
• 7:16
  It points towards maybe needing another trigger, or maybe the
• 7:20
  knowledge was preserved somehow. It opens up possibilities and it
• 7:23
  leads us right into the preservation problem.
• 7:25
  Meaning how much stuff would actually survive from way back
• 7:28
  then? Exactly.
• 7:29
  And the answer is very little. Think about our cities now.
• 7:33
  London. Manhattan.
• 7:35
  Give them 100,000 years, what's left?
• 7:38
  Dust, basically. Maybe some foundations?
• 7:40
  Almost nothing, as button puts it.
• 7:42
  Concrete crumbles, metal rusts away in thousands of years.
• 7:46
  What lasts? Maybe deeply carved stone.
• 7:50
  Maybe nuclear waste if they had it.
• 7:52
  So how many sites do we actually have from say older than 100,000
• 7:55
  years? Get this, globally there are
• 7:57
  only about 9 homo sapiens sites confirmed from that far back,
• 8:02
  maybe up to 15 if you count debated 1.
• 8:04
  Nine yeah out of hundreds of thousands of.
• 8:06
  Years 9 confirmed glimpses, 9 snapshots.
• 8:09
  Mostly caves, fire pits, some basic stone tools.
• 8:12
  That's it for over 200,000 years of our history.
• 8:15
  Wow, so finding only simple tools doesn't mean that's all
• 8:17
  they have. Precisely.
• 8:18
  Think about today. You've got Elon Musk sending
• 8:21
  rockets to Mars, and at the same time there are uncontacted
• 8:24
  tribes living completely off the grid.
• 8:26
  Subsistence lifestyles. Finding stone tools in one place
• 8:29
  doesn't mean advanced stuff didn't exist somewhere else.
• 8:32
  Which brings us to the Colombo structure.
• 8:36
  This sounds intriguing. Oh, this is extraordinary.
• 8:39
  Found in modern day Zambia, it's pieces of wood.
• 8:42
  Wood. How did that survive?
• 8:43
  OK, so these aren't just random sticks.
• 8:45
  They were deliberately cut in notches and connected together,
• 8:48
  tapered and secured at right angles.
• 8:50
  Looks like a platform, maybe part of a dwelling.
• 8:53
  OK. And the age.
• 8:54
  This is the mind blower 476,000 years old.
• 8:58
  Wait. Half a million years, almost.
• 9:00
  OK, that predates Homo sapiens. Exactly.
• 9:02
  Attributed maybe to Homo heidelbergensis and the only
• 9:05
  reason it survived. Fell into a bog, got preserved
• 9:09
  in waterlogged sediment an. Extreme edge case scenario like
• 9:12
  Button says. Totally, which implies how many
• 9:14
  countless others just rotted away.
• 9:16
  This fine massively disputes the idea that humans didn't build
• 9:19
  complex things or settled down until like 12,000 years ago.
• 9:23
  And it completely clashes with that cognitive revolution idea
• 9:26
  from Harare sapiens, right? The idea we only got smart 50 or
• 9:30
  60,000 years. Ago flies right in the face of
• 9:32
  it, this suggests mainstream anthropology might have been off
• 9:35
  by over 400,000 years, about when sophisticated behaviors
• 9:39
  emerged. That's staggering, yeah.
• 9:41
  And if that kind of evidence can be lost so easily, think about
• 9:44
  actual cataclysms erasing whole cultures.
• 9:47
  Like the Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago, that
• 9:51
  thing was immense. How bad was it?
• 9:54
  Bad enough that it might have reduced the entire human
• 9:57
  population to maybe just 3000 to 10,000 individuals left on the
• 10:01
  planet. A massive genetic bottleneck.
• 10:04
  So imagine a civilization existed before Toba.
• 10:06
  Gone, wiped out, leaving maybe no trace at all.
• 10:10
  It shows how these great bottlenecks could just erase
• 10:12
  chapters of our history. Like those lost cities in the
• 10:15
  Amazon, they're finding out with Lidar, once dismissed as myth.
• 10:18
  Exactly. Or just look how fast nature
• 10:20
  reclaims places like Detroit, Oregon, Chernobyl.
• 10:22
  When humans leave, our footprint might seem huge, but time and
• 10:26
  nature are powerful forces. OK, so if the deep, deep past is
• 10:29
  that hard to grasp, what about, well, places we think we know
• 10:34
  better, like ancient Egypt? Egypt still full of mysteries
• 10:38
  even if you take the conventional date for the Great
• 10:39
  Pyramid like 2500 BC. They were just wildly ahead of
• 10:43
  everyone else. And the official explanation for
• 10:46
  how they built it? Wooden sledges, Copper chisels
• 10:49
  on granite. It feels insufficient.
• 10:53
  Doesn't make sense is how Button puts it, especially given the
• 10:56
  precision and scale. And then there's the whole tomb
• 10:58
  assumption for the Great Pyramid.
• 11:00
  Right. They never actually found a
• 11:01
  pharaoh's body inside it, did they?
• 11:03
  Nope. Nobody.
• 11:05
  Later Pharaoh's might have just reused much older structures, so
• 11:08
  why the weird assumption it was built as a tomb?
• 11:12
  Are there other theories like Christopher Dunn's idea about it
• 11:14
  being a power plant? Yeah, that's mentioned.
• 11:17
  And then there are these really wild claims from Italian
• 11:21
  researchers using tomography. Tomography like ground
• 11:24
  penetrating radar. Something like that, claiming
• 11:26
  there are structures 2 kilometers deep beneath the
• 11:28
  Great Pyramid. 2 kilometers? What kind of structures?
• 11:31
  Hundreds of meters of pylons, these pillars in uniform
• 11:36
  positions with some sort of a coil wrapped around them.
• 11:38
  OK, that sounds pretty out there.
• 11:40
  Yeah, yeah, Button acknowledges they sound like bonkers claims,
• 11:43
  But he adds, there's the exciting possibility that
• 11:46
  they're right. If they are, talk about the
• 11:49
  greatest monkey wrench into history.
• 11:51
  Wow. And then there's the Sphinx in
• 11:53
  the water erosion debate. Right, Robert Shook's theory.
• 11:55
  He argues the erosion patterns look like they were caused by
• 11:58
  rain, heavy rainfall, not just wind and sand, which would make
• 12:02
  it much older. Especially since the Sphinx gets
• 12:04
  buried by sand so quickly. How does wind eroded if it's
• 12:08
  covered half the time? Good point, and this ties into
• 12:10
  the green Sahara idea. The Sahara used to be green.
• 12:13
  Yeah, for like 9000 years. Lush Savannah, and then it
• 12:17
  rapidly turned into desert at precisely the time that we're
• 12:20
  told ancient Egypt emerged. So the theory is maybe a
• 12:24
  civilization flourished in the green Sahara and as it dried out
• 12:28
  they migrated to the Nile. That's one compelling idea, and
• 12:31
  you've got Wadiyal Hitan, the Valley of the Whales nearby.
• 12:34
  Hundreds of whale fossils 40 million years old found in the
• 12:37
  desert. Just shows how drastically
• 12:39
  landscapes change. And what about those artifacts?
• 12:42
  The Super precise ones. Oh yeah, the vases, the statues
• 12:46
  from early dynasties made from incredibly hard granite diorite.
• 12:51
  With precision. Like was it a thousandth of a
• 12:53
  human hair? Something like that.
• 12:54
  Perfectly symmetrical. How did they do that with the
• 12:57
  tools they supposedly had and the drill holes?
• 12:59
  Chris Dunn talks about suggesting machinery far beyond
• 13:02
  simple hand tools. It really does feel like things
• 13:05
  just keep getting older the more we look like the anti keithera
• 13:08
  mechanism. The anti keithera mechanism is
• 13:10
  just bananas found in a shipwreck look like a hunk of
• 13:14
  shit. As Rogan might say, this is.
• 13:16
  A corroded lump. Right.
• 13:17
  Yeah, but when they scanned, it turned out to be this incredibly
• 13:22
  complex system of gears, an ancient Greek computer,
• 13:25
  basically. What did it do?
• 13:27
  Tracked lunar cycles, planetary movements, even predicted
• 13:30
  eclipses. Sophisticated astronomical
• 13:33
  calculations from over 2000 years ago.
• 13:36
  And nothing like it appeared again for centuries.
• 13:38
  Nope, not until the 16th century really.
• 13:41
  Which fuels that idea. We are a species with amnesia.
• 13:45
  Did we lose something? It's a powerful thought, and it
• 13:48
  seems the potential timeline keeps stretching back further
• 13:51
  and further with some of these anomalies.
• 13:53
  Like the fossilized cart ruts in Turkey.
• 13:56
  Yeah, tell me about those. They look like tracks from some
• 13:59
  kind of, well, terrain vehicle, but they're apparently embedded
• 14:02
  in rock. Dated by a doctor.
• 14:04
  Cultipin to 12:14 million years old.
• 14:07
  Million. OK, that's deep time.
• 14:08
  Deep time. If that's accurate, it implies
• 14:11
  some kind of technology, some kind of civilization.
• 14:14
  Way, way before anything we conceive of.
• 14:16
  And wasn't there something about a wheel?
• 14:19
  A wheel like object found in a coal mine estimated age around
• 14:22
  300 million years old, and it apparently looks remarkably like
• 14:27
  a wheel spokes and all three. 100 million.
• 14:29
  I mean, if these are real, that's not even human history
• 14:31
  anymore. That's something else.
• 14:32
  Potentially a non human industrial society millions of
• 14:36
  years ago. Echoes of the current
• 14:38
  hypothesis. An ancient advanced civilization
• 14:40
  on Earth that vanished. Which is a wild bridge to the
• 14:43
  the tridactyl mummies from Peru. You sound controversial.
• 14:48
  Very controversial, discussed by Jesse Michaels on Rogan.
• 14:52
  These are mummified bodies found in Peru.
• 14:55
  What's different about them? They have reportedly fully
• 14:58
  intact bone structure, but only three fingers, three toes and a
• 15:03
  different shaped head compared to humans.
• 15:05
  Elongated skulls, different proportions.
• 15:07
  How old are they dated? Between 700 and 1700 years old,
• 15:11
  so relatively recent compared to some things we've discussed.
• 15:15
  And the evidence is just visual. They claim X-rays show an extra
• 15:19
  digit or joint in the fingers, distinct skull anatomy, making
• 15:22
  it harder to just dismiss as a crude hoax apparently.
• 15:25
  And there's artwork. Yeah, ancient artwork in the
• 15:28
  region apparently depicts similar beings. 3 finger, 3 toed
• 15:32
  people with big heads. Wow.
• 15:34
  OK. And then there's this really
• 15:35
  eerie connection Button mentions to the Virginia UFO incident in
• 15:39
  Brazil 1996. Virginia.
• 15:41
  What happened there? Reports of a crashed craft and
• 15:44
  creatures seen that match the long head.
• 15:47
  Three fingers, three toes. A soldier who supposedly handled
• 15:51
  one died from a mysterious infection.
• 15:52
  OK, that's a lot to take in. And this is the same region of
• 15:55
  the Nazca Lines. Roughly, yeah.
• 15:58
  The Nazca Lines, only visible from the sky.
• 16:01
  One figure looks uncannily like a space suit.
• 16:04
  So the question becomes, what are these Peruvian mummies, if
• 16:08
  they're real? That's the provocative thought.
• 16:11
  What if these are real creatures that existed alongside us?
• 16:14
  What if they are not human? It opens up totally new
• 16:17
  possibilities, unknown branches of Earth life, maybe even, as
• 16:22
  some speculate, beings from other dimensions.
• 16:25
  It's. Just fundamentally challenges
• 16:27
  our place in the universe or even on this planet.
• 16:29
  Definitely. Which brings us back to how we
• 16:31
  process this information. There's this critique of
• 16:34
  academic gatekeeping and ego. The resistance from mainstream
• 16:37
  science. Yeah, the idea that some
• 16:39
  established figures protect the narratives they've built their
• 16:41
  careers on. They resist new evidence
• 16:43
  because, well, ego gets in the way.
• 16:45
  Is there an example of that? The Clovis first debate in North
• 16:48
  America is a classic one. For decades, the consensus was
• 16:52
  humans arrived around 13,000 years ago.
• 16:54
  Clovis culture, right? Right scientists like I think
• 16:57
  Button mentions Jack Ma who proposed earlier dates were
• 16:59
  basically destroyed professionally, but then they
• 17:02
  found those 22,000 year old footprints in White Sands, New
• 17:06
  Mexico proved the critics wrong. So the resistance held back
• 17:10
  progress. For decades and Button makes the
• 17:12
  point your students are not going to hate you if you say
• 17:15
  listen I wrote a whole book on this but I was so wrong they
• 17:19
  would respect you more. It's about intellectual honesty.
• 17:23
  Which is maybe easier now with how information spreads.
• 17:26
  That's the hope the Internet platforms like YouTube shows
• 17:30
  like Rogan's, these deep dives, they've democratized the access
• 17:34
  to information so. Theories that might have been
• 17:36
  squashed before can get out there.
• 17:38
  Exactly, theories that potentially wouldn't have been
• 17:41
  able to get out there in the pre Internet age can reach millions
• 17:44
  now. Sure, there's potential for
• 17:46
  nonsense too, of course. Needs critical thinking.
• 17:49
  Absolutely. But it allows for actual debate,
• 17:51
  it speeds up the process hopefully of getting new valid
• 17:55
  ideas accepted and looked into properly, it feels.
• 17:58
  Like we're circling back to the core theme now.
• 18:00
  Which is. Fundamentally, we don't know
• 18:02
  what's going on now, so how can we know what's going on 5000
• 18:05
  years ago or 50,000 or 500,000? Yeah, that quote really
• 18:10
  resonates. We are a species with amnesia.
• 18:13
  We've potentially forgotten vast parts of our own story.
• 18:16
  But it doesn't have to be a downer, right?
• 18:18
  It's actually kind of exciting. Totally, Button says.
• 18:21
  It's a really exciting time to find things out.
• 18:23
  We have new tools, AI, better scanning tech, Lidar genetics,
• 18:29
  plus this open flow of information.
• 18:31
  Our understanding of history isn't some finished book, it's
• 18:34
  this massive puzzle. And we keep finding new pieces.
• 18:38
  Pieces that make us rethink the whole picture.
• 18:40
  Precisely. So maybe the thought to leave
• 18:42
  you with is this What incredible discovery is waiting just around
• 18:46
  the corner? What piece of evidence might
• 18:48
  totally rewrite our past and maybe even reshape how we see
• 18:52
  our future? Definitely something to think
• 18:54
  about. We really encourage you.
• 18:55
  If this stark your interest. Check out Michael Button's
• 18:57
  YouTube channel. Look into some of the
• 18:59
  researchers and topics we touched.
• 19:00
  On Yeah, Keep Exploring. Your engagement with these big,
• 19:03
  complex ideas is fantastic. It shows people are hungry for
• 19:06
  this stuff. Absolutely.
• 19:08
  Remember, our grasp of history isn't fixed, it's alive, it's
• 19:11
  unfolding, and there are so many mysteries still out there.
• 19:14
  Thanks for joining us on this deep dive.