Latest / The Joe Rogan Experience / #2546 - Michael Button
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast
- 0:08Speaker 1: by night, all day.
- 0:12Speaker 2: Hey, good to see you, brother. What's going on?
- 0:14Speaker 1: Good, man. It's been a wild year for me.
- 0:18Speaker 2: I bet it has been.
- 0:20Speaker 1: Since I was last here, I mean, I've seen my
- 0:23Speaker 1: YouTube growth in numbers I couldn't have imagined before. I've
- 0:26Speaker 1: met so many cool people. I've managed to get to
- 0:29Speaker 1: a point where it's now my job to research and
- 0:32Speaker 1: investigate ancient history and the vast mysteries of our past.
- 0:36Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean, that's something I was doing for
- 0:39Speaker 1: free before. So the fact that I'm now able to
- 0:42Speaker 1: do that full time is just an immense privilege. And
- 0:45Speaker 1: I'm so grateful to everyone that's helped me get there,
- 0:47Speaker 1: including you.
- 0:47Speaker 2: Well, you're putting out fantastic content.
- 0:50Speaker 1: Thank you.
- 0:51Speaker 2: And it's such an interesting subject. And the giant blind
- 0:56Speaker 2: spot that the mainstream archaeologists have left has allowed all
- 1:03Speaker 2: these people to go through and get a much larger
- 1:05Speaker 2: audience even than them. And it's really important when someone
- 1:09Speaker 2: like you does it because you're so thorough and you're
- 1:12Speaker 2: so objective and you're so measured in the way you
- 1:16Speaker 2: describe these things and talk about these things. There's no
- 1:18Speaker 2: fantastic claims, no hyperbole. It's all very well laid out.
- 1:23Speaker 2: And even when you go to like extreme possibilities of
- 1:26Speaker 2: these things, it's very measured. So I really appreciate that.
- 1:30Speaker 1: Well, thank you. I appreciate you saying that. And Yeah.
- 1:32Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:32Speaker 1: I mean, I'm always trying to make it as good
- 1:34Speaker 1: as I possibly can. And I try and listen to
- 1:35Speaker 1: what people say and try and improve. And I don't
- 1:37Speaker 1: think I've reached like the peak of where I could
- 1:39Speaker 1: possibly be, but you know, I'm trying my hardest, but
- 1:41Speaker 1: it's not just that. I mean, as you say, I
- 1:43Speaker 1: think there are so many people out there and now
- 1:46Speaker 1: that I'm in this position, I've seen it firsthand. There
- 1:48Speaker 1: are like millions and millions of people around the world
- 1:51Speaker 1: that are deeply fascinated by these questions, by the vast
- 1:55Speaker 1: mysteries of our past.
- 1:56Speaker 2: So As well they should be. And they also know
- 1:59Speaker 2: that we're getting a very narrow version of it from
- 2:03Speaker 2: mainstream academics. And they're so determined to cling to their
- 2:09Speaker 2: timelines and cling to this notion that anything new that's
- 2:13Speaker 2: discovered by people outside of their little circle can't be accurate.
- 2:17Speaker 2: And I think that's so silly. Yeah.
- 2:20Speaker 1: I mean, I think someone like me has the kind
- 2:23Speaker 1: of advantage of the fact that because I, you know,
- 2:25Speaker 1: didn't continue my career in academia or I wasn't in academia,
- 2:28Speaker 1: but that was the pathway that I was on. Because
- 2:31Speaker 1: I've gone independent now, I kind of have the freedom,
- 2:34Speaker 1: if you like, to talk about these ideas in a
- 2:36Speaker 1: much more open way than maybe I would have been
- 2:38Speaker 1: able to if I was, well, wouldn't have been able
- 2:41Speaker 1: to if I was still in academia, because, you know,
- 2:43Speaker 1: I'm not restricted by funding or I'm not restricted by,
- 2:48Speaker 1: Even the pressures of people working in academia hating on me,
- 2:52Speaker 1: I mean, I get a lot of hate anyway, but
- 2:54Speaker 1: I mean, I think I have that freedom to almost
- 2:57Speaker 1: come at things from a completely open-minded perspective and speak
- 3:00Speaker 1: about these ideas without any restrictions. And I think that
- 3:04Speaker 1: is the advantage that I have that academics perhaps don't.
- 3:10Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm in a great place.
- 3:13Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 3:13Speaker 2: So let's get into it. So in the last year,
- 3:16Speaker 2: a lot of wild stuff has been discovered, which is
- 3:19Speaker 2: really exciting. It's so interesting how quick this stuff is moving.
- 3:23Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 3:24Speaker 2: It's wild.
- 3:24Speaker 1: I mean, there's been, I think, two papers in particular
- 3:26Speaker 1: that have come out in the year since I was
- 3:29Speaker 1: last here on the show that I think have huge
- 3:32Speaker 1: ramifications for how we view history. So, I mean, I
- 3:37Speaker 1: don't know where to start. I mean, I think we
- 3:40Speaker 1: should start like this. I think As things currently stand,
- 3:45Speaker 1: there are three huge questions that archaeology cannot answer. And
- 3:51Speaker 1: it's interesting because these three questions we used to think
- 3:54Speaker 1: we had an answer to, but in light of new discoveries,
- 3:57Speaker 1: in light of new evidence coming up, we no longer
- 4:00Speaker 1: have the answer to these questions. And I think that's
- 4:03Speaker 1: fascinating because it's almost like the rug has been pulled
- 4:06Speaker 1: out from underneath our understanding of human history, but on
- 4:08Speaker 1: the surface, it's kind of like business as usual.
- 4:11Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean? So what are these questions?
- 4:14Speaker 1: So, I mean, and this is just coming from me, right?
- 4:16Speaker 1: So the caveat on the whole conversation, I'm not an academic,
- 4:18Speaker 1: I'm not a professional archaeologist. I'm just, I mean, I
- 4:21Speaker 1: have a degree in ancient history, but I think my
- 4:22Speaker 1: main qualification is that I'm a super nerd for all
- 4:25Speaker 1: this stuff. And I spent my whole life researching it.
- 4:28Speaker 1: So that's the caveat on everything. So don't take what
- 4:30Speaker 1: I say as gospel. And I always encourage people to
- 4:32Speaker 1: go and look at the actual archaeology, go and read
- 4:35Speaker 1: the journals, read the papers and go investigate what yourself,
- 4:38Speaker 1: for yourself, like listen to what I say, but don't
- 4:40Speaker 1: take what I say as gospel, because at the end
- 4:42Speaker 1: of the day, I'm just a YouTuber, you know? So
- 4:44Speaker 1: that's the caveat I want to put on it. But
- 4:45Speaker 1: from my mind, these are the three questions that I
- 4:48Speaker 1: think archaeology can no longer answer, but used to think
- 4:51Speaker 1: it had an answer for. So the first question is,
- 4:54Speaker 1: and we spoke about this a little bit last time,
- 4:57Speaker 1: is the fascinating question of why after hundreds and hundreds
- 5:02Speaker 1: and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of human
- 5:05Speaker 1: beings like us being on this planet, why did it
- 5:09Speaker 1: take so long for civilization to emerge? And then why,
- 5:13Speaker 1: when it did, did it emerge in all these different
- 5:15Speaker 1: unconnected locations all over the globe at pretty much the
- 5:18Speaker 1: exact same time? So we see civilization flourishing in Mesoamerica.
- 5:23Speaker 1: We see civilization flourishing in South America, in Egypt, in
- 5:26Speaker 1: the Indus Valley, in Mesopotamia, in ancient India, in ancient China,
- 5:30Speaker 1: all around about the same time, give or take a
- 5:34Speaker 1: thousand or so years. But compared to the time span
- 5:37Speaker 1: of human beings on this planet, you know, 300,000 years
- 5:40Speaker 1: plus for modern humans. And I would argue some of
- 5:43Speaker 1: these papers are showing that it could be a lot
- 5:46Speaker 1: longer than that. Why, after so long, did civilization suddenly
- 5:50Speaker 1: crop up all over the place? And we no longer
- 5:53Speaker 1: can answer that question in light of new discoveries. So
- 5:56Speaker 1: that's question one. Why does civilization emerge everywhere all at
- 6:00Speaker 1: once after so long of not doing so? Question two is.
- 6:06Speaker 1: How old is human intelligence? How long have humans been intelligent?
- 6:11Speaker 1: How long has a mind like ours really inhabited this planet?
- 6:15Speaker 1: And I think two papers in particular that have come
- 6:19Speaker 1: out in the 12 months since I was here have
- 6:22Speaker 1: huge ramifications for that question. And also combining to that
- 6:26Speaker 1: is the question of other human species. How intelligent were
- 6:29Speaker 1: other human species? Because we used to think that we
- 6:32Speaker 1: were the smart ones.
- 6:33Speaker 2: I mean, our name.
- 6:34Speaker 1: homo sapiens literally translates to wise man which is a
- 6:38Speaker 1: incredibly humble thing for us to say about ourselves but
- 6:42Speaker 1: but yeah so so that's question two how old is
- 6:44Speaker 1: human intelligence and again i think the answer is we
- 6:47Speaker 1: don't have the answer anymore um so that's that's really
- 6:51Speaker 1: fascinating and then question three is when did humans first
- 6:55Speaker 1: reach the more isolated land masses so that's the americas
- 6:59Speaker 1: where we are right now and also australia which is
- 7:02Speaker 1: perhaps less important but still interesting. And again, we don't
- 7:06Speaker 1: have the answer for that anymore. And I think whatever
- 7:09Speaker 1: the answer is to these three questions, why does civilization
- 7:13Speaker 1: appear everywhere all at once? How old is human intelligence?
- 7:16Speaker 1: And when did humans first reach the more isolated parts
- 7:19Speaker 1: of the world? The answer to those questions, whatever it is,
- 7:23Speaker 1: I think is fundamentally important because whatever the answer is,
- 7:27Speaker 1: is the reason we're all here, right? It's the reason
- 7:29Speaker 1: we all live in this civilization. It's the reason we
- 7:31Speaker 1: all enjoy the fruits of everything that we exist in today.
- 7:35Speaker 1: And yet we don't know the answer anymore. But as
- 7:38Speaker 1: I said, on the surface, everyone's kind of carrying on
- 7:41Speaker 1: like it's business as usual, but we no longer know
- 7:45Speaker 1: the answer to the most fundamental questions of how we
- 7:47Speaker 1: got here. So, yeah.
- 7:50Speaker 2: So for question number one, why did all of these
- 7:55Speaker 2: civilizations emerge roughly the same time? What do you think?
- 8:01Speaker 2: Do you think that this is incorrect and that these
- 8:06Speaker 2: civilizations probably existed far earlier than that, but there's no
- 8:11Speaker 2: evidence of them because of time and just erosion and
- 8:15Speaker 2: natural catastrophes and fill in the blank, all the factors. And,
- 8:21Speaker 2: or we have not discovered some of these yet, like
- 8:25Speaker 2: some of the weirdness of the Amazon, you know, as
- 8:27Speaker 2: they find these what would appear to be the grids
- 8:31Speaker 2: of ancient cities that are hidden in the jungle that
- 8:33Speaker 2: they're discovering with LIDAR and these other technologies that were
- 8:36Speaker 2: unavailable until fairly recently. So we know that not only
- 8:41Speaker 2: was the Amazon filled with people, but it was filled
- 8:44Speaker 2: with millions of people. And that's crazy. That is a
- 8:47Speaker 2: crazy shift in the way we used to look at
- 8:50Speaker 2: the Amazon just a few decades ago. And, We don't
- 8:54Speaker 2: know who these people were. We don't know. Like if
- 8:57Speaker 2: you go really far back, like the Olmecs is just
- 8:59Speaker 2: a word. We gave them that word. We don't know
- 9:01Speaker 2: what the fuck they were doing. We have no idea
- 9:03Speaker 2: what they looked like. We know some of the heads
- 9:06Speaker 2: look roughly either Polynesian or perhaps even African. It's very strange.
- 9:11Speaker 2: Very strange. Big giant heads that are left behind. And
- 9:15Speaker 2: that's like the cornerstone of what we understand about the civilization. Okay. What?
- 9:21Speaker 2: How long? 6,000 years we think. Who knows? It's just
- 9:24Speaker 2: a rough guess. Like there's really nothing to go on.
- 9:29Speaker 2: Do you think that this is just like as far
- 9:33Speaker 2: back as we can find stuff? Or do you think,
- 9:37Speaker 2: what do you think?
- 9:38Speaker 1: Well, I think in terms of the civilization question, I
- 9:41Speaker 1: think it's just, I think it's an old idea that
- 9:45Speaker 1: we kind of drew this line. And the line is
- 9:47Speaker 1: the invention of writing, right? So it's around 3000, 4000 B.C.
- 9:52Speaker 1: was the invention of writing or supposedly was the invention
- 9:54Speaker 1: of writing. And that in the 20th century was kind
- 9:56Speaker 1: of given as the marker of civilization. We were finding
- 9:58Speaker 1: all these civilizations in the 20th century. like ancient Sumer.
- 10:01Speaker 1: And so that was kind of given as the start
- 10:03Speaker 1: of civilization. But I think in terms of like more
- 10:06Speaker 1: recent stuff, so 3000 BC back to like 12,000 BC,
- 10:11Speaker 1: I think the answer is that clearly civilization is older.
- 10:14Speaker 1: I mean, considering we see things like Tash Tapella, Quebecly Tepe, 12,000
- 10:18Speaker 1: years ago. I think that is a civilization. I think
- 10:21Speaker 1: over time that will come to be accepted as a civilization.
- 10:24Speaker 1: And I think whatever you want to define civilization as,
- 10:27Speaker 1: I think we can now clearly say that it did
- 10:29Speaker 1: exist 12,000 years ago rather than 6,000 years ago. So
- 10:32Speaker 1: that's a kind of doubling of the timeline. In terms
- 10:35Speaker 1: of going back much further than that, I think then
- 10:37Speaker 1: you get into kind of like purely hypothetical scenarios, like
- 10:40Speaker 1: is it possible? And that's when I think things like
- 10:43Speaker 1: the history of human intelligence start to come into play
- 10:45Speaker 1: because It was incredibly recently that we thought humans were
- 10:50Speaker 1: only got intelligent. We thought humans were young, like only 100,000
- 10:53Speaker 1: years old, only a few decades ago. And now we
- 10:55Speaker 1: know we're much older than that. And so this is
- 10:58Speaker 1: what I mean about everything kind of being back on
- 11:00Speaker 1: the table again, because we now have an incredibly increased
- 11:04Speaker 1: time span of human intelligence that I would argue, and
- 11:07Speaker 1: I'll come to this later, stretches over a million years.
- 11:10Speaker 1: And yet the old idea, which is still sort of
- 11:13Speaker 1: in place, but I think is breaking. I think most
- 11:15Speaker 1: archaeologists would accept that it's breaking. But the old idea
- 11:18Speaker 1: was that humans only became intelligent around 50,000 years ago.
- 11:23Speaker 1: And so because that idea kind of was in hold,
- 11:26Speaker 1: it almost made sense, right? So humans only existed from 100,000
- 11:29Speaker 1: years ago, then got smart 50,000 years ago. Then the
- 11:30Speaker 1: climate got good around 14,000 years ago. we see the
- 11:36Speaker 1: agricultural revolution and the emergence of the first civilizations. Like
- 11:39Speaker 1: it was very neat. Do you know what I mean?
- 11:41Speaker 1: But now in light of new evidence and in light
- 11:43Speaker 1: of new discoveries, suddenly everything's back on the table. Suddenly
- 11:46Speaker 1: the whole time span of prehistory or not the whole
- 11:49Speaker 1: of prehistory, but I would argue, and I'll get onto
- 11:51Speaker 1: why I think this later. I would argue that the
- 11:54Speaker 1: time span of human intelligence has increased by 20 times
- 11:59Speaker 1: from 50,000 to over a million years. And I'll explain
- 12:02Speaker 1: why in a minute, but I think that puts everything
- 12:05Speaker 1: back on the table i think that the possibilities of
- 12:07Speaker 1: prehistory are are so vast now because of our understanding
- 12:11Speaker 1: has shifted so dramatically in the last few decades and
- 12:14Speaker 1: i don't think anyone's really talking about it and that's
- 12:16Speaker 1: kind of why i do what i do because i
- 12:19Speaker 1: really want to bang this drum if you like that
- 12:22Speaker 1: everything's back on the table as i say and so
- 12:25Speaker 1: yeah i don't know i kind of got a bit
- 12:26Speaker 1: sidetracked there from the original.
- 12:27Speaker 2: Question well that's a no you it's a great start
- 12:30Speaker 2: um Jesse Michaels was here yesterday and he had a
- 12:33Speaker 2: really fascinating theory. I don't know if it's, is that
- 12:35Speaker 2: his theory or is it someone else's theory, the ergot theory?
- 12:39Speaker 2: His theory was that he believes that agriculture and that
- 12:47Speaker 2: as they started agriculture wasn't just significant in that you
- 12:51Speaker 2: could like stay in one place and you would have
- 12:53Speaker 2: food and you always had a reliable diet. You didn't
- 12:56Speaker 2: have to worry about starving to death. And then you,
- 12:59Speaker 2: because you had That sort of relaxation that came with that.
- 13:03Speaker 2: You could start inventing things and building things and civilization
- 13:06Speaker 2: would advance. He thinks it's also because ergot grows on
- 13:12Speaker 2: these different wheats and barleys and grains and that these people,
- 13:17Speaker 2: whether knowingly or unknowingly, were probably ingesting this psychedelic substance,
- 13:23Speaker 2: which is akin to LSD. And that this was a
- 13:27Speaker 2: key part of what Brian Murarrescu talked about in the
- 13:30Speaker 2: Eleusinian Mysteries in his great book, The Immortality Key. And
- 13:35Speaker 2: that this was probably what led to a lot of invention,
- 13:38Speaker 2: a lot of innovation, a lot of alternative thought, a
- 13:42Speaker 2: lot of creativity, and a lot of like, you know,
- 13:45Speaker 2: whatever the wild advancements of the time were.
- 13:48Speaker 1: Did you see that they just not proved it, but
- 13:51Speaker 1: they just... They just did a study on the Eleusinian
- 13:54Speaker 1: mysteries where they kind of showed that they were doing,
- 13:57Speaker 1: they did have ergot. Because when Brian wrote that book,
- 14:00Speaker 1: they hadn't proved that, but something just came out.
- 14:02Speaker 2: Did you see the, it was a puma bone pipe
- 14:06Speaker 2: that they found that tested positive for DMT?
- 14:11Speaker 1: Where, in Eleusis?
- 14:12Speaker 2: I do not know. I think it was, I don't,
- 14:15Speaker 2: it might have been in the American, no. Where was that? Peru. Yes.
- 14:19Speaker 1: Really?
- 14:19Speaker 2: Yes. How old is that, Jamie?
- 14:21Speaker 4: Jamie?
- 14:24Speaker 2: See if you can put that in a perplexity if
- 14:26Speaker 2: it knows what this is all about because it's a
- 14:29Speaker 2: fascinating subject. Because not only does it imply that they
- 14:33Speaker 2: were willingly taking psychedelic drugs, that somehow or another they
- 14:36Speaker 2: knew how to make DMT. Like, okay, what? Because that's
- 14:42Speaker 2: a complicated process when you have to separate the molecule
- 14:46Speaker 2: from whatever plant it's in. And then you have to
- 14:49Speaker 2: figure out that you need to freebase it or smoke it.
- 14:51Speaker 2: Like what?
- 14:52Speaker 5: This is actually in northwestern Argentina.
- 14:55Speaker 2: Aha.
- 14:56Speaker 5: So it's still the Andes.
- 14:58Speaker 2: The Inca Cueva, a high altitude cave site in Jujuy,
- 15:03Speaker 2: northwestern Argentina. The tubular smoking pipes are made from the
- 15:08Speaker 2: long bones of a puma. They were found alongside anadenanthera.
- 15:18Speaker 2: and Dananthra seeds, including the plant commonly associated with Vilca
- 15:27Speaker 2: Sibyl snuff traditions. Residue testing detected tryptamine alkaloids in the pipes.
- 15:34Speaker 2: So they were figuring out how to take these seeds
- 15:38Speaker 2: and smoke them. The material has been dated to roughly
- 15:43Speaker 2: 2130 BCE, over 4,000 years ago. That makes the find
- 15:48Speaker 2: amongst the oldest direct archaeological evidence for intentional use of
- 15:53Speaker 2: psychoactive anadenanthera. Sorry, scientists in the southern Andes. That's fucking crazy.
- 16:05Speaker 2: The careful answer is DMT was detected in pipe residues.
- 16:09Speaker 2: But anadenanthera. Colubrina is not simply a DMT plant. Its
- 16:17Speaker 2: psychoactive chemistry can include bufetinin DMT and 5-MeO DMT in
- 16:24Speaker 2: varying quantities. Depending on plant material and preparation, the archaeological
- 16:28Speaker 2: interpretation is that the pipes were used in a ritual
- 16:31Speaker 2: context involving, one more time, ananthera rather than proof that
- 16:39Speaker 2: people were using modern purified DMT. Either way. They're smoking
- 16:44Speaker 2: whatever the fuck that stuff is. They're getting DMT from it.
- 16:47Speaker 2: So they had figured out somehow or another that ingesting
- 16:50Speaker 2: it through smoke. Now, one of the reasons why this
- 16:54Speaker 2: is particularly significant is there's scholars out of I think
- 16:59Speaker 2: it's the University of Jerusalem that believe that the burning
- 17:04Speaker 2: bush that Moses encountered.
- 17:07Speaker 1: Some kind of psychedelic.
- 17:08Speaker 2: That's what that's exactly what they think. They think the
- 17:11Speaker 2: translation was it was. They believe it was possibly the
- 17:13Speaker 2: acacia tree, which is apparently rich in DMT, so that
- 17:18Speaker 2: Moses has Moses trips balls and gets some really good
- 17:22Speaker 2: solid rules to live by and comes back with them
- 17:25Speaker 2: and said, hey, this is what God said.
- 17:27Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think it's clearly the case that
- 17:31Speaker 1: ancient cultures, not just in South America, but across the world,
- 17:36Speaker 1: were using psychedelic substances. And yeah, that's interesting. I mean,
- 17:40Speaker 1: the theory of whether that caused agriculture, whether that led
- 17:44Speaker 1: to civilization or anything like that, I mean, I don't know,
- 17:46Speaker 1: but it's certainly interesting that human beings seem to have
- 17:50Speaker 1: been experimenting with psychoactive substances for a long, long, long, long,
- 17:54Speaker 1: long time. And yeah, that's fascinating.
- 17:57Speaker 2: Yeah, and much like in our culture today, and, you know,
- 18:02Speaker 2: especially what happened in 1970, where all that stuff was
- 18:05Speaker 2: demonized and put on schedule one. Back then, during the
- 18:08Speaker 2: Eleusinian Mysteries, the reason why those mysteries stopped is because
- 18:12Speaker 2: the powers that be were like, hey, these guys are
- 18:14Speaker 2: a fucking problem. These trippy dudes with their weird ideas
- 18:17Speaker 2: who invented democracy, they're going to fuck this whole thing up.
- 18:21Speaker 2: We're not going to be able to run it and
- 18:23Speaker 2: tell everybody what to do and force them into going
- 18:24Speaker 2: to war.
- 18:26Speaker 1: Yeah, I know. The powers that be always want to
- 18:28Speaker 1: restrict any kind of thought that's outside of the... What
- 18:31Speaker 1: they want people to think. They don't want people to
- 18:33Speaker 1: think as freely as they can.
- 18:35Speaker 2: Anything that limits their control. Yeah. You know, because everybody
- 18:39Speaker 2: wants control. And there's always new groups that say, you
- 18:42Speaker 2: don't know what the fuck you're doing. Let me take
- 18:43Speaker 2: the realm. And that's always been the case. Which is
- 18:48Speaker 2: probably good for people. You know, it probably is what
- 18:52Speaker 2: leads to, I mean, not the war part of it,
- 18:55Speaker 2: but probably these new ideas that... is what leads to
- 18:58Speaker 2: an advancement of civilization rather than stagnation that we find
- 19:01Speaker 2: in some places in the world where they haven't had
- 19:04Speaker 2: a chance to do that.
- 19:05Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 19:06Speaker 2: You know, like my friends that have been to Afghanistan,
- 19:09Speaker 2: they had to serve over there. They're essentially saying that, like,
- 19:13Speaker 2: they're living like people lived thousands of years ago. There's warlords,
- 19:17Speaker 2: and they control regions, and that's how they've always done it.
- 19:23Speaker 2: And they live this weird nomadic lifestyle in the mountains...
- 19:27Speaker 2: And it's not much different than the way it was
- 19:29Speaker 2: thousands and thousands of years ago.
- 19:30Speaker 1: It's very clan-like.
- 19:31Speaker 5: Yeah.
- 19:33Speaker 2: And if you don't have– if that guy and these
- 19:36Speaker 2: groups just stay in control forever, it's like there's no
- 19:40Speaker 2: motivation for them to change and evolve and grow.
- 19:43Speaker 1: There's no innovation Yeah.
- 19:44Speaker 2: Nothing's happening. Also, they're stuck in the mountains. It's like
- 19:47Speaker 2: you're just trying to live. But, you know, when we
- 19:50Speaker 2: think of these places, these very fertile places on earth
- 19:53Speaker 2: where like particularly Turkey, Turkey's fascinating, you know, and many
- 19:59Speaker 2: people are now speculating that that if there is a
- 20:02Speaker 2: singular place, but that might have been one of the
- 20:05Speaker 2: birthplaces of true civilization.
- 20:08Speaker 4: Yeah.
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- 21:16Speaker 1: I mean, I think it undoubtedly is. I think Taştapela,
- 21:19Speaker 1: which is in modern day Turkey, is the earliest evidence,
- 21:22Speaker 1: in my view, of something akin to civilization. And now
- 21:25Speaker 1: archaeologists will say it's not civilization because it doesn't quite
- 21:28Speaker 1: tick off every part of the checklist. But I think
- 21:31Speaker 1: that's neither here nor there. I think it's clearly a
- 21:33Speaker 1: very sophisticated culture. I mean, you have like 14 sites
- 21:36Speaker 1: there that are now clearly shown to be interlinked, shared symbolism,
- 21:40Speaker 1: shared religious tradition, same architectural styles. Very impressive architecture, clearly
- 21:46Speaker 1: organized labor, stratified society, because how do you achieve that
- 21:49Speaker 1: without someone at the top and someone below? And these
- 21:51Speaker 1: are all things that we used to think were civilization, right?
- 21:55Speaker 1: And yet people aren't happy with us calling Tashdapella a civilization,
- 21:59Speaker 1: but I think it will get there.
- 22:00Speaker 2: But don't you think that's just because of them trying
- 22:03Speaker 2: to protect their timeline that they've been teaching? Yeah.
- 22:06Speaker 1: And I think it will change. I think it will change.
- 22:08Speaker 2: I don't think there's any other explanation other than that.
- 22:10Speaker 2: I mean, it fits, as you said, all the criteria
- 22:13Speaker 2: for a civilization that we used to apply. And the
- 22:15Speaker 2: fact that they were moving the goalposts just because they
- 22:18Speaker 2: didn't know it existed.
- 22:19Speaker 1: And they're finding residential buildings at Gobekli Tepe now. And
- 22:22Speaker 1: that was always one that used to say, look, people
- 22:23Speaker 1: didn't live there. They must have migrated there. But now
- 22:25Speaker 1: they're finding that people did live there, like, I guess,
- 22:27Speaker 1: permanently or at least semi-permanently. Yeah, there's all the sites
- 22:30Speaker 1: and quite a vast area all connected and So the
- 22:34Speaker 1: only ones they haven't got now is writing. And there's
- 22:37Speaker 1: an interesting discovery regarding writing at Gobekli Tepe and agriculture.
- 22:41Speaker 2: Yeah, we talked about that yesterday.
- 22:43Speaker 1: The Irving Finkel thing.
- 22:44Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah, really interesting. So are those where you see
- 22:48Speaker 2: those pillars, are those sites where you have like those
- 22:51Speaker 2: concentric circles?
- 22:53Speaker 1: I assume so. Those are the famous ones anyway. Callahan Tepe,
- 22:57Speaker 1: Gobekli Tepe, Seyfer Tepe. Those are the biggest ones.
- 22:59Speaker 2: And only 5% of Gobekli Tepe currently has even been excavated, right?
- 23:06Speaker 2: Which is pretty crazy when you think like, well, okay,
- 23:10Speaker 2: how many of them are also still underground? Like how
- 23:14Speaker 2: many do we know only exist because of ground penetrating
- 23:16Speaker 2: radar and all the other techniques? Yeah.
- 23:19Speaker 1: I mean, it's wild. Like Gobekli Tepe, if all of
- 23:21Speaker 1: it was excavated as something like 50 times larger than
- 23:24Speaker 1: Stonehenge and Stonehenge is obviously an incredibly famous site and
- 23:26Speaker 1: yet it's so much bigger and Like, to be clear,
- 23:30Speaker 1: it is standard archaeological practice to not excavate too much
- 23:35Speaker 1: of a site.
- 23:36Speaker 2: What are we looking at here?
- 23:37Speaker 1: That's Gobekli Tepe.
- 23:38Speaker 2: And what are we looking at in terms of these grids?
- 23:42Speaker 1: I think maybe that's the kind of archaeological pit.
- 23:45Speaker 2: I think.
- 23:46Speaker 1: I'm not 100% sure.
- 23:47Speaker 2: It seems like it, right? Because it seems like the
- 23:49Speaker 2: grids go on top of these circles, which doesn't make
- 23:51Speaker 2: any sense. So, obviously, they have to go very slowly.
- 23:57Speaker 2: The risk of destroying some incredible find, some beautiful ancient
- 24:03Speaker 2: thing because you're using tractors or something.
- 24:05Speaker 1: Like that is too great. It is valid, but I
- 24:07Speaker 1: would argue, and I've said this before, is that Gobekli
- 24:10Speaker 1: Tepe is a site that has such important ramifications for
- 24:14Speaker 1: our understanding of civilization and the origins of civilization that
- 24:18Speaker 1: it should receive special treatment, right? Because it is the
- 24:21Speaker 1: oldest site that looks like civilization. So I always think
- 24:25Speaker 1: that maybe we should not, obviously you want to be
- 24:28Speaker 1: careful when you go in and you want to follow
- 24:29Speaker 1: correct archaeological procedure, but at the same time, what if
- 24:33Speaker 1: a relic, like equivalent to the Rosetta Stone, the one
- 24:36Speaker 1: stone that we found that completely translated Egyptian hieroglyphs and
- 24:40Speaker 1: opened up ancient Egypt to our understanding, what if some
- 24:43Speaker 1: kind of equivalent artifact is hiding in the unexcavated 95%
- 24:46Speaker 1: of Gobekli Tepe? That could be waiting for us to find.
- 24:50Speaker 5: Have we talked about this boar before, Joe?
- 24:52Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 24:53Speaker 4: I don't remember ever seeing it, but It's not new,
- 24:57Speaker 4: but it was also found at Gobekli Tepe.
- 24:58Speaker 5: It was painted.
- 24:59Speaker 4: I think some of the mouth was painted red.
- 25:03Speaker 2: It's crazy looking.
- 25:04Speaker 5: It's pretty close to life-size.
- 25:09Speaker 2: The whole thing is really fascinating because it's also, I
- 25:12Speaker 2: think it's the first evidence of 3D carving in stone too.
- 25:17Speaker 1: Yeah, raised relief I think is called. Or not a statue.
- 25:20Speaker 2: What we're saying about that is like these boars and
- 25:23Speaker 2: snakes and all these different animals that are on these
- 25:26Speaker 2: incredible pillars, they're not carved into it. The stone is
- 25:30Speaker 2: carved around it, which is advanced. It takes sophisticated use
- 25:36Speaker 2: of tools. And an understanding of how to work stone
- 25:39Speaker 2: to be able to do something like that.
- 25:41Speaker 1: And crucially, specialization, right? That's someone's job. They're not out
- 25:44Speaker 1: there gathering food. That's their job. That's how they spend
- 25:48Speaker 1: their time.
- 25:48Speaker 2: And it's also, hey, how did you move those? Those
- 25:53Speaker 2: stones are huge. The biggest ones are like how many?
- 25:56Speaker 1: I think most of them are like 10 tons. But
- 25:58Speaker 1: I think they found one that hadn't been moved by
- 26:00Speaker 1: the quarry that was something like 50 tons. And obviously,
- 26:02Speaker 1: they would have... assumed that they would have had a
- 26:05Speaker 1: method to move that, or else they wouldn't have carved
- 26:07Speaker 1: it out.
- 26:07Speaker 2: Yeah, 50 tons is high in stubby little peckers.
- 26:12Speaker 5: It says clutching.
- 26:14Speaker 2: Clutching their peckers. Yeah. Okay. Whatever you're into, bro. Must
- 26:21Speaker 2: have been a weird world back then. And then the
- 26:23Speaker 2: real question is, is this the oldest civilization, or is
- 26:28Speaker 2: this the oldest reboot of civilization that was destroyed by
- 26:32Speaker 2: the Great Flood? And by the younger giant's impact and
- 26:35Speaker 2: whatever the fuck could have happened to whatever civilization previously existed.
- 26:40Speaker 2: That's where things get real squirrely. Yeah, well, exactly.
- 26:43Speaker 1: Because if that is a civilization, which I think it's
- 26:45Speaker 1: becoming clear that it is, and it doesn't really matter
- 26:47Speaker 1: how you define civilization. It's clearly incredibly sophisticated. Like, it's
- 26:50Speaker 1: a very sophisticated culture.
- 26:51Speaker 2: Yeah, that word is a problem. Yeah, exactly.
- 26:53Speaker 1: Like, who cares? It's clearly a very sophisticated culture.
- 26:55Speaker 2: It's like when Fauci was talking about gain of function. Like, hey, fucker.
- 26:59Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 27:00Speaker 2: You know what we're talking about.
- 27:01Speaker 1: Exactly.
- 27:01Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah. But.
- 27:02Speaker 1: But yeah, that means that, you know, the timeline of civilization,
- 27:06Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it, has doubled from 6,000
- 27:09Speaker 1: years to 12,000 years. So then the question becomes, how
- 27:12Speaker 1: much further back does it go? Because clearly, Tashtapella, Gobekli Tepe,
- 27:15Speaker 1: it's not the first thing these people built. They weren't
- 27:18Speaker 1: starting from scratch. They weren't just hunter-gatherers that thought, let's
- 27:21Speaker 1: try something new and build this. There's clearly a long
- 27:24Speaker 1: procedure up to that point. So how far back does
- 27:26Speaker 1: that go?
- 27:27Speaker 2: And for people that don't know, we should probably explain
- 27:30Speaker 2: that One of the reasons why they're able to accurately
- 27:33Speaker 2: carbon test Gobekli Tepe is because– and this is where
- 27:38Speaker 2: it gets really weird. The dirt is uniform in that
- 27:42Speaker 2: it was intentionally covered. So these sites weren't covered just
- 27:48Speaker 2: over time like maybe the Sphinx was in Egypt. They
- 27:51Speaker 2: were covered intentionally and they were covered 11,600-ish years ago.
- 27:57Speaker 2: So how old were they before they were covered?
- 28:00Speaker 1: Yeah, of course. I mean, that's only the earliest date
- 28:02Speaker 1: we have, but that doesn't mean it's the date that
- 28:04Speaker 1: they were constructed.
- 28:05Speaker 2: And why were they covered?
- 28:06Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, there is debate over that, but that's
- 28:08Speaker 1: what Klaus Schmidt thought.
- 28:09Speaker 2: What is the debate?
- 28:10Speaker 1: Well, some people say it wasn't intentionally covered, and it
- 28:12Speaker 1: was just kind of like a landslide.
- 28:14Speaker 2: Like a crazy landslide that'll happen at once?
- 28:16Speaker 1: Because, I mean, it's really hard to prove.
- 28:17Speaker 2: But what an amazing landslide that covers everything.
- 28:20Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I would still lean
- 28:22Speaker 1: towards the original interpretation from the original archaeologist, Klaus Schmidt.
- 28:27Speaker 2: And why did he think they covered it? I don't know.
- 28:30Speaker 2: Like a conquering civilization where like, fuck these people and
- 28:33Speaker 2: their beautiful pillars.
- 28:35Speaker 1: No, I think he thought the people that built it
- 28:36Speaker 1: covered it.
- 28:38Speaker 2: Interesting.
- 28:38Speaker 1: Well, I guess you can't tell, can you? And that's
- 28:40Speaker 1: the thing with so much of this stuff is that
- 28:42Speaker 1: no one knows. And especially the further back you get
- 28:45Speaker 1: in time, anyone that talks with any confidence around the past,
- 28:48Speaker 1: and this is one of my main bugbears with archaeology. Like,
- 28:52Speaker 1: I love archaeology and I have a huge respect for
- 28:54Speaker 1: archaeologists and I think they do amazing work, but one
- 28:56Speaker 1: of my main bugbears is the confidence in which people
- 28:59Speaker 1: talk about the past and ruling out other possibilities, because
- 29:03Speaker 1: at the end of the day, none of us know
- 29:05Speaker 1: what happened in the deep, deep past, especially when you
- 29:07Speaker 1: start getting back to these crazy timescales. It's all speculation.
- 29:10Speaker 1: And it doesn't matter if you're a YouTuber like me
- 29:12Speaker 1: or if you're a professor, we're all just speculating based
- 29:15Speaker 1: on the very limited evidence that we have. And so
- 29:17Speaker 1: I don't like it when people say definitive things. I
- 29:20Speaker 1: always try and say, maybe this is the case or
- 29:23Speaker 1: maybe that's the case. We don't know. And I think
- 29:25Speaker 1: everyone should approach history with that mindset. And that's kind
- 29:27Speaker 1: of If I can get any message across to people,
- 29:31Speaker 1: that is the message. We don't know, and here's a possibility,
- 29:35Speaker 1: and here's a possibility, and here's the evidence that we
- 29:37Speaker 1: think is true, but you know it's really hard to.
- 29:40Speaker 2: Tell but it also does stand to reason that biology
- 29:44Speaker 2: and archaeology as they expand the timeline as biology has
- 29:48Speaker 2: expanded the timeline archaeology should probably tag along.
- 29:51Speaker 1: Well yeah that's what i mean about the fact that
- 29:53Speaker 1: the rug's kind of been pulled out from underneath.
- 29:55Speaker 2: Us yeah What on purpose means here? There's good reason
- 29:59Speaker 2: to think humans intentionally deposited at least some of the fill.
- 30:03Speaker 2: Enclosure D alone contained roughly 500 cubic meters of rubble
- 30:07Speaker 2: and cultural debris and particular items including broken anthropomorphic sculpture
- 30:13Speaker 2: heads appear to have been deliberately placed near pillars during refilling.
- 30:17Speaker 2: But archaeologists do not have definitive evidence for the often
- 30:20Speaker 2: repeated popular claim that its builders intentionally buried the entire
- 30:25Speaker 2: site at once to hide it, preserve it, or mark
- 30:28Speaker 2: a single ritual closure. The mound is man-made in the
- 30:32Speaker 2: sense that it consists of accumulated archaeological deposits, but its
- 30:36Speaker 2: formation involved both human actions and natural sediment movement, ending
- 30:41Speaker 2: around 8,000 BCE. Yo. That's a long fucking time ago.
- 30:47Speaker 2: I don't think people even really can wrap their head
- 30:49Speaker 2: around how long we're talking. You know, especially, that's the
- 30:53Speaker 2: other thing. One of the things that I loved about
- 30:58Speaker 2: your whole video series was the one where you were
- 31:02Speaker 2: talking about what would be left if there was a
- 31:04Speaker 2: human civilization 100,000 or more years ago. And that's not
- 31:09Speaker 2: unreasonable if this biology assessment is correct, is that there
- 31:17Speaker 2: have been humans far longer than we used to think.
- 31:22Speaker 2: So that's the case. Because if we used to think
- 31:23Speaker 2: it was 50,000 years, I think when I was in
- 31:25Speaker 2: high school, they were saying the Homo sapiens were like 50,000
- 31:29Speaker 2: years old or maybe 100, right? And now the conventional
- 31:33Speaker 2: estimate is like, what, three?
- 31:35Speaker 1: So the oldest fossils we have of anatomically modern humans
- 31:39Speaker 1: are 315 to 360,000 years old. I mean, it's the
- 31:41Speaker 1: same fossil set from Jebel Aroud in Morocco and But
- 31:46Speaker 1: this obviously is really hard to date accurately, but it's
- 31:49Speaker 1: between 300 and 350,000.
- 31:50Speaker 2: And then I think it's really important to note that
- 31:53Speaker 2: the fossil record is incredibly incomplete because most people don't
- 31:58Speaker 2: leave a fossil.
- 32:00Speaker 1: It's so unlikely that you'd fossilize. It's something like one
- 32:02Speaker 1: in a million.
- 32:03Speaker 2: So it's such a crazy metric to try to figure
- 32:08Speaker 2: out what the past is from these tiny scraps. It's
- 32:12Speaker 2: like trying to read a book. by a single shard
- 32:16Speaker 2: of a piece of paper with a half a sentence
- 32:18Speaker 2: in it. And you're like, what do you think this
- 32:19Speaker 2: book was about? Like, fuck.
- 32:21Speaker 5: Exactly.
- 32:21Speaker 2: There's not much evidence. That's the problem. But the evidence
- 32:24Speaker 2: that they do find is pushing the timeline way back,
- 32:29Speaker 2: way back. And that alone, you would think archaeology would go, well, hey, guys,
- 32:36Speaker 2: in light of this new evidence, maybe we should consider
- 32:39Speaker 2: the possibility that civilization is quite a bit older than
- 32:41Speaker 2: we think. They are the same exact animal. What would
- 32:45Speaker 2: take them 300,000 years to develop complex civilization and agriculture
- 32:52Speaker 2: and all these different things? Like why would it take
- 32:54Speaker 2: so long? And is it possible that given the– I
- 32:59Speaker 2: mean the incredible possibilities in terms of like what kind
- 33:03Speaker 2: of natural disasters took place, just asteroid impacts that we know,
- 33:09Speaker 2: we find them all over the earth. All over the
- 33:12Speaker 2: earth and some of them are 20,000 years old, 50,000
- 33:16Speaker 2: years old. We find them everywhere. What kind of an
- 33:18Speaker 2: impact would that have had? What would be left of
- 33:21Speaker 2: those civilizations? And all those questions, again, guys like you
- 33:24Speaker 2: are the ones proposing them and putting them out there.
- 33:28Speaker 2: And it's a really good question, especially in light of
- 33:33Speaker 2: what we understand about humans biologically. Doesn't it make sense
- 33:37Speaker 2: that these people, these just as– anatomically completely like us.
- 33:45Speaker 2: Why would it take them hundreds of thousands of years
- 33:48Speaker 2: to figure out a roof?
- 33:50Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. But I think we have clear evidence now
- 33:54Speaker 1: that what we call modern intelligence, behavioral modernity, goes back so, so,
- 34:02Speaker 1: so much further than we think. I would argue back
- 34:05Speaker 1: over a million years in light of a couple of
- 34:08Speaker 1: papers that have come out. in the last 12 months.
- 34:11Speaker 2: And what are these papers?
- 34:13Speaker 1: So, I mean, there's been two really significant papers, I think,
- 34:16Speaker 1: since we last spoke. One of them, I think, has
- 34:20Speaker 1: really big ramifications for human intelligence. And that's a paper
- 34:23Speaker 1: that came out regarding the island of Sulawesi, which is
- 34:27Speaker 1: in Indonesia. And this is in relation to human seafaring.
- 34:33Speaker 1: Seafaring was always thought to be an exclusively sapien strait,
- 34:35Speaker 1: exclusively modern human strait, because it's a really hard thing
- 34:38Speaker 1: to do, right? You need to be quite clever to
- 34:40Speaker 1: build a boat, to build something that's sophisticated enough to
- 34:44Speaker 1: be seaworthy, to get across ocean boundaries and to reach
- 34:47Speaker 1: isolated land masses. And we always thought that was only
- 34:50Speaker 1: sapiens until very recently. But a paper came out in
- 34:54Speaker 1: August last year. You actually sent it to me. Yeah,
- 34:57Speaker 1: I don't think you sent me a post that was
- 34:59Speaker 1: about stone tools that was found. And I was like,
- 35:01Speaker 1: that's interesting. I clicked on the paper. And then I
- 35:03Speaker 1: was like, oh, wow, look where these stone tools were found.
- 35:06Speaker 1: And it was really, really interesting because they were found
- 35:08Speaker 1: on Sulawesi. And Sulawesi is an island that crucially sits
- 35:14Speaker 1: east of something called the Wallace Line, which is a
- 35:16Speaker 1: biogeographic boundary, which means that it has been an island
- 35:20Speaker 1: and separated from the mainland for tens of millions of
- 35:22Speaker 1: years and separated by deep ocean channels that are between,
- 35:27Speaker 1: depending on the fluctuating sea levels at the time, between
- 35:29Speaker 1: 50 and 100 kilometers across. So it's always been an island.
- 35:34Speaker 1: And yet, in August 2025, archaeologists at a site called
- 35:38Speaker 1: Callio found stone tools on Sulawesi. And that means that
- 35:42Speaker 1: some type of human, probably not sapiens, but I guess
- 35:44Speaker 1: you never know, some type of human managed to cross
- 35:47Speaker 1: that ocean boundary and reach Sulawesi. And that's fascinating. But
- 35:52Speaker 1: it's worth saying that it's not the only piece of
- 35:54Speaker 1: evidence in the region.
- 35:56Speaker 2: There's also.
- 35:57Speaker 1: A decade or so ago, we found stone tools on Flores,
- 36:01Speaker 1: which is just below Sulawesi. It's another island and crucially, again,
- 36:04Speaker 1: east of the Wallace line. So again, you have to
- 36:06Speaker 1: cross an ocean boundary to get to Flores. And they
- 36:09Speaker 1: found stone tools there that are 1.02 million years old.
- 36:13Speaker 1: And I didn't even say the Sulawesi tools are 1.04
- 36:17Speaker 1: to 1.4 million years old. So Over a million years ago,
- 36:21Speaker 1: some type of human was crossing ocean boundaries to get
- 36:24Speaker 1: to these islands. And there's also Luzon, which is just
- 36:27Speaker 1: above Sulawesi, same region. And they found stone tools there,
- 36:30Speaker 1: which are 700,000 years old. Now, the theory always was
- 36:35Speaker 1: that this was an accident. When we just had Flores,
- 36:39Speaker 1: the theory was that it was accidental drift. So a
- 36:42Speaker 1: couple of humans were swept out to sea and somehow
- 36:45Speaker 1: survived the the stormy ocean and the tropical sun cling
- 36:48Speaker 1: to some driftwood and made it to Flores and somehow
- 36:52Speaker 1: survived and colonized the island. But now that we've got Flores,
- 36:56Speaker 1: Luzon and Sulawesi, three islands all in the same region,
- 36:59Speaker 1: all separated by this ocean boundary, I think it's starting
- 37:02Speaker 1: to point less towards accident and more towards behavior, right?
- 37:07Speaker 1: More towards a deliberate sea crossing because to colonize, I
- 37:12Speaker 1: was doing some research because of these discoveries and There's
- 37:16Speaker 1: actually been a few papers from NASA on how many
- 37:18Speaker 1: humans you need to colonize an isolated landmass because NASA
- 37:23Speaker 1: were doing it for like, if you're going to Mars
- 37:25Speaker 1: or something and you need a certain amount of humans
- 37:29Speaker 1: or breeding age to not, um, have like genetic problems
- 37:33Speaker 1: in the population too. So you need a certain amount
- 37:36Speaker 1: of humans of a, of a breeding age to, to
- 37:39Speaker 1: ensure viability, right? Because otherwise you're going to inbreed and
- 37:42Speaker 1: you're all going to die out because of genetic issues.
- 37:44Speaker 1: And they said it was something like you need 160
- 37:47Speaker 1: people at least. And that is with strict breeding controls
- 37:51Speaker 1: and genetic testing. We can probably assume they weren't doing
- 37:54Speaker 1: genetic testing on themselves. And so then the number somewhere
- 37:57Speaker 1: near 500. So what are the chances that 500 individuals
- 38:01Speaker 1: were all swept out to sea at the same time,
- 38:03Speaker 1: all survived the crossing and all landed on an island
- 38:07Speaker 1: and colonized it? That's a huge amount of humans for
- 38:11Speaker 1: an accident. Do you know what I mean? And then
- 38:12Speaker 1: three times in three separate islands, all in the same region.
- 38:16Speaker 1: At what point does accident start looking like behavior? Do
- 38:19Speaker 1: you know what I mean? Because what are the chances
- 38:22Speaker 1: of 500 individuals all being swept out to sea, all surviving,
- 38:26Speaker 1: all reaching these islands and all colonizing in three separate occasions,
- 38:29Speaker 1: all around about a million years ago?
- 38:32Speaker 2: Not good.
- 38:33Speaker 1: It's not a high chance, is it? And I think
- 38:35Speaker 1: if we apply Occam's razor to it, which is, you know,
- 38:37Speaker 1: the simplest explanation wins. I think the simplest explanation is
- 38:41Speaker 1: that these humans were intelligent enough to build boats, right? Right.
- 38:46Speaker 1: And that's, I mean, and that is a controversial opinion.
- 38:48Speaker 1: That's not accepted. It's accepted that the humans reached these islands.
- 38:51Speaker 1: That's not controversial. Humans were on these islands a million.
- 38:54Speaker 2: Years ago, 700K. It's just not accepted that it was intentional.
- 38:57Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not accepted that they built boats.
- 38:59Speaker 2: That seems silly. But I think it's... It doesn't make
- 39:01Speaker 2: any sense if it's not. 500 of them make it
- 39:04Speaker 2: over by floating and surviving? Yeah. What?
- 39:07Speaker 1: Exactly.
- 39:07Speaker 2: All at the same time?
- 39:08Speaker 5: Exactly.
- 39:09Speaker 1: And this is what I mean about taking data points
- 39:10Speaker 1: from different kind of science. Yeah. Because I'm looking into
- 39:15Speaker 1: what NASA is saying about humans colonizing somewhere, and I'm saying, well, look,
- 39:19Speaker 1: 500 people or more than 500 people of breeding age
- 39:22Speaker 1: as well, not just people, all reaching an island on
- 39:25Speaker 1: three separate occasions, all in the same region. Are we
- 39:28Speaker 1: sure this wasn't deliberate? So I think that has huge
- 39:31Speaker 1: ramifications for human intelligence because that was always thought to
- 39:35Speaker 1: be an exclusively sapiens thing, building a boat, because that's
- 39:38Speaker 1: really hard to build a boat. You have to have planning.
- 39:41Speaker 1: You have to have foresight. You have to be good
- 39:43Speaker 1: enough at carpentry to construct something that's seaworthy.
- 39:46Speaker 2: You have to Trial and error.
- 39:48Speaker 1: Yeah, trial and error. And you have to have the
- 39:50Speaker 1: imagination as well to dream about what's on the other
- 39:53Speaker 1: side of the horizon.
- 39:53Speaker 3: Yes.
- 39:54Speaker 1: And the bravery and the incredible reckless courage to go
- 39:57Speaker 1: for it and to go out there across the horizon
- 39:59Speaker 1: and reach an island.
- 40:00Speaker 2: And possibly navigate through the stars. Like they knew how
- 40:04Speaker 2: to do that. Maybe.
- 40:07Speaker 1: Otherwise, why would you set out, you know?
- 40:08Speaker 2: Right. And how would you repeat it?
- 40:11Speaker 5: Exactly.
- 40:11Speaker 2: Yeah. Do you remember which way you went? Tower. It's
- 40:15Speaker 2: a fucking dude with a giant brow ridge. Yeah. Furry
- 40:19Speaker 2: face is telling you, I remember going this way. Like,
- 40:22Speaker 2: are you fucking sure? How are you doing? Are you
- 40:24Speaker 2: using the stars? Like, what are you doing?
- 40:27Speaker 1: But humans weren't even meant to have complex language by then.
- 40:29Speaker 1: They weren't meant to be capable of this.
- 40:31Speaker 2: That's crazy. We're seeing these things. There has to be
- 40:34Speaker 2: some sort of organization. If you're getting a group of
- 40:37Speaker 2: people to agree to get in the boat. if they
- 40:39Speaker 2: can't communicate with each other, that seems even more ridiculous.
- 40:43Speaker 2: Because let's say at the minimum of 50 kilometers, how
- 40:46Speaker 2: long does it take you to row 50 kilometers? Seems
- 40:49Speaker 2: like it would be days.
- 40:50Speaker 1: It would be tough, wouldn't it? And an ocean as well.
- 40:53Speaker 2: Yeah, right. If you even survive, how long is it
- 40:56Speaker 2: going to take before you get across? I mean, maybe
- 40:59Speaker 2: they figured out when the stormy season was and they
- 41:01Speaker 2: time it for when it's not so stormy. But I mean,
- 41:05Speaker 2: how are they doing that? Do they have a calendar
- 41:06Speaker 2: a million years ago?
- 41:07Speaker 1: Whatever they were doing, If it was deliberate, which I
- 41:10Speaker 1: think the evidence points towards, it's a clear sign of
- 41:13Speaker 1: what we call modern intelligence.
- 41:16Speaker 2: And organization and most likely communication.
- 41:19Speaker 1: Which we always used to think only emerged 50,000 years ago.
- 41:22Speaker 2: That's crazy.
- 41:22Speaker 1: And so now, if it's over a million years old,
- 41:24Speaker 1: you know, that's like a 20 times.
- 41:27Speaker 1: And it could be 1.4. The Sulawesi tools are dated
- 41:30Speaker 1: to 1.04 to 1.4. So that's, I don't know, what's that,
- 41:32Speaker 1: like 25 times older than we think?
- 41:34Speaker 2: That's so funny, that 0.4. That's a lot. It's huge.
- 41:37Speaker 2: It's absolutely gigantic.
- 41:38Speaker 1: Hundreds of thousands of years. Yeah, and this is what
- 41:40Speaker 1: you were saying about, like, people can't get their heads
- 41:42Speaker 1: around the sheer enormity of these timescales that we're talking about.
- 41:45Speaker 2: Like, it's so long. Yeah.
- 41:46Speaker 1: It's so long.
- 41:47Speaker 2: Well, another weird one that's come up fairly recently that
- 41:52Speaker 2: I know you've talked about is the copper mining in
- 41:55Speaker 2: North America. That one blew me away. Just the volume
- 42:00Speaker 2: of copper that was removed.
- 42:04Speaker 1: Yeah, they had a whole copper industry in North America 9,000
- 42:07Speaker 1: years ago.
- 42:09Speaker 2: Just listen to that again. Say that one more time.
- 42:12Speaker 1: A whole copper industry in North America 9,000 years ago.
- 42:15Speaker 1: And that's the same as the earliest day anywhere else
- 42:18Speaker 1: in the world.
- 42:19Speaker 2: And the volume. This is what's going to freak people out.
- 42:22Speaker 2: Tell them how much copper was removed.
- 42:25Speaker 1: I don't know off the top of my head, but
- 42:26Speaker 1: it's a lot. And to be fair, there's lots of
- 42:28Speaker 1: natural copper. I think it's in the kind of northern
- 42:30Speaker 1: parts of the United States as it is now. I
- 42:33Speaker 1: don't know how much they removed off the top of
- 42:34Speaker 1: my head, but it is a lot of copper.
- 42:37Speaker 2: Like a commercial copper mine volume.
- 42:40Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why I said industry.
- 42:42Speaker 2: It's so crazy. And I don't understand how they determined
- 42:47Speaker 2: the amount of copper that was removed. But if that
- 42:50Speaker 2: is correct... That seems to indicate that there was some
- 42:54Speaker 2: sort of sophisticated metallurgy going on in North America 9,000
- 43:00Speaker 2: years ago.
- 43:01Speaker 1: Yeah, which is as early as anywhere else in the world.
- 43:04Speaker 1: And that completely flies in the face of what we
- 43:06Speaker 1: used to think about people in North America. And it's
- 43:11Speaker 1: interesting because what the evidence appears to show is that
- 43:14Speaker 1: they did this for a few thousand years, but then
- 43:16Speaker 1: they dropped it and they stopped doing it. Now, I
- 43:18Speaker 1: don't know what that suggests, but Either it suggests something
- 43:22Speaker 1: happened to them or they decided they didn't want to
- 43:23Speaker 1: do it anymore. But either way, it kind of goes
- 43:26Speaker 1: against this idea that we've always kind of assumed that
- 43:29Speaker 1: technology is like an escalator, right? We always assume that
- 43:32Speaker 1: technology is an escalator.
- 43:33Speaker 2: Yeah, there you go.
- 43:34Speaker 1: 1.5 billion pounds of copper.
- 43:35Speaker 2: What? So wrap your head around this, folks. Archaeology and
- 43:40Speaker 2: date mining and copper tool use, but it generally cannot
- 43:44Speaker 2: calculate annual or century-specific production 9,500 years ago. One older
- 43:51Speaker 2: broad estimate puts a total archaic period extraction in the
- 43:56Speaker 2: Lake Superior region at up to about 1.5 billion pounds
- 44:02Speaker 2: of copper, roughly 680,000 metric tons. But that covers many millennia,
- 44:10Speaker 2: not the century 9,500 years ago. So that means that
- 44:14Speaker 2: they were doing it for thousands of years. They're saying
- 44:20Speaker 2: it covers many millennia.
- 44:21Speaker 1: Yeah, they were doing it for, yeah, as it says,
- 44:23Speaker 1: the peak between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago.
- 44:26Speaker 2: That's crazy. That's crazy. So at least 9,500 years ago,
- 44:33Speaker 2: they started doing this somewhere around there. And they did
- 44:37Speaker 2: it for thousands of years. They removed copper for thousands
- 44:40Speaker 2: of years.
- 44:41Speaker 4: A bunch of it was just sitting on the top.
- 44:43Speaker 4: They called it float copper, I think.
- 44:45Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 44:46Speaker 2: That's probably how they first started finding it. And then
- 44:50Speaker 2: they probably started digging. Isn't it interesting how precious, what
- 44:55Speaker 2: we call precious metals, just they exist in weird deposits.
- 44:59Speaker 2: It's like erratic. It's all over the place. It's like,
- 45:01Speaker 2: come find me.
- 45:03Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 45:04Speaker 2: And these people use this stuff for weapons. They use
- 45:08Speaker 2: this stuff for jewelry. They used it for all kinds
- 45:11Speaker 2: of things. Arrow points, I'm sure. They probably used it
- 45:14Speaker 2: for all sorts of things. They had to use it
- 45:16Speaker 2: for weapons, right?
- 45:17Speaker 3: Probably, yeah.
- 45:18Speaker 1: I think they found, like, spear points and stuff.
- 45:19Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe that makes sense.
- 45:21Speaker 1: But then they dropped it, and then they just stopped
- 45:23Speaker 1: doing it. And we don't know why they did that,
- 45:25Speaker 1: but as I was saying.
- 45:27Speaker 2: Oh, wow, look, there's the copperhead arrow.
- 45:30Speaker 1: It goes against this idea that we have that technology
- 45:33Speaker 1: is like an escalator, and you just take one level
- 45:35Speaker 1: of technology and you keep going up. It shows that
- 45:37Speaker 1: people can invent something or discover something and then stop
- 45:40Speaker 1: doing it and forget about it. And I think that
- 45:42Speaker 1: has implications for how we look at prehistory as a whole,
- 45:44Speaker 1: because it suggests that people... You know, rather than just
- 45:47Speaker 1: going straight line this linear path upwards, we can go
- 45:49Speaker 1: up and down and forget things and rediscover things.
- 45:53Speaker 2: Right. And that's what the– this is the alternative theory
- 45:57Speaker 2: is that we're a reinvention of civilization currently and that
- 46:02Speaker 2: we're the most advanced reinvention that we're aware of. But
- 46:06Speaker 2: it doesn't mean that there hasn't been some sort of
- 46:08Speaker 2: a civilization before us that perhaps reached heights where we
- 46:13Speaker 2: are or greater in a completely different direction. And I
- 46:17Speaker 2: think when you look at some of the stone structures
- 46:19Speaker 2: that exist, those are the best evidence because they're so perplexing.
- 46:24Speaker 2: The stones in Lebanon, what are they called? The Trilithon stones?
- 46:27Speaker 1: Yeah, Baalbek.
- 46:28Speaker 2: Yeah. Those are crazy. Like what happened there? How? What?
- 46:32Speaker 2: How'd you get them up there?
- 46:33Speaker 1: It's weird because they're attributed to the Romans, right? But
- 46:36Speaker 1: there's no Roman records of them doing that. And that's
- 46:40Speaker 1: not particularly weird in itself until you realize that it's
- 46:43Speaker 1: a bigger engineering project than anything the Romans did anywhere.
- 46:48Speaker 1: I mean, the Colosseum is obviously an incredible thing, but
- 46:50Speaker 1: the blocks aren't as big as these blocks at Baalbek.
- 46:53Speaker 1: And yet they don't mention it anywhere. And you'd think that,
- 46:55Speaker 1: you know, a civilization that documented as much the Romans
- 46:59Speaker 1: would at least mention their biggest engineering project somewhere, you know?
- 47:02Speaker 1: And I mean, that doesn't mean it wasn't the Romans,
- 47:04Speaker 1: but it's just a weird thing.
- 47:05Speaker 2: It's very weird. It's very weird. And it's also weird
- 47:08Speaker 2: that like many places, The structures that are on top
- 47:13Speaker 2: of it are not as sophisticated, not as difficult to do.
- 47:17Speaker 2: That's how it is over and over and over again.
- 47:19Speaker 2: That's Sacsayhuaman. That's a lot of these places. You see
- 47:22Speaker 2: the base, the oldest stuff. It seems like they find
- 47:25Speaker 2: stuff and they build on top of stuff that was
- 47:27Speaker 2: already there. And then you're dealing with thousands and thousands
- 47:30Speaker 2: of years of civilization where people don't even remember who
- 47:33Speaker 2: built it. You know, like the gods. The gods put
- 47:37Speaker 2: these rocks here.
- 47:37Speaker 1: It happens all over the world.
- 47:38Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 47:39Speaker 1: People build on old sites because often the sites are
- 47:41Speaker 1: the best site in the region because that's why someone's
- 47:43Speaker 1: built there originally. So it makes sense to reuse them.
- 47:46Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that the latest civilization that used
- 47:48Speaker 1: it was the first. I mean, it could be, but
- 47:50Speaker 1: it also doesn't mean that they are definitively. But often
- 47:53Speaker 1: that's how we take it. And, yeah, that's not necessarily
- 47:57Speaker 1: the best way of looking at them, I think.
- 47:58Speaker 2: I think what you said earlier is really important that–
- 48:02Speaker 2: We can't possibly know. And to make these definitive statements
- 48:07Speaker 2: about things where you just don't have enough evidence, you
- 48:10Speaker 2: don't have enough facts, you can't really say definitively we know.
- 48:15Speaker 2: And that drives experts crazy because they don't like to
- 48:19Speaker 2: do that. They don't like to let that go, especially humans,
- 48:23Speaker 2: especially men. They love the ego that comes with being
- 48:27Speaker 2: the one who has the information, the expert opinion. That
- 48:31Speaker 2: appeal to authority. That I'm the one who could tell you, oh,
- 48:34Speaker 2: this is nonsense. These Michael Buttons on YouTube with their bullshit,
- 48:40Speaker 2: their archaeological bullshit. They love doing that. But no one's
- 48:45Speaker 2: listening to them. That's what's cute. Yeah.
- 48:47Speaker 1: And, yeah, I mean, I'm grateful that a lot of
- 48:50Speaker 1: people listen to me.
- 48:51Speaker 2: Well, like I said, you're really good at it. And
- 48:54Speaker 2: it is undeniably, just based on what we've said so far,
- 48:57Speaker 2: this is undeniably strange. It's undeniably weird and it's undeniably,
- 49:02Speaker 2: at least to me and you, interesting. And that's why
- 49:06Speaker 2: the subject will hopefully will continue the pathway that it's
- 49:12Speaker 2: on because there's so many people like you now that
- 49:15Speaker 2: are looking at this stuff and they're very credible people,
- 49:17Speaker 2: very objective. The Ben Van Kirkwick of the world, and
- 49:21Speaker 2: Jimmy Corsetti, all these people that are looking at this
- 49:23Speaker 2: stuff and go, hey, there's a lot going on here, people.
- 49:26Speaker 2: There's a lot.
- 49:27Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's interesting that... The more we uncover,
- 49:31Speaker 1: the more we discover, the more new evidence that comes out.
- 49:34Speaker 1: I think what we're starting to realize is that the
- 49:37Speaker 1: limits on our own knowledge... vastly bigger than we ever
- 49:42Speaker 1: used to think. We used to think we kind of
- 49:44Speaker 1: had it figured out, and this is what I'm talking
- 49:45Speaker 1: about with those three questions I mentioned at the start.
- 49:48Speaker 1: We used to think we had the answer to these
- 49:50Speaker 1: big questions, but with each new discovery, we're starting to
- 49:53Speaker 1: realize just how vast the unknown is. I think there's
- 49:58Speaker 1: two subjects where this kind of applies. I think the
- 50:00Speaker 1: first is physics, and obviously I'm not smart enough or
- 50:03Speaker 1: clever enough to talk about physics in any meaningful capacity,
- 50:05Speaker 1: but I think it's fair to say that The more
- 50:07Speaker 1: we learn about the nature of reality and the universe,
- 50:10Speaker 1: the more we realize just how big it is and
- 50:11Speaker 1: how crazy it is and how little we understand about
- 50:13Speaker 1: our place in it. And I think the other subject
- 50:16Speaker 1: is history. I think the more we learn about history,
- 50:19Speaker 1: the more we realize how huge the amount of time
- 50:22Speaker 1: humans have been on this planet is, how long a
- 50:24Speaker 1: mind like ours has been on this planet, how long
- 50:26Speaker 1: humans that are very similar to us have been on
- 50:29Speaker 1: this planet is. And I think it's a vital thing
- 50:32Speaker 1: because physics is kind of the question of where are we,
- 50:35Speaker 1: but History is kind of the question of who are
- 50:39Speaker 1: we and where did we come from? And that's why
- 50:41Speaker 1: I'm so interested in it, because it's a fundamental question
- 50:46Speaker 1: to civilization and to who we are. And I think
- 50:48Speaker 1: it's really important. And so that's why I talk about
- 50:51Speaker 1: this stuff.
- 50:52Speaker 2: Yeah. And also, it's cool.
- 50:54Speaker 1: It's very cool. It's so fascinating.
- 50:55Speaker 2: I love it.
- 50:56Speaker 1: And I know you love it, too.
- 50:57Speaker 2: And it's great. Well, it's it's it's so weird. You know,
- 51:01Speaker 2: it's so it's so weird to think, like, what was
- 51:03Speaker 2: it like thousands and thousands of years ago? What did
- 51:07Speaker 2: they know? Where did they learn it? And are these stories,
- 51:13Speaker 2: these flood myths that exist in all these ancient cultures,
- 51:16Speaker 2: is this an echo of a historical record of people
- 51:21Speaker 2: trying to keep track of this event that took place
- 51:26Speaker 2: that crushed us and brought us down to a few
- 51:28Speaker 2: thousand people all over the world and we had to rebuild?
- 51:31Speaker 2: And that's also when you go back thousands of years
- 51:36Speaker 2: in the conventional timeline. People were so barbaric. They were
- 51:41Speaker 2: so horrible just a few thousand years ago. If they
- 51:44Speaker 2: were capable 5,000 years ago of building ancient Egypt, probably
- 51:49Speaker 2: earlier than that. But if, why were they so brutal 2,000
- 51:52Speaker 2: years ago? Because I think those are the people that survived.
- 51:56Speaker 2: I think the people that survived were probably fucking terrible. Yeah.
- 52:00Speaker 2: Because they had to be. You know, if there's only like,
- 52:02Speaker 2: we know that like the Toba volcano, which was like
- 52:06Speaker 2: Is that Indonesia? 70,000 years ago got us down to, what,
- 52:12Speaker 2: just a few thousand people globally? Yeah. Imagine that life.
- 52:19Speaker 2: Imagine what you had to do to stay alive. Imagine
- 52:21Speaker 2: even the thought of raising children in a world where
- 52:24Speaker 2: there's only 7,000 people left and limited amounts of food. And,
- 52:29Speaker 2: you know, most of the population of Earth is dead.
- 52:33Speaker 1: What?
- 52:34Speaker 2: This is crazy.
- 52:35Speaker 1: We've been through some crazy things as a species.
- 52:37Speaker 2: Yeah. You did it. Didn't you do a video of
- 52:42Speaker 2: there's some evidence that at some point in history, most
- 52:48Speaker 2: people were killed off in war? Yes.
- 52:51Speaker 1: That is related to what you were just saying about.
- 52:53Speaker 1: So just after the agricultural revolution, the theory is that
- 52:57Speaker 1: because humans then had like property, And we're kind of
- 53:01Speaker 1: defending things that people got a lot more violent. And
- 53:04Speaker 1: there's a lot of evidence that around 6,000 years ago,
- 53:10Speaker 1: basically all the men died. There's like evidence that 95%
- 53:13Speaker 1: of male bloodlines were removed. And we can see this
- 53:15Speaker 1: from the Y chromosome in genetics. And there's a massive
- 53:20Speaker 1: drop off of the diversity, the genetic diversity in male bloodlines.
- 53:23Speaker 1: And something like 95% went. And no one quite knows
- 53:26Speaker 1: why this is, but we see lots of mass graves
- 53:28Speaker 1: around this time and violent graves and all these people
- 53:32Speaker 1: were killing each other. And it might not have been that,
- 53:34Speaker 1: but it's weird that it only affected men, because if
- 53:36Speaker 1: it was a natural disaster, it would, you know, it
- 53:37Speaker 1: wouldn't be specific to either gender, but it's only men.
- 53:41Speaker 1: So some people think it's like a big amount of violence,
- 53:44Speaker 1: but no one really knows. But it's really interesting.
- 53:47Speaker 2: Well, doesn't it make sense, though? I mean, think, if
- 53:50Speaker 2: you go from hunter and gathering, where you're constantly moving,
- 53:53Speaker 2: nomadic tribes, a bunch of people that stick together, you're
- 53:57Speaker 2: in tents or whatever, and then all of a sudden
- 53:59Speaker 2: you're stationary, and you've developed agriculture, and you stay put.
- 54:04Speaker 2: And then there's hunter-gatherer tribes that still exist, because guess what?
- 54:06Speaker 2: They still exist today. So it's not like it was
- 54:08Speaker 2: a uniform discovery of agriculture. Everybody adopted it, and there
- 54:12Speaker 2: was no more hunter-gatherer tribes, and there's no more tribes
- 54:15Speaker 2: of wandering marauders. Mm-hmm. So there's still these tribes of
- 54:18Speaker 2: wandering marauders. And so now you have to defend this
- 54:21Speaker 2: spot because you're stuck there because you're dumbass built a house.
- 54:26Speaker 2: Like the Mongols used to make fun of people that
- 54:28Speaker 2: lived in houses. They thought they were fools and they
- 54:33Speaker 2: lived in felt tents, period. That's how you're supposed to live.
- 54:35Speaker 2: You keep moving. And this idea of staying put, like,
- 54:38Speaker 2: look at these idiots. We're just going to go sack
- 54:40Speaker 2: their city. They really had no respect for people that
- 54:43Speaker 2: were so stupid that they stuck themselves behind walls. Like,
- 54:46Speaker 2: you assholes can't even run away. We're going to launch
- 54:49Speaker 2: lit human beings on fire with catapults onto your thatched
- 54:53Speaker 2: roofs and set everything ablaze. It turns out people are
- 54:57Speaker 2: really good at starting fires when you light them on
- 54:59Speaker 2: fire because we're fatty. Mongols figured out a lot of
- 55:03Speaker 2: cute stuff. But it makes sense that that's when war
- 55:07Speaker 2: would become ubiquitous. This episode is brought to you by
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- 56:21Speaker 1: Yeah, once we settle down and once we owned... You
- 56:24Speaker 1: stay put.
- 56:25Speaker 2: You become a target.
- 56:26Speaker 5: Exactly.
- 56:26Speaker 1: And you have something to defend, be it livestock or
- 56:28Speaker 1: crops or houses, as you say. And so, yeah, there's
- 56:31Speaker 1: quite a lot of evidence that violence did increase massively
- 56:33Speaker 1: as we entered the kind of agricultural age that we're
- 56:37Speaker 1: still in. So that is interesting.
- 56:40Speaker 2: It's very interesting. And it also is logical. It's a
- 56:43Speaker 2: logical progression of how people would behave given the fact
- 56:46Speaker 2: that now all of a sudden they have resources that
- 56:48Speaker 2: they've accumulated. They have a very specific location. They have
- 56:51Speaker 2: to defend that location. That's when people figure out walls
- 56:54Speaker 2: and that's a bigger– whatever. The weird thing is the
- 57:00Speaker 2: Great Wall of China. Like the arrow turrets are facing
- 57:04Speaker 2: the wrong way.
- 57:05Speaker 1: Really? Yeah.
- 57:07Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of it. A lot of the Great Wall,
- 57:09Speaker 2: the arrows– Are facing inward.
- 57:12Speaker 1: To try and keep people in rather than out?
- 57:14Speaker 2: Or try to keep people from China. Escaping. Going to wherever,
- 57:18Speaker 2: whatever's on the other side. It might have been some
- 57:21Speaker 2: sections of it weren't constructed by the people that we
- 57:24Speaker 2: think were constructed it. You ever seen that? No, I've
- 57:27Speaker 2: never seen that. It's very weird. Like people have pondered
- 57:30Speaker 2: like why are the arrow? Because there's these slots where
- 57:34Speaker 2: they can be protected but shoot arrows through. But they're
- 57:37Speaker 2: facing towards China. Yeah. They're not like China defending the
- 57:41Speaker 2: wall against the Huns. It's weird. That is strange. That
- 57:45Speaker 2: is strange. See if you can find some of that.
- 57:47Speaker 1: I'm looking it up.
- 57:50Speaker 5: It's not a really great answer in this.
- 57:53Speaker 2: So part of it is and part of it isn't.
- 57:55Speaker 2: Mostly the Great Wall's defensive features face north outward towards
- 57:59Speaker 2: the steppe, the usual direction of major raids and invasions,
- 58:02Speaker 2: but many surviving sections have arrow slits and parapets facing
- 58:06Speaker 2: both north and south, including seemingly inward towards China. Why
- 58:12Speaker 2: face inward? Defense after a breach. If attackers cross the
- 58:15Speaker 2: wall or capture the tower, so they prepared to be invaded?
- 58:20Speaker 2: Chinese garrisons needed to shoot and counterattack from the south
- 58:23Speaker 2: side as well. Control of movement both ways. The wall
- 58:26Speaker 2: was a network of forts, gates, signals, roads, not just
- 58:29Speaker 2: a one-sided barrier. Also regulated border crossings, trade, and movement.
- 58:34Speaker 2: It is crazy that they've invented a wall that you
- 58:37Speaker 2: could see from space.
- 58:39Speaker 1: I know, it's wild. It's like one of the biggest
- 58:40Speaker 1: engineering projects ever.
- 58:42Speaker 2: Like, how long is that? Is it like 1,000 miles
- 58:44Speaker 2: or something crazy?
- 58:45Speaker 1: I have no idea, but it's big.
- 58:46Speaker 2: How long is the Great Wall of China? Take a guess.
- 58:52Speaker 2: I say 1,000 miles. It's probably more. Easily.
- 58:56Speaker 1: China's so big in itself and the fact that it's
- 58:57Speaker 1: the whole, like.
- 58:58Speaker 2: Yeah. What do you think, Jamie? Take a guess. 6,000 kilometers.
- 59:00Speaker 4: 6,000?
- 59:00Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 59:00Speaker 1: Wow.
- 59:00Speaker 3: Jesus, Jamie. Wow.
- 59:06Speaker 2: You would be really good on The Price is Right.
- 59:08Speaker 5: Oh, my God.
- 59:10Speaker 2: 21,000 kilometers. Holy shit. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. 13,171 miles. Motherfucker,
- 59:13Speaker 2: that's crazy. Have you ever been there? No.
- 59:29Speaker 5: I've been there.
- 59:30Speaker 1: It's crazy. It's amazing. It's so beautiful. The whole region
- 59:33Speaker 1: around there, I mean, obviously it's really long.
- 59:35Speaker 2: The famous continuous-looking Ming-era wall that most visitors picture is
- 59:40Speaker 2: much shorter, still 8,850 kilometers. When associated structures and natural
- 59:47Speaker 2: barriers are included, UNESCO describes the overall Great Wall complex
- 59:51Speaker 2: as more than 20,000 kilometers long. So at the very least,
- 59:55Speaker 2: the part that you visit the Ming-era wall, 8,850 kilometers,
- 1:00:02Speaker 2: which is fucking wild. That is so much wall. Yeah. Like,
- 1:00:09Speaker 2: what were they doing? So it was built over 2,000
- 1:00:12Speaker 2: years from early walls in the 5th to 3rd centuries
- 1:00:17Speaker 2: BCE through major work in the Ming Dynasty, which ended
- 1:00:21Speaker 2: in 1644. Have you ever seen some of the stuff
- 1:00:24Speaker 2: that Cassie Coppersmith did? has uh talked about in regards
- 1:00:29Speaker 2: to uh ancient technology evidence from china.
- 1:00:33Speaker 1: Not specifically her stuff but there's lots of weird lots
- 1:00:37Speaker 1: of weird things in ancient china.
- 1:00:39Speaker 2: Yeah weird stuff like jade artifacts that seem to be
- 1:00:43Speaker 2: machined that don't make any sense that are like super
- 1:00:46Speaker 2: old and that seem to be artifacts that were passed
- 1:00:49Speaker 2: down from generation to generation and the You know, thousands
- 1:00:53Speaker 2: of years ago, the civilization that was in possession of them,
- 1:00:58Speaker 2: their current ability to make artifacts was, like, much cruder.
- 1:01:03Speaker 2: So it seems like this was older stuff that they
- 1:01:05Speaker 2: had somehow or another acquired. And they lost their knowledge of... Like,
- 1:01:08Speaker 2: wafer-thin jade, highly polished, seemed to be machined. Like, weird stuff.
- 1:01:16Speaker 1: I haven't seen that specifically, but, yeah, that's interesting.
- 1:01:19Speaker 2: I don't know about that. Yeah, it seems like a
- 1:01:24Speaker 2: really clear pattern that exists everywhere, that there was something
- 1:01:29Speaker 2: like these ancient vases that they find in Egypt, that
- 1:01:33Speaker 2: they find these in these old sites, and that these
- 1:01:37Speaker 2: things that were carved out of diorite, which is insanely
- 1:01:40Speaker 2: hard stone, and carved to, you know, within less than
- 1:01:44Speaker 2: a human hair of variance, not only that, If it
- 1:01:48Speaker 2: was on a lathe, how do you account for the
- 1:01:50Speaker 2: fact that it has these handles on the side? Like
- 1:01:53Speaker 2: how the fuck did they do this? And this was
- 1:01:56Speaker 2: all stuff that was like really, really old by the
- 1:02:00Speaker 2: time these people had it. And that these people, their
- 1:02:03Speaker 2: current state of pottery and sculpture and all this, much
- 1:02:07Speaker 2: cruder than this stuff. So it seems like these are
- 1:02:10Speaker 2: like really old things that are artifacts of a time
- 1:02:13Speaker 2: where things were more sophisticated. So it's more evidence of this.
- 1:02:17Speaker 1: Up and down nature of technology. Yeah, I mean, it's logical, right,
- 1:02:20Speaker 1: that people learn things, discover things, excel at them, and
- 1:02:23Speaker 1: then later people forget them.
- 1:02:25Speaker 2: Of course, especially when you take into consideration natural disasters.
- 1:02:28Speaker 2: Natural disasters, wars, things along those lines. You know, like Baghdad,
- 1:02:34Speaker 2: before the Mongols got there, was like the center of
- 1:02:37Speaker 2: science in the world.
- 1:02:38Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah. Arabs.
- 1:02:39Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 1:02:39Speaker 1: They were incredible at science. And then it's just the
- 1:02:42Speaker 1: natural cycle of civilizations. And we see that throughout recorded history.
- 1:02:45Speaker 1: So why would it not be the case for human
- 1:02:46Speaker 1: beings in the much, much, much, much, much larger period
- 1:02:49Speaker 1: of time, which is prehistory. Um, but it's not just
- 1:02:53Speaker 1: thing is it's not just like natural disasters and things.
- 1:02:56Speaker 1: And obviously that plays a part, but it's also just
- 1:02:59Speaker 1: the sheer nature of preservation, right? Such a long amount
- 1:03:02Speaker 1: of time that we've been around human beings on this planet.
- 1:03:05Speaker 1: It's just almost impossible for things to survive when we
- 1:03:08Speaker 1: talk about these 100,000 years, 200,000 years. Yeah. It's so
- 1:03:12Speaker 1: hard for things to survive that long.
- 1:03:14Speaker 5: Right.
- 1:03:14Speaker 2: Any objects, any things that would be left over. Like,
- 1:03:19Speaker 2: you know, I'm sure you've seen those AI depictions of
- 1:03:22Speaker 2: what New York City would look like in just a
- 1:03:24Speaker 2: thousand years. It's like nothing. Everything's crumbling. Gone.
- 1:03:27Speaker 1: It's mental.
- 1:03:28Speaker 2: No buildings, no glass. Everything gets absorbed in the earth.
- 1:03:30Speaker 2: You get a jungle where Manhattan is. And maybe you
- 1:03:34Speaker 2: would stumble upon a piece of metal one day.
- 1:03:36Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:03:36Speaker 1: But even then, like, I mean, I've done quite a
- 1:03:38Speaker 1: lot of research on material degradation and almost all our
- 1:03:40Speaker 1: modern materials other than stone are gone in a few millennia.
- 1:03:44Speaker 1: And a few millennia is a long time, but not
- 1:03:45Speaker 1: compared to these timescales that we're talking about.
- 1:03:47Speaker 2: No, if these timescales are accurate in terms of the
- 1:03:51Speaker 2: human brain, in terms of the ability to logically like
- 1:03:57Speaker 2: view the world, invent things, creativity, if they possess this 300,000
- 1:04:01Speaker 2: years ago, Like why, why wouldn't they have figured a
- 1:04:07Speaker 2: lot of this stuff out?
- 1:04:08Speaker 1: They definitely did. That's the thing. Like the seafaring thing
- 1:04:11Speaker 1: over 1 million years ago.
- 1:04:12Speaker 4: Okay.
- 1:04:12Speaker 1: You can debate it. It could have been an accident.
- 1:04:14Speaker 1: I suppose. I don't think it is, but you can
- 1:04:15Speaker 1: debate it. But I think that we have completely undisputable
- 1:04:19Speaker 1: evidence that human beings were this intelligent 500,000 years ago
- 1:04:23Speaker 1: with the Colombo structure, which we spoke about a lot
- 1:04:25Speaker 1: last time. But that is undeniable evidence that some kind
- 1:04:29Speaker 1: of human was unbelievably smart and 500 or 476,000 years ago?
- 1:04:35Speaker 2: Yeah, it was building houses.
- 1:04:37Speaker 1: Or building something.
- 1:04:38Speaker 2: Some sort of structure.
- 1:04:39Speaker 1: Whatever that is requires incredible levels of intelligence. It is
- 1:04:43Speaker 1: clear evidence of what we define as modern behavior.
- 1:04:46Speaker 2: Right, and it probably wasn't a one-off.
- 1:04:47Speaker 1: Definitely not.
- 1:04:48Speaker 2: And so this is what you found. So then it means,
- 1:04:50Speaker 2: were they teaching each other? So, okay. So if they
- 1:04:55Speaker 2: were teaching each other, what kind of language did they have?
- 1:04:58Speaker 2: What kind of concepts could they grasp?
- 1:05:00Speaker 1: You're not doing that without abstract thinking without symbolic intelligence.
- 1:05:04Speaker 2: Right. And how far did it go? Because it's very
- 1:05:07Speaker 2: rare that we find a piece of wood from that
- 1:05:10Speaker 2: long ago that we can carbon date and that we
- 1:05:12Speaker 2: can test. So how much do we not find? Most
- 1:05:16Speaker 2: of it?
- 1:05:17Speaker 1: Almost all of it. Because the chances of that surviving
- 1:05:20Speaker 1: is so unbelievably unlikely.
- 1:05:24Speaker 2: I'm a moron, but I had a thought. My thought
- 1:05:28Speaker 2: was if... AI can get so intelligent that it can
- 1:05:35Speaker 2: do an accurate account of all of the objects on earth,
- 1:05:41Speaker 2: all of the people on earth, all of the things
- 1:05:44Speaker 2: on earth, essentially every molecule that exists on earth, and
- 1:05:49Speaker 2: then extrapolate back to how they got in that position
- 1:05:53Speaker 2: in the first place, whether through natural ore deposits, natural disasters, volcanoes,
- 1:05:59Speaker 2: all these different things like I wonder what kind of
- 1:06:04Speaker 2: a version of a timeline we would be able to
- 1:06:08Speaker 2: construct with like a super advanced artificial intelligence. I wonder
- 1:06:12Speaker 2: if it's possible to get a framework that is much
- 1:06:17Speaker 2: more definitive than what we're looking at now. I don't
- 1:06:20Speaker 2: know if it's possible. I mean, you'd have to have
- 1:06:22Speaker 2: enough technology that you would be able to literally like
- 1:06:25Speaker 2: scan the entire outer crust of the earth, which seems
- 1:06:29Speaker 2: daunting today. But ground-penetrating radar seemed ridiculous 500 years ago, right?
- 1:06:36Speaker 2: So as we continue to expand, I mean, AI is
- 1:06:40Speaker 2: solving math equations that have perplexed mathematicians for 50 years.
- 1:06:45Speaker 2: They're solving it like that. So this is a new thing.
- 1:06:47Speaker 2: It's a very rapidly emerging thing. I wonder what kind
- 1:06:52Speaker 2: of a version, what kind of a map of history,
- 1:06:57Speaker 2: at least in terms of like, Rough timelines of things
- 1:07:00Speaker 2: we'll be able to get.
- 1:07:01Speaker 1: That's the great hope for archaeology, right? Is that modern
- 1:07:05Speaker 1: technology allows us to discover things that we previously would
- 1:07:09Speaker 1: not have been able to discover. And as you say,
- 1:07:10Speaker 1: LIDAR is the current example of that. But if you
- 1:07:13Speaker 1: just extrapolate forward, what else could we possibly use to
- 1:07:16Speaker 1: discover things that we haven't?
- 1:07:17Speaker 2: And of course, something like that will emerge. Because nobody
- 1:07:21Speaker 2: even considered, again, 500 years ago, what are you talking about?
- 1:07:25Speaker 2: 500 years from now, who the fuck knows? Who knows?
- 1:07:28Speaker 2: We literally can't imagine what kind of breakthroughs are available.
- 1:07:34Speaker 1: That's the hope. But again, I think part of what
- 1:07:38Speaker 1: makes me think that perhaps we're not going to discover
- 1:07:42Speaker 1: stuff is this preservation problem because so much of it
- 1:07:45Speaker 1: is just gone. I mean, I guess if like what
- 1:07:48Speaker 1: you say, if we can like somehow extrapolate.
- 1:07:49Speaker 2: Or time machines. Yeah, I mean. They could figure out
- 1:07:52Speaker 2: a time machine that'll throw the whole monkey wrench. right
- 1:07:55Speaker 2: into the gears.
- 1:07:57Speaker 1: Well, I think that whatever happens, our current understanding of history, that's,
- 1:08:03Speaker 1: that cannot be the kind of end point that what
- 1:08:06Speaker 1: we currently think about history is, is there's no way
- 1:08:09Speaker 1: that we've like reached.
- 1:08:10Speaker 2: No, there's no way we're done.
- 1:08:12Speaker 1: And that's why it frustrates me so much when people
- 1:08:14Speaker 1: are so definitive about it, because it's like, you really
- 1:08:16Speaker 1: think that we're not going to, because I mean, that's
- 1:08:18Speaker 1: the science is always advancing in every single field all
- 1:08:21Speaker 1: the time. And we, We're never at the point where
- 1:08:24Speaker 1: we've discovered everything. And yet there's always people in every
- 1:08:26Speaker 1: period of history that think this is the kind of
- 1:08:28Speaker 1: upper limit.
- 1:08:30Speaker 2: What would be around from 300,000 years ago? Other than
- 1:08:35Speaker 2: what we've found so far, stone tools, shit like that,
- 1:08:38Speaker 2: like metal would all be gone.
- 1:08:40Speaker 1: Well, that's the thing. Everything would be gone unless it's
- 1:08:42Speaker 1: like incredibly unlikely preservation, like the Colombo structure, like incredibly
- 1:08:47Speaker 1: unlikely for it to happen. But I mean, there could
- 1:08:48Speaker 1: be other things like that out there. And there almost
- 1:08:50Speaker 1: certainly is, but... That's what's exciting.
- 1:08:53Speaker 2: It's like, God, you don't want to dig up the
- 1:08:55Speaker 2: whole world, but you kind of do.
- 1:08:57Speaker 5: It's not that old, but this is a jade... sword.
- 1:09:00Speaker 4: Sorry, the handle's jade. The sword would have been probably metal.
- 1:09:04Speaker 4: That's why the metal's all fucked up, but the handle's not.
- 1:09:09Speaker 2: Wow.
- 1:09:09Speaker 5: So anything with.
- 1:09:10Speaker 4: Cool rocks or crystals or diamonds?
- 1:09:12Speaker 2: Right, right, because the handle is kind of all that's left.
- 1:09:16Speaker 2: The sword is... A rotten piece of shit.
- 1:09:18Speaker 5: There's a few other old, let's.
- 1:09:21Speaker 3: See.
- 1:09:22Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the ones, these disks are really weird.
- 1:09:26Speaker 4: 3000 B.C.
- 1:09:28Speaker 5: To 2000 B.C. But they have, I was just doing
- 1:09:32Speaker 5: the research.
- 1:09:33Speaker 4: Up until the Ming Dynasty, I think it was like 1660,
- 1:09:35Speaker 4: they have a book.
- 1:09:37Speaker 5: Someone wrote about how they were doing this.
- 1:09:39Speaker 2: Ooh.
- 1:09:39Speaker 5: But that's in 1600. 1600.
- 1:09:42Speaker 2: What did they do? I mean, various things. In 1600.
- 1:09:45Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:09:46Speaker 2: But some of these are 3,000 years older than that,
- 1:09:48Speaker 2: which is weird.
- 1:09:51Speaker 5: Jade artifacts.
- 1:09:52Speaker 2: Wow. This is the cooler shit, though. Nephrite.
- 1:09:58Speaker 5: Ooh.
- 1:10:00Speaker 4: But the description on how they did this, I'm almost not.
- 1:10:03Speaker 5: I have.
- 1:10:03Speaker 4: To take it as they say it, but the description
- 1:10:06Speaker 4: on how they did it was like they would put
- 1:10:08Speaker 4: abrasives on string and slowly wear away the jade how.
- 1:10:15Speaker 2: Do they do these three-dimensional little carvings yeah it says
- 1:10:19Speaker 2: like they would put they'd get this slurry of water
- 1:10:22Speaker 2: and that kind of makes sense that one that you
- 1:10:25Speaker 2: just showed how old is that one i don't i
- 1:10:26Speaker 2: don't even know what it is that's fucking weird it
- 1:10:30Speaker 2: says how did ancient chinese carve what's the word that's
- 1:10:34Speaker 2: the question i asked without metal tools.
- 1:10:36Speaker 5: This is the link i think what is that image.
- 1:10:40Speaker 2: That's crazy, man.
- 1:10:42Speaker 5: What's that from?
- 1:10:45Speaker 2: Where's that from?
- 1:10:46Speaker 5: Carving.
- 1:10:47Speaker 2: What year is that? Oh, that's a modern master. Okay,
- 1:10:52Speaker 2: that makes sense. That makes sense. Because I was like,
- 1:10:55Speaker 2: how could you do that? That's like the flower petals
- 1:10:57Speaker 2: and everything like that. That seems like you need metal tools. Oh,
- 1:11:00Speaker 2: so this is just an article on the evolution of
- 1:11:02Speaker 2: Chinese jade carving.
- 1:11:03Speaker 5: Yeah, that aside.
- 1:11:04Speaker 2: Okay, so this is a modern. Okay, that's why it's confusing.
- 1:11:06Speaker 3: That's older.
- 1:11:10Speaker 2: A griffin.
- 1:11:12Speaker 5: Obviously older. Some of these are drilled.
- 1:11:17Speaker 4: Like these little holes, if you look and zoom in
- 1:11:19Speaker 4: real close, you can see evidence of drills.
- 1:11:21Speaker 5: But that's not, you know.
- 1:11:23Speaker 2: You could have hand drills. Okay. Yeah. I mean, you
- 1:11:26Speaker 2: could have harder stone that you've figured out how to
- 1:11:30Speaker 2: work into a position. And you could have sand. And
- 1:11:33Speaker 2: there's a bunch of things they could use. Pretty wild.
- 1:11:36Speaker 5: Something like this. I mean, it's very crude.
- 1:11:38Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
- 1:11:39Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, all that is like you could attribute
- 1:11:42Speaker 2: that to ingenuity and, you know, craftsmen with years of
- 1:11:46Speaker 2: learning how to work these different things. It's when you
- 1:11:49Speaker 2: get to large stuff that you're like, okay, how'd you
- 1:11:52Speaker 2: get these stones from Aswan? How'd you get a 50-ton
- 1:11:58Speaker 2: block of granite and move it through the mountains with
- 1:12:01Speaker 2: no roads? Help me out.
- 1:12:04Speaker 1: They rolled it all apparently.
- 1:12:05Speaker 2: How'd you get hundreds of them, thousands of them, millions
- 1:12:08Speaker 2: of them? How'd you do it? It's too wild. Yeah,
- 1:12:11Speaker 2: it is very wild. And like some of these things,
- 1:12:17Speaker 2: I'll send you the Cassie Coppersmith episode that I did
- 1:12:19Speaker 2: with her because some of the stuff is like it's
- 1:12:22Speaker 2: very confusing because the timeline is pretty clear that this
- 1:12:24Speaker 2: is older stuff and the older stuff is more complex
- 1:12:27Speaker 2: and more difficult to create and seems to indicate the
- 1:12:30Speaker 2: use of machinery. One of the things she pointed out
- 1:12:33Speaker 2: was this crazy statue of a Buddha is that in
- 1:12:38Speaker 2: India where the guy achieved enlightenment by standing still and
- 1:12:44Speaker 2: it's how tall was it is it 90 feet tall
- 1:12:49Speaker 2: the largest individual standing statue thousands of years old looks
- 1:12:55Speaker 2: like it's machined like really weird like really weird statue
- 1:13:00Speaker 2: there's so much weird stuff in India and how did
- 1:13:03Speaker 2: they get it there Did you guys, did you move
- 1:13:05Speaker 2: it there? Or was it a stone that you said, hmm,
- 1:13:09Speaker 2: wouldn't it be dope if we just, yeah, look at
- 1:13:11Speaker 2: that fucker with a big giant hog. But, I mean,
- 1:13:15Speaker 2: it's really detailed. It's like, see if you can find
- 1:13:17Speaker 2: a good image of it, young Jimmy. There's some.
- 1:13:22Speaker 5: Her photo is still on my computer.
- 1:13:24Speaker 2: Yeah. It's really wild. And she said you see it
- 1:13:27Speaker 2: from a long way away. Somebody put their watermark right
- 1:13:31Speaker 2: over his dong. How rude. They knew you were going
- 1:13:34Speaker 2: to be looking right there.
- 1:13:36Speaker 4: Me?
- 1:13:37Speaker 2: No, everybody. Humans.
- 1:13:39Speaker 1: There's also like the Kaliasa temple, I think the one
- 1:13:42Speaker 1: where they carve right down somehow, hammer and chisel apparently.
- 1:13:47Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 1:13:49Speaker 1: Who knows? It's incredible sophistication.
- 1:13:50Speaker 2: That's the one where an army went to try to
- 1:13:53Speaker 2: destroy it and they tried for years and they gave up.
- 1:13:56Speaker 5: Really?
- 1:13:56Speaker 2: Yeah. I didn't know that. They barely put a fucking
- 1:13:58Speaker 2: dent in it. They scratched a few things up, but
- 1:14:01Speaker 2: they worked on it for years to try to destroy it. Why? Why?
- 1:14:04Speaker 2: Because some new guy came along and said, fuck these
- 1:14:06Speaker 2: people in the temple.
- 1:14:06Speaker 1: Yeah, this isn't my religion. This doesn't suit my story.
- 1:14:09Speaker 2: Like what the Taliban did to those ancient Buddhists.
- 1:14:11Speaker 1: Yeah, they blew them up.
- 1:14:11Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, there's over 1,000 years old and they're like, no.
- 1:14:15Speaker 1: An ISIS to Palmyra.
- 1:14:16Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:14:17Speaker 1: Sad, man.
- 1:14:18Speaker 2: I know. It's really sad. And if that's human inclination
- 1:14:21Speaker 2: to do that kind of stuff, like how long have
- 1:14:25Speaker 2: we been doing that? Well, yeah. Probably always. Yeah. How
- 1:14:29Speaker 2: much stuff is not around anymore because some asshole came
- 1:14:31Speaker 2: along and wanted it removed?
- 1:14:33Speaker 1: Yeah, because it doesn't suit your narrative.
- 1:14:35Speaker 2: Exactly.
- 1:14:35Speaker 1: Because everyone's always building a story. Humans have always done that,
- 1:14:38Speaker 1: built a story around to legitimize power and rule. And
- 1:14:42Speaker 1: if it doesn't suit your story, you destroy it. And then, yeah.
- 1:14:45Speaker 2: Exactly.
- 1:14:46Speaker 1: Would I be able to have some of that coffee?
- 1:14:47Speaker 2: Hell yeah, dog. Get on in there. Thank you.
- 1:14:50Speaker 1: I've got to wake myself up.
- 1:14:53Speaker 2: Yeah, you're jet lagged. Trip across the pond.
- 1:14:56Speaker 1: Yes, exactly.
- 1:14:58Speaker 2: Here he is. This is what it looks like. Isn't
- 1:15:00Speaker 2: that wild, dude?
- 1:15:02Speaker 1: That's incredible.
- 1:15:03Speaker 5: Yeah.
- 1:15:03Speaker 1: What's the, um, date on this, the conventional date? Do
- 1:15:06Speaker 1: we know?
- 1:15:08Speaker 2: That's a good question. They're going to have to carbon
- 1:15:11Speaker 2: date his dong. We don't know, but I'm sure it's known. Uh,
- 1:15:14Speaker 2: there's a guess, right? Like what is the guess of
- 1:15:17Speaker 2: the timeline? Whatever it is, it's very perplexing. It's a
- 1:15:22Speaker 2: 57 feet tall monolithic statue of Lord Bahubali.
- 1:15:28Speaker 5: Uh, Okay, so 983 CE.
- 1:15:31Speaker 2: That's what they believe. That's AD, yeah. Yeah, AD, current era.
- 1:15:41Speaker 2: Regard as the tallest Jain statue until 2016. Construction of
- 1:15:45Speaker 2: the statue was commissioned by the Ganga dynasty minister. Okay,
- 1:15:50Speaker 2: so how? How did you make that? Where'd you get it?
- 1:15:53Speaker 2: How'd you get it there? You did that, what? You
- 1:15:56Speaker 2: did that over a thousand years ago? And how do
- 1:15:59Speaker 2: we know that that's the timeline? I mean, it's weird.
- 1:16:06Speaker 2: It's weird because it looks machined. When you look at it,
- 1:16:10Speaker 2: go back to some of the images, please. When you
- 1:16:13Speaker 2: look at the detail of the fingers and the toes
- 1:16:17Speaker 2: and the uniformity of the face, it's fucking weird, man.
- 1:16:23Speaker 2: It's like these people had a lot of fucking resources.
- 1:16:27Speaker 2: Look at the size of that dude standing next to it. Like,
- 1:16:29Speaker 2: for real, how do you get that? If that's not
- 1:16:32Speaker 2: a big, giant, contiguous block that was sitting there, what
- 1:16:36Speaker 2: is it made out of?
- 1:16:38Speaker 1: Granite, I think.
- 1:16:39Speaker 2: So that's not just a giant, perfect slab of granite
- 1:16:42Speaker 2: that happens to be roughly in the shape of a guy.
- 1:16:44Speaker 2: And you're like, wouldn't that be dope if we made
- 1:16:47Speaker 2: a dude out of that with a giant dong and
- 1:16:49Speaker 2: just had him just staring over our kingdom?
- 1:16:53Speaker 1: But we don't do that anymore. That's what's weird. No
- 1:16:56Speaker 1: one's building things like this anymore.
- 1:16:57Speaker 2: Certainly not out of stone. No. Yeah, because we like
- 1:17:00Speaker 2: to make money and it takes too much time to
- 1:17:03Speaker 2: do a fucking pyramid when you can make a nice
- 1:17:05Speaker 2: skyscraper in just a couple of years and put a
- 1:17:07Speaker 2: big Trump on the roof.
- 1:17:08Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 1:17:12Speaker 2: No surviving technical manual records records rather the exact construction procedure.
- 1:17:17Speaker 2: Archaeological and art historical understanding is that the artisans shaped
- 1:17:22Speaker 2: the statue in situ, removing stone around the intended figure.
- 1:17:26Speaker 2: roughing out the body, then refining the face, limbs, hair,
- 1:17:30Speaker 2: and distinctive vines, climbing the legs. Imagine if you fucked
- 1:17:32Speaker 2: that up. This approach avoided the near impossible task of quarrying, transporting,
- 1:17:38Speaker 2: and raising a 17 meter finished sculpture onto a hill. Yeah.
- 1:17:43Speaker 2: So if they moved it, if there was definitive proof
- 1:17:46Speaker 2: that it was moved there, then there's another monkey wrench
- 1:17:49Speaker 2: gets thrown into the whole thing. And then you have
- 1:17:51Speaker 2: to go, okay, how? But it does make much more
- 1:17:54Speaker 2: sense if you just carved it out. But also like,
- 1:17:57Speaker 2: How long would that take? What kind of tools are
- 1:18:00Speaker 2: we talking about? What kind of shitty-ass tools do people
- 1:18:03Speaker 2: have at 900 CE?
- 1:18:06Speaker 5: Well, then here's the rest of the stuff they did
- 1:18:09Speaker 5: in India.
- 1:18:09Speaker 2: They did weird stuff in India where they just carved
- 1:18:12Speaker 2: stuff right out of the stone. What was the motivation
- 1:18:15Speaker 2: to build these temples, just carve them right out of
- 1:18:18Speaker 2: volcanic stone?
- 1:18:20Speaker 1: It's insane.
- 1:18:21Speaker 2: Crazy.
- 1:18:22Speaker 1: So detailed as well.
- 1:18:24Speaker 2: Insanely detailed. And also some of the sculptures are three-dimensional.
- 1:18:28Speaker 2: Like how did you get behind them and carve that out?
- 1:18:30Speaker 2: And how did you make all these like weird things?
- 1:18:32Speaker 2: Have you ever seen some of them where they go
- 1:18:34Speaker 2: over it with a light and you can.
- 1:18:35Speaker 1: See how three-dimensional it is? Yeah, and the Barabar Caves,
- 1:18:39Speaker 1: do you know about them? Also in India where there's
- 1:18:41Speaker 1: like completely mirror-polished surfaces. And yet the conventional explanation for
- 1:18:45Speaker 1: that is that they were just shelters.
- 1:18:47Speaker 2: Right.
- 1:18:47Speaker 1: But why are they so precise? They're like completely precise.
- 1:18:50Speaker 1: and they've got this weird mirror polishing. Yeah, you don't
- 1:18:52Speaker 1: need that If you're just building a shelter.
- 1:18:54Speaker 2: And how about those pillars that look like they were
- 1:18:55Speaker 2: cut on lathes.
- 1:18:56Speaker 5: Mm-hmm.
- 1:18:57Speaker 2: Yeah, like what? How did you? What's going on guys?
- 1:19:04Speaker 2: What did you we're missing so much. Oh We're missing
- 1:19:07Speaker 2: so many details about the past. It's, it's so frustrating
- 1:19:11Speaker 2: if you're really interested in it. Cause it's like, how
- 1:19:14Speaker 2: much do we know versus how much are we just assuming?
- 1:19:17Speaker 1: Well, that's the thing we're assuming so much. And that's
- 1:19:20Speaker 1: why it bugs me when it's presented as fact or
- 1:19:23Speaker 1: presented as we have all the answers because we clearly don't.
- 1:19:26Speaker 2: Yeah. Um, what are the other papers that have come
- 1:19:29Speaker 2: out that have been, so.
- 1:19:30Speaker 1: That was the paper about the 1 million year old skull,
- 1:19:33Speaker 1: human skull that was found in China, uh, last year. Um,
- 1:19:37Speaker 1: And this is super interesting because this is a human
- 1:19:39Speaker 1: with a modern size brain, but that was found a
- 1:19:43Speaker 1: million years ago. And so again, that has implications for
- 1:19:46Speaker 1: what was really going on a million years ago. And
- 1:19:47Speaker 1: if you link that to the, what I would argue
- 1:19:50Speaker 1: is modern behavior with the seafaring in Southeast Asia, then
- 1:19:54Speaker 1: you have a million year old skull found in China,
- 1:19:57Speaker 1: in Northeast Asia. You know, you put those two things
- 1:20:02Speaker 1: together and you suddenly got human beings with modern brains
- 1:20:05Speaker 1: doing modern things a million years ago and i think
- 1:20:08Speaker 1: it's fascinating so i mean the paper came out uh
- 1:20:12Speaker 1: i think in october last year and what they did
- 1:20:15Speaker 1: was they took there are these fossils from a place
- 1:20:17Speaker 1: called yongshan in china uh and they were discovered actually
- 1:20:20Speaker 1: in the 1990s i think it was 1989 and 1990
- 1:20:24Speaker 1: there's two skulls yongshan one and yongshan two um but
- 1:20:27Speaker 1: they were badly deformed yeah there you go jamie right
- 1:20:29Speaker 1: on cue um badly badly deformed and They were always
- 1:20:33Speaker 1: thought to be Homo erectus because of where they were found, China,
- 1:20:36Speaker 1: and how old they were, over a million years old,
- 1:20:39Speaker 1: because that was the only type of human that should
- 1:20:40Speaker 1: have been in China or in that area at that time,
- 1:20:43Speaker 1: at that age. They were always assumed to be Homo erectus,
- 1:20:47Speaker 1: but a few researchers from a university in China, along
- 1:20:50Speaker 1: with the Natural History Museum in London, a professor named
- 1:20:54Speaker 1: Professor Chris Stringer, they applied modern reconstruction techniques to Yongxiang II,
- 1:20:58Speaker 1: the second skull, And so they use something called CT
- 1:21:02Speaker 1: scanning to reconstruct it. And what they discovered was that
- 1:21:05Speaker 1: they think it's actually a Homo longi skull, which is
- 1:21:09Speaker 1: this part of the same clad as Denisovan, Denisovan. And
- 1:21:12Speaker 1: why that's important is that Denisovan is kind of like
- 1:21:15Speaker 1: a cyst.
- 1:21:15Speaker 2: How do you say it? Do you say Denisovan or Denisovan?
- 1:21:17Speaker 2: I don't know. I say Denisovan, but I keep hearing Denisovan.
- 1:21:21Speaker 2: I'm trying to change it. Yeah.
- 1:21:23Speaker 1: All the scientists say Denisovan, but the cave is Denisovan cave.
- 1:21:27Speaker 1: So it should be Denisovan, you would think.
- 1:21:29Speaker 2: Fuck the scientists.
- 1:21:30Speaker 1: It doesn't matter. Denisovan, Denisovan, whatever. Either way, these scientists
- 1:21:34Speaker 1: think this skull is Homo longi, which is a clad
- 1:21:36Speaker 1: of Denisovan, which is crucially a sister species to Neanderthal
- 1:21:40Speaker 1: and us, sapiens. Which means that if this skull is
- 1:21:43Speaker 1: a million years old, and if it is Homo longi,
- 1:21:46Speaker 1: that means that the divergence of our species must have
- 1:21:49Speaker 1: happened before them. So when humans split into Neanderthal, Denisovan,
- 1:21:54Speaker 1: and Homo sapien... If this human was already walking around
- 1:21:57Speaker 1: 1 million years ago, that means that whatever became us
- 1:22:01Speaker 1: had already diverged at that point. So we were already
- 1:22:03Speaker 1: a distinct species, Homo sapiens, 1 million years ago, which
- 1:22:07Speaker 1: is a staggeringly long amount of time and so much
- 1:22:10Speaker 1: older than what we thought before. We used to think
- 1:22:12Speaker 1: this was around 500,000 years ago. So it's like a 400,000
- 1:22:16Speaker 1: or more than that jump from what we thought before.
- 1:22:18Speaker 2: Have you heard the theory about Neanderthals that they believe
- 1:22:21Speaker 2: that Neanderthals were not just a separate group of human
- 1:22:26Speaker 2: but were actually created by humans interbreeding with other ancient primates.
- 1:22:32Speaker 2: How do you mean? So instead of Neanderthals existing previously,
- 1:22:37Speaker 2: that Homo sapiens predate Neanderthals and that Homo sapiens breeding
- 1:22:43Speaker 2: with some other ancient primate, some other one of these,
- 1:22:48Speaker 2: created Neanderthals. Maybe.
- 1:22:50Speaker 1: I haven't heard that.
- 1:22:51Speaker 2: I don't know. Yeah. I don't know if it's right.
- 1:22:54Speaker 2: I read it and I was like, what? I was like, okay,
- 1:22:57Speaker 2: this is a crazy theory. And it's, you know, because
- 1:23:01Speaker 2: the thought is that Neanderthals were bred out with, you know,
- 1:23:05Speaker 2: that there was interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals. But that
- 1:23:09Speaker 2: might have actually like predated Neanderthals themselves. Like it might
- 1:23:13Speaker 2: be the cause of Neanderthals is that humans, Homo sapiens
- 1:23:17Speaker 2: bred with something else.
- 1:23:19Speaker 1: Well, we definitely bred with Neanderthals. And probably Denisovans and
- 1:23:23Speaker 1: Neanderthals and Denisovans bred together as well. We're all so similar.
- 1:23:26Speaker 1: The fact that we can have kids together is incredible.
- 1:23:29Speaker 1: And they actually recently found evidence of humans and as
- 1:23:32Speaker 1: in sapiens and Neanderthals actually coexisting for a long, long
- 1:23:35Speaker 1: time in the same place and like living in the
- 1:23:37Speaker 1: same place. And because you could always argue before that
- 1:23:40Speaker 1: perhaps it was, you know, non-consensual breeding between like a
- 1:23:44Speaker 1: Neanderthal male, a sapien woman. But now we have evidence
- 1:23:46Speaker 1: that we did live like alongside each other cooperatively. I
- 1:23:49Speaker 1: can't remember where the site is, but. that was found recently. So, yeah,
- 1:23:54Speaker 1: that's interesting as well because.
- 1:23:55Speaker 2: See if you can find any, whatever the hell I
- 1:23:58Speaker 2: found about Neanderthals possibly a result of humans breeding with
- 1:24:03Speaker 2: other primates.
- 1:24:04Speaker 1: With other primates? So is it not even.
- 1:24:05Speaker 2: I mean, not other humans. We're not created by modern humans.
- 1:24:10Speaker 2: They're a closely related extinct branch of the human family.
- 1:24:14Speaker 2: This is a very recent proposal.
- 1:24:17Speaker 5: I might have asked the question too in a different way.
- 1:24:19Speaker 2: How did you ask it?
- 1:24:19Speaker 5: I said Neanderthals created by humans, which isn't.
- 1:24:22Speaker 2: Really what you said. No. See if you search, is there,
- 1:24:31Speaker 2: put this in. Is there a theory that Neanderthals were
- 1:24:39Speaker 2: a result of human, maybe see Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens.
- 1:24:47Speaker 2: Homo sapiens breeding with other primates. I guess you wouldn't
- 1:25:00Speaker 2: say primates, though, because that's a monkey. Other... Homos? Other homos.
- 1:25:08Speaker 2: Other ancient humans. Write that, ancient humans. Ancient human species.
- 1:25:15Speaker 2: Let's see what perplexity has to say about this. I
- 1:25:19Speaker 2: wish I'd saved that because it was really interesting. It says, no,
- 1:25:26Speaker 2: not as the main scientific explanation. That's, but that don't
- 1:25:30Speaker 2: mean the main scientific explanation. I'm saying, is there a theory?
- 1:25:35Speaker 2: I want to know if there's a theory.
- 1:25:38Speaker 4: Uh, well then that has to now, I mean, that's
- 1:25:40Speaker 4: about how we're using this actual thing is I'm using
- 1:25:42Speaker 4: it in a general way.
- 1:25:43Speaker 2: Right. But not as the main scientific explanation. Absolutely. But
- 1:25:47Speaker 2: is there a theory? Has anyone, has anyone theorized that
- 1:25:52Speaker 2: this is possible? Ask that. Theorized that this is possible.
- 1:26:02Speaker 5: It's going to have to crawl.
- 1:26:03Speaker 4: If it's new, it has to crawl the websites to
- 1:26:05Speaker 4: find that information.
- 1:26:07Speaker 2: I want it to crawl. I know.
- 1:26:08Speaker 5: We can't make it crawl.
- 1:26:09Speaker 2: Crawl, bitch.
- 1:26:12Speaker 1: They're going to take over, man. They're going to ruin
- 1:26:13Speaker 1: the film.
- 1:26:13Speaker 2: Yes. Here it goes. Researchers have proposed hybridization-based ideas, but
- 1:26:19Speaker 2: generally not the exact claim that Neanderthals originally formed from
- 1:26:22Speaker 2: Homo sapiens plus another species. What has been proposed? Paleontologists
- 1:26:26Speaker 2: propose that particularly late Neanderthal or early modern human fossils
- 1:26:29Speaker 2: are might be Neanderthal-Homo sapien hybrids or descendants of populations
- 1:26:33Speaker 2: that mix repeatedly. No, this is not quite what I'm saying.
- 1:26:36Speaker 2: This is what's fucked up when you watch too many
- 1:26:39Speaker 2: videos and you read too many articles and you don't
- 1:26:41Speaker 2: save them. This was quite a few months ago, too.
- 1:26:48Speaker 2: The Denisovan thing is weird because there's recent proposals. I
- 1:26:54Speaker 2: think this is a paper I sent in. I sent
- 1:26:56Speaker 2: you a podcast where they're discussing this paper that as
- 1:27:00Speaker 2: of August, like this month, there's some speculation about the
- 1:27:05Speaker 2: height of the Denisovans and that they think they might
- 1:27:08Speaker 2: have been much larger than Homo sapiens at the time.
- 1:27:11Speaker 1: Yeah, they found a bone. They found a bone, a
- 1:27:12Speaker 1: thigh bone, I think, under the sea and suggest the Denisovans.
- 1:27:17Speaker 1: And everything we found about Denisovans is that they were
- 1:27:20Speaker 1: bigger than us. So the teeth we found, we haven't
- 1:27:22Speaker 1: got much from them, but the tooth is bigger. The
- 1:27:25Speaker 1: jawbone is bigger. The dragon man skull, which has been
- 1:27:28Speaker 1: classified as very similar to Denisovan, is bigger. And then
- 1:27:31Speaker 1: they found this thigh bone that suggests that they were
- 1:27:34Speaker 1: considerably over six foot tall. Now, obviously, that's not like
- 1:27:37Speaker 1: a massive giant, but compared to, you know, the average
- 1:27:40Speaker 1: height of a human today is something like a male
- 1:27:43Speaker 1: human is something like five, eight or five, nine. And
- 1:27:46Speaker 1: so a Denisovan being over six foot is like quite
- 1:27:49Speaker 1: a considerable jump from that. So it's not like a
- 1:27:50Speaker 1: mythical giant, but it's still massive. bigger than you'd expect
- 1:27:54Speaker 1: an ancient human to be.
- 1:27:55Speaker 2: And it's also, we're going with a limited amount of fossils, right?
- 1:27:58Speaker 1: So limited, so limited.
- 1:27:59Speaker 2: So just from what we know, they existed with larger skulls.
- 1:28:07Speaker 2: Recent genetic research confirms that modern humans, Homo sapiens, and
- 1:28:11Speaker 2: Neanderthals repeatedly interbred a course of period spanning roughly 200,000
- 1:28:14Speaker 2: to 250,000 years ago. While it's long believed that interbreeding
- 1:28:18Speaker 2: occurred during a brief window of About 50,000 to 60,000
- 1:28:22Speaker 2: years ago, advanced genomic mapping shows multiple waves of contact
- 1:28:28Speaker 2: occurred much earlier. 200,000 to 250,000 years ago, an early
- 1:28:33Speaker 2: wave of Homo sapiens migrating out of Africa encountered and
- 1:28:37Speaker 2: mated with Neanderthals in Eurasia. So what this guy was
- 1:28:40Speaker 2: saying was that it might not have been that, but
- 1:28:45Speaker 2: that even earlier than this, Neanderthals were a result of
- 1:28:50Speaker 2: human beings interbreeding with others. Or Homo sapiens interbreeding with others.
- 1:28:57Speaker 2: I don't know. Thank you, though. what were we just at? Oh, Denisovans.
- 1:29:04Speaker 2: So just that one alone was way bigger than most
- 1:29:08Speaker 2: humans at the time. And just given the size of
- 1:29:11Speaker 2: the head, the bones are bigger. It's a bigger brow.
- 1:29:14Speaker 2: It seems like a more robust, larger version of a human.
- 1:29:18Speaker 2: And then when you take into account the range and
- 1:29:21Speaker 2: size of human beings, given the correct amount of resources
- 1:29:26Speaker 2: and food and protein, we got seven-foot-plus humans that are
- 1:29:31Speaker 2: all over the place today. And imagine if these Denisovan skulls,
- 1:29:36Speaker 2: which seem to be a completely different structure than a
- 1:29:40Speaker 2: Homo sapiens, they might be the giants of the Bible,
- 1:29:43Speaker 2: is the point. This might be what they were talking about.
- 1:29:46Speaker 2: There might have been a race of much larger people
- 1:29:49Speaker 2: that were physically dominant over Homo sapiens.
- 1:29:51Speaker 1: They could have been, they could have been a considerably bigger.
- 1:29:54Speaker 1: They don't even need to be that big for the,
- 1:29:56Speaker 1: the myths to kind of perpetuate.
- 1:29:57Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean?
- 1:29:58Speaker 1: Like just for someone to be a little bit bigger
- 1:30:00Speaker 1: and you encounter a group of them and you're like
- 1:30:02Speaker 1: a small homo sapien community, you're going to remember that.
- 1:30:05Speaker 2: Well, whenever I do the UFC weigh-ins and I'm standing
- 1:30:09Speaker 2: next to massive fucking, you know, these huge heavyweights, like
- 1:30:15Speaker 2: some of these guys are just gigantic humans, you know?
- 1:30:18Speaker 2: Six foot seven, six foot nine, 265 pounds, and they
- 1:30:21Speaker 2: have to cut weight to make 265. These are giant people.
- 1:30:26Speaker 2: And then you think this is whatever percentage of people
- 1:30:31Speaker 2: that are around today that are that big. If the Denisovans,
- 1:30:35Speaker 2: if we just have a limit, we might have caught
- 1:30:37Speaker 2: just a few small ones. I mean, that's what we
- 1:30:39Speaker 2: don't know. I mean, I wonder what the fuck would
- 1:30:42Speaker 2: happen if they found some bones that indicated there was
- 1:30:46Speaker 2: a man that was nine feet tall.
- 1:30:47Speaker 1: And we know that primates can get that big. And
- 1:30:50Speaker 1: obviously we're a primate. I can't remember what it's called, but.
- 1:30:52Speaker 2: Gigantopithecus.
- 1:30:53Speaker 1: That's the one, yeah. Absolutely gigantic as per the name.
- 1:30:56Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 1:30:57Speaker 1: So primates are kind of line of animals can get
- 1:31:02Speaker 1: really big.
- 1:31:03Speaker 2: And along the same lines of the timeline of discovery
- 1:31:08Speaker 2: of that is fascinating too. Because I think it was
- 1:31:10Speaker 2: in the 1920s, an archaeologist was in an apothecary shop
- 1:31:14Speaker 2: in China. And he found molars. They were from a
- 1:31:18Speaker 2: primate that didn't make any sense.
- 1:31:19Speaker 1: They were really big.
- 1:31:20Speaker 2: Yeah, huge. He's like, where did you get this? And
- 1:31:24Speaker 2: he went there and then that's where they found jawbones
- 1:31:26Speaker 2: and things. So there's some, we used to think that
- 1:31:28Speaker 2: they were bipedal because I've read that before. But now
- 1:31:31Speaker 2: they're thinking that not, not necessarily. And that they might
- 1:31:36Speaker 2: have been, because like a lot of people thought that's Bigfoot.
- 1:31:39Speaker 2: You know, there's this myth that persists throughout Native American cultures,
- 1:31:45Speaker 2: everywhere else. Yeah, they think it might have been an
- 1:31:47Speaker 2: enormous orangutan. Look at that movie. What was it, The
- 1:31:52Speaker 2: Jungle Book?
- 1:31:53Speaker 5: Jungle Book, yeah.
- 1:31:56Speaker 2: So a 10-foot-tall orangutan, like what? I mean, it just
- 1:32:03Speaker 2: makes sense. If there's the people, you brought up florists before.
- 1:32:07Speaker 2: Now we also know about those little hobbit people that
- 1:32:09Speaker 2: lived on the island of Flores that were these three-foot-tall,
- 1:32:12Speaker 2: tiny little people. Mm-hmm. So the island dwarfism, and then
- 1:32:17Speaker 2: there's a totally different version of human beings, of the
- 1:32:20Speaker 2: human chain, the human tree. Who knows? Who knows what
- 1:32:25Speaker 2: these Denisovans look like?
- 1:32:26Speaker 1: And island gigantism is also a thing in nature. We
- 1:32:29Speaker 1: see that and we see island dwarfism.
- 1:32:30Speaker 2: With reptiles, right?
- 1:32:31Speaker 1: So it could apply to primates and to humans.
- 1:32:34Speaker 2: Sure, as long as they had enough food. Yeah. It's
- 1:32:36Speaker 2: just the idea of a Denisovan. I mean, they only
- 1:32:41Speaker 2: discovered them in 2010, right?
- 1:32:43Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, Sony. And we have hardly anything about them.
- 1:32:47Speaker 2: How many are we missing? You know what I mean?
- 1:32:49Speaker 1: We literally have, like, a tooth, a jawbone, and this
- 1:32:51Speaker 1: thigh bone, and a few other things.
- 1:32:52Speaker 2: Right, and how many other versions of humans are we missing?
- 1:32:55Speaker 1: Yeah, there's ghost populations in our DNA. We know we're
- 1:32:57Speaker 1: missing humans. Like, there are other types of humans that
- 1:33:00Speaker 1: we just have nothing for.
- 1:33:01Speaker 2: Yeah, that's weird.
- 1:33:03Speaker 1: That's so weird.
- 1:33:03Speaker 2: That show, Human, have you ever seen that show? It's on... God,
- 1:33:07Speaker 2: is it a BBC show?
- 1:33:08Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
- 1:33:08Speaker 1: No, I watched that.
- 1:33:09Speaker 2: Very interesting.
- 1:33:10Speaker 1: It's good.
- 1:33:11Speaker 2: But she was on a podcast recently talking about this
- 1:33:14Speaker 2: ghost DNA and how weird it is that a few
- 1:33:17Speaker 2: hundred thousand years ago something happened and there's this DNA
- 1:33:21Speaker 2: that's in there that's like, what is this? What's this stuff?
- 1:33:25Speaker 1: Yeah, there's so many populations of humans that we think
- 1:33:28Speaker 1: existed because of our DNA, but we don't know who
- 1:33:30Speaker 1: they were. We've never found them. And they could be,
- 1:33:33Speaker 1: you know... very close to us, but also with significant differences.
- 1:33:37Speaker 1: And it's just, it's all up in the end. Same
- 1:33:40Speaker 1: with so much of prehistory. We just, we don't know.
- 1:33:42Speaker 2: Yeah. And I wonder like what kind of a society,
- 1:33:47Speaker 2: what kind of, if, do they find stone tools? With Denisovans?
- 1:33:52Speaker 2: Do they know that yet?
- 1:33:52Speaker 1: It's really hard to attribute stone tools to anything because
- 1:33:55Speaker 1: if you just have the tools, you don't know what
- 1:33:57Speaker 1: human used them, what human made them.
- 1:33:59Speaker 2: Right.
- 1:34:00Speaker 1: Because you have to find like a skeleton and it's
- 1:34:02Speaker 1: so hard to find a skeleton next to the tools.
- 1:34:04Speaker 1: And even then you don't actually know if it was
- 1:34:05Speaker 1: that that made the tools. We don't know.
- 1:34:09Speaker 2: Yeah. What else has been fascinating for you recently?
- 1:34:15Speaker 1: So I think. The question that I mentioned at the start,
- 1:34:18Speaker 1: the one like, when did humans reach isolated land masses,
- 1:34:21Speaker 1: such as, uh, America and Australia is a really interesting
- 1:34:25Speaker 1: question because again, the old ideas we have have proven
- 1:34:33Speaker 1: to be incorrect. And I think it's, especially in the
- 1:34:35Speaker 1: case of the Americas, I think it's super interesting because obviously,
- 1:34:38Speaker 1: as you know, we used to think it was Clovis
- 1:34:40Speaker 1: first 13,000 years ago, but. So many sites now seem
- 1:34:44Speaker 1: to be pushing that back much, much, much, much, much
- 1:34:46Speaker 1: older into the past. So, yeah, that's a really interesting question.
- 1:34:50Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, now we know that humans have been
- 1:34:54Speaker 1: in the Americas for at least 22,000 years with white
- 1:34:57Speaker 1: sands footprints, which I'm sure you've heard of that.
- 1:34:59Speaker 2: Yes, 22,000 years. It's crazy.
- 1:35:02Speaker 1: So that's the oldest accepted evidence. But I think there's
- 1:35:04Speaker 1: loads of interesting sites that potentially push it quite a
- 1:35:07Speaker 1: lot further back than that, which are a bit more controversial.
- 1:35:09Speaker 1: But when you take them all together, they're kind of, yeah,
- 1:35:11Speaker 1: there's white sands. So that's now accepted, I think, by
- 1:35:14Speaker 1: most archaeologists. And why that's important is because it kind
- 1:35:19Speaker 1: of opens it all up again. Because of when the
- 1:35:23Speaker 1: glacial maximums happen, the opening of the corridor, because that's
- 1:35:27Speaker 1: pre that. It means that we now don't know how
- 1:35:30Speaker 1: long humans have been in the Americas. It could go
- 1:35:32Speaker 1: back way further. And then you start looking at these
- 1:35:34Speaker 1: other sites, and you think maybe it's a lot, lot older.
- 1:35:37Speaker 1: So there's one in Mexico called Chicoita Cave. apologies for
- 1:35:43Speaker 1: the pronunciation is probably wrong, but this is a 33,000
- 1:35:48Speaker 1: years old and high in the mountains of Northern Mexico,
- 1:35:51Speaker 1: they found like 2000 stone tools. Um, and they did
- 1:35:57Speaker 1: like 50 separate dates and the date isn't controversial. What's
- 1:36:00Speaker 1: controversial is if they were human made tools. Um, but
- 1:36:03Speaker 1: the scientists working at the site think that this is
- 1:36:06Speaker 1: evidence of humans in the Americas, 33,000 years ago. Then
- 1:36:09Speaker 1: there's a site in Brazil called Pedro Furada. which is 50,000
- 1:36:13Speaker 1: years old. Is that Chikawite? Yeah.
- 1:36:21Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
- 1:36:21Speaker 1: So, I mean, it looks just like a tool, but
- 1:36:23Speaker 1: I mean, people argue that they're natural. So it's up
- 1:36:26Speaker 1: in the air. It's not accepted yet, but I think
- 1:36:28Speaker 1: that's the, probably the most, the least controversial.
- 1:36:33Speaker 2: 26,000 years ago.
- 1:36:36Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:36:36Speaker 1: But it goes up to, it's like 30 to 33,000 years,
- 1:36:38Speaker 1: I think. But yeah, there's a site called Pedra Furada
- 1:36:42Speaker 1: in Brazil where they found a hearth-like structure. So people
- 1:36:46Speaker 1: making fire, they found charcoal, they found blackened stones, heated
- 1:36:49Speaker 1: stones rather. And they dated that to like 50 or 60,000
- 1:36:54Speaker 1: years ago. So that's like a lot older than White Sands, obviously.
- 1:36:59Speaker 1: So that's a really interesting site. Again, not fully accepted
- 1:37:03Speaker 1: by archaeologists, but the people working there are quite convinced
- 1:37:06Speaker 1: that it's evidence of human presence in Brazil, which is
- 1:37:09Speaker 1: obviously quite far south. um, 50, over 50,000 years ago. Um,
- 1:37:14Speaker 1: but the thing is you can't prove it because you haven't,
- 1:37:17Speaker 1: they need so many things to say it for sure.
- 1:37:19Speaker 1: They need like a fossil of a human basically, because
- 1:37:22Speaker 1: otherwise you can say it's natural.
- 1:37:24Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:37:25Speaker 1: Uh, I don't know what those paintings are. I'm assuming
- 1:37:28Speaker 1: they're more recent because otherwise that would be pretty clear evidence. Um,
- 1:37:32Speaker 1: but I think that the half like structures and the,
- 1:37:36Speaker 1: The heated stones and the charcoal are dated to over.
- 1:37:38Speaker 2: 50,000 years ago. That's crazy. Go back to that last one, please.
- 1:37:43Speaker 2: Right there. That is wild. That is wild.
- 1:37:45Speaker 1: I'm assuming that is much more recent because otherwise that
- 1:37:48Speaker 1: would be very clear evidence of human presence. But I
- 1:37:52Speaker 1: think the oldest layers go back. I think it's been continuously. Oh,
- 1:37:55Speaker 1: they think it's been continuously inhabited for thousands and thousands
- 1:37:59Speaker 1: of years with the oldest being over 50,000 years old.
- 1:38:06Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 1:38:06Speaker 1: Are they the tools? They might be the tools. So
- 1:38:09Speaker 1: critics say that it's natural, right?
- 1:38:13Speaker 2: That those are natural things, not tools?
- 1:38:16Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:38:17Speaker 1: But a paper came out in 2023 that really made
- 1:38:19Speaker 1: the case that it's human presence.
- 1:38:21Speaker 2: Napping. Yeah. Yeah.
- 1:38:24Speaker 1: And I think it's leaning that way, but it's just
- 1:38:28Speaker 1: so hard to prove it, right? So it's not accepted.
- 1:38:30Speaker 2: Yet, but Jamie, uh, I just sent you a link
- 1:38:32Speaker 2: that I found yesterday. I thought it was pretty bizarre,
- 1:38:35Speaker 2: a completely different part of the world, but also really interesting.
- 1:38:39Speaker 2: It's a link to an Instagram video. There's so much
- 1:38:43Speaker 2: of this stuff now. That's what's so cool. It's like,
- 1:38:46Speaker 2: and if you're in a good algorithm, You get indenidated.
- 1:38:49Speaker 2: Give me some volume on this.
- 1:38:55Speaker 3: Algerian Sahara with 5,000 rooms, and we still haven't seen
- 1:39:00Speaker 3: all of them. It's called Sefar. No roads lead to it.
- 1:39:03Speaker 3: No vehicle can reach it. The only way in is
- 1:39:06Speaker 3: on foot through a maze of stone pathways that all
- 1:39:09Speaker 3: look identical. On the walls inside, there are 15,000 paintings,
- 1:39:14Speaker 3: animals that no longer exist here, rivers that dried up
- 1:39:17Speaker 3: thousands of years ago, and then things no one can identify.
- 1:39:21Speaker 3: Floating figures with no faces. Beings with round heads wearing
- 1:39:25Speaker 3: what looks like suits. A figure over three meters tall
- 1:39:29Speaker 3: that the man who discovered it simply called a god.
- 1:39:32Speaker 3: Most of Sephar is still unmapped. Whatever else is in there,
- 1:39:36Speaker 3: no one's seen it yet.
- 1:39:38Speaker 2: I could do without that guy's voice. He's a little ridiculous.
- 1:39:42Speaker 5: I'm going to take the radio head out.
- 1:39:43Speaker 2: Yeah, settle down, buddy. It sounds like an AI voice, right?
- 1:39:47Speaker 2: Like a super enthusiastic AI voice? Is that what it is?
- 1:39:49Speaker 5: Well, it could be. It very well could be. It
- 1:39:53Speaker 5: definitely is going to be in the future, but.
- 1:39:57Speaker 5: What was it called? I don't... I don't remember.
- 1:39:59Speaker 2: Sephar? It's just... Yeah. Okay.
- 1:40:03Speaker 5: Let's try to look it up.
- 1:40:04Speaker 2: Let's see if we can look it up. Sub-Saharan Africa
- 1:40:07Speaker 2: is another weird one, right? Because especially the Sahara itself,
- 1:40:12Speaker 2: that used to be vast, green, grassy trees, jungle. Who
- 1:40:17Speaker 2: knows what it was? And now, no one's really has
- 1:40:23Speaker 2: really any understanding of what's under that sand.
- 1:40:25Speaker 1: Yeah but it was fertile and green right up until
- 1:40:28Speaker 1: literally right up until the point that the conventional timeline
- 1:40:31Speaker 1: has civilization starting like around 4000 bc is when it
- 1:40:35Speaker 1: flipped to to desert um so yeah i mean i'm
- 1:40:39Speaker 1: sure there's there has been archaeological work done in the
- 1:40:41Speaker 1: sahara but compared to the size of the sahara right
- 1:40:44Speaker 1: there's there's just got to be loads of stuff under
- 1:40:46Speaker 1: there that could potentially change our understanding of origins of
- 1:40:50Speaker 1: civilization for sure um very interesting region but yeah extremely
- 1:40:53Speaker 1: hard to excavate for many reasons such as the climate
- 1:40:57Speaker 1: and also political instability a lot of those countries are
- 1:40:59Speaker 1: pretty fucked up so it's hard to like go in
- 1:41:01Speaker 1: there and do archaeology but very interesting region of the
- 1:41:04Speaker 1: world and obviously that is where egypt emerged just after
- 1:41:08Speaker 1: this period so you know what were the people that
- 1:41:10Speaker 1: kind of went to the mal river doing before there's
- 1:41:13Speaker 1: many interesting things there's um What's it called? There's an
- 1:41:16Speaker 1: interesting site. Napta Playa, I think it's called.
- 1:41:18Speaker 5: Yeah, it's going to be a little hard to get to.
- 1:41:20Speaker 5: It's in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
- 1:41:22Speaker 2: Boy.
- 1:41:23Speaker 5: In Algeria.
- 1:41:25Speaker 2: Jeez. Buried.
- 1:41:28Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
- 1:41:28Speaker 1: I have heard of this, actually.
- 1:41:30Speaker 5: Somewhere in there.
- 1:41:32Speaker 2: Fuck. Imagine you're an archaeologist. You're tasked with, you know,
- 1:41:41Speaker 2: someone gives you some funding. Hey.
- 1:41:43Speaker 1: Sahara Desert, bro.
- 1:41:44Speaker 2: We want you to get in there. And go look around. What?
- 1:41:48Speaker 1: Yeah, it's probably not the ideal place to go.
- 1:41:50Speaker 2: You can't even go without getting killed.
- 1:41:51Speaker 1: Yeah, you don't want to get shot.
- 1:41:52Speaker 2: You could literally die. So, no. Yeah.
- 1:41:58Speaker 1: Just imagine if you found something cool.
- 1:41:59Speaker 5: Imagine you found a bunch of cool shit.
- 1:42:01Speaker 2: Yeah, you go. Good luck. Just good luck taking it out.
- 1:42:04Speaker 5: They're like, oh, where'd you get that?
- 1:42:06Speaker 2: Exactly. Thank you. Exactly. They'll kill you. That was also
- 1:42:10Speaker 2: my thought. I was going to bring that up about
- 1:42:11Speaker 2: Gobekli Tepe, about if they bring in more archaeologists, more
- 1:42:15Speaker 2: people to dig, if they really, truly expand. They really
- 1:42:17Speaker 2: have to keep track of what they find because the
- 1:42:20Speaker 2: amount of money that someone can get for an artifact
- 1:42:23Speaker 2: on the black market is pretty incredible. This is an
- 1:42:26Speaker 2: issue with Egypt, right?
- 1:42:28Speaker 1: And South America.
- 1:42:29Speaker 2: Yes, and South America. But Egypt in particular, there's some inconsistencies.
- 1:42:33Speaker 2: with Zahi Hawass's versions of like what was discovered in
- 1:42:38Speaker 2: some places, whether or not a skeleton was in a
- 1:42:40Speaker 2: sarcophagus versus what he said later. You know, like in
- 1:42:44Speaker 2: the older versions, there was a skeleton and the newer versions,
- 1:42:48Speaker 2: they didn't find anything. So did you sell a skeleton?
- 1:42:51Speaker 2: Because people sell, I'm not saying he did, but did
- 1:42:54Speaker 2: somebody sell a skeleton? Because people sell skeletons. And if
- 1:42:58Speaker 2: you are some rich guy who lives in some other
- 1:43:01Speaker 2: country and you're a billionaire from oil And you're like,
- 1:43:04Speaker 2: you know what I'd like? You've got a guy. He's like,
- 1:43:06Speaker 2: you've got everything. You've got all the Ferraris. He's like,
- 1:43:08Speaker 2: you know what I want? I want an Egyptian skeleton.
- 1:43:12Speaker 2: Get me that. Go get me a mummy. I want
- 1:43:15Speaker 2: a fucking mummy.
- 1:43:16Speaker 1: Or any kind of artifacts or anything.
- 1:43:17Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 1:43:18Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:43:19Speaker 2: Especially something gold, some ancient gold. All that stuff was
- 1:43:22Speaker 2: stolen out of there. So was it melted down? For
- 1:43:26Speaker 2: grave robbers, that must have been an incredible place to
- 1:43:30Speaker 2: be before everybody discovered all those tombs. Because we know, like,
- 1:43:34Speaker 2: with King Tut, which was preserved, but luckily nobody got
- 1:43:38Speaker 2: into that until... What year was that? They found it. Tutankhamun's.
- 1:43:43Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but within the last couple decades, I think.
- 1:43:46Speaker 1: I'm not sure.
- 1:43:48Speaker 2: Whatever it was. I think it was a little longer
- 1:43:49Speaker 2: than that. But the point is, it's, like, fantastic gold
- 1:43:53Speaker 2: sarcophagus cover and massive fucking treasure trove of jewels and things. Like,
- 1:43:59Speaker 2: how much of that stuff is... scattered in private collections
- 1:44:03Speaker 2: in the world, you know?
- 1:44:05Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 1:44:06Speaker 1: And in South America, like, because they spent, like, underneath Cusco,
- 1:44:10Speaker 1: there's all these tunnels, right? And people have known about
- 1:44:12Speaker 1: them for a long, long time. But it took a
- 1:44:14Speaker 1: long time for archaeology to kind of accept that they
- 1:44:17Speaker 1: were there. But people have been going, like, people had, like,
- 1:44:20Speaker 1: tours and stuff down at the tunnels before it was, like,
- 1:44:22Speaker 1: widely accepted. And back then, it's just rife for people
- 1:44:25Speaker 1: selling off to the black market because there's no control
- 1:44:27Speaker 1: over it. There's no kind of institutional... control over it
- 1:44:30Speaker 1: so people could just kind of do what they want
- 1:44:32Speaker 1: until it actually finally got like you know controlled by
- 1:44:37Speaker 1: the authorities so yeah who knows what went and all
- 1:44:40Speaker 1: over the world as you say yeah there could be
- 1:44:42Speaker 1: stuff that is really interesting that is just out there and.
- 1:44:46Speaker 2: Then there's the elongated skulls the weird fucking skulls and
- 1:44:51Speaker 2: a long history of people discovering those like how many
- 1:44:54Speaker 2: people got the good ones how many of them were
- 1:44:56Speaker 2: removed a long time ago and sit somewhere and It's
- 1:45:00Speaker 2: almost like you have to go raid all the rich
- 1:45:02Speaker 2: guys in the world.
- 1:45:03Speaker 1: See what you got hiding in your basement.
- 1:45:05Speaker 2: Just find some guy, like, what's your Google search like?
- 1:45:10Speaker 2: Let's find out who's got the stuff. Because, I mean,
- 1:45:13Speaker 2: if you're a person with a private museum, if you've
- 1:45:16Speaker 2: got that kind of money. And, like, there's people in
- 1:45:18Speaker 2: the world that have private zoos, right? So they have
- 1:45:21Speaker 2: so much money in other countries that they've, you know,
- 1:45:24Speaker 2: they have basically the wild kingdom in their backyards. And
- 1:45:29Speaker 2: that guy's like, well, I got that. Now I want–
- 1:45:33Speaker 2: I want something even more weird. I want you to
- 1:45:35Speaker 2: build– like I went to the Cairo Museum once, and
- 1:45:39Speaker 2: I like the way it looks. I want that in
- 1:45:41Speaker 2: my house. There's got to be people like that in
- 1:45:44Speaker 2: the world.
- 1:45:44Speaker 1: This guy.
- 1:45:47Speaker 5: He's one of them.
- 1:45:48Speaker 2: Here he goes.
- 1:45:48Speaker 4: 91-year-old Don Miller from Indiana. He had thousands of artifacts
- 1:45:53Speaker 4: removed from his house.
- 1:45:55Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
- 1:45:55Speaker 5: I think he had Egyptian mummies.
- 1:45:58Speaker 2: Whoa.
- 1:45:59Speaker 5: I'm trying to find the good pictures in the.
- 1:46:00Speaker 2: List of what he had. So they seized his stuff.
- 1:46:04Speaker 2: How'd they find out about it? Was he on Instagram?
- 1:46:09Speaker 4: A delegation from China went to Indiana to claim their stuff.
- 1:46:12Speaker 2: Whoa. A delegation from China. I wonder if they showed
- 1:46:15Speaker 2: up with guns. Give me your shit back. FBI raided
- 1:46:18Speaker 2: a 91-year-old missionary's home and found thousands of stolen Native
- 1:46:22Speaker 2: American bones. Whoa.
- 1:46:25Speaker 5: Amazon River canoe.
- 1:46:28Speaker 2: Wow, Ming Dynasty jade, an Egyptian sarcophagus, and a dugout
- 1:46:32Speaker 2: canoe that had traveled down the Amazon River. Wow.
- 1:46:37Speaker 4: It was just in his house. There's a picture of
- 1:46:39Speaker 4: his house and another thing I had. I mean, it's
- 1:46:41Speaker 4: just all.
- 1:46:42Speaker 2: How'd this guy get the scratch? Where's he getting the
- 1:46:44Speaker 2: money for all this? What'd this guy do?
- 1:46:47Speaker 5: I don't know why there's not a movie about him.
- 1:46:48Speaker 2: After 10 years, FBI returned 7,000 rare artifacts... Looted by
- 1:46:54Speaker 2: Indiana grave robber. Oh, he's a grave robber. That's what
- 1:46:58Speaker 2: they call him? So it's just a dude who's a collector.
- 1:47:01Speaker 2: He might not necessarily be a grave robber.
- 1:47:06Speaker 5: I don't think this is the same guy.
- 1:47:08Speaker 2: FBI found 42,000 relics and 2,000 human bones in a
- 1:47:13Speaker 2: man's home. What is that? Whoa, what the? What is that,
- 1:47:19Speaker 2: a horse?
- 1:47:19Speaker 5: Maybe like a pangolin or something.
- 1:47:20Speaker 2: A sloth? Yeah, it looks like a pangolin, right? 42,000 relics. Oh,
- 1:47:27Speaker 2: same guy. No. Don Miller. Whoa. It is the same guy.
- 1:47:33Speaker 2: That's crazy. This guy's a nut. He died in 2015.
- 1:47:38Speaker 2: Too bad. He was 91 when agents first knocked on
- 1:47:43Speaker 2: his door in 2014. Wow, he only lived a year later.
- 1:47:46Speaker 2: The 42,000 artifacts hoarded by Miller represent maybe the largest
- 1:47:50Speaker 2: ever seizure from a private collection. So this was interesting.
- 1:47:55Speaker 2: It's like, are they saying that he's not allowed to
- 1:47:59Speaker 2: acquire them? Do we have rules in terms of like, say,
- 1:48:02Speaker 2: if you found some stuff? I know we have rules
- 1:48:06Speaker 2: about Native Americans, right? FBI became involved when they learned
- 1:48:10Speaker 2: thousands of items were obtained in violation of antiquities laws
- 1:48:15Speaker 2: and federal and state statutes. According to the FBI, Miller
- 1:48:18Speaker 2: went on digs around the world and illegally brought his
- 1:48:21Speaker 2: finds home to the United States.
- 1:48:24Speaker 4: I think Nick Cage had to give back that skull
- 1:48:26Speaker 4: he bought because it was stolen from somewhere or something.
- 1:48:30Speaker 2: He bought a skull?
- 1:48:31Speaker 4: Like a T-Rex skull.
- 1:48:32Speaker 2: Oh.
- 1:48:32Speaker 5: You ever hear about that?
- 1:48:35Speaker 2: Oh, he had to give back his T-Rex skull?
- 1:48:37Speaker 5: I think so because they found out that it was
- 1:48:38Speaker 5: like stolen. So he gave it back. I don't know
- 1:48:41Speaker 5: what happened with the money, but.
- 1:48:43Speaker 2: Whoa. How much does a T-Rex cost?
- 1:48:47Speaker 5: Also, I was thinking, this guy got.
- 1:48:48Speaker 1: He got fucked. They found this guy.
- 1:48:50Speaker 5: There's got to be.
- 1:48:51Speaker 1: We just.
- 1:48:52Speaker 5: I brought him up because I knew about it.
- 1:48:55Speaker 4: He, you know, probably talked about it at the bar and.
- 1:48:57Speaker 2: All that kind of shit. Yeah.
- 1:48:59Speaker 5: What about the people who don't?
- 1:49:00Speaker 2: He's on Facebook. Yeah.
- 1:49:01Speaker 5: What about the people who don't?
- 1:49:02Speaker 2: Those old dudes are all on Facebook. Have you seen
- 1:49:05Speaker 2: the dinosaur that Waze to Well has?
- 1:49:08Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 1:49:08Speaker 2: Waze to Well... legally purchased a dinosaur. What, like a...
- 1:49:12Speaker 2: So they have, like, a dinosaur bone, some aquatic dinosaur
- 1:49:16Speaker 2: that they have suspended in their ceiling.
- 1:49:18Speaker 3: Really?
- 1:49:19Speaker 2: Yeah, you can buy dinosaur bones.
- 1:49:21Speaker 3: Um.
- 1:49:21Speaker 1: He bought a skull for $ 276, 000. Whoa, he got fucked.
- 1:49:24Speaker 2: Stole it from the Mongolian government. Wow. Smuggled it out
- 1:49:28Speaker 2: of the Gobi Desert. He voluntarily returned the fossil to
- 1:49:31Speaker 2: the Mongolian government after U.S. authorities found it was smuggled.
- 1:49:35Speaker 5: Oh, no.
- 1:49:36Speaker 4: Wow.
- 1:49:38Speaker 2: Um... See if you can find the ways to weld dinosaur. Yeah,
- 1:49:42Speaker 2: you can buy dinosaur bones. That's pretty cool. There's a
- 1:49:44Speaker 2: lot of people that don't believe in dinosaurs lately. Really?
- 1:49:47Speaker 2: This is very confusing.
- 1:49:49Speaker 3: Why?
- 1:49:49Speaker 1: What's their reasoning?
- 1:49:50Speaker 2: Oh, just they've been lied to about everything. Maybe dinosaurs too.
- 1:49:54Speaker 2: And there's people that think that dinosaurs are actually the
- 1:49:56Speaker 2: dragons of ancient history. And that's all bullshit. It's the
- 1:50:01Speaker 2: dumbest theories. I mean, like, you know, we have, there's
- 1:50:05Speaker 2: the ways to weld dinosaur. That's what it looks like.
- 1:50:08Speaker 1: That's pretty dope.
- 1:50:08Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty sick. Some sort of an aquatic dinosaur.
- 1:50:13Speaker 2: How much of that is actual bone and how much
- 1:50:15Speaker 2: of it is replica? I don't know. Some of them
- 1:50:17Speaker 2: are replica. I think that's actual bone. But, like, they
- 1:50:20Speaker 2: have T-Rexes. I think the most complete T-Rex is, I
- 1:50:28Speaker 2: want to say 80%. What is the most complete T-Rex
- 1:50:32Speaker 2: skeleton ever found?
- 1:50:34Speaker 5: That one just sold recently.
- 1:50:37Speaker 2: At an auction. Oh, yeah?
- 1:50:39Speaker 5: Yeah, it was 62% complete.
- 1:50:41Speaker 2: Is that the most complete one ever?
- 1:50:42Speaker 5: I'm pretty sure.
- 1:50:42Speaker 2: I thought there was a.
- 1:50:45Speaker 5: Oh, there's one that's 90%.
- 1:50:45Speaker 2: Oh, there you go.
- 1:50:47Speaker 4: Well, discovered with 90% of its skeleton recovered.
- 1:50:52Speaker 2: Yeah, we know a lot, folks. This idea that dinosaurs
- 1:50:54Speaker 2: aren't real is really silly.
- 1:50:57Speaker 1: No, it's definitely real.
- 1:50:58Speaker 2: Sue. Yeah. Whoa. Okay. So that's real. Guys, stop. That's
- 1:51:04Speaker 2: a real skull. The problem is there's been deception. And
- 1:51:09Speaker 2: one of the big pieces of deception is when you
- 1:51:12Speaker 2: go to a lot of museums and you see a
- 1:51:15Speaker 2: dinosaur skeleton, you assume that's how they found it and
- 1:51:18Speaker 2: they put it back together again. Whereas a lot of
- 1:51:20Speaker 2: the pieces of those bones are not real. A lot
- 1:51:22Speaker 2: of the pieces are recreations and some entire skeletons that
- 1:51:30Speaker 2: are in museums are all a recreation. There's no actual
- 1:51:33Speaker 2: bone that you're actually looking at. And so then people
- 1:51:36Speaker 2: were like, hey.
- 1:51:40Speaker 1: It's the same with ancient sites, though.
- 1:51:42Speaker 2: 67 million years old, 80% intact. So, like, just that alone,
- 1:51:46Speaker 2: 80% of that is real. That's amazing. They're real. It's
- 1:51:50Speaker 2: a fucking real thing that existed just like fucking crocodiles
- 1:51:54Speaker 2: are still real today. There was a real group of
- 1:51:58Speaker 2: large reptiles that roamed the earth.
- 1:52:01Speaker 1: For a long time. But the crazy thing, I think
- 1:52:03Speaker 1: dinosaurs really highlight the kind of fragmentary nature of the
- 1:52:06Speaker 1: fossil record, right? Because they existed for 160 million years
- 1:52:11Speaker 1: or something like that. But we only have like a
- 1:52:13Speaker 1: few thousand fossils from that huge amount of time. And
- 1:52:17Speaker 1: it just shows how little survives, right?
- 1:52:20Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And the fossil record is just really weird.
- 1:52:24Speaker 2: It takes a lot to make a fossil. So we
- 1:52:26Speaker 2: have a tiny fraction of the actual data.
- 1:52:30Speaker 1: And we have to extrapolate out from that. And just
- 1:52:33Speaker 1: that's our understanding. And that's why we do not know
- 1:52:36Speaker 1: what happened in the deep past.
- 1:52:37Speaker 2: Isn't it fucking cool?
- 1:52:38Speaker 1: It's so cool.
- 1:52:39Speaker 2: I love it.
- 1:52:39Speaker 1: That's why I do what I do, man. I fucking
- 1:52:41Speaker 1: love it.
- 1:52:42Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know anybody who when you first learn
- 1:52:45Speaker 2: about this, anybody that I want to talk to, when
- 1:52:47Speaker 2: you first learn about this stuff, you don't go, whoa.
- 1:52:50Speaker 2: You know, because it is so interesting. and um that's
- 1:52:54Speaker 2: why to me the um reaction to Graham Hancock's Netflix
- 1:52:59Speaker 2: series was so strange like so unhinged like why why
- 1:53:03Speaker 2: are you guys freaking out about this and calling it
- 1:53:05Speaker 2: the most dangerous show.
- 1:53:07Speaker 1: Yeah I mean I've experienced this firsthand now because I
- 1:53:10Speaker 1: mean last time I was here I wasn't really known
- 1:53:12Speaker 1: about but now I'm a kind of people know who
- 1:53:14Speaker 1: I am and I get so much hate. It's weird
- 1:53:19Speaker 1: because people paint me out to be something I'm not like.
- 1:53:21Speaker 1: And it's just so strange because I'm me and I
- 1:53:23Speaker 1: know what I think and I know what I believe. Obviously,
- 1:53:25Speaker 1: you've experienced that on a whole different level. Yeah, I've
- 1:53:28Speaker 1: experienced it from the government.
- 1:53:29Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. But it's just wild.
- 1:53:32Speaker 1: It's so weird when people paint you out to be
- 1:53:35Speaker 1: someone that you're not and put words in your mouth.
- 1:53:36Speaker 1: It's strange.
- 1:53:39Speaker 2: You'll get used to it. The key is just don't
- 1:53:42Speaker 2: read it. That's the key. Like you're going to be
- 1:53:44Speaker 2: aware of enough of it peripherally. People will bring it
- 1:53:47Speaker 2: to your attention if it's really important or if it's
- 1:53:50Speaker 2: like significant. None of it's going to really be important.
- 1:53:53Speaker 2: But as long as– and you're a very conscientious guy
- 1:53:56Speaker 2: and you do a really good job, like I said,
- 1:53:58Speaker 2: of being objective and measured and that's all you need
- 1:54:00Speaker 2: to do. Just keep doing that. Just don't read the comments.
- 1:54:03Speaker 2: Because there's a bunch of people out there that are
- 1:54:07Speaker 2: just very– unhappy period, no matter what. And when someone
- 1:54:11Speaker 2: is getting a lot of attention, they're very angry always.
- 1:54:15Speaker 2: And there's whatever that number is, one out of a hundred,
- 1:54:17Speaker 2: one out of a thousand, it doesn't matter when they
- 1:54:20Speaker 2: reach you, that negativity is never good for you. It's
- 1:54:23Speaker 2: only bad.
- 1:54:24Speaker 1: And it sits with you a little bit more. Like
- 1:54:25Speaker 1: you get all the positive comments, but you don't really fuck,
- 1:54:27Speaker 1: you don't like the negative ones sticks in your brain.
- 1:54:30Speaker 1: But you know, what's really interesting is like, uh, people
- 1:54:32Speaker 1: have done like hit pieces on me and shit, but
- 1:54:35Speaker 1: And obviously loads of negative stuff comes through, but also
- 1:54:37Speaker 1: I've had like actual archaeologists and actual people working in
- 1:54:41Speaker 1: national institutions reach out to me and say like, you know,
- 1:54:43Speaker 1: these are like actual archaeologists. And they're saying like, Michael,
- 1:54:46Speaker 1: we value your work. And like, we actually think you're
- 1:54:48Speaker 1: an important voice and stuff like that. And I find
- 1:54:50Speaker 1: that really encouraging because these are You know, it's easy
- 1:54:53Speaker 1: for us to think about archaeologists as like a kind
- 1:54:55Speaker 1: of bogeyman. They're like want to suppress all this stuff,
- 1:54:58Speaker 1: but they're not all like that. No, I think.
- 1:55:00Speaker 2: Particularly the young ones, particularly people that are coming up
- 1:55:04Speaker 2: that really the reason why they got into this in
- 1:55:05Speaker 2: the first place is because it's such a fascinating subject.
- 1:55:08Speaker 2: And like you, when you've spoken on this, when you
- 1:55:12Speaker 2: were in school and you were getting your degree, you
- 1:55:17Speaker 2: were confused as to why these alternative perspectives weren't. entertained.
- 1:55:22Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of young people that feel
- 1:55:26Speaker 2: confined by the gatekeepers. They feel confined by the career
- 1:55:31Speaker 2: academics that are sort of in charge of who gets tenure,
- 1:55:37Speaker 2: who gets jobs, who gets grants. And it's a very
- 1:55:40Speaker 2: confusing thing. You don't want to ruffle any feathers or
- 1:55:42Speaker 2: step on any toes. And so you feel constrained in
- 1:55:45Speaker 2: your ability to be curious. And that seems insane for
- 1:55:51Speaker 2: something that is so inherently curious, curiosity driven.
- 1:55:55Speaker 1: So inherently unknown as well. We do not know, as
- 1:55:59Speaker 1: we keep saying.
- 1:55:59Speaker 2: Right, right, right. We're not talking about stuff that's like,
- 1:56:03Speaker 2: you know, established science where you can clearly, you know,
- 1:56:07Speaker 2: it's not mathematics. This is something like weird. You know,
- 1:56:10Speaker 2: you're looking at hints of the past. And the more
- 1:56:16Speaker 2: we look, the more we find older stuff. It's like
- 1:56:18Speaker 2: Graham always says. stuff just keeps getting older yeah it's
- 1:56:24Speaker 2: crazy well it's just so cool that you're out there
- 1:56:26Speaker 2: making videos and that you could do that for a living.
- 1:56:28Speaker 1: Now i know it's wild i feel i feel so
- 1:56:30Speaker 1: lucky that i get to uh do something i'm so
- 1:56:33Speaker 1: interested in and talk about these topics and also to
- 1:56:37Speaker 1: like create not to kind of like inspire this thinking
- 1:56:41Speaker 1: and other people that's really what i want to try
- 1:56:43Speaker 1: and do is to get people thinking about history from
- 1:56:45Speaker 1: this different perspective and to think about the unknown and
- 1:56:48Speaker 1: think about the potential that what humans could have been
- 1:56:51Speaker 1: doing now that we know that a mind like ours
- 1:56:53Speaker 1: could have existed for a million years, that humans like
- 1:56:56Speaker 1: us could have inhabited this planet for such a vastly
- 1:57:00Speaker 1: longer length of time than we used to believe and
- 1:57:01Speaker 1: all the possibilities that throws up. More than anything, that's
- 1:57:04Speaker 1: what I want people to think about when they watch
- 1:57:07Speaker 1: my work. I don't want to tell them to believe
- 1:57:09Speaker 1: this or tell them to believe that. I just want
- 1:57:11Speaker 1: them to kind of think about it themselves and open
- 1:57:14Speaker 1: their minds to the possibilities that could have occurred. And
- 1:57:17Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that like people always say that I
- 1:57:20Speaker 1: like saying that there's like advanced civilizations in prehistory. I'm
- 1:57:22Speaker 1: not saying that. I'm just saying there's a lot more
- 1:57:26Speaker 1: on the table than we used to think. And I
- 1:57:28Speaker 1: think that's really fascinating. I wish more people would kind
- 1:57:31Speaker 1: of take that possibility seriously. And that's why I get
- 1:57:34Speaker 1: encouraged when I get these emails from people that actually
- 1:57:36Speaker 1: in the institutions, because they're the people that are going
- 1:57:38Speaker 1: to rewrite the textbooks. Like I can say what I want.
- 1:57:41Speaker 1: Like I'm just a YouTuber, but we need the people
- 1:57:43Speaker 1: that actually work in, in the institutions to think in
- 1:57:45Speaker 1: this way. And then, Then I think we might update
- 1:57:48Speaker 1: our thinking on these things.
- 1:57:49Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of those young folks that
- 1:57:53Speaker 2: are coming up now in archaeology that do have alternative perspectives.
- 1:57:58Speaker 2: Whether or not they're being suppressed. And it's also very
- 1:58:00Speaker 2: encouraging for them to see a pathway outside of academics, academia,
- 1:58:05Speaker 2: like what you're pursuing. And to see, like, not only
- 1:58:08Speaker 2: is this viable, but you can do... do it with
- 1:58:10Speaker 2: the proper approach, like the way that you're doing it.
- 1:58:14Speaker 2: Where you're not making crazy claims, not saying the aliens
- 1:58:17Speaker 2: did it. You're not saying anything nutty. You're just saying, hey,
- 1:58:20Speaker 2: there's a lot going on here. And to pretend that
- 1:58:24Speaker 2: we have an accurate map of the territory seems silly.
- 1:58:27Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
- 1:58:28Speaker 1: Yeah, I just think there's so much more on the
- 1:58:30Speaker 1: table now than there used to be only a few
- 1:58:32Speaker 1: decades ago. And I think that's so exciting when we
- 1:58:34Speaker 1: look at our past because, as I say, it's the
- 1:58:36Speaker 1: reason we're all here, right? It's the reason we live
- 1:58:38Speaker 1: in this civilization is the answer to these questions. And
- 1:58:41Speaker 1: we don't know the answer to these questions anymore. So
- 1:58:43Speaker 1: let's talk about it, you know?
- 1:58:45Speaker 2: Yeah. What else have you found recently that's interesting?
- 1:58:49Speaker 1: Yeah, so, I mean, there's older American sites, so.
- 1:58:54Speaker 1: So there's obviously the Cerruti Macedon site, which is 130,000
- 1:58:57Speaker 1: years old, which is controversial, but I think people.
- 1:58:59Speaker 2: Spoke about that. That's the Macedon bones where they appear
- 1:59:02Speaker 2: to be, it appears signs of human smashing the bones
- 1:59:06Speaker 2: to get the marrow.
- 1:59:07Speaker 1: Yeah, just after, like, freshly smashed after the animal had died,
- 1:59:10Speaker 1: and they found, like, these anvils, like, these things that
- 1:59:13Speaker 1: look like tools next to the bones, and it's controversial
- 1:59:16Speaker 1: because we can't prove that that was human activity, but
- 1:59:18Speaker 1: it looks like human activity. It was even published in
- 1:59:20Speaker 1: Nature in 2017, so.
- 1:59:23Speaker 1: You know, it's another little data point that pushes back
- 1:59:25Speaker 1: human presence in the America potentially to over 100,000 years ago.
- 1:59:28Speaker 1: And there's even more. There's a site called Calico where,
- 1:59:32Speaker 1: I think this one's a little bit, I don't really
- 1:59:34Speaker 1: buy this one, but a very famous archaeologist called Louis Leakey,
- 1:59:38Speaker 1: who was like one of the top names in the
- 1:59:40Speaker 1: archaeology in the 20th century, he believed that Calico showed
- 1:59:44Speaker 1: evidence of human presence in the Americas over 100,000 years
- 1:59:46Speaker 1: ago as well. So It's another data point. And then
- 1:59:50Speaker 1: there's Way at Larco, which I think you've heard of.
- 1:59:53Speaker 1: Have you heard of Way at Larco? It's this site
- 1:59:54Speaker 1: in Mexico where they had this volcanic ash over these
- 1:59:58Speaker 1: human tools, and they dated the ash to crazy numbers.
- 2:00:02Speaker 1: I'm talking like 300,000, 400,000, 500,000 years ago, and the
- 2:00:03Speaker 1: tools were below this layer.
- 2:00:04Speaker 2: What? Yeah.
- 2:00:05Speaker 1: I'm not aware of that one. So in the 1950s,
- 2:00:14Speaker 1: There was a Mexican archaeologist who was doing some work
- 2:00:17Speaker 1: in the Vasco Basin in Mexico near the city of Pubella.
- 2:00:20Speaker 1: And he was finding all these extinct Pleistocene animal remains
- 2:00:23Speaker 1: there alongside human activity. So he called in some American
- 2:00:26Speaker 1: archaeologists and they did some work and they identified this
- 2:00:29Speaker 1: site called Huayatlaco, which is an archaeological site there. And
- 2:00:33Speaker 1: they found these very sophisticated stone tools. They're like bifacial
- 2:00:37Speaker 1: stone tools, which means they've been worked on on two sides.
- 2:00:39Speaker 1: And it's quite a sophisticated level of tool. And so
- 2:00:42Speaker 1: they found this and they were like, OK, this is
- 2:00:44Speaker 1: an interesting site. Let's bring in some geologists. So the
- 2:00:46Speaker 1: geologists came in and they were expecting to date the
- 2:00:50Speaker 1: kind of sediment around the tools to around 8,000 to 10,000
- 2:00:53Speaker 1: years ago because they knew about a volcanic eruption that
- 2:00:56Speaker 1: had happened at that time. And so they expected the
- 2:00:58Speaker 1: volcanic ash to be from that. So they did all
- 2:01:00Speaker 1: this testing. But then they found that the ash was
- 2:01:04Speaker 1: giving these crazy dates, like 200,000, 300,000, up to 600,000
- 2:01:06Speaker 1: years old. And that was completely mental because the tools
- 2:01:12Speaker 1: were below this layer of ash. And then they dated
- 2:01:15Speaker 1: a camel pelvis, I think, that was in situ with
- 2:01:19Speaker 1: the tools. And that camel pelvis came back to 250,000
- 2:01:24Speaker 1: years old as well. And that was in the same
- 2:01:26Speaker 1: layer of the tools. So they kind of brought all
- 2:01:28Speaker 1: their different dating methods together. And there's multiple kind of
- 2:01:32Speaker 1: geological dating methods on the sediment, the ash, and also
- 2:01:35Speaker 1: the camel pelvis. And they kind of collected all this
- 2:01:38Speaker 1: to a date of 250,000 years ago for this site,
- 2:01:42Speaker 1: for where these tools were found. And yeah, and so
- 2:01:47Speaker 1: they tried to publish this and they received like immense
- 2:01:50Speaker 1: pushback because obviously this was the time of the Clovis
- 2:01:53Speaker 1: first paradigm. And, you know, people weren't ready for Clovis
- 2:01:58Speaker 1: to be broken, let alone by such a huge margin,
- 2:02:01Speaker 1: like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years old. And
- 2:02:04Speaker 1: they couldn't publish for like 20 years. And by that time,
- 2:02:07Speaker 1: many of the artifacts had gone missing, and they didn't
- 2:02:10Speaker 1: know where they were, and the site actually got razed.
- 2:02:14Speaker 1: It got kind of removed. And I'm not trying to
- 2:02:16Speaker 1: say that's some conspiracy or anything, but it just means
- 2:02:19Speaker 1: that you can't really prove it. But they did eventually publish,
- 2:02:22Speaker 1: and the geologists have always stuck by this date, and
- 2:02:24Speaker 1: there's multiple lines of evidence that suggests that the tools
- 2:02:28Speaker 1: were found below this layer of roughly 250,000 years old.
- 2:02:32Speaker 1: And that's obviously hugely older than we think humans have
- 2:02:35Speaker 1: been in the Americas. It's a very interesting site. I
- 2:02:40Speaker 1: want to give a shout out to Will Brown, who's
- 2:02:42Speaker 1: got a channel called Incredible History. He's actually been to
- 2:02:44Speaker 1: the site and he kind of like nudged me in
- 2:02:46Speaker 1: the direction of looking into this one. He's got a
- 2:02:48Speaker 1: great channel. But yeah, it's super interesting because we can't
- 2:02:52Speaker 1: prove it because the tools have gone missing. The site
- 2:02:55Speaker 1: no longer exists, but there's a paper out there written
- 2:02:58Speaker 1: by serious scientists saying that, you know, there could be
- 2:03:02Speaker 1: human presence in the Americas. over 200,000 years ago, potentially
- 2:03:06Speaker 1: even older than that. And that would just radically change
- 2:03:09Speaker 1: our understanding of humans in America. So then when you
- 2:03:12Speaker 1: put all these sites together, so obviously White Sands is
- 2:03:14Speaker 1: the earliest at 22,000. But then when you add that
- 2:03:16Speaker 1: to Chicoete Cave, as I mentioned earlier, 33,000. Pedra Furada
- 2:03:19Speaker 1: in Brazil, over 50,000. Cerruti Mastodon, 130,000. I don't really
- 2:03:21Speaker 1: think Calico is.
- 2:03:28Speaker 1: I think that's natural. But then we had Larko at 250,000.
- 2:03:31Speaker 1: You know, it only takes one of them to be
- 2:03:33Speaker 1: right for our understanding of when humans reached America to
- 2:03:36Speaker 1: radically shift. And I think it's only logical that humans
- 2:03:39Speaker 1: were in America a lot longer than we think. Because,
- 2:03:43Speaker 1: you know, when we're talking about the vast span of
- 2:03:44Speaker 1: time that we've been on this planet, why couldn't we
- 2:03:47Speaker 1: have reached these places?
- 2:03:48Speaker 3: Right.
- 2:03:49Speaker 2: And then the question is, how did we reach them?
- 2:03:51Speaker 2: And from where? You know, from where? Exactly. That's the
- 2:03:56Speaker 2: weird thing is some of the... When you look at
- 2:04:00Speaker 2: pyramid structures, for instance, where did that idea come from?
- 2:04:04Speaker 2: How did that idea make it to the Aztecs?
- 2:04:06Speaker 1: All over the world we find pyramids.
- 2:04:08Speaker 2: Weird. It is weird.
- 2:04:10Speaker 1: I mean, you could say that it's just like a
- 2:04:13Speaker 1: logical way of building things, but maybe. Who knows?
- 2:04:17Speaker 2: Well, there's also the weirdness in the fact that the
- 2:04:19Speaker 2: Aztecs themselves didn't build the pyramids.
- 2:04:22Speaker 1: Oh, some of them, yeah. Like Teotihuacan was there before,
- 2:04:26Speaker 1: and they said it was... The name literally means place
- 2:04:29Speaker 1: where the gods lived, and they found it there. And
- 2:04:33Speaker 1: so it was before them, and they don't know who
- 2:04:35Speaker 1: built it. Right. They give us lots of our names.
- 2:04:37Speaker 1: They gave us the name Olmec. Olmec means the rubber people,
- 2:04:41Speaker 1: because they knew about the Olmecs. They knew they existed
- 2:04:43Speaker 1: before them, but they didn't really know who they were,
- 2:04:45Speaker 1: but they just called them the rubber people.
- 2:04:47Speaker 2: Is it because they lived around rubber trees?
- 2:04:49Speaker 4: Yes.
- 2:04:49Speaker 1: I think it's because they use rubber or something. I'm
- 2:04:51Speaker 1: not 100% sure.
- 2:04:54Speaker 2: So what's the conventional theory about who built these Aztec temples?
- 2:04:59Speaker 1: I think the theory is that it was a culture
- 2:05:02Speaker 1: that came just before the Aztecs that we don't have
- 2:05:06Speaker 1: a name for. But they don't know. Imagine you don't
- 2:05:10Speaker 1: know anything about them.
- 2:05:11Speaker 2: You don't have a name for them. But they made
- 2:05:13Speaker 2: insanely sophisticated architecture with stone.
- 2:05:18Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
- 2:05:19Speaker 2: That mirrored the cosmos.
- 2:05:20Speaker 1: Yeah, no one knows who built the Pyramid of the Sun.
- 2:05:22Speaker 1: I think that's what it's called at Teotihuacan. But it's
- 2:05:25Speaker 1: ginormous and it's incredible. And there's all these different layers
- 2:05:28Speaker 1: to it and incredibly sophisticated. But we don't know who
- 2:05:31Speaker 1: built it. We don't really know when they built it.
- 2:05:33Speaker 1: I mean, we think we know kind of the region,
- 2:05:34Speaker 1: but we don't know. As is the case with so
- 2:05:39Speaker 1: much of this stuff, we do not know.
- 2:05:40Speaker 2: Is there a conventional timeline?
- 2:05:43Speaker 1: For Teotihuacan?
- 2:05:44Speaker 2: Yeah. And what are they basing it on? If they
- 2:05:48Speaker 2: think it came right before the Aztecs? Because I had
- 2:05:50Speaker 2: read as long as 1,000 years before them.
- 2:05:53Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I mean by
- 2:05:55Speaker 1: right before because I'm thinking in these big, big, big–
- 2:05:57Speaker 1: That's a long time. It's a long time, yeah.
- 2:05:58Speaker 2: The United States is not even 300 years old. Yeah, yeah. Yeah,
- 2:06:01Speaker 2: of course.
- 2:06:02Speaker 1: But, yeah, what I'm trying to say is I don't
- 2:06:05Speaker 1: think it's like way.
- 2:06:06Speaker 2: Way, way, way old. Right, right, right, right. So somewhere
- 2:06:09Speaker 2: around 1,000 years before. But that's the thing. It's like
- 2:06:12Speaker 2: how many of these things happened where there was some
- 2:06:15Speaker 2: sort of a civilization and then it collapsed? and then
- 2:06:18Speaker 2: new people came along. The idea that you would have
- 2:06:22Speaker 2: a civilization that was capable of building something as fantastic
- 2:06:27Speaker 2: as some of those Aztec constructions, and then they would
- 2:06:31Speaker 2: just go away.
- 2:06:31Speaker 1: We just lost all memory of it, all memory of it.
- 2:06:34Speaker 1: And then people just wandered up there one day, the Aztecs,
- 2:06:36Speaker 1: and they're like, whoa, what is this?
- 2:06:38Speaker 2: And it was probably covered with jungle, right?
- 2:06:42Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 2:06:43Speaker 2: I mean, how many of those things were just absorbed?
- 2:06:46Speaker 2: by just nature.
- 2:06:50Speaker 1: And it's no wonder that they think it was built
- 2:06:52Speaker 1: by gods, right? Because you see it and you're like,
- 2:06:54Speaker 1: that is incredible.
- 2:06:55Speaker 2: Who built this?
- 2:06:56Speaker 1: It must have been the gods.
- 2:06:57Speaker 2: And there's no one living in it. Fuck.
- 2:07:00Speaker 1: And it just shows how easily human civilizations can reach
- 2:07:03Speaker 1: a really high peak level of sophistication and then go
- 2:07:06Speaker 1: down again and collapse and just all memory of them
- 2:07:08Speaker 1: is gone.
- 2:07:09Speaker 2: Yeah. Any other cool things you've discovered recently?
- 2:07:14Speaker 1: Well, there's also the question of when humans reached Australia,
- 2:07:16Speaker 1: which I think is another really interesting question because the
- 2:07:19Speaker 1: conventional time is 65,000 years ago. And there's a site
- 2:07:23Speaker 1: called Majed Bebe in Northern Australia. And that's the earliest
- 2:07:25Speaker 1: accepted site in Australia. And that's right in the north
- 2:07:28Speaker 1: of the country. And it makes sense because you have
- 2:07:31Speaker 1: to cross water to get to Australia. You have to
- 2:07:33Speaker 1: build boats and cross water. But there's another really interesting
- 2:07:36Speaker 1: site that's right in the south of Australia where archaeologists found...
- 2:07:43Speaker 1: blackened stones again and charcoal and hearth-like structures. And they
- 2:07:47Speaker 1: dated this site to 120,000 years ago, which is double,
- 2:07:52Speaker 1: just about double the time that we think humans were
- 2:07:54Speaker 1: in Australia. And it's in the very south of the country.
- 2:07:57Speaker 1: And the archaeologists that are working there actually wrote in
- 2:08:01Speaker 1: their paper that the evidence supports a cultural origin over
- 2:08:04Speaker 1: a natural origin so they think that it's cultural as
- 2:08:07Speaker 1: in human rather than natural but they can't prove it
- 2:08:11Speaker 1: because there's no associated artifacts and no associated skeletons but
- 2:08:16Speaker 1: they think that it it kind of leans towards being
- 2:08:19Speaker 1: a cultural origin. And obviously if that's correct, that means
- 2:08:24Speaker 1: human beings were only in Australia twice as long as
- 2:08:26Speaker 1: we thought, but also had inhabited the entire continent or
- 2:08:29Speaker 1: not inhabited, but had gone through the entire continent right
- 2:08:32Speaker 1: down to the very South of the country, twice as
- 2:08:35Speaker 1: old as we thought. And it's just another thing that's
- 2:08:37Speaker 1: like pushing it older and older and older. And it's
- 2:08:39Speaker 1: not accepted, but it's so hard to prove these things
- 2:08:42Speaker 1: because we can't find skeletons or we can find skeletons,
- 2:08:46Speaker 1: but it's extremely rare. So, The bar is so high
- 2:08:49Speaker 1: for proof, but this site called Moygill 120,000 years ago is,
- 2:08:55Speaker 1: I think, very strong suggestive evidence that human beings have
- 2:08:58Speaker 1: been in Australia twice as long as we think. And
- 2:09:01Speaker 1: obviously that means that they had to have got there
- 2:09:03Speaker 1: by boat and yeah. That's another interesting one.
- 2:09:06Speaker 2: Wasn't there something that was done on the genetic connection
- 2:09:11Speaker 2: between Australian Aboriginal people and Denisovans? Yeah, yeah.
- 2:09:17Speaker 1: They think that maybe there was different migration pathways and
- 2:09:20Speaker 1: different human species potentially also reached Australia. And it's not
- 2:09:23Speaker 1: that wild because if you think back to the seafaring
- 2:09:26Speaker 1: thing we were talking about earlier, if people were reaching
- 2:09:28Speaker 1: islands over a million years ago, then why couldn't they
- 2:09:30Speaker 1: have reached Australia much earlier than we think?
- 2:09:32Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 2:09:33Speaker 1: Because if we had that capability for so long, Why not?
- 2:09:38Speaker 2: When they do this, is this, I mean, because obviously
- 2:09:42Speaker 2: they didn't even know about Denisovans until 2010. So is
- 2:09:45Speaker 2: this like genetic analysis? And if so, like, do they
- 2:09:51Speaker 2: have genes? Like, how do they get genetic material from
- 2:09:56Speaker 2: these Denisovan skeletons?
- 2:09:57Speaker 1: I think you can take it from... Like a tooth
- 2:10:00Speaker 1: or something? I'm not quite sure, but I think you can.
- 2:10:02Speaker 1: I think they know the kind of genetic makeup of
- 2:10:05Speaker 1: the different human species. So I think you can tell
- 2:10:08Speaker 1: that way if you've got a trace of the DNA.
- 2:10:10Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I was saying. If it's fossilized, do
- 2:10:13Speaker 2: they have actual DNA from Denisovans? And if they do,
- 2:10:17Speaker 2: how are they guessing that people, Aboriginal people in Australia,
- 2:10:23Speaker 2: have some traces of it? Just like Europeans have traces
- 2:10:26Speaker 2: of Neanderthal.
- 2:10:27Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 2:10:27Speaker 1: And also people in.
- 2:10:30Speaker 1: I think like Nepal and these high-altitude places, they have
- 2:10:32Speaker 1: quite high traces of Denisovan DNA, and that's what they
- 2:10:36Speaker 1: think allows them to live in high-altitude environments. They think
- 2:10:38Speaker 1: that Denisovans are more robust than modern humans and can
- 2:10:42Speaker 1: live in more extreme environments. And they think that people
- 2:10:45Speaker 1: that live in those kind of high-altitude regions of the
- 2:10:48Speaker 1: Himalayas and stuff have that kind of gene, if you like.
- 2:10:52Speaker 1: I'm not sure that's the science behind it, but they
- 2:10:55Speaker 1: think they have the traces of that, and that's what
- 2:10:57Speaker 1: allows them to live in these more isolated... high altitude environments.
- 2:11:00Speaker 2: So they think Denisovans lived in high altitude, mostly? Maybe.
- 2:11:04Speaker 2: They don't know. Well, there's only a few bones, right? Exactly.
- 2:11:08Speaker 1: So it's really hard to tell.
- 2:11:10Speaker 2: So fucking interesting, man.
- 2:11:12Speaker 1: And also in that region, they found recently the oldest
- 2:11:16Speaker 1: evidence of advanced surgery, which is like way older than
- 2:11:19Speaker 1: we think. It's like 31,000 years ago. They found some
- 2:11:21Speaker 1: surgery in Borneo, which is again in this same region.
- 2:11:25Speaker 1: I think Indonesia is such a fascinating region because It's
- 2:11:28Speaker 1: the place of where the Sunda Shelf was, where obviously
- 2:11:30Speaker 1: the sea level's risen, have covered a huge expanse of
- 2:11:34Speaker 1: land that used to be land, but now no longer is.
- 2:11:37Speaker 1: And so many interesting discoveries here. But yeah, this surgery
- 2:11:40Speaker 1: thing is, they found the skeleton of a child that
- 2:11:45Speaker 1: had had his leg amputated, but had lived for many, many, many,
- 2:11:50Speaker 1: many years afterwards. And his whole lower leg had been
- 2:11:54Speaker 1: amputated off and but had like healed like completely and
- 2:11:57Speaker 1: he lived like or she i think as a girl
- 2:11:59Speaker 1: lived like a lot longer after that and obviously that's
- 2:12:02Speaker 1: quite an advanced thing to to do right because you
- 2:12:04Speaker 1: have to understand how to prevent infection you have to
- 2:12:08Speaker 1: it's a very humid place as well so it's very
- 2:12:09Speaker 1: hard to survive probably was very painful for that individual
- 2:12:12Speaker 1: but this pushed back our understanding of surgery by like
- 2:12:16Speaker 1: 20 000 no maybe not quite that long i can't
- 2:12:18Speaker 1: remember i think it was like 7 000 years ago
- 2:12:20Speaker 1: so yeah by a long way because this is 31
- 2:12:21Speaker 1: 000 years ago So again, it's showing prehistoric humans to
- 2:12:24Speaker 1: be far more sophisticated than we think. They were performing
- 2:12:27Speaker 1: surgery 31,000 years ago and surviving and living for years afterwards.
- 2:12:32Speaker 2: That is insane. I wonder if they had any pharmacological
- 2:12:37Speaker 2: interventions to deal with the pain.
- 2:12:39Speaker 1: Well, I think they would have used wild plants because
- 2:12:41Speaker 1: we've got so much evidence now of other human species
- 2:12:44Speaker 1: and our human species using wild plants to.
- 2:12:48Speaker 1: For medicinal purposes.
- 2:12:49Speaker 2: Right.
- 2:12:50Speaker 1: We see Neanderthals doing that a long, long time ago,
- 2:12:52Speaker 1: like cultivating wild plants and using them as painkillers and
- 2:12:56Speaker 1: stuff like that.
- 2:12:57Speaker 2: What's going to kill the pain of a fucking amputation? Well,
- 2:13:00Speaker 2: probably not much. Of a bone saw. I know. Right?
- 2:13:04Speaker 2: And they're like, what kind of tools do they have? Like,
- 2:13:06Speaker 2: what were they doing it with? How did they stitch
- 2:13:09Speaker 2: people up? Did they have needles? Did they have thread?
- 2:13:11Speaker 2: Did they just leave the wound open? Like, what did
- 2:13:13Speaker 2: they do?
- 2:13:14Speaker 1: But whatever they did, it worked. And they were sophisticated
- 2:13:17Speaker 1: enough to keep that person alive and to care for
- 2:13:19Speaker 1: them and for them to live years afterwards. Excuse me.
- 2:13:23Speaker 2: It's wild.
- 2:13:24Speaker 1: It's wild. So it's yet more evidence of people being
- 2:13:26Speaker 1: super sophisticated so much longer in time than we thought.
- 2:13:29Speaker 1: And it all points in one direction, man, which is
- 2:13:32Speaker 1: humans have been here longer. They've been more intelligent than
- 2:13:34Speaker 1: we thought for a long, long time.
- 2:13:36Speaker 2: If you had to guess, what do you think is
- 2:13:38Speaker 2: the oldest... real true civilization how long when do you
- 2:13:45Speaker 2: think it started.
- 2:13:46Speaker 1: So i think in terms of like what we call
- 2:13:49Speaker 1: civilization in terms of our current like cycle of it
- 2:13:52Speaker 1: if you like i think it is and whatever came
- 2:13:55Speaker 1: before that but i don't think it would probably been
- 2:13:57Speaker 1: that far further before that but i think that from
- 2:14:00Speaker 1: the onset of the holocene i think we basically started
- 2:14:02Speaker 1: right away all over the globe and you know develop
- 2:14:06Speaker 1: civilization because it happens everywhere right Back to question one,
- 2:14:10Speaker 1: why did it happen everywhere all over the time? Because
- 2:14:11Speaker 1: I think that's what humans do. I think once we
- 2:14:13Speaker 1: get a stable period of climate, we innovate. Because agriculture
- 2:14:18Speaker 1: and civilization can't have been a very hard invention to
- 2:14:22Speaker 1: do because everyone did it. It happened everywhere all over
- 2:14:26Speaker 1: the world. So it's not like a really unique, hard
- 2:14:28Speaker 1: thing to do because people did it everywhere. So that
- 2:14:31Speaker 1: makes me think, what about all the other periods of
- 2:14:33Speaker 1: stable climate that we've had? And now that we know
- 2:14:35Speaker 1: that human beings have been around for so long, we've
- 2:14:37Speaker 1: had It's something like four stable warm periods in the
- 2:14:40Speaker 1: time that we have modern sapient fossils, so 300,000 years.
- 2:14:44Speaker 1: But then if you extrapolate that out to this million-year
- 2:14:47Speaker 1: timescale of modern-sized brains and modern behavior with the seafaring,
- 2:14:51Speaker 1: it's something like 11 warm periods that we've lived through
- 2:14:54Speaker 1: of stable climate conditions that have lasted for over 10,000 years.
- 2:14:59Speaker 1: So you look at each of those warm periods and
- 2:15:00Speaker 1: you think, if agriculture and civilization isn't that hard seismic
- 2:15:06Speaker 1: of an invention to do, Why couldn't it have happened
- 2:15:09Speaker 1: in those previous warm periods, 11 of them going back
- 2:15:11Speaker 1: to a million years and possibly beyond?
- 2:15:13Speaker 2: There's also that very weird phenomenon when someone somewhere figures
- 2:15:18Speaker 2: something out. Even if people aren't connected, other places in
- 2:15:22Speaker 2: the world, people figure it out at the same time.
- 2:15:24Speaker 2: We know that to be the case today. Rupert Sheldrake
- 2:15:27Speaker 2: has a term for it. I think it's called, is
- 2:15:30Speaker 2: it morphic resonance? So his term is also based around
- 2:15:35Speaker 2: theories that they've done with rats and mazes. that if
- 2:15:39Speaker 2: you teach a rat a maze on the East Coast,
- 2:15:41Speaker 2: rats on the West Coast learn it quicker. Really?
- 2:15:44Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 2:15:46Speaker 1: Yeah, he's got lots of interesting work, hasn't he, about
- 2:15:48Speaker 1: kind of almost telepathic... Yeah, weird stuff.
- 2:15:51Speaker 2: Yeah, very weird stuff. There's probably some sort of Akashic record,
- 2:15:55Speaker 2: there's probably some sort of shared field of information that
- 2:16:00Speaker 2: whether or not it's tangible and you can write it
- 2:16:02Speaker 2: down verbatim or whether or not it's some sort of
- 2:16:04Speaker 2: implied concepts and ideas that are transmitted... through the species
- 2:16:10Speaker 2: that like creativity itself is almost like something that we
- 2:16:15Speaker 2: tap into like uniformly as a species.
- 2:16:19Speaker 1: It's like you can like almost like we're in an antenna.
- 2:16:21Speaker 2: Yeah yeah and that like when michael button figures something
- 2:16:24Speaker 2: out someone on the other part of the world's like
- 2:16:27Speaker 2: oh i feel it yeah it's just very weird it's
- 2:16:30Speaker 2: a very weird idea yeah you know and it's It's
- 2:16:34Speaker 2: impossible to prove. You can imply it. And the rat
- 2:16:38Speaker 2: thing is very interesting. I think they've done them with
- 2:16:40Speaker 2: some other things as well. So it's interesting because like
- 2:16:47Speaker 2: if that's not the case, then what do you have,
- 2:16:49Speaker 2: a seafaring civilization that travels the entire globe? Do you
- 2:16:53Speaker 2: have something that's so advanced they figured out how to
- 2:16:57Speaker 2: traverse continents and they're bringing all this information with them?
- 2:17:01Speaker 2: Is it one group? No, it seems like they all
- 2:17:03Speaker 2: kind of figure it out at the same time or roughly.
- 2:17:06Speaker 1: But it is pretty much the same time in comparison
- 2:17:08Speaker 1: to the amount of time that we've been on the planet, right?
- 2:17:10Speaker 1: It's not a coincidence.
- 2:17:11Speaker 2: It's an explosion.
- 2:17:12Speaker 5: Exactly.
- 2:17:12Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 2:17:13Speaker 1: So why? Because the reason given is the climate. That's
- 2:17:16Speaker 1: the old reason. But I think that is the reason because,
- 2:17:19Speaker 1: you know, the climate got warmer. So agriculture, civilization. And yeah,
- 2:17:22Speaker 1: that makes sense. But then why not before? Why not
- 2:17:24Speaker 1: in all of these 11 warm periods where humans have
- 2:17:26Speaker 1: been here and been smart? If it's such a common invention,
- 2:17:30Speaker 1: why didn't it happen before?
- 2:17:31Speaker 5: Right.
- 2:17:31Speaker 2: Maybe it did. Maybe it did. It's also interesting how
- 2:17:34Speaker 2: much stuff, like, if you think about the global temperature, like,
- 2:17:39Speaker 2: where is it always warm? Well, it's always warm around
- 2:17:41Speaker 2: the equator. It kind of always stays warm around there. And, well,
- 2:17:44Speaker 2: what's around there? Well, the Amazon. Yeah, exactly.
- 2:17:48Speaker 1: And even in periods of, yeah, like... the fully glaciated
- 2:17:50Speaker 1: periods some places on the earth were perfectly habitable right
- 2:17:54Speaker 1: so who knows but then i mean and that goes
- 2:17:58Speaker 1: back into the like you say the amazon it goes
- 2:18:00Speaker 1: back into the question of how long have humans been
- 2:18:01Speaker 1: in america because if we've been in america and the
- 2:18:03Speaker 1: america's for a lot longer than we think then people
- 2:18:06Speaker 1: have been in the amazon a lot longer we think
- 2:18:07Speaker 1: and then you look at the discoveries in the amazon
- 2:18:09Speaker 1: and how there's been civilizations there a lot further back
- 2:18:12Speaker 1: in time than we thought. Well, how far back in time? Obviously,
- 2:18:15Speaker 1: the evidence we've seen so far doesn't point like crazy
- 2:18:17Speaker 1: back in time, but we don't know.
- 2:18:19Speaker 2: Well, there's so little evidence. That's the problem. I mean,
- 2:18:22Speaker 2: they're just recently discovering these grids, right? And so how
- 2:18:26Speaker 2: much archaeological work has been done on all these grids?
- 2:18:29Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, exactly. It's so hard. And also the rainforest
- 2:18:32Speaker 1: is such like an extreme recycling kind of natural machine
- 2:18:35Speaker 1: that it's going to destroy anything that's older than... than
- 2:18:39Speaker 1: uh right a few thousand years ago so.
- 2:18:41Speaker 2: It doesn't mean there's not stuff that's older than a
- 2:18:43Speaker 2: few thousand years ago it just means there's nothing left.
- 2:18:46Speaker 1: And they could have built in organic materials that have
- 2:18:48Speaker 1: just decayed and you would never see it and they
- 2:18:51Speaker 1: could have been doing that hundreds of thousands of years
- 2:18:53Speaker 1: ago and who knows so it's wild man it's so
- 2:18:56Speaker 1: wild uh i think there's the potential is all enormous
- 2:19:00Speaker 1: just absolutely enormous and that's why i do what i
- 2:19:03Speaker 1: do because i think it's so fascinating and i love
- 2:19:05Speaker 1: talking about it and i love uh getting other people
- 2:19:09Speaker 1: to think about it. And that's the great privilege of
- 2:19:11Speaker 1: me being able to do this job. So, yeah.
- 2:19:15Speaker 2: Well, it's an important job. It really is. Because those videos,
- 2:19:19Speaker 2: although they are just YouTube and they're entertaining, they're just
- 2:19:24Speaker 2: something that anyone can digest. There's so much valid, fascinating
- 2:19:28Speaker 2: information on them and so many valid questions that we
- 2:19:32Speaker 2: really can't quite answer. And it expands. When people watch them,
- 2:19:37Speaker 2: you get this understanding like, oh, wow, this is a
- 2:19:40Speaker 2: big puzzle. This thing is really complicated. It's a lot
- 2:19:44Speaker 2: more complicated than we've been told, especially by people that
- 2:19:48Speaker 2: want you to believe that they have the answers.
- 2:19:51Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why I hate it. I hate the certainty
- 2:19:53Speaker 1: that people talk about the past because I never talk
- 2:19:55Speaker 1: about it with certainty. I'm not saying this is necessarily true.
- 2:19:58Speaker 1: I'm just saying possibilities everywhere, so many different possibilities. And yeah,
- 2:20:04Speaker 1: everything we seem to discover pushes it in one direction
- 2:20:06Speaker 1: that's older and more intelligent back in time. And yeah,
- 2:20:10Speaker 1: there's so many interesting things. And we barely scratched the
- 2:20:13Speaker 1: surface today.
- 2:20:14Speaker 2: I know. We could do this for days. Before we
- 2:20:17Speaker 2: wrap it up, though, is there any other really interesting
- 2:20:20Speaker 2: ones that you'd like to talk about?
- 2:20:21Speaker 1: Yeah, there was something interesting that came out in regards
- 2:20:24Speaker 1: to writing. There's a couple of interesting things regarding writing.
- 2:20:27Speaker 1: So obviously writing is the kind of marker of civilization.
- 2:20:31Speaker 1: Like writing began, civilization began. but we're starting to see
- 2:20:34Speaker 1: evidence of symbolic meaning being transmitted through symbolic notation, like
- 2:20:40Speaker 1: way back further in time than we believe. So obviously
- 2:20:43Speaker 1: the earliest writing is still thought to be about 4,000
- 2:20:46Speaker 1: BC with the ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform and stuff like that.
- 2:20:49Speaker 1: But as you mentioned, Irvin Finkel, the kind of idea
- 2:20:52Speaker 1: regarding Tashdapella having a similar thing, and that's 12,000 years ago,
- 2:20:56Speaker 1: but there's much, much older evidence of humans conveying information
- 2:21:00Speaker 1: in a symbolic fashion. So there's... An archaeologist called Genevieve
- 2:21:06Speaker 1: von Petzinger, I believe she's called, and she found evidence
- 2:21:08Speaker 1: that on all these Ice Age paintings that we find
- 2:21:12Speaker 1: in Europe with all these incredible like bulls and bison
- 2:21:15Speaker 1: and stuff, and you've probably seen them, but next to
- 2:21:17Speaker 1: them is like this kind of symbol of notation that
- 2:21:19Speaker 1: people have kind of overlooked for years. But she found
- 2:21:24Speaker 1: 32 recurring signs across a period of 30,000 years all
- 2:21:28Speaker 1: across the continent. And these signs, she thinks, like a,
- 2:21:32Speaker 1: not a language as such, but a kind of a
- 2:21:34Speaker 1: system of encoding meaning. Yeah, there you go.
- 2:21:37Speaker 2: They're the signs.
- 2:21:38Speaker 1: And she kind of makes the argument that these signs
- 2:21:41Speaker 1: are not a language as such, but a kind of
- 2:21:45Speaker 1: tradition of conveying information that lasted for 30,000 years. And
- 2:21:51Speaker 1: that is such a long length of time. Like if
- 2:21:53Speaker 1: you think about the oldest language Today, I think it's
- 2:21:56Speaker 1: ancient Chinese and that's only a few thousand years old.
- 2:21:59Speaker 1: And yet these signs appear all across the continent of
- 2:22:02Speaker 1: Europe across a time span of 30,000 years. Pretty much
- 2:22:06Speaker 1: exactly the same and just these signs. And they also
- 2:22:09Speaker 1: find them in other continents as well. And she doesn't
- 2:22:12Speaker 1: say there's any connection there. I'm not sure there is
- 2:22:14Speaker 1: any connection there.
- 2:22:15Speaker 2: The spirals are really weird. They find spirals all over
- 2:22:20Speaker 2: the place, right?
- 2:22:21Speaker 5: Yeah.
- 2:22:22Speaker 1: They find these signs all over the world. Jamie, you
- 2:22:23Speaker 1: might be able to find a.
- 2:22:26Speaker 2: All over the world.
- 2:22:27Speaker 1: Yeah, there's like a cool map where they kind of
- 2:22:28Speaker 1: point where it's all found. If you scroll down a
- 2:22:30Speaker 1: little bit on the left, that one, yeah.
- 2:22:35Speaker 2: You see this. That's really blurry.
- 2:22:37Speaker 1: Yeah, once it loads. But it's all over the world.
- 2:22:42Speaker 2: There you go.
- 2:22:42Speaker 1: And it's the same signs. Wow.
- 2:22:47Speaker 2: That's crazy. So the same signs in Europe, North America,
- 2:22:52Speaker 2: Central Africa, South America. Southern Africa, Australia, Malaysia, East Africa,
- 2:22:59Speaker 2: New Guinea. Wow. Borneo, Myanmar.
- 2:23:05Speaker 1: And she thinks it's like a much older symbolic tradition
- 2:23:08Speaker 1: that humans have kind of carried with them in the
- 2:23:11Speaker 1: kind of migratory routes. And it actually goes back much
- 2:23:14Speaker 1: older than the Ice Age art date of like 40,000 years,
- 2:23:17Speaker 1: but actually comes from when humans first reached Europe out
- 2:23:20Speaker 1: of Africa and spreading across the world. And we've kind
- 2:23:22Speaker 1: of kept the same tradition of conveying information. And again,
- 2:23:26Speaker 1: this has massive implications for human intelligence because even though
- 2:23:30Speaker 1: it's not a full language, the ability to convey information
- 2:23:34Speaker 1: in a symbolic way is a marker of really sophisticated intelligence.
- 2:23:38Speaker 1: And so it's another really interesting discovery that kind of
- 2:23:41Speaker 1: points towards intelligence. And also to maintain that tradition over
- 2:23:46Speaker 1: such a long length of time is really interesting because
- 2:23:50Speaker 1: we don't really do that. As I say, the oldest
- 2:23:52Speaker 1: language is ancient Chinese and it's only a few thousand
- 2:23:54Speaker 1: years old. And yet these people somehow managed to pass
- 2:23:57Speaker 1: on this language, quote unquote, for 30,000 years.
- 2:24:02Speaker 2: Have you ever heard anybody discuss the concept that human
- 2:24:05Speaker 2: beings might have had some sort of telepathy that atrophied
- 2:24:13Speaker 2: when we started using language and writing and communicating with words?
- 2:24:17Speaker 1: Well, what's really interesting is the human brain size has
- 2:24:20Speaker 1: decreased since Civilization began.
- 2:24:23Speaker 4: Uh-huh.
- 2:24:24Speaker 1: Which is strange. And it makes sense because if everything
- 2:24:27Speaker 1: was oral before, you need more of your brain to
- 2:24:30Speaker 1: hold all the information. But once you can kind of
- 2:24:33Speaker 1: outsource it to physical objects, you don't need so much brain, like,
- 2:24:38Speaker 1: size and space.
- 2:24:40Speaker 2: How much has it decreased?
- 2:24:41Speaker 1: I can't remember off the top of my head. But
- 2:24:43Speaker 1: I don't think that's even controversial. I think there's quite
- 2:24:45Speaker 1: a lot of evidence that the human brain size has
- 2:24:47Speaker 1: decreased a little bit in the last 10,000 years or whatever.
- 2:24:51Speaker 2: Well, what... Weren't like there was some ancient people that
- 2:24:55Speaker 2: thought writing was a bad idea and that you should
- 2:24:58Speaker 2: you should remember everything and that writing and writing things
- 2:25:02Speaker 2: down was actually going to degrade your memory.
- 2:25:04Speaker 1: Well, I think it certainly does, because you don't need
- 2:25:07Speaker 1: that brain like part of your brain anymore if you're
- 2:25:10Speaker 1: not memorizing all the information you have. Like, and it
- 2:25:12Speaker 1: makes us smarter as a whole, as a civilization.
- 2:25:15Speaker 2: Of course. And then if you extrapolate, so do hard drives.
- 2:25:17Speaker 5: Exactly.
- 2:25:18Speaker 1: Well, it's happening on an even bigger scale now with
- 2:25:20Speaker 1: AI and stuff like that.
- 2:25:21Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. Same process, though. Like, people talk about chat
- 2:25:24Speaker 2: GPT decreasing people's intelligence.
- 2:25:26Speaker 1: Well, because it outsources thinking itself, which is a crazy step.
- 2:25:30Speaker 2: And we're going to just go like a raisin. Exactly.
- 2:25:33Speaker 1: So, I mean, maybe we're regressing. But I think as
- 2:25:38Speaker 1: a civilization, we're learning more.
- 2:25:40Speaker 2: Yes, collectively.
- 2:25:41Speaker 5: But as the individual.
- 2:25:42Speaker 2: Right.
- 2:25:42Speaker 1: Maybe we're aggressive.
- 2:25:43Speaker 2: And our potential to learn and just remember things. Like
- 2:25:47Speaker 2: when I just from when I was a boy, I
- 2:25:48Speaker 2: knew everybody's phone number. Yeah. And now I don't know anybody.
- 2:25:51Speaker 2: I know like three people's phone numbers.
- 2:25:53Speaker 1: Because we don't have to memorize anymore.
- 2:25:54Speaker 2: Exactly.
- 2:25:55Speaker 1: It's wild.
- 2:25:56Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
- 2:25:57Speaker 1: And there's also another paper that came out regarding language,
- 2:26:00Speaker 1: which is they found over 200 objects. And it's around
- 2:26:05Speaker 1: the same date, around 40,000 years ago. And they basically
- 2:26:08Speaker 1: found like a proto-writing script that had the same level
- 2:26:10Speaker 1: of complexity as the early Sumerian scripts from 3000 BC,
- 2:26:14Speaker 1: but from 40,000 years ago in Ice Age Europe. Again,
- 2:26:18Speaker 1: so it's like another kind of proto-language, symbolic thinking and
- 2:26:24Speaker 1: conveying meaning through symbols. I don't know if, I can't
- 2:26:27Speaker 1: quite remember off the top of my head, Jamie, but
- 2:26:28Speaker 1: if you type in like, it was this year. So
- 2:26:31Speaker 1: if you type in P-N-A-S, proto-writing script, 40,000 years ago
- 2:26:37Speaker 1: or something. They found it like loads of like symbols
- 2:26:40Speaker 1: engraved on bones. And they argued that it was the
- 2:26:42Speaker 1: same level of complexity as the early Sumerian scripts. And again,
- 2:26:46Speaker 1: this was the marker of civilization 3000 BC, but now it's,
- 2:26:51Speaker 1: this capability is so much older now because of these
- 2:26:53Speaker 1: new discoveries.
- 2:26:54Speaker 2: Yeah. I saw that. It's really weird. Like when you're
- 2:26:56Speaker 2: looking at the writing, like, okay, what are they like
- 2:26:58Speaker 2: the little scratches on the bones and clay and whatever
- 2:27:01Speaker 2: it is. What are they conveying? Do we even understand
- 2:27:05Speaker 2: what they're conveying or just assume they're conveying something?
- 2:27:09Speaker 1: Well, I think they categorized it and they seem to
- 2:27:11Speaker 1: think it is a kind of proto-script.
- 2:27:15Speaker 2: Fucking weird, man. Like that's a script?
- 2:27:19Speaker 1: Well, yeah, like a proto-script. So like the kind of
- 2:27:21Speaker 1: thing that became language.
- 2:27:22Speaker 2: But Right, so there had to be a precursor to language.
- 2:27:25Speaker 1: A written language. But if it existed 40,000 years ago,
- 2:27:29Speaker 1: it's so much older than we used to think this
- 2:27:31Speaker 1: capability emerged. Yeah. And what does that kind of entail?
- 2:27:35Speaker 2: Can I see that again, Jamie, the images? How weird.
- 2:27:39Speaker 2: And so at the bottom, that looks a lot like cuneiform.
- 2:27:41Speaker 1: I think these, I think these ones are examples of
- 2:27:43Speaker 1: more advanced, but they're saying it's at the same level
- 2:27:45Speaker 1: as this, but 40,000 years ago, which is vastly older
- 2:27:50Speaker 1: than cuneiform.
- 2:27:55Speaker 2: It's so interesting.
- 2:27:56Speaker 3: Okay.
- 2:27:57Speaker 2: I'm sure you've seen the, we talked about this yesterday
- 2:27:59Speaker 2: as well, the Italian guy who came up with this
- 2:28:03Speaker 2: concept of erosion dating. Oh, on the pyramids. Yeah. That's
- 2:28:09Speaker 2: another weird one. It was like at the high end,
- 2:28:11Speaker 2: he thinks it might be 20 plus thousand years old.
- 2:28:14Speaker 2: It's like, okay, what? Yeah.
- 2:28:16Speaker 1: Yeah, because he compared the erosion, because there was an
- 2:28:19Speaker 1: earthquake like 500 years ago that kind of shook all
- 2:28:21Speaker 1: these casing stones off.
- 2:28:22Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 2:28:22Speaker 1: And he compared the erosion to.
- 2:28:25Speaker 1: With the blocks that had always been exposed with the
- 2:28:26Speaker 1: ones that had recently become exposed. And yeah, he got
- 2:28:29Speaker 1: this day. I mean, I'd like to see that method,
- 2:28:31Speaker 1: like tried and tested on sites we know the age
- 2:28:33Speaker 1: of and, you know, proven that way before I take
- 2:28:36Speaker 1: that too seriously. But, you know, it's interesting.
- 2:28:39Speaker 2: It's all interesting. Listen, your show is super interesting. I'm
- 2:28:43Speaker 2: so glad you're around. I'm so glad there's someone like
- 2:28:46Speaker 2: you that's willing to do that kind of work. Because
- 2:28:48Speaker 2: obviously Jamie and I are not going to do it.
- 2:28:51Speaker 2: Not this week. but we're super happy to have you
- 2:28:54Speaker 2: in anytime you've got some new stuff you want to
- 2:28:56Speaker 2: talk about. And I'm really excited that your channel just
- 2:28:59Speaker 2: keeps growing because it's really good, man. You can really
- 2:29:02Speaker 2: tell you put in so much work and so much
- 2:29:04Speaker 2: effort and research and it's just excellent. It's super entertaining
- 2:29:07Speaker 2: and it's right up my alley.
- 2:29:08Speaker 1: So I appreciate it, Joe.
- 2:29:10Speaker 2: Thanks for being the fucking man.
- 2:29:12Speaker 1: Thank you, man. Well, straight back at you. And I
- 2:29:14Speaker 1: really appreciate all the support you've shown me. Like it
- 2:29:16Speaker 1: doesn't go unnoticed, man. Like it, it really means a lot. And, uh, Yeah,
- 2:29:21Speaker 1: if I could just do a little self-plug real quick.
- 2:29:23Speaker 1: I've got my channel, Michael Button, search it up, everyone,
- 2:29:27Speaker 1: and check me out. But also, I just started a
- 2:29:28Speaker 1: second channel called Patterns of History because I'm really interested in,
- 2:29:33Speaker 1: once we move into recorded history, it's really interesting to
- 2:29:36Speaker 1: see how when the silence lifts and we have these
- 2:29:39Speaker 1: ruins we can cross-check and these dates we can kind
- 2:29:42Speaker 1: of match to different civilizations. It's so interesting how civilizations
- 2:29:46Speaker 1: seem to follow the same patterns all over the world
- 2:29:49Speaker 1: of rise, collapse, fall, and things like that. And it
- 2:29:52Speaker 1: applies today. I think we see the same patterns happening
- 2:29:55Speaker 1: and civilizations always think that they're more advanced and there
- 2:30:00Speaker 1: we go.
- 2:30:00Speaker 2: Thanks.
- 2:30:01Speaker 1: And better than the ones before.
- 2:30:02Speaker 2: But right.
- 2:30:03Speaker 1: I mean, it's another fucking, I could go on for
- 2:30:05Speaker 1: another three hours on that, but it's so, it's so
- 2:30:08Speaker 1: interesting how we see the same recurring patterns happen throughout
- 2:30:11Speaker 1: civilizations across recorded history as well. So that's like another
- 2:30:14Speaker 1: little project that I'm, I'm working on, but I'm still a,
- 2:30:18Speaker 1: I'm still going to go as hard as I possibly
- 2:30:19Speaker 1: can on the kind of archaeological lost history side of things.
- 2:30:22Speaker 2: Well, it's beautiful that you have so much time to
- 2:30:24Speaker 2: do two different channels too. It's awesome.
- 2:30:26Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I'm trying my best.
- 2:30:28Speaker 2: Well, you're kicking ass, dude. Congratulations. It's awesome. Always great
- 2:30:31Speaker 2: to have you. Thank you for being here. One more time,
- 2:30:34Speaker 2: people want to see your channel. They want to find you.
- 2:30:36Speaker 2: What's the best place? I know you're on Spotify now
- 2:30:38Speaker 2: as well, right? So just audio?
- 2:30:40Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it's the videos as well.
- 2:30:41Speaker 2: It's exactly the same.
- 2:30:42Speaker 1: Yeah, I just put them up there so people can,
- 2:30:44Speaker 1: if people, some people prefer to listen, they let me
- 2:30:45Speaker 1: know that.
- 2:30:46Speaker 2: So I put it out there.
- 2:30:47Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 2:30:47Speaker 1: So yeah, I've got both my channels. I'm also about
- 2:30:49Speaker 1: to make some music.
- 2:30:50Speaker 2: People should check out my music.
- 2:30:51Speaker 5: Oh, really?
- 2:30:51Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm in a band.
- 2:30:52Speaker 2: This is my band. Oh, that's the Alien Head?
- 2:30:54Speaker 1: That's why I keep wearing the Alien Head, yeah.
- 2:30:56Speaker 2: Oh, what's the name of your band?
- 2:30:57Speaker 1: We're called Headache. Can you get it? It's like the headache, yeah.
- 2:31:03Speaker 1: So if people want to check that out, it's cool.
- 2:31:04Speaker 2: What kind of music? Punk rock. Oh, you're a fucking
- 2:31:07Speaker 2: punk rocker.
- 2:31:07Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm a punk rocker, bro. I used to do
- 2:31:09Speaker 1: that all the time and then COVID kind of fucked
- 2:31:11Speaker 1: us up and we couldn't perform live and our drummer
- 2:31:12Speaker 1: moved to Australia. But we're going to try to make
- 2:31:16Speaker 1: some music again in the near future, so.
- 2:31:17Speaker 2: That's awesome.
- 2:31:18Speaker 1: Thisisheadache.com if people want to check that out.
- 2:31:21Speaker 2: But, yeah. Check it out. All right. Michael, thank you.
- 2:31:24Speaker 2: Appreciate it, Joe. Look at that.
- 2:31:25Speaker 1: There you go.
- 2:31:26Speaker 2: Get us on. Moody-looking motherfuckers.
- 2:31:28Speaker 5: Yeah, the boys.
- 2:31:29Speaker 1: The guy in the back.
- 2:31:30Speaker 2: Get your hair out of your eyes, bro.
- 2:31:31Speaker 1: Can't see you like that.
- 2:31:33Speaker 2: All right. Bye, everybody. Bye.