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#096 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman with Michael Button · INSPIRE STORY

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