#2546 - Michael Button

0:00You're a real good boy, Matt, check it out! The Joe, Rogan, experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night! All day! Hey, good to see you brother, what's going on? Good, man, it's been, um... I spent a wild year for me. I've had it a husband. Since I was last here, I mean, I've seen my YouTube growth and numbers I couldn't have imagined before. I've met so many cool people. I managed to get to a point where it's now my job to research and investigate ancient history and the vast mysteries of our past. And yeah, I mean, that's something I was doing for three before. So the fact that I'm now able to do that full time is just an immense privilege. And I'm so grateful to everyone that's helped me get there, including you. Well, you're putting out fantastic content. Thank you. And it's such an interesting subject. And the giant blind spot that the mainstream archaeologists have left

1:02has allowed all these people to go through and get a much larger audience even than them. And it's really important when someone like you does it, because you're so thorough and you're so objective and you're so... You're so measured in the way you describe these things and talk about these things. There's no fantastic claims, no hyperbole. It's all very well laid out. And even when you go to extreme possibilities of these things, it's very measured. So I really appreciate that. Well, thank you. I appreciate you saying that. And yeah, yeah, I'm always trying to make it as good as I possibly can. And I try and list to what people say and try to improve. And I don't think I've reached the peak of where I could possibly be, but I'm trying my hardest. But it's not just that. I mean, as you say, I think there are so many people out there. And now that I'm in this position, I've seen it firsthand. Like millions and millions of people around the world that are deeply fascinated by these questions, by the vast mysteries of our past. As well, they should be. And they also know that we're getting a very narrow version of it from mainstream academics.

2:05And they are so determined to cling to their timelines and cling to this notion that anything new that's discovered by people outside of their little circle can't be accurate. And I think that's so silly. Yeah. I mean, I think someone like me has the kind of advantage of the fact that because I, you know, didn't continue my career in academia, or I wasn't in academia, but that was the pathway that I was on. Right. Because I've gone independent now. I kind of have the freedom, if you like to talk about these ideas and I'm much more open way than maybe I would have been able to if I was, well, wouldn't been able to if I was still in academia because, you know, I'm not restricted by funding or I'm not restricted by even the pressures of, you know, people working in academia, hating on me, I mean, I get a lot of hate anyway, but I mean, I think I have that freedom to almost come up things from a completely open-minded perspective and speak about these ideas without any restrictions. And I think that is the advantage that I have that academics perhaps don't.

3:10So yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm in a great place. Yeah, so let's get into it. So in the last year, a lot of wild stuff has been discovered, which is really exciting. It's so interesting how quick this stuff is moving. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, there's been, I think two papers in particular that have come out in the year since I was last here on the show that I think have huge ramifications for how we view history. So, I mean, I don't know what to start. I mean, I think we should start like this. I think as things currently stand, there are three huge questions. The archaeology cannot answer. And it's interesting because these three questions we used to think we had an answer to, but in light of new discoveries, in light of new evidence coming up, we no longer have the answer to these questions. And I think that's fascinating because it's almost like the rug has been pulled out from underneath our understanding of human history. But on the surface, it's kind of like business as usual. Do you know what I mean?

4:12So what are these questions? So, I mean, and this is just coming from me, right? Okay. And caveat on the whole conversation, I'm not an academic, I'm not a professional archaeologist. I mean, I have a degree in ancient history, but I think my main qualification is that I'm a super nerd for all this stuff. And I spend my whole life researching it. So that's the caveat on everything. So don't take what I say as gospel, and I always encourage people to go and look at the actual archaeology, go and read the journals, read the papers, and go investigate what you're self, for yourself, like listen to what I say, but don't take what I say as gospel, because the end of the day, I'm just a YouTuber, you know? So that's the caveat I want to put on it. But from my mind, these are the three questions that I think archaeology can no longer answer, but used to think it had an answer for. So the first question is, and we spoke about this a little bit last time, is the fascinating question of why, after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of human beings, like us being on this planet, why did it take so long for civilization to emerge? And then why, when it did, did it emerge in all these different, unconnected locations all over the globe,

5:17pretty much the exact same time. So we see civilization flourishing in Mesoamerica, we see civilization flourishing in South America, in Egypt, in the Indus Valley, in Mesopotamia, in India, in China, all around about the same time, give or take a thousand or so years, but compared to the time span of human beings on this planet, you know, 300,000 years plus for modern humans, and I would argue some of these papers are showing that it could be a lot longer than that. Why, after so long, did civilization suddenly crop up all over the place? And we no longer can answer that question in light of new discoveries. So that's question one, why did civilization emerge everywhere, all at once after so long of not doing so? Question two is, how old is human intelligence? How long have humans been intelligent? How long has a mind like ours really inhabited this planet? And I think two papers in particular that have come out in the 12 months since I was here have huge ramifications for that question.

6:25And also, combining to that is the question of other human species. How intelligent were other human species? Because we used to think that we were the smart ones. I mean, our name, Homo sapiens, literally translates to Y's man, which is an incredibly humble thing for us to say about ourselves. But, yeah, so that's question two, how old is human intelligence? And again, I think the answer is, we don't have the answer anymore. So that's really fascinating. And then question three is, when did humans first reach the more isolated land masses? So that's the Americas where we are right now. And also Australia, which is perhaps less important, but still interesting. And again, we don't have the answer for that anymore. And I think whatever the answer is to these three questions, why the civilization appear everywhere all at once, how old is human intelligence? And when did humans first reach the more isolated parts of the world? The answer to those questions, whatever it is, I think is fundamentally important because whatever the answer is is the reason we're all here, right?

7:29It's the reason we all live in this civilization. It's the reason we all enjoy the fruits of everything that we exist in today. And yet we don't know the answer anymore. But as I said on the surface, everyone's kind of carrying on like its business as usual, but we no longer know the answer to the most fundamental questions of how we got here. So, yeah. So for question number one, why did all of these civilizations emerge roughly the same time? What do you think? Do you think that this is incorrect? And that these civilizations probably existed far earlier than that, but there's no evidence of them because of time and just erosion and natural catastrophes and fill in the blank, all the factors. And, or we have not discovered some of these yet, like some of the weirdness of the Amazon, you know, as they find these, what would appear to be the grids of ancient cities that are hidden in the jungle that they're discovering with the LIDAR and these other technologies that were unavailable until fairly recently.

8:38So we know that not only was the Amazon filled with people, but it was filled with millions of people, and that's crazy. That is a crazy shift in the way we used to look at the Amazon just a few decades ago. And we don't know who these people were. We don't know, like if you go really far back, like the Olmex is just a word, we gave them that word. We don't know what the fuck they were doing. We have no idea what they looked like. We know some of the heads look roughly either Polynesian or perhaps even African. It's very strange, very strange, big giant heads that are left behind and that's like the cornerstone of what we understand about the civilization. Okay. What? How long? 6,000 years, we think? Who knows? It's just a rough guess. Like there's really nothing to go on. Do you think that this is just like as far back as we can find stuff? Or do you think, what do you think?

9:38Well, I think in terms of the civilization question, I think it's just, I think it's an old idea that we kind of drew this line. And the line is the invention of writing. So it's through around 3,000, 4,000 BC was the invention of writing or supposedly was the invention of writing. And that in the 20th century was kind of given as the marker of civilization. We were finding all these civilizations in the 20th century, like ancient Sumer. And so that was kind of given as the start of civilization. But I think in terms of like more recent stuff. So 3,000 BC back to like 12,000 BC, I think the answer is that clearly civilization is older. I mean, considering we see things like Tash de Pelleux, a Beclitepe, 12,000 years ago. I think that is a civilization. I think over time that will come to be accepted as a civilization. And I think whatever you want to define civilization as, I think we can now clearly say that it did exist 12,000 years ago rather than 6,000 years ago. So that's a kind of doubling of the timeline. In terms of going back much further than that, I think then you get into purely hypothetical scenarios, like is it possible? And that's when I think things like the history of human intelligence start to come into play because it was incredibly recently that we thought humans were only got intelligent.

10:50We thought humans were young, like only 100,000 years old, only a few decades ago. And now we know we're much older than that. And so this is how I mean about everything kind of being back on the table again, because we now have an incredibly increased time span of human intelligence that I would argue in our comes this later stretches over a million years. And yet the old idea, which is still sort of in place, but I think is breaking. I think most archaeologists would accept that is breaking. But the old idea was that humans only became a part of the world. Humans only became intelligent around 50,000 years ago. And so because that idea kind of was in hold, it almost made sense, right? So humans only existed from 100,000 years ago, then got smart 50,000 years ago. Then the climate got good around 14,000 years ago. We see the agricultural revolution and the emergence of the first civilizations, like it was very neat, you know what I mean? But now in light of new evidence and in light of new discoveries. Suddenly everything's back on the table, suddenly the whole time span of prehistory or not the whole of prehistory, but I would argue and I'll get on to why I think this later, I would argue that the time span of human intelligence has increased by 20 times from 50,000 to over a million years. And I'll explain why in a minute. But I think that puts everything back on the table.

12:05I think the possibilities of prehistory are so vast now because of our understanding has shifted so dramatically in the last few decades. And I don't think anyone's really talking about it. And that's kind of why I do what I do because I really want to bang this drum if you like the. Everything's back on the table, as I say and so yeah, I kind of got a bit sidetracked there from the original question. Well, that's a no, it's a great start. Jesse Michaels was here yesterday and he had a really fascinating theory. I don't know if it's that his theory or is it someone else's theory, the the ergot theory. His theory was that he believes that agriculture and that as they started agriculture wasn't just significant in that you could like stay in one place and you would have food and you always had a reliable diet. You didn't have to worry about starving to death and then you because you had that sort of relaxation that came with that you could start inventing things and building things and civilisation would advance.

13:07He thinks it's also because ergot grows on these different weets and barley and grains and that these people, whether knowingly or unknowingly, were probably ingesting this psychedelic substance, which is akin to LSD. And that this was a key part of what Brian Merer-Resky talked about in the Illusinian mysteries in his great book The Immortality Key and that this was probably what led to a lot of invention, a lot of innovation, a lot of alternative thought, a lot of creativity and a lot of like, you know, whatever the wild advancements of the time were. Did you see that they just not proved it but they just they just did a study on the Illusinian mysteries where they kind of showed that they they were doing they did have a ergot because when Brian wrote that book they hadn't proved that but something just came out. Did you see the it was a puma bone pipe that they found that tested positive for DMT?

14:10No, I think it was I don't it might have been in the American now where was that Peru yes, yes, how old is that Jamie? See if you can put that in a perplexity if it knows what this is all about because it's a fascinating subject because not only does it not imply that they were willingly taking psychedelic drugs it somehow or another they knew how to make DMT. Like okay what because that's a complicated process when you have to separate the molecule from whatever planted in and then you have to figure out that you need to free base that are smoke it like how what this is actually a northwestern Argentina. The Inca Cueva a high altitude cave site in jujoy northwestern Argentina the tubular smoking pipes are made from the long bones of a puma they were found alongside and a denanthera and a denanthera seeds including the plant commonly associated with villi.

15:25Vilca Sebil snuff traditions residue testing detected triptamine alkaloids in the pipes so they were figuring out how to take these seeds and smoke them. The materials been dated to roughly 2,130 BCE over 4,000 years ago that makes the fine amongst the oldest direct archaeological evidence for intentional use of psychoactive anadenthera and a denanthera and a den sorry scientists in the southern and these that's fucking crazy the careful answer is DMT was detected in pipe residues. But anadenthera colubrina is not simply a DMT plant its psychoactive chemistry can include bufatin in DMT and 5 meo DMT in varying quantities depending on plant material and preparation the archaeological interpretation is that the pipes were used in a ritual context involving one more time and then anthera rather than prove that the plant is in the same way as the plant.

16:38Rather than prove that people were using modern purified DMT either way they're smoking whatever the fuck that stuff is they're getting DMT from it so they had figured out somehow or another that ingesting it through smoke. Now one of the reasons why this is particularly significant is there's scholars out of I think it's the University of Jerusalem that believe that the burning bush that Moses encountered some kind of psychedelic that's what that's exactly what they think they think the translation was it was they believe it was possibly the cacetry which is apparently rich in DMT so that Moses has Moses trips ball and get some really good solid rules to live by and comes back with them and said hey this is what God said. Yeah I mean I think there's clearly the case that ancient cultures not just in South America but across the world were using psychedelic substances and yeah that's interesting I mean the theory of whether that caused agriculture whether that led to civilization or anything like that I mean I don't know but it's certainly interesting that human beings seem to have been experimenting with cycle

17:51active substances for a long long long long long time and yeah let's pass the name. Yeah and much like in our culture today and you know especially what happened in 1970 where all that stuff was demonized and put on schedule one back then during the Illusionian mysteries the reason why those mysteries stopped is because the powers that they were like hey these guys are a fucking problem these trippy dudes they're weird ideas who invented democracy they're gonna fuck this up. We're not gonna be able to run it and tell everybody what to do and force them to go on a war. Yeah I know you know the powers that be always want to restrict any kind of like thought that's outside of the what they want people to think they don't want people to think as freely as as they can and I guess anything that limits their control. Yeah. You know because we everybody wants control and there's always new groups that say you don't know what the fuck you're doing let me take the realm and that's always been the case. Which is probably good for people you know it probably is what leads to I mean not the more part of it but probably these new ideas is what leads to an advancement of civilization rather than stagnation that we find in some places in the world where they haven't had a chance to do that.

19:05Yeah you know like my friends have been to Afghanistan they had to serve over there essentially saying that like this they're living like people lived thousands of years ago. There's warlords and they control regions and that's how they've always done it and they live this weird nomadic lifestyle in the mountains and it's not much different than the way it was thousands and thousands of years ago. Very clown like a way to live in. Yeah and if you don't have if that guy and this these groups is staying control forever like it's like there's no motivation for them to change and evolve and grow. Nothing's no innovation or anything. Yeah nothing's happening also they're stuck in the mountains. Yeah. You're just trying to live. But you know when you we think of these places these very fertile places on earth where like particularly Turkey Turkey is fascinating. You know and many people are now speculating that that if there is a singular place that but that might have been one of the birthplaces of true civilization.

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21:09Check it out. This ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience. I think it undoubtedly is I think Tash Depello which is in modern day Turkey is the earliest evidence in my view of something akin to civilization and now archaeologists will say it's not civilization because it doesn't quite tick off every part of the checklist but. I think that's neither here nor there I think it's clearly a very sophisticated culture. I mean you have like 14 sites there now clearly shown to be into link shared symbolism shared religious traditions same architectural styles very impressive architecture clearly organized labor stratified society because how do you achieve that without someone at the top and someone below and these are all things that we used to think were civilization right and yet people are happy with us calling a Tash Depello or civilization but I think it will get the. But don't you think that's just because of them trying to protect their timeline that they've been teaching yeah and I think it will change I think it will change I don't think there's any other explanation of that I mean it fits as you said all the criteria for civilization that we used to apply and the fact that they were moving the goalposts just because they didn't know existed and they're finding residential buildings a good backly tapay now and that was always one that used to say that people didn't live there they must have migrated there but now they're finding that people did live there like I guess permanently or at least semi permanently yeah there's all the sites and.

22:30Quite a vast area all connected and so the only ones they haven't got now is is writing and there's an interesting discovery regarding writing at Gobekli tepe and agriculture yeah we talked about that yesterday the other thing think with it yes yes yeah really interesting so are those we see those pillars are those sites where you have like the those concentric circles I assume so those are the famous ones anyway kada han tepe Gobekli tepe safer tepe those are the biggest ones and I think its really interesting to see the most interesting and it will be of the best place I can see the most interesting things here the most interesting things. really interesting. So, those pillars are those sites where you have those concentric circles. I assume so. Those are the famous ones anyway. Cartagon, tapie, gobekli, tapie, safer, tapie. Those are the biggest ones. And only 5% of gobekli tapie currently has even been excavated, right? Which is pretty crazy. When you think like, okay, how many of them are also still underground? How many do we know only exist because of ground penetrating radar and all the other techniques? Yeah, I mean, it's wild. Like, gobekli tapie, if all of it was excavated, is something like 50 times larger than Stonehenge and Stonehenge is obviously an incredibly famous site. And yet, it's so much bigger and like, to be clear, it is standard archaeological practice to

23:34not excavate too much of a site. But what are we looking at here? That's gobekli tapie. And what are we looking at in terms of these grids? I think maybe that's the kind of archaeological, but I think I'm not 100% sure. It seems like it, right? Because it seems like the grids go on top of these circles, which doesn't make any sense. So, obviously, they have to go very slowly. The risk of destroying some incredible find, some beautiful ancient thing because you're using tractors or something like this. It's valid. It is valid. But I would argue, and I've said this before, is the gobekli tapie as a site that has such important ramifications for our understanding of civilization and the origins of civilization that it should receive special treatment, right? Because it is the oldest site that looks like civilization. So, I always think that maybe we should not, obviously, you want to be careful when you go in and you want to follow correct archaeological procedure, but at the same time, what if a relic equivalent to the reset of stone, the one stone

24:36that we found that completely translated Egyptian hieroglyphs and opened up ancient Egypt to our understanding? What if some kind of equivalent artifact is hiding in the unexgivated 95% of gobekli tapie? That could be waiting for that for us to find. I've talked about this before, Joe. Yeah. I don't remember ever seeing it, but it's not new, but it was also found that gobekli tapie was painted. I think like some of the mouth was painted red. It's crazy looking. It's life-sized. Pretty close to life-sized. The whole thing is really fascinating because it's also, I think it's the first evidence of 3D carving in stone too. Yeah, it's really, I think it's not. Yeah, well, that's not she, but what we're saying about that is, like, these boars and snakes and all these different animals that are on these incredible pillars. They're not carved into it. The stone is carved around it, which is advanced. It takes sophisticated use of tools and understanding

25:38how to work stone to be able to do something like that. Crucially specialization, right? That's someone's job. They're not out there gathering food. That's their job. That's how they spend their time. It's also, hey, how'd you move those? What those stones are huge? What are the biggest ones are? How many, how heavy are they? Most of them are like 10 tons, but they found one that hadn't been moved by the quarry that was something like 50 tons. Obviously, they would have assumed that they would have had a method to move that. I was, they wouldn't have carved out. 50 tons is high and stubby little peckers. Clutching. Clutching their peckers? Yeah. Okay. Whatever you're into, bro, must have been a weird world back then. Then the real question is, is this the oldest civilization or is this the oldest reboot of civilization that was destroyed by the great flood and by the younger, driest impact and whatever the fuck could have happened to whatever civilization previously existed? That's what things get real squirrelly. Yeah, well,

26:42exactly because if that is a civilization, which I think it's become clear that it is, and it doesn't really matter how you define civilization, it's clearly incredibly sophisticated. It's a very sophisticated world. Yeah, that word is a problem. Exactly. Who cares? It's clearly very sophisticated. It's like when Fauci was talking about gain of function. Like a fucker. You know what we're talking about. Exactly. But yeah, that means that the timeline of civilization, whatever you want to call it, has doubled from 6000 years to 12,000 years. So then the question becomes how far much further back does it go? Because clearly, Tash de Pelo, Gabecli Tepe, it's not the first thing these people built. They didn't, they weren't starting from scratch. They weren't just hunter gatherers that thought, that's try something new and build this. Like it's clear, there's clearly a long procedure up to that point. So how far back does that go? That's... And for people that don't know, we should probably explain that one of the reasons why they're able to accurately carbon test go back to Tash de Pelo is because... And this is where it gets really weird. The dirt is uniform in that it was intentionally covered. So these sites weren't covered, you know, just over time,

27:48like maybe this thing wasn't Egypt. They were covered intentionally and they were covered 11,600 years ago. So how old were they before they were covered? Yeah, of course. I mean, that's the only the earliest date we have, but that doesn't mean it's the date that they were constructed. And why were they covered? Yeah, I mean, there is debate over that, but that's what Clash Mett thought. What is the debate? Well, some people say it wasn't intentionally covered, and it was just kind of like a landslide over. Like a crazy landslide that'll happen at once. Because it's really hard to prove. What an amazing landslide that covers everything. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I would still lean towards the original interpretation from the original archaeologist Clash Mett, but obviously... And why did he think they covered it? I don't know. I think... I think conquering civilization or like fuck these people and their beautiful pillars. No, I think he thought the people that built it covered it. I guess he can't, you can't tell, can you? And that's the thing with so much of this stuff is that no one knows, and especially the further back you get in time, anyone that talks with any confidence around the past. And this is one of my main bug bears with archaeology. Like, I love archaeology,

28:52and I have a huge respect for the archaeologists, and I think they do amazing work, but one of my main bug bears is the confidence in which people talk about the past and rolling out other possibilities, because at the end of the day, none of us know what happened in the deep, deep past, especially when you start getting back to these crazy timescales. It's all speculation, and it doesn't matter if you're a YouTuber like me or if you're a professor. We're all just speculating based on the very limited evidence that we have. And so I don't like it when people say definitive things. I always try and say, maybe this is the case or maybe that's the case, we don't know. And I think everyone should approach history with that mindset. And that's kind of, if I can get any message across to people, it's that that is the message like, we don't know, and here's a possibility, and here's a possibility, and here's the evidence that we think is true, but you know, it's really hard to tell. But it also does stand a reason that biology and archaeology, as they expand the timeline, as biology has expanded the timeline, archaeology should probably tag along. Well, that's what I mean about the fact that the drugs kind of been pulled out from underneath us.

29:55Yeah. What on-purpose means here? There's good reason to think humans intentionally, deposit at least some of the fill, enclosure D alone contained roughly 500 cubic meters of rubble and cultural debris, and particular items, including broken anthropomorphic sculpture heads, appear to have been deliberately placed near pillars during refilling. But archaeologists do not have definitive evidence for the often repeated popular claim that its builders intentionally buried the entire site at once to hide it, preserve it, or mark a single ritual closure. The mound is man-made in the sense that it consists of accumulated archaeological deposits, but its formation involve both human actions and natural sediment movement, ending around 8,000 BCE. Yo! That's a long fucking time ago. I don't think people even really can wrap their head around how long we're talking. You know, especially that's the other thing about one of the things that I

30:57loved about your whole video series was the one where you were talking about what would be left if there was a human civilization a hundred thousand or more years ago. And that's not unreasonable if this biology assessment is correct, is that there have been humans far longer than we used to think. So that's okay because if we used to think it was 50,000 years, I think when I was in high school they were talking, they were saying the homo sapiens were like 50,000 years old over, maybe a hundred, right? And now the conventional estimate is like what three? So the oldest fossils we have of anatomically modern humans are 315 to 360,000 years old. I mean, that's it's the same fossil set from Jabella, Rudin, Morocco. But this obviously is really hard to date accurately, but it's between 300 and 350,000 years old. And then I think it's really important to note that the fossil record is incredibly incomplete because most people don't leave a fossil.

31:59It's so hard to, like, it's so unlikely that you'd fossilize it. It's something like one in a million. So it's such a crazy metric to like try to figure out what the past is from these tiny scraps. It's like trying to read a book by a single shard of a piece of paper with a half a sentence in it. And you're like, what do you think this book is about? Like, fuck. Exactly. There's not much evidence. That's the problem. But the evidence that they do find is pushing the timeline way back, way back. And that alone, you would think archaeologists would go, well, hey guys, in light of this new evidence, maybe we should consider the possibility of civilization is quite a bit older than we think. They are the same exact animal. What would take them 300,000 years to develop complex civilization and agriculture and all these different things? Like, why would it take so long? And is it possible that given the, I mean, the incredible possibilities when in

33:02terms of like what kind of natural disasters took place? Just asteroid impacts that we know, we find them all over the earth, all over the earth and some of them are 20,000 years old, 50,000 years old, we find them everywhere. And like, what kind of an impact would that have had? What would be left of those civilizations? And all those questions, again, guys, like you are the ones proposing them and putting them out there. And it's a really good question. It's especially in light of what we understand about humans biologically. Like, wouldn't it make sense that these people, these just as anatomically, completely like us? Like, why would it take them hundreds of thousands of years to figure out a roof? Yeah, exactly. But I think it's, it's, I think we have clear evidence now that what we call modern intelligence, behavioral and modernity goes back so, so, so much further than

34:03we think. Like, I would argue back over a million years in light of a couple of papers that have come out in the last 12 months. One of these papers? So, I mean, there's been two really significant papers I think since we last spoke. One of them, I think, has really big ramifications for human intelligence. And that's a paper that came out regarding that island of Sulawesi, which is in Indonesia. And this is in relation to human seafaring. So, seafaring was always thought to be an exclusively sapient straight, exclusively modern human straight, because it's a really hard thing to do, right? You need to be quite clever to build a boat, to build something that's sophisticated enough to be sea worthy to get across ocean boundaries and to reach isolated land masses. And we always thought that was only sapiens until very recently, but a paper came out in August last year. You actually sent it to me. You don't think you sent me a post that was about stone tools that was found. And I was like, that's interesting. I clicked on the paper. And then I was

35:03like, oh, wow, look where these stone tools were found. And it was really, really interesting, because they were found on Sulawesi. And Sulawesi is an island that crucially sits east of something called the Wallace Line, which is a biogiographic boundary, which means that it has been an island and separated from the mainland for tens of millions of years and separated by deep ocean channels that are between, depending on the, the fluctuating sea levels at the time, between 50 and 100 kilometers across. So there's always been an island. And yet in August 2025, archaeologists at a site called Caliou found stone tools on Sulawesi. And that means that some type of human, probably not sapiens, but I guess you never know, some type of human managed to cross that ocean boundary and reach Sulawesi. And that's fascinating, but it's worth saying that it's not the only piece of evidence in the region. There's also a few, a decade or so ago, we found stone tools on flores, which is just below Sulawesi. It's another island and crucially again, east of the Wallace

36:05Line. So again, you have to cross an ocean boundary to get to flores. And they found stone tools there that are 1.0, two million years old. And I didn't even say the Sulawesi tools are 1.0, four to 1.4 million years ago, two years old. So over a million years ago, some type of human was crossing ocean boundaries to get to these islands. And there's also Luzon, which is just above Sulawesi, same region. And they found stone tools there, which are 700,000 years old. Now, the theory always was that this was an accident. When we just had flores, the theory was that it was accidental drift. So a couple of humans were swept out to sea and somehow survived the stormy ocean and the tropical sun clinging to some driftwood and made it to flores and somehow survived and colonized the island. But now that we've got flores, Luzon and Sulawesi, three islands all in the same region all separated by this ocean boundary, I think it's starting to point less towards accident and more towards behavior, more towards the deliberate sea crossing. Because to colonize,

37:12I was doing some research because of these discoveries. And there's actually been a few papers from NASA on how many humans you need to colonize an isolated land mass because the NASA were doing it for like if you were going to Mars or something. And you need a certain amount of humans or breeding age to not have like genetic problems in the population. So you need a certain amount of humans of a breeding age to ensure viability, right? Because otherwise you're going to inbreeding, you're all going to die out because of genetic issues. And they said it was something like you need 160 people at least and that is with strict breeding controls and genetic testing. We can probably assume they weren't doing genetic testing on themselves. And so then the number somewhere near 500. So what are the chances that 500 individuals were all swept out to sea at the same time all survived the crossing and all landed on an island and colonized it? That's a huge amount of humans for an accident, you know what I mean? And then three times in three separate islands

38:14all in the same region. At what point does accident start looking like behavior? Do you know what I mean? Because that is how what are the chances of 500 individuals all being swept out to sea, all surviving, all reaching these islands and all colonizing in three separate occasions, all around about a million years ago? I think it's not a high chance is it? I think if we apply Occam's razor to it, which is the simplest explanation wins. I think the simplest explanation is that these humans were intelligent enough to build boats, right? And that is a controversial opinion, that's not accepted. It's accepted that the humans reached these islands, that's not controversial. Humans were on these islands a million years ago, 700K. It's just not accepted that it was intentional. Yeah, it's not accepted that they built boats. But it seems silly. But I think it's doesn't make any sense. It's not a 500 of them make it over by floating and surviving. Yeah, what exactly at the same time? Exactly. And this is what I mean about taking data points from different kind of science. So yeah, because I'm looking into what NASA are saying about humans colonizing

39:16somewhere. And I'm saying, well, look, 500 people or more than 500 people of breeding age as well, not just people, all reaching an island through on three separate occasions, all in the same region. Are we sure this wasn't deliberate? So I think that has huge ramifications for human intelligence, because that was always thought to be an exclusively sapient thing, building a boat, because that's really hard to build a boat. You have to have planning, you have to have foresight, you have to be good enough at carpentry to construct something that's sea worthy. You have to trial an error. Yeah, trial and error. And you have to have the imagination as well to dream about what's on the other side of the horizon and the bravery and the incredible reckless courage to go for it and to go out there across the horizon and reach an island and possibly navigate through the stars. They knew how to do that. Maybe. Maybe. They put us, why would you set out? Right. And how would you repeat it? Exactly. Yeah, how do you remember which way you went? Tower. It's a fucking dude with a giant brow ridge. Yeah. Ferry face is telling you, I remember going this way,

40:22like, are you fucking sure? How you didn't? Are you using the stars? Like, what are you doing? And he was wondering who men have complex language by them. They want men, they want men to be capable of this. That's crazy. We're seeing these things. There has to be some sort of organization. If you're getting a group of people to agree to get in the boat, if they can't communicate with each other, that seems ridiculous. That seems even more ridiculous. Because let's say at the middle of 50 kilometers, how long does it take you to row 50 kilometers? It seems like it would be days. It would be tough, wouldn't it? And they know an ocean as well, like a nice top. Yeah, right. If you even survive, how long is it going to take before you get across? I mean, maybe they figured out when the stormy season was and they time it for when it's not so stormy. But I mean, now, how are they doing that? Do they have a calendar a million years ago? Whatever they were doing, if it was deliberate, which I think the evidence points towards, it's a clear sign of what we call modern intelligence and an organization and most likely communication, which we always used to think only emerged 50,000 years ago. That's crazy. And so now, if it's over a million

41:24years old, you know, that's like that is a 20 times and it could be 1.4. The Civil Ways He Tools are dated to 1.04 to 1.4. So that's, I don't know, what's that like, 25 times older than we think? That's so funny, the point four. That's a lot. It's huge. It's absolutely gigantic. Yeah. And this is what you were saying about like people can't get their heads around this share enormity of these timescales that we're talking about. Like it's so long. Yeah. It's so long. Well, another weird one that's come up fairly recently that I know you've talked about is the copper mining in North America. That one blew me away just the volume of copper that was removed. Yeah, they had a whole copper industry in North America, 9,000 years ago, which is just listen to that again. Say that one more time. The whole copper industry in North America, 9,000 years ago. And that's the same as the earliest day anywhere else in the world. And the volume. This is what this is what's going to free people out. Tell them how much copper was

42:24removed. I don't know off the top of my head, but it's a lot. And to be fair, there's lots of natural copper. I think it's in the kind of northern parts of the United States, as it is now. I don't know how much they removed off the top of my head, but it is a lot of copper. And like, a commercial copper mine volume. Yeah, that's why I said industry like it's big. It's so crazy. And I don't understand how they determined the amount of copper that was removed. But if that is correct, that seems to indicate that there was some sort of sophisticated metallurgy going on in North America, 9,000 years ago. Yeah, which is as early as anywhere else in the world. And that completely flies in the face of what we used to think about people in North America. And it's interesting because what the evidence appears to show is that they did this for a few thousand years, but then they dropped it and they stopped doing it. Now, I don't know what that suggests, but either it suggests something happened to them or they decided they didn't want to do it anymore. But either way, it kind of goes against this idea that we've always kind of assumed

43:28that technology is like an escalator, right? We always assume that technology isn't as... Yeah, there you go. 1.5 billion pounds of copper. What? So wrap your head around this, folks. Archaeology and date mining and copper tool use, but it's generally cannot calculate annual or century-specific production, 9,500 years ago. One older broad estimate puts a total archaic period extraction in the Lixapiria region at up to about 1.5 billion pounds of copper, roughly 600 and 80 thousand metric tons. But that covers many millennia, not the century, 9,500 years ago. So that means that they were doing it for thousands of years. But they're saying it covers many millennia. Yeah, they were doing it for... Yeah, as it says, the peak between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago. That's crazy. That's crazy. So at least 9,500 years ago, they started doing this somewhere around

44:35there. And they did it for thousands of years. They removed copper for thousands of years. A bunch of... I was just sitting on the top. They called it float copper, I think. Mm-hmm. Like that. Like float your... That's probably how they first started finding it. Yeah, that's right. And then they probably started digging. Isn't that interesting how like precious, what we call precious metals, just they exist in weird deposits. It's like erratic. It's all over the place. It's like, come find me. Yeah. And these people use this stuff for weapons. They use this stuff for jewelry. They used it for all kinds of things. Arrow points, I'm sure. They probably use it for all sorts of things. They had to use it for weapons, right? Probably, yeah. I think they found like spare points and stuff. Yeah, me remember it makes sense. But then they dropped it and then they just they stopped doing it. And we don't know why they did that. But as I always say, Wow, look kind of... There's the copperhead arrow. It goes against this idea that we have that technology is like an escalator. And you just take one level of technology and you keep going up. It shows that people can invent something or discover

45:39something and then stop doing it and forget about it. And I think that has implications for how we look at prehistory as a whole because it suggests that people, you know, rather than just going straight line this linear path upwards, we can go up and down and forget things and we discover things and... Right. And that's what the... This is the alternative theory is that we're we're a reinvention of civilization currently. And that we're the most advanced re-advention that we're aware of. But it doesn't mean that there hasn't been some sort of a civilization before us that perhaps reached heights where we are or greater in a completely different direction. And I think when you look at some of the stone structures that exist, those are the best evidence because they're so perplexing. The stones in Lebanon. What do they call the Trilathon stones? Yeah, a Balbekian. Yeah. Those are crazy. Like what happened there? How? What? How did you get them up there? It's weird because they're a trippy into the Romans, right? But there's no Roman records of them doing that. And it's... And that's not particularly weird in itself until you realize that

46:42it's a bigger engineering project than anything the Romans did anywhere. I mean, the Colosseum is obviously an incredible thing, but the blocks aren't as big as these blocks at Balbek. And yeah, they don't mention it anywhere. And you'd think that, you know, a civilization that documented as much the Romans would at least mention their biggest engineering project somewhere, you know? And I mean, that doesn't mean it wasn't the Romans, but it's just a weird thing like... It's very weird. It's very weird. And it's also weird that like many places, the structures that are on top of it are not as sophisticated. It's not as difficult to do. That's how it is over and over and over again. That sucks a while. Ma'am, that's a lot of these places. You see the base, the oldest stuff. It seems like they find stuff and they build on top of stuff that was already there. And then you're dealing with thousands and thousands of years of civilization where people don't even remember who built it. You know, the gods put these rocks here. It happens all over the world. Yeah. People build on old sites because often the sites are the best site in the region because

47:43that's why someone's built there originally. So it makes sense to reuse them. But that doesn't mean that the latest civilization that used it was the first. I mean, it could be, but it also doesn't mean that they are definitively. But often that's how we take it. And yeah, that's not necessarily the best way of looking at them, I think. I think we said earlier, it's really important that we can't possibly know and to make these definitive statements about things where you just don't have enough evidence. You don't have enough facts. You can't really say definitively, we know. And that drives experts crazy because they don't like to do that. They don't like to let that go. Especially humans, especially men. They love, you know, the ego that comes with being the one who has the information, the expert opinion that appeal to authority that I'm the one who could tell you. Oh, this is nonsense. These Michael buttons on you too with their bullshit, their archaeological bullshit. They love doing that. But no one's listening to them. That's what's cute. Yeah. And yeah,

48:48I mean, I'm grateful that a lot of people listen to me. Well, you're really good at it. And it is undeniably just based on what we said so far. This is undeniably strange. It's undeniably weird and it's undeniably at least to mean you interesting. You know, and that's why the subject will, you know, hopefully will continue the pathway that it's on because there's so many people like you now that are looking at this stuff and they're very credible people who are very objective, the Ben Van Kirkwicks of the world, Jimmy Corsetti's, all these people that are looking at stuff and go, hey, there's a lot going on here, people. There's a lot. Yeah. I think it's interesting that it's like the more we uncover, the more we discover, the more new evidence that comes out. I think what we're starting to realize is that the limits on our own knowledge of vastly bigger than we ever used to think. Like we used to think we kind of had it figured out. And this is what I'm talking about with those three questions I mentioned at the start. Like we used to think we had the answer to

49:50these big questions, but with each new discovery, we're starting to realize just how vast the unknown is. I think I think you I think there's two subjects where this kind of applies. I think the first is physics and obviously I'm not smart enough or clever enough to talk about physics and any meaningful capacity, but I think it's fair to say that the more we learn about the nature of reality and the universe, the more we realize just how big it is and how crazy it is and how little we understand about our place in it. And I think the other subject is history. I think the more we learn about history, the more we realize how huge the amount of time humans have been on this planet is, how long a mind like ours has been on this planet, how long humans that are very similar to us have been on this planet is. And I think it's a vital thing because it's, physics is kind of the question of where are we, but history is kind of the question of who are we and where do we come from. And that's why I'm so interested in it because it's a fundamental question to civilization, and to who we are. And I think it's really important. And so that's why I talk about this stuff.

50:52Yeah, and also it's cool. It's very cool. It's so fascinating. I love it. And I know you love it too. And it's great. Well, it's so weird. You know, it's so it's so weird to think like what was it like thousands and thousands of years ago? What, what did they know? Where did they learn it? And was, are these stories, these flood myths that exist in all these ancient cultures? Is this an echo of a historical record of people trying to keep track of this event that took place that crushed us and brought us down to, you know, a few thousand people all over the world. And we had to rebuild. And that's, it's also when you go back thousands of years in the conventional timeline, people were so barbaric. They were so horrible, just a few thousand years ago. If they were capable five thousand years ago of building ancient Egypt, or probably earlier than that. But if why were they so brutal two thousand years ago? Because I think those are the people that survived.

51:56I think the people that survived were probably fucking terrible. They had to be, you know, if there's only like, we know that like the Toebo volcano, which was like, is that Indonesia? It's near. 70,000 years ago, got us down to what, just a few thousand people globally. Yeah, yeah. Imagine that life. Imagine what you had to do to stay alive. Imagine even the thought of raising children in a world where there's only 7,000 people left in limited amounts of food. And, you know, most of the population of earth is dead. What? Yeah. It's crazy. We've been through some crazy things as a species. Yeah. You did it. Didn't you do a video of, there's some evidence that at some point in history, most people were killed off in war? Yes. That is related to what you were just saying about. So just after the agricultural revolution,

52:56the theory is that because humans then had like property and were kind of defending things that people got a lot more violent, and there's a lot of evidence that around 6,000 years ago, basically all the men died. There's like evidence that 95% of male bloodlines were removed. And we can see this from the the Y chromosome in genetics. And there's a massive drop off of the diversity, the genetic diversity in male bloodlines. And something like 95% went. And no one quite knows where this is, but we see lots of mass graves around this time of and violent graves. And like all these people were killing each other and it might not have been that, but it's weird that it only affected men because if it was a natural disaster, it wouldn't be specific to either gender. But it's only men. So some people think it's like a big amount of violence, but no one really knows. But it's really interesting. Well, doesn't it make sense, though? I mean, think if you go from hunter and gathering where you're constantly moving, nomadic tribes, people, bunch of people stick together, you're intense or whatever. And then all

53:58of a sudden you're stationary and you've developed agriculture and you stay put. And then there's hunter gatherer tribes still exist because guess what? They still exist today. So it's not like it was a uniform discovery of agriculture. Everybody adopted it. And there was no more hunter gatherer tribes and there's no more tribes of wandering marauders. So there's still these tribes of wandering marauders. And so now you have to defend this spot because you're stuck there. Because you're dumb ass build a house. Well, like the Mongols used to make fun of people that lived in houses. They, you know, they thought they were fools and they lived in felt tense period. That's how you're supposed to live. You keep moving and this idea is staying put like, look at these idiots. Like we're just going to go sack their city. Like they really had no respect for people that were so stupid that they stuck themselves behind walls. Like you assholes can't even run away. We're going to launch lit human beings on fire with catapults onto your thatched roofs and set everything ablaze. You know, it turns out people are really good at starting fires when you

54:58light them on fire because we're fatty. Yeah. Mongols figured out a lot of cute stuff. But, you know, it makes sense that that's when war would become ubiquitous. This episode is brought to you by Keytone IQ. I've tried a lot of supplements, but for years it's been one thing that I've been obsessed with to keep my brain locked in and that's ketones and energy molecule our brains naturally create when pushed to our limits. Keytones used to cost thousands of dollars a shot and were only used by super elite people. But now, thanks to a six million dollar research contract with the military, Keytone IQ had a breakthrough and you can finally get ketones online on Amazon or at target for five dollars a shot. They don't taste good, but damn, do they work? Trust me, if you rely on your brain for your day to day success like I do, take Keytone IQ. I take it and I love it. I feel sharper. I make better decisions. I have faster memory recall and a more productive. Your

55:59brain thrives on ketones. Go to ketone.com slash Rogan for 30% off your subscription order or find Keytone IQ at target stores nationwide in the protein and electrolyte aisle and get your first shot free. They're so confident in it that they even offer a 60 day money back guarantee. So go ahead and take your shot. Yeah, once we settle down and once we owned, you stay put. You become a target. Exactly. And you have something to defend with, it's going to be at livestock or crops or houses as you say. And so, yeah, there's quite a lot of evidence that violence did increase massively as we entered the kind of agricultural age that we're still in. So that is interesting. It's very interesting. And it also is logical. It's a logical progression of how people would behave given the fact that now all of a sudden they have resources that they've accumulated. They have a very specific location that have to defend that location. That's when people figure out walls and that's a bigger, you know, whatever the weird thing is the

56:59the Great Wall of China. Like the arrow turrets are facing the wrong way. Really? Yeah. Yeah, a lot of it. A lot of the Great Wall, the arrows are facing inward. It's trying to keep people in rather than out or trying to keep people from China. Escape it. Going to wherever, whatever's on the other side, it might have been some sections of it weren't constructed by the people that we think were constructed it. You've never seen that? Not ever seen that. Very weird. People pondered. Why did the arrow? Because there's these slots where they can be protected but shoot arrows through. But they're facing towards China. They're not like China defending the wall against the Huns. It's weird. I strange. I strange. See if you can find some of that. I'm walking that up because it's not a really great answer in this. It's so part of it is and part of it isn't. Mostly the Great Wall's defensive features face north outward towards the step. The usual direction of major rays in evasion. But many surviving

58:03sections have arrow slits and parapets facing both north and south, including seemingly inward towards China. Why face inward? Defense after a breach. Fetacres cross the wall are captured out. So they prepare to be invaded. Chinese garrisons needed to shoot and counter attack from the south side as well. Control of movement both ways. The wall was a network of forts, gates, signals, roads, not just to one side of barrier. Also regulated border crossings trade and movement. It is crazy that they've invented a wall that you can see from space. I know. It's wild. It's like one of the biggest engineering projects ever. Like how long is that like a thousand miles or something crazy? I have no idea but it's big. How long is the Great Wall of China? I'll tell you yes. I say a thousand miles. It's probably more. Easily. I have a Chinese so big in itself and the fact that it's the whole like, yeah. What do you think Jamie? Tell you yes. Six thousand kilometers. Six thousand? Wow. Jesus, Jamie. You would be really good on the price is right.

59:08Oh my god. 21,000 kilometers. Holy shit. Oh my god. Oh my god. 13,171 miles. Motherfucker, that's crazy. Have you ever been though? No. I've been there. It's crazy. It's amazing. It's so beautiful. The whole region around there. I mean, obviously it's really long but. The famous, continuous looking Ming Error Wall that most visitors picture is much shorter. Still, 8,850 kilometers. When associated structures and natural barriers are included, UNESCO describes the overall Great Wall complex as more than 20,000 kilometers long. So at the very least, the part that you visit the Ming Error Wall 8,850 kilometers, which is fucking wild. That is so much wall. Yeah. Like what were they doing? So it was built over 2,000 years

1:00:13from early walls in the fifth to third centuries BCE through major work in the Ming Dynasty, which ended in 1644. Have you ever seen some of the stuff that Cassie Comprasmith has talked about in regards to ancient technology evidence from China? Not specifically her stuff but there's lots of weird things in ancient China. Yeah, weird stuff like Jade artifacts that seem to be machined that don't make any sense that are like super old and that seem to be artifacts that were passed down from generation to generation and the thousands of years ago, the civilization that was in possession of them, their current ability to make artifacts was like much cruder. So it seems like this was older stuff that they had somehow another acquired. And they lost the knowledge of wafer thin, Jade, highly polished, seemed to be machined. Like weird, weird stuff. I haven't seen that specifically but that's interesting. I don't know

1:01:20about that. Yeah, it seems like a really clear pattern that exists everywhere. That there was something like these ancient vases that they find in Egypt, that they find these in these old sites and that these things that were carved out of diorite, which is insanely hard stone, and carved to within less than a human hair of variance. Not only that, if it was on a lathe, how do you account for the fact that it has these handles on the site? How the fuck did they do this? And this was all stuff that was like really, really old by the time these people had it. And that these people, their current state of pottery and sculpture and it's much cruder than this stuff. So it seems like these are really old things that are artifacts of a time where things were more sophisticated. So it's more evidence of this up and down nature of technology. Yeah, I mean, it's logical, right? That people learn things, discover things, excel at them and then

1:02:23later people forget them. Of course, especially when you take any consideration natural disasters. Natural disasters, wars, things along those lines. You know, look, Baghdad, before the Mongols got there, it was like the center of science in the world. Yeah, yeah, the Arabs, yeah, they were incredible at science. And then it's just the natural cycle of civilizations and we see that throughout recorded history. So why would it not be the case for human beings in the much, much, much, much, much, much, much larger period of time, which is prehistory? But it's not just, thing is it's not just like natural disasters and things and obviously that plays a part, but it's also just the sheer nature of preservation, right? Such a long amount of time that we've been around human beings on this planet. It's just almost impossible for things to survive when we talk about these 100,000 years, 200,000 years. Yeah, it's so hard for things to survive that long. Right. Any objects, any things that would be left over, like, you know, I'm sure you've seen those AI depictions of what New York City would look like in just a thousand

1:03:24years. It's like nothing. Everything's crumbling. Gone. It's mental. No buildings, no glass. Everything gets absorbed in the earth. You got a jungle where Manhattan is. And maybe you would stumble upon a piece of metal one day. Yeah. But even then, like, I mean, I've done quite a lot of research on material degradation and almost all our modern materials are then stone. I've gone in a few millennia. And I'm few millennia's a long time, but not compared to these timescales that we're talking about. No, if these timescales are accurate in terms of the human brain, in terms of the ability to logically view the world, invent things, creativity, if they possess this 300,000 years ago, like, why wouldn't they have it figured a lot of the stuff out? They definitely did. That's the thing, like the seafaring thing over one million years ago, okay, you can debate it. It could have been an accident, I suppose. I don't think it is, but you can debate it. But I think that we have completely undisputable evidence that human beings were this intelligent 500,000 years ago with the Columbus

1:04:24structure, which we spoke about a lot last time. Like, that is undeniable evidence that some kind of human was unbelievably smart 500 or 476,000 years ago. Yeah, it was building houses. Or building something, some sort of structure. Whatever that is requires incredible levels of intelligence. It is clear evidence of what we define as modern behavior. Right, and it probably wasn't a one-off. Definitely not. And so this is what you found. So then it means, were they teaching each other? So, okay, so if they're teaching each other, what kind of language did they have? What kind of concepts could they grasp? You're not doing that without abstract thinking, without symbolic intelligence. Right. And how far did it go? Because if it's very rare that we find a piece of wood from that long ago that we can carbonate and that we can test. So how much do we not find most of it? Almost all of it. Because the chances of that surviving is so unbelievably unlikely. I'm a moron, but I had a thought. My thought was, if AI can get so intelligent

1:05:33that it can do an accurate account of all of the objects on earth, all of the people on earth, all of the things on earth, essentially every molecule that exists on earth, and then extrapolate back to how they got in that position in the first place. Whether through natural ore deposits, natural disasters, volcanoes, all these different things. I wonder what kind of a version of a timeline we would be able to construct with a super advanced artificial intelligence. I wonder if it's possible to get a framework that is much more definitive than what we're looking at now. I don't know if it's possible. I mean, you'd have to have enough technology that you would be able to literally scan the entire outer crust of the earth, which seems daunting today, but ground penetrating radars seemed ridiculous 500 years ago. Right. So as we continue to expand,

1:06:38I mean, AI is solving mathematicians that have perplexed mathematicians for 50 years. They're solving it like that. So this is a new thing. It's a very, very rapidly emerging thing. I wonder what kind of a version, what kind of a map of history, at least in terms of rough timelines of things we'll be able to get. That's the great hope for archaeology. Right. It's that modern technology allows us to discover things that we previously would not been able to discover. And as you say, Lidar, the current example of that, but if you just extrapolate forward, what else could be possibly used to discover things that we haven't. Of course, something like that will emerge because nobody even considered Lidar again 500 years ago, what are you talking about 500 years from now? Who the fuck knows? Who knows? We literally can't imagine what kind of breakthroughs are available. That's the hope. But again, I think part of what makes me

1:07:40think that perhaps we're not going to discover stuff is this preservation problem because so much of it is just gone. I mean, I guess if what you say, if we can somehow extract it. Or time machines. Yeah. I mean, they could figure out a time machine that they'll throw the whole monkey wrench right into the gears. Well, I think that whatever happens, our current understanding of history, that's that cannot be the kind of endpoint. What we currently think about history is just there's no way that we've like reached. There's no way we're done. And that's what frustrates me so much when people are so definitive about it because it's like, you really think that we're not going to, because we, that's the science is always advancing in every single field all the time. We're never at the point where we've discovered everything. And yet there's always people in every period of history that think this is the kind of upper limit. What would be around from 300,000 years ago, other than what we've found so far, stone tools, shit like that, like that'll would all be gone. Well, that's the thing. Everything would be gone unless it's like

1:08:43incredibly unlikely preservation like the Columbus structure, like incredibly unlikely for it to happen. But I mean, there could be other things like that out there. And there almost certainly is. But yeah, most things would be exciting. It's like, God, you don't want to dig up the whole world, but you kind of do. Yeah, it's not that old, but this is a Jade sword with, er, sorry, the handles the sword would have been prime metal. That's why the metals all fucked up, but the handle is not. So anything with cool rocks or crystals or, right, the handle. Yeah, the handle is kind of all that's left. The sword is a rotten piece of shit. A few other old, yeah, that's the one. These discs are really weird. Or 3000 BC to 2000 BC. Oh, but they have, I was just doing the research up until the Ming Dynasty. I think it was like 16, they have a book, someone wrote about how they were doing this. Oh, that's in 1600. What did they do? I mean, various, various things in 1600.

1:09:45Yeah, but some of these are 3000 years older than that, which is weird. Jade artifacts. Wow. There's a weird. This is the color set that net fright. Oh, but the description on how they did this. I'm almost not I'm going to have to take it as they say it, but like the description of how they did it was like they would put abrasives on string and slowly wear away the Jade. How do they do these three dimensional little carvings? Yeah, it says like they would put, they'd get this slurry of water and that kind of makes sense. That one that you just showed, how old is that one? I don't even know what it is. That's fucking weird. It says, how did ancient Chinese carve? What's the word? That's the question I asked without metal tools. This is the link, I think. What is that image? That's crazy, man. What's that fright? Where's that from? Carving what years? Oh, that's a

1:10:50modern master. Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense because I was like, how could you do that? That's like the flower petals and everything like that. That seems like you need metal tools. Oh, so this is just an article on the evolution of Chinese Jade carving. Yeah, that is so that's so this is a modern. Okay, that's what it's using. That's older. Yeah, a Griffin. Obviously older. Some of these are drill. Like these little holes, if you look in zoom in real close, you can see evidence of drills. That's not, you know, you could have hand drills. Okay. Yeah, I mean, you could have harder stone that you've figured out how to work into a position. You could have sand and there's a bunch of things that could use. Pretty wild. Something like this. I mean, it's very crude. Yeah, I mean, all that is like you could attribute that to ingenuity and craftsmen with years of learning how to work these different things. It's when you get to large stuff that you're like, okay,

1:11:52how'd you get these stones from Aswan? How'd you get a 50 ton block of granite and move it through the mountains with no roads? Help me out. Yeah, but I roll it. How'd you get hundreds of them, thousands of them, millions of them. How'd you do it? Yeah, it is very wild. And it and like some of these things, I'll send you the Cassie coppersmith episode that I did with her. Because some of the stuff is like, it's very confusing because the time light's pretty clear that this is older stuff and the older stuff is more complex and more difficult to create and seems to indicate the use of machinery. You know, one of the things that she pointed out was this crazy statue of a Buddha. Is that in India? Where the guy achieved enlightenment by standing still? And it's how old was it? Is it 90 feet tall? I remember the one sticking out of the largest individual standing statue, thousands of years old.

1:12:54Looks like it's machined. Like really weird. Like really weird statue. There's so much weight stuff in India. And how did they get it there? Did you guys, did you move it there? Or was it a stone that you said wouldn't be dope if we just, yeah, look at that fucker with a big giant hog. But I mean, it's really detailed. It's like, see if you can find a good image of it. Young Jim. Yeah. There's some of them on her photos still on my computer. Yeah, it's really wild. And she said you see it from a long way away. Somebody put their watermark right over his dog, a rude. They knew you're going to be looking right there. Me? No, everybody. Humans. There's also like the Kaliasa temple, the thing that one they call us. Yeah, carve right down somehow, hammer and chisel about me. Yeah. Who knows? It's incredible. That's the one where an army went to try to destroy it and they tried for years and they came up. Really? Yeah, they barely put a fucking dent in it.

1:13:59They scratched a few things up, but they worked on it for years to try to destroy it. Why? Because some new guy came along and said, fuck these people in the temple. Yeah, this isn't my like religion. This isn't suit my story. Like what the Taliban did is they blew them up. Yeah. I mean, there's over a thousand years old and they're like, no, not just a Palmyra. Yeah. I know it's really sad. And if that's human inclination to do that kind of stuff, like, how long, how long have we been doing that? Like how much, how much stuff? Yeah. Because stuff is not around anymore because some asshole came along and wanted it removed. Yeah, because it doesn't suit your narrative. Exactly. Because everyone's always building a story. Humans have always done that built a story around to legitimize power and rule. And if it doesn't suit your story, you destroy it. And then yeah, exactly. Would I be able to have some of that coffee? Hell yeah, dog. I can get it on in there. Thank you. I got to wait myself up. Yeah, you're jet lagged. Trip across the pond. Yes, exactly. Here he is. This is what it looks like.

1:15:00Not wild, dude. That's incredible. Yeah. What's the date on this, the conventional date? Do we know? That's a good question. They don't have to carbon date is don't. I don't know, but I'm sure it's known. There's a gas, right? Like, what is the gas of the timeline? Whatever it is, it's very perplexing. It's a 57 feet tall monolithic statue of Lord Bahu Bali. 93. Okay. So 93 CE. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. AD, current era. Regardless, the tallest Jane statue until 2016 construction of the statue was commissioned by the Ganga dynasty minister. Okay. So how did you make that? Where'd you get it? How'd you get it there? You did that? What? You did that over a thousand years ago. And how do we know that that's the timeline? I mean, it's weird. It's weird because it looks

1:16:07machined. When you look at it, go back to some of the images, please. When you look at the detail of the fingers and the toes and the uniformity of the face, it's fucking weird, man. It's like these people had a lot of fucking resources. Look at the size of that dude standing next to it. Like, for real, how do you get that's if you if that's not a big giant contiguous block that was sitting there, what is it made out of? Granted, I think. So that's not just a giant perfect slab of granite that happens to be roughly in the shape of a guy. And you're like, wouldn't that be dope if we made a dude out of that with a giant dong and just had him just staring over our kingdom. But we don't do that anymore. That's just weird. We don't know what the building thinks like this anymore. Certainly not a stone. No. Yeah, because we like to make money and it takes too much time to do a fucking pyramid when you can make a nice skyscraper in just a couple of years and put a big Trump on the roof. Yeah. No surviving technical manual records records rather

1:17:16the exact construction procedure, archaeological and art historical understanding is that the artisans shape the statue in situ, removing stone around the intended figure, roughing out the body, then refining the face, limbs, hair and distinctive vines climbing the legs. Imagine if you fuck that up. This approach avoided the near impossible task of quarrying, transporting and raising a 17 meter finished sculpture onto a hill. Yeah. So if they moved it, if there was definitive proof that it was moved there, then there's another monkey wrench gets thrown into the whole thing. And then you have to go, okay, how? But it does make much more sense if you just carved it out. But also like, how long would that take? What kind of tools are we talking about? What kind of shitty ass tools do people have at 900 CE? Well, then who's the rest of the steel? Tell them the stuff they did in India. They did weird stuff in India where they just carved stuff right out of the stone. Like what? What was the motivation to build these temples just carve them right out of volcanic stone?

1:18:20It's insane. Crazy. So detailed as well. And insanely detailed. And also some of the sculptures are three-dimensional. Like how did you get behind them and carve that out and how did you make all these weird things? Or have you ever seen some of them where they go over it with a light? And you can see the three dimensions. Yeah. And the Barabakh caves, do you know about them also in India, whether it's like completely mirror polished surfaces? Yeah. And yet the conventional explanation for that is that they were just shelters. Right. But why are they so precise? They're like completely precise and they've got this weird mirror polishing. Yeah. You don't need that if you're just building a shelter. And how about those pillars that look like they were cut on leaves? Yeah. Like what? How did you... What's going on guys? I know. What did you... We're missing so much. We're missing so many details about the past. It's so frustrating if you're really interested in it because it's like how much do we know versus how much are we just assuming? Well that's the thing we're assuming so much. And that's why it bugs me when it's presented as fact. Or presented as we have all the answers

1:19:24because we clearly don't. Yeah. What are the other papers that have come out that have been... So there was the paper about the one million year old skull, human skull that was found in China last year. And this is super interesting because this is a human with a modern size brain but that was found a million years ago. And so again that has implications for what was really going on a million years ago. And if you link that to the... What I would argue is modern behavior with the sea fairing in Southeast Asia then you have a million year old skull found in China in North East Asia. You know, put those two things together and you suddenly got human beings with modern brains doing modern things a million years ago and I think it's fascinating. So I mean the paper came out I think in October last year and what they did was they took... There are these fossils from a place called Yongshan in China and they were discovered actually in the 1990s I think it was 1989 and 1990 there's two skulls of Yongshan one and Yongshan two. But they were badly deformed. Yeah,

1:20:28they go Jamie Ratenq. Badly badly deformed and they were always thought to be homo erectus because of where they were found China and how old they were over a million years old because that was the only type of human that should have been in China or in that area at that time at that at that age. They always assumed to be homo erectus but a few researchers from a university in China along with the natural history museum in London a professor named Professor Chris Stringer. They applied modern reconstruction techniques to Yongshan two the second skull and so they use something called CT scanning to reconstruct it and what they discovered was that they think it's actually a homolongi skull which is this part the same clad as denisivan, denisivan and why that's important is that denisivan is kind of like a system. How do you say denisivan or denisivan? I don't know. I say denisivan but I keep hearing denisivan, I'm trying to change it. Yeah, all the scientists say denisivan but the cave is denisivan so it should be denisivan you would think. It doesn't matter denisivan, denisivan, whatever.

1:21:32Either way these scientists think this skull is homolongi which is a clad of denisivan which is crucially assistive species to Neanderthal and us sapiens which means that if this skull is a million years old and if it is homolongi that means that the divergence of our species must have happened before them so when humans split into Neanderthal, denisivan and homosapien if this human was already walking around one million years ago that means that whatever became us had already diverged at that point so we were already a distinct species homosapiens one million years ago which is a staggeringly long amount of time and so much older than what we thought before we used to think this was around 500,000 years ago so it's like a 400,000 or more than that jump from what we thought before. Have you heard the theory about Neanderthals that they believe that Neanderthals were not just a separate group of human but were actually created by humans interbreeding with other ancient primates? How do you mean? So instead of Neanderthals existing previously that

1:22:37homosapiens predate Neanderthals and that homosapiens breeding with some other ancient primate, some other one of these created Neanderthals. Maybe I haven't heard that. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know if it's right. I read it and I was like what? I was like okay this is this is a crazy theory and it's you know because the thought is that Neanderthals were bred out with you know that there was interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals but that might have actually like predated Neanderthals themselves like it might be the cause of Neanderthals is that humans, homosapiens bred with something else? Well we definitely bred with Neanderthals and probably Denisovans and Neanderthals and Denisovans bred together as well. We're all so similar the fact that we can have kids together is incredible. And they actually recently found evidence of humans and as in sapiens and Neanderthals actually coexisting for a long long time in the same place and like living in the same place and because you could always argue before that perhaps it

1:23:40was you know non-consensual breeding between like a Neanderthal male, the sapien woman. But now we have evidence that we did live like alongside each other cooperatively. I can't remember where the site is but that was found recently so yeah that's interesting as well because saving you can find any whatever the hell I found about Neanderthals possibly a result of humans breeding with other primates. With other primates so is it not even me not other humans? We're not created by modern humans we're closely related extinct branch of the human family. This is a very recent proposal. I might have asked the question too in a different way. How'd you ask? I said where the Neanderthals created by humans which isn't really what you said. No. See if if you search is there put this in. Is there a theory that Neanderthals were a result of human, maybe you see homo sapiens, homo sapiens,

1:24:47homo sapiens breeding with other primates. I guess you wouldn't say primates though because that's a monkey. Other homos. Other human humans, right that ancient humans, ancient human species. Let's see what complexity I'm so sorry about this. I wish I'd save that because it was really interesting. It says no not as the main scientific explanation. That's been done. I don't mean the main scientific explanation. I'm saying is there a theory? I want to know if there's a theory. Well then that has to know. I mean that's about how we're using this actual thing. I'm using it in a general way. Right but not as the main scientific explanation absolutely but is there a theory? Has

1:25:49anyone has anyone theorized that this is possible? Ask that. Theorized that this is possible. It's going to have to crawl. If it's new it's mean it has to crawl the websites to find that you know I might not have. I wanted to crawl. I'm out we can't make a crawl. I'm not going to take over I think I'm going to run the whole of the beach. Yes here it goes. Researchers have proposed hybridization based ideas but generally not the exact claim that Neanderthals originally formed from homo sapiens plus another species. What has been proposed? Paleontologists have proposed a particularly late Neanderthals early modern human fossils might be Neanderthal homo sapiens hybrids or descendants of populations that makes repeatally. No this is not quite what I'm saying. This is what's fucked up when you watch too many videos and you read too many articles and you don't save them. This was quite a few months ago too. The Denysovian thing is weird because there's recent proposals so I think this is a paper I sent

1:26:56to you in a podcast where they're discussing this paper that as of August like this month there's some speculation about the height of the Denysovians and that they think they might have been much larger than homo sapiens of the time. Yeah they found a bone. They found a bone a thigh bone I think under the sea and suggest the Denysovans and everything we found about Denysovans is that they were bigger than us. So the teeth we found we haven't got much from them but the tooth is bigger the jaw bone is bigger the dragon man skull which has been classified as very similar to Denysovans is bigger and then they found this thigh bone that suggests that they were considerably over six foot tall now obviously that's not like a massive giant but compared to you know the average height of a human today is something like a male human is something like five eight or five nine and so a Denise of them being over six foot is like quite a considerable jump from that so it's not like a mythical giant but it's bigger than you'd expect an ancient human to be. And it's also we're going with a limited

1:27:57amount of fossils. So limit. So just from what we know they existed and with larger skulls. Recent genetic research confirms that modern humans homo sapiens and the antitols repeatedly interpret of course a period spanning roughly 200,000 to 250,000 years ago while it's long believed that interbreeding occurred during a brief window of about 50 to 60,000 years ago advanced genomic mapping shows multiple waves of contact occurred much earlier 200,000 and 250,000 years ago an early wave of homo sapiens migrating out of Africa encountered and mated with Neanderthals in Eurasia. So what this guy was saying was that it might not have been that but that even earlier than this Neanderthals were a result of human beings into breeding with others or homo sapiens interbreeding with others. I don't know thank you though.

1:29:02Well we're just at oh Denis Olvins so just that one alone was way bigger than most humans at the time and just within the size of the head the bones are bigger it's a bigger brow it's it's it's it seems like a more robust larger version of a human and then when you take into account the range and size of human beings given the the correct amount of resources and food and protein like we got seven foot plus humans that are all over the place today and imagine if these Denis Olvins skulls which seem to be like a completely different structure than a homo sapiens we might there might be the giants of the bible is the point yeah this might be what they were talking about like there might have been a race of much larger people that were physically dominant over homo sapiens. They could have been they could have been considered bigger and they don't even need to be that big for the the myths to kind of perpetuate do you know what I mean like just for someone to be a little bit bigger and you encounter a group of them and you're like a small

1:30:02homo sapiens community you're gonna remember that as well. Well whenever I do the UFC weigh-ins I'm standing next to massive fucking you know these huge heavyweights like some of these guys are just gigantic humans you know six foot seven six foot nine two hundred sixty five pounds and they have to cut weight to make two sixty five these are giant people you know and then you think this is you know whatever percentage of people that are around today that are that big if the denisovans if we just have a limit we might have caught just a few small ones. I mean that's what we don't know I mean I wonder what the fuck would happen if they found some bones that indicated there was a man that was nine feet tall and we know that primates can get that big and obviously we're a primate I can't remember what it's called but just going to bethicus. Yeah absolutely gigantic as per the name yeah so they can primates are kind of line of of animals can get really big

1:31:03thing. And that along the same lines of like the the timeline of discovery of that is fascinating too because I think it was in the 1920s and archaeologists was in an apothecary shop in China and he found molars that were from a primate that didn't make any sense. We were really big. Yeah huge and he's like where or did you get this and he went there and then that's where they found jaw bones and things so there's some we used to think that they were bipedal because I've read that before but now they're thinking that not not necessarily and that they might have been because like a lot of people thought that's bigfoot you know there's this myth that persists throughout Native American cultures for reals yeah the thing that might have been an enormous orangutan like that movie what was it the jungle book? Yeah so a 10 foot tall orangutan like what I mean it just makes sense if there's the people you brought florists before now we

1:32:07know also know about those little hobbit people that live in the island floors that release three foot tall tiny little people so the island dwarfism and then there's there they're there a totally different version of human beings of you know the human chain the human tree who knows who knows what these dynosolvins look like? And island gigantism is also a thing in nature we see that and we see our little dogs right? So we could apply to primates and to humans sure as long as they had enough food yeah yeah it's just the idea of a dynosolvins I mean they they only discovered them in 2010 right? Oh yeah so many and we have hardly anything about them so how many are we missing you know we literally have like a tooth or jaw bone and this thigh bone and a few of the same right and how many other versions of humans are we missing? Yeah there's ghost populations in our DNA we know we're missing humans like there are other types of humans that we just have nothing for yeah that's weird that show human have you ever seen that show? That's not um God is it a BBC show?

1:33:08Oh yeah no I watched that yeah very interesting it's good but she was on a podcast recently talking about um this ghost DNA how weird it is that a few hundred thousand years ago some something happened and there's this DNA that's in there it's like what is this what's this stuff? Yeah there's so many populations of humans that we think existed because of our DNA but we don't know who they were we've never found them and they could be you know very close to us but also we have significant differences and it's just it's all up in the end same with so much of prehistory we just we don't know yeah and I wonder like what kind of a society what kind of if do they find stone tools with Denisovans do they know that yeah it's really hard to attribute stone tools to anything because if you just have the tools you don't know what human use them what human made them right because you have to find like a skeleton and it's so hard to find a skeleton next to the tools and even then you don't actually know if it was that that made the tools so we don't know yeah um what else has

1:34:11been fascinating for you recently um so I think the question that I mentioned at the start the one like when did humans reach isolated lamb masses such as uh america and australia is a really interesting question because again the old ideas we have have proven to be incorrect and I think especially in the case of the Americas I think it's super interesting because obviously as you know we used to think it was clover's first 13000 years ago but so many sites now seem to be pushing that back much much much much much yeah older into the past um so yeah that's a really interesting question I mean obviously now we know that humans have been in the Americas for at least 22 thousand years with white sans footprints which I'm sure you've you've heard of that yes 22 thousand years yeah it's crazy so that's the oldest accepted evidence but I think there's loads of interesting sites that potentially push it quite a lot further back than that which are a bit more controversial but when you take them all together they're kind of yeah there's white sans

1:35:12so that's now accepted I think by most archaeologists and what why that's important is because it kind of opens it all up again because because of when the the kind of ice the glacial maximums happen it kind of the opening of the corridor because that's pre that it means that we now don't know how long humans have been in the Americas it could go back way further and then you start looking at these other sites and you think maybe it's a lot a lot older so there's one in Mexico called Chicoita Cave apologies for the pronunciations probably wrong but this is a 30 3000 years old and high in the mountains of northern Mexico they found like 2000 stone tools and they did like 50 separate dates and the date isn't controversial what's controversial is if they were human made tools but the scientists working at the site think that this is evidence of humans in the Americas 33 thousand years ago then there's a site in Brazil called Pedro Ferrada which is 50 thousand years old

1:36:15is that Chicoita yeah yeah exactly so I mean it looks just like a tool but I mean people argue that they're natural so it's up in the air it's not accepted yet but I think that's the probably the most the least controversial um 26 thousand years ago yeah but it goes up to it's like 30 to 33 thousand years I think um but yeah there's a site called Pedro Ferrada in Brazil where they found a half like structure so people making fire they found charcoal they found blackened stones heated stones rather uh and that they dated that to like 50 or 60 thousand years ago so that's like a lot older than than white sands obviously um so that's a really interesting site again not fully accepted by archaeologists but the people working there are quite convinced that it's evidence of human presence in Brazil which is obviously quite far south um 50 over 50 thousand years ago um but the thing is you can't prove it because you haven't they need so many things to say it for sure they need like a

1:37:20fossil of a human basically because otherwise you can say it's natural yeah uh I don't know what those paintings are assuming they're more recent because always that will be pretty clear evidence um but I think the the half like structures and the the the heated stones and the charcoal the date it over that's crazy go back to that last one please right there that is wild that is wild I'm assuming that is much more recent because otherwise that would be very clear evidence of human presence but I think the oldest layers go back I think it's been continuously oh they think it's been continuously inhabited for thousands and thousands of years with the oldest being over 50 thousand years old yeah are they the tools they might be the tools that because so so critics say that it's natural right but the those are natural things not tools yeah but paper came out in 2023 that really made the case that it's human presence so napping yeah yeah um and I I think it's yeah I think it's leaning

1:38:27that way but it's just so hard to prove it right so it's not accepted yet but Jamie I just sent you a link that I found yesterday I thought it was pretty bizarre a completely different part of the world but also really interesting it's a link to an Instagram video there's so much of this stuff now that's what's so cool it's like and if you're in a good algorithm you get indedinated give me some volume on this jurean Sahara with 5,000 rooms and we still haven't seen all of them it's called sephar no roads lead to it no vehicle can reach it the only way in is on foot through a maze of stone pathways that all look identical on the walls inside there are 15,000 paintings animals that no longer exist here rivers that dried up thousands of years ago and then things no one can identify floating figures with no faces beings with round heads wearing what looks like suits a figure over three meters tall that the man who discovered it simply called a god most of

1:39:32sephar is still unmapped whatever else is in there no one's seen it yet I could do it without I could do without that guys for voice he's a little ridiculous I think the radio had out yeah settled down putty it sounds like a AI voice right like a super enthusiastic AI voice is that what it is it could be they very well could be it definitely is gonna be in the future but I don't what was it called I don't remember sephar it's just yeah okay let's try to look it up see if we look it up it subsaharan africa is another weird one right because especially the the Sahara itself like that used to be vast green grassy trees jungle like who knows what it was and now no one's really has really any understanding of what's under that sand yeah but it was fertile and green right up until literally right up until the point the conventional timeline has civilization starting like around 4000 BC is when it flipped to desert so yeah I mean I'm sure

1:40:39this there has been archaeological work done in the Sahara but compared to the size of the Sahara there's there's just got to be loads of stuff under there that could potentially change our understanding of the origins of civilization for sure very interesting region but yeah extremely hard to excavate for many reasons such as the climate and also political instability a lot of those countries are pretty fucked up so it's hard to like go in there and do archaeology but very interesting region of the world and obviously that is where Egypt emerged just after this period so you know what were the people that kind of went to the Malriver doing before there's many interesting things there's them what's it called there's an interesting site napsiplier I think it's good yes it'll be a little hard to get to the middle of the Sahara desert boy in Algeria geez buried oh yeah I've heard of this actually somewhere in there fuck imagine you're an archaeologist you're tasked with uh you know someone gives you some

1:41:41funding hey it's a whole desert bro we want you to get in there and uh go look around what yeah you it's probably not the ideal place to go you can't even go without getting killed you don't get shot you could literally die so no just imagine if you found something cool I imagine you found a bunch of cool shit yeah you go good luck just good like taking it out does they're like oh where'd you get that yeah exactly thank you exactly they'll kill you that was also my thought I was gonna bring that up about go back to Tampi about if they bring in more archaeologists more people to dig if they really truly expand they really have to keep track of what they find because the amount of money that someone can get for an artifact on the black market is pretty incredible this is an issue with Egypt right on South America yeah yes and South America but Egypt in particular there's some inconsistencies with zahihawas's versions of like what was discovered in some places within a skeleton was in a sarcophagus versus what he said later you know like in the

1:42:44older versions there was a skeleton and the newer versions they didn't find anything so did you sell a skeleton because people sells I'm not saying he did but did somebody sell a skeleton because people sell skeletons and if you are some rich guy who lives in some other country and you're a billionaire from oil and you like you know what I'd like you got a guy so like you've got everything you got all the Ferraris like you know what I want Egyptian skeleton get me that go get me a mummy I want a fucking mummy or any kind of artifacts or anything like yeah yeah especially something gold some ancient gold all that stuff was stolen out of there so was it melted down like for graveraubbers like that must have been an incredible place to be before everybody discovered all those tombs because we know like with King Tot which was preserved but luckily nobody got into that until what year was that they found it two toned commons I'm not sure but within the last couple decades I think I'm not sure whatever it was it was I think it was a little longer

1:43:49than that but the point is it's like fantastic gold sarcophagus cover massive fucking treasure trove of jewels and things like how much of that stuff is scattered in private collections in the world you know yeah and in South America like because they spent like underneath kusko there's all these tunnels right and people have known about them for a long long time but it took a long time for archaeology to kind of accept that they were there but people have been going it like people had like a tours and stuff down with the tunnels before it was like widely accepted and back then it's just right for people setting off to the black market because there's no control over it there's no kind of an institutional control over it so people could just kind of do what they want until it actually finally got like you know controlled by the authorities so yeah who knows what went and all over the world as you say yeah there could be stuff that is really interesting that is just out there and then there's the elongated skulls the weird fucking skulls and a long history of people

1:44:53discovering this like how many people got the good ones how many of them were removed a long time ago and sit somewhere someone's like you have to go read all the rich guys in the world see if you go hide in your basement find some guy like what's your google search like find out who's got the stuff because I mean if you're a person with a private museum if you got that kind of money and like there's people in the world that have private zoos right so they have so much money in other countries that they've you know they have basically the wild kingdom in their backyard you know and that guy's like well I got that now I want I want somebody even bull way yeah I want you to build like I went to the Cairo museum once and I like the way it looks I want that in the house you know it's got to be people like that in the world he's one of them here he goes 91 year old Don Miller from Indiana he had thousands of artifacts removed from his house oh wow I think he had Egyptian mummies whoa I'm trying to find

1:45:59the good pictures in the so they seized his stuff how did they find out about that he was he on Instagram a delegation from China went to Indiana to claim the show a delegation from China I wonder if they showed up with guns give me your ship back FBI rated a 91 year old missionaries home and found thousands of stolen Native American bones whoa Amazon River canoe wow the main dynasty jade and Egyptians are Cophagus and a dugout canoe that had traveled down the Amazon River wow it's just in his house there's a picture of his house and another thing I had it I mean it's just all how this guy get this scratch where's he getting the money for all this what this guy do I don't know why there's not a movie about him after 10 years FBI return 7,000 rare artifacts looted by Indiana grave robber oh he's a grave robber that's you know that's what they call him so it's just a dude who is a collector he's might might not necessarily be a grave robber

1:47:06don't think this is the same guy they found FBI found 42,000 relics and 2,000 human bones in a man's home what is that what is that a horse yeah looks like a penguin right 42,000 relics oh same guy no don Miller whoa it is the same guy that's crazy oh this guy's a nut he died in 2015 too bad he was 91 when agents first knocked on his door in 2014 while he only lived a year later the 42,000 artifacts hoarded by Miller representing with maybe the largest ever seizure from a private collection so this was interesting it's like are they saying that he's not allowed to acquire them like do we have rules in terms of like say if you found some stuff I know we have rules about Native Americans

1:48:08FBI became involved when they learned thousands of items were obtained in violation of antiquities laws and federal and state statutes according to the FBI Miller went on digs around the world and illegally brought his finds home to the United States I think Nick Cage had to give back that skull he bought because it was stolen from somewhere or something he bought a skull like a T-Rex skull oh oh he had to give back his T-Rex skull because they found out that it was like stolen so gave it back I don't know what happened with the money but whoa um how much is the T-Rex also I was thinking like this guy got fucked they found this guy there's gotta be as we just I brought him up because I knew about it uh he you know probably talked about it at the bar and all that kind of yeah what about the people who don't he's on Facebook yeah what about the people who don't those old dudes are all on Facebook um have you seen the dinosaur that Ways to Well has yeah Ways to Well legally purchased a dinosaur what like I said they have a like a dinosaur bone

1:49:14some aquatic dinosaur that they have suspended in their ceiling ready yeah you can buy dinosaur bones um he bought a skull for 276 thousand dollars whoa he got fucked government wow he voluntary return the fossils to the Mongolian government after US authorities found it was smuggled wow um see if you can find the Ways to Well dinosaur yeah you can buy dinosaur bones it's pretty cool it's a lot of people that don't believe in dinosaurs lately they're very confusing yeah what what's that reasoning oh just they've been lied to about everything maybe dinosaurs too and then there's people that think that dinosaurs are actually the dragons of ancient history and that that's uh that's all bullshit it's the dumbest theories I mean like you know we have I there there's the Ways to Well dinosaur that's what it looks like that's pretty dope yeah it's pretty sick some sort of an aquatic dinosaur uh how much of that is actual bone and how much

1:50:15of his replica I don't know some of them are replica I think that's actual bone but like they have T a T Rex is I think the most complete T Rex is I want to say 80 percent what is the most complete T Rex skeleton ever found no one just sold recently uh at an auction oh yeah yeah 62 percent complete is that the most complete one ever pretty sure I thought there was a well there's one that's 90 percent oh there you go well discovered with 90 percent of the skeleton recovered yeah we know a lot folks this idea that dinosaurs aren't real is is really silly no that's not real yeah whoa okay so that's real guys stop that's a real skull that the problem is there's been deception and one of the one of the big pieces of deception is when you go to a lot of museums and you see a dinosaur skeleton you assume that's how they found it and they put it

1:51:18back together again whereas a lot of the pieces of those bones are not real yeah a lot of the pieces are recreations and entire entire um some entire skeletons that are museums are all a recreation there's no actual bone that you're actually looking at and so then people are like hey the same with uh it's the same with ancient sites the 67 million years old 80 percent intact so like just that alone 80 percent of that is real um they're real okay so fucking a real thing that existed just like fucking crocodiles are still real today there was a real group of large reptiles that roamed the earth for a long time but the crazy thing I think dinosaur was really highlight the the kind of fragmentary nature of the fossil record right because they existed for 160 million years or something like that but we only have like a few thousand fossils from that huge amount of time and it just shows how little survives right yeah exactly and that the fossil records

1:52:22just really weird it's a it takes a lot to make a fossil so we have a tiny fraction of the actual data and we have to extrapolate out from from that and just that's our understanding and that's why it's we do not know what happened in the deep past which isn't fucking cool it's so cool I love it that's why I do I do man I love it yeah I don't know anybody who when you first learn about this to anybody that I want to talk to when you first learn about this stuff you don't go whoa you know because it's it is so interesting and um that's why to me the um reaction to Graham Hancock's Netflix series was so strange like so unhinged like why why are you guys freaking out about this and calling it the most dangerous show yeah I mean I've experienced this first hand now because I mean last time I was here I wasn't really known about but now I'm a kind of people know who I am and I get so much hate it's weird because people like paint me out to be something I'm not like and it's just so strange because I'm me and I know I think and I know I believe and yeah

1:53:25obviously you like experienced down a whole different level but yeah I've experienced it from the government it's just why it is so weird when people like paint you out to be someone that you know and put words in your mouth and like it's strange but you'll get used to it um the the key is just don't read it that's the key like you're gonna be aware of enough of it peripherally people bring it to your attention if it's really important or if it's like significant none of it's gonna really be important but as long as and you're a very conscientious guy and you do a really good job like I said being objective and measured and that's all you need to do just keep doing that just don't read the comments yeah because there's a bunch of people out there that are just very unhappy period no matter what and when someone is getting a lot of attention they're very angry always and there's whatever that number is one out of a hundred one out of a thousand it doesn't when they reach you that negativity is never good for you it's only bad for you and it sits with you a little bit more like you get all the positive comments you don't really fuck you know like

1:54:28exactly and you the negative one six in your brain because you know what's really interesting is like a people have done like hit pieces on me and shit but an obviously loads of negative stuff comes through but also I've had like actual archaeologists and actual people working in national institutions reach out to me and say like you know these are like actual archaeologists and they're saying like Michael we value your work and like we actually think your important voice and stuff like that and I I found that really encouraging because these are you know it's easy for us to think about archaeologists is like a kind of bogeyman they're like I want to suppress all this stuff but they're not all like that no I think I'm open to these particularly the young ones particularly people that are coming up that it really the reason why they got into this in the first place is because it's such a fascinating subject and like you when you've spoken on this when you were in school and you were getting your degree you were confused as to why these alternative perspectives weren't entertained I think there's a lot of young people that feel confined by the gatekeepers they can they feel confined by the career academics that are sort of in charge of

1:55:34who gets tenure who gets jobs who gets grants it's a very confusing thing you don't want to ruffle any further step on any toes and so you feel constrained in your ability to be you know curious and that's that seems insane for something that is so inherently curious curiosity driven so inherently unknown as well yeah we do not know as we keep saying right right right we're not talking about stuff that's like you know a stab of science where you can clearly you know it's not mathematics this is something like weird you know you're you're you're looking at hints of the past and the more we look the more we find older stuff it's like grandma always says stuff just keeps getting older yeah it's crazy well it's just so cool that you're out there making videos and that you could do that for a living now I know that's why I feel I feel so lucky that I get to do some of them so interested in and talk about these topics and also to like create not to kind of like

1:56:40inspire this thinking and other people that's really what I want to try and do is to get people thinking about history from this different perspective and to think about the unknown and think about the potential that what humans could have been doing now that we know that a mind like hours could have existed for a million years that humans like us could have inhabited this planet for such a vastly longer length of time than we used to believe in all the possibilities that throws up more than anything that's what I want people to to think about when they watch my work I don't want to tell them to believe this or tell them to believe that I just want them to kind of think about themselves and open their minds to the possibilities that could have occurred and that doesn't mean that like people always say that I like saying that there's like advanced civilizations in prehistory I'm not saying that I'm just saying there's a lot more on the table than we used to think and I think that's really fascinating I wish more people would kind of take that possibility seriously and that's why I get encouraged when I get these emails from people that actually in the institutions because they're the people that are going to rewrite the textbooks like I can say what I want like I'm just a youtuber but we need the people that actually work in

1:57:44in the institutions to think in this way and then then I think we might update I think in on these things I think there's a lot of those young folks that are coming up now in archaeology that do have alternative perspectives whether or not they're being suppressed and it's also very encouraging for them to see a pathway outside of academics academia like what you're pursuing and to see like not only is this viable but you can do it with the the proper approach like the way that you're doing it where you're not you're not making crazy claims not saying the aliens did it you're not saying anything nutty you're just saying hey there's a there's a lot going on here and to pretend that we have an accurate map of the territory seems silly yeah I think I just think there's so much more on the table now than there used to be only a few decades ago and I think that's so exciting when we look at our past because as I say it's the reason we're all here right it's the reason we live in this civilization is the answer to these questions and we don't know the answer to these questions anymore so let's let's talk about yeah what else have you found recently that's interesting

1:58:49yeah so I mean I was still there's still there's older American sites so so there's obviously the serene mastone site which is 130,000 years old which is controversial but I think people that's the mastodon bones were they appeared to be it appears signs of human smashing the bones to get the marrow yeah just after like fresh freshly smashed after the animal had died and they they found like these anvil's like these things that look like tools next to the bones and it's controversial because we can't prove that that was human activity but it looks like human activity it was even published in nature in 2017 so you know it's another little data point that pushes back human presence in the America potentially to over a hundred thousand years ago and there's even more there's a site called Calico where I think this one's a little bit I don't I don't really buy this one but a very famous archaeologist called Lewis Leakey who's like one of the top names in the archaeology in the 20th century he believed the Calico showed evidence of human presence in the Americas over a hundred thousand years ago as well so so another data point

1:59:49and then there's um then there's way at Laco which um I think you've heard of have you heard of way at Laco it's this site in Mexico where they had this volcanic ash over these human tools and they dated the ash to like crazy numbers I'm talking like 300,000 400,000 500,000 years ago and the tools were below this layer. What? Yeah so now I'm not aware of that one. So in the 1950s there was a a Mexican archaeologist who was doing some work in the Vascular basin in Mexico near the city of Pubella and he was finding all these extinct Pleistocene animal remains there alongside human activity so he called in some American archaeologists and they did some work and they identified this site called way at Laco which is an archaeological site there and they found these very sophisticated stone tools they're like bifacial stone tools which means they've been worked on on two sides and it's quite a sophisticated level of tool and so they found this and they were like okay this is an interesting site let's bring in some geologists so the geologists came in and they were expecting to date the kind of sediment around the tools to around 8,000 to 10,000 years ago because they knew

2:00:54about a volcanic eruption that had happened at that time and so they expected the volcanic ash to be from that so they did all this testing but then they found that the ash was giving these crazy dates like 200,000 300,000 up to 600,000 years old and that was completely mental because the tools were below this layer of ash and then they dated a camel pelvis I think that was in situ with the tools and that camel pelvis came back to 250,000 years old as well and that was in the same layer of the tools so they kind of brought all their different dating methods together and there's multiple kind of geological dating methods on the sediment, the ash and also the camel pelvis and they kind of collected all this to a date of 250,000 years ago for this site for where these tools were found and yeah and so they tried to publish this and they received like immense pushback because obviously this was the time of the Clovis first paradigm and you know people weren't ready for Clovis to be

2:01:58broken let alone by such a huge margin like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years old and they couldn't publish for like 20 years and by that time many of the artifacts had gone missing and they didn't know where they were and the site actually got raised like it got kind of removed yeah and I'm not trying to say that's like some conspiracy or anything but it just means that you can't really prove it but they did eventually publish and the geologists have always stopped by this date and there's multiple lines of evidence that suggest that the tools were found below this layer of roughly 250,000 years old and that's obviously like hugely older than we think humans have been in the Americas so it's a very interesting site I want to give a shout out to Will Brown who's got a channel called Incredible History he's actually been to the site and he kind of like nudged me in the direction of looking into this one he's got a great channel but yeah it's super interesting because we can't prove it because the tools have gone missing the site no longer exists but there's a paper out there written by serious scientists saying that

2:03:01you know there could be human presence in the Americas over 200,000 years ago potentially even older than that and that would just radically change our understanding of humans in America so then when you put all these sites together so obviously white sands is the earliest at 22,000 but then when you add that to Chico E. Takeh, as I mentioned earlier 33,000, Pedro Fueradro in Brazil over 50,000, Saruti Mastodon 130,000, I don't really think Calico is, I don't think that's natural but then where'd Laco it 250,000 you know it only takes one of them to be right for our understanding of when humans reached America to radically shift and I think it's only logical that humans were in America a lot longer than we think because you know when we're talking about the vast span of time that we've been on this planet why couldn't we have reached these places right and then the question is how did we reach them and from where you know from where exactly that's the the weird thing is some of the when you look at like pyramid structures for instance like

2:04:02where did that idea come from how that idea make it to the Aztecs all over the world we find pyramids you know weird is weird I mean you could say that it's just like a logical way of building things but maybe who knows well there's also the weirdness and the fact that the Aztecs themselves didn't build the pyramids oh with some of them yeah like Teotihuacan was there before and they said it was the name literally means place where the gods lived and they found it there and so it was before them they don't know who built it right they give us lots of our names they get they gave us the name Olmech Olmech means the rubber people because they knew about the Olmechs they knew they existed before them but they didn't know really know who they were but they just called them the rubber people is because they lived around rubber trees I think it's because they use rubber or something I'm not 100% sure what's the conventional theory about who built these Aztec temples I think the theory is that it was a culture that came just before the Aztecs that we don't have

2:05:06a name for but they don't know they don't know they don't imagine you don't know anything about them you don't have a name for them but they made insanely sophisticated architecture with stone that mirrored the cosmos yeah no one knows who built the pyramid of the Sun I think that's what it's called at Teotihuacan but it's ginormous and it's incredible and so all these different layers to it and incredibly sophisticated we don't know who built it we don't really know when they built it I mean we think we know kind of the region but we don't know as is the case with so much of this stuff we do not know is there a conventional timeline like if I tell you to walk on yeah did they like and what are they basing it on if they think it came right before the Aztecs because I had read as long as a thousand years before yeah I mean that's kind of what I mean by right before because I'm thinking it's a long time yeah the United States is not even 300 years old yeah yeah yeah of course but yeah but what I'm trying to say is I don't think it's like you know way way right right right right so somewhere around a thousand

2:06:10years before but that's the thing is like how many of these things happened where there was some sort of a civilization and then it collapsed and then new people came along like the idea that you would have a civilization there was capable of building something as fantastic as some of those Aztec constructions and then they would just go away we just lost all memory of it all memory of it and then people just wandered up their one day of the Aztecs and they're like whoa what is this you know like and it was probably covered with jungle right yeah I mean how many of those things were just absorbed by you know the just the just nature and it's no wonder that they think it was built by gods right because you see it and you're like that's incredible who built this it must have been the gods and there's no one living in it and just so it shows how easily human civilizations can reach a really high peak level of sophistication and then go down again and collapse and just all memory of them is gone yeah um any other cool things you've discovered recently well there's

2:07:14also the question of when humans reach Australia which I think is another really interesting question because the conventional time is is 65,000 years ago and there's a site called Maget Bay Bay in northern Australia and that's the early-saccepted site in Australia and that's right in the north of the country and it makes sense because you have to you have to cross water to get to Australia you have to build boats and cross water but there's another really interesting site that's right in the south of Australia where archaeologists found um black and stones again and charcoal and half-like structures and they dated this site to 120,000 years ago which is double just about double the time that we think humans are in Australia and it's in the very south of the country and the archaeologist that have working there actually wrote in their paper that the evidence supports a cultural origin over a natural origin so they think that it's cultural as in human rather than natural but they can't prove it because there's no associated artifacts and no associated skeletons but they think that it

2:08:17it kind of leans towards being a cultural origin and obviously if that's correct that means human beings were only in Australia twice as long as we thought but also had inhabited the entire continent or not inhabited but had gone through the entire continent right down to the very south of the country twice as old as we thought and it's just another thing that's like pushing it older and older and older and it's not accepted but it's so hard to prove these things because we can't find skeletons or we can find skeletons but it's extremely rare so the bar is so high for proof but this site called Moijil 120,000 years ago is I think very strong suggestive evidence that human beings have been in Australia twice as long as we think and obviously that means that they had to have got there by boat and yeah there's another one there something that was done the genetic connection between Australian Aboriginal people and Dindas Olvins yeah yeah they think that maybe there was different migration,

2:09:20pathways and different human species potentially also reached Australia and it's not that wild because if you think back to the the seafaring thing we were talking about earlier if people were reaching islands over a million years ago then why couldn't they have reached Australia much earlier than we think yeah because if we had that capability for so long why not when they do this is this I mean because obviously they didn't even know about Dindas Olvins until 2010 so is this like a genetic analysis and if so like do they have genes like how do they get genetic material from these Dindas Olvins skeletons I think you can take it from like to I'm not sure but I think you can I think they know the kind of genetic makeup of the different human species and so they I think you can tell that way if you've got like a trace of the DNA yeah that's what I was saying like if it's fossilized do they have actual DNA from Dindas Olvins and if they do like how are they how are they guessing that people Aboriginal people

2:10:22in Australia have some traces of it so like Europeans have traces of Neanderthal yeah and also people in I think like Nepal and these high-outitude places they have quite high traces of Dinesi DNA and that's what they think allows them to live in high-outitude environments they think the Dinesi vans are more robust than modern humans and can live in more extreme environments and I think the people that live in those kind of high-outitude regions of the Himalayas and stuff have that kind of gene if you like I'm not sure that's the science behind it but they think they have the traces of that and that's what allows them to live in these more isolated high-outitude environments so they think Dindas Olvins lived in high altitude mostly maybe they don't know but well there's only a few bonds right exactly so it's really hard to tell so fucking interesting man and also in that region they they found recently the oldest the oldest evidence of advanced surgery which is like way older than we think it's like 31,000 years ago they found some surgery

2:11:23in Borneo which is again in this same region I think Indonesia is such a fascinating region because it's the place of where the Sunta shelf was where obviously the sea levels risen have covered a huge expansive land that used to be land but now no longer risen so many interesting discoveries here but yeah this surgery thing is they found the skeleton of a child that had had his leg amputated and but had lived for many many many years afterwards and his whole like lower leg had been amputated off and but had like healed like completely and he lived like or she I think as a girl lived like a lot longer after that and obviously that's quite an advanced thing to do right because you have to understand how to prevent infection you have to it's a very humid place as well so it's very hard to survive it was very painful for that individual but this pushback are understanding of surgery by like 20,000 no maybe not quite that long I can't remember I think it was like 7,000 years ago so yeah I'll buy a long way because this is 31,000 years ago so again it's showing prehistoric humans to be far more sophisticated than we think they

2:12:26were performing surgery 31,000 years ago and surviving and living for years afterwards and that is insane I wonder if they had any pharmacological interventions like to deal with the pain well I think they would have used wild plants because we've got so much evidence now of other human species and our human species using wild plants to as a medicinal from medicinal purposes right we see the underthrows doing that a long long time ago like cultivating wild plants and using them as pain killers and stuff like that what's going to kill the pain of a fucking amputation well probably not much but bones are right and they're like what kind of tools did they have like what were they doing it with how they how they stitch people up do they have needles did they have thread they just leave the wound open like what did they do but whatever they did it worked and they were sophisticated enough to keep that person alive and to care for them and for them to live years afterwards excuse me it's wild it's wild so it's yet more evidence of people being super sophisticated so much longer

2:13:28in time than we thought and it all points in one direction man which is humans have been here longer they've been more intelligent than we thought for a long long time if you had a guess what do you think is the oldest real true civilization how long when do you think it started so i think in terms of like what we call civilization in terms of our current like cycle of it if you like i think it is tash de pellet and whatever came before that but i don't think it would probably been that far further before that but i think that from the onset of the holocaust and i think we basically started right away all over the globe and you know called a developed civilization because it happens everywhere right back to question one why did it happen everywhere all over the time because i think that's what humans do i think once we get a stable period of climate we we innovate because agriculture and civilization can't have been a very hard invention to do because everyone did it it happened everywhere all over the world so it's not like a really unique hard thing to do because people did it everywhere so that makes me think of

2:14:32what about all the other periods of stable climate that we've had and now that we know that humans have been around for so long we've had it's something like four stable warm periods in the time that we have modern sapient fossils so 300,000 years but then if you extrapolate that out to this million-year timescale of modern size brains and modern behavior with the sea fairing it's something like 11 warm periods that we've lived through of stable climate conditions that have lasted for over 10,000 years so you look at each of those warm periods and you think if agriculture and civilization isn't that you know hard seismic oven invention to to do why couldn't it have happened in those previous warm periods 11 of them going back to a million years and possibly beyond there's also that very weird phenomenon when when someone somewhere figures something out even if people aren't connected other places in the world people figured out the same time that we know that to be the case today rupert shell Drake has a term for it a thing's called is it morphic resonance so his his term is is also based around theories they've done with rats and mazes that if

2:15:39you teach a rat a maze on the east coast rats on the west coast learn it quicker really yeah yeah he's got lots of interesting work hasn't he about kind of almost telepathic yeah weird stuff there's probably some sort of a casheic record that there's probably some sort of shared field of information that whether or not it's tangible and you can you know write it down verbatim or whether or not it's some sort of implied concepts and ideas that are transmitted through the species that like creativity itself is almost like something that we tap into like uniformly as a species it's like you can like almost put like we're in on ten out yeah yeah and that like when Michael button figure something out someone on the other part of the world like oh I feel it yeah it's just very weird it's a very weird idea yeah you know and it's it's impossible to prove or I mean I you can you can apply it and the rap thing it's very interesting I think they've done them with

2:16:40some other things as well you know so it's it's it's it's interesting because like if that's not the case then what do you have a sea faring civilization that travels the entire globe do you have something that that so so advanced they figured out how to traverse continents and they're bringing all this information with them is it one group no it seems like they all kind of figure it out at the same time or roughly roughly but it is pretty much the same time in comparison to the amount of time that we've been on the planet right it's not a coincidence it's an explosion exactly yeah so why because the reason given is the climate that's the old reason but I think that is the reason because you know the climate got warmer so agriculture civilization and yeah that makes sense but then why not before why not in all of these eleven warm periods where humans have been here right i've been smart if it's such a common invention why didn't happen before right maybe it did maybe it did it's also interesting how much stuff like if you think about the global temperature like where is it always warm well it's always warm around the equator kind of always stays warm

2:17:42around there and well what's around there well the amazon yeah and even in periods of yeah like the fully glaciated periods some places on the earth were perfectly habitable right so who knows but then i mean and that goes back into the like you say the amazon and goes back into the question of how long the humans been in america because if we've been in america and the america is for a lot longer than we think then people have been in the amazon a lot longer we think and then you look at the discoveries in the amazon and how there's been civilizations there a lot further back in time than we thought well how far back in time obviously the evidence we've seen so far doesn't point like crazy back in time but we don't know well there's so little evidence that's the problem i mean they're just recently discovering these grids right and so how much archaeological work has been done on all these grids oh yeah exactly so hard and also the the rainforest is such like a extreme recycling kind of natural machine yes it's going to destroy anything that's this older than than uh right a few thousand years ago so it doesn't mean that there's not stuff that's older than

2:18:43a few thousand years ago it just means there's nothing left and they could have built in organic materials that have just decayed and you would never see it and they could have been done with doing that hundreds of thousands of years ago and who knows so it's wild man it's so wild uh I think this the potential is enormous just absolutely enormous and that's why I do what I do because I think it's so fascinating and I love talking about it and I love uh getting other people to think about it and that's the great privilege of me being able to do this job um so yeah well it's an important job it really is because those videos although they are you know just YouTube and they're entertaining they're just you know something that anyone can digest there's so much valid fascinating information on them and so many valid questions that we really can't quite answer and expands the like when people watch them you get this understanding like oh wow this is a big puzzle this this thing is really complicated like it's a lot more complicated than we've been told

2:19:46especially by you know people that want you to believe that they have they have the answers yeah that's what I just hate it I hate the certainty that people talk about the past because I never talk about with certainty I'm not saying this is necessarily true I'm just saying you know possibilities everywhere so many different possibilities and uh yeah everything we seem to discover pushes it in one direction that's older and more intelligence back in time and yeah there's there's so many interesting things um and we haven't even barely scratched the surface today I know what do you do this for days um before we wrap it up those or any and the other really interesting ones that you'd like to talk about yeah there was something interesting that came out in regards to writing there's a couple of interesting things regarding writing because obviously writing is the kind of marker of civilization like writing began civilization began but we're starting to see evidence of symbolic meaning being transmitted through symbolic notation like way back further in time than we believe so obviously the earliest writing is still thought to be about 4000 BC with the ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform and stuff like that but as you mentioned

2:20:50of and think all they're the kind of idea regarding tash de pellare having a similar thing and that's 12,000 years ago but there's much much older evidence of humans conveying information in a symbolic fashion so there's um an archaeologist called Genevieve von Petzinger I believe she's called and she found evidence that on all these ice age paintings that we find in Europe with all these incredible like bulls and bison and stuff and you've probably seen them but next to them is like this kind of symbol of notation that people have kind of overlooked for years but she found 32 recurring signs across a period of 30,000 years all across the continent and these signs she thinks are like a not a language as such but a kind of a system of encoding meaning yeah there you go there the signs and she kind of makes the argument that these signs are um not a language as such but a kind of tradition of conveying information that lasted for 30,000 years and that is

2:21:51such a long length of time like if you think about the oldest language today is I think it's ancient Chinese and that's only a few thousand years old and yet these signs appear all across the continent of Europe across the time span of 30,000 years I pretty much exactly the same and just these signs and they also find them in other continents as well and she doesn't say there's any connection there I'm not sure there is any connection there but the spirals are really weird they find spirals all over the place right yeah they find these signs all over the world that Jamie you might be able to find uh all over the world yeah there's like a cool map where they kind of point where so we'll find if you scroll down a little bit uh on the left uh that one yeah you see this that's really blurry yeah once it loads but it's all over the world there you go and it's the same signs wow that's crazy so the same signs in Europe North America Central Africa South America

2:22:54Southern Africa Australia Malaysia East Africa New Guinea wow Borneo Myanmar and she thinks it's like a much older symbolic tradition that humans have kind of carried with them in the kind of migratory roots and it actually goes back much older than the the iSage art date of like 40,000 years but actually comes from when humans first reach Europe out of Africa and spreading across the world and we've kind of kept the same tradition of conveying information and again this has massive implications for human intelligence because even though it's not a full language the ability to convey information in a symbolic way is a marker of really sophisticated intelligence and so it's another really interesting discovery that kind of points towards intelligence and also the the kind of the to maintain that tradition over such a long length of time is really interesting because we don't really do that like as I say the oldest language is ancient Chinese and it's only a few thousand years old and yet these people somehow managed to pass on this

2:23:58language quote unquote for 30,000 years have you ever heard anybody discuss the concept that human beings might have had some sort of some sort of telepathy that atrophied when we started using language and writing and communicating with words what's really interesting is the human brain size has decreased since civilization began which is straight because and it makes sense because if everything was oral before you need more of your brain to hold all the information but once you can kind of outsource it to physical objects you don't need so much brain like size and space how much is it decreased I can't remember off the top of my head but it's I don't think that's even controversial I think there's quite a lot of evidence that the human brain size has decreased a little bit in the last 10,000 years or whatever well what weren't like there was some ancient people that thought writing was a bad idea and that you should you should remember everything and that

2:25:00writing and writing things down was actually going to degrade your memory why I think it certainly because you don't need that brain like part of your brain anymore if you're not memorizing what the information you have like it makes it smarter as a whole as a civilization but and then they extrapolate so the hard drives exactly what it is happening on a bigger scale now with AI and stuff like that and you know exactly same process though like people have talked about Chatchy BT decreasing people's intelligence because it outsources thinking itself which is a crazy step and we're going to just go like a reason exactly so yeah so I mean maybe we're regressing well I think as a civilization we're learning more and yes collectively as the individual right maybe we're regressing and our potential to learn and just to remember things like when I just from when I was a boy I knew everybody's phone number yeah yeah and now I know I know I know like three people's phone numbers because we don't have to memorize anymore exactly in this world yeah yeah and there's also another paper that came out regarding language which is they found

2:26:03over 200 objects and this around the same date around 40,000 years ago and they basically found like a proto-right in script that had the same level of complexity as the early Sumerian scripts from 3000 BC but from 40,000 years ago in I say Europe again so it's like another kind of proto-language symbolic thinking and conveying meaning through symbols I don't know if I can't quite remember off the top of my head Jamie but if you type in like it was this year so if you type in PNAS proto-writing 40,000 years ago or something they found it loads of like symbols and grave on bones and they argued that it was the same level of complexity as the early Sumerian scripts and again this was the marker of civilization 3000 BC but now it's this capability is so much older now because of these new discoveries yeah I saw that it's really weird like when you look at the writing like okay what are they like the little scratches on the bones and clay and whatever it is like what are they what are they conveying do we even understand what they're conveying or

2:27:06just assume they're conveying something well I think they categorized it and they seem to think it is a kind of proto script like that's a script well yeah like a proto script so like the kind of thing that became language but right so there had to be a precursor of language but if it a written language but if it if it existed 40,000 years ago it's so much older than we used to think this capability emerged yeah and what does that what does that kind of entail what can I see that again Jamie the images how weird and so at the bottom that looks a lot like cune four I think the I think these ones are examples of more advanced but they're saying it's at the same level as this but 40,000 years ago which is vastly older than cune four it's so interesting I'm sure you've seen the we talked about this history as well the Italian guy who came up with this concept of erosion dating that's another weird one like at the high end he

2:28:12thinks it might be 20 plus thousand years old it's like okay what yeah because he compared the erosion because there was an earthquake like 500 years ago the coming shook all these casing stones off yeah and he compared the erosion with the blocks that had always been exposed with the ones that had recently become exposed and yeah he got this day I mean I'd like to see that method like tried and tested on sites we know the age of and you know proven that way before I take that too seriously but you know it's interesting and it's all interesting you listen you show super interesting I'm so glad you're around I'm so glad that someone like you that's willing to do that kind of work because obviously Jamie and I are not going to do it but we're super happy to have you in anytime you've got some new stuff you want to talk about and I'm really excited that your channel just keeps growing because it's really good man you can really tell you put in so much work and so much effort and research and it's just excellent it's super entertaining it's right up my alley so I appreciate you thanks for being the fucking man thank you very much back at you and I

2:29:14really appreciate like all the support you've shown me like it doesn't go unnoticed man like it it really means a lot and yeah if I could just do a little self plug real quick I've got my channel with Michael button search up everyone and check me out Bob also I just started a second channel called Patterns of History because I'm really interested in once we move into recorded history it's really interesting to see how when the silence lifts and we have these ruins we can cross check and these dates we can kind of match to different civilizations it's so interesting how civilizations seem to follow the same patterns all over the world of rise collapse fall and things like that and it applies today I think we see the same patterns happening and civilizations always think that they're more advanced and there we go thanks yeah and better than the ones before but I mean it's another fucking I could go on for another three hours on that but it's so it's so interesting how we see the same recurring patterns happen throughout civilizations across recorded history as well so that's like another little project that I'm working on but I'm still I'm still going to go as

2:30:18hard as I possibly can on the kind of archaeological lost history well it's beautiful that you have so much time to do two different channels too it's awesome yeah well I'm trying my best well you kick an ass dude congratulations it's awesome always great to have you thank you for being here one more time people want to see your channel they want to find you what's the best place I know you're on Spotify now as well right so it just audio yeah well it's the videos as well yeah I just put them up there so people can if people some people prefer to listen they let me know that so I put out there um so yeah I've got both my channels I'm also about to make some music if people should check out my music yeah I'm in a band this is my band oh that's the alien head that's if I keep wearing the alien head yeah oh what's the name you're bad we're called headache if people if you get it it's like the headache yeah so people want to check that out we're kind of music punk rock oh you're fucking punk rock rock rock rock alright I used to do that all the time and then COVID kind of fucked us up and we couldn't perform live and I'll drum a move to Australia but we're gonna try to make some music again in the near future so that's awesome this is headache.com if people want

2:31:20to check that out um but yeah check it out all right Michael thank you appreciate you look at that here you go Moody looking mother fuckers yeah the boy going to back get your hair out bro can't see like that all right? fire buddy