#2546 - Michael Button

Joe Rogan Podcast, 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 a wild year for me. I bet it has been. Since I was last here, I mean, I've seen my YouTube growth in numbers I couldn't have imagined before. I've met so many cool people. I've managed to get to a point where it's now my job to research and investigate ancient history and the vast mysteries of our past. And yeah, I mean, that's something I was doing for free before. So the fact that I'm now able to do that full time is just an immense privilege. And I'm so grateful to everyone that's helped me get there, including you. Well, you're putting out fantastic content. Thank you. And it's such an interesting subject. And the giant blind spot that the. The mainstream archaeologists have left has allowed all these people to go through and get a much larger audience even than them. Yeah. And it's really important when someone like you does it because you're so thorough and you're so objective and you're so measured in the way you describe these things and talk about these things. There's no fantastic claims, no hyperbole. It's all very well laid out. And even when you go to like extreme possibilities of these things. It's very. It's very measured. So I really appreciate that. Well, thank you. I appreciate you saying that. And yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm always trying to make it as good as I possibly can. And I try and listen to what people say and try and improve. And I don't think I've reached like the peak of where I could possibly be. But, you know, I'm trying my hardest. But it's not just that. I mean, as you say, I think there are so many people out there. And now that I'm in this position, I've seen it firsthand. There are like millions and millions of people around the world that are deeply fascinated by these questions, by the vast mysteries of our past. So. As well, they should be. And they also know that we're getting a very narrow version of it from mainstream academics. And they're so determined to cling to their timelines and cling to this notion that anything new that's discovered by people outside of their little circle can't be accurate. And I think that's so silly. Yeah. I mean, I think someone like me has the kind of advantage of the fact that because I, you know, didn't continue my career. I wasn't in academia, but that was the pathway that I was on. Because I've gone independent now, I kind of have the freedom, if you like, to talk about these ideas in a much more open way than maybe I would have been able to if I was. Well, I wouldn't have 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 at 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. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, 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. Yeah. It's so interesting how quick this stuff is moving. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, there's been, I think, two papers in particular. They 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 where to start. I mean, I think we should start like this. I think as things currently stand, there are three huge questions that archaeology cannot answer. And it's interesting because these three questions we used to think we had an answer to. But in light of new. 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? So, what are these questions? So, I mean, and this is just coming from me, right? Okay. Caveat on the whole conversation. I'm not an academic. I'm not a professional archaeologist. I'm just, 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 spent my whole life researching. 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 for yourself. Like, listen to what I say, but don't take what I say as gospel. Because at the end of the day, I'm just a YouTuber, you know? So, that's the caveat I want to put on it. But from my mind, these are the three questions that I think archaeology can no longer answer, but used to think it had an answer for. So, the first question is, and we spoke about this a little bit last time. Is the fascinating question of why after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of human beings like us being on this planet, 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 at pretty 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 ancient India, in ancient China, all around about the same time, give or take a thousand or so years. But compared to the time span of human beings on this planet, you know, 300,000 years plus for modern humans. 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. And also, combining to that is the question: is the question of other human species, how intelligent were other human species? Because we used to think that we were the smart ones. I mean, our name, Homo sapiens, literally translates to wise man, which is an incredibly humble thing for us to say about ourselves. But yeah, so that's question two: how old is human intelligence? And again, I think the answer is, we don't have the answer anymore. So, that's really fascinating. And then question three is: when did humans first reach. the more isolated land masses? So, that's the Americas, where we are right now, and also Australia, which is perhaps less important, but still interesting. And again, we don't have the answer for that anymore. And I think, whatever the answer is to these three questions, why does civilization appear everywhere all at once? How old is human intelligence? And when did humans first reach the more isolated parts of the world? The answer to those questions, whatever it is, I think is fundamentally important, because. whatever the answer is, is the reason we're all here, right? It's the reason we all live in this civilization. It's the reason we all enjoy the fruits of everything that we exist in today. And yet, we don't know the answer anymore. But as I said, on the surface, everyone's kind of carrying on like it's business as usual. But we no longer know the answer to the most fundamental questions of how we got here. So, 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, or we have not discovered some of these yet? Like some of the weirdness? Like some of the weirdness of the Amazon, you know, as they find these, what would appear to be the grids of ancient cities that are hidden in the jungle that they're discovering with LIDAR and these other technologies that were unavailable until fairly recently. So we know that not only was the Amazon filled with people, but it was filled with millions of people. And that's crazy. That is a crazy shift in the way we used to look at the Amazon just a few decades ago. And we don't know who these people were. We don't know. Like if you go really far back, like the Olmecs 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, well, what do you think? Well, I think. This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is presented by the Farmer's Dog, gently cooked fresh dog food that's clinically shown to support healthy aging, just in time for National Dog Day on August 26th. Both of my dogs eat it. Love it. New customers get 50% off your first box at the Farmers Dog. dot com slash rogan plus you get free shipping this episode is brought to you by focus features from the acclaimed director of jason bourne comes the thrilling new movie the uprising starring andrew garfield in a land of kings a man of the people will defy the most powerful empire on earth and ignite a revolution inspired by a true story experience the legendary epic and witness the rise of a legend the uprising only in theaters september 10th discover it at dolby cinema rated r under 17 not admitted without a parent well in terms of the civilization question i think it's just it's i think it's an old idea that we kind of drew this line and it's the line is the invention of writing right so it's around 3000 4000 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 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 3000 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 topella quebec li tepe 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 it's going to be accepted as a civilization but i think it's going to be accepted as a civilization so that's the kind of doubling of the timeline in terms of going back much further than that i think then you get into kind of like 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 we thought humans were young like only 100 000 years old only a few decades ago and now we know we're much older than that and so this is how we're going to be able to say that it's a civilization and it's a civilization and i think that's what i mean about everything kind of being back on the table again because we now have a incredibly increased time span of human intelligence that i would argue and i'll come to this later stretches over a million years and yet the old idea which is still sort of in place but i think is breaking i think most archaeologists would accept that it's breaking but the old idea was that humans only became intelligent around 50 000 years ago and so because that idea kind of was in hold it almost made 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 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 pre-history or not the whole of pre-history 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 years and i think that's a very significant difference between the time span of pre-history and the time span of human intelligence and i think that's a very significant difference between the time span of human intelligence and the time span of pre-history and i think that's a very significant difference between the time span of human intelligence and the time span of pre-history because the time span of pre-history has increased by 20 times from 50 000 to over a million years and i'll explain why in a minute but i think that puts everything back on the table i think that the possibilities of pre-history are 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 no you it's a great start um jesse michaels was here yesterday and he had a really fascinating theory i don't know if it's is that his theory or is it someone else's theory the the ergot theory his theory was that um he believes that agriculture and that as they started agriculture wasn't just significant in that you could like stay in one place and you would have food and you always had a reliable diet you didn't have to worry about starving to death and then you because you had that sort of relaxation that came with that you could start inventing things and building things and civilization would advance he thinks it's also because ergot grows on these different wheats and barleys 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 murray rescue 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 what are the whatever the wild advancements of the time were did you see that they just um not proved it but they just they just did a study on the hallucinian mysteries where they kind of showed that they they were doing uh they did have ergot because when brian wrote that book they hadn't proved that but something just came out did you see the um it was a puma bone pipe that they found that tested positive for dmt where in elusis i do not know i think it was i don't it might have been in the america no where was that peru yes really yes how old is that jamie see if you can put that in a perplexity if it knows what this is all about because it's a fascinating subject because not only does it not imply that they were willingly taking psychedelic drugs that somehow or another they knew how to make dmt like okay what because that's a complicated process when you have to separate the molecule from whatever plant it's in and then you have to figure out that you need to freebase it or smoke it like how what this is actually in northwestern argentina aha the and so it's the indies but um the inca cueva a high altitude cave site in jujoy northwestern argentina uh the tubular smoking pipes were made from the long bones of a puma they were found alongside uh and uh dan and thura anna dananthra and dananthra seeds including the plant commonly associated with uh vil phil vilca sibil snuff traditions residue testing detected tryptamine alkaloids in the pipes so they were figuring out how to take these seeds and smoke them um the material has been dated to roughly 2130 bce over 4 000 years ago that makes the find amongst the oldest direct archaeological evidence for intentional use of psychoactive anna den ther anna den nan thera anna dent sorry scientists in the southern andes that's crazy the careful answer is dmt was detected in pipe residues but uh anna dan therera uh colubrina is not simply a dmt plant its psychoactive chemistry can include uh bufetin bufetinin dmt and 5meo 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 uh then nand thera rather than proof that people were using modern purified dmt either way they're smoking whatever the that stuff is they're getting dmt from it so they had figured out somehow or another that ingesting it through smoke now the one of the reasons why this is particularly significant is there's scholars out of um i think it's the university of jerusalem that uh believed that the burning bush the mo that moses encountered some kind of psychedelic that's what what that's exactly what they think they think the translation was it was they believed it was possibly the acacia tree which is apparently rich in dmt so that moses has moses trips balls yeah and gets some really good solid rules to live by and comes back with them and said hey this is what god said yeah i mean i think there's it'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 psychoactive substances for a long long long long long time um and yeah that's fascinating yeah and much like uh 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 illusinian mysteries the reason why those mysteries stopped is because the powers that be were like hey these guys are a problem these trippy dudes are their weird ideas who uh invented democracy uh they're gonna this whole thing up we're not gonna be able to run it and tell everybody what to do and force them into going to war yeah i know yeah but the powers that be always want to restrict any kind of like thought that's outside of the uh what they want people to think they don't want people to think uh as freely as as they can and anything that limits their control yeah um you know because control everybody wants control and there's always new groups that say you don't know what the you're doing let me take the realm and that's always been the case um which is probably good for people you know it probably is what leads to i mean not the war 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 yeah 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 they control regions and that's how they've always done it and they live this weird nomadic lifestyle in the mountains and it's not much different than the way it was thousands and thousands of years ago very clan like yeah yeah and if you don't have if that guy's and there's these groups just stay in control forever like it's like there's no motivation for them to change and evolve and grow nothing there's no innovation yeah nothing's happening also they're stuck in the mountains it's like you're just trying to live yeah but you know when you we think of these places these very fertile places on earth where like particularly Turkey Turkey's fascinating you know and many people are now speculating that that if there is a singular place that but that might have been one of the birthplaces of true civilization this episode is brought to you by blue chew man let's talk about blue chew they're already the number one brand for better sex but what they're doing with blue chew gold is completely next-level gold is a four-in-one formula designed to make your bedroom noisy again obviously it gets you hard like you're back in your 20s and everything is handled 100% online but gold boosts your arousal getting you ready for sex physically and mentally plus it dissolves under your tongue for faster absorption so you get that spontaneous energy back look at the stats gold is three times stronger five times faster in eight times longer lasting than old-school methods blue chew gold is the real deal right now buy two months of blue chew gold and get the third free with my code Rogan you will also receive free overnight shipping head over to blue chew calm for details and important safety information check it out this ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience yeah I mean I think it undoubtedly is I think Tash to Pella 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 not 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 interlinked shared symbolism shared religious tradition same architectural styles very impressive architecture clearly organized labor struck stratified society because how do you achieve that without someone at the top and someone below and these are all things that we used to think were civilization right and yet people aren't happy with us calling Tash to Pella a civilization but I think it will get there but don't you think that's just because of them trying to protect their timeline that they've been teaching yeah and I think it will change 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 a civilization that we used to apply and the fact that they were moving the gold posts just because they didn't know it existed and they're finding residential buildings at Gobekli Tepe now and that was always one that used to say look people didn't live there they must have migrated there but now they're finding that people did live there like I guess permanently or at least semi permanently yeah there's all the sites and crazy quite 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 yes yeah really interesting so are those where you see those pillars are those sites where you have like the those concentric circles I assume so those are the famous ones anyway Kalahan Tepe Gobekli Tepe Safer Tepe those are the biggest ones and only 5% of Gobekli Tepe currently has even been excavated right which is pretty crazy when you think like okay how many of them are also still underground like how many do we know only exists because of ground penetrating radar and all the other techniques yeah I mean it's wild like Gobekli Tepe 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 like to be clear it is standard Arca archaeological practice to not excavate too much of a site but what are we looking at here that's Gobekli Tepe and what are we looking at in terms of these these grids I think maybe that's the kind of archaeological right I think I'm not 100% 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 though the risk of destroying some incredible find some beautiful ancient thing because you're using tractors or something like this is too valid it is valid but I would argue and I've said this before is the Gobekli Tepe is a site that has such important ramifications for our understanding of civilization and the origins of civilization that it should receive special treatment right because it is the oldest site that looks like civilization so I always think that maybe we should not obviously you want to be careful when you go in and you want to follow correct archaeological procedure but at the same time what if a relic like equivalent to the Rosetta stone the one stone that we found that completely translated Egyptian hieroglyphs and opened up ancient Egypt to our understanding what if some kind of equivalent artifact is hiding in the unexcavated ninety-five percent of Gobekli Tepe that could be waiting for that for us to find and talked about this bore before Joe yeah I don't remember ever seeing it but it's not new but it was also found at Gobekli Tepe it was painted uh-huh I think like some of the mouth was painted red it's crazy looking it's life I'm pretty close to life size the whole thing is really very fascinating because it's also I think it's the first evidence of 3D carving in stone too yeah relief I think yeah yeah or that's a statue but what what we're saying about that is in like these boars and snakes and all these different animals that are on these incredible pillars they're not carved into it those the stone is carved around it which is advanced that's you know it takes a sophisticated use of tools and an understanding of how to work stone to be able to do something like that and crucially specialization right that's someone's job they're not out there gathering food that that's their job that's their right how they spend their time and it's also hey how did you move those what those stones are huge the biggest ones are like how many how I think most of them are like 10 tons but they found I think they found one that hadn't been moved by the quarry that was something like 50 tons and obviously they would have um assumed that they would have had a method to move that was they wouldn't have carved out yeah 50 tons is high and um stubby little peckers says clutching clutching their peckers yeah okay yeah whatever you're into bro must have been a weird world back then and then the real question is is this the oldest civilization or is this the oldest reboot of civilization that was destroyed by the great flood and by the younger Gi's impact and whatever the could could have happened to whatever civilization previously existed that's what things get real squirrely yeah well exactly because if if that is a civilization which I think it's becoming clear that it is and it doesn't really matter how you define civilization it's clearly incredibly sophisticated like it's a very sophisticated that word is a problem exactly just like who cares it's clearly very sophisticated it's like when Fauci was talking about gain of function like hey you know what we're talking about exactly exactly yeah but but yeah that means the you know the timeline of civilization whatever you want to call it has doubled from 6 000 years to 12 000 years so then the question becomes how much further back does it go because clearly tash depella gobekli 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 let'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 gobekli tepe is because and this is where it's really weird the dirt is uniform in that it was intentionally covered so these sites weren't covered you know just over time like maybe the Sphinx was in Egypt they were covered intentionally and they were covered 11 600-ish years ago so how old were they before they were covered yeah of course I mean that's only the 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 Klaus Schmidt thought the original what is the debate well some people say it wasn't intentionally covered and it was just kind of like a a landslide like a crazy landslide that'll happen at once because I mean 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 Klaus Schmidt but obviously why did he think they covered it I don't know I think conquering civilization or like these people and their beautiful pillars no I think he thought the people that built it covered it or interesting well 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 bugbears with archaeology like I I love archaeology and I have a huge respect for the for archaeologists and I think they do amazing work but one of my main bugbears is the confidence in which people talk about the past and ruling out other possibilities because at the end of the day none of us know what happened in the deep deep past especially when you start getting back to these crazy time scales 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 that 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 to reason that biology and archaeology as they expand the timeline as biology has expanded the timeline archaeology should probably tag along well yeah that's what i mean about the fact that the rug's kind of been pulled out from underneath us yeah uh what on purpose means here there's good reason to think humans intentionally deposited at least some of the fill enclosure d alone contained roughly 500 cubic meters of rubble and cultural debris and particular items including broken anthropomorphic sculpture heads appear to have been deliberately placed near pillars during refilling 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 involved 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 could wrap their head around how long we're talking you know especially that's the other thing about um one of the things that i loved about uh your 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 the case because if we used to think it was 50 000 years i think when i was in high school they were talking they were they were saying homo sapiens were like 50 000 years old or maybe 100 right and now the conventional estimate is like what three so the oldest fossils we have of anatomically modern humans are 315 to 360 thousand years old i mean that's it's the same fossil set from jebel aroud in morocco and but this obviously is really hard to date accurately but it's between 300 and 350 000 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 oh it's so hard to like it's so unlikely that you'd fossilize 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 was about like fuck exactly there's not much evidence that's the problem but the evidence that they do find is pushing the timeline way back way back and um that alone you would think archaeology would go well hey guys in light of this new evidence maybe we should consider the possibility that civilization is quite a bit older than we think they are the same exact animal what would take them 300 000 years to uh develop complex civilization and agriculture and all these different things like why why would it take so long and is it possible that given the i mean the incredible possibilities when in terms of like what kind of national 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 are the ones proposing them and putting them out there and it's a really good question it's especially in light of you know what we understand about humans biologically like wouldn't doesn't it make sense that these people these just as like 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 um i think we have clear evidence now that what we call modern intelligence behavioral modernity goes back so so so much further than we think like i would argue back over a million years in light of a couple of papers that have come out in the last 12 months and what are these papers so i mean there's been two really significant papers i think since we last spoke um one of them i think has really big ramifications for human intelligence and that's a paper that came out regarding the island of sulawesi which is in indonesia and this is in relation to human seafaring so seafaring was always thought to be an exclusively sapien 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 to reach isolated land masses and we always thought that was only sapiens until very recently but a paper came out uh in august last year you actually sent it to me yeah i don't think you sent me a post that was about um stone tools that was found and i was like that's interesting i clicked on the paper and then i was like oh wow look where these stone tools were found and it was really really interesting because they were found on sulawesi and sulawesi is an island that crucially sits east of something called the wallace line which is a biogeographic boundary which means that it has been an island and separated from the mainland for tens of millions of years and separated by deep ocean channels that are between depending on the the fluctuating sea levels at the time between 50 and 100 kilometers across so it's always been an island and yet in august 2025 archaeologists at a site called calio found stone tools on sulawesi and that means that some type of human probably not sapiens but i guess you never know some type of human managed to cross that ocean boundary and reach sulawesi and that's fascinating but it's worth saying that it's not the only piece of evidence in the region there's also a 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 line so again you have to cross an ocean boundary to get to flores and they found stone tools there that are 1.02 million years old and i didn't even say the sulawesi tools are 1.04 to 1.4 million years 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 in the 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 uh the theory was that it was accidental drift so and a couple of humans were swept out to sea and somehow survived the the stormy ocean and the tropical sun clinged to some driftwood and made it to flores and and somehow survived and colonized the island but now that we've got flores luzon and sulawesi islands all in the same region all separated by this ocean boundary i think it's starting to point less towards accident and more towards behavior right more towards a deliberate sea crossing because to to colonize that i was i was doing some research because of these discoveries and there's actually been a few papers from nasa on how many humans you need to colonize an isolated landmass because nasa were doing it for like if you're going to mars or something and you need a certain amount of humans of breeding age to not um have like genetic problems in the population to so you need a certain amount of humans of a breeding age to to ensure viability right because otherwise you're going to inbreed and you're all going to die out because of genetic issues and they said it was something like um 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 the crossing and all landed on an island and colonized it that's a huge amount of humans for for an accident do you know what i mean and then three times in three separate islands all 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 good it's not it's not a high chance is it and i think if we apply occam's razor to it which is you know the simplest explanation wins i think the simplest explanation is that these humans were intelligent enough to build boats right right and that's i mean and that is a controversial opinion that's not accepted it's accepted that the humans reach these islands that that's not controversial humans were on these islands a million years ago 700k it's just not accepted that it was intentional It's not accepted that they built boats. - That seems silly. It doesn't make any sense if it's not 500 of them make it over by floating and surviving. Yeah. What? Exactly. All at the same time. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. It's nice to get a little time back during the day. It's why we try to find shortcuts like shaving while showering or keeping a simple matching wardrobe so you can easily put together an outfit for work. And if you're hiring, you use ZipRecruiter. It's the ultimate time-saving hack. Plus, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan. With its powerful matching tech, ZipRecruiter shows you the most interested, qualified candidates first so you can spend less time scouring for the best match. Save time and meet great candidates sooner with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free. At ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. Endless summer escapes start here. Travel the worlds of Netflix IRL. Inspired by fan favorites like Stranger Things and Squid Game. Brave the upside down. Face off with the front man. Play leveled up arcade games. Shop exclusive merch. And enjoy themed food and drinks. Beat the heat. Play, eat, and shop on repeat. At Netflix House at Galleria Dallas. Bring your crew and save. Get your tickets today at Netflix.com slash house. Exactly. And this is what I mean about taking data points from different kind of science. So, because I'm looking into what NASA is saying about humans colonizing somewhere, and I'm saying, well, look, 500 people or more than 500 people of breeding age as well, not just people, all reaching an island on three separate occasions, all in the same region. Are we sure this wasn't deliberate? So, I think that happens. It has huge ramifications for human intelligence because that was always thought to be exclusively sapiens 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 seaworthy. You have to. Trial and 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. Like, they knew how to do that? Maybe. Maybe. Otherwise, why would you set out, you know? Right. And how would you repeat it? Exactly. Yeah. Do you remember which way you went? Tower! It's a fucking dude with a giant brow ridge, furry face, is telling you, I remember going this way. Like, are you fucking sure? How are you doing? Are you using the stars? Like, what are you doing? But humans weren't even meant to have complex language back then. They weren't meant to be. They weren't meant to be capable of this. That's crazy. I mean, yeah, we're seeing these things. Because they're an organization. There has to be some sort of organization. If you're getting a group of people to agree to get in the boat, if they can't communicate with each other, that seems ridiculous. It seems even more ridiculous. Because let's say at the minimum of 50 kilometers, how long does it take you to row 50 kilometers? Seems like it would be days. It would be tough, wouldn't it? Days? And an ocean as well. Yeah. Right. It seems tough. 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. And they time it for when it's not so stormy. But, I mean, 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 organization. And most likely communication. Which we always used to think only emerged 50,000 years ago. That's crazy. And so now, if it's over a million years old, you know, that's like a 20 times. And it could be 1.4. The Sulawesi tools are dated to 1.04. So that's, I don't know, what's that, like 25 times older than we think? That's so funny, that 0.4. That's a lot. It's huge. It's absolutely gigantic. Hundreds of thousands of years. Yeah. And this is what you were saying about, like, people can't get their heads around the sheer enormity of these timescales that we're talking about. Like, it's so long. Yeah. It's so long. Well, another weird one that's come up fairly recently that I know you've talked about is the copper mining. Oh, yeah. In North America. Yeah. That one blew me away. Just the volume. 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. A whole copper industry in North America 9,000 years ago. And that's the same as the earliest day anywhere else in the world. And the volume. This is what's going to freak people out. Tell them how much copper was removed. I don't know off the top of my head, but it's a lot. And to be fair, there's lots of natural copper. I think it's in the kind of northern. In parts of the United States as it is now. I don't know how much they removed off the top of my head, but it is a lot of copper. Like a commercial copper mine volume of copper. Yeah, that's why I said industry. Like it's big. 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. 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 that technology is like a machine. It's like an escalator, right? We always assume that technology is an escalator. Yeah, there you go. Here it is. 1.5 billion pounds of copper. What? So wrap your head around this, folks. Archaeology and date mining and copper tool use, but it generally cannot calculate annual or century-specific production 9,500 years ago. One older broad estimate puts a total archaic period extraction in the Lake Superior region at up to about 1.5. 1.5 billion pounds of copper, roughly 680,000 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. They're saying it covers many millennia. Yeah, they were doing it for, yeah, as it says, the peak between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago. That's crazy. That's crazy. So at least 9,500 years ago, they started doing this, somewhere around there, and they did it for thousands of years. They removed copper for thousands of years. A bunch of it was just sitting on the top. They called it float copper, I think. Like that, like float. That's probably how they first started finding it, and then they probably started digging. Isn't it 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. Like, come find me. Yeah. And these people used this stuff for weapons. They used this stuff for jewelry. They used it for all kinds of things. Arrow points, I'm sure. They probably used it for all sorts of things. They had to use it for weapons, right? Probably, yeah. I think they found, like, spear points and stuff. Yeah, maybe that makes sense. 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 was saying, it kind of. Oh, wow, look, 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 something and then stop doing it and forget about it. And I think that has implications for how we look at prehistory as a whole because it suggests that people, you know, rather than just going straight line this linear path upwards, we can go up and down and forget things and rediscover things. Right. And that's what the, this is the alternative theory, is that we're a reinvention. We're a re-invention of civilization currently, and that we're the most advanced re-invention 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 are they called, the Trilithon stones? Yeah, Baalbek, yeah. Yeah, those are crazy. Like, what happened there? How? What? How did you get them up there? It's weird because they're attributed to the Romans, right? But there's no Roman records of them doing that. And that's not particularly weird in itself until you realize that it's a bigger engineering project than anything the Romans did anywhere. I mean, the Colosseum is obviously an incredible thing, but the blocks aren't as big as these blocks at Baalbek. And yet they don't mention it anywhere. And you'd think that, you know, a civilization that documented as much as the Romans would at least, mention their biggest engineering project somewhere, you know? And I mean, that doesn't mean it wasn't the Romans, but it's just a weird thing. It's very weird. It's very weird. And it's also weird that, like many places, the structures that are on top of it are not as sophisticated, not as difficult to do. That's how it is over and over and over again. That's Saqsaywaman, 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 don't even remember who built it you know like uh the gods the gods put these rocks here it happens all over the world yeah people build on old sites because often the sites are the best site in the region because that's why someone's built there originally so right 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 uh not necessarily the best way of looking at them i think i think what you said earlier is really important that we can't possibly know and to make these definitive statements about things where you just don't have enough evidence you don't have enough facts you can't really say definitively we know 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 you know the ego that comes with being the one who has the information 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. That is strange. See if you can find some of that. I'm looking it up. It's not a really great answer in this. So part of it is and part of it isn't. Mostly the Great Wall's defensive features face north outward towards the steppe. The usual direction of major raids and invasions. But many surviving sections have arrow slits and parapets facing both north and south, including seemingly inward towards China. Why face inward? Defense after a breach. If attackers cross the wall or capture the tower, so they're prepared to be invaded? Hmm. Chinese garrisons needed to shoot and counterattack from the south side as well. Control of movement both ways. The wall was a network of forts, gates, signals, roads, not just a one-sided barrier. Also regulated border crossings, trade, and movement. It is crazy that they've invented a wall that you could see from space. I know. It's wild. It's like one of the biggest engineering projects ever. Like how long is that? Is it like a thousand miles or something crazy? I have no idea, but it's big. How long is the Great Wall of China? Take a guess. I say a thousand miles. It's probably more. Easily. China's so big in itself and the fact that it's the whole like. Yeah. What do you think, Jamie? Take a guess. 6,000 kilometers. 6,000? Yeah. Wow. Jesus, Jamie. Wow. You would be really good on the Price is Right. Yeah, I'm not. Oh, my God. 21,000 kilometers. I was way closer. Holy shit. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. 13,171 miles. Motherfucker, that's crazy. Have you ever been there? No. I've been there. It's crazy. It's amazing. It's so beautiful. The whole region around there. I mean, obviously, it's really long, but. The famous continuous-looking Ming era wall that most visitors picture is much shorter. Still, 8,850 kilometers. When associated structures and natural barriers are included, UNESCO describes the overall Great Wall complex as more than 20,000 kilometers long. So, at the very least, the part that you visit, the Ming era wall, 8,850 kilometers, which is fucking wild. That is so much wall. Yeah. Like, what were they doing? So it was built over 2,000 years from early walls in the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE through major work in the Ming Dynasty, which ended in 1644. Have you ever seen some of the stuff that Cassie Coppersmith has talked about in regards to ancient technology evidence from China? Not specifically her stuff, but there's lots of weird 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 thousands of years ago, the civilization that was in possession of them, their current. Their current ability to make artifacts was, like, much cruder, so it seems like this was older stuff that they had somehow or another acquired. And they lost their knowledge of. Like, wafer-thin jade, highly polished, seemed to be machined, like, weird stuff. I haven't seen that specifically, but, yeah, that's interesting. I don't know about 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, you know, within less than a human hair of variance. Not only that, if it was on a lathe, how do you account for the fact that it has these handles on the side? Like, how the fuck did they do this? And this was all stuff that was, like, really, really. really old by the time these people had it, and that these people, their current state of pottery and sculpture and all this, was much cruder than this stuff. So it seems like these are, like, 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. Up-and-down nature. Yeah, I mean, it's logical, right? That people learn things, discover things, excel at them, and then later people forget them. Of course, especially when you take into consideration natural disasters. Natural disasters, wars, things along those lines. You know, like Baghdad, before the Mongols got there, was, like, the center of science in the world. Yeah, yeah. The Arabs, yeah. They were incredible at science. And then it's just the natural cycle of civilizations, and we see that throughout recorded history. So why would it not be the case for human beings in the much, much, much, much, much larger period of time, which is prehistory? But it's not just. Thing is, it's not just, like, natural disasters and things, and obviously that plays a part, but it's also just the sheer nature of preservation, right? 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, 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 1,000 years. It's, like, nothing. Everything's crumbling. Gone. It's mental. No buildings, no glass. Everything gets absorbed in the earth. You've got a jungle where Manhattan is, and maybe you would stumble upon a piece of metal one day. Yeah. But even then, like, I mean, I've done quite a lot of research on material degradation, and almost all our modern materials, other than stone, are gone in a few millennia. And a few millennia is 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, like, view the world. Invent things, creativity. If they possessed this 300,000 years ago, like, why wouldn't they have figured a lot of this stuff out? They definitely did. That's the thing. Like, the seafaring thing over 1 million years ago, okay, you can debate it. It could have been an accident, I suppose. I don't think it is, but you can debate it. But I think that we have completely undisputable evidence that human beings were this intelligent 500,000 years ago with the Colombo structure, which we spoke about a lot last time. Yeah. There's undeniable evidence that some kind of human was unbelievably smart 476,000 years ago. Yeah, it was building houses. Mm-hmm. 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? Mm-hmm. Did. So, okay. So if they were teaching each other, what kind of language did they have? Yeah. What kind of concepts could they grasp? You're not doing that without abstract thinking. Right. Without symbolic intelligence. Right. And how far did it go? Because it's very rare that we find a piece of wood from that long ago that we can carbon date and that we can test. So how much do we not find? Most of it? Yeah. Almost all of it. What do you mean by that? Because the chances of that surviving is so unbelievably unlikely. I'm a moron. But I had a thought. Oh. My thought was, if AI can get so intelligent that it can do an accurate account of all of the objects on earth, all of the people on earth, all of the things on earth, essentially every molecule that exists on earth, and then extrapolate back to how they got in that position in the first place. Whether through natural ore deposits. 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 like scan the entire outer crust of the earth, which seems daunting today, but ground penetrating radar seemed ridiculous 500 years ago, right? So as we continue to expand, I mean, AI is solving math equations that have perplexed mathematicians for 50 years. They're solving it like that. So this is a new thing. It's a very, very rapidly emerging thing. I wonder what kind of a version. What kind of a map? A map of history, at least in terms of like rough timelines of things we'll be able to get. That's the great hope for archeology, right? Is that modern technology allows us to discover things that we previously would not have been able to discover. And as you say, LIDAR is the current example of that. But if you just extrapolate forward, what else could we possibly use to discover things that we haven't? Of course, something like that will emerge because nobody even considered, 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 there will be. mm-hmm that's the hope yeah but again I think part of what makes me think that perhaps we're not going to discover stuff is this preservation problem because so much of it is just gone I mean I guess if like what you say that if we can like somehow extra or time machines yeah I mean they could figure out a time machine 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 the kind of end point that what we currently think about history is is there's no way that we've like reached no there's no way we're done and that's why it frustrates me so much when people are so definitive about it because it's like you really think that we're not gonna because I mean that's the science is always advancing in every single field all the time we're never at the point where we've discovered everything and yet there's always people in every period of history that think this is the kind of upper limit what would be around from 300,000 years ago other than what we've found so far stone tools shit like that like metal would all be gone well that's the thing everything would be gone unless it's like incredibly unlikely preservation like the Colombo structure like incredibly unlikely for it to happen but I mean there could be other things like that out there and there almost certainly is but yeah most things that's what's exciting it's like god you don't want to dig up the whole world but you kind of do yeah it's not that old but this is a jade sword with or sorry the handles jade the sword would have been probably metal that's why the metal is all fucked up but the handle is not wow so anything with cool rocks or crystals or right right because the handle yeah the handle is kind of all that's left the sword is a rotten piece of shit there's a few other old uh let's see yeah that's the one these these discs are really weird they're three thousand bc to 2000 bc but they have I was just doing the research up until the Ming dynasty I think it was like 1660 they have a book someone wrote about how they were doing this oh but this is that's that's in 1600 what did they do I mean various various things in 1600 yeah but some of these are 3 000 years older than that which is weird jade artifacts wow this is weird this is the cooler shit though nephrite but the description on how they did this I'm almost not I'm I have to take it as they say it but like the description of how they did it was like they would put abrasives on string and slowly wear away the jade how did they do these three-dimensional little carvings yeah it 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 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 right where's that from carving what year is that oh that's a modern master okay that makes sense that makes sense because I was like how how could you do that that's like the flashback of the ancient chinese carvings yeah that's the link I think what is that image that's 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 okay so this is a modern okay that's why it's confusing other stuff that's older yeah a griffin um obviously older some of these are drill like these little holes that if you look and zoom in real close you can see evidence of drills but that's not you know you could have hand drills okay yeah I mean you could have hand drills yeah I mean you could have hand drills harder stone that you've figured out how to work into a position and you could have sand and there's a bunch of things they could use it's like 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 you know craftsmen with years of learning how to work these different things it's when you get to large stuff that you're like okay yeah how'd you get these stones from ass one how'd you uh how'd you get a full 50 ton block of granite and move it through the mountains with no roads. Help me out. But they rolled it all apparently. How'd you get hundreds of them? Thousands of them? Millions of them? How'd you do it? It's too wild. Yeah, it is very wild. And 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 timeline is pretty clear that this is older stuff. And the older stuff is more complex and more difficult to create. And seems to indicate the use of machinery. You know, one of the things she pointed out was this crazy statue of a Buddha. Is that in India? Where the guy achieved enlightenment by standing still. And it's how tall was it? Was it 90 feet tall? Oh yeah, I remember the one sticking out of the. Largest individual standing statue. Thousands of years old. Looks like it's machined. Like really weird. Like really weird statue. There's so much weird stuff in India. And how did they get it there? Did you guys did you move it there? Or was it a stone that you said wouldn't it be dope if we just. 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 Jimmy. There's some. Her photo is still on my computer. It's really wild. And she's she said, you see it from a long way away. Somebody put their watermark right over his dong. How rude. They knew you're going to be looking right there. Me? No, everybody. Humans. There's also like the Kaliasa temple. I think the one where they carve right down somehow. Hammer and chisel apparently. Yeah. Who knows? It's incredible sophistication. That's the one where an army went to try to destroy it. And they tried for years and they gave up. Really? Yeah. I didn't know that. They barely put a fucking dent in it. They scratched a few things up. But they worked on it for years to try to destroy it. Why? Because some new guy came along and said, fuck these people in the temple. Yeah, this isn't my religion. This doesn't suit my story. Like what the Taliban did to those ancient Buddhists. Yeah, they blew them up. I mean, there's over a thousand years old and they're like. An ISIS to Palmyra. Yeah. Beat the heat. Play, eat, and shop on repeat at Netflix House at Galleria Dallas. Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's. Home of the save. I know, it's really sad. And if that's human inclination to do that kind of stuff, like, how long have we been doing that? Like, how much stuff is not around anymore because some asshole came along and wanted it removed? Yeah, because it doesn't suit your narrative. Exactly. Because everyone's always building a story. Humans have always done that, built a story around, to legitimize power and rule. And if it doesn't suit your story, you destroy it. And then, yeah. Exactly. Would I be able to have some of that coffee? Hell yeah, dog. Get on in there. Thank you. I'm gonna wake myself up. Yeah, you're jet lagged. Trip across the pond. Yes, exactly. Here he is. This is what it looks like. Isn't that wild, dude? That's incredible. Yeah. What's the date on this, the conventional date? Do we know? That's a good question. They're gonna have to carbon date his dong. We don't know, but I'm sure it's known. There's a guess, right? Like, what is the guess of the timeline? Whatever it is, it's very perplexing. It's a 57 feet tall monolithic statue of the Lord Bahubali. 983. Okay. So, 983 CE. That's AD, yeah. Yeah, AD. Current era. Regard as the tallest Jain statue until 2016. Construction of the statue is commissioned by the Ganga Dynasty Minister. Okay, so how? How'd 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 you, how do we know that that's the timeline? I mean, it's weird. It's weird because it looks machined. When you look at it, go back to some of the images, please. When you look at, like, the detail of the fingers and the toes and the uniformity of the face, it's fucking weird, man. It's like, these people had a lot of fucking resources. Look at the size of that dude standing next to it. Like, for real, how do you get that? If you, if If that's not a big, giant, contiguous block that was sitting there, what is it made out of? Granite, I think. So if 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 what's weird. No one's building things like this anymore. Certainly not out of 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, the exact construction procedure. Archaeological and art historical understanding is that the artisans shaped 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 fucked 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 here's the rest of the stuff they did in India. They did weird stuff in India where they just carved stuff right out of the stone. Like, what was the motivation to build these temples, just carve them right out of volcanic stone? It's insane. Crazy. So detailed as well. Insanely detailed. And also, some of the sculptures are three-dimensional. Like, how did you get behind? How did you get behind them and carve that out? And how did you make all these, like, weird things? Have you ever seen some of them where they go over it with a light and you can see about three dimensions? Oh, yeah. And the Barabar Caves, do you know about them? Also in India, where there's, like, completely mirror-polished surfaces. Yes. And yet the conventional explanation for that is that they were just shelters. Right. But why are they so precise? They're, like, completely precise and they've got this weird mirror polishing. Yeah. You don't need that if you're just building a shelter. And how about those pillars that look like they were cut on lathes? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Like, what? How did you—what's going on, guys? I know. What did you—we're missing so much. We're missing so many details about the past. It's so frustrating if you're really interested in it because it's like, how much do we know versus how much are we just assuming? Well, that's the thing. We're assuming so much. And that's why it bugs me when it's presented as fact or presented as we have all the answers because we clearly don't. Yeah. What are the other papers that have come out? 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-sized 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 seafaring in Southeast Asia, then you have a million-year-old skull found in China in Northeast Asia. And, you know, you 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. And 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 Yongxiang in China. And they were discovered actually in the 1990s. I think it was 1989 and 1990. There's two skulls, Yongxiang 1 and Yongxiang 2. But they were badly deformed. Yeah. There you go, Jamie. Right on cue. Badly, badly deformed. And they were always thought to be Homo erectus because of where they were found, China, and how old they were, over a million years old, because that was the only type of human that should have been in China or in that area at that time, at that age. They were 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 Yongxiang 2. The second skull. And so they used something called CT scanning to reconstruct it. And what they discovered was that they think it's actually a Homo longi skull, which is this part of the same clad as Denisovan, Denisovan. And why that's important is that Denisovan is kind of like a cyst. How do you say it? Do you say Denisovan or Denisovan? I don't know. Because I say Denisovan, but I keep hearing Denisovan. I'm trying to change it. Yeah. All the scientists say Denisovan. But the cave is Denisovan cave. So it should be Denisovan. Denisovan, you would think. Fuck the scientists. It doesn't matter. Denisovan, Denisovan, whatever. Either way, these scientists think this skull is Homo longi, which is a clad of Denisovan, which is crucially a sister species to Neanderthal and us, sapiens. Which means that if this skull is a million years old and if it is Homo longi, that means that the divergence of our species must have happened before them. So when humans split into Neanderthal, Denisovan and Homo sapien, if this human was already walking around 1 million years. That means that whatever became us had already diverged at that point. So we were already a distinct species, Homo sapiens, 1 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 us? Other ancient primates? How do you mean? So instead of Neanderthals existing previously, that Homo sapiens predate Neanderthals and that Homo sapiens breeding with some other ancient primate, some other one of these, created Neanderthals. 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, OK, this is this is a crazy theory. Yeah. And it's, you know, because the thought is that Neanderthals were bred out with, you know, that there was interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals. But that might have actually like predated Neanderthals themselves. Like it might be the cause of Neanderthals is that humans, Homo sapiens bred with something else. Well, we definitely bred with Neanderthals. Right. And probably Denisovans and Neanderthals and Denisovans bred together as well. And 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 was, you know, nonconsensual breeding. Right. Between like a Neanderthal male, a 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. See if you can find any whatever the hell I found. About Neanderthals possibly a result of humans breeding with other primates. With other primates. So is it not even. I mean, not other other humans. We're not created by modern humans. They'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 more that Neanderthals created by humans, which isn't really what you said. No. See if the. If you. Put this in. Is there a theory that Neanderthals were a result of human. Maybe see Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens. Breeding. With other. Primates. Primates. I guess you wouldn't say primates, though, because that's a monkey. Other. Homos. Other homos. Other ancient humans. Write that. Ancient humans. Ancient human species. Let's see what perplexity has to say about this. I wish I'd saved that. Because it was really interesting. It says, no, not as the main scientist. 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 now. I mean, that's about how we're using this actual thing is I'm using it in a general way. Right. But not as the main scientific explanation. Absolutely. But is there a theory? Has anyone has anyone theorized that this is possible? Ask that. All right. Theorized. That this is possible. It's going to have to crawl. If it's new, 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 it crawl. Crawl, bitch. They're going to take over, man. They're going to ruin the film. 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 propose a particular late Neanderthal early modern human species. fossils might be Neanderthal homo sapien hybrids or descendants of populations that mix repeatedly 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 because it was quite a few months ago too let me ask um the the denisovan thing is weird because um there's recent proposals i think this is a paper i sent sent you in um a podcast where they're discussing this paper that as of august like this month there's some speculation about the height of the denisovans and that they think they might have been much larger than homo sapiens at the time yeah they found a bone they found a bone a thigh bone i think under the sea and suggest the denisovans and everything we found about denisovans is um 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 denisovan 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 denisovan being over six foot is like quite a considerable jump from that so it's not like a mythical giant but it's still bigger than you'd expect an ancient human to be and it's also we're going with a limited amount of fossils so just from what we know they existed and with larger skulls uh recent genetic research confirms that modern humans homo sapiens and neonatals repeatedly interbred a course of 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 and the genomic mapping shows multiple waves of contact and the genomic mapping shows much earlier 200 000 and 250 000 years ago an early wave of homo sapiens migrating out of africa encountered and mated with neanderthals in eurasia so what this guy was saying was that it might not have been that but that even earlier than this neanderthals were a result of human beings interbreeding with others or homo sapiens interbreeding with others i don't know thank you though um what we're just at oh denis ovans so just that one alone was way bigger than most humans at the time and just even the size of the head the bones are bigger it's a bigger brow it'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 i think it's a very big difference between the size of the head and the bones we got seven foot plus humans that are all over the place today and imagine if these denisovan skulls which seem to be like a completely different structure than a homo sapiens we might they might be the giants of the bible is the point yeah like this might be what they were talking about like there might have been a race of much larger people that were physically dominant over homo sapiens they could have been they could have been a considerably 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 homo sapien community you're gonna remember that as 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 265 pounds and they have to cut weight to make 265 these are giant people yeah 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 oh yeah i mean that's what we don't know i mean i wonder what the fuck would happen if they found some bones that indicated there was a man that was nine feet tall and we know that primates can get that big and obviously we're a primate i can't remember what it's called but that's the one yeah absolutely gigantic as per the name yeah so they can primates are kind of line of of animals can get really big so endless summer escapes start here travel the worlds of netflix irl inspired by fan favorites like stranger things and squid game brave the upside down face off with the front man play leveled up arcade games shop exclusive merch and enjoy themed food and drinks beat the heat play eat and shop on repeat at netflix house at galleria dallas bring your crew and save get your tickets today at netflix.com slash house hank joined bj's wholesale club the day he became a father of 30 i coach football now coach hank saves up to 25 off grocery store prices 30 pounds of pasta three cases of protein bars 75 sports drinks and that's just pre-game he knows teamwork and bj's knows savings this is your home coach home of the save join for just twenty dollars at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months open soon limited time offer new members only bj's home of the save 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 an archaeologist was in an apothecary shop in china and he found molars that were from a primate that didn't make any sense really big yeah huge he's like where did you get this and he went there and then that's where they found jaw bones and things so there's some um 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 everywhere else yeah they think it might have been an enormous uh orangutan like that movie what was it the jungle book jungle book yeah so a 10 foot tall orangutan like what i mean it just makes sense if there's the people you brought up florist before now we also know about those little hobbit people that lived on the island floors that were these three foot tall tiny little people so the island dwarfism and then there's there they're a totally different version of human beings of of you know the human chain the human tree who knows who knows what these denisovans look like an island gigantism is also a thing in nature we see that and we see reptiles right so it could apply to to primates and to humans sure as long as they had enough food yeah yeah it's just um the idea of a denisovan i mean they they only discovered them in 2010 right oh yeah sony and we have hardly anything about them so how many are we missing you know i mean we literally have like a tooth a jaw bone and this thigh bone and a few other right and how many other versions of humans are we missing yeah there's ghost populations in our dna we know where humans like there are other types of humans that we just have nothing for yeah that's weird that's so weird that show human have you ever seen that show that's on um god is it a bbc show oh yeah no i watched that yeah yeah very interesting it's good um but she was on a podcast recently talking about um this ghost dna and how weird it is that a few hundred thousand years ago some something happened and there's this dna that's in there that's like what is this what's this stuff yeah it's like it's like we think existed because of our dna but we don't know who they were we've never found them and they could be you know very close to us but also with significant differences and it's just it's all up in the air and same with so much of prehistory we just we don't know yeah and i wonder like what kind of a society what kind of if do they find stone tools with denisovans do they know that yet it's really hard to attribute stone tools to anything because if you just have the tools you do you don't know what human you're talking about i mean it's it's it's hard to attribute stone tools to anything because if you just have the tools you do you don't know what human you don't know what human you're talking about it's really hard to attribute stone tools to anything because if you just have the tools you do 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 been fascinating for you recently um so i think the question that i mentioned at the start the one like when did humans reach isolated land 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 clovis first 13 000 years ago but so many sites now seem to be pushing that back much much much much much 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 22 000 years with white sands footprints which i'm sure you've you've heard of that yes 22 000 years it's crazy so that's the oldest accepted evidence but i think there's loads of interesting sites that potentially push it quite a lot further back than that which are a bit more controversial but when you take them all together they're kind of yeah there's white sands so that's now accepted i think uh by most archaeologists and what why that's important is it because it kind of opens it all up again because because of when the the kind of the glacial maximums happen it kind of the opening of the the corridor because Because that's pre that, it means that we now don't know how long humans have been in americas it could go back way further and then you start looking at these other sites and you think maybe it's a lot lot older so there's one in mexico called chicauita cave uh apologies for the pronunciation is probably wrong but this is a 33 000 years old and high in the mountains of northern mexico they found like 2 000 stone tools um and they did like 50 separate dates and the date isn't controversial what's controversial is if they were human-made tools um but the scientists working at the site think that this is evidence of humans in the americas 33 000 years ago then there's a site in brazil called pedro ferrada which is 50 000 years old um is that chicauita yeah yeah exactly so i mean it looks just like a tool but i mean people argue that they're natural um so it's up in the air it's not accepted yet but i think that's the probably the most uh the least controversial um 26 000 years ago yeah but it goes up to it's like 30 to 33 000 years i think um but yeah there's a site called pedro ferrada in brazil where they found a hearth-like structure so people making fire they found charcoal they found blackened stones uh heated stones rather uh and that they dated that to like 50 or 60 000 years ago so that's like a lot older than than white sands obviously 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 50 000 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 fossil of a human basically because otherwise you can say i don't know what those paintings are i'm assuming they're more recent because always that would be pretty clear evidence um but i think the the hearth-like structures and the the the heated stones and the charcoal are dated to over 50 000 years ago 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 a long time ago i think it's been a long time ago i think it's been continuously inhabited for thousands and thousands of years with the oldest being over 50 000 years old yeah are they the tools they might be the tools that because so so critics say that it's natural right um but that those are natural things not tools yeah but a 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 that way but it's just so hard to prove it right so it's not accepted yet but jamie uh 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 indenindated give me some volume on this would you Sahara with 5,000 rooms, and we still haven't seen all of them. It's called Sefar. 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 Sefar is still unmapped. Whatever else is in there, no one's seen it yet. I could do without that guy's voice. He's a little ridiculous. I gotta take the radio head out. Yeah, settle down, buddy. It sounds like an AI voice, right? Like a super enthusiastic AI voice. Is that what it is? Well, it could be. It very well could be. It definitely is gonna be in the future, but um, I don't, what was it called? I don't, I don't remember. Sefar? It's just, uh, yeah. Okay, let's try to look it up. See if we can look it up. In, um, sub-Saharan 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, no one's really, 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 that the conventional timeline has civilization starting, like around 4,000 BC is when it flipped to, to desert. Um, so yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's, there has been archeological work done in the Sahara, but compared to the size of the Sahara, there's, there's just gotta be loads of stuff under there that could potentially change our understanding of the origins of civilization for sure. Um, 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 archeology, 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 Nile River doing before? There's many interesting things. There's, um, what's it called? There's an interesting site, Napta Playa, I think it's called. Yeah, it's going to be a little hard to get to. It's in the middle of the, the Sahara desert boy in Algeria. Geez. Buried. Oh yeah. I have heard of this actually. Somewhere in there. Fuck. Imagine you're an archeologist and you, you're tasked with, uh, you know, someone gives you some funding. Hey, Sahara desert, bro. Why don't you get in there and, uh, go look around. What? Yeah. It's probably not the ideal place to go. You can't even go without getting killed. Yeah, you don't want to get shot. You could literally die. So, no. Yeah. Just imagine if you found something cool. I imagine you found a bunch of cool shit. Yeah, you go. Good luck. Just good luck taking it out. Just like, oh, where'd you get that? Exactly. Thank you. Thank you. Exactly. They'll kill you. That was also my thought. I was going to bring that up about Gobekli Tepe, about if they bring in more archeologists, 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? And South America. Yeah. Yes. And South America. But Egypt in particular, there's some inconsistencies with, uh, Zahi Hawass's versions of like what was discovered in some places, whether or not a skeleton was in a sarcophagus versus what he said later. You know, like in the older versions, there was a skeleton and the newer versions, they didn't find anything. So like, did you sell a skeleton? Did you sell a skeleton? Because people sell, 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're like, uh, you know what I'd like? You got a guy, he's like, you've got everything. You got all the Ferraris. Like, you know what I want? 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. Especially something gold. Ancient gold. All that stuff was stolen out of there. So was it melted down? Like for grave robbers, like that must've been an incredible place to be before everybody discovered all those tombs. Cause we know like with King Tut, which was preserved, but luckily nobody got into that until what year was that? They found it. Two-ton commons. I'm not sure, but within the last couple of decades, I think, I'm not sure. Whatever it was, it was, I think it was a little longer than that, but the point is it's like fantastic gold sarcophagus cover and massive fucking treasure trove of jewels and things like how much of that stuff is scattered in private collections in the world, you know? Yeah. And in South America, like, because they spent like underneath Cusco, there's all these tunnels. Right. And people have known about them for a long, long time, but it took a long time for archeology to kind of accept that they were there, but people have been going in. Like people had like, uh, tours and stuff down at the tunnels before it was like widely accepted. And back then it's just rife for people setting off to the black market because there's no control over it. There's no kind of a institutional control over it. So people could just kind of do what they want until it actually finally got like, uh, you know, controlled by the authorities. So who knows what went and all over the world, as you say, uh, yeah, there could be stuff that is really interesting that is just out there. And then there's the elongated skulls, the weird fuck and skulls and a long history of people discovering those, like how many people got the good ones, how many of them were removed a long time ago and sit somewhere. It's almost like you have to go read all the rich guys in the world. See what you got hiding in your basement. Find some guy like what's your Google search like, let's, let's find out who's got the stuff. Cause I mean, if you're a person with a private museum, if you're, if you've got that kind of money and like, well, 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. Now, I want. I want something even more weird, yeah. I want you to build. Like, I went to the Cairo Museum once, and I like the way it looks. I want that in my house, you know? There's got to be people like that in the world. This guy. He's one of them. 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 the good pictures in the list. Psycho. So they seized his stuff. How'd they find out about it? Was he on Instagram? A delegation from China went to Indiana to claim their stuff. Whoa! A delegation from China. I wonder if they showed up with guns. Give me your shit back. FBI raided a 91-year-old missionary's home and found thousands of stolen Native American bones. Whoa. Amazon River canoe. Wow. Ming Dynasty jade. An Egyptian sarcophagus. And a dugout canoe that had traveled down the Amazon River. Wow. It was just in his house. There's a picture of his house in another thing I had. I mean, it's just all. How'd this guy get the scratch? Where's he getting the money for all this? What'd this guy do? I don't know why there's not a movie about him. After 10 years, FBI returned 7,000 rare artifacts looted by Indiana grave robber. Oh, he's a grave robber. Yeah, that's, you know. That's what they call him? So it was just a dude who was a grave robber. He's a collector. He might not necessarily be a grave robber. I don't think this is the same guy. They found. FBI found 42,000 relics and 2,000 human bones in a man's home. What is that? Whoa, what the. What is that, a horse? Maybe like a pangolin or something. A sloth? Yeah, it looks like a pangolin, right? 42,000 relics. Oh, same guy. No. 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. Wow, he only lived a year later. The 42,000 artifacts hoarded by Miller represent what may be 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, right? FBI became involved when they learned thousands of items were obtained in violation of antiquities laws and federal and state statutes. According to the FBI, Miller went on digs around the world and illegally brought his 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. You ever hear about that? Oh, he had to give back his T-Rex skull? I think so, because they found out that it was, like, stolen. So he gave it back. I don't know what happened with the money, but. Whoa. How much is a T-Rex skull? Also, I was thinking, like, this guy got. He got fucked. They found this guy. There's got to be. We just. I brought him up because I knew about it. He, you know, probably talked about it at the bar and all that kind of shit. Yeah. What about the people who don't? He's on Facebook. Yeah. Those old dudes are all on Facebook. Have you seen the dinosaur that Ways to Well has? Yes. Ways to Well legally purchased a dinosaur. What, like a. So they have, like, a dinosaur bone, some aquatic dinosaur that they have suspended in their ceiling. Really? Yeah, you can buy dinosaur bones. He bought a skull for $276,000. Whoa, he got fucked. Stolen from the Mongolian government. Wow. Stolen from the Gobi Desert. He voluntarily returned. He returned the fossil to the Mongolian government after U.S. authorities found it was smuggled. Oh, no. Wow. See if you can find the Ways to Well dinosaur. That's pretty cool. There's a lot of people that don't believe in dinosaurs lately. Really? This is very confusing. Why? What's their reasoning? Oh, just they've been lied to about everything. Maybe dinosaurs, too. And there's people that think that dinosaurs are actually the dragons of ancient history. And that's all bullshit. It's the dumbest theories. I mean, like, you know, we have. 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. How much of that is actual bone? And how much of it is replica? I don't know. Some of them are replica. I think that's actual bone. But, like, they have T-Rexes. I think the most complete T-Rex is. I want to say 80%. What is the most complete T-Rex? What is the most complete T-Rex skeleton ever found? That one just sold recently at an auction. Oh, yeah? Yeah, it was 62% complete. Is that the most complete one ever? Pretty sure. I thought there was a. Oh, there's one that's 90%. Oh, there you go. Well, discovered with 90% of its skeleton recovered. Mm. Yeah, we know a lot, folks. This idea that dinosaurs aren't real is really silly. No, it's definitely real. Sue. Yeah. Whoa. Okay. Okay. So, that's real. Guys, stop. That's a real skull. The problem is there's been deception. And one of the big pieces of deception is when you go to a lot of museums and you see a dinosaur skeleton, you assume that's how they found it and they put it back together again, whereas a lot of the pieces of those bones are not real. A lot of the pieces are recreations and some entire skeletons that are in museums. They're all recreations. There's no actual bone that you're actually looking at. And so, then people are like, "Hey." It's the same with ancient sites, though. 67 million years old, 80% intact. So, just that alone, 80% of that is real. That's amazing. 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. Right. That roamed the Earth. For a long time. But the crazy thing, I think dinosaurs really highlight the kind of fragmentary nature of the fossil record, right? Because they existed for 160 million years or something like that, but we only have like a few thousand fossils from that huge amount of time and it just shows how little survives, right? Yeah, exactly. And the fossil record's just really weird. It takes a lot to make a fossil, so we have a tiny fraction of the actual data. And we have to extrapolate out from that, and just that's our understanding. And that's why we do not know what happened in the deep past, which is- Isn't it fucking cool? It's so cool. I love it. That's why I do what I do, man. I fucking love it. Yeah, I don't know anybody who, when you first learn about this stuff, anybody that I want to talk to, when you first learn about this stuff, you don't go, "Whoa." Because it is so interesting, and that's why, to me, the reaction to Graham Hancock's Netflix series was so strong. It was so strange. So unhinged. Like, why are you guys freaking out about this and calling it the most dangerous show? Yeah. I mean, I've experienced this firsthand now, because last time I was here, I wasn't really known about, but now people know who I am, and I get so much hate, so much hate. It's weird, because people paint me out to be something I'm not like, and it's just so strange because I'm me, and I know what I think, and I know what I believe, and yet, obviously, you've experienced that on a whole different level, but- Yeah, I've experienced it from the government. Yeah. Exactly. But it's just wild. It's so weird when people paint you out to be someone that you're not, and put words in your mouth, and it's strange, but it's great. You'll get used to it. The key is just don't read it. That's the key. You're going to be aware of enough of it peripherally. People will bring it to your attention if it's really important or if it's significant. None of it's going to really be important. But as long as. And you're a very conscientious guy, and you do a really good job, like I said, of being objective. And measured. And that's all you need to do. Just keep doing that. Just don't read the comments. Yeah. 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 whatever that number is, one out of 100, one out of 1,000, it doesn't matter. When they reach you, that negativity is never good for you. It's only bad for you. Yeah. And it sits with you a little bit more. You get all the positive comments, but you don't really. Exactly. And then the negative ones. Yeah. The negative ones stick in your brain. But you know what's really interesting is people have done hit pieces on me and shit, and obviously loads of negative stuff comes through. But also I've had actual archeologists and actual people working in actual institutions reach out to me and say, "These are actual archeologists," and they're saying, "Michael, we value your work, and we actually think you're an important voice," and stuff like that. And I find that really encouraging because these are. It's easy for us to think about archeologists as a bogeyman that want to suppress all this stuff, but they're not all like that. No. I think- Some of them are open to these things. Particularly the young ones, particularly people that are coming up that really. The reason why they got into this in the first place is because it's such a fascinating subject. And like you, when you've spoken on this, when you were in school and you were getting your degree, you were confused as to why these alternative perspectives weren't entertained. I think there's a lot of young people that feel confined by the gatekeepers. they feel confined by the career academics that are sort of in charge of who gets tenure who gets jobs who gets grants and it's a very confusing thing you don't want to ruffle any feathers step on any toes 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 right as we keep saying right right right we're not talking about stuff that's like you know established science where you can clearly you know it's not mathematics this is something like weird yeah you know you're you're looking at hints of the past and um 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 it's wild i feel i feel so lucky that i get to uh do something i'm so interested in and talk about these topics and also to like create not to kind of like inspire this thinking and other people that's really what i want to try and do is to get people thinking about history from this different perspective and to think about the unknown and think about the potential that what humans could have been doing now that we know that a mind like ours could have existed for a million years that humans like us could have inhabited this planet for such a vastly longer length of time than we used to believe and all the possibilities that throws up more than anything that's what i want people to to think about when they watch my work i don't want to tell them to believe this or tell them to believe that i just want them to kind of think about 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 what i want people to think about when they watch my work i don't want people to think that i'm just saying that there's a lot more on the table than we used to think about really fascinating i wish more people would uh kind of take that possibility seriously um 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 in the institutions to think in this way and then then i think we we might uh update our thinking on these things i think there's a lot of those young folks that are coming up now in archaeology that um do have alternative ways of thinking um and i think that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about i think that's what i want people to think about and i think that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and that's what i want people to think about and 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 making crazy claims not saying the aliens did it you're not saying anything nutty you're just saying hey um there's uh there's a lot going on here and to pretend that we have a 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 you let's uh let's talk about you know yeah what else have you found recently that's interesting um yeah so i mean i was still there's still um there's older american sites so um so there's obviously the saruti maston site which is 130 000 years old which is controversial but i think people that's the mastodon bones where they appear 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 found like these anvils like these things that look like holes 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 uh calico where i think this one's a little bit i don't i don't really buy this one but a very famous uh archaeologist called lewis leakey who's like one of the top names in the archaeology in the 20th century he believed the the calico showed evidence of human presence in the americas over a hundred thousand years ago as well so it's another data point and then there's um then there's way at larko which um i think you've heard of have you heard of where larko is 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 i'm not aware of that one 1950s there was a mexican archaeologist who was doing some work in the vasculo 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 larko which is a 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 about a volcanic eruption that had happened at that time and so they expected the volcanic ash to be from that so they did all this testing but then they found that the ash was giving these crazy dates like 200 000 300 000 ash was giving these crazy dates like 200 000 300 000 ash was giving these crazy dates like 200 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 um 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 methods together and there's multiple kind of geological dating methods on the sediment the ash and 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 um yeah and so they tried to publish this and um they received like immense pushback because obviously this was the the time of the clovis first paradigm and you know people weren't ready for clovis to be broken let alone by such a huge margin like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years old and they couldn't publish for like 20 years and by that time many of the artifacts that they were found had gone missing and they they didn't know where they were and the site actually got raised like it got kind of removed yeah and i don't 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 they the geologists have always stuck by this date and there's multiple lines of evidence that suggests that the tools were found below this layer of roughly 250 000 years old and that's obviously like hugely older than we think humans have been in the americas so it's a very interesting site um uh i want to give a shout out to will brown uh 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 um but yeah it's 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 you know there could be human presence in the americas over 200 000 years ago potentially even older than that and that would just radically change our understanding of humans in america so then when you put all these sites together so obviously white sands is the earliest at 22 000 but then when you add that to chicoete cave as i mentioned earlier 33 000 pedro furada in brazil over 50 000 saruti mastodon 130 000 i don't really think calico is i think that's natural but then where larko at 250 000 you know it only takes one of them to be right for our understanding of when humans reached america to radically shift 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 endless summer escapes start here travel the worlds of netflix irl inspired by fan favorites like stranger things and squid game brave the upside down face off with the front man play leveled up arcade games shop exclusive merch and enjoy themed food and drinks beat the heat play eat and shop on repeat at netflix house at galleria dallas bring your crew and save get your tickets today at netflix.com slash house hank joined bj's wholesale club the day he became a father of 30 i coach football now coach hank saves up to 25 off grocery store prices 30 pounds of pasta three cases of protein bars 75 sports drinks and that's just pre-game he knows teamwork and bj's savings this is your home coach home of the save join for just 20 at bj's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months open soon limited time offer new members only bj's home of the save 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 where did that idea come from how did that idea make it to the aztecs all over the world would be fine yeah pyramids yeah weird it is weird i mean you could say that it's just like a a logical way of building things but maybe who knows well there's also the weirdness and the fact that the aztecs themselves didn't build the pyramids oh some of them yeah like uh yeah teotihuacan was there before and they said it was the name literally means place where the gods lived and they found it there and uh so it was before them and they don't know who built it right they give us lots of our names they get they gave us the name olmec olmec means uh the rubber people uh because they knew about the olmecs they knew they existed before them but they didn't really know who they were but they just called them the rubber people is because they lived around rubber trees i think it's because they use rubber or something i'm not 100 sure um so what's the conventional theory about who built these aztec temples um i think the theory is that it was a a culture that came just before the aztecs um that we don't have a name for but they don't i mean 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 it's ginormous and it's incredible and yeah see all these different layers to it and incredibly sophisticated but 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 teotihuacan yeah did they like and what are they basing it on um if they think it came right before the aztecs because i had read is as long as a thousand years before them yeah i mean that's kind of what i mean by right before because i'm thinking in these big big it's a long time yeah the united states is not even 300 years old yeah yeah yeah of course but um yeah but what i'm trying to say is i don't think it's like uh you know way right right right right so somewhere around a thousand years before but that's the thing it's like how many of these things happened where there was some sort of a civilization and then it collapsed and then new people came along like the idea that you would have a civilization that was capable of building something as fantastic as some of those aztec constructions and then they would just go away we just lost all memory of it all memory of it and then people just wandered up there one day the aztecs and they're like whoa what is this you know like and it was probably covered with jungle right yeah i mean how many of those things were just absorbed by you know the just the just nature and it's no wonder that they think it was built by gods right because you see it and you're like that is incredible who built this it must have been the gods and there's no one living in it mark 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 also the question of when humans reached australia which i think is another really interesting question because the conventional time is is 65 000 years ago and there's a site called majed bebe in northern australia and that's the earliest accepted site in australia and that's right in the north of the country and it makes sense because you have to 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 blackened stones again and charcoal and hearth-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 going to be able to reach australia and it's in the very south of the country and the archaeologists that are 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 it kind of leans towards being a cultural origin and obviously if that's correct that means human beings are going to be 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 for proof but this site uh called mojil 120 000 years ago and it's a very rare site and it's a very years ago is I think very strong suggestive evidence that human beings have been in Australia twice as long as we think and obviously that means that they had to have got there by boat and yeah that's another interesting one. Wasn't there something that was done on the genetic connection between Australian Aboriginal people and Denisovans? Yeah yeah they think that maybe there was different migration pathways 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 Denisovans 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 Denisovan skeletons? I think you can take it from like a tooth or something? I'm not quite sure but I think you can. I think they know the kind of genetic makeup of of the different human species and so I think you can tell that way if you've got like a trace of the the DNA. Yeah that's what I was saying like if it's fossilized do they have actual DNA from Denisovans and if they do like how are they how are they guessing that people aboriginal people in Australia have some traces of it? Just like Europeans have traces of Neanderthal. Yeah and also people in I think like Nepal and these high altitude places they have quite high traces of Denisovan DNA and that's what they think allows them to live in high altitude environments. They think that Denisovans are more robust than modern humans and can live in more extreme environments and they think that people that live in those kind of high altitude regions of the Himalayas and stuff have that DNA. I think that's what they're trying to tell us. Yeah and I think that kind of gene if you like I'm not sure that's the science behind it but they think they have the traces of that and that's what allows them to live in these more isolated high altitude environments. So they think Denisovans lived in high altitude mostly? Maybe. They don't know. Well there's only a few bones right? Exactly so it's really hard to tell. So fucking interesting man. And also in that region they found recently the oldest evidence of advanced surgery which is like way older than we think. It's like 31. 1000 years ago they found some surgery in Borneo which is again in this same region. I think Indonesia is such a fascinating region because it's the place of where the Sunda shelf was where obviously the sea level's risen have covered a huge expanse of land that used to be land but now no longer is and so many interesting discoveries here but yeah this surgery thing is they found the skeleton of a child that had had his leg amputated and but had lived for many many years and they found a skeleton of a child that had had his leg amputated and but had lived for many many many many years afterwards and his his whole like lower leg had been amputated off and but had like healed like completely and he'd 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 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 probably was very painful for that individual but this pushed back our understanding of surgery by like 20 000 no maybe not quite that long I can't remember I think it was like 7 000 years ago so yeah by a long way because this is 31 000 years ago so again it's showing prehistoric humans to be far more sophisticated than we think they were performing surgery 31 000 years ago and surviving and living for years afterwards 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 uh as for medicinal purposes right we see neanderthals doing that a long long time ago like cultivating wild plants and using them as painkillers and stuff like that what's gonna kill the pain of a amputation well probably not much but a bone saw I know right and they're like what kind of tools did they have like what were they doing it with how did they stitch people up did they have needles did they have thread they just leave the wound open like what did they do but whatever they did it worked and they were sophisticated enough to keep that person alive and to care for them and for them to live years afterwards excuse me it's wild it's wild so it's yet more evidence of people being just super sophisticated so much longer in time than we thought and it all points in one direction man which is humans have been here longer they've been more intelligent than we thought for a long long time if you had a guess what do you think is the oldest real true civilization how long when do you think it started so I think in terms of like what we call civilization in terms of our current like cycle of it if you like I think it is Tash topella 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 Holocene I think we basically started right away all over the globe and you know develop civilization because it happens everywhere right back to the 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 what about all the other periods of stable climate that we've had. And now that we know that human beings have been around for so long, we've had something like four stable warm periods in the time that we have modern sapient fossils, 300,000 years. But then if you extrapolate that out to this million year timescale of modern sized brains and modern behavior with the seafaring, it's something like 11 warm periods that we've lived through of stable climate conditions that have lasted for over 10,000 years. So you look at each of those warm periods and you think, if agriculture and civilization isn't that hard seismic of an invention to do, why couldn't it have happened in those previous warm periods? 11 of them going back to a million years and possibly beyond. There's also that very weird phenomenon when someone somewhere figures something out, even if people aren't connected, other places in the world, people figure it out at the same time. We know that to be the case today. Rupert Sheldrake has a term for it. I think it's called, is it morphic resonance? So his term is also based around theories that they've done with rats and mazes, that if you teach a rat a maze on the East Coast, rats on the West Coast learn it quicker. Really? Yeah. Yeah, he's got lots of interesting work, hasn't he? About kind of almost telepathic. Yeah, weird stuff. Yeah, very weird stuff. There's probably some sort of Akashic record that there's probably some sort of shared field of information. That whether or not it's tangible and you can 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 almost feel like we're in an antenna. Yeah. Yeah. And that like when Michael Button figures something out, someone on the other part of the world is like, oh, I feel it. Yeah. It's just very weird. It's a very weird idea. You know, and it's impossible to prove or you can imply it. And the rat thing is very interesting. I think they've done them with some other things as well. You know, so it's interesting because like if that's not the case, then what do you have a seafaring civilization that travels the entire globe? Do you have something that so advanced they figured out how to traverse continents? And they're bringing all this information with them? Is it one group? No, it seems like they all kind of figure it out at the same time or 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 11 warm periods where humans have been here? Right. And been smart. If it's such a common invention, why didn't it happen before? Right. Maybe it did. Maybe it did. It's also interesting how much stuff, like, if you think about the global temperature, like, where is it always warm? Well, it's always warm around the equator. Kind of always stays warm around there. And well, what's around there? Well, the Amazon. Yeah, exactly. And even in periods of, yeah, like the fully glaciated periods, some places on the Earth were perfectly habitable. Right. So who knows? But then, I mean, and that goes back. It goes back into the, like you say, the Amazon. It goes back into the question of how long have humans been in America? Because if we've been in America and the Americas for a lot longer than we think, then people have been in the Amazon a lot longer than 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? How much has been done on all these grids? Oh, yeah, exactly. It's so hard. And also the rainforest is such like an extreme recycling kind of natural machine that it's going to destroy anything that's older than a few thousand years ago. It doesn't mean there's not stuff that's older than a few thousand years ago. It just means there's nothing left. And they could have built in organic materials that have just decayed and you would never see it. And they could have been doing that hundreds of thousands of years ago. And who knows? So it's wild, man. It's so wild. I think 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 getting other people to think about it. And that's the great privilege of me being able to do this job. So, yeah. Well, it's an important job. It really is. Because those videos, although they are just YouTube and they're entertaining, they're just something that anyone can digest. There's so much valid, fascinating. There's so much fascinating information on them and so many valid questions that we really can't quite answer. And it expands the, like, when people watch them, you get this understanding, like, oh, wow, this is a big puzzle. This thing is really complicated. Like, it's a lot more complicated than we've been told, especially by, you know, people that want you to believe that they have the answers. Yeah, that's why I hate it. I hate the certainty that people talk about the past because I never talk about it with certainty. I'm not saying this is necessary. It's not necessarily true. I'm just saying, you know, possibilities everywhere. So many different possibilities. And, yeah, everything we seem to discover pushes it in one direction. That's older and more intelligence back in time. And, yeah, there's so many interesting things. And we barely scratched the surface today. I know. We could do this for days. Before we wrap it up, though, is there any 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. So 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, Irvin Finkel, the kind of idea regarding Tashdapella having a similar thing, and that's 12,000 years ago, but there's much, much older evidence of humans conveying information in a symbolic fashion. So there's 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 kind of a system of encoding meaning. Yeah, there you go. They're the signs. And she kind of makes the argument that these signs are. Not a language as such, but a kind of tradition of conveying information that lasted for 30,000 years. And that is such a long length of time. Like, if you think about the oldest language today 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 a time span of 30,000 years, are 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 anything. I don't think there's any connection there. And I'm not sure there is any connection there, but. The spirals are really weird. They find spirals all over the place, right? Yeah. They find these signs all over the world. Jamie, you might be able to find a. All over the world. Yeah, there's like a cool map where they kind of point where it's all found. If you scroll down a little bit on the left, that one, yeah. You see this. That's really blurry. Yeah, once it loads, but it's all over the world. There you go. And it's the same signs. Wow. That's crazy. So the same signs in Europe, North America, Central Africa, South America, Southern Africa, Australia, Malaysia, East Africa, New Guinea. Wow. Borneo, Myanmar. And she thinks it's like a much older symbolic tradition that humans have kind of carried with them in the kind of migratory. And it actually goes back much older than the Ice Age art date of like 40,000 years, but actually comes from when humans first reached Europe out of Africa and spreading across the world. And we've kind of kept the same tradition of conveying information. 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 kind of the to maintain that tradition over such a long length of time is really interesting, because we don't really do that. As I say, the oldest language is ancient Chinese, and it's only a few thousand years old. And yet these people somehow managed to pass on this language, quote unquote, for 30,000 years. Have you ever heard anybody discuss the concept that human beings might have had some sort of telepathy that atrophied? When we started using language and writing and communicating with words? What's really interesting is the human brain size has decreased since civilization began, which is strange because because and it makes sense because if everything was oral before, you need more of your brain to hold all the information. but once you can kind of outsource it to physical objects you don't need so much brain like size and space how much is it decreased I can't remember off the top of my head but it's I don't think that's even controversial 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 writing and writing things down was actually going to degrade your memory well I think it certainly does because you don't need that brain like part of your brain anymore if you're not memorizing with the information you have like and it makes us smart as a whole as a civilization but and then extrapolate so to hard drives mm-hmm exactly it's happening on a bigger scale now with AI and stuff yes exactly same process though like people talk about chat GPT decreasing people's intelligence because it's the outsource is thinking itself which is a crazy step and we're gonna just go like a raisin exactly so yeah so I mean maybe we're regressing I think as a civilization we're learning more and yes collectively but as an individual right maybe we're regressing and our potential to learn and just 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 like three people's phone numbers because we don't have to memorize anymore exactly it's wild yeah yeah and there was also another page paper that came out regarding language which is they found over 200 objects and this around the same day around 40,000 years ago and they basically found like a proto writing script that had the same level of complexity as the early Sumerian scripts from 3000 BC but from 40,000 years ago in Ice Age Europe again so it's an 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 my head Jamie but I 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 like loads of like symbols engraved on bones and they argued that it was the same level of complexity as the early Sumerian scripts and again this was the marker of civilization 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're looking at the writing like okay what are they like the little scratches on the bones and clay and whatever it is like what are they what are they conveying do we even understand what they're conveying or just assume they're conveying something well I think they categorized it and they 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 to language but if it a written language but if it existed 40 thousand 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 cuneiform 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 cuneiform it's so interesting look I'm sure you've seen the we talked about this yesterday as well the Italian guy who came up with this concept of erosion dating that's that's another weird one it was like at the high end he thinks it might be 20 plus thousand years old it's like okay what yeah yeah cuz he compared the erosion because there was an earthquake like 500 years ago they kind of shook all these casing stones off yeah he compared the erosion with the blocks that always been exposed with the ones that 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're interesting listen your shows super interesting I'm so glad you're around I'm so glad there's someone like you that's willing to do that kind of work it's obviously Jamie and I are not gonna do it but we're super happy to have you in any time you've got some new stuff you want to talk about and I'm really excited to hear from you and I'm really excited that your channel just keeps growing because it's really good man you could really tell you put in so much work and so much effort and research and it's just excellent it's super entertaining and it's right up my alley so I appreciate it Joe thanks for being the fucking man thank you man straight back at you and I really appreciate all the support you've shown me like it doesn't go unnoticed man like it it really means a lot and yeah if I could just do a little self-plug real quick I've got my own channel I've got a 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 all over the world and it's really interesting to see how that's happening and civilizations always think that they're more advanced and there we go thanks better than the ones before but right 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 a I'm still gonna go as hard as I possibly can on the kind of archaeological lost history well it's beautiful that you have so much time to do two different channels - it's awesome well I'm trying my best well you're kicking 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 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's yeah I put out there um see I've got both my channels I'm also about to make some music if you should check out really yeah I'm in a band this is my band oh that's the alien head that's why I keep wearing the alien head yeah oh what's the name your band we're called Headache if people get it it's like the headache yeah so people want to check that out what kind of music punk rock oh you're a fucking punk rocker I used to do that all the time and then COVID kind of fucked us up and we couldn't perform live and our drummer moved to Australia 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 to check that out but yeah check it out all right Michael thank you appreciate it look at that there you go get us on moody looking motherfuckers yeah the boys yeah the guy in the back get your hair out of your eyes bro can't see you like that all right bye everybody endless summer escapes start here travel the worlds of Netflix IRL inspired by fan favorites like stranger things and squid game brave the upside down face off with the front man play leveled up arcade games shop exclusive 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