In this episode, we discuss the theory that the extinction of the North American land animals at the end of the ice age may have been caused by a comet impact. We discuss this theory, as well as some other theories that have come to light over the past few years, including the idea that climate change and human predation may have played a role in the extinction event. We also discuss some new evidence that points to a major flood from Lake Agassiz that could be the cause of the Younger Dryas and the disappearance of the Ice Age megafauna. We hope you enjoy this episode and that it fills in some of the gaps that have been left by the lack of answers to the question of what caused the extinction. If you like the podcast, please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts and we'll read out your comments and thoughts in the next episode. Thanks again for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Timestamps: 0:00:00 - What was the impact of a comet? 1:50 - What is the likelihood that a comet hit the Earth? 2:30 - Is climate change to blame? 3:20 - How climate change is related to the extinction? 4:40 - What role did climate change play a role? 5:15 - What are the most likely culprits? 6:20 7:30 What are we can do to prevent climate change? 8:40 9:00 11:10 - What do we know about the Ice age? 10:10: What can we do about it? 13:00 -- Is there more? 14: Is there a link between ice age and climate change happening now? 15:30 -- what is the impact? 16:40 -- does it matter? 17:20 -- what are we need to know? 18:00 | Is there any evidence? 19:30 | What is our role in this? 21:40 | What does it mean? ? 22: What are you waiting for us to do next? 27:00 // 21: Is it possible? 26:20 | What do you think we should do about the impact 27 - Is there something we can we learn from the evidence we can learn from it? ? 35:20 // 27:40 // Is it a comet
00:00:20.000Of course, Randall Carlson, amazing gentleman who knows far too much about terrifying things like asteroids.
00:00:27.000And Graham Hancock, author, also a fantastic human being, many times been on this podcast as well.
00:00:34.000And This all came out of a podcast that Randall and Graham and I did recently and Michael Shermer commented on it and it was all essentially on the hypothesis that the great extinction that happened with the North American land animals that happened somewhere around the end of the Ice Age And the end of the Ice Age,
00:00:59.000the abrupt end of the Ice Age, being caused, please correct me if I fuck any of this up, being caused by a comet impact.
00:01:07.000Michael Shermer had some questions about that, and we said this would be an amazing podcast to get everybody together in a room and go over this.
00:01:15.000Since then, there's been some interesting stuff that's happened.
00:01:18.000I thought this was really fascinating, that Forbes has a mainstream article in Forbes, Did a Comet Wipe Out Ice Age Megafauna?
00:01:29.000And then there was also this interpretation that's fairly recent as well about one of the stone tablets, one of the stone carvings, rather, on Gobekli Tepe.
00:01:38.000And Graham, you would probably be the best to describe that.
00:01:41.000Yeah, that was published in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, a peer-reviewed journal, by a couple of scientists from the University of Edinburgh.
00:01:55.000And they are proposing an interpretation of the Gobekli Tepe imagery.
00:02:01.000There's quite a lot of imagery on those T-shaped pillars, particularly one pillar, pillar 43 and enclosure D. And their deduction, what they take from their interpretation, of course many will disagree with them, their interpretation is that those images are speaking of the comet impact.
00:02:17.000They're speaking of a comet that hit the Earth roughly 12,900 years before our time.
00:02:23.000And Randall, this has been something that you've been obsessed with for many, many years now.
00:02:28.000We've documented and detailed it in many conversations that we've had on the podcast.
00:02:56.000It seems to fill gaps that were, at this point, still unexplained.
00:03:03.000You know, there's varying theories between Some extent of climate change and some extent of human predation that caused the extinction and I've always felt like you can't blame it on one or the other.
00:03:18.000I think humans probably had a role but only in the very final stages of the extinction event and one of the One of the scenarios would certainly suggest that there were extreme climate changes between what's called the Balling Alorod,
00:03:34.000which was the rather gradual warming at the very end of the Pleistocene, which was then followed by the Younger Dryas, which was the return to full glacial cold, and in the end of the Younger Dryas, which is dated at about 11,600, which is considered now to be the boundary of the Holocene,
00:03:55.000Would be the beginning of the Holocene.
00:03:56.000And it seems that most of the extinctions did occur between roughly 13,000 and 11,600 years ago, although the dating has a widespread on it, so you can't pinpoint it down to a specific event.
00:04:10.000But I've always felt like that there had to be something we needed to look at that triggered The extreme climate changes that we do see at the end of the Ice Age.
00:04:20.000And to my opinion, you can't attribute that solely to Milankovitch theories, which is basically the changing solar terrestrial geometries, because they're too slow.
00:04:32.000And what we see at the end of the Ice Age were very rapid climate changes.
00:04:38.000One of the things that I think has been missing has been the trigger.
00:04:42.000Wallace Brecker pointed out years ago that possibly a major flood from the draining of Lake Agassiz caused an interruption of the thermohalene circulation, which is basically the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean,
00:04:57.000and that this might have been what triggered the Younger Dryas and then also contributed to the mass extinction events.
00:05:03.000But now I think that the dating of the draining of Lake Agassiz is too late for that and was probably a latter event within the overall melting phenomena that occurred between roughly 14,600 and about 11,000 years ago.
00:05:20.000Somewhere in there we have to fit that mass extinction event and I definitely have thought that climate change was the dominant factor in that.
00:05:29.000But then what triggered the climate change?
00:05:31.000That always seemed to me to be something that was not ever really explained.
00:05:36.000The comet impact theory is very controversial, but the evidence has been steadily mounting now for a decade.
00:05:46.000Like the core samples that show nuclear glass scattered out throughout Asia and Europe at roughly the same time period when they do the core samples?
00:05:54.000Yes, most of it's dating to 12,800 to 13,000 years ago.
00:06:06.000These kind of things are associated with impact, not necessarily always caused by impact.
00:06:11.000So this has been part of the reason for the controversy, but it's the abundance of all of these at a particular level which leads a large group of scientists to feel that we have had a...
00:06:21.000It's the full assemblage of things that is difficult to explain by processes without invoking some type of a cosmic event.
00:06:30.000And it also corresponds with what you believe is a period where Earth travels through a series of comets.
00:06:38.000Well, this gets us to the ideas of what would be called the British neocatastrophists.
00:06:45.000Victor Klube and William Napier and a number of others that have theorized that from time to time Earth encounters the debris from a large disintegrating comet.
00:06:55.000And there's an interesting William Napier addresses this in an interesting article I can pull up here pretty soon, that possibly around 13,000 years ago, Earth may have encountered some of the debris from a disintegrating comet,
00:07:11.000which ultimately goes back to Fred Whipple, who is one of the godfathers of cometary science.
00:07:17.000Could I just come in on that for a second?
00:07:18.000I mean, specifically, Bill Napier and Victor Klub are identifying the remnants of this comet.
00:07:25.000With the torrid meteor stream, which is familiar, I think, to everybody.
00:08:15.000And actually, I listen to it on audio.
00:08:18.000So it's, I don't know, like 16, 18 hours of Graham reading with his wonderful British accent, which, as you know, for Americans, that elevates the quality of the argument by an order of magnitude.
00:08:31.000Yeah, that's how they sell things in infomercials over here.
00:08:59.000So it's good to remember that, so you have these guys on the podcast for three or four hours, and the audience listening thinks, yeah, why don't these guys get a fair hearing?
00:09:07.000I mean, it's like there's the mainstream and then there's these guys.
00:09:12.000There's hundreds of alternative archaeological theories.
00:09:15.000So which one gets the play, which one gets attention, which one doesn't?
00:09:20.000And for a mainstream archaeologist who's busy in the field and trying to get grants and so on, they mostly just don't have the time to sort through all these alternative theories because this is just one.
00:09:31.000And as we'll see in the next couple hours, there's hundreds and hundreds of things to be addressed.
00:09:38.000So just to rattle off a few, the lost tribes of Israel who colonized the Americas, Mormon archaeology, explanation of Native Americans, the Kensington rune stones in Minnesota that the Vikings had come here, the black Egyptian hypothesis.
00:09:52.000When I was in graduate school, this book called Black Athena was published, that the Egyptians were actually black, and that The, you know, sort of Western white male dominance of history had written them out of the past.
00:10:05.000So, you know, this was a whole alternative history, alternative archaeology.
00:10:09.000Piltdown man, Thor Heiderdahl, in his hypothesis that the Polynesian islands were colonized by South Americans who went...
00:10:19.000That's since been debunked, but that's yet another one of these things.
00:10:23.000South American archaeology, Omec statues seem to have like African features on them.
00:10:28.000So maybe Afghans went directly across to South America.
00:10:31.000So there's, you know, Eric Van Donegan, Zechariah Sitchin.
00:10:35.000Now most of these Graham rejects in his book, to your credit, so you're a good skeptic too.
00:10:42.000But for an outsider to an anthropologist from Mars who steps into this thing cold, doesn't know anything, it's like, well, they're all alternative, which is the right one?
00:11:22.000So you put it in the mainstream through peer-reviewed journals.
00:11:25.000And then you go to conferences and you have it out.
00:11:28.000And that's kind of where we end up with, well, this is what we think is probably true for now.
00:11:33.000And then all these other people out here, if they don't jump in and into the pool where everybody is, Then there's no way for an outsider to know whether these alternative things have any validity or not, other than they make a compelling case in a popular book,
00:11:49.000yes, but what do the mainstream scientists think?
00:11:52.000And the problem is that, so a couple of specific things, like what I call patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise, you know, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich or whatever.
00:12:04.000You know, taking, like, pectoglyphs and then comparing them to constellations, like, you know, here we have some constellations on your roof here.
00:12:16.000It's easy in the mind's eye to find a pattern.
00:12:19.000The question is, did those people really think 10,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago?
00:12:23.000So this is a field called archaeoastronomy.
00:12:25.000Ed Krupp, the director of the Griffith Observatory here in LA, this is what he does.
00:12:30.000And sometimes he thinks the patterns mean something.
00:12:48.000The director there, he just can't deal with them all.
00:12:52.000Just as one example I used in my book, Why People Believe Were Things, that one guy calculated that if you divide the height of the pyramid into twice the side of the base, you get the number close to pi.
00:13:03.000And then he just sort of works all these different numbers, so therefore it's cosmically significant.
00:13:07.000Well, Richard Hoagland was the best example of that, right?
00:13:10.000He would find these patterns in Mars and claim that if you go from this rock to half the distance, why would you do that?
00:13:41.000It's not like we voted on it and decided this is the truth.
00:13:44.000It's that independently, all these different scientists working in different fields, publishing in different journals, come to the same conclusion.
00:13:51.000So we call this consilient science or convergence of evidence science.
00:13:55.000That it's not like these guys are meeting on the weekends going, boy, we got to combat those crazy right-wingers with our data.
00:14:02.000They're independently coming to these conclusions.
00:14:05.000So that lifts our confidence that, yeah, there's probably something to their theory.
00:14:09.000Such that there's now so much data converting to this, you'd have to deconstruct every one of those independent lines.
00:15:01.000It's totally relevant because I think almost all of your argument is based on this residue of anomalies, what we call the God of the gaps argument.
00:15:11.000If you, scientists, can't explain this particular rock right here, Or that particular petroglyph, and I'm going to count that toward my compilation of data to support my hypothesis of a lost civilization.
00:15:22.000But no one is saying that the scientists can't explain it.
00:15:26.000What essentially, particularly Randall, with his series of images as shown, is that what you have here is something that can be explained by rapid melting of the ice caps.
00:15:44.000I mean, it depends what you mean by rapid.
00:15:46.000You know, I mean, a glacial dam that, as our geologist will tell us in a moment, that breaks, that's fairly rapid.
00:15:52.000Back in 96, there was a very popular book called The Noah's Flood.
00:15:56.000This was a serious book by two geologists that said it was the rapid filling up of the Black Sea that swamped over the civilizations living on the edges of this, and that that's where the Noachian flood story comes from.
00:16:10.000Okay, so it was widely debated and so on, and since it hasn't fared that well.
00:17:00.000So, my final point is the falsifiability one.
00:17:03.000That is, what would it take to refute your hypothesis?
00:17:07.000Like, for me, the answer would be, like, if Gobekli Tepe turned out to be what you think it might have been, The place where advanced ancient civilization once inhabited or they used it.
00:17:31.000Errors had taken place, that in reinventing civilization we shouldn't perhaps go down quite the same route as before.
00:17:39.000Perhaps writing isn't always an advance.
00:17:42.000Perhaps an oral tradition which records in memory, which enhances and uses the power of memory, may be a very effective way of dealing with information.
00:17:52.000We regard writing as an advance, and I can see lots of reasons.
00:17:57.000Why it is an advance, but if we put ourselves into the heads of ancient peoples, maybe it wasn't.
00:18:02.000I mean, there's a tradition from ancient Egypt that the god Thoth, god of wisdom, was the inventor of writing.
00:18:08.000But we have a text in which he is questioned by a pharaoh who is saying, well, actually, have you really done a good thing by introducing writing?
00:18:17.000Because then the words may roam around the world without wise advice to put them into context.
00:18:23.000And what will happen to memory when people...
00:18:26.000So there might be a choice, not Not to go that way.
00:18:28.000Alright, but then what do you mean by advance?
00:18:30.000When you say there used to be a lost advanced civilization before 10,000 years ago...
00:18:35.000Well, let's just pause here for a second, because what we know for a fact is that the carbon dating in all the area around Gobekli Tepe is somewhere around 12,000 years.
00:19:01.000So when that story broke, this is long before you came along with your book, it was controversial in the sense that we thought hunter-gatherers could not do something like this because to do that you need a large population with a division of labor and so forth.
00:19:16.000And so the response to archaeologists was, well, I guess we were wrong about hunter-gatherers.
00:19:21.000Maybe they can do more stuff than we gave them credit for.
00:19:25.000So why is that not a reasonable hypothesis versus it was actually advanced, but we mean something completely different by advanced, not writing and metal and technology.
00:20:23.000And he said basically 50 times as much as they've already excavated is still under the ground, that there's hundreds and hundreds of giant stone pillars that they've identified with ground-penetrating radar.
00:20:34.000He's not even sure If they're ever going to excavate them.
00:20:38.000But by all accounts, we are looking, if we take what's still under the ground into account, we're looking at the largest megalithic site that's ever been created on Earth.
00:20:46.000And it pops up 11,600 years ago with no obvious background to it.
00:20:56.000But to me, that's immediately a rather puzzling and interesting situation.
00:20:59.000And I would be remiss as an author and an inquirer into these matters if I didn't take great interest in that.
00:21:05.000The sudden appearance, 7,000 years before Stonehenge, of a megalithic site that dwarfs Stonehenge.
00:21:11.000To me, that's a mystery, and it's really worth inquiring into.
00:21:13.000To put it into perspective, that's more than 2,000 years older than what we now consider to be the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza in comparison to us to then.
00:21:24.000So between our time now in 2017 and the construction of the Great Pyramid, you're talking about 2,000 years earlier than that.
00:21:30.000And that is unbelievable when you're talking about 7,000 years before what we thought people were doing.
00:21:37.000Okay, but my point was that instead of, before we go down the road of constructing a lost civilization that was super advanced, but different from our idea of advanced, why not just a tribute to these fully modern hunter-gatherers who had the same size brains we have and so on,
00:21:53.000that they were able to figure out and do this.
00:21:56.000We just underestimated their abilities.
00:21:58.000But why did archaeologists tell us for so long hunter-gatherers couldn't do it and we needed agricultural populations that could generate surpluses, that could pay for the specialists to...
00:22:07.000So now what archaeologists are saying, I guess we were wrong about hunter-gatherers.
00:22:11.000Well, they might be wrong about hunter-gatherers or there might be another civilization that they had not discovered that has been unearthed by time.
00:22:19.000Sorry, Michael, lost civilizations are not such an extraordinary idea.
00:22:25.000I mean, nobody knew that the Indus Valley civilization existed at all until some railway work was done around Moenjodaro in 1923. Suddenly, a whole civilization pops up out of the woodwork that's just never been taken into account before the 1920s.
00:22:39.000We still can't read its script, you know?
00:22:41.000The idea that we come across that another turn of the spade reveals information that causes us to reconsider...
00:22:48.000Not just was it hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists, but perhaps something bigger than this is involved.
00:23:02.000They would be happy to go there if there's evidence for it.
00:23:05.000By what you just said, they now fully accept the Indus Valley civilizations.
00:23:09.000How did that happen if they were dogmatically closed-minded?
00:23:13.000I don't say that they were dogmatically close-minded about that.
00:23:16.000The evidence, the massive amount of evidence that came up with the discovery of Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, Dolavira, and other such sites is very difficult.
00:23:25.000You have to be completely stupid to say that that's not a civilization.
00:23:42.000But any of us who read back into history 10,000 years ago, what we're thinking, that they might have been thinking, that's always dangerous for anybody, not just you, all of us.
00:24:14.000Well, when you have a perfectly north-south aligned structure, perfectly north-south, a true north, not magnetic north, then you are dealing with astronomy by definition.
00:24:23.000And there are other alignments of the stone circles.
00:24:25.000True north as established today or with the precession of the equinoxes when you're talking about 12?
00:24:43.000Case in point, two weeks ago in the journal Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, there was published an article that...
00:24:50.000Humans, or maybe Neanderthals, lived in San Diego area 130,000 years ago.
00:24:56.000This is an order of magnitude older than the Clovis data, so 13,000.
00:25:00.000This was the mastodon bones they found that were smashed.
00:25:48.000He absolutely adamantly insists that that site was deliberately buried and finally covered with a hill, which is what Göbekli Tepe means in the Turkish language, pot-bellied hill.
00:26:58.000But isn't there some proof that the mainstream idea of these hunters and gatherers never had anything in what the theory was that would indicate these people were capable of building something even remotely the size of Gobekli Tepe?
00:27:12.000To me, that's the stunning That's the beauty of this find.
00:27:15.000It overturns our ideas of primitive hunter-gatherers that could not do this.
00:28:27.000Perhaps he's not right, but he went on record with me as saying that was the first Thank you very much.
00:28:51.000That what we're looking at is evidence of some kind of transfer of technology, that people came into that area who had other knowledge and that that was applied and perhaps they mobilized the local population around this site.
00:29:01.000Perhaps that's precisely why we see agriculture developing there.
00:29:04.000So perhaps that's the skill that's being passed on.
00:29:07.000But I don't see anything particularly...
00:29:09.000Okay, the stone work is spectacular, but that's not any more advanced than a few millennium afterwards.
00:29:17.000But you're talking about something 20 feet tall made of stone by people that were hunter-gatherers?
00:29:22.000But a couple hundred people can move multi-ton stones.
00:29:26.000There's no mystery in moving the stones.
00:29:27.000They're still moving 20-ton stones in Indonesia today.
00:29:30.000I mean, megalithic cultures still exist.
00:29:31.000You also know that the carving on the outside is extremely complex.
00:29:51.000No, the carvings were on the outside, meaning they didn't carve them into the rock, they carved away the rock around them, which is pretty sophisticated stuff for hunter-gatherers, and they're doing this on these 20-foot-tall stone columns.
00:30:30.000It's not that much of a reach to carve stone.
00:30:34.000People have been carving stones for thousands of years.
00:30:36.000But the entire archaeological opinion on megalithic sites for decades before this was precisely that it was beyond their ability to do that.
00:30:43.000Right, and now the mainstream has changed its mind about this.
00:31:20.000I agree with Graham that we've, again, undersold who these people were.
00:31:24.000My friend Jared Diamond goes to Papua New Guinea.
00:31:27.000He talks in the opening chapter of Guns, Germs, and Steel, how smart these people are that live out there in nature, what it takes to survive.
00:31:34.000He wouldn't last an hour, you know, from L.A., he wouldn't last an hour with his Papua New Guinean friends out there in the wild.
00:31:41.000Well, that's just because he doesn't know how to survive, and they've been passing down the information for generation after generation.
00:32:26.000It's my job to offer an alternative point of view and to offer a coherently argued alternative point of view.
00:32:31.000And I must say, go Beckley Tepe strikes me as a gigantic fucking mystery and a mystery that is worthy of exploration from a point of view that may not satisfy you.
00:32:42.000Oh, well, you don't have to satisfy me.
00:32:50.000But like your opening chapter with Schmidt, I thought I really loved the kind of conversational style you had with Schmidt in the book where he's dialoguing, where Schmidt goes, and look at this.
00:33:00.000And then he says, but wait, what's that again?
00:34:34.000You can have any kind of number of states...
00:34:35.000But what you can't apparently have is the possibility of a transfer of technology from people who were really masters of that technology already when they came in.
00:35:04.000I think it's reasonable to consider the possibility that there was something more than just hunter-gatherers involved here in creating this extraordinary place.
00:35:14.000It seems to me that to say hunter-gatherers could build this, I wouldn't be opposed to the idea that they're hunting and gathering, but it does certainly imply a lot of leisure time.
00:35:29.000Well, again, if we place this back particularly within that climate zone at 11,006 to 12,000, 13,000 years ago, whatever it turns out to be, we're dealing with an extremely demanding and challenging climate.
00:35:46.000Which wouldn't necessarily, to my mind, be conducive to the emergence of a settled culture that would be capable of undertaking a project on this scale.
00:35:58.000And as somebody who's built a lot of things and moved quite a few heavy weights in my time, I find the idea sort of perplexing to me that they would be...
00:36:10.000What I would have to ask is, what is their motive?
00:36:13.000What is their motive for undertaking a project on this scale?
00:37:02.000We knew that all along about hunter-gatherers when we were saying they couldn't build megalithic sites.
00:37:07.000But we're looking at a time where the environment is undergoing rapid changes, to which adaptations would be extremely challenging.
00:37:16.000And we know those changes are going on all over the planet.
00:37:19.000We know that sea levels are rapidly rising over a period of a few thousand years, from a sea stand low of about 400 feet up to the present level.
00:37:29.000We also know that That biotas were shifting dramatically all over the planet.
00:37:34.000The effects of the Younger Dryas were global.
00:37:36.000Pretty much that is, I think, the emerging consensus now.
00:37:39.000That both hemispheres, north and south, were being affected by the climate changes of the Younger Dryas.
00:37:45.000So what we're doing is replacing this phenomena, this project, within this context of these extremely challenging times in which, you know, adaptation to the environmental changes Could easily be the all-consuming challenge of the times.
00:38:03.000I'm just finding it difficult to imagine a disconnect, to see this disconnect between a project of this magnitude and the motive for doing it during a time when obviously the environment could be posing serious constraints upon people's ability to function in that Well,
00:38:25.000Randall, we don't even know the motives of the Easter Islanders and why they raised these huge...
00:39:01.000So, the fact that they were able to build something so monumental, what kind of a leap is it at all to think that these people could figure out how to plant food and figure out how to make a house?
00:39:12.000Well, I mean, again, if you look back 30,000 years, 40,000 years to these cave paintings, these are pretty sophisticated.
00:40:55.000But I don't think it's even What I'm saying is that it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to think these people were pretty smart.
00:43:28.000And when I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, essentially I was saying civilization is much older and much more mysterious than we thought.
00:43:40.000And I was ridiculed for proposing that.
00:43:44.0002013, one of the magazines that ridiculed me, New Scientist magazine in Britain, publishes as a cover story, a picture of Gobekli Tepe, and the headline, Civilization is much older and much more mysterious than we thought.
00:45:00.000But David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwatersrand has been working on this problem since 1973, and his argument is that the remarkable similarities that we see in rock and cave art all around the world are explained that we're dealing with a shamanistic art.
00:45:14.000Shamanism involves altered states of consciousness.
00:45:16.000This is typical visions of altered states of consciousness, and it seems to have accompanied a great leap forward in human behavior.
00:45:54.000It could be a number of different things.
00:45:55.000So, let's get away from Gobekli Tepe and ancient civilizations, and let's get back to the geological evidence, which, Randall, you're an expert at.
00:46:04.000And this is one of the main things that you had a dispute with, and this is one of the reasons why we got everybody together.
00:46:10.000Now, what is your thoughts on what Randall and Graham proposed, specifically Randall, who is much more on the geological side of things?
00:46:37.000Is going to be doing some more work on the draft of his article for you that is up online, because that article is full of bullshit statements about me which are demonstrably false.
00:48:58.000Then, a cheap shot, you know, he cites Jesus Gemara and accuses me of not having the scientific knowledge to deal with issues of gravitation.
00:49:09.000Now, it's true that Jesus Gemara, who is a descendant of the Incas, who has worked 70 years on the megaliths of Sacsayhuaman, whose father before him, Alfredo Gemara, worked 70 years, it's true that he's got a way-out theory about gravitation.
00:49:22.000Thing is, I state in my book that it's a way-out theory.
00:49:25.000What I go on to say, quoted in the attack, is that, however, this isn't the part of his theory I'm interested in.
00:49:31.000Where I feel he is solidly persuasive is in his observations of the anomalous character of the monuments of the Andes, etc., etc.
00:49:39.000He just presents me as buying what Jesus Guamara says.
00:49:42.000I mean, if that's the standard that you're going to have in Skeptic magazine, you have a serious problem.
00:49:46.000And then Gobekli Tepe, he contends that Gobekli Tepe is too advanced to have been completed by hunter-gatherers and must have been constructed by a more advanced civilization.
00:49:58.000I say it was constructed by hunter-gatherers, but that they were advised and supported by people who had knowledge of this kind of work beforehand.
00:50:56.000He cites Klaus Schmidt on the character.
00:51:01.000Schmidt makes a salient point, almost as if he anticipated Hancock's book.
00:51:04.000Quote, fabulous or mythical creatures such as centaurs or the sphinx, winged bulls or horses, do not yet occur in the iconography and therefore in the mythology of prehistoric times.
00:51:14.000They must be recognized as creations of the high cultures which arose later.
00:51:47.000So he's taking issue with me because I suggest that the vulture on Pillar 43 in Enclosure D is representing the teapot asterism of the constellation of Sagittarius.
00:52:00.000And he goes and gives us little things of Uncle Sam and Some other thing that he shows, you know, anybody can impose any image on anything.
00:52:07.000Well, it's not my fault that a couple of academics who didn't even talk to me and had nothing whatsoever to do to me have published a major study in the, I quote it again, the Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, a peer-reviewed journal, where they make precisely that identification.
00:54:44.000I mean, if we were to have a comet impact in the world today, which were to take out all the underpinnings of modern civilization, I might go settle with hunter-gatherers because they're the people who know best how to live in that situation.
00:55:34.000Perhaps there's been a forgotten episode in human history.
00:55:38.000Perhaps its fingerprints are present at a number of sites around the world.
00:55:43.000But perhaps the extremely defensive, arrogant and patronizing attitude of mainstream academia is stopping us from considering that possibility.
00:55:50.000And therefore, I campaign to get that possibility considered.
00:55:53.000And I try to do so with as loud a voice as possible.
00:56:27.000How does something get online if it's not supposed to be?
00:56:29.000Why is such a person who will do that a useful contributor to your side of the debate?
00:56:35.000One of the reasons we're here is to get your point of view exactly right.
00:56:38.000So you're saying that there's no evidence that any lost civilization exists, only the fingerprints of their influence on later peoples we do know existed.
00:56:51.000I'm saying there are physical objects.
00:56:55.000But see, this is that argument from either ignorance or personal incredulity.
00:56:59.000I don't accept the mainstream, or I can't think of how this pyramids could have been built, therefore it was built by somebody else through some other technology.
00:58:01.000And then why do mainstream archaeologists not accept the older date for the Sphinx?
00:58:07.000And the answer is because they have a whole bunch of other evidence that points to the date that they think it does.
00:58:13.000The answer to your question is very simple.
00:58:15.000Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass put it on record back in 1992 when John Anthony West and Robert Schock first presented the rainfall erosion evidence on the Sphinx.
00:58:26.000And what Lehner and Hawass said is, the Sphinx can't possibly be 12,000 plus years old because there was no other culture anywhere in the world that was capable of creating large-scale monumental architecture like this.
00:58:38.000Show me one other structure that's capable of doing that.
00:58:41.000Well, they could say that in 1992, Michael, but they can't say it in 2017, not since Gobekli Tepe.
00:58:47.000If you don't mind, Graham, could you please, for people, so this could be a standalone thing, people could understand, what is the argument about the Sphinx, the enclosure of the Sphinx, and Dr. Robert Schock from Boston University, who's a geologist, what was his conclusion?
00:58:59.000What Schock is saying is that the Sphinx and the trench out of which the Sphinx is cut...
00:59:06.000It bears the unmistakable evidence of precipitation-induced weathering, weathering caused by exposure to a substantial period of heavy rainfall.
00:59:14.000And that is particularly pointed out in the vertical fissures in the trench.
00:59:18.000You see, the Sphinx itself has been subject to so much restoration over so many years that it's difficult for people to even see the core body of the Sphinx today.
00:59:26.000But you can see the vertical fissures even down at the back of there.
00:59:30.000That is what shock counts as rainfall, precipitation-induced weathering, heavy rainfall, which is selectively removing the softer layers and leaving the harder layers in place.
00:59:40.000And the problem is we don't have that rainfall in Giza, in Egypt, four and a half thousand years ago.
00:59:46.000You have to go back much earlier to get that rainfall.
00:59:56.000Schock disagrees with me on many things, as a matter of fact.
00:59:59.000And I disagree with him on many things, but I think he's on the money on this.
01:00:03.000So that alone would set back at least that one...
01:00:06.000I mean, it's pretty much established that the Great Pyrene of Giza was constructed about 2,500 BC, right?
01:00:11.000There's absolutely no doubt that a huge project went on at Giza around 2,500 BC. So your argument is not that the whole thing was that much older, was that parts of it seemed to have been from an earlier civilization, or at least that civilization far, far earlier than was...
01:00:28.000I would say that the ground plan, what we have at Giza, the basic layout of the site, was established in what the ancient Egyptians called Zeptepe, the first time.
01:00:37.000Astronomically and geologically, I and my colleagues suggest that the first time can be dated to the period of about 12,500 to 13,000 years ago.
01:00:47.000That was when the site was laid out, because there's intriguing astronomical alignments of the Great Pyramids to the belt of Orion.
01:00:53.000I know Ed Krupp has a completely opposite view on this.
01:00:56.000And of the Great Sphinx to the constellation of Leo, rising due east, housing the sun on the equinox, the astrological age of Leo.
01:01:32.000It's that, okay, if the Sphinx is built, or the layout for the whole thing is built in, say, 10, 11,000 years ago, and then the pyramids are built, you know, 2500 B.C., what happened in between?
01:01:44.000Where are all the people, the trash, the places where they lived?
01:01:47.000Well, there's a bunch of different styles of construction.
01:01:51.000I would propose, Michael, something like a monastery.
01:01:54.000Which has a relatively small archaeological footprint, is on the site.
01:01:58.000I mean, the idea of information, knowledge, and traditions lasting for thousands of years within a religious system shouldn't be too absurd to us.
01:02:06.000I mean, Judaism is dealing with ideas that are already best part of 4,000 years old if we go back to Ur of the Chaldees and so on and so forth.
01:02:12.000So that's all I'm suggesting, really, that the idea is preserved, maintained, that the survivors...
01:02:25.000Perhaps, again, one can only speculate, and I think there's a lot of speculation on the archaeological side too, one can only speculate, perhaps having gone through a cataclysm, perhaps they felt to blame for this, wrongly or rightly.
01:02:37.000I mean, there are many, many traditions in which humanity's behaviour is implicated in the cataclysm that takes place.
01:02:43.000And perhaps they didn't want to switch civilisation on completely right there.
01:02:47.000Perhaps they waited, passed down the knowledge through initiates, Enough was there to create a mystery because it's undoubtedly a mystery that the construction of the great pyramids, the first huge pyramids in Egypt, preceded only really by the Zoser pyramid at Saqqara,
01:03:03.000that the construction of the great pyramids is vastly superior to the construction of the pyramids of the fifth and sixth dynasty that follow it.
01:03:12.000And that's a little bit counterintuitive that we have this collapse in skills.
01:03:15.000One would have expected it to got better.
01:03:16.000So it sounds like the work on the pyramids started already with a level of knowledge in hand.
01:03:21.000Yes, but okay, so here's how I would think about that.
01:03:25.000There's a lot of perhapsing and maybes.
01:04:08.000And its alignment with the constellation of Leo housing the sun at dawn on the spring equinox.
01:04:13.000It's an equinoctial mark, and nobody would dispute that.
01:04:15.000Nobody would dispute that the ancient Egypt...
01:04:17.000Well, no, I mean, if you make a monument pointing perfectly Jewish...
01:04:19.000I've stood on the back of the Sphinx at dawn on the spring equinox, and believe me, again, I could show a picture, its head lines up perfectly.
01:04:33.000You're building an equinoctial marker in 2500 BC. Do you know what constellation is housing the sun in 2500 BC? I haven't run the little program.
01:04:44.000So logically, if you're creating an equinoctial, and the ancient Egyptians were not shy about making images of bulls, plenty of them, if you're making an equinoctial marker in 2500 BC, you really should create it in the form of a bull, not in the form of a lion, you know?
01:04:58.000That's the puzzling issue, and yet we do have a time when a lion constellation housed the sun at dawn on the spring equinox, and that is the period of the younger dryers.
01:05:08.000Okay, I'd say that's a pretty big leap.
01:05:10.000Well, I know you'd say that, and your colleagues all say that too.
01:05:12.000And then we have a gap of about five or six thousand years where there's nothing.
01:05:18.000I'm going to refer back to several articles that were published in the 80s and 90s.
01:05:23.000This one is from Nature, Early 80s, Late Quaternary History of the Nile.
01:05:28.000And what it's discussing is the evidence that there was a major shift In the hydraulic regime of the Nile River.
01:05:35.000It says, between 20,000 and 12,000 years before present, when timberline in the headwaters was lower, vegetation cover more open than today, the Nile was a highly seasonal braided river, which brought mixed coarse and fine sediments down to Egypt and Sudan.
01:05:53.000This cold, dry interval had ended by 12,500 years before present, when overflow from Lake Victoria and higher rainfall in Ethiopia sent extraordinary floods down the main Nile.
01:06:09.000And those floods have been documented to have been 120 feet above the modern flood plain of the Nile.
01:06:16.000Any civilization, or whatever you want to call it, living along the Nile River at that time, Would have had to abandon whatever they were doing there in this regime, this intensified hydraulic regime.
01:06:30.000And it goes on to say, it marked a revolutionary change to continuous flow with a superimposed flood peak.
01:06:37.000So what happened is that there was a major environmental change that occurred right there around 12,000 to 12,500 years.
01:06:45.000The dating could be adjusted somewhat since the early 80s, but the point is made is that because of a major Hydrological change, major vegetation cover change, major environmental change, this would have caused also imposed changes upon whatever culture was existing there or living there at the time.
01:07:05.000Now what we have is In the aftermath of that event, we have basically the emergence of desert, which now would require serious adaptation.
01:07:17.000It's very likely, too, that these events could have also decimated the population at the time, leaving basically no workforce.
01:07:28.000And then, over a period of two or three or four thousand years, you find that That there's enough of a recovery that these kind of monumental structures can be renewed.
01:07:39.000But it's clear from this and a lot of other studies, studies in the eastern Mediterranean showing that there are sap repel layers, which is basically material that has been washed in from the continental surface that has not oxidized.
01:07:55.000It has essentially become rotten and Carried in organic material, carried in off of the continents by this enhanced regime of water flow, actually forcing so much water that there was a fresh water lid on the eastern Mediterranean that caused a cessation in the circulation between the upper waters and the lower waters.
01:08:22.000Reducing the amount of oxygen brought down to the to the lower waters and so you had these layers of mud that formed on the bottom of the Mediterranean that show this massive influx of fresh water flowing off of out of the Nile and off of the the Egyptian continent at this same time so Clearly the evidence shows that there were major climatic changes that occurred around this time.
01:08:46.000It is not so speculative to imagine that whoever, whatever, and we don't have to invoke any kind of a super advanced civilization, but whatever cultures were there that were perhaps capable of carving blocks of stone, transporting blocks of stone,
01:09:03.000as they were at Gobekli Tepe during this time range, That their activity would have been interrupted to the extent that it might have taken millennia to recover, to get the labor force necessary to undertake major monumental programs on the Giza Plateau.
01:09:21.000So I think that if we assume this gradualistic scenario, yeah, that's a fair question to ask.
01:09:29.000But if there is a major climatic downturn and a major disruption of the settled patterns of whatever culture was already there, then, you know, now we might have an explanation why there would be a gap.
01:09:42.000Especially if these events caused a bottleneck in the population of the area.
01:09:49.000Of course this is all speculative, but it is not speculative to say that there is multiple lines of evidence suggesting these major even cataclysmic changes that engulfed that part of the world during that era.
01:10:02.000So that could provide an explanation of why there is a gap there.
01:10:12.000Only if you have to have the Sphinx in conjunction with 12,000 years ago and the lost civilization.
01:10:18.000If you just say that rainwater erosion on the Sphinx is not an explanation for the age and that the traditional accepted age is what we think it is, then there's no gap to fill.
01:10:32.000So really, all we're talking about is we have, again, lots of evidence here, one anomaly here.
01:10:37.000I really want the anomaly thing to stick, so I've got to explain the gap.
01:10:40.000The gap is explained by environmental changes.
01:10:43.000Yeah, but what is the lots of evidence other than a lot of assumptions and a lot of maybes?
01:10:49.000Actually, can you cite me a single contemporary inscription from the date that the Sphinx is supposed to have been made that refers to the Sphinx?
01:13:28.000They genuinely and absolutely believe that their argument is right.
01:13:32.000The notion that I'm proposing is apparently so preposterous to them that it isn't even worthy of consideration, but it is worthy of insults and attacks on me, on my integrity, on my decency as a human being, on my honesty.
01:13:49.000And by the way, I know that archaeologists, academics constantly attack each other all the time.
01:13:54.000I used to take this stuff personally, but then when I see what they do to each other, the ravaging attack dogs are let loose on any new idea.
01:14:02.000I sometimes wish scientists would actually look for what's good in a new idea rather than what's bad.
01:14:07.000But I get why they do look for what's bad.
01:14:10.000But in other words, some young graduate student working in that area could make a name for himself by overturning...
01:14:15.000My son was a young graduate student at the University of Cardiff studying Egyptology.
01:14:20.000He got marked down in his degree because he proposed the possibility that the pyramids and the Sphinx might be or might have older origins.
01:15:41.000Well, they're being forced to accept Gobekli Tepe, and that's a new idea.
01:15:45.000You know where you were talking about things taking a long time, and what seems like a long time to us is really a blink of the eye in terms of archaeology?
01:15:54.000We're essentially in the middle of that with things like Gobekli Tepe, with Forbes publishing an article about the Younger Dryas possibly being impacted by comets and that being one of the causes of mass extinction.
01:16:26.000Well, this is where perhaps we need to bring in our phone-a-friend, you know, Malcolm LeCompte, one of the Younger Dryas impact scientists.
01:16:34.000I mean, the point being made is the following.
01:16:37.000Firstly, that the primary impacts were on ice.
01:16:39.000There may have been as many as four impacts, that they were on the North American ice cap.
01:16:44.000Some craters have been suggested, for example, very deep holes in the Great Lakes.
01:16:48.000Other craters have been and will be looked at by the team in the coming months, whether it includes the Corosol Crater.
01:16:55.000Crater, the Quebec terrain, and so on and so forth.
01:17:00.000The crater has not been found yet, but I would be surprised if a crater was easy to find when, you know, the impact is on two-mile-deep ice.
01:17:09.000And, you know, one of the biggest strewn fields in the world, which is the Australian tektite strewn field, there's no crater associated with that, but everybody accepts the impact proxies.
01:17:18.000There's enough of them to justify that, and that's what's going on around this impact hypothesis.
01:17:22.000So on a related question to that is not the lost civilizations and the demise of humans, but the megafauna extinction of North American mammals.
01:17:29.000So this has been long debated before the impact hypothesis was proposed.
01:17:35.000And the competing hypotheses were overhunting, humans just hunted them, to the point, not every last one, to the point where the population numbers get too low and these species can't survive.
01:17:47.000The climate change weakened the populations, then the humans came over and overhunted them.
01:17:52.000Alright, so, and then the impact hypothesis is proposed.
01:17:56.000Okay, so this was debated, and it didn't fare that well because there were a lot of mammals and other species that didn't go extinct that you would expect from a massive impact like that, it would have wiped out.
01:18:07.000Why the selected species, the kinds of species that humans would hunt, are the ones that went extinct, whereas these others didn't?
01:18:14.000Well, why would humans be hunting the largest species?
01:18:18.000There's no evidence that humans hunted the predators.
01:18:21.000There is evidence that they hunted woolly mammoths, but it's very sparse.
01:18:25.000I mean, you have no more than a dozen sites that show association between human hunting and mammoths.
01:18:33.000And a lot of those, like the Lubbock Lake site, is now being questioned.
01:18:37.000What was previously interpreted as being butchering marks on On the mammoth remains there are now being reinterpreted as possibly natural marks on the mammoth bones.
01:18:49.000But it's a big stretch to go from, okay we've got a dozen sites where we have mammoth remains and along with those mammoth remains we find a few Clovis spear points In two or three cases we actually find, or they have found, spear points embedded within the mammoth,
01:19:06.000like in the rib cage, but it's a very large stretch to go from there to say that ten or twelve million woolly mammoths, or four species of mammoths on four continents, were wiped out by Paleo-Indian hunters, probably in bands of no more than two or three dozen,
01:19:23.000Have you ever been to a head-smashed-in buffalo site?
01:19:27.000Yes, but that's a good example because nowhere did that go anywhere close to exterminating the species of American bison.
01:19:35.000But each site has its own particular explanation.
01:19:38.000It could be hunting, it could be a massive flood.
01:20:03.000Again, the dating of the migration of humans into South America is controversial at this point.
01:20:11.000There is evidence that humans were there long before.
01:20:13.000Paul Martin's idea of blitzkrieg requires that the animals be so stupid that they had no adaptive capabilities to the appearance of a new predatory species.
01:20:25.000But what is being demonstrated from examining the life ways of The Paleo-Indian peoples is that they had very diversified diets, and they were hunter-gatherers.
01:20:38.000Now, why would they be choosing the largest, most dangerous animals to hunt when they had such a proliferation of other smaller animals?
01:20:47.000We know that they were foraging, we know that they were eating seafood and fishing, because all of this is being found in the camps.
01:20:56.000And then it certainly doesn't explain the extermination of the cave bears, the short-faced bears, the camelops, the giant beavers, the giant armadillos, the American Pleistocene lion, the ground sloths that were the size of giraffes.
01:21:16.000Four species of proboscideans, meaning mammoths, extinct on four continents.
01:22:06.000It could be that their food source wasn't removed.
01:22:09.000It could be that their predators were wiped out and they managed to survive.
01:22:13.000I mean, there's a lot of animals that are still alive today in this continent.
01:22:16.000Like, for instance, a pronghorn antelope.
01:22:19.000A pronghorn antelope, Dan Flores, who's a wildlife historian, wrote an amazing book.
01:22:25.000On it, and when he was talking about the American savanna during, you know, like 15,000 plus years ago, there was all sorts of crazy animals millions of years ago that were like cheetahs that were running down animals at extreme speeds, which is the reason why pronghorn antelopes can run so much faster than any of their current predators.
01:22:46.000Something much faster than them was killing them, and that was wiped out, but they managed to make it.
01:22:51.000One of the reasons why they probably managed to make it is because their predators were wiped out.
01:22:58.000If it's overkill, it's intriguing that the overkill occurs, you know, precisely in the Younger Dryas window, because I think you'd agree that now the whole story of the peopling of the Americas is pretty much up for grabs.
01:23:11.000I mean, Clovis first was the dominant model for a very long time, and under that model, we're to envisage these Clovis hunters coming in across the Bering Land Bridge, going down the ice-free corridor, and then in like 800 years, With their sophisticated fluted points, they wipe out all the mammoths in North America.
01:23:28.000But now we know that humans have been coexisting and butchering mammoths, coexisting with mammoths for thousands of years before that, possibly tens of thousands of years before that.
01:26:25.000Today, decades later, the Clovis first model has collapsed.
01:26:30.000Okay, based on dozens of new studies, we now know that pre-Clovis peoples slaughtered mastodons in Washington State, dined on desert parsley in Oregon, made all-purpose stone tools that were Ice Age version of the X-Acto...
01:28:36.000When he proposed that Bluefish Caves was 24,000 years old, it was not accepted.
01:28:40.000What the Smithsonian are saying is now, this is accepted.
01:28:43.000You need to get up to speed with the data, Michael.
01:28:45.000Okay, my archaeology friends, like Jared Diamond, who I just checked with on this, who's at UCLA. Well, he certainly has a dog in the fight.
01:28:53.000Well, he just says, here's the problem.
01:28:56.000For 50 years, people propose pre-Clovis examples, recites, or evidence.
01:29:13.000You're quoting a friend who says the evidence hasn't held up before.
01:29:17.000Instead of quoting these articles with these scientists who are talking about the data that's showing that human beings butchered horses 24,000 years ago, you're disputing it just because you talked to a friend.
01:29:28.000I'm saying that that has to be confirmed.
01:29:50.000I'm going to say in the latest evidence that overwhelmingly shows humans coming across the Siberian Straits into North America 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,000 years ago.
01:30:16.000Now the problem is, well, if they lived on the shores, which is where the good fishing and eating is, Those are underwater.
01:30:22.000And short of doing good underwater archaeology, which is hard to do and expensive, and most of it's probably gone, we may never know.
01:30:29.000One of my beefs with archaeology, actually, is that 10 million square miles of the planet that were above water during the Ice Age are underwater now, and marine archaeology is still mainly looking at shipwrecks, you know.
01:30:39.000They do that because it's where the light is.
01:30:42.000Well, that leaves a big unanswered question.
01:30:44.000At any rate, for the record, can I at least say that you completely oppose the Smithsonian's position on this, that there has been no paradigm shift?
01:32:30.000It is a radical proposal, but it's strong enough to justify publication in nature.
01:32:35.000What's interesting to me is that the immediate reaction of the archaeological community is not to say, well, what could this mean?
01:32:41.000Let's look into the implications of this.
01:32:42.000I mean, if there were Neanderthals or Denisovans in North America 130,000 years ago, we have a whole new scenario building here that really should interest everyone.
01:32:51.000Instead of the first reaction is, Let's destroy this because it's really annoying.
01:33:19.000Clovis First is a discredited and abandoned position.
01:33:23.000And I have something else to ask you, actually, concerning genetics and DNA. I'm sure you're well up on that.
01:33:29.000I mean, can you explain why we have a strong signal of Denisovan DNA in certain groups of South American Indians and in Australian Aborigines and Melanesians?
01:33:40.000But that Denisovan DNA doesn't crop up in North American Indians.
01:33:43.000How would we explain that if they all came through the Bering Strait?
01:34:04.000Okay, so in the history of the peopling of America, that area, there's always somebody that comes in with, it's not Clovis, it's this, it's that, and rarely do they last.
01:34:30.000Maybe there are multiple migrations into North America, and we just don't have all the sites.
01:34:34.000But when somebody comes up with a site that's tens of thousands of years earlier than all the others that are accepted here, and it's over here, where are all the sites in between?
01:34:44.000It's like the 5,000-year gap with the Egyptian complex.
01:35:03.000But if they came by boat, then that clearly implies they had navigational skills, they had the ability to build boats, and find your way across the ocean.
01:35:35.000And one of the issues, of course, was the short-faced bear was so formidable, according to Dan Flores, that it would have been a huge impediment for people crossing on foot anyway.
01:35:44.000And the short-faced bear went extinct right around the time we see more evidence of human beings entering in.
01:36:32.000If you don't want to cite anything specifically, don't keep bringing up things that are refuted because you don't have anything that you're pointing to.
01:36:49.000No, okay, I'm making a slightly different point.
01:36:52.000That's the problem, is that you're not addressing the actual issues we're talking about.
01:36:56.000You muddy the water by saying things have been tossed out the window, so we have to be careful here and toss these things out the window as well.
01:37:04.000We contemplate them, published in Nature, for example.
01:37:08.000So let's watch what happens to the 130,000-year-old hypothesis.
01:37:11.000If it holds up, and there's other sites that are dated that way, and so on and so forth, that will be truly revolutionary, and scientists would accept it.
01:37:21.000You see, the problem is that when you have a very strong paradigm like Clovis first, which really dominates American archaeology, prehistoric archaeology for a very long period, it's difficult from a career point of view for archaeologists to come up and propose alternative sites.
01:37:35.000Those who did, like Tom Dillahay, like Jacques Sankt-Mars, paid a very heavy price for so doing.
01:37:41.000So the incentive to go looking for older stuff than Clovis Is extremely low in the archaeological community as a result of this ferocious reaction that went on for 30 or 40 or even 50 years.
01:37:54.000You know, I mean, also consider the Valsichilo excavations in Mexico, where the suggestion of some sort of human presence 230,000 years ago.
01:38:05.000I mean, that good archaeology, but it was utterly dismissed and the archaeologists involved were ruined for getting involved in that.
01:38:11.000It's hard to see how that's a profession that encourages people to think out When careers get ruined and research funding gets withdrawn for an idea that doesn't fit the current mainstream hypothesis.
01:38:23.000We don't like to think that scientists do that.
01:39:19.000It's mostly negative evidence that I don't accept the date of this.
01:39:22.000There is this peculiar sort of footprint-looking thing in the mud.
01:39:26.000Cremo refers specifically to the knowledge filter.
01:39:28.000The most useful thing about that book is the publication of reports, archaeological reports, which are no longer available to the public, which do suggest an alternative point of view.
01:39:38.000I would say it's a very useful book to read.
01:39:39.000Beyond that, I have nothing to say about it.
01:40:05.000I understand, but why do no other geologists or archaeologists accept it?
01:40:10.000Actually they do, and I've had multiple conversations with Robert where he has cited the fact that he has gotten a considerable body of support from other geologists.
01:40:20.000Not from Egyptologists, but from geologists who do recognize The effects of severe water erosion on limestone, carbonate rocks, and that's what we have there.
01:40:30.000We have a severe water erosion that appears and is preserved on the quarry walls around the Sphinx.
01:40:36.000The Sphinx itself, as Graham said, is difficult to ascertain because of all of the reconstruction that has gone on.
01:40:42.000But the quarry walls, which would have once had the very distinct stepped profile of a typical quarry, No longer have that.
01:40:52.000Now they have a textbook profile, parabolic profile, that would be consistent with sheet flooding, which would be both dissolution, because carbonate rocks dissolve in acidic waters, and what's called corrosion,
01:41:08.000which would be the effects of water loaded with sand sediment, which would make it very rough.
01:41:16.000So if you've got the sand sediment Flowing over the edge of what would have been a quarry wall, what you're going to end up with is a smoothing off of the rough corners and the final result would be a very rounded profile like you see there.
01:41:31.000You would also see where the fissures in the rock would be selectively widened and opened by the water penetrating those fissures.
01:41:38.000I mean it has all the earmarks of a very textbook case of water erosion.
01:41:45.000Don't you think it's very disingenuous comparing that to someone who thinks that human beings have been here for tens of millions of years with no evidence to support it whatsoever?
01:41:52.000Well, of course, he doesn't say he has no evidence.
01:41:55.000He has a 900-page book full of evidence.
01:43:07.000I've stated it many times, and I've presented the evidence that I think underwrites that opinion.
01:43:13.000You and your colleagues are absolutely at liberty to disagree, and you do.
01:43:16.000You don't think it's disingenuous to compare that to someone who says something that defies our current understanding of human beings and the actual evolution of humans?
01:43:25.000You're talking about someone who's saying that human beings are how many millions of years old?
01:44:17.000When you're faced with a bunch of different alternative theories that are coming in, take physics.
01:44:23.000I mean, every physicist, like you just had Lawrence Krauss, he gets these letters daily of people saying, I think I figured out why Einstein was wrong.
01:44:41.000If there are other alternative theories, that's not my problem either.
01:44:45.000It's the problem for the mainstream to sort it out and figure which to pay attention to and which not.
01:44:49.000Well, I'm suspicious of the whole idea of the mainstream, because even looking in the mainstream, you find so many divergent points of view that, you know, I think that's basically a fiction.
01:44:59.000That there is this mainstream that has arrived at this consensus, and that there are no ulterior motives there, and that there are no dogmas that are being perpetuated there.
01:45:13.000You know, I mean, I look at a lot of the geological stuff and realize that there are many different points of view.
01:45:20.000When we talk about these floods at the end of the last ice age, there are many divergent points of view.
01:45:25.000There is what could be considered the mainstream, yet even that has multiple interpretations.
01:45:36.000You know, I mean, I don't know what constitutes the mainstream there, because there have been a group that has opposed it at every turn, but at the same time, the group that accepts the comet hypothesis has continued to grow.
01:45:46.000In fact, there's even a number of individuals involved that set out specifically to disprove it or discredit it, who are now basically on board.
01:45:55.000And it has grown from being a small handful of scientists to there are now 63 scientists from 55 Different institutions that are on board with the idea that something remarkable happened at the end of the last Ice Age.
01:46:08.000It was probably exogenic, meaning something from outside, something from space.
01:46:14.000There's no consensus as to exactly what that was, which would be normal because these discoveries are in their infancy at this point.
01:46:23.000But there's been an attempt to discredit the idea, simply because that as the evidence has come in over the last decade, it has evolved, and new mysteries have been opened up as the evidence comes in, and the claim is being made, well, there's no consistent interpretation of this evidence,
01:46:43.000I mean, an example is Pinter's requiem.
01:46:46.000Pinter and Dalton's requiem for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
01:46:50.000I mean, they published a paper in PNAS saying requiem, suggesting that the impact hypothesis is already dead.
01:46:56.000That was in 2011. Every single one of Pinter's points have been responded to.
01:47:01.000Those who are critical of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis rarely cite the fact That the so-called refutations have themselves been refuted, that new information is constantly coming in.
01:47:10.000I see a very one-sided game being played here with a group of academics who are determined to demonstrate that there could have been no possibility of anything like a comet impact 12,800 years ago, and that these 63 or 65 scientists who are proposing that are just completely wrong.
01:47:29.000And when they refute the refutations, I very rarely see that referred to or commented upon at all.
01:47:35.000Your colleague DeFant has dismissed the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis without actually going in detail into the debate that's gone on.
01:47:44.000He has this graph in his paper showing all these different dates for these That's from one of the critical papers.
01:47:52.000You know, there's another side to this argument.
01:47:54.000So he needs to be listening to what the other side would say.
01:47:56.000Well, that's the point where maybe we should have Marc Defant come on and maybe we should have Malcolm Lecomte come on as well, because Malcolm Lecomte is actually one of those 63 Younger Dryas impact scientists.
01:48:07.000Explain to people that are just listening to this, what is this graph that you're showing?
01:48:11.000Well, this is the carbon-14 date ranges from samples taken from the Younger Dryas boundary.
01:48:18.000So this is the boundary here, and the point of this is that there's not a single consistent series of dates that would consistently show, yep, absolutely for sure at every site it comes in right there, is that they bounce around a lot here.
01:48:30.000Now maybe Mark, this is, you know, his area, he could come on and Skype here.
01:48:35.000They bounce around, and what's the point of this for the layperson who's listening to this?
01:48:40.000Well, so if you take the ones that are above the gray line, then those are showing that something like an impact happened much earlier, or much later.
01:48:48.000And the ones below it are that it's, you know, much earlier.
01:48:51.000So where's the consistency of a single impact consistent across that I don't think there's any argument that it was a single impact.
01:49:00.000In fact, there's arguments that there's...
01:49:40.000And everybody knows who does radiocarbon dating that the dating might have Errors and inconsistencies in it.
01:49:48.000The one article I think that came out last year by James Kennett and 25 others was the Bayesian chronological analysis consistent with synchronous age of 12,835 to 12,735 calibrated years before present for Younger Dryas Boundary on four continents.
01:50:04.000That's a refutation of precisely what you're publishing there.
01:50:48.000A cosmic impact event at 12,800 calibrated years before present formed the Younger Dryas boundary layer containing peak abundances in multiple high temperature impact related proxies including spherules, milk glass, and nano diamonds.
01:51:00.000Bayesian statistical analysis of 354 dates from 23 sedimentary sequences over four continents.
01:51:05.000Established a model Younger Dryas boundary age of 12,835 calibrated years before present.
01:51:11.000Supporting a synchronicity of the Younger Dryas boundary layer at high probability, 95%, this range overlaps that of a platinum peak recorded in the Greenland ice sheet and of the onset of the Younger Dryas climate episode in six key records, suggesting a causal connection between the impact event and the Younger Dryas.
01:51:28.000Due to its rarity and distinctive characteristics, the Younger Dryas boundary layer is proposed as a widespread correlation datum.
01:51:35.000And Randall, if I can remember what you said correctly, you believe that there was probably more than one significant impact over a period of several thousand years.
01:51:44.000Let me pop in on that very, very quickly.
01:51:46.000I don't mean to cut you off, but let's be clear.
01:51:51.000The suggestion is that 12,800 years ago, Comets break up into multiple parts.
01:51:57.000I mean, anybody who saw the Shoemaker-Levy 9 NASA films back in 1994 is aware that that comet broke up into more than 20 fragments, all of which hit Jupiter, sometimes creating explosions larger than the Earth itself.
01:52:11.000So I don't think it's controversial that comets break up into fragments.
01:52:14.000And this is the suggestion of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, that we're dealing with a giant comet that broke up into multiple fragments that orbits in the torrid meteor stream, and that four of those fragments, that's the suggestion, four largest fragments, fell out of the torrid meteor stream,
01:52:31.000coming in on a trajectory roughly northwest to southeast, crossing the North American ice cap, and there are up to four impacts on the North American ice cap.
01:52:42.000Impactors then continue across the Atlantic Ocean.
01:52:44.000There's a suggestion of impacts in Belgium and indeed as far east as Abu Huraira in Syria.
01:52:59.000So the suggestion is that there were multiple impacts at the beginning.
01:53:02.000Now, the next question is what happened 11,600 years ago when the Younger Dryas ends?
01:53:07.000And global temperatures shoot up incredibly rapidly, and the science on that is much less advanced than the science on the beginning of the Younger Dryas.
01:53:16.000Fred Hoyle, back in the 1980s, was puzzled by the sudden temperature increase at the end of the Younger Dryas, and he suggested presciently, I would say, that this may have been caused by a comet impact in an ocean.
01:53:29.000So maybe other bits of the torrid meteor stream impacted the Earth, other filaments within the stream impacted the Earth 11,600 years ago, or maybe something else caused it.
01:53:38.000I mean, Robert Schock is in favour of extraordinary solar activity being responsible for that warming.
01:53:44.000We don't absolutely know, but that's broadly the suggestion.
01:53:49.000It certainly impacts at the beginning, possibly impacts other things at the end.
01:53:53.000Well Klub and Napier and others, Duncan Steele and other astronomers, have speculated that there could be impact eras, epochs, in which there's an enhanced possibility of the Earth being impacted.
01:54:07.000Particularly if you have a large comet that enters into the solar system, begins to undergo a hierarchy of disintegrations, and basically litters the inner solar system with material.
01:54:17.000And we do know that the Earth crosses the torrid meteor stream twice each year.
01:54:21.000Once in late June and once in late October, early November.
01:54:27.000And we know that the Tunguska event of 1908, which is not speculative, I mean, that happened.
01:54:34.000It occurred on June 30th, which would have been the peak of the torrid meteor shower.
01:54:38.000It also came from the direction of the Sun.
01:54:42.000Its position in space, where it emanated, its radiant point in space from which it emanated at that time was totally consistent with the torrid meteor stream radiant.
01:54:52.000So it's very possible that the Tunguska event of 1908 was a member of that family of meteorites.
01:55:04.000Again, there's nothing definitive there, but it would be a prime candidate for investigation.
01:55:10.000Again, I mentioned earlier, this goes back to the work of Fred Whipple, way back in the 1940s, who began to Researched the tarred meteor stream and came to believe that it was much, much more active in the past than it is now.
01:55:23.000That it's an old, diffuse meteor stream that at one time, and like Graham said, you know, it has multiple objects still within it.
01:55:33.000That's a fragment of the original giant comet.
01:55:37.000Of the original giant comet that they estimate might have been based upon the amount of material still remnant in the zodiacal light cloud that perhaps it was somewhere around 60 miles or 100 kilometers in diameter.
01:55:53.000And another thing that I'm taken to task for is that I report the work of Klub and Napier and their suggestion that the torrid meteor stream is actually fucking dangerous and that we should be paying attention to it, that it has been a hidden hand in human history in the past and that it can cause us trouble in the future.
01:56:13.000We have the technology to deal with the large objects in the Taurid meteor stream if any filaments are on an orbit that will result in impacts on the Earth.
01:56:22.000At the very least, it's extremely unwise of us not to pay attention.
01:56:25.000I'm accused of being sort of a doom-monger and constantly predicting the end of the world and this and that, but actually I'm simply reporting astronomers who are very concerned about the Taurid meteor stream and the possibility that we may face further impacts from it in the future.
01:56:38.000That's not woo-woo, that is science, you know.
01:56:41.000Absolutely, and I would agree with that.
01:56:43.000And that is a form of catastrophism that scientists accept as very real.
01:57:17.000To be very clear about the Younger Dryas, one of the puzzling things about it is that you have cataclysm at the beginning, and this global temperature slump is surely cataclysmic by any standards, and you have cataclysm at the end.
01:57:34.000A huge increase in global temperatures.
01:57:52.000Staunch opponent of Atlantis and that you believe Plato made Atlantis up in order to make a political point, and you may be right, but the date that Plato puts on the submergence of Atlantis is 11,600 years ago, 9,000 years before the time of Solon, which happens to coincide with Meltwater Pulse 1b and the end of the Younger Dryas,
01:58:08.000which I would have thought would cause you to rethink your position on Plato just a little.
01:59:24.000In my opinion, the Plato one is a commentary on his own culture of Athens and being too bellicose, being too warlike, and that this is not good for where we're going.
01:59:35.000And the fact that he picks a date that coincides with a geologically significant date of flooding is not really going to change your opinion?
01:59:44.000I think, well, I think, again, that's...
01:59:48.000I mean, we're finding a connection, not Plato.
01:59:51.000Well, Plato said there was an advanced civilization with advanced agriculture, advanced architecture, advanced navigational abilities, which was submerged by the sea, swept from the face of the earth, so that mankind had to begin again like children,
02:00:09.000And lo and behold, he puts a geologically significant date on that, a date that we ourselves have only known is significant in the last 20 or 30 years.
02:00:18.000So, where is this place, this Atlantis?
02:00:35.000But, you know, I don't necessarily take Plato's account literally, but I do say, well, it's rather coincidental that his dating falls exactly on meltwater pulse 1b when we know there was a huge influx of water into the ocean.
02:00:47.000And also, if we look at his geography, it's interesting because he cites, you know, basically a land mass west of the Pillars of Hercules, which is Pillars of Hercules, the Straits of Gibraltar.
02:01:01.000And he places this essentially in the Mid-Atlantic.
02:01:04.000I think it was Krantor, one of the commentators on him, that said it was something like three or four days sail west.
02:01:13.000But if you look there, there is a sunken landmass that sank at the end of the last ice age because of the rapidly rising sea level.
02:01:20.000And this has been well established by marine geology, looking at evidence that the Azores Plateau underwent an isostatic subsidence, which would have been resulting from The rapidly rising sea level.
02:01:32.000We know there's no doubt that the North American continent has rebounded isostatically after the removal of this tremendous mass of ice that mantled North America up to anywhere from 1,000 to possibly 1,500 feet.
02:01:47.000Well, if you do a comparable isostatic adjustment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, you'll find that the Azores Island Complex are much, much larger.
02:01:57.000And it turns out that that might actually be a nice place to develop at least a maritime culture, something along the lines of the Phoenicians or the Minoans.
02:02:05.000During the period of the Ice Age, because during the period of the Ice Age, the climate of the world was so much different than now.
02:02:13.000You know, the Great Basin area was filled with huge lakes, vegetation, forests, savanna, and grasslands.
02:02:21.000Like Graham said, with the lowered sea level, there were much larger areas of the coastline that were exposed.
02:02:29.000And that's probably where most of people would have resided during the Ice Age, is near the coastlines, because that would have been the most benevolent place.
02:02:38.000With the rising of the sea level, all of that's lost.
02:02:40.000And there's nothing really fringed about saying, well, people might have lived on islands in the Mid-Atlantic, especially when we know that those islands most likely had a benevolent climate during the Ice Age.
02:03:32.000We coexist with hunter-gatherers in the Amazon jungle who don't even know we exist.
02:03:37.000I mean, so I don't see why a priori that's just an impossible idea to look at.
02:03:42.000Am I misremembering that in your book you mention Indonesia as a site for Atlantis?
02:03:46.000I mentioned Gunung Padang not as a site for Atlantis.
02:03:50.000That's Danny Hilman Natawajaja, who is a geologist.
02:03:53.000He's Indonesia's leading expert in megathrust earthquakes, as a matter of fact.
02:03:58.000He has written a book proposing that Indonesia was Atlantis and that Gunung Padang, which he's been involved in investigating, is a site from Atlantean Times.
02:04:38.000It's one of those areas in the world where there was very large-scale flooding.
02:04:42.000Huge amounts of land were swallowed up.
02:04:44.000Also, Sahel, the connection of Australia to New Guinea during the Ice Age was also washed away.
02:04:49.000There's a whole range of issues regarding sea level rise in that very area, which anybody with an interest in these subjects should be paying attention to.
02:04:58.000Quite possible that, like today, many of the advanced civilizations of today are on the water, whether it's New York or Los Angeles, and that was probably the case back then.
02:05:07.000And so the idea of Atlantis might not have been about one particular area, but many advanced areas that were wiped out along with their knowledge.
02:05:16.000This is the thesis of that book I mentioned, Noah's Flood, that the two geologists with the Black Sea theory, that they were, you know, rimmed with small villages and, you know, massive flooding almost instantly wiped out,
02:05:31.000and then that gets passed down as, you know, the oral tradition is these myths.
02:05:38.000Why don't we get into more discussion about the actual impact hypothesis and the mega flooding so that we can get our guys on standby, get them involved.
02:05:47.000What is your geologist, your geologist, since you're by yourself and there's two of them, what is your geologist opposed to what Randall and Graham are proposing?
02:05:57.000I think it's on the impact hypothesis versus the multiple glacial dams that burst over periods of time, like that slide.
02:06:11.000Okay, let's call him up and get him on Skype.
02:06:13.000We've never done this before, so this might suck.
02:06:18.000See, this slide here, he is showing these are each independent carbon-14 dates of these different instant floods in North America from each individual ice dams.
02:06:57.000So, you've had a chance to listen to these guys talk.
02:07:01.000What is your thoughts, just stepping into this cold?
02:07:05.000Well, first of all, I did not mean to upset Mr. Hancock.
02:07:09.000He seemed to be quite disturbed, and I want to apologize if I've disturbed him.
02:07:14.000No, no, you haven't disturbed me, and I'm not upset.
02:07:18.000It's just simply that you're extremely selective in what you present in your draft, admittedly draft article that you've chosen to put online.
02:10:17.000No, Mr. Hancock, what I brought up him for was simply to state that you didn't understand And I say it right there, that you don't understand Newton's physics.
02:10:33.000But I'm not even talking about Newton's...
02:10:37.000If you don't understand Newton's simple physics, the laws of Newton...
02:10:41.000If I wished to make an argument about gravity, I wouldn't go saying that that isn't the part of Jesus Gamara's theory that I'm interested in.
02:10:51.000I'm interested in the other aspect of his work, his observations through years of fieldwork...
02:11:31.000I mean, Graham, I know there was something else that you objected to.
02:11:33.000Well, yeah, the other thing that I find to be misrepresenting is the statement, yet Hancock makes the following stunning claim, quote, Our ancestors are being initiated into the secrets of metals and how to make swords and knives.
02:11:47.000What Mark Defant does not tell his readers is that I make that claim.
02:12:47.000Okay, Graham in his first book in Fingerprints suggested that there was a continent where this civilization lived and through some machinations this continent went south and ended up destroying that civilization.
02:13:39.000I'm saying that the public doesn't understand the science To the degree that you're misrepresenting.
02:13:45.000So they need the superior knowledge of Marc Defant in order to understand...
02:13:49.000No, I think they need the knowledge of science, not the knowledge that I have.
02:13:53.000Let me come to your point, which is you're saying that I proposed one mechanism for cataclysm in Fingerprints of the Gods, and that I'm proposing another mechanism for cataclysm today.
02:14:02.000What I proposed in Fingerprints of the Gods was that there had been a gigantic cataclysm In the ballpark of 12,500 years ago, I looked at a number of possibilities of which the most striking to me at the time was Earthcrust displacement.
02:14:17.000And Earthcrust displacement is reported as the work of Charles Hapgood, not my work, but I do report it in Fingerprints of the Gods as an excellent theory which explains the information.
02:14:28.000Since I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, I've learnt a lot.
02:14:31.000I've learnt a lot, and I wouldn't want to defend that theory strongly today.
02:14:35.000I don't know if you have bought the latest edition of my book, the paperback edition of Magicians of the Gods, but it contains a chapter saying whatever happened to Earthcrust displacement.
02:14:45.000I address the change of view in this, and I think I have a right to change my view, and I think it's healthy that...
02:14:53.000Permanently to a view that I hold in 1995 if new evidence persuades me that it's wrong.
02:14:58.000I'm sure that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
02:15:00.000And fundamental proposition is we had a massive global cataclysm in the ballpark of 12,500 years ago.
02:15:07.000So naturally, it's of great interest to me when a large group of scientists, more than 60 of them, over a period of more than 10 years now, present evidence of a massive comet impact event 12,800 years ago exactly in the window I proposed.
02:15:36.000By the way, I would also point out that in fingerprints, you had people believing that the end of the world was coming in 2012. Now, how am I supposed to take you seriously when you say things like that and then change your mind?
02:15:47.000We could all be dead by now if we believed you.
02:15:49.000I have absolutely changed my mind on the Mayan calendar.
02:15:53.000I regard the Mayan calendar as an interesting technological artifact with a better estimate of the length of the solar year than the estimate that we have with today.
02:16:03.000The Mayan calendar is based primarily on the position of the sun amongst the constellations at the winter solstice.
02:16:41.000It has nothing to do with running through comet clouds.
02:16:45.000And yet you're saying that somehow we're on some sort of cycle where the comets are going to come back and strike the Earth right now, sometime during the next 40 years.
02:17:26.000And it is my job to report the work of other people, and I report the work of Victor Klub, Bill Napier, and Emilio Spedicato, all of whom draw attention to the torrid meteor stream, and who regard it as the greatest collision hazard facing the Earth at this time,
02:17:41.000and who specifically indicate that we may run into a filament of the torrid meteor stream in the next 30 years that is going to be very bad for our civilization.
02:17:49.000And it has nothing to do with precession.
02:18:11.000That 12,000 years ago, this civilization was destroyed and now you're saying, uh-oh, that civilization was so smart that they knew we were going to go through another shower and we're all doomed in the next 40 years.
02:18:24.000You didn't say doomed in magicians like you did in fingerprints.
02:18:27.000But we must conclude that that's your opinion, because I don't know anybody else that you've referenced on that issue.
02:18:33.000The procession has nothing to do with that, and it's not even on that cycle.
02:18:54.000You're really teaching grandma to suck eggs here.
02:18:58.000So anyway, I guess this has just been going on all day.
02:19:03.000You can't criticize Michael for bringing up other people that are saying strange things and comparing it to you and say, oh no, you can't say that because it's not about me.
02:19:38.000But I think that if you read the literature carefully...
02:19:41.000The majority of scientists right now, and I know that this is still a go, and you know what I like about the comet people is that they're doing it in the scientifically right way.
02:19:52.000They're getting people to review the material, they're getting people to go through that gauntlet to where they get criticized, they make sure that they do things right, and they get it out there.
02:20:02.000Firestone did this in 2007, he was crucified, he's come back, his group has come back with a lot of good stuff.
02:20:09.000So I want to wait and see this play out.
02:20:11.000I said that in my paper that we're going to have to wait to get a conclusion here.
02:20:16.000So I'm not saying that they're wrong, but right now, if I read the literature as a scientist, I have to say that the comet guys are getting hit pretty hard.
02:20:24.000What do you make of the latest platinum paper in Nature's scientific reports?
02:20:28.000The platinum anomaly across North America and its coincidence in time with the Greenland ice cores and the platinum anomaly there.
02:21:10.000I'd like you to show those if you can, because it's hard to understand what he's trying to say, other than it doesn't refute the common hypothesis.
02:21:18.000Let's bring Malcolm on, since he's one of the co-authors of the platinum paper.
02:21:23.000This is going to get super complicated.
02:21:35.000What I'd like to do is go back and talk a little bit, if I may, about Gobekli Tepe, because I've read...
02:21:44.000I know that Schmidt never, ever found anything to suggest that there were anything in the early part of Gobekli Tepe that were not hunter-gatherers.
02:22:40.000The word magicians of the gods comes from the Apkalu in ancient Sumer, and they were considered to have superior powers, and they were considered to be magicians of a sort.
02:22:50.000Should I not report that, because it's there in the Sumerian text?
02:22:53.000No, I think you should tell us what Michael's been asking all day, is what were their superpowers.
02:22:57.000I'm not saying that they had superpowers.
02:23:18.000Okay, well, I just want your audience to know that Schmidt, who worked there for 20 years, that didn't go there for two days and look around, take some notes and leave and write a book on it, he worked there for 20 years.
02:23:29.000And he found, with dates and everything, he found that there were hunter-gatherers there building those megaliths.
02:23:36.000If you went to Easter Island and you found the Moai and you said, oh my gosh, there must have been some secret civilization that made these Moai because stupid hunter-gatherers couldn't possibly make these.
02:24:34.000I did record my interviews with him, with his agreement, and what he states clearly...
02:24:41.000I don't disagree with you that the people around Gobekli Tepe were hunter-gatherers when Gobekli Tepe was started.
02:24:47.000What precisely intrigued Klaus Schmidt Was the possibility, his phrase not mine, that Gobekli Tepe was a center of innovation, a place where new ideas were deliberately seeded and spread out in the population.
02:24:59.000I have Klaus Schmidt on record saying that.
02:25:04.000And that to me is a very interesting proposition because it suggests that we have a site here that is being used to mobilize a population and to transfer to them the knowledge of agriculture, which suddenly appears...
02:25:16.000Around Gobekli Tepe at the time that Gobekli Tepe is functioning.
02:25:22.000What I mean by suddenly is Klaus Schmidt stated very clearly that these are the people, the very same people who made Gobekli Tepe, in Klaus Schmidt's view, are the people who quote-unquote invented agriculture.
02:25:36.000If you don't mind me interrupting here for a second, what about Easter Island?
02:25:40.000Was Easter Island established by hunter-gatherers or not?
02:27:30.000I hope that it's a useful contribution to the debate.
02:27:33.000I mean, archaeologists can choose not to listen to anything I say, to dismiss me as a complete lunatic, as they often do, to accuse me, as you do, in writing of duping the public, of conning the public, and so on and so forth.
02:28:06.000What I am left with is that Hancock...
02:28:09.000I'm going to put my reading glasses on so I can read this properly.
02:28:12.000What I am left with, this is quoting you Mark, is that Hancock has a real knack for conning a hellacious number of people into buying his books.
02:28:21.000I mean that's a direct ad hominem insult.
02:28:44.000And to say you're just putting it online for your students and you've been proven incorrect on how many different times in this article now?
02:29:07.000So the core is, is the impact hypothesis likely to be true or not?
02:29:11.000And as an independent phenomenon, is it connected?
02:29:15.000To Gobekli Tepe and the Younger Dryas.
02:29:17.000I mean, that's kind of what we're getting at.
02:29:20.000Maybe you can explain that graph that shows all the glacial dam bursts and the dating of those as thousands of years before the 12,800-year impact.
02:31:07.000The green areas are the old glacial lakes.
02:31:10.000One of them you can see is the Columbia Lake.
02:31:13.000And the other one on the far right, over in Montana, that's Lake Missoula.
02:31:19.000Now, I guess my point here is that you guys want to make the flooding out here to be immense.
02:31:29.000And I think Brett's original idea was that there was just one flooding.
02:31:36.000But then Brett came to understand, after looking at the data and all of the geologic work, that it wasn't just one flood, that it's many floods.
02:31:46.000And that was the point of all of those dates that I show you, that there have been at least 17 specific floods dated.
02:31:53.000There are probably as many as 40 to 50 floods out there.
02:31:56.000And they're all probably related to Glacial dams breaking.
02:32:02.000Now, where in the world would you ever say that this small area relative to an entire continent, why would you say that this is evidence for a comet strike?
02:32:15.000Not even the comet guys are saying that this flooding out here is related to a comet.
02:32:21.000Because there are a large number of area, a very small number of actual area that is flooded.
02:32:29.000If you take a look now at my dates, or not my dates, but the dates, do you have that, Michael?
02:32:36.000We're going to bring that up, but let's let Randall Carlson address you now, because he's the one that's the expert of this.
02:32:41.000I mean, he's got a point that if you just look at, if you confine your examination to this area, but the point is, is you've got evidence of mega-flooding all around the ice sheet margin, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
02:34:32.000You look at the internal stratification.
02:34:34.000How does glaciers create internal stratification?
02:34:39.000I've looked at numerous drumlins in Canada, I've looked at drumlins in New York State, I've looked at drumlins in probably a dozen different places, and where you can see exposures, you see stratification.
02:34:54.000You don't see, if glaciers are grinding over a deformable substrate, how is it that they produce anything other than a chaotic jumble of glacial till?
02:36:45.000That water potentially was changed from flowing down the Mississippi Valley into the Atlantic or the Arctic.
02:36:53.000No one has been able to find any evidence of flooding towards the Atlantic or the Arctic.
02:36:59.000When you say there are all kinds of evidence of flooding up there, Wally Broker backed off of his theory because we couldn't find any flooding up there.
02:37:08.000What he backed off of was the idea that the draining of Glacial Lake Agassiz triggered the Younger Dryas.
02:37:14.000Because the dating of the draining of Glacial Lake Agassiz was post Younger Dryas.
02:37:56.000I mean, as the ice receded, the glacial Lake Agassiz expanded, and at some point it finally breached right there by Big Stone Lake in Minnesota and basically carved out the Minnesota River Valley, which geological studies have confirmed,
02:38:13.000they call it River Warren and have confirmed that essentially it was carrying its peak discharge was roughly 4,000 times greater than the modern Minnesota River that flows there.
02:38:27.000The Mississippi then conveyed that water into the Gulf of Mexico and deposited huge amounts of Delta material that New Orleans is built on now.
02:38:36.000You know, you're trying to make a flood where a flood isn't.
02:38:39.000There's a difference between a glacier melting, which causes a lot of water, and a comet striking it, which creates copious amounts of water.
02:38:48.000I think you guys referred to it the last time as a tsunami.
02:38:50.000There's no evidence of a tsunami in North America.
02:38:53.000And by the way, here's another question.
02:38:56.000Why are you guys talking about North America?
02:39:00.000When your Atlantis is supposed to be in Egypt, or you guys have run around, you found some evidence of flooding in North America, and somehow this relates to a destruction of Atlantis and some lost civilization.
02:40:59.000Well, most of the material in there was washed in.
02:41:02.000So, I mean, we don't know how much it would have eroded until somebody does some core samples to get down to...
02:41:08.000Something that can be dated to earlier than the late glacial maximum.
02:41:12.000But the floor of Camas Prairie is thick layers of very coarse gravel, boulders, and this is what composes the current ripples that you see there.
02:41:24.000I mean, I don't see how you can look at those current ripples that are sometimes 40 and 50 feet in amplitude with 200 and 300 feet cord lengths and say that that wasn't a catastrophic flow.
02:41:34.000It was a catastrophic flow, but it wasn't like a tsunami.
02:41:39.000Well, then how would you characterize it?
02:41:49.000Practically, says that there were about 40 different floods until you came along, and now you're trying to refute this because somebody told you a common story.
02:41:57.000You're not familiar with the work of Victor Baker or Russell Bunker or a number of others that have challenged the 40 floods hypothesis.
02:42:05.000And are you going to tell me that those current ripples in Camas Prairie are created, they're the product of 40 separate floods?
02:44:04.000I still think there were multiple floods.
02:44:07.000I think we have to look at two distinct regimes of floods, though.
02:44:10.000And as far as the radiocarbon dating, the thing we have to be really careful of is that Floods will entrain older sediment.
02:44:19.000And in that older sediment, there could be radiocarbon dated material that doesn't really date the time of the flood, but was excavated by the flood, entrained into flood waters, and then redeposited.
02:44:32.000You know, that's a major problem with radiocarbon dating any time you look at flood sediments.
02:44:37.000And I do believe there were multiple floods.
02:44:39.000That's, you know, I think it's a misinterpretation to think that I only think that there was one flood.
02:44:44.000But there, you know, the problem is here, and I do, I think, we're colleagues, and my approach to this is just like, you know, in the MMA, when two guys get out there and try to beat the crap out of each other, and then at the end of it, they give each other a hug.
02:45:48.000I think we could get back to a discussion about drumlins and how they formed.
02:45:52.000You know, there is studies on the Valley Heads mooring that are at the south end of the Finger Lakes that have...
02:45:58.000I can't think of who did it right now, I could pull it up, but basically said it's water deposited.
02:46:05.000But there's a lot of unresolved issues about what happened during this transition, planetary transition, out of the last ice age, and I think it's important that we have these discussions, that we have these dialogues, and that we try to get to the bottom of what actually happened, without imposing too many preconceptions upon our models,
02:46:23.000because I think we're looking at something very unprecedented here.
02:46:27.000Randall, I couldn't have said that better.
02:46:31.000Let me go back to the big picture, if I could, just for a minute, because I want to address something that Graham said earlier, and that is that Graham seems to have this idea that comets break up all the time, but people that understand,
02:46:48.000I think, comets and meteorites understand that the The comet Schumer Levy or whatever it was that broke up.
02:46:58.000Schumer Levy 9. It broke up because of the gravitation of Jupiter.
02:47:03.000We would not expect these comets to break up entering into the atmosphere.
02:47:08.000It's one of the problems that the comet people have had.
02:47:12.000Firestone once suggested a four kilometer wide comet striking them and now they've broken it up into multiple comets.
02:47:21.000The problem is you can't get it separated.
02:47:24.000If a comet breaks up, it's very hard to separate it so that it hits in multiple places.
02:47:30.000And so this is a big picture kind of problem that the comet people are having with the scientists.
02:47:38.000So you may be able to get it to hit the North American ice sheet, but I'm telling you that the studies are showing that You're not going to be able to do this without leaving some marks.
02:47:52.000And so far, nobody's been able to find a crater.
02:47:54.000Do you know that they're suggesting that a four-kilometer comet, if it could break up, it would generate one million crater Meteor, craters.
02:48:48.000There's a lot to be learned here, obviously, and there's a lot that already has been learned, and this is an It's an unbelievably fascinating subject.
02:48:55.000And I think oftentimes when these debates get heated, a lot gets lost in who's wrong or who's right.
02:49:01.000But I think what we can all agree on is that what we're dealing with is an unbelievable point in history, in the history of this planet.
02:49:08.000And trying to figure out what caused it and why is some really fascinating stuff.
02:49:13.000So Mark, I really appreciate your time and really appreciate you imparting your knowledge on us.
02:49:19.000Mark, if at all possible, I would love to kind of keep some of this dialogue going, because I really would value your input.
02:49:26.000I tried to write you, Randall, and I couldn't get through.
02:50:05.000And he's one of the Comet Research Group scientists.
02:50:09.000This is a large and diverse body of scientists who come at the material with different expertise and different It happens that Malcolm is a co-author of the recent I Regarded Highly Significant paper, Finding a Platinum Anomaly Across North America.
02:50:27.000And I would hope he might begin with addressing why that might indicate a comet impact.
02:50:46.000So, give us your thoughts on what Graham just said, if you would, as to why it makes sense that it was a comet that hit and why there would be these large deposits of these, what was it exactly?
02:51:02.000Platinum in the recent paper, but Malcolm is also an expert in magnetic microspherules and I think he can address that issue as well.
02:51:09.000The whole range of proxies, of impact proxies.
02:51:12.000Now, Malcolm, please just give us your thoughts on this entire phenomenon, if you will.
02:53:09.000We have indications that it was more of an asteroid than anything else.
02:53:13.000And I can conceive of a rubble pile that somehow became disassociated, although there'd have to be a mechanism or a model for that, and I don't think we have a model for that.
02:53:25.000Asteroids come in many flavors, and rubble piles are certainly one.
02:53:30.000Loose aggregates of material that could become separated, possibly.
02:53:41.000I guess the biggest criticism that we faced in terms of the impact hypothesis is that the evidence has not been replicable.
02:53:52.000And we now have I guess three or four evidence lines that have been replicated by numerous independent groups.
02:54:04.000If you look at the nanodiamonds, which may be the most controversial of the bunch of the evidence lines, that's been replicated by four different groups independent.
02:54:17.000The magnetic microspherals, which were initially treated very hostily because they didn't understand what we were talking about, and some of that was a self-inflicted wound on the part of the initial study, which didn't show what we really were finding.
02:54:33.000And that's been corrected, and yet the same objection or criticism is being made.
02:54:40.000Magnetic microspherals are typically very...
02:54:45.000Well, they're melted and then they're quenched.
02:54:48.000They're subjected to high temperatures and then those temperatures are rapidly reduced, which is sort of accepted to be characteristics of an impact.
02:54:56.000So we've got that evidence of an impact, and that's been replicated by 10 different independent groups, including many of the same sites that were originally disputed.
02:55:10.000So, the disputation has been largely based upon the failure to do the most basic part of the protocol, which is to do the scanning electron microscopic analysis of the spherules.
02:55:25.000Okay, that is the microspherals and the nanodiamonds.
02:55:31.000The other is the discovery of platinum, iridium, or osmium, which are the platinum group elements which are characteristic of an asteroid impact.
02:55:40.000And we found some evidence of iridium.
02:55:44.000Not a lot, but there have been certain sites that are rich in iridium.
02:55:48.000And once again, this is at the Younger Dryas boundary.
02:56:42.000Well this is from Malcolm's 2012 independent evaluation of conflicting microspheral results from different investigations.
02:56:51.000This is his supplementary information figure 4. So it's just so that the people watching this can actually see what you're talking about when you're Discussing the rapid quenching effect on the surface of the microspherals.
02:57:06.000So we've got up on the screen here, Supplementary Information Figure 4, where you've got the microspherals from Topper, Blackwater Draw, and Paw Paw Cove.
02:57:17.000So just so people can see what that surface texture looks like.
02:57:22.000Yeah, you see these, they look like leaf-like structures across.
02:57:27.000Some of them are harder to see, but they're there.
02:57:29.000If you see the original image, it's large enough and clear enough to actually see these, what we call dendritic structures or almost like a carpet weave.
02:57:40.000Those are essentially truncated crystallization.
02:57:43.000It's a crystallization process that's quenched.
02:57:48.000I've had geologists try to explain it to me.
02:57:50.000And that's what I'm trying to do here.
02:57:53.000But the fact that these are enhanced, these things are quite enhanced at the Ember Dryas and really depleted above and below.
02:58:03.000Now there are spherules throughout the column.
02:58:06.000Any column of soil, when you go down vertically deeper, you find spherules.
02:58:13.000But those spherules are typically what we call orthogenic, which means that they're created by terrestrial processes.
02:58:18.000You need to do a scanning electron microscope and X-ray dispersive spectroscopy to differentiate those from the terrestrial processes that are producing these things.
02:58:37.000Yeah, your figure five has a framboidal spheryl, which is probably what you're talking about.
02:58:42.000If you could go to slide 113, Jamie, and you'll be able to see.
02:58:55.000And when you look at an optical microscope, they look just like the, or very much like the, what we call impact spherules or magnetic microspherules.
02:59:08.000I mean, I've got sites that have tens of thousands of these things in every couple of centimeters of sediment.
02:59:14.000So you've got to separate the impact spherules or the magnetic microspherules from these things.
02:59:23.000But what you appear to be saying, Markham, is that there is an abundance of impact proxy evidence, which, in your opinion, adds up to a cosmic impact of some sort, not necessarily a comet, you're suggesting an asteroid.
02:59:35.000It's a mysterious event in that sense, but what it adds up to is an impact, in your view.
02:59:41.000All these, what we call proxies, the impact spherules, the platinum group elements, the The melt glass, which I haven't discussed yet, and the nanodiamonds are enhanced, and the enhancement has been replicated on numerous occasions for each of these proxies.
02:59:58.000So anyone who says that the work of you and your team has been completely debunked is clearly not completely familiar with the literature then?
03:00:11.000So I would say that, because typically what we see is that the opposition literature does not cite the studies that have come out.
03:00:22.000We try and cite both the critical studies and ours and give reasons why our studies supplant theirs.
03:00:32.000But I wish they would share, but that hasn't been the case.
03:00:38.000It would be nice if we could have had you on with Mark so you guys could exchange information, but unfortunately our capability is that we can only take one phone call at a time.
03:00:47.000We will definitely try to update that for the new studio, although we never anticipated this was going to happen in the first place.
03:00:56.000Up on the screen, Malcolm, we've got from Ted Bunch et al.
03:01:01.0002012, very high temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic air bursts and impacts 12,900 years ago.
03:01:08.000So we have figure from supplementary information 6. The light photo micrographs of magnetic and glassy spherules from Melrose, Pennsylvania and it shows the the wide variety of shapes which includes spherules, ovals, teardrops,
03:01:24.000and dumbbells and I think so you can see pretty distinctly what you're talking about here with it with the glassy spherules and then like particularly I'm not sure if you were co-author of this paper or not.
03:01:45.000Yeah, it shows some very interesting teardrop shapes, dumbbell shapes, and where you can actually see that, like, dumbbell H up there consists of two dissimilar Accretionary spherules, one clear silicon-rich and the other opaque iron-rich that have been fused together.
03:02:01.000And that's pretty convincing evidence of the energy that's involved in these phenomena, that you actually have these fused spherules like this.
03:02:09.000And then, Jamie, if you go down to the next image, which is a scanning electron microscope images comparing younger drive boundary spherules on the top row with known impact spherules on the bottom row, this is a very interesting comparison because, and you've probably seen this one,
03:02:26.000Malcolm, A, there's three across the top, three across the bottom, and A is actually a From Knudsen's or Knudsen's farm in Canada, it's a Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary spheryl.
03:02:40.000And just below it is a Younger Dryas spheryl from Lake Utsio in Mexico.
03:02:45.000And one can see the morphological similarity of the two quite clearly.
03:02:51.000C is a spheryl from the Tunguska airburst.
03:02:55.000And then D is Younger Dryas Boundary from Lyngen, Germany, which dates to 12,800 years before present.
03:03:03.000And there you can see very clearly the rapid quench melt texture on the surface between the two, comparing Tunguska Airburst with A Younger Dryas Boundary object.
03:03:16.000And then finally E and F we have an Iron Calcium Silica Spheryl from Meteor Crater compared with an Iron Calcium Silica Younger Dryas Boundary Spheryl from Abu Haria Syria.
03:03:30.000And again in each of these cases you can see the similarities between the different types of objects.
03:03:35.000So you have these three objects which are Come from that Younger Dryas boundary layer, all which have morphological similarity to known impact proxies.
03:03:45.000And this is very difficult to dismiss this as being mere coincidence.
03:03:52.000And those are very, especially the A, C, B, and D pictures are very similar to the material that I'm taking out of the Younger Dryas boundary at the sites that I've been looking at.
03:04:04.000Malcolm, what evidence, if any, are you aware of about what is that nuclear glass material called trinitite?
03:04:14.000From what I understand, there's quite a bit of that that also appears in the same time period in the core samples?
03:04:23.000There are some instances of it, but I wouldn't say quite a bit.
03:04:27.000Some of these, I mean, they're very site-specific.
03:04:29.000And one of the things I've been trying to do is work my way closer and closer to Canada and see if there's any truth to this whole idea that the primary impact site was Canada.
03:04:41.000So I've been trying to look at sites closer and closer.
03:04:45.000I've seen sites in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania that produce what appears to be some form of trinitite or milk glass, or what Ted Bunch would call scoria-like objects.
03:05:02.000And it seems to bear out that, at least that far, we're getting richer material out of the sediment, out of the under dryness boundary sediment.
03:05:12.000And is this trinitite, this material, only produced in this manner?
03:05:16.000It's also produced through nuclear explosion tests, right?
03:05:19.000But other than that, is this the only way that it's produced on Earth?
03:05:24.000Well, an impact would do it, or a fulgurite could do it.
03:05:27.000A fulgurite is what's produced by a lightning strike.
03:05:49.000What I was going to say about the melt glass is that in the material we're looking at, you see evidence of melted zircons, melted chromite, all of which are very high temperature features,
03:06:05.000indicating a very high temperature that was experienced by that particular object.
03:06:10.000Are you seeing the image we have up here?
03:06:17.000Yeah, A is from Meteor Crater, and B is from the Trinity nuclear test, and then with the 22 kiloton yield, and then C is from one of the Soviet-era nuclear tests, and D is, again, a scoria-like object from Abu Huria.
03:08:15.000But what you don't find is anything above or below it, that particular layer.
03:08:21.000Unless you know that it's been a very dynamic environment, in which case it can be spread out in the soil column.
03:08:27.000And what's the implication of nothing above it and below it?
03:08:30.000Well, that you've got a specific date for it.
03:08:35.000And the layer that we typically try and just limit our investigation to layers that have been dated to the hemorrhagrius boundary or contain the hemorrhagrius boundary layer.
03:09:01.000Yeah, and I should add there that proving an impact is not easy.
03:09:06.000It takes a while, and just as proving an impact crater is not easy, as I'm sure Mark would agree, that you find a crater, there's no guarantee that it's either an impact event or a volcanic event until you do the research.
03:09:22.000But if you could summarize for us, what's your opinion now on the balance of the evidence?
03:09:27.000Always bearing in mind that you may change that opinion as more evidence comes in.
03:09:31.000Yeah, I would say we're facing an unprecedented type of event here that appears to have been something approaching global.
03:09:39.000I mean, we've got evidence now in South America, we've got evidence, and a lot of this stuff is unpublished.
03:09:45.000I mean, there's a lot of things that I could bring up that aren't published, so it's kind of useless to refer to them, because there's no way of checking what I'm saying.
03:09:53.000But we're seeing stuff that goes very far into South America.
03:10:27.000He says, we infer that the central Pacific was a site of deposition of osmium resulting from dust cloud following a meteorite impact at 12,000 kiloanadams plus or minus 4,000.
03:10:41.000So right in that ballpark, Sharma says that he found osmium, and I believe he's come up with microspherals from that same core.
03:10:52.000So the Central Pacific gives you an idea of how extensive this thing was.
03:10:57.000Now, Malcolm, this is obviously some controversial material.
03:11:00.000It's fairly new in terms of the public consciousness.
03:11:05.000Have you had anybody debate you on this, or have you had anybody oppose you?
03:11:36.000Do you have an opinion on the association of the impact with the megafauna extinction and also then Graham's hypothesis about the extinction of this lost civilization?
03:11:50.000I won't even comment on the lost civilization aspects of this.
03:11:55.000I have a hard enough time dealing with the meteorite impact.
03:11:58.000As far as the megafauna goes, I think that I guess I would say all of the above.
03:12:04.000I think that all these factors came into play.
03:12:06.000You've got humans who are, for that period, technologically advanced with the Clovis point and the atlatl and the spear, the replaceable spear tip.
03:12:23.000That must have been devastating to the fauna.
03:12:25.000But the idea of attacking a proboscinian to me is almost unthinkable.
03:12:31.000Today, if you don't have a high-powered rifle, I just don't see how you realistically go up against a bull elephant.
03:12:41.000I mean, it just strikes me as far too dangerous to take on.
03:12:45.000But there are aspects of that question that I think are going to be very interestingly debated in the next...
03:12:52.000The next couple of years or so, we have a book coming out that addresses that directly at one of the sites I've been researching, that the whole extinction of the megafauna may have been as much related to religion as something else.
03:13:04.000There may have been a religion built around the extinction of the megafauna.
03:13:11.000Well, you'd want the evidence for that, and that evidence will be coming out in a book that's going to be published in about a month or two.
03:13:19.000I could speak to the whole idea of hunting bull elephants, though, unfortunately.
03:13:23.000People have been hunting them with bows and arrows forever.
03:13:29.000You get less range, but people hunt...
03:13:32.000With not just modern compound bows, which are very powerful, which would allow you to shoot from 100 yards away, but with long bows.
03:13:40.000They've been hunting elephants with bows and arrows for a long time.
03:13:44.000You know, especially the thing with woolly mammoths was that they would go after the females, apparently, according to Dan Flores, who wrote American Serengeti, and that the females would keep the young in their body.
03:14:02.000And so it made them extremely vulnerable when they were pregnant.
03:14:05.000Obviously, if you kill off the females that are pregnant, you're killing off a substantial part of the breeding population, and the population suffers tremendously.
03:14:18.000You know, I mean, humans, I'm sure, had an impact on virtually anything that we could eat when we were starving.
03:14:25.000But whether or not we wipe them out, the blitzkrieg hypothesis, there's a lot of holes in that theory, according to a lot of people that have studied it.
03:14:33.000Well, I think if you have an environmental impact or a degradation of the environment that might follow a significant impact, you know, extraterrestrial impact, so you're reducing the population or stressing the population of megafauna that way,
03:14:49.000and then you've got a population of hunters in addition to that, especially if they're, for some reason or other, focused on hunting proboscenians, and when the number gets limited, they don't care whether it's a female or a male.
03:15:12.000Malcolm, is there anything else you would like to add before we let you go?
03:15:17.000No, I guess one thing is I found it interesting in the discussion of the scab lands and that was really, it was looking at the scab lands from flying over them when I was a young naval officer that got me interested in science and why I pursued science.
03:15:37.000It was looking at the catastrophes that were etched in the landscape there, the catastrophic floods that really caused me to pursue a A career in science.
03:15:52.000Well, Mark, we're very, very thankful for your time, and we really, really appreciate your input here, and it means a lot.
03:15:59.000And thank you for everything you've done.
03:16:01.000Thank you for everything that you continue to do to highlight this.
03:16:05.000It is such a fascinating subject, and it's so amazing, and it's just, without someone like you presenting hard data in science, it would definitely be lost.
03:16:32.000The guy was sitting there on standby, probably, you know, chomping at the bit.
03:16:36.000Jamie, before we go, I want to see some pictures of the scab lands, because that is pretty amazing stuff.
03:16:40.000And Randall, one more thing before we go.
03:16:43.000One thing that you pointed out to me during one of the episodes that was so stunning was these woolly mammoths that had been literally knocked over by an impact with broken legs and that died on the spot.
03:17:03.000So let's go to the Scablands first so we can show the audience on YouTube, which is, by the way, only about 10% of the people that watch this.
03:17:12.000So if you're listening to this, go check out the Scablands on Google, and you can see this.
03:17:22.000Well, this is textbook scab land right here.
03:17:27.000Let's see, this is probably Rock Lake or Sprague Lake in the Cheney-Palouse scab lands.
03:17:34.000Yeah, you see the potholes there, that's a sign of turbulence, extreme turbulence within the water.
03:17:42.000Colking is what the process is called, where it's so turbulent that it actually produces vortexes, high intensity vortex motion in the water.
03:17:51.000It'll pick up sediment and then it can drill its way right into the bedrock.
03:17:57.000Going down there, that's Palouse Falls, which Wow.
03:18:02.000That's an underfit waterfall because what you have to realize is that at the peak of the flooding this entire scene was submerged below water and the cataract here is an extinct feature and the flow over here was thousands of times greater than the present Palouse River that you see right there.
03:18:23.000We've got a lot of great pictures up on the Geocosmic Rex website and some awesome video clips.
03:18:59.000Yeah, this whole Scabland thing has literally fascinated me since 1970. And like Malcolm, I think that summer of 1970, traveling out in some of these landscapes was...
03:22:07.000And what happens is that in the particularly warm years, when the permafrost around the rivers collapses, it exposes these huge deposits of bones, which have been buried in the permafrost.
03:22:20.000This is, you know, when I look at stuff like this, this is why I say there had to be another mechanisms of extinction besides human hunting.
03:23:42.000These mortality events of modern animals, even like looking at elephants that perished during some of the severe droughts in the 80s in Africa.
03:23:50.000Taphanomic studies show that it doesn't take three, four, five years before the remains have completely disappeared.
03:24:00.000In order to preserve a fossil, it has to be rapidly removed from any kind of forces, oxidation, or scavengers, or anything that would consume it, see?
03:24:09.000This stuff has been, again, it's been frozen in the permafrost for however many years, 10 or 12 or 15,000 years.
03:24:21.000Now, there was one that I really wanted you to get to that was a mastodon that had been literally knocked over and had broken legs.
03:24:28.000Yeah, we could look very quickly at slide 92. This is one of the more interesting anomalous events.
03:24:40.000This was the flash-frozen woolly mammoth.
03:24:46.000Go to slide 93. It's a much clearer...
03:24:49.000Yeah, this was a mammoth, a six-ton mammoth that was, again, one of these river collapses.
03:24:55.000The banks collapsed during a warm spring and exposed this remains of a woolly mammoth with soft tissue preserved, contents of the food in its stomach undigested, actually a mouthful of food.
03:25:10.000The hips of the mammoth were both broken, as if he was thrown back on his haunches very violently.
03:25:16.000He had an erect penis, which suggests that he was suffocated.
03:25:34.000You'll see the front-left forelimb there.
03:25:36.000You'll see the bottom there, left, right at the center of the screen.
03:25:39.000That's his back leg that you see right there.
03:25:44.000The interesting thing about this is, you know, the...
03:25:48.000Rapidity of climate change that's implied by being able to freeze a six-ton mammoth because the contents of his stomach, according to the studies, had not really even putrefied yet, which implies that the entire carcass had been frozen through and through probably in less than 10 hours.
03:26:04.000Well, like Utsi, the Iceman, that's what happened to him.
03:26:08.000That's exactly what happened to him, yes.
03:26:10.000Interesting point, and that would be a subject that we...
03:26:13.000And he fell in between a crevice and a glacier, correct?
03:26:16.000Yeah, and probably got rapidly buried under the snow and the ice, and that's how he ended up being preserved overnight.
03:26:24.000The next slide actually shows a reconstruction in a museum in Russia, showing the circumstances under which he was found.
03:26:40.000By the way, as a sidebar on Utsi, to show you how science changes rather slowly sometimes, it was a decade before they found out he was murdered, because they found arrow point in his scapula here that cut his bone, and he had defensive wounds on his hands and arms,
03:26:56.000so he'd gotten in a fight, and he had other people's blood on his hands, so he gave as good as he got and lost a fight, so he was murdered.
03:27:13.000So sometimes this stuff has to just take a while.
03:27:14.000So if I can try to find some common ground before we sign off with Graham.
03:27:19.000You know, your book, you have this really great sentence that I quote.
03:27:25.000It would mean at least that some yet unknown and unidentified people somewhere in the world had already mastered all the arts and attributes of a high civilization more than 12,000 years ago.
03:27:34.000And sent out emissaries around the world.
03:27:36.000I think this is entirely possible cognitively, for sure.
03:27:41.000And, you know, what would do it for me would, you know, the boats that they sent the emissaries out on, the wood, carbon-14 dated, and some specific examples of high arts and attributes of high civilization.
03:28:02.000And I think as the research continues in this area, for the last few years, having been very much an outsider, I have felt that the evidence is moving in a direction that is helpful to the argument that I make.
03:28:19.000I hope the evidence that you're looking for will come out.
03:28:22.000But I'm trying to, like I say, my role as a reporter, and I'm trying to be a reporter for the alternative sides of things, but to do so in an effective and hopefully thoroughly referenced way.
03:28:35.000There's a good argument in the history of science to be made for the role of outsiders, I mean complete outsiders, to come in and shake things up.
03:28:48.000And if nothing else, they push people to really figure out what it is they believe and why, because otherwise no one's going to challenge them.
03:28:57.000Harlan Bratz is a good example of that.
03:29:31.000So this is a mastodon that was dug up in a pit years ago.
03:29:36.000Excavation showed that the bones were lying on and in a layer of limey clay or marl about one foot in thickness.
03:29:45.000When it gets up there and it goes on to say, the skeleton proved to be badly disturbed and the bones crushed and broken.
03:29:51.000As an example of the amount of disturbance, one of the ribs lay beneath one of the tusks, while another was thrust through an aperture in the pelvis.
03:29:59.000A shoulder blade rested to the right of the skull and one of the large neck vertebrae was found about 10 feet from the skull, near a portion of the pelvis.
03:30:07.000In spite of the wide dislocation of the parts, Now this is where it really is interesting.
03:30:13.000The bones of one of the feet remained intact and in place, very possibly in the spot where the animal last stepped.
03:30:20.000So in other words, The foot, there was a foot still embedded in the soft material where he was apparently stepping at the time whatever happened to him.
03:30:31.000And this is all the same time period as the other mastodon?
03:30:33.000We don't have dating on this, but it likely was at the very end probably right in that Younger Dryas window because of the amount of sediment over it.
03:30:43.000Go to the next slide, Jamie, and we'll see 126, we can get a better view.
03:30:46.000So this thing, theoretically at least, was blown back.
03:30:54.000There you can see one of the femurs that's been busted squarely across.
03:30:59.000They go on to say that even the largest of the bones, such as the thigh bones, were broken squarely across in places, indicating that some considerable force had been exerted upon them.
03:31:10.000Any conclusion as to an agency powerful enough to cause such destruction must be highly speculative.
03:31:18.000So, basically, what you're seeing here is a mastodon that got smashed into the ground.
03:32:06.00085. 85 is an interesting slide because what it shows is the London ivory docks, which over a period of about two centuries, this was mammoth ivory that's being dug out of the Siberian permafrost.
03:33:15.000Does it have anything to do with human predation, or was it a natural catastrophe that somehow ended up putting all these mammoths down and burying them into permafrost?
03:33:45.000I want to thank Brad Young, Cameron Wiltshire, My brother Rowan, my wife Julie, for helping all make this possible.
03:33:53.000I also want to have people go to the Geocosmic Wrecks website and the Sacred Geometry International website for a lot more of this kind of stuff.
03:34:01.000Then I'm going to thank my beloved partner and wife, Santa, who's shared every adventure with me for the last quarter of a century.
03:34:09.000We've climbed the Great Pyramid together, we've been at the bottom of the ocean together, and I wouldn't be doing any of this stuff if it weren't for that wonderful woman behind me.
03:34:16.000Michael Sherman, who do you want to thank?
03:34:18.000Oh, I'll thank my wife, Jennifer, my little boy, Vinny, and my agent, my lawyer.
03:34:31.000Let's thank Joe Rogan, because I can tell you this, Joe.
03:34:34.000I speak all over the world, and whether it's South Africa, or whether it's Japan, or whether it's Britain, or whether it's the United States, or whether it's Croatia, people come up to me and they say, Joe Rogan sent me.