In this episode of Archaeology in the Dark, archaeologist and comedian, Flippin' Flint, and archaeologist Graham, join me to talk about archaeology, sex and sex objects, and why archaeologists should be worried about sex in the ancient world. This episode is brought to you by Excavation Discovery, a company that specialises in the excavation and analysis of ancient artifacts and sites across the globe. The company's mission is to find, analyze, and interpret all kinds of ancient artefacts and artifacts related to human history and culture. Their mission is simple: to help us understand what archaeology is all about. We hope you enjoy this episode, and that it makes you think about sex, love, and sex in general. And if you don't like sex? Then you'll love this episode! It's a short, 30-minute episode where we talk about sex and archaeology in general, and how to make sense of sex in ancient art and artefacts found in the past and in the present. If you do, please leave us a review of this episode on Apple Podcasts, and tell us what you think of it! I'll be looking out for it in the comments section below. Cheers, Joe and Graham! - The Dark Side of the Moon - The Lonely Planet Podcast and Joe and Gav Thanks, Joe & Gav! Thanks for listening, Joe, Gav, for making this podcast, and for supporting us, for being here, and supporting us with your support and support us, and your support, for helping us make this podcast and for being a safe and accessible and accessible, for us to do what we can do the best we can be the most important thing we all of us can do in the most beautiful place in the 21st century. - we really appreciate it! - Thank you so much! - Your support is so much, and we really do appreciate it. We really appreciate you. We look forward to seeing you! - Joe & Graham, for your support. - Joe, for the support you're amazing! - Jamie, for all the support we can all do the most of our lives, and so much more! - Shout out to you, and all the work you can do, we appreciate it, thanks you, thank you, for listening out for all your support we get it out there, and the love you're so much.
00:00:52.000Alright, we had a bit of a technical issue, but we're up.
00:00:55.000So, Flint, you were just explaining how your passion is archaeologists, you're an archaeologist, and you have this opportunity to sort of educate people on how archaeology is done.
00:01:07.000Yeah, that's my goal is to try to share what we do, why we do it, and what our goals are with it, yeah.
00:02:02.000Alright, so look, one of the things that I see when I'm online or in person sharing archaeology is I find it's tough to get across what it is, and so I wanted to start with a fun example.
00:02:12.000So I understand that maybe not everybody can see the screen, so Joe, do you mind actually just kind of describing what this artifact is that you see?
00:02:41.000Well, I mean, you're finding artwork and parts of civilization that were left behind and, you know, have been around in this case since over 2,000 years.
00:02:52.000Yeah, and for a long time scholars thought that a piece like this described sort of life in Athens, and they connect it to Athenian texts, sort of like Plato describing people having sex even, right?
00:03:03.000And on the other hand, however, every single piece of Athenian artwork with graphic sex like this, couples actually fucking with penises and stuff like that, ends up in Italy.
00:03:13.000It's part of an Athenian pornographic export market.
00:03:16.000And Kathleen Lynch and Sean Lewis and others have published on this.
00:03:20.000And so the real point is that what we're looking at is the painters are designing something for consumers in Italy and particularly in Etruria.
00:03:28.000And this instead fits better in with telling us about life in Etruscans and the kind of stuff that they show in their tombs, sort of romance between people.
00:03:36.000Or the kind of sexual scenes that they designed themselves in Italy as well.
00:03:40.000And the whole point here is that archaeology is not really about an artifact.
00:03:46.000And so when we sort of look at how much archaeology there is in the world, this is a map that shows the Horn of Africa with every single archaeological site that's been surveyed there.
00:04:01.000And this is just because of the terrain.
00:04:03.000Many of these are tombs, for example, Islamic and pre-Islamic tombs, and so they're visible on the surface.
00:04:09.000And so in many ways when we think about archaeology today in the 21st century, we're thinking about big data sets and trying to analyze them statistically and understand the kind of patterns they put together.
00:04:21.000And we use innovative technology, sort of LIDAR, lasers from the sky to see these things underground.
00:04:26.000For example, here are this publication by Canuto in 2018 records 61,480 structures still to be excavated, found with LIDAR and surface survey, right?
00:04:47.000And so, I mean, we have this huge data set, and with it we get high resolution.
00:04:51.000For example, the bottom image in red, it shows Luter's trenches.
00:04:54.000Because while there's a lot of archaeology, because people have been everywhere, it's very fragile, and it's at risk.
00:05:00.000And that's something I also want to take some time to get across a bit while I'm here.
00:05:04.000And my own research is very much big data-oriented, too.
00:05:08.000I've studied nearly a million animal bones and teeth and horn fragments from ancient Greece, like this pile here from the island of Crete, from Azoria.
00:05:16.000And in particular, I also want to get across the kind of precision we have.
00:05:20.000Right now, I do what's called isotope analysis.
00:05:23.000I look at oxygen and carbon isotopes in the teeth of these animals.
00:05:27.000And by taking multiple samples on different parts of the teeth, you can see the different areas that I've drilled on that tooth on the right, right?
00:05:33.000And what that does is it lets me understand the diet of the animal and where it's moving in the landscape seasonally.
00:05:39.000So in different seasons of the year, I can understand the kind of ways that people are raising animals.
00:05:45.000We can do this with human remains too.
00:05:46.000And we can get this high level of resolution and precision that people don't always realize that we have, right?
00:05:53.000And so in this case, I'm here to try to discuss with Graham and to test his lost civilization hypothesis.
00:06:01.000He's written about it in many books and he's given many talks here and on Netflix and he's talked about this idea of a lost advanced civilization from the Ice Age, an advanced civilization that's around the globe, right?
00:06:14.000And in particular he thinks there was a global cataclysm at that time and the survivors introduced agriculture, architecture, astronomy and arts to hunter-gatherers.
00:06:24.000And so I'm trying to tackle this with an open mind.
00:06:27.000And I want to tackle this with the perspective of my own experience and my own expertise.
00:06:32.000And so, in that sense, if you think about what Carl Sagan says, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
00:06:39.000Graham is in many ways the first person to admit that the evidence he has is fingerprints.
00:06:43.000It's kind of what he thinks is this technological transmission to hunter-gatherers, but he does not have any direct, dated evidence of this civilization.
00:06:53.000It's, after all, a lost civilization, right?
00:06:56.000And so what I've been thinking through is, how can my own experience and expertise kind of test this hypothesis in a fair way?
00:07:03.000That's kind of my goal here, while here.
00:07:06.000And so I'm here doing a lot of research.
00:07:08.000I'm here to present what I see are two clear disproofs of a lost, advanced Ice Age civilization.
00:07:14.000And I mean, archaeologists, we're fairly sure this does not exist.
00:07:18.000We've been looking for this kind of civilization for several hundred years.
00:07:22.000This idea of a pre-flood civilization has been around for several hundred years.
00:07:27.000And so what I want to do is focus on where my own experience and expertise is.
00:08:00.000And so this— So your claim was that Graham ignores this?
00:08:04.000My claim is that he ignores most of the evidence for hunter-gatherers in the Ice Age.
00:08:09.000Is that he ignores it or that he doesn't focus on it as much as he's focused on ancient advanced civilization?
00:08:15.000I mean, I think that's one and the same.
00:08:18.000I think if you're going to look at the Ice Age, we need to look at the totality of evidence to understand what's there.
00:08:23.000And so, for example, he proposes the reason why the Ice Age civilization isn't there is because it's underwater.
00:08:29.000It's been, you know, we've had 200 feet of sea level rise since the Younger Dryas, and therefore it's not accessible.
00:08:35.000And so I really want to focus on Ice Age coastlines, evidence from Ice Age coastlines and excavations, underwater evidence from the Ice Age, things like that, these areas where he says that archaeologists don't look, but we are looking, and what we find is the ephemeral traces of hunter-gatherers.
00:08:52.000Rather than some sort of advanced civilization.
00:08:55.000And so that's one thing I want to show.
00:08:57.000I want to share this kind of evidence.
00:09:00.000But I think it's the kind of thing that has a direct bearing on looking for such an Ice Age civilization.
00:09:05.000When you're studying these coastal areas where these Ice Age people lived and you're studying these underwater areas, What would you call them?
00:10:20.000So when you're finding remnants of ancient hunter-gatherers, how much evidence, how much of the ground do you think you've studied?
00:10:30.000We've definitely not studied most of the ground, but as I'll show, we've studied a lot, and we actually put together predictive models on how to find this stuff.
00:10:37.000Because it's really expensive to go diving, right?
00:10:39.000How many dives do you think have been done?
00:11:51.000Like right now on Earth, there are people that are living in essentially a Stone Age manner, right?
00:11:55.000I wouldn't call it a Stone Age manner, no.
00:11:57.000Let's say people in uncontacted indigenous tribes in the Amazon.
00:12:02.000I mean, they essentially are living with animal skins and bows and arrows, and they're living very similar to the way people lived 10,000 years ago.
00:12:09.000I think there's plenty of people living today in their traditional lifestyles, yeah.
00:12:12.000Right, but then there's also people that live in Tokyo.
00:12:17.000So if you find evidence of agriculture that dates back to a specific period where you can see the wild plants, you can see this transition into domesticated plants, is it possible that we're dealing with a region?
00:12:29.000And I think part of the theory about the Younger Dryas Impact Theory was that although it probably devastated the entire human race, It didn't impact all the places the same way.
00:12:41.000Just like right now, if a volcano goes off in Iceland, we don't even notice it, right?
00:12:49.000Yes, but in this case, what I'm thinking about is, unlike, you know, I know you guys have mentioned at times you can't radiocarbon date stone.
00:14:02.000For the last 20 years, if you go to the museum in Naples, they have what's called the Gabinetto Segreto, and it has all the erotic art from Pompeii and Herculaneum and things like that.
00:14:11.000And archaeologists, look, we're underfunded, we're not perfect, but our goal, most of us, is to publish everything open data.
00:14:18.000And we have at this point millions upon millions of archaeological records available from things like Open Context, the Archaeology Data Service, the Digital Archaeological Record, even the Radiocarbon Paleolithic Europe database.
00:14:30.000So when you're talking about the Ice Age, we have radiocarbon dates directly dated from 13,000 sites in Europe and Siberia.
00:14:37.000We have quite a bit of evidence of this ephemeral evidence for hunter-gatherers, if you see what I mean.
00:14:42.000And so the evidence is just enormous, this database for hunter-gatherers.
00:14:47.000And so I think it's important that we deal with the existing evidence and see where it leads us, if you see what I mean.
00:14:52.000And what is the oldest evidence for hunter-gatherers, just for the audience?
00:15:02.000But in terms of what we would consider Stone Age man or, you know, early homo sapien, What is, like, the earliest buildings that we know of?
00:15:16.000What's the earliest tools that we know of?
00:16:13.000So you were saying that we have a very clear chain.
00:16:17.000Essentially, you're saying there's a clear chain between what we know of in terms of like hunter-gatherers and then more modern civilizations.
00:16:29.000Not linear, that's a bad, but that you know at what point in time it started, I should say.
00:16:34.000I think what we can say is we can understand, start pinpointing the starts of domestication and things like that.
00:16:39.000But I think that what this big data set that we now have shows is there is no linear trajectory to human culture.
00:16:46.000It's actually very heterogeneous, what happens.
00:16:48.000It's different in different areas of the world, and therefore we need to understand the local context to understand them.
00:16:54.000And that's really what it's picturing.
00:16:56.000I mean, in many ways, like I think Graham's TV show is fun and interesting TV, but I think it misrepresents what we think of as the birth of civilization.
00:17:05.000We don't really write or teach about that anymore.
00:17:09.000It's very different in different places.
00:17:11.000Even the very term civilization is something that everybody has a different definition for.
00:17:17.000I never use the term civilization while teaching or writing, for example.
00:17:21.000It's a term that you can use to mean anything.
00:17:24.000And so it's like this grand narrative approach to human prehistory is something that's from the 20th century and not really a component of 21st century archaeology, is what I would say.
00:17:36.000And so I just want to end with a couple questions for Graham, if he's willing.
00:17:40.000At different times he's described that civilization that he's looking for from 12,000 years ago, it was advanced as, say, our own civilization in the late 18th or early 19th century.
00:17:51.000And so, you know, as an archaeologist, we study technology.
00:17:54.000We study the material remains of the past.
00:17:58.000And so I wonder what we're trying to look for, right?
00:18:01.000And so I know that this is kind of how the last conversation with Michael Shermer started.
00:18:07.000But I do want to just quickly say Graham has acknowledged that there's a good chance there's no metallurgy, for example.
00:18:12.000I'm with this civilization he said maybe a decision was made not to use metals and I'd say we could definitively prove there was no large-scale metallurgy in the ice age if you look at ice cores in in the Arctic right we can track metallurgy of the Roman period of medieval periods Based on lead emissions that end up in these ice cores.
00:18:31.000And there are no emissions from metallurgy in the ice age.
00:18:35.000So we can be sure that there's no global metallurgical civilization that's doing a lot of mining and smelting.
00:18:42.000Certainly they're not burning fossil fuels like they might be in the 18th or 19th century.
00:18:46.000So we know that could not have been around that early because it would show up in the atmosphere.
00:18:50.000Likewise, we can think about shipwrecks, right?
00:18:53.000Graham has mentioned that the bulk of marine archaeology has focused on shipwrecks and not the continental shelves.
00:18:59.000And so the thing is, at this point, we have something like three million shipwrecks from around the world.
00:19:05.000And so one of my questions for Graham is if this is a global civilization with ships, Why is it that we don't have shipwrecks from this global civilization?
00:19:16.000If we're looking for a civilization that's traversing the oceans, we should find these shipwrecks.
00:19:22.000And similarly, these shipwrecks are located near the coast.
00:19:25.000They're located on the submerged continental shelves.
00:19:27.000We are actually exploring these submerged continental shelves in detail.
00:19:31.000We're able to find scattered ephemeral shipwrecks, but not monuments of some sort of civilization.
00:19:37.000And the shipwrecks, what's the oldest one that we've found so far?
00:19:40.000Well, there was one that was just published from about, I think it was about 6,000, 7,000 years ago off the coast of Italy that I saw.
00:19:47.000Something around there would say what I'd say is around the oldest that we have, yeah.
00:19:51.000And at what point in time, these are mostly wooden boats?
00:19:54.000Yeah, these are mostly wooden boats, yeah.
00:19:55.000At what point in time would they deteriorate completely?
00:19:58.000Well, so actually underwater environments are really good for the preservation of organic remains, which is why we actually get wood in waterlogged environments rather than on land, for example.
00:20:08.000You either need to be in a really dry environment for wood to preserve, or a really wet environment, or with those seeds I was showing, it needs to be charred.
00:20:44.000Like, they're just zooming in on this boat, and it just looks almost exactly like it looked when it sank because the water's freezing cold.
00:20:58.000Just imagine what it would have been to have been on that boat back then.
00:21:01.000I mean, the preservation underwater is amazing.
00:21:03.000There's this shipwreck off the coast of Italy that I just presented, what was on the Bad Boy of Science YouTube about shipwrecks and stuff.
00:21:10.000And there's still the vine netting that was holding the Roman cargo was still preserved.
00:21:27.000It depends on the burial environment that they're in.
00:21:30.000So taphonomy is what archaeologists use to study how things survive and how they are there.
00:21:35.000And so typically when things are buried, they're very stable.
00:21:38.000Or when they're, you know, sitting, it depends on where you are on the bottom of the ocean, but typically it's very, very stable.
00:21:44.000In fact, the worst place to be is the tidal zone.
00:21:47.000So when sea level rises very slow and an area is stuck in that tidal zone, things will get battered.
00:21:53.000But if things are deeply deposited quickly or sea level rises very quick, that actually helps preserve stuff.
00:21:59.000And so that's how we can still find these kind of shipwrecks and ice age sites and other sort of settlements underwater.
00:22:06.000Now what about the shifting of sediment at the bottom of the ocean when you're dealing with things like 10, 20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago?
00:22:13.000Yeah, so there's actually, I was just talking with Jessica Cook-Hale out of Bradford about this.
00:22:17.000And actually, so she's done some studies off the coast of Florida of sort of hurricanes that are coming in today because she's excavating Stone Age shell mounds there.
00:22:25.000And it turns out actually that the hurricanes coming in today really don't disturb them much at all.
00:23:10.000Every article I have published and most of my colleagues have published is something that is adding and changing our picture of the past.
00:23:17.000We're not locked in on a specific narrative.
00:23:20.000What we're trying to do is update the picture of the past for each other, for our colleagues and for people all around the world to sort of give a sense of, you know, human culture and the diversity of it, the resilience of it and how we've survived this long so that we can learn from it.
00:23:43.000It's in a way a historic occasion, because as far as I know, this is the first time ever that a mainstream archaeologist has sat down in a public forum and debated somebody who's looking at the past from an alternative point of view.
00:24:02.000And I'm grateful to you for sitting in the hot seat and doing that.
00:24:07.000I think it's really valuable and I hope the audience will find it useful.
00:24:15.000I'm going to try and recall a few of your questions.
00:24:18.000The lost civilization that I'm thinking of is like a black hole in space to me.
00:24:23.000It's like something missing in the story of our past to the extent that I can That I can put form on it.
00:24:29.000I think we're looking at a civilization, like all civilizations, that emerged out of shamanism.
00:24:35.000I believe that they did have rather advanced astronomy and a knowledge of the world.
00:24:45.000When I speak of a 19th century level of technology...
00:24:49.000I'm talking specifically about knowledge of longitude.
00:24:55.000The longitude problem was not solved by our civilization until the middle of the 18th century.
00:25:00.000And I'm talking about knowledge of very hard-to-observe astronomical phenomena such as the precession of the equinoxes.
00:25:08.000That knowledge is normally attributed to the ancient Greeks, but I think there's compelling evidence that it's much, much earlier than that.
00:25:19.000I'm not quite sure where to start with my first presentation, but you're telling us that archaeology is very keen on new ideas and wants to really explore and investigate the past.
00:26:48.000And then they entered the main part of the Americas and gradually made their way further south.
00:26:54.000And this was a dominant paradigm until, I would say, the 1990s when it began to be seriously questioned.
00:27:02.000But I would wonder whether the ghost of Clovis first is still not haunting archaeology.
00:27:10.000So let me just say a few words on this subject.
00:27:15.000So across the Bering Straits 13,400 years ago and There's a single common origin, supposedly that was the idea with Clovis first.
00:27:29.000And there have been recent genetic discoveries showing a very close relationship between Australasians and certain peoples of the Amazon rainforest.
00:27:39.000We've talked about this before on your show, Joe, and I can go into that in more detail later.
00:27:45.000A huge amount of evidence from South America has a bearing on this subject.
00:27:49.000This is the typical tool set that the Clovis people were thought to have used.
00:27:56.000And despite the fact that you're telling us that Clovis First has been debunked since the 1990s, really, and you were taught that it was debunked in the 2000s, We can find new scientists publishing this in 2013 questioning the Clovis first model.
00:28:18.000And those who did question the Clovis first model, I mean, I do love your picture of this free and open and generous archaeology.
00:28:25.000But actually, archaeologists can be very, very mean to other archaeologists who disagree with them.
00:28:31.000And the example of this is Jacques Sancmars, who investigated bluefish caves in the Yukon and found evidence of human beings there more than 20,000 years ago.
00:28:42.000Now, if that evidence were correct, it would blow the Clovis first model out of the water.
00:28:46.000People are suddenly in America more than 7,000 years before Clovis.
00:28:51.000The reaction to that was not welcoming.
00:28:53.000The reaction to that was fury at Jack Sankt-Mars.
00:28:59.000Rather than launching a major new search for more early evidence, the find stirred fierce opposition and a bitter debate, one of the most acrimonious and unfruitful in all of science, noted the journal Nature.
00:29:11.000And it was a brutal experience for Jacques Sainte-Mars.
00:29:14.000He likened it to the Spanish Inquisition.
00:29:17.000Audiences paid little heed to his evidence at academic conferences.
00:29:20.000They gave short shrift to the evidence.
00:29:53.000And the fact that he was right was later confirmed.
00:29:56.000It was confirmed that, indeed, human beings had been at Bluefish Cave.
00:30:02.000There's the publication from 2017, I think.
00:30:07.000Yes, January 2017, confirming that all along Jacques Saint-Marc had been right and that the ruining and destruction of his reputation For saying something that other archaeologists disagreed with had been wholly unnecessary.
00:30:21.000And again, the Smithsonian, the study raises serious questions about the effect of the bitter decades-long debate over the peopling of the new world.
00:30:29.000Did archaeologists in the mainstream marginalize dissenting voices on this key issue?
00:30:33.000And if so, what was the impact on North American archaeology?
00:30:37.000Did the intense criticism of pre-Clovis sites produce a chilling effect, stifling new ideas and hobbling the search for early archaeology?
00:30:49.000You're telling me that it was debunked in the 90s, Flint, but here's Clovis being debunked again in 2007, National Geographic.
00:30:57.000Here's Clovis being debunked in 2012. I mean, for a theory that was debunked in the 1990s, it's weird to see it still being debunked in 2012. It's like there's something still there to debunk, isn't there?
00:31:14.000Recently, the scientific consensus has changed to acknowledge the presence of pre-Clovis cultures in the America, ending the Clovis first consensus.
00:31:22.000This was a piece from the 15th of April, 2023. My God, here's the big think.
00:31:31.000April 2022. Clovis apparently still needs to be debunked.
00:31:37.000It keeps on haunting archaeology and people keep on having to debunk it.
00:31:43.000And I'd like to just mention Tom Dillehay.
00:31:46.000Tom Dillehay discovered the site of – excavated the site of Monteverde in Chile and he found evidence that human beings had been there 14,000, maybe as much as 18,000 years ago in the deep south of South America.
00:32:01.000And again, the archaeology that Flint would like us to believe exists would have welcomed that find.
00:32:19.000That Tom Delahaye has been vindicated and that he was absolutely correct all along, that human beings were in Monteverde thousands of years before Clovis and he was eventually vindicated.
00:32:37.000Now what I want to do, if you don't mind, is just play a tiny little clip from Tom Delahaye himself.
00:32:46.000I don't have audio set up for you to do that.
00:33:08.000After a slight technical hitch, let's play this clip from Tom Dillehay, who was the discoverer and excavator of Monteverdi.
00:33:22.000I put together an interdisciplinary research team of people, got National Geographic funding and National Science Foundation funding, and that went pretty well the way we expected it to, and I found that the scientists were open-minded.
00:33:39.000We had Australian, Chilean, and Argentinian archaeologists working with us.
00:33:45.000Cumulatively speaking, those people, besides myself, probably had close to 100 years of experience amongst them.
00:33:53.000What surprised me on the other side of the coin was the stiff, closed-mindedness of many North American archaeologists.
00:34:01.000But some of the North American colleagues were very difficult to deal with, and I think at times presenting a very unhealthy atmosphere.
00:34:14.000Cutting us off before we can present the data at meetings, not talking with us about it, refusing to even look at the data, this sort of thing.
00:34:27.000So, I think I've got a few minutes left of my presentation time, and I would like to deal with the issue that Flint has mentioned of archaeology somehow knowing that there was no lost civilization.
00:34:51.000If we could call this up on the screen, Jamie.
00:34:57.000So, the Society for American Archaeology, of which Flint is a member, wrote an open letter to Netflix shortly after the release of my show, Ancient Apocalypse.
00:35:12.000Really asking Netflix to cancel the show.
00:35:18.000They said reclassify it as science fiction.
00:35:22.000Now to my mind, what is the result of 30 plus years of work on my part being reclassified as science fiction is as good as cancelling it.
00:35:30.000Netflix did not reclassify it as science fiction, but archaeology, the Society for American Archaeology, It says that it really sees no evidence for an advanced lost civilization of the Ice Age and that my series is simply entertainment with ideological goals.
00:35:52.000So I want to get into the parts of the world that archaeology has not looked at.
00:36:00.000It's kind of interesting, though, from that statement, just the last thing.
00:36:03.000Contrary to Hancock's claims, archaeology does not willfully ignore credible evidence, nor does it seek to suppress it in a conspiratorial fashion.
00:36:14.000Yeah, we just showed in the case of Tom Dillehay that his evidence was suppressed, that in the case of Jacques Sainte-Mars, his evidence was suppressed, that archaeology was not open-minded about the work of these guys, that they suffered humiliation and great difficulty in advancing their work.
00:36:31.000And furthermore, I'd like to make another point clear at this point, Flint.
00:36:33.000I don't think there's an archaeological conspiracy against me.
00:36:41.000I don't think archaeologists are sitting together in a kambal, conspiring against me.
00:36:46.000I think that archaeology is locked into a mindset about the past where my ideas simply seem preposterous.
00:36:52.000And I think it's very annoying to archaeology that those ideas have some resonance with the public.
00:36:58.000But I absolutely I refute any suggestion that I have ever said that archaeology is involved in a conspiracy against me or is trying to suppress my work.
00:37:39.000How much does archaeology really know about the past of the Sahara?
00:37:45.000Well, we understand about the domestication of pearl millet in the Sahara from when the Sahara was much more – much of it was actually more habitable because it was not desert.
00:37:54.000So we can see the domestication of pearl millet and sorghum.
00:38:23.000What I mean is that due to remote sensing, due to surface survey, and due to archaeological excavation, we actually have Reasonable coverage across the Sahara.
00:38:32.000We understand that during green periods in the Neolithic, we can see agricultural villages.
00:38:38.000And before the Neolithic, we can find ephemeral hunter-gatherer camps where they were napping stones.
00:38:44.000But the fact of the matter is, right about 1% of the Sahara has been excavated and 99% hasn't.
00:38:50.000So to say that there's no possibility of any traces of a lost civilization in the Sahara seems to me a bit premature, particularly since during the African humid period, and there were several of them, the Sahara was green and fertile and was a very attractive environment in which to live.
00:39:07.000I might come on to the ancient maps issue, but there's an ancient map up there which shows a green and fertile Sahara, I think the Sahara is a fascinating,
00:41:40.000These are just scratching the surface.
00:41:43.000The archaeologists who are working on these sites believe that there are thousands and thousands more of these geoglyph sites, that they're just touching the edge.
00:41:51.000When I was there with them back in September 23, I think it was, we actually did a bit of LIDAR work.
00:41:58.000We put up a drone with LIDAR attached and we found new geoglyphs, geoglyphs that had not been found before, within a mile.
00:42:23.000And therefore I do not believe that archaeology can tell us that it can rule out any possibility of a lost civilization while it has so failed to serve the Amazon and is only now beginning to do so.
00:42:34.000And those who are doing that work are convinced that there's much, much, much more to be found.
00:42:38.000Thousands more of these geoglyphs, for example.
00:42:42.00027 million square kilometers of the Earth's surface was above water during the Ice Age, and it's underwater today.
00:42:49.000So yes, there has been quite a bit of marine archaeology.
00:42:52.000I think Nick Fleming says there's about 3,000 sites that have been investigated underwater over the years.
00:42:59.000But it's, again, you're looking at a tiny fraction of 1% of the I think we're good to go.
00:43:21.000What is now Britain and continental Europe, a submerged landmass, are beginning to investigate this.
00:43:27.000It wouldn't surprise me at all if lots of evidence of hunter-gatherers is found in these submerged areas.
00:43:34.000But to say that enough work has been done to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization seems to me absurd when we're dealing with 27 million people.
00:43:44.000And I just want to say that I and my wife, Santa, have done a great deal of diving.
00:43:48.000We did seven years of scuba diving all over the world.
00:43:51.000And what we did was we followed up local accounts of underwater structures, fishermen, local divers, and we went where they took us.
00:43:58.000This is Nanmadol Ponepe on the island of Ponepe.
00:44:01.000You go a bit further underwater and you start finding structures underwater.
00:44:05.000Go a bit further still and you find this huge column underwater.
00:44:12.000That column has been submerged for more than 13,000 years.
00:44:18.000And it compares very interestingly with this column, if you see on the left, the submerged column at Namadol, on the right, this column from Tinian, the island of Tinian, also in that region of the Pacific.
00:44:29.000I wonder if the megaliths of Tinian have been misdated.
00:44:33.000What we're looking at here, and I apologize to listeners who are listening and not watching, but what we're looking at here are my fins disappearing into a tunnel.
00:44:43.000And that tunnel looks to me, this is in Japan by the way, off the island of Yonaguni, that tunnel looks to me very man-made, particularly when I get inside it and find two, on each side, two big megaliths piled one on top of the other.
00:44:58.000And then when you come to the end of the tunnel, you see ahead of you these two massive megalithic blocks directly in view from the tunnel.
00:45:09.000That's a shot that Santa took of me diving beside those megalithic blocks just to give you a sense of the scale of them.
00:45:50.000We're in this out of passion for our subject.
00:45:53.000We've done more than 200 dives at Yonaguni.
00:45:55.000I've been hands-on with this structure and all the other structures around it, and I am absolutely confident that we're looking at a rock-hewn structure, a natural rock face that was cut and shaped by human beings.
00:46:07.000Here at Karama, We're looking at a stone circle underwater, depth 30 plus meters, 32 meters, I think.
00:46:15.000Been submerged again for more than 13,000 years.
00:46:38.000You see the inner curve of the outer megalith matching the outer curve of the central megalith.
00:46:44.000And to you, that's not even interesting?
00:46:46.000I mean, even the photos you were showing at Yonaguni showed a lot of natural fractures along straight lines.
00:46:51.000And so I think that it's really easy to confuse what can happen naturally and geologically with something that looks kind of anthropogenic.
00:46:57.000But this does not look man-made to me.
00:46:59.000It does not look like anything I've ever seen.
00:47:01.000Well, that's interesting because I took a geologist diving there, Wolf Witchman.
00:47:06.000He was skeptical about Yonaguni, but he did confess after we came up from the dive at Karima that there's no way, in his opinion, that this could have been made by nature.
00:49:06.000The rest of it's buried in sand on the left there.
00:49:09.000On the right, a stone wall with a standout feature above it.
00:49:13.000To suggest that these things are natural seems to me completely absurd.
00:49:18.000And my point is that if Santa and I, with no external funding, the only funding we have – I've never had financial sponsorship from anybody – the only funding that we have is the kind readers who buy my books and allow us to undertake this research.
00:49:35.000And we've risked our lives for 30 years investigating this research.
00:49:40.000And if we can find structures of this nature underwater on a very limited basis, then I would imagine that a detailed archaeological survey would find much more.
00:49:50.000The submerged continental shelves, the Sahara Desert and the Amazon alone, these are three large underserved areas by archaeology and I think it's premature for archaeology to say that they can rule out any possibility of a lost civilization.
00:50:05.000While there's so much of the earth that remains to be studied and actually how much of the so-called developed industrial countries, how much of the land area of those countries have been investigated?
00:50:17.000I mean, so look, A, I fully agree with you that I'd like to see more archaeology done in ethical, informed ways.
00:50:23.000I am not trying to argue against searching for sites in the Sahara, the Amazon, or underwater.
00:50:30.000I think we can hopefully agree that more archaeology needs to be done.
00:50:33.000I would say in developed countries our coverage is even better though, mainly due to the fact that laws require archaeological excavation and survey prior to construction.
00:50:42.000So whenever there's sort of construction going on in cities, there's archaeology happening.
00:50:47.000Whenever pipelines or highways or things like that are being done, there's survey and there's excavation.
00:50:52.000And so, I mean, at this point, our numbers of archaeological sites are well in the millions, right?
00:50:56.000And billions of artifacts that have been found.
00:51:00.000I'm not trying to say it's perfect, though, and at the same time, the kind of excavations that happen sort of on a rescue basis before construction, they're not going to have the same kind of investment that an academic project will have.
00:51:14.000On the other hand, an academic project is going to make a much smaller hole, you know, because we are focusing on maximizing the evidence that we can get.
00:51:22.000And so, you know, in no way am I trying to say that archaeology has perfect coverage, but we do have quite a bit of coverage that people are unfamiliar with, and we do have quite a bit of coverage of this late Ice Age period where we have many,
00:51:37.000many thousands of sites from ephemeral hunter-gatherers, underwater, above water, and elsewhere.
00:51:48.000Because those other images aren't nearly as compelling to me as some of the right angles and what looks like passageways and that curved surface underground.
00:52:47.000If these are natural formations, they're so bizarre that you have enormous straight lines and right angles that look like they're cut and not just straight on one side, straight on all sides.
00:54:14.000I've seen a lot of crazy natural stuff, and I see nothing here that to me reminds me of human architecture, and I've seen human architecture all over the world.
00:54:21.000Jamie, go to that one that we were just looking at with Graham.
00:54:24.000It's lower right, like below the main image to the right-hand side.
00:54:57.000It's just the appearance of those stones stacked in a uniform manner in that tunnel, all these things, and that this exists somewhere else, it's very similar.
00:55:14.000These might be renderings of what they think it looks like, I suppose.
00:55:17.000I mean, regardless, we still have no dates from this.
00:55:32.000This is Kerama of Akajima in the Okinawa group of islands.
00:55:38.000To me, Flint, it's stunning that you see that as a totally natural thing, but I guess we've just got very different eyes.
00:55:45.000The central uprights surrounded by upright megaliths all cut out of the bedrock, very similar to the chamber recently excavated at Karahantepi, where you have uprights cut out of the bedrock as well.
00:55:59.000It seems to me inconceivable that nature could have made this, that nature could have separated out this central upright and then created the upright surrounding it in such a perfect way.
00:57:16.000It's a whole series of monuments which continue over a distance of a couple of miles underwater.
00:57:34.000It's the combination of all of these different things across an area of two miles off the island of Yonaguni.
00:57:42.000That make that one of my high priority sites for man-made workmanship.
00:57:48.000And the Indian sites are also extremely intriguing.
00:57:51.000And unfortunately, none of that work has been followed up, which is a pity.
00:57:57.000And when we come to what you call rescue archaeology, Flint, if we come back to Northern Europe, for example, I mean, the last place on earth that I would look for the remains of a lost civilization is Northern Europe.
00:58:12.000Because Northern Europe was a frozen wilderness during the Ice Age, and any lost civilization worth its salt would not have focused a lot of effort on Northern Europe in that time.
00:58:22.000The place to look is down near the tropics, down near the equator.
00:58:26.000It's in places that weren't horrifically cold and unbearable during the Ice Age.
00:58:32.000And when you talk about rescue archaeology, this is one of the problems I have, is that There is no targeted search for the possibility of a lost civilization because archaeology is already convinced that no such thing could have existed.
00:58:44.000So what we get is accidental discovery.
00:58:47.000Somebody's building a road or building a dam.
00:58:49.000They call in the archaeologists to see if there's any archaeology that's going to be disrupted and some archaeology is found sometimes.
00:58:56.000That's how the Cerruti Mastodon site near San Diego was discovered because roadworks were being done there.
00:59:04.000But this is not a targeted search for a lost civilization.
00:59:09.000I would maintain that in the Amazon rainforest, in the Sahara Desert, in the 27 million square kilometers of continental shelves, massively underserved by archaeology, and in other areas of the world, archaeology's focus is on very limited parts of those,
00:59:27.000And then, I'm sure you know this, Flint, that when we come to most archaeological sites, The amount of the site that is excavated is rarely more than 5% and often less than that.
00:59:38.000And that's for good motives, to preserve the site for future generations of archaeologists to investigate.
00:59:43.000But again, it doesn't, I think, allow archaeologists to lay such claim to the past that they can absolutely rule out any possibility of a lost civilization.
00:59:54.000Yeah, I mean, so if you want to, Jamie, do you want to look up the site Pavlopetri, P-A-V-L-O-P-E-T-R-I? This is a site in the Aegean, and this is an example of kind of what, I mean, I can boot it up on my computer if you can.
01:00:12.000So if you look at this, you have very clear stone courses, for example, underwater.
01:00:17.000And it's not just sort of stone courses and walls that we find.
01:00:20.000This is from a few thousand years ago.
01:00:22.000What we find actually are a ton of artifacts with it, right?
01:00:25.000They dive, they excavate, they pull up ceramics, they pull up stone tools.
01:00:29.000And they are able to therefore show that this was an occupied place.
01:00:33.000This is obviously not due to sea level rise.
01:00:35.000This is due to tectonic activity, that this is now underwater.
01:00:39.000Helicae off the north coast of Greece also is another one that people have suggested might have inspired Plato's Atlantis because it happened during Plato's lifetime that that city was submerged underwater.
01:00:50.000And so we actually do find, you know, from more recent times, actual underwater sites aplenty.
01:04:29.000So the difference to me is like there's some instances like in between the steps where you look at that flat surface and the uniform line across the flat surface.
01:04:43.000Some of the stuff on the right looks much more refined than what you see in Yanaguni, but that also could be attributed to the underwater erosion, right, in thousands and thousands of years.
01:04:53.000Whereas how old is Sacsayhuaman supposed to be?
01:04:56.000Well, that's an ongoing argument, Joe.
01:04:58.000Well, Pedro Cieza de Leon mentioned it was only built 100 years before he was there.
01:05:02.000The difference between, in my mind, Sakse-Waman shows all those other things that are so clearly architecture, so clearly stone blocks fitted and piled onto each other.
01:05:14.000You don't quite see that level of sophistication at the Yanaguni site, but you do see some stuff that's very bizarre and doesn't look like it's natural.
01:05:22.000And I suggest if we were to look further and spend the money and investigate thoroughly, we would find a lot more.
01:05:28.000I'm simply raising this to I don't want to address Flint's apparent point that archaeology has done enough already to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization.
01:05:37.000That's certainly what's said in the SAA's letter to Netflix.
01:05:40.000And Flint, what is your position on that, specifically what he's talking about South America, that South America would be a place where an advanced civilization would thrive during the Ice Age time because it wouldn't be experiencing the brutal cold that Northern Europe had?
01:05:54.000No, but I still think we'd want to find some sort of evidence of things like agriculture, right?
01:05:59.000And so we can look at the development of agriculture in South America and in Mesoamerica.
01:06:23.000And so, I mean, look, we've done a lot of work in the rainforest with LIDAR in particular, and that's been dated based on excavations.
01:06:29.000Stefan Rostein just published in 2024 a series of LIDAR structures that were all connected with one another alongside major roads, and based on excavations of several of them, it dates to about 2,500 years ago.
01:06:42.000And so this is the key thing, is we want to understand clear dates for stuff.
01:07:29.000I actually hope that people who are interested in more archaeology happening donate to things like the Archaeological Institute of America, the European Association of Archaeologists, and the Society for American Archaeologists.
01:07:39.000That can help fund more surveys and excavations.
01:07:43.000If somebody wanted to do that, where would they go?
01:07:45.000To their websites, saas.org, archaeological.org.
01:08:59.000And because of erosion, there might be stuff visible, right?
01:09:02.000So they targeted these areas and they found, what, nearly 200 different sites, all dating to the Ice Age, dense scatters, some of them dense, not all of them are dense, like this one on the right, of lithics, of stone tools that showed people working in place, and they mapped them out in the desert.
01:09:19.000They have 36,000 different artifacts that they found in this survey.
01:09:24.000And in many places, they could actually refit these back together so they could understand that people were doing this right here in this spot.
01:09:32.000And so, you know, one of the great things about Desert Survey is because of all the wind erosion, we actually should have exposed more architecture, more artifacts, and because it's so dry, things like organic material preserves sometimes as well.
01:09:46.000And so we actually have this picture of stuff that's different than, say, you know, in a more temperate zone.
01:09:52.000But if we start looking at underwater sites, I talked with Dr. Jessica Cook-Hale, who's now at the University of Bradford, who has done underwater dives and found Ice Age sites off the coast of Florida.
01:10:23.000Isn't that a part of a big lawsuit right now?
01:10:25.000And so one of the things that she does is she is an underwater archaeologist who focuses on the Stone Age and this period that we're talking about at the end of the Ice Age.
01:10:34.000And what we're looking at here, she'll talk about it, it's just a short one-minute clip, is this site's underwater, they all date to the end of the Ice Age.
01:10:41.000And so they're lithic scatters, just like my dad found in the Sahara Desert, of hunter-gatherers underwater sites, though.
01:10:49.000And so let's see what some of these look like.
01:10:57.000So what she does is she develops predictive models based on the geomorphology.
01:11:01.000This is actually her colleague finding some stone tools.
01:11:05.000So they look at the underwater geomorphology, they take known sites above water, and then they predict where they might be able to go and successfully find material.
01:11:15.000And then they go dive, and often enough they do find that material.
01:11:36.000So periods where people were using shellfish.
01:11:38.000As a subsistence base, it's really important to look at those sites on land and say, what are the factors?
01:11:43.000What environmental patterns or cultural patterns can we tease out of these larger distributions?
01:11:47.000And then we project it offshore, and if we're fortunate, then after we pull all those threads together, this is what we get.
01:11:54.000And so yeah, this is just like with my dad when he targeted areas in the Sahara.
01:11:59.000Now she's at University of Bradford and they're doing dives in different areas of Europe and they're specifically targeting this kind of Stone Age material from this period and they're able to successfully find it.
01:12:09.000And so I think that that's important to understand because this material is there to find even though it's very much ephemeral material from hunter-gatherer camps.
01:12:18.000And this is oftentimes outcrops of stone For making these kind of stone tools.
01:12:22.000So that's what they're actually finding, is where they're making it, looking at the geomorphology to find them.
01:12:28.000And so if we, sorry, let's get past this.
01:12:31.000We already talked about this wall, but I also wanted to brought up other kinds of underwater finds that have been found from the Stone Age.
01:12:39.000It's 115 feet underwater, off the coast of Marseille, found recently in 1985 by Henri Kosquet, and it's dated to 27,000 and 19,000 years ago and dated by radiocarbon.
01:12:49.000It's actually the painted cave with the most radiocarbon dates from it, right?
01:13:07.000And so we actually are looking underwater and successfully finding this kind of material.
01:13:12.000But it's not just underwater, because I don't think we need to stop there.
01:13:16.000If we look at this culture in Europe at the end of the Ice Age, this Magdalenean culture that's associated with most of these painted caves from about 17,000 to 12,000 years ago, the exact period that Graham's civilization should date to, we have radiocarbon dates from a large number of these caves,
01:13:52.000That's just another way you misrepresent my work.
01:13:55.000Okay, I'm sorry for misrepresenting your work, Graham.
01:13:58.000But there's no room for some sort of large agricultural civilization along most of these coasts because the way sea level rise has worked is it's variable in different places.
01:14:07.000And so we actually have a whole lot of coverage near to Ice Age coasts from the end of the Ice Age, not the glacial maximum.
01:14:17.000Yeah, so these are lines based on 100 meters and 120 meters of sea level rise, which is about the amount that existed from the Younger Dryas.
01:14:26.000There's more from the glacial maximum, but that's 20,000 years ago.
01:14:29.000We're talking about 12,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age.
01:14:32.000And so all these caves on the north of Spain are only a few miles away from that Ice Age coastline.
01:14:39.000So just, you know, short walking distance.
01:14:58.000But take the Cinder Shelf, for example.
01:15:00.000An enormous amount of submerged material there.
01:15:03.000I'm not disputing that we're going to find hunter gatherer sites underwater.
01:15:10.000I'm simply saying, and you seem to keep evading this issue, that not enough has been done to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization.
01:15:18.000There were hunter gatherers all over the world.
01:15:48.000Between the Malaysian Peninsula, the Indonesian Islands, out over to New Guinea and Australia, the submerged Sunda Shelf and the Sahul area, to me is absolutely fascinating.
01:16:02.000And not enough underwater archaeology has been done there.
01:16:10.000But I'm saying that for archaeology to claim and to quite viciously and unpleasantly attack me for suggesting the possibility that there might be a lost civilization, to make that claim while having failed thus far to investigate thoroughly the vast areas Of the submerged continental shelves,
01:16:30.000the vast areas of the Amazon rainforest, the vast areas of the Sahara Desert that have not been investigated, that claim is premature and that claim is disingenuous.
01:16:38.000But we have thousands of sites from these areas.
01:16:40.000I don't care how many sites you've got.
01:16:42.000There's 3,000 underwater sites that have been found.
01:16:44.000Graham, working with archaeology is working from the known and what we actually have towards the unknown.
01:16:49.000And when you say that we're not investigating these areas, I'm showing you that we have.
01:17:51.000So for example, sea level rise is not even everywhere.
01:17:54.000Just off the southern coast of Crete, I've been here.
01:17:57.000Dr. Tom Strasser has shown me around this site.
01:18:00.000Very thankfully, I'm very much in debt to him.
01:18:02.000This is an area where the African tectonic plate is moving under the European tectonic plate, and so the land is rising faster than the sea level has risen.
01:18:11.000And so, Tom specifically targeted it for a survey.
01:18:15.000He found dozens of sites, and then he excavated several of them.
01:18:18.000What this is, is this is an uplifted sea cave.
01:18:21.000It's a cave that was formed from wave action.
01:19:14.000Or we can go to North America, where we have 12,000 different sites, I think it is, with Clovis points, and we can see where these coastlines are.
01:19:23.000On the eastern seaboard, yes, there's a large amount of submerged continental shelf, including the area in Florida where we saw Jessica Cokail dived and found sites.
01:19:32.000If you look at the western seaboard, on the other hand, There is not nearly as much of a submerged continental shelf.
01:19:38.000And what's really interesting about the western seaboard is not only have we been exploring it for 40 plus years and we have multiple sites dating to this period at the end of the Ice Age, sometimes with wood and cording, other times with stone tools, all of them hunter-gatherers.
01:20:55.000Out of the University of Victoria, for example, Duncan McLaren has found footprints right there on what is an end of the Ice Age coast from about 15,000 years ago.
01:21:28.000It's not that we're necessarily looking for one thing or another.
01:21:31.000We're targeting areas that are exposed, that we can understand Coastal interactions at this early time.
01:21:39.000And whatever we find, whether it's footprints or something else, we work to publish it.
01:21:43.000And then we put together clear dates of the stratigraphy in order to get it at high resolution when these people were walking on this coastline, on this beach, if you see what I mean.
01:21:54.000These three different people right here.
01:21:56.000But how did you feel when Tom Dilleheny?
01:22:01.000Delahaye was the excavation of Monteverde.
01:22:02.000How did you feel when he was describing what was ultimately true but was being dismissed and he was being shut off and people weren't willing to look at the data?
01:22:31.000I have worked with some assholes before, right?
01:22:34.000And so I would say, though, that to represent that as all of archaeology is kind of silly because most archaeologists don't focus on the peopling of America.
01:22:46.000When people arrive in America does not impact the research I do, for example.
01:22:50.000All my Greek colleagues, all people that do Chinese archaeology, people that do archaeology of Australia, none of those people really have a horse in the game for the peopling of Americas.
01:23:00.000And so if there were a few asshole archaeologists, well, then I condemn them.
01:23:07.000And I think that there are, just like in any community of people, whether it's politicians, entertainers, or in your neighborhood, there's assholes.
01:23:13.000We should say that that's the wrong way to be.
01:23:16.000And if those people are assholes, I think that's a problem.
01:23:19.000Flint, you were showing us a picture of Florida recently, the submerged continental shelf around Florida.
01:24:15.000Yeah, we can get to Pimini in a second.
01:24:17.000I do want to point out that right in downtown Miami right here is an archaeological site called Cutler Ridge, which also dates to the end of the Ice Age.
01:24:24.000It has shells, it has lithics, it has even, I think, human remains, and it shows that kind of coastal interaction not too far from the Ice Age coast.
01:25:00.000They were embroidered into the clothes that this child was buried in, right?
01:25:04.000It's about a seven-year-old little child buried there.
01:25:07.000And so you get these kind of pictures of the past of the people that lived in this sort of tough terrain and exploited the coasts all over the world.
01:25:15.000And so I just want to really emphasize underwater archaeology.
01:25:19.000We find things, for example, like a seawall off the coast of Israel trying to combat the coast level rise that was happening in the Stone Age, right?
01:25:28.000We have lithic artifacts On submerged archaeological sites all over the world from different periods.
01:25:35.000And so we really are looking for this.
01:25:40.000And we are finding plentiful Stone Age stuff, hunter-gatherer sites.
01:25:44.000And it just sort of, it strikes me as unbelievable that we have so many thousands of sites that That show coastal interactions at the end of the Ice Age from these hunter-gatherers, but we have no evidence of a lost advanced civilization.
01:25:59.000That strikes me as, maybe this doesn't disprove it, but it makes it very, very hard to swallow, if you see what I mean, because nobody really understands how much archaeology we have.
01:27:32.000Just beneath the compass rose there, can we highlight that somehow?
01:27:37.000The submerged Bahama banks, the Grand Bahama banks, you're on them now.
01:27:42.000That was a big island above water during the ice age and it actually stayed above water until about 6,900 years ago.
01:27:51.000So let's just talk, because I know Bimini has been a very controversial issue.
01:27:54.000I don't know if it's a controversial issue for you, but certainly for a large number of your colleagues, the suggestion that the so-called Bimini Road is a man-made artifact has been mocked and laughed at a great deal.
01:28:08.000I'm not sure if mocked is right, but I've definitely heard it's a geological sand beach.
01:29:07.000So it's this map that I'm interested in.
01:29:09.000It's this large island and the possibility that that large island was depicted on, as it looked during the last ice age, that it is the submerged Bahama banks and that running up the middle of it is a depiction of the so-called Bimini Road.
01:29:27.000Now, I'm showing, as it looks today, top left, where the Bimini Islands are and the island of Andros.
01:29:36.000If you go back 4,800 years, bottom left, You can see that the Grand Bahama banks were submerged.
01:29:44.000But up until 6,900 years ago, they were above water.
01:29:48.000And 12,400 years ago, they were above water.
01:29:52.000And I must say that looks very much to me like the island that's depicted on the Piri Reis map.
01:30:38.000So I used to do a lot of GIS for archeological projects where I'd take historical maps and I'd try to line them up with actual terrain like satellite imagery and stuff like that.
01:30:46.000You should work on georectifying these maps to see how they line up in real space because right now what I see, I have to squint to see if it looks right or not.
01:30:54.000And so I think working with something like a GIS expert to georectify this stuff and show how actually accurate it would be, where you could actually statistically measure that, would make it a lot more convincing in my mind.
01:32:02.000Because if you read the literature, you'll find that archaeologists constantly refer to work that was done by Eugene Shin and a couple of other geologists arguing that,
01:32:20.000A, the Mooney Road is totally natural, and B, that it's pretty young.
01:32:27.000But this is an area where there's a real problem because in the literature on that, archaeologists cite the 1980 and later work of Eugene Shin, which itself cites his 1978 article.
01:32:44.000But 1978 article is very hard to find.
01:32:48.000I had to do a lot of work to get hold of it, and I did.
01:32:52.000And actually the 1978 article contradicts almost everything that's said in the 1980 and later articles.
01:33:03.000Are there any artifacts from the Bimini Road?
01:33:07.000Because I've excavated road surfaces and I've found lots of artifacts.
01:33:11.000But let me just play you again, Jamie.
01:33:12.000I guess I'll have to airdrop this to you.
01:33:14.000Let me just play you a little clip from Eugene Shin, upon whose authority the Bimini Road is being dismissed as totally natural and very recent.
01:34:03.000And this is just a little clip from Eugene Shin.
01:34:05.000Yeah, well, I remember when I first met you, I was a graduate student of Rasmus.
01:34:10.000And I remember running into you, and you were carving this stone statue.
01:34:14.000And somebody asked you what you were doing with it, and you said you were taking it over to the Bahamas and throwing it overboard and hoping that these sheep would find them.
01:34:23.000So I don't know if we've followed up on that.
01:34:25.000Well, someone told me they saw it in a magazine somewhere, but I kept waiting for something that really happened to them.
01:34:35.000The guy who's planting artifacts on the Bimini Road is the main authority that is used to dismiss the Bimini Road as a man-made structure.
01:34:46.000Did he actually do that or was he just joking around about doing that?
01:37:17.000We don't know what it is, but what it is is a series of megalithic blocks laid out side by side.
01:37:22.000Let's see better images of it, perhaps something more that gives you the scale of it, because there's a problem with looking at things up close.
01:37:29.000Yeah, and can I just give a quick shout-out to UT Austin, which directs that project in Romania?
01:39:03.000You don't look at that and go, wow, that really looks man-made?
01:39:06.000I think it looks really cool, but again, I've seen a lot of...
01:39:09.000But if you knew for sure that was man-made, wouldn't that sync up?
01:39:16.000Like, if you knew for sure, if this had been dated and everyone knew where this came from and you saw this and this was from an archaeological site that was well known and established, you would look at that and say, yes, that fits that.
01:39:28.000You wouldn't look at that if it was in a well-known archaeological site and say, oh, this piece is man-made.
01:39:35.000All the other stuff is clearly natural.
01:39:39.000I mean, look, to me, I don't see anything that tells me that it's man-made is all I can say.
01:39:44.000What I meant to say is if you looked at this, you wouldn't say this is natural.
01:39:48.000If you looked at this at a known archaeological site, I just reversed it, sorry.
01:39:53.000If you looked at this at a known archaeological site and there was other structures there and then there was this, you would say this is a part of that.
01:39:59.000You wouldn't say that this is natural.
01:40:08.000If there was other structures next to that that were clearly man-made, you would assume, I would think, that that would be man-made as well.
01:40:16.000No, that was what I was going to say is there's oftentimes a lot of natural stones alongside archaeological stones at sites.
01:40:22.000There was this one example of a perfectly circular depression at this site in north of Pilos.
01:40:29.000And so we kept saying to ourselves, it's in the middle of Of a stone structure.
01:40:35.000And so we went back and forth on whether it's man-made or not, this circular depression.
01:41:24.000So, since we saw Eugene Shin and the reference from the audience to the sheep, Who believe in outrageous possibilities like a lost civilization of the Ice Age.
01:41:38.000I want to address, Flint, the way that you dealt with the media about my work.
01:41:46.000I'm going to show a little PowerPoint presentation here and we'll talk it through.
01:41:54.000Well, we know that it's very painful to be burnt at the stake.
01:41:58.000And heretics were burnt at the stake until relatively recently.
01:42:01.000And there's Galileo brought before the Inquisition for heresy.
01:42:06.000And here we have Flint Dibble, who, sorry if I'm being direct, Flint, but you do recently appear to have set yourself up as a sort of modern Inquisition.
01:42:16.000To investigate and test whether output actually fits into what is regarded as acceptable thought by the mainstream.
01:42:28.000So I noticed your attack on the homo naledi controversy on your YouTube channel.
01:42:36.000And that concerns the work of Lee Berger, who's an explorer in residence with National Geographic.
01:42:44.000He was really too big a target for you to bring down, Flint.
01:42:48.000But this guy, my friend Danny Hillman Natawajaja, he wasn't such a big target for you to bring down.
01:42:56.000And you presented this video on your YouTube channel where you refer to it as a pyramid scheme, which is an insult in itself.
01:43:06.000And I'd like to take this opportunity just to play a little clip from Flint's YouTube channel, if that's all right with you, Flint.
01:44:37.000They say, on top of this buried, decayed rock mass, a unique stone artifact resembling a traditional Sundanese dagger called Kujang stone was discovered.
01:45:11.000I think because I don't I don't find the anime person and the Graham Hancock too is a circle of the pseudo science for me so It's not his circle, it's not the archaeologists.
01:45:24.000You know, the ordinary people or the people in the outside, they waiting for our research and they waiting for what we said.
01:45:33.000Because they always believe what we said, the archaeologists said.
01:46:08.000Small outreach on YouTube, but you have a much larger outreach with journalists, and you've put yourself forward, you and John Hoopes, actually, as people that journalists should talk to.
01:46:26.000There's a pyramidal structure in the island of Java in Indonesia, which the work of Danny Hillman, who's a very experienced geologist, has suggested might be as much as 25,000, 27,000 years old at the very base of it.
01:47:21.000In Danny's estimation, what the remote sensing shows is rock structures that have been cut and shaped and moved into place by human beings.
01:47:33.000And the net result of all this pressure was that Archaeological Prospection, the journal that published the paper, came under such huge pressure.
01:47:45.000There was such a huge amount of media fuss about this.
01:47:47.000And I do think actually that all of that was caused.
01:47:49.000I think poor Danny suffered because his findings were featured in my show.
01:47:55.000I think the reaction of archaeology to my show was probably why Danny got targeted.
01:48:01.000But at the end of the day, the Witchfinder General worked out and the piece was retracted, causing massive humiliation for Danny and his team.
01:48:10.000Now, what Danny and his team asked for was that criticisms be published alongside the article, but that the article not be retracted.
01:48:18.000And that seems to me to be fair enough.
01:48:21.000Flint and his colleagues have really created a huge fuss in the media about me.
01:52:32.000And none of his research was ever acknowledged in this article.
01:52:35.000And the media never, ever went to him, which is why I got in touch with him, because there's all this publicity around this site, Gunung Padang, partly because Graham's right.
01:53:28.000We're probably getting lost in the weeds here on this.
01:53:31.000Danny Hillman and his team have done years of investigative work with seismic tomography, with ground-penetrating radar, using their expertise in those technologies They are of the opinion, and we can see the image roughly in the middle at the top there.
01:53:49.000Those are photographs from Lutfi Jondry's book, not from Danny Hillman's article.
01:53:53.000This is the excavations that he did, where he has clear radiocarbon dates.
01:54:06.000This is an example of the resistivity tomography work that Danny and his team have done.
01:54:13.000In the article, there's a question mark after tunnel slash chamber.
01:54:15.000And my view is that this work needed to be taken much more seriously and not rubbished and dismissed in the way that it has been.
01:54:24.000And that I do feel that the retraction of the article, rather than the publication of opposing comments, is important.
01:54:33.000And thirdly, Ludwig Yandri has not done any of the work looking into the deep depths of Gunung Padang.
01:54:39.000His excavations have only been in the top meter or so.
01:54:42.000Can I pause you for a second here and explain what we're looking at?
01:54:44.000So the people listening, we're looking at an analysis of the ground structure.
01:54:49.000And what type of instruments were used?
01:54:54.000Seismic tomography which sends sound waves down into the ground and bounces back a reflection of what is seen, low resistivity, high resistivity, and ground penetrating radar.
01:55:05.000We don't have time to go into all of this in depth.
01:55:08.000The information has been extensively published.
01:55:10.000I've published on my website a massive article by Danny responding to the retraction of his article and I suggest that we don't waste a lot of time going on with it.
01:55:20.000Okay, but what evidence is there that this is man-made?
01:55:23.000The evidence is the interpretation that Dani and his team, who are largely geologists, have put upon the imagery that they receive from their remote sensing work.
01:55:32.000And their suggestion is that there are man-made tunnels and chambers in the depth of Gunung Padang, The stonework in Gunung Padang is not in its natural formation or natural shape that has been placed by human beings.
01:55:45.000And when you go down and you take up soil samples associated with that stonework, you find that they date back to about 25,000 years ago.
01:55:55.000None of those cores came from that tunnel or chamber or any of those features that they described.
01:55:59.000None of this is a reason for the article to be retracted.
01:56:02.000I never called for the article to be retracted.
01:56:05.000And it's still available online in its full text and all of its images there.
01:56:09.000Do you think having the word retracted across the top of an article helps the credibility of the article?
01:56:14.000Yeah, but they did not do an honest job of presenting the archaeology of this site by ignoring the major excavations that have already taken place there.
01:56:22.000And I think that that's very important.
01:56:24.000The excavations have been in the top meter.
01:56:27.000What was the findings of those excavations?
01:56:29.000Yeah, can I get the HDMI really quickly, Jamie?
01:56:33.000Okay, so on the left is actually the book published by Lou Fiondre, and I'll show you some of the trenches that he's done.
01:56:39.000So there's this megalithic architecture there, and he's gone down in all the different terraces and along many of the different walls and excavated below them so that you can get dateable material We're good to go.
01:58:20.000Now, Graham, what evidence is there that there's man-made structures or any evidence of man-made construction that's older than that there?
01:58:29.000It's the interpretation of the ground-penetrating radar and the seismic resistivity – seismic tomography work that's been done.
01:58:36.000It's the interpretation of that made by Danny and his team past a year of – Which is just this that we're looking at here?
01:58:44.000But we just don't have time to go there.
01:58:45.000I'm actually giving a presentation on Flint's influence on media and culture, and we're getting drawn into a – Because it's something that comes up and I want to clarify.
01:58:55.000But what evidence that you could show us that looks like man-made structures, man-made tunnels, man-made anything other than this stuff that's on the outside?
01:59:05.000So the presumption is that these deeper layers are older, but why?
01:59:11.000They're definitely older because of the carbon dating of the soils that have been brought up beside them.
01:59:15.000What comes to question is whether those soils were associated with anything worked by human beings.
02:00:37.000And before we could figure out exactly whether the magnetometry was accurate or not, we put in trenches to test it.
02:00:43.000And that's always what you do when you do remote sensing, whether it's remote sensing with satellite imagery, LIDAR, magnetometry, GPR, ground penetrating radar is here.
02:00:54.000You always want to make sure that you test it because you have to be questioning that your interpretation of it can be wrong because that does happen quite a bit of times.
02:01:03.000You know, it's like if you go out with a metal detector, right?
02:01:05.000And you get some signals, it's not always going to be what you want it to be, if you see what I mean.
02:01:19.000Obviously we don't have time to get into depth.
02:01:21.000Yeah, what I'll say is there's a major article by Danny published on my website which presents all his evidence and which addresses the issue of what he regards as the unfair retraction of his paper.
02:01:35.000And I don't believe his paper would have been retracted if Gunung Padang had not appeared as episode one of my Netflix series.
02:01:42.000Is that evidence to you as compelling or less compelling than Bimini Road?
02:02:09.000This is Benjamin Steele from the SEO journal, search engine journal.
02:02:16.000Thank you, Flink Dibble, for speaking with him.
02:02:21.000And we're learning that how algorithms are rewarding good faith critique by legit scientists and creators.
02:02:32.000People ask, here's just a Google search.
02:02:36.000Archaeologist Flint Dibble says, Hancock's claims reinforce white supremacist ideas, stripping indigenous people of their rich heritage, and instead giving credit to aliens or white people.
02:04:01.000And I never make that the foreground of anything that I write.
02:04:04.000I put that in there as a paragraph and I say he should not be citing these kind of sources without critiquing them because they do the harm.
02:04:22.000So the reason is, is because for a long time, Atlantis was used as a colonial justification by the crown of Spain for claiming land in the New World.
02:04:32.000And so this idea of Atlantis from the 16th, built up into the 19th century, with the book on Atlantis by Ignatius Donnelly, it described this as this kind of global superpower, That was, you know, European and that was responsible for these monuments in indigenous areas.
02:04:51.000It stripped credit away from local cultures of their heritage.
02:05:10.000Right, but go back to the quote, Jamie.
02:05:12.000But listen, this quote here, reinforce white supremacist ideas, stripping indigenous people with a rich heritage, and instead giving credit to aliens or white people.
02:05:29.000I said that not in specific relation to Hancock's claims, but in specific relation to this narrative of Atlantis that has gone back hundreds of years.
02:06:35.000That's a quote from your article published in The Conversation.
02:06:39.000This sort of race science is outdated and Lansing's debunked, especially given the strong links between Atlantis and Aryans proposed by several Nazi archaeologists.
02:06:48.000You are associating me with this, and you are attempting to get me cancelled effectively.
02:06:54.000No, I'm asking you to distance yourself from that is actually what I'm trying to do.
02:06:57.000But that's not what you're doing, though.
02:06:58.000You're associating him with that, clearly.
02:07:04.000Look at the way it's phrased on your article.
02:07:07.000This sort of race science is outdated and long since debunked, especially given the strong links between Atlantis and Aryans proposed by several Nazi archaeologists.
02:08:09.000I was referring to his take on the Olmec heads, where he described them as from an African culture.
02:08:14.000And he specifically took that from Ignatius Donnelly, who also described them that way, almost in the exact same words based on their facial appearances, despite the fact that Ann Cyphers has done excavation there and demonstrated with DNA and artifacts that these were indigenous people.
02:09:02.000But there's many people that have made those connections.
02:09:05.000Looking at those, they look Polynesian perhaps.
02:09:07.000And yet the people that have excavated it and done the DNA right at that site at San Lorenzo have shown that none of those people had African descent.
02:09:14.000Right, but what are those structures representative of?
02:09:36.000Perhaps we'll do that next, but I would just love to just complete this little point that I want to make here, which is the influence of Flint and his colleagues on media and culture.
02:09:45.000And again, we've got the Society for American Archaeology, 5,000 members.
02:11:34.000But you started off by saying we're not sitting around thinking about you.
02:11:37.000Most of my dad's colleagues, when I mentioned I'm coming on here to do this, they had no idea you'd talk about the Ice Age.
02:11:42.000I'm speaking of archaeologists like you, Flint, who see me as public enemy number one and who have quite a substantial outreach in the media.
02:12:16.000Tell me where I've claimed that you hide the evidence.
02:12:18.000You have claimed many times that we try to shut down alternative narratives, that we try to silence them.
02:12:23.000That suggests there's an archaeological conspiracy where we're all working together to have one narrative.
02:12:29.000No, it suggests that there's a strongly held point of view, there's a paradigm, and that those who go against the paradigm are likely to be attacked, like Tom Dillehay.
02:14:01.000But what they did to him is the thing that you're saying.
02:14:04.000It's a famous event from the 1990s where he invited down a series of Clovis First people, and he convinced them at Monte Verde.
02:14:09.000They came down there, they had a conversation, he showed them the evidence, and what resulted from that conversation was that entire group changing their mind on stuff.
02:14:18.000I'm not saying there were not a few bad actors.
02:14:22.000But what I am trying to say is that it's not some sort of conspiracy of everybody in archaeology against Dillahay, against Graham, against whatever.
02:15:15.000When you're public, okay, and you post something public and you get involved in a discussion about some contentious issue that's public, the whole world can attack you.
02:15:24.000So try to connect that to Graham or connect that to anything.
02:16:43.000That forms the basis of the education system about the past.
02:16:45.000Now, you like to present yourself as this small, lone voice, but frankly, by comparison with big archaeology, as you call it in your so-called scare quotes, by comparison with that, my outreach is very small, even on Netflix.
02:16:58.000Graham, I was hoping we'd have a respectful conversation here.
02:17:01.000Yes, I was hoping that you would not disrespect me in the way that you've done.
02:17:06.000I came here to present actual evidence, and I've done that.
02:17:08.000Here you have Dibble exhorted colleagues to mobilize worldwide in the battle against pseudo-archaeology.
02:17:14.000If there's any conspiracy here, who's it against?
02:18:21.000How can you claim there's an Ice Age civilization and ignore all the Ice Age evidence that we have?
02:18:25.000The Ice Age evidence that you have, don't dispute it.
02:18:27.000Of course there were hunter-gatherers in the world in the Ice Age.
02:18:30.000There's hunter-gatherers in the world now.
02:18:32.000I'm sorry, there's hunter-gatherers in the world now.
02:18:35.000There's hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforest.
02:18:37.000There's hunter-gatherers in the Namibian desert.
02:18:39.000We coexist with hunter-gatherers today.
02:18:42.000Why shouldn't an advanced civilization have coexisted with hunter-gatherers in the past?
02:18:46.000I mean, look, as I've said, I think you have an issue with the sources that you cite, and I think that you have an issue with the evidence that supports your civilization.
02:18:53.000I think we should probably take a break and clear our heads.
02:18:58.000I'm deeply unhappy that you have associated me with white supremacism, racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism.
02:19:05.000I mean, if you didn't notice, it was always the same quote recycled.
02:19:08.000So I said something once and then it gets recycled in like 15 different pieces.
02:19:21.000And I would like Graham to separate himself from that history in a stronger way.
02:19:27.000Because he goes around the world to different cultures, and he claims that instead of their ancestors building this stuff, it was done by his civilization.
02:19:36.000They were the ones that taught people around the world how to do that.
02:19:39.000But does he do that in his own backyard?
02:19:41.000Does he go to Stonehenge and say that Stonehenge was built by this lost civilization?
02:19:45.000No, he says it was built by Neolithic British people.
02:19:48.000Because I wouldn't look for a lost civilization in Northern Europe during the Ice Age.
02:21:50.000We have absolutely no hope of surviving a global cataclysm like the Younger Dryas because we are spoiled children of the world.
02:21:57.000We do not have the survival techniques.
02:22:00.000The people in the world who know how to survive are the hunter-gatherers in the world today.
02:22:04.000And if I were a survivor of this civilization, I would head for hunter-gatherers and I would try and make my home amongst them so that I could have some hope of surviving.
02:22:13.000And that's all that I'm suggesting, is that a civilization which had...
02:22:17.000Quite advanced astronomy, which was able to map the world, had a knowledge of longitude.
02:22:25.000I'm not saying they sent spaceship to the moon.
02:22:27.000I'm saying that they were destroyed at the end of the Ice Age, that there were a very small number of survivors, that those survivors settled amongst other hunter-gatherer peoples and benefited from their knowledge and exchanged knowledge with them.
02:22:40.000I am not saying that they introduced agricultural products to those people.
02:22:45.000I'm not saying they brought agriculture from where they came from.
02:22:47.000I'm saying that they helped to nurture the idea of agriculture amongst those people.
02:22:54.000I suggest you take a little bathroom break, clear our heads, relax, come back, and let's discuss some of the ancient construction.
02:25:18.000I don't know what it means exactly, but I do find it intriguing.
02:25:24.000And I see this as actually an example of the problems here because you cite Spanish colonial literature about, say, a white Quetzalcoatl coming.
02:25:32.000You talk about this as different kinds of people.
02:26:11.000The ink has been analyzed, the hides have been analyzed, and this individual has tan skin, no beard, but a feathered headdress because this is the feathered serpent guy.
02:26:21.000Actually, we can't see anything from that image, but that's not the point that I want to make.
02:26:25.000The point that I want to make is, do you think that the Spanish I think that every single source that we have of white skin in indigenous Americas comes from Spanish sources.
02:27:00.000Is there a document about this Spanish conspiracy?
02:27:05.000Do you regard the peoples of Mexico, the peoples of Colombia, the peoples of Bolivia as so stupid that they would simply accept an imposition upon them by the Spaniards?
02:27:16.000No, I think that interpreting these kind of sources is difficult.
02:27:19.000And so, Jamie, do you mind playing my video by Curly Tlapoyawa?
02:27:24.000He's an indigenous archaeologist here in Mexico.
02:27:26.000He is a co-host of the Tales from Aslantis podcast.
02:27:58.000I'm Krillit Lapoyawa, an archaeologist and cultural consultant specializing in Mesoamerica.
02:28:04.000I want to briefly touch on why expertise is so important when it comes to researching our ancestral cultures.
02:28:13.000And I'm going to use the example of a mistake involving the Feast of Panquetzalistli, a Mexica ceremony celebrating the rebirth of the sun during the winter solstice.
02:28:25.000Panquetzalistli translates to the raising of the banners in the Nahuatl language.
02:28:30.000This refers to the multiple banners that are constructed to decorate the various temples and sacred centers associated with this feast.
02:28:39.000Now, when the Spanish cronistas wrote about the feast of Panquetzalistli, they truncated the word Panquetzalistli to the first three letters, P-A-N, Pan, leaving us with La Fiesta de Pan, or the Festival of Pan.
02:28:55.000This shortening of words in colonial Spanish was pretty common, as paper was in short supply and this was an effective way of saving space.
02:29:04.000Spanish friars had developed an entire method of shorthand to accomplish this.
02:29:10.000Well, the problem arose when a non-expert looked at these writings and didn't account for this shorthand, and La Fiesta de Pan became erroneously translated as Festival of Bread.
02:29:26.000This simple mistake can cause this individual's research into Mexica festivals to go entirely off the rails, and it completely distorted the actual meaning of the festival.
02:29:39.000All because someone without adequate training decided to claim something without adequate evidence.
02:29:52.000It makes sense to me that if a group of people were conquered by white people who showed up on boats and dominated the society, that they would have a great influence on a lot of the myths and cultures.
02:30:04.000And not only that, but that they would heavily discourage deviation from the changes that they've made to those myths.
02:30:11.000And if you did that over the course of one generation, you would have a complete different narrative.
02:30:17.000What intrigues me is that whether he's described as having white skin or a beard or not, we have a tradition of a civilizing hero, Quetzalcoatl in Mexico, Bochica in Colombia, Viracocha in Bolivia,
02:30:34.000depicted as a bearded individual who comes in a time of chaos, who teaches certain skills, And then leaves.
02:30:47.000This tradition is a Pan-American tradition.
02:30:50.000David Carrasco, I think you have to respect the work of David Carrasco, has drawn attention to this.
02:30:56.000And to the notion that the magical pen of Cortez could somehow have hoodwinked an entire continent into making up myths.
02:31:06.000And I just don't think that's credible at all.
02:31:08.000I don't understand what your video is telling us either.
02:31:10.000My video is trying to explain the complexity of difficulty of interpreting Spanish sources.
02:31:15.000Can I show a different video that talks about the complexity of Quetzalcoatl as a figure?
02:31:55.000For example, the Quetzalcoatl myth that Graham frequently cites was written a hundred years after the conquest by Hispanicized indigenous scribes who were educated by Spanish priests.
02:32:06.000Hence, the overtly Christian overtones of this myth.
02:32:11.000But let's examine an indigenous Mishtek story recorded prior to the conquest.
02:32:16.000Several gods, including Katsopoat, or Lord Ninewind in Mishtek mythology, perform a mushroom ceremony and create the known world at Apoola.
02:32:27.000During this ceremony, Lord Ninewind plays music by scraping a stone around a human skull.
02:32:34.000This is a completely different picture of Quetzalcoatl than the one we get from the post-conquest myth preferred by Graham.
02:32:41.000In fact, in the Mishteka Alta today, when asked by anthropologist John Monaghan to draw Quetzalcoatl, his indigenous volunteers drew a plumed serpent surrounded by clouds.
02:32:58.000And so the key thing I'm trying to say here is that Quetzalcoatl, all these different figures, they're not all one thing that you lump together.
02:33:04.000There's a variety of different traditions.
02:33:07.000You pick and choose the one that you prefer for your story, which is fine.
02:33:10.000I think that your investigations and your beliefs are totally cool.
02:33:14.000I'm not going to convince you otherwise.
02:33:56.000We know that once indigenous people are colonized that they try to at least alter their beliefs and if not indoctrinate them into what beliefs they have.
02:34:08.000And we have recent evidence for that in North America.
02:34:12.000With how Native Americans were treated when they were put on reservations and brought into school systems and forced Christianity and told that they couldn't use their language.
02:34:22.000I mean, we have very recent evidence of human beings trying to impose their ideas on the people that they've conquered.
02:34:30.000It makes sense to me that that would be something that would also have been done by the Spaniards that entered Mexico.
02:34:41.000I'm not persuaded by that in this case.
02:34:44.000The myth is too widespread and that constant reference to a bearded figure is very odd.
02:34:51.000And as a civilization bringer in a time of chaos, in a time of disaster after a great cataclysm, Again, I mean, Flint and I can disagree on this.
02:35:10.000And I also think it's a lot more complex than that.
02:35:12.000So I study ancient Greek mythology, and you can see how these oral traditions change over time anyway, even without being conquered, right?
02:35:27.000And so, you know, you can see how Achilles' spear changes its description from a big Bronze Age style spear, the kind of spear that we see in Bronze Age graves.
02:35:36.000And then the next line, he has a smaller Iron Age style spear, the kind of thing that we see painted on Iron Age pots.
02:35:42.000And so, you know, you can see how these oral traditions adapt to what's going on around them.
02:35:47.000And I think that that's important to recognize here with these kind of traditions that are written down by, you know, Spanish-educated indigenous people and by Spanish priests as well.
02:35:58.000Also, you must take into consideration, I would imagine, that a lot of these people can't read and that they're actually probably not only being conquered by the Spaniards, but they're also being imposed upon with their language, which we know to be fact.
02:36:46.000I'd like to pick up on this, finally, on this issue of Quetzalcoatl and on Sahagun and on the interpretation of indigenous traditions.
02:36:58.000And this is in my reply to the Society for American Archaeology and their attempt to have my series reclassified as science fiction, where they suggest that all these stories were made up.
02:37:14.000David Carrasco is a leading scholar of the Americas, and he writes, What is challenging to me is Glendinens.
02:37:33.000She's just another one of these archaeologists who say that it was all made up.
02:37:36.000Glendinens claim that this Spanish political fiction of both Quetzalcoatl returning and Moctezuma's vacillation and collapse was picked up by Sahagun, who powerfully reinforced it, erroneously thinking it was an Indian belief when in fact the ruler's gesture of abdication was a very late dawning story,
02:37:53.000making its first appearance 30 or more years after the conquest.
02:37:56.000The stunning implication is that this Spanish fiction, the story of Moctezuma's paralysis, parades down the years through the literature and scholarship and is internalized by commentators less wary than Clendenin, all the way to Leon Portilla, who falls unconsciously under Cortes' charismatic pen along with the rest of us.
02:38:15.000This means that Leon Portilla's extensive Nahuatl training and sense of the Aztec ethos, not to mention Sahagun's profound familiarity with Spanish native exchanges, Thank you.
02:38:46.000Well, no, I've stated from the very beginning that it's extremely complicated, that there's a lot of different versions of Quetzalcoatl mythology, and so I think that it's wrong to say that there's only one version of that.
02:39:01.000I tend to think, though, also that this is fairly irrelevant at this point, because I think what we're still missing is any kind of accurate archaeological evidence with dates.
02:39:10.000So when you go, for example, to the Olmec heads, or you talk about Quetzalcoatl, or when you talk about any of the kind of evidence that you have in Yonagunian underwater, we're still missing dates and how this relates to your larger hypothesis of a lost Ice Age civilization.
02:39:24.000And so I think that that's important to think about well-dated evidence.
02:39:27.000So do you mind if I go into my argument about the domestication of plants and food and things like that?
02:39:33.000Could I just, since we talked about Danny Hillman and Gunung Padang, I do have a major article on my site where Danny refutes the retraction of his paper.
02:40:39.000And I would urge those who are interested in getting into this matter in depth to look in more detail at what Danny has to say in this article.
02:40:54.000There's that so-called Kujang stone or man-made artifact.
02:41:05.000These are the different units that have been identified with the remote sensing.
02:41:24.000I'm trying to find the Yeah, natural columnar rocks, Gunung Padang columnar rocks.
02:41:36.000It's the way, when you get down deep, that this material is referenced, that Danny and his team have concluded that even in the 27,000-year-old parts of Gunung Padang, we are dealing with man-made workmanship.
02:42:02.000But he's pointing out that as we go deeper, we get material which is not in its natural formation, but is in a formation that was placed by human beings.
02:42:15.000We sort of covered that before, but what's showing that it was placed by human beings?
02:43:49.000This is the correspondence between him and the editorial team from Archaeological Perspecting, which unfortunately ended up in the article being retracted.
02:44:02.000I want to point out, when I interviewed Dr. Yondry, his goal talking to me was to write a response.
02:44:07.000Like, we never got in touch with the journal to retract.
02:44:22.000And while we're on my website, I'd just like to say that I've recently put up a major article concerning Gobekli Tepe and the issue of whether we're looking at a transfer of technology or gradual evolution or both.
02:44:40.000There's been a huge amount of research done around Gobekli Tepe.
02:44:44.000Archaeologists have suggested that that research It vitiates my argument that Gobekli Tepe was a transfer of technology.
02:44:52.000I've been investigating that research in depth, and my view is it strengthens my argument enormously.
02:44:59.000But again, we're getting into material that's too far and too deep to go into here.
02:45:04.000No, I think we should get into this a little bit.
02:45:06.000What makes you think it's a transfer of technology?
02:45:09.000Well, I start off my Netflix series by saying it's an enormous sight.
02:45:15.000You can't just wake up one morning with no prior skills, no prior knowledge, no background in working with stone and create something like Gobekli Tepe.
02:45:21.000There has to be a long history behind it and that history is completely missing.
02:45:25.000To me it very strongly speaks of a lost civilization transferring their technology, their skills, their knowledge to hunter-gatherers.
02:45:32.000And what I've done in this article is I've brought up to date my investigation into Gobekli Tepe.
02:45:39.000Of course, the Natufians are dealt with at great length in this article.
02:45:57.000In research by Hakle and Gopher, for example, and of the introduction of geometric elements into the stonework in pre-gobekli tepi cultures, you find that almost all of it comes after the beginning of the Younger Dryas,
02:46:15.000not before the beginning of the Younger Dryas.
02:46:17.000There is an interesting development at Ain Malaha in Israel, also called Ainan, I think we're good to go.
02:46:42.000So that's why you think it's evidence of a transfer?
02:47:09.000Go back to Tepe, it was a sacred site.
02:47:10.000And we know that they're hunting gazelles by the thousands and harvesting wild plants.
02:47:14.000This has been published ad nauseum by people like Laura Dietrich, who have talked about the kind of plants that they're harvesting.
02:47:21.000Right, but was it possible that they just didn't bring food to this area because it was a sacred site for ceremony and ritual and perhaps not at all for people to live in?
02:47:33.000No, it seems more like they were there about half of the year.
02:47:35.000So they're there during the warm months.
02:47:37.000If you look at the harvesting season from the plant remains we have, and then the wild plants that are gathered, and then if you look at the isotope evidence and the mortality profile from the teeth of the animals that they're slaughtering, we see that they're there basically during the warm six months of the year.
02:47:53.000At Gobekli Tepe I'm talking about, yeah.
02:47:55.000For about six months out of the year, that's when people are there harvesting these.
02:47:58.000And so I sort of say they found an ecological niche and they've learned how to exploit this.
02:48:03.000And to sort of stay there for half the year, they probably went to the lowlands during the other half of the year, which is a fairly common mobile pastoral or hunter-gatherer strategy, which is where you move to where the food is in different seasons, right?
02:48:16.000And so that area is a very naturally abundant area during the warm months.
02:48:22.000And so, you know, there's so much more that's under excavation right now by Lee Clare and other colleagues that shows sort of domestic spaces around this ceremonial center that we have.
02:48:32.000I sort of think of it as like Washington, D.C. We have the ceremonial center in downtown and then we have the less nice looking areas outside.
02:48:40.000Is it possible that there was a sophisticated culture that also was hunter-gatherers because the resources were so rich that they didn't need agriculture?
02:48:48.000Yeah, I think that's what we're seeing in this period.
02:48:55.000I think they found a successful niche and they really exploited it and did a great job with it.
02:49:00.000And so I think that that's what's going on right in this period.
02:49:02.000And it's also the period where we can start to see the start of domestication.
02:49:07.000And so do you think that that also explains the resources that were required to build such immense stone structures that they had the time to do this because they had abundant food?
02:49:15.000Yeah, they had abundant food six months out of the year, and while they're there, they had the time to build those kind of structures.
02:49:21.000But were they the first of those kinds of structures, you think, that were...
02:49:25.000Well, I mean, that's a tough question to ask.
02:49:27.000So, I mean, we certainly have T-shaped pillars from other sites in the region.
02:49:31.000In fact, there were some that were found by Klaus Schmidt before he found Gobekli Tepe at Navalichori.
02:50:13.000The quarries at Gobekli Tepe are right nearby.
02:50:15.000And how do you think they moved those things?
02:50:18.000You know, there's so many different ways to move large stones.
02:50:21.000There's been so many different experiments that show with rollers or ropes, you can get enough people and know how, levers, and you can do that.
02:50:27.000And so, you know, there's so many videos on YouTube of Wally Wallington and others that show you how you can move stones weighing many, many, many tons.
02:50:36.000I don't think there's any mystery around the moving of the stones.
02:51:16.000Neolithic skyscraper in a way, but it's after the Younger Dryas.
02:51:19.000There's Tell Caramel, which has got five towers, Quotique Tepe, Guantuklu Tara, Abu Huraira.
02:51:29.000Abu Huraira is a fascinating site and it was hit by an airburst.
02:51:33.000According to the team working on the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, Abu Huraira, the destruction of Abu Huraira took place because one of those comet fragments 12,800 plus years ago exploded over Abu Huraira within 100 or 200 miles of Gobekli Tepe.
02:51:52.000I'm not an expert on this particular topic, but I know a lot of people that believe that the evidence is not there for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.
02:52:00.000Yeah, there's a huge dispute going on about it.
02:52:04.000It's an interesting discussion in science.
02:52:06.000I would like to say that the destruction is an archaeologist's best friend.
02:52:09.000So when sort of a site is destroyed suddenly from earthquakes, from volcanoes, from warfare, from fire, it actually helps preserve material for us.
02:52:17.000And so, you know, if there is this kind of global catastrophe, that should make things more preserved and easier for archaeologists to find.
02:52:25.000But isn't that dependent upon the scale of the catastrophe?
02:52:27.000Well, no, because it's not going to be incineration everywhere, because we still have hunter-gatherer evidence everywhere.
02:52:33.000Right, but it could be incineration in a lot of places, and the hunter-gatherer evidence that you have is after the fact.
02:52:40.000No, the hunter-gatherer evidence we have is from well before the fact as well.
02:52:44.000Yeah, we have hunter-gatherer evidence going back hundreds of thousands of years.
02:52:48.000Right, but have you seen the evidence of the Younger Dryas Impact Theory in terms of iridium levels, nanodiamonds?
02:52:55.000I'm not someone who's I'm more thinking about it from an archaeological point of view, which is that if there was a destruction, just like with Pompeii or Herculaneum with the pyroclastic flow, that stuff helps preserve material for us.
02:53:08.000Same thing with earthquakes knocking over buildings.
02:53:11.000Would an atom bomb preserve material for us?
02:53:14.000Yes, because the atom bomb, the very center of it might vaporize stuff, but then the whole area that gets abandoned afterwards because of the radiation, that actually is going to make that area an archaeological paradise for people once that radiation goes away.
02:53:27.000But if Randall Carlson's work on the impact to what was the ice that was covering North America...
02:53:41.000He talks about that, but he also just talks about that there's massive evidence of intense erosion, so very quick water flow that happened through an area that was absolutely devastating.
02:53:53.000I mean, look, so the more rapid a destruction is, the better it preserves for us, just like with sea level rise.
02:53:59.000Right, but dependent upon how strong the force is, right?
02:54:03.000But if it's a global catastrophe, how is it so strong everywhere, yet it's not wiping out our evidence from hunter-gatherers at this exact same time?
02:54:12.000We have ephemeral traces, footprints, campgrounds, fires, and hearths.
02:54:18.000Because human beings did survive, right?
02:54:19.000Yeah, but we have it from this exact same period.
02:54:22.000Right, but human beings did survive at that same period.
02:54:25.000And it didn't wipe out the traces of them from that period.
02:54:28.000But the traces you're talking about are stone tools and...
02:54:31.000Hearths, footprints, things like that that are extremely ephemeral, animal bones and seeds.
02:54:36.000We have all of these things from the period around this supposed destruction.
02:54:40.000But do you have them in the area where the supposed destruction occurred?
02:54:43.000We don't know where the supposed destruction happened because nobody's ever found it.
02:54:46.000But with Randall Carlson's descriptions of these massive floods of water, just hundreds of millions of pounds of water.
02:54:53.000Well, let's go to J. Harlan Bretts long before Randall Carlson.
02:54:56.000I mean, the Channel Scare Plans are an enigma.
02:54:59.000The massive water flows, I don't think anybody's disputing that massive amounts of water flow through there.
02:55:03.000It's a question of exactly when that happened and why it happened.
02:55:06.000Also, what would be left over in that area?
02:55:08.000There's not evidence of hunter-gatherers in that area from Well, I remember he showed, when he was here last, he showed sort of mammoth bones from that kind of period.
02:55:16.000No, that was from Siberia though, wasn't it?
02:55:58.000The evidence for the Younger Dryas impact is found in what are called impact proxies, and that's iridium, nanodiamonds, platinum, melt glass like trinitite, found in sites across a vast area of the Earth's surface,
02:56:14.00050 million plus square kilometers, an enormous area.
02:56:19.000Abu Herrera, next to Gobekli Tepe, happens to be one of those areas, and what they're suggesting is that a fragment of a comet We're good to go.
02:56:44.000Because that's the peak of the Beta Torids.
02:56:47.000It wasn't big enough to hit the earth and create a crater.
02:59:18.000And I've also read James Lawrence Powell, who the authors of this paper largely ignore, but who is a highly respected figure and in whose view the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis has been prematurely rejected.
02:59:34.000Bill Napier is a member of the Comet Research Group.
02:59:36.000He's the person who's connected it to the torrid meteor stream.
02:59:40.000He's talking about the evidence of a large comet about entering the inner solar system about 20,000 years ago, going into fragmentation, creating a wide debris trail through which the Earth passes twice a year.
02:59:53.000And it's a catastrophe of celestial origin which occurred around 12,900 BC, BP, before the present.
03:00:00.000Now, you're referring to a refutation paper, but would you really so quickly accept it when you look at the credentials of the people in the comet research?
03:00:10.000I mean, James Kennett, marine geologist professor at the University of California, he's a world expert in paleoceanography.
03:00:17.000Dr. Richard Firestone, James Whitker, Albert Goodyear, Alan West.
03:00:21.000There I am with Alan West at the Younger Dryas boundary.
03:00:24.000In Murray Springs, the Younger Dryas boundary is full of the signatures of a massive cosmic impact, probably an airburst, rather like the airburst that took place over Abu Huraira.
03:00:35.000I'm not expecting anybody to read these papers I'm putting up here.
03:00:38.000I'm just saying that the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis has been widely published, extensively published over the last decade, that there's a huge amount of information in support of it.
03:00:47.000There we're looking at the Younger Dryas boundary field extending on the right as far as Abu Huraira and on the left covering most of North America.
03:00:55.000It's also found in Belgium, by the way.
03:00:58.000It's found in the deep south of Chile.
03:01:06.000And this platinum anomaly documented at the Younger Dryas onset is particularly important.
03:01:13.000But the evidence of a cosmic impact at Abu Herrera, that one, I mean, we know that Michael Shermer is an opponent of my work.
03:01:21.000But even Michael Shermer, in my view, by the way, I want to thank Michael for this, a true gentleman.
03:01:26.000When he realizes he's got something wrong, he says so.
03:01:30.000And here he says, in the light of the work at Abu Herrera, he says he's going to address his priors about my theory in the light of this evidence from a massive cosmic impact over Abu Herrera.
03:01:44.000So the fact that a paper has been published which claims to refute the Younger Dryas impact Is really not anything at all.
03:01:52.000The question is, what's the depth to that refutation?
03:01:57.000And why is it that the same team who claimed to have refuted the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis in 2023 also published a requiem for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis in 2011?
03:02:09.000Clearly there was something wrong with their 2011 requiem.
03:02:13.000I am not a scholar that focuses on these kind of questions.
03:02:27.000We understand that it has some of the earliest domesticated crops there.
03:02:30.000And so the entire point is that this kind of, even if this hypothesis is true, it would not have wiped out the evidence for the civilization that you're looking for.
03:02:40.000Because we can see very clearly that if it's true at Abu Herrera, it did not wipe out the entire settlement.
03:03:34.000So basically we collect samples from every single unit that we excavate, and we put it in what's called a flotation tank, where we pump up a bunch of air to separate any charred plant material from the soil and the sediment.
03:03:46.000And then it sort of drains out right around here into a mesh, and then we can start to study it under a microscope.
03:04:12.000Right where that wheat kernel or the spikelet that the wheat seed is attached on, it attaches to the plant.
03:04:19.000And the reason for this is in wild plants, like wheats or beans or peas, It's going to propagate itself by falling off the plant easily.
03:04:27.000If birds or humans are harvesting it, it's not that it wants to, it doesn't have agency, but it propagates itself more easily by shattering easily off of the stem of the plant.
03:04:37.000On the other hand, as soon as humans start gathering it, that does nothing.
03:04:41.000Because some seeds fall, it replants itself in the field.
03:04:44.000But as soon as humans start gathering it and planting it in new fields, then all of a sudden there's an evolutionary sort of impact on the plant itself.
03:04:53.000And so what's selected for is the mutation for a seed that hangs on to the plant.
03:04:59.000Because you're cutting off the plant, taking it with you, and then planting it somewhere else.
03:05:03.000And so this is a shift in grains that we call brittle to a tough ruckus.
03:05:08.000And you can see it's kind of a clean scar right here on the left in wild wheat, while it's a much sort of tougher scar on the right.
03:05:15.000Do we know what the evolutionary mechanism is that would cause it to do that?
03:05:20.000Yeah, so there's two different genes that actually control this in wheat, for example.
03:05:24.000And so we actually know just statistically speaking and by sampling wild wheat today that this is going to exist within any field of wild wheat.
03:05:33.000There's going to be a few seeds with this genetic mutation.
03:05:36.000And then as soon as humans start collecting it and cultivating it, planting it somewhere, it's going to automatically put evolutionary pressure We're good to go.
03:06:02.000A, we have 35,000 of these now that we're studying.
03:06:05.000B, you can see the population of rice at archaeological sites.
03:06:09.000It starts off mostly as brittle, meaning it shatters easily, and over time it takes about 1,500 years for rice to evolve to become fully domesticated where it hangs onto the plant more easily.
03:06:23.000We could see this later on in the Holocene.
03:06:25.000So we're talking several thousand years later, like 5,000 years ago, in sort of the Sahara Desert during the green Sahara periods where we see the domestication of pearl millet.
03:06:35.000Same exact transition is what happens.
03:06:38.000And you can see these statistics of it happening, changing statistically over time the population of millets in these regions from, you know, a brittle ruckus that breaks off easily to a tough ruckus where the seed hangs on.
03:06:54.000It's just, yeah, it's just selectionary pressure.
03:06:58.000It's the pressure of humans now collecting it and then planting it.
03:07:02.000So as soon as there's one seed that's like that with that mutation, it slowly proliferates every single time humans replanted in a new field.
03:08:02.000In fact, Gordon Hillman first worked out this would happen really rapidly, that it would take just a few hundred years for the population of these plants to change over.
03:08:10.000Now we know it takes a few thousand years for it to fully, the full population at archaeological sites to go from wild, breaking off easy types to domesticated, hanging on to the plant types.
03:09:44.000And this is about the underground vara that Yima is said in myth to have created following a disastrous cataclysm.
03:09:57.000But is it possible that this cycle of domesticating wheat and beans and all these different things has taken place many, many times?
03:10:04.000And that if you left them alone, they would go back to the wild form where if there was a disaster and people stopped growing them in this particular region, how long would it take for them to revert back to their original state?
03:10:19.000How many thousands of years do you think?
03:10:20.000Well, I don't know because we, I mean, we've, I'd have to look that up because I know that we've observed this kind of stuff, feral, domesticates going feral, but I don't have that off.
03:10:29.000And you said how many years from the original till the whole crop?
03:10:40.000Years ago, around the time of the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, and then people are resorted to hunter-gatherers again, and it takes a long time before they start using agriculture again.
03:12:13.000I mean, I know we're in the middle of this crazy debate, but just the wonder of nature itself...
03:12:20.000The complexity involved in these natural life forms adapting to their environment is so fascinating.
03:12:26.000And the fact that it's such a contentious issue amongst biological creatures, specifically human beings, because of religious implications.
03:12:33.000But if you just look at it in terms of what we know for sure with plants, it is such a bizarre, bizarre process.
03:12:41.000It's so fascinating and complex and there's so much going on.
03:12:46.000And just what their understanding of the communication that plants have with each other through mycelium and the different organisms that exist in the earth and that they're sharing resources and like what a bizarre, fascinating world.
03:14:32.000So, to get back to your question though, because I think you asked a good question, when we think about sort of this change over time with domestication, we also see a change in time in the kind of stone tools that people are using.
03:14:42.000So, it takes thousands of years before we start seeing these sickle type blades associated with harvesting these crops, right?
03:14:49.000And then the next step we can take is this introduction, this sort of transfer of technology that agriculturalists do When they move into Europe and elsewhere.
03:15:01.000I was actually doing the flotation to collect the plants from this project when I was a student.
03:15:05.000And this is in Albania, directed by University of Cincinnati.
03:15:09.000So these are the trenches that we excavated.
03:15:11.000But this is one of the earliest agricultural sites in Europe from about 6400 BC, right?
03:15:17.000And what's really cool is we can see what this kind of introduction looks like.
03:15:21.000We see a full package introduced at the same time.
03:15:24.000We see multiple different domesticated plants, multiple different domesticated animals, as well as new types of artifacts like stone tools and pottery of different types than what the hunter-gatherers were using there.
03:15:45.000And so that's one of the key things is we have parallels for this.
03:15:48.000And so when we go back to this sort of end of the Stone Age type period where we're maybe looking for something like a seed bank or a shelter that's keeping these Noah's Ark or something like that, what we can also look at is it doesn't look like anything's introduced.
03:16:03.000These plants and animals get domesticated in the natural regions where their wild progenitors were growing.
03:16:11.000And so there's not like an introduction of a new species that was not there.
03:16:15.000Instead, we already saw these wild plants in place in the Ice Age in these spaces, and then we see we can date directly these with radiocarbon, right?
03:16:25.000There's no reason to assume anything else.
03:16:28.000We date plant remains and bones directly.
03:16:31.000And then lastly, I just want to talk about not archaeological evidence, but paleoecological evidence.
03:16:37.000So these are kind of cores taken in lakes, lagoons, swamps on the seafloor.
03:16:43.000And this is what a palynologist, so those are people that study pollen, look at.
03:16:47.000And so this map is from an article that I was actually a co-author on, looking at different paleoecological proxies around the Greek peninsula.
03:16:56.000Yeah, this is pollen under an electron microscope.
03:16:59.000From Dartmouth College, I think it is, this image.
03:17:02.000And so, you know, we have these kind of cores that give us a sense of the landscape.
03:17:07.000And, you know, we can track, for example, the rise of different agricultural societies.
03:17:12.000From pollen that floats through the air.
03:17:14.000We can track, for example, tree crops when they start getting introduced and when they become common.
03:17:19.000We can track grains and when they come in and become very common in these different regions.
03:17:23.000And the key thing I want to draw your attention to is a lot of these proxies, these cores, are taken from coastal areas.
03:17:29.000And some are even taken from underwater.
03:17:31.000So we have underwater cores from the seabed, and we can reconstruct these sunken landscapes and this sort of ecosystem that was there.
03:17:40.000And nowhere do we see an ecosystem of agriculture, arboriculture, or anything like that.
03:17:46.000Instead, we see very natural landscapes, the type of landscapes that hunter-gatherers would live in.
03:17:51.000And so this, I think, is really important because it's not just that there's no evidence for agriculture that early.
03:17:58.000We have evidence against it from those pollen cores, but also this article by Peter Richardson and colleagues points out that agriculture, it was probably too hostile of a condition for agriculture in the Ice Age.
03:18:10.000The reason why is because there's too little CO2. Plants need carbon dioxide.
03:18:16.000To be able to propagate and grow and be grown intensively in particular.
03:19:06.000We come down on the stub of a wall, and we change what we're doing to follow what we know, which is that wall, and we expose it.
03:19:14.000When we found the griffin warrior tomb at Pilos, for example, we found the corner on the very first day.
03:19:18.000And by the third day, we already expanded the trench so that we could catch what we know is there.
03:19:23.000And so it's the same kind of thing when you dig a layer.
03:19:25.000It's the same thing when you sort of test a hypothesis like Graham's, which is we want to work from what we do know, what we do know from the Ice Age and what we do know from right after this period of domestication.
03:19:37.000And so what we do know is all this kind of natural evidence about the climate, about the ecology, and about how domestication actually happens.
03:19:45.000And so that's why I think that, unlike the other part with the Ice Age sort of coastal stuff, I think that's sort of like, why do we keep finding tens of thousands of Ice Age sites that are hunter-gatherers?
03:19:55.000It's a bit of a coincidence we don't find your civilization.
03:19:59.000It's not tens of thousands, it's 3,000 sites.
03:21:41.000We see some sheen on sickles that show that people were cutting wild grasses and using the seeds.
03:21:46.000We do see all of that but we don't see domestication.
03:21:49.000The steps that begin to lead us towards domestication begin after the Younger Dryas and I think that's the elephant in the room.
03:21:55.000I think that what happened there during the Younger Dryas is extremely mysterious and I don't think we have the whole story.
03:22:02.000And I'm simply proposing that the survivors of a civilization who were in very small numbers Traveled around the world seeking refuge, sharing their knowledge with those they took refuge amongst and sharing the knowledge of those they took refuge amongst.
03:22:18.000It was an exchange, not a one-way trip.
03:22:21.000And they did not bring plants and seeds with them.
03:22:24.000They worked with what was locally available.
03:22:26.000And that's precisely what we see happening after 12,900 years ago in this whole area of hundreds, thousands of square miles around Gobekli Tepe going right down into the Jordan Valley.
03:22:37.000Abu Herrera being a particularly interesting example, very close to Gobekli Tepe, is the first steps being taken towards domestication.
03:22:45.000There have been multiple attempts to harvest wild grains before that, but no domestication.
03:22:50.000Suddenly we see the domestication happening.
03:22:52.000And of course it's happening with locally available plants.
03:22:54.000I've never said that they introduced plant species from elsewhere.
03:22:58.000But if they're introducing the technology of agriculture, that would imply that they had agriculture beforehand, which, as I'm trying to show, it doesn't make any sense.
03:23:06.000You need to invent new species of plants.
03:23:08.000You need to go against all the evidence that we have.
03:23:33.000What do you not understand about the word lost?
03:23:36.000I don't know what they were growing, but what I'm mystified by is this sudden surge towards domestication, which you rightly say is a long, slow process.
03:24:30.000It's just planting them in the ground.
03:24:32.000And that's why I think that there's something odd about the Younger Dryas episode.
03:24:38.000And to me, that's something odd when I combine it with mythology from all around the world about the destruction of a great civilization in a global cataclysm About the fact that there were a few survivors, about the suggestion that they traveled around the world sharing their knowledge and ideas,
03:24:55.000that's why I think that the spark for the agricultural revolution that we see in that area was introduced.
03:25:02.000Not the agriculture itself, not the plants themselves.
03:26:57.000Was the climate shift the trigger for agriculture?
03:27:01.000It had to be the trigger for something, right?
03:27:03.000Whenever there's a massive change in the environment, people adapt to that change.
03:27:08.000And if you look at the sophistication levels of societies over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, they always move towards a more sophisticated, they figure out new ways, new methods, they get better at things.
03:27:20.000It just makes sense that they would eventually figure out agriculture.
03:27:24.000In this area, there were multiple attempts to figure out agriculture.
03:27:27.000Right, but there was also probably multiple attempts to figure out how to make a boat before they figured out how to make a submarine.
03:27:33.000I mean, so I tend to think that what we see with our record is it's very heterogeneous.
03:27:38.000So that's why we see agriculture showing up at different times in different places.
03:27:42.000And so I think that that's really key to get across.
03:27:45.000I do think that this climatic change, it introduced more CO2, it introduced more humidity and rainfall that made agriculture actually possible, sort of as an intensive undertaking to do.
03:27:58.000And so I think that that's really important to acknowledge.
03:28:00.000But I don't want to sort of say that human agencies didn't have something to do with that because humans were the ones that chose to change from just gathering to planting.
03:28:29.000Because whatever it is, one of the more fascinating things is Robert Shock out of Boston University, the geologist who examined the erosion in the Temple of the Sphinx and determined it to be thousands of years of rainfall.
03:28:45.000And which would predate the Sphinx by quite a bit because this is all stone that had been moved by human beings and it had been used to construct the Sphinx and this this temple the Sphinx had been carved out it's very clear that it was carved out and you see these massive fissures that look exactly like water erosion he specifically said that he showed these images To other geologists without telling them what they were looking at.
03:29:12.000And they almost unanimously said that it was water erosion over thousands of years of rainfall.
03:29:17.000And then when he would show them exactly what he was telling them to describe, then they didn't want to have any part of it because they're like, okay, now you're saying something that's really crazy because now you're saying that this structure is 11,000 years old as opposed to, you know, 4,500 years old.
03:29:47.000So if you could hook me up again, Jamie, to the HDMI. And again, credit to my wife, Santa, who has taken every risk with me, every step, every dive for the last 30-plus years.
03:30:03.000This is her aerial photograph of the Sphinx enclosure and of the Sphinx temple, so-called.
03:30:16.000Sphinx Temple directly in front of the Sphinx, so-called, and the Valley Temple to the left as we view it.
03:30:24.000And you can see that the Sphinx is a rock-hewn structure cut out of the bedrock with a trench around it.
03:30:32.000And if we go in here, the notion that the Sphinx bears the marks of precipitation-induced weathering is an evolution of an idea that the late great John Anthony West had many, many years ago.
03:30:46.000You've had John on your show before we passed away.
03:31:11.000It was he who brought Robert Schock to the Giza Plateau.
03:31:15.000And Robert took a look at the erosion around the Sphinx and eventually came to the conclusion The best explanation for it was that this Sphinx enclosure had been subjected to at least a thousand years of extremely heavy rainfall.
03:31:32.000And Robert Schock right now puts that back to around the 10,000 BC date, 12,000 plus years ago during the Younger Dryas.
03:31:40.000When indeed there were heavy rains in Egypt.
03:31:44.000And it's these deep vertical fissures in the side of the enclosure wall which most clearly demonstrate what he's talking about.
03:31:53.000The rain water pouring off the edge of the plateau.
03:31:57.000Would have carved, would have selectively cut out the softer areas of rock and created these fissures that we see through it and this rounded, scalloped profile in Robert Schock's view and in mine.
03:32:07.000And I've had Robert Schock on as well.
03:32:44.000This happens again and again with archaeologists, unfortunately.
03:32:48.000Now, I'll just complete this point because it's often said that the Sphinx was the work of the pharaoh Khafre.
03:32:54.000And that these two temples were the work of the Pharaoh Kafre, particularly the Vali Temple that we see on the right there.
03:33:00.000There's no inscriptions in the Sphinx Temple, but when we come to the Vali Temple, what we're looking at is a limestone core, and those limestone blocks were actually taken out of the Sphinx Trench.
03:33:13.000Which was then faced in a later time with granite.
03:33:17.000And there's a quote from Robert Schock there who's saying that basically the original temples were limestone and that they were faced with granite.
03:33:30.000Now, that's the interior of the temple.
03:33:32.000You can see that there's definitely two phases of construction there.
03:33:36.000No dispute that that's Old Kingdom Egypt.
03:33:39.000And then there's the limestone massive megalithic walls behind it, which are heavily eroded, as you can see, even from here.
03:33:45.000Now, interestingly, is that temple really associated with the Pharaoh Khafre?
03:33:50.000In 1947, I.E.S. Edwards, who was one of the leading Egyptologists of his time, wrote this.
03:33:57.000Around each doorway is a band of hieroglyphic inscription giving the name and titles of the king.
03:34:02.000No other inscriptions or relief occur anywhere else in the building.
03:34:05.000That's been taken to assume that the name of the king was given as Khafre.
03:34:09.000Actually, Edwards corrected himself in 1993. Around each doorway was carved a band of hieroglyphic inscription giving the name and titles of the king, but only the last words, beloved of the goddess Bastet and beloved of the goddess Hathor, are preserved.
03:34:23.000No other inscriptions occur anywhere else in the building.
03:34:26.000In other words, there's nothing in that temple that directly connects it to the pharaoh Khafre.
03:34:32.000But what's interesting is the way that that granite facing, which certainly was done in the Old Kingdom, has actually been the interior of the granite has actually been cut to match the heavily weathered limestone that it's covering.
03:36:07.000So first off, I want to sort of show this is what it looks like even the neck.
03:36:10.000You don't see the neck today because they expanded the headdress as a support for the head.
03:36:16.000And so the point is that there's these different layers of this limestone here that we can understand geologically.
03:36:22.000And so there's this very dense limestone that's up by the head, and then the rest of the limestone is much more fragile and porous.
03:36:31.000So I do want to be clear, how do we date the Sphinx?
03:36:34.000What kind of evidence archaeologically are we using?
03:36:36.000And so what that comes from is largely radiocarbon dates from the pyramids themselves.
03:36:41.000So pieces of wood that were in between the blocks of the pyramids have been radiocarbon dated and definitively tell us that the pyramids were built during the Old Kingdom, right?
03:36:52.000Didn't they do work on the pyramids at multiple stages where they would probably reseal things and surface things and clean things?
03:37:01.000If they were constructed 12, 13, 20,000 years ago and people were still inhabiting them 5,000 years ago, wouldn't it make sense that they would do things to them?
03:37:10.000Well, we have inscriptions in there from areas that are sealed off from the actual construction, graffiti from the workmen, referring to, for example, Friends of Khufu and different workmen gangs that are in there.
03:38:56.000And so this is a photo of some of these quarries, and I want to point out that the quarry walls look a lot like exactly the walls of the Sphinx itself.
03:39:03.000It has the same kind of erosion on it.
03:39:05.000It has the same kind of rough working on it.
03:39:08.000And so what you're actually seeing with the Sphinx is you're seeing this roughened shape from quarrying, which is then built with nicer stones around it.
03:39:16.000Right, but we're talking about the temple, the Sphinx, the outside structure is what Robert Schock was discussing.
03:39:21.000That shows much more clear indication of the water erosion.
03:39:25.000Not necessarily this, which shows a lot of kind of different erosion.
03:39:29.000By the way, this restoration on the pores of the Sphinx is modern.
03:39:51.000Graham, you would know more than I do.
03:39:53.000I think it's quite a bit too, but it doesn't really matter to me.
03:39:55.000I think whether geologists agree with him or not, whether archaeologists agree with him or not, he's spoken his truth, he's made his case, and I think it's a strong and compelling case.
03:40:04.000And what I'm trying to do is present the evidence that goes against him, right?
03:40:07.000But when you look at those fissures that are in that wall, You see the same thing on quarries there.
03:40:13.000It's the same exact kind of fissures on this is just a completely different quarry in a different area of Giza.
03:40:18.000That's not the most specific example of it though.
03:40:20.000If you show other examples of that wall.
03:40:23.000There's other examples of that wall that are much more rounded out.
03:40:49.000That takes a lot of experimentation, and I've seen no evidence that shows how to date this kind of erosion to 12,000 years ago or something like that.
03:40:59.000Can you show images from what you were looking at when it shows the water erosion?
03:41:33.000And if you're talking about the different layers of stone, which are softer in some layers and harder in other, if you did have that kind of water flowing through it, it would make sense that the softer layers would be more eroded.
03:41:45.000And that's Robert Schock's contention.
03:41:47.000And how are you going to date that, though, to however long ago?
03:43:34.000Well, yeah, I think if we're going to talk about archaeological evidence, we need directly dated stuff.
03:43:38.000And one of the things that's fascinating about Egypt is the discovery of older construction methods that are below, and very sophisticated, below the surface.
03:43:46.000Different temples were built on previous construction.
03:43:50.000I mean, that happens in every culture, where you see sort of spaces being reused in different ways.
03:43:55.000The Temple of Horus at Edfu, where the Atlantis story is told in an ancient Egyptian context, is a good example of that, because the Temple of Horus at Edfu was just the latest incarnation of a series of older temples that had stood on that site.
03:44:10.000It is a regular issue in ancient Egypt.
03:44:13.000And so how much time are we talking about then?
03:44:16.000So if we go back to 4,500 years ago, which is the established date of the construction of the Great Pyramid, right?
03:45:15.000I mean, but we have no evidence from the Giza Plateau of any occupation that early, and that's one of the most intensively explored archaeological landscapes in the world.
03:45:25.000In terms of artifacts or seeds or food.
03:45:27.000We have nothing that dates back that old.
03:45:29.000The question is, like, what would be left?
03:45:32.000Well, we'd find stuff just like we find stuff everywhere.
03:45:34.000Is there a point of no return, though?
03:45:37.000Is there a time period, whether it's 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, where all the stuff you're looking for would have already been consumed by the Earth?
03:45:44.000No, because when you work in stone, this survives.
03:45:48.000Stone tools, fire pottery, bones themselves are going to survive in that kind of environment.
03:45:54.000What do we think they used to transport these stones, cut these stones, place them, and how did they have a mathematical understanding of geometry?
03:46:03.000To the point where they could put together this immense structure of 2,300,000 stones.
03:46:09.000If you think about everybody else that was alive 4,500 years ago, you don't think of anything even remotely as sophisticated as Egypt.
03:46:26.000Yeah, and I mean, but the Egyptians tell us that they do it.
03:46:29.000They tell us the names of their engineers that design it, like Imhotep, and they have depictions of them moving enormous stones and statues that take, you know, 50, 60 people.
03:47:57.000You get a series of actually dozens of 70-ton granite blocks up to 300 feet above the base of the pyramid to form the ceiling of the King's Chamber and the floor and the ceilings of the relieving chambers above the King's Chamber.
03:48:14.000No matter how much wet sand you've got, you're not going to get them 300 feet in the air.
03:48:42.000But I find it difficult to see how your wet sand example gets 70 ton granite blocks 300 feet in the air.
03:48:50.000But you've got to make the concession that there's such a jump between what these people were able to do and what everybody else was able to do.
03:49:15.000It's as different to the rest of the world as to hunter-gatherer civilizations that are in the Amazon to people that are living in Manhattan.
03:49:22.000And that's why even in the Roman period, Egypt was a tourist destination, you know, to go there and see these marvels.
03:49:28.000And so ever since they've been built, it's become a tourist destination because they're so visually striking and they really grab at everybody's imagination, right?
03:49:38.000And so there's something very enigmatic about that.
03:49:41.000But I don't want to sort of say just because it's enigmatic and mysterious that we should not give credit to these people because they were smart people.
03:49:49.000No one's saying don't give credit to these people.
03:49:51.000I think even people that are dating Egypt back, like the hieroglyphs that date it back to more than 30,000 years, it's the same people.
03:50:01.000No one's saying it's different people that did it.
03:50:03.000What everyone's saying is, like, how did they achieve the level of sophistication that they absolutely undeniably had at the very most recent 4,500 years ago?
03:50:15.000So just that alone, like, what the fuck was going on there?
03:51:01.000So this is another one of Santa's amazing pictures of the Great Pyramid from the air.
03:51:07.000The ancient Egyptians spoke of a time called Zep Tepe, the first time when the gods walked the earth.
03:51:14.000And if we're going to find out when that was, you need to have knowledge of an obscure astronomical phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes.
03:51:24.000Now, we all know that we, everybody's heard the song, We Live in the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
03:51:31.000Because the Earth wobbles on its axis and it's the viewing platform from which we observe the stars, it changes the times that particular stars rise in times of year and it changes the positions of those stars in the sky as viewed from the Earth.
03:51:47.000Right now, at dawn on the spring equinox, the sun rises against the background of the constellation of Pisces.
03:51:52.000We live, if you like, in the age of Pisces, and we will do for the next hundred years or so.
03:51:57.000But because of the precessional wobble, we're going to move into the age of Aquarius in about a hundred years.
03:52:01.000That just means that the constellation of Aquarius will house the sun on the spring equinox in that time because of the precessional wobble.
03:52:09.000And these shifts take place at the rate of about one degree every 72 years.
03:52:14.000The discovery is attributed to a Greek astronomer and mathematician called Hipparchus.
03:52:22.000And we're looking at 127 BC. But these guys, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Deschend, in an amazing piece of work called Hamlet's Mill, strongly dispute that.
03:52:35.000And they suggest that we're looking at an extremely ancient knowledge of procession.
03:52:40.000The worldwide heritage of a lost civilization to which all subsequent civilizations in all parts of the globe, forgetful of the source of the precious legacy they received, are the ungrateful heirs.
03:52:50.000Giorgio de Santillana was professor of the history of science at MIT. Hertha von Deschen was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University.
03:52:59.000They refer to the fact that a series of numbers keep cropping up in ancient myths all around the world, associated with imagery.
03:53:07.000And those numbers are all based on the number 72. I have to be quick about this, but 72 divided by 2 is 36. 72 plus 36 is 108. 108 divided by 2 is 54. There's a whole series of numbers in ancient mythology, far more ancient than the Greeks,
03:53:44.000And here we see the great serpent wrapped around the body of Mount Mandera, and teams of demons and angels are pulling on the body of the serpent.
03:53:56.000And this is seen as an image of precession, of the processional wobble by Santillana and Von Deschend.
03:54:04.000And they point out that it's not only expressed in myth, We're good to go.
03:54:26.000Angkor Wat is, like the Great Pyramid, is aligned to within a fraction of a single degree of true north, south, east, and west.
03:54:33.000And on the spring equinox, if you go to Angkor and stand at the end of that long causeway right in the center, you'll observe this and you'll only observe it then.
03:54:40.000You'll observe the sun rising directly over the central tower and sitting on top of the central tower of Angkor Wat.
03:54:46.000This site, nobody disputes it, is an equinoctial marker.
03:54:50.000It's designed to celebrate the spring equinox.
03:54:52.000And that's what you see at that time and at that time only.
03:55:35.000Because degrees are divided into 60 minutes.
03:55:39.000So we're talking about three arc minutes, a tiny fraction of a single degree of error in the Great Pyramid.
03:55:44.000The Great Pyramid seems to be speaking to the earth.
03:55:48.000It's not only aligned almost precisely to true north, it's placed very close to latitude 30, one third of the way between the equator and the North Pole.
03:55:56.000And most mysteriously of all, if you take the height of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by 43,200, which is a precessional number, it's one of those numbers, you get the polar radius of the Earth.
03:56:09.000And if you measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by the same number, you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth.
03:56:17.000So we have a monument that is perfectly aligned to geographical north and that encodes the dimensions of the earth On a scale based on a key motion of the Earth itself, the precession of the Earth's axis.
03:56:36.000But if anybody wants to freeze the frame and look at this slide, all this information comes from IES Edwards about the statistics of the Great Pyramid and the calculations are there.
03:58:10.000It's an epoch of several hundred years.
03:58:13.000But the constellation of Leo was the age of Leo, was rising, housing the sun 12,600 years ago.
03:58:22.000Procession can be used to fix the date of monuments, still is today.
03:58:25.000The Hoover Dam has a star map built into it, which freezes the skies above the Hoover Dam.
03:58:31.000And the reason that is there, the architect said, in remote ages to come, intelligent people with knowledge of procession would be able to discern the astronomical time of the dam's construction.
03:58:44.000So, let's use this processional tool to consider the age of the whole Giza Plateau.
03:58:50.000I strongly reaffirm, I do not insist that the pyramids are 12,000 years old.
03:58:55.000I do insist that the Sphinx is 12,000 years old.
03:58:58.000I think it's a very strong argument that Robert Shock has made.
03:59:01.000But I do think the ground platforms for the Sphinx were there.
03:59:03.000I think for the pyramids were there 12,000 years ago, and I think the project was completed much later by the ancient Egyptians.
03:59:11.000You need to know a bit about Egyptian mythology.
03:59:13.000The god Osiris, who walked the earth in the legendary Zeb Tepe the first time, murdered by 72 conspirators, another one of those processional numbers, eventually becomes the ruler of the ancient Egyptian afterlife kingdom, which is called the Duat,
03:59:28.000which is both an underworld and a region of the sky.
03:59:32.000And here's Robert Boval's Orion correlation.
03:59:35.000And one of Robert's strongest critics is Ed Krupp from the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, who doesn't accept the correlation.
03:59:43.000Nevertheless, he does accept that according to the pyramid text, the pharaoh rose to the stars as Orion.
03:59:48.000Egyptian astronomy recognized Orion, at least his belt, as the celestial incarnation of Osiris.
03:59:54.000And I want to pay tribute to Robert Boval.
03:59:56.000He's another researcher in this alternative field.
03:59:59.000Who has suffered massive heart-rending attacks by the academic establishment and yet who has contributed a key idea that is worthy of further consideration.
04:00:11.000One of the reasons I don't separate the Great Pyramids from the ancient Egyptians is that there are four shafts cut through the body of the Great Pyramid.
04:00:20.000The southern shaft of the King's Chamber points directly at the belt of Orion, specifically at the lowest of the three stars, as it crosses the meridian, which is the north-south line in the sky, in the epoch that the pyramids are supposedly built, around 2500 BC. And so do all the other four shafts also target stars in that epoch,
04:00:41.000the epoch of 2500 BC. But, when we come back to the Sphinx, we have to remember this alignment is slow.
04:00:50.000It would have remained recognizable for more than a thousand years, roughly the younger Dryas, roughly from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago.
04:00:58.000What confronts us at Giza, in my view, is a three-dimensional representation of the sky of about 12,000 800 to 11,600 years ago.
04:01:11.000We have the Sphinx looking due east at the constellation of Leo.
04:01:15.000At the moment, the Sun bisects the horizon.
04:01:18.000We find that the constellation of Orion is sitting due south on the meridian with its three belt stars in the same pattern as the three great pyramids on the ground.
04:01:26.000And not only that, but precession has caused the orientation of the belt stars to change.
04:01:30.000In 2500 BC, they were in the wrong orientation.
04:01:34.00010,500 BC, they're in the right orientation.
04:01:39.000And I'm just asking, are we looking at the date stamp of Zep Tepe, the first time, written in the astronomical language of precession?
04:01:47.000And lastly, in case anybody doubts that we've made up these images, these are shots from Stellarium.
04:01:53.000This is 10,600 BC. This is the due east view from Giza, looking at the constellation of Leo rising in direct line with the gaze of the Sphinx.
04:02:03.000As the sun breaks the horizon, Leo is a bit higher.
04:02:07.000If we look due south at that moment, we'll see the constellation of Orion sitting due south on the meridian.
04:02:14.000And finally, we have Orion and the Sphinx in this single image.
04:02:19.000These are genuine images from Stellarium.
04:02:21.000Anybody can have a computer software program and go look at the ancient skies.
04:02:26.000And the ancient skies tell us that there's this astonishing connection between the Sphinx in its equinoctial alignment and the constellation of Leo and between the great pyramids and the constellation of Orion as it looked 12,500 years ago.
04:02:40.000Flint, what is your take on the understanding of the processional equinoxes?
04:03:13.000It even aligns reasonably well with the equinox.
04:03:15.000But we don't have any examples of, say, a constellation sign facing another constellation sign.
04:03:21.000It's a one-off example that, as I started at the very beginning, archaeology is built upon patterns.
04:03:28.000And so a one-off example to me is not convincing that that's the intention of that, is to have it facing Leo, because we only have this one example.
04:03:37.000And it's an interesting idea, but I don't see it as proven at all.
04:03:44.000If we want to get into some of the math, so look, I had surgery this last year and I was listening to one of your podcasts, Graham, while I was zonked out of my mind on painkillers.
04:04:01.000But so I wanted to check out this math about the pyramid.
04:04:05.000And so, I mean, I know that you did not originate with this math, but you use it a lot to explain how cultures see the procession.
04:04:13.000And so, in a sense, you take the height of the pyramid, 146.5 meters, you're trying to see how it relates to the polar radius of the Earth, 6,356,000 meters, and then you're using this precession number 72, which is the amount that the Earth's wobble changes by one degree is 72 years.
04:05:37.000You take the polar radius of the Earth, 6,356,000, divide that by 420, divide it by our precession, 72, and you get the solution to this problem, which is 210.185.
04:05:50.000Let's round that to 210. Which is pretty cool because that's half of 420. Plus it's 3 times 7 times 10. And then when you do it in reverse, 420 times 15,120, which is that processional number of 72 times 210, and you get 6,350,400.
04:06:07.000It's 99.91% accurate, more accurate than the height of the Great Pyramid.
04:06:12.000So every time you smoke a joint, You are connecting with the Earth mathematically.
04:06:16.000The reality is that math is there to find relationships between numbers.
04:06:20.000And so we can go and find those very easily if we work them out.
04:06:24.000And I'm not saying that you did this in reverse.
04:06:26.000I'm saying that we're always going to find mathematical relationships between such numbers.
04:06:31.000And so that's what I think is really important here to think about, that it's always going to be there if you look.
04:06:37.000It's not something that the Egyptians necessarily encoded in there.
04:06:41.000That's a large assumption, if you see what I mean.
04:06:44.000What doesn't make sense to me is how do you think they were able to align the pyramid, the true north, south, east, and west, within such a slight degree of error?
04:06:55.000And do you think they had knowledge at all about the processional equinoxes?
04:07:01.000For the second one, I'd say I see no evidence of knowledge of the processional equinoxes in ancient Egyptian architecture.
04:07:09.000In terms of the first question, aligning it with True North, there's different ways you can do that with the North Star or by even on an equinox, if you hold up an obelisk or a stick and you trace the shadow that it makes, you're going to end up getting True North Southeast West.
04:07:24.000And so there's different ways that they could have worked out what True North was.
04:07:36.000Yeah, but just be kind of beyond smart.
04:07:38.000That's what freaks me out about the whole subject.
04:07:41.000It's like, how was this, regardless of the argument about the date, whatever it is, humans built it, they did somehow, they made something that is so immense and so mind-blowing that today people scratch their heads and say, how?
04:07:56.000Yeah, and I think that that's such a cool thing when you think about the past.
04:07:59.000You know, they didn't have TV. They didn't have Joe Rogan to listen to.
04:08:04.000And so, you know, I fully agree with Graham that a lot of ancient cultures are looking at the stars.
04:08:09.000And we can track different times when they're aligning things with solstices, equinoxes, or different...
04:08:15.000What do you make of what looks like ancient drill marks and all these different bizarre ways it seems like they were carving the stones out that's kind of inexplicable?
04:08:26.000Yeah, see, I'm not sure if I'd say it's inexplicable.
04:08:29.000You oftentimes see those drill marks, and so they're not as precise as some people always claim online and stuff like that.
04:08:36.000Not just that they were precise, but that it required a drill that moves at an insane speed.
04:08:40.000Well, I think it required a lot of sand.
04:08:42.000It was the abrasion of the sand that actually did that.
04:08:45.000And so the sand itself is just slowly abrading down the granite.
04:09:28.000It's the three pyramids on the ground and their relationship to Orion at the same moment that the Sphinx equinoctially targeted very precisely, not slightly, but perfectly due east.
04:09:39.000It's gazing at its celestial counterpart in the sky.
04:09:42.000And the Milky Way is in position over the Nile River as well at the same time.
04:09:48.000It's a picture of the sky that we're looking at at Giza.
04:09:50.000A picture of the sky 12,600 years before our time that we're looking at at Giza.
04:09:55.000And I don't think that's a coincidence.
04:09:57.000I think that's a deliberate, intentional date stamp that's been placed on that place.
04:10:05.000A whole complex of monuments on the Giza Plateau and indeed the Nile River as well, which are being put on the ground to mirror the sky at that time.
04:10:15.000And I think it's worth taking seriously.
04:10:17.000And then we add the issue of the erosion of the Sphinx to this, which also puts it back to 12,000 years.
04:10:24.000And I think it's unfortunate that archaeology is so hurried to dismiss all of this and so unwelcoming to the possibility that we might be missing something in the human story.
04:10:36.000Can I give a little conclusion myself?
04:10:53.000I'm here to try to share the kind of evidence that we have and what archaeologists actually do.
04:10:58.000And I really do strongly believe that we do update with new evidence.
04:11:02.000I think that every single paper we publish is trying to change the paradigm of how we see the past with new methods, new evidence, and new things like that.
04:11:10.000And what we're starting to realize is that Humans were very resilient and very innovative.
04:11:15.000We're seeing these mammoth bone structures going back 30,000 years, something like that, 20,000 years.
04:11:23.000But so we're seeing this evidence for sort of major hunter-gatherer monuments that is growing and really changing our picture of who we are.
04:11:31.000But at the same time, I want to say that archaeology is very much about cultural heritage around the world.
04:11:36.000We need to give credit to the people that did things and we need to really understand how modern people see their own cultural heritage and respect that.
04:11:44.000And so I just want to give a shout out to everybody listening from all over the world.
04:11:51.000But lastly, not lastly, I have a couple things I want to say, but I want to say there's major threats to archaeology that are going on in the world right now.
04:11:57.000There was just a major BBC article from yesterday.
04:12:00.000Wales, where I am right now, there's a 20% across the board cut to cultural heritage in Wales.
04:12:05.000They're talking about closing the National Museum in Cardiff.
04:12:09.000The National Museum of Wales, one of the jewels of that sector there.
04:12:13.000And so I want to draw everybody's attention.
04:12:16.000To this petition in front of the Welsh Parliament to try to get this debated because it's really important that these scale of cuts do not happen.
04:12:24.000Everybody that's listening, Graham, I think you and me can agree that archaeological research is important.
04:12:30.000You could not do the research you do without the kind of cultural heritage initiatives that happen.
04:12:55.000If you want to have people go out and do their own research, We need to have these kind of subjects available at public universities, like Cardiff University, one of the top archaeology departments in the world.
04:13:06.000It was just ranked just a few weeks ago in one of the world rankings as like in the top 20 or 30 in the world.
04:13:13.000Sheffield, where I learned how to study ancient animal remains.
04:13:16.000University of Sheffield just completely axed and destroyed a few years ago.
04:13:20.000And so what we're seeing is a complete defunding of the humanities and the social sciences and history and archaeology, anthropology, classical studies and more.
04:13:30.000And so please, if we care about understanding these mysteries from the past, we need to fund being able to teach people.
04:13:36.000We need to fund the actual research into it.
04:13:50.000Most of our research is funded through grants that we competitively get, like my grant that I use to do my isotope analysis, or it's funded through private donations.
04:13:59.000I can understand how, with our knowledge of history, it's so fascinating.
04:14:06.000That archaeology would somehow or another be underfunded.
04:15:13.000There's also a lot of really great archaeology podcasts.
04:15:16.000I want to give a big shout out to the Tales from Atlantis, The Dirt, Movies We Dig, and one that's not on here that I'm going to appear on next week talking about the Bronze Age collapse and climate change in the eastern Mediterranean is Let's Talk About Myths, Baby, hosted by Liv Albert.
04:15:55.000And so what I want to say is if you are wealthy and you're listening to this and you're worried about societal collapse, don't go and try to hide from it.
04:16:21.000Guy Middleton's book goes all over the world and looks at collapse.
04:16:24.000It is the rich and the elites who get eaten.
04:16:26.000So we have to invest in everyone if we want to survive this.
04:16:30.000And my own research into climate change at the end of the Bronze Age, what it shows is that the ancient Greeks adapted too late.
04:16:37.000It took them hundreds of years to realize that the climate had dried, and it took them hundreds of years to adapt their food production systems.
04:16:45.000We understand how the world is changing around us.
04:16:48.000Let's listen to that and try to invest in our future.
04:16:51.000Everything we do, whether it's trading stocks, deciding how to fix our plumbing, deciding on what we're going to do is based on our knowledge of the past.
04:16:59.000And so we need to invest in our knowledge from the past and what it can tell us so that we can act properly today.
04:17:21.000Yeah, it's been an interesting conversation, Flint, and there's So much, both from my side and from yours, that we've not been able to touch on.
04:17:33.000My request to you is, I showed that clip where you're calling for a crusade against pseudo-archaeology.
04:17:45.000With pseudo-archaeology from the beginning, I believe your friend John Hoops, your co-author John Hoops, is one of the moderators of my Wikipedia page, which people cannot edit my Wikipedia page.
04:19:07.000So much want to control the narrative about the past.
04:19:11.000And why do so by attaching notions like racism and white supremacy to people that archaeology disagrees with?
04:19:19.000Is it not possible to have disagreements that don't involve all of that?
04:19:23.000I'll tell you frankly, I was hurt badly, wounded badly as a human being.
04:19:29.000By this association that you were very largely responsible for, of my work with white supremacy, racism, and all the other stuff that's written about in the SAA's letter.
04:19:40.000I don't think any of that was necessary.
04:19:41.000I don't think any of that got to grips with the fundamentals of my work or my ideas.
04:19:46.000It was just an attempt to write me off and to smear me.
04:19:50.000And I think it's most unfortunate, and perhaps if anybody can learn a lesson from this, it's actually we're all on the same side.
04:20:14.000I have never knowingly told a lie, although I am constantly accused of lying.
04:20:20.000I tell my truth and I try to represent my truth as best as I can.
04:20:24.000And I believe that's true for the majority of people in the alternative field.
04:20:28.000Can't we have some kind of meeting of minds between alternative approaches to the past and the archaeological approach to the past?
04:20:34.000And is it not possible that something beautiful might grow out of that?
04:20:39.000If I could speak to that, I think the problem is one of communication and this bizarre modern time where someone says something and then a bunch of people attack that thing that someone says.
04:20:50.000There's a big difference between a rational, calm, kind person being able to have a disagreement with someone face to face.
04:20:59.000I think today there were some contentious moments, but I think overall we set a very nice tone of just letting each side speak to what they believe and what the evidence shows and have a very,
04:21:14.000I think, a productive conversation about it.
04:21:17.000And I think part of the problem is most people don't have access to the people that are saying these things that they disagree with.
04:21:25.000They make a YouTube video or they make a blog post or they make a podcast, whatever it is, and they dispute it and they attack that person and maybe they insult that person or maybe they connect that person to a bunch of horrible things because they're so emotionally invested in one side or the other side being correct,
04:21:53.000Human beings are designed to sit down and talk to each other.
04:21:56.000And I think so much of our world's problems, other than obviously geopolitical issues and military issues and— So much of our differences with each other, a lot of it is a lack of communication.
04:22:10.000We don't necessarily honestly communicate about things.
04:22:14.000And where you get a more nuanced understanding of who this person is you're talking to, where they stand, who they are.
04:22:25.000And there's also the effect that it has on the person who's attacked who wants to kind of attack back, you know, which is very unproductive.
04:22:33.000It's very unproductive to carry around that pain.
04:22:36.000It's very unproductive to carry around that criticism.
04:22:40.000It burdens you and it takes away resources from all other parts of your life.
04:22:44.000It can create a ripple effect that affects personal relationships, business relationships, all sorts of things in your life, your health, whether or not you take care of yourself.
04:22:54.000You're so embattled in these conflicts with human beings that are almost mostly unnecessary, especially at that level, amongst kind, intelligent people that really just want to find out what's true.
04:24:41.000But I hope that we change our tones on both ends because, like I said, the tone you chose in that show was offensive to archaeologists.
04:24:48.000Yeah, that was because I'd been offended by archaeologists for 30 years.
04:24:52.000I hear you, but if we want to end this and take the temperature down, we have to think about how we do this, and we need to talk about different aspects of that in a friendlier way.