In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Joe talks about the latest in the Flint Dibble vs. archaeology debate, and the new evidence that has been uncovered about human seafarers in the last ice age. Joe also discusses the difference between domestic seeds and wild ones, and how domesticated seeds are much more resilient than wild ones. Joe also talks about some of the weirdest things he has ever heard about seeds, and why he thinks they should be used in food production, and what they could do to make them more nutritious and more resilient and why it s a bad idea to grow them in the wild. And, of course, he talks about how the seeds could be used to make food and food products more nutritious, which could be a good thing, because they could be the key to food production in the modern world. This is a great episode for anyone who wants to know the truth about what happened in the ice age and the impact it had on our ancestors, and whether it has any relevance to our current understanding of the past. Joe is joined by archaeologist and botanist, Dr. Flint Dibble, and they discuss all sorts of other topics related to the Ice Age, including the discovery of the oldest shipwrecks we have ever found, as well as a new theory about the origin of the seeds that could help us understand the origins of the wild ones we ve been growing in the Wild. and the potential impact they could have on food production. in the future of food production and food production on our day to day life, and our future. Thanks to Dr. Dibble for coming on the show, and for bringing us the truth. Joe Rogans podcast, and we hope you enjoy this episode! . Thank you so much for listening, and Joe for being a friend of the pod, and listening to the pod. , and for supporting the pod and for sharing it with your friends and family and friends, and I hope you have a great day! -Joe Rogan Podcast by day, by night, all day. by night. - by night - all day, Joe by day - by day by night by night Thanks, Joe's Podcast by Night, by day - Night, All Day, All day, All Night, By Night, Day, by Night by Night by Day, By Day, Night, all Day
00:00:24.000But before we do anything, I think we should probably address what we know now about the debate that you had with Flint Dibble.
00:00:31.000So that was the last time we were here.
00:00:34.000I appreciate that he came on, and I thought it was going to be an interesting discussion, but It turned out he played fast and loose with the truth and distorted quite a bit of information that were some key points that you had discussed,
00:00:51.000one of them being the amount of shipwrecks that were discovered.
00:00:55.000He greatly inflated the amount of shipwrecks that had been discovered.
00:00:59.000You released a video today that went over a lot of this stuff.
00:01:03.000And one of the things that went over is the oldest shipwreck that we are currently available.
00:01:37.000But there's a more central point than that, which really needed to be brought up by the archaeologists in this, which is that archaeology universally accepts that human beings were seafarers as much as 50,000 years ago.
00:01:55.000And I put the evidence on this into the video.
00:02:16.000And yet there's evidence now that it was settled 14,000 years ago, certainly 14,000 to 12,500 years ago.
00:02:26.000It was settled, in other words, during the ice age.
00:02:29.000And these were large planned migrations.
00:02:32.000When you're going to migrate to an island, you can't just go two or three people by accident because you'll become extinct.
00:02:38.000You have to bring in quite a large population.
00:02:41.000And they reckon that populations of a thousand or so were being brought across that water, across the ocean, across the Mediterranean Sea to Cyprus.
00:02:56.00050,000 years ago human beings got there and even at the lowest sea level they would have had to cross about 90 kilometers of open water in large numbers.
00:03:06.000And again, no ships have been found to testify to that, yet archaeologists accept that they got there by ship.
00:03:12.000So to say that we haven't found any ships from the ice age is not really evidence about anything.
00:03:18.000And if we're finding the oldest ships that we currently are aware of, which is, as you said, about 6,000 years ago, if you tack on another 6,000 years of decay on top of that, what are the odds you're going to find anything?
00:04:28.000When they start using large-scale agriculture, the seeds become more robust and stick to the plant because it makes sense that if you're going to harvest all of the plants and then take the seeds off of it, for the plant to prosper,
00:04:43.000you would want the seeds to be more robust.
00:06:11.000I mean, to be honest, I felt beaten up after that debate.
00:06:15.000But looking back in retrospect on the whole thing, I think it actually makes the point that we have a very arrogant, very controlling discipline in archaeology which has established a narrative about the past and which will fight tooth and nail to maintain that narrative.
00:06:35.000I think instead of smearing people who talk about the possibility of a lost civilization or people who even talk about aliens, I think instead of smearing them, archaeology should understand why people are asking those questions.
00:06:47.000People are asking those questions because they're not satisfied with what archaeology is offering.
00:06:52.000It's not providing a nurturing, satisfying resolution to many of the problems that come from the past.
00:07:00.000That's what drives me, is curiosity about anomalies in the past.
00:07:05.000I'm often misrepresented as saying that somehow I've proved that a lost civilization existed, and I don't claim to have proved that.
00:07:13.000What I do say is, join me on this journey.
00:07:17.000Let's see if they're explained by archaeology or if they're not explained.
00:07:21.000And I found quite a number that are not explained by archaeology, and that's particularly to do with astronomical alignments with traditions that are shared all around the world.
00:07:31.000It's to do with things that archaeologists by and large don't study.
00:07:35.000This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by Call of Duty.
00:07:40.000You know, when a new Call of Duty drops, everyone's trying to find a way to squeeze in those extra hours of gameplay.
00:08:04.000Life can be chaotic, but you shouldn't have to miss out on the latest Call of Duty just because you've got, I don't know, responsibilities.
00:08:52.000Well, it's also one of the things that's fascinating is just even with conventional archaeology, the dates keep getting pushed further and further back.
00:10:01.000So they found footprints there and these are absolutely human footprints and there's not just a few of them, there's thousands of them.
00:10:07.000There's thousands of them and what's amazing when you actually see the footprints is you can see the interactions between the human beings and animals.
00:10:16.000You can see that somebody is reacting to a giant sloth which has suddenly turned around and the person who's behind it suddenly turns around as well.
00:10:26.000Mammoth footprints overlaying human footprints and then human footprints overlaying those.
00:10:31.000And it goes down for meters under the ground.
00:10:34.000So you have a very deep stratification of these impressions that have been left behind by our ancestors.
00:10:42.000And by animals that are now completely extinct.
00:10:45.000Mammoths and mastitons went extinct during the Younger Dryas, but there are their footprints from 23,000 years ago side by side with the footprints of human beings.
00:10:53.000It's very intimate to see a footprint, to see those five toes, to see the heel mark.
00:10:59.000To see sometimes a child walking beside a mother, that's there in the record as well.
00:11:52.000The exhibits are in the San Diego Natural History Museum, and I talked with the expert there, Dr. Tom Desmarais.
00:11:58.000And they are convinced that they are looking at human traces there.
00:12:03.000It was a butchering of a mastodon, but the way the bones were broken and the marrow was extracted, they don't see any other way that this could have been done except by human beings.
00:12:12.000It's 130,000 years old, not 23,000 years old, not 13,000 years old, but 130,000 years old.
00:12:19.000And, you know, this opens the possibility that human beings have been in the Americas before they were in Europe.
00:12:29.000That's a door that opens all kinds of possibilities which have been neglected.
00:12:32.000I think that the prejudice that the Americas were only settled very late in the human story That led archaeology to not have their eye on the possibility of what happens if they were here earlier.
00:12:48.000Well, what I was going to ask is as they're digging deeper and deeper and they're finding these footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, is there a possibility that they could dig deeper still and find things that are even older?
00:13:04.000The first footprints were found completely by accident and they were found by indigenous local people who alerted the National Park Service to them.
00:13:17.000And we have a number of indigenous spokespeople who speak to the White Sands Mystery and how it feels for them, the emotional feeling of seeing the footprints of their ancestors from 23,000 years ago.
00:13:30.000The thing is that the dunes are constantly shifting and sometimes the footprints will be covered up and then wind will reveal them again.
00:14:12.000And the way the evidence is looking, it's most likely that South America was settled first, before North America was settled.
00:14:20.000And that raises all kinds of questions.
00:14:21.000And we've gone into this in Season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse, primarily to do with the DNA evidence of a direct connection between the peoples of New Guinea and Australia.
00:14:33.000And the peoples of certain tribes in South America, and that's very ancient, very old DNA evidence in South America, but also to do with archaeological sites like Monte Verde.
00:14:43.000I did bring up the issue of Tom Dillehay the last time we were on when Flint was here.
00:14:48.000And Tom Dillehay, who found Monte Verde, who excavated Monte Verde in South America and realized that it was plus 14,000 years old and therefore a lot older, than what was then accepted as the model for the first peoples in North America.
00:15:04.000When he put that idea forward, he was eviscerated by his colleagues in archaeology.
00:15:09.000It took them a decade to come around to accepting that actually he was right.
00:15:13.000There are many other sites in South America going back 30 plus thousand years.
00:15:18.000They're all controversial because they conflict with an existing model.
00:15:21.000But I think instead of clinging on to existing models, I think it's one of the problems with archaeology is this territoriality, this kind of control of the past.
00:15:30.000I think instead of doing that, it would be nicer if archaeology was a little bit more welcoming, a little bit more open to new and different ideas.
00:15:38.000Unfortunately, that's just the thing when people are supposed experts in a subject and someone comes along that's also been studying it but from an untraditional perspective.
00:15:55.000I've come to the point where I believe that some archaeologists, not all of them, most actually this problem is with a small number of archaeologists, but they're extremely vocal.
00:16:06.000I think what we're looking at is a kind of abuse of power.
00:16:12.000They are the official spokespeople for the past and they use that power to slap down any point of view that doesn't agree with theirs.
00:16:23.000So I think that there's an abuse of power there and at the same time There's not a realization that that's happening because the mindset that drives it is the feeling that members of the general public are unable to decide things for themselves.
00:16:38.000This is the arrogance of archaeology, that they feel that they have to tell people what to think about the past and they underestimate the intelligence of the public and the ability of the public to discern, to make choices between different possibilities about the past.
00:16:51.000They think that Archaeologists seem to think that only one possibility of the past must be considered by the general public, and that's their possibility.
00:16:58.000And it reminds me a lot of the heresy hunters back in the 16th century.
00:17:02.000You know, the people who disagreed with their point of view got burned at the stake.
00:17:07.000Well, you don't get burned at the stake today, but you can get lynched by a mob of archaeologists online.
00:17:12.000Well, it's also the same thing that we saw during COVID. With medical experts that disagreed with the narrative.
00:17:20.000When you take esteemed professors and doctors and physicians and you cast them into this kook label because they disagree with the narrative that the medical establishment is pushing and then they turn out to be correct, which most of them did.
00:18:31.000How could you find even an area where you want people to agree with you?
00:18:37.000It's part of this desperate search to say we archaeologists know everything and we must discredit in any way we can anybody who has anything opposite to say.
00:18:47.000It's an unfortunate human characteristic.
00:19:05.000But I don't think that archaeologists and aircraft pilots can be compared in that sense.
00:19:11.000Archaeology is a much more interpretive discipline.
00:19:13.000An aircraft pilot is not really interpreting situations that much.
00:19:16.000He knows what to do in such situations.
00:19:18.000Archaeologists are interpreting the past and yet they seem to get very upset by other interpretations of the past that are offered that don't agree with theirs.
00:19:27.000And this is the problem of expertise in our society.
00:19:34.000But we should not place all our faith and trust in experts.
00:19:38.000We need to liberate our own consciousness and freely think about things and make our own decisions about things and resist Resist absolutely being told what to think.
00:19:49.000Well, the problem is these experts are human beings.
00:19:52.000And human beings have very distinct behavior traits that they exhibit, especially when they're in a position of power and prestige.
00:19:59.000And they like to hold that and it feels good for them to be the person that looks down upon the people that don't know better and tell them what to do and tell them what to think.
00:20:08.000And when you're doing that with something like...
00:20:10.000Look, if you're doing that with something like mathematics, and someone's a mathematical expert, math is a very specific and precise science.
00:20:30.000These fascinating technologies like LIDAR, where you have the ability, ground-penetrating radar, all these different things where you can look into the soil itself and find things that aren't visible on the surface.
00:20:41.000See them through trees, see them through...
00:20:48.000Well, that was part of our adventure with Season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse, was working with a really professional team in Brazil, led by an archaeologist, Marty Parsons, from the University of Helsinki, and a geographer from Brazil, Oseo Ranzi.
00:21:05.000I'll say you, years ago, was the first person who noticed that there are these huge geometrical structures emerging out of the Amazon jungle, and he noticed it on a flight on a commercial aircraft in an area that happened to have been cleared by local farmers for planting crops,
00:21:23.000that there was this massive geometrical earthwork there.
00:21:26.000And that – he actually coined the term geoglyphs for these because he compared them in some ways with the Nazca lines, which again are really only visible from the air.
00:21:36.000You get suddenly the massive scope and extent of these things and it's same with the geoglyphs in the Amazon.
00:21:46.000The ones we know about up till now, we largely know about them because of these tragic clearances of the Amazon rainforest, which is maybe a short-term economic gain but is a long-term really not a very good idea.
00:22:00.000But now with LiDAR, it's possible to find these things without damaging any rainforest at all.
00:22:17.000And we found – I say we, it was actually the LiDAR expert who found – You can see the edge of the rainforest where the clearances stop and the rainforest hasn't yet been interfered with.
00:22:46.000And this raises the question, how much more is there in the Amazon to find?
00:22:53.000Even the archaeologists who are most reluctant are now willing to accept that the Amazon had a huge population before the Spanish conquest.
00:23:02.000Millions, cities, a whole different way of life, a whole different kind of civilization from the one that we have today, one that lived in a man-made garden, which is what the Amazon really and truly is, and lived in harmony with that.
00:23:18.000We've talked about that before but for people who've never heard those other podcasts, they've determined that the Amazon rainforest is at least partially man-made.
00:23:28.000They've determined that because of the preponderance of trees that serve human needs.
00:23:34.000They call them hyper-dominant and things like Brazil nut trees which are providing food for human beings are in massive dominance in relation to trees that aren't useful to human beings.
00:23:45.000And it's clear that this is the result of a long-term human project to make this jungle serve human needs.
00:24:14.000And there's the other thing that you've discussed in depth, the terra preta, this man-made, incredibly rich nutrient-dense soil that they can grow incredible agriculture off of that we really to this day don't know how they created.
00:24:30.000Again, it was a great privilege to have the opportunity to stand in a pit of terra preta that is being excavated to get down 15 feet into that.
00:24:39.000Can they recreate it once they get it?
00:24:42.000It appears that modern, not modern, but indigenous communities in the Amazon are still doing this.
00:24:50.000They're still doing it, mixing all kind of refuse and waste together and enriching the soil with it.
00:25:29.000So it's these spots of fertility all over the Amazon and we went into that mystery quite a bit in one of the episodes.
00:25:35.000It's so interesting, especially when you consider the stories like The Lost City of Z, you know, which they turned into an interesting film.
00:25:43.000But the book details these records of these incredible cities that these people had visited a long time ago.
00:25:50.000And then when they tried to go back, there was nothing there.
00:25:57.000But those cities were just consumed by the jungle.
00:26:01.000And much like Detroit, if you go to Detroit now, you can see there's a bunch of neighborhoods in Detroit that are essentially abandoned and trees are growing right through the houses.
00:26:13.000I mean, that's just a few decades ago.
00:26:14.000And the houses are almost gone in some ways.
00:26:17.000If you went back 200 years ago, there'd probably be nothing left of them.
00:26:21.000This is probably exactly what happened in the Amazon, except the trees just consume the landscape because it's such an incredible dense rainforest that things grow so quickly there.
00:27:09.000And they report seeing enormous, thriving, prosperous cities, highly civilized with advanced arts and crafts.
00:27:16.000And they were not believed because a hundred years later when other Spaniards made that voyage and went into the Amazon they couldn't find the cities and the reason they couldn't find them is precisely the reason that you give which is that the jungle had eaten those cities because the human population had been wiped out by disease brought by the Spaniards.
00:27:36.000The Spaniards didn't have to have direct contact with those indigenous peoples in the middle of the Amazon.
00:27:40.000The diseases just jumped from population to population and just killed everybody.
00:27:47.000Most people probably aren't even aware.
00:27:50.000Everyone knows there was a genocide of Native Americans in this country, but most people don't know that 90% of them were wiped out by disease.
00:28:10.000And to some extent, it was used deliberately as a biological weapon, like those smallpox-infected blankets.
00:28:17.000Is that true, the smallpox-infected blankets?
00:28:19.000Because I've heard that that was like a rumor or a myth.
00:28:22.000It may well be a rumor, but from what I've looked at from the Spanish conquest of Mexico, there was a realization that we can kill these people with smallpox.
00:28:36.000And we have some immunity to it that they don't have.
00:28:39.000Right, because we had it forever in Europe.
00:28:40.000It's just so terrible when you read Cabeza de Vaca's story about visiting the Maya civilization and you realize, like, you guys fucking killed everybody.
00:29:05.000Primarily because of disease and secondarily because the Aztecs weren't popular with their neighbors.
00:29:11.000So it really wasn't just Cortes and 400 Spaniards.
00:29:15.000It was Cortes and 400 Spaniards plus smallpox plus the Tlaxcalans who the Aztecs had used as a sort of farm for human sacrifices for 100 years.
00:29:28.000And the Tlaxcalans looked at Cortez and they said, we can use this guy.
00:29:59.000And again, the moment we start talking about people's facial features, then they jump in with you're being a racist, you're being a white supremacist or whatever, although the Olmec heads don't serve white supremacism.
00:31:03.000So what people are trying to do by blanking out swear words and cutting out different words is that you can bypass algorithms that selectively remove or limit the distribution of those kind of posts with those keywords in it.
00:31:43.000From what I understand, those use of brackets is just to trick the algorithm.
00:31:49.000Just like the two asterisks for shooter.
00:31:52.000I think it's very unfortunate that in serious and interesting discussions about the past, That this issue of race immediately gets dumped into it because those who are dumping race into the issue know that that's a way to shut down a conversation.
00:32:08.000Nobody wants to be accused of being a racist.
00:32:10.000It's also the dumbest suggestion because the most sophisticated ancient civilization that's baffling people to this day is in Africa.
00:33:59.000How did they have such incredible sophistication in their construction methods?
00:34:03.000How did they get those massive 80-plus ton stones 500 miles down from the mountains with no equipment, no heavy machinery?
00:34:12.000Whatever they did, I think it's reasonable to say that in a different way, I don't think they had iPhones, I don't think they had email, but they were probably more sophisticated than us today in their ability to manipulate stone and make constructions.
00:34:35.000The Great Pyramid remains to me an abiding mystery, which despite probably a hundred or more visits to the Great Pyramid and being inside it and spending the night in it and exploring every passage in every chamber.
00:34:49.000Including the so-called relieving chambers above the king's chamber.
00:35:25.000And in the broader span, if you look at the Fourth Dynasty pyramids and even go back to the end of the Third Dynasty, the Pyramid of Zoser, the Step Pyramid, you find that this is a sudden...
00:36:00.000You do find wonderful chambers and you do find what you don't find in any of the Great Pyramids, which is huge numbers of hieroglyphs and accounts of the person who was supposedly buried in that pyramid.
00:36:11.000What do you think of Christopher Dunn's work?
00:36:14.000Christopher Dunn came on the podcast and he explained his theory that he thinks the Great Pyramid of Giza was some sort of a power plant.
00:36:44.000And when he looks at particularly at Saqqara, you have this thing called the Serapium, which is an underground labyrinth.
00:36:53.000And it's got wide corridors through it and then off each side are rooms.
00:36:58.000And in each room are these gigantic basalt buildings.
00:37:02.000There are boxes which appear to have held the corpses of bulls.
00:37:07.000They're like sarcophagi for human beings, but they're on an enormous, gigantic scale, weighing hundreds of tons and cut out of the hardest possible rock, precisely engineered.
00:39:19.000Well, perhaps in some cases we are, but certainly in others, including those in the great museums in Cairo.
00:39:26.000They've now moved a lot of the content of the Cairo Museum out to a big museum at Giza, and some of it's in transition, but they have thousands of these things.
00:39:34.000The thing is, like, even if this was modern technology, we don't know what they did.
00:39:39.000We don't know what modern technology exists that you could take an incredibly hard piece of stone and cut it into this unbelievably precise little vase with handles on it and some bizarre method that we don't know and hollowed out the inside of it and some of them with very thin necks and then hollowed out inside.
00:44:07.000But those like Chris Dunn who are studying the technology of ancient Egypt are confident that we're looking at the traces of a lost technology.
00:44:17.000Like so much else in ancient Egypt, like we don't know how the 70-ton blocks were raised to become the roof of the king's chamber either.
00:44:24.000There's so much that we don't know and that's not explained and that is easily written off by abusively arrogant experts who say there's no mystery here.
00:44:36.000That doesn't look super precise in terms of the radius of it when you're looking at it.
00:45:50.000I've no doubt people have tried to make copies with modern materials.
00:45:54.000I feel like we're looking at a few different versions of it.
00:45:56.000Well, also you've got to think, if it is made out of stone, some of the edges have to be beat up just from being in the ground for thousands of years.
00:47:13.000But one of the things about wheel is you have to ask yourself in what circumstances, in what places, in what conditions are wheels useful?
00:47:22.000There are some conditions in which a wheel is not a useful thing and which is going to get bogged down in the sand and which is not going to be helpful.
00:47:29.000So the use of sleds was certainly part of how ancient Egyptians moved huge stones and I don't dispute that.
00:47:39.000The problem is how they then get those stones 300 feet in the air.
00:48:28.000It's going to have different priorities, different ways of looking at things.
00:48:31.000But one of the things that the ancient Egyptians had, which I'm not aware that any other civilization has had, is the ability to sustain essentially a single culture with a single purpose.
00:48:42.000Set of spiritual ideas and to sustain that for 3000 years and to keep people happy and fed and well looked after.
00:48:49.000You know, this is an amazing achievement, amazing stability when you look at it.
00:48:54.000What our civilization, how old is it really?
00:49:37.000We can make the best possible machines.
00:49:41.000And we're a society that is built around production and consumption and a society in which people define themselves in terms of what they own and what they possess and what they produce.
00:49:52.000And it becomes a very materialistic society, a society that's focused on material things where we define ourselves by our material possessions.
00:50:01.000Ancient Egypt had a totally different focus.
00:50:04.000Yeah, they were great at making material things, but that was secondary.
00:50:31.000How did everyone agree on this particular myth or this story?
00:50:36.000Unless there was some experience being brought to bear in it.
00:51:06.000What do you think they're trying to say?
00:51:07.000Well, I think first of all it's evidence of a remote common origin of this idea.
00:51:13.000When it's found amongst cultures all around the world that apparently had no contact with one another and are often separated by hundreds or thousands of years, the same idea is found about what happens to us after death.
00:51:23.000The only reasonable explanation I can come up with Is that they've all inherited this idea and then developed it in their own ways from a remote common source.
00:51:32.000And that's one of the main reasons that I'm curious about the possibility of a lost civilization.
00:51:36.000That these spiritual ideas are found all around the world.
00:51:40.000And they involve the journey of the soul after death and a leap to the heavens.
00:51:46.000Sometimes it's called an underworld but really it's set in the sky.
00:51:50.000And this journey that takes place where you are judged on what you've done with your life...
00:51:55.000This is something else that we avoid in the world today is taking responsibility for our own lives.
00:52:02.000The ancient Egyptians required you to take responsibility for your life.
00:52:05.000And if you did not do so, the outcome after death would not be good.
00:52:09.000You had to You had to celebrate the gift of life.
00:52:15.000You had to realize the incredible gift that you had been given.
00:52:20.000And one of the opportunities of that gift is the opportunity to accumulate wisdom.
00:52:25.000And that's one of the things, hopefully, that we all do as we get older, is get a bit more wisdom and a bit more understanding.
00:52:33.000But in the case of ancient Egypt, That idea is developed over 3,000 years.
00:52:38.000And it's essentially the same at the beginning as it is at the end.
00:52:42.000That the soul – that death is not the end.
00:52:46.000This is the conclusion of a society that put its best minds at work for 3,000 years on this problem.
00:53:33.000They're very perplexing questions, which actually are of great significance to every one of us.
00:53:40.000Yeah, I mean, suppose death just is the end.
00:53:43.000Then that's a way not to have to take too much responsibility for our lives, for the impact that we've had on others, for the pain that we may have caused, or for the joy that we may have caused.
00:53:55.000If death's the end, there's no up or downside to that, whatever we do.
00:54:01.000But from the ancient Egyptian point of view, death's not the end.
00:54:04.000And you have been given the precious gift of life.
00:54:20.000They bear some relationship actually to the Ten Commandments.
00:54:25.000But there's another question which is called the weighing of words and that question is what did you do with the gift we gave you?
00:54:32.000We gave you the gift of the human life.
00:54:34.000We gave you the gift of the opportunity to love or to hate at your choice.
00:54:39.000We gave you the gift to live in a human body, to have this incredible consciousness, to be able to integrate all kinds of information from all kinds of spheres.
00:55:34.000If there's natural selection of humans and natural selection of animals that allows them to prosper and to get better and to evolve, it makes sense that that would happen with the soul as well.
00:55:46.000I'm just so confused as to what the environment was like that allowed these people to keep this insane civilization developing and innovating for so long.
00:56:00.000That they were so more advanced than anyone else that was alive back then that we're aware of, at least as far as like what we've uncovered, what they left behind.
00:57:49.000And that takes the journey back even further and that's one of the reasons why I have a problem with the notion that civilization just emerges 6,000 years ago because we had the same kit, the same wiring, the same brains for at least 300,000 years and we weren't doing any of this stuff apparently.
00:58:08.000I suspect we were but it's not made the record.
00:58:11.000Well, it seems that what they were dealing with in terms of the resources in the Nile Valley was unbelievably bountiful.
00:59:24.000That was the place to be, just as it is today, to be near coastlines.
00:59:28.000The Amazon rainforest was a bountiful place, and the Sahara Desert was green and rich for thousands of years during the Ice Age, with lakes, with rivers.
00:59:39.000It was the kind of place where a civilization might well have emerged.
00:59:47.000So anybody who doesn't think there's a mystery in the Sahara Desert, and anybody who really tries to dismiss the notion that most of it hasn't been really excavated, but it really hasn't been.
01:00:32.000This is the problem for me with saying archaeology has basically got the story of the human past nailed down, is that there's huge areas which have not been investigated.
01:00:41.000And I reject the idea that that is a god of the gaps argument because that's not why I'm proposing there was a lost civilization.
01:00:51.000I'm not demanding that people believe me.
01:00:53.000I just want to inject this idea into the discussion so that it can be considered.
01:01:01.000Taken out of context was a little clip where you asked me during the debate, is there any evidence for your lost civilization in what they've found?
01:01:11.000And I said, in what they've found, no.
01:01:13.000And then I went on to say, but that brings us to the point of what they've looked for and what they've not looked for, what they've found and what they've not found.
01:01:22.000That has been taken again and again as me saying that there's no evidence for my lost civilization.
01:01:29.000Whereas what I'm actually saying is there's no evidence in what archaeologists have studied for a lost civilization because I'm not studying what archaeologists study.
01:01:38.000I am very happy to use material from archaeologists, and I could not do what I do if I didn't use material from archaeologists.
01:01:48.000It's a very important basis to my work.
01:02:02.000It's a universal story of a massive cataclysm with a few survivors who bring their knowledge to others.
01:02:09.000This story, this is one of the reasons why I think the Atlantis story, which Flint-Dibble is so opposed to, deserves to be taken seriously.
01:02:19.000Because it's part of a global tradition.
01:02:42.000The fact that this is found all around the world, to me, is a memory of something that happened to our ancestors, something so traumatic, something so huge that it's been preserved better than almost anything else from our past.
01:02:54.000What is your take on the Reichardt structure?
01:04:30.000And then at the end of the day, to twist what I said, that in what archaeologists have studied, there's no evidence from my lost civilization.
01:05:18.000And you'll find that that argument is not based on what archaeologists have studied.
01:05:22.000It's based precisely on what they've not studied about the past.
01:05:26.000Well, regardless of the argument that Flint tried to put forth, that there's no evidence of what you're saying, the exaggeration of the shipwrecks, the stuff about seeds, the fact is this resonates with a lot of people.
01:05:44.000This mystery is perplexing, it's confusing, and there's a lot of it out there.
01:06:31.000I mean, it's super hard to resist the idea that that's man-made, and especially if it goes deeper under the ground, and they think it does.
01:06:49.000When I look at that photograph, to me, that is a man-made structure.
01:06:53.000But I realize now, in the environment in which I live, surrounded by archaeologists who are extremely hostile to my work, that it's not in my interest to leap to a conclusion about anything before I've studied it.
01:07:45.000Is it part of the lost story of the Americas?
01:07:47.000There's so much that's been lost, particularly in North America, with the massive destruction that took place during the 19th and 18th and early 20th century.
01:07:59.000It's reckoned that there were a million mound sites in North America.
01:08:04.000If you go back to 1500, there's about 100,000 left, which is a lot actually.
01:08:12.000But most of them are massively destroyed and the other 900,000 have gone, just plowed under, turned into farmland.
01:08:21.000And how much else of the prehistory of North America has been lost as a result of a process where Where first of all, there was a conviction that the indigenous inhabitants had only been here for a very short time, whereas we now know they've been here for a very long time.
01:08:36.000And secondly, there was a propagandistic desire not to give too much credit to them.
01:08:41.000So let's get rid of some of their stuff.
01:08:45.000I was very disappointed when we were shooting season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse that we were not allowed by the authorities to film in Cahokia, which is one of the great mounds that still survive, because they've been told that I'm a pseudo-archaeologist and that I'm going to mislead the public if I go there.
01:09:04.000So the best way is just to stop me going there.
01:09:07.000We tried to film in Moundville in Alabama as well, and again we were denied permission to film there.
01:09:13.000There's no doubt that archaeology has joined ranks to do their best to prevent me doing what I do.
01:09:21.000To deny anyone the ability to – especially we're going to put something like this on Netflix where millions of people are going to see it.
01:09:29.000Deny people the – Just the access through video of experiencing this site and the mystery that's attached to it.
01:11:31.000I often would like to compare it to a sort of furious – in terms of the level of consciousness, our civilization today is like a furious, petulant teenager.
01:11:43.000But in terms of what it can do, in terms of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, it's a god.
01:11:49.000So we have godlike powers with the consciousness of an immature teenager.
01:11:54.000That's what we're looking at in the world today.
01:11:56.000And maybe by understanding our past better, by understanding our unity that comes down from the past, maybe we can learn something that would be helpful to us in not carrying on in this way.
01:12:07.000Because we do live at an inflection point just now.
01:12:59.000I mean, it's just disturbing how many times we can travel to ancient places like Greece or any place where you go to Rome and realize, oh, there's a thriving civilization here at one point.
01:15:15.000You know, I imagine that as people get older and wiser and realize the folly of their ways, particularly in their youth, maybe he would be more open to the idea that the civilization is just this civilization, same civilization, but older than you think it is.
01:15:30.000Yeah, I'm hoping to persuade him of that.
01:15:33.000I think it'll be an interesting dialogue if we get to have it.
01:15:36.000I think people for a long time had this concept in their mind that changing the dates somehow negates the accomplishment of the people that lived in the prescribed date.
01:16:00.000That's been said to me repeatedly, that I'm suggesting that all the achievements of certain indigenous cultures around the world should actually be handed to a lost civilization, that ideas were brought to them.
01:16:12.000Yet, weirdly, those same archaeologists recognize that agriculture was introduced to Europe.
01:16:46.000I've always felt that there were, if there was a lost civilization at all, and I believe there was, but I can't absolutely prove it, I think we're looking at a terrible cataclysm.
01:16:58.000Part of it happened near Gobekli Tepe.
01:17:01.000Abu Huraira in Syria was hit by one of those airbursts, absolutely incinerated at that time.
01:17:09.000A terrible cataclysm with relatively few survivors and that those survivors, just as we would do today, took refuge amongst people who'd made it through the disaster better.
01:17:21.000And those people who'd made it through would most likely have been hunter-gatherers.
01:17:27.000Because hunter-gatherers are so resilient and so able to survive disasters, whereas people in a quote-unquote civilized condition are often not.
01:17:38.000I understand that the hurricanes that are happening in the US at the moment are horrific, horrific natural events which are killing people.
01:17:46.000But we're talking about something on a scale vastly larger than that.
01:17:52.000We find it hard enough to make it through a hurricane.
01:17:54.000I find it difficult to see how we could make it through another Younger Dryas impact event or how we could make it through a man-made cataclysm as a result of nuclear war, which is, I suspect and I fear, is much closer than we think.
01:18:40.000When you're talking about Gobekli Tepe, one of the things that Jimmy Corsetti has talked about recently in his YouTube show is that they have stopped excavation and they've planted trees above some of the areas,
01:19:21.000It's often because of funds, but it's also because of the feeling that as technology improves, more may be learned from these sites in the future.
01:19:29.000And that's a reasonable argument, because excavation is destruction.
01:19:34.000To a certain extent, excavation destroys what's being excavated.
01:19:38.000And therefore, when you interfere with a site and start excavating it, you may be I mean, go back 100 years from where we are at present and you didn't have carbon dating,
01:19:55.000you didn't have LiDAR, you didn't have...
01:19:59.000All kinds of methods of dating objects, you know, luminescence, the luminescence from rocks is another way of dating.
01:20:08.000We didn't have any of those technologies.
01:20:10.000And so I think the speculation is 100 years in the future, archaeologists may have technologies that would be able to extract more information than this.
01:20:25.000I know for sure because I spent three days with Klaus Schmidt who was the original excavator of Gobekli Tepe that underneath that place there are dozens of huge unexcavated stone circles with enormous megalithic pillars in them all under the ground waiting to be excavated and the decision appears to have been made not to excavate them.
01:20:47.000And I do find that slightly suspicious.
01:20:51.000I think the site has got such an important role.
01:20:54.000It's such an iconic site that to just stop the excavation or to only continue it in a very small way isn't satisfactory.
01:21:04.000When you say suspicious, like what would be the motivation for discontinuing that kind of excavation other than the fear of destroying things?
01:21:17.000I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist.
01:21:39.000For example, Danny Hillman Natawajaja, who is the geologist who brought to the world's attention the mystery of Gunung Padang in Indonesia, which appeared in the first episode of season one of Ancient Apocalypse.
01:21:53.000The possibility that this site is more than 27,000 years old, that we're looking at a pyramidial structure that has had several phases of work done on it and that the earliest phases go back deep into the last ice age.
01:22:38.000The same thing is happening with the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
01:22:41.000An enormous amount of attacks are being made on that hypothesis rather than considering it as an interesting explanation for the cataclysms at the end of the Ice Age.
01:22:49.000A lot of people are just focused on trying to destroy it in every way possible.
01:22:56.000Maybe there's some truth, deep truth to this, that there was a cataclysm, that there was an ancient apocalypse, something really horrific that happened.
01:23:09.000This is something that would lead any government to want to avoid panic, to suppress, to cover up these issues.
01:23:18.000So that would be the conspiracy theory.
01:23:19.000I'm not saying I buy it, but I'm saying that it's possible.
01:23:22.000Would also a conspiracy be that they'd recognize that some of the area around Gobekli Tepe was older still and they decided just the archaeologists didn't want to confront it and they put a stop to it?
01:23:49.000Turkish archaeologists, it's interesting, are calling this now a civilization.
01:23:53.000They're calling it the Tas Tepler civilization, the Stone Hills civilization.
01:23:58.000And they're finding that the same iconography, the same building techniques, not quite on the scale of Göbekli Tepe, are repeated all across the region.
01:24:05.000They extend all the way down to the south of the Jordan Valley, to Jericho.
01:24:09.000The ancient site of Jericho is part of that lost collection.
01:24:13.000Or emerging civilization that appeared at the end of the Younger Dryas.
01:24:18.000I was mentioning about how it was settled in what appeared to have been planned, organized settlement events near the end of the last ice age.
01:24:26.000Again, you find that same iconography that you find at Gobekli Tepe turning up there.
01:24:32.000The tendency to use T-shaped pillars, to use certain designs like a V-shaped necklace.
01:24:41.000This kind of iconography and the structures, these circular structures, semi-subterranean structures that are so characteristic of Gobekli Tepe, they're found there as well.
01:24:53.000Jericho in the Jordan Valley is absolutely intriguing.
01:24:57.000The massive tower there, which again dates back right to the end of the last ice age, a huge megalithic tower with the world's oldest known tower.
01:25:04.000There's a megalithic stairway that runs up inside it.
01:25:08.000So what's emerging as a result, if Gobekli Tepe hadn't been found, none of this would have happened.
01:25:12.000But it's led to a widespread interest in the whole area.
01:25:16.000So while excavation may have stopped at Gobekli Tepe or may have slowed down, it is continuing elsewhere across the region.
01:25:24.000And to be fair to archaeologists, we need to recognize that.
01:25:27.000Is the size and scale of Gobekli Tepe unique in comparison to the ones that are around it?
01:25:32.000So far, the ones that have been found, Gobekli Tepe is unique.
01:25:36.000And I think it's clear now that Gobekli Tepe itself was the end of a process, not the beginning of a process.
01:25:43.000It was something that marked – it was a marker.
01:25:46.000It was something that brought together the best of everything that they'd accumulated and created it in one place.
01:25:53.000And left it there finally at the end burying it, sealing it as a time capsule which then was untouched for more than 10,000 years before Klaus Schmidt opened it up in 1996. I can't help feeling that's precisely what Gobekli Tepe is.
01:26:53.000You can find it on the Gebel al-Arak knife handle from Egypt.
01:27:01.000You can find it from Saybuk, S-A-Y-B-U-R-K, in Turkey, the man between two felines.
01:27:11.000And you can find it in the Indus Valley civilization right across in Pakistan on these steatite seals that they used to make, where again you see that same icon of the man between two felines.
01:27:22.000And it suggests that cultural ideas way back in the remote past were being spread around the world very, very rapidly.
01:30:22.000And then the next one is from Tiwanaku in Bolivia.
01:30:25.000That's a redrawing from Tiwanaku in Bolivia.
01:30:29.000And again, it's a man between two felines.
01:30:31.000So when I see this kind of complicated image turning up all around the world, I can't help feeling that there's a remote common source, which is sharing.
01:30:39.000It's not each culture representing or influencing the other.
01:30:42.000It's a remote common source that they all share.
01:30:48.000What do you think he's got in his hands?
01:30:52.000Well, it looks like two felines that he's holding apart.
01:30:55.000Right, but what are those things that are dangling down?
01:30:57.000I absolutely have no idea, and I'm not sure if anybody else does, although I'm reminded in that one of the handbags that we see in some of the figures from ancient Sumer.
01:31:06.000Right, but what is the thing on the left?
01:31:09.000Again, I don't know, and I don't think anybody does.
01:31:11.000Why does he have steps on his chest and a wheel?
01:31:46.000So what I'm saying is we're seeing a sudden emergence of something that is being recognized as a civilization in Turkey just immediately after Göbekli Tepe, around the time of Göbekli Tepe.
01:31:56.000And we're seeing it in the Jordan Valley, and we're seeing it in the Indus Valley, and we're seeing it in South America as well.
01:32:03.000The same iconography keeps on repeating, and I don't think it's a coincidence.
01:32:07.000The area where the Olmec are, have there ever been LIDAR excavations or...
01:32:24.000The areas where LIDAR has been used in Mexico and Central America and Guatemala has been finding thousands of Mayan ruins that nobody knew were there before.
01:33:29.000They define themselves as being in favor of indigenous peoples and against any kind of supremacy, but by and large they look to Europe and to the Middle East as the origins of civilization and don't consider that it might have been in the Americas.
01:33:42.000And what we're trying to show is that the story in the Americas is much older than it's been and that there are mysteries here that have never been explained by archaeology.
01:33:51.000How much of the Amazon has been explored with LiDAR?
01:34:04.000What would be needed, I'm hoping some amazing philanthropist will come forward, and if such a philanthropist will come forward, I can connect him with the people who are doing the work in Acre, that we have a LiDAR survey of the whole of the Amazon.
01:34:49.000Echo of that earlier discovery of lost cities in the Amazon.
01:34:53.000These stories won't go away because there is a hidden past in the Amazon.
01:34:57.000And because there were cities in the Amazon, and God knows what was in them, you know, before the Spanish came along and destroyed everything.
01:35:06.000God, it seems like that has to be discovered.
01:35:58.000And I think it's right and proper that we have curiosity about our past.
01:36:03.000And I think it's unfortunate that people, including myself, who express that curiosity, Without any dogma, but simply are mystified by problems from the past, are so likely to get slapped down and face this abusive power grab by archaeology who are saying the past is ours.
01:37:13.000I don't think that's working anymore because I think enough people have seen your work and enough people have heard you talk and they know that you're reasonable and intelligent and that there's something there.
01:37:21.000And the more people look at these images, the more people hear.
01:37:25.000People like Flint just out and out lie to try to dismiss these things.
01:37:30.000I think he let archaeology down very badly in the way that he manipulated that debate.
01:37:36.000And I'm sorry it's taken me so long to come back with the fact-checking, but it was necessary to do.
01:37:43.000And I'm very grateful to a number of completely independent, separate individuals on the internet who have drawn attention to some of what Flint did.
01:37:53.000One calls himself illegitimate scholar.
01:37:56.000And the other calls himself dedunking.
01:37:58.000And they got into this material very, very early and helped me to understand how I'd been duped by this material.
01:38:07.000Well, that's the beautiful thing about the internet.
01:38:09.000There's a lot of people out there that are very invested in these ideas and exploring them.
01:38:14.000And they also find it very uncomfortable that they're being confronted by these scholars, these people that are supposed to be the ones that are...
01:38:24.000The experts in this area that are dismissing things that shouldn't be dismissed, that are lying about statistics, just try to diffuse your argument.
01:38:33.000And there's also that feeling of just being patronized by the so-called experts.
01:38:37.000Nobody wants to be patronized and feel that somebody else regards them as too stupid to make up their own mind on something.
01:38:43.000And they think that somehow or another that exploring these ideas dismisses the legitimate work that archaeologists have already done, which I don't think it does at all.
01:38:51.000Archaeologists have done some fantastic work, and it's really important work.
01:38:55.000What I've realized is that there's almost two different mindsets at work here in looking at the past.
01:39:01.000I think archaeology is very determined to demonstrate that it's a science, that it's a hard science, that it's completely rational, that it's all based on scientific method and anything that sounds unscientific, which include myths, must be avoided.
01:39:18.000And also, I do find that archaeology, and it may be true in other sciences as well, is very reluctant to use the imagination.
01:39:25.000The imagination is seen as a deadly threat.
01:39:29.000Whereas I think imagination is a really important thing in interpreting the past.
01:39:33.000We should be open to possibilities rather than coming into what we confront with a closed idea.
01:39:39.000We should consider how it might have been, what might have happened.
01:39:42.000Let's use our imagination and think about this.
01:40:28.000I have a real problem with that because that is patronizing to the indigenous people.
01:40:32.000I think the myths were there amongst the indigenous people and I think the Spaniards saw how they could use them, how they could manipulate them.
01:40:39.000But I don't think they made up the myths and somehow imposed them upon the indigenous people who then believed that they were their own myths.
01:40:49.000Well, my concern with that line of thinking is that we've seen evidence of that sort of destruction of the real history of people in America with how they forced Native Americans onto reservations and forced them into speaking English and forced them into learning Christianity.
01:41:06.000There was a concerted effort to erase their history and their culture.
01:41:10.000And that the conquerors imposed that on the people that were there.
01:41:15.000But this is a kind of conspiracy theory that's being proposed, that the Spanish Cortes and Pizarro and others who were involved in the conquest of the Americas, that they got together and they created a fiction and then they made the indigenous people believe that fiction.
01:41:32.000While accepting everything else that the indigenous people believed, that was a fiction.
01:41:37.000There's no document which says that Spaniards conspired to create these stories.
01:41:41.000I believe that when we find them in Mexico, when we find them in Peru, when we find them in Colombia, when we find them in Bolivia, we are looking at indigenous traditions.
01:41:51.000And I have no doubt that the Spanish saw those traditions and said, we can use this.
01:42:08.000When you hear about things like the lost city of Z, when you hear about all the different times where European explorers did make it to the Americas and spread their diseases, like, well, you're going to have myths from those folks, too.
01:42:19.000So who's to think that there wasn't multiple versions of that that happened all throughout history?
01:42:56.000And there's so much that's unknown about our past.
01:43:00.000Oh, I know what I wanted to bring up to you today because I saw this online.
01:43:04.000Maybe you could find it before I could pull it up, Jamie, because you're that good.
01:43:06.000But there's a scientist that believes there's reason to believe that those hobbit people on the island of Flores, that they exist currently.
01:43:19.000So this was, yeah, the hobbit-like species of early humans may still be living in the jungles of Indonesia.
01:44:17.000So why do they think that there might still roam?
01:44:20.000Well, this is just because of anecdotal stories, right?
01:44:23.000Because there have been multiple stories that people that live in the deep rainforest have said that they've encountered these little hare creatures.
01:44:35.000It has a parallel with the Bigfoot story, of course, a different size of creature.
01:44:40.000But maybe creatures have survived, which we think are extinct.
01:44:44.000Especially small populations of them that are very remote and very difficult to get.
01:44:48.000There are reports of sighting by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly, and I conclude the best way to explain that they told me what they told me is a non-sapiens hominin has survived on Flores to the present or very recent times.
01:45:38.000That's what I'm so grateful to the universe for and so grateful to my readers for is that I have been given this opportunity to live a fun life.
01:45:52.000And to travel the world and to investigate mysteries and to put across my point of view on those mysteries.
01:46:01.000I couldn't do any of that if it wasn't for my readers.
01:47:00.000You know, I first found out about you because of Fingerprints of the Gods.
01:47:03.000And one of the things that I found most fascinating when I started going into your work was the idea that the Ark of the Covenant exists in Ethiopia.
01:47:13.000That's what brought me into this field.
01:47:15.000Before that, I wrote all about current affairs.
01:47:17.000That story is so nuts and it sounds so ridiculous and people go, what?
01:47:21.000But then when you go into the history of these people that live there and they all suffered radiation poisoning and it's like, wait a minute.
01:47:31.000And let's not forget that there's an indigenous population of Old Testament Jews in Ethiopia, the Falashas, who have their own story about how the Ark of the Covenant Got there.
01:47:50.000I was a current affairs guy, and Ethiopia was on my beat.
01:47:53.000And I just kept on coming across this story.
01:47:56.000And I realized it was central to Ethiopian culture.
01:47:58.000And I decided to investigate it and explore it.
01:48:01.000And it led to the sign and the seal, which was published in 1992. And that's what set me on the path to fingerprints of the gods and everything that followed that.
01:48:29.000They're very similar in many ways to ancient Egyptian obelisks.
01:48:33.000They're a bit different in shape, but same sort of height, some of them going 110 feet high, cut out of solid granite right up there in the highlands of Ethiopia.
01:48:43.000And then they have an ancient church, the Church of St. Mary, Cathedral actually of St. Mary of Zion, where the Ark apparently was kept for hundreds and hundreds of years.
01:48:54.000And then now it's been moved into a chapel that stands next to St. Mary of Zion Cathedral.
01:49:00.000And that chapel is guarded by armed men.
01:49:04.000The whole town is an armed camp that is protecting what they believe to be the Ark of the Covenant, but it's guarded particularly by one guy.
01:50:19.000I think it's what is rightly described as an out of place artifact.
01:50:24.000Because if you look at the description in the book of Exodus, the very precise dimensions of it, I think in modern terms we'd say three feet nine inches long by two feet three inches high and wide.
01:50:44.000It shoots out jets of fire and kills completely innocent people.
01:50:49.000It kills 50,000 Philistines in the city of Ashdod when they briefly capture it from the Israelites and make the mistake of...
01:50:57.000Treating it like a tourist object and they open the Ark of the Covenant and look inside and suddenly everybody in that city is dying and what they're dying of is cancerous tumors.
01:51:06.000This is described in the Old Testament.
01:51:10.000So it's intriguing that this object is so precisely specified and is reported to have done these terrible things.
01:51:17.000It's just insane that we know where it is.
01:51:19.000Well, we know that—I believe Ethiopia has a very strong claim to it, but that's all I can say because I've not seen it myself.
01:51:26.000I've been right outside the door of that sanctuary chapel several times.
01:52:19.000And, of course, gold is a very good insulator against radiation.
01:52:24.000I don't want to go too far down this track.
01:52:26.000To me, the fascinating thing is that Ethiopia is the only country in the world that actually claims to have the Ark of the Covenant.
01:52:34.000That it's central to religion and culture in Ethiopia today.
01:52:38.000That there's much to support that argument, particularly in the form of the Falashas, the Ethiopian Jews, and their very ancient traditions about how they got to Ethiopia in the first place.
01:52:48.000In context to all of that, I think Ethiopia has a very good claim, very interesting claim, and that's why I wrote a book about it.
01:52:57.000That one to me is just like, we know where it is.
01:53:01.000That one to me is so crazy that someone is keeping that information from the rest of the humans.
01:53:06.000Because if we found out the Ark of the Covenant was in fact a real object and we know where it is and it does match the description of the Bible, that kind of changes everything.
01:53:15.000Now all of a sudden the Bible is not just stories and myths.
01:53:18.000The Bible is some sort of a historical record.
01:53:21.000Well, let's not forget that one of the world's best known flood myths also comes from the Bible, which is the flood of Noah, which again is part of this worldwide tradition of which I am absolutely convinced Atlantis should be understood as a part of that worldwide tradition of a global flood and the loss of a former civilization.
01:53:39.000And again, it's one of the reasons why I've done the work I've done over these years.
01:53:43.000So when you're doing season two, what did you learn from doing season one that you applied to season two?
01:53:50.000Was there anything different about the way you went about it?
01:53:54.000I have learned from the criticisms of archaeologists and one of the first things that became very clear to me, and they're absolutely right, is we need more indigenous voices in this series.
01:54:08.000And that's what we've made sure to do.
01:54:10.000We have an amazing archaeologist, indigenous archaeologist from Easter Island.
01:54:16.000We spent quite a bit of time filming in Easter Island and it's a strong...
01:54:20.000This series doesn't do country by country episodes.
01:55:14.000And secondly, the date that she's found 3,000-year-old banana phytoliths in Easter Island blows out of the water the notion that Easter Island was only settled 1,000 years ago or less, which is the current idea of archaeology.
01:55:29.000Again and again, we've had indigenous...
01:55:31.000Guests on the show who have brought real important information to it.
01:55:35.000Amongst those geoglyphs in Brazil, we had a member of the Apurina people who is a caretaker for those geoglyphs.
01:55:45.000And he talked to us about what is special to him about the geoglyphs, about how this is a sacred place to his tribe and how they still gather there today and how they...
01:55:58.000Understand that it's somehow connected to the journey to the next world, to the journey of life after death.
01:56:04.000And that then rings a bell in my mind of that whole idea of a journey to the afterlife and a portal through which we pass into that other realm.
01:57:58.000How come this tiny island, which only ever had a population of a few thousand, did something that is normally only done by big civilizations, which was create a written script?
01:58:09.000But they have a script, the Easter Island script, and it's written on wooden boards.
01:58:13.000And we learned that the boards we see today, none of which, by the way, are in Easter Island now.
01:58:18.000They're all in museums around the world.
01:58:20.000They themselves were copies of copies of copies of earlier wooden boards that wore out and these things go back far into the remote past as far as the indigenous people of Easter Island are concerned.
01:58:31.000And to have a fully formed elaborate script which nobody can interpret today, you have to remember the tragic history of Easter Island.
01:58:40.000There was a point where Easter Island's population was reduced to just 11 people.
01:58:46.000And it was reduced to 11 people by Peruvian slave raids.
01:58:49.000They came and slaved the people of Easter Island and they took them to work in Peru and put them elsewhere in the Pacific.
01:58:56.000Eventually there was a movement to restore them to their homeland and gradually people came back.
01:59:01.000But at one point its population was reduced to 11. We're good to go.
01:59:31.000It wouldn't need to communicate in that way, and yet it had its own script.
01:59:34.000And this script, can we see what it looks like?
01:59:38.000Can you find the Easter Island script, Jamie?
01:59:40.000If you look up the word rongo-rongo, R-O-N-G-O, rongo-rongo tablets.
01:59:46.000One of the things that's interesting about AI is that they believe that AI is going to be able to determine or decipher, rather, a bunch of different things that we currently can't.
02:00:12.000The way it runs is you read from left to right along the top row, then you go from right to left along the next row, Then you go from left to right along the next door and so on and so forth, a sort of snake-like.
02:00:32.000According to Leo, the elder who we talk to in Easter Island, it contains memories of the past.
02:00:39.000It contains memories of the past in Easter Island, instructions on how to navigate the Information about the stars and information about how to live as a community.
02:00:54.000All we have is an oral tradition which itself is very fragmented and very faint because of that reduction of Easter Island's population to just 11 people.
02:01:02.000And the fact that the elders who were, within historical times, able to read these tablets were all wiped out.
02:01:13.000Cuneiform, I think, because of its relationship to later languages, which were known.
02:01:18.000I mean, cuneiform is a writing system.
02:01:21.000You find the earliest version, I think, amongst the Sumerians and then in later Babylonian society as well.
02:01:27.000But when you have a language and you have a language that it's related to that you can read or where you have a text in two different languages but it's the same text, then you're in a place where you can begin to translate it.
02:01:44.000That's what the Rosetta Stone does in ancient Egypt because we have it in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs but we also have it in Greek.
02:01:51.000And that's why suddenly the code of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs was cracked because of the Rosetta Stone.
02:01:57.000Well, there isn't a Rosetta Stone for the Easter Island script or for the Indus Fali script.
02:02:02.000But I think in the case of the cuneiform, there was something similar, some context to place it in.
02:02:07.000So the Easter Island, these enormous statues, one of the things they found, and I don't know when they started doing this, they dug deeper and deeper and deeper and found out that the heads that are above the surface are just a tiny part of it.
02:02:20.000So do you think that it's just natural erosion that covered up everything else?
02:03:15.000And the issue is, on this tiny island, if this thing is only 700 years old, which is something that archaeologists often say 700 or 1000 years old, if it's only that old, how do you get 30 feet of sedimentation on this tiny island in just 700 years?
02:03:32.000It looks like a much longer period that would be required to create that depth of sedimentation.
02:03:38.000So how much time do you think, I mean, has there been speculation, like just natural layers of sediment being dropped down?
02:03:47.000How long would it take to cover something like that?
02:03:49.000Well, this is where I'd like to defer to the work of Dr. Robert Schock, who's a brilliant expert in this field.
02:03:56.000We invited Robert Schock to join us in Season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse, but he...
02:04:01.000I think that's unfortunate because I think Robert Shock has done breakthrough work on Easter Island.
02:04:07.000And it's Robert Shock who first realized that this is a problem.
02:04:11.000This deep burial of these statues by natural sedimentation is a problem.
02:04:16.000It's a chronological problem that speaks to these statues being much older than we imagine they are.
02:04:22.000Is Robert Schock declining because of the criticism that he received about the Temple of the Sphinx?
02:05:47.000I don't understand what the problem is between us.
02:05:49.000He and I disagree over the cause of the Younger Dryas cataclysm.
02:05:53.000Robert Schock believes that it was a massive solar outburst that brought this catastrophe about, and he focuses on the end of the Younger Dryas, 11,600 years ago.
02:06:02.000I'm more of the view that the Comet Research Group is right, and that we're looking at the effect of largely of airbursts of large cometary fragments right across the surface of the Earth.
02:06:43.000If you're listening, please, let's work together because we have many common enemies.
02:06:49.000And that's one of the problems with the alternative side is that there's a lot of infighting in the alternative side and everybody's scrambling for their own bit of turf.
02:06:58.000Whereas the archaeological side, they're very unified in terms of attacking what they call pseudo-archaeology.
02:07:05.000They work as a team and that teamwork makes them very efficient.
02:07:10.000We're very inefficient on the alternative side.
02:07:13.000Well, I'm assuming, I shouldn't be assuming, but I'm assuming it's the criticism.
02:07:18.000He probably wants to keep his job and he said everything he wants to say.
02:08:47.000Did sail the oceans and I'm not surprised that we haven't found their ships since we haven't found the ships for those who sailed to Australia or for those who sailed to Cyprus either.
02:08:57.000But it had abilities that we do not attribute to period of that time and those abilities included the ability to calculate longitude, something that our civilization didn't crack until the 18th century.
02:09:09.000And I suggest it's only a theory that these multiple navels of the earth around the world were fixed points on the earth where longitude connections were made.
02:09:27.000That Angkor Wat is 72 degrees of longitude east of Giza, because that number 72 occurs in ancient myths all around the world and is strongly connected to this phenomenon called precession of the equinoxes,
02:09:44.000which, first of all, it changes the pole star.
02:09:48.000At the moment, the Earth wobbles on its axis, but it's a very slow wobble over 26,000 years.
02:10:03.000Because the extended North Pole of the Earth is spiraling in the heavens and it's pointing at different bits of space over a roughly 26,000 year period.
02:10:15.000One degree of precession takes 72 years to unfold.
02:10:19.000That's why the fact that the relationship of the Great Pyramid to the Earth being on the scale of 1 to 43,200 is interesting.
02:10:27.000If it was on the scale of 1 to 57,000, I couldn't care less.
02:10:30.000But 43,200 is one of those numbers that we find in mythology and traditions all around the world.
02:10:37.000And there's very solid scholarly backing for this in a book I've mentioned to you before, which is called Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Deschen.
02:10:47.000Giorgio was professor of history of science at MIT. They draw attention to this, that there appears to have been a very ancient knowledge of this obscure astronomical phenomenon.
02:10:57.000Which our culture attributes to the Greeks and thinks only goes back a couple of thousand years.
02:11:02.000Santillana and Vendetian were of the view that it goes back to what they called some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization of the remote past.
02:11:11.000How could they even know that that was happening?
02:11:14.000By what method could they make those calculations that the Earth wobbles on its axis every 26,000 years?
02:11:21.000You have to observe for more than one human lifetime.
02:11:54.000But if you extend it for several hundred years, it'll be very clear that something is going on.
02:11:58.000And what's going on is the constellation that rises behind the sun, particularly notable at key moments of the year, the summer and winter solstice and the spring and autumn equinox and the age in which we live.
02:12:15.000Of course, astrology is another one of those things that archaeologists despise.
02:12:19.000But as anybody who follows astrology will know, we live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
02:12:24.000And that's because the sun on the spring equinox is, within the next 150 years, is going to move entirely out of Pisces, where it sits at the moment, and is going to move into Aquarius.
02:12:36.000The age of Pisces, with Pisces housing the sun on the spring equinox, began around the time of Christ, just over 2,000 years ago.
02:12:45.000And before that, it was the age of Aries.
02:12:47.000We have all this ram symbolism in ancient Egypt at that time.
02:12:50.000Before that, it was the age of Taurus, constellation of Taurus housing the sun.
02:12:54.000All of this is a process that unfolds at the rate of one degree every 72 years.
02:12:58.000So when I find that the Great Pyramid models the Earth on a scale of 1 to 43,200, which is 72 times 600, I wake up and I think this is interesting.
02:13:09.000And when I find that Angkor, one navel of the earth, is separated from Giza, another navel of the earth, by 72 degrees of longitude, that rings another bell.
02:13:17.000And I think that's something curious and worthy of exploration.
02:13:20.000I think we also, when we talk about ancient people studying the sky, we think of the sky today.
02:13:27.000And our sky, unfortunately, is burdened by light pollution almost everywhere.
02:13:32.000Anywhere there's civilization, it's very difficult to see the stars.
02:14:14.000Because I think it makes us disconnected from the idea that we're connected totally to the universe and that feeling of awe that you get when you see a completely star-filled night.
02:14:25.000I've talked about this before, but I'll say it again.
02:14:27.000I was in the observatory in the Big Island in Hawaii.
02:14:33.000And when you go up to the Keck Observatory, the sky, you go through the clouds.
02:14:38.000And when you get up to the top and you look, you can't believe that you could see it.
02:14:48.000The last time was pretty good, but one time we caught it perfectly where there was no moon in the sky and the sky was completely clear and it was astounding.
02:15:16.000It's one of the saddest things about our culture.
02:15:19.000It's incredible that you can go out at night and you can see and drive and go to your favorite restaurant and go to the movies and all kinds of nice stuff.
02:15:26.000But what we're trading off is literally our connection to this insanely beautiful thing.
02:15:55.000That is why it's so crazy to say that the phenomenon like precession wasn't discovered until the Greeks about 2,200 years ago because the ancients were living with those skies for thousands and thousands of years before and they were paying very close attention to them.
02:16:09.000There's strong evidence that the constellations of the zodiac We're not inventions of the Greeks either.
02:16:17.000I mean, in a sense, the constellations aren't inventions because they happen to be on the path of the sun.
02:16:22.000The zodiac are the constellations which roughly are in the place in the sky that the sun occupies through the course of the year.
02:16:30.000But there's increasing evidence that the Greeks inherited that and that the knowledge was very early and it may well go back into the Upper Paleolithic.
02:16:38.000There's this incredible figure of Taurus.
02:16:41.000In the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux Cave in France, one of those cave paintings which shows the stars of the Pleiades above the shoulder of the bull exactly where they should be.
02:16:51.000What is the oldest version of astrology that we have?
02:16:57.000Well, again, you have the official position on this and you have the unofficial position.
02:17:36.000I don't mean to be selfish to the human race, but we would not be here.
02:17:40.000No human beings would be here if it were not for that whole vast universe out there.
02:17:44.000It would be wrong to say that the universe exists so that we can be, but the fact is we would not be.
02:17:52.000We're part of that huge cosmos, and you're right.
02:17:56.000It's forgetting that we're part of the cosmos, or regarding the cosmos as something that we must conquer, which is the modern mindset, which is most unhelpful.
02:18:09.000I've always been fascinated by astrology, not like the newspaper astrology, like, you're a Cancer, so that means this.
02:18:14.000But the idea that the time you were born, the place on Earth you were born, where you were conceived, all these play a factor in your personality, and that this was somehow or another mapped out by people thousands and thousands of years ago.
02:18:32.000I know a lot of people like to dismiss it as myth, and I've been one of those people, but part of me wonders if there is some sort of an impact that, look, we know that the gravity from the moon affects the tides.
02:18:55.000And the idea that these very bizarre biological entities, that their personalities and their existence is in some way motivated, shaped, or at least influenced by the position in the stars in which they were born is very interesting.
02:19:12.000Because people studied that shit for a long time.
02:19:15.000If there was nothing to it, Why have so many generations of people studied it?
02:19:34.000Not the way we look at it at the moment as sort of something out there that doesn't mean much to us, except that we're going to conquer it with spaceships.
02:20:46.000And he feels that there's something useful being contributed by this approach.
02:20:50.000And so is it generally agreed that there is a connection between the methods or the design of the construction and the correlation between star systems?
02:21:03.000Is it agreed by archaeologists that the reason why these things are constructed in a very specific direction and in a very specific design, that it is mirroring the cosmos?
02:21:15.000I think that archaeologists are very reluctant to accept the broader idea.
02:21:21.000They are willing, they can hardly deny that some structures are specifically aligned to the equinoctial rising point of the sun, in other words, due east.
02:21:30.000And other structures are aligned to the rising or the setting of the sun on the summer or the winter solstice.
02:21:37.000Serpent Mound in Ohio is a classic example of that, which is oriented precisely to the setting sun on the winter solstice.
02:21:46.000But the broader idea that, for example, positions of stars in the sky might be replicated on the ground, that's an idea that archaeology completely rejects.
02:21:57.000And that's where I would like to pay tribute to my dear friend Robert Boval, who's been very ill for the last many years.
02:22:03.000But Robert Boval brought us the Orion correlation.
02:22:07.000And my god, did archaeology descend upon him like a ton of bricks.
02:22:10.000For just noticing that the three great pyramids of Giza are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of Orion's belt.
02:22:17.000And then when we work precession into the equation, we find that they're not laid out in the pattern of Orion's belt as it looked in 2500 BC when the pyramids are supposed to have been built.
02:22:28.000They're laid out in the pattern of Orion's belt in 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago.
02:22:34.000So it's like a marker on the Giza Plateau speaking to that age, just as Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe speaks to that age in the astronomical diagram on that pillar.
02:22:45.000Which also means that there would have been a line 35,000 years ago as well.
02:23:43.000And John was of the view that the Sphinx is more than 30,000 years old rather than just 12,500 years old.
02:23:50.000Well, that's what it aligned so interestingly with Robert Shock's analysis of the water erosion, that this is thousands of years of rainfall.
02:24:00.000That's the really important matter that Robert Shock has brought to the table, which no other person has dared to do.
02:24:08.000Now, John Anthony West started that process.
02:24:10.000He was aware of a problem in the weathering of the Sphinx, but he wasn't quite sure what the problem was.
02:24:17.000He was following up some writings by a scholar called Schwaller de Lubix back in the 1920s or 1930s who said something about water weathering on the Sphinx.
02:24:26.000And so John brought Robert Schock there to Giza and Robert Schock immediately recognized...
02:24:30.000The weathering patterns on the Sphinx as the result of heavy rainfall, exposure to heavy rainfall for thousands of years.
02:24:38.000And you have to go back to the younger dryers to get that kind of heavy rainfall in Giza.
02:24:44.000Hence the notion that the Sphinx geologically, whatever else we may say about it, is 12,000 plus years old.
02:25:02.000I just hugely respect him for doing that.
02:25:04.000I also thought it was really fascinating that he showed images, cropped images, of this water erosion to other geologists.
02:25:11.000They all agreed it was water erosion until they figured out where it was.
02:26:01.000Secondly, I will be doing a speaking event in the US. It'll be the only speaking event that I do in 2025. And that's going to be in Sedona, 19th and 20th of April 2025. That's a good place for it, all those freaks.
02:26:35.000And the final thing I want to say is thank you to Keanu Reeves.
02:26:38.000Thank you to Keanu Reeves for joining me on the show.
02:26:42.000Keanu reached out to me some years ago because he's making this incredible comic book series called Berserker, B-R-Z-R-K-R, about an immortal warrior who's born 80,000 years ago but has the power of a god and cannot be killed.
02:26:59.000And back, I think, at least two years ago, Keanu reached out to me for some advice, some historical advice on where in the world could such an individual have been born 80,000 years ago.
02:27:11.000And we talked about that and we exchanged emails and then we had some nice Zoom conversations together.
02:27:34.000Actually, just before Keanu and I spent a day together filming for season two of Ancient Apocalypse, he'd watched the debate between me and Flint Dibble.
02:27:42.000He knew what he was facing, getting into this, but he had, again, the courage and the integrity to stand up, to stand by me in that story.
02:27:52.000And I'm enormously grateful to him for doing that.
02:27:55.000And I found along the way, I suspected it when we knew each other just by Zoom and by email, I found along the way what an incredible gentleman Keanu Reeves is, how kind-hearted he is, how humble he is, how he turned up for the shoot carrying his own baggage.
02:28:11.000He's just a gem of a human being and he radiates kindness and decency and care and love towards others and I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to get to know him and I hope our paths will continue to cross in the future.