00:00:54.000And the giant blind spot that the mainstream archaeologists have left has allowed all these people to go through and get a much larger audience, even than them.
00:01:07.000And it's really important when someone like you does it because you're so thorough and you're so objective and you're so measured in the way you describe these things and talk about these things.
00:01:18.000There's no fantastic claims, no hyperbole.
00:01:42.000I mean, as you say, I think there are so many people out there.
00:01:45.000And now that I'm in this position, I've seen it firsthand.
00:01:48.000There are like millions and millions of people around the world that are deeply fascinated by these questions, by the vast mysteries of our past.
00:02:20.000I mean, I think someone like me has the kind of advantage of the fact that because I, you know, didn't continue my career in academia, or I wasn't in academia, but that was the pathway that I was on.
00:02:31.000Because I've gone independent now, I kind of have the freedom, if you like, to talk about these ideas in a much more open way than maybe I would have been able to if I was, well, wouldn't have been able to if I was still in academia because.
00:02:43.000You know, I'm not restricted by funding or I'm not restricted by even the pressures of people working in academia hating on me.
00:02:53.000I mean, I get a lot of hate anyway, but I mean, I think I have that freedom to almost come at things from a completely open minded perspective and speak about these ideas without any restrictions.
00:03:03.000And I think that is the advantage that I have that academics perhaps don't.
00:03:10.000So, yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm in a great place.
00:03:24.000I mean, there's been, I think, two papers in particular that have come out in the year since I was last here on the show that I think have huge ramifications for how we view history.
00:03:36.000So, I mean, I don't know where to start.
00:03:38.000I mean, I think we should start like this.
00:03:42.000I think as things currently stand, there are three huge questions.
00:03:51.000And it's interesting because these three questions we used to think we had an answer to, but in light of new discoveries, in light of new evidence coming up, we no longer have the answer to these questions.
00:04:02.000And I think that's fascinating because it's almost like the rug has been pulled out from underneath our understanding of human history.
00:04:08.000But on the surface, it's kind of like business as usual.
00:04:21.000I mean, I have a degree in ancient history, but I think my main qualification is that I'm a super nerd for all this stuff and I spend my whole life researching it.
00:04:31.000And I always encourage people to go and look at the actual archaeology, go and read the journals, read the papers, and go investigate for yourself.
00:04:38.000Like listen to what I say, but don't take what I say as gospel because at the end of the day, I'm just a YouTuber, you know?
00:04:43.000So that's the caveat I want to put on it.
00:04:45.000But from my mind, these are the three questions that I think archaeology can no longer answer, but used to think it had an answer for.
00:04:54.000And we spoke about this a little bit last time, is the fascinating question of why, after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of human beings like us being on this planet, why did it take so long for civilization to emerge?
00:05:12.000And then why, when it did, did it emerge in all these different unconnected locations all over the globe at pretty much the exact same time?
00:05:20.000So we see civilization flourishing in Mesoamerica.
00:05:23.000We see civilization flourishing in South America.
00:05:26.000Egypt and the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia and ancient India and ancient China, all around about the same time, give or take a thousand or so years, but compared to the time span of human beings on this planet, you know, 300,000 years plus for modern humans, and I would argue some of these papers are showing that it could be a lot longer than that.
00:05:47.000Why, after so long, did civilization suddenly crop up all over the place and we no longer can answer that question in light of new discoveries?
00:07:16.000And when did humans first reach the more isolated parts of the world?
00:07:21.000The answer to those questions, whatever it is, I think is fundamentally important because whatever the answer is, is the reason we're all here, right?
00:07:29.000It's the reason we all live in this civilization.
00:07:31.000It's the reason we all enjoy the fruits of everything that.
00:07:35.000We exist in today, and yet we don't know the answer anymore.
00:07:37.000But as I said, on the surface, everyone's kind of carrying on like it's business as usual, but we no longer know the answer to the most fundamental questions of how we got here.
00:08:01.000Do you think that this is incorrect and that these civilizations probably existed far earlier than that, but there's no evidence of them because of time and just erosion and natural catastrophes and fill in the blank, all the factors?
00:08:21.000Or we have not discovered some of these yet.
00:08:25.000Like some of the weirdness of the Amazon, you know, as they find these, what appear to be the grids of ancient cities that are hidden in the jungle that they're discovering with LIDAR and these other technologies that were unavailable until fairly recently.
00:08:39.000So we know that not only was the Amazon filled with people, but it was filled with millions of people.
00:10:04.000But I think, in terms of like more recent stuff, so 3000 BC back to like 12,000 BC, I think the answer is that clearly civilization is older.
00:10:14.000I mean, considering we see things like Tash Tapela, Gebekli Tepe, 12,000 years ago, I think that is a civilization.
00:10:21.000I think over time that will come to be accepted as a civilization.
00:10:24.000And I think whatever you want to define civilization as, I think we can now clearly say that it did exist 12,000 years ago rather than 6,000 years ago.
00:10:32.000So that's a kind of doubling of the timeline.
00:10:34.000In terms of going back much further than that, I think then you get into kind of like purely hypothetical scenarios.
00:10:41.000And that's when I think things like the history of human intelligence start to come into play because it was incredibly recently that we thought humans were only got intelligent.
00:10:51.000We thought humans were young, like only 100,000 years old, only a few decades ago.
00:10:55.000And now we know we're much older than that.
00:10:57.000And so, this is how what I mean about everything kind of being back on the table again because we now have an incredibly increased time span of human intelligence that I would argue, and I'll come to this later, stretches.
00:11:09.000Over a million years and yet the old idea, which is still sort of in place but I think is breaking.
00:11:14.000I think most archaeologists would accept it is breaking.
00:11:17.000But the old idea was that humans only became intelligent around 50 000 years ago and so because that idea kind of was in hold, it almost made sense, right.
00:11:28.000So humans only existed from 100 000 years ago, then got smart 50 000 years ago, then the climate got good around 14 000 years ago.
00:11:36.000We see the agricultural revolution and the emergence of the first civilizations.
00:11:39.000Like it was very neat, do you know what I mean?
00:11:41.000But now, In light of new evidence and in light of new discoveries, suddenly everything's back on the table.
00:11:46.000Suddenly, the whole time span of prehistory, or not the whole of prehistory, but I would argue, and I'll get onto why I think this later, I would argue that the time span of human intelligence has increased by 20 times from 50,000 to over a million years.
00:12:02.000But I think that puts everything back on the table.
00:12:05.000I think that the possibilities of prehistory are so vast now because our understanding has shifted so dramatically in the last few decades.
00:12:13.000And I don't think anyone's really talking about it.
00:12:16.000And that's kind of why I do what I do, because.
00:12:19.000I really want to bang this drum, if you like, that everything's back on the table, as I say.
00:12:30.000Jesse Michaels was here yesterday, and he had a really fascinating theory.
00:12:34.000I don't know if it's his theory or is it someone else's theory, the Ergot theory?
00:12:39.000His theory was that he believes that agriculture and that as they started agriculture wasn't just significant in that.
00:12:50.000You could stay in one place and you would have food and you always had a reliable diet.
00:12:56.000You didn't have to worry about starving to death.
00:12:59.000Then, because you had that sort of relaxation that came with that, you could start inventing things and building things and civilization would advance.
00:13:07.000He thinks it's also because ergot grows on these different wheats and barley and grains, and that these people, whether knowingly or unknowingly, were probably ingesting this.
00:13:21.000Psychedelic substance, which is akin to LSD, and that this was a key part of what Brian Mirarescu talked about in the Illusinian Mysteries in his great book, The Immortality Key, and that this was probably what led to a lot of invention, a lot of innovation, a lot of alternative thought, a lot of creativity, and a lot of like, you know, whatever the wild advancements of the time were.
00:13:48.000Did you see that they just not proved it, but they just They just did a study on the Eleusinian mysteries where they kind of showed that they were doing, they did have a.
00:14:41.000Because that's a complicated process when you have to separate the molecule from whatever plant it's in, and then you have to figure out that you need to free base it or smoke it.
00:14:59.000The Inca Cueva, a high altitude cave site in Jujoy, northwestern Argentina.
00:15:06.000The tubular smoking pipes were made from the long bones of a puma.
00:15:10.000They were found alongside Andadananthera seeds, including the plant commonly associated with Vilca Sibil snuff traditions.
00:15:29.000Residue testing detected tryptamine alkaloids in the pipes.
00:15:34.000So they were figuring out how to take these seeds and smoke them.
00:15:41.000The material has been dated to roughly 2130 BCE, over 4,000 years ago.
00:15:48.000That makes the find amongst the oldest direct archaeological evidence for intentional use of psychoactive anadenthera, sorry, scientists in the southern Andes.0.99
00:16:17.000Its psychoactive chemistry can include bufatinin DMT and 5-MeO DMT in varying quantities.
00:16:26.000Depending on plant material and preparation, the archaeological interpretation is that the pipes were used in a ritual context involving, one more time, anadenanthera rather than proof that people were using modern purified DMT.0.91
00:16:42.000Either way, they're smoking whatever the fuck that stuff is, they're getting DMT from it.
00:16:47.000So, they had figured out somehow or another that ingesting it through smoke.0.93
00:16:52.000Now, one of the reasons why this is particularly significant is there's scholars out of I think it's the University of Jerusalem that believe that the burning bush that Moses encountered Some kind of psychedelic.
00:17:10.000They think the translation was they believe it was possibly the acacia tree, which is apparently rich in DMT, so that Moses has.
00:17:18.000Moses trips balls and gets some really good solid rules to live by and comes back with them and said, Hey, this is what God said.
00:17:27.000Yeah, I mean, I think it's clearly the case that ancient cultures, not just in South America, but across the world, were using psychedelic substances.
00:17:55.000Yeah, and much like in our culture today, and especially what happened in 1970, where all that stuff was demonized and put on Schedule I, back then during the Illicinian mysteries, the reason why those mysteries stopped is because the powers that be were like, hey, these guys are a fucking problem.0.95
00:18:14.000These trippy dudes with their weird ideas who invented democracy, they're going to fuck this whole thing up.
00:18:21.000We're not going to be able to run it and tell everybody what to do and force them into going to war.0.97
00:18:43.000And that's always been the case, which is probably good for people.
00:18:50.000You know, it probably is what leads to, I mean, not the war part of it, but But probably these new ideas is what leads to an advancement of civilization rather than stagnation that we find in some places in the world where they haven't had a chance to do that.
00:19:34.000And if you don't have, if that guy and these groups just stay in control forever, like it's like there's no motivation for them to change and evolve and grow.
00:19:49.000But you know, when you think of these places, these very fertile places on earth, where like particularly Turkey, Turkey's fascinating, you know, and many people are now speculating that that.
00:20:01.000If there is a singular place, but that might have been one of the birthplaces of true civilization.
00:20:08.000This episode is brought to you by Blue Chew.
00:21:11.000This ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience.
00:21:16.000Yeah, I mean, I think it undoubtedly is.
00:21:18.000I think Tash Tapela, which is in modern day Turkey, is the earliest evidence, in my view, of something akin to civilization.
00:21:24.000And now, archaeologists will say it's not civilization because it doesn't quite tick off every part of the checklist.
00:21:30.000But I think that's neither here nor there.
00:21:33.000I think it's clearly a very sophisticated culture.
00:21:35.000I mean, you have like 14 sites there that are now clearly shown to be interlinked, shared symbolism, shared religious traditions, same architectural styles.
00:24:07.000But I would argue, and I've said this before, is that Gebekli Tepe is a site that has such important ramifications for our understanding of civilization and the origins of civilization that it should receive special treatment, right?
00:24:20.000Because it is the oldest site that looks like civilization.
00:24:23.000So I always think that maybe we should not.
00:24:27.000Obviously, you want to be careful when you go in and you want to follow correct archaeological procedure.
00:24:31.000But at the same time, what if a relic.
00:24:34.000Like equivalent to the Rosetta Stone, the one stone that we found that completely translated Egyptian hieroglyphs and opened up ancient Egypt to our understanding.
00:24:42.000What if some kind of equivalent artifact is hiding in the unexcavated 95% of Gbekli Tepe?
00:24:48.000That could be waiting for us to find.0.91
00:24:50.000We talked about this boar before, Joe.
00:24:53.000I don't remember ever seeing it, but it's not new, but it was also found at Gbekli Tepe.
00:25:21.000What we're saying about that is in like these boars and snakes and all these different animals that are on these incredible pillars, they're not carved into it.
00:25:29.000The stone is carved around it, which is advanced.
00:25:34.000It takes a sophisticated use of tools and an understanding of how to work stone to be able to do something like that.
00:26:21.000Must have been a weird world back then.
00:26:22.000And then the real question is is this the oldest civilization or is this the oldest reboot of civilization that was destroyed by the Great Flood and by the Younger Dryas Impact and whatever the fuck could have happened to whatever civilization previously existed?
00:26:40.000That's when things get real squirrely.
00:26:44.000If that is a civilization, which I think it's becoming clear that it is, and it doesn't really matter how you define civilization, it's clearly incredibly sophisticated.
00:26:50.000Like, it's a very sophisticated culture.
00:27:03.000But yeah, that means that, you know, the timeline of civilization, whatever you want to call it, has doubled from 6,000 years to 12,000 years.
00:27:10.000So then the question becomes, how much further back does it go?
00:27:14.000Clearly, Tash De Pella, Gebekli Tepe, it's not the first thing these people built.
00:27:27.000And for people that don't know, we should probably explain that one of the reasons why they're able to accurately carbon test Gobekli Tepe is because, and this is where it gets really weird, the dirt is uniform in that it was intentionally covered.
00:27:44.000So, these sites weren't covered just over time like maybe the Sphinx was in Egypt.
00:27:51.000They were covered intentionally and they were covered 11,600 ish years ago.
00:28:40.000And that's the thing with so much of this stuff is that no one knows.
00:28:43.000And especially the further back you get in time, anyone that talks with any confidence around the past.
00:28:48.000And this is one of my main bugbears with archaeology.
00:28:51.000Like, I love archaeology and I have a huge respect for archaeologists and I think they do amazing work.
00:28:56.000But one of my main bugbears is the confidence in which people talk about the past and Ruling out other possibilities because at the end of the day, none of us know what happened in the deep, deep past, especially when you start getting back to these crazy time scales.
00:29:09.000It's all speculation, and it doesn't matter if you're a YouTuber like me or if you're a professor, we're all just speculating based on the very limited evidence that we have.
00:29:17.000And so, I don't like it when people say definitive things.
00:29:20.000I always try and say, maybe this is the case, or maybe that's the case.
00:29:24.000We don't know, and I think everyone should approach history with that mindset.
00:29:29.000If I can get any message across to people, it's that that is the message.
00:29:33.000We don't know, and here's a possibility, and here's a possibility, and here's the evidence that we think is true, but you know, it's really hard to tell.
00:29:41.000But it also does stand to reason that biology and archaeology, as they expand the timeline, as biology has expanded the timeline, archaeology should probably tag along.
00:29:51.000Well, yeah, that's what I mean about the fact that the rug's kind of been pulled out from underneath us.
00:29:58.000There's good reason to think humans intentionally deposited at least some of the fill.
00:30:03.000Enclosure D alone contained roughly five hundred cubic meters of rubble and cultural debris, and particular items, including broken anthropomorphic sculpture heads, appear to have been deliberately placed near pillars during refilling.
00:30:18.000But archaeologists do not have definitive evidence for the often repeated popular claim that its builders intentionally buried the entire site at once to hide it, preserve it, or mark a single ritual closure.
00:30:30.000The mound is man-made in the sense that it consists of accumulated archaeological deposits, but its formation Involved both human actions and natural sediment movement ending around 8,000 BCE.0.61
00:30:47.000I don't think people even really can wrap their head around how long we're talking.0.87
00:30:51.000You know, especially that's the other thing about one of the things that I loved about your whole video series was the one where you were talking about what would be left if there was a human civilization 100,000 or more years ago.
00:31:11.000So, if this biology assessment is correct, is that there have been humans far longer than we used to think.
00:31:22.000So, if that's the case because if we used to think it was 50,000 years, I think when I was in high school, they were saying the Homo sapiens were like 50,000 years old, maybe 100, right?
00:31:31.000And now the conventional estimate is like what, three?
00:31:35.000So, the oldest fossils we have of anatomically modern humans are 315 to 360.
00:31:43.000I mean, it's the same fossil set from Jebel Aroud in Morocco.
00:31:46.000But this obviously is really hard to date accurately, but it's between 300 and 350,000 years old.
00:31:51.000And then I think it's really important to note that the fossil record is incredibly incomplete because most people don't leave a fossil.
00:32:00.000It's so unlikely that you'd fossilize.
00:32:24.000But the evidence that they do find is pushing the timeline way back, way back.
00:32:30.000And that alone, you would think archaeology would go, well, hey, guys, in light of this new evidence, maybe we should consider the possibility that civilization is quite a bit older than we think.
00:32:55.000Is it possible that given the incredible possibilities in terms of what kind of natural disasters took place, just asteroid impacts that we know, we find them all over the Earth, all over the Earth, and some of them are 20,000 years old, 50,000 years old, we find them everywhere.
00:33:18.000What kind of an impact would that have had?
00:33:20.000What would be left of those civilizations?
00:33:22.000And all those questions, again, guys like you are the ones proposing them and putting them out there.
00:33:28.000And it's a really good question, especially in light of what we understand about humans biologically.
00:33:35.000Doesn't it make sense that these people, just as anatomically completely like us, why would it take them hundreds of thousands of years to figure out a roof?
00:33:52.000But I think we have clear evidence now that what we call modern intelligence, behavioral modernity, goes back so, so, so much further than we think.
00:34:04.000Like, I would argue back over a million years in light of a couple of papers that have come out in the last 12 months.
00:34:25.000Regarding the island of Sulawesi, which is in Indonesia.
00:34:28.000And this is in relation to human seafaring.
00:34:32.000So, seafaring was always thought to be an exclusively sapient trait, exclusively modern human trait, because it's a really hard thing to do, right?
00:34:39.000You need to be quite clever to build a boat, to build something that's sophisticated enough to be seaworthy to get across ocean boundaries and to reach isolated landmasses.
00:34:48.000And we always thought that was only sapiens until very recently.
00:35:03.000And then I was like, oh, wow, look where these stone tools were found.
00:35:06.000And it was really, really interesting because they were found on Sulawesi.
00:35:10.000Sulawesi is an island that crucially sits east of something called the Wallace Line, which is a biogeographic boundary, which means that it has been an island and separated from the mainland for tens of millions of years and separated by deep ocean channels that are between, depending on the fluctuating sea levels at the time, between 50 and 100 kilometers across.
00:36:16.000Tools are 1.04 to 1.4 million years old.
00:36:20.000So, over a million years ago, some type of human was crossing ocean boundaries to get to these islands.
00:36:25.000And there's also Luzon, which is just above Sulawesi, same region.
00:36:28.000And they found stone tools there, which are 700,000 years old.
00:36:32.000Now, the theory always was that this was an accident.
00:36:37.000When we just had Flores, the theory was that it was accidental drift.
00:36:41.000So, a couple of humans were swept out to sea and somehow survived the.
00:36:46.000The stormy ocean and the tropical sun cling to some driftwood and made it to Flores and somehow survived and colonized the island.
00:36:53.000But now that we've got Flores, Luzon, and Sulawesi, three islands all in the same region, all separated by this ocean boundary, I think it's starting to point less towards accident and more towards behavior, right?
00:37:07.000More towards a deliberate sea crossing.
00:37:09.000Because to colonize, I was doing some research because of these discoveries, and there's actually been a few papers from NASA on how many humans you need.
00:37:20.000To colonize an isolated landmass, because NASA were doing it for like if you're going to Mars or something.
00:37:26.000And you need a certain amount of humans of breeding age to not have like genetic problems in the population.
00:37:35.000So you need a certain amount of humans of a breeding age to ensure viability, right?
00:37:40.000Because otherwise you're going to inbreed and you're all going to die out because of genetic issues.
00:37:44.000And they said it was something like you need 160 people at least, and that is with strict breeding controls and genetic testing.
00:37:52.000We can probably assume they weren't doing genetic testing on themselves.
00:37:56.000And so then the number's somewhere near 500.
00:37:58.000So, what are the chances that 500 individuals were all swept out to sea at the same time, all survived the crossing and all landed on an island and colonized it?
00:38:09.000That's a huge amount of humans for an accident.
00:38:35.000And I think if we apply Occam's Razor to it, which is you know, the simplest explanation wins.
00:38:39.000I think the simplest explanation is that these humans were intelligent enough to build boats right right, and that's I mean, and that is a controversial opinion, that's not accepted.
00:38:49.000It's accepted that the humans reached these islands.
00:38:52.000That that's not, that's not controversial.
00:38:53.000Humans were on these islands a million years ago, 700k.
00:38:56.000It's just not accepted that it was intentional.
00:38:57.000Yeah, it's not accepted that they built both.0.71
00:39:09.000And this is what I mean about taking data points from different kinds of science.
00:39:12.000So, because I'm looking into what NASA is saying about humans colonizing somewhere, and I'm saying, well, look, 500 people or more than 500 people of breeding age as well, not just people, all reaching an island on three separate occasions, all in the same region.
00:39:30.000So, I think that has huge ramifications for human intelligence because that was always thought to be an exclusively sapient thing, building a boat, because that's really hard.
00:39:40.000To build a boat, you have to have planning, you have to have foresight, you have to be good enough at carpentry to construct something that's seaworthy.
00:41:05.000Do they have a calendar a million years ago?
00:41:07.000But whatever they were doing, if it was deliberate, which I think the evidence points towards, it's a clear sign of what we call. Modern intelligence and organization, and most likely communication, which we always used to think only emerged 50,000 years ago.
00:41:39.000And this is what you were saying about like people can't get their heads around the sheer enormity of these timescales that we're talking about.
00:42:45.000And I don't understand how they determine the amount of copper that was removed.
00:42:49.000But if that is correct, that seems to indicate.
00:42:53.000That there was some sort of sophisticated metallurgy going on in North America 9,000 years ago.
00:43:01.000Yeah, which is as early as anywhere else in the world.
00:43:05.000And that completely flies in the face of what we used to think about people in North America.
00:43:11.000And it's interesting because what the evidence appears to show is that they did this for a few thousand years, but then they dropped it and they stopped doing it.
00:43:18.000Now, I don't know what that suggests, but either it suggests something happened to them or they decided they didn't want to do it anymore.
00:43:24.000But either way, it kind of goes against this idea that we've always kind of assumed that technology is like an escalator, right?
00:43:31.000We always assume that technology is an escalator.
00:43:37.000So, wrap your head around this, folks.
00:43:39.000Archaeology and date mining and copper tool use, but it generally cannot calculate annual or century specific production 9,500 years ago.
00:43:51.000One older broad estimate puts a total archaic period extraction in the Lake Superior region at up to about 1.5 billion pounds of copper, roughly 680,000 metric tons.
00:44:08.000But that covers many millennia, not the century 9,500 years ago.
00:44:12.000So that means that they were doing it for thousands of years.
00:44:19.000They're saying it covers many millennia.
00:44:21.000Yeah, they were doing it for, as it says, the peak between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago.
00:45:25.000But as I was saying, wow, there's the Copperhead arrow.
00:45:30.000It goes against this idea that we have that technology is like an escalator and you just take one level of technology and you keep going up.
00:45:37.000It shows that people can invent something or discover something and then stop doing it and forget about it.
00:45:41.000And I think that has implications for how we look at prehistory as a whole because it suggests that people, you know, rather than just going straight line this linear path upwards.
00:45:49.000We can go up and down and forget things and rediscover things.
00:45:53.000And that's what the - this is the alternative theory, is that we're a reinvention of civilization currently and that we're the most advanced reinvention that we're aware of.
00:46:05.000But it doesn't mean that there hasn't been some sort of a civilization before us that perhaps reached heights where we are or greater in a completely different direction.
00:46:15.000I think when you look at some of the stone structures that exist, those are the best evidence.
00:46:33.000It's weird because they're attributed to the Romans, right?
00:46:35.000But there's no Roman records of them doing that.
00:46:39.000And that's not particularly weird in itself until you realize that it's a bigger engineering project than anything the Romans did anywhere.
00:46:47.000I mean, the Colosseum is obviously an incredible thing, but the blocks aren't as big as these blocks at Baalbek.
00:46:52.000And yet, they don't mention it anywhere.
00:46:54.000And you'd think that, you know, a civilization that documented as much as the Romans would at least mention their biggest engineering project somewhere, you know?
00:47:02.000And I mean, that doesn't mean it wasn't the Romans, but it's just a weird thing.
00:47:54.000And yeah, that's not necessarily the best way of looking at them, I think.
00:47:58.000I think what you said earlier is really important that we can't possibly know, and to make these definitive statements, About things where you just don't have enough evidence, you don't have enough facts, you can't really say definitively we know.
00:48:14.000And that drives experts crazy because they don't like to do that.
00:48:19.000They don't like to let that go, especially humans, especially men.1.00
00:48:22.000They love the ego that comes with being the one who has the information, the expert opinion, that appeal to authority that I'm the one who could tell you, oh, this is nonsense, these Michael Buttons on YouTube with their bullshit.1.00
00:48:59.000And it's undeniably, at least to me and you, interesting.
00:49:02.000You know, and that's why the subject will, you know, hopefully will continue the pathway that it's on.
00:49:11.000Because There's so many people like you now that are looking at this stuff, and they're very credible people who are very objective.
00:49:17.000The Ben Van Kirkwicks of the world, the Jimmy Corsetti's, all these people that are looking at this stuff and go, Hey, there's a lot going on here, people.
00:49:26.000Yeah, I think it's interesting that the more we uncover, the more we discover, the more new evidence that comes out.
00:49:33.000I think what we're starting to realize is that the limits on our own knowledge are vastly bigger than we ever used to think.
00:49:42.000Like, we used to think we kind of had it figured out, and this is what I'm talking about with those three questions I measured at the Mentioned at the start, like we used to think we had the answer to these big questions, but with each new discovery, we're starting to realize just how vast the unknown is.
00:49:55.000I think there's two subjects where this kind of applies.
00:49:59.000I think the first is physics, and obviously, I'm not smart enough or clever enough to talk about physics in any meaningful capacity, but I think it's fair to say that the more we learn about the nature of reality and the universe, the more we realize just how big it is and how crazy it is and how little we understand about our place in it.
00:50:14.000But I think the other subject is history.
00:50:16.000I think the more we learn about history, The more we realize how huge the amount of time humans have been on this planet is, how long a mind like ours has been on this planet, how long humans that are very similar to us have been on this planet is.
00:50:29.000And I think it's a vital thing because it's physics is kind of the question of where are we, but history is kind of the question of who are we and where did we come from?
00:50:40.000And that's why I'm so interested in it because it's a fundamental question to civilization and to who we are.
00:51:10.000And are these stories, these flood myths that exist in all these ancient cultures, an echo of a historical record of people trying to keep track of this event that took place that crushed us and brought us down to a few thousand people all over the world and we had to rebuild?
00:51:33.000It's also when you go back thousands of years in the conventional timeline, people were so barbaric.
00:51:41.000They were so horrible just a few thousand years ago.
00:51:44.000If they were capable 5,000 years ago of building ancient Egypt, probably earlier than that, but why were they so brutal 2,000 years ago?
00:51:53.000Because I think those are the people that survived.0.99
00:51:56.000I think the people that survived were probably fucking terrible.0.99
00:52:19.000Imagine what you had to do to stay alive.
00:52:21.000Imagine even the thought of raising children in a world where there's only 7,000 people left and limited amounts of food and, you know, most of the population of Earth is dead.
00:52:50.000Yes, that is related to what you were just saying about.
00:52:53.000So, just after the agricultural revolution, the theory is that because humans then had like property and were kind of defending things, that people got a lot more violent.
00:53:04.000And there's a lot of evidence that around 6,000 years ago, Basically, all the men died.
00:53:11.000There's like evidence that 95% of male bloodlines were removed, and we can see this from the Y chromosome in genetics.
00:53:18.000And there's a massive drop off of the diversity, the genetic diversity in male bloodlines, and something like 95% went.
00:53:26.000And no one quite knows where this is, but we see lots of mass graves around this time and violent graves, and like all these people were killing each other.
00:53:33.000And it might not have been that, but it's weird that it only affected men because if it was a natural disaster, it wouldn't be specific to either gender, but it's only men.
00:53:41.000So some people think it's like, A big amount of violence, but no one really knows, but it's really interesting.
00:53:49.000I mean, think if you go from hunter and gathering, where you're constantly moving, nomadic tribes, a bunch of people that stick together, you're in tents or whatever, and then all of a sudden you're stationary and you've developed agriculture and you stay put.
00:54:04.000And then there's hunter gatherer tribes that still exist because guess what?
00:54:08.000So it's not like it was a uniform discovery of agriculture.
00:54:11.000Everybody adopted it and there was no more hunter gatherer tribes and there's no more tribes of wandering marauders.0.99
00:54:17.000So, there's still these tribes of wandering marauders, and so now you have to defend this spot because you're stuck there because you're dumbass, build a house.0.97
00:54:26.000The Mongols used to make fun of people that lived in houses.0.99
00:54:30.000They thought they were fools and they lived in felt tents, period.0.98
00:54:34.000That's how you're supposed to live.0.99
00:55:02.000Mongols figured out a lot of cute stuff.0.62
00:55:04.000But, you know, it makes sense that that's when war would become ubiquitous.
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00:56:43.000It's a logical progression of how people would behave, given the fact that now all of a sudden they have resources that they've accumulated.
00:59:32.000The whole region around there, I mean, obviously, it's really long.
00:59:35.000The famous continuous looking Ming era wall that most visitors picture is much shorter, still, 8,850 kilometers.
00:59:44.000When associated structures and natural barriers are included, UNESCO describes the overall Great Wall complex as more than 20,000 kilometers long.
00:59:54.000So, at the very least, the part that you visit.0.90
00:59:57.000The Ming era wall, 8,850 kilometers, which is fucking wild.0.86
01:00:11.000So it was built over 2,000 years from early walls in the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE through major work in the Ming Dynasty, which ended in 1644.
01:00:23.000Have you ever seen some of the stuff that Cassie Coppersmith has talked about in regards to ancient technology evidence from China?
01:00:33.000Not specifically her stuff, but there's lots of weird things in ancient China.
01:00:39.000Yeah, weird stuff like jade artifacts that seem to be machined that don't make any sense, that are like super old, and that seem to be artifacts that were passed down from generation to generation.
01:00:51.000And thousands of years ago, the civilization that was in possession of them, their current ability to make artifacts was like much cruder.
01:01:03.000So it seems like this was older stuff that they had somehow or another acquired.
01:03:29.000Everything gets absorbed in the earth.
01:03:30.000You've got a jungle where Manhattan is.
01:03:33.000And maybe you would stumble upon a piece of metal one day.
01:03:36.000But even then, like, I mean, I've done quite a lot of research on material degradation, and almost all our modern materials, other than stone, are gone in a few millennia.
01:03:48.000If these timescales are accurate in terms of the human brain, In terms of the ability to logically view the world, invent things, creativity.
01:04:00.000If they possessed this 300,000 years ago, why wouldn't they have figured a lot of this stuff out?
01:04:10.000The seafaring thing over 1 million years ago, okay, you can debate it.
01:04:13.000It could have been an accident, I suppose.
01:04:14.000I don't think it is, but you can debate it.
01:04:16.000But I think that we have completely undisputable evidence that human beings were this intelligent 500,000 years ago with the Colombo structure, which we spoke about a lot last time.
01:05:28.000My thought was if AI can get so intelligent that it can do an accurate account of all of the objects on Earth, all of the people on Earth, all of the things on Earth, essentially every molecule that exists on Earth, and then extrapolate back to how they got in that position in the first place, whether through natural ore deposits,0.98
01:05:57.000natural disasters, volcanoes, all these different things.
01:06:21.000I mean, you'd have to have enough technology that you would be able to literally like scan the entire outer crust of the earth, which seems daunting today, but ground penetrating radar seemed ridiculous 500 years ago, right?
01:06:48.000It's a very, very rapidly emerging thing.
01:06:52.000I wonder what kind of a version, what kind of a map of history, at least in terms of like rough timelines of things, we'll be able to get.
01:07:03.000That's the great hope for archaeology, right?
01:07:04.000Is that modern technology allows us to discover things that we previously would not have been able to discover.
01:07:10.000And as you say, LiDAR is the Current example of that, but if you just extrapolate forward, what else could we possibly use to discover things that we haven't?
01:07:17.000Of course, something like that will emerge because nobody even considered like, again, 500 years ago, what are you talking about?0.95
01:07:25.000500 years from now, who the fuck knows?0.90
01:07:36.000But again, I think part of what makes me think that perhaps we're not going to discover stuff is this preservation problem because so much of it is just gone.
01:07:47.000I mean, I guess if, like, what you say, if we can, like, somehow extrapolate.
01:08:12.000And that's why it frustrates me so much when people are so definitive about it, because it's like, you really think that we're not going to, because, I mean, that's the thing.
01:08:19.000Science is always advancing in every single field all the time.
01:08:22.000We're never at the point where we've discovered everything, and yet there's always people in every period of history that think this is the kind of upper limit.
01:08:30.000What would be around from 300,000 years ago, other than what we've found so far?0.94
01:08:41.000Everything would be gone unless it's like incredibly unlikely preservation, like the Colombo structure, like incredibly unlikely for it to happen.
01:11:26.000I mean, you could have harder stone that you've figured out how to work into a position, and you could have sand, and there's a bunch of things they could use.
01:11:39.000I mean, all that is like, you could attribute that to ingenuity and, you know, Craftsmen with years of learning how to work these different things.
01:11:48.000It's when you get to large stuff that you're like, okay, how'd you get these stones from Aswan?
01:11:55.000How'd you get a 50 ton block of granite and move it through the mountains with no roads?
01:16:39.000So if that's not just a giant, perfect slab of granite that happens to be roughly in the shape of a guy, and you're like, wouldn't that be dope?
01:16:46.000If we made a dude out of that with a giant dong and just had him just staring over our kingdom.
01:16:59.000Yeah, because we like to make money and it takes too much time to do a fucking pyramid when you can make a nice skyscraper in just a couple of years and put a big trump on the roof.0.82
01:17:12.000No surviving technical manual records records, rather, the exact construction procedure, archaeological and.
01:17:19.000Art historical understanding is that the artisans shaped the statue in situ, removing stone around the intended figure, roughing out the body, then refining the face, limbs, hair, and distinctive vines, climbing the legs.
01:17:44.000So if they moved it, if there was definitive proof that it was moved there, then there's another monkey wrench gets thrown into the whole thing.
01:19:44.000And so, again, that has implications for what was really going on a million years ago.
01:19:47.000And if you link that to what I would argue is modern behavior with seafaring in Southeast Asia, then you have a million year old skull found in China in Northeast Asia.
01:20:01.000You know, put those two things together and you suddenly got human beings with modern brains doing modern things a million years ago.
01:20:28.000Yeah, there you go, Jamie Rotten Q. Badly, badly deformed.
01:20:31.000And they were always thought to be Homo erectus because of where they were found, China, and how old they were, over a million years old, because that was the only type of human that should have been in China or in that area at that time.
01:20:44.000At that age, they always assumed to be a Homo erectus, but a few researchers from a university in China, along with the Natural History Museum in London, a professor named Professor Chris Stringer, they applied modern reconstruction techniques to Yongxiang II, the second skull.
01:21:00.000And so they used something called CT scanning to reconstruct it.
01:21:04.000And what they discovered was that they think it's actually a Homo longi skull, which is this part of the same clad as Denisovan.
01:21:14.000Denisovan is kind of like a sister species.
01:21:32.000Either way, these scientists think this skull is Homo longi, which is a clad of Denisovan, which is crucially a sister species to Neanderthal and us, sapiens, which means that if this skull is a million years old and if it is.
01:21:45.000Homo longi, that means that the divergence of our species must have happened before then.
01:21:50.000So, when humans split into Neanderthal, Denisovan, and Homo sapien, if this human was already walking around one million years ago, that means that whatever became us had already diverged at that point.
01:22:03.000So, we were already a distinct species, Homo sapiens, one million years ago, which is a staggeringly long amount of time and so much older than what we thought before.
01:22:11.000We used to think this was around 500,000 years ago.
01:22:15.000Thousand or more than that jump from what we thought before.
01:22:18.000Have you heard the theory about Neanderthals that they believe that Neanderthals were not just a separate group of humans but were actually created by humans interbreeding with other ancient primates?
01:22:33.000So instead of Neanderthals existing previously, that Homo sapiens predate Neanderthals and that Homo sapiens breeding with some other ancient primate, some other one of these, created Neanderthals.
01:22:55.000I was like, okay, this is a crazy theory.
01:22:59.000And it's, you know, because the thought is that Neanderthals were bred out with, you know, that there was interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals.
01:23:26.000The fact that we can have kids together is incredible.
01:23:29.000And they actually recently found evidence of humans and, as in, sapiens and Neanderthals actually coexisting for a long, long time in the same place and like living in the same place.
01:23:38.000And because you could always argue before that perhaps it was, you know, non consensual breeding between like a Neanderthal male and a sapient woman.
01:23:45.000But now we have evidence that we did live like alongside each other cooperatively.
01:23:49.000I can't remember where the site is, but that, Was found recently.
01:23:52.000So, yeah, that's interesting as well because.
01:26:15.000Researchers have proposed hybridization based ideas, but generally not the exact claim that Neanderthals originally formed from Homo sapiens plus another species.
01:26:25.000Paraleontologists have proposed that particularly late Neanderthal or early modern human fossils might be Neanderthal Homo sapiens hybrids or descendants of populations that mix repeatedly.
01:26:34.000No, this is not quite what I'm saying.
01:26:37.000This is what's fucked up when you watch too many videos and you read too many articles and you don't save them.
01:26:45.000Let me ask another one before they find it.
01:26:49.000The Denisovan thing is weird because there are recent proposals.
01:26:54.000I think this is a paper I sent you a podcast where they're discussing this paper.
01:27:00.000That as of August, like this month, there's some speculation about the height of the Denisovans and that they think they might have been much larger than Homo sapiens at the time.
01:27:26.000The dragon man skull, which has been classified as very similar to Denisovan, is bigger.
01:27:31.000And then they found this thigh bone that suggests that they were considerably over six foot tall.
01:27:36.000Now, obviously, that's not like a massive giant, but compared to, you know, the average height of a human today is something like a male human is something like 5'8 or 5'9.0.94
01:27:46.000And so, a Denisovan being over six foot is like quite a considerable jump from that.0.65
01:27:50.000So, it's not like a mythical giant, but it's still.0.99
01:27:53.000Bigger than you'd expect an ancient human to be.
01:27:55.000And it's also we're going with a limited amount of fossils, right?
01:28:07.000Recent genetic research confirms that modern humans, Homo sapiens, and Neanderthals repeatedly interbred across a period spanning roughly 200,000 to 250,000 years ago.
01:28:17.000While it's long believed that interbreeding occurred during a brief window of about 50 to 60,000 years ago, advanced Genomic mapping shows multiple waves of contact occurred much earlier.
01:28:29.000200,000 and 250,000 years ago, an early wave of Homo sapiens migrating out of Africa encountered and mated with Neanderthals in Eurasia.
01:28:38.000So, what this guy was saying was that it might not have been that, but that even earlier than this, Neanderthals were a result of human beings interbreeding with others.
01:28:53.000Or Homo sapiens interbreeding with others.
01:29:13.000It seems like a more robust, larger version of a human.
01:29:18.000And then when you take into account the range and size of human beings, given the correct amount of resources and food and protein, we got.
01:29:28.000Seven foot plus humans that are all over the place today, and imagine if these Denisovan skulls, which seem to be like a completely different structure than a Homo sapiens, we might, they might be the giants of the Bible, is the point.
01:29:58.000Like just for someone to be a little bit.
01:29:59.000Bigger, and you encounter a group of them, and you're like a small homo sapient community, you're going to remember that as well.0.97
01:30:05.000Well, whenever I do the UFC weigh-ins, I'm standing next to massive fucking, you know, these huge heavyweights.0.94
01:30:15.000Like some of these guys are just gigantic humans, you know, six foot seven, six foot nine, 265 pounds, and they have to cut weight to make 265.0.96
01:30:59.000Primates, our kind of line of animals, can get really big.
01:31:03.000And that, along the same lines of the timeline of discovery of that, is fascinating, too, because.
01:31:10.000I think it was in the 1920s, an archaeologist was in an apothecary shop in China, and he found molars that were from a primate that didn't make any sense.
01:31:28.000We used to think that they were bipedal, because I've read that before, but now they're thinking that not necessarily, and that they might have been.
01:31:36.000Because a lot of people thought that's Bigfoot.
01:31:39.000Myth that persists throughout Native American cultures, everywhere else.
01:31:46.000Yeah, they think it might have been an enormous orangutan.
01:32:03.000If there's the people, you brought up florists before.0.93
01:32:07.000Now we also know about those little hobbit people that lived on the island florists that were these three foot tall, tiny little people.1.00
01:33:11.000But she was on a podcast recently talking about this ghost DNA and how weird it is that a few hundred thousand years ago something happened.
01:33:20.000And there's this DNA that's in there that's like, what is this?
01:33:53.000It's really hard to attribute stone tools to anything because if you just have the tools, you don't know what human used them, what human made them.
01:34:10.000What else has been fascinating for you recently?
01:34:15.000So I think the question that I mentioned at the start, the one like, when did humans reach isolated land masses such as America and Australia is a really interesting question because, again, the old ideas we have.
01:34:32.000Have proven to be incorrect, and I think, especially in the case of the Americas, I think it's super interesting because obviously, as you know, we used to think it was Clovis first 13,000 years ago, but so many sites now seem to be pushing that back much, older into the past.
01:34:47.000Um, so yeah, that's a really interesting question.
01:34:50.000I mean, obviously, now we know that humans have been in the Americas for at least 22,000 years with white sands footprints, which I'm sure you've heard of that, yes, 22,000 years, it's crazy.
01:35:02.000So that's the oldest accepted evidence, but I think there's loads of interesting sites that.
01:35:06.000Potentially push it quite a lot further back than that, which are a bit more controversial, but when you take them all together, they're kind of yeah, there's why it stands.
01:35:13.000So that's now accepted, I think, by most archaeologists.
01:35:17.000And what why that's important is that because it kind of opens it all up again because of when the kind of ice, the glacial maximums happen, it kind of the opening of the corridor because that's pre that it means that we now don't know how long humans have been in the Americas, it could go back way further.
01:35:33.000And then you start looking at these other sites and you think maybe it's a lot, lot older.
01:35:38.000There's one in Mexico called Chicoita Cave.
01:37:01.000Again, not fully accepted by archaeologists, but the people working there are quite convinced that it's evidence of human presence in Brazil, which is obviously quite far south, over 50,000 years ago.
01:37:14.000But the thing is, you can't prove it because you haven't.
01:37:17.000They need so many things to say it for sure.
01:37:19.000They need like a fossil of a human, basically, because otherwise you're going to say it's natural.
01:37:46.000I'm assuming that is much more recent because otherwise that would be very clear evidence of human presence.
01:37:52.000But I think the oldest layers go back.
01:37:54.000I think it's been continuously, or they think it's been continuously inhabited for thousands and thousands of years, with the oldest being over 50,000 years old.
01:39:02.000No roads lead to it, no vehicle can reach it.
01:39:05.000The only way in is on foot through a maze of stone pathways that all look identical.
01:39:10.000On the walls inside, there are 15,000 paintings.
01:39:14.000Animals that no longer exist here, rivers that dried up thousands of years ago, and then things no one can identify floating figures with no faces, beings with round heads wearing what looks like suits.
01:39:27.000A figure over three meters tall that the man who discovered it simply called a god.
01:40:19.000And now, no one's really has any understanding of what's under that sand.
01:40:25.000Yeah, but it was fertile and green right up until.
01:40:28.000Literally, right up until the point that the conventional timeline has civilization starting, like around 4000 BC, is when it flipped to desert.
01:40:38.000So, yeah, I mean, I'm sure there has been archaeological work done in the Sahara, but compared to the size of the Sahara, there's just got to be loads of stuff under there that could potentially change our understanding of the origins of civilization for sure.
01:40:51.000Very interesting region, but yeah, extremely hard to excavate for many reasons, such as the climate and also political instability.
01:42:10.000I was going to bring that up about Gobekli Tepe.
01:42:12.000About if they bring in more archaeologists, more people to dig, if they really truly expand, they really have to keep track of what they find because the amount of money that someone can get.
01:42:22.000For an artifact on the black market is pretty incredible.0.72
01:42:25.000This is an issue with Egypt, right?0.86
01:42:30.000But Egypt in particular, there's some inconsistencies with Zahi Hawass's versions of what was discovered in some places, whether or not a skeleton was in a sarcophagus, versus what he said later.
01:42:44.000In the older versions, there was a skeleton, and the newer versions, they didn't find anything.
01:45:13.000Because, I mean, if you're a person with a private museum, if you've got that kind of money, and like there's people in the world that have private zoos, right?
01:45:20.000So they have so much money in other countries that they've, you know, they have basically the wild kingdom in their backyard, you know?
01:45:29.000And that guy's like, well, I got that.
01:51:05.000The problem is there's been deception.
01:51:08.000And one of the big pieces of deception is when you go to a lot of museums and you see a dinosaur skeleton, you assume that's how they found it and they put it back together again.
01:51:19.000Whereas a lot of the pieces of those bones are not real.
01:52:42.000Yeah, I don't know anybody who, when you first learn about this stuff, anybody that I want to talk to, when you first learn about this stuff, you don't go, whoa.0.96
01:52:50.000You know, because it is so interesting.
01:53:08.000I mean, I've experienced this firsthand now because, I mean, last time I was here, I wasn't really known about, but now I'm a kind of people know who I am and I get so much hate.
01:53:32.000It's so weird when people like paint you out to be someone that you're not and put words in your mouth and like it's strange, but you'll get used to it.
01:54:30.000But you know what's really interesting is like people have done like hit pieces on me and shit, but.
01:54:35.000And obviously loads of negative stuff comes through, but also I've had like actual archaeologists and actual people working in actual institutions reach out to me and say, like, you know, these are like actual.
01:54:44.000Archaeologists, and they're saying, like, Michael, we value your work, and we actually think you're an important voice, and stuff like that.
01:54:49.000And I find that really encouraging because these are you know, it's easy for us to think about archaeologists as like a kind of bogeyman.
01:54:56.000They're like, want to suppress all this stuff, but they're not all like that.
01:54:59.000Some of them are open to these things.
01:55:00.000Particularly the young ones, particularly people that are coming up that really the reason why they got into this in the first place is because it's such a fascinating subject.
01:55:08.000And like you, when you've spoken on this, when you were in school and you were getting your degree, you were.
01:55:18.000Confused as to why these alternative perspectives weren't entertained.
01:55:23.000I think there's a lot of young people that feel confined by the gatekeepers.
01:55:29.000They feel confined by the career academics that are sort of in charge of who gets tenure, who gets jobs, who gets grants.
01:56:30.000I feel so lucky that I get to do something I'm so interested in and talk about these topics and also to like create, not to kind of like inspire this thinking and other people.
01:56:42.000That's really what I want to try and do is to get people thinking about history from this different perspective and to think about the unknown and think about the potential that what humans could have been doing now that we know that.
01:56:53.000A mind like ours could have existed for a million years, that humans like us could have inhabited this planet for such a vastly longer length of time than we used to believe, and all the possibilities that throws up.
01:57:03.000More than anything, that's what I want people to think about when they watch my work.
01:57:07.000I don't want to tell them to believe this or tell them to believe that.
01:57:10.000I just want them to kind of think about it themselves and open their minds to the possibilities that could have occurred.
01:57:17.000And that doesn't mean that, like, people always say that I like saying that there's like advanced civilizations in prehistory.
01:57:25.000There's a lot more on the table than we used to think.
01:57:27.000And I think that's really fascinating.
01:57:29.000I wish more people would kind of take that possibility seriously.
01:57:34.000And that's why I get encouraged when I get these emails from people that are actually in the institutions because they're the people that are going to rewrite the textbooks.
01:57:41.000Like, I'm just a YouTuber, but we need the people that actually work in the institutions to think in this way.
01:57:46.000And then I think we might update our thinking on these things.
01:57:50.000I think there's a lot of those young folks that are coming up now in archaeology that do have alternative perspectives, whether or not they're being suppressed.
01:58:00.000And it's also very encouraging for them to see a pathway outside of academics, academia, like what you're pursuing, and to see, like, not only is this viable, but you can do it with the Proper approach, like the way that you're doing it, where you're not making crazy claims, not saying the aliens did it, you're not saying anything nutty.
01:58:19.000You're just saying, hey, there's a lot going on here.
01:58:23.000And to pretend that we have an accurate map of the territory seems silly.
01:58:28.000Yeah, I just think there's so much more on the table now than there used to be only a few decades ago.
01:58:33.000And I think that's so exciting when we look at our past, because as I say, it's the reason we're all here, right?
01:58:37.000It's the reason we live in this civilization, is the answer to these questions.
01:58:40.000And we don't know the answer to these questions anymore.
01:59:30.000There's a site called Calico where I think this one's a little bit, I don't really buy this one, but a very famous archaeologist called Lewis Leakey, who was like one of the top names in the archaeology in the 20th century, he believed that Calico showed evidence of human presence in the Americas over 100,000 years ago as well.
02:00:46.000So the geologists came in and they were expecting to date the kind of sediment around the tools to around eight.
02:00:52.000Thousand to ten thousand years ago because they knew about a volcanic eruption that had happened at that time, and so they expected the volcanic ash to be from that.
02:01:00.000So they did all this testing, but then they found that the ash was giving these crazy dates like 200,000, 300,000, up to 600,000 years old, and that was completely mental because the tools were below this layer of ash.
02:01:14.000And then they dated a camel pelvis, I think, that was in situ with the tools, and that camel pelvis came back to 250,000 years.
02:01:24.000Years old as well, and that was in the same layer of the tools.
02:01:27.000So they kind of brought all their different dating methods together, and there's multiple kind of geological dating methods on the sediment, the ash, and also the camel pelvis.
02:01:36.000And they kind of collected all this to a date of 250,000 years ago for this site, for where these tools were found.
02:01:45.000And yeah, so they tried to publish this and they received like immense pushback because obviously this was the time of the Clovis first paradigm.
02:01:55.000And, you know, people weren't ready for Clovis to be broken, let alone by such a huge margin, like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years old.
02:02:03.000And they couldn't publish for like 20 years.
02:02:06.000And by that time, many of the artifacts had gone missing.
02:02:10.000They didn't know where they were, and the site actually got razed, like it got kind of removed.
02:02:15.000Yeah, and I'm not trying to say that's like some conspiracy or anything, but it just means that you can't really prove it.
02:02:21.000But they did eventually publish, and the geologists have always stuck by this date.
02:02:24.000There's multiple lines of evidence that suggest that the tools were found below this layer of roughly 250,000 years old.
02:02:32.000And that's obviously like hugely older than we think humans have been in the Americas.
02:02:50.000But yeah, it's super interesting because we can't prove it because the tools have gone missing.
02:02:55.000The site no longer exists, but there's a paper out there written by serious scientists saying that, you know, there could be human presence in the Americas over 200,000 years ago, potentially even older than that.
02:03:07.000And that would just radically change our understanding of humans in America.
02:03:11.000So then when you put all these sites together, so obviously White Sands is the earliest at 22,000.
02:03:16.000But then, when you add that to Chicoete Cave, as I mentioned earlier, 33,000.
02:03:31.000You know, it only takes one of them to be right for our understanding of when humans reached America to radically shift.
02:03:37.000And I think it's only logical that humans were in America a lot longer than we think, because, you know, when we're talking about the vast span of time that we've been on this planet, Why couldn't we have reached these places?
02:06:20.000Like, the idea that you would have a civilization that was capable of building something as fantastic as some of those Aztec constructions and then they would just go away.
02:06:42.000Yeah, I mean how many of those things were just absorbed by you know the just the just nature no wonder that they think it was built by gods right because you see it and you're like that is incredible Who built this it must have been the gods and there's no one living in it mm-hmm and just so it shows how easily human civilizations can reach a really high peak level of sophistication and then go down again and collapse and just all memory of them is gone.
02:07:09.000Yeah Any other cool things you've discovered recently?
02:07:14.000Well, there's also the question of when humans reached Australia, which I think is another really interesting question because the conventional time is 65,000 years ago.
02:07:22.000And there's a site called Majed Bebe in northern Australia, and that's the earliest accepted site in Australia.
02:07:27.000And that's right in the north of the country, and it makes sense because you have to cross water to get to Australia.
02:07:33.000You have to build boats and cross water.
02:07:35.000But there's another really interesting site that's right in the south of Australia where archaeologists found blackened stones again and charcoal and hearth-like structures.
02:07:49.000120,000 years ago, which is double, just about double the time that we think humans are in Australia.
02:07:55.000And it's in the very south of the country.
02:07:57.000And the archaeologists that are working there actually wrote in their paper that the evidence supports a cultural origin over a natural origin.
02:08:05.000So they think that it's cultural, as in human, rather than natural.
02:08:10.000But they can't prove it because there's no associated artifacts and no associated skeletons.
02:08:16.000But they think that it kind of leans towards being a cultural origin.
02:08:22.000And obviously, if that's correct, That means human beings were only in Australia twice as long as we thought, but also had inhabited the entire continent.
02:08:29.000Well, not inhabited, but had gone through the entire continent right down to the very south of the country, twice as old as we thought.
02:08:36.000And it's just another thing that's like pushing it older and older and older.
02:08:39.000And it's not accepted, but it's so hard to prove these things because we can't find skeletons, or we can find skeletons, but it's extremely rare.
02:08:50.000But this site called Moyjil, 120,000 years ago, is, I think, Very strong suggestive evidence that human beings have been in Australia twice as long as we think.
02:09:01.000And obviously, that means that they had to have got there by boat.0.52
02:09:23.000And it's not that wild because if you think back to the seafaring thing we were talking about earlier, If people were reaching islands over a million years ago, then why couldn't they have reached Australia much earlier than we think?
02:10:35.000And that's what they think allows them to live in high altitude environments.
02:10:38.000They think that Denisovans are more robust than.
02:10:42.000Modern humans and can live in more extreme environments.
02:10:45.000And they think that people that live in those kind of high altitude regions of the Himalayas and stuff have that kind of gene, if you like.
02:10:53.000I'm not sure that's the science behind it, but they think they have the traces of that and that's what allows them to live in these more isolated high altitude environments.
02:11:00.000So they think Denisovans lived in high altitude mostly?
02:11:12.000And also in that region, they found recently the.0.98
02:11:16.000The oldest evidence of advanced surgery, which is like way older than we think, it's like 31,000 years ago.
02:11:21.000They found some surgery in Borneo, which is again in this same region.
02:11:25.000I think Indonesia is such a fascinating region because it's the place where the Sunda Shelf was, where obviously the sea levels have risen, have covered a huge expanse of land that used to be land but now no longer is.
02:11:37.000And so many interesting discoveries here.
02:11:39.000But yeah, this surgery thing is they found the skeleton of a child that had had.
02:11:46.000His leg was amputated, but had lived for many, many, many, many years afterwards.
02:11:52.000And his whole lower leg had been amputated off, but had healed completely.
02:11:57.000And he'd lived, or she, I think, as a girl, lived a lot longer after that.
02:12:01.000And obviously, that's quite an advanced thing to do, right?
02:12:04.000Because you have to understand how to prevent infection.
02:12:08.000It's a very humid place as well, so it's very hard to survive.
02:12:11.000Probably was very painful for that individual, but this pushed back our understanding of surgery by.
02:12:16.000Like 20,000, no, maybe not quite that long.
02:12:34.000I wonder if they had any pharmacological interventions to deal with the pain.
02:12:40.000Well, I think they would have used wild plants because we've got so much evidence now of other human species and our human species using wild plants for medicinal purposes.
02:12:50.000We see Neanderthals doing that a long, long time ago, like cultivating wild plants and using them as painkillers and stuff like that.
02:13:44.000How long, when do you think it started?
02:13:47.000So I think in terms of like what we call civilization, In terms of our current cycle of it, if you like, I think it is Tash Tapella and whatever came before that.
02:13:56.000But I don't think it would probably have been that far further before that.
02:13:59.000But I think that from the onset of the Holocene, I think we basically started right away all over the globe and developed civilization because it happens everywhere, right?
02:14:09.000Back to question one why did it happen everywhere all over the time?
02:14:11.000Because I think that's what humans do.
02:14:13.000I think once we get a stable period of climate, we innovate because agriculture and civilization can't have been a very hard invention to do because.
02:14:25.000It happened everywhere all over the world.
02:14:27.000So it's not like a really unique, hard thing to do because people did it everywhere.
02:14:31.000So that makes me think of what about all the other periods of stable climate that we've had?
02:14:34.000And now that we know that human beings have been around for so long, we've had something like four stable warm periods in the time that we have modern sapient fossils, so 300,000 years.
02:14:44.000But then if you extrapolate that out to this million year time scale of modern sized brains and modern behavior with the seafaring, it's something like 11 warm periods that we've lived through of stable climate conditions that have lasted for.
02:14:59.000So you look at each of those warm periods and you think, if agriculture and civilization isn't that hard seismic of an invention to do, why couldn't it have happened in those previous warm periods?
02:15:11.00011 of them going back to a million years and possibly beyond.
02:15:14.000There's also that very weird phenomenon when someone somewhere figures something out, even if people aren't connected, other places in the world, people figure it out at the same time.
02:15:52.000There's probably some sort of Akashic record, there's probably some sort of shared field of information.
02:15:59.000That whether or not it's tangible and you can, you know, write it down verbatim, or whether or not it's some sort of implied concepts and ideas that are transmitted through the species, that like creativity itself is almost like something that we tap into like uniformly as a species.
02:16:19.000It's like you can almost put like we're in an antenna.
02:17:57.000But then, I mean, and that goes back into the, like you say, the Amazon, it goes back into the question of how long have humans been in America?
02:18:02.000Because if we've been in America and the Americas for a lot longer than we think, then people have been in the Amazon a lot longer than we think.
02:18:08.000And then you look at the discoveries in the Amazon and how there's been civilizations there a lot further back in time than we thought.
02:18:30.000And also, the rainforest is such an extreme recycling kind of natural machine that it's going to destroy anything that's older than a few thousand years ago.
02:19:43.000Like, it's a lot more complicated than we've been told, especially by, you know, people that want you to believe that they have the answers.
02:20:29.000Kind of marker of civilization, like writing began, civilization began, but we're starting to see evidence of symbolic meaning being transmitted through symbolic notation, like way back further in time than we believe.
02:20:42.000So, obviously, the earliest writing is still thought to be about 4000 BC with the ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform and stuff like that.
02:20:49.000But as you mentioned, Irvin Finkel, the kind of idea regarding Tashdapella having a similar thing, and that's 12,000 years ago.
02:20:56.000But there's much, much older evidence of humans conveying information in a symbolic fashion.
02:21:01.000So there's an archaeologist called Genevieve von Petzinger, I believe she's called, and she found evidence that on all these Ice Age paintings that we find in Europe with all these incredible bulls and bison and stuff, and you've probably seen them, but next to them is this kind of symbol of notation that people have kind of overlooked for years, but she found 32 recurring signs across a period of 30,000 years all across the continent.
02:21:29.000And these signs, she thinks, are like not a language as such, but kind of a A system of encoding meaning.
02:21:38.000And she kind of makes the argument that these signs are not a language as such, but a kind of tradition of conveying information that lasted for 30,000 years.
02:21:51.000And that is such a long length of time.
02:21:53.000Like, if you think about the oldest language today, I think it's ancient Chinese, and that's only a few thousand years old.
02:21:59.000And yet these signs appear all across the continent of Europe across a time span of 30,000 years.
02:22:05.000Are pretty much exactly the same, and just these signs.
02:22:08.000And they also find them in other continents as well.
02:22:11.000And she doesn't say there's any connection there.
02:22:13.000I'm not sure there is any connection there, but.
02:23:05.000And she thinks it's like a much older symbolic tradition that humans have kind of carried with them.
02:23:11.000In the kind of migratory routes, and it actually goes back much older than the Ice Age art date of like 40,000 years, but actually comes from when humans first reached Europe out of Africa and spreading across the world.
02:23:22.000And we've kind of kept the same tradition of conveying information.
02:23:26.000And again, this has massive implications for human intelligence because even though it's not a full language, the ability to convey information in a symbolic way is a marker of really sophisticated intelligence.
02:23:38.000And so it's another really interesting discovery that kind of points towards intelligence and also the.
02:23:45.000To maintain that tradition over such a long length of time is really interesting because we don't really do that.
02:23:51.000As I say, the oldest language is ancient Chinese and it's only a few thousand years old.
02:23:55.000And yet these people somehow managed to pass on this language, quote unquote, for 30,000 years.
02:24:02.000Have you ever heard anybody discuss the concept that human beings might have had some sort of telepathy that atrophied when we started using language and writing and communicating with words?
02:24:18.000What's really interesting is the human brain size has decreased since civilization began.
02:24:24.000Which is strange because, and it makes sense because if everything was oral before, you need more of your brain to hold all the information.
02:24:32.000But once you can kind of outsource it to physical objects, you don't need so much brain size and space.
02:24:51.000Well, what weren't like there were some ancient people that thought writing was a bad idea and that you should remember everything and that writing and writing things down was actually going to degrade your memory?
02:25:04.000Well, I think it certainly does because you don't need that brain, like part of your brain anymore if you're not memorizing all the information you have.
02:25:12.000Like, and it makes us smart as a whole, as a civilization.
02:25:15.000And then it extrapolates so to hard drives.
02:25:57.000And there was also another paper that came out regarding language, which is they found over 200 objects, and it's around the same date, around 40,000 years ago.
02:26:07.000And they basically found like a proto writing script that had the same level of complexity as the early Sumerian scripts from 3000 BC, but from 40,000 years ago in Ice Age Europe.
02:26:18.000Again, so it's like another kind of proto language, symbolic thinking and conveying meaning through symbols.
02:26:26.000I don't know if, I can't quite remember off the top of my head, Jamie, but if you type in like, it was this year, so.
02:26:31.000If you type in PNAS proto writing 40,000 years ago or something, they found it loads of like symbols engraved on bones and they argued that it was the same level of complexity as the early Sumerian scripts.
02:26:45.000And again, this was the marker of civilization 3000 BC.
02:26:50.000But now it's this capability is so much older now because of these new discoveries.
02:28:10.000It was like at the high end, he thinks it might be 20.
02:28:13.000Plus thousand years old, it's like okay, what?
02:28:16.000Yeah, yeah, because he compared the erosion because there was an earthquake like 500 years ago that kind of shook all these casing stones off.
02:28:22.000Yeah, and he compared the erosion uh with the blocks that had always been exposed with the ones that had recently become exposed.
02:28:29.000I mean, I'd like to see that method like tried and tested on sites we know the age of and you know proven that way before I take that too seriously.
02:28:37.000But you know, it's interesting, and it's all interesting.
02:28:41.000You're listening, your show's super interesting.
02:29:21.000Yeah, if I could just do a little self-plug real quick.
02:29:23.000I've got my channel, Michael Button, search it up, everyone, and check me out.
02:29:27.000But I've also, I just started a second channel called Patterns of History because I'm really interested in, once we move into recorded history, it's really interesting to see how when the silence lifts and we have these ruins we can cross-check and these dates we can kind of match to different civilizations, it's so interesting how civilizations seem to follow the same patterns all over the world of rise, collapse, fall, and things like that.
02:29:54.000We see the same patterns happening, and civilizations always think that they're more advanced and there we go, thanks, and better than the ones before.0.96
02:30:02.000But I mean, it's another fucking thing, I could go on for another three hours on that.0.84
02:30:07.000But it's so interesting how we see the same recurring patterns happen throughout civilizations across recorded history as well.0.97
02:30:13.000So that's like another little project that I'm working on, but I'm still going to go as hard as I possibly can on the kind of archaeological lost history science.
02:30:22.000Well, it's beautiful that you have so much time to do two different channels too.