The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #961 - Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson & Michael Shermer

00:00:03.000 3...2...

00:00:08.000 This is live, ladies and gentlemen.

00:00:11.000 And this is a very unusual podcast we're going to have here in a very unusual discussion.

00:00:15.000 I have to my left Michael Shermer, very famous skeptic.

00:00:18.000 He's been on the podcast before.

00:00:20.000 Of course, Randall Carlson, amazing gentleman who knows far too much about terrifying things like asteroids.

00:00:27.000 And Graham Hancock, author, also a fantastic human being, many times been on this podcast as well.

00:00:34.000 And This all came out of a podcast that Randall and Graham and I did recently and Michael Shermer commented on it and it was all essentially on the hypothesis that the great extinction that happened with the North American land animals that happened somewhere around the end of the Ice Age And the end of the Ice Age,

00:00:59.000 the abrupt end of the Ice Age, being caused, please correct me if I fuck any of this up, being caused by a comet impact.

00:01:07.000 Michael Shermer had some questions about that, and we said this would be an amazing podcast to get everybody together in a room and go over this.

00:01:15.000 Since then, there's been some interesting stuff that's happened.

00:01:18.000 I thought this was really fascinating, that Forbes has a mainstream article in Forbes, Did a Comet Wipe Out Ice Age Megafauna?

00:01:27.000 Just a couple of weeks ago.

00:01:29.000 And then there was also this interpretation that's fairly recent as well about one of the stone tablets, one of the stone carvings, rather, on Gobekli Tepe.

00:01:38.000 And Graham, you would probably be the best to describe that.

00:01:41.000 Yeah, that was published in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, a peer-reviewed journal, by a couple of scientists from the University of Edinburgh.

00:01:55.000 And they are proposing an interpretation of the Gobekli Tepe imagery.

00:02:01.000 There's quite a lot of imagery on those T-shaped pillars, particularly one pillar, pillar 43 and enclosure D. And their deduction, what they take from their interpretation, of course many will disagree with them, their interpretation is that those images are speaking of the comet impact.

00:02:17.000 They're speaking of a comet that hit the Earth roughly 12,900 years before our time.

00:02:23.000 And Randall, this has been something that you've been obsessed with for many, many years now.

00:02:28.000 We've documented and detailed it in many conversations that we've had on the podcast.

00:02:36.000 Yes.

00:02:36.000 I can't say that I'm that familiar with that article.

00:02:40.000 I haven't had a chance to get into it.

00:02:41.000 But this idea that the comet impact is what has caused the end of the Ice Age?

00:02:47.000 Well, it's so complex, but now what we do is we throw some type of an impact into the mix, and it seems to fill gaps.

00:02:55.000 Pull this right up to you.

00:02:56.000 It seems to fill gaps that were, at this point, still unexplained.

00:03:03.000 You know, there's varying theories between Some extent of climate change and some extent of human predation that caused the extinction and I've always felt like you can't blame it on one or the other.

00:03:18.000 I think humans probably had a role but only in the very final stages of the extinction event and one of the One of the scenarios would certainly suggest that there were extreme climate changes between what's called the Balling Alorod,

00:03:34.000 which was the rather gradual warming at the very end of the Pleistocene, which was then followed by the Younger Dryas, which was the return to full glacial cold, and in the end of the Younger Dryas, which is dated at about 11,600, which is considered now to be the boundary of the Holocene,

00:03:50.000 post-Younger Dryas, pre-boreal it's called.

00:03:55.000 Would be the beginning of the Holocene.

00:03:56.000 And it seems that most of the extinctions did occur between roughly 13,000 and 11,600 years ago, although the dating has a widespread on it, so you can't pinpoint it down to a specific event.

00:04:10.000 But I've always felt like that there had to be something we needed to look at that triggered The extreme climate changes that we do see at the end of the Ice Age.

00:04:20.000 And to my opinion, you can't attribute that solely to Milankovitch theories, which is basically the changing solar terrestrial geometries, because they're too slow.

00:04:32.000 And what we see at the end of the Ice Age were very rapid climate changes.

00:04:38.000 One of the things that I think has been missing has been the trigger.

00:04:42.000 Wallace Brecker pointed out years ago that possibly a major flood from the draining of Lake Agassiz caused an interruption of the thermohalene circulation, which is basically the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean,

00:04:57.000 and that this might have been what triggered the Younger Dryas and then also contributed to the mass extinction events.

00:05:03.000 But now I think that the dating of the draining of Lake Agassiz is too late for that and was probably a latter event within the overall melting phenomena that occurred between roughly 14,600 and about 11,000 years ago.

00:05:20.000 Somewhere in there we have to fit that mass extinction event and I definitely have thought that climate change was the dominant factor in that.

00:05:29.000 But then what triggered the climate change?

00:05:31.000 That always seemed to me to be something that was not ever really explained.

00:05:36.000 The comet impact theory is very controversial, but the evidence has been steadily mounting now for a decade.

00:05:44.000 Including physical evidence, right?

00:05:46.000 Like the core samples that show nuclear glass scattered out throughout Asia and Europe at roughly the same time period when they do the core samples?

00:05:54.000 Yes, most of it's dating to 12,800 to 13,000 years ago.

00:05:59.000 These are called impact proxies.

00:06:01.000 Impact proxies.

00:06:02.000 Nanodiamonds, melt glass, microspherules.

00:06:06.000 These kind of things are associated with impact, not necessarily always caused by impact.

00:06:11.000 So this has been part of the reason for the controversy, but it's the abundance of all of these at a particular level which leads a large group of scientists to feel that we have had a...

00:06:21.000 It's the full assemblage of things that is difficult to explain by processes without invoking some type of a cosmic event.

00:06:30.000 And it also corresponds with what you believe is a period where Earth travels through a series of comets.

00:06:38.000 Well, this gets us to the ideas of what would be called the British neocatastrophists.

00:06:45.000 Victor Klube and William Napier and a number of others that have theorized that from time to time Earth encounters the debris from a large disintegrating comet.

00:06:55.000 And there's an interesting William Napier addresses this in an interesting article I can pull up here pretty soon, that possibly around 13,000 years ago, Earth may have encountered some of the debris from a disintegrating comet,

00:07:11.000 which ultimately goes back to Fred Whipple, who is one of the godfathers of cometary science.

00:07:17.000 Could I just come in on that for a second?

00:07:18.000 I mean, specifically, Bill Napier and Victor Klub are identifying the remnants of this comet.

00:07:25.000 With the torrid meteor stream, which is familiar, I think, to everybody.

00:07:29.000 We pass through it twice a year.

00:07:30.000 We see meteorites particularly at the end of October, early November.

00:07:33.000 That debris stream is still there.

00:07:35.000 It still contains, according to their argument, bits of the comet.

00:07:39.000 There are large objects in it, like comet Inki, Rudnicki, Ogiatto, and so on, four or five kilometers in diameter.

00:07:45.000 And the suggestion is that the meteor stream has got lots of small bits of dust, but it's got some larger stuff too.

00:07:51.000 And some of that stuff fell out of the meteor stream 12,800 years ago and impacted primarily the North American ice cone.

00:07:58.000 Now, Michael, when you listened to that podcast, you had some questions.

00:08:02.000 You are a professional skeptic, so of course you're skeptical.

00:08:06.000 What are your thoughts about all this?

00:08:08.000 Yeah, let me pull back and give a bigger picture.

00:08:11.000 After the podcast, I went and got the book.

00:08:14.000 Magicians of the Gods.

00:08:15.000 And actually, I listen to it on audio.

00:08:18.000 So it's, I don't know, like 16, 18 hours of Graham reading with his wonderful British accent, which, as you know, for Americans, that elevates the quality of the argument by an order of magnitude.

00:08:31.000 Yeah, that's how they sell things in infomercials over here.

00:08:34.000 And Graham, you're a good writer.

00:08:36.000 It's a very compelling story.

00:08:38.000 Thank you.

00:08:38.000 You're a great skeptic.

00:08:39.000 And so I think a number of points about, in general, the idea of alternative archaeology, which is really what we're talking about here.

00:08:50.000 I prefer that to pseudo-archaeology because that's supposed to be a little bit of an insult.

00:08:57.000 Alternative archaeology.

00:08:59.000 So it's good to remember that, so you have these guys on the podcast for three or four hours, and the audience listening thinks, yeah, why don't these guys get a fair hearing?

00:09:07.000 I mean, it's like there's the mainstream and then there's these guys.

00:09:10.000 But there isn't just these guys.

00:09:12.000 There's hundreds of alternative archaeological theories.

00:09:15.000 So which one gets the play, which one gets attention, which one doesn't?

00:09:20.000 And for a mainstream archaeologist who's busy in the field and trying to get grants and so on, they mostly just don't have the time to sort through all these alternative theories because this is just one.

00:09:31.000 And as we'll see in the next couple hours, there's hundreds and hundreds of things to be addressed.

00:09:36.000 So that's kind of what we do.

00:09:38.000 So just to rattle off a few, the lost tribes of Israel who colonized the Americas, Mormon archaeology, explanation of Native Americans, the Kensington rune stones in Minnesota that the Vikings had come here, the black Egyptian hypothesis.

00:09:52.000 When I was in graduate school, this book called Black Athena was published, that the Egyptians were actually black, and that The, you know, sort of Western white male dominance of history had written them out of the past.

00:10:05.000 So, you know, this was a whole alternative history, alternative archaeology.

00:10:09.000 Piltdown man, Thor Heiderdahl, in his hypothesis that the Polynesian islands were colonized by South Americans who went...

00:10:17.000 West to...

00:10:17.000 went east to west.

00:10:19.000 That's since been debunked, but that's yet another one of these things.

00:10:23.000 South American archaeology, Omec statues seem to have like African features on them.

00:10:28.000 So maybe Afghans went directly across to South America.

00:10:31.000 So there's, you know, Eric Van Donegan, Zechariah Sitchin.

00:10:35.000 Now most of these Graham rejects in his book, to your credit, so you're a good skeptic too.

00:10:42.000 But for an outsider to an anthropologist from Mars who steps into this thing cold, doesn't know anything, it's like, well, they're all alternative, which is the right one?

00:10:51.000 And how do we know?

00:10:52.000 And so the way it works in science is...

00:10:57.000 You know, the default position is the skeptical position.

00:11:00.000 We assume your hypothesis is not true, not just you, anybody's hypothesis, like the Klube-Napier hypothesis.

00:11:07.000 That was widely published.

00:11:08.000 It was widely covered in mainstream scientific journals and popular science magazines like Scientific American.

00:11:16.000 And it has not fared that well over the last decade or so.

00:11:19.000 It's still around.

00:11:20.000 It's still debated.

00:11:22.000 So you put it in the mainstream through peer-reviewed journals.

00:11:25.000 And then you go to conferences and you have it out.

00:11:28.000 And that's kind of where we end up with, well, this is what we think is probably true for now.

00:11:33.000 And then all these other people out here, if they don't jump in and into the pool where everybody is, Then there's no way for an outsider to know whether these alternative things have any validity or not, other than they make a compelling case in a popular book,

00:11:49.000 yes, but what do the mainstream scientists think?

00:11:52.000 And the problem is that, so a couple of specific things, like what I call patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise, you know, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich or whatever.

00:12:03.000 Those are fun examples.

00:12:04.000 You know, taking, like, pectoglyphs and then comparing them to constellations, like, you know, here we have some constellations on your roof here.

00:12:16.000 It's easy in the mind's eye to find a pattern.

00:12:19.000 The question is, did those people really think 10,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago?

00:12:23.000 So this is a field called archaeoastronomy.

00:12:25.000 Ed Krupp, the director of the Griffith Observatory here in LA, this is what he does.

00:12:30.000 And sometimes he thinks the patterns mean something.

00:12:33.000 Sometimes they're totally random.

00:12:37.000 Or he takes something like the pyramids.

00:12:39.000 As Graham knows, there's a hundred theories about the pyramids.

00:12:43.000 And there's the mainstream one, and then there's all these other ones.

00:12:46.000 And this is why people like...

00:12:48.000 The director there, he just can't deal with them all.

00:12:52.000 Just as one example I used in my book, Why People Believe Were Things, that one guy calculated that if you divide the height of the pyramid into twice the side of the base, you get the number close to pi.

00:13:03.000 And then he just sort of works all these different numbers, so therefore it's cosmically significant.

00:13:07.000 Well, Richard Hoagland was the best example of that, right?

00:13:10.000 He would find these patterns in Mars and claim that if you go from this rock to half the distance, why would you do that?

00:13:18.000 That doesn't make any sense.

00:13:19.000 He would create these patterns.

00:13:21.000 Right.

00:13:22.000 And that's okay.

00:13:23.000 All scientists look for patterns.

00:13:26.000 Take climate change.

00:13:28.000 Either the Earth is getting warmer or it's not.

00:13:30.000 Either it's human-caused or it's not.

00:13:31.000 There's a pattern in the data.

00:13:33.000 You can see the pattern.

00:13:34.000 The question is, is the pattern real?

00:13:36.000 So this is why we use the term climate consensus.

00:13:40.000 It's not a democracy.

00:13:41.000 It's not like we voted on it and decided this is the truth.

00:13:44.000 It's that independently, all these different scientists working in different fields, publishing in different journals, come to the same conclusion.

00:13:51.000 So we call this consilient science or convergence of evidence science.

00:13:55.000 That it's not like these guys are meeting on the weekends going, boy, we got to combat those crazy right-wingers with our data.

00:14:02.000 They're independently coming to these conclusions.

00:14:05.000 So that lifts our confidence that, yeah, there's probably something to their theory.

00:14:09.000 Such that there's now so much data converting to this, you'd have to deconstruct every one of those independent lines.

00:14:16.000 So then you have things like...

00:14:19.000 What I call the problem of the residue of anomalies.

00:14:22.000 In any field, there are residue of anomalies we can't explain.

00:14:26.000 So, like UFOs, for example.

00:14:28.000 Ufologists, and me, a skeptic, agree that 90 to 95% of all the UFO sightings are explained by natural phenomena.

00:14:35.000 Venus, swamp gas, airplanes, geese, whatever.

00:14:38.000 They know that.

00:14:40.000 And so we're really only talking about 5%.

00:14:42.000 Like, how do you explain that one right there in 1967 on June 3rd?

00:14:48.000 I don't know.

00:14:49.000 No one knows that one.

00:14:50.000 And then from there, they build, well, that's my case.

00:14:52.000 If you can't explain that, then I have a case.

00:14:56.000 No, no, no.

00:14:57.000 Well, that's very different than what we're talking about here.

00:14:59.000 How is that relevant to us here?

00:15:01.000 It's totally relevant because I think almost all of your argument is based on this residue of anomalies, what we call the God of the gaps argument.

00:15:11.000 If you, scientists, can't explain this particular rock right here, Or that particular petroglyph, and I'm going to count that toward my compilation of data to support my hypothesis of a lost civilization.

00:15:22.000 But no one is saying that the scientists can't explain it.

00:15:26.000 What essentially, particularly Randall, with his series of images as shown, is that what you have here is something that can be explained by rapid melting of the ice caps.

00:15:39.000 Randall, step in, if you will.

00:15:41.000 Well, I'll just...

00:15:41.000 Okay, go ahead if you want.

00:15:43.000 Well, they do say...

00:15:44.000 I mean, it depends what you mean by rapid.

00:15:46.000 You know, I mean, a glacial dam that, as our geologist will tell us in a moment, that breaks, that's fairly rapid.

00:15:52.000 Back in 96, there was a very popular book called The Noah's Flood.

00:15:56.000 This was a serious book by two geologists that said it was the rapid filling up of the Black Sea that swamped over the civilizations living on the edges of this, and that that's where the Noachian flood story comes from.

00:16:10.000 Okay, so it was widely debated and so on, and since it hasn't fared that well.

00:16:14.000 But that's fairly rapid.

00:16:16.000 I mean, we're talking over the course of weeks or months or years.

00:16:19.000 To a geologist, you know, thousands of years is rapid.

00:16:23.000 So, you know, an impact by a comet happens in a couple hours or a couple of days or weeks versus a couple of months or years.

00:16:30.000 What do we mean by rapid?

00:16:31.000 Okay, well, what are you saying then?

00:16:34.000 Okay.

00:16:35.000 So what are you saying about their theories in particular?

00:16:37.000 Okay, so the problem, I think, Graham, the deepest problem is much of your theory depends on negative evidence.

00:16:46.000 That is, I don't accept the mainstream explanation for the pyramids, the Sphinx, the Machu Picchu, whatever.

00:16:52.000 Well, let's not talk about that.

00:16:53.000 Let's just talk about this specific subject, because it's going to take a long time just to cover astroidal impacts.

00:16:59.000 Yeah, all right.

00:17:00.000 So, my final point is the falsifiability one.

00:17:03.000 That is, what would it take to refute your hypothesis?

00:17:07.000 Like, for me, the answer would be, like, if Gobekli Tepe turned out to be what you think it might have been, The place where advanced ancient civilization once inhabited or they used it.

00:17:20.000 Where are the metal tools?

00:17:22.000 Where are the writing, the examples of writing?

00:17:25.000 Perhaps a decision was made not to use metal.

00:17:28.000 Perhaps a decision was made that...

00:17:31.000 Errors had taken place, that in reinventing civilization we shouldn't perhaps go down quite the same route as before.

00:17:39.000 Perhaps writing isn't always an advance.

00:17:42.000 Perhaps an oral tradition which records in memory, which enhances and uses the power of memory, may be a very effective way of dealing with information.

00:17:52.000 We regard writing as an advance, and I can see lots of reasons.

00:17:57.000 Why it is an advance, but if we put ourselves into the heads of ancient peoples, maybe it wasn't.

00:18:02.000 I mean, there's a tradition from ancient Egypt that the god Thoth, god of wisdom, was the inventor of writing.

00:18:08.000 But we have a text in which he is questioned by a pharaoh who is saying, well, actually, have you really done a good thing by introducing writing?

00:18:17.000 Because then the words may roam around the world without wise advice to put them into context.

00:18:23.000 And what will happen to memory when people...

00:18:26.000 So there might be a choice, not Not to go that way.

00:18:28.000 Alright, but then what do you mean by advance?

00:18:30.000 When you say there used to be a lost advanced civilization before 10,000 years ago...

00:18:35.000 Well, let's just pause here for a second, because what we know for a fact is that the carbon dating in all the area around Gobekli Tepe is somewhere around 12,000 years.

00:18:46.000 Is that correct?

00:18:46.000 11,600 years ago is the earliest they've found so far, but a great deal of Gobekli Tepe is still underground.

00:18:52.000 Right, so at least what we know is someone built some pretty impressive structures 11,600 years ago.

00:18:59.000 7,000 years before Stonehenge.

00:19:01.000 So when that story broke, this is long before you came along with your book, it was controversial in the sense that we thought hunter-gatherers could not do something like this because to do that you need a large population with a division of labor and so forth.

00:19:16.000 And so the response to archaeologists was, well, I guess we were wrong about hunter-gatherers.

00:19:21.000 Maybe they can do more stuff than we gave them credit for.

00:19:25.000 So why is that not a reasonable hypothesis versus it was actually advanced, but we mean something completely different by advanced, not writing and metal and technology.

00:19:33.000 We mean, I don't know what you mean.

00:19:35.000 What do you mean?

00:19:36.000 Well, I mean, we have a body of archaeology, which goes on for decades, which is saying that megalithic sites...

00:19:45.000 For example, Gigantia in Malta or Hagorim or Menaedra.

00:19:49.000 Megalithic sites date to no older than five and a half to six thousand years old.

00:19:55.000 Gigantia would push it close to six thousand years old.

00:19:59.000 There are no older sites than that and therefore the megalithic site is associated with a certain stage of Neolithic development.

00:20:07.000 Then along comes Gobekli Tepe, 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.

00:20:12.000 Incredibly sophisticated site, very large scale.

00:20:15.000 I mean, Klaus Schmidt, sadly he's passed away.

00:20:17.000 I spent three days working the site with him.

00:20:20.000 He was very generous to me.

00:20:21.000 He showed me a lot.

00:20:22.000 He talked to me a lot.

00:20:23.000 And he said basically 50 times as much as they've already excavated is still under the ground, that there's hundreds and hundreds of giant stone pillars that they've identified with ground-penetrating radar.

00:20:34.000 He's not even sure If they're ever going to excavate them.

00:20:38.000 But by all accounts, we are looking, if we take what's still under the ground into account, we're looking at the largest megalithic site that's ever been created on Earth.

00:20:46.000 And it pops up 11,600 years ago with no obvious background to it.

00:20:52.000 It just...

00:20:54.000 Well, that we know of.

00:20:56.000 But to me, that's immediately a rather puzzling and interesting situation.

00:20:59.000 And I would be remiss as an author and an inquirer into these matters if I didn't take great interest in that.

00:21:05.000 The sudden appearance, 7,000 years before Stonehenge, of a megalithic site that dwarfs Stonehenge.

00:21:11.000 To me, that's a mystery, and it's really worth inquiring into.

00:21:13.000 To put it into perspective, that's more than 2,000 years older than what we now consider to be the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza in comparison to us to then.

00:21:24.000 So between our time now in 2017 and the construction of the Great Pyramid, you're talking about 2,000 years earlier than that.

00:21:30.000 And that is unbelievable when you're talking about 7,000 years before what we thought people were doing.

00:21:37.000 Okay, but my point was that instead of, before we go down the road of constructing a lost civilization that was super advanced, but different from our idea of advanced, why not just a tribute to these fully modern hunter-gatherers who had the same size brains we have and so on,

00:21:53.000 that they were able to figure out and do this.

00:21:56.000 We just underestimated their abilities.

00:21:58.000 But why did archaeologists tell us for so long hunter-gatherers couldn't do it and we needed agricultural populations that could generate surpluses, that could pay for the specialists to...

00:22:06.000 Yes, that was the theory.

00:22:07.000 So now what archaeologists are saying, I guess we were wrong about hunter-gatherers.

00:22:11.000 Well, they might be wrong about hunter-gatherers or there might be another civilization that they had not discovered that has been unearthed by time.

00:22:19.000 Sorry, Michael, lost civilizations are not such an extraordinary idea.

00:22:25.000 I mean, nobody knew that the Indus Valley civilization existed at all until some railway work was done around Moenjodaro in 1923. Suddenly, a whole civilization pops up out of the woodwork that's just never been taken into account before the 1920s.

00:22:39.000 We still can't read its script, you know?

00:22:41.000 The idea that we come across that another turn of the spade reveals information that causes us to reconsider...

00:22:48.000 Not just was it hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists, but perhaps something bigger than this is involved.

00:22:53.000 Or in between that.

00:22:54.000 That's not such an extraordinary idea.

00:22:56.000 I get it that mainstream archaeology doesn't want to go there, but that's my job to go there.

00:23:00.000 No, I don't think that's correct.

00:23:02.000 They would be happy to go there if there's evidence for it.

00:23:05.000 By what you just said, they now fully accept the Indus Valley civilizations.

00:23:09.000 How did that happen if they were dogmatically closed-minded?

00:23:13.000 I don't say that they were dogmatically close-minded about that.

00:23:16.000 The evidence, the massive amount of evidence that came up with the discovery of Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, Dolavira, and other such sites is very difficult. 0.98

00:23:25.000 You have to be completely stupid to say that that's not a civilization. 0.90

00:23:28.000 Gobekli Tepe is a bit more nuanced. 1.00

00:23:30.000 You know, we have stone circles.

00:23:32.000 We have some interesting astronomical alignments, the world's first perfectly north-south aligned building.

00:23:37.000 Maybe.

00:23:37.000 No, definitely.

00:23:38.000 Again, that's a patternicity thing.

00:23:39.000 Well, I'm citing Klaus Schmidt, you know.

00:23:41.000 Well, that's all right.

00:23:42.000 But any of us who read back into history 10,000 years ago, what we're thinking, that they might have been thinking, that's always dangerous for anybody, not just you, all of us.

00:23:52.000 That's a good point.

00:23:52.000 Who is Klaus Schmidt?

00:23:53.000 Klaus Schmidt was the original excavator of Gobekli Tepe.

00:23:56.000 He was the head of the German Archaeological Institute dig at Gobekli Tepe.

00:24:00.000 He kindly spent three days showing me around the site.

00:24:05.000 And really nobody's disputing the astronomical alignments of Gobekli Tepe.

00:24:09.000 They weren't particularly interesting to Klaus Schmidt, but they're there.

00:24:11.000 And what is the alignment?

00:24:13.000 Like how is it established?

00:24:14.000 Well, when you have a perfectly north-south aligned structure, perfectly north-south, a true north, not magnetic north, then you are dealing with astronomy by definition.

00:24:23.000 And there are other alignments of the stone circles.

00:24:25.000 True north as established today or with the precession of the equinoxes when you're talking about 12?

00:24:29.000 True north is always true north.

00:24:30.000 Okay.

00:24:30.000 It's the rotation axis of our planet.

00:24:32.000 Okay, so to this day it points exactly in the same place where it was pointing?

00:24:36.000 It always points to true north.

00:24:37.000 Okay.

00:24:40.000 Sure they want to go there.

00:24:41.000 They would be happy to go there.

00:24:43.000 Case in point, two weeks ago in the journal Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, there was published an article that...

00:24:50.000 Humans, or maybe Neanderthals, lived in San Diego area 130,000 years ago.

00:24:56.000 This is an order of magnitude older than the Clovis data, so 13,000.

00:25:00.000 This was the mastodon bones they found that were smashed.

00:25:02.000 Mastodon bones, yes.

00:25:03.000 So here's an example of how, okay, so clearly there's not some conspiracy to keep alternative people or fringe or radical theories out.

00:25:11.000 It was published in peer-reviewed, the most prestigious journal in the world.

00:25:14.000 There it is.

00:25:15.000 And then what happened?

00:25:16.000 Well, hasn't there been a massive reaction to that and lots of scathing remarks by other academics?

00:25:22.000 Yes, but that's normal.

00:25:23.000 That's how science works.

00:25:24.000 You get pushed back.

00:25:26.000 You've got to have a thick skin.

00:25:27.000 It's just the way it goes.

00:25:28.000 You've got to have a thick skin, that's for sure.

00:25:29.000 But maybe sometimes your skin is so thick that you just can't sense anything around you.

00:25:34.000 Well, of course, we don't want that either.

00:25:35.000 So what do you think is going on when you look at something like Gobekli Tepe that's covered, covered up purposefully, right?

00:25:43.000 Yes, deliberately buried.

00:25:44.000 Again, I cite Klaus Schmidt.

00:25:46.000 He's the authority on this.

00:25:47.000 He's the excavator.

00:25:48.000 He absolutely adamantly insists that that site was deliberately buried and finally covered with a hill, which is what Göbekli Tepe means in the Turkish language, pot-bellied hill.

00:25:58.000 And you're talking about something.

00:25:59.000 Give me the perspective of how large they believe it is currently.

00:26:03.000 What's excavated at the moment is on a scale of Stonehenge.

00:26:07.000 What's under the ground may be as much as 50 times larger.

00:26:10.000 Jesus.

00:26:11.000 But Buckley-Tepley, no one lived there.

00:26:14.000 There's no tools.

00:26:15.000 There's no...

00:26:16.000 Well, you're talking about 12,000 years old, though.

00:26:19.000 But if it's buried, there should be pottery.

00:26:21.000 There's no pottery, no writing, no articles of clothing.

00:26:24.000 No one lived there.

00:26:25.000 Well, you're saying nobody lived there, so why should they have pottery?

00:26:27.000 Why should pottery be in the field? 0.98

00:26:28.000 Why would they go along and break some pots and stick it in the artificial field?

00:26:32.000 But how about something? 1.00

00:26:32.000 They're trash. 1.00

00:26:34.000 Something that would indicate it's a different kind of people than what we're used to seeing in the archaeological record. 1.00

00:26:41.000 It's just rubbish that they poured in.

00:26:43.000 It's just stones and earth. 1.00

00:26:44.000 Buckets of it.

00:26:45.000 In other words, Graham, for you to gain Support for your theory amongst mainstream archaeologists.

00:26:50.000 They want to see positive evidence to overturn the old theory.

00:26:53.000 In other words, the burden of proof is on the person challenging the mainstream.

00:26:57.000 I completely agree.

00:26:57.000 In every field.

00:26:58.000 But isn't there some proof that the mainstream idea of these hunters and gatherers never had anything in what the theory was that would indicate these people were capable of building something even remotely the size of Gobekli Tepe?

00:27:12.000 To me, that's the stunning That's the beauty of this find.

00:27:15.000 It overturns our ideas of primitive hunter-gatherers that could not do this.

00:27:19.000 Apparently they can.

00:27:21.000 That's one possible assessment.

00:27:23.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:27:24.000 I call this, somebody else called it, the bigotry of low expectations.

00:27:27.000 It's like, we had this kind of low expectations for these hunter-gatherers, maybe we should jettison that idea.

00:27:33.000 And in my own other field of history of religion, it also threw that off, because this apparently was a kind of a spiritual, religious...

00:27:40.000 That's the wrong word.

00:27:41.000 They wouldn't have used anything like that.

00:27:42.000 Actually, nobody can know that, Michael.

00:27:43.000 That's right.

00:27:44.000 But if it was, the big National Geographic article emphasized that, maybe this is the very first religious, spiritual temple ever built.

00:27:52.000 Because they didn't live there, so they went there for a reason.

00:27:54.000 But isn't it also possible that this is signs that civilization was more advanced 12,000 years ago than we thought?

00:28:01.000 Okay, more advanced.

00:28:01.000 Again, what do we mean by advanced?

00:28:03.000 We're talking about the ability to construct an amazing structure.

00:28:07.000 How big was it?

00:28:08.000 How tall are these stones?

00:28:09.000 Some of them are 20 feet tall.

00:28:10.000 Some of them are smaller with astronomical alignments.

00:28:14.000 Klaus Schmidt called it a center of innovation.

00:28:16.000 He was intrigued by the way that agriculture emerges around Gobekli Tepe at the same time that Gobekli Tepe is created.

00:28:25.000 I mean, he went on record with me.

00:28:27.000 Perhaps he's not right, but he went on record with me as saying that was the first Thank you very much.

00:28:51.000 That what we're looking at is evidence of some kind of transfer of technology, that people came into that area who had other knowledge and that that was applied and perhaps they mobilized the local population around this site.

00:29:01.000 Perhaps that's precisely why we see agriculture developing there.

00:29:04.000 So perhaps that's the skill that's being passed on.

00:29:07.000 But I don't see anything particularly...

00:29:09.000 Okay, the stone work is spectacular, but that's not any more advanced than a few millennium afterwards.

00:29:17.000 But you're talking about something 20 feet tall made of stone by people that were hunter-gatherers?

00:29:22.000 But a couple hundred people can move multi-ton stones.

00:29:26.000 There's no mystery in moving the stones.

00:29:27.000 They're still moving 20-ton stones in Indonesia today.

00:29:30.000 I mean, megalithic cultures still exist.

00:29:31.000 You also know that the carving on the outside is extremely complex.

00:29:35.000 It's three-dimensional carving.

00:29:36.000 Okay, but...

00:29:37.000 But you know what that means?

00:29:39.000 But Lasko at 30,000 years ago has magnificent cave paintings with three-dimensional animals.

00:29:45.000 But that's painting.

00:29:46.000 Hold on a second.

00:29:47.000 Do you know what I'm saying when I say three-dimensional carvings?

00:29:49.000 Yeah, like the Venus.

00:29:51.000 No, the carvings were on the outside, meaning they didn't carve them into the rock, they carved away the rock around them, which is pretty sophisticated stuff for hunter-gatherers, and they're doing this on these 20-foot-tall stone columns.

00:30:04.000 I mean, it's pretty impressive stuff.

00:30:06.000 Okay, but there the assumption is that they couldn't have figured this out.

00:30:09.000 We know from modern societies where, say, Australian Aborigines, in one generation, they go from stone tools to flying airplanes. 0.80

00:30:18.000 The brains are quite capable of doing these amazing things.

00:30:21.000 It's the same brains.

00:30:22.000 Did they go from stone tools to flying airplanes without somebody introducing them to airplanes?

00:30:27.000 Yeah, you're actually making his argument for him.

00:30:29.000 No, no.

00:30:30.000 It's not that much of a reach to carve stone.

00:30:34.000 People have been carving stones for thousands of years.

00:30:36.000 But the entire archaeological opinion on megalithic sites for decades before this was precisely that it was beyond their ability to do that.

00:30:43.000 Right, and now the mainstream has changed its mind about this.

00:30:46.000 Or at the very least...

00:30:47.000 A little shift.

00:30:48.000 Let's pause for a moment.

00:30:49.000 Let's pause for a moment.

00:30:50.000 So, for sure, we all agree human beings made this.

00:30:54.000 Yes, not aliens.

00:30:56.000 So the argument is not whether or not aliens made it.

00:31:01.000 The argument is whether or not humans made it that were sophisticated.

00:31:06.000 Well, they're clearly sophisticated enough to make this incredible structure that is some sign of some sort of civilization.

00:31:17.000 I believe so, yeah.

00:31:18.000 It is.

00:31:19.000 It's a gigantic structure.

00:31:20.000 I agree with Graham that we've, again, undersold who these people were.

00:31:24.000 My friend Jared Diamond goes to Papua New Guinea.

00:31:27.000 He talks in the opening chapter of Guns, Germs, and Steel, how smart these people are that live out there in nature, what it takes to survive.

00:31:34.000 He wouldn't last an hour, you know, from L.A., he wouldn't last an hour with his Papua New Guinean friends out there in the wild. 0.99

00:31:41.000 Well, that's just because he doesn't know how to survive, and they've been passing down the information for generation after generation.

00:31:48.000 They're very smart.

00:31:49.000 Okay, so it's not a problem of intelligence.

00:31:51.000 And is there...

00:31:52.000 Okay, so here's the other thing we don't know, is that there might be lots more of these sites and where there's...

00:31:58.000 There are.

00:31:58.000 I visited one of them, Karahan Tepe.

00:32:00.000 You've got the T-shaped pillars sticking out the side of a hill in a farmer's backyard.

00:32:04.000 I mean, I think we're actually at the beginning of opening up this inquiry, not at the end of it, by any means.

00:32:10.000 Okay, but then before you...

00:32:12.000 Okay, why not just say, we don't know.

00:32:14.000 This is a spectacular mystery.

00:32:15.000 You leave it at that.

00:32:16.000 Why write a book that says, I'm going to fill in all the gaps with this?

00:32:19.000 You guys on the mainstream side won't speculate and won't explore.

00:32:22.000 I don't claim to be an archaeologist.

00:32:24.000 I'm not a scientist.

00:32:25.000 I'm an author.

00:32:26.000 It's my job to offer an alternative point of view and to offer a coherently argued alternative point of view. 0.56

00:32:31.000 And I must say, go Beckley Tepe strikes me as a gigantic fucking mystery and a mystery that is worthy of exploration from a point of view that may not satisfy you. 0.88

00:32:42.000 Oh, well, you don't have to satisfy me. 0.97

00:32:45.000 You and your colleagues.

00:32:46.000 And I certainly don't have to satisfy you or them.

00:32:49.000 That's not my project.

00:32:50.000 But like your opening chapter with Schmidt, I thought I really loved the kind of conversational style you had with Schmidt in the book where he's dialoguing, where Schmidt goes, and look at this.

00:33:00.000 And then he says, but wait, what's that again?

00:33:03.000 A little bit like Columbo.

00:33:05.000 Like, wait, I have just one more question.

00:33:07.000 And, you know, the mystery kind of thickens.

00:33:09.000 That's perfectly okay.

00:33:11.000 That's great.

00:33:11.000 I mean, that's what science is all about, is uncovering mysteries that we then have to figure out.

00:33:16.000 So there's always more mysteries.

00:33:18.000 But that doesn't mean, that's not positive evidence in favor of a particular theory like a lost civilization.

00:33:23.000 It's just, we can't explain this.

00:33:25.000 Full stop.

00:33:27.000 Yeah.

00:33:27.000 We certainly can't explain it, and you can't explain it by saying that we underestimated hunter and gatherers either.

00:33:33.000 Well, why not?

00:33:34.000 We know they made it.

00:33:35.000 Whatever you want to call them.

00:33:36.000 Well, we know humans made it.

00:33:38.000 That's right.

00:33:38.000 We know humans made it.

00:33:39.000 So whatever you want to call them.

00:33:40.000 But why do they believe that people were only hunters and gatherers 12,000 years ago?

00:33:44.000 It's because they didn't have any evidence to the contrary.

00:33:46.000 Right.

00:33:47.000 This is evidence to the contrary.

00:33:48.000 I agree.

00:33:50.000 So you agree that there weren't hunter and gatherers?

00:33:52.000 Okay, but there's several stages in between.

00:33:55.000 Just, you know, 12 people living out in the jungle by themselves versus us.

00:34:00.000 You know, there's like a whole bunch of different...

00:34:01.000 Well, I would say that Gobekli Tepe is a gigantic stage.

00:34:06.000 Well, we don't...

00:34:06.000 Okay, they didn't live there, so we have to figure out where were they living and what was there.

00:34:12.000 So that has to be excavated.

00:34:13.000 We've excavated 10% of it, right?

00:34:16.000 And meanwhile, what you're saying is that we shouldn't speculate at all, because I mean, mainstream archaeology is speculating.

00:34:21.000 Mainstream archaeology is speculating when saying it definitely was hunter-gatherers who did this.

00:34:25.000 That's also a speculation.

00:34:26.000 That seems more of a reach.

00:34:28.000 Okay, but not...

00:34:28.000 They may be more than hunter-gatherers.

00:34:31.000 They may have been partially settled.

00:34:34.000 You can have any kind of number of states...

00:34:35.000 But what you can't apparently have is the possibility of a transfer of technology from people who were really masters of that technology already when they came in.

00:34:42.000 But where are these people?

00:34:43.000 Well, you're dealing with an incredible...

00:34:46.000 12,000 years ago, their fingerprints are there.

00:34:48.000 Let's find their homes.

00:34:49.000 I don't know.

00:34:49.000 I don't know that their homes matter.

00:34:51.000 Would their homes even survive after 12,000 years?

00:34:54.000 I'm not sure. 1.00

00:34:55.000 They're trash. 1.00

00:34:55.000 They're tools. 1.00

00:34:56.000 They're something. 0.99

00:34:57.000 Screw trash and tools. 0.98

00:34:59.000 We've got Gobekli Tepe. 1.00

00:35:01.000 It confronts us.

00:35:02.000 It challenges the mainstream model.

00:35:04.000 I think it's reasonable to consider the possibility that there was something more than just hunter-gatherers involved here in creating this extraordinary place.

00:35:13.000 And that's all I've done.

00:35:14.000 It seems to me that to say hunter-gatherers could build this, I wouldn't be opposed to the idea that they're hunting and gathering, but it does certainly imply a lot of leisure time.

00:35:27.000 A lot of leisure time.

00:35:29.000 Well, again, if we place this back particularly within that climate zone at 11,006 to 12,000, 13,000 years ago, whatever it turns out to be, we're dealing with an extremely demanding and challenging climate.

00:35:46.000 Which wouldn't necessarily, to my mind, be conducive to the emergence of a settled culture that would be capable of undertaking a project on this scale.

00:35:58.000 And as somebody who's built a lot of things and moved quite a few heavy weights in my time, I find the idea sort of perplexing to me that they would be...

00:36:10.000 What I would have to ask is, what is their motive?

00:36:13.000 What is their motive for undertaking a project on this scale?

00:36:16.000 Because it's an enormous project.

00:36:18.000 And to move a 20-ton block of stone is really a challenging task to undertake.

00:36:25.000 Today?

00:36:26.000 Today!

00:36:26.000 Well, without the infrastructure of large...

00:36:33.000 Machines and so forth.

00:36:35.000 But to do it by hand, it would be an enormous undertaking.

00:36:40.000 To me, it's like, when are they having time to hunt and gather when you're engaged in a project of this scale?

00:36:46.000 But we know hunter-gatherers have way more free time than modern society people do. 0.89

00:36:50.000 That's the one thing we've learned is that it's a pretty good way to make a living, actually.

00:36:53.000 They have a better, varied diet than we have.

00:36:55.000 This is the Neanderthal diet, right? 0.94

00:36:57.000 They have a better, varied diet and a lot more free time.

00:37:01.000 A lot less stress.

00:37:02.000 We knew that all along about hunter-gatherers when we were saying they couldn't build megalithic sites.

00:37:07.000 But we're looking at a time where the environment is undergoing rapid changes, to which adaptations would be extremely challenging.

00:37:16.000 And we know those changes are going on all over the planet.

00:37:19.000 We know that sea levels are rapidly rising over a period of a few thousand years, from a sea stand low of about 400 feet up to the present level.

00:37:29.000 We also know that That biotas were shifting dramatically all over the planet.

00:37:34.000 The effects of the Younger Dryas were global.

00:37:36.000 Pretty much that is, I think, the emerging consensus now.

00:37:39.000 That both hemispheres, north and south, were being affected by the climate changes of the Younger Dryas.

00:37:45.000 So what we're doing is replacing this phenomena, this project, within this context of these extremely challenging times in which, you know, adaptation to the environmental changes Could easily be the all-consuming challenge of the times.

00:38:03.000 I'm just finding it difficult to imagine a disconnect, to see this disconnect between a project of this magnitude and the motive for doing it during a time when obviously the environment could be posing serious constraints upon people's ability to function in that Well,

00:38:25.000 Randall, we don't even know the motives of the Easter Islanders and why they raised these huge... 1.00

00:38:30.000 But we know they did it.

00:38:31.000 But hasn't that become a central question, though?

00:38:34.000 Something had to have motivated them.

00:38:35.000 But let's get back to Tebekli Tepe.

00:38:38.000 So let's just be real clear.

00:38:40.000 We know they're humans.

00:38:41.000 We know that it's at least 12,000 years old.

00:38:43.000 And we know that the real dispute here, the real question is, did these people have structures and did they have agriculture?

00:38:49.000 We know that they were human beings.

00:38:51.000 They were essentially modern human beings.

00:38:53.000 So, were they hunter-gatherers or did they have structures in agriculture?

00:38:56.000 Well, before Gobekli Tepe, they didn't have structures and they didn't have agriculture.

00:38:59.000 After Gobekli Tepe, they did. 0.86

00:39:01.000 So, the fact that they were able to build something so monumental, what kind of a leap is it at all to think that these people could figure out how to plant food and figure out how to make a house?

00:39:12.000 Well, I mean, again, if you look back 30,000 years, 40,000 years to these cave paintings, these are pretty sophisticated.

00:39:19.000 Yeah.

00:39:19.000 Beautiful.

00:39:20.000 They are.

00:39:20.000 Clearly they had abstract reasoning.

00:39:22.000 They could think from the concrete to the abstract and so on.

00:39:25.000 It's not a big reach to go from that to moving stones around.

00:39:29.000 I'd say there's a big difference between painting and engraving on cave walls.

00:39:33.000 I don't think so.

00:39:33.000 To me, the painting is even more sophisticated.

00:39:35.000 Sorry, I'm creating the largest megalithic site that's ever been built on Earth.

00:39:39.000 Yeah.

00:39:39.000 I think there's a huge difference between those two.

00:39:42.000 I mean, nobody would compare the construction effort on Stonehenge or Gigantia with cave paintings.

00:39:48.000 I agree with you.

00:39:48.000 The cave paintings are magnificent.

00:39:50.000 I've had the privilege to visit many of the painted caves.

00:39:52.000 Stunning work.

00:39:53.000 And as Picasso said when he came out of Lascaux, we have invented nothing.

00:39:57.000 I mean, that was that modern human mind...

00:40:01.000 Symbolic-minded at work there, but this is another matter.

00:40:03.000 This is a large-scale construction project that's going on, and it's not just a construction project.

00:40:09.000 It's not like huts.

00:40:10.000 It's hundreds and hundreds of very, very large megalithic pillars, which have to be mobilized, brought to the place.

00:40:16.000 You know, organizing a workforce in order to do that, even that requires preparation and time and learning and practice.

00:40:22.000 It's not something that you wake up one morning and just can do overnight.

00:40:25.000 You think that the paintings are more impressive than Gobekli Tappi?

00:40:29.000 Yeah, or at least comparable. 0.96

00:40:31.000 I think that's absolutely ridiculous.

00:40:34.000 To convey three-dimensionality on a 2D plane, that's what Picasso meant. 0.78

00:40:40.000 It's like, wow, that's incredible.

00:40:41.000 It's like developing perspective.

00:40:43.000 And to use the natural shape of the walls to create a three-dimensional perspective look, that's pretty abstract.

00:40:50.000 You're comparing apples and pears.

00:40:51.000 It's not a construction project.

00:40:53.000 We don't have to compare them.

00:40:55.000 But I don't think it's even What I'm saying is that it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to think these people were pretty smart.

00:41:01.000 Well, we know that they were smart.

00:41:02.000 We know that they were smart just because of the fact that those construction projects were done.

00:41:06.000 By who?

00:41:07.000 By whoever.

00:41:08.000 We know that they were smart.

00:41:09.000 Whoever built Gobekli Tepe was clearly intelligent.

00:41:11.000 Whoever made those 3D carvings, clearly they were intelligent.

00:41:14.000 But to think that someone drawing on cave paintings is more impressive than erecting twigs.

00:41:20.000 We're good to go.

00:41:38.000 There's tens of thousands of years to develop more that we're very likely to find more archaeological sites.

00:41:45.000 And yet, up till now, we haven't found that.

00:41:48.000 We haven't found all of that intermediate material.

00:41:51.000 See, if I could actually see that intermediate material between the Upper Paleolithic Cave And Gobekli Tepe.

00:42:22.000 Where they learn the skills to move the stones, to organise the workforce, to feed and water the workforce in a rather dry place.

00:42:27.000 All of that is actually quite a logistical challenge.

00:42:30.000 Yep, and obviously somebody met it somehow.

00:42:33.000 Some humans.

00:42:34.000 So the real question is, did they have structures?

00:42:36.000 Did they have agriculture?

00:42:38.000 Did they have some sort of a community where they lived in an established location?

00:42:41.000 I would imagine so.

00:42:43.000 So that would push back the time where we thought that there was a civilization.

00:42:47.000 That would push them back into a realm of at least stepping out of the hunter-gatherer stage.

00:42:54.000 Now, your guy Schmid, as you show in your book, he did not go as far as you guys.

00:42:57.000 Certainly not, no.

00:42:59.000 But he admitted it's a mystery.

00:43:00.000 Okay, that would be the scientific approach.

00:43:03.000 I don't know what it is.

00:43:04.000 Great mystery.

00:43:05.000 Let's just wait and see.

00:43:07.000 Versus, I'm going to postulate a lost civilization.

00:43:10.000 Nothing wrong with that, Graham.

00:43:11.000 It's a free country, and scientists do this all the time, as you've mentioned.

00:43:16.000 There's a rather humorous thing, which I have to say, actually...

00:43:20.000 I might even ask Jamie to pull up the couple of images of Fingerprints of the Gods.

00:43:26.000 That's the book I'm best known for.

00:43:28.000 And when I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, essentially I was saying civilization is much older and much more mysterious than we thought.

00:43:40.000 And I was ridiculed for proposing that.

00:43:44.000 2013, one of the magazines that ridiculed me, New Scientist magazine in Britain, publishes as a cover story, a picture of Gobekli Tepe, and the headline, Civilization is much older and much more mysterious than we thought.

00:43:57.000 Fair enough.

00:43:57.000 Okay, fair enough.

00:43:58.000 And scientists do do this.

00:44:01.000 I mean, I've followed paleoanthropology for my whole adult life.

00:44:04.000 And one of the big mysteries is how did we get a big brain?

00:44:08.000 How did we get to abstract reasoning from, say, what chimps can do?

00:44:12.000 No one knows.

00:44:13.000 The doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years, right?

00:44:16.000 And because no one knows, every couple of years there's a new book out.

00:44:20.000 It's climate change.

00:44:21.000 It was...

00:44:21.000 The throwing arm, cooking food.

00:44:24.000 That's right.

00:44:24.000 Cooking meat.

00:44:25.000 You know, meat is another big one.

00:44:26.000 A Harvard perfect...

00:44:26.000 Meat.

00:44:27.000 Okay.

00:44:27.000 And these books come and go.

00:44:28.000 And some of them have legs.

00:44:29.000 Some of them don't.

00:44:31.000 And it's just the way it goes.

00:44:32.000 And then there's Terrence McKenna's theory.

00:44:33.000 It's pretty obvious it was psychedelics.

00:44:35.000 Yeah, that's Terrence McKenna's stoned ape theory.

00:44:37.000 Not that made the brain bigger, but that...

00:44:38.000 Switch the brain on.

00:44:39.000 Is this the old Julian?

00:44:42.000 Julian Jaynes, no.

00:44:43.000 The bicameral mind, not at all. 0.95

00:44:44.000 This is David Lewis Williams, who's professor of anthropology at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

00:44:50.000 His neuropsychological theory of cave art.

00:44:53.000 All kudos to Terence McKenna and Food of the Gods.

00:44:56.000 What a brilliant...

00:44:58.000 What a brilliant alternative thinker.

00:45:00.000 But David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwatersrand has been working on this problem since 1973, and his argument is that the remarkable similarities that we see in rock and cave art all around the world are explained that we're dealing with a shamanistic art.

00:45:14.000 Shamanism involves altered states of consciousness. 1.00

00:45:16.000 This is typical visions of altered states of consciousness, and it seems to have accompanied a great leap forward in human behavior.

00:45:22.000 And you covered this in your book?

00:45:24.000 I covered it in Supernatural.

00:45:26.000 As did Richard Wrangham's theory.

00:45:28.000 This is a highly regarded scientist at Harvard.

00:45:32.000 So he's the meat-eating guy.

00:45:35.000 It's cooking meat.

00:45:36.000 By cooking the protein, that's what gives you the energy to build a huge brain.

00:45:41.000 All right, so now this guy is starting with 10 pluses on his side.

00:45:44.000 He's Harvard and already respected.

00:45:46.000 And even so, his book was like, eh, maybe.

00:45:49.000 Well, it's probably a series of different events and a bunch of different factors.

00:45:53.000 That's right.

00:45:54.000 It could be a number of different things.

00:45:55.000 So, let's get away from Gobekli Tepe and ancient civilizations, and let's get back to the geological evidence, which, Randall, you're an expert at.

00:46:04.000 And this is one of the main things that you had a dispute with, and this is one of the reasons why we got everybody together.

00:46:10.000 Now, what is your thoughts on what Randall and Graham proposed, specifically Randall, who is much more on the geological side of things?

00:46:19.000 Yeah.

00:46:20.000 Well, this is why I brought in my phone-a-friend, a geologist.

00:46:23.000 So, by way of background, after your show, I thought, you know, let's just give this a fair hearing.

00:46:29.000 This is what we do.

00:46:30.000 So this will be our cover story, and I think the end-of-summer issue comes out.

00:46:34.000 Sorry.

00:46:35.000 I hope that Marc Defant... 0.87

00:46:37.000 Is going to be doing some more work on the draft of his article for you that is up online, because that article is full of bullshit statements about me which are demonstrably false. 0.90

00:46:48.000 He's on.

00:46:48.000 Yeah, he's there, and I'm happy to engage with those particular issues.

00:46:53.000 Well, I'll have to put on my reading glasses.

00:46:54.000 And whatever article's online, this has not been published yet.

00:46:57.000 Well, it claims that it's a draft of the article that will appear in a 2017 edition of Skeptic magazine.

00:47:06.000 So pull it up, Graham, and give you a chance to have your time in court.

00:47:10.000 Let's let Graham go over it first, and then we'll have Mark on to refute what he said.

00:47:15.000 So here's the font on magicians of the gods.

00:47:19.000 By the way, Michael, I mean, you say that you're here to, you know, to respectfully aim to get at the truth.

00:47:25.000 Yeah.

00:47:26.000 There it is.

00:47:26.000 Conjuring up the lost civilization from nothing.

00:47:28.000 Yeah, let me just get to the top of this.

00:47:32.000 I've got it here.

00:47:33.000 Just bear with me a second.

00:47:34.000 So, amongst the words in Mark Defant's article, he's accusing me of duping.

00:47:41.000 The public.

00:47:41.000 He's saying that I'm public enemy number one.

00:47:44.000 He's accusing me of arm waving.

00:47:47.000 I admit I do wave my arms.

00:47:49.000 Pontificating.

00:47:49.000 Well, my grandfather was a minister of the church.

00:47:52.000 Little interest in peer-reviewed research.

00:47:55.000 Claimed that no academic would debate. 1.00

00:47:57.000 That's Utter bullshit. 0.99

00:47:58.000 I had a debate with Zahi Hawass. 1.00

00:48:00.000 He's a leading Egyptian Egyptologist.

00:48:03.000 Back in 2015, it was not my fault that Zahi Hawass walked out on that debate.

00:48:07.000 I can play the video, if you like, a minute and a half of Zahi Hawass lambasting me and then walking out and refusing to debate further.

00:48:15.000 So it's bullshit to say I don't debate or I'm not willing to debate.

00:48:19.000 And finally, he says that I'm conning a hellacious number of people into buying his books. 0.98

00:48:23.000 Now, how can we get any dialogue going when somebody begins like that?

00:48:28.000 Okay.

00:48:28.000 Then would you like some further?

00:48:31.000 Bear with me because I just have to scroll down and I don't have a mouse...

00:48:36.000 I don't have a mouse.

00:48:37.000 So, Hancock and Carlson claimed that several times that no academic would debate them.

00:48:41.000 Not true.

00:48:43.000 I'm accused of doing an about-face since fingerprints of the gods.

00:48:50.000 Are my views not allowed to evolve with new evidence?

00:48:54.000 Is that somehow a crime on my part?

00:48:57.000 Let me just finish.

00:48:58.000 Then, a cheap shot, you know, he cites Jesus Gemara and accuses me of not having the scientific knowledge to deal with issues of gravitation.

00:49:09.000 Now, it's true that Jesus Gemara, who is a descendant of the Incas, who has worked 70 years on the megaliths of Sacsayhuaman, whose father before him, Alfredo Gemara, worked 70 years, it's true that he's got a way-out theory about gravitation.

00:49:22.000 Thing is, I state in my book that it's a way-out theory.

00:49:25.000 What I go on to say, quoted in the attack, is that, however, this isn't the part of his theory I'm interested in.

00:49:31.000 Where I feel he is solidly persuasive is in his observations of the anomalous character of the monuments of the Andes, etc., etc.

00:49:37.000 Defante doesn't cite that.

00:49:39.000 He just presents me as buying what Jesus Guamara says.

00:49:42.000 I mean, if that's the standard that you're going to have in Skeptic magazine, you have a serious problem.

00:49:46.000 And then Gobekli Tepe, he contends that Gobekli Tepe is too advanced to have been completed by hunter-gatherers and must have been constructed by a more advanced civilization.

00:49:56.000 Well, no, that's not what I say.

00:49:58.000 I say it was constructed by hunter-gatherers, but that they were advised and supported by people who had knowledge of this kind of work beforehand.

00:50:05.000 How is that different?

00:50:06.000 I think it's very different.

00:50:07.000 I'm not saying it was constructed by.

00:50:09.000 I'm saying that a group of people settled amongst hunter-gatherers and transferred some skills for them.

00:50:15.000 He says that, he quotes me, Hancock makes the following stunning claim.

00:50:20.000 Quote, our ancestors are being initiated into the secrets of metals and how to make swords and knives.

00:50:25.000 I do not make that claim.

00:50:26.000 I'm reporting that this claim is made in the book of Enoch.

00:50:31.000 That is not my claim.

00:50:32.000 Then what else?

00:50:33.000 So you don't think that's the explanation?

00:50:35.000 Well, I'm being misrepresented by your author here.

00:50:39.000 If he wants to represent me, if he accuses me of cherry-picking, he shouldn't cherry-pick my statements.

00:50:44.000 He should quote it in full context.

00:50:45.000 We're still working on this.

00:50:45.000 Let's get it right.

00:50:46.000 You don't accept it.

00:50:47.000 It's out there on the internet.

00:50:50.000 He's still working on it, but he's published online.

00:50:53.000 Here's a beautiful one.

00:50:54.000 I didn't know it was online.

00:50:55.000 Here's a beautiful one.

00:50:56.000 He cites Klaus Schmidt on the character.

00:51:01.000 Schmidt makes a salient point, almost as if he anticipated Hancock's book.

00:51:04.000 Quote, fabulous or mythical creatures such as centaurs or the sphinx, winged bulls or horses, do not yet occur in the iconography and therefore in the mythology of prehistoric times.

00:51:14.000 They must be recognized as creations of the high cultures which arose later. 0.99

00:51:17.000 Well, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. 1.00

00:51:19.000 You've just been talking about the painted caves. 1.00

00:51:22.000 Go to Chauvet Cave.

00:51:23.000 You'll see a lion man, Holsteinstad, a lion man carved out of mammoth ivory.

00:51:28.000 Go to Chauvet, bison man, straddling lion woman. 0.99

00:51:32.000 Her right arm is transferring...

00:51:34.000 It's transforming into the head of a lion.

00:51:38.000 So certainly these mythical creatures did exist in the Upper Paleolithic and it's rubbish to say that they didn't.

00:51:44.000 I mean, how can I go on?

00:51:45.000 The teapot.

00:51:46.000 Oh yeah.

00:51:47.000 Okay.

00:51:47.000 So he's taking issue with me because I suggest that the vulture on Pillar 43 in Enclosure D is representing the teapot asterism of the constellation of Sagittarius.

00:52:00.000 And he goes and gives us little things of Uncle Sam and Some other thing that he shows, you know, anybody can impose any image on anything.

00:52:07.000 Well, it's not my fault that a couple of academics who didn't even talk to me and had nothing whatsoever to do to me have published a major study in the, I quote it again, the Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, a peer-reviewed journal, where they make precisely that identification.

00:52:23.000 So at least I'm not alone.

00:52:25.000 At least there are peer-reviewed credential scholars who also agree that that figure...

00:52:30.000 I think?

00:53:02.000 I don't think that study proves...

00:53:06.000 Anything and so on and so forth.

00:53:08.000 Just to clarify what you do believe then, so that we don't misrepresent you.

00:53:12.000 So you don't think that the lost civilization instructed them on the use of metals?

00:53:18.000 I don't know.

00:53:19.000 I don't see evidence for that.

00:53:20.000 But why would you put that in the book then?

00:53:23.000 I didn't put it in the book.

00:53:24.000 I was quoting the Book of Enoch.

00:53:25.000 It's a huge passage on the Book of Enoch.

00:53:27.000 It's not me who's saying that.

00:53:28.000 It's the Book of Enoch that's saying that.

00:53:29.000 Okay, I understand, but why...

00:53:31.000 All I require your defant to do... 1.00

00:53:36.000 Is to state that Hancock is citing the Book of Enoch.

00:53:39.000 He didn't do that.

00:53:41.000 What's the word?

00:53:44.000 Disingenuous?

00:53:45.000 Is that the polite word you guys use?

00:53:48.000 It seems more than disingenuous.

00:53:50.000 It's a character assassination.

00:53:51.000 What the question is, what's the context of including that in your book?

00:53:55.000 I forget.

00:53:56.000 Well, the context is that actually I was criticizing Zachariah Sitchin.

00:54:01.000 That's primarily what I was doing.

00:54:02.000 So you don't think that a lost civilization instructed the people who built Gobekli Tepe on the use of metals and tools?

00:54:07.000 I see no evidence for that.

00:54:09.000 I see Gobekli Tepe.

00:54:10.000 I can't go say they instructed them on the use of metals and tools unless I can find evidence for it.

00:54:14.000 Well, so what did they do?

00:54:16.000 We don't know.

00:54:16.000 They generated agriculture.

00:54:18.000 They created a center of excellence around which a hunting gatherer...

00:54:21.000 No, not they who built Gobekli Tepe.

00:54:23.000 The lost civilization that advised them that you think happened.

00:54:27.000 Yeah.

00:54:27.000 What did they do if they...

00:54:30.000 They've come through a cataclysm.

00:54:32.000 They're survivors, few in number.

00:54:33.000 This is my scenario.

00:54:35.000 You don't have to accept it.

00:54:37.000 I'm sure you don't.

00:54:38.000 They take refuge amongst hunter-gatherers. 0.96

00:54:41.000 I mean, I don't know.

00:54:41.000 You probably have some survival skills.

00:54:43.000 I don't have many.

00:54:44.000 I mean, if we were to have a comet impact in the world today, which were to take out all the underpinnings of modern civilization, I might go settle with hunter-gatherers because they're the people who know best how to live in that situation.

00:54:56.000 I have no survival skills.

00:54:58.000 Yeah, so go settle amongst her together. 0.99

00:54:59.000 But I might be able to transfer some of my knowledge to them.

00:55:02.000 I might have something that I could transfer to them.

00:55:05.000 And I might have very strong reasons why I might not choose to transfer all of it.

00:55:08.000 So, in other words, perhaps this is what happened.

00:55:11.000 Okay, maybe.

00:55:12.000 But how is that different from Zachariah Sitchin's?

00:55:16.000 Well, the aliens advised him.

00:55:18.000 Well, that's a lot different.

00:55:20.000 I think it's massively different, especially since Zachariah Sitchin has his aliens arriving here in 1970s NASA technology.

00:55:26.000 Weirdly, he wrote his book in the 1970s.

00:55:28.000 I mean, I don't go there.

00:55:31.000 I don't make that suggestion.

00:55:33.000 I'm simply saying...

00:55:34.000 Perhaps there's been a forgotten episode in human history.

00:55:38.000 Perhaps its fingerprints are present at a number of sites around the world.

00:55:43.000 But perhaps the extremely defensive, arrogant and patronizing attitude of mainstream academia is stopping us from considering that possibility.

00:55:50.000 And therefore, I campaign to get that possibility considered.

00:55:53.000 And I try to do so with as loud a voice as possible.

00:55:55.000 Well, you're doing it.

00:55:57.000 You're doing it, man.

00:55:57.000 But doesn't it disturb you that you...

00:55:59.000 I mean, you run Skeptic Magazine and someone publishes something like that?

00:56:03.000 I mean, that goes against the whole idea of critical thinking.

00:56:07.000 I mean, it's misrepresenting his quotes.

00:56:10.000 It's misrepresenting his perspective, his point of view.

00:56:13.000 It's really disingenuous.

00:56:15.000 This is one reason we're doing this, so we could get his...

00:56:17.000 But why would anybody write something like that?

00:56:19.000 And why would you guys publish something like that without checking the facts?

00:56:22.000 We are.

00:56:23.000 This was not supposed to be posted online.

00:56:26.000 It's online, though.

00:56:27.000 How does something get online if it's not supposed to be?

00:56:29.000 Why is such a person who will do that a useful contributor to your side of the debate?

00:56:35.000 One of the reasons we're here is to get your point of view exactly right.

00:56:38.000 So you're saying that there's no evidence that any lost civilization exists, only the fingerprints of their influence on later peoples we do know existed.

00:56:51.000 I'm saying there are physical objects.

00:56:52.000 I say Gobekli Tepe is one of them.

00:56:54.000 I say the Sphinx is another.

00:56:55.000 But see, this is that argument from either ignorance or personal incredulity.

00:56:59.000 I don't accept the mainstream, or I can't think of how this pyramids could have been built, therefore it was built by somebody else through some other technology.

00:57:07.000 That's not what he's saying.

00:57:08.000 That's not what I'm saying.

00:57:09.000 They're just post-dating it.

00:57:10.000 What I'm saying is the Sphinx is older.

00:57:13.000 I do go with Robert Schalk's argument on the geology.

00:57:16.000 I'm also very interested in the astronomy of the site.

00:57:18.000 And again, I have slides that I could show on this if we have time.

00:57:22.000 You might want to get into Ed Krupp's criticism of the Orion correlation and why he says it's upside down.

00:57:27.000 I can talk to you about that.

00:57:29.000 We do.

00:57:30.000 I mean, I know Ed Krupp's argument about that.

00:57:32.000 That was from the 90s, I think.

00:57:34.000 What's your thoughts on Robert Schock's conclusions?

00:57:38.000 That's not something I know much about.

00:57:40.000 Well, you should.

00:57:41.000 It's a huge factor.

00:57:42.000 It's a huge factor.

00:57:43.000 Because it's all about water erosion.

00:57:45.000 Your Mark Defant knows about Schock, and he rejects it on the basis of that paper.

00:57:49.000 And that paper really doesn't date the Sphinx.

00:57:52.000 It works with dating of large blocks in the valley and the Sphinx temples.

00:57:56.000 There's not a single sample taken from the Sphinx.

00:57:59.000 Alright, then who dated it?

00:58:00.000 Who dated it?

00:58:01.000 And then why do mainstream archaeologists not accept the older date for the Sphinx?

00:58:07.000 And the answer is because they have a whole bunch of other evidence that points to the date that they think it does.

00:58:13.000 The answer to your question is very simple.

00:58:15.000 Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass put it on record back in 1992 when John Anthony West and Robert Schock first presented the rainfall erosion evidence on the Sphinx.

00:58:26.000 And what Lehner and Hawass said is, the Sphinx can't possibly be 12,000 plus years old because there was no other culture anywhere in the world that was capable of creating large-scale monumental architecture like this.

00:58:38.000 Show me one other structure that's capable of doing that.

00:58:41.000 Well, they could say that in 1992, Michael, but they can't say it in 2017, not since Gobekli Tepe.

00:58:47.000 If you don't mind, Graham, could you please, for people, so this could be a standalone thing, people could understand, what is the argument about the Sphinx, the enclosure of the Sphinx, and Dr. Robert Schock from Boston University, who's a geologist, what was his conclusion?

00:58:59.000 What Schock is saying is that the Sphinx and the trench out of which the Sphinx is cut...

00:59:06.000 It bears the unmistakable evidence of precipitation-induced weathering, weathering caused by exposure to a substantial period of heavy rainfall.

00:59:14.000 And that is particularly pointed out in the vertical fissures in the trench.

00:59:18.000 You see, the Sphinx itself has been subject to so much restoration over so many years that it's difficult for people to even see the core body of the Sphinx today.

00:59:26.000 But you can see the vertical fissures even down at the back of there.

00:59:30.000 That is what shock counts as rainfall, precipitation-induced weathering, heavy rainfall, which is selectively removing the softer layers and leaving the harder layers in place.

00:59:40.000 And the problem is we don't have that rainfall in Giza, in Egypt, four and a half thousand years ago.

00:59:46.000 You have to go back much earlier to get that rainfall.

00:59:49.000 That's the suggestion.

00:59:50.000 So that's the suggestion by Robert Schock, independently of your conclusions?

00:59:55.000 Totally independently, yeah.

00:59:56.000 Schock disagrees with me on many things, as a matter of fact.

00:59:59.000 And I disagree with him on many things, but I think he's on the money on this.

01:00:03.000 So that alone would set back at least that one...

01:00:06.000 I mean, it's pretty much established that the Great Pyrene of Giza was constructed about 2,500 BC, right?

01:00:11.000 There's absolutely no doubt that a huge project went on at Giza around 2,500 BC. So your argument is not that the whole thing was that much older, was that parts of it seemed to have been from an earlier civilization, or at least that civilization far, far earlier than was...

01:00:28.000 I would say that the ground plan, what we have at Giza, the basic layout of the site, was established in what the ancient Egyptians called Zeptepe, the first time.

01:00:37.000 Astronomically and geologically, I and my colleagues suggest that the first time can be dated to the period of about 12,500 to 13,000 years ago.

01:00:47.000 That was when the site was laid out, because there's intriguing astronomical alignments of the Great Pyramids to the belt of Orion.

01:00:53.000 I know Ed Krupp has a completely opposite view on this.

01:00:56.000 And of the Great Sphinx to the constellation of Leo, rising due east, housing the sun on the equinox, the astrological age of Leo.

01:01:03.000 Again, I have slides I can...

01:01:05.000 It aligns with the geological evidence that Robert Schock concludes...

01:01:09.000 It aligns with the geological evidence.

01:01:10.000 Thousands of years of rainfall.

01:01:11.000 The age of Leo pretty much exactly spans the younger Dryas, as a matter of fact.

01:01:15.000 And so the only argument against that at the time was that there were no other structures like that from 12,000 years ago.

01:01:21.000 Correct.

01:01:21.000 And then Krupp said that the Orion correlation wasn't real because it was upside down.

01:01:27.000 Do you want to get into that now?

01:01:29.000 Well, first...

01:01:30.000 That's not the only argument.

01:01:32.000 It's that, okay, if the Sphinx is built, or the layout for the whole thing is built in, say, 10, 11,000 years ago, and then the pyramids are built, you know, 2500 B.C., what happened in between?

01:01:44.000 Where are all the people, the trash, the places where they lived?

01:01:47.000 Well, there's a bunch of different styles of construction.

01:01:50.000 But not dated in between.

01:01:51.000 I would propose, Michael, something like a monastery.

01:01:54.000 Which has a relatively small archaeological footprint, is on the site.

01:01:58.000 I mean, the idea of information, knowledge, and traditions lasting for thousands of years within a religious system shouldn't be too absurd to us.

01:02:06.000 I mean, Judaism is dealing with ideas that are already best part of 4,000 years old if we go back to Ur of the Chaldees and so on and so forth. 0.93

01:02:12.000 So that's all I'm suggesting, really, that the idea is preserved, maintained, that the survivors...

01:02:18.000 On where?

01:02:19.000 On the site, but in something like a monastery.

01:02:22.000 Which has got a very small archaeological footprint.

01:02:24.000 It is not high.

01:02:25.000 Perhaps, again, one can only speculate, and I think there's a lot of speculation on the archaeological side too, one can only speculate, perhaps having gone through a cataclysm, perhaps they felt to blame for this, wrongly or rightly.

01:02:37.000 I mean, there are many, many traditions in which humanity's behaviour is implicated in the cataclysm that takes place.

01:02:43.000 And perhaps they didn't want to switch civilisation on completely right there.

01:02:47.000 Perhaps they waited, passed down the knowledge through initiates, Enough was there to create a mystery because it's undoubtedly a mystery that the construction of the great pyramids, the first huge pyramids in Egypt, preceded only really by the Zoser pyramid at Saqqara,

01:03:03.000 that the construction of the great pyramids is vastly superior to the construction of the pyramids of the fifth and sixth dynasty that follow it.

01:03:12.000 And that's a little bit counterintuitive that we have this collapse in skills.

01:03:15.000 One would have expected it to got better.

01:03:16.000 So it sounds like the work on the pyramids started already with a level of knowledge in hand.

01:03:21.000 Yes, but okay, so here's how I would think about that.

01:03:25.000 There's a lot of perhapsing and maybes.

01:03:28.000 Always.

01:03:28.000 Yes, well, so you have a bunch of Egyptologists and archaeologists who have been working on this site for centuries.

01:03:36.000 This is one of the most, you know, ancient mysteries and so on.

01:03:39.000 And so let's say there's like 20 lines of evidence that point to, built roughly around this time period here.

01:03:46.000 And then you come on and say, okay, but there's this one anomaly of the rain thing, and there was only rain at this time.

01:03:53.000 Now there's a huge gap.

01:03:54.000 You have one anomaly or line of evidence here and like 20 here.

01:03:57.000 Well, we're talking about different structures, though.

01:03:59.000 There's not a lot of evidence that points to the Sphinx being from a particular time period.

01:04:02.000 Well, he's saying like 12,000, right?

01:04:05.000 I'm saying the rainfall evidence suggests that.

01:04:06.000 Right, but other evidence.

01:04:07.000 Add its alignment.

01:04:08.000 And its alignment with the constellation of Leo housing the sun at dawn on the spring equinox.

01:04:13.000 It's an equinoctial mark, and nobody would dispute that. 0.58

01:04:15.000 Nobody would dispute that the ancient Egypt...

01:04:17.000 Well, no, I mean, if you make a monument pointing perfectly Jewish... 1.00

01:04:19.000 I've stood on the back of the Sphinx at dawn on the spring equinox, and believe me, again, I could show a picture, its head lines up perfectly.

01:04:27.000 With the rising sun.

01:04:28.000 No, I don't think anybody, even Krupp, is disputing that it's an equinoctial marker.

01:04:31.000 Now, here's the thing.

01:04:32.000 You're an ancient Egyptian. 0.99

01:04:33.000 You're building an equinoctial marker in 2500 BC. Do you know what constellation is housing the sun in 2500 BC? I haven't run the little program.

01:04:42.000 It's the constellation of Taurus.

01:04:44.000 So?

01:04:44.000 So logically, if you're creating an equinoctial, and the ancient Egyptians were not shy about making images of bulls, plenty of them, if you're making an equinoctial marker in 2500 BC, you really should create it in the form of a bull, not in the form of a lion, you know?

01:04:58.000 That's the puzzling issue, and yet we do have a time when a lion constellation housed the sun at dawn on the spring equinox, and that is the period of the younger dryers.

01:05:08.000 Okay, I'd say that's a pretty big leap.

01:05:10.000 Well, I know you'd say that, and your colleagues all say that too.

01:05:12.000 And then we have a gap of about five or six thousand years where there's nothing.

01:05:18.000 I'm going to refer back to several articles that were published in the 80s and 90s.

01:05:23.000 This one is from Nature, Early 80s, Late Quaternary History of the Nile.

01:05:28.000 And what it's discussing is the evidence that there was a major shift In the hydraulic regime of the Nile River.

01:05:35.000 It says, between 20,000 and 12,000 years before present, when timberline in the headwaters was lower, vegetation cover more open than today, the Nile was a highly seasonal braided river, which brought mixed coarse and fine sediments down to Egypt and Sudan.

01:05:53.000 This cold, dry interval had ended by 12,500 years before present, when overflow from Lake Victoria and higher rainfall in Ethiopia sent extraordinary floods down the main Nile.

01:06:09.000 And those floods have been documented to have been 120 feet above the modern flood plain of the Nile.

01:06:16.000 Any civilization, or whatever you want to call it, living along the Nile River at that time, Would have had to abandon whatever they were doing there in this regime, this intensified hydraulic regime.

01:06:30.000 And it goes on to say, it marked a revolutionary change to continuous flow with a superimposed flood peak.

01:06:37.000 So what happened is that there was a major environmental change that occurred right there around 12,000 to 12,500 years.

01:06:45.000 The dating could be adjusted somewhat since the early 80s, but the point is made is that because of a major Hydrological change, major vegetation cover change, major environmental change, this would have caused also imposed changes upon whatever culture was existing there or living there at the time.

01:07:05.000 Now what we have is In the aftermath of that event, we have basically the emergence of desert, which now would require serious adaptation.

01:07:17.000 It's very likely, too, that these events could have also decimated the population at the time, leaving basically no workforce.

01:07:28.000 And then, over a period of two or three or four thousand years, you find that That there's enough of a recovery that these kind of monumental structures can be renewed.

01:07:39.000 But it's clear from this and a lot of other studies, studies in the eastern Mediterranean showing that there are sap repel layers, which is basically material that has been washed in from the continental surface that has not oxidized.

01:07:55.000 It has essentially become rotten and Carried in organic material, carried in off of the continents by this enhanced regime of water flow, actually forcing so much water that there was a fresh water lid on the eastern Mediterranean that caused a cessation in the circulation between the upper waters and the lower waters.

01:08:22.000 Reducing the amount of oxygen brought down to the to the lower waters and so you had these layers of mud that formed on the bottom of the Mediterranean that show this massive influx of fresh water flowing off of out of the Nile and off of the the Egyptian continent at this same time so Clearly the evidence shows that there were major climatic changes that occurred around this time.

01:08:46.000 It is not so speculative to imagine that whoever, whatever, and we don't have to invoke any kind of a super advanced civilization, but whatever cultures were there that were perhaps capable of carving blocks of stone, transporting blocks of stone,

01:09:03.000 as they were at Gobekli Tepe during this time range, That their activity would have been interrupted to the extent that it might have taken millennia to recover, to get the labor force necessary to undertake major monumental programs on the Giza Plateau.

01:09:21.000 So I think that if we assume this gradualistic scenario, yeah, that's a fair question to ask.

01:09:28.000 What happened in that interval?

01:09:29.000 But if there is a major climatic downturn and a major disruption of the settled patterns of whatever culture was already there, then, you know, now we might have an explanation why there would be a gap.

01:09:42.000 Especially if these events caused a bottleneck in the population of the area.

01:09:49.000 Of course this is all speculative, but it is not speculative to say that there is multiple lines of evidence suggesting these major even cataclysmic changes that engulfed that part of the world during that era.

01:10:02.000 So that could provide an explanation of why there is a gap there.

01:10:07.000 Makes a ton of sense.

01:10:09.000 Well, does it because...

01:10:11.000 Does it not?

01:10:12.000 Only if you have to have the Sphinx in conjunction with 12,000 years ago and the lost civilization. 0.80

01:10:18.000 If you just say that rainwater erosion on the Sphinx is not an explanation for the age and that the traditional accepted age is what we think it is, then there's no gap to fill.

01:10:32.000 So really, all we're talking about is we have, again, lots of evidence here, one anomaly here.

01:10:37.000 I really want the anomaly thing to stick, so I've got to explain the gap.

01:10:40.000 The gap is explained by environmental changes.

01:10:43.000 Yeah, but what is the lots of evidence other than a lot of assumptions and a lot of maybes?

01:10:49.000 Actually, can you cite me a single contemporary inscription from the date that the Sphinx is supposed to have been made that refers to the Sphinx?

01:10:57.000 I'm sorry.

01:10:58.000 Can you cite a single contemporary inscription?

01:11:04.000 Contemporary to the date that Egyptologists ascribe to the Sphinx.

01:11:07.000 In other words, to the reign of Khufu.

01:11:08.000 Can you cite me a single inscription that talks about the Sphinx being built?

01:11:12.000 This is not, I don't study this area, I don't know.

01:11:15.000 Okay, well you can't, because there is no such inscription.

01:11:17.000 Okay, well, so?

01:11:18.000 Well, one would have thought there would be.

01:11:20.000 Well, maybe.

01:11:20.000 It's a giant project.

01:11:21.000 It's 270 feet long, it's 70 feet high, it's carved out of solid rock.

01:11:26.000 Nothing.

01:11:26.000 No reference to it at all in the Old Kingdom.

01:11:28.000 You actually have to come down to the New Kingdom to get references to the Sphinx in inscriptions.

01:11:32.000 But you've already said that the pyramids were built at the time we think they were built, not...

01:11:37.000 Thousands of years ago.

01:11:37.000 I would say that a great deal of work was done on the pyramids at the time of 2500 BC. I think the ground plan was laid out earlier.

01:11:43.000 And we have like the step pyramid, which is cruder and not as well designed as the other pyramids.

01:11:48.000 That's a transitional stage at that time.

01:11:50.000 Often argued to be a transitional stage.

01:11:52.000 You've been to the step pyramid, I'm sure.

01:11:54.000 No, no, I'm not.

01:11:55.000 Right.

01:11:55.000 And you've been to Giza, though.

01:11:57.000 No, I've never been to Giza.

01:11:58.000 Oh dear.

01:11:59.000 Well, they do make a very different impact.

01:12:01.000 I mean, I've climbed the Great Pyramid five times.

01:12:03.000 I mean, you're dealing with something orders of magnitude different in terms of what's required.

01:12:08.000 I mean, this thing weighs six million tons.

01:12:11.000 Oh, I understand.

01:12:12.000 It's 281 feet high.

01:12:13.000 It consists of two and a half million individual blocks of stone.

01:12:17.000 It's aligned to true north within three sixtieths of a single degree.

01:12:21.000 I mean, to compare that to Zoser is really not a valid comparison at all.

01:12:26.000 What's more interesting to me is the radical decline that takes place in pyramid building skills in the fifth and sixth dynasty.

01:12:32.000 Go to Unas, go to Pepe, go to Teti at Saqqara.

01:12:35.000 These are shambles.

01:12:36.000 You can hardly even recognize them as a pyramid.

01:12:38.000 What happened to all that knowledge that's invested in the Great Pyramid?

01:12:41.000 Why does Egypt devolve so rapidly?

01:12:45.000 How do we explain this pristine, amazing work that's done on the Great Pyramid unless there's a legacy of knowledge being attached to it?

01:12:51.000 Okay, so every Egyptian archaeologist knows everything you just said, and they don't accept any of your arguments.

01:13:00.000 Why not?

01:13:01.000 That's why I'm needed, because somebody's got to counter this.

01:13:03.000 Is it just that they're closed-minded, and they follow Zahia Vash, and they never think for themselves?

01:13:08.000 You want to see a closed mind?

01:13:10.000 I'll play you a one-and-a-half-minute video of Zahia Vash refusing to debate with me.

01:13:14.000 All of them?

01:13:15.000 Every one of the Egyptologists and archaeologists over the last two centuries and so on?

01:13:19.000 They're all dogmatically closed-minded and they can't see the arguments as clear as you?

01:13:24.000 Or is it they're not convinced by your argument?

01:13:26.000 They're not convinced by my argument.

01:13:28.000 They genuinely and absolutely believe that their argument is right.

01:13:32.000 The notion that I'm proposing is apparently so preposterous to them that it isn't even worthy of consideration, but it is worthy of insults and attacks on me, on my integrity, on my decency as a human being, on my honesty.

01:13:44.000 All of those things get attacked.

01:13:47.000 You know, because mainstream...

01:13:48.000 And that's fine.

01:13:48.000 I'm ready for that.

01:13:49.000 And by the way, I know that archaeologists, academics constantly attack each other all the time.

01:13:54.000 I used to take this stuff personally, but then when I see what they do to each other, the ravaging attack dogs are let loose on any new idea.

01:14:02.000 I sometimes wish scientists would actually look for what's good in a new idea rather than what's bad.

01:14:07.000 But I get why they do look for what's bad.

01:14:10.000 But in other words, some young graduate student working in that area could make a name for himself by overturning...

01:14:15.000 My son was a young graduate student at the University of Cardiff studying Egyptology.

01:14:20.000 He got marked down in his degree because he proposed the possibility that the pyramids and the Sphinx might be or might have older origins.

01:14:27.000 He was impressed by my work.

01:14:28.000 It did him a lot of harm in his degree.

01:14:30.000 And if all this was true, then eventually it would come out.

01:14:35.000 You haven't answered my point.

01:14:36.000 If you go against the mainstream view, your career does not progress as an Egyptologist.

01:14:40.000 I disagree.

01:14:41.000 Give me an example.

01:14:42.000 How is it that we know anything that we know about Egyptology now?

01:14:45.000 Give me an example from Egyptology of somebody who's gone against the mainstream view and been lauded for so doing.

01:14:49.000 Well, look, we don't believe everything about it that we believed two centuries ago at, say, Napoleon's time, right?

01:14:56.000 How did all that knowledge come about?

01:14:57.000 How did all the change in that science develop?

01:14:59.000 Well, it really begins with Champollion and the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone.

01:15:03.000 How was he able to do that against the mainstream?

01:15:05.000 There was no mainstream that he was against.

01:15:08.000 This is my point.

01:15:09.000 The mainstream has taken time to form, and it's very solid now.

01:15:13.000 Egyptologists all sing from the same hymn book.

01:15:14.000 You'll find very little disagreement amongst them on anything.

01:15:17.000 But this is true in every field.

01:15:18.000 But somehow or another, Einstein managed to make an impact because he turned out to be right.

01:15:23.000 Well, I'm no Einstein, and I don't know if I'm right, but I'm going to continue to oppose that mainstream.

01:15:27.000 Somebody has to.

01:15:28.000 I don't know if that's a valid comparison, Einstein and archaeology.

01:15:31.000 Take paleoanthropology.

01:15:33.000 I mean, it's a completely different field now than a century ago.

01:15:36.000 How did that happen if no one ever accepts new ideas?

01:15:39.000 They do.

01:15:40.000 It happens all the time.

01:15:41.000 Well, they're being forced to accept Gobekli Tepe, and that's a new idea. 0.99

01:15:45.000 You know where you were talking about things taking a long time, and what seems like a long time to us is really a blink of the eye in terms of archaeology?

01:15:52.000 We're in the middle of that.

01:15:54.000 We're essentially in the middle of that with things like Gobekli Tepe, with Forbes publishing an article about the Younger Dryas possibly being impacted by comets and that being one of the causes of mass extinction.

01:16:05.000 Right.

01:16:05.000 These are all mainstream ideas now.

01:16:07.000 And when Alvarez proposed the impact hypothesis for the demise of the dinosaurs in 1980, it was ridiculed.

01:16:14.000 And Buddy turned out to be right, and then that became the accepted mainstream.

01:16:17.000 Right.

01:16:17.000 It takes time.

01:16:18.000 And now people are challenging that.

01:16:20.000 Wasn't the key turning point the finding of the crater?

01:16:22.000 That's what made the difference.

01:16:23.000 It's kind of hard to argue with that.

01:16:25.000 So again, where's your crater?

01:16:26.000 Well, this is where perhaps we need to bring in our phone-a-friend, you know, Malcolm LeCompte, one of the Younger Dryas impact scientists.

01:16:34.000 I mean, the point being made is the following.

01:16:37.000 Firstly, that the primary impacts were on ice.

01:16:39.000 There may have been as many as four impacts, that they were on the North American ice cap.

01:16:44.000 Some craters have been suggested, for example, very deep holes in the Great Lakes.

01:16:48.000 Other craters have been and will be looked at by the team in the coming months, whether it includes the Corosol Crater.

01:16:55.000 Crater, the Quebec terrain, and so on and so forth.

01:16:59.000 There are candidates.

01:17:00.000 The crater has not been found yet, but I would be surprised if a crater was easy to find when, you know, the impact is on two-mile-deep ice.

01:17:09.000 And, you know, one of the biggest strewn fields in the world, which is the Australian tektite strewn field, there's no crater associated with that, but everybody accepts the impact proxies.

01:17:18.000 There's enough of them to justify that, and that's what's going on around this impact hypothesis.

01:17:22.000 So on a related question to that is not the lost civilizations and the demise of humans, but the megafauna extinction of North American mammals.

01:17:29.000 So this has been long debated before the impact hypothesis was proposed.

01:17:35.000 And the competing hypotheses were overhunting, humans just hunted them, to the point, not every last one, to the point where the population numbers get too low and these species can't survive.

01:17:45.000 Or climate change, or both.

01:17:47.000 The climate change weakened the populations, then the humans came over and overhunted them.

01:17:52.000 Alright, so, and then the impact hypothesis is proposed.

01:17:56.000 Okay, so this was debated, and it didn't fare that well because there were a lot of mammals and other species that didn't go extinct that you would expect from a massive impact like that, it would have wiped out.

01:18:07.000 Why the selected species, the kinds of species that humans would hunt, are the ones that went extinct, whereas these others didn't?

01:18:14.000 Well, why would humans be hunting the largest species?

01:18:18.000 There's no evidence that humans hunted the predators.

01:18:21.000 There is evidence that they hunted woolly mammoths, but it's very sparse.

01:18:25.000 I mean, you have no more than a dozen sites that show association between human hunting and mammoths.

01:18:33.000 And a lot of those, like the Lubbock Lake site, is now being questioned.

01:18:37.000 What was previously interpreted as being butchering marks on On the mammoth remains there are now being reinterpreted as possibly natural marks on the mammoth bones.

01:18:49.000 But it's a big stretch to go from, okay we've got a dozen sites where we have mammoth remains and along with those mammoth remains we find a few Clovis spear points In two or three cases we actually find, or they have found, spear points embedded within the mammoth,

01:19:06.000 like in the rib cage, but it's a very large stretch to go from there to say that ten or twelve million woolly mammoths, or four species of mammoths on four continents, were wiped out by Paleo-Indian hunters, probably in bands of no more than two or three dozen,

01:19:23.000 Have you ever been to a head-smashed-in buffalo site?

01:19:27.000 Yes, but that's a good example because nowhere did that go anywhere close to exterminating the species of American bison.

01:19:35.000 But each site has its own particular explanation.

01:19:38.000 It could be hunting, it could be a massive flood.

01:19:41.000 Earthquake, whatever.

01:19:42.000 Could be a massive flood, yes, exactly.

01:19:43.000 I think there you and I would be in complete agreement.

01:19:46.000 What does it mean by massive?

01:19:47.000 Global versus, you know, local.

01:19:49.000 So, for example, there's 52 mammalian genera went extinct in South America.

01:19:53.000 Why would they go extinct in South America?

01:19:55.000 About the time that humans were moving down, they're hunting.

01:19:57.000 The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis includes South America.

01:20:00.000 It does.

01:20:01.000 There were impacts there.

01:20:02.000 It does.

01:20:03.000 Again, the dating of the migration of humans into South America is controversial at this point.

01:20:11.000 There is evidence that humans were there long before. 0.98

01:20:13.000 Paul Martin's idea of blitzkrieg requires that the animals be so stupid that they had no adaptive capabilities to the appearance of a new predatory species. 0.96

01:20:25.000 But what is being demonstrated from examining the life ways of The Paleo-Indian peoples is that they had very diversified diets, and they were hunter-gatherers. 0.98

01:20:38.000 Now, why would they be choosing the largest, most dangerous animals to hunt when they had such a proliferation of other smaller animals?

01:20:47.000 We know that they were foraging, we know that they were eating seafood and fishing, because all of this is being found in the camps.

01:20:56.000 And then it certainly doesn't explain the extermination of the cave bears, the short-faced bears, the camelops, the giant beavers, the giant armadillos, the American Pleistocene lion, the ground sloths that were the size of giraffes.

01:21:16.000 Four species of proboscideans, meaning mammoths, extinct on four continents.

01:21:23.000 And to me, like, wait a second.

01:21:25.000 We cannot invoke a modern example to say, well, here is...

01:21:31.000 How about the Maori?

01:21:32.000 Well, that's controversial also.

01:21:35.000 I mean, they drove the mowerbirds extinct in...

01:21:38.000 Past eagle.

01:21:40.000 Well, that's an assumption.

01:21:41.000 If you ask the Maori themselves...

01:21:44.000 There's a big difference between that and people with atlatls killing off all the saber-toothed tigers.

01:21:47.000 But here's another answer to one of your questions.

01:21:49.000 You were saying, like, why would some of the animals be alive?

01:21:51.000 Well, we know that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago didn't kill everything.

01:21:56.000 Right.

01:21:57.000 That is a massive impact, far bigger than anything we're talking about.

01:22:00.000 And many, many animals survived that.

01:22:02.000 So we don't know why things survive and why they don't.

01:22:04.000 It could be proximity to the impact.

01:22:06.000 It could be that their food source wasn't removed.

01:22:09.000 It could be that their predators were wiped out and they managed to survive.

01:22:13.000 I mean, there's a lot of animals that are still alive today in this continent.

01:22:16.000 Like, for instance, a pronghorn antelope.

01:22:19.000 A pronghorn antelope, Dan Flores, who's a wildlife historian, wrote an amazing book.

01:22:25.000 On it, and when he was talking about the American savanna during, you know, like 15,000 plus years ago, there was all sorts of crazy animals millions of years ago that were like cheetahs that were running down animals at extreme speeds, which is the reason why pronghorn antelopes can run so much faster than any of their current predators.

01:22:46.000 Something much faster than them was killing them, and that was wiped out, but they managed to make it.

01:22:51.000 One of the reasons why they probably managed to make it is because their predators were wiped out.

01:22:55.000 It's not an even...

01:22:57.000 Another point, Michael.

01:22:58.000 If it's overkill, it's intriguing that the overkill occurs, you know, precisely in the Younger Dryas window, because I think you'd agree that now the whole story of the peopling of the Americas is pretty much up for grabs.

01:23:11.000 I mean, Clovis first was the dominant model for a very long time, and under that model, we're to envisage these Clovis hunters coming in across the Bering Land Bridge, going down the ice-free corridor, and then in like 800 years, With their sophisticated fluted points, they wipe out all the mammoths in North America.

01:23:28.000 But now we know that humans have been coexisting and butchering mammoths, coexisting with mammoths for thousands of years before that, possibly tens of thousands of years before that.

01:23:37.000 You mean from evidence in Siberia?

01:23:38.000 I don't only mean from evidence in Siberia.

01:23:40.000 I mean, I can cite you from Nature magazine just recently.

01:23:43.000 Huge, huge number.

01:23:44.000 I don't think the Yukon is in Siberia, is it?

01:23:47.000 No.

01:23:47.000 I think the Yukon's in North America.

01:23:49.000 Jacques Sankt Mars, you know, the excavator of the Bluefish Caves in the Yukon.

01:23:55.000 Back in the 1970s was proposing that human beings had been in the Americas at least 24,000 years ago.

01:24:01.000 His reputation was utterly destroyed.

01:24:03.000 His research funding was withdrawn.

01:24:04.000 He was given no access to grants.

01:24:07.000 He wasn't able to do his work.

01:24:08.000 He was heavily penalized and punished by the community.

01:24:11.000 And now just a few weeks ago we have the Smithsonian coming out and saying, sorry, we got it wrong.

01:24:15.000 Jacques Sainte-Mars was right all along. 0.99

01:24:17.000 And Tom Dillehay, you know, with his work in Monteverdi, the shit that he had to take. 0.94

01:24:22.000 I think we're in a very interesting time. 0.97

01:24:25.000 The peopling of the Americas is really a paradigm that has absolutely been overthrown.

01:24:30.000 The notion of Clovis first.

01:24:31.000 Well, you disagree with Smithsonian then, which is fine.

01:24:34.000 I do too.

01:24:35.000 No, the Mesa Verde, again, it's an anomaly.

01:24:38.000 It's an isolated site.

01:24:39.000 Where are all the sites between Clovis and Monteverde?

01:24:43.000 Do you honestly think Clovis was still first?

01:24:46.000 For thousands and thousands of years.

01:24:48.000 Come on, Michael.

01:24:48.000 Do you think Clovis was still first?

01:24:50.000 Where are all the people between Clovis and Monteverde?

01:24:53.000 Not my problem.

01:24:54.000 It is your problem.

01:24:55.000 No, it's not my problem.

01:24:56.000 They're there in Monteverde and they're there in North America.

01:24:58.000 Go figure.

01:24:59.000 What's more likely?

01:25:00.000 Go figure why there's a Denisovan trace in South American Indians and not in North American Indians.

01:25:05.000 It's like the nature paper I brought up earlier.

01:25:07.000 Maybe people cross the ocean.

01:25:08.000 That there were Neanderthals or humans in San Diego 130,000 years ago.

01:25:12.000 But when you look at that...

01:25:14.000 Okay, so they have mammoth bones.

01:25:15.000 It looks like they might have been broken in the length, okay?

01:25:19.000 And the tools, but they're not...

01:25:20.000 Okay, the tools.

01:25:21.000 We're kind of changing subjects here, though.

01:25:22.000 Well, no, no, no.

01:25:23.000 You're trying to quibble the evidence of earlier human presence.

01:25:26.000 That's right.

01:25:26.000 You're trying to quibble it.

01:25:27.000 Well, not quibble.

01:25:28.000 Well, you're quibbling it.

01:25:30.000 You're quibbling it.

01:25:31.000 What are you saying very specifically that's opposing what he just said?

01:25:36.000 The reason archaeologists don't accept earlier than Clovis, say earlier than about 13,000, 14,000 years.

01:25:41.000 They do.

01:25:41.000 It's massively accepted.

01:25:44.000 Say Mesa Verde, for example.

01:25:45.000 Okay, I have to bring up an image at this point.

01:25:47.000 Why don't they accept Mesa Verde?

01:25:48.000 They do accept Mesa Verde.

01:25:50.000 It is accepted now.

01:25:51.000 Michael, are you sure about this?

01:25:52.000 As what, 24,000 years?

01:25:54.000 Fifteen plus.

01:25:55.000 Possibly significantly older.

01:25:59.000 Fifteen is kind of the outside of the window that humans came across the Bering Strait.

01:26:03.000 That's possible.

01:26:04.000 Not 24,000 years.

01:26:05.000 Could you open Clovis first?

01:26:06.000 Not 130,000 years ago.

01:26:08.000 Now, if it turns out that that nature paper is right and that's confirmed, then that does overturn the mainstream theory for sure.

01:26:15.000 But why would you...

01:26:15.000 This is not like your field of study.

01:26:17.000 Why would you argue against the Nature paper?

01:26:19.000 Okay, I'll just give you...

01:26:20.000 Let's quote the Smithsonian.

01:26:22.000 I ask professionals...

01:26:23.000 Smithsonian, slide number five.

01:26:25.000 Today, decades later, the Clovis first model has collapsed.

01:26:30.000 Okay, based on dozens of new studies, we now know that pre-Clovis peoples slaughtered mastodons in Washington State, dined on desert parsley in Oregon, made all-purpose stone tools that were Ice Age version of the X-Acto...

01:26:43.000 Yeah, between 13,000...

01:26:44.000 That's not...

01:26:44.000 No, look at the...

01:26:45.000 All between that, and then 24,000 years down at the bottom, Michael.

01:26:49.000 You know, are you saying the Smithsonian are wrong on this?

01:26:52.000 Michael, you're jumping to conclusions before you even read that.

01:26:55.000 You want to be right.

01:26:56.000 So badly, you didn't read the part, and other animals there...

01:26:59.000 Hold on a second! 0.93

01:27:00.000 Confirming that humans had butchered horses and other animals there 24,000 years ago.

01:27:06.000 It says it right there, and you are arguing against it without even reading it, which means you want to be right.

01:27:11.000 No.

01:27:11.000 No, that's absolutely what's going on.

01:27:13.000 Because I have no dog in this fight.

01:27:15.000 Well, why didn't you read that whole thing before you started pointing at you being correct?

01:27:17.000 You published Skeptic Magazine and you have no dog in the fight?

01:27:20.000 You're asking me, why don't mainstream archaeologists accept dates in the tens of thousands...

01:27:27.000 Okay, call it whatever you want.

01:27:29.000 It goes back 11, 13, 15...

01:27:30.000 But what do you think about what that says?

01:27:32.000 That there's evidence they butchered horses 24,000 years ago?

01:27:35.000 Okay, I would have to check the site on that.

01:27:36.000 I haven't seen this article.

01:27:38.000 Well, now that you have seen it...

01:27:39.000 Not my problem. 0.99

01:27:43.000 You're here opposing this and you're saying there's no evidence you haven't even read the fucking article. 0.98

01:27:47.000 Okay, I'm not opposing anything. 0.93

01:27:49.000 I'm saying this is the reason why scientists accept these dates here because there's lots and lots of evidence for 10,000, 11,000, 12,000.

01:27:58.000 Then you find one person that says 24,000.

01:28:02.000 Another one like two weeks ago.

01:28:04.000 This is not one person.

01:28:05.000 This is very disappointing that you're arguing this without really doing any research about it.

01:28:10.000 The article is titled, What Happens When An Archaeologist Challenges Mainstream Thinking.

01:28:17.000 And that's in the Smithsonian in the month of March.

01:28:22.000 Jack sunk Mars.

01:28:23.000 It was a brutal experience.

01:28:26.000 Something that St. Mars once likened to the Spanish Inquisition.

01:28:29.000 At conferences, audiences paid little heed to his presentation, giving short shrift to the evidence, etc., etc., etc.

01:28:35.000 The result was always the same.

01:28:36.000 When he proposed that Bluefish Caves was 24,000 years old, it was not accepted.

01:28:40.000 What the Smithsonian are saying is now, this is accepted.

01:28:43.000 You need to get up to speed with the data, Michael.

01:28:45.000 Okay, my archaeology friends, like Jared Diamond, who I just checked with on this, who's at UCLA. Well, he certainly has a dog in the fight.

01:28:53.000 Well, he just says, here's the problem.

01:28:56.000 For 50 years, people propose pre-Clovis examples, recites, or evidence.

01:29:01.000 They never hold up.

01:29:03.000 The dating turned out to be incorrect.

01:29:05.000 The carbon-14 was not calibrated right.

01:29:07.000 There was this, there was that.

01:29:09.000 They never hold up.

01:29:10.000 So essentially, you're quoting a friend.

01:29:12.000 Yeah, you're quoting a friend.

01:29:13.000 You're quoting a friend who says the evidence hasn't held up before.

01:29:17.000 Instead of quoting these articles with these scientists who are talking about the data that's showing that human beings butchered horses 24,000 years ago, you're disputing it just because you talked to a friend.

01:29:28.000 I'm saying that that has to be confirmed.

01:29:31.000 But why argue against it?

01:29:33.000 I'm not arguing against it.

01:29:34.000 You certainly were.

01:29:35.000 No, I'm just saying that...

01:29:36.000 Was he?

01:29:37.000 Am I wrong?

01:29:37.000 I feel you were arguing against it and saying that it's not the case and quibbling it.

01:29:41.000 I don't know.

01:29:42.000 If I'm correct, you seem to be a Clovis First advocate.

01:29:45.000 Put your reputation on the line and say you advocate Clovis First.

01:29:49.000 I'm not going to put a label on it.

01:29:50.000 I'm going to say in the latest evidence that overwhelmingly shows humans coming across the Siberian Straits into North America 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,000 years ago.

01:30:00.000 That they definitely did then.

01:30:01.000 They definitely did then.

01:30:02.000 Did they before?

01:30:04.000 What could push it back much earlier would be if they came by boat.

01:30:07.000 So like where I live in Santa Barbara, there are sites on the Channel Islands that go back 11,000, 12,000 years ago.

01:30:14.000 And they came by boat.

01:30:16.000 Now the problem is, well, if they lived on the shores, which is where the good fishing and eating is, Those are underwater.

01:30:22.000 And short of doing good underwater archaeology, which is hard to do and expensive, and most of it's probably gone, we may never know.

01:30:29.000 One of my beefs with archaeology, actually, is that 10 million square miles of the planet that were above water during the Ice Age are underwater now, and marine archaeology is still mainly looking at shipwrecks, you know.

01:30:38.000 Well, okay.

01:30:39.000 They do that because it's where the light is.

01:30:42.000 Well, that leaves a big unanswered question.

01:30:44.000 At any rate, for the record, can I at least say that you completely oppose the Smithsonian's position on this, that there has been no paradigm shift?

01:30:50.000 I will look at this.

01:30:51.000 I haven't seen the Smithsonian thing.

01:30:52.000 All right, I'm not aware of the horse find from 24,000 years ago.

01:30:56.000 I am aware of the 130,000-year date from the Nature paper two weeks ago.

01:30:59.000 I have a slide on that, too.

01:31:01.000 Okay, but show the stone tools.

01:31:04.000 They're nothing like Clovis points.

01:31:06.000 It's just a big, like, hand rock that might have been used.

01:31:09.000 It might have been random.

01:31:11.000 Sorry, a big hand rock is all there is before 13,000 years ago?

01:31:15.000 No, I'm talking about the 130,000-year-old site.

01:31:17.000 Oh, 130,000-year-old site.

01:31:18.000 Oh, you're talking about the San Diego thing.

01:31:20.000 We don't need to talk about that.

01:31:22.000 That raises interesting questions.

01:31:24.000 Was it Neanderthals? 0.51

01:31:25.000 Was it Denisovans?

01:31:27.000 Was it anatomically modern humans?

01:31:29.000 Or is it a misdated site?

01:31:30.000 It raises interesting questions.

01:31:32.000 Or is it a misinterpreted site?

01:31:33.000 Because they aren't stone tools.

01:31:35.000 They're just rocks.

01:31:36.000 I'm not pinning anything to that.

01:31:38.000 I'm saying yes, that report was published in Nature.

01:31:41.000 The question is not necessarily just about the stone tools.

01:31:42.000 It's about how the bones were shattered.

01:31:44.000 And they believe the bones were shattered deliberately.

01:31:46.000 Indicating that someone was trying to get at the marrow.

01:31:48.000 Maybe.

01:31:49.000 Or.

01:31:49.000 Yeah, maybe.

01:31:50.000 Or a tractor rolled over it a couple years ago and it was excavated and broken that way.

01:31:55.000 No, no, no, no, no.

01:31:55.000 No one had excavated.

01:31:57.000 That's just speculation on your part.

01:31:58.000 No, not on my part.

01:31:59.000 This was one of the responses to the paper.

01:32:01.000 Immediately the find has been quibbled by the archaeological mainstream.

01:32:06.000 Of course, it's been published by the archaeological mainstream, too, and the rest of the mainstream is quibbling it.

01:32:09.000 So we'll see how that plays out.

01:32:11.000 But I thought you said that can't happen.

01:32:12.000 We will say what can't happen.

01:32:13.000 That the mainstream won't allow, you know, radical ideas.

01:32:16.000 Nature published it, and the idea is being quibbled.

01:32:19.000 And here the Smithsonian publishes, so apparently it's okay.

01:32:22.000 Nature certainly would not have published it if the evidence were not strong.

01:32:26.000 I accept that.

01:32:27.000 Nature's not in the business of publishing, you know...

01:32:29.000 Fringy stuff.

01:32:30.000 It is a radical proposal, but it's strong enough to justify publication in nature.

01:32:35.000 What's interesting to me is that the immediate reaction of the archaeological community is not to say, well, what could this mean?

01:32:41.000 Let's look into the implications of this.

01:32:42.000 I mean, if there were Neanderthals or Denisovans in North America 130,000 years ago, we have a whole new scenario building here that really should interest everyone.

01:32:51.000 Instead of the first reaction is, Let's destroy this because it's really annoying.

01:32:56.000 Let's get rid of it.

01:32:57.000 Let's prove it's wrong. 1.00

01:32:58.000 Let's suggest that it was a fucking bulldozer or something like that. 0.99

01:33:00.000 Maybe it was. 1.00

01:33:01.000 I don't know.

01:33:02.000 The work hasn't been done yet.

01:33:04.000 But that instant sort of...

01:33:05.000 It's almost like an immune response to an idea that doesn't fit into the prevailing paradigm.

01:33:11.000 But the other work, the work in South America, the Bluefish Caves work, that's really not controversial anymore.

01:33:17.000 That's very widely accepted.

01:33:19.000 Clovis First is a discredited and abandoned position.

01:33:23.000 And I have something else to ask you, actually, concerning genetics and DNA. I'm sure you're well up on that.

01:33:29.000 I mean, can you explain why we have a strong signal of Denisovan DNA in certain groups of South American Indians and in Australian Aborigines and Melanesians?

01:33:40.000 But that Denisovan DNA doesn't crop up in North American Indians.

01:33:43.000 How would we explain that if they all came through the Bering Strait?

01:33:46.000 I have no idea.

01:33:47.000 Well, it could be boats.

01:33:48.000 I mean, this just happens to be something I don't know anything about.

01:33:50.000 Okay.

01:33:51.000 So part of the problem of even doing this is that...

01:33:53.000 It was your idea.

01:33:55.000 Well, here we are talking.

01:33:56.000 This is good.

01:33:57.000 But part of the risk is that you're going to find something I don't happen to know about.

01:34:01.000 And then it's like, you see, I made my point.

01:34:03.000 What point?

01:34:04.000 Okay, so in the history of the peopling of America, that area, there's always somebody that comes in with, it's not Clovis, it's this, it's that, and rarely do they last.

01:34:16.000 Why?

01:34:17.000 The dates were miscalibrated or whatever.

01:34:19.000 It's not just that scientists are closed-minded, although they can be.

01:34:22.000 It's that the convergence of evidence isn't strong enough to overturn the mainstream theory.

01:34:28.000 But it does happen.

01:34:30.000 Maybe there are multiple migrations into North America, and we just don't have all the sites.

01:34:34.000 But when somebody comes up with a site that's tens of thousands of years earlier than all the others that are accepted here, and it's over here, where are all the sites in between?

01:34:44.000 It's like the 5,000-year gap with the Egyptian complex.

01:34:48.000 Where are the sites?

01:34:49.000 If it's true, they didn't fly there.

01:34:51.000 So how'd they get there?

01:34:52.000 And there must be a trail somewhere that we could find, unless they came by boat, and then that evidence is gone.

01:34:58.000 Or unless you're dealing with 24,000 years ago and there's not much evidence to find.

01:35:02.000 Maybe.

01:35:03.000 But if they came by boat, then that clearly implies they had navigational skills, they had the ability to build boats, and find your way across the ocean.

01:35:13.000 You can do the coast.

01:35:17.000 You don't need a big ocean going.

01:35:19.000 No, you don't need an ocean going.

01:35:21.000 I mean, this is one hypothesis that's proposed, is that they came across by boat just following the shore.

01:35:28.000 The same area as the Bering Strait.

01:35:30.000 Yeah, you're just 100 feet offshore, you can go in and...

01:35:33.000 Most likely both, right?

01:35:35.000 And one of the issues, of course, was the short-faced bear was so formidable, according to Dan Flores, that it would have been a huge impediment for people crossing on foot anyway.

01:35:44.000 And the short-faced bear went extinct right around the time we see more evidence of human beings entering in.

01:35:51.000 But why did it go extinct?

01:35:52.000 That's the big question.

01:35:53.000 Well, you have to add that to the list of predators that there would have been no reason for humans to have been hunting.

01:35:58.000 Yeah, well that's an enormous, enormous animal.

01:36:00.000 So there's sort of two factors that go on here.

01:36:02.000 There's positive evidence in favor of a hypothesis, then there's negative evidence against the mainstream hypothesis.

01:36:08.000 And you really need both.

01:36:10.000 So it's not enough to just say, I don't accept the evidence for here.

01:36:15.000 Okay, that's fine.

01:36:15.000 Scientists do that all the time.

01:36:17.000 What evidence?

01:36:18.000 Let's speak in specifics, because you keep doing this.

01:36:20.000 You keep saying, well, they find things, and it turns out, no, that's not true.

01:36:23.000 You're essentially proving your point of being a skeptic without having any real cases.

01:36:28.000 You just keep saying this.

01:36:29.000 All of the cases we're talking about.

01:36:30.000 But no, you can't say all the cases.

01:36:32.000 If you don't want to cite anything specifically, don't keep bringing up things that are refuted because you don't have anything that you're pointing to.

01:36:39.000 So you're just muddying the water.

01:36:40.000 You're essentially pissing in the pool.

01:36:42.000 No, no.

01:36:43.000 The Clovis thing, for example.

01:36:44.000 Gobekli Tepe.

01:36:45.000 The pyramids.

01:36:46.000 All of these...

01:36:47.000 What's been disproved?

01:36:49.000 No, okay, I'm making a slightly different point.

01:36:52.000 That's the problem, is that you're not addressing the actual issues we're talking about.

01:36:56.000 You muddy the water by saying things have been tossed out the window, so we have to be careful here and toss these things out the window as well.

01:37:03.000 Not toss out, just...

01:37:04.000 We contemplate them, published in Nature, for example.

01:37:08.000 So let's watch what happens to the 130,000-year-old hypothesis.

01:37:11.000 If it holds up, and there's other sites that are dated that way, and so on and so forth, that will be truly revolutionary, and scientists would accept it.

01:37:20.000 They were.

01:37:21.000 You see, the problem is that when you have a very strong paradigm like Clovis first, which really dominates American archaeology, prehistoric archaeology for a very long period, it's difficult from a career point of view for archaeologists to come up and propose alternative sites.

01:37:35.000 Those who did, like Tom Dillahay, like Jacques Sankt-Mars, paid a very heavy price for so doing.

01:37:41.000 So the incentive to go looking for older stuff than Clovis Is extremely low in the archaeological community as a result of this ferocious reaction that went on for 30 or 40 or even 50 years.

01:37:54.000 You know, I mean, also consider the Valsichilo excavations in Mexico, where the suggestion of some sort of human presence 230,000 years ago.

01:38:05.000 I mean, that good archaeology, but it was utterly dismissed and the archaeologists involved were ruined for getting involved in that.

01:38:11.000 It's hard to see how that's a profession that encourages people to think out When careers get ruined and research funding gets withdrawn for an idea that doesn't fit the current mainstream hypothesis.

01:38:23.000 We don't like to think that scientists do that.

01:38:25.000 They do that.

01:38:26.000 Are you familiar with Michael Cremo's book, Forbidden Archaeology?

01:38:29.000 I know Michael, yeah.

01:38:30.000 And he makes, in my mind, as compelling a case as you do.

01:38:36.000 For his, humans were here tens of millions of years ago.

01:38:41.000 And, you know, his book is, you know, 900 pages long.

01:38:44.000 Tens of millions?

01:38:45.000 Yeah, tens of millions, okay?

01:38:46.000 And he's a Hindu.

01:38:47.000 So his idea is, you know, this sort of long recycling and...

01:38:51.000 But what evidence is it based on for tens of millions of years?

01:38:54.000 I'm not here to defend Michael Cremo or to have a discussion about Michael Cremo.

01:38:58.000 That's not why I'm sitting at this table.

01:39:00.000 I understand, but my point is that...

01:39:01.000 Michael Cremo is not me.

01:39:03.000 That's right.

01:39:04.000 But there's lots of alternative archaeology.

01:39:07.000 This is where I began.

01:39:08.000 There's lots of alternative archaeology books and theories about this.

01:39:10.000 Right, but what evidence is there that supports that?

01:39:12.000 None.

01:39:13.000 So why are you bringing up that when there's evidence that he's bringing up?

01:39:17.000 Cremo's evidence is similar to his.

01:39:18.000 Why?

01:39:19.000 It's mostly negative evidence that I don't accept the date of this.

01:39:22.000 There is this peculiar sort of footprint-looking thing in the mud.

01:39:26.000 Cremo refers specifically to the knowledge filter.

01:39:28.000 The most useful thing about that book is the publication of reports, archaeological reports, which are no longer available to the public, which do suggest an alternative point of view.

01:39:38.000 I would say it's a very useful book to read.

01:39:39.000 Beyond that, I have nothing to say about it.

01:39:41.000 Right.

01:39:42.000 Yeah, but that's not necessarily true.

01:39:44.000 You're saying his only evidence...

01:39:46.000 He's pointing to some pretty significant evidence.

01:39:49.000 The Sphinx thing is a geologist from Boston University proposed this because of water erosion.

01:39:55.000 Because of water erosion that could have only been done by thousands of years of rainfall, in his opinion, as a...

01:40:01.000 As a qualified geologist.

01:40:03.000 That's not a lack of evidence.

01:40:05.000 I understand, but why do no other geologists or archaeologists accept it?

01:40:10.000 Actually they do, and I've had multiple conversations with Robert where he has cited the fact that he has gotten a considerable body of support from other geologists.

01:40:20.000 Not from Egyptologists, but from geologists who do recognize The effects of severe water erosion on limestone, carbonate rocks, and that's what we have there.

01:40:30.000 We have a severe water erosion that appears and is preserved on the quarry walls around the Sphinx.

01:40:36.000 The Sphinx itself, as Graham said, is difficult to ascertain because of all of the reconstruction that has gone on.

01:40:42.000 But the quarry walls, which would have once had the very distinct stepped profile of a typical quarry, No longer have that.

01:40:52.000 Now they have a textbook profile, parabolic profile, that would be consistent with sheet flooding, which would be both dissolution, because carbonate rocks dissolve in acidic waters, and what's called corrosion,

01:41:08.000 which would be the effects of water loaded with sand sediment, which would make it very rough.

01:41:16.000 So if you've got the sand sediment Flowing over the edge of what would have been a quarry wall, what you're going to end up with is a smoothing off of the rough corners and the final result would be a very rounded profile like you see there.

01:41:31.000 You would also see where the fissures in the rock would be selectively widened and opened by the water penetrating those fissures.

01:41:38.000 I mean it has all the earmarks of a very textbook case of water erosion.

01:41:45.000 Don't you think it's very disingenuous comparing that to someone who thinks that human beings have been here for tens of millions of years with no evidence to support it whatsoever?

01:41:52.000 Well, of course, he doesn't say he has no evidence.

01:41:55.000 He has a 900-page book full of evidence.

01:41:58.000 It's the quality of the evidence.

01:42:00.000 What about the quality of that evidence?

01:42:02.000 Okay.

01:42:03.000 If it was that good, you know, we're not geologists sitting here.

01:42:06.000 If it was that good, why don't geologists look at it and go, he's right?

01:42:09.000 But they do.

01:42:09.000 Well, they do!

01:42:10.000 That's the point.

01:42:10.000 You're not listening.

01:42:11.000 They do?

01:42:11.000 They all do?

01:42:12.000 No, they don't all do.

01:42:13.000 Some geologists who work with Egyptologists say that shock is wrong.

01:42:18.000 Okay, we have a geologist on the line.

01:42:19.000 Why don't we ask him?

01:42:21.000 Mark?

01:42:22.000 Well, we can have one guy's opinion.

01:42:23.000 We could also have other guys' opinions that we can get from our guests.

01:42:25.000 I mean, this matter has been in the public domain since 1992. It hasn't gone away.

01:42:32.000 Schock's argument that we are looking at precipitation-induced weathering on the Sphinx has not been debunked.

01:42:38.000 It has been opposed.

01:42:39.000 It has been disagreed with.

01:42:41.000 But that is different from saying it's debunked, and Schock stays solid and strong.

01:42:45.000 On that issue, he is a credentialed geologist.

01:42:47.000 He is a professor of geology at the University of Boston.

01:42:50.000 He has a right to speak out about this, and he's stated his view.

01:42:54.000 I happen to find his view very interesting, especially since it correlates with what I regard as the interesting astronomy of the site.

01:43:01.000 I think that site has origins that do go back.

01:43:05.000 Into the Younger Dryas.

01:43:06.000 That's my opinion.

01:43:07.000 I've stated it many times, and I've presented the evidence that I think underwrites that opinion.

01:43:13.000 You and your colleagues are absolutely at liberty to disagree, and you do.

01:43:16.000 You don't think it's disingenuous to compare that to someone who says something that defies our current understanding of human beings and the actual evolution of humans?

01:43:25.000 You're talking about someone who's saying that human beings are how many millions of years old?

01:43:29.000 Tens of millions.

01:43:30.000 Tens of millions.

01:43:30.000 Well, we know for a fact, right?

01:43:32.000 If you pay attention to evolution, right?

01:43:35.000 We weren't even humans a million years ago, correct?

01:43:38.000 I mean, there are creationists who think...

01:43:40.000 Okay, but we're not talking about them.

01:43:41.000 We're talking about Graham Hancock.

01:43:43.000 I know.

01:43:43.000 But my point was that, so here you have the mainstream scientists.

01:43:46.000 And so it's like, there's Graham.

01:43:48.000 He seems so reasonable.

01:43:49.000 But there's 50 like him.

01:43:52.000 And each of them thinks that they're right.

01:43:54.000 There's your language.

01:43:55.000 He seems so reasonable.

01:43:57.000 So you're right there accusing me of dissimulation.

01:43:59.000 And you're saying there's 50 like him.

01:44:01.000 The subject is that I'm not, and then there's 50 like me. 0.73

01:44:04.000 More patronizing, arrogant, deeply unpleasant and personal approach.

01:44:08.000 Graham, I'm sorry.

01:44:09.000 I didn't mean it to sound like that.

01:44:11.000 I really don't.

01:44:12.000 Okay, I have a larger point.

01:44:14.000 Apology accepted.

01:44:17.000 When you're faced with a bunch of different alternative theories that are coming in, take physics.

01:44:23.000 I mean, every physicist, like you just had Lawrence Krauss, he gets these letters daily of people saying, I think I figured out why Einstein was wrong.

01:44:31.000 And he can't address them all.

01:44:33.000 And they're smart people, they're thoughtful people, they really believe it.

01:44:36.000 What do you do with that?

01:44:39.000 That's my point.

01:44:39.000 I feel that's not my problem.

01:44:41.000 If there are other alternative theories, that's not my problem either.

01:44:45.000 It's the problem for the mainstream to sort it out and figure which to pay attention to and which not.

01:44:49.000 Well, I'm suspicious of the whole idea of the mainstream, because even looking in the mainstream, you find so many divergent points of view that, you know, I think that's basically a fiction.

01:44:59.000 That there is this mainstream that has arrived at this consensus, and that there are no ulterior motives there, and that there are no dogmas that are being perpetuated there.

01:45:13.000 You know, I mean, I look at a lot of the geological stuff and realize that there are many different points of view.

01:45:20.000 When we talk about these floods at the end of the last ice age, there are many divergent points of view.

01:45:25.000 There is what could be considered the mainstream, yet even that has multiple interpretations.

01:45:33.000 And the same with the comet idea.

01:45:36.000 You know, I mean, I don't know what constitutes the mainstream there, because there have been a group that has opposed it at every turn, but at the same time, the group that accepts the comet hypothesis has continued to grow.

01:45:46.000 In fact, there's even a number of individuals involved that set out specifically to disprove it or discredit it, who are now basically on board.

01:45:55.000 And it has grown from being a small handful of scientists to there are now 63 scientists from 55 Different institutions that are on board with the idea that something remarkable happened at the end of the last Ice Age.

01:46:08.000 It was probably exogenic, meaning something from outside, something from space.

01:46:14.000 There's no consensus as to exactly what that was, which would be normal because these discoveries are in their infancy at this point.

01:46:23.000 But there's been an attempt to discredit the idea, simply because that as the evidence has come in over the last decade, it has evolved, and new mysteries have been opened up as the evidence comes in, and the claim is being made, well, there's no consistent interpretation of this evidence,

01:46:41.000 and therefore We've debunked it.

01:46:43.000 I mean, an example is Pinter's requiem.

01:46:46.000 Pinter and Dalton's requiem for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.

01:46:50.000 I mean, they published a paper in PNAS saying requiem, suggesting that the impact hypothesis is already dead.

01:46:56.000 That was in 2011. Every single one of Pinter's points have been responded to.

01:47:01.000 Those who are critical of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis rarely cite the fact That the so-called refutations have themselves been refuted, that new information is constantly coming in.

01:47:10.000 I see a very one-sided game being played here with a group of academics who are determined to demonstrate that there could have been no possibility of anything like a comet impact 12,800 years ago, and that these 63 or 65 scientists who are proposing that are just completely wrong.

01:47:29.000 And when they refute the refutations, I very rarely see that referred to or commented upon at all.

01:47:35.000 Your colleague DeFant has dismissed the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis without actually going in detail into the debate that's gone on.

01:47:44.000 He has this graph in his paper showing all these different dates for these That's from one of the critical papers.

01:47:52.000 You know, there's another side to this argument.

01:47:54.000 So he needs to be listening to what the other side would say.

01:47:56.000 Well, that's the point where maybe we should have Marc Defant come on and maybe we should have Malcolm Lecomte come on as well, because Malcolm Lecomte is actually one of those 63 Younger Dryas impact scientists.

01:48:07.000 Explain to people that are just listening to this, what is this graph that you're showing?

01:48:11.000 Well, this is the carbon-14 date ranges from samples taken from the Younger Dryas boundary.

01:48:18.000 So this is the boundary here, and the point of this is that there's not a single consistent series of dates that would consistently show, yep, absolutely for sure at every site it comes in right there, is that they bounce around a lot here.

01:48:30.000 Now maybe Mark, this is, you know, his area, he could come on and Skype here.

01:48:35.000 They bounce around, and what's the point of this for the layperson who's listening to this?

01:48:40.000 Well, so if you take the ones that are above the gray line, then those are showing that something like an impact happened much earlier, or much later.

01:48:48.000 And the ones below it are that it's, you know, much earlier.

01:48:51.000 So where's the consistency of a single impact consistent across that I don't think there's any argument that it was a single impact.

01:49:00.000 In fact, there's arguments that there's...

01:49:02.000 No, there's more than one...

01:49:03.000 We're talking about a stretch of thousands of years and multiple impacts.

01:49:07.000 The younger Dryas runs 1,200 years.

01:49:09.000 Randall, please give me your...

01:49:11.000 Because you're the expert at this.

01:49:14.000 Well, these are dates for the Younger Dryas.

01:49:17.000 There's a big spread, obviously, but there's also a lot of possibilities for introducing inaccuracies into the dating.

01:49:25.000 What's called the old wood effect can sometimes make Make it appear to be older than it is by a millennium or two millennium.

01:49:34.000 But what we certainly do see here is a clustering right around 13,000 years ago.

01:49:39.000 That looks pretty evident to me.

01:49:40.000 And everybody knows who does radiocarbon dating that the dating might have Errors and inconsistencies in it.

01:49:48.000 The one article I think that came out last year by James Kennett and 25 others was the Bayesian chronological analysis consistent with synchronous age of 12,835 to 12,735 calibrated years before present for Younger Dryas Boundary on four continents.

01:50:04.000 That's a refutation of precisely what you're publishing there.

01:50:07.000 It is.

01:50:07.000 It's a refutation of this.

01:50:09.000 But Mark Defant does not refer to that refutation.

01:50:11.000 Jamie, could you pull up The Age of Leo?

01:50:16.000 I think I gave that to you.

01:50:18.000 And go to slide number 167. Wow.

01:50:28.000 167. And that refers to the go to slide 167. Jesus, you're not fucking around.

01:50:39.000 167 slides? 0.99

01:50:44.000 There we go.

01:50:47.000 There we go.

01:50:48.000 A cosmic impact event at 12,800 calibrated years before present formed the Younger Dryas boundary layer containing peak abundances in multiple high temperature impact related proxies including spherules, milk glass, and nano diamonds.

01:51:00.000 Bayesian statistical analysis of 354 dates from 23 sedimentary sequences over four continents.

01:51:05.000 Established a model Younger Dryas boundary age of 12,835 calibrated years before present.

01:51:11.000 Supporting a synchronicity of the Younger Dryas boundary layer at high probability, 95%, this range overlaps that of a platinum peak recorded in the Greenland ice sheet and of the onset of the Younger Dryas climate episode in six key records, suggesting a causal connection between the impact event and the Younger Dryas.

01:51:28.000 Due to its rarity and distinctive characteristics, the Younger Dryas boundary layer is proposed as a widespread correlation datum.

01:51:35.000 And Randall, if I can remember what you said correctly, you believe that there was probably more than one significant impact over a period of several thousand years.

01:51:44.000 Let me pop in on that very, very quickly.

01:51:46.000 I don't mean to cut you off, but let's be clear.

01:51:51.000 The suggestion is that 12,800 years ago, Comets break up into multiple parts.

01:51:57.000 I mean, anybody who saw the Shoemaker-Levy 9 NASA films back in 1994 is aware that that comet broke up into more than 20 fragments, all of which hit Jupiter, sometimes creating explosions larger than the Earth itself.

01:52:11.000 So I don't think it's controversial that comets break up into fragments.

01:52:14.000 And this is the suggestion of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, that we're dealing with a giant comet that broke up into multiple fragments that orbits in the torrid meteor stream, and that four of those fragments, that's the suggestion, four largest fragments, fell out of the torrid meteor stream,

01:52:31.000 coming in on a trajectory roughly northwest to southeast, crossing the North American ice cap, and there are up to four impacts on the North American ice cap.

01:52:42.000 Impactors then continue across the Atlantic Ocean.

01:52:44.000 There's a suggestion of impacts in Belgium and indeed as far east as Abu Huraira in Syria.

01:52:51.000 It's a global event.

01:52:52.000 50 million square kilometers of the Earth's surface is within the Younger Dryas boundary field.

01:52:57.000 It's a really huge thing.

01:52:59.000 So the suggestion is that there were multiple impacts at the beginning.

01:53:02.000 Now, the next question is what happened 11,600 years ago when the Younger Dryas ends?

01:53:07.000 And global temperatures shoot up incredibly rapidly, and the science on that is much less advanced than the science on the beginning of the Younger Dryas.

01:53:16.000 Fred Hoyle, back in the 1980s, was puzzled by the sudden temperature increase at the end of the Younger Dryas, and he suggested presciently, I would say, that this may have been caused by a comet impact in an ocean.

01:53:29.000 So maybe other bits of the torrid meteor stream impacted the Earth, other filaments within the stream impacted the Earth 11,600 years ago, or maybe something else caused it.

01:53:38.000 I mean, Robert Schock is in favour of extraordinary solar activity being responsible for that warming.

01:53:44.000 We don't absolutely know, but that's broadly the suggestion.

01:53:48.000 We have the beginning and the end.

01:53:49.000 It certainly impacts at the beginning, possibly impacts other things at the end.

01:53:53.000 Well Klub and Napier and others, Duncan Steele and other astronomers, have speculated that there could be impact eras, epochs, in which there's an enhanced possibility of the Earth being impacted.

01:54:07.000 Particularly if you have a large comet that enters into the solar system, begins to undergo a hierarchy of disintegrations, and basically litters the inner solar system with material.

01:54:17.000 And we do know that the Earth crosses the torrid meteor stream twice each year.

01:54:21.000 Once in late June and once in late October, early November.

01:54:27.000 And we know that the Tunguska event of 1908, which is not speculative, I mean, that happened.

01:54:34.000 It occurred on June 30th, which would have been the peak of the torrid meteor shower.

01:54:38.000 It also came from the direction of the Sun.

01:54:42.000 Its position in space, where it emanated, its radiant point in space from which it emanated at that time was totally consistent with the torrid meteor stream radiant.

01:54:52.000 So it's very possible that the Tunguska event of 1908 was a member of that family of meteorites.

01:55:04.000 Again, there's nothing definitive there, but it would be a prime candidate for investigation.

01:55:10.000 Again, I mentioned earlier, this goes back to the work of Fred Whipple, way back in the 1940s, who began to Researched the tarred meteor stream and came to believe that it was much, much more active in the past than it is now.

01:55:23.000 That it's an old, diffuse meteor stream that at one time, and like Graham said, you know, it has multiple objects still within it.

01:55:32.000 Comet Enki is the best known.

01:55:33.000 That's a fragment of the original giant comet.

01:55:37.000 Of the original giant comet that they estimate might have been based upon the amount of material still remnant in the zodiacal light cloud that perhaps it was somewhere around 60 miles or 100 kilometers in diameter.

01:55:53.000 And another thing that I'm taken to task for is that I report the work of Klub and Napier and their suggestion that the torrid meteor stream is actually fucking dangerous and that we should be paying attention to it, that it has been a hidden hand in human history in the past and that it can cause us trouble in the future.

01:56:11.000 Now this is not gloom and doom.

01:56:13.000 We have the technology to deal with the large objects in the Taurid meteor stream if any filaments are on an orbit that will result in impacts on the Earth.

01:56:22.000 At the very least, it's extremely unwise of us not to pay attention.

01:56:25.000 I'm accused of being sort of a doom-monger and constantly predicting the end of the world and this and that, but actually I'm simply reporting astronomers who are very concerned about the Taurid meteor stream and the possibility that we may face further impacts from it in the future.

01:56:38.000 That's not woo-woo, that is science, you know.

01:56:41.000 Absolutely, and I would agree with that.

01:56:43.000 And that is a form of catastrophism that scientists accept as very real.

01:56:49.000 Some do.

01:56:49.000 Well, lots.

01:56:51.000 What, if anything, do you oppose about what they've just said?

01:56:54.000 Nothing.

01:56:55.000 Nothing?

01:56:55.000 Nothing about the Younger Dryas period?

01:56:57.000 Just a technical question.

01:56:59.000 Your slide was 12,800.

01:57:03.000 Gobekli Tepe, the oldest C14 dates are what? 0.77

01:57:07.000 11,600.

01:57:09.000 That's a 1,200 year gap.

01:57:13.000 That's kind of a slow catastrophe.

01:57:17.000 To be very clear about the Younger Dryas, one of the puzzling things about it is that you have cataclysm at the beginning, and this global temperature slump is surely cataclysmic by any standards, and you have cataclysm at the end.

01:57:34.000 A huge increase in global temperatures.

01:57:36.000 And you have meltwater pulse 1b.

01:57:38.000 You have a lot of water going into the ocean at that time.

01:57:41.000 So both ends of the Younger Dryas are cataclysmic.

01:57:44.000 And it's at the recent end of the Younger Dryas, 11,600 years ago, that we see Gobekli Tepe mysteriously popping up. 0.87

01:57:51.000 And I know that you're...

01:57:52.000 Staunch opponent of Atlantis and that you believe Plato made Atlantis up in order to make a political point, and you may be right, but the date that Plato puts on the submergence of Atlantis is 11,600 years ago, 9,000 years before the time of Solon, which happens to coincide with Meltwater Pulse 1b and the end of the Younger Dryas,

01:58:08.000 which I would have thought would cause you to rethink your position on Plato just a little.

01:58:14.000 Well, it's interesting.

01:58:16.000 I'm open to the idea.

01:58:17.000 I tend to read myths in the same way your guest Jordan Peterson does.

01:58:21.000 It's a story to deliver some sort of moral homily to us.

01:58:25.000 It's a commentary on our own culture, our society.

01:58:28.000 It's a literary way of delivering a message to people.

01:58:32.000 That's how I tend to read.

01:58:33.000 Instead of reading them like, let's see if we can figure out what happened historically.

01:58:37.000 There's hard data in Plato's whatever you think it is.

01:58:41.000 And that hard data is that the submergence of Atlantis happened 9,000 years before the time of Solon.

01:58:47.000 That is a date.

01:58:48.000 That is 9,600 BC. That is 11,600 years ago.

01:58:52.000 This, to me, is a strong reason why we shouldn't just completely dismiss Plato's notion of a lost civilization of the ice age.

01:58:59.000 I'm not against that idea.

01:59:00.000 I mean, the idea that, say, the parting of the Red Sea happened because of some impact.

01:59:03.000 I'm not against that idea.

01:59:04.000 I'm not proposing that.

01:59:05.000 Please don't go there.

01:59:06.000 Waste of time.

01:59:07.000 Okay, but there are people that think that.

01:59:09.000 I don't.

01:59:09.000 Okay.

01:59:10.000 Or that the plagues of the Bible can be explained by natural events.

01:59:12.000 I don't go there.

01:59:13.000 Waste of time.

01:59:14.000 Deal with Plato.

01:59:15.000 All right.

01:59:15.000 But my point is that some of them may have historical origins.

01:59:19.000 Some of them may be completely made up as mythic stories for some other reason.

01:59:23.000 You have to take them one at a time.

01:59:24.000 In my opinion, the Plato one is a commentary on his own culture of Athens and being too bellicose, being too warlike, and that this is not good for where we're going.

01:59:34.000 That's my opinion.

01:59:35.000 And the fact that he picks a date that coincides with a geologically significant date of flooding is not really going to change your opinion?

01:59:44.000 I think, well, I think, again, that's...

01:59:45.000 It's a pretty amazing coincidence.

01:59:47.000 Is it?

01:59:48.000 I mean, we're finding a connection, not Plato.

01:59:51.000 Well, Plato said there was an advanced civilization with advanced agriculture, advanced architecture, advanced navigational abilities, which was submerged by the sea, swept from the face of the earth, so that mankind had to begin again like children,

02:00:07.000 with no memory of what went before.

02:00:09.000 And lo and behold, he puts a geologically significant date on that, a date that we ourselves have only known is significant in the last 20 or 30 years.

02:00:18.000 So, where is this place, this Atlantis?

02:00:21.000 Not my problem.

02:00:23.000 There's a long history of people speculating.

02:00:25.000 If we found a site, that would be a big plus for that position.

02:00:29.000 Go do more marine archaeology.

02:00:31.000 Well, if we take it literally, obviously, then it's...

02:00:34.000 Below the ocean.

02:00:35.000 But, you know, I don't necessarily take Plato's account literally, but I do say, well, it's rather coincidental that his dating falls exactly on meltwater pulse 1b when we know there was a huge influx of water into the ocean.

02:00:47.000 And also, if we look at his geography, it's interesting because he cites, you know, basically a land mass west of the Pillars of Hercules, which is Pillars of Hercules, the Straits of Gibraltar.

02:01:01.000 And he places this essentially in the Mid-Atlantic.

02:01:04.000 I think it was Krantor, one of the commentators on him, that said it was something like three or four days sail west.

02:01:13.000 But if you look there, there is a sunken landmass that sank at the end of the last ice age because of the rapidly rising sea level.

02:01:20.000 And this has been well established by marine geology, looking at evidence that the Azores Plateau underwent an isostatic subsidence, which would have been resulting from The rapidly rising sea level.

02:01:32.000 We know there's no doubt that the North American continent has rebounded isostatically after the removal of this tremendous mass of ice that mantled North America up to anywhere from 1,000 to possibly 1,500 feet.

02:01:47.000 Well, if you do a comparable isostatic adjustment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, you'll find that the Azores Island Complex are much, much larger.

02:01:57.000 And it turns out that that might actually be a nice place to develop at least a maritime culture, something along the lines of the Phoenicians or the Minoans.

02:02:05.000 During the period of the Ice Age, because during the period of the Ice Age, the climate of the world was so much different than now.

02:02:13.000 You know, the Great Basin area was filled with huge lakes, vegetation, forests, savanna, and grasslands.

02:02:21.000 Like Graham said, with the lowered sea level, there were much larger areas of the coastline that were exposed.

02:02:29.000 And that's probably where most of people would have resided during the Ice Age, is near the coastlines, because that would have been the most benevolent place.

02:02:38.000 With the rising of the sea level, all of that's lost.

02:02:40.000 And there's nothing really fringed about saying, well, people might have lived on islands in the Mid-Atlantic, especially when we know that those islands most likely had a benevolent climate during the Ice Age.

02:02:53.000 So I don't go into, you know...

02:02:56.000 Me neither.

02:02:58.000 Me neither.

02:03:16.000 You know, extreme about that idea, in my mind.

02:03:21.000 Even the idea that a more advanced, sophisticated, quasi-technological culture coexisted with hunter-gatherers isn't too strange.

02:03:30.000 I mean, we do so today.

02:03:32.000 We coexist with hunter-gatherers in the Amazon jungle who don't even know we exist. 0.99

02:03:37.000 I mean, so I don't see why a priori that's just an impossible idea to look at.

02:03:42.000 Am I misremembering that in your book you mention Indonesia as a site for Atlantis?

02:03:46.000 I mentioned Gunung Padang not as a site for Atlantis.

02:03:50.000 That's Danny Hilman Natawajaja, who is a geologist.

02:03:53.000 He's Indonesia's leading expert in megathrust earthquakes, as a matter of fact.

02:03:58.000 He has written a book proposing that Indonesia was Atlantis and that Gunung Padang, which he's been involved in investigating, is a site from Atlantean Times.

02:04:08.000 Danny has proposed that.

02:04:10.000 Now, what's interesting about Indonesia...

02:04:15.000 I think we're good to go.

02:04:22.000 I think we're good to go.

02:04:36.000 I think he has a point.

02:04:37.000 I think it's an interesting...

02:04:38.000 It's one of those areas in the world where there was very large-scale flooding.

02:04:42.000 Huge amounts of land were swallowed up.

02:04:44.000 Also, Sahel, the connection of Australia to New Guinea during the Ice Age was also washed away.

02:04:49.000 There's a whole range of issues regarding sea level rise in that very area, which anybody with an interest in these subjects should be paying attention to.

02:04:58.000 Quite possible that, like today, many of the advanced civilizations of today are on the water, whether it's New York or Los Angeles, and that was probably the case back then.

02:05:07.000 And so the idea of Atlantis might not have been about one particular area, but many advanced areas that were wiped out along with their knowledge.

02:05:16.000 This is the thesis of that book I mentioned, Noah's Flood, that the two geologists with the Black Sea theory, that they were, you know, rimmed with small villages and, you know, massive flooding almost instantly wiped out,

02:05:31.000 and then that gets passed down as, you know, the oral tradition is these myths.

02:05:36.000 To me, that seems totally reasonable.

02:05:37.000 Totally reasonable.

02:05:38.000 Why don't we get into more discussion about the actual impact hypothesis and the mega flooding so that we can get our guys on standby, get them involved.

02:05:47.000 What is your geologist, your geologist, since you're by yourself and there's two of them, what is your geologist opposed to what Randall and Graham are proposing?

02:05:57.000 I think it's on the impact hypothesis versus the multiple glacial dams that burst over periods of time, like that slide.

02:06:11.000 Okay, let's call him up and get him on Skype.

02:06:13.000 We've never done this before, so this might suck.

02:06:16.000 Well, hopefully it'll work.

02:06:18.000 See, this slide here, he is showing these are each independent carbon-14 dates of these different instant floods in North America from each individual ice dams.

02:06:31.000 And what separates these dates?

02:06:33.000 They're separated by...

02:06:34.000 Well, it looks like from 20,000 to 12,000, so all before the impact.

02:06:41.000 Well, 12,800, wasn't that one?

02:06:43.000 Mark's on the line.

02:06:46.000 Mark, can you hear us?

02:06:49.000 Yes, I can hear you.

02:06:50.000 Mark DeFent.

02:06:51.000 Mark DeFent, thank you very much for doing this.

02:06:53.000 We really appreciate you coming on here.

02:06:55.000 It's my pleasure.

02:06:57.000 So, you've had a chance to listen to these guys talk.

02:07:01.000 What is your thoughts, just stepping into this cold?

02:07:05.000 Well, first of all, I did not mean to upset Mr. Hancock.

02:07:09.000 He seemed to be quite disturbed, and I want to apologize if I've disturbed him.

02:07:14.000 No, no, you haven't disturbed me, and I'm not upset.

02:07:18.000 It's just simply that you're extremely selective in what you present in your draft, admittedly draft article that you've chosen to put online.

02:07:26.000 You don't represent me accurately.

02:07:29.000 Let me go ahead and answer his question because I know we're getting short on time.

02:07:33.000 No, no, no.

02:07:33.000 We have plenty of time.

02:07:34.000 We have plenty of time.

02:07:36.000 Okay.

02:07:36.000 Well, first of all, would you allow me just to address Gobekli Tepe for a minute?

02:07:43.000 Sure.

02:07:45.000 Would you like to address the article first?

02:07:47.000 I think that probably would be the most fair since we just brought that up.

02:07:50.000 Okay.

02:07:51.000 I'm sorry.

02:07:52.000 What was the question then?

02:07:54.000 Graham?

02:07:54.000 Well, I read out on air various passages in your article where you misrepresent me.

02:08:02.000 No, I didn't.

02:08:03.000 Sorry?

02:08:04.000 No, I didn't misrepresent you.

02:08:06.000 You didn't misrepresent me.

02:08:07.000 Okay.

02:08:08.000 In fact, you said that I said that...

02:08:12.000 That I was actually talking about someone in Indonesia when I said you didn't understand Newton's physics.

02:08:19.000 No, I didn't say you were talking about someone in Indonesia.

02:08:24.000 I said you were talking about Jesus Gamara.

02:08:45.000 Excuse me, you're drowning me out here.

02:08:48.000 I was asked to explain whether or not I thought I was misleading.

02:08:53.000 And I don't think I was misleading.

02:08:55.000 You clearly state in there that maybe gravity was due to the way we've changed orbits around the Sun.

02:09:02.000 Gravity is not due to that.

02:09:03.000 It's due to the mass and the inverse of...

02:09:08.000 What do you mean?

02:09:09.000 I don't state that.

02:09:10.000 Jesus Guamara states that, and I say I disagree with it.

02:09:15.000 Come on.

02:09:16.000 I want to be respectful.

02:09:18.000 I can't really hear you when I'm talking.

02:09:20.000 I apologize.

02:09:22.000 But I feel like you are selectively changing the meaning of what I'm saying.

02:09:29.000 Well, why don't you quote me as these words from my text?

02:09:34.000 When you say that I buy the gravity thing of Jesus Guamara, why don't you quote me when I say...

02:09:38.000 Hold on.

02:09:39.000 This is just the opposite of that.

02:09:41.000 What I go on to say, not quoted in the attack, is the following quote.

02:09:45.000 However, this isn't the part of his theory I'm interested in.

02:10:00.000 I know you're not.

02:10:17.000 No, Mr. Hancock, what I brought up him for was simply to state that you didn't understand And I say it right there, that you don't understand Newton's physics.

02:10:33.000 But I'm not even talking about Newton's...

02:10:35.000 I'm not talking about...

02:10:37.000 If you don't understand Newton's simple physics, the laws of Newton...

02:10:41.000 If I wished to make an argument about gravity, I wouldn't go saying that that isn't the part of Jesus Gamara's theory that I'm interested in.

02:10:51.000 I'm interested in the other aspect of his work, his observations through years of fieldwork...

02:10:56.000 My point wasn't that, Michael.

02:10:56.000 My point was simply to point out that you didn't understand Newton mechanics when I'm talking about this guy.

02:11:01.000 You're a complete wasting time here.

02:11:03.000 Okay, Graham, the way the article is...

02:11:06.000 Michael, hold on a second.

02:11:06.000 Hold on.

02:11:07.000 Let these guys talk it out.

02:11:08.000 We did misrepresent him.

02:11:09.000 We did.

02:11:10.000 The way the sentence is structured, it's clearly out of context.

02:11:14.000 We're going to change that.

02:11:16.000 Yeah, I was taken out of context, and that's what I'm objecting to.

02:11:18.000 Mark, I'm not sure why he included it in the book in the first place, but he's not arguing about gravity at all.

02:11:24.000 So we will fix that.

02:11:25.000 Maybe we can get straight to the flooding thing that Randall was talking about.

02:11:30.000 As long as Graham is fine with that.

02:11:31.000 I mean, Graham, I know there was something else that you objected to.

02:11:33.000 Well, yeah, the other thing that I find to be misrepresenting is the statement, yet Hancock makes the following stunning claim, quote, Our ancestors are being initiated into the secrets of metals and how to make swords and knives.

02:11:47.000 What Mark Defant does not tell his readers is that I make that claim.

02:11:51.000 I don't make that claim.

02:11:52.000 I am actually reporting what is said in the Book of Enoch.

02:11:56.000 That's not me who's saying that.

02:11:58.000 That's the Book of Enoch.

02:11:59.000 Graham, we'll fix that.

02:12:00.000 Okay.

02:12:01.000 Otherwise, let's get back to the main meat of this, for God's sake.

02:12:06.000 Okay.

02:12:07.000 Just give me the list of things and I'll fix them.

02:12:09.000 I will.

02:12:10.000 Because that's not the point of that.

02:12:12.000 Well, Mark, you're obviously very critical of Graham's work, and maybe erroneously so.

02:12:19.000 But let's get to what you think about what you've heard so far.

02:12:25.000 All right, Mr. Rogan.

02:12:27.000 I don't want to come across as a pompous scientist.

02:12:32.000 What I want to do is I want to protect people...

02:12:36.000 From these grandiose assumptions.

02:12:41.000 Graham in his first...

02:12:42.000 Mr. Hancock in his first book...

02:12:44.000 Please call me Graham.

02:12:46.000 Please call me Graham.

02:12:47.000 Okay, Graham in his first book in Fingerprints suggested that there was a continent where this civilization lived and through some machinations this continent went south and ended up destroying that civilization.

02:13:04.000 Well...

02:13:04.000 As a geologist, that's just nonsense.

02:13:08.000 And now he comes back and he wants us to believe that he was all wrong.

02:13:12.000 And then all of a sudden it's okay now to believe in comet strikes, to kill this famous civilization that's supposed to exist.

02:13:19.000 This is duping people.

02:13:21.000 I don't know if he means to do it, but he certainly seems to be duping people.

02:13:24.000 Mark, all my work is in print and online.

02:13:27.000 I mean, I gather that you see your role as a protector for the public.

02:13:31.000 Obviously you feel that the public are not intelligent enough to make discerning decisions of their own in this respect.

02:13:38.000 However, to address...

02:13:39.000 I'm saying that the public doesn't understand the science To the degree that you're misrepresenting.

02:13:45.000 So they need the superior knowledge of Marc Defant in order to understand...

02:13:49.000 No, I think they need the knowledge of science, not the knowledge that I have.

02:13:53.000 Let me come to your point, which is you're saying that I proposed one mechanism for cataclysm in Fingerprints of the Gods, and that I'm proposing another mechanism for cataclysm today.

02:14:02.000 What I proposed in Fingerprints of the Gods was that there had been a gigantic cataclysm In the ballpark of 12,500 years ago, I looked at a number of possibilities of which the most striking to me at the time was Earthcrust displacement.

02:14:17.000 And Earthcrust displacement is reported as the work of Charles Hapgood, not my work, but I do report it in Fingerprints of the Gods as an excellent theory which explains the information.

02:14:28.000 Since I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, I've learnt a lot.

02:14:31.000 I've learnt a lot, and I wouldn't want to defend that theory strongly today.

02:14:35.000 I don't know if you have bought the latest edition of my book, the paperback edition of Magicians of the Gods, but it contains a chapter saying whatever happened to Earthcrust displacement.

02:14:45.000 I address the change of view in this, and I think I have a right to change my view, and I think it's healthy that...

02:14:51.000 I mean, why would I stick...

02:14:53.000 Permanently to a view that I hold in 1995 if new evidence persuades me that it's wrong.

02:14:58.000 I'm sure that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

02:15:00.000 And fundamental proposition is we had a massive global cataclysm in the ballpark of 12,500 years ago.

02:15:07.000 So naturally, it's of great interest to me when a large group of scientists, more than 60 of them, over a period of more than 10 years now, present evidence of a massive comet impact event 12,800 years ago exactly in the window I proposed.

02:15:21.000 Graham, that's how you're slippery.

02:15:21.000 You are applying that there are a lot of people out there that believe in this.

02:15:25.000 There are some people that believe in it, I agree.

02:15:29.000 But for the most part, I think taking an honest view, the comet hypothesis has gotten debunked. 0.77

02:15:34.000 Well, that's complete rubbish, Mark.

02:15:36.000 By the way, I would also point out that in fingerprints, you had people believing that the end of the world was coming in 2012. Now, how am I supposed to take you seriously when you say things like that and then change your mind? 0.94

02:15:47.000 We could all be dead by now if we believed you.

02:15:49.000 I have absolutely changed my mind on the Mayan calendar.

02:15:53.000 I regard the Mayan calendar as an interesting technological artifact with a better estimate of the length of the solar year than the estimate that we have with today.

02:16:03.000 The Mayan calendar is based primarily on the position of the sun amongst the constellations at the winter solstice.

02:16:27.000 Do you know what procession means?

02:16:29.000 Yes, I know exactly what procession means.

02:16:32.000 Okay, well, all of this stuff that you claim is on a procession.

02:16:36.000 A procession is the...

02:16:38.000 Is the Earth spinning like a top?

02:16:41.000 It has nothing to do with running through comet clouds.

02:16:45.000 And yet you're saying that somehow we're on some sort of cycle where the comets are going to come back and strike the Earth right now, sometime during the next 40 years.

02:16:54.000 That's what you said in magicians.

02:16:55.000 No, that's what Victor Klube and Bill Napier and Emilio Spedicato say.

02:17:01.000 I'm a reporter!

02:17:03.000 You're the one that said in your book, you just got all over Mr. Sherman...

02:17:08.000 Michael Schirmer for saying the same things about other people.

02:17:11.000 I want to know what you think.

02:17:13.000 You tell me what you think.

02:17:14.000 I am a reporter.

02:17:16.000 You can't cop out on it.

02:17:20.000 You're talking about science.

02:17:22.000 Mark, we can't talk over each other like this.

02:17:25.000 I am a reporter.

02:17:26.000 And it is my job to report the work of other people, and I report the work of Victor Klub, Bill Napier, and Emilio Spedicato, all of whom draw attention to the torrid meteor stream, and who regard it as the greatest collision hazard facing the Earth at this time,

02:17:41.000 and who specifically indicate that we may run into a filament of the torrid meteor stream in the next 30 years that is going to be very bad for our civilization.

02:17:49.000 And it has nothing to do with precession.

02:18:04.000 No, no, no, no.

02:18:11.000 That 12,000 years ago, this civilization was destroyed and now you're saying, uh-oh, that civilization was so smart that they knew we were going to go through another shower and we're all doomed in the next 40 years.

02:18:24.000 You didn't say doomed in magicians like you did in fingerprints.

02:18:27.000 But we must conclude that that's your opinion, because I don't know anybody else that you've referenced on that issue.

02:18:33.000 The procession has nothing to do with that, and it's not even on that cycle.

02:18:37.000 It has a cycle of about 21,000 years.

02:18:41.000 25,920 years, actually, for a procession.

02:18:50.000 One degree every 72 years, give or take a small margin.

02:18:53.000 That is the precession. 0.99

02:18:54.000 You're really teaching grandma to suck eggs here. 1.00

02:18:58.000 So anyway, I guess this has just been going on all day. 0.98

02:19:03.000 You can't criticize Michael for bringing up other people that are saying strange things and comparing it to you and say, oh no, you can't say that because it's not about me.

02:19:11.000 It's not true.

02:19:12.000 You're...

02:19:12.000 You're doing the same thing.

02:19:14.000 You're reporting about other people and saying nonsense.

02:19:16.000 Yeah, I'm reporting the work of Victor Klu, Bill Napier, and Emilio Spedicato.

02:19:21.000 And I also indicate that I strongly support that work.

02:19:26.000 That's as far as I go.

02:19:27.000 Mark, if I could stop you here.

02:19:28.000 So you think that this comet wiping out all the Ice Age megafauna theory has been debunked?

02:19:35.000 Is that what you're saying?

02:19:36.000 No, sir, I have not saying that.

02:19:38.000 But I think that if you read the literature carefully...

02:19:41.000 The majority of scientists right now, and I know that this is still a go, and you know what I like about the comet people is that they're doing it in the scientifically right way.

02:19:52.000 They're getting people to review the material, they're getting people to go through that gauntlet to where they get criticized, they make sure that they do things right, and they get it out there.

02:20:02.000 Firestone did this in 2007, he was crucified, he's come back, his group has come back with a lot of good stuff.

02:20:09.000 So I want to wait and see this play out.

02:20:11.000 I said that in my paper that we're going to have to wait to get a conclusion here.

02:20:16.000 So I'm not saying that they're wrong, but right now, if I read the literature as a scientist, I have to say that the comet guys are getting hit pretty hard.

02:20:24.000 What do you make of the latest platinum paper in Nature's scientific reports?

02:20:28.000 The platinum anomaly across North America and its coincidence in time with the Greenland ice cores and the platinum anomaly there.

02:20:34.000 What do you say to that?

02:20:35.000 Well, I say that, and maybe we can bring him on, The problem with that is that what does platinum have to do with the comet?

02:20:43.000 You know, platinums are high in asteroids, but they're not high in comets.

02:20:47.000 Comets are icy bodies.

02:20:48.000 I saw the paper.

02:20:49.000 I read it.

02:20:50.000 I think it's interesting, but I can't for the life of me figure out how he's correlating it.

02:20:56.000 He has, in the different areas of the Clovis, he has platinum concentrations that are seemingly not matching up.

02:21:05.000 They're outside the Younger Dryas.

02:21:08.000 They're inside the Younger Dryas.

02:21:10.000 I'd like you to show those if you can, because it's hard to understand what he's trying to say, other than it doesn't refute the common hypothesis.

02:21:18.000 Let's bring Malcolm on, since he's one of the co-authors of the platinum paper.

02:21:23.000 This is going to get super complicated.

02:21:25.000 I can only do one caller at a time.

02:21:27.000 We can only do one caller at a time, apparently.

02:21:29.000 Well, I think Markham should have his voice in.

02:21:32.000 Well, I don't want to criticize him if he can't be here.

02:21:34.000 That's okay.

02:21:35.000 What I'd like to do is go back and talk a little bit, if I may, about Gobekli Tepe, because I've read...

02:21:44.000 I know that Schmidt never, ever found anything to suggest that there were anything in the early part of Gobekli Tepe that were not hunter-gatherers.

02:21:54.000 They all were hunter-gatherers.

02:21:55.000 You know, he found 22,000 stone tools there when he dug that place up.

02:22:03.000 I'm not disputing that.

02:22:04.000 He never found any domesticated animals.

02:22:06.000 He never found any domesticated grain.

02:22:08.000 He found tons of bones of animals.

02:22:11.000 So we know that about 100 to 200 people were probably working on Gobekli Tepe at one time, and they were fed by wild animals and grain.

02:22:20.000 So there's no reason to go out on a limb here and say that some magical civilization came in.

02:22:27.000 And by the way, that's another thing that drives me crazy.

02:22:29.000 You're saying that these guys were magicians.

02:22:31.000 You're saying that they had secret knowledge.

02:22:33.000 What possible secret knowledge did they give to the people at Gobekli Tebi?

02:22:37.000 How can you possibly say things like that?

02:22:39.000 Again, I'm not saying that.

02:22:40.000 The word magicians of the gods comes from the Apkalu in ancient Sumer, and they were considered to have superior powers, and they were considered to be magicians of a sort.

02:22:50.000 Should I not report that, because it's there in the Sumerian text?

02:22:53.000 No, I think you should tell us what Michael's been asking all day, is what were their superpowers.

02:22:57.000 I'm not saying that they had superpowers.

02:22:59.000 It's the Sumerians who said that.

02:23:00.000 I simply report that. 0.99

02:23:01.000 You can regard that as a cop-out if you like, but I am a fucking reporter. 0.98

02:23:04.000 Why did you call your book Magicians of the Gods? 0.98

02:23:06.000 Because that's the direct implication of the Apkalu. 0.98

02:23:09.000 They were the Magicians of the Gods.

02:23:10.000 It sounds like you're saying they had magical powers to me.

02:23:13.000 No, I'm saying that they were the magicians of the gods as they were called in an ancient culture.

02:23:17.000 That's all I'm saying.

02:23:18.000 Okay, well, I just want your audience to know that Schmidt, who worked there for 20 years, that didn't go there for two days and look around, take some notes and leave and write a book on it, he worked there for 20 years.

02:23:29.000 And he found, with dates and everything, he found that there were hunter-gatherers there building those megaliths. 0.95

02:23:36.000 If you went to Easter Island and you found the Moai and you said, oh my gosh, there must have been some secret civilization that made these Moai because stupid hunter-gatherers couldn't possibly make these. 0.98

02:23:50.000 Well, we know. 0.98

02:23:59.000 Are you seriously saying that the inhabitants of Easter Island were hunter-gatherers?

02:24:06.000 Well, absolutely.

02:24:07.000 And if matter of fact, we can see the population of the Pacific Ocean.

02:24:11.000 They had no agriculture?

02:24:13.000 Are you saying that?

02:24:13.000 We know that they didn't get to the Pacific Ocean until about 1,000 years ago.

02:24:16.000 Hold on a second.

02:24:19.000 What do you think they were?

02:24:20.000 They certainly weren't a big civilization.

02:24:23.000 Mark, please let him respond.

02:24:25.000 Go ahead.

02:24:26.000 Well, first of all, did you meet Klaus Schmidt?

02:24:28.000 Do you know him personally?

02:24:29.000 Well, you know he's dead, and you know that I haven't met him.

02:24:32.000 Okay, well, I did meet him.

02:24:33.000 I do know him personally.

02:24:34.000 I did record my interviews with him, with his agreement, and what he states clearly...

02:24:41.000 I don't disagree with you that the people around Gobekli Tepe were hunter-gatherers when Gobekli Tepe was started.

02:24:47.000 What precisely intrigued Klaus Schmidt Was the possibility, his phrase not mine, that Gobekli Tepe was a center of innovation, a place where new ideas were deliberately seeded and spread out in the population.

02:24:59.000 I have Klaus Schmidt on record saying that.

02:25:01.000 I quote him saying that in my book.

02:25:04.000 And that to me is a very interesting proposition because it suggests that we have a site here that is being used to mobilize a population and to transfer to them the knowledge of agriculture, which suddenly appears...

02:25:16.000 Around Gobekli Tepe at the time that Gobekli Tepe is functioning.

02:25:20.000 What do you mean by suddenly?

02:25:22.000 What I mean by suddenly is Klaus Schmidt stated very clearly that these are the people, the very same people who made Gobekli Tepe, in Klaus Schmidt's view, are the people who quote-unquote invented agriculture.

02:25:36.000 If you don't mind me interrupting here for a second, what about Easter Island?

02:25:40.000 Was Easter Island established by hunter-gatherers or not?

02:25:44.000 You were saying not?

02:25:45.000 You say it was established by hunter-gatherers.

02:25:47.000 I say not.

02:25:48.000 I say Easter Island was an agricultural society.

02:25:50.000 What's there to hunt and gather on a tiny island?

02:25:52.000 Have you been to Easter Island?

02:25:53.000 I have.

02:25:53.000 Six times.

02:25:54.000 And you know you can walk across it in three hours.

02:25:57.000 What's there to hunt and gather on that?

02:26:00.000 Oh, no, you're misunderstanding my point.

02:26:02.000 My point is that these are not sophisticated people.

02:26:05.000 I want to go back and agree with you on Gobekli Tepe.

02:26:09.000 I think that you've got Schmidt right.

02:26:11.000 And in fact, it's a UNESCO site.

02:26:13.000 We all recognize how important it is.

02:26:15.000 But what I think Michael and I can understand...

02:26:19.000 It's how this ties into some magnificent civilization.

02:26:23.000 There's nothing there that indicates that they were influenced by some other civilization.

02:26:28.000 They started out as hunter-gatherers, and then they evolved into agricultural society.

02:26:35.000 And that's what makes it a great site.

02:26:37.000 Can I answer you?

02:26:38.000 You're seriously saying that there's nothing there.

02:26:40.000 I mean, the largest megalithic site on Earth, 7,000 years older than Stonehenge is there.

02:26:46.000 There's no background to it.

02:26:47.000 No evidence of practice or training.

02:26:50.000 The megalithic site itself is the problem for me.

02:26:53.000 Okay.

02:26:54.000 Honestly, we've got megaliths in quite a few sites.

02:26:57.000 And by the way, you're right.

02:26:58.000 There's a megalith just down the road from Gobekli Tepe, and there are probably several other.

02:27:03.000 I can see them on maps.

02:27:05.000 Yeah, we need to get to the bottom of this.

02:27:06.000 We've got a wonderful amount of work to do there.

02:27:08.000 You bet.

02:27:08.000 So I think, Graham, we're in good agreement on this.

02:27:11.000 Okay, so you guys are in agreement on that.

02:27:12.000 What I want to point out is that I don't think that there's any need to call upon This great civilization that you say exists.

02:27:20.000 Well, to me, the simplest explanation is a transfer of knowledge, a transfer of technology.

02:27:24.000 I've been writing about the possibility of a lost civilization for more than a quarter of a century.

02:27:29.000 That's what I do.

02:27:30.000 I hope that it's a useful contribution to the debate.

02:27:33.000 I mean, archaeologists can choose not to listen to anything I say, to dismiss me as a complete lunatic, as they often do, to accuse me, as you do, in writing of duping the public, of conning the public, and so on and so forth.

02:27:45.000 I didn't use the word conning.

02:27:46.000 Well, you did use the word conning, actually.

02:27:48.000 It's in the very last paragraph of your article, because I got it right here in front of me.

02:27:52.000 We will fix that.

02:27:54.000 You did use the word conning.

02:27:55.000 Michael, this was the first thing I wrote.

02:27:58.000 I just put it up for my students.

02:27:59.000 Well, it's there.

02:28:00.000 It's there.

02:28:01.000 Hold on a second.

02:28:03.000 Exactly.

02:28:04.000 I am left with...

02:28:06.000 What I am left with is that Hancock...

02:28:09.000 I'm going to put my reading glasses on so I can read this properly.

02:28:12.000 What I am left with, this is quoting you Mark, is that Hancock has a real knack for conning a hellacious number of people into buying his books.

02:28:21.000 I mean that's a direct ad hominem insult.

02:28:23.000 It's online in your article.

02:28:25.000 Do you stand by it or not?

02:28:27.000 Listen, I apologize to you for the use of that language.

02:28:31.000 Is that what you want to hear?

02:28:32.000 Because I do.

02:28:33.000 I'm sorry you used it in the first place.

02:28:35.000 I think you're misleading your students.

02:28:37.000 Why would you say that you're just putting that online for your students as if that's not a big deal?

02:28:42.000 You're putting it on the internet.

02:28:44.000 And to say you're just putting it online for your students and you've been proven incorrect on how many different times in this article now?

02:28:51.000 Well, about seven.

02:28:52.000 Proven incorrect?

02:28:52.000 I haven't been proven incorrect.

02:28:54.000 Well, you have.

02:28:56.000 You misquote me.

02:28:57.000 You don't give the context.

02:28:58.000 And even Michael has said that the skeptic article will not reflect these out-of-context statements that you're making here.

02:29:07.000 Right.

02:29:07.000 So the core is, is the impact hypothesis likely to be true or not?

02:29:11.000 And as an independent phenomenon, is it connected?

02:29:15.000 To Gobekli Tepe and the Younger Dryas. 0.93

02:29:17.000 I mean, that's kind of what we're getting at.

02:29:20.000 Maybe you can explain that graph that shows all the glacial dam bursts and the dating of those as thousands of years before the 12,800-year impact.

02:29:33.000 Can we put the map up first?

02:29:35.000 We need to map up first.

02:29:37.000 You guys can get into what does that mean.

02:29:41.000 Which map is that?

02:29:42.000 Which map?

02:29:43.000 On your own?

02:29:45.000 Which map, Mark?

02:29:47.000 I'm sorry, it's the glacial map.

02:29:50.000 Western Washington, or Washington State, Oregon.

02:29:54.000 Jamie will put it up.

02:29:57.000 And by the way, to protect Michael here, I submitted this.

02:30:03.000 Michael made an immense amount of changes on that paper.

02:30:05.000 I put it up because I wanted my students to see it.

02:30:08.000 I had no idea that people would go online and look at that like you have.

02:30:12.000 And unfortunately, you've sent tens of thousands of people probably to it by letting them know it's on here, and I'm sorry for that.

02:30:18.000 But anyway, let's go to this.

02:30:20.000 But why is it okay to just put that up online for your students?

02:30:23.000 Yeah, I don't get that.

02:30:23.000 How come you don't have any problem with that, but you do have a problem with it as it stands, being released to the general public?

02:30:32.000 Um...

02:30:34.000 I think I stand by everything I said, except for the personal comment at the end.

02:30:41.000 Okay, so let's put up this map.

02:30:46.000 Let's get back to the map.

02:30:48.000 Okay, the brown areas are...

02:30:51.000 Now, I have to emphasize that the Scablands is very famous.

02:30:56.000 People have been working on...

02:30:57.000 Geologists have been working on this for more than 100 years, I bet.

02:31:01.000 And very intricate, detailed mapping.

02:31:04.000 And we now know what areas have been flooded.

02:31:06.000 That's in the brown.

02:31:07.000 The green areas are the old glacial lakes.

02:31:10.000 One of them you can see is the Columbia Lake.

02:31:13.000 And the other one on the far right, over in Montana, that's Lake Missoula.

02:31:19.000 Now, I guess my point here is that you guys want to make the flooding out here to be immense.

02:31:29.000 And I think Brett's original idea was that there was just one flooding.

02:31:36.000 But then Brett came to understand, after looking at the data and all of the geologic work, that it wasn't just one flood, that it's many floods.

02:31:46.000 And that was the point of all of those dates that I show you, that there have been at least 17 specific floods dated.

02:31:53.000 There are probably as many as 40 to 50 floods out there.

02:31:56.000 And they're all probably related to Glacial dams breaking.

02:32:02.000 Now, where in the world would you ever say that this small area relative to an entire continent, why would you say that this is evidence for a comet strike?

02:32:15.000 Not even the comet guys are saying that this flooding out here is related to a comet.

02:32:21.000 Because there are a large number of area, a very small number of actual area that is flooded.

02:32:29.000 If you take a look now at my dates, or not my dates, but the dates, do you have that, Michael?

02:32:36.000 We're going to bring that up, but let's let Randall Carlson address you now, because he's the one that's the expert of this.

02:32:41.000 I mean, he's got a point that if you just look at, if you confine your examination to this area, but the point is, is you've got evidence of mega-flooding all around the ice sheet margin, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

02:32:55.000 You've got the work of...

02:32:58.000 Keyhue and Lord in the Midwestern states.

02:33:01.000 South Dakota, North Dakota, Eastern Montana.

02:33:04.000 You've got massive spillways out there that discharged off the ice sheet.

02:33:09.000 You have Glacial River Warren that was undoubtedly formed by most likely Glacial Lake Agassiz.

02:33:18.000 And you've got the St. Croix River where I took Graham a couple of years ago that had mega floods down it.

02:33:25.000 There were mega floods down the Mississippi River.

02:33:27.000 There was Glacial Lake, Wisconsin that discharged down the Wisconsin River, left the Wisconsin Dells.

02:33:34.000 There are the Finger Lakes in New York that probably were created by massive floods emanating off of that.

02:33:40.000 No, they were scoured.

02:33:41.000 Scoured!

02:33:42.000 Exactly, right.

02:33:43.000 They were scoured, and they were probably scoured by subglacial floods that were coming under high pressure.

02:33:50.000 Because, you know, you have the drumlin fields that are just to the south of them.

02:33:54.000 And you've probably seen the work of John Shaw and Claire Beaney and Bruce Rainey and those out of Canada.

02:34:02.000 Yes, but I think Sean's idea about drumlins is crazy.

02:34:05.000 Well, why would that be?

02:34:08.000 How do you propose the drumlins then were formed?

02:34:12.000 Oh, easily.

02:34:13.000 The glaciers came forward and topped the terminal moraine and spread the moraines out into drumlins.

02:34:24.000 But how?

02:34:25.000 I mean, you've got features that look like they're totally fluvially produced.

02:34:30.000 They look like inverted boatels.

02:34:32.000 You look at the internal stratification.

02:34:34.000 How does glaciers create internal stratification?

02:34:39.000 I've looked at numerous drumlins in Canada, I've looked at drumlins in New York State, I've looked at drumlins in probably a dozen different places, and where you can see exposures, you see stratification.

02:34:54.000 You don't see, if glaciers are grinding over a deformable substrate, how is it that they produce anything other than a chaotic jumble of glacial till?

02:35:06.000 You can actually see layering.

02:35:07.000 I've seen it myself, and we can pull up pictures of it here in a minute, and I'd like for you to explain it to me.

02:35:12.000 Before you do that, because I'm not disagreeing with you.

02:35:14.000 A drumlin, by definition, is made up of till.

02:35:17.000 I think we're getting kind of technical for this audience, but, you know, an esker is something that's stratified, not a drumlin.

02:35:24.000 So you're misidentifying them as drumlins?

02:35:27.000 No, I am not misidentifying drumlins.

02:35:30.000 I know very clearly the difference between an asker and a drumlin. 0.99

02:35:33.000 I've looked at many askers.

02:35:34.000 I've hiked on them.

02:35:36.000 I've flown over them in airplanes.

02:35:38.000 But certainly you must agree that the Finger Lakes are gouged.

02:35:40.000 They are gouged, yes.

02:35:41.000 Are they gouged by glaciers, or are they also gouged by subglacial megafloods?

02:35:47.000 That's the question, and I think that's a fair question to ask.

02:35:50.000 And if we look at some of the studies, we find out that the depositional material in them is massive.

02:35:56.000 It's not stratified, it's massive, as if it was dumped in there over a very short period of time.

02:36:03.000 Let me go back to the bigger picture.

02:36:06.000 But hold on a second, what's your point about that?

02:36:10.000 Sorry Joe, I can't hear you.

02:36:12.000 I'm sorry, respond to that, what he just said.

02:36:15.000 What am I responding to?

02:36:17.000 Look, we're going to have to disagree.

02:36:19.000 I mean, what am I supposed to...

02:36:20.000 I don't want to get in an argument with him here.

02:36:22.000 He thinks that they're done by water.

02:36:24.000 I think that traditionally, the way most geologists see the Finger Lakes is they're gouged out.

02:36:29.000 They're parallel to one another.

02:36:31.000 If he thinks it's water, okay, what can we do?

02:36:34.000 We can disagree, I guess.

02:36:35.000 Let me go back up to the main glacier, the Laurentide Glacier.

02:36:41.000 Wally Broker suggested in the 90s...

02:36:45.000 That water potentially was changed from flowing down the Mississippi Valley into the Atlantic or the Arctic.

02:36:53.000 No one has been able to find any evidence of flooding towards the Atlantic or the Arctic.

02:36:59.000 When you say there are all kinds of evidence of flooding up there, Wally Broker backed off of his theory because we couldn't find any flooding up there.

02:37:08.000 What he backed off of was the idea that the draining of Glacial Lake Agassiz triggered the Younger Dryas.

02:37:14.000 Because the dating of the draining of Glacial Lake Agassiz was post Younger Dryas.

02:37:20.000 And so that's what he backed off of.

02:37:23.000 He didn't necessarily back up.

02:37:24.000 Look, we know that the moraines have been carefully mapped.

02:37:31.000 You can watch the Atlantide Glacier move back moraine after moraine, and there are no holes in that moraine that suggest flooding.

02:37:39.000 There's no change in the lake level of Lake Agassiz.

02:37:43.000 There's no evidence there, Randall, for flooding.

02:37:46.000 You've got it wrong if you look at the careful mapping that the geologists have done.

02:37:51.000 You've just said that there was no change in the level of Lake Agassiz.

02:37:55.000 How is that possible?

02:37:56.000 I mean, as the ice receded, the glacial Lake Agassiz expanded, and at some point it finally breached right there by Big Stone Lake in Minnesota and basically carved out the Minnesota River Valley, which geological studies have confirmed,

02:38:13.000 they call it River Warren and have confirmed that essentially it was carrying its peak discharge was roughly 4,000 times greater than the modern Minnesota River that flows there.

02:38:24.000 And where did that end up?

02:38:25.000 That flowed into the Mississippi.

02:38:27.000 The Mississippi then conveyed that water into the Gulf of Mexico and deposited huge amounts of Delta material that New Orleans is built on now.

02:38:36.000 You know, you're trying to make a flood where a flood isn't.

02:38:39.000 There's a difference between a glacier melting, which causes a lot of water, and a comet striking it, which creates copious amounts of water.

02:38:48.000 I think you guys referred to it the last time as a tsunami.

02:38:50.000 There's no evidence of a tsunami in North America.

02:38:53.000 And by the way, here's another question.

02:38:56.000 Why are you guys talking about North America?

02:39:00.000 When your Atlantis is supposed to be in Egypt, or you guys have run around, you found some evidence of flooding in North America, and somehow this relates to a destruction of Atlantis and some lost civilization.

02:39:15.000 Well, that's not Randall.

02:39:16.000 That's not what I'm talking about right now.

02:39:19.000 I'm not talking about that.

02:39:20.000 We know there was a Phenoscandian ice sheet.

02:39:22.000 We know there was a Cordillera ice sheet.

02:39:24.000 We know there was a Laurentide ice sheet.

02:39:25.000 We know they all melted.

02:39:27.000 We know that there was somewhere around 6 million cubic miles of ice wrapped up in those ice sheets at the late glacial maximum.

02:39:36.000 They're all gone now.

02:39:38.000 They had to melt.

02:39:39.000 That was an enormous amount of water.

02:39:41.000 And I don't know if you have been.

02:39:43.000 Out to the scab lands.

02:39:44.000 I've been going back to the scab lands and the area of Glacial Lake Missoula since 1970. I've been across that thing 60,000 miles.

02:39:52.000 Back and forth I have over 10,000 photographs of the material in the field.

02:39:56.000 And I can tell you those floods were enormous.

02:40:00.000 They were beyond...

02:40:01.000 Yeah, you're cherry picking.

02:40:02.000 Look at the map.

02:40:03.000 You've shown some pictures.

02:40:04.000 You know we can measure those current ripple marks that you've shown.

02:40:08.000 We can measure how much water went over them.

02:40:10.000 All you have to do is measure the current ripples.

02:40:12.000 You can go into Camas Prairie and you've got a current ripple field there that is about seven miles long.

02:40:18.000 I know.

02:40:18.000 I know it very well.

02:40:20.000 Okay.

02:40:20.000 And the high water mark in there is at 4,200 feet above sea level.

02:40:24.000 The floor of Camas Prairie is just 1,400 feet lower than that.

02:40:29.000 So we know that there were 1,400 feet of water that passed through Camas Prairie and down into the Flathead River.

02:40:35.000 No, we don't.

02:40:37.000 Are you disregarding the high water marks?

02:40:41.000 From the bottom of the canyon to the top of the canyon is not what it was when the water first started flowing in that area.

02:40:48.000 You can't take the bottom of the canyon and say, oh, there must have been 4,000 feet of water here.

02:40:53.000 I'm not talking about a canyon.

02:40:54.000 I'm talking about Camas Prairie Basin, which is not a canyon.

02:40:57.000 It's a basin.

02:40:57.000 Well, it had to erode at one time.

02:40:59.000 Well, most of the material in there was washed in.

02:41:02.000 So, I mean, we don't know how much it would have eroded until somebody does some core samples to get down to...

02:41:08.000 Something that can be dated to earlier than the late glacial maximum.

02:41:12.000 But the floor of Camas Prairie is thick layers of very coarse gravel, boulders, and this is what composes the current ripples that you see there.

02:41:24.000 I mean, I don't see how you can look at those current ripples that are sometimes 40 and 50 feet in amplitude with 200 and 300 feet cord lengths and say that that wasn't a catastrophic flow.

02:41:34.000 It was a catastrophic flow, but it wasn't like a tsunami.

02:41:39.000 Well, then how would you characterize it?

02:41:41.000 We can play this game.

02:41:44.000 Are you saying that...

02:41:46.000 Every geologist on the planet...

02:41:49.000 Practically, says that there were about 40 different floods until you came along, and now you're trying to refute this because somebody told you a common story.

02:41:57.000 You're not familiar with the work of Victor Baker or Russell Bunker or a number of others that have challenged the 40 floods hypothesis.

02:42:05.000 And are you going to tell me that those current ripples in Camas Prairie are created, they're the product of 40 separate floods?

02:42:13.000 Oh, absolutely.

02:42:14.000 In fact, when you showed me your pictures, I could see the flow changes in that.

02:42:18.000 Oh, don't give me your incredulous stuff.

02:42:21.000 Even incredulous doesn't mean you're right.

02:42:24.000 You do the incredulous all the time, Mark.

02:42:26.000 Well, that's because you say some pretty incredulous things.

02:42:30.000 40 floods created the Camas Prairie.

02:42:32.000 That's what you're saying.

02:42:33.000 That's the product of 40 separate floods.

02:42:36.000 I don't know how many floods have been in there.

02:42:39.000 I know that they're counting them.

02:42:42.000 And I last read something to the effect of 40, somewhere around there.

02:42:46.000 Yeah, that's based on the work of Richard Waite, goes back to the early 80s, and I think he's got...

02:42:52.000 No, go to his graph.

02:42:55.000 Can we go to his graph?

02:42:57.000 Whose graph?

02:42:58.000 Which graph is this, Mark?

02:42:59.000 It's the one right below the map.

02:43:02.000 Yeah, this one.

02:43:04.000 It's the dating of the floods.

02:43:06.000 Here we go.

02:43:07.000 We're at that right now.

02:43:08.000 Look, Randall, hopefully we're disagreeing as comrades here rather than just fighting each other.

02:43:18.000 I'm just trying to give you some data here.

02:43:20.000 Look at those.

02:43:22.000 Those are Missoula floods, Lake Missoula.

02:43:26.000 He's got them Right.

02:43:44.000 And you can see that these are documented very, very well.

02:43:49.000 So I don't understand why you're so opposed to multiple floods.

02:43:55.000 In fact, I heard in the last time you guys were on this show, I heard you say that you thought there were multiple floods.

02:44:01.000 Now you're trying to argue against that idea.

02:44:03.000 No, I am not.

02:44:04.000 I still think there were multiple floods.

02:44:07.000 I think we have to look at two distinct regimes of floods, though.

02:44:10.000 And as far as the radiocarbon dating, the thing we have to be really careful of is that Floods will entrain older sediment.

02:44:19.000 And in that older sediment, there could be radiocarbon dated material that doesn't really date the time of the flood, but was excavated by the flood, entrained into flood waters, and then redeposited.

02:44:32.000 You know, that's a major problem with radiocarbon dating any time you look at flood sediments.

02:44:37.000 And I do believe there were multiple floods.

02:44:39.000 That's, you know, I think it's a misinterpretation to think that I only think that there was one flood.

02:44:44.000 But there, you know, the problem is here, and I do, I think, we're colleagues, and my approach to this is just like, you know, in the MMA, when two guys get out there and try to beat the crap out of each other, and then at the end of it, they give each other a hug.

02:44:56.000 That's kind of where I'm coming from.

02:44:58.000 So, you know, there's nothing personal here.

02:45:00.000 I'm sorry we couldn't give each other a hug, but I feel the same way.

02:45:02.000 And by the way, you guys are very bright.

02:45:05.000 And very knowledgeable.

02:45:08.000 Well, you know, I really value this, because I'm looking for holes in this idea, very much so.

02:45:16.000 And I have done some serious thinking about this over many years, and I have interviewed most of the geologists that have worked on it.

02:45:25.000 I've been in half a dozen field trips, guided by the main geologists that have worked on this, and had a chance to dialogue with them.

02:45:33.000 And, you know, I'm convinced that, you know, there's still some...

02:45:37.000 There's a lot to be learned about this.

02:45:39.000 And I think we need to be looking at, like you said, the big picture.

02:45:43.000 And, you know, we could get back to a discussion of the Finger Lakes and how they formed.

02:45:47.000 I think that's important.

02:45:48.000 I think we could get back to a discussion about drumlins and how they formed.

02:45:52.000 You know, there is studies on the Valley Heads mooring that are at the south end of the Finger Lakes that have...

02:45:58.000 I can't think of who did it right now, I could pull it up, but basically said it's water deposited.

02:46:05.000 But there's a lot of unresolved issues about what happened during this transition, planetary transition, out of the last ice age, and I think it's important that we have these discussions, that we have these dialogues, and that we try to get to the bottom of what actually happened, without imposing too many preconceptions upon our models,

02:46:23.000 because I think we're looking at something very unprecedented here.

02:46:27.000 Randall, I couldn't have said that better.

02:46:29.000 It was very well articulated.

02:46:31.000 Let me go back to the big picture, if I could, just for a minute, because I want to address something that Graham said earlier, and that is that Graham seems to have this idea that comets break up all the time, but people that understand,

02:46:48.000 I think, comets and meteorites understand that the The comet Schumer Levy or whatever it was that broke up.

02:46:58.000 Schumer Levy 9. It broke up because of the gravitation of Jupiter.

02:47:03.000 We would not expect these comets to break up entering into the atmosphere.

02:47:08.000 It's one of the problems that the comet people have had.

02:47:12.000 Firestone once suggested a four kilometer wide comet striking them and now they've broken it up into multiple comets.

02:47:21.000 The problem is you can't get it separated.

02:47:24.000 If a comet breaks up, it's very hard to separate it so that it hits in multiple places.

02:47:30.000 And so this is a big picture kind of problem that the comet people are having with the scientists.

02:47:38.000 So you may be able to get it to hit the North American ice sheet, but I'm telling you that the studies are showing that You're not going to be able to do this without leaving some marks.

02:47:52.000 And so far, nobody's been able to find a crater.

02:47:54.000 Do you know that they're suggesting that a four-kilometer comet, if it could break up, it would generate one million crater Meteor, craters.

02:48:06.000 You know how big that was?

02:48:07.000 That was 49,000 years ago.

02:48:09.000 We don't see that in the climate record.

02:48:12.000 49,000 years ago, we should see it.

02:48:14.000 We don't see it.

02:48:15.000 It's barely a little thing.

02:48:18.000 We're going to have a huge comet strike.

02:48:21.000 Malcolm Lecomte has been standing by for the best part of three hours.

02:48:24.000 Since he's a member of the Comet Research Group, wouldn't it be a good time to bring him on?

02:48:27.000 Yeah, we can bring him on as long as Mark is satisfied that he said his piece.

02:48:32.000 But unfortunately, Mark, we can't have two people on the phone at the same time.

02:48:36.000 Okay.

02:48:37.000 I really appreciate you having me on, Joe.

02:48:39.000 I appreciate you coming on, too, and I'm glad you guys, especially you and Randall, seem to have ironed out a lot of your ideas.

02:48:47.000 Randall's a great guy.

02:48:48.000 There's a lot to be learned here, obviously, and there's a lot that already has been learned, and this is an It's an unbelievably fascinating subject.

02:48:55.000 And I think oftentimes when these debates get heated, a lot gets lost in who's wrong or who's right.

02:49:01.000 But I think what we can all agree on is that what we're dealing with is an unbelievable point in history, in the history of this planet.

02:49:08.000 And trying to figure out what caused it and why is some really fascinating stuff.

02:49:13.000 So Mark, I really appreciate your time and really appreciate you imparting your knowledge on us.

02:49:19.000 Mark, if at all possible, I would love to kind of keep some of this dialogue going, because I really would value your input.

02:49:26.000 I tried to write you, Randall, and I couldn't get through.

02:49:29.000 I'm not sure why.

02:49:30.000 I'm not either, because if I would have seen that, I definitely would have responded.

02:49:34.000 Well, I have a website.

02:49:35.000 Please send me.

02:49:36.000 I'd love to keep up with you.

02:49:37.000 I will.

02:49:37.000 We'll definitely connect you guys after this is over.

02:49:40.000 And thank you once again, Mark.

02:49:41.000 Really, really appreciate you calling in.

02:49:42.000 If I can just say, I do hope you'll revisit your article and just have a look at the context in which you present me there.

02:49:48.000 Absolutely.

02:49:48.000 Never meant to insult you.

02:49:50.000 Thank you, Mark.

02:49:51.000 Okay.

02:49:52.000 Now, we are going to call caller number two.

02:49:59.000 This is a fascinating podcast, though.

02:50:02.000 And your friend who's waiting is?

02:50:04.000 Markham LeCompte.

02:50:05.000 Markham LeCompte.

02:50:05.000 And he's one of the Comet Research Group scientists.

02:50:09.000 This is a large and diverse body of scientists who come at the material with different expertise and different It happens that Malcolm is a co-author of the recent I Regarded Highly Significant paper, Finding a Platinum Anomaly Across North America.

02:50:27.000 And I would hope he might begin with addressing why that might indicate a comet impact.

02:50:34.000 Right.

02:50:35.000 Is Malcolm on?

02:50:36.000 It should be.

02:50:37.000 Malcolm, can you hear us?

02:50:38.000 I can hear.

02:50:39.000 Can you hear me?

02:50:40.000 Excellent.

02:50:40.000 How are you, Malcolm?

02:50:41.000 Thank you very much for joining us.

02:50:44.000 I'm happy to be here.

02:50:46.000 So, give us your thoughts on what Graham just said, if you would, as to why it makes sense that it was a comet that hit and why there would be these large deposits of these, what was it exactly?

02:51:02.000 Platinum in the recent paper, but Malcolm is also an expert in magnetic microspherules and I think he can address that issue as well.

02:51:09.000 The whole range of proxies, of impact proxies.

02:51:12.000 Now, Malcolm, please just give us your thoughts on this entire phenomenon, if you will.

02:51:17.000 I will.

02:51:22.000 Happy to be here.

02:51:23.000 Happy to have you.

02:51:28.000 Is he breaking up?

02:51:29.000 No, go ahead.

02:51:30.000 Go ahead, Malcolm.

02:51:32.000 I think there's an issue.

02:51:34.000 Seems to be the...

02:51:35.000 Oh, I know what's going on.

02:51:37.000 I've got a feedback.

02:51:38.000 I've got to turn off this.

02:51:39.000 Oh, yeah, you've got to mute that other video.

02:51:42.000 Oh, okay.

02:51:44.000 You're listening to us at the same time as talking to us.

02:51:47.000 You're getting us on like a 40-second delay or something.

02:51:51.000 Exactly, yeah.

02:51:52.000 Okay, we cool now?

02:51:54.000 Actually, I was very interested to hear Mark's...

02:51:57.000 His initial statement kind of put me off, but his subsequent statements I thought were pretty accurate.

02:52:04.000 And there are many problems with the...

02:52:13.000 Thank you very much.

02:52:26.000 So, I can't sign up to say that I'm defending the comet impact hypothesis because I don't frankly know what it was.

02:52:35.000 We have a lot of evidence that appears to be extraterrestrial in nature.

02:52:39.000 We have magnetic microspherals.

02:52:41.000 I can give you a...

02:52:45.000 The different criticism we get is that the evidence has not been replicated.

02:52:49.000 And that's where I thought Mark was going when his initial statement was that the comet impact hypothesis has been debunked.

02:52:56.000 And I think what he meant was, if I can speak for him, was that the fact that it was a comet has been debunked.

02:53:04.000 I don't think that's necessarily true yet.

02:53:05.000 It just doesn't indicate it.

02:53:07.000 That it was a comet.

02:53:09.000 We have indications that it was more of an asteroid than anything else.

02:53:13.000 And I can conceive of a rubble pile that somehow became disassociated, although there'd have to be a mechanism or a model for that, and I don't think we have a model for that.

02:53:25.000 Asteroids come in many flavors, and rubble piles are certainly one.

02:53:30.000 Loose aggregates of material that could become separated, possibly.

02:53:34.000 But I just don't know at this stage.

02:53:41.000 I guess the biggest criticism that we faced in terms of the impact hypothesis is that the evidence has not been replicable.

02:53:52.000 And we now have I guess three or four evidence lines that have been replicated by numerous independent groups.

02:54:04.000 If you look at the nanodiamonds, which may be the most controversial of the bunch of the evidence lines, that's been replicated by four different groups independent.

02:54:15.000 Five different studies.

02:54:17.000 The magnetic microspherals, which were initially treated very hostily because they didn't understand what we were talking about, and some of that was a self-inflicted wound on the part of the initial study, which didn't show what we really were finding.

02:54:33.000 And that's been corrected, and yet the same objection or criticism is being made.

02:54:40.000 Magnetic microspherals are typically very...

02:54:45.000 Well, they're melted and then they're quenched.

02:54:48.000 They're subjected to high temperatures and then those temperatures are rapidly reduced, which is sort of accepted to be characteristics of an impact.

02:54:56.000 So we've got that evidence of an impact, and that's been replicated by 10 different independent groups, including many of the same sites that were originally disputed.

02:55:10.000 So, the disputation has been largely based upon the failure to do the most basic part of the protocol, which is to do the scanning electron microscopic analysis of the spherules.

02:55:25.000 Okay, that is the microspherals and the nanodiamonds.

02:55:31.000 The other is the discovery of platinum, iridium, or osmium, which are the platinum group elements which are characteristic of an asteroid impact.

02:55:40.000 And we found some evidence of iridium.

02:55:44.000 Not a lot, but there have been certain sites that are rich in iridium.

02:55:48.000 And once again, this is at the Younger Dryas boundary.

02:55:51.000 Not above, not below.

02:55:52.000 It's there.

02:55:54.000 At that boundary.

02:55:55.000 So that date seems to be pretty solid.

02:55:57.000 And iridium is indicative of an impact of extraterrestrial origin, correct?

02:56:02.000 That's correct.

02:56:03.000 The platinum is simply just another more plentiful platinum group element.

02:56:09.000 Obviously that's why they're called the platinum groups.

02:56:11.000 Osmium is one that is usually associated with iridium.

02:56:15.000 There are now 11 studies by independent groups that have confirmed the occurrence of platinum, osmium, or iridium.

02:56:25.000 So it looks to me like the evidence is piling up.

02:56:28.000 The most recent one, of course, is the platinum study by Moore that just came out a few months ago.

02:56:34.000 Now Randall Carlson just, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but Randall Carlson just had us pull up some images that we're looking at.

02:56:40.000 Randall, please explain what this is.

02:56:42.000 Well this is from Malcolm's 2012 independent evaluation of conflicting microspheral results from different investigations.

02:56:51.000 This is his supplementary information figure 4. So it's just so that the people watching this can actually see what you're talking about when you're Discussing the rapid quenching effect on the surface of the microspherals.

02:57:06.000 So we've got up on the screen here, Supplementary Information Figure 4, where you've got the microspherals from Topper, Blackwater Draw, and Paw Paw Cove.

02:57:17.000 So just so people can see what that surface texture looks like.

02:57:22.000 Yeah, you see these, they look like leaf-like structures across.

02:57:27.000 Some of them are harder to see, but they're there.

02:57:29.000 If you see the original image, it's large enough and clear enough to actually see these, what we call dendritic structures or almost like a carpet weave.

02:57:40.000 Those are essentially truncated crystallization.

02:57:43.000 It's a crystallization process that's quenched.

02:57:47.000 I'm not a geologist.

02:57:48.000 I've had geologists try to explain it to me.

02:57:50.000 And that's what I'm trying to do here.

02:57:53.000 But the fact that these are enhanced, these things are quite enhanced at the Ember Dryas and really depleted above and below.

02:58:03.000 Now there are spherules throughout the column.

02:58:06.000 Any column of soil, when you go down vertically deeper, you find spherules.

02:58:13.000 But those spherules are typically what we call orthogenic, which means that they're created by terrestrial processes.

02:58:18.000 You need to do a scanning electron microscope and X-ray dispersive spectroscopy to differentiate those from the terrestrial processes that are producing these things.

02:58:37.000 Yeah, your figure five has a framboidal spheryl, which is probably what you're talking about.

02:58:42.000 If you could go to slide 113, Jamie, and you'll be able to see.

02:58:47.000 Yeah, there it is.

02:58:47.000 You can see very distinct difference.

02:58:49.000 So we've got your figure five up in the screen now, Malcolm.

02:58:53.000 Yeah, that's a typical framboid.

02:58:55.000 And when you look at an optical microscope, they look just like the, or very much like the, what we call impact spherules or magnetic microspherules.

02:59:06.000 And they occur much more frequently.

02:59:08.000 I mean, I've got sites that have tens of thousands of these things in every couple of centimeters of sediment.

02:59:14.000 So you've got to separate the impact spherules or the magnetic microspherules from these things.

02:59:23.000 But what you appear to be saying, Markham, is that there is an abundance of impact proxy evidence, which, in your opinion, adds up to a cosmic impact of some sort, not necessarily a comet, you're suggesting an asteroid.

02:59:35.000 It's a mysterious event in that sense, but what it adds up to is an impact, in your view.

02:59:39.000 Is that a fair summary?

02:59:41.000 All these, what we call proxies, the impact spherules, the platinum group elements, the The melt glass, which I haven't discussed yet, and the nanodiamonds are enhanced, and the enhancement has been replicated on numerous occasions for each of these proxies.

02:59:58.000 So anyone who says that the work of you and your team has been completely debunked is clearly not completely familiar with the literature then?

03:00:06.000 That would seem to be the case.

03:00:08.000 We're disingenuous in that regard.

03:00:11.000 So I would say that, because typically what we see is that the opposition literature does not cite the studies that have come out.

03:00:22.000 We try and cite both the critical studies and ours and give reasons why our studies supplant theirs.

03:00:32.000 But I wish they would share, but that hasn't been the case.

03:00:38.000 It would be nice if we could have had you on with Mark so you guys could exchange information, but unfortunately our capability is that we can only take one phone call at a time.

03:00:47.000 We will definitely try to update that for the new studio, although we never anticipated this was going to happen in the first place.

03:00:54.000 It's been awesome.

03:00:55.000 Oh, there we go.

03:00:56.000 Up on the screen, Malcolm, we've got from Ted Bunch et al.

03:01:01.000 2012, very high temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic air bursts and impacts 12,900 years ago.

03:01:08.000 So we have figure from supplementary information 6. The light photo micrographs of magnetic and glassy spherules from Melrose, Pennsylvania and it shows the the wide variety of shapes which includes spherules, ovals, teardrops,

03:01:24.000 and dumbbells and I think so you can see pretty distinctly what you're talking about here with it with the glassy spherules and then like particularly I'm not sure if you were co-author of this paper or not.

03:01:40.000 I was not.

03:01:41.000 You were not, okay.

03:01:42.000 Are you familiar with that paper?

03:01:43.000 Yes, I am.

03:01:44.000 Good, okay.

03:01:45.000 Yeah, it shows some very interesting teardrop shapes, dumbbell shapes, and where you can actually see that, like, dumbbell H up there consists of two dissimilar Accretionary spherules, one clear silicon-rich and the other opaque iron-rich that have been fused together.

03:02:01.000 And that's pretty convincing evidence of the energy that's involved in these phenomena, that you actually have these fused spherules like this.

03:02:09.000 And then, Jamie, if you go down to the next image, which is a scanning electron microscope images comparing younger drive boundary spherules on the top row with known impact spherules on the bottom row, this is a very interesting comparison because, and you've probably seen this one,

03:02:26.000 Malcolm, A, there's three across the top, three across the bottom, and A is actually a From Knudsen's or Knudsen's farm in Canada, it's a Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary spheryl.

03:02:40.000 And just below it is a Younger Dryas spheryl from Lake Utsio in Mexico.

03:02:45.000 And one can see the morphological similarity of the two quite clearly.

03:02:49.000 Then C and D compares.

03:02:51.000 C is a spheryl from the Tunguska airburst.

03:02:55.000 And then D is Younger Dryas Boundary from Lyngen, Germany, which dates to 12,800 years before present.

03:03:03.000 And there you can see very clearly the rapid quench melt texture on the surface between the two, comparing Tunguska Airburst with A Younger Dryas Boundary object.

03:03:16.000 And then finally E and F we have an Iron Calcium Silica Spheryl from Meteor Crater compared with an Iron Calcium Silica Younger Dryas Boundary Spheryl from Abu Haria Syria.

03:03:30.000 And again in each of these cases you can see the similarities between the different types of objects.

03:03:35.000 So you have these three objects which are Come from that Younger Dryas boundary layer, all which have morphological similarity to known impact proxies.

03:03:45.000 And this is very difficult to dismiss this as being mere coincidence.

03:03:51.000 Yeah, I would agree.

03:03:52.000 And those are very, especially the A, C, B, and D pictures are very similar to the material that I'm taking out of the Younger Dryas boundary at the sites that I've been looking at.

03:04:04.000 Malcolm, what evidence, if any, are you aware of about what is that nuclear glass material called trinitite?

03:04:14.000 From what I understand, there's quite a bit of that that also appears in the same time period in the core samples?

03:04:23.000 There are some instances of it, but I wouldn't say quite a bit.

03:04:27.000 Some of these, I mean, they're very site-specific.

03:04:29.000 And one of the things I've been trying to do is work my way closer and closer to Canada and see if there's any truth to this whole idea that the primary impact site was Canada.

03:04:41.000 So I've been trying to look at sites closer and closer.

03:04:45.000 I've seen sites in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania that produce what appears to be some form of trinitite or milk glass, or what Ted Bunch would call scoria-like objects.

03:05:02.000 And it seems to bear out that, at least that far, we're getting richer material out of the sediment, out of the under dryness boundary sediment.

03:05:12.000 And is this trinitite, this material, only produced in this manner?

03:05:16.000 It's also produced through nuclear explosion tests, right?

03:05:19.000 But other than that, is this the only way that it's produced on Earth?

03:05:24.000 Well, an impact would do it, or a fulgurite could do it.

03:05:27.000 A fulgurite is what's produced by a lightning strike.

03:05:32.000 It could produce spherules.

03:05:37.000 It could produce all the high-temperature products that you see in an impact.

03:05:42.000 But in a very limited way.

03:05:43.000 You wouldn't expect to see it in a layer unless there was some sort of global lightning storm.

03:05:48.000 Yeah.

03:05:49.000 What I was going to say about the melt glass is that in the material we're looking at, you see evidence of melted zircons, melted chromite, all of which are very high temperature features,

03:06:05.000 indicating a very high temperature that was experienced by that particular object.

03:06:10.000 Are you seeing the image we have up here?

03:06:13.000 Yes, I am.

03:06:14.000 Okay, good.

03:06:17.000 Yeah, A is from Meteor Crater, and B is from the Trinity nuclear test, and then with the 22 kiloton yield, and then C is from one of the Soviet-era nuclear tests, and D is, again, a scoria-like object from Abu Huria.

03:06:34.000 And then if we go to, let's see...

03:06:38.000 You've got to love that it says Stalinite.

03:06:43.000 The scoria-like objects, the melt glass for scoria-like objects has only been found in about half a dozen sites to this point.

03:06:50.000 So we're still, you know, and I think it's a matter of how close you are to an impact point.

03:06:54.000 And if they're very far apart, that would lend credence, I think, to this idea of multiple impacts.

03:07:00.000 If they seem to get more plentiful as you get further and further north, then maybe there's more legitimacy to a primary impact site.

03:07:09.000 Right now, we just don't know.

03:07:13.000 We're still working that out.

03:07:16.000 Alright, we got another nice slide from the Bunch article here.

03:07:20.000 A beautiful slide, yeah.

03:07:21.000 Calcium oxide, rich scoria-like object created by the melting of carbonate and silica-rich precursor rocks.

03:07:28.000 The yellow area is the calcium oxide, the white area is lechatelurite, and dark areas are iron oxide.

03:07:36.000 So that's a really nice...

03:07:37.000 The electrotelurite.

03:07:38.000 Yeah, I've been struggling with getting that pronunciation down.

03:07:44.000 And then, Jamie, if you go to the next one, we will see there's a scoria-like object from Meteor Crater, Arizona.

03:07:52.000 And you could toggle back and forth between the two so the people can kind of see the similarity between them.

03:07:58.000 And I see a lot.

03:07:59.000 In the sites that produce milk glass, that's what I'm seeing.

03:08:02.000 Yeah.

03:08:03.000 Those two types of particulates.

03:08:06.000 And how much of this material are you finding in these sites?

03:08:10.000 Well, you don't find, I have to say, you don't find a lot of this material.

03:08:14.000 It's a struggle to get it.

03:08:15.000 But what you don't find is anything above or below it, that particular layer.

03:08:21.000 Unless you know that it's been a very dynamic environment, in which case it can be spread out in the soil column.

03:08:27.000 And what's the implication of nothing above it and below it?

03:08:30.000 Well, that you've got a specific date for it.

03:08:35.000 And the layer that we typically try and just limit our investigation to layers that have been dated to the hemorrhagrius boundary or contain the hemorrhagrius boundary layer.

03:08:44.000 Right.

03:08:45.000 Well, like I say, if you have a very dynamic environment, it can really screw things up.

03:08:50.000 It can be very difficult to interpret.

03:08:53.000 So this is difficult.

03:08:54.000 If you've got a lot of flooding, repetitive flooding.

03:08:55.000 Difficult science to do.

03:08:58.000 Say again?

03:08:59.000 This is difficult science to do.

03:09:01.000 Yeah, and I should add there that proving an impact is not easy.

03:09:06.000 It takes a while, and just as proving an impact crater is not easy, as I'm sure Mark would agree, that you find a crater, there's no guarantee that it's either an impact event or a volcanic event until you do the research.

03:09:20.000 And spend the time to investigate it.

03:09:22.000 But if you could summarize for us, what's your opinion now on the balance of the evidence?

03:09:27.000 Always bearing in mind that you may change that opinion as more evidence comes in.

03:09:31.000 Yeah, I would say we're facing an unprecedented type of event here that appears to have been something approaching global.

03:09:39.000 I mean, we've got evidence now in South America, we've got evidence, and a lot of this stuff is unpublished.

03:09:45.000 I mean, there's a lot of things that I could bring up that aren't published, so it's kind of useless to refer to them, because there's no way of checking what I'm saying.

03:09:53.000 But we're seeing stuff that goes very far into South America.

03:10:00.000 And we're seeing things in Syria.

03:10:02.000 We haven't looked elsewhere.

03:10:03.000 We've seen it out in the Pacific Ocean.

03:10:04.000 We've seen it in Europe.

03:10:07.000 So, I mean, where does it end?

03:10:09.000 Right now, we haven't found an end to it yet.

03:10:10.000 And it's all at the Younger Dryas boundary.

03:10:13.000 That's correct.

03:10:13.000 Yeah.

03:10:14.000 What have you found in the Pacific Ocean?

03:10:17.000 Well, Sharma has found...

03:10:19.000 There's a paper I can cite from his...

03:10:22.000 It may even be just a presentation.

03:10:26.000 I can quote it.

03:10:27.000 He says, we infer that the central Pacific was a site of deposition of osmium resulting from dust cloud following a meteorite impact at 12,000 kiloanadams plus or minus 4,000.

03:10:41.000 So right in that ballpark, Sharma says that he found osmium, and I believe he's come up with microspherals from that same core.

03:10:52.000 So the Central Pacific gives you an idea of how extensive this thing was.

03:10:57.000 Now, Malcolm, this is obviously some controversial material.

03:11:00.000 It's fairly new in terms of the public consciousness.

03:11:05.000 Have you had anybody debate you on this, or have you had anybody oppose you?

03:11:10.000 Yeah, it goes with the territory.

03:11:15.000 I wish the opposition, in some respects, in some cases, I wish the opposition was of a bit higher caliber than what I've seen.

03:11:24.000 I think it's been a sad state that the most virulent opposition has not, I haven't regarded it as particularly high quality.

03:11:33.000 Malcolm, Michael Shermer here.

03:11:36.000 Do you have an opinion on the association of the impact with the megafauna extinction and also then Graham's hypothesis about the extinction of this lost civilization?

03:11:50.000 I won't even comment on the lost civilization aspects of this.

03:11:55.000 I have a hard enough time dealing with the meteorite impact.

03:11:58.000 As far as the megafauna goes, I think that I guess I would say all of the above.

03:12:04.000 I think that all these factors came into play.

03:12:06.000 You've got humans who are, for that period, technologically advanced with the Clovis point and the atlatl and the spear, the replaceable spear tip.

03:12:23.000 That must have been devastating to the fauna.

03:12:25.000 But the idea of attacking a proboscinian to me is almost unthinkable.

03:12:31.000 Today, if you don't have a high-powered rifle, I just don't see how you realistically go up against a bull elephant.

03:12:41.000 I mean, it just strikes me as far too dangerous to take on.

03:12:45.000 But there are aspects of that question that I think are going to be very interestingly debated in the next...

03:12:52.000 The next couple of years or so, we have a book coming out that addresses that directly at one of the sites I've been researching, that the whole extinction of the megafauna may have been as much related to religion as something else.

03:13:04.000 There may have been a religion built around the extinction of the megafauna.

03:13:09.000 How so?

03:13:11.000 Well, you'd want the evidence for that, and that evidence will be coming out in a book that's going to be published in about a month or two.

03:13:19.000 I could speak to the whole idea of hunting bull elephants, though, unfortunately.

03:13:23.000 People have been hunting them with bows and arrows forever.

03:13:26.000 It's not an atlatl.

03:13:27.000 Atlatl is less effective.

03:13:29.000 You get less range, but people hunt...

03:13:32.000 With not just modern compound bows, which are very powerful, which would allow you to shoot from 100 yards away, but with long bows.

03:13:40.000 They've been hunting elephants with bows and arrows for a long time.

03:13:44.000 You know, especially the thing with woolly mammoths was that they would go after the females, apparently, according to Dan Flores, who wrote American Serengeti, and that the females would keep the young in their body.

03:13:56.000 Their gestation period was very long.

03:13:58.000 I believe you said it was two years.

03:14:00.000 Is that correct?

03:14:01.000 I think he said it was two years.

03:14:02.000 And so it made them extremely vulnerable when they were pregnant.

03:14:05.000 Obviously, if you kill off the females that are pregnant, you're killing off a substantial part of the breeding population, and the population suffers tremendously.

03:14:13.000 So that was one.

03:14:14.000 But it also could have been that end.

03:14:18.000 You know, I mean, humans, I'm sure, had an impact on virtually anything that we could eat when we were starving.

03:14:25.000 But whether or not we wipe them out, the blitzkrieg hypothesis, there's a lot of holes in that theory, according to a lot of people that have studied it.

03:14:33.000 Well, I think if you have an environmental impact or a degradation of the environment that might follow a significant impact, you know, extraterrestrial impact, so you're reducing the population or stressing the population of megafauna that way,

03:14:49.000 and then you've got a population of hunters in addition to that, especially if they're, for some reason or other, focused on hunting proboscenians, and when the number gets limited, they don't care whether it's a female or a male.

03:15:06.000 Yeah, I think that's very reasonable.

03:15:12.000 Malcolm, is there anything else you would like to add before we let you go?

03:15:17.000 No, I guess one thing is I found it interesting in the discussion of the scab lands and that was really, it was looking at the scab lands from flying over them when I was a young naval officer that got me interested in science and why I pursued science.

03:15:37.000 It was looking at the catastrophes that were etched in the landscape there, the catastrophic floods that really caused me to pursue a A career in science.

03:15:48.000 It's really a remarkable landscape.

03:15:50.000 It's just a personal observation.

03:15:52.000 Well, Mark, we're very, very thankful for your time, and we really, really appreciate your input here, and it means a lot.

03:15:59.000 And thank you for everything you've done.

03:16:01.000 Thank you for everything that you continue to do to highlight this.

03:16:05.000 It is such a fascinating subject, and it's so amazing, and it's just, without someone like you presenting hard data in science, it would definitely be lost.

03:16:13.000 So thank you, thank you so much.

03:16:15.000 Thank you.

03:16:16.000 Thank you, Malcolm.

03:16:17.000 Yeah, thank you, Malcolm.

03:16:19.000 Alright, Malcolm, we're gonna let you go.

03:16:22.000 Okay.

03:16:23.000 Take it easy, buddy.

03:16:24.000 Sound down.

03:16:26.000 Time for your nap, Malcolm.

03:16:28.000 It's a lot of energy.

03:16:30.000 These podcasts are long.

03:16:31.000 I mean, four hours.

03:16:32.000 The guy was sitting there on standby, probably, you know, chomping at the bit.

03:16:36.000 Jamie, before we go, I want to see some pictures of the scab lands, because that is pretty amazing stuff.

03:16:40.000 And Randall, one more thing before we go.

03:16:43.000 One thing that you pointed out to me during one of the episodes that was so stunning was these woolly mammoths that had been literally knocked over by an impact with broken legs and that died on the spot.

03:16:56.000 Do you have those images?

03:16:58.000 I do.

03:16:58.000 That was actually a Mastodon.

03:16:59.000 Mastodon, I'm sorry.

03:17:01.000 Yeah.

03:17:02.000 I want to see those.

03:17:03.000 So let's go to the Scablands first so we can show the audience on YouTube, which is, by the way, only about 10% of the people that watch this.

03:17:12.000 So if you're listening to this, go check out the Scablands on Google, and you can see this.

03:17:21.000 Describe it to us, Randall.

03:17:22.000 Well, this is textbook scab land right here.

03:17:27.000 Let's see, this is probably Rock Lake or Sprague Lake in the Cheney-Palouse scab lands.

03:17:34.000 Yeah, you see the potholes there, that's a sign of turbulence, extreme turbulence within the water.

03:17:42.000 Colking is what the process is called, where it's so turbulent that it actually produces vortexes, high intensity vortex motion in the water.

03:17:51.000 It'll pick up sediment and then it can drill its way right into the bedrock. 0.85

03:17:57.000 Going down there, that's Palouse Falls, which Wow.

03:18:02.000 That's an underfit waterfall because what you have to realize is that at the peak of the flooding this entire scene was submerged below water and the cataract here is an extinct feature and the flow over here was thousands of times greater than the present Palouse River that you see right there.

03:18:23.000 We've got a lot of great pictures up on the Geocosmic Rex website and some awesome video clips.

03:18:32.000 Geocosmic Rex, R-E-X. Rex, okay.

03:18:36.000 I thought you were saying wreck, like a car wreck.

03:18:38.000 Well, it's a play on words.

03:18:40.000 Oh, okay.

03:18:42.000 So, yeah, we are talking about that.

03:18:44.000 Okay.

03:18:45.000 Yeah, and we've got some great drone footage on there.

03:18:48.000 Did we show that last time I was here?

03:18:50.000 I don't believe we did.

03:18:51.000 We might have, did we?

03:18:52.000 I think you showed a bit of the Camas Prairie ripples.

03:18:55.000 Did we show potholes, cataract?

03:18:59.000 Yeah, this whole Scabland thing has literally fascinated me since 1970. And like Malcolm, I think that summer of 1970, traveling out in some of these landscapes was...

03:19:14.000 Here we go.

03:19:15.000 Yeah, here we go.

03:19:16.000 This is the drone footage.

03:19:19.000 Wow.

03:19:21.000 That's incredible.

03:19:22.000 Yeah, and let's see.

03:19:24.000 Be ready to pause if we need to here.

03:19:28.000 Is this the beginning?

03:19:29.000 Because at the beginning we have a Google Earth image so you can get a sense of what we're looking at here.

03:19:34.000 Go back to the beginning.

03:19:35.000 Right at the very beginning.

03:19:37.000 Let's see if...

03:19:38.000 It starts off with the drone.

03:19:39.000 Oh, it starts off with the drone.

03:19:40.000 Okay.

03:19:41.000 There should be...

03:19:43.000 Another one that actually...

03:19:45.000 That's okay.

03:19:46.000 This is pretty cool.

03:19:47.000 Yeah.

03:19:48.000 These are 400-foot cliffs.

03:19:50.000 This was a recessional cataract, very similar to Dry Falls.

03:19:54.000 The water was pouring, coming from behind our view here.

03:19:59.000 Where is this specifically, if anybody wanted to go watch this or look at this area?

03:20:03.000 Oh, the actual area?

03:20:04.000 Yeah.

03:20:04.000 This is in eastern Washington.

03:20:06.000 Where specifically?

03:20:07.000 This is on the eastern rim of Quincy Basin, it's called.

03:20:10.000 It's right along, just if you can see up there where those cliffs are in the middle distance, right below there is the Columbia River.

03:20:18.000 And this is just north of Wenatchee, Wisconsin, Washington.

03:20:24.000 So basically what we had here was plucking, quarrying as the water poured over this ridge.

03:20:30.000 This is the Babcock Ridge and behind us is the Quincy Basin which served as a temporary holding pond.

03:20:37.000 And let's see, as the drone comes around, I'm looking for the team.

03:20:47.000 Oh, keep going.

03:20:49.000 Zoom in a little bit more there, Jamie.

03:20:51.000 Yeah, I think we did show this.

03:20:52.000 You can see you guys down there on the ground, right?

03:20:54.000 Yeah, we're in there somewhere lost in the vastness of the...

03:20:59.000 Yeah, now I remember we did show this.

03:21:01.000 Yeah.

03:21:01.000 What about those images of the Mastodons?

03:21:04.000 Let's look at those and then let's get out of here.

03:21:06.000 Okay.

03:21:06.000 For that, you have to go to the world of the Pleistocene.

03:21:12.000 Which I just should have given you.

03:21:14.000 That sounds like an amusement park.

03:21:16.000 Yeah.

03:21:17.000 The world of the Pleistocene.

03:21:18.000 Could be a winner.

03:21:19.000 Some dudes with animal skins on them.

03:21:21.000 Well, maybe if they succeed in cloning some of those flash-frozen animals up there.

03:21:27.000 They're really talking about doing that, right?

03:21:29.000 Yeah, I don't know how plausible it is, but...

03:21:32.000 That seems like a terrible idea.

03:21:34.000 What could go wrong?

03:21:36.000 Nothing.

03:21:37.000 It's not like there's any diseases.

03:21:38.000 Well, that's one of the big concerns about climate change, right?

03:21:40.000 That we're going to release some diseases that we don't have an immune system for?

03:21:44.000 Yep.

03:21:45.000 Go to slide 78. This is a good example of...

03:21:51.000 By the way, who is more thoroughly documented than Randall Carlson?

03:21:55.000 Jesus Christ, man.

03:21:57.000 Go to slide 6,222.

03:22:00.000 50 plus years of walking the walk in the Channel Scablands.

03:22:04.000 Yeah, this is a bone deposit.

03:22:07.000 And what happens is that in the particularly warm years, when the permafrost around the rivers collapses, it exposes these huge deposits of bones, which have been buried in the permafrost.

03:22:20.000 This is, you know, when I look at stuff like this, this is why I say there had to be another mechanisms of extinction besides human hunting.

03:22:28.000 Because this pile...

03:22:30.000 Yeah, because...

03:22:31.000 Is it possible that this...

03:22:32.000 I mean, it's not necessarily at the bottom of a cliff, right?

03:22:34.000 Because you know that they pushed a lot of them off cliffs.

03:22:37.000 Yeah, no, no.

03:22:38.000 This is stuff that when the river floods, it erodes the banks.

03:22:42.000 And then this stuff falls out of the riverbanks.

03:22:44.000 Right.

03:22:45.000 So it's been locked into the permafrost for however many thousands of years.

03:22:49.000 And it seems like there's, interestingly, two peaks of dates that one...

03:22:55.000 Right around 13,000, and the other one around 36,000, that the fossilized remains are dating to.

03:23:03.000 Which could point to, potentially, that there was some sort of an impact back then as well, or something else, some sort of an event.

03:23:09.000 Who knows?

03:23:09.000 I don't know.

03:23:10.000 I don't have an opinion on that.

03:23:11.000 But by having all these together, I mean, has it been theorized that perhaps there's not a cliff near this, right?

03:23:18.000 Yeah, just off to the right.

03:23:20.000 There is a cliff?

03:23:21.000 There is a cliff.

03:23:22.000 We're at the bottom of a cliff right here.

03:23:24.000 Actually, it's a riverbank.

03:23:27.000 You know that that was a hunting method.

03:23:29.000 They used to storm them off the side of cliffs, and they literally couldn't even eat all of them.

03:23:34.000 Like buffalo head smashed in.

03:23:36.000 They would run so many of them off cliffs.

03:23:38.000 Yeah, but here's the thing.

03:23:40.000 When you look at...

03:23:42.000 These mortality events of modern animals, even like looking at elephants that perished during some of the severe droughts in the 80s in Africa.

03:23:50.000 Taphanomic studies show that it doesn't take three, four, five years before the remains have completely disappeared.

03:24:00.000 In order to preserve a fossil, it has to be rapidly removed from any kind of forces, oxidation, or scavengers, or anything that would consume it, see?

03:24:09.000 This stuff has been, again, it's been frozen in the permafrost for however many years, 10 or 12 or 15,000 years.

03:24:16.000 So it was likely covered in an event?

03:24:19.000 Covered in an event, yes.

03:24:21.000 Now, there was one that I really wanted you to get to that was a mastodon that had been literally knocked over and had broken legs.

03:24:28.000 Yeah, we could look very quickly at slide 92. This is one of the more interesting anomalous events.

03:24:40.000 This was the flash-frozen woolly mammoth.

03:24:46.000 Go to slide 93. It's a much clearer...

03:24:49.000 Yeah, this was a mammoth, a six-ton mammoth that was, again, one of these river collapses.

03:24:55.000 The banks collapsed during a warm spring and exposed this remains of a woolly mammoth with soft tissue preserved, contents of the food in its stomach undigested, actually a mouthful of food.

03:25:10.000 The hips of the mammoth were both broken, as if he was thrown back on his haunches very violently.

03:25:16.000 He had an erect penis, which suggests that he was suffocated. 0.98

03:25:22.000 Or he was a freak? 1.00

03:25:23.000 Or he was a freak, yeah.

03:25:26.000 Michael laughs at that.

03:25:29.000 The wolves ate the flesh off the skull.

03:25:32.000 That's why it's buried like that.

03:25:34.000 You'll see the front-left forelimb there.

03:25:36.000 You'll see the bottom there, left, right at the center of the screen.

03:25:39.000 That's his back leg that you see right there.

03:25:44.000 The interesting thing about this is, you know, the...

03:25:48.000 Rapidity of climate change that's implied by being able to freeze a six-ton mammoth because the contents of his stomach, according to the studies, had not really even putrefied yet, which implies that the entire carcass had been frozen through and through probably in less than 10 hours.

03:26:04.000 Well, like Utsi, the Iceman, that's what happened to him.

03:26:08.000 That's exactly what happened to him, yes.

03:26:10.000 Interesting point, and that would be a subject that we...

03:26:13.000 And he fell in between a crevice and a glacier, correct?

03:26:16.000 Yeah, and probably got rapidly buried under the snow and the ice, and that's how he ended up being preserved overnight.

03:26:24.000 The next slide actually shows a reconstruction in a museum in Russia, showing the circumstances under which he was found.

03:26:37.000 If you go to, let's see.

03:26:40.000 By the way, as a sidebar on Utsi, to show you how science changes rather slowly sometimes, it was a decade before they found out he was murdered, because they found arrow point in his scapula here that cut his bone, and he had defensive wounds on his hands and arms,

03:26:56.000 so he'd gotten in a fight, and he had other people's blood on his hands, so he gave as good as he got and lost a fight, so he was murdered.

03:27:03.000 Wow.

03:27:04.000 And that took, with all that careful observation and laboratories, 10 years before that came out.

03:27:12.000 Fascinating stuff.

03:27:13.000 So sometimes this stuff has to just take a while.

03:27:14.000 So if I can try to find some common ground before we sign off with Graham.

03:27:19.000 You know, your book, you have this really great sentence that I quote.

03:27:25.000 It would mean at least that some yet unknown and unidentified people somewhere in the world had already mastered all the arts and attributes of a high civilization more than 12,000 years ago.

03:27:34.000 And sent out emissaries around the world.

03:27:36.000 Okay.

03:27:36.000 I think this is entirely possible cognitively, for sure.

03:27:41.000 And, you know, what would do it for me would, you know, the boats that they sent the emissaries out on, the wood, carbon-14 dated, and some specific examples of high arts and attributes of high civilization.

03:27:54.000 So if it's not metal and riding...

03:27:57.000 Then whatever it is, I would change my mind.

03:28:00.000 Absolutely.

03:28:00.000 That's good to hear, Michael.

03:28:02.000 And I think as the research continues in this area, for the last few years, having been very much an outsider, I have felt that the evidence is moving in a direction that is helpful to the argument that I make.

03:28:18.000 I hope it'll continue to be that way.

03:28:19.000 I hope the evidence that you're looking for will come out.

03:28:22.000 But I'm trying to, like I say, my role as a reporter, and I'm trying to be a reporter for the alternative sides of things, but to do so in an effective and hopefully thoroughly referenced way.

03:28:35.000 There's a good argument in the history of science to be made for the role of outsiders, I mean complete outsiders, to come in and shake things up.

03:28:41.000 I mean Freeman Dyson is an example.

03:28:44.000 Totally self-taught.

03:28:45.000 Autodidact.

03:28:46.000 I call you an autodidact.

03:28:47.000 Absolutely.

03:28:48.000 And if nothing else, they push people to really figure out what it is they believe and why, because otherwise no one's going to challenge them.

03:28:57.000 Harlan Bratz is a good example of that.

03:28:59.000 You know, a high school teacher.

03:29:01.000 Right.

03:29:01.000 How about Randall Carlson?

03:29:03.000 He's a good example of that, too.

03:29:04.000 Absolutely.

03:29:05.000 We'll see.

03:29:06.000 Do you still want to look at this real quick?

03:29:08.000 Sure.

03:29:09.000 I got it right here.

03:29:10.000 Let's do it.

03:29:11.000 He could go for days.

03:29:12.000 That's what I love about Randall.

03:29:13.000 He never gets tired of this stuff.

03:29:15.000 If you could bottle your enthusiasm, it would be an awesome pill.

03:29:19.000 Well, maybe we can talk about that.

03:29:22.000 Put it in the memory focus there.

03:29:25.000 Alright, we're going to look at this mastodon here.

03:29:29.000 Is it 125?

03:29:30.000 125, yeah.

03:29:31.000 So this is a mastodon that was dug up in a pit years ago.

03:29:36.000 Excavation showed that the bones were lying on and in a layer of limey clay or marl about one foot in thickness.

03:29:45.000 When it gets up there and it goes on to say, the skeleton proved to be badly disturbed and the bones crushed and broken.

03:29:51.000 As an example of the amount of disturbance, one of the ribs lay beneath one of the tusks, while another was thrust through an aperture in the pelvis.

03:29:59.000 A shoulder blade rested to the right of the skull and one of the large neck vertebrae was found about 10 feet from the skull, near a portion of the pelvis.

03:30:07.000 In spite of the wide dislocation of the parts, Now this is where it really is interesting.

03:30:13.000 The bones of one of the feet remained intact and in place, very possibly in the spot where the animal last stepped.

03:30:20.000 So in other words, The foot, there was a foot still embedded in the soft material where he was apparently stepping at the time whatever happened to him.

03:30:31.000 And this is all the same time period as the other mastodon?

03:30:33.000 We don't have dating on this, but it likely was at the very end probably right in that Younger Dryas window because of the amount of sediment over it.

03:30:43.000 Go to the next slide, Jamie, and we'll see 126, we can get a better view.

03:30:46.000 So this thing, theoretically at least, was blown back.

03:30:50.000 Yeah, go to...

03:30:53.000 there we go.

03:30:54.000 There you can see one of the femurs that's been busted squarely across.

03:30:59.000 They go on to say that even the largest of the bones, such as the thigh bones, were broken squarely across in places, indicating that some considerable force had been exerted upon them.

03:31:10.000 Any conclusion as to an agency powerful enough to cause such destruction must be highly speculative.

03:31:18.000 So, basically, what you're seeing here is a mastodon that got smashed into the ground.

03:31:24.000 Wow.

03:31:25.000 The forces...

03:31:26.000 There were strong, powerful shear forces that would have literally separated his leg from the foot that's still...

03:31:33.000 Immersed into the ground.

03:31:36.000 So, I mean, there are many examples of this.

03:31:38.000 And the last slide we're going to show.

03:31:41.000 If you go back, I promise.

03:31:43.000 I once went digging with Jack Horner, the paleontologist, the dinosaur digger.

03:31:47.000 And he showed these debris flow pileups of dinosaur bones that had been splintered and broken.

03:31:55.000 And these are huge, just from the force of the water and then piling up of a wall.

03:32:02.000 And so, if you could do it to a dinosaur.

03:32:05.000 Wow.

03:32:05.000 Right.

03:32:06.000 Yeah.

03:32:06.000 85. 85 is an interesting slide because what it shows is the London ivory docks, which over a period of about two centuries, this was mammoth ivory that's being dug out of the Siberian permafrost.

03:32:24.000 That's just a drawing.

03:32:25.000 Oh, that's just a drawing, yeah.

03:32:28.000 That's the problem with that.

03:32:30.000 Like, that's what it looked like.

03:32:33.000 Well, this is what it looked like.

03:32:35.000 A 19th century scene showing the ivory floor of the London docks covered by thousands of mammoth tusks.

03:32:40.000 And this went on year after year after year after year for roughly two centuries.

03:32:45.000 There is so much of that mammoth ivory, by the way, that they use it to make knife handles.

03:32:49.000 I actually have a knife handle that was made out of mammoth ivory.

03:32:54.000 Yeah, and still to this day, not only is it legal, but it's common to use mammoth ivory for different kinds of things.

03:33:01.000 There's so much of it.

03:33:02.000 Well, they're not an endangered species because they're...

03:33:04.000 It's kind of a loophole.

03:33:06.000 In this case, though, what we have is tux that are being, again, dug out of the permafrost.

03:33:11.000 Right.

03:33:12.000 So, how did they get there?

03:33:13.000 That becomes the question.

03:33:15.000 Does it have anything to do with human predation, or was it a natural catastrophe that somehow ended up putting all these mammoths down and burying them into permafrost?

03:33:25.000 That's the question I want to raise.

03:33:27.000 Well, I think we raised a lot of questions.

03:33:29.000 I think we got some pretty good answers.

03:33:31.000 I think we had some great dialogue, and I really appreciate your time, all three of you guys.

03:33:35.000 And thank you to Malcolm, and thank you to Mark, and thank you to Young Jamie.

03:33:39.000 Well, thanks for hosting us.

03:33:41.000 My pleasure.

03:33:41.000 Thank you to you, Joe.

03:33:43.000 Can I do a quick shout-out?

03:33:44.000 Yes, shout it out.

03:33:45.000 I want to thank Brad Young, Cameron Wiltshire, My brother Rowan, my wife Julie, for helping all make this possible.

03:33:53.000 I also want to have people go to the Geocosmic Wrecks website and the Sacred Geometry International website for a lot more of this kind of stuff.

03:34:01.000 Then I'm going to thank my beloved partner and wife, Santa, who's shared every adventure with me for the last quarter of a century.

03:34:09.000 We've climbed the Great Pyramid together, we've been at the bottom of the ocean together, and I wouldn't be doing any of this stuff if it weren't for that wonderful woman behind me.

03:34:16.000 Michael Sherman, who do you want to thank?

03:34:18.000 Oh, I'll thank my wife, Jennifer, my little boy, Vinny, and my agent, my lawyer.

03:34:22.000 No.

03:34:24.000 No, no, but Skeptic.com and my partner, Pat, who keeps the show running when I'm running around doing things like this.

03:34:30.000 All right.

03:34:30.000 And Joe Rogan.

03:34:31.000 Let's thank Joe Rogan, because I can tell you this, Joe.

03:34:34.000 I speak all over the world, and whether it's South Africa, or whether it's Japan, or whether it's Britain, or whether it's the United States, or whether it's Croatia, people come up to me and they say, Joe Rogan sent me.

03:34:45.000 Well, thank you.

03:34:46.000 I appreciate it.

03:34:47.000 You have the most interesting guest.

03:34:50.000 Well, you're one of them, dude.

03:34:51.000 All you guys are.

03:34:52.000 Thank you so much.

03:34:53.000 We'll see you guys soon.

03:34:54.000 Thank you.

03:34:54.000 Bye.

03:34:55.000 So long.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 16, 2017

Joe Rogan Experience #961 - Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson & Michael Shermer

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