The Joe Rogan Experience - #2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint Dibble
Episode Date: April 16, 2024Graham Hancock, formerly a foreign correspondent for "The Economist," has been an international bestselling author for more than 30 years with a series of books, notably "Fingerprints of the Gods," "M...agicians of the Gods" and "America Before," which investigate the controversial possibility of a lost civilization of the Ice Age destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. Graham is the presenter of the hit Netflix documentary series "Ancient Apocalypse." https://grahamhancock.com https://www.youtube.com/GrahamHancockDotCom https://twitter.com/Graham__Hancock Flint Dibble is an archaeologist at Cardiff University who has conducted field work and laboratory analyses around the Mediterranean region from Stone Age caves to Egyptian tombs to Greek and Roman cities. Flint enjoys sharing archaeology - from the nitty gritty to the grand - with people around the world. Subscribe to his YouTube channel, "Archaeology with Flint Dibble," or follow him on X/Twitter for behind-the-scenes deep dives into 21st century archaeology. www.youtube.com/flintdibble https://twitter.com/FlintDibble Links for donations to: the Archaeological Institute of America: https://www.archaeological.org/donate/ the Council for British Archaeology: https://www.archaeologyuk.org/support-us/donations.html the Society for American Archaeology: https://ecommerce.saa.org/saa/Member/SAAMember/Fundraising/SAA_Donate.aspx Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
All right.
Well, this took a lot of time to organize, but I'm very excited and I'm happy you're
both here.
Thank you.
Flint, please introduce yourself to everybody, what you do.
Yeah. Hi, my name is Flint and I'm an archaeologist. I've done archaeology my whole life.
My dad was an archaeologist and I'm just very passionate about sharing archaeology and what we do,
I find in general that people don't really understand what modern archaeology is about.
And so I'm going to try to get that across while here, you know, that's my goal.
Fantastic. Take that microphone and try to keep it about a fist
from your face.
One second.
We have to, his HDMI is not working.
It's not going through.
All right, we had a bit of a technical issue, but we're up.
So Flint, you were just explaining
how your passion is archaeologists.
You're an archaeologist.
And you have this opportunity to sort of educate
people on how archaeology is done.
Yeah, that's my goal is to try to share what we do, why we do it, and what our goals are
with it, yeah.
Okay, terrific.
And Graham, everybody knows you.
You've been on this podcast about 10 times.
Well, largely thanks to you, Joe.
Oh, I'm very happy.
Happy to introduce the world to it.
Are we okay, Flint, with the HDMI?
I think we've been doing shows together since
2011 you I think were one of my first real guests you might be the first real guest
Because before that it was just my friends just comedians. Yeah, and it was all in my house and we
Yeah, it's fantastic
Jamie setting everything up making sure we're good to go
Okay Jamie's setting everything up, making sure we're good to go. Okay, the way we'd agree to do this is Flint, you wanted to open and you wanted to do about 10 minutes and just sort of explain things.
Yeah.
And so we'll let you do that and then Graham, you'll have an opportunity to respond.
Yeah, thank you. Jamie, do you mind pulling up my screen?
Here we go. Alright, so look, one of the things that I see when I'm online or in person sharing archaeology
is I find it's tough to get across what it is.
And so I wanted to start with a fun example.
So I understand that maybe not everybody can see the screen.
So Joe, do you mind actually just kind of describing what this artifact is that you
see?
Oh, you're putting this on me, buddy.
Exactly. You're putting this on me, buddy. Yeah, exactly. Well, this says, uh, Athenian red figure from, uh, 470 BC, and, uh, it is two people having
sex.
It's a man on top of a woman, you see his penis, you see it's, uh, yeah, it's very
graphic.
It is very graphic.
So what do you think this shares about what archaeology is?
Any ideas?
Well, I mean, you're finding artwork and parts of civilization
that were left behind and, you know, have been around in this case since over
2,000 years. Yeah, and for a long time scholars thought that a piece like this
described sort of life in Athens, and they connected to Athenian texts sort of
like Plato describing people having sex even, right? And on the other hand, however,
every single piece of Athenian artwork
with graphic sex like this,
couples actually fucking with penises and stuff like that,
ends up in Italy.
It's part of an Athenian pornographic export market.
And Kathleen Lynch and Sean Lewis
and others have published on this.
And so the real point is, is that what we're looking at
is the painters are designing something for consumers in Italy,
and particularly in Etruria. And this instead fits better in with telling us about life in Etruscans,
and the kind of stuff that they show in their tombs, sort of romance between people,
or the kind of sexual scenes that they design themselves in Italy as well.
And the whole point here is that archaeology is not really about an artifact, it's not about a monument, it's about our patterns. And so when we sort of look at how much archaeology
there is in the world, this is a map that shows the Horn of Africa with every single
archaeological site that's been surveyed there, and there's 171,000 of them.
That's incredible. It just looks amazing.
And this is just because of the terrain. Many of the, many of these are tombs,
for example, Islamic and pre-Islamic tombs, and so they're visible on the surface.
And so in many ways when we think about archaeology today in the 21st century, we're thinking
about big data sets and trying to analyze them statistically and understand the kind
of patterns they put together.
And we use innovative technology, sort of LIDAR, lasers from the sky,
to see these things underground. For example, here are this publication by Canuto in 2018 records
61,480 structures still to be excavated, found with LIDAR and surface survey, right? And so at the
same time... And this is for people listening, it says ancient lowland Maya complex, as revealed
by airborne laser scanning of northern Guatemala. That's amazing. Yeah and so I mean we
have this huge data set and with it we get high resolution for example the
bottom image in red it shows looters trenches because while there's a lot of
archaeology because people have been everywhere there's it's very fragile and
it's at risk and that's something I also want to take some time to get across a
bit while I'm here.
And my own research is very much big data oriented too.
I've studied nearly a million animal bones and teeth and horn fragments from ancient
Greece like this pile here from the island of Crete from Azoria.
And in particular, I also want to get across the kind of precision we have.
Right now, I do what's called isotope analysis.
I look at oxygen and carbon isotopes
in the teeth of these animals. And by taking multiple samples on different parts of the teeth,
you can see the different areas that I've drilled on that tooth on the right, right?
And what that does is it lets me understand the diet of the animal and where it's moving
in the landscape seasonally. So in different seasons of the year, I can understand the kind
of ways that people are raising animals.
We can do this with human remains too.
And we can get this high level of resolution and precision
that people don't always realize that we have, right?
And so in this case, I'm here to try to discuss with Graham
and to test his lost civilization hypothesis.
He has this, he's written about it many books
and he's given many talks here and on Netflix. And he's written about it many books and he's given many talks here
and on Netflix and he's talked about this idea of a lost advanced civilization from
the Ice Age, an advanced civilization that's around the globe, right? And in particular,
he thinks there was a global cataclysm at that time and the survivors introduced agriculture,
architecture, astronomy, and arts to hunter-gatherers and so i'm trying to take a tackle this with an open mind
and i want to tackle this with the perspective of my own experience
and my own expertise
and so in that sense if you think about what carl sagan says
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
graham is in many ways the first person to admit that the evidence he has his
fingerprints
what he thinks is this technological transmission to hunter-gatherers, but he does
not have any direct dated evidence of this civilization.
It's after all a lost civilization, right?
And so what I've been thinking through is how can my own experience and expertise kind
of test this hypothesis in a fair way?
That's kind of my goal here,
while here. And so I'm here doing a lot of research. I'm here to present what I see are
two clear disproofs of a lost, advanced Ice Age civilization. And I mean, archaeologists,
we're fairly sure this does not exist. We've been looking for this kind of civilization
for several hundred years. This idea of a pre-flood civilization
has been around for several hundred years. And so what I want to do is focus on where my own
experience and expertise is. My dad was an ice age archaeologist. He studied Neanderthal caves.
And so I want to dig into some of the stuff that he's excavated and surveyed. These are,
for example, 103,000 year old stone tools from Egypt. And so we have just so much Ice Age evidence
and Graham usually ignores it and he claims that his civilization... Do you have your
notifications on or something? The dongle is doing that? If you hit mute maybe it might stop.
Yeah I just muted it. Okay. Sorry about that. No worries, no worries. And so this...
So your claim was that Graham ignores this? My claim is that he doesn't... he ignores most of the evidence for hunter-gatherers in the Ice Age, which
is...
Is that he ignores it or that he doesn't focus on it as much as he's focused on this ancient
advanced civilization?
I mean, I think that's one and the same.
I think if you're going to look at the Ice Age, we need to look at the totality of evidence
to understand what's there.
And so, for example, he proposes the reason why the Ice Age civilization isn't there is because it's underwater. It's been,
you know, we've had 200 feet of sea level rise since the Younger Dryas, and therefore
it's not accessible. And so I really want to focus on Ice Age coastlines, evidence from
Ice Age coastlines and excavations, underwater evidence from the ice age, things like that,
these areas where he says that archaeologists don't look, but we are looking and what we
find is the ephemeral traces of hunter-gatherers rather than some sort of advanced civilization.
And so that's one thing I want to show. I want to share this kind of evidence. Some
of it's new, some of it's not, but I think it's the kind of thing that has a direct bearing
on looking for such an Ice Age civilization.
When you're studying these coastal areas where these Ice Age people lived and you're studying
these underwater, whatever, what would you call them?
Are they cities?
Are they towns?
Are they villages?
No, these are, so in this case, this is a really brand new find from like a month ago.
It's actually a hunting wall off the coast of Germany.
So it's where they have their camp.
Yeah, or maybe just where they drove a game along to hunt them.
But most of what's underwater are lithic scatter, scatters of stone tools, stuff like this.
What do you have there?
I have a series of different stone tools.
I'll show them off a little later.
Let me touch one of them.
Yeah, sure.
How old is this?
These are all modern replicas made by archaeologists. Some of them made by my dad and some of them have been made by...
I thought you were going to hook us up with some real stuff. Sorry, no, I can't bring real stuff.
I have a real arrowhead. It's from here. I do have an ancient corn cob right here.
Oh, that's not nearly as interesting. From about 1200 years ago from the Southern Methodist University
archaeology collection and I'll explain why this is here in a bit.
My question for you though was how much of the ground do you think has
actually been studied when you're looking at these ancient ice age
Neanderthal populations or were they Homo sapiens as well? These are Homo sapiens
this is from you know right at the end of the ice age so this is modern humans
yeah. So these when you're finding remnants of ancient hunter-gatherers, how much evidence,
how much of the ground do you think you've studied?
We've definitely not studied most of the ground, but as I'll show, we've studied a lot and
we actually put together predictive models on how to find this stuff.
And so, because it's really expensive to go diving, right?
And so-
How many dives do you think have been done?
Like how many times?
Thousands.
Thousands.
Yeah, oh yeah. And lots of different sites have been found from all over the world.
And specifically it was done to try to locate these ancient civilizations?
To try to locate Stone Age, Ice Age stuff, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah. And then my second thing I'd like to focus on is food. I am an archaeologist who studies
ancient food. I'm an environmental archaeologist. I've studied millions of animal bones from the
past. I've helped collect thousands and thousands of seeds like
these. And it's something that people don't realize we can get. We've
developed sampling methods and we now at this point have millions of
archaeobotanical remains, so seeds, from ancient civilizations and ancient
societies all over the world. And I want to sort of show you how we understand
domestication as a process. And we can see where it happened in real time, in
real space, the sort of evolution from a wild plant to a domestic plant, because
that counters Graham's idea that the civilization introduced agriculture. It
was not an introduction, it's something that happened in a real space, and we'll
track how we can see humans taking control of the reproductive life cycle of these plants, is what I want to show you. Can I pause you for a second? Yeah, of course. Is that in a real space and we'll track how we can see humans taking control of the reproductive life cycle of these plants is what I want to show you.
Can I pause you for a second?
Yeah, of course.
Is that in a particular region?
Like right now on earth there are people that are living in essentially a Stone Age manner,
right?
I wouldn't call it a Stone Age manner, no.
Okay, let's say people in uncontacted indigenous tribes in the Amazon.
I mean, they essentially are living with animal skins and
bows and arrows, and they're living very similar to the way people lived 10,000 years ago.
I think there's plenty of people living today in their traditional lifestyles, yeah.
Right, but then there's also people that live in Tokyo.
Of course.
So the world is huge. So if you find evidence of agriculture that dates back to a specific
period where you can see the wild plants, you can see this transition into domesticated plants, is it possible that we're dealing
with a region?
And I think part of the theory about the Younger Dryas Impact Theory was that although it probably
devastated the entire human race, it didn't impact all the places the same way.
Just like right now, if a volcano goes off in Iceland, we don't
even notice it, right? But over there, it's devastating.
Yes, but in this case, what I'm thinking about is, unlike, you know, I know you guys have
mentioned at times you can't radio carbon date stone, we can date these seeds. So we
can date that transition from domestic to, or from wild to domestic.
And what are the oldest seeds that you've found?
Oh, the oldest seeds we have go back tens of thousands of years. The oldest domesticated crops we have go back about 11,000 years.
And where are those from?
From Syria, Turkey, the Fertile Crescent area, yeah.
Is it possible that there was domestication before that in other parts of the world?
I'm going to show you why that's not possible.
Okay.
Yeah, that's kind of my goal there.
Okay.
Yeah, because, and it's not even a disproof of an advanced civilization
It's a disproof of agriculture period in the Ice Age
There's a lot of reasons why there was no agriculture and so I want to get into the weeds on that. Let's say, okay
So just to kind of go off. I also want to explain penis. I know man. What are you doing to us here?
Hey, you got to get the audience. These are penis pipes? Is that a pipe? Yeah, they are.
That's a rough-
Not pipe, it's a lamp.
A lamp, okay.
Sorry, yeah.
But so, you know, archeology-
Those are cool.
I think archeology should be open.
But of course, in the 20th century, the mores of certain Italian museums like here in Naples,
they kept this stuff hidden.
So do they hide this just because of the graphic nature of it?
Yeah, but it's now open.
For the last 20 years, if you go to the museum in Naples, they have
what's called the Gabinetto Segreto, and it has all the erotic art from Pompeii and Herculaneum
and things like that. And archaeologists, look, we're underfunded, we're not perfect,
but our goal, most of us, is to publish everything open data. And we have at this point millions
upon millions of archaeological records available from things like open context, the archaeology data service, the digital archaeological record, even the radiocarbon paleolithic Europe
database. So when you're talking about the Ice Age, we have radiocarbon dates directly
dated from 13,000 sites in Europe and Siberia. We have quite a bit of evidence of this ephemeral
evidence for hunter-gatherers, if you see what I mean. And so the evidence is just enormous, this database for hunter-gatherers, and so I think
it's important that we deal with the existing evidence and see where it leads us, if you
see what I mean.
And what is the oldest evidence for hunter-gatherers, just for the audience?
Oh, God, I mean, that goes back, you know, a million years or something, pre-homo sapiens.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, but, so, but in terms of what we would consider a Stone Age man or, you know, early
homo sapien, what is like the earliest buildings that we know of, what's the earliest tools
that we know of, what do we have?
The earliest tools we know of are many hundreds of thousands of years, right, before modern
homo sapiens. Similar to the ones you just showed us.
Yeah.
Well, they're bigger.
They're probably...
This isn't quite it either.
This is a middle Paleolithic style core that my dad made.
But the earliest stone tools are quite large, many of them.
But as time goes on, they become smaller and smaller because humans become more efficient
at using this raw material, right?
Because there's only a few different kinds of stones that you can nap. It's what's called a conchoidal fracture. I'll pass some of these
around at some point. We'll do a show and tell. And I'll show you how we can tell the
difference between kind of a man-made stone tool versus just a piece of shatter.
I actually just watched a documentary on it, or a YouTube video, I should say. And it was
really fascinating watching them nap them.
Yeah, exactly.
How they do it with like a piece of leather on their leg,
and they knock the top of it.
It's very interesting.
You even have some lovely deer antler
that could be used for that, right?
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Yeah.
OK, so continue.
So you were saying that we have a very clear chain.
Essentially, you're saying there's
a clear chain between what we know of in terms of hunter
gatherers and then more modern civilizations, it's
a pretty linear line.
No, I don't see it as a linear line.
Not linear, that's a bad, but that you know at what point in time it started, I should
say.
I think what we can say is we can understand, start pinpointing the starts of domestication
and things like that, but I think that what this big data set that we now have shows is
there is no linear trajectory
to human culture.
It's actually very heterogeneous what happens.
It's different in different areas of the world, and therefore we need to understand the local
context to understand them.
And that's really what it's picturing.
I mean, in many ways, like I think Graham's TV show is fun and interesting TV, but I think
it misrepresents what we think of as the birth of civilization.
We don't really write or teach about that anymore. It's very different in different
places. Even the very term civilization is something that everybody has a different definition
for. So we almost never use it. I never use the term civilization while teaching or writing,
for example. It's just, it's a term that you can use to mean anything. And so it's like this grand narrative approach to human prehistory
is something that's from the 20th century and not really a component of
21st century archaeology is what I would say.
Got it. Okay. And so I just want to end with a couple questions for Graham if he's willing.
At different times he's described that civilization that he's looking for
from 12,000 years ago,
it was advanced to say our own civilization in the late 18th or early 19th century.
And so, you know, as an archaeologist, we study technology, we study the material remains
of the past.
And so I wonder what we're trying to look for, right?
And so I know that this is kind of how the last conversation with Michael Schermer started. And so I get that. But I do want to just quickly say Graham has acknowledged
that there's a good chance there's no metallurgy, for example, with this civilization. He said
maybe a decision was made not to use metals. And I'd say we could definitively prove there
was no large-scale metallurgy in the Ice Age. If you look at ice cores in the Arctic, right,
we can track metallurgy of the Roman period, If you look at ice cores in the Arctic, right, we can track metallurgy
of the Roman period, of medieval periods, based on lead emissions that end up in these ice cores.
And there are no emissions from metallurgy in the Ice Age. So we can be sure that there's no global
metallurgical civilization that's doing a lot of mining and smelting. Certainly they're not
doing burning fossil fuels like they might be in the 18th or 19th century. So we know that could not have been around that
early because it would show up in the atmosphere. Likewise, we can think about shipwrecks, right?
Graham has mentioned that the bulk of marine archaeology has focused on shipwrecks and
not the continental shelves. And so the thing is at this point, we have something like three
million shipwrecks from around
the world.
And so one of my questions for Graham is, if this is a global civilization with ships,
why is it that we don't have shipwrecks from this global civilization?
I see this as a big, big problem.
If we're looking for a civilization that's traversing the oceans, we should find these
shipwrecks.
And similarly, these shipwrecks are located near the coast. They're located on the submerged continental shelves. We
are actually exploring these submerged continental shelves in detail. We're able
to find scattered ephemeral shipwrecks, but not monuments of some sort of
civilization. And the shipwrecks, what's the oldest one that we've found so far?
Well, there was one that was just published from about, I think it was
about six, seven thousand years ago off the coast of Italy that I saw.
Something around there, I'd say, is around the oldest that we have, yeah.
And at what point in time do you, these are mostly wooden boats?
Yeah, these are mostly wooden boats, yeah.
What point in time would they deteriorate completely?
Well, so actually underwater environments are really good for the preservation of organic
remains, which is why we actually get wood in waterlogged environments rather than on land, for example.
You either need to be in a really dry environment for wood to preserve or a really wet environment
or with those seeds I was showing, it needs to be charred.
So in general, wood will decay.
So in a lot of underwater environments, it'll just preserve as long as it's in homeostasis.
Which is why that explorer's boat that sank that hit... whose boat was that? Do you know the boat I'm
talking about? Famous Explorer is this beautiful wooden boat that's almost
completely intact at the bottom of the ocean. I think it hit an iceberg.
Yeah. Which explorer was that Jamie? You remember that dude? There's an
amazing video of it. It's amazing. they're just zooming in on this this boat and it just looks almost exactly like it looked when it's saying cuz the water's freezing cold
That's it right there. Look at that Erna Shackleton. Oh, yeah
Yeah, it's incredible like the whole boat just imagine what it had been to been on that boat back then
I mean the preservation underwater is amazing
There's the shipwreck off the coast of Italy that I just presented, what was on the Bad
Boy of Science YouTube about shipwrecks and stuff, and there's still the vine netting
that was holding the Roman cargo was still preserved.
And so the just underwater preservation is just freaky.
And is it, would it stay that way for 20,000 years, you think?
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
There's this idea that things just decay the older they are, and that's really not true.
It depends on the burial environment that they're in.
So the taphonomy is what archaeologists use to study how things survive and how they are
there.
And so typically when things are buried, they're very stable.
Or when they're, you know, sitting, it depends on where you are on the bottom of the ocean.
But typically it's very, very stable.
In fact, the worst place to be is the tidal zone. It depends on where you are on the bottom of the ocean, but typically it's very, very stable.
In fact, the worst place to be is the tidal zone.
So when sea level rise is very slow and an area is stuck in that tidal zone, things will
get battered.
But if things are deeply deposited quickly or sea level rise is very quick, that actually
helps preserve stuff.
And so that's how we can still find these kind of shipwrecks and ice age sites and other
sort of settlements underwater.
Now what about the shifting of sediment at the bottom of the ocean when you're dealing
with things like 10, 20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago?
Yeah, so there's actually I was just talking with Jessica Cook-Hale out of Bradford about
this and actually so she's done some studies off the coast of Florida of sort of hurricanes
that are coming in today because she's excavating stone age shell mounds there.
And it turns out actually that the hurricanes coming in today
really don't disturb them much at all.
Yeah, she's published on that.
So it's mostly surface water.
Yeah, it's going to depend on the specific environment is the answer.
So certain environments it's not going to preserve, others it will.
Yeah, it's variable is the reality of it.
Was there any other questions for Graham?
I just wanted to end by saying look, you know archaeologists we what we find is what we publish, right?
We are not trying to keep stuff hidden if I found Atlantis
I would publish Atlantis Klaus Schmidt found go back Lee Tepe
He published go back Lee Tepe and so I think that that's really important. We want to change and rewrite history. That's how we make a name for
ourselves. Every article I have published and most of my colleagues have published
is something that is adding and changing our picture of the past. We're not locked
in on a specific narrative. What we're trying to do is update the picture of
the past for each other, for our colleagues, and for people all around the world,
to sort of give a sense of, you know, human culture and the diversity of it, the resilience of it, and how we've survived this long,
so that we can learn from it.
Okay. Graham.
Flint, first of all, thank you for joining me here.
Oh, yeah, thank you. It's in a way a historic occasion, because as far as I know, this is the first time ever
that a mainstream archaeologist has sat down in a public forum and debated somebody who's
looking at the past from an alternative point of view.
And I'm grateful to you for sitting in the hot seat and doing
that. I think it's really valuable and I hope the audience will find it useful.
I'm going to try and recall a few of your questions. The lost civilization that I'm
thinking of, it's like a black hole in space to me. It's like something missing in the
story of our past to the extent that I can put form on it. I think we're looking at a
civilization like all civilizations that emerged out of shamanism. I believe that they did
have rather advanced astronomy and a knowledge of the world, But I don't compare, when I speak of
a 19th century level of technology, I'm talking specifically
about knowledge of longitude.
The longitude problem was not solved by our civilization
until the middle of the 18th century.
And I'm talking about knowledge of very
hard to observe astronomical phenomena such as
the precession of the equinoxes.
That knowledge is normally attributed to the ancient Greeks, but I think there's compelling
evidence that it's much, much earlier than that.
I'm not quite sure where to start with my first presentation, but you're telling us that archaeology is
very keen on new ideas and wants to really explore and investigate the past, is that
right? That's my perspective, yeah. That's your perspective, all right. Let's have a
look at Clovis first. Now, tell me what your view on the Clovis first thesis is. Well,
when I was an undergraduate student, I was taught that there were people here before
Clovis and that was over 20 years ago.
And that would be what decade?
That would be the early 2000s.
The early 2000s.
So would you feel that the whole Clovis First idea?
Clovis First is the idea that, excuse me, it's a culture that archaeologists call the
Clovis culture.
The reason that they call it the Clovis culture. The reason that they call
it the Clovis culture is because its artifacts were first found in a place called Blackwater
Draw, and nearby Blackwater Draw is the town of Clovis, New Mexico. So archaeologists named
this culture the Clovis culture after that. And it was for a long while thought to be
the first culture, the first human presence in the Americas.
And the dating that was put on that was around 13,400 years ago.
But this culture crossed the Bering Straits, which were then a land bridge, as you can see from this image on the screen.
They crossed the Bering Straits, they entered into North America, they came down
through, often it was argued an ice-free corridor, although
that's very debatable, and then they entered the main part of the Americas and gradually
made their way further south. And this was a dominant paradigm until, I would say, the
1990s when it began to be seriously questioned. But I would wonder whether the ghost of Clovis
First is still not haunting archaeology. So let me just say a few words on this subject.
So across the Bering Straits 13,400 years ago, and there's a single common origin, supposedly that was the idea with Clovis first.
And there have been recent genetic discoveries showing a very close relationship between
Australasians and certain peoples of the Amazon rainforest.
We talked about this before on your show, Joe, and I can go into that in more detail
later. A huge amount
of evidence from South America has a bearing on this subject. This is the typical tool
set that the Clovis people were thought to have used. And despite the fact that you're
telling us that Clovis first has been debunked since the 1990s, really, and you
were taught that it was debunked in the 2000s. We can find new scientists publishing a list
in 2013 questioning the Clovis First model. And those who did question the Clovis First
model, I mean, I do love your picture of this free and open and generous archaeology, but actually archaeologists can be very very
mean to other archaeologists who disagree with them, and the example of
this is Jacques Saint-Germain, who investigated bluefish caves in the Yukon
and found evidence of human beings there more than 20,000 years ago. Now if that
evidence were correct, it would blow the Clovis first model out of the water. People are suddenly in America more than
7,000 years before Clovis. The reaction to that was not welcoming. The reaction
to that was fury at Jack Sunk Mars. And here's the Smithsonian, rather than
launching a major new search for more early evidence, the Feinstered fierce
opposition and a bitter debate, one of the most acrimonious and unfruitful in all of science, noted the
journal Nature. And it was a brutal experience for Jacques Saint-Mars. He likened it to the
Spanish Inquisition. Audiences paid little heed to his evidence at academic conferences.
They gave short shrift to the evidence, then his competence was questioned.
When Jack proposed that Bluefish Cays was 24,000 years old, it was not accepted, says
William Josie. And the fact is that Jack St. Mars was ruined by the archaeological reaction
to his discovery. His career was wrecked. His research funding was withdrawn, he was ignored by colleagues in the
halls of academia, he was insulted and humiliated, it destroyed his life, but he was right. And the
fact that he was right was later confirmed. It was confirmed that indeed human beings had been
beings had been at Bluefish Caves. There's the publication from 2017, I think. Yes, January 2017, confirming that all along Jacques Saint-Marce had been right and that the ruining and destruction
of his reputation for saying something that other archaeologists disagreed with had been
wholly unnecessary. And again, the Smithsonian, the study raises serious questions about the
effect of the bitter decades-long debate over the peopling of the New World. Did archaeologists
in the mainstream marginalize dissenting voices on this key issue? And if so, what was the
impact on North American archaeology? Did the intense criticism of pre-Clovis sites
produce a chilling effect, stifling new ideas and hobbling the search for early sites. So here's Clovis debunked,
you're telling me that it was debunked in the 90s Flint, but here's Clovis being debunked
again in 2007, National Geographic. Here's Clovis being debunked in 2012. I mean for
a theory that was debunked in the 1990s, it's weird to see it still being debunked in 2012.
It's like there's something still there to debunk, isn't there?
And Wikipedia entry, recently the scientific consensus has changed to acknowledge the presence
of pre-Clovis cultures in the America, ending the Clovis first consensus.
This was a piece from the 15th of April 2023.
My god, here's the big big think, April 2022. Clovis apparently still needs to be debunked.
It's like a zombie. It keeps on haunting archaeology and people keep on having to debunk it.
and people keep on having to debunk it. And I'd like to just mention Tom Dillehay.
Tom Dillehay discovered the site of,
excavated the site of Monteverde in Chile,
and he found evidence that human beings had been there
14,000, maybe as much as 18,000 years ago
in the deep south of South America.
And again, the archeology that Flint would like us
to believe exists would have welcomed that find, the archaeology that Flint would like us to believe exists
would have welcomed that find, but no, that find was not welcomed. That find was massively
attacked, particularly by American archaeologists. And what we now know that Tom Delillehay has been vindicated and that he was absolutely correct all along,
that human beings were in Monte Verde
thousands of years before Clovis.
He was eventually vindicated.
Now what I want to do if you don't mind
is just play a tiny little clip from Tom Dillehay himself.
I don't have audio set up for you to do that.
Can you send it to him?
I just have the HDMI cable.
Rapidevi sends it to you, can you do that?
Sure. Okay.
How do I send it to you?
You can even have a Mac.
We'll pause.
After a slight technical hitch. Okay, we're back. After a
slight technical hitch, let's play this clip from Tom Dillehay who was the
discoverer and excavator of Monte Verde. I put together an interdisciplinary
research team of people, got National Geographic funding
and National Science Foundation funding.
That went pretty well the way we expected it to.
I found that the scientists were open-minded.
This includes archaeologists.
We had Australian, Chilean, and Argentinian archaeologists working with us.
Accumulatively speaking, those people besides myself probably had close to a hundred years
of experience amongst them.
What surprised me on the other side of the coin was the stiff, closed-mindedness of many
North American archaeologists.
But some of the North American colleagues were very difficult to
deal with and I think at times presenting a very unhealthy atmosphere, cutting us off
before we could present the data at meetings, not talking with us about it, refusing to
even look at the data, this sort of thing.
So, I think I've got a few minutes left
of my presentation time, and I would like to deal with the issue that Flint has mentioned
of archeology somehow knowing
that Flint has mentioned of archeology somehow knowing
that there was no lost civilization.
If we could call this up on the screen, Jamie.
So the Society for American Archeology of which Flint is a member,
wrote an open letter to Netflix shortly after the release
of my show, Ancient Apocalypse, really asking Netflix to cancel the show. Not to cancel,
this is quite cleverly put. They said, don't, they said, reclassify it as science fiction.
Now to my mind, what is the result of 30 plus years of
work on my part being reclassified as science fiction is as good as
cancelling it. Netflix did not reclassify it as science fiction but
archaeology, the Society for American Archaeology says that it really sees no
evidence for an advanced lost civilization of the Ice Age, and that it's simply, my
series is simply entertainment with ideological goals.
So I want to get into the parts of the world that archaeology has not looked at.
It's kind of interesting though from that statement, just the last thing, contrary to
Hancock's claims, archaeology does not willfully ignore credible evidence, nor does it seek
to suppress it in the conspiratorial fashion, but we just showed that.
Yeah, we just showed in the case of Tom Dillehay that his evidence was suppressed, but in the
case of Jacques Sanck-Mars, his evidence was suppressed, that archaeology was not open-minded about the work of these guys, that they suffered humiliation and great difficulty in advancing their work.
And furthermore, I'd like to make another point clear at this point, Flint. I don't
think there's an archaeological conspiracy against me. I'm not so conceited. I don't
imagine there's a conspiracy. I don't think archaeologists are sitting together in a Kambal
conspiring against me. I think that archaeology is locked into a mindset about the past where my ideas simply seem preposterous. And I think it's very annoying to archaeology that those ideas have some resonance with the public.
But I absolutely refute any suggestion that I have ever said that archaeology is involved in a conspiracy against me or is trying to suppress my work
That is that is not the case
Look, there's the Sahara Desert a bit of archaeology has been done in the Sahara Desert, but we're looking at nine point two
million square kilometers of the Sahara Desert
Tell me how much of the Sahara you think has actually been excavated Flint by archaeologists
I'd say a bunch of it has been surveyed,
including by my dad. No, no, no. How much has actually been excavated?
What sort of percent? Well, a lot of sort of desert archaeology does not have
excavation. It's eroded away due to the wind. So what you're asking to my
question, how much does archaeology really know about the past of
the Sahara? Well we understand about
the domestication of pearl millet in the Sahara from when the Sahara was a much
more, much of it was actually more habitable because it was not desert so we
can see the domestication of pearl millet in Sorghum. No. We can see ice age sites across it.
My question is related specifically to my subject. Has enough of the Sahara
been excavated for
archaeology to exclude any possibility that they've missed anything important
in the Sahara? We have found thousands of sites of ephemeral hunter-gatherer
remains in the Sahara. You're still not answering my question, how much of the
Sahara has archaeology actually looked at? I have no idea but quite a bit, Graham.
What do you mean by quite a bit? What I mean is that due to remote sensing, due to surface survey, and due to archaeological
excavation, we actually have reasonable coverage across the Sahara.
We understand that during green periods in the Neolithic, we can see agricultural villages,
and before the Neolithic, we can find ephemeral hunter-gatherer camps where they were napping
stones.
But the fact of the matter is, round about 1% of the Sahara has been excavated and 99%
hasn't.
So to say that there's no possibility of any traces of a lost civilization in the Sahara
seems to me a bit premature, particularly since during the African Humid period, and
there were several of them, the Sahara was green and fertile and was a very attractive environment in which
to live. I might come on to the ancient maps issue, but there's an ancient map up there
which shows a green and fertile Sahara. And oddly, it coincides very much with a radar
survey of the Sahara done in 2015 showing river channels in exactly the places shown
in that ancient map. I think the Sahara is a fascinating,
underserved area by archaeology. And the plain fact of the matter is it's very expensive
to work there, it's very difficult to work there, and archaeology has done very little
work in the Sahara. Not no work, not no work, but very little. Not enough to write off the
possibility that evidence might be found in the future. You know, you're basing this on our technology now. Let's look 200 years in
the future. Look how much archaeology has progressed in the last 50 years.
200 years in the future, the technologies might be so much more advanced. There's so
much stuff
that is simply not being looked at. And the Sahara is one of those
underserved areas, as far as I'm concerned. So is the Amazon.
6. seven million square
kilometers, about five and a half still covered by rainforest. It's bigger than
India. And well here's an article from Nature. 95% of the Amazon has
simply not been investigated at all and those bits that have been investigated
are minuscule by comparison. Yet, where investigation
is taking place in the Amazon, astonishing finds are being made. And these are in the
Brazilian state of Acre, and geoglyphs have been found there. And I've recently been with,
not all archaeologists are as opposed to my work as you and your colleagues.
But I've been with Marty Parsenen,
who's a leading archaeologist studying the Amazon.
I've been with Alceo Ranzi, who's a geographer from Brazil,
and with Fabio de Vaz Filho, who's a lidar expert.
This is very recently, actually.
And we did some lidar work in that area, and this is
the kind of thing that's being found. Huge, enormous earthworks, geoglyphs, which where
we define them in the West, we would recognize them as almost as hinges. The amount of workmanship that goes into these earthworks is stunning,
and they are very precise, very geometrical. You have squares. Here you have a square enclosing
a circle. More of the same. Takino is a gigantic site. These are just scratching the surface.
The archaeologists who are working on these sites
believe that there are thousands and thousands more of these geoglyphs sites, that they're just
touching the edge. When I was there with them back in September 23, I think it was, we actually did
a bit of lidar work. We put up a drone with lidar attached and we found new geoglyphs,
geoglyphs that had not been found before, within as, geoglyphs that had not been found before,
within a mile of geoglyphs that had been found,
but still covered by canopy rainforest.
And Marty and Arceo are of the view
that if we were to really investigate
the whole of the Amazon from this point of view,
we would have to revolutionize
our whole view of human history.
That archeology has hardly touched
this incredibly important region.
And therefore I do not believe
that archaeology can tell us that it can rule out any possibility of a lost civilization
while it has so failed to serve the Amazon and is only now beginning to do so. And those
who are doing that work are convinced that there's much, much, much more to be found.
Thousands more of these geoglyphs, for example. 27 million square kilometres of the Earth's surface was
above water during the Ice Age and it's underwater today. So yes, there has been quite a bit
of marine archaeology. I think Nick Fleming says there's about 3,000 sites that have been
investigated underwater over the years. But it's, again, you're looking at a tiny fraction
of 1% of the submerged areas that have been investigated.
I was very excited when I saw this, but it turned out that it was just another search
for shipwrecks. And fortunately, some new work is now being done. Archaeologists are
beginning to look at the submerged area, Doggerland, for example, between what is now Britain and
continental Europe, a submerged
landmass.
They're beginning to investigate this.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if lots of evidence of hunter-gatherers is found in these
submerged areas.
I would expect that to be the case.
But to say that enough work has been done to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization
seems to me absurd when we're dealing with 27 million square kilometers.
And I just want to say that I and my wife, Santha, have done a great deal of diving.
We did seven years of scuba diving all over the world.
And what we did was we followed up local accounts of underwater structures,
fishermen, local divers, and we went where they took us.
This is Nandmadol, Ponnapay, on the island of Ponnapay.
You go a bit further underwater and you start finding structures underwater. Go a bit further still and you find this huge
column underwater. This is a depth of 27 meters. That column has been submerged
for more than 13,000 years and it compares very interestingly with this
column if you see on the left the submerged column at Namadol, on the
right this column from Tinian, the island of Tinian, also in that region of the
Pacific. I wonder if the megaliths of Tinian have been misstated. What
we're looking at here, and I apologize to listeners who are listening and not
watching, but what we're looking at here are my fins disappearing into a tunnel.
And that tunnel looks to me, this is in Japan by
the way, off the island of Yonaguni, that tunnel looks to me very man-made
particularly when I get inside it and find two, on each side two big megaliths
piled one on top of the other. And then when you come to the end of the tunnel
you see ahead of you these two massive megalithic blocks
directly in view from the tunnel. That's a shot that Santa took of me diving
beside those megalithic blocks just to give you a sense of the scale of them.
They're enormous. No, they did not fall from a cliff above. There is no cliff
above. And they're in context. We're looking at a huge rocky outcrop
with these two megalithic blocks on the side. But let's go round to the right of that rocky
outcrop and we find a rock-hewn area with steps. And those steps, archaeologists tend
to argue this is all completely natural. I have done more than 200 dives at Yonaguni.
Santha and I risked our lives. We are not dilettantes. We are in this out of conviction.
We are in this out of passion for our subject. We've done more than 200 dives at Yonaguni.
I've been hands-on with this structure and all the other structures around it, and I
am absolutely confident that we're looking at a rock-hewn structure, the natural rock face that was cut and shaped by human beings. Here at Karama we're looking at
a stone circle underwater, depth 30 plus meters, 32 meters I think, been
submerged again for more than 13,000 years. There I'm videoing for scale, you
can see somebody down beside that central megalith.
Flint, do you think nature made that?
I see no evidence of it being manmade,
if that's what you're saying.
You see no evidence of that being manmade.
You see a central upright, you see upright surrounding it,
you see the inner curve of the outer megalith
matching the outer curve of the central megalith,
and to you, that's not even interesting?
I mean even the photos you were showing of Yonaguni showed a lot of natural fractures
along straight lines, and so I think that it's really easy to confuse
what can happen naturally and geologically with something that looks kind of anthropogenic,
but this does not look man-made to me, it does not look like anything I've ever seen.
Well that's interesting because I took a geologist diving there, Wolf Wichman,
he's very skeptical. He was skeptical
about Yonaguni, but he did confess after we came up from the dive at Kerama that
there's no way in his opinion that this could have been made by nature.
This is a rock wall off Taiwan. Again, Santhan, I went diving there. That's a
local diver called Steve Shear.
He's showing us this rock wall.
We can get in close to it.
We can see a sort of pediment in front of it.
And if you get up close, you can see that it is actually made of individual blocks put
together.
Let's go to India, southeast coast of India.
My wife Santha was born in Malaysia, but she's of Tamil, South Indian origin, so we had a
great advantage in South India in talking to local fishermen and divers because Santha
speaks the Tamil language fluently.
And we had asked them, are there any structures underwater off here?
And they said, you bet there are.
There's a whole city underwater off here.
And we've complained to the government about it because we keep catching our nets on it and fishermen have to go down and sometimes they die trying to free
the nets. We'd like the whole thing cleared away. So we said, would you take us out there and show
us? And it took some time to put it together. This was an expedition with the Scientific
Exploration Society in Britain that I put together. As you can see, it's a very low-tech
expedition. But when we got
out there, come on, Flint, tell me these are man-made. Tell me these are natural blocks.
That's a very blurry picture, Graham.
Tell me they're natural blocks.
I cannot tell for sure with these photos.
There I'm putting my diving knife between two blocks, and there, and then a curved wall. Actually the team from the National
Institute of Oceanography in India who were with us were intrigued by this.
Do you have any more photos of that that are maybe more convincing? No that's
that's that's that's what I've got but I'm trying to keep it short. Right some
of them do have characteristics of stone walls for sure but it's hard to tell.
That's the top of a stone wall, the rest of it's
buried in sand on the left there. On the right, a stone wall with a standout
feature above it. To suggest that these things are natural seems to me
completely absurd. And my point is that if Santa and I, with no external
funding, the only funding we have, I've never had financial
sponsorship from anybody, the only funding that we have is the kind readers who buy my books and
allow us to undertake this research. And we've risked our lives for 30 years investigating this
research. And if we can find structures of this nature underwater on a very limited basis, then I would imagine
that a detailed archaeological survey would find much more.
So the submerged continental shelves, the Sahara Desert, and the Amazon alone, these
are three large underserved areas by archaeology.
I think it's premature for archaeology to say that they can rule out any possibility
of a lost civilization while there's so much of the earth that remains to be studied.
And actually, how much of the so-called developed industrial countries, how much of the land area of those countries have been investigated?
I mean, so look, A, I fully agree with you that I'd like to see more archaeology done in ethical informed ways. I am not trying to argue
against searching for sites in the Sahara, the Amazon, or underwater. I think we can hopefully
agree that more archaeology needs to be done. I would say in developed countries our coverage is
even better though, mainly due to the fact that laws require archaeological excavation and survey
prior to construction. So whenever there's sort of construction going on in cities, there's archaeology happening. Whenever pipelines
or highways or things like that are being done, there's survey and there's
excavation. And so I mean, at this point our numbers of archaeological sites are
well in the millions, right? And billions of artifacts that have been found. And
so it's not, I'm not trying to say it's perfect though, and at the same time the
kind of excavations that happen sort of on a rescue basis before construction, they're not going
to have the same kind of investment that an academic project will have.
On the other hand, an academic project is going to make a much smaller hole, you know,
because we are focusing on maximizing the evidence that we can get.
And so, you know, know, in no way am I
trying to say that archaeology has perfect coverage, but we do have quite a
bit of coverage that people are unfamiliar with, and we do have quite a
bit of coverage of this late Ice Age period where we have many, many thousands
of sites from ephemeral hunter-gatherers, underwater, above water, and
elsewhere. As we do above water.
Yeah.
Would you mind showing Yonaguni again?
Because those other images aren't nearly as compelling to me as some of the right angles
and what looks like passageways and that curved surface underground.
That to me, that's a wild one.
See the other stuff, I'm like, things look weird in nature sometimes and I'm not an expert.
And so I look at that and I'm like, that's blurry, it's green, it's odd.
Yeah, it's odd.
Maybe if you were there physically, you would have a different impression of it.
Maybe it would look more like a stone wall.
But Yonaguni to me blows me away.
This blows me away, but the other image blows me away of the curved front of that feature
and what looks like steps to the right of it.
So there's that tunnel.
That's crazy too.
That's crazy too because the lines line up.
It looks like two blocks were cut and placed on each side and there seems like a very clear
passageway in between them.
Especially since at the end of the passageway you're confronted by this.
This is what you look at. These are crazy. If these are natural formations,
they are so bizarre that you have enormous straight lines and right
angles that look like they're a cut and not just straight on one side, straight
on all sides. You might go, yeah, so look at this slide, you can see even to the
right of those two blocks, what Graham is calling blocks,
you can see these sort of straight angles that are made.
You can see another vertical one
to the left of them as well.
Right, so how do you think they were placed in that manner?
Well, I don't know if they were placed.
I think this is where we need-
So you think it's possible that they just broke off
at some point in history and landed like that?
I think they were-
Again, this is compelling to me,
but not as compelling as the other one.
Show me the other one with the front curved surface.
This.
Notice that.
This looks crazy.
The whole thing looks crazy.
The steps look crazy.
The fact that it's all this one uniform flat line.
Switch to my computer to show you these.
Some of these look bizarre.
Nature sometimes looks bizarre, though.
I'm assuming that people have investigated this like
Geologists and stuff from what I saw professor Masaki Kimura
Has investigated it and he's published extensively on it and he's a geologist
He's absolutely convinced that Yonaguni has been worked extensively by human hands and have another geologist like Robert Schock suggested that it's not
Yeah, I took Robert there his initial impression was initial impression was that it was man-made. Later he changed his view.
That's fine. He did three dives there.
But I mean, I don't know, I've seen a lot of crazy natural stuff and I see nothing here that to me
reminds me of human architecture and I've seen human architecture all over the world.
Jamie, go to that one that we were just looking at with Graham. It's a lower right, like below the main image
to the right-hand side, yeah, the next one, that one.
Yeah.
It's certainly crazy, I'll give you that.
Yeah, it's very bizarre how flat that surface is.
Very bizarre.
And how it juts off and it's flat below it in a uniform
line. The curved surface of the front of it is very bizarre, too, the other image that
you had, Graham.
But stone oftentimes fractures in straight ways, you know?
That's how it fractures naturally.
Yeah, I get it. I get it. It's just the appearance of those stones stacked in a uniform manner in that tunnel all these things and that
this exists somewhere else it's very similar.
These might be renderings of what they think it looks like I suppose.
I mean regardless we still have no dates from this we have no artifacts.
We do have dates from the submergence. You're looking at material that's more than
12,000 years old.
Well, you're looking at stuff that was above land.
This was a tough dive, massive currents there. This is Karama of Akejima in the Okinawa group
of islands. To me, Flint, it's stunning that you see that as a totally natural thing, but
I guess we've just got very different eyes. The central upright surrounded by upright megaliths all cut out of the bedrock, very
similar to the chamber recently excavated at Karahan Tepe, where you have uprights cut
out of the bedrock as well. It seems to me inconceivable that nature could have made
this, that nature could have separated out this central upright and then created the upright surrounding
it in such a perfect way. But it's not totally perfect, right? Look at the back.
The back is much larger. There's a piece on the side that seems like it's cut
out and then there's a piece in front that seems like it's cut out, but even
the one to the lower left is not cut the same. it's odd that you have that passageway when you're looking
down and it's sort of uniform on all sides around the monolith that's pretty
fascinating it's interesting my point my point is not nearly enough work has been
done yeah archaeology and how long ago was supposedly was this above ground
about 13,000 years ago, somewhere of that order.
That was the last time it could have been done above ground.
Otherwise nature, if you believe so, has done it, but I'm pretty confident we're looking
at it.
What is the most compelling evidence you've seen in an underwater site of man-made construction
or moving of stones?
I repeat, this is Kerama. I am not showing, I'm only showing a fraction of the slides
that we have from Yonaguni. Yonaguni isn't simply that terrace, it's a whole series of
monuments which continue over a distance of a couple of miles underwater. There's a huge
stone face carved out of the rock. There's
a passageway. Down at the bottom of Yonaguni, there's rocks have been cleared to the side
away from the passageway. It's the combination of all of these different things across an
area of two miles off the island of Yonaguni that make that one of my high priority sites for
manmade workmanship. And the Indian sites are also extremely intriguing and unfortunately,
none of that work has been followed up, which is a pity. And when we come to what you call
rescue archaeology, Flint, if we come back to Northern Europe, for example. I mean, the last place on Earth that I would look for the remains of a lost civilization
is Northern Europe, because Northern Europe was a frozen wilderness during the Ice Age,
and any lost civilization worth its salt would not have focused a lot of effort on Northern
Europe in that time.
The place to look is down near the tropics, down near the equator. It's in places that weren't horrifically cold and
unbearable during the ice age. And when you talk about rescue archaeology, this is one
of the problems I have is that there is no targeted search for the possibility of a lost
civilization because archaeology is already convinced that no such thing could have existed.
So what we get is accidental discovery. Somebody's building a road or building a dam. They call
in the archaeologists to see if there's any archaeology that's going to be disrupted and
some archaeology is found sometimes. That's how the Cerruti Mastodon site in near San
Diego was discovered because roadworks were being done there. But this is not a targeted
search for a lost civilization. This is accidental discovery. I would maintain that in the Amazon
rainforest, in the Sahara Desert, in the 27 million square kilometers of continental shelves,
massively underserved by archaeology, and in other areas of the world, archaeology's
focus is on very limited parts of those, not on
massive parts of them. And then I'm sure you know this, Flint, that when we come to most
archaeological sites, the amount of the site that is excavated is rarely more than 5% and
often less than that. And that's for good motives to preserve the site for future generations
of archaeologists to investigate. But again, it doesn't, I think,
allow archaeologists to lay such claim to the past that they can absolutely rule out
any possibility of a lost civilization.
Okay. Flint?
Yeah. I mean, so if you want to, Jamie, do you want to look up the site Pavlopetri, P-A-V-L-O,
P-E-T-R-I? This is a site in the Aegean, and this is an example of kind of what a...
I mean, I can boot it up on my computer.
So if you look at this, you have very clear stone courses, for example, underwater. And
it's not just sort of stone courses and walls that we find. This is from a few thousand
years ago. What we find actually are a ton of artifacts with it, right? They dive, they excavate, they pull up ceramics, they pull
up stone tools, and they are able to therefore show that this was an occupied place. This
is obviously not due to sea level rise, this is due to tectonic activity, that this is
now underwater. Helikai off the north coast of Greece also is another one that people
have suggested might have inspired Plato's Atlantis because it happened during Plato's lifetime that that city was
submerged underwater. And so we actually do find, you know, from more recent times, actual
underwater sites aplenty.
And Pavlopetri, what year was that?
I think it's from about 3,000, oh, 3,000 years ago or so. So. So like 1000 BC-ish. I could be off back.
Are you saying those are natural blocks at Pavlopetra?
No, I'm saying you can say see clear stone courses that looks exactly like the type of
architecture we have above ground. And so the same kind of stone courses.
What you have in Yonaguni.
You would expect that from the historic period, no?
You would expect that from the historic period.
Yeah, we would. And so I would expect though if you're going to make an argument for something
like Yonaguni that it would look like architecture. Maybe even the type of architecture that you
have.
Looks like megalithic architecture to me. Looks like Rockhuean architecture. Looks like
the Rockhuean areas of Sacsayhuaman, for example. Jamie actually pulled up some pictures of
those.
No, we see many different blocks at Sacsayhuaman. We see multiple courses of blocks stacked
one on top of each other.
You know Sacsayhuaman. Have you been there?
No, I've never been there, Graham.
So how can you possibly talk about it?
Because I've seen photos of it.
Well, I've been there dozens of times.
Wait, wait, how can you actually talk about it?
I was there just a few weeks ago.
Wait a second.
Okay, but let's look at the images so we can discuss this.
Let's look at the images because Sacsayhuaman is a very complicated site.
Yes, there are huge blocks in the zigzag walls at Sacsayhuaman,
but there are also huge rock-cut areas with steps in them.
I don't understand how being there lets you talk about it better than me.
You've been there as a tourist to see how archaeologists have conserved it and preserved it and
presented it for people coming by. That is not the same thing as excavating a site.
That is not the same thing with understanding archaeological literature.
Well, we should tell me that I've not been there so I can not talk about archaeology.
It's obvious that you're ignorant of the site, Flint.
You're ignorant of the site because you don't know what the site looks like you don't know
Areas that are cut out of solid rock. Let's just talk about blocks
It's not bigger here and let's like look at it and yeah, let's do that. Let's look at it
SAC say why HUA MAM? S-A-C-S-A-Y-H-U-A-M-A-M.
Okay, got it.
Now that's the blocky walls that you've been talking about.
Yeah, and that doesn't look anything like Yonaguni.
But they confront another area.
You were showing us some pictures of it earlier, Jamie.
A whole Rockhue and Hillside.
I don't know. None of that looks like Yonaguni. This looks like actual architecture.
Yeah, it is actual architecture. Yeah, I agree.
But this is not the picture that I would like to see.
Do you want to find it, Graham, and put it up through HDMI? Because Jamie obviously-
I know what he was asking for about
Stumbled across it. I wasn't it wasn't there on purpose or anything It was probably in here somewhere and like how I got there. I was clicking around. So hmm
Let's see if we can get
And I mean, you know part of the goal though is to also have a date
So, you know like some of that stuff that you showed off the coast in this in That one there. Okay. There's lots of this in Saksay Hwaman
Frint, as you would know if you'd been there. This still does not look anything
like Yonaguni to me. It doesn't look like a series of steps cut out of rock. I mean it looks like a
series of steps, yeah, but it doesn't look like, it actually looks like a room
there even, is what I see on the left for example. It's not a room. To me it looks similar but not similar in that whole room area on the left hand side.
I don't think anybody could look at that and never argue that that wasn't made by humans.
I think that's so clear.
Whereas if you look at, go back.
But I also don't know if this is Saksehu'uma.
This is on Quora, right?
Yeah, I don't know what it is.
Let's go look and see what it is. It's a photo by Santa Fe. It is Saksehuamon. This is on Quora, right? Yeah, I don't know what it is.
Let's go look and see.
It's a photo by Santa Fe.
It is.
It is, okay.
By your wife.
So the difference to me is like there's some instances like in between the steps where
you look at that flat surface and the uniform line across the flat surface, that does look
similar to Yanaguni.
Some of the stuff on the right looks much more refined than what you see in Yonaguni but that also could be
attributed to the underwater erosion, right, in thousands and thousands of years. Whereas
how old is Sacsayhuaman supposed to be?
Well, that's an ongoing argument, Joe.
Well, Pedro Cieza de Leon mentioned it was only built a hundred years before he was there.
The difference between, in my mind, Sacsay Waman shows all those other things that are so clearly architecture.
So clearly stone blocks fitted and piled onto each other.
You don't quite see that level of sophistication at the Yanaguni site,
but you do see some stuff that's very bizarre and doesn't look like it's natural.
And I suggest if we were to look further and spend the money and investigate thoroughly,
we would find a lot more. I'm simply raising this to address Flint's apparent point that
archaeology has done enough already to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization.
That's certainly what's said in the SAA's letter to Netflix.
And Flint, what is your position on that, specifically what he's talking about South America, that South America would be a place where an advanced civilization would
thrive because it wouldn't, during the Ice Age time, because it wouldn't be experiencing
the brutal cold that Northern Europe had? No, but I still think we'd want to find some
sort of evidence of things like agriculture, right? And so we can look at the development
of agriculture in South America and in Mesoamerica, I have slides on that, and we can see that it actually, we can see the transition from wild to domestic
in real space and time.
In which areas though?
So in Mesoamerica we can see it with Teosinte, further south in the northern part of South
America we can see it with a variety of different crops.
And these are all areas that are outside of the rainforest?
No, some of them are at the edges of the rainforest.
And so I mean look, we've done a lot of work
in the rainforest with lidar in particular,
and that's been dated based on excavations.
Stephane Rostain just published in 2024
a series of lidar structures that were all connected
with one another alongside major roads.
And based on excavations of several of them,
it dates to about 2,500 years ago.
And so this is the key thing, is we
want to understand clear dates for stuff.
And that is the key thing.
We have plentiful evidence.
Do you mind if I show you some of our IceAge evidence that we have?
Yes, it resets.
I think the HDMI resets when you're shutting the computer.
Did I shut my computer?
Yeah.
Sorry.
Should I unplug it then?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Technology, man.
I don't know.
Sorry, I have a cheap computer.
I work for a public university and have a small grant.
I don't think it's the computer's problem.
I think it's all good.
Let me pull up my actual one.
So let's look at some of the Ice Age stuff that we can look exactly where Graham says we're not looking.
And I want to show you what we do have.
No, no, I say you're not looking enough.
Okay, but I want to show you what we find when. No, no, I say you're not looking enough. Okay, but I want to show you what we find when we do look.
Okay.
Because I completely agree, Graham, I actually hope that people who are interested in more
archaeology happening donate to things like the Archaeological Institute of America, the
European Association of Archaeologists, and the Society for American Archaeologists.
That can help fund more surveys and excavations.
If somebody wanted to do that, where would they go?
To their websites, saas.org, archaeological.org.
I think it's archaeological.org.
Can I give you guys the links to put it on the YouTube and stuff like that?
Sure.
Yeah, so archaeological.org for the Archaeological Institute of America.
And I'll give you guys the links for that so you can show that.
Terrific.
I just wanted to get it out there while it's still in people's minds.
Look it up, Archaeological Institute of America, Society for American Archaeology, and European
Association for Archaeologists.
They are great institutions that support stuff.
I just want to dedicate this quick thing to my dad.
He was an ice age archaeologist.
He innovated how to do mapping and how to look at stone tools, and please blame him for any of my mistakes, any of his colleagues that are listening.
So I want to talk about one of his surveys that he actually did in the upper deserts
of Egypt, above Abydos. Abydos is famous because that's where the pre-dynastic dynasty came
from in Egypt. But up in the upper areas, him with Debelchevsky and Shannon McFerrin,
they went and they surveyed 2100 different places where based on sort of
the geology of the areas, they thought there was a decent chance that people
might have been there in the past because of it being not a desert
environment but more of a savanna and more green, and because of erosion there
might be stuff visible, right? So they targeted these areas and they found what? Nearly 200 different sites all dating to the Ice Age, dense
scatters, some of them dense, not all of them are dense, like this one on the
right, of lithics, of stone tools that showed people working in place and they
mapped them out in the desert. They have 36,000 different artifacts that they
found in this survey. And in many places
they could actually refit these back together so they could understand that
people were doing this right here in this spot. And so you know one of the
great things about Desert Survey is because of all the wind erosion we
actually should have exposed more architecture, more artifacts, and because
it's so dry, things like organic material
preserve sometimes as well. And so we actually have this picture of stuff that's different
than say, you know, in a more temperate zone. But if we start looking at underwater sites,
I talked with Dr. Jessica Cook-Hale, who's now at the University of Bradford, who has
done underwater dives and found Ice Age sites off the coast of Florida.
So this is in the Gulf of Mexico.
Jamie, oh, I have to give this to you.
Sorry.
I have a video here for you.
You could air drop it.
No, I don't know if I have air drop.
No, it's okay.
Just give him the flash drive.
Yeah, he's got a...
I'm low tech, Graham.
Well, it's just Windows.
Yeah, no, I know.
Isn't that a part of a big lawsuit right now?
And so one of the things that she does is she is an underwater archaeologist who focuses
on the Stone Age and this period that we're talking about at the end of the Ice Age.
And what we're looking at here, she'll talk about it, it's just a short one-minute clip,
is this site's underwater, they all date to the end of the Ice Age.
And so they're lithic scatters, just like my dad found in the Sahara Desert, of hunter-gatherers under underwater sites though. And so let's see
what some of these look like.
Can I ask you something? How do they go about choosing these areas to search?
Yeah, she's going to explain that. So what she does is she develops predictive models
based on the geomorphology. This is her find, actually her colleague, finding some stone tools.
So they look at the underwater geomorphology, they take known sites above water, and then they predict
where they might be able to go and successfully find material, and then they go dive and often
enough they do find that material. And they're able to find... Here we go, yeah. Okay.
Burt has some of the densest terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene occupations in the American
Southeast or definitely in Florida.
We don't just do random dives.
We go back from the known to the unknown.
We look at terrestrial patterns.
We look at cultural types.
So periods where people were using shellfish as a subsistence base, it's really important
to look at those sites on land and say, what are the factors?
What environmental patterns or cultural patterns
can we tease out of these larger distribution?
And then we project it offshore.
And if we're fortunate, then after we
pull all those threads together, this is what we get.
And so yeah, this is just like with my dad
when he targeted areas in the Sahara.
Now she's at University of Bradford,
and they're doing dives in different areas of Europe.
And they're specifically targeting this kind of stone age material from this period and
they're able to successfully find it.
And so I think that that's important to understand because this material is there to find even
though it's very much ephemeral material from hunter-gatherer camps.
And this is oftentimes outcrops of stone for making these kind of stone tools.
So that's what they're actually finding is where they're making it, looking at the geomorphology
to find them.
And so if we, sorry, let's get past this.
We already talked about this wall, but I also wanted to brought up other kinds of underwater
finds that have been found from the Stone Inch.
Kosker Cave, it's a Pena Cave, it's 115 feet underwater off the coast of Marseille, found
recently in 1985 by Henri Cosquet, and
it's dated to 27,000 and 19,000 years ago, and dated by radiocarbon.
It's actually the Painted Cave with the most radiocarbon dates from it, right?
And this is what we have.
We have panels of black horses.
We have this one of the only Painted Caves with sea creatures.
For example, these ox, I think there's some stuff that they describe as jellyfish,
there's a black stag. And so we actually are looking underwater and successfully finding
this kind of material. But it's not just underwater, because I don't think we need to stop there.
If we look at this culture in Europe at the end of the Ice Age, this Magdalenian culture
that's associated with most of these painted caves from about 17,000
to 12,000 years ago, the exact period that Graham's civilization should date to. We have
radiocarbon dates from a large number of these caves, very clearly locked in in time. And
what do we see? They're actually, even with sea level rise, they're only a couple miles
from the Ice Age coast. So these are very, very close. There's
not room for some sort of empire there or civilization.
I claim no empire.
Okay, that's fine.
That's just another way you misrepresent my work.
Okay, I'm sorry for misrepresenting your work, Graham. But there's no room for some sort
of large agricultural civilization along most of these coasts because the way sea level
rise has worked is it's variable in different places. And so we actually have a whole lot
of coverage near to Ice Age coasts from the end of the Ice Age, not the glacial maximum.
Can you explain those lines? Yeah, so these are lines based on 100 meters and 120 meters
of sea level rise, which is about the amount that existed
from the younger Dryas. There's more from the glacial maximum, but that's 20,000 years ago.
We're talking about 12,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age. And so there are only these,
all these caves on the north of Spain are only a few miles away from that Ice Age coastline.
So just, you know, short walking distance. Right. So anything that had been submerged would have to be within those boundaries.
Yeah, exactly.
And there's only a few miles there.
It's not like a huge, untapped landscape to look at, if you see what I mean.
Not in the Bay of Biscay.
Not in the Bay of Biscay.
Not in many places.
But take the Sunda Shelf, for example.
Okay.
Enormous amount of submerged material there. I'm not disputing that we're going
to find hunter-gatherer sites underwater. I'm simply saying, and you seem to keep evading
this issue, that not enough has been done to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization.
There were hunter-gatherers all over the world during the Ice Age, and of course we're going
to find hunter-gatherer sites underwater. But to say that we've done enough underwater archaeology to rule out
the possibility that something very surprising might be found underwater, to me, is actually
dishonest. There's just not enough being done. There's not enough being done in the Sahara,
there's not enough being done in the Amazon, and there's not been done enough on those 27 million square kilometers of submerged continental shelves. The whole area between the
Malaysian Peninsula, the Indonesian islands, out over to New Guinea and
Australia, the submerged Sunda shelf and the Sahul area, to me is absolutely
fascinating and not enough underwater archaeology has been done
there to rule out the possibility. I'm not saying that we're not going to find hunter-gatherer
sites, of course we are, but I'm saying that for archaeology to claim and to quite viciously
and unpleasantly attack me for suggesting the possibility that there might be a lost
civilization, to make that claim while having failed thus far to investigate thoroughly the vast areas of the submerged continental shelves,
the vast areas of the Amazon rainforest, the vast areas of the Sahara Desert that have not been investigated,
that claim is premature and that claim is disingenuous.
But we have thousands of sites from these areas.
I don't care how many sites you've got.
But, Graham, give me a second.
There's 3,000 underwater sites that have been found.
Graham, working with archaeology is working from the known and what we actually have towards
the unknown.
And when you say that we're not investigating these areas, I'm showing you that we have.
We have evidence from all...
No, no, I admit you have.
Okay, so let me explain and share with people.
Don't misrepresent me.
I'm not misrepresenting you.
Of course you've surveyed some of those areas, yes.
We've surveyed quite a bit of them, and quite a bit of them are on land.
What do you mean by quite a bit? How much of the submerged continental shores have actually
been settled?
Graham, I'm going to keep showing you areas that we have evidence for. Why do we have
so much evidence for ephemeral hunter-gatherers but not evidence from an advanced civilization
that is global? That should leave behind monuments that are far easier to find. Instead, what
we get are plentiful sites outside and in caves that show coastal interactions.
We have evidence of these hunter-gatherers interacting with the coastlines.
They're collecting shellfish and fish.
They're turning them into beads.
They turn whale bones into points to hunt with and to other kinds of artifacts.
And these whale bones and these shells don't just end up on those coastal sites, they end
up further inland as well. So we can see all over the world this kind of coastal interaction, and it's
not just areas like that. So for example, sea level rise is not even everywhere. Just
off the southern coast of Crete, I've been here, Dr. Tom Strasser has shown me around
this site, very thankfully, I'm very much in debt to him. This is an area where the
African tectonic plate is moving where the African tectonic plate
is moving under the European tectonic plate and so the land is rising faster
than the sea level has risen.
And so Tom specifically targeted it for a survey. He found dozens of sites
and then he excavated several of them. What this is, is this is an uplifted sea
cave.
It's a cave that was formed from wave action,
you know, before the ice
age, and then with tectonic uplift, it raised up many, many, many meters above the current
sea level. And what did he find? He found a Stone Age hunter-gatherer camp. He excavated
it. He found obsidian. He found other kinds of lithic tools. He found animal bones. And
he dated it to right at the end of the ice age, right?
None of that's surprising to me.
Okay. Just to address my key point. How much of the submerged continental shelves have actually
been investigated by archaeology? It doesn't matter. It does matter. 27 million square kilometers,
the size of Europe and China added together and you've investigated less than 5% of it,
that doesn't matter? The fact that we found thousands of these hunter-gatherer sites does not matter?
It does matter. Of course you're going to find them.
That's what I expect to find in the world.
Both things can be true.
Both can be true.
Or we can go to North America where we have 12,000 different sites, I think it is, with
Clovis points, and we can see where these coastlines are.
On the eastern seaboard, yes, there's a large amount of submerged continental shelf, including the area in Florida where we saw
Jessica Cokale dived and found sites. If you look at the western seaboard, on the other hand, there
is not nearly as much of a submerged continental shelf. And what's really interesting about the
western seaboard is not only have we been exploring it for 40 plus years and we have multiple sites dating to this period at the end of the Ice Age,
sometimes with wood and cording, other times with stone tools, all of them hunter-gatherers.
One second, Graham.
Sure.
And so you mentioned this Clovis First hypothesis, right?
It's been decades, you bring up news articles and headlines that say that it's still being
debunked.
That's not what archaeology is. Our articles ourselves don't say that. Our articles instead present new
hypotheses like the Kelp Highway Hypothesis, because scholars do not write the headlines
for media articles. I cannot help how journalists portray what we do, okay? And so what we're
looking at is this new migration pathway, the Kelp Highway Hypothesis done by John Erlinson and others.
And what we can do is we can specifically target areas that are above water.
So what's happening along the Pacific Coast north in Canada is the glacier is melting
and that causes sea level rise, but the weight of the glacier pushes down the land.
So as it melts, there's less weight on the land and it's called isostatic rebound. So there's a whole chunk of the Pacific coast on, sorry,
along Canada where it's above land right now for us to excavate and people have
been targeting that. Out of the University of Victoria, for example, Duncan
McLaren has found footprints right there on what is an end of the Ice Age coast
from about 15,000 years ago.
These are footprints in beach sand from three different people from this analysis.
And so we can get these ephemeral traces of hunter-gatherers moving into the Americas at this time.
Maybe some of them had lived there for a few thousand years.
And we can target these areas that are above land that were Ice Age coasts using our knowledge of geology.
That is what we do. It's not that we're necessarily looking for one thing
or another. We're targeting areas that are exposed,
that we can understand coastal interactions
at this early time. And whatever we find, whether it's footprints or something else,
we work to publish it. And then we put together clear dates of the stratigraphy in order to get it at high resolution when these
people were walking on this coastline, on this beach, if you see what I mean. These
three different people right here.
But how did you feel when Tom Dillehey...
Tom Dillehey was the excavator.
How did you feel when he was describing what was ultimately true, but was being dismissed
and he was being shut off and people weren't willing to look at the data?
How do you feel as an archaeologist?
Oh, I think that's complete.
I don't mean that what Graham's saying is bullshit.
I think it's complete bullshit for any colleagues of mine that try to shoot down actual evidence.
That is ridiculous.
I'm not trying to say that all of archaeology is like any community of people. There include some
assholes. I have worked with some assholes before, right? And so I would say, though,
that to represent that as all of archaeology is kind of silly because most archaeologists
don't focus on the peopling of America. Me, I do ancient
Greek research. When people arrive in America, it does not impact the research I do, for
example. All my Greek colleagues, all the people that do Chinese archaeology, people
that do archaeology of Australia, none of those people really have a horse in the game
for the peopling of America. And so if there were a few asshole archaeologists, well then
I condemn them. I think that is a problem, you know? And I think that there are, just like in any
community of people, whether it's politicians, entertainers, or in your neighborhood, there's
assholes, we should say that that's the wrong way to be. And if those people are assholes,
I think that's a problem.
Flanders, you were showing us a picture of Florida recently, the submerged continental
shelf around Florida.
Let's go back to that. That's why I interrupted you. And apologies for doing that.
You're fine.
Now, we're looking at the Florida Peninsula. And just to the right of that, we're looking
at a large island that was above water during the Ice Age. It's in the light shaded green area. The dark shaded bit is the island
called Andros. But what we're looking at is the Bahama banks that were above water during
the Ice Age. So this might be a good opportunity to get into the controversial issue of Bimini,
which is one of the many issues that I featured in Ancient Apocalypse and that
I've been attacked for.
Do you mind if I actually finish my PowerPoint first?
Oh, go ahead.
Yes, sorry.
Okay, sorry.
No, you're fine.
All right, we'll go back to Bimini.
Yeah, we can get to Bimini in a second.
I do want to point out that right in downtown Miami right here is an archaeological site
called Cutler Ridge, which also dates to the end of the Ice Age.
It has shells, it has lithics, it has even I think human remains, and it shows
that kind of coastal interaction not too far from the Ice Age coast. It's just a few
miles away. Sorry, let me... Do you have images from that? No, I don't think I do. I'm
sorry. No worries. We could Google it if we want. But I do want to just sort of
end this little thing by saying that we have coastal Ice Age archaeology from
around the world. From Africa, from Asia, from Australia, from
the Americas. Everywhere you look there are Ice Age coastal sites. For example,
this set of beads from a burial of a child from La Medellin. These are marine
beads found inland. They were embroidered into the clothes that this child
was buried in, right? It's about a seven-year-old little child buried there. And so you get these kind of pictures of the past, of the
people that lived in this sort of tough terrain and exploited the coasts all over the world. And so I
just want to really emphasize underwater archaeology, we find things, for example, like a seawall off
the coast of Israel trying to combat the coast level
rise that was happening in the Stone Age, right? We have lithic artifacts on submerged
archaeological sites all over the world from different periods. And so we really are looking
for this. Now, we're not just finding shipwrecks, and we are finding plentiful Stone Age stuff,
hunter-gatherer sites, and it just
sort of, it strikes me as unbelievable that we have so many thousands of sites that show
coastal interactions at the end of the Ice Age from these hunter-gatherers, but we have
no evidence of a lost advanced civilization. That strikes me as maybe this doesn't disprove
it, but it makes it very, very hard to swallow, if you see what I mean, because nobody really understands how much archaeology we have. We have a lot
these days. It is a study of big data. It's not a study of just going to one site after
another. It's about aggregating this to understand how people were living at the past and sometimes
zooming in to get pictures of individual people and how they survived. To draw, I have to really repeat myself here.
Yeah, I can go back up there.
We're looking at...
Pimmining?
...less than 5% of the continental shelves that have been studied at all by archaeology.
I'm not surprised that we find hunter-gatherer traces underwater.
I'm very glad that we do.
I would be very surprised if we didn't.
But what I'm saying is that not enough of that 27 million square kilometers has been investigated. Only a tiny fraction
has been investigated. And that fraction is not enough to draw the conclusion that we
can absolutely say there was no lost civilization. Same goes for the Amazon rainforest. Same
goes for the Sahara desert.
But can we say there's no evidence for an advanced civilization in what they have studied? In what they have studied, yes. We can say there's no evidence for an advanced
civilization. But that brings us to another issue of what is studied and what is not studied
by archaeology, which we can get into and we will get into. But I would like to go back Flint's inundation map of Bimini. Yeah, it's here. And we, just beneath the
compass rose there, you can, can we highlight that somehow? Yeah, that
submerged Bahama banks, the Grand Bahama banks, you're on them now, that was a big
island above water during the
ice age and it actually stayed above water until about 6,900 years ago. So let's just
talk, because I know Bimini has been a very controversial issue, I don't know if it's
a controversial issue for you, but certainly for a large number of your colleagues, the
suggestion that the so-called Bimini Road is a man-made artifact has been mocked and
laughed at a great deal.
I'm not sure if mocked is right, but I've definitely heard it's a geological sand beach.
It's the beach sand.
Do we see it?
Are you familiar with the general work that's been done at Bimini?
I am not a geologist, so I'll go with no.
Okay.
But I've heard from other geologists that it is definitely not manmade.
Okay.
Well, what I want, can I put my...
Can I put my...
HDMI.
HDMI.
I've got so many different pairs of glasses here.
It's really crazy.
Bimini inundation maps. Yes, I just want to say I worked with Dr. Glenn Milne, who's a
leading geologist studying marine archaeology. This is the Piri Reis map. And change my glasses yet again, I'll tell you old age is a bitch.
So it's this map that I'm interested in, it's this large island, and the possibility that
that large island was depicted on as it looked during the last ice age, that it is the submerged
Bahama banks and that running up the middle of it is a depiction of the so-called Bimini
Road.
Now, I'm showing, as it looks today, top left where the Bimini Islands are and the island
of Andros.
If you go back 4,800 years, bottom left, you can see that the Grand Bahama banks were submerged. But up until 6,900 years ago,
they were above water. And 12,400 years ago, they were above water. And I must say that
looks very much to me like the island that's depicted on the Piri Reefs map. This is Glenn
Milne. He worked with me on the inundation maps from my 2002 book Underworld. I think you have to agree
that he's a very major expert in the field. And these inundation maps that he has given
us are a very accurate representation. And those original maps, the ancient ones, how
old are they? That's the 1513 Piri Reis map, which was based on more than 20 older source maps, as he tells
us on his own handwriting.
We only have a fragment of the map.
It's full of inaccuracies and problems.
But I'm just...
Do you know what would convince me?
What?
So I used to do a lot of GIS for archaeological projects where I'd take historical maps and
I'd try to line them up with actual terrain like satellite imagery and stuff like that. You should work on geo-rectifying these
maps to see how they line up in real space because right now what I see I have to squint
to see if it looks right or not. And so I think working with something like a GIS expert
to geo-rectify this stuff and show how actually accurate it would be where you could actually
statistically measure that would make it a lot more convincing in my mind.
No, that's a very good idea, Flint. Thank you.
Can we see images of the Bimini Road itself?
I'll show you a couple of slides. If I can put this up. Come on. And that's me diving on the Bimini Road.
And so these are arranged in what fashion?
I see the small segments of it.
No, there's a huge extensive area.
It runs for about more than half a mile right off the coast of Bimini of these
blocks. Now, what I want to get to here is the suggestion that this is totally a natural
site. Are you not familiar at all with the work that's been done on this, Flint?
It's not my expertise, no. Yeah. Because if you read the literature, you'll find that archaeologists constantly refer
to work that was done by Eugene Shin and a couple of other geologists arguing that A,
the Moon-year-old is totally natural, and B, that it's pretty young.
It's only 3,000
years old or so. But this is an area where there's a real problem, because in the literature
on that, archaeologists cite the 1980 and later work of Eugene Shin, which itself cites his 1978 article. But 1978 article is very hard to find. I had
to do a lot of work to get hold of it and I did. And actually the 1978 article
contradicts almost everything that's said in the 1980 and later and later
articles. The whole authority for... Are there any artifacts from the Bimini Road?
Because I've excavated road surfaces and I found lots of artifacts.
But let me just play you again, Jamie, I guess I'll have to air drop this to you.
Let me just play you a little clip from Eugene Shin, upon whose authority the Bimini Road
is being dismissed as totally natural and very recent. Could we add or drop
this, Jermi?
And then I'd like to show you what a road surface looks like under excavation afterwards
from a project I work on in Romania.
So this is the guy whose work on Bimini is used by archaeology to dismiss it as A, totally
natural and B, totally recent. So we would hope that he would be an honest person, that
he wouldn't disguise his own findings from an earlier period of time. How do I play it?
I play it. Oh, you play it. Okay. And this is just a little clip from Eugene Shin.
Yeah well I remember when I first met you I was a film director with Steve Rasmus.
And I remember running to you and you were carving this stone statue and
somebody asked you what you're doing with it and you said you were taking it
over to the Bahamas and throw it overboard and open it and these sheep would play.
So I don't know if you followed up on that. Well, someone told me, they saw
it in a magazine somewhere, but I kept waiting for, you know, something really happened.
The guy who's planting artifacts on the Bimini Road is the main authority that is used to
dismiss the Bimini Road as a man-made structure.
Did he actually do that or was he just joking around about doing that?
It's not clear.
I think joking about it would be in very bad taste as well.
And especially referring to the sheep who think that it might be.
Well, it's certainly not a scientific approach.
To my mind, it's not a scientific approach at all.
I think this is the moment where I'm going to do my sort of second major presentation.
Do you mind if I quickly show some images of a road surface?
Yeah, please.
I'm very happy for you to do so.
Sure. Jamie, do you mind showing the HDMI?
I'd like to see better images of Bimini Road.
Jamie, there's loads of images of Bimini Road on the net.
In Romania, we did a series of magnetometry surveys, this is
called Histria, it's sometimes referred to as the Romanian Pompeii, and so to
ground truth our magnetometry survey we opened up trenches to find these Roman
roads. And so what you see when you look at Roman roads is you see pottery in the
packing of it, you see animal bones. In fact, they specifically use these complete toe, foot bones from cattle and horses and amphora toes, amphora, these kind of ceramic
vessels used to transport wine and olive oil and things like that, as drainage. And so,
you know, as you dig into a road surface, you expect to find this kind of material everywhere.
I've excavated roads in Greece, in Italy, and in
Romania.
And how old are these roads?
These are from, this is about 2,000 years ago.
Yeah.
And so this is the kind of packing that you get.
You get plentiful artifacts associated with roads all the time.
And there's no reason, I could see maybe the animal bones not preserving underwater, but
ceramics preserve really well.
Those thousands and
thousands of shipwrecks that we've excavated. Most of what we find is the
wood from the ship and then ceramic vessels. And so that survives. Ceramic is
virtually indestructible once it's high-fired. And so you know this is the
kind of stuff that we find alongside road surfaces and we find it everywhere
in the world. And at Bimini, how much searching have they done looking for things like that?
Dr. Stephen Levy A great deal of work has been done by amateurs
who archaeologists have poured really most unpleasant scorn on for several decades.
But that work has, in my view, been highly valuable and has been worthwhile doing.
I don't claim that the Bimini Road is a road. That's just what it's referred to these days. I do claim that it's a very large
megalithic structure which was submerged by rising sea levels.
So calling it a road is an unfortunate term. You can't compare it to this road.
We don't know what it is. But what it is is a series of megalithic blocks laid out side
by side. Sometimes on top of other megalithic blocks.
Perhaps something more that gives you the scale of it, because
there's a problem with looking at things up close.
Yeah, and can I just give a quick shout out to UT Austin, which directs that project in
Romania?
Yeah, shout out to UT Austin.
Yeah, Adam Rabinowitz, UT Austin, you guys rock.
Shout out.
Okay, so that looks crazy manmade.
That last image though, go back to that last one. That's crazy. I mean, that
is how big are these stones?
They weigh a couple of tons each. They're about 12 feet long on one side by about 15
feet long on the other.
They're fairly uniform in size.
They're fairly uniform in size. In many cases, and again, the contrary has been claimed,
in many cases they are propped up on other blocks underneath
them. There are multiple layers. And in many cases, the bedding planes do not, in fact,
slope as one would expect if this were natural. They're horizontal. And this is one of the
things that's been missed in the geological literature. But...
Go to the one in the upper left hand corner, Jamie, please.
You know, I'm just looking for some proof here.
Things look cool, I get that, but it's like a question of how do we tell the difference
between man-made and natural.
And that's not easy, and I've never really again seen architecture like this.
We don't see stuff like this on the sites that Graham goes to in ancient apocalypse, for example. It doesn't look like this. We don't see stuff like this on the sites that Graham goes to in ancient apocalypse for example. It doesn't look like this. If it's the same
culture at those places, we'd expect to see more sites that look like this.
Right, we're dealing with completely different parts of the world, correct?
Yeah, which is my point that it's not all one culture. Yeah, I agree. So this one is
fascinating. Look at that one. That doesn't intrigue you? You don't look at
that and go, wow, that really looks manmade.
I think it looks really cool, but again, I've seen a lot of...
But if you knew for sure that was manmade, wouldn't that sync up? If you knew for sure,
if this had been dated and everyone knew where this came from and you saw this and this was
from an archaeological site that was well known and established you would look at that and say yes that fits that.
If we had...
You wouldn't look at that if it was in a well known archaeological site and say oh this
piece is manmade.
All the other stuff is clearly natural.
I mean look to me I don't see anything that tells me that it's manmade is all I can say.
I screwed that up.
What I meant to say is if you looked at this, you wouldn't say this is natural.
If you looked at this at a known archaeological site, I just reversed it, sorry.
If you looked at this at a known archaeological site and there was other structures there
and then there was this, you would say this is a part of that.
You wouldn't say that this is natural.
Not necessarily.
So there's a site that I worked with.
But look at this right here.
Jared Sussman I get what you're saying, Charlie.
Pete Slauson But you know what I'm saying? If there was
other structures next to that that were clearly manmade, you would assume, I would think,
that that would be manmade as well.
Jared Sussman No, that was what I was going to say is there's
oftentimes a lot of natural stones alongside archaeological stones at sites. There was
this one example of a perfectly circular depression
at this site in North Apelos. And so we kept saying to ourselves, it's in the middle of a stone structure.
And so we went back and forth on whether it's man-made or not, this circular depression.
Geologists showed up, they said, nope, that part's not man-made, if you see what I mean.
We are, we listen and collaborate with geologists who understand how to tell the difference.
Well, we definitely know that that happens with sinkholes.
There's a great example of this very circular sinkhole that goes, it was like hundreds of feet deep, right, Jamie?
That one that swallowed up those buildings?
And it looks crazy, like someone took an apple core to the earth and it's completely natural.
It's just nuts what could happen, you know?
That is nuts. But that's sort of a different thing than stones being laid out in a uniform fashion like that.
No, it wasn't here. What was the name of the site?
What are you looking for?
No, no, he was looking at Pelos, which is not the site itself. It was an early Hellatic site north of it.
Blanking on right this second. So since we saw Eugene Shin and the reference
from the audience to the sheep who believe in outrageous possibilities like a lost civilization
of the Ice Age, I want to address, Flint, the way that you dealt with the media about my work.
And I'm going to show a little PowerPoint presentation here, and we'll talk it through.
Well, we know that it's very painful to be burnt at the stake.
And heretics were burnt at the stake until relatively recently.
And there's Galileo brought before the Inquisition for heresy.
And here we have Flint Dibble, who, sorry if I'm being direct, Flint, but you do recently
appear to have set yourself up as a sort of modern inquisition to investigate and test
whether output actually fits into what is regarded as acceptable thought by the mainstream.
So I noticed your attack on the Homan Aledi controversy on your YouTube channel. And that
concerns the work of Lee Berger, who's an explorer in residence with the National Geographic. He was really too big a target for you to bring down, Flint.
But this guy, my friend Danny Hillman,
Nathu Wajadja, he wasn't such a big target
for you to bring down.
And you presented this video on your YouTube channel,
where you refer to it as a pyramid scheme, which
is an insult in itself. And I'd like to take this opportunity just to play a little clip
from Flint's YouTube channel if that's alright with you Flint. Yeah feel free.
Okay Jamie another bit of airdrop here. Now this is a clip from your YouTube
channel. This was an interview with Dr. Lutfi Yondri.
Yeah, now you're very, very smart that you brought on a couple of Indonesian speakers
to join your assassination of the work of Danny Hillman, Natwa Jaja.
Dr. Lutfi Yondri excavated the site of Gunung Padang.
He did major excavations there.
Yeah, indeed so.
Indeed so.
And there's a conflict of interest between him. That's literally
at the bottom there. There's a conflict of interest between him and Danny regarding Gunung
Padang and work done on Gunung Padang. But I'm more interested in the way that you guys
present this and the mockery that's involved in it. Let's just play that little clip, Jamie.
Harry, do you want to expand on any of these points
to bring up a different point of view
of your thoughts on this article?
I will criticize him about the author first.
OK.
If you see the author, there is a Dany Hillman,
and the others, you can see only one, the archaeologist.
Who is the archaeologist?
The one archaeologist?
Archaeologist is the only one. Ali Akbar.
So, it's only Ali Akbar.
Eleven is the geologist. All the geography and the geologist. It's not the archaeologist.
Wait, wait. They have one sentence. They say,
on top of this buried decayed rock mass, a unique stone artifact resembling a traditional Sundanese
dagger called Kujang stone was discovered that is all they say is that
how you identify artifacts in Indonesia denied the oldest pyramid I think it's only Ali Akbar who supports him for this one.
He's the only one, there's only one that supports him.
I think, because I don't find any person. And the Graham Hancock too.
He's the circle of the pseudo-science for me. So his circle's not the archaeologists, you know, the ordinary people, or the people in
the outside, they waiting our research and they waiting what we say because they always
believe what we say, the archaeologists say, we say it is the civilization, okay, it's
civilization, it's like that because we are the researcher, we are the archaeologists.
Now I'll continue with my little bit of presentation there.
If we can call that up again, Jamie.
That's the still Flint and then let's go on.
So here we have, you have great influence on media and culture.
You say that you just have a small YouTube channel and that's true Flint.
You do have a small outreach on YouTube, but you have a much larger outreach with journalists and you've put yourself forward, you and John Hoops actually, as people the journalists should talk to. Now Gunung Padang was the first episode in my Netflix Ancient Apocalypse TV series.
It's about this huge pyramidal structure in the island of Java in Indonesia, which the
work of Danny Hillman, who's a very experienced geologist, has suggested might be as much
as 25, 27,000 years old at the very base of it.
And here we have the Guardian. Well, there's Bill
Farley on the left. He's strongly recommending that Flint's interview, the one I've just
shown a clip from, be watched. There's Bill Farley saying it was not worthy of publication.
This is the article that Danny Hillman and his team published a peer-reviewed article
on this. It went through a year of peer review before it was published until Flint and his colleagues
began to put pressure on in the media. Here's the claim being rubbish by Dibble and others.
They point out that Natuagid had provided no evidence that buried material was made
by humans. Actually, they did. In Danny's estimation, what the remote sensing shows is rock structures
that have been cut and shaped and moved into place by human beings. And the net result
of all this pressure was that Archaeological Prospection, the journal that published the
paper came under such huge pressure, there was such a huge amount of media fuss about this,
and I do think actually that all of that was caused, I think poor Danny suffered because his
findings were featured in my show. I think the
reaction of archaeology to my show was probably why Danny got targeted, but at the end of the day,
the witch finder general worked out and the piece was retracted, causing massive humiliation for Danny and his
team. Now what Danny and his team asked for was that criticisms be published
alongside the article, but that the article not be retracted. And that seems
to me to be fair enough. Flint and his colleagues have really created a huge fuss in the
media about me and this is just a small example. Satan loves Graham Hancock the
most. But wait a minute, hold on, they didn't post that, right? Who? I'm talking
about Flint's influence on media. You can't connect Flint to that. Go back to
that image again. You can't connect Flint to this. go back to that image again. Yeah, I'm connect Flint to this
Well, I can make a quick comment
But even if but this Satan loves Graham Hancock the most is either one of two things
It's either an insane person or it's some sort of a propaganda campaign
It's someone who's trying to dismiss you or get the fundamentalist Christians against you
It followed the onslaught on my work following the release of ancient
apocalypse. I understand but this person might have gone after you anyway. I'm talking about the influence on media.
Can I make a quick comment about my media influence? A lot of my media influence has to do with you announcing this conversation.
The media rarely ever got in touch with me about you until you announced this conversation over a year ago.
And then since then I've had plentiful journalists get in touch with me to comment on things related to your show
So you're the one that's actually given me this media platform. I do not go to these journalists at all
Which is great because that's why you're here. Yeah, happy you're here to do this
And I think we could do this amicably we can discuss these things
The the issue of whether or not this site has any evidence.
I'm moving on from Gunung Padang.
I think that's kind of important for the people listening.
What evidence is there?
The evidence is years of dedicated work that's published in that paper, which eventually was retracted.
Why were you laughing when you saw that tool?
Because it wasn't a tool. You don't
think that's a tool? No. What do you think that is? I think it's natural again. That looked
absolutely nothing like any human-made tool I've ever seen. And to be honest, the excavator of the
site agrees. And so, you know, that it was never described in the article. Can we see that again?
Can we see that image again? I don't have it on me, but you can go back on there. We'd have to play
the video again. We can Google it if you want. I just want to see that image? Can we see that image again? I don't have it on me, but you can go back on there. We'd have to play the video again.
We can Google it if you want to.
I just want to see that image.
But actually that's the least important part of it.
Right, but the image is...
That piece right there.
Boy, that piece looks like a tool to me.
It looks like it's been shaped by human hands.
If you cut out the part where we go into it in a little more depth,
and we compare it to the Ku-jang daggers, which it looks likegers, which okay. I'm not saying it looks like a Coojang dagger
I don't know what that is. But what if someone showed me that in the museum?
I would say oh 100% that was made by human beings. Does it mean it 100% was I mean in the weirdest of circumstances
Could that be naturally formed?
Perhaps but boy it doesn't look like it look at the the right angles at the base of it, how it looks like it's carved and worked.
Look at the line down the center of it.
That's not how we identify human working.
But that looks very similar to the touch of modern humans or some human that we would
recognize as human on stone.
And that's the importance of people that are familiar with the millions of artifacts that
do exist.
So we can look for things.
That doesn't look to you like it was worked?
Not really, no.
No, it looks like just a natural stone that looks eroded like that.
Yeah, it just looks like a weird eroded stone from a slope.
So like maybe thousands and thousands of years of a channel passing underneath the base of
it has eroded that part of it.
Yeah, rolling around, sediment, stuff like that abrading against it.
But how do you, what about the uniform peak, which is fairly uniform, the peak of it, the way it expands at the base and it looks like there's a... It's just
not how we identify tools though. The line down the center of it. I understand, but nothing
about that? No, no. And in fact, part of what we were laughing at is that they don't describe
it or go into any detail about it in the article. They just describe it in half of a sentence
and then they show an image that's about the size of my, you know, like a quarter or a nickel.
How large is the actual artifact? I think it's something like this. So you're making
about 12 inches? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The artifact is the least important part of Dani's work.
I was just fascinated by the dismissal of it that you guys were laughing because I just
don't know if that's a thing to laugh at. But part of that was in the context of the fact that Lutfi Yondri had been snubbed.
He'd been working at that site for several decades.
He'd published a book on it and none of his research was ever acknowledged in this article
and the media never ever went to him, which is why I got in touch with him because there's
all this publicity around this site, Gunung Padang, partly because Graham's right, it
was on his show and nobody's paying attention to the fact that major excavations had happened there.
This is, I'm sorry I'm interrupting you, but this image looks much less man-made.
Yeah, and that's just another image of the same thing.
But the other side of it is probably what we were looking at previously?
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, okay.
But that looks man-made.
So one side does and once I does not
Just to my untrained eyes the bottom bottom right hand corner Jamie click on that one. Yeah
Get make that a little larger. That's that looks odd
That looks very odd. That looks that looks like somebody worked it the other side does not there's not another artifact in the world like it
Can I be clear? Yeah, please. That the issue here is not that. I understand. I mean, we're
probably getting lost in the weeds here on this. Danny Hillman and his team have done years of
investigative work with seismic tomography, with ground penetrating radar. Using their expertise
in those technologies, they are of the opinion. And we can see the
image second, roughly in the middle at the top there.
Those are photographs from a Lutfi Yondri's book, not from Danny Hillman's article. This
is the excavations that he did where he has clear radiocarbon dates.
Sorry, I'm talking top left, top left. Where you see the red and the blue. Yes, this is an example of the resistivity
tomography work that Danny and his team have done.
In the article there's a question mark after tunnel slash chamber.
And my view is that this work needed to be taken much more seriously and not rubbished
and dismissed in the way that it has been.
And that I do feel that the retraction of the article rather than the publication of
opposing comments is important.
And thirdly, Lutfri Jandri has not done any of the work looking into the deep depths of
Gunung Padang.
His excavations have only been in the top meter or so.
Can I pause you for a second here and explain what we're looking at?
So the people listening, we're looking at an analysis of the ground structure.
And what type of instruments were used?
Seismic tomography, which sends sound waves down into the ground and bounces back a reflection
of what is seen, low resistivity, high resistivity, and ground penetrating radar.
We don't have time to go into all of this in depth.
The information has been extensively published.
I've published on my website a massive article by Danny responding to the retraction of his
article and I suggest that we don't waste a lot of time going on with that.
Okay, but what evidence is there that this is manmade?
The evidence is the interpretation that Danny and his team, who are largely geologists,
have put upon the imagery that they receive from their remote sensing work.
And their suggestion is that there are manmade tunnels and chambers in the depth of Gunung
Padang, that the stonework in Gunung Padang is not in its natural formation or natural
shape that has been placed by human beings and when you go down and you take up soil samples
associated with that stonework you find that they date back to about 25,000 years ago.
None of those cores came from that tunnel or chamber or any of those features that they described.
None of this is a reason for the article to be retracted.
I never called for the article to be retracted and it's still available online in its full text and all of its images there. Do you think
having the word retracted across the top of an article helps the credibility of the article?
Yeah, but they did not do an honest job of presenting the archaeology of the site by
ignoring the major excavations that have already taken place there. And I think that that's
very important when you publish an article. The excavations have been in the top meter.
What was the findings of those excavations?
Yeah, can I get the HDMI really quickly, Jamie? Okay, so on the left is actually the book
published by Louis Fiondry, and I'll show you some of the trenches that he's done. He's
done... So there's this megalithic architecture there, and he's gone down in all the different
terraces and along many all the different terraces
and along many of the different walls and excavated below them so that you can get
datable material from under the walls that are visible, the same walls that Graham featured in
episode one of Ancient Apocalypse, right? And so in the case of all of them, he has carbon charcoal
that he has taken and that dates to 2500 years ago.
It's impossible for there to be clear charcoal
underneath all of these walls.
Here, let me get a photo.
Also, he's found plentiful artifacts,
ground stone, this is for grinding sort of plant products.
This is pottery that he's found.
And then charcoal found underneath each of these walls
where there's sterile soil, date that, and that tells you that the wall dates after that. And consistently across all of them,
the dates came back as about 2100 years ago. So 100 BCE is when the walls that we
see on the site were built.
Danny doesn't dispute any of that for the depths to which
Lutfri Yondhry excavated.
But he doesn't demonstrate anything of the man-made underneath. It's the 15 to 20 meters below.
He does demonstrate its man made. And he claims that there was a reorganization of the site that was reorganizing an earlier layer,
but these photos from this excavation demonstrate that this was not built on earlier architecture.
This is built on soil. And so there's no architecture directly underneath these terraces.
built on soil. And so there's no architecture directly underneath these terraces. None of the areas where Danny excavated or dropped the core into have anything to do with the
standing architecture that's there.
Okay, so to summarize, these particular excavation sites are very clear 2,000 something...
100 years, yeah.
2,100 years. Very clear. Now, Graham, what evidence is there that there's man-made structures or any evidence
of man-made construction that's older than that there?
It's the interpretation of the ground penetrating radar and the seismic resistivity, seismic
tomography work that's been done. It's the interpretation of that made by Danny and his
team past a year of...
Which is just this that we're looking at here?
No, there's much more. Past it, but we just don't have time to go there. I'm actually giving a presentation on
Flint's influence on media and culture and we're getting drawn into a... But it's
important because it's something that comes up and I want to clarify. So is,
what evidence that you could show us that looks like man-made
structures, man-made tunnels, man-made anything, other than this stuff that's on
the outside. So the presumption is that these deeper layers are older, but why?
They're definitely older because of the carbon dating of the soils that have been brought
up beside them. What comes to question is whether those soils were associated with anything
worked by human beings.
Right, and what evidence is it that there are?
The evidence is the interpretation of Danny and his team from the remote sensing, that we are
looking at stone work that has been manipulated and maneuvered by human beings. And how do they
make that distinction? They never claim anything was manipulated and maneuvered. They never claim
that in that article. I've read that article a few times. They claim at the depths of Gunung
Parang that the stone is not in its natural formation.
They claim that that's a tunnel slash chamber question mark.
They have another area where they claim there's a step question mark, and I have never seen
evidence for a pyramid where you're saying your question marks for these things.
But this is not...
It's not been excavated.
Can we be clear?
This is not...
So when we talk about all the conflict involved in something that is clear as day like the Bimini Road
Right, so he disagrees. He says it could be a natural formation other people agree. This is less evidence than that
Right because we're not seeing the actual stone structures. We're not seeing the actual work. We're interpreting this ground
Penetrating. Yeah, exactly. So with archaeology, we'd interpreting this ground penetrating seismic.
Yeah, exactly. And so with archaeology, we'd often do what we call ground truthing. So
I showed you that road at Hestria excavated by the University of Texas at Austin. The
first thing we did was we did remote sensing. So we did magnetometry. And before we could
figure out exactly whether the magnetometry was accurate or not, we put in trenches to
test it. And that's always what you do when you do remote sensing,
whether it's remote sensing with satellite imagery, lidar,
magnetometry, GPR, ground penetrating radar is here,
you always want to make sure that you test it,
because you have to be questioning
that your interpretation of it can be wrong,
because that does happen quite a bit of times.
You know, it's like if you go out with a metal detector, right, and you get some signals, it's not always
going to be what you want it to be, if you see what I mean. And so you actually go and
you test it. That's just the way that all archaeology with remote sensing works.
Right. Okay. This is, okay, obviously we don't have time to get into depth, but...
Yeah, what I'll say is there's a major article by Danny published
on my website which presents all his evidence and which addresses the issue of what he regards
as the unfair retraction of his paper. And I don't believe his paper would have been
retracted if Gunung Padang had not appeared as episode one of my Netflix series. Is that
evidence to you as compelling or less compelling than Bimini Road?
It's it's at least as compelling at least as compelling, but we don't have time to get into it here
I want to go okay
I want to complete what I was what I was saying which is the the influence that Flint and his colleagues have on on media
and culture
And if we can put my
my
And if we can put my HDMI back on, yeah. So this was the next slide.
This is Benjamin Steele from the SEO journal, Search Engine Journal.
Thank you, Flink Dibble, for speaking with him.
And we're learning that how algorithms are rewarding good faith
critique by legit scientists and creators. People ask, here's just a Google search,
archaeologist Flint Dibble says Hancock's claims reinforce white supremacist ideas,
stripping indigenous people of their rich heritage, and instead
giving credit to aliens or white people.
Actually, I've never...
Did you really say that?
No, I said that this idea of Atlantis, the way it goes back 200 years, it has been used
for those reasons.
So are you saying your quote is incorrect?
I think that it's editing me out of context.
Graham, I've never called you a white supremacist or a racist.
No, no, you've said that you...
But how does...
Hang on, that's because, that's because
you're very, if I, if I may say so, very slippery in the way that you deal with, because you
know perfectly well, you know perfectly well that saying that my work encourages white
supremacism is, and encourages racism, is going to end up with me being tarred as a
racist. And you know very well that tarring
somebody as a racist in this day. Look, the results there, down there. Make no mistake,
Hancock is a white supremacist like Trump.
Look at that sped up.
T.D.O. there, it's racist fiction pretending to be science.
These are not my words.
But no, you cite 19th century sources, you cite 16th century sources and I label those as racist. And I see it as a problem to re-adapt those kind of sources without critiquing them.
Because this idea of a white Atlantis is what existed in the 19th century.
I have no such idea.
But you might not, but you're citing those sources on critically.
Why should I not cite them?
And I never make that the foreground of anything that I write.
I put that in there as a paragraph and I say he should not be citing these kind of sources
without critiquing them because they do the harm.
There's a lot of harm in the history.
Can you be specific about that?
What are these sources that you're citing about Atlantis and why do you think that they
reinforce white supremacy?
Yeah, sure.
So the reason is, is because for a long time Atlantis was used as a colonial
justification by the Crown of Spain for claiming land in the New World. And so this idea of
Atlantis from the 16th, built up into the 19th century with the book on Atlantis by
Ignatius Donnelly, it described this as this kind of global superpower that
was, you know, European and that was responsible for these monuments in indigenous areas.
It stripped credit away from local cultures of their heritage.
Right, but he's not doing that.
I never said he did.
I said that he's citing these sources.
But this is something that is a very nuanced subject.
And when you say that it reinforces white supremacy
Again, I said the sources do right but you would go back to the quote Jamie, but go back to the tweet
It's but listen, but you this is this this quote here
Reinforce white supremacist ideas stripping indigenous people the rich heritage and instead giving credit to aliens or white people
None of those things are true. I know Graham doesn't even talk about aliens, right? stripping indigenous people with a rich heritage and instead giving credit to aliens or white people.
None of those things are true.
I know, Graham doesn't even talk about aliens.
Right, but what?
Did you say that?
I said that not in specific relation to Hancock's claims, but in specific relation to this narrative
of Atlantis that has gone back hundreds of years.
Right, but that...
As Dibble, here's the Guardian, so they're misquoting you, are they?
As Dibble states, such claims reinforce white supremacist ideas.
They strip indigenous people of their rich heritage and instead give credit to aliens
or white people.
Why didn't you get the Guardian to put that right?
Well I don't-
Did you actually say that though?
I did not say that Graham reinforces white supremacist ideas.
As I've said-
So this quote is not real?
They strip the stories of Atlantis?
Yes.
And I think that that's an issue.
So Graham, you go around the world to megalithic sites, right?
So the quote, reinforce white supremacist ideas, that's not yours.
No, that's not a quote.
It's not in quotation.
Right, it was in the other article.
That's what I'm getting to.
And again, they strip indigenous people of their rich heritage and give credit to aliens
or white people.
In short, the series promotes ideas of race science that are outdated and long debunked. And this is your own article, Flint. Here you are. I'm quoting from that's a quote from your
article published in the conversation. This sort of race science is outdated and long sinks debunked,
especially given the strong links between Atlantis and Aryans proposed by several Nazi archaeologists. You are associating me with
this and you are attempting to get me cancelled effectively.
No, I'm asking you to distance yourself from that is actually what I'm trying to do.
But that's not what you're doing though. You're associating him with that, clearly.
I don't think so.
It's a propaganda.
You don't think that?
Look at the way it's phrased on your article.
This sort of race science is outdated and long since debunked, especially given the
strong links between Atlantis and Arians proposed by several Nazi archaeologists.
That's like a part of the headline.
So you want me to show you some tweets I've gotten from people that are fans of Graham
Hancock and think that-
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, chose to highlight at the top of the page. No, I did not highlight that at the top of the page.
Why is that like that? That's actually near the end of it. That's a quote from the article.
That's near the end of it. But why is it up there like that? I put it there. You did it. Oh, Jesus.
I did not put that there like that. I'm just taking an extract from Flint's article. Okay.
But you did print it. You did print that this sort of race science is outdated, long since debunked.
What were you referring to when you said that, if you weren't referring to Graham?
I was referring to his take on the Olmec heads, where he described them as from an African
culture. And he specifically took that from Magnatius Donnelly, who also described them
that way, almost in the exact same words based on their facial appearances, despite the fact
that Anne Cyphers has done excavation there and demonstrated with DNA and artifacts that these were indigenous people
from the area in Mexico.
And so that was an older essay that Graham has written and that was what that quote was
specifically relevant to.
But how does it reinforce white supremacist ideas that they were seafaring Africans?
Well, because again, it strips credit away from the people who actually did that. That doesn't reinforce white supremacy. It reinforces,
if anything, he's trying to say that it was black people from Africa that were able to seafare and
create these structures. Yeah, using some pretty silly stereotypes is what I said. What do you mean about facial features? Yeah, yeah. But there's many people that have made those connections.
Looking at those, they look Polynesian perhaps.
And yet the people that have excavated it and done the DNA right at that site at San
Lorenzo have shown that none of those people had African descent.
Right, but what are those structures representative of?
Are they the people that were there?
Of course.
But is it possible that those structures are-
No, we have no evidence of African people in the Americas.
Right, we don't have any evidence of it, but we do have the actual structure of those faces
and they do, I mean, be honest, they look either Polynesian or they look fascinating.
Excuse me, I can bring up some imagery on that.
Okay.
Perhaps we'll do that next, but I would just love to complete this little point that I
want to make here, which is the influence of Flint's and his colleagues on media and
culture. And again, we've got the Society for American Archaeology, 5,000 members,
Flint is one, Flint's co-author John Hoopes actually helped to write this letter for the
Society of American Archaeology. They're saying that I embolden extreme voices that misrepresent
archaeological knowledge in order to spread false historical narratives that are overtly misogynistic,
chauvinistic, racist, and anti-semitic. I mean, you apply those labels to somebody and you're
going to get that person hated by a lot of people. You threw the whole ball. I did not write that.
No, your co-author John Hoopes wrote it. We urge Netflix to add disclaimers that the
Continentalism founded. They They wanted to be called science fiction
In other words, that's a very clever way of canceling me no cancel culture at work. Go back to that
Why would you so much more of a celebrity than me is Flint Netflix correct?
I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I am Flint. That's that's not really my problem
Hey Netflix, hey Netflix, correct your mistake and reclassify ancient apocalypse as fantasy. Netflix corrects
your mistakes. This is you pushing this, Flint. And then the general media, fishy Netflix
show, ancient apocalypse is the most dangerous show on Netflix. You used the word dangerous
repeatedly in your conversation piece. I don't think so. I don't think I've ever called you dangerous, Graham. I've not called you these things. You're misinterpreting me.
You don't think I'm dangerous. You don't think that...
I think that the way that you refer to archaeology as you say that you're
number one enemy of archaeology and things like that, you are promoting
people to dislike what we do. We are doing our jobs. No, you started off ancient apocalypse by calling us patronizing
and arrogant.
I'm saying archaeologists see me as public enemy number one. That's exactly what I'm
saying.
But you started off by saying we're not sitting around thinking about you. Most of my dad's
colleagues, when I mentioned I'm coming on here to do this, they had no idea you talk
about the Ice Age. They thought you were talking about pyramids.
I'm speaking of archaeologists like you, Flint, who see me as public enemy number one and
who have quite a substantial outreach in the media. Uniland, pseudo-archaeology as Dibble
calls it, acts to reinforce white supremacist ideas, Flint-Dibble interview, ancient apocalypse,
Graham Hancock and conspiracy theories. I mean. What the fuck is the conspiracy theory?
That archaeologists are conspiring against me, which I've never said or ever suggested.
You claim we're trying to hide the evidence just like with Clovis first. We shut down
all the alternative narratives. That's a conspiracy theory.
Tell me where I've claimed that you hide the evidence.
You have claimed many times that we try to shut down alternative narratives, that we
try to silence them. That suggests there's an archaeological conspiracy where we're all working together to have one
narrative.
No, it suggests that there's a strongly held point of view, there's a paradigm, and that
those who go against the paradigm are likely to be attacked, like Tom Dillehay, like Jacques
Saint-Germain.
All of them still had successful careers for many decades, but Jacques Saint-Marv
excavated many other sites.
But are you denying that he was attacked for the very thing that you're saying archaeologists
don't do?
No, but I'm denying there's a coordinated attack.
But there's a coordinated attack on him?
I've never said there's a coordinated attack.
On Dillehay there was not an attack?
No, of course not.
Was there more than one person?
I have no idea.
This was before I was even a scholar.
How many architects were involved in this?
How many, the people in this? Hmm?
How many? When the people that criticized Dillehay, that went after him.
Oh, a very large number. The Clovis First Lobby, the Clovis Police, as they used to be called by other archaeologists.
So it's not, it wasn't one person.
Well, think about how many people actually study the Clovis period. That is a tiny period in one area of the world.
The majority of archaeologists do not study that. Even Americanist archaeologists.
But that's completely irrelevant.
Most Americanist archaeologists study much later periods.
It's fundamental to the issue of the peopling of the Americas.
But it's direct, it's also direct evidence of a group of archaeologists going after this
one guy for saying something that turned out to be correct.
It's evidence of an academic argument which happens, yes.
Not that simple, right? Because he was correct and they dismissed him, they wouldn't listen
to his evidence, and he turned out to be correct. What do you mean? He kept excavating that site, he invited people down there and convinced them that he, right? Because he was correct and they dismissed him, they wouldn't listen to his evidence, and he turned out to be correct. What do you mean, he kept
excavating that site, he invited people down there and convinced them that he was right.
If they didn't listen to him, and they didn't take the data, and they did dismiss him,
and publicly, they still did all those things that you're trying to obfuscate.
I'm not trying to obfuscate anything, that's no, that's not fair at all.
But that what he did to him is the thing that you're saying. It's a famous event from the 1990s where he invited down a series of Clovis First People
and he convinced them at Monteverde.
They came down there, they had a conversation, he showed them the evidence and what resulted
from that conversation was that entire group changing their mind on stuff.
I'm not saying there were not a few bad actors.
There's assholes everywhere.
But what I am trying to say is that it's not some sort of conspiracy of everybody in archaeology against Dillehay, against Graham, against
whatever.
But nobody said everybody.
And nobody's saying conspiracy. I don't believe there's a conspiracy against me. I've said
that a thousand times.
You said you're public enemy number one.
Yes, I am. Clearly, Flint, to you, because you have, and John Hoopes, for example, from the University
of Kansas, I can play you some stuff from John Hoopes too if you want.
So what is this right here?
It says to Graham, Jimmy and others, we see you and we'll share with the world just how
you try to bully and censor us.
Who's trying to censor you?
Well, I'd argue that when people swore me-
This is a quote from Flint Dibble, by the way, from one of his tweets.
There's times when people swore me, and they- People online, Dibble, by the way, from one of his tweets. There's times when people swore me, and they-
People online, you mean?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Tweet people.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, don't read that.
OK, I try not to, but I have a small Twitter account.
Yeah, but that has nothing to do- it's just people.
It's just random people.
When you're public, OK, and you post something public,
and you get involved in a discussion
about some contentious issue that's public,
the whole world can attack you.
So try to connect that to Graham, the whole world can attack you. So try to connect
that to Graham or connect that to anything. You're just dealing with people. He's not
responsible for that. You're responsible if you engage and read it.
Flint, do you believe that there's such a thing, you know we've all heard the word big
pharma. Do you think there's such a thing as big archaeology?
No. Oh, how odd.
Because here you are, Flint Dibble, January 23rd, this is 2023.
These scare quotes, sarcasm.
The reality is we live in a period where we're seeing an increased distrust of scholars and
scientists.
As an archaeologist, I think we have to respond by engaging with the public, and we do. In many ways, the reach of big archaeology is way beyond that of Graham Hancock.
Think about the millions of school children and parents who visit museums, etc., etc.
You just told me you don't believe in the big archaeology, but right here you've said
there is a big archaeology.
That's in quotes for sarcasm.
Oh, sorry, you lost me there.
That's in quotes for sarcasm. Oh, sorry, you lost me there. That's okay. Because you're saying, so you don't think that the millions of school children
and the teaching of archaeology, what archaeology teaches us about the past forms the basis of
the education system about the past. Not people like me, people like you. That forms the basis
of the education system about the past. Now you like me, people like you. That forms the basis of the education system
about the past. Now, you like to present yourself as this small lone voice, but frankly, by comparison
with big archaeology, as you call it in your so-called scare quotes, by comparison with that,
my outreach is very small, even on Netflix. Graham, I was hoping we'd have a respectful
conversation here. Yes, I was hoping that you would not disrespect me in
the way that you've done. I came here to present actual evidence, and I've done that. Here
you have Dibble exhorted colleagues to mobilize worldwide in the battle against pseudo-archaeology.
If there's any conspiracy here, who's it against? Let's move on. Next one, Flint. Are you having
fun? The ball's in your court. The ball's in my court? Yeah, go ahead. Say
something interesting. Say something new. Say something interesting. Listen, this is
like I came here to have a respectful conversation. I want to be very clear about this, Graham.
I have critiqued the sources that you have used and I've critiqued the evidence that
you use. I have only met you for the first time today, so I do not know how you are as a person or how you treat other people. And so, to be honest,
I think that you've just tried to go and smear me back for what you see as a smear on yourself.
Fair enough. That's okay.
I'm just presenting facts, what you actually said.
I'm presenting facts as well from archaeology.
Yes. The archaeology that's not And I've shown you the kind of big data
evidence that we actually have, which disproves your entire civilization.
Let's have a look at, it doesn't disprove my entire civilization. How could you possibly
do that when you've only investigated less than 5% of the continental shells, 1% of the
Sahara, 1% of the Amazon? How can you possibly disprove?
How can you claim there's an Ice Age civilization and ignore all the Ice Age evidence that we
have? The Ice Age evidence that we have?
The Ice Age evidence that you have, don't dispute it.
Of course there were hunter-gatherers in the Ice Age.
There's hunter-gatherers in the world now.
I'm sorry, there's hunter-gatherers in the world now.
There's hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforest.
There's hunter-gatherers in the Namibian desert.
I mean, you start off...
We coexist with hunter-gatherers today.
Why shouldn't an advanced civilization have coexisted with hunter-gatherers in the past?
I mean, look, as I've said, I think you have an issue with the sources that you cite, and
I think that you have an issue with the evidence that supports your civilization. I think we
should probably take a break and clear our heads.
Well, we can certainly take a break.
I'm deeply unhappy that you have associated me with white supremacism, racism, misogyny,
anti-Semitism, and other labels.
I mean, if you didn't notice, it was always the same quote recycled. So I said something
once and then it gets recycled in like 15 different pieces.
Right. I understand, but you said it.
I did say it, and I said that there's this history of this idea which has been used by
white supremacists, and that's an issue. And I would like Graham to separate himself from that history in a stronger way.
Because he goes around the world to different cultures, and he claims that instead of their ancestors building this stuff,
it was done by his civilization. They were the ones that taught people around the world how to do that.
But does he do that in his own backyard? Does he go to Stonehenge and say that Stonehenge was built by this lost civilization? No, he says it was built by Neolithic British people.
Because I wouldn't look for a lost civilization in Northern Europe during the Ice Age.
Why not? We have hunter-gatherers there.
Yes, a lost civilization would not be choosing to live in Northern Europe during the Ice
Age. It was a frozen fucking wilderness.
Not everywhere.
Why would they want to live there?
Not after the last glacial maximum. We have people in the UK living there. Well,
it's not where I look. I look in areas, in underserved areas of the world. We talked
about these- And so this is an issue. We have the-
We talked about these mysterious strangers. The lovely aspects of humans around the world,
and then he goes around and tells people it wasn't their ancestors that
did that.
No, I don't tell people that.
Well, I don't.
I'm sorry.
I don't tell people that.
He doesn't cite a civilization that created it.
I don't cite a civilization that's teaching people how to do it.
It could have very well been the ancestors of the people that were there before in the
exact same area.
Let me summarize in very brief what I am actually saying.
I'm saying that there was a cataclysm at the end of the last
Ice Age. It's called the Younger Dryas. There are arguments about whether this cataclysm
was caused by fragments of a disintegrating comet. This is the Comet Research Group. This
is the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. But I'm saying there was a cataclysm at that time.
There was a civilization. Now, it's you, not me, who say that that civilization
was an empire. It's you, not me, who say that that civilization, you know, had temples and
was highly advanced in every part. I don't say that. I don't say that. I'm looking at,
in my view, what we're looking at is a civilization like all others that emerged out of shamanism,
but that went a little bit further than some other civilization,
than some other shamanistic cultures, that developed a highly advanced knowledge of astronomy
that was able to explore and map the world.
And I'm saying that at the end of the Ice Age, that civilization was largely destroyed,
that a very small number of survivors settled amongst hunter-gatherers as we would today.
I've made this point before, but if there was a cataclysm on our planet today, people from our so-called advanced technological
civilization would not survive it. We have absolutely no hope of surviving a global cataclysm
like the Younger Dryas because we are spoiled children of the world. We do not have the
survival techniques. The people in the world who know how to survive are the hunter-gatherers
in the world today. And if I were a survivor of this civilization, I would head for hunter-gatherers and I would
try and make my home amongst them so that I could have some hope of surviving.
And that's all that I'm suggesting is that a civilization that which had quite advanced
astronomy, which was able to map the world, had a knowledge of longitude.
I'm not saying they had machines.
I'm not saying they had motor cars. I'm not saying they sent spaceship to the moon, I'm
saying that they were destroyed at the end of the ice age, that there were a very small
number of survivors, that those survivors settled amongst other hunter-gatherer peoples
and benefited from their knowledge and exchanged knowledge with them. I am not saying that
they introduced agricultural products to those people, I'm not saying that they introduced agricultural products to those people.
I'm not saying they brought agriculture from where they came from.
I'm saying that they helped to nurture the idea of agriculture amongst those people.
I suggest you take a little bathroom break, clear our heads, relax, come back, and let's
discuss some of the ancient construction.
Let's discuss... Before we do that, can I just,
the issue of the Olmec heads.
Yes.
I have no view actually on what they are,
but can I just show some pictures?
Yes, please.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Jamie.
Let me get the,
let me get the,
yeah, so these are the Olmec heads.
Santa photographed these in Mexico
way back in the early 1990s. And they're certainly intriguing looking. I'm not sure whether they're
Africans, whether they're Polynesians, or whether they're Maya. They could well be Maya.
Or Olmec.
I'm just interested. Yes, they're Olmec.
We have a strong connection between the so-called Olmec civilization and the Maya civilization.
Maya in a sense are the inheritors of the Olmec civilization.
I'm interested by things like this.
I don't know what to make of them.
These are Olmec figures from Tresopotes.
In the center is a picture of Pharaoh Khafre wearing the Nemes headdress,
and I'm just intrigued by the fact that these Olmec figures wear a very similar headdress
to that. I don't know what to make of it. I'm not saying that ancient Egyptians went
to Central America. I'm not saying that Central Americans went to ancient Egypt. What I'm
suggesting is that maybe both of them inherited a shared idea from an ancestral
civilization that was ancestral to them both. And then in the same Olmec culture, we have
these images on the left, the figure that's often referred to as the ambassador. And on
the right, the figures called the danzantes, the dancer figures from Monte Alban.
I mean Flint, what do you make of these figures?
What sort of ethnic group would you think they belong to?
I don't identify ethnic groups like that, man.
Like it's a stone carving.
That's not how we identify ethnic groups.
No, I'm not actually interested.
So good.
So you don't identify an ethnic group, but what you would do you see beards on these
figures? Yeah, and people all over the world would do you see beards on these figures?
Yeah, and people all over the world on every continent have beards from different ethnic
groups.
It's just curious that amongst the Olmecs, we have this, and we have this, and we have
this.
And I'm just intrigued by that.
I don't know what it means exactly.
But I do find it intriguing.
And I see this as actually an example of the problems here because you cite Spanish colonial
literature about, say, a white Quetzalcoatl coming.
You talk about this as different kinds of people.
No, no, no, no.
Yes, you do in fingerprints of the gods.
We've got to get correct on this.
We've got to get correct on this.
Are you saying that the whole story of the bearded, pale-skinned Quetzalcoatl was a Spanish invention.
Yes, I am. I can show you a depiction of Quetzalcoatl from the pre-Spanish period.
I can show you depictions too.
No, can I please get the... Here we go. This is Quetzalcoatl on the Borgia Codex. This is from before any Europeans arrived
in the New World. This is on a hide. The ink has been analyzed, the hides have been analyzed,
and this individual has tan skin, no beard, but a feathered headdress because this is the feathered
serpent coat. Well, actually, we can't see anything from that image, but that's not the point that I want to make.
The point that I want to make is, do you think that the Spanish deliberately imposed an idea
of Quetzalcoatl on the Mexican?
I think that every single source that we have of white skin in indigenous Americas comes
from Spanish sources, and therefore I see it as-
Who are quoting indigenous sources? But quoting them inaccurately because people quote things
in biased ways how do you all the time how do you know they're quoting them
inaccurate because again we have earlier representations there is there a
couple of these individuals there they don't have white skin this is the
documents Graham is there a document against about this Spanish conspiracy? Do you
do you regard the peoples of Mexico, the peoples of Colombia, the peoples of
Bolivia are so stupid that they would simply accept and imposition upon them
by the Spaniards? No, I think that interpreting these kind of sources is
difficult and so Jamie do you mind playing my video by Curly Tlapoyewa?
He's an indigenous archaeologist here in Mexico.
He is a co-host of the Tales from Atlantis podcast.
Can I interrupt you?
How old is that image, the image that you just showed?
It's from like the 14th century BC.
Okay.
14th century AD, you mean?
AD, sorry, yes.
I misspoke.
Chill.
So this is pre-Spanish invasion?
Yeah.
It's been dated and studied the hides
in the inks. Is there others of Quetzalcoatl from that period or before that? Yeah, there's
other Quetzalcoatl images and they're all very similar. Yeah. If you go on Wikipedia,
there's several images of him. Okay, go ahead, play this. I'm Krillit Lapoyawa, an archaeologist
and cultural consultant specializing in Mesoamerica. I want to
briefly touch on why expertise is so important when it comes to researching
our ancestral cultures. And I'm going to use the example of a mistake involving
the feast of Panquetzalistli, a Mexica ceremony celebrating the rebirth of the
Sun during the winter solstice. Panquetzalisli translates to the raising of the banners in the Nahuatl language.
This refers to the multiple banners that are constructed to decorate the various
temples and sacred centers associated with this feast. Now when the Spanish
cronistas wrote about the feast of Panquets alisli, they truncated
the word panquets alisli to the first three letters, P-A-N, pan, leaving us with la fiesta
de pan, or the festival of pan.
This shortening of words in colonial Spanish was pretty common, as paper was in short supply,
and this was an effective way of saving space.
Spanish friars had developed an entire method of shorthand
to accomplish this. Well, the problem arose when a non-expert looked at these
writings and didn't account for this shorthand and
La Fiesta de Pan became erroneously translated as
Festival of Bread. Pan is bread in Spanish.
This simple mistake can cause this individual's research
into Mexica festivals to go entirely off the rails.
And it completely distorted the actual meaning
of the festival.
All because someone without adequate training
decided to claim something without adequate
evidence.
Expertise matters.
Context matters.
It makes sense to me that if a group of people were conquered by white people who showed
up on boats and dominated the society, that they would have a great influence on a lot
of the myths and cultures and not
only that but that they would heavily discourage deviation from the changes that they've made
to those myths. And if you did that over the course of one generation, you would have a
complete different narrative.
What intrigues me is that whether he's described as having white skin or a beard or not. We have a tradition of a
civilizing hero, Quetzalcoatl in Mexico, Bochica in Colombia, Viracocha in Bolivia,
depicted as a bearded individual who comes in a time of chaos, who teaches certain skills and then leaves. This tradition is a Pan-American
tradition. David Carrasco, I think you have to respect the work of David Carrasco, has
drawn attention to this and to the notion that the magical pen of Cortes could somehow
have hoodwinked an entire continent into making up myths.
And I just don't think that's credible at all.
I don't understand what your video is telling us either.
My video is trying to explain the complexity of difficulty of interpreting Spanish sources.
Can I show a different video that talks about the complexity of Quetzalcoatl as a figure?
Sure.
Can you play the video by, sorry, let me, the one by Marika Stoll, but not the hallucinogens one,
the other one.
Hello everyone.
My name is Marika Stoll.
I'm an archeologist and research associate
at Indiana University.
I also live in Oaxaca and work closely
with rural indigenous communities.
It's been claimed that archaeologists do not engage with indigenous myths.
This is simply not true. But once again, context matters.
For example, the Quetzalcoatl myth that Graham frequently cites was written a hundred years after the conquest
by Hispanicized indigenous scribes who were educated by Spanish priests,
hence the overtly Christian overtones of this myth. But let's examine an indigenous Mixtec story
recorded prior to the conquest. Several gods, including Katsapowat or Lord Nine Wind in Mixtec
mythology, perform a mushroom ceremony and create the known world at Apo'ola.
During this ceremony,
Lord Nyawind plays music by scraping a stone
around a human skull.
This is a completely different picture of Petzalcoatl
than the one we get from the post-conquest myth
preferred by Graham.
In fact, in the Mixtecca Alta today, when asked by anthropologist
Joan Monahan to draw Quetzalcoatl, his indigenous volunteers drew a plumed serpent surrounded by
clouds. Again, context matters. And so the key thing I'm trying to say here is that Quetzalcoatl,
all these different figures, they're not all one thing that you lump together. There's a variety of different traditions. You pick and choose the one that
you prefer for your story, which is fine. I think that your investigations and your
beliefs are totally cool. I'm not going to convince you otherwise. Same with people listening.
I'm trying to show the facts here and just how complex the situation is of indigenous
myths, of archaeological evidence. We have
a lot of different evidence.
A Pan-American myth of a bearded civilizer could not have been imposed on the indigenous
population entirely by Spaniards. So that's my view. That's David Carrasco's view as well.
Again, if you look at my response to the SAA's attempt to get Netflix to reclassify
my show as science fiction, you'll find detailed information on that there.
Let's move on.
Do you mind sharing my screen really quickly?
Can I pause you for a second though? We know that once indigenous people are colonized,
that they try to at least alter their beliefs and if not indoctrinate them into
what beliefs they have and we have recent evidence for that in North
America with how Native Americans were treated when they were put on
reservations and brought into school systems and forced Christianity and told
that they couldn't use their language. I mean, we have very recent evidence of human
beings trying to impose their ideas on the people that they've conquered. It makes sense
to me that that would be something that would also have been done by the Spaniards that
entered Mexico.
Yeah. I am not persuaded by that in this case. The myth is too widespread and that constant reference
to a bearded figure is very odd. And as a civilization bringer in a time of chaos, in
a time of disaster after a great cataclysm. Again, I mean, Flint and I can disagree on
this. I'm intrigued by that information. And I don't think that the indigenous peoples
of the Americas were so easily hoodwinked by the Spaniards.
I don't think it's hoodwinked, I think it's conquered.
And I also think it's a lot more complex than that so I study ancient Greek
mythology and you can see how these oral traditions change over time anyway even
without being conquered, right? You can see for example the weapons, the spears
and the shields that Homeric heroes
used. Sue Sherritt has an article on this. And so, you know, you can see how Achilles'
spear changes its description from a big Bronze Age-style spear, the kind of spear that we
see in Bronze Age graves. And then the next line, he has a smaller Iron Age-style spear,
the kind of thing that we see painted on Iron Age pots. And so, you know, you can see how
these oral traditions adapt to what's going on around them. And I think
that that's important to recognize here with these kind of traditions that are
that are written down by you know Spanish and educated indigenous people
and by Spanish priests as well. Also that you must take into consideration I would
imagine that a lot of these people can't read and that these they're actually
probably not only being conquered by the Spaniards
But they're also being imposed upon with their language, which we know to be fact
Which is why a Mexican speaks Spanish some of these traditions were recorded by Bernardino de Sahagun within 20 years of the conquest
Bernardino de Sahagun is relied upon extensively by by archaeologists
You know that 20 years after the conquest after the conquest right but don't man you could
do a lot in 20 years yeah yeah okay and again there's just no evidence for these
kind of culture heroes with this color skin or those kind of things I don't
care about the color skin I do care about the culture heroes okay we'll take
a bathroom break we'll come back much. Much more to talk about. Okay. Thank you all.
All right. We're back.
I'd like to pick up on this finally, on this issue of Quetzalcoatl and on Sahagun and on
the interpretation of indigenous traditions. And this is in my reply to the Society for American Archaeology,
and their attempt to have my series
reclassified as science fiction,
where they suggest that all these stories were made up.
David Carrasco is a leading scholar of the Americas,
and he writes, I have no doubt that Cortes was striving
to impress the royal mind
with his extraordinary management skills, or that his literary craft was elegant and profoundly
political.
What is challenging to me is Glendinens, she's just another one of these archaeologists who
say that it was all made up.
Glendinens claimed that this Spanish political fiction of both Quetzalcoatl returning and
Moctezuma's vacillation and collapse was picked up by Sahagun, who powerfully
reinforced it, erroneously thinking it was an Indian belief when in fact the
ruler's gesture of abdication was a very late dawning story, making its first
appearance 30 or more years after the conquest. The stunning implication is
that this Spanish fiction, the story of Moctezuma's paralysis, parades down the
years through the literature and scholarship and is internalized by commentators less wary than Clendinan, all the way to Leon
Portilla who falls unconsciously under Cortes' charismatic pen along with the rest of us.
This means that Leon Portilla's extensive Naho'atl training and sense of the Aztec ethos,
not to mention Sahagun's profound familiarity with Spanish
native exchanges, contribute no effective critical stance in relation to the Spanish
literary craft, which later Spaniards were not aware of and which a number of Indians
internalized as their own.
I'm quoting from David Carrasco here.
I'm simply stating that this issue about Quetzalcoatl is more complicated than Flint would perhaps wish us to believe.
Well, no, I've stated from the very beginning that it's extremely complicated, that there's
a lot of different versions of Quetzalcoatl mythology, and so I think that it's wrong
to say that there's only one version of that.
I don't say there's only one.
Well, you only use one in your argument.
That's true.
I tend to think, though, also that this is fairly irrelevant at this point, because I think what we're still missing is any kind of accurate archaeological evidence with dates.
So when you go, for example, to the Olmec heads, or you talk about Quetzalcoatl,
or when you talk about any of the kind of evidence that you have in Yonaguni and underwater,
we're still missing dates and how this relates to your larger hypothesis of a lost Ice Age
civilization. And so I think that that's important to think about well-dated evidence.
So do you mind if I go into my argument about the domestication of plants and food and things
like that?
Sure.
Okay.
Could I just, since we talked about Danny, Danny Hillman and Gunung Padang, I do have
a major article on my site where Danny refutes the retraction of his paper.
And there are some images with that, which will perhaps help us to understand what he's
talking about. Sorry, I'm having to scroll through an enormous amount of material here.
There's a very long article on my website.
Like you, I've probably created like 500 slides for this conversation.
This is not a slide.
I'm live on my website here.
I don't know how to get to the bottom
of this enormous piece of work.
You don't have a slider on the right-hand side?
I tried to use it.
And when I used it, it did something
weird with the screen.
I'm very old tech.
Can you do like a search for a text?
Yeah, this is a Mac. I just want to get to the end of it.
There we are, yeah. Yeah, I just want to show some of these pictures that Danny puts up.
And I would urge those who are interested in getting into this matter in depth to look in more
detail at what Dani has to say in this article.
But there's that so-called Kujang stone or man-made artifact.
But it's really these are the different units that have been identified with the remote
sensing.
Not actually the remote sensing.
Those units were identified from a scar that was exposed.
But that's okay.
I'm not finding the pictures I want here.
What are you trying to find? I'm trying to find the imagery of natural column rocks, Gunung Padang column rocks.
It's the way when you get down deep that this material is referenced that Danny and his team have concluded that even in the 27,000
year old parts of Gunung Padang, we are dealing with manmade workmanship. I won't take it
further than that.
Which slides of these? Are you talking like B8, B9, and B10?
Yeah.
And those are at 27,000 years?
No, those are not. But he's pointing out that as we go deeper, we get material which is
not in its natural formation, but is in a formation that was placed by human beings.
And I wouldn't want to necessarily have...
We sort of covered that before, but like, yeah, what's showing that it was placed by
human beings? Is this what they're... What was that last image that
you had up there? A little higher up above that? What is it now above that? The one that
showed that, the outline of the area. What is that?
That's the five terraces. It's a terrace slope in a sense.
Right. So that's what has been excavated.
That's what's been excavated by Ludwig Jondry.
And at the base of that, it's been dated to about 2100 years.
Yeah, exactly. That's right and Danny doesn't dispute that. It's the deeper material
that's of interest to me. Right but what evidence is it that shows the deeper material has been
manipulated by humans? Well if we can pause for a minute let me run through this enormous
article and I will see if I can find it. Is any of the evidence visual?
Yes.
So is it that same sort of thing, like the imagery that showed?
Yes.
It's like that Rorschach test is what I call it.
So it's...
I'm sorry.
It's too big an article for me to go through.
It's there on my website.
It's Danny's retraction.
It's Danny's refutation of the retraction.
What are you specifically looking for in this?
I'm looking for his ground penetrating radar and his seismic tomography.
Why don't you just do a search for ground penetrating radar on this page?
Just, what is it, Command-F?
Yeah. Here I go.
Jamie will hook you up.
This is mine.
Okay, ground penetrating radar.
I'm not controlling here.
Okay. How many versions of it is there? There's only
two.
Yeah, this is the correspondence between him and the editorial team from archaeological
prospecting, which unfortunately ended up in the article being retracted.
I want to point out when I interviewed Dr. Yondhuri, his goal talking to me was to write
a response. Like we never got in touch with the journal to retract. It was other people
that did that. We wanted to write a response and I think we're still aiming to do so. So
that's our goal.
About Yongpedong?
Yeah, about Yongpedong. Yeah, yeah.
And while we're on my website, I'd just like to say that I've recently put up a major article
concerning Gobekli Tepe and the issue of whether we're looking at a transfer of technology
or gradual evolution or both. There's been a huge amount of research done around Gobekli Tepe.
Archaeologists have suggested that that research vitiates my argument that Gobekli Tepe was
a transfer of technology.
I've been investigating that research in depth, and my view is it strengthens my argument
enormously.
But again, we're getting into material that's too far and too deep to go into here.
I would just like- No, I think we should get into this a little bit.
What makes you think it's a transfer of technology?
Well, I start off my Netflix series by saying it's an enormous sight. You can't just wake
up one morning with no prior skills, no prior knowledge, no background in working with stone
and create something like Gobekli Tepe. There has to be a long history behind it, and that
history is completely missing.
You mean the Natufian culture?
To me, it very strongly speaks of a lost civilization transferring their technology, their skills,
their knowledge to hunter-gatherers. And what I've done in this article is I've brought
up to date my investigation into Quebec-Litepe. Of course, the Natufians are dealt with a
great length in this article. How do I search Natufian?
There are many predecessor cultures. The question is...
Who worked in stone.
Who worked in stone. The question is, when did this stone work? If you look at the research
by Hacla and Gofer, for example, and of the introduction of geometric elements into the stonework in pre-Gobbeck
Ditape cultures, you find that almost all of it comes after the beginning of the Younger
Dryas, not before the beginning of the Younger Dryas. There is an interesting development
at Ain Malaha in Israel, also called Ainan, where some kind of geometric plan seems to have been put into
place. But the bulk of the work, the bulk of the, I hate to use the word that archaeologists
dislike a Neolithic revolution, but the bulk of the revolution took place after the Younger
Dryas.
So that's why you think it's evidence of a transfer.
Yes, I do. Except that the fact that there's no domesticated plants or animals echo Bechley-Tapas. So that's why you think it's evidence of a transfer? Yes, I
do. Except that the fact that there's no domesticated plants or animals at
Gobekli Tepe, so if there's a transfer of knowledge, why are they not
transferring agriculture? Well, there was actually agriculture in
Abu Huraira, for example. But not at Gobekli Tepe. Abu Huraira is a Natufian site that was occupied before Gobekli Tepe.
Would you find agriculture around Notre Dame? Yeah, we have. It was a sacred occupied before Gobekli Tepe. Would you find agriculture around
Notre Dame? Yeah, we have a sacred site. Gobekli Tepe was a sacred site. And we know that they're
hunting gazelles by the thousands and harvesting wild plants. This has been published ad nauseam
by people like Laura Dietrich, who have talked about the kind of plants that they're harvesting.
And the ice was impossible that they just didn't bring food to this area because it was a sacred
site for ceremony and ritual and perhaps not at all for people to live in?
No, it seems more like they were there about half of the year.
So they're there during the warm months.
If you look at the harvesting season from the plant remains we have and then the wild
plants that are gathered and then if you look at the isotope evidence and the
Mortality profile from the teeth of the animals that they're slaughtering we see that they're there basically during the warm six months of the year
So this is still not at go back to go back to talk about yeah for about six months out of the year
That's when people are there
Harvesting these and so I sort of say they found an ecological niche and they've learned how to exploit this and to sort of stay
There for half the year found an ecological niche and they've learned how to exploit this and to sort of stay there
for half the year. They probably went to the lowlands during the other half of the year,
which is a fairly common mobile pastoral or hunter-gatherer strategy, which is where you
move to where the food is in different seasons, right? And so that area is a very naturally
abundant area during the warm months. And so, you know, there's so much more that's
under excavation right now by Lee Clare and other colleagues that shows sort of
domestic spaces around this ceremonial center that we have. I sort of think of it
as like Washington DC. We have the ceremonial center in downtown and then
we have the less nice-looking areas outside. Is it possible that there was a
sophisticated culture that also was hunter-gatherers because the resources were so rich that they didn't need agriculture?
Yeah, I think that's what we're seeing in this period.
So there's no need to grow plants?
I think they found a successful niche and they really exploited it and did a great job
with it.
And so I think that that's what's going on right in this period.
And it's also the period where we can start to see the start of domestication.
And so do you think that that also explains the resources that were required to build such immense stone structures
that they had the time to do this because they had abundant food?
Yeah, they had abundant food six months out of the year.
And while they're there, they had the time to build those kind of structures.
But were they the first of those kinds of structures you think that were?
Well, I mean that's a tough question to ask.
So I mean we certainly have T-shaped pillars from other sites in the region.
In fact there were some that were found by Klaus Schmidt before he found Gobekli Tepe
at Navali Ciori.
So it's a younger site.
Navali Ciori is a younger site.
It is a younger site and so I think there's more invested.
But what we do have is good monumental architecture from that period that we've known about for 60 years. If you go to Teles Sultán
or Jericho, there's a pre-pottery Neolithic tower there. And so it's an enormous, not
megalithic, but an enormous monumental structure that we've known about in that area from the
exact same period.
So this is pre-metallurgy?
This is all pre-metallurgy?
Pre-wheel?
Yeah, well, yeah, probably pre-wheel.
And where are they getting these stones from?
From the area. Most of them seem to be local.
The quarries at Kobakli Tepe are right nearby.
And how do you think they moved those things?
You know, there's so many different ways to move large stones.
There's been so many different experiments that show with rollers or ropes.
You can get enough people and know-how levers and you can
do that. And so you know there's so many videos on YouTube of Wally Wallington
and others that show you how you can move stones weighing many many many tons.
I don't think there's any mystery around the moving of the stones. Yeah. I don't
claim that there is. I think what's intriguing... I'll go back there Tappy, but there
certainly is in Egypt. Yes, Egypt's a bigger mystery and we can go into that.
Show us how that's put it.
But what intrigues me about Gobekli Tepe is the precision, the underlying geometrical
plan of the site, and the astronomical alignments of Gobekli Tepe. And I think that the transfer of technology that I referred to did take place. It took
place gradually. There's a site called Tal Caramel. You've spoken of Jericho. The Tar
of Jericho is fascinating. It's sort of Neolithic skyscraper in a way, but it's after the Younger
Dryas. There's Tal Caramel, which has got five towers, Quotic Tepe, Bontuclu Tara, Abu Hurera.
Abu Hurera is a fascinating site and it was hit by an air burst.
According to the team working on the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the destruction of
Abu Hurera took place because one of those comet fragments 12,800 plus years ago exploded over Abu Huraira
within 100 or 200 miles of Qubeqli Tepe.
Certainly a controversial point. I'm not an expert on this particular topic, but I know
a lot of people that believe that the evidence is not there for the Younger Dryas Impact
Hypothesis.
Yeah, there's a huge dispute going on about it. It's an interesting discussion in science.
I would like to say that destruction is an archaeologist's best friend. So when sort
of a site is destroyed suddenly from earthquakes, from volcanoes, from warfare, from fire, it
actually helps preserve material for us. And so, you know, if there is this kind of global
catastrophe, that should make things more preserved and easier for archaeologists to
find.
But isn't that dependent upon the scale of the catastrophe?
Well no, because even like it's not going to be what incineration everywhere because
we still have hunter-gatherer evidence everywhere.
Right, but it could be incineration in a lot of places and the hunter-gatherer evidence
that you have is after the fact.
No, the hunter-gatherer evidence we have is from well before the fact as well.
As well. Yeah, we have hunter- have hunter gather evidence going back hundreds of thousands of
years. Right, but when you look at the... Have you seen the evidence of the Younger Dryas
Impact theory in terms of like iridium levels, nano diamonds? I'm not someone
who's qualified to be able to comment on that. I'm more thinking about it from an
archaeological point of view, which is that if there was a destruction just like
with Pompeii or Herculaneum with the pyroclastic flow, that stuff helps preserve material for us. Same thing with earthquakes
knocking over buildings.
Right, but if you...
Wouldn't atom bomb preserve material for us?
Yes, because the atom bomb, the very center of it might vaporize stuff, but then the whole
area that gets abandoned afterwards because of the radiation, that actually is going to
make that area an archaeological paradise for people once that radiation goes away.
But if Randall Carlson's work on the impact to what was the ice that was
covering North America...
In one small landscape.
What do you mean?
Meaning he talks about it in the scab lands, right?
Not just the scab lands. He talks about that, but he also just talks about that there's massive evidence of intense erosion. So very quick waterfall, water flow that happened
through an area that was absolutely devastating.
I mean, look, so the more rapid the destruction is, the better it preserves for us, just like
with sea level rise.
Right. But dependent upon how strong the force is, right?
It's hard to imagine how...
But if it's a global catastrophe, how is it so strong everywhere, yet it's not wiping
out our evidence from hunter-gatherers at this exact same time?
We have ephemeral traces, footprints, campgrounds, fires and hearths, we have lithics.
Right, because human beings did survive, right?
Yeah, but we have it from this exact same period.
Right, but human beings did survive at that same period.
And it didn't wipe out the traces of them from that period.
But the traces you're talking about are stone tools and...
Hearths, footprints, things like that that are extremely ephemeral, animal bones and
seeds.
We have all of these things from the period around this supposed destruction.
But do you have them in the area where the supposed destruction occurred?
We don't know where the supposed destruction happened because nobody's
ever found that. But with Randall Carlson's descriptions of this massive
floods of water, just hundreds of millions of pounds of water. Let's go to
J. Harlan Bretz long before Randall Carlson. I mean the channel scaplands are
an enigma. The massive water flows, I don't think anybody's disputing that
massive amounts of water flowed through there. It's a question of exactly when that happened and why.
Also what would be left over in that area? There's not evidence of hunter-gatherers
in that area from that time. Well I remember he showed, when he was here last, he showed
sort of mammoth bones from that kind of period. No, that was from Siberia though,
wasn't it? Was it from Siberia? I don't remember. But it's certainly not from the
channel scablands. But let's cut to the
chase here. Between 12,900 and 12,800 years ago, a very dramatic climate episode occurred
and that's called the Younger Dryas. The world had been gradually warming up before that.
And then suddenly, it went very, very cold. There is evidence of a six-meter sea level
rise at exactly that time, which is very hard to explain. But it looks like the suggestion
is that that was due to impacts on the ice cap, on the North American ice cap, and perhaps
on the European ice cap. The evidence for the Younger Dryas impact is found in what are called impact proxies and that's iridium,
nanodiamonds, platinum, melt glass like trinitite, found in sites across a vast
area of the Earth's surface, 50 million plus square kilometers, an enormous
area. Abu Hurairah, next to Quebec-Litepe, happens to be one of those areas and
what they're suggesting is that a fragment of a comet blew up in the sky, that it was an air burst. Exactly the
same thing that happened over Tunguska in Siberia on the 30th of June 1908. That was
an object that fell out of the sky, almost certainly out of the torrid meteor stream,
which is thought to be the progenitor of the remnant giant comet, because that's
the peak of the beta torids. It wasn't big enough to hit the earth and create a crater,
it blew up in the sky. When it blew up in the sky, fortunately over an uninhabited area
of Siberia, it flattened 2,000 square miles of trees. It was absolutely catastrophic.
No, there is evidence for that.
There is evidence for that.
No.
Compelling evidence.
There's not?
No, Vance Halliday and his colleagues just published a huge refutation of this entire
hypothesis.
Of the Tunguska event?
No, not the Tunguska event.
We're talking about the younger dress.
You're talking about the other one.
I'm sorry, calling something a refutation doesn't mean it's a refutation.
No, but it still is not being applied to.
That's currently the record of what there is.
Well, actually, it has been replied to extensively by Martin Swetman.
But are you referring to Abhaharer?
I'm referring to the entire idea of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.
Right, but Tunguska, you're not...
No, I'm not debating Tunguska.
But that's what you were saying.
Then I misheard him.
Okay, you misheard him.
Yeah, yeah. Sorry.
He was talking about the amount of forest that was flattened by the Tunguska.
I misheard him. I thought he was talking about...
And it did happen during the torrid meteor shower.
Yeah, I guess it happened what?
Recently, like a hundred years ago or something.
Yeah, but it did happen during the same time of the year where the Earth passes through.
Okay, yeah.
I'm not debating Tunguska.
Okay, that was what it seemed like.
I apologize.
I think this would be a good moment for me to just give a little bit of information
about the younger dry ice impact. Can we can we do that because it's very important to
my feelings about okay. And God these short site I tell you being 73 is no joke. Yeah.
So the younger dry ice impact hypothesis since 2007, it's been a compelling and thoroughly
documented case. It's been put together by more than 60 eminent scientists. Of course,
some scientists oppose them as well. It was hit 12,800 years ago by multiple fragments
of a disintegrating comet. Mark Boslow is one of the authors of that refutation piece that you've just put in. Here he is saying that Graham Hancock's use of the impact
hypothesis in Netflix is all wet. Here we have a post responding to that. Graham
Hancock is a charlatan and a fraud. Younger Dryas impact hypothesis is
widely debunked. I'm sorry it's not. If you want to learn about the work done go
go see Mark Boslow. Here's that paper you're talking about, Flint, the comprehensive
refutation of the Younger Dryas hypothesis. Because something is called something does
not mean it is something.
Have you read it? It's fairly detailed.
I have read it in great detail, and I've also read James Lawrence Powell, who the authors
of this paper largely ignore, but who is a highly respected figure and in
whose view the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis has been prematurely rejected.
Bill Napier is a member of the Comet Research Group.
He's the person who's connected it to the torrid meteor stream.
He's talking about the evidence of a large comet about entering the inner solar system about 20,000 years ago, going into fragmentation, creating a
wide debris trail through which the earth passes twice a year. And it's a
catastrophe of celestial origin which occurred around 12,900 BC, that BP
before the present. Now you're referring to a refutation paper, but would you really so
quickly accept it when you look at the credentials of the people in the comet research? I mean,
James Kennett, Marine geologist professor at the University of California, he's a world
expert in paleoceanography. Dr. Richard Firestone, James Whitker, Albert Goodyear, Alan West.
There I am with Alan West at the Younger Dryas boundary in Murray Springs.
The Younger Dryas boundary is full of the signatures of a massive cosmic impact, probably
an air burst, rather like the air burst that took place over Abahorera. I'm not expecting
anybody to read these papers I'm putting up here. I'm just saying that the Younger Dryas
impact hypothesis has been widely published, extensively published over the last decade,
that there's a huge amount of information in support of it. There we're looking at the
Younger Dryas boundary field extending on the right as far as Abu Huraira and on the
left covering most of North America. It's also found in Belgium, by the way. It's found
in the deep south of Chile. It's found in Antarctica, it's found all over the world.
And this platinum anomaly documented at the Younger Dryas Onset is particularly
important. But the evidence of a cosmic impact at Abba Herrera, that one, I mean
we know that Michael Shermer is an opponent of my work, but even Michael
Shermer, in my view by the way I want to thank Michael for this, a true gentleman. When he realizes he's got something wrong, he says so. And
here he says in the light of the work at Abu Huraira, he says he's going to address his
priors about my theory in the light of this evidence from a massive cosmic impact over
Abu Huraira. So the fact that a
paper has been published which claims to refute the Younger Dryas impact is
really not anything at all. The question is what's the depth to that refutation?
Is it a solid refutation? Does it really work and why is it that the same team
who claimed to have refuted the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis in 2023, also published a requiem for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis in 2011.
Clearly there was something wrong with their 2011 requiem.
I am not a scholar that focuses on these kind of questions.
I focus on archaeological evidence.
So I'm going to try to reply from that perspective.
And so one of the examples you give is if this is Abu Huraira, for example,
the site is still there for us to excavate. We understand that it has some of the earliest
domesticated crops there. And so the entire point is that this kind of, even if this hypothesis
is true, it would not have wiped out the evidence for the civilization that you're looking for.
Because we can see very clearly that if it's true at Abu Hurairaera it did not wipe out the entire settlement. It's there, we're
excavating it now. Isn't Abba Herrera one of the first places that show evidence
of real agriculture? Yeah, so let's talk about some real agriculture. That's part of the evidence I'm talking about.
Can we talk about some agriculture? Sure. Alright, cool. Can you boot up my HDMI?
You got all excited. Yeah, this is like my stuff finally. I did my dad's stuff earlier,
now I get to do some of my stuff. In fact, this is some of the sites I work on. So okay,
I want to be clear that we have a lot of evidence for ancient plants and seeds, right? We have,
I'll show you the statistics, we have hundreds of thousands, millions of these just from the time
period of thinking about domestication. So how do we even collect
tiny little seeds of grains and beans and peas? Any idea, Joe? No. Okay, so you know how wood floats?
So does carbonized plant material. So basically we collect samples from every single unit that
we excavate and we put it in what's called a flotation tank where we pump up a bunch of air
to separate any charred plant material from the soil and the sediment.
And then it sort of drains out right around here into a mesh, and then we can start to study it under a microscope.
So, all right, big question. What the heck is the difference between wild and domesticated wheat? Any ideas?
No? Graham?
Yes, the domesticated wheat depends on human beings helping it
continue.
And how do we identify that?
I'm not quite sure.
Okay, that's important though.
So all right, let's go to the bottom here.
It's the scar, right where that wheat kernel or the spikelet that the wheat seed is attached
on, it attaches to the plant.
And the reason for this is in wild plants like wheat or beans or peas, it's going to
propagate itself by falling off the plant easily. reason for this is in wild plants like wheat or beans or peas, it's going to propagate
itself by falling off the plant easily. If birds or humans are harvesting it, it's not
that it wants to, it doesn't have agency, but it propagates itself more easily by shattering
easily off of the stem of the plant. On the other hand, as soon as humans start gathering
it that does nothing, because some seeds fall, it replants itself in the field But as soon as humans start gathering it and planting it in new fields then all of a sudden there's an evolutionary
sort of
Impact on the plant itself and so what's selected for is the mutation for a seed that hangs on to the plant
Do you see what I mean?
Because you're cutting off the plant taking it with you and then planting it somewhere else
And so this is a shift in grains
that we call a brittle to a tough rachis.
And you can see it's kind of a clean scar right here
on the left in wild wheat,
while it's a much sort of tougher scar on the right.
Do we know what the evolutionary mechanism is
that would cause it to do that?
Yeah, so there's two different genes
that actually control this in wheat, for example.
And so we actually know, just statistically speaking, and by sampling wild wheat today,
that this is going to exist within any field of wild wheat.
There's going to be a few seeds with this genetic mutation.
And then as soon as humans start collecting it and cultivating it, planting it somewhere,
it's going to automatically put evolutionary pressure on that,
and it's over time. And we see this shift from shattering to non-shattering in barley, in wheat,
in rice, in every single grain species that we have domesticated. And so you can see this
statistically, for example, in China, where over time, A, we have 35,000 of these now that we're studying, B, you can
see the population of rice at archaeological sites, it starts off mostly as brittle, meaning
it shatters easily, and over time it takes about 1,500 years for rice to evolve to become
fully domesticated, where it hangs onto the plant more easily. And so we see this repeatedly,
we could see this later on in the
Holocene, so we're talking several thousand years later, like five thousand years ago, in sort of
the Sahara Desert during the Green Sahara periods where we see the domestication of pearl millet,
same exact transition as what happens. And you can see these statistics of it happening,
changing statistically over time the population of millets in these regions
from, you know, a brittle rachis that breaks off easily to a tough rachis where the seed
hangs on.
How does it figure out that?
It's just, yeah, it's just that, it's just selectionary pressure.
It's the pressure of humans now collecting it and then planting it, so as soon as there's
one seed that's like that with that mutation,
it slowly proliferates every single time humans replanted in a new field.
It just takes thousands of years.
And we see this in wheat, barley, rice, oats, teosinte, which becomes corn.
We see it in millet sorghum. We see it with the pods for beans and peas.
So the pod changes how it breaks off the plant, and again it
goes from shattering to tough. And so we see that with lentils, chickpeas, peas,
common beans, runner beans, soybeans, fava, vetch, all of these species, dozens of
them, it's the first sign of human domestication. And so that's what we can
see. The second sign is actually... How many thousands years does it take
before this starts showing? Something, well, it starts showing up fairly quickly, immediately.
So you get small percentages of it, for example.
You can see this with the rice graph here with all of them.
So at Abu Hurera, for example, it's a small percentage of the crops that actually have
this feature to them.
So it looks like just 150 years and it starts changing.
Yeah, it slowly starts changing over.
In fact, Gordon Hillman first worked out this would happen really rapidly, that it would take just a few hundred years for the population of these plants to change over.
Now we know it takes a few thousand years for it to fully, the full population at
archaeological sites to go from wild,
breaking off easy types to domesticated, hanging onto the plant types.
That is fascinating.
Yeah.
It's just, it's fascinating how the plant somehow or another adapts and figures it out that
this is the way to survive.
It's really cool because it's not human selection either.
In fact, 40 years ago when we first started studying domestication, we thought that all
this was due to conscious human selection.
And now we know that it's actually the plant adapting to us and what we do.
Yeah, it's cool as hell, isn't it?
I agree with you on all of that. I don't want to stop you with your presentation, but how does that,
what bearing does that have on getting rid of a lost civilization?
Again, it's not about getting rid of a lost civilization. I'm actually here to show that there's no
agriculture at all in the Ice Age. It doesn't have to do with a lost
civilization, but that's a key component of your civilization. So the second
Well, there's no agriculture at all amongst the Inuit either right? No no
right but they survived but in his books and in his Netflix series he
describes this civilization as introducing agriculture he talks about
seed banks and things like that oh yeah and the magicians of the gods I have a
quote in here show me okay you want me to? Yeah. I want to see it. Give me a second.
It seems fanciful to you. I can't do your accent. Do you want to read it? It seems fanciful
to imagine that we might in an almost high tech sense be looking at the specifications
of a seed bank here. Oh, this is from Fingerprints of the Gods. No, it's from Magicians of the
Gods. Oh, maybe I repeated it in magicians.
And this is about the underground Vara that Yima is said in myth to have created following
a disastrous, following a disastrous cataclysm.
But is it possible that this cycle of domesticating wheat and beans and all these different things
has taken place many, many times?
And that if you left them alone
They would go back to the wild form where if they're like if there was a disaster and people stopped growing them in this particular
Region, how long would it take for them to revert back to their?
original state
How many thousands of years you think well, I don't know because we I mean we've I'd have to look that up because I know that
We've observed this kind of stuff, feral, domestic hits going feral, but I don't have that off. And
you said how many years from the original till the whole crop? Something like 3,000 years. Dorian Fuller
has actually published a lot on estimating the time ranges of this. So if you had agriculture in
12,800 years ago, around the time of the Younger Drys Impact Theory, and then people are resorted
to hunter-gatherers again, and it takes a long time before they start using agriculture
again.
Is it possible?
But that's not what he's claiming.
He's claiming that they...
Yeah, I know, but I'm asking.
Is it possible that those plants would revert and then the process would happen again once
people started growing them intentionally?
That's tough to tell because what we see is it's exactly at that time, at least in southwest
Asia, where this domestication starts.
We haven't seen the reverse happen.
No, no, no.
But is it possible?
Well, I mean, it would have to have happened a lot earlier.
But if people weren't cultivating it anymore, wouldn't the natural selection revert back
to the original state?
Yes, I agree with that.
It would revert back.
But it would take a long time.
It would take a long time.
And so I want to get into how the next trait size takes thousands of years after that, which is the selection for
large seeds. So we measure these seeds and we can see their change over time.
And I have here a really cool... Is this a selection by farmers and by people that
are... That's such a great question because actually we think at first it's
not. So this is the plants adapting to the fact that they're being planted in
plowed and tilled and cleared fields. And so larger seeds actually grow faster. So they out-compete
their neighbors that might have been planted with smaller seeds.
Because it's monocrop, because they're constantly surrounded by other plants that are similar
and so they're competing for resources.
They're competing for resources and the ones with larger seeds on average grow. So this
is done from a lot of experimental archaeology. That is so wide. Yeah, Glenis Jones, Dorian Fuller and others.
Glenis Jones at Sheffield who's retired now has taught me this. That is so, just the fact,
I mean I know we're in the middle of this crazy debate, but just the wonder of nature itself,
the complexity involved in these natural life forms adapting to their environment is
so fascinating.
And the fact that it's such a contentious issue amongst biological creatures, specifically
human beings, because of religious implications, but if you just look at it in terms of what
we know for sure with plants, it is such a bizarre, bizarre process.
It's so fascinating and complex and there's so much going on. And just with
our understanding of the communication that plants have with each other through mycelium
and the different organisms that exist in the earth and that they're sharing resources
and like what a bizarre, fascinating world.
Almost mysterious.
There's a lot to learn.
So mysterious. Well, there's a lot to learn for sure.
I think that's what's cool because we have this kind of stuff. So you asked about selection. Yeah. So
this is a maize cob from about 1250 AD. This is part of the Southern Methodist University
Archaeological Research Collection. That's how little they were back then. That's how little they were. So if you want to hold it, you can.
Sure, yeah. Chuck it over here. Be careful. So how old is this? That's from about 800 years ago.
Wow.
Yeah.
And so I want to thank Master Bullinger.
Was this a full piece of corn?
Yeah, that's a full cob, yeah.
Folks, this is like a thumb.
Not even my thumb.
It's like one of my smaller fingers.
And just to get a sense of-
This is crazy.
Like, they think of a corn cob today.
It's just, I mean, I had one over Thanksgiving.
It was massive.
It was like this big.
Yeah exactly.
We've grown like a farm now.
Now that's human selection, that's human selection at that point.
It's crazy.
That's amazing.
And to give you a sense of just how much we find, this is our charred corn kernels.
Oh wow.
Again, from Southern Methodist University.
And how old are these?
So this, they're not exactly sure where they come from.
They think they're subsampled from collections at Pop Creek
Pueblo in New Mexico, so several hundred years old for sure
But yeah, they were collected a long time ago, so they're not sure yeah
There's the kernels are so tiny and the only way dehydrated their charred their charred right, but that's how larger
Yeah, they probably would have been larger, so we we study how charring impacts these things as well
Yeah
So we do a lot of experiments to understand that so that we can see the shape and the size and stuff like that
That's so cool
So to get back to your question though
Because I think you you're asked a good question when we think about sort of this change over time with
Domestication we also see a change in time in the kind of stone tools that people are using
So it takes thousands of years before we start seeing these sickle type blades associated with harvesting these
crops, right? And then the next step we can take is this introduction, this sort of transfer
of technology that agriculturalists do when they move into Europe and elsewhere. And we
can track this in real time. So this is from a project, the very, I was actually doing
the flotation to collect the plants from this project when I was a student. So this is from a project, the very, I was actually doing the flotation to collect the plants from this project when I was a student and this is in
Albania, directed by University of Cincinnati. So these are the trenches
that we excavated, but this is one of the earliest agricultural sites in Europe
from about 6400 BC, right? And what's really cool is we can see what this kind
of introduction looks like. We see a full package introduced at the same time. We
see multiple different domesticated plants, multiple different domesticated
animals, as well as new types of artifacts like stone tools and pottery
of different types than what the hunter-gatherers were using there. And so
this is kind of a parallel. This is where we see this transfer of technology is
when agriculturalists spread out and they take a whole package with them. We
call it the Neolithic package, right?
And so that's one of the key things is we have parallels for this.
And so when we go back to this sort of end of the Stone Age type period,
where we're maybe looking for something like a seed bank or a shelter that's keeping these Noah's Ark or something like that,
what we can also look at is it doesn't look like anything's introduced. These plants and animals get domesticated in the natural regions where their wild progenitors
were growing and living.
And so there's not like an introduction of a new species that was not there.
Instead, we already saw these wild plants in place in the Ice Age in these spaces, and
then we see we can date directly these with radiocarbon, right?
There's no reason to assume anything else.
We date plant remains and bones directly.
And then lastly, I just want to talk about not archaeological evidence, but paleoecological
evidence.
So these are kind of cores taken in lakes, lagoons, swamps on the sea floor, and this
is what a palynologist, so those are people
that study pollen, look at. And so this map is from an article that I was actually a co-author
on looking at different paleoecological proxies around the Greek peninsula.
Is that a real image of pollen?
Yeah, this is pollen under an electron microscope from Dartmouth College, I think it is, this
image. And so, you know, we have these kind of cores that give us a sense of the landscape and you know we can track
for example the rise of different agricultural societies from pollen that
floats through the air. We can track for example tree crops when they start
getting introduced and when they become common. We can track grains and when they
come in and become very common in these different regions. And the key thing I
want to draw your attention to is a lot of these proxies, these cores
are taken from coastal areas.
And some are even taken from underwater.
So we have underwater cores from the seabed, and we can reconstruct these sunken landscapes
and the sort of ecosystem that was there.
And nowhere do we see an ecosystem of agriculture, arbore culture, or anything
like that. Instead, we see very natural landscapes, the type of landscapes that hunter-gatherers
would live in. And so this, I think, is really important because there really is... It's
not just that there's no evidence for agriculture that early. We have evidence against it from
those pollen cores, but also this article by Peter Richardson and colleagues
points out that agriculture, it was probably too hostile of a condition for agriculture
in the ice age.
The reason why is because there's too little CO2.
Plants need carbon dioxide to be able to propagate and grow and be grown intensively in particular.
It's also a period of aridity.
It's very dry because
so much of the fresh water is trapped at the poles in the ice sheets.
But this is not the case of the Amazon, right? In the equator, the environment would be different.
But we have pollen cores from those areas, and again, we have no evidence of any kind
of intensive agriculture.
Those vastly understudied areas. I never claimed...
But they are vastly understudied, right?
Well, sure, but you have to imagine that a pollen core is actually tracking a larger
landscape, right? Because pollen travels really far. And so you're able to, with one core,
track a much larger landscape and put that together. And so, you know, I just cannot
emphasize this enough. We need to, I have a phrase I like to use about archaeology.
We work from the known to the unknown.
So this is true when we excavate. We come down on the stub of a wall and we change what
we're doing to follow what we know, which is that wall, and we expose it. When we found
the Griffin Warrior tomb at Pelos, for example, we found the corner on the very first day,
and by the third day we already expanded the trench so that we could catch what we know
is there. And so it's the same kind of thing when you dig a layer.
It's the same thing when you sort of test a hypothesis like Graham's, which is we want
to work from what we do know, what we do know from the Ice Age and what we do know from
right after this period of domestication.
And so what we do know is all this kind of natural evidence about the climate, about
the ecology, and about how domestication actually happens. And so that's why I think that unlike the other part with
the Ice Age sort of coastal stuff, I think that's sort of like why do we keep
finding tens of thousands of Ice Age sites that are hunter-gatherers? It's a
bit of a coincidence we don't find your civilization. Here...
It's not tens of thousands, it's 3,000 sites that have been found underwater.
That's not true. We have 13,000 different sites in the Paleolithic radiocarbon database.
No, no, I'm talking about underwater.
Okay, but we have 3 million shipwrecks that have been mapped.
Not relevant to my article.
According to UNESCO, and they're on the continental shelves.
Can I pick up on some points you've made, or are you not quite finished yet?
Sure, you can pick up, Graham.
I don't ever claim that the very small numbers of survivors of my proposed lost civilization
introduced plant species. What I'm saying is that they introduced the concept of domesticating
plants. There is evidence of early, very early agriculture, more than 20,000 years ago at
Ohalo...
Gatherers. Yeah, of Ohalo II. Gatherers.
Yeah, of Ohalo II.
It never reached the stage of domestication.
Yeah.
They're gathering, not planting.
That goes back 23, what, 24,000 years ago.
They gathered, but they did not domesticate.
And there are a number of attempts at domestication, but it's after the Younger Dryas that we see
this sudden surge in domestication. Now I'm not saying, and I've never said, and you will not be able to find a quote where
I've said that they introduced agriculture. They introduced the idea of agriculture. And
we're talking about a very small number of people. The myths speak of seven sages, again
and again, in multiple locations around the world, bringing the idea of agriculture. But
the agriculture is then applied to locally available plant species. And we do then see the long process
of domestication beginning after the younger dryers, not before it. We don't see that domestication
occurring before 12,900 years ago. We see some attempts at gathering crops. We see some
sheen on sickles that show that people were cutting wild grasses
and using the seeds. We do see all of that, but we don't see domestication. The steps
that begin to lead us towards domestication begin after the Younger Dryas, and I think
that's the elephant in the room. I think that what happened there during the Younger Dryas
is extremely mysterious, and I don't think we have the whole story. And I'm simply proposing
that the survivors of a civilization who were in very small numbers
traveled around the world seeking refuge,
sharing their knowledge with those they took refuge amongst,
and sharing the knowledge of those they took refuge amongst.
It was an exchange, not a one-way trip, and they did not bring plants and seeds with them.
They worked with
what was locally available. And that's precisely what we see happening after 12,900 years ago
in this whole area of hundreds, thousands of square miles around Gobekli Tepe going
right down into the Jordan Valley. Abu Huraira being a particularly interesting example very
close to Gobekli Tepe is the first steps being taken towards domestication.
There'd been multiple attempts to harvest wild grains before that, but no domestication.
Suddenly we see the domestication happening. And of course it's happening with locally
available plants. I've never said that they introduced plant species from elsewhere.
But if they're introducing the technology of agriculture, that would imply that they
had agriculture beforehand, which as I'm trying to show, does not, it doesn't make any sense. You need to invent new species
of plants, you need to go against all the evidence that we have. What new species
of plants? Why do you need to invent them? Well because they were using wild grasses in
the area of Aga Harlow 2 in the Jordan Valley. They were using them 23,000 years ago.
Yeah, in the area of those wild plants. But they did not domesticate them.
But then what was your civilization growing?
I don't know. What I do know is, I don't know. What do you not understand about the word
lost? I don't know what they were growing, but what I'm mystified by is this sudden surge
towards domestication, which you rightly say is a long slow process. It doesn't happen overnight. It takes
a long time, but we see those first steps being taken after, not before, the
younger dryers. And that's where I... And it's not so sudden. We're talking about thousands of years when
agriculture starts in different places. So, you know, it's very early in
southwest Asia, but it's a thousand or plus year lag in East Asia or Mesoamerica.
So when people say suddenly, I think that that's a misinterpretation of the evidence.
In terms of human generations, we're talking hundreds of human generations.
What I'm referring to suddenly is the transition from harvesting wild grasses to setting in
process a project that will lead to domestication of wild grasses. And that cannot be demonstrated before the Younger Dryas. It can only be
demonstrated after the Younger Dryas. It's not a project, it's just planting them in the ground.
And that's why I think that there's something odd about the
Younger Dryas episode. And to me, that's something odd when I combine it with
mythology from all around the world about the destruction
of a great civilization in a global cataclysm, about the fact that there were a few survivors,
about the suggestion that they traveled around the world sharing their knowledge and ideas.
That's why I think that the spark for the agricultural revolution that we see in that
area was introduced. Not the agriculture itself, not the plants themselves,
they used locally available plants, they'd be daft.
But to play devil's advocate, if they did do that,
wouldn't it would immediately show up as agriculture?
No.
Why would it take thousands of years for it to take hold?
Because it takes a long time to domesticate plants,
as Flint has been saying.
It's not something you could do over that.
Well, you see the shift starting immediately.
You see the shift in 150 years.
And you see it immediately at Abu Huraira.
Yes, and then elsewhere not as early.
But is it also possible that the Younger Gias Impact Theory affected the climate,
and it made agriculture more possible,
and then they figured it out after that because it was colder
we've heard that right yeah we've had lots of cold periods in the past if you
go back through the ice age 400,000 years or so right that's a different
species of human almost no no no they hadn't 400,000 years ago but they
hadn't figured out anything that we the earliest the earliest evidence so far
for anatomically modern humans is from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.
It's about 320,000 years old, 315,000 years old, something like that, anatomically modern
humans.
So I think it makes sense to-
But they hadn't, but my point is they hadn't figured out anything that we figured out.
No.
So wouldn't it make sense that at one point in time the human species would figure out agriculture
And if that that transition would take place
For over a period of thousands of years after a massive shift in the climate the mystery to me is why?
During the previous massive shifts in the climate that took place multiple times over the 400,000
Yes, humans hadn't evolved to do any of the things that they evolved to do eventually.
Build structures, dams, you know, boats, seafaring.
All those things took place afterwards, right?
So there has to be a timeline for all innovation anyway.
I'm responding to your point, was the climate shift the trigger for agriculture?
Right.
It had to be the trigger for something, right?
What I'm saying is that...
Whenever there's a massive change in the environment, people adapt to that change. And if you look
at the sophistication levels of societies over the course of hundreds of thousands of
years, they always move towards a more sophisticated, they figure out new ways, new methods, they
get better at things. It just makes sense that they would eventually figure out agriculture.
In this area, there were multiple attempts to figure out agriculture.
Right, but there was also probably multiple attempts to figure out how to make a boat
before they figured out how to make a submarine.
Yes, that's true.
Right?
I mean, so I tend to think that what we see with our record is it's very heterogeneous.
So that's why we see agriculture showing up at different times in different places.
And so I think that that's really key to get across.
I do think that this climatic change, it introduced more CO2, it introduced more humidity and
rainfall that made agriculture actually possible, sort of as an intensive undertaking to do.
And so I think that that's really important to acknowledge, but I don't want to sort of
say that human agencies
didn't have something to do with that because humans were the ones that chose
to change from just gathering to planting. And so I think that's really
really key to demonstrate. I want to get to Egypt because I think it's one of the
most bizarre accomplishments of human beings and the age of Egypt is a fascinating piece of
discussion because whatever it is, one of the more fascinating things is
Robert Chalk out of Boston University, the geologist who examined the erosion
in the temple of the Sphinx and determined it to be thousands of years
of rainfall, and which would predate the Sphinx by quite a bit because this is all stone that
had been moved by human beings and it had been used to construct the Sphinx and this
temple of the Sphinx had been carved out. It's very clear that it was carved out and
you see these massive fissures that look exactly like water erosion. He specifically said that he showed these images to other geologists without telling
them what they were looking at.
And they almost unanimously said that it was water erosion over thousands of years of rainfall.
And then when he would show them exactly what he was telling them to describe, then they
didn't want to have any part of it because they're like, okay, now you're saying something
that's really crazy because now you're saying something that's really crazy, because now
you're saying that this structure is 11,000 years old as opposed to, you know, 4,500 years
old.
Surprise, surprise.
I'm going to disagree with you.
Well, it's not me.
It's Robert Schott.
No, Robert Schott.
Yeah, yeah.
Shall we look at some images of the Sphinx?
Yes.
Yeah.
Let's look at images of the water erosion because it's-
And then I'll show some images of the quarries nearby.
Let's do that.
Yeah.
Sure.
So if you could hook me up again, Jamie, to the HDMI.
And again, credit to my wife, Santa, who has taken every risk with me, every step, every
dive for the last 30 plus years. This is her aerial
photograph of the Sphinx enclosure and of the Sphinx temple. How did she get that picture?
In a helicopter. Wow. Back in the mid 90s somewhere. Sphinx temple directly in front
of the Sphinx so-called and the valley temple to the left as we view it.
And you can see that the Sphinx
is a rock-hewn structure cut out of the bedrock with a trench around it. And if we go in here,
the notion that the Sphinx bears the marks of precipitation-induced weathering is an
evolution of an idea that the late great John Anthony West had many,
many years ago. You've had John on your show before. He's a dear friend of mine.
He was great. Magical Egypt, I can't recommend enough. It's such a fascinating, fascinating
material. He has two of them, two series. I think there's like three DVDs in each one. And it's just
incredible stuff just on the undisputable things about the construction methods and how fascinating it is that they built these
things. Marvelous out-of-the-box thing, Kerry. I miss him so much. He was a
dear friend. It was he who brought Robert Shock to the Giza plateau and
Robert took a look at the erosion around the Sphinx and eventually came to the
conclusion that the best explanation for it was that this Sphinx
enclosure had been subjected to at least a thousand years of extremely heavy rainfall.
And Robert Schoch right now puts that back to around the 10,000 BC date, 12,000 plus
years ago during the Younger Dryas when indeed there were heavy rains in Egypt. And it's these deep vertical fissures
in the side of the enclosure wall, which most clearly demonstrate what he's talking about,
that rainwater pouring off the edge of the plateau would have carved, it would have selectively
cut out the softer areas of rock and created these fissures that we see through it and
this rounded scalloped profile in Robert Shock's view and in mine.
And I've had Robert Shock on as well. We talked about it for a long time.
And I want to pay tribute to Robert Shock here. He and I have had our differences, but
Robert Shock in my view is a hero. Robert Shock is a mainstream academic who has stuck
his neck out for an idea that is very unpopular with mainstream academics. He's taken all
the risks for his career, he's put himself out there, and he's spoken his truth. And I want to respect Robert
Shock, I want to express that respect and kudos to Robert Shock for everything he's
done. He's helped to advance this field enormously and to allow people to think previously unthinkable
thoughts.
And I've seen him attacked mercilessly.
Mercilessly, mercilessly. This happens again and again with archaeologists, unfortunately. Now, I'll just complete this point because
it's often said that the Sphinx was the work of the Pharaoh Khafre and that these two temples
were the work of the Pharaoh Khafre, particularly the Vali Temple that we see on the right there.
There's no inscriptions in the Sphinx Temple, but when we come to the Vali temple, what we're looking at is a limestone core, and those limestone
blocks were actually taken out of the Sphinx trench, which was then faced in a
later time with granite. And there's a quote from Robert Shock there,
who's saying that basically the original temples were limestone and that they were
faced with granite. Now, that's the interior of the temple. You can see that there's definitely
two phases of construction there. There's the granite, no dispute that that's old kingdom
Egypt. And then there's the limestone massive megalithic walls behind it, which are heavily
eroded as you can see even from here here. Now interestingly, is that temple really associated with the Pharaoh
Khafre? In 1947, I.S. Edwards, who was one of the leading Egyptologists of his time,
wrote this, around each doorway is a band of hieroglyphic inscription giving the name
and titles of the king. No other inscriptions or relief occur anywhere else in the building. That's been taken to assume that the name of the king was given
as Khafre. Actually, Edwards corrected himself in 1993. Around each doorway was carved a
band of hieroglyphic inscription giving the name and titles of the king, but only the
last words, beloved of the goddess Bastet and beloved of the goddess Hathor, are preserved.
No other inscriptions occur anywhere else in the building. In other words, there's nothing in that temple that
directly connects it to the pharaoh Khafre. But what's interesting is the way that that
granite facing, which certainly was done in the Old Kingdom, has actually been the interior
of the granite has actually been cut to match the heavily weathered limestone that it's
covering. It's been cut to shape that, weathered limestone that it's covering.
It's been cut to shape that, they're honoring and respecting that ancient
structure. And so in my opinion the geological evidence on the antiquity of
the Sphinx is strong. There's no doubt that the ancient Egyptians were there,
that they did work on the Sphinx, that the head of the Sphinx was re-carved into a
human head. I and my colleagues believe it was originally the head of a lion,
that the Sphinx was an entire lionved into a human head. I and my colleagues believe it was originally the head of a lion, that the Sphinx was an entire lion.
But the evidence that it's been carved is that it has far less erosion than the rest
of the body, correct?
And also the head is way out of proportion to the rest of the body. That's an issue
because one thing the ancient Egyptians were pretty good at when they put their minds to
it was proportion. And the disproportionate size of the head of the Sphinx in relation
to the whole body of the Sphinx
I mean if you look at other ancient Egyptian Sphinxes
They also have small heads if you put my head on a lion it would look small and they
Indeed it would look small
That's the point it was a lion before and it was cut that it was heavily eroded and it was then cut down into a human
Head, but it does have a distinctly different
Form of erosion.
No, that's actually where I'd come and disagree with you. I have some photos as well. What's
your evidence that it was connected to Khafre? The head. Oh yeah, and I can show you why.
The head looks way less eroded. Yeah, because it's a different stratum of the natural limestone.
I see. So if you look at the geology of the area. Are you finished, Graham? If not,
I'll put up some slides. Yeah, go ahead. Okay. Yeah, let's do this.
So first off, I want to sort of show this is what it looks like, even the neck.
You don't see the neck today because they expanded the headdress as a support for the head.
And so the point is that there's these different layers of this limestone here that we can understand geologically.
And so there's this very dense limestone
that's up by the head, and then the rest of the limestone
is much more fragile and porous.
So I do want to be clear, how do we date the Sphinx?
What kind of evidence, archaeologically, are we using?
And so what that comes from is largely radiocarbon dates
from the pyramids themselves.
So pieces of wood that were in between the
blocks of the pyramids have been radiocarbon dated and definitively tell
us that the the pyramids were built during the Old Kingdom, right?
But didn't they do work on the pyramids at multiple stages where they would probably like
reseal things and surface things and clean things? If they were constructed
12, 13, 20,000 years ago and people were still
inhabiting them 5,000 years ago, wouldn't it make sense that they would do things to
them? Well, we have inscriptions in there from areas that are sealed off from the actual
construction graffiti from the workmen referring to, for example, friends of Khufu and different
workmen gangs that are in there. And these are in areas-
It's graffiti like they tagged it. Yeah, yeah, they tagged it, exactly.
You know that that particular graffiti in the Khufu cartouche has long been suggested
as a forgery by Howard Vives.
Except it uses versions of Khufu's name that were not known until later by scholars. And
so that's...
What versions of those?
I don't know, man. I don't read hieroglyphs. I read Egyptologists.
Where did you get that information from?
I got that... From Zahi Hawass? man. I don't read hieroglyphs. I read Egyptologists. Where did you get that information from?
I got that information from... Zahi Hawass. No, not from Zahi Hawass. I've never met Zahi
Hawass. I got that information from reading, man. But okay, so let's go back. How do we
know that these radiocarbon dates with the blocks in the pyramid relate to the Sphinx
itself? Because the Sphinx is just hewn out of natural stone, right, these different layers here. So the reason we know is because geochemists have done stone sourcing on the chemistry of these
stones in the pyramids, and they've been able to trace them to different quarries at Giza.
And so this is photos of different quarries and cuttings for the quarries, and so they've
taken samples from the quarries themselves and from the stones in the pyramids.
They do different kinds of geochemical analyses to show the ratios of, in this case, magnesium and iron.
And then they trace them back to specific quarries there.
And so they know that a bunch of the stones from Khafre, for example, come from the area of the Sphinx.
The Sphinx is from a quarry. It's a quarry site for those
stones. And so one of the things I…
Go back to that slide for a second.
Yeah.
We're cutting into the quarry walls. Okay.
And so this is a photo of some of these quarries, and I want to point out that the quarry walls
look a lot like exactly the walls of the Sphinx itself. It has the same kind of erosion on it,
it has the same kind of rough working on it, and so what you're actually seeing with the Sphinx is you're seeing this
roughened shape from quarrying, which is then built with nicer stones around it.
Right, but we're talking about the temple, the Sphinx, the outside structure is what Robert Schock was discussing. That shows much more clear indication of the water erosion.
Not necessarily this, which shows a lot of kind of different erosion.
By the way, this restoration on the pores of the Sphinx is modern.
Yes, that is modern.
I'm not going to deny that.
But what I'm trying to explain to you is that we can't, A, I don't think that anybody really
agrees with Schock that it is erosion.
B, if it is erosion, well, a lot of geologists do Well, a lot of geologists do not, nor do many geologists.
But many geologists do. Many geologists do agree with that.
Very few. Very few.
I think it's quite a bit. Graham, you would know more than I do.
I think it's quite a bit too, but it doesn't really matter to me. I think whether geologists
agree with him or not, whether archaeologists agree with him or not, he's spoken his truth,
he's made his case, and I think it's a strong and compelling case.
And what I'm trying to do is present the evidence that goes against him, right? with him or not. He's spoken his truth. He's made his case. And I think it's a strong and compelling case.
And what I'm trying to do is present the evidence that goes against him, right?
But when you look at those fissures that are in that wall...
You see the same thing on quarries there. You know, it's the same exact kind of fissures
on this is just a completely different quarry in a different area of Giza.
That's not the most specific example of it though. If you show other examples of that
wall...
And so I mean...
There's other examples of that wall that are much more rounded out. So I have been to Giza by the way.
See this just doesn't look the same to me. Wait, but I have a reason for saying
that. I've been to Giza. The one time I went to Giza, it rained. In fact, the taxi
got into an accident because the oil on the on the road got so slick that we
were hit from behind. Right, it does rain. Very minor fender-bender. But the point is...
But you're not denying that the climate radically changed in that area.
How do you date erosion like this?
That takes a lot of experimentation, and I've seen no evidence that shows how to date this
kind of erosion to 12,000 years ago or something like that.
Are you in control of the thing now, so to speak?
I am, and I was going to show some-
Graham, can you show images from what you were looking at when it shows the water erosion because it's sure it's it looks very different
Though the images that Graham was showing from the where Robert Shock did his work
It's much more extreme the ones that you have are from a distance and the other ones are kind of blurry and you're looking at
It looks similar, but like I was in 2003
Sure you were but I'm sure you were.
But this is different.
The fissures in there are different.
They really look like water flow.
And if you're talking about the different layers of stone, which are softer in some
layers and harder in other, if you did have that kind of water flowing through it, it
would make sense that the softer layers would be more eroded.
And that's Robert Schock's contention.
And how are you going to date that, though, to however long ago?
One of the other key dispro...
Well, don't you date it, though...
I'm not controlling this life.
But don't you date it, though, by the amount of rainfall that we know took place at a certain
time?
No, because a small amount of rainfall can also cause erosion, especially in a dry environment.
So in very dry environments, a tiny amount of rainfall can actually damage things even
worse because things are so dry.
But that level of erosion?
Well, but you need to come up with some independent way of dating it, right?
And that's where the issue is.
What we do have is independent confirmation that the blocks in the pyramids came from
the quarry right there.
And we have dates on those blocks from radiocarbon dates of wood in between those blocks. There's an area where my work is
misunderstood. I strongly support Robert Shock on the 12,000 year old dating of
the Sphinx and of the megalithic temples in front of the Sphinx. I've never claimed
that the pyramids are 12,000 years old. I know some people do.
Some people do. I've never claimed that I
Do not seek to divorce the end. That's why I brought up from the notion that they've been resurfaced because that's the claim
Yeah, I've heard that claim that were what you know people had been living in them for thousands of years
And so that the material that you're dating is from that time period
Yeah, and what do you make of the hieroglyphs that show kingdoms going back 30,000 years?
I've never heard that, so I have no comment.
It's in all the king lists of the...
Oh, you mean the dating of that. Yeah, well, so there's a lot of issues with the way that
those are dated because they're not precisely dated, it's just generations. So it's about
how you interpret that kind of stuff. But it's still, it becomes an issue of mythology.
Are they adding in extra generations there and stuff like that?
Or are they actually reporting their truthful memory of their past?
Well, but we'd want to have directly dated evidence of that.
You might want to have that.
Well, yeah, I think if we're going to talk about archaeological evidence, we need
directly dated stuff.
And one of the things that's fascinating about Egypt is the discovery of older
construction methods that are below and very sophisticated
below the surface. The different temples were built on previous construction.
I mean that happens in every culture.
Right.
Where you see sort of spaces being reused in different ways.
Right, right, right.
Temple of Horus at Edfu where the Atlantis story is told in an ancient Egyptian context
is a good example of that because the temple of Horus at Edfu was just the latest incarnation of a series of older temples that had stood on that site.
It is a regular issue in ancient Egypt.
So how much time are we talking about then? So if we go back to 4,500 years ago, which
is the established date of the construction of the Great Pyramid, right? Somewhere around
that?
Edfu dates to the Ptolemaic period, so it's actually after Plato. So can I talk
a second about Edfu? No, we'll come to that. I think it'd be really good to talk about
Edfu and Atlantis. All right, briefly though, forget it, we've been doing this for a long
time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It's great. Everybody's hanging in there. But these temples
that were built on these older temples, what time period is ascribed to them? Like, what's
the oldest construction?
Well, in the case of Edfu, it comes into the early old kingdom, the earliest, not prehistoric.
So what year? Maybe 4,000 years ago.
And so what is the oldest construction that we're aware of in Egypt?
I mean, we have Neolithic buildings that go back, you know know 8,000 years or something, 9,000 years. Yeah. I think the oldest construction that we're
aware of in Egypt is the great Sphinx and the megalithic temples in front of
it. That's my view. I mean but we have no evidence from the Giza plateau of
any occupation that early and that's one of the most intensively explored
archaeological landscapes in the world. In terms of food, seeds. In terms of anything, yeah.
In terms of artifacts or seeds, anything. In terms of
artifacts or seeds or food, we have nothing that dates back that old. The question is like, what
would be left? Well, we'd find stuff just like we find stuff everywhere. Is there a point of no
return though? Is there a time period where there's 20,000 or 30,000 years ago where all the stuff
you're looking for would have already been consumed by the earth? No, because when you work in stone
This survives. Stone tools. Yeah, stone tools. But what about fire pottery? Bones themselves are gonna survive in that kind of environment.
What do we think they used to transport these stones, cut these stones, place them, and how did they have a
mathematical understanding of geometry to the point where they could put together this immense structure of 2,300,000 stones. If you think about everybody else
that was alive 4,500 years ago, you don't think of anything even remotely sophisticated
as Egypt.
I don't know. I think what we're starting to see is that there is a lot more stuff that's
very sophisticated at that time.
Right, but there's nothing like the Great Paranarchisa.
Look, in terms of visual striking stuff. I agree also accomplishment
Yeah, and I mean but the Egyptians tell us that they do it
They tell us the names of their engineers that design it like Imhotep and they they they have depictions of them moving
Enormous stones and statues that take you know 50 60 people they they do it on sand
Here wait. I have this booted up in my Google if you want Jamie
This is from later, but uh they do it on sand. Here, wait, I have this booted up in my Google, if you want, Jamie.
This is from later, but, sorry, I hate Google sometimes. But this is from a little later, I think it's New Kingdom, but it shows people moving this enormous statue. And so what they're
actually doing is doing it on sand. Come on, Post. And what is what year is this image from?
Oh god, it's I think it's New Kingdom. So maybe
2500 years ago something no more than that
3000 years ago ish
But what they're showing is they do it on a sledge right here a sled and then they pour water on the sand
So that it can actually help move it and so it makes it actually doable to move something that large and so I mean
I just want to get back to the point that look humans are smart
Let me ask you this though is this this is 2,000 years ago
Probably more like 3,000 isn't that after these things were made this well
No, because the Egyptians kept constructing large things so they did have things like this that they made during this time period? They stopped building pyramids, but they still built enormous temples like
a carnation. And these enormous statues. Yeah, exactly.
Sliding megalithic statues on wet sand, I'm not disputing that, but what I'm wondering
is how you get a series of actually dozens of 70-ton granite blocks up to 300 feet above the base of the
pyramid to form the ceiling of the King's chamber and the floor and the
ceilings of the relieving chambers above the King's chamber. No matter how much
wet sand you've got you're not going to get them 300 feet in the air.
Levers? What levers? Yeah, well, levers made of wood. We can find this online.
No, hang on, levers made of wood. You been to geezer so, you know what the Great Pyramid. Yeah
We're envisaging a ramp right? It's possible. Yeah a
Ramp to bring yeah stones up to that
I'm in very smart people with large labor forces and the equipment need to I'm envisaging that too
But I find it difficult to see how your wet sand example gets 70 ton granite blocks 300 feet in the air.
But you've got to make the concession that there's such a jump between what these people
were able to do and what everybody else was able to do. There's such a difference.
I mean, I think there's just doing something different is how I'd put it.
It's not just doing something different. It's doing something on a scale that no one is doing 4,500 years ago.
That scale's insane.
It's cool as hell.
I mean, it's cool as hell.
But it's also, it's so different.
It's as different to the rest of the world as to hunter-gatherer civilizations that are
in the Amazon to people that live in Manhattan.
And that's why even in the Roman period, Egypt was a tourist destination, you know, to go there
and see these marvels. And so ever since they've been built, it's become a tourist destination
because they're so visually striking and they really grab at everybody's imagination, right?
And so there's something very enigmatic about that. But I don't want to sort of say just because
it's enigmatic and mysterious that we should don't want to sort of say just because it's enigmatic
and mysterious that we should not give credit to these people because they were
smart people. No, it's the same people. No one's saying don't give credit to these people. I think even
people that are dating Egypt back, like the hieroglyphs that dated back to
more than 30,000 years, it's the same people. No one's saying it's different
people that did it. What everyone's saying is like, how did they achieve the level of sophistication that they absolutely undeniably
had at the very most recent 4,500 years ago? So just alone, like, what the fuck was going
on there?
There's a date stamp at Giza. And this concerns another issue between archaeology and me,
is what counts as evidence? What can we regard as evidence? Archaeology dismisses the great
Sphinx as evidence for an older civilization on the grounds that you've put, can't be presented
as evidence for an older civilization. And the other thing that archaeology tends to
dismiss is mythology
and tradition. Can I give a small quick presentation which is much to do with Egypt and much to
do with what impassions me about this subject? And then we'll come back to Flint.
So this is another one of Santhas' amazing pictures of the Great Pyramid from the air.
The ancient Egyptians spoke of a time called Zeptepe, the first time, when the gods walked
the earth. And if we're going to find out when that was, you need to have knowledge
of an obscure astronomical phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes. Now we all
know that we, everybody's heard the song, we live in the dawning of the age
of Aquarius.
Actually, this connects to this idea.
Because the Earth wobbles on its axis and it's the viewing platform from which we observe
the stars, it changes the times that particular stars rise in times of year and it changes
the positions of those stars in the sky as viewed from the
Earth.
Right now at dawn on the spring equinox, the sun rises against the background of the constellation
of Pisces. We live, if you like, in the age of Pisces and we will do for the next hundred
years or so, but because of the processional wobble, we're going to move into the age of
Aquarius in about a hundred years. That just means that the constellation of Aquarius will
house the sun on the spring equinox in that time because of the processional wobble. And
these shifts take place at the rate of about one degree every 72 years. Now, the discovery
is attributed to a Greek astronomer and mathematician called Hipparchus, and we're looking at 127 BC. But these guys, Giorgio de Santillana
and Hertha von Deschend, in an amazing piece of work called Hamlet's Mill, strongly dispute
that. And they suggest that we're looking at an extremely ancient knowledge of procession.
Worldwide heritage of a lost civilization to which all subsequent civilizations in all
parts of the globe forgetful of the source of the precious legacy they received are the
ungrateful heirs.
Giorgio de Santillana was professor of the history of science at MIT.
Hertha von Deschen was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University.
So they're no lightweights.
They refer to the fact that a series of numbers keep cropping up in ancient myths all around
the world associated with imagery.
And those numbers are all based on the number 72.
I have to be quick about this, but 72 divided by 2 is 36.
72 plus 36 is 108.
108 divided by 2 is 54.
There's a whole series of numbers in ancient mythology, far more ancient than the Greeks,
which deploy these
numbers. They go back into the Rig Veda in written forms and much, much earlier than
that. If we go to Angkor in Cambodia, an amazing site against, Santha took this from a helicopter
way back in the 90s, you'll find at Angkor a myth displayed on the walls and that's called the churning of the milky ocean and here
we see the the great serpent wrapped around the body of Mount Mandera and
teams of demons and angels are pulling on the body of the serpent and this is
seen as an image of precession of the processional wobble by Santillana and
Vundescient and they point out that it's not only expressed in myth,
but also in architecture.
So at Angkor Thom, we've got 108 statues on the bridge.
That's a processional number.
It's 72 plus 36, 54 on each side.
And it's the churning of the milky ocean by Mount Mandera
that's being displayed
there. Angkor Wat is, like the Great Pyramid, is aligned to within a fraction of a single
degree of true north, south, east and west. And on the spring equinox, if you go to Angkor
and stand at the end of that long causeway right in the centre, you'll observe this and
you'll only observe it then. You'll observe the sun rising directly over the central tower
and sitting on top of the central tower of Angkor Wat. This site, nobody disputes
it, is an equinoctial marker. It's designed to celebrate the spring equinox
and that's what you see at that time and at that time only. Let's jump over to
Egypt now. When we come to the Nile Delta, here's the Great Pyramid. Now I give
you some statistics. It's 481.39
feet high originally. It's a bit lower today. It lost some 30 feet from its top
in an earthquake. Footprint of the base 13.1 acres, weight 6 million tons, 2.3
million blocks. Lost casing stones also came off in that earthquake. 115,000 of
them weighing 10 tons each covering an area of 22 acres.
Anger of Slope is 52 degrees. And this monument is aligned to within three sixtieths of a
single degree of true north. Why do I pick three sixtieths? Because degrees are divided
into 60 minutes. So we're talking about three arc minutes, a tiny fraction of a single degree
of error in the Great Pyramid.
The Great Pyramid seems to be speaking to the Earth. It's not only aligned almost precisely
to true north, it's placed very close to latitude 30, one-third of the way between the equator
and the North Pole. And most mysteriously of all, if you take the height of the Great
Pyramid and multiply it by 43,200, which is a precessional
number, it's one of those numbers, you get the polar radius of the Earth. And if you
measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by the same number, you get
the equatorial circumference of the Earth. So we have a monument that is perfectly aligned
to geographical north and that encodes the dimensions of the Earth on
a scale based on a key motion of the Earth itself, the precession of the Earth's axis.
This to me is very clever. Now I'm not going to support that here, there's not much time,
but if anybody wants to freeze the frame and look at this slide, all this information comes
from IES Edwards about the statistics of the Great Pyramid and the calculations are there. Now there's the Giza Plateau, there's our three Great
Pyramids. Can you see the Sphinx in this Flint?
How about you Joe? Is that in the left hand corner? Yeah it's in the left there.
It's in the left there. It's 270 feet long, but you can see how it's kind of dwarfed
by the pyramids in the background. The Great Sphinx looks over the Nile Valley. That's
the Nile Valley we're looking at. And the Great Sphinx is oriented perfectly due east.
We've talked about the erosion of the Sphinx. This is the view from the back of the Sphinx's
head. If you were there at the summer solstice, you would see the sun rising very far to the left,
far to the north of east.
If you were there at the winter solstice,
you'd see the sun rising very far to the south,
south of east.
But if you're there on the spring equinox,
you see the Sphinx is looking directly at the rising sun,
just like Angkor does.
It's an equinoctial marker.
It's clearly there to celebrate the equinoctial moment. And we find the same kind of metaphor of a whirling, churning
process taking place in ancient Egypt, for example, here. And the question then becomes,
was there a time when the lion Sphinx looked at a lion in the sky? And yes, there was a
time when the lion Sphinx looked at a lion in the sky. And yes, there was a time when the lion's finks looked at a lion in the sky, and that time is around 12,600 years ago. It's not
a single moment, it's an epoch of several hundred years. But the constellation of Leo,
it was the age of Leo, was rising, housing the sun 12,600 years ago.
Procession can be used to fix the date of monument still is today. The
Hoover Dam has a star map built into it which freezes the skies above the
Hoover Dam and the reason that is there, the architect said, in remote ages to
come, intelligent people with knowledge of procession would be able to discern
the astronomical time of the dam's construction. So let's use this processional tool to consider
the age of the whole Giza Plateau. I strongly reaffirm I do not insist that the pyramids
are 12,000 years old. I do insist that the Sphinx is 12,000 years old. I think it's a
very strong argument that Robert Shock has made. But I do think the ground platforms
for the Sphinx were there. I think that for the pyramids were there 12,000 years ago and I think the project was completed much
later by the ancient Egyptians. You need to know a bit about Egyptian mythology. The god
Osiris who walked the earth in the legendary Zeph-Tepi the first time, murdered by 72 conspirators,
another one of those processional numbers, eventually becomes the ruler of the
ancient Egyptian afterlife kingdom which is called the Duat, which is both an underworld
and a region of the sky. And here's Robert Baval's Orion correlation. And one of Robert's
strongest critics is Ed Krupp from the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, who doesn't accept
the correlation. Nevertheless, he does accept that according to the pyramid text, the pharaoh rose to the stars as Orion.
Egyptian astronomy recognized Orion at least as belt as the celestial
incarnation of Osiris. And I want to pay tribute to Robert Boval. He's another
researcher in this alternative field who has suffered massive heart-rending
attacks by the academic establishment and yet who has suffered massive heart-rending attacks by the academic establishment, and yet who
has contributed a key idea that is worthy of further consideration. One of the reasons
I don't separate the Great Pyramids from the ancient Egyptians is that there are four
shafts cut through the body of the Great Pyramid, and this is not disputed. The southern shaft
of the King's Chamber points directly at the belt of Orion,
specifically at the lowest of the three stars, as it crosses the meridian, which is the north-south
line in the sky, in the epoch that the pyramids are supposedly built, around 2500 BC. And
so do all the other four shafts also target stars in that epoch, the epoch of 2500 BC. But when we come back to the Sphinx, we have
to remember this alignment is slow. It would have remained recognizable for more than a
thousand years, roughly the Younger Dryas, roughly from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago. What
confronts us at Giza in my view is a three-dimensional representation of the sky of about 12,800
to 11,600 years ago.
We have the Sphinx looking due east at the constellation of Leo.
At the moment, the sun bisects the horizon.
We find that the constellation of Orion is sitting due south on the meridian with its
three belt stars in the same pattern as the three great pyramids on the ground. And not only that, but precession has caused
the orientation of the belt stars to change. In 2500 BC, they were in the wrong orientation.
10,500 BC, they're in the right orientation. And I'm just asking, are we looking at the
date stamp of Zeptepi, the first time, written in the astronomical language of precession?
And lastly, in case anybody doubts that we've made up these images, these are shots from
Stellarium.
This is 10,600 BC.
This is the due east view from Giza, looking at the constellation of Leo rising in direct
line with the gaze of the Sphinx.
As the sun breaks the horizon,
Leo is a bit higher. If we look due south at that moment, we'll see the constellation
of Orion sitting due south on the meridian. And finally, we have Orion and the Sphinx
in this single image. These are genuine images from Stellarium. Anybody can have a computer
software program and go look at the ancient skies.
And the ancient skies tell us that there's this astonishing connection
between the Sphinx and its equinoctial alignment and the constellation of Leo and between the great pyramids and
the constellation of Orion as it looked
12,500 years ago.
Flint, what is your take on this, the understanding of the processional equinoxes?
Do you buy it?
Unsurprisingly no.
So let me explain.
So my issue here, there's a bunch of things that Graham talked about and I have replied
to a few different ones.
And then I'd like to do a quick presentation.
Oh, geez, this has been a long conversation. So I think the issue with the lion facing Leo rests on that assumption.
So obviously it's facing the sunrise.
It even aligns reasonably well with the equinox.
But we don't have any examples of, say, a constellation sign facing another constellation
sign.
That's a one-off example that, as I started at the very beginning,
archaeology is built upon patterns. And so a one-off example to me is not convincing that that's
the intention of that, is to have it facing Leo, because we only have this one example. And it's
an interesting idea, but I don't see it as proven at all. If we want to get into some of the math, so
look, I had surgery this last year and I was listening to one of your podcasts, Graham,
while I was zonked out of my mind on painkillers.
Thank you. That must have been fun.
Oh, yeah. And so it wasn't a Joe Rogan podcast, it was a different one you did. But so I wanted
to check out this math about the pyramid.
And so what, I mean, I know that you did not originate with this math, but you use it a
lot to explain how cultures see the precession.
And so in a sense, you take the height of the pyramid, 146.5 meters, you're trying to
see how it relates to the polar radius of the earth, 6,356,000 meters, and then you're
using this precession number 72, which is the amount that the earth's 6,356,000 meters, and then you're using this procession number 72, which is
the amount that the earth's wobble changes by one degree is 72 years.
And so you multiply it by 43,200.
Why is that a processional number?
Because that's 72 times 600.
And I checked it.
I checked it in different kinds of things.
If you do it in feet or you do it in a metric system, it works, right?
Because that's how math works.
So with multiplication, it's going to be transferable
to different kind of units and it's 99.57% accurate. But then I thought to myself,
wait a second, can we find this elsewhere? And sure enough, as Graham states, you can.
So I went to my own backyard, the Parthenon in Greece, and the Parthenon has 46 inner columns
plus 23 outer columns for a total of 69 columns, which I
think is a pretty cool number in and of itself. You got 69. And then you can multiply 69 by
576,000, which is also a processional number of 72 times 8,000, and you get 39,744,000,
which is 99.17% accurate to the global circumference of the Earth.
And kind of my point here, though, is that this will work for everything, because you
have such a large number, you can solve it yourself.
So let's take 420.
We all love 420, right?
So you just do this backwards.
You take the polar radius of the Earth, 6,356,000, divide that by by four twenty divide it by our procession seventy two and you get the solution to this problem
which is two hundred and ten point one eight five let's round that to two ten
which is pretty cool because that's half of four twenty plus it's three times
seven times ten and then when you do it in reverse four twenty times fifteen
thousand one hundred and twenty which is that precision of processional number of
seventy two times two ten and you get 6,350,400. It's
99.91% accurate, more accurate than the height of the Great Pyramid. So every time you smoke
a joint, you are connecting with the Earth mathematically. The reality is that math is
there to find relationships between numbers, and so we can go and find those very easily
if we work them out. And I'm not saying that you did this in reverse I'm saying that we're always going to
find mathematical relationships between such numbers and so that's what I think
is really important here to think about that it's always going to be there if
you look it's not something that the Egyptians necessarily encoded in there
that's a large assumption if you see what I mean yeah that makes sense to me
what doesn't make sense to me is how do you think they
were able to align the pyramid, the true north, south, east, and west within such a slight
degree of error? And do you think they had knowledge at all about the processional equinoxes?
For the second one, I'd say I see no evidence of knowledge of the processional equinoxes in
ancient Egyptian architecture. In terms of the first question, aligning it with true north,
there's different ways you can do that with the north star, or by even on an equinox, if you hold
up an obelisk or a stick and you trace the shadow that it makes, you're going to end up getting
true north, south, east, west.
And so there's different ways that they could have worked out what true north was.
Which one they used, I'm not sure.
But the level of accuracy that they achieved.
Smart people.
Smart people.
But just be kind of beyond smart.
That's what freaks me out about the whole subject.
It's like how was this, regardless of the argument about the date, whatever
it is, humans built it. They did somehow, they made something that is so immense and so mind-blowing
that today people scratch their heads and say how. Yeah and I think that that's such a cool thing when
you think about the past. You know they didn't have TV, they didn't have Joe Rogan to listen to,
they had the stars above them. And so you, I fully agree with Graham that a lot of ancient cultures are looking at the stars
and we can track different times when they're aligning things with solstices, equinoxes, or
different... What do you make of the what looks like ancient drill marks and all these different
bizarre ways it seems like they were carving the stones out that's kind of inexplicable.
Yeah, see, I'm not sure if I'd say it's inexplicable.
You oftentimes see those drill marks,
and so they're not as precise
as some people always claim online and stuff like that.
Not just that they were precise,
but that it required a drill that moves at an insane speed.
Well, I think it required a lot of sand.
It was the abrasion of the sand that actually did that and so it's it's the sand
Itself is just slowly up rating down the granite with a core
But it's coring it like what would you use to do that a drill made of copper or bronze and then sand and water?
Yeah, this has ever been shown to be possible. Yeah
Has that ever been shown to be possible? Yeah, yeah.
I think it's scientists against myths on YouTube that have done that.
They've done those core samples?
Like they've dug into a stone like that?
They've drilled into granite like that, yeah.
I know that they tried to cut them and it took a long ass time.
Oh yeah.
They were sawing back and forth.
I think that's what we need to think about is this takes a long ass time.
It's a huge achievement of human energy and things like that.
I'd like to just finish on this point of the date stamp.
It's not one thing, it's two things.
It's the three pyramids on the ground and their relationship to Orion at the same moment
that the Sphinx equinoctially targeted, very precisely not slightly but perfectly due east,
is gazing at its celestial counterpart in the sky, and the Milky Way is in position over
the Nile River as well at the same time. It's a picture of the sky that we're looking at
at Giza, a picture of the sky 12,600 years before our time that we're looking at at Giza.
And I don't think that's a coincidence. I think that's a deliberate intentional date
stamp that's been placed on that place. It's not just one monument,
it's a whole complex of monuments on the Giza Plateau and indeed the Nile River as well,
which are being put on the ground to mirror the sky at that time. And I think it's worth
taking seriously, I think it's worth investigating, and then we add the issue of the erosion of
the Sphinx to this, which also puts it back to 12,000 years. And I think it's unfortunate that archaeology is so
hurried to dismiss all of this and so unwelcoming to the possibility that we might be missing something in the human story.
Can I give a little conclusion myself? Sure, please do. All right. Jamie, do you mind if I could share my slides?
First of all, I really want to express thank you to both of you for having me.
Thank you.
Thanks for coming.
I want to say I'm not here to tell people what to believe.
I really am not.
I'm here to try to share the kind of evidence that we have and what archaeologists actually
do.
And I really do strongly believe that we do update with new evidence.
I think that every single paper we publish is trying to change the paradigm of how we see the past with new methods, new
evidence and new things like that. And what we're starting to realize is that humans were
very resilient and very innovative. We're seeing these mammoth bone structures going
back 30,000 years, something like that, 20,000 years. I think I got that date wrong. It's
been a long chat. But so we're seeing this evidence
for sort of major hunter-gatherer monuments that is growing and really changing our picture
of who we are. But at the same time, I want to say that archaeology is very much about
cultural heritage around the world. We need to give credit to the people that did things,
and we need to really understand how modern people see their own cultural heritage and
respect that. And so I just want to give a shout out to everybody listening from all over the
world be proud of who you come from. But lastly, not lastly, I have a couple
things I want to say, but I want to say there's major threats to archaeology
that are going on in the world right now. There was just a major BBC article from
yesterday, Wales, where I am right now there's a 20% across-the-board cut to
cultural heritage
in Wales.
They're talking about closing the National Museum in Cardiff, the National Museum of
Wales, one of the jewels of that sector there.
And so I want to draw everybody's attention.
I'll share the links with you guys to this petition in front of the Welsh Parliament
to try to get this debated because it's really important that these scale of cuts do not
happen.
Everybody that's listening, Graham, I think you and me can agree that archaeological research
is important. You could not do the research you do without the kind of cultural heritage
initiatives that happen.
Absolutely not. I couldn't do any of the work I do without the work that's been done by
archaeologists. And I've said that on Joe's show multiple times.
I agree with you. And I want people to support the funding of archaeology history. At Cardiff University where I teach there's threats
to cut all ancient languages from the program, from the teaching program, Latin,
ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Hebrew. And so this is a huge deal if you want to
have people go out and do their own research we need to have these kind of
subjects available at public universities like Cardiff University. One
of the top archaeology
departments in the world, it was just ranked just a few weeks ago in one of the world rankings
as like in the top 20 or 30 in the world, it had just closed. Sheffield, where I learned
how to study ancient animal remains. University of Sheffield just completely axed and destroyed
a few years ago. And so what we're seeing is a complete defunding of the humanities and the social sciences and history and archaeology
Anthropology classical studies and more and so please if we care about understanding these mysteries from the past
We need to fund being able to teach people we need to fund the actual research into it
Can I ask you what what's the motivation behind defunding archaeology saving money?
To put on on what?
I have no idea. New buildings.
We don't actually cost that much.
Most of our research is funded through grants that we competitively get,
like my grant that I use to do my isotope analysis,
or it's funded through private donations.
I can't understand how, with our knowledge of history,
it's so fascinating that archaeology would somehow
or another be underfunded.
Yeah, it's real bad.
UNC Greensboro just cut their anthropology and archaeology department.
It's crazy when you consider what our culture does spend money on.
That it's not spending money on finding out who we are and where we came from.
Is there better evidence that we're sick?
Yeah, it's very good evidence that we're sick.
That we don't want funding of our past.
We want to live in the moment.
We're a sick civilization.
We tick all the boxes for the next lost civilization.
I'll get to that in a second.
Oh no.
I would like to, since you've had your moment here, Flint, or do you have more?
Oh no, I have just a couple more things to say, and then you can finish up as we agree.
Okay, we'll wrap it up.
Sorry.
We also face threats like looting, so the trade in archaeological artifacts usually
comes from looting done by terrorists, different cartels around the world, and we need funding
to protect sites and things like that.
But I want to share that there's good archaeology on YouTube.
I want to give a shout out to the World of Antiquity, Stefan Milo, Archaeology Tube.
There's a new channel by Dr. Smithy Nathan that I think is really interesting.
Pause this, go check out some of these channels.
There's also a lot of really great archaeology podcasts.
I want to give a big shout out to the Tales from Atlantis, The Dirt, Movies We Dig,
and one that's not on here that I'm going to appear on next week,
talking about the Bronze Age collapse and climate change in the Eastern Mediterranean is Let's Talk
About Myths, Baby, hosted by Liv Albert. So check those out. But lastly, I just want to
talk about why it matters that we study the past. When we look at scholarship and understanding
the collapse of societies, what we usually see is human resilience. It's not like everybody
dies. People survive. It's the like everybody dies. People survive. It's
the upper crust of society that disappears. It's the palaces, it's the political structures,
it's the major temples, it's the monuments, it's the art. Normal people survive. And so
what I want to say is if you are wealthy and you're listening to this and you're worried
about societal collapse, don't go and try to hide from it. You need to invest in our society. That is what your wealth and status is based upon is our society
itself. So you need to invest in the resilience of the people around you and
not thinking that you can protect yourself. Because if you look at history,
go read these books. Eric Klein's book comes out tomorrow. Guy Middleton's book
goes all over the world and looks at collapse, it is the rich and the elites who get eaten. So we have to invest in everyone if we want to survive
this. And my own research into climate change at the end of the Bronze Age, what it shows is that
the ancient Greeks adapted too late. It took them hundreds of years to realize that the climate had
dried and it took them hundreds of years to adapt their food production systems. And so let's not do that.
We understand how the world is changing around us.
Let's listen to that and try to invest in our future.
Everything we do, whether it's trading stocks, deciding how to fix our plumbing, deciding
on what we're going to do is based on our knowledge of the past.
And so we need to invest in our knowledge from the past and what it can tell us so that
we can act properly today.
Ironically sound like you're preparing us for the collapse of civilization.
I already gave that interview.
It sounds like what you're saying. Sounds like rich people better put your money back into society. Exactly.
Or we're fucked. Graham, you want to wrap this up?
Yeah, it's been an interesting conversation, Flint, and there's so much both from my
side and from yours that we've not been able to touch on.
My request to you is I showed that clip where you're calling for a crusade against pseudo-archaeology. With pseudo-archaeology from the beginning. I believe your friend John Hoopes, your co-author
John Hoopes is one of the moderators of my Wikipedia page, which people cannot edit my
Wikipedia page. It's locked. Now, the request that I have is, is it necessary for archaeology
to insult those of us who come from different
perspectives and look at the past in a different way? Insult people like Robert Bovall, insult
people like Robert Shock, insult people like John Major Jenkins, who John Hoops had a horrible
campaign against back in the 2010s through until John Major Jenkins died in 2018. Does
mainstream archaeology have to insult us all the time in that way? Is it not
possible to have a meeting of minds and say, well here are a bunch of outsiders,
we archaeologists think that they're completely crazy, but let's actually
entertain their views, let's look at them, let's not be so combative
about this. When I first started writing about this,
Fingerprints of the Gods, in 1995, I was immediately attacked by archaeology. It began immediately.
BBC Horizon devoted a whole program to trying to rubbish my work and gave platform to archaeologists
to do that. Why do we need to have this conflict? Why is it not possible to have multiple points of view on the past?
Why ultimately does archaeology so much want to control the narrative about the past?
And why do so by attaching notions like racism and white supremacy
to people that archaeology disagrees with?
Is it not possible to have disagreements that don't involve all of that?
I'll tell you frankly, I was hurt badly, wounded badly
as a human being by this association that you were
very largely responsible for of my work with white supremacy,
racism, and all the other stuff that's written about
in the SAA's letter.
I don't think any of that was necessary.
I don't think any of that got to grips with the fundamentals of my work or my ideas. It was just an attempt to write me off and to
smear me. And I think it's most unfortunate, and perhaps if anybody can learn a lesson
from this, it's actually we're all on the same side. We're all looking at the past.
We're all trying to solve the mystery of the past. Some of us are doing it in a rigorous
scientific manner in the manner that you are. Some of us are doing it in a rigorous scientific manner in the manner that you are. Some of us are doing it in multiple different ways.
I've devoted 30 years of my life to this subject.
I'm passionate about this subject.
It matters to me.
I have never knowingly told a lie, although I am constantly accused of lying.
I tell my truth and I try to represent my truth as best as I can.
And I believe that's
true for the majority of people in the alternative field. Can't we have some kind of meeting
of minds between alternative approaches to the past and the archaeological approach to
the past? And is it not possible that something beautiful might grow out of that?
If I could speak to that, I think the problem is one of communication and this bizarre modern time where someone
says something and then a bunch of people attack that thing that someone says.
There's a big difference between a rational, calm, kind person being able to have a disagreement
with someone face to face.
Because like I think today there were some contentious moments but I think overall we set a very nice tone of just
letting each side speak to what they believe and what the evidence shows and have a very,
I think, a productive conversation about it. And I think part of the problem is most people don't
have access to the people that are saying these things that they disagree with.
So what do they do?
They make a YouTube video or they make a blog post or they make a podcast, whatever it
is, and they dispute it and they attack that person and maybe they insult that person or
maybe they connect that person to a bunch of horrible things because they're so emotionally
invested in one side or the other side being correct, whether they're right or wrong.
And I think it's a function that it's a part of how human beings aren't really meant to talk to each other
that way. They're not meant to share ideas. They're meant to do this. Human beings are
designed to sit down and talk to each other. And I think so much of our world's problems,
other than obviously geopolitical issues and military issues. So much of our differences with each other, a lot of it is a lack of communication.
We don't necessarily honestly communicate about things.
And where you get a more nuanced understanding of who this person is you're talking to, where
they stand, who they are, what their beliefs are, how do they get to these places?
What caused them to think like this?
And there's also the effect that it has on the person
who's attacked, who wants to kind of attack back,
which is very unproductive.
It's very unproductive to carry around that pain.
It's very unproductive to carry around that criticism.
And it burdens you, and it takes away resources
from all other parts of your life.
It can create stress, it can create a ripple effect that affects personal relationships,
business relationships, all sorts of things in your life, your health, whether or not you take care
of yourself. You're so embattled in these conflicts with human beings that are almost mostly
unnecessary, especially at that level amongst kind, intelligent people that really just
want to find out what's true.
A good statement, Joe.
Yeah, we can all be nicer to each other.
I agree with you.
I really believe that.
We can all be nicer.
And it doesn't need to involve pouring scorn and mobilizing hatred against others. As I say, I've been involved in this conflict
with archaeology for 30 plus years. But the thing that hurt me the most is this bizarre
association of me with racism and white supremacy and anti-Semitism and misogyny. All these
words are in the Society for American Archaeology letter letter which tried to get my show branded as science fiction. So I mean
one thing that I would say is I've read your books in the upcoming release of
your show right and the tone between your books and the tone between your
show is night and day. You were very combative. What do you mean by the upcoming release of my
show? I meant back two years ago. Yeah. So you read all my books?
No, several of them though. Okay. You have a lot of books. Because that's the other thing
I'm going to pick you up on that I'd like to say right now is that in a show like this,
we've gone a bit probably over three hours. Oh yeah. We're at like four hours and 30 minutes.
But it's not enough. I've written a large number of books. We'll talk about Ed Futex and Atlantis next time.
Thousands of footnotes. For those who'd like to evaluate my work, do check out the books. It can't be possibly sampled here, just as
Flintz can't on the basis of a three-hour show. But I think we've done well. I think there is some kind of meeting of minds. I like you as a person, Flintz.
But I hope that we change our tones on both ends, because like I said, the tone you chose in that show was offensive to archaeologists.
Yeah, that was because I'd been offended by archaeologists for 30 years.
I hear you, but if we want to end this and take the temperature down, we have to think
about how we do this, and we need to talk about different aspects of that in a friendlier
way. So are you still going to crusade against
pseudo-archaeology? And what is it? important. So are you still going to crusade against pseudo-archaeology?
Well I don't...
And what is it?
Well I think, but the best way to crusade against stuff that's not correct is to do
what you've done, just come on in...
That's why I agreed to come here, okay?
Yeah, it's great.
And I think everybody's goal is the same.
We want to find out what happened.
Like what, what, this incredible history of the human species.
It's so bizarre, and especially when
it comes to, I am so fascinated with Egypt, that that one to me is the craziest of crazy.
What was going on there?
What changed in the world that that's not possible anymore?
That societies like that don't exist?
And how did they exist 4,500 years ago in this one place?
And they maintained their civilization for 3,000 years.
Yes, it's crazy.
And it was also a place rich with resources at the time.
There's a lot of factors, right?
But it's just, that's the most important thing.
It's like, what happened?
What happened?
What was the process?
So thank you, Flint, for coming on.
And thank you for explaining all that stuff
about grain and agriculture.
That was really, really fascinating.
Next time I'll share my research on bones,
and ancient drugs. Yes, I wanna hear it.
Let's talk, let's talk.
And thank you, Graham.
It's always great to talk to you,
and I really appreciate all your work
and your years of dedication to this.
And it's just opened up these conversations,
and I think it's interesting.
It's just really interesting to find out what happened.
Yeah, well Joe, thank you to you for hosting this first time ever kind of event.
My pleasure, I think it was great.
I think this can be done with a lot of subjects, you know.
Like people don't have to be assholes.
We can all be nice.
That's a beautiful line to end with.
People don't have to be assholes.
Alright, bye everybody.
Bye. to Adler. People don't have to be at Adler. Don't have to be. Alright, bye everybody.