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Julian Dorey Podcast
#367 - "Groundbreaking!" - 1 Million Yr-old Skulls, Egyptian Labyrinth & Ancient DNA | Michael Button
03:07:32
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- [00:00]
A
At Hinge, we love a good conversation, but lately those conversations are stopping short. So we asked 30,000 daters to tell us what's really going on. What we found is that 84% of Gen Z daters do want deeper emotional connections, but they're 36% more hesitant than millennials to start a deep conversation. And that's what we call the communication gap. Space between wanting connection and making a move. You can ask one better question and start closing the gap today. Learn more in Hinge's 2025 Gen Z date report, now live at Hinge co.
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B
At the end of the day, no one really knows what happened in the deep, deep past. If we're talking about the classic lost civilizations of the Amazon. Francesco, he was the one that reported seeing vast cities in the jungle. So then he came back to Europe and everyone laughed at him. But then when you think about what happened when people conquer new lands is that people get killed, and that's what happens. In recent years, they're starting to think that maybe this guy wasn't lying. They've been seeing these vast geometric earthworks. It's proof that civilization in South America is far older and far more complex. You look at so much of the megalithic stonework, then you look at the culture that built it, and it just doesn't line up, up at all, which is interesting.
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A
It. It must have been aliens.
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B
This all buys into the argument, which is that human history everywhere is far older than we think. North American archaeologists basically tried to get this guy almost killed because he was making these statements. The idea was called the Clovis First Theory.
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A
So, hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank. All the way from across the pond, Michael Button got you in studio. Welcome.
- [01:41]
B
Hey, Julian, how you doing?
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A
How you like in New Jersey, man?
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B
It's good, man. I was walking around listening. This is going to make you laugh or probably hate me. I was listening to the Sopranos theme tune because those big Sopranos fans, you.
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A
Know, I don't hate you at all for that. You fit right in. That's. That's what you should do. It gets you in the vibe. All the opening scenes.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Were filmed, as you know, in Jersey. Yeah.
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B
I was walking around. I woke up this morning.
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A
Yeah. Know when you're walking through, like, Jersey City at 6am Be careful. But, you know, it's, it's actually funny because I grew up in South Jersey and then I moved up here when I was 22. And I've been up here mostly except for the three years I went back to my parents house as an adult. And when I was first up here, the way I kind of learned all the landmarks was where Sopranos filmed.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Which is like I. I forget who told me to do that. And then you basically learn North Jersey.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Through that cool stuff. But you study the good stuff. The, the ancient. Ancient.
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B
Ancient.
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A
That's a very shitty, shitty English accent. I don't have a good one. But you know what I like about guys like you, Michael, is that you come at it from both angles. So you are traditionally trained academically, you went to college for this in Birmingham and are obsessed and we'll get into your whole backstory with that. But you also are fascinated by actual new discoveries and not putting the ivory tower around it and, you know, stopping discussion on things that we've decided to define as truth forever and never question which, you know. Do you ever find it like a little strange that we're living in this world now where you kind of have like hardcore academics and then hardcore all opposite everything, history, people, and they're just fighting all the time.
- [03:22]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons I started to do what I do because I felt like there wasn't enough people kind of bridging that divide, if you, if you know what I mean. Like people that are open to more alternative ideas about history, but also come from an evidence based academic background like myself. And so that's why I start to do what I do and I try to bring it from that perspective. Because at the end of the day, this is kind of my view on history is that no one really knows what happened in the deep, deep past. Like once you get back before recorded history, before, you know, 5,000, 6,000 years ago, early civilizations like ancient Sume, ancient Egypt, no one really knows what happened back then before people started writing stuff down. So it's all interpretation and that's all the mainstream side of doing. They're just interpreting evidence. So the alternative side of doing interpreting evidence in a different way. So I try to, as I say, bridge that divide. And yeah, it's going pretty well so far.
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A
Yeah. And you also just got to go off of what new evidence is found. I mean, it should be that simple. I feel like, you know, our world wants to make that complex these days and like some fucking revolutionary idea. But, you know, we had this concept that, you know, whether it was people said, oh, humanity is 6,000 years old or 10,000 years old or something like that. We, we just had this, like, beat into us in society for hundreds of years. And now, you know, like, you were pointing out, there's evidence that things are strong evidence that things are much older than we thought, you know, and so you were telling me off camera, like, you like, looking at the Neanderthal stuff going all the way back, like, what's, what's the farthest back you've gone and actually explored evidence.
- [04:52]
B
Well, this is the thing, like, we have a mindset when we look at history is we base everything off ideas that I think were formed, like, 50 to 100 years ago, when we used to think the human species was extremely young. So not even that long ago, like maybe in the 1990s or the 1980s, we were under the impression that human beings, Homo sapiens, were only like 30,000 years old or something. And then new evidence came to light that we were actually 50,000 years old. And then new evidence came to light. We're 100,000 years old and then 200,000 years old. And then in 2018, we discovered these fossils in Morocco at the Jabella brood site, which showed that modern Homo sapiens, anatomically modern, just like you and me, were 315,000 years old, potentially up to 360,000 years old. And that's a super, super long time ago. Like, what was that called? It's called Jebel irud, I think, obviously it's like an Arabic name, and so I probably completely butchered that pronunciation, but, yeah, it's in. Yeah, that's the one. Yeah, that looks right, doesn't it?
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A
So you said we discovered it's over 300,000 years old through that?
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B
Yeah. So the estimate is somewhere between about 300,000 to 360,000 years old, and they're classified as modern Homo sapien remains. So the brain case is pretty much identical to us, and that pushed back the age of our species by 100,000 years. So it was pretty, pretty like paradigm shifting discovery. And that came out while I was at university. And that was kind of the spark that led me to go down this path that I have gone down and not pursue a traditional career and academia. Instead, kind of think about these ideas from a slightly alternative perspective, because I thought it was a really, like, paradigm shifting thing, because when you look at how old human civilization is, Right. The dawn of civilization, the very earliest time the civilization formed is 5,000 years ago. So then what about the other 310,000 years? You know, prehistory is literally 98, 99% of our story. And yet it's just a dark cloud, it's a shroud of mystery that we don't really know anything about. So that's kind of where my whole interest in this stuff kicked off. And I make a lot of videos about prehistory, about, you know, that whole time. And then as you say, Neanderthals, other human species, they were all existing in this time. And then there's also this really interesting discovery that literally came out about a month ago, which was this. I don't know if you've seen this. It's about the human skull found in China that was a million years old. Did you see that? So it's not, it's not Homo sapien, just to be clear, it's. But you said human skull, it's human skull. So it's classified as Homo longi, which is very similar to Denisovan. So it's a different human species, but what they effectively are. Yeah, there you go. It's effectively like a sister species of ours. So I mean that's not a very technical way of putting it, but it's like the most. That's a layman way of putting it. But effectively they're large brained humans.
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A
Right.
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B
So they're very similar to us, basically a sister species or a cousin species, not an ancestor, someone that's alongside us.
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A
Oh, not an ancestor, not an ancestor.
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B
No. So like a sister species. Yeah. And the same, pretty much the same brain size as us.
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A
Which does that suggest, maybe I'm reading too far into this, does that suggest therefore that in finding this, and it's a million years old, that at the same time there were Homo sapiens that existed at that moment?
- [08:05]
B
Exactly. So that's what the scientists who did this study suggests. So one of the scientists is Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London and he actually is quoted I think maybe in this article saying this basically suggests that Homo sapiens were around, around a million years ago, or at least the direct lineage of Homo sapiens, a distinct lineage of the humans that became Homo sapiens.
- [08:28]
A
Yeah, here we go deep. Just found that the startling analysis has dramatically shifted the timeline of the evolution of large brained humans back at least a half a million years? According to Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum co led on the research, co lead on the research, he said there are likely to be a million year old fossils of Homo sapiens somewhere on our planet. We haven't found them yet. And what was the. This is where it gets way above my pay grade. But do you make that jump strictly by being able to say that the genetic evidence we found right here suggests that one would have been impossible without the other. Is that how they do it?
- [09:06]
B
So they made that leap. So the genetic evidence suggests that we're younger than this. The genetic evidence suggests we diverge. So this is basically how it works because this, this Homo longi skull, or perhaps Denisovan skull, was found and reconstructed using CT scanning and classified as Homo longi, which is a sister species to us. That suggests that our last common ancestor was before then. So if these humans were walking around a million years ago, that means that our species diverged before that point. Which means that whatever became Homo sapiens, potentially Homo sapiens, was around at this point. That's what it suggests. Obviously the dating may not be correct. It's a reconstruction of an extremely old fossil, but it's a very interesting discovery. Yeah, and potentially extremely paradigm shifting. And the reason I bring this up is because, you know, if we're 300,000 years old, that's crazy, but if we're a million years old, then in my view, you know, everything's, everything's on the table. Right. Like it's such a vast length of time. Like it's incredible.
- [10:03]
A
There's a strange exponential curve with which we, how look at, with which we look at time as far as, like in the modern day bias. I talked about this with, with Gnostic informant when he was here. But it's like when we look at the last, you know, we're both of this era. So you look at the last 30 years, it seems like pretty similar part of, you know, one thing came after another. Then you look a hundred years out and you're like, wow, that was a while ago. But now that you got to 100, when you go 200 years back, the distance between the hundred and 200 in your mind that you're looking at shrinks, and 200 to 400 shrinks and 400 to a thousand shrinks, suddenly you start to make a leap such that you can look at some history of a Roman emperor in 50 AD and look at another one in 400 AD, 350 years apart, and assume it's like a very similar era. So now extrapolate that to, oh, you know, we thought we were like 6,000 years old, by the way. Nope, we're actually 100,000. Nope, we're 200. Nope, we're 300. Oh, that we're a million.
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B
Yeah.
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A
The jumps here that you're making, think about all the extinctions that could have happened. That definitely happened in between all those times as well. It's like you are unearthing, no pun intended, so many different segments of history in one fell swoop. But treating it like one discovery, it's. That's so fascinating to me.
- [11:27]
B
Yeah, I think we is almost the way, as you say, we look at the world. Like we have a very warped perception of time. And, you know, we can because we only think in like very short timescales, like our own life, you know, like 100 years at most. Or potentially if you're looking at the whole history of civilizations, you can kind of sort of conceptualize it like 5,000 years or whatever. But then once you get up to these massive, massive, massive timescales, 100,000 years, 300,000 years, potentially up to a million years, our human brain can't really, like think about that. It doesn't really compute up there. So I think that's potentially where many people go wrong and potentially why we have, I believe, some kind of recency bias when we look at history and we think that everything that's happened in the last few thousand years, the stuff we can see, is all that's happened. You know, we think that because we can see that that's the only sophisticated era of human history. We live at the pinnacle of human history and we may do, but that doesn't mean that nothing else happened in, you know, the 99% of human history that came before that we can't see. And think of all the human lives, all the stories, all the cultures, all the potential, you know, achievements that our species have made in that vast length of time that we have lost and. Yeah, that we can't see anymore. And it's fascinating to me. So yeah, that's why I do what I do.
- [12:44]
A
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- [14:51]
B
Well, I would, I wouldn't say there's evidence of this, but I would say it's, it's possible, you know, because another thing when you get up to these huge timescales is the preservation problem, right? Like, what realistically is going to survive that long if something, not maybe not like New York City, but some kind of settlement existed 100,000 years ago, right? What realistically would we expect to survive now 100,000 years in the future? Like, what's going to be left? It's really hard for materials to survive that long. And especially if you think about the kind of things that humans were likely building with, which is the things they find in their environment, you know, like wood or something or plants or reeds or anything that they would find around them to build with, it's just going to decay. Like the Earth is an incredible recycling machine of destruction effectively. And we're, we kind of underestimate, in my view, the sheer destructive nature of our planet when it comes to erasing our human past. And I always think, you know, humans like us, with a mind like us, and that's A debatable point which I want to get into is the kind of history of intelligence and whether we did have a mind like us for this long. But in my view, we've had a mind like ours for at least 300,000 years, potentially much longer than that. What does that mean? Like, what could we have been doing in that time? And what would we realistically see left to prove it?
- [16:11]
A
I want to get into that. But even. Even before we go down that rabbit hole, it's also like, what about population sizes, too? Because, like, if we have a brain that's of this capacity, it's one thing when you're working in a population of, you know, 10,000 of us who aren't even connected with the Internet or something like that. Now you're working in a world of 8 billion people, 4, 3 to 4 billion of which are connected on the Internet at any given time and can exchange ideas at the fastest rate in human history. It's like, may have the same power, but we have significantly more resources and scale to be able to, you know, put something like this in our hands or something like that. It doesn't mean that they couldn't come up with amazing at a smaller population with this little thing popping around up there. You know what I mean?
- [16:53]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's a good point, to be fair. Like, more people, you have more chance of a lone genius coming up with something, or people just being able to connect together and work together, especially in our connected society. Like, yes. But something I always think about when I look at past populations of humans is we don't really know how high the population levels were because we have these things called genetic bottlenecks. So if you look throughout history, like, if you look at the genetics of our species, you have these moments in time where the population crashes and almost all of humans are wiped out. But what that means is only a very small amount of the genetic information survives. So you can't really tell. You can tell at this point There are only 10,000 individuals left, so you only get their genes passing through. So you don't know what you've lost, if that makes sense. Because if everyone's dead or everyone's been wiped out, you don't have their genetic information passed through. You've only got the 10,000 people that survive through this bottleneck. So there could be anything happening before then. Doesn't mean there was genes die off. Exactly. So you can't prove that there wasn't, you know, millions of humans 200,000 years ago. Doesn't mean There was, but you can't prove that there wasn't, which I always find, I always find that really interesting because, you know, I think when you look at the climatic history of the earth, there are these periods, these warm periods where humanity could easily have flourished. And then you look at the crashes that, these moments in the Earth's climactic history which had the potential to completely wipe out massive amounts of humans. And we know that that happened. So it's very interesting. And I always look at those warm periods and think, what could have happened in those warm periods and what could have happened when those warm periods ended and we crashed into ice ages? And how must that have affected human populations? And yeah, something I, I dwell on a lot and yeah, I find it very interesting.
- [18:42]
A
Yeah, a lot of directions to go here. But I do want to, I, I do want to touch the, the point you made about you believing that it's around 300, 000 years that we've had this type of, you know, cranial ability or brain ability. Why, why did you land on that specific time range?
- [18:58]
B
Well, that's the oldest modern human fossils, right? 300, 000 years, the ones we were just speaking about. But then you have this skull here, which is not Homo sapien, but it's the same size brain case, it's a large brain hominin, and that's been around for, if these results are correct, for a million years. So it's potential that humans with, you know, the brain, the size of ours has been around for that amount of time. Now there's a big debate in kind of anthropology and history of when intelligence emerged. So the traditional view was always that intelligence didn't emerge till relatively recently. And the view always was until the last few decades that prehistoric humans were effectively stupid. So have you ever read the book.
- [19:41]
A
Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari?
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B
That's the one, yeah.
- [19:44]
A
Yeah. I don't think I've read the whole thing, but I've definitely read some of that because I've owned that for years on my Kindle.
- [19:51]
B
It's a good book and it does a really good job of speaking about the importance of symbolic intelligence to us as a species and why that's been such a evolutionary advantage. But what it, it does do is it promotes this idea that this intelligence didn't emerge until about 50,000 years ago.
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A
And what does he base that on?
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B
Basically, we have these cave paintings in Europe that were painted around that date and that evidence. And it's not just him. He's kind of collecting the Kind of thoughts of academia and presenting it to a layman audience. So it's not his argument, but he's kind of presenting what used to be. I think this is changing now. But what used to be the, the mainstream argument for human intelligence, which is that it didn't emerge until around 50,000 years ago when Homo sapiens apparently migrated out of Africa. At least that's the current story. We migrated out of Africa at that point and we created all these beautiful cave paintings in Europe which are undeniably incredible. But my argument is just because we see this evidence from 50,000 years ago of these incredible cave paintings doesn't mean that's when humans got smart, right? I mean we've had this size brain for at least 300,000 years based on fossil evidence, potentially up to a million years. Just because we see cave paintings of incredible sophistication from 50,000 years ago doesn't mean that that's when humans got smart. So this is the cognitive revolution argument, right, that humans only got smart at this date. But I would argue that in recent decades, loads and loads of evidence has come out to suggest that humans have had these cognitive capabilities for way longer. And not just Homo sapiens, but also our sister species like Neanderthals and Denisovans. Because there's so much evidence that these humans were doing incredible things. Like we have clear signs of symbolic behavior that are much older than this. There's a site in South Africa called Blombos Cave which has these like ornaments that humans created a hundred thousand years ago. So that's almost twice as old as this so called cognitive revolution happened. And there's even older examples. There's these eagle claw talon jewelry like necklaces made by neanderthals from about 130000 years ago that were found in Croatia. Neanderthals made these underground stone circles out of stalagmites, which. Why would you do that if you don't have symbolic intelligence, right? You wouldn't start building stone circles if. And like that's kind of, that's the same. I feel like I need to probably explain what symbolic intelligence is and why that's important thing. So. And sapiens does a really good job of explaining this. I'll give sapiens that. Because symbolic intelligence has allowed our species to thrive in many ways. So the idea is that because we can think in the abstract, right? So we can kind of create these concepts that aren't real, but we all collectively agree on them. So what's an example? Maybe like, maybe like a country Right. Like, so the United States, we're in the United States right now.
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A
Right.
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B
And we both believe that. We both believe in the existence of the United States. But the United States isn't a real thing. You can't story. It's a story. Exactly. You can't touch the United States. If I go outside the studio right now and touch the ground, I'm not touching the United States, I'm just touching some ground. But because we all agree that the United States is a thing, it allows us to cooperate in massive groups. So you have like the whole of, you know, the US army or something. Yes, all believe in the United States, so they will cooperate in a huge group of humans and that allows us to get things done. And so that's the kind of power of symbolic intelligence. We believe these shared myths and that allows us to cooperate in massive groups. And no other animal can really do that. You don't get, like, chimps that all believe in, like the chimp nation and like, collectively, you know, cooperate in groups of thousands of chimps. Like, chimps can only really cooperate in bands of about 50 chimps. And then they split, they split into different groups because they can't kind of create a myth to. To kind of base themselves around and work in a massive group.
- [23:49]
A
That's interesting, though, just strictly on, like this. The symbolism of the math, though, too. I can't remember if it's 50 or 100, but the difference is going to be minimal here. If you've ever read Tribe by Sebastian Younger, he talks about how, you know, there's a certain mathematical number to which you can actually exist where the tribe all works together. And he was talking about humans in this case, so meaning when it goes bey that it starts to thread off into different ideologies and different people with different, you know, I guess, priorities. And then you look at regular sociologists who are going to talk to you about, like, the total number of real close relationships a human being is capable of having on an individual basis. It's also somewhere in that neighborhood, like a hundred or something like that. And so the fact that chimps can't cooperate beyond 50 is interesting because even if those numbers of like 50 to 100 for us humans to be able to either form relationships or stick in one tribe are similar, we are able to cooperate on a macro level, symbolically, to use your term, at a way bigger number just to, you know, be able to agree, like, you know what? Yeah, there's a border here.
- [25:03]
B
Exactly.
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A
That's our country. That's pretty crazy. It's just like it's basically one revolution pass where chimps are. That's it. But it makes all the difference in the world.
- [25:11]
B
Exactly. And I really, I support that argument made by books like Sapiens that that is such an evolutionary advantage for our species because it's everywhere. You mean you look at like companies like Apple. Apple has thousands, tens of thousands of people all over the globe all cooperating together because they all believe in the existence of the company Apple, which isn't a real thing. You can't fucking touch Apple. You can't, you can't. There is no real thing Apple because we all believe in it. We can cooperate in these massive groups.
- [25:37]
A
That's right.
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B
So that's what symbolic intelligence is. That's why it's important. The theory always was that we didn't have this until about 50 to 60,000 years ago. And the evidence of why that emerged at that point was purely based on these cave paintings.
- [25:51]
A
Yeah, that's kind of wild.
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B
It's not really much evidence, is it?
- [25:54]
A
No. And it's also like, that's evidence that just was put in a place where it didn't get destroyed.
- [25:59]
B
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
- [26:00]
A
You know, think of all the things that have happened since then from a planetary level that could have destroyed basically all evidence and, you know, leave an outlier like that.
- [26:10]
B
Yeah.
- [26:10]
A
So I wouldn't, I wouldn't measure it that way either. That's interesting though, that, like, what's the evidence that those cave paintings meant that those particular human beings, whether they were the oldest or not, sounds like they weren't. But what's the evidence, therefore, that those paintings were made shortly after those people left Africa? Like, how do we know that?
- [26:31]
B
Well, that's the date that we have for the, like, the mass migration out of Africa is around 60, 000 years ago. So it's called the out of Africa M migration. And it's. We pull that up, it's when humans, now would we do. So this is the thing with out of Africa is there are Homo sapiens that we found that are older than this date outside Africa. But the idea is that that's when we kind of came out of Africa and survives. Yeah. 60,000 years ago. Yeah.
- [26:54]
A
The out of Africa migration is the theory that all modern humans originated in Africa and later spread to the rest of the world in multiple waves, with the most successful wave beginning around 60,000 years ago. Just like you said, this migration was likely driven by climate changes and followed routes through the Middle east leading to the eventual settlement of Europe, Asia, And Australia, early migrants were adaptable hunter gatherers who used their skills to survive and spread across different environments. And then they have a video of it here. You know what, quick question. And this is like a very basic question for a guy like you, but I do think it helps reset the deck for idiots like me when we're talking and thrown around like Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, obviously these are different things, but they're discussed in a light in common parlance where it's like, oh, we're talking about like humankind in a way. If you had to outline the main differences between when they exist, obviously Homo sapiens still exist, but you know, and, and what the differences were between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. How would you explain that to like a fifth grader?
- [27:56]
B
Well, you, you say that's a simple question, but that's not a simple question as well. That's like the question there is like no one really knows. And there's so much debate around that, like, what is the difference between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens? How different really are we? Because we can't have been that different because we bred with Neanderthals. We still have Neanderthal DNA in us, at least non African people do. So me and you, like, as white people, we have Neanderthal DNA within us, so we can't have been that different from them because you can't breed with something that's, you know, genetically too different. So we are very similar to Neanderthals. And so the difference is what people classify is, is like, like skull and like brow ridge shape and stuff like that. But there's also variety amongst Homo sapiens.
- [28:38]
A
That's what I'm saying. We have all different looking people around the world. I don't look anything like a guy in China. But we're both the same human race.
- [28:46]
B
Exactly. So I mean, so, so yeah, I mean there, there is like, so you can identify, they do identify Neanderthal skull and they, they claim, you know, they say it's a different species, but the line of that is quite blurry. And yeah, it's kind of in flux. It's always in debate really. And so it kind of depends where you kind of land in that, in that debate. But my argument is that we are extremely similar to Neanderthals. And I, and this is quite controversial, but I would say I'm not sure they're, you know, any different from us in terms of intelligence. And that's why, that's why I base, that's where I take these sites like them creating jewelry and say, look, they clearly had symbolic intelligence, right? They were. They were clever. And I think, to be honest, I think it. It's a really outdated idea that they were dumb. Because what's interesting is that we. We kind of put ourselves on this pedestal, right? We. So when Neanderthals were discovered in. At the exact same time as Darwin's theory of evolution. So in the late 19th century, Darwin had this theory that, you know, we're no different from animals, basically. And that was a huge paradigm shift in the scientific world because up until that point, humans had always been seen as, you know, the pinnacle of everything. We're God's children, right? We're the smart, you know, people that came from the Garden of Eden. We're the clever ones. But then Darwin came along and he was like, no, we're just another animal. And that was a huge shock to everyone because suddenly we lost our special status. And at that exact same time, we discovered the first ever Neanderthal skeleton. And so it was like, hold on, we're not even just another animal. We're not even the only type of human. So what basically happened was that we decided that, okay, we may not be any different from these animals, and we may not be the only human, but we're the smart ones, right? And then we named ourselves Homo sapiens, which literally translate to wise man. So we were like, okay, we're the smart ones then. So we've given ourselves our special status again because we've lost this special status. So that's kind of where this idea came from that Neanderthals and other human species were dumb because it was us basically trying to regain our special status on top of the food chain. But I don't think that's really scientific at all. I think that's just us trying to big ourselves up. And I think since then, loads of evidence has come out to show that Neanderthals were just as smart as us and Denisovans were just as smart as us. And, yeah, I don't. Yeah, I don't see any scientific basis on why that we think that they were stupider than us, other than us trying to make ourselves look good.
- [31:26]
A
When was the last time we saw Denisovans on. On. On Earth? Is that what you just said?
- [31:31]
B
When was the last time we saw them on Earth? So we. I mean, we have hardly any evidence of Denisovans. We have, like, a tooth and a jawbone, and they just found this. Well, they just classified this skull called the Dragon man. Skull as Denisovan or Denisovan. So they found Denisovans in Denisova Cave in Siberia relatively recently, like a decade ago. And they just, they classified it as a new species.
- [31:56]
A
What, what made it diff, what made it different for them to be able to classify it? Like the literal shape of the skull and brows similar to Neanderthals.
- [32:06]
B
Yeah. So. Well, I mean, we hardly have anything. So as I say, we only have a teeth and a jawbone. And what's interesting is they're quite big as well. Like the Denisovan molar is like way bigger than a sapien molar. And that leads to people who have theories that maybe they were giants or something. But they're a distinct species because I mean, they're so much bigger. But we, we really don't know very much about them because of the sheer lack of fossil evidence.
- [32:29]
A
Oh, it sounds like there's a lot on the bone there. No pun intended. Yeah, that's, that's going to be a rabbit hole for me. I'm very unfamiliar with that. The end of the year wears everyone down. Long days, short nights, too much caffeine, and somehow of course, you're still exhausted. If you've been pushing through burnout, it might not just be stress, it could be your sleep. Thankfully, there's Ghostbed. Ghostbed is a family run company founded by a team with more than 20 years of mattress making expertise. They know how to build a bed that's comfortable, durable and actually helps you recover after long days. Every Ghostbed mattress is made with premium materials, proven cooling technology, exclusive Procore layer, a targeted support system that reinforces the center of the mattress where your body's the heaviest. It helps keep your spine aligned and your back supported so you wake up ready to take on whatever's next. And if you're a hot sleeper, Ghostbed's cooling materials help regulate your temperature automatically, keeping you comfortable all night long. Every Ghostbed mattress comes with a 101 night sleep trial and a 20 to 25 year warranty. Furthermore, shipping is fast and free with most orders arriving at in two to five days. Right now during Ghostbed's holiday sale, you can get 25% off site wide for a limited time. Just go to ghostbed.com Julian that link is in my description below. And use promo code Julian at checkout. Once again, that's ghostbed.com Julian link in my description below. Promo code Julian upgrade your sleep with Ghostbed, the makers of the coolest bed in the world. Some exclusions apply. See site for details. This podcast is supported by the RealReal. Meet Christine. She loves shopping. And this is the sound of fashion overload. Too many fabulous things, not enough space. So Christine started selling with the RealReal.
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- [34:58]
B
Yeah, I mean they're relatively new in terms of our understanding of them human species.
- [35:04]
A
Now when was the last time, like you said, there's Neanderthal DNA in some Homo sapiens, but when was the last time we saw them exist at like that we know of at scale, so to speak.
- [35:19]
B
So they disappeared around this time of the out of Africa migration, right, the 50, 60,000. Yeah, exactly. So this, that is in my view, the biggest argument for the idea that we are smarter than them is that we effectively replace them because, you know, we won. So maybe we are smarter. But then that's often an argument given like, you know, okay, maybe they did all this symbolic stuff. Maybe they had in symbolic intelligence, they had the same size brain as us, but we won. So we're the smart ones. But there's loads of other reasons why we could have wiped them out. I mean, firstly, did we wipe them out or did we just merge? Right. Did we just breed with them and we kind of morphed into what we are now and we're both sapien and Neanderthal? Or was it something like disease? Was these two populations clashing a lot of possible. And they died because we gave them some horrible pathogen. Like it's not clear. And this is the thing with prehistory is, is presented as we know all the answers. Right. We've worked it all out in our modern age, we're all so smart in the, in the space age, you know, we know everything, but we don't really. It's just guesses based on extremely limited evidence.
- [36:22]
A
Yeah, there's a lot of possibilities that, you know, could be way different to your point than we were just smarter than them. It's also like, you think about like warring populations. I'm just playing this out in my head, you know, if I had Lane Johnson and Miles Garrett in my race, you don't know who they are. Lane Johnson is a left tackle on the Eagles. He's huge. Okay? And then Miles Garrett is the defensive end on Cleveland Browns for American football.
- [36:50]
B
American football.
- [36:51]
A
He's. They're both enormous, right? If I put them up next to belong Jalal, who I just had in here, who's like a fucking genius neuroscientist, they're going to kill him. You know, no disrespect to Balon. He's not their size. And they're going to be able to wield any kind of blunt force weapon and kill him very quickly. So maybe, and I'm really going beyond where I should here, but maybe there's also a poss that like Homo sapiens had developed based on what the world populations were at a time to be able to wipe out the Neanderthals because they had more and they were bigger or a combination of that as well. Meaning it wouldn't have to do with like what they have up here to survive. Is that possible or is that a little beyond?
- [37:34]
B
Well, I think Neanderthals are probably a little bit bigger than us in terms of, you know, physical anatomy. They're probably slightly bigger than us. They had slightly bigger heads, but that doesn't mean that. I mean, and that's an argument for we were more intelligent. Right. But then there's evidence coming out recently that Neanderthals had the same kind of technology as us. Like, we recently found some arrowheads that were. I mean, to have an arrowhead. You mean you have a bow and arrow. That's pretty sophisticated technology. We don't really think of bows and arrows as technology, but.
- [38:04]
A
Oh, it is.
- [38:05]
B
It is technology. And again, that was always thought to be a primarily safe and exclusively sapien technology, but now we know that Neanderthals. Yeah, there you go.
- [38:14]
A
Very good. Got it. All right. 880-000-year-old stones in Uzbekistan may be the world's oldest arrowheads, and they might have been made by Neanderthals. All right, let's read a little bit of this. Tiny stone artifacts discovered in Uzbekistan may be the oldest known arrowheads. A new study suggests it remains unclear whether their stone, whether these stone tools were created by modern humans, Neanderthals or some other group. Archaeologists found the tools at the site of of Obi Rahmat in northeastern Uzbekistan. Previous excavations uncovered a variety of stone tools at the site, such as a thin and wide blades and smaller bladelets. But numerous small triangular points called micro lists were overlooked in prior work because they were broken. Let me get a little more, Joe. Now, in a study published Aug. 11 in the journal Plus One, the researchers argue that these micro points are too narrow to have fit into anything other than arrow like shafts. The stones also did display the kind of damage that would be expected from used arrowhead. Study co author Hughes Pleissen, an associate scientist at the University of Bordeaux in France, told Live Science. These micro points, which are about 80,000 years old, may therefore be the oldest arrowheads in the world. Around 6000 years older than 74,000 years old. Artifacts unearthed in Ethiopia. Wow.
- [39:35]
B
Yes. I mean, not definitively Neanderthal, but likely Neanderthal. If you base the.
- [39:41]
A
Keep that, Michael.
- [39:42]
B
Sorry. If you base the view of history around the outs of Africa migration, then that's almost certainly Neanderthal because that's outside of Africa. Right. And we know that Homo sapiens did go outside of Africa, but that's probably why they're saying they're likely Neanderthal. But it's more evidence that, I mean, if they are Neanderthal, it's more evidence that, you know, they were as intelligent as us because they were developing technology such as arrowheads, sophisticated weapons technology, you know, so were they stupider than us? I don't know.
- [40:08]
A
Is there, I don't want to ask this. Is there evidence? Not even evidence, but is there a possibility that there are offshoot of human species that exist in our DNA right now that we don't know about? Similarly to how we do know about. There is some Neanderthal DNA in, in some of our DNA.
- [40:30]
B
So what do you mean? You mean like traces of previous human species?
- [40:33]
A
Sure.
- [40:34]
B
Yeah. There's Denisovan DNA in what kind of. I think it's Southeast Asian populations or other oceanic populations. Yeah, I mean we, we interbred with these species and this is why I say we must have been so similar because you, you can't breed with something that's too different from you. So if we can breed with them, we, we're not going to be crazy different to them. You know.
- [41:01]
A
I wonder where that line is. Like what the percentage line for differences to be able to still breed. Because like you can't, you can't go, what's another mammal, you can't go breed with a horse or something like that. Right.
- [41:15]
B
Exactly. You can't breathe. A big chimp or anything.
- [41:17]
A
Yeah, yeah, you can't. You can't breathe with a chimp, which is, like, a lot closer than a horse to. To human DNA. But Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were so close, whether it's 0.01 or 001, I don't. Meaning we literally separate them in, like, species, but they're so close that the average person would almost be like, that looks like the same thing. That's like. It's such a strange bar because then, like I said, we still live in a world where I'm the same species as someone in China. When we genetically look so different. And you can say that about anywhere in the world. You know, I look different from a person in this country or that country. And yet we're the. We accept ourselves as the same species. Sometimes that gets, you know, like. It makes all the sense in the world to me. But then I see we separate something off, like Neanderthal, and I'm like, would we separate that today, you know, like, if we looked at it?
- [42:11]
B
So I think there are. I'm not. I'm not a geneticist, but I think there are some, you know, genetic differences between the species. But then, as you say, there are genetic. Slight genetic differences between different races. But, I mean, you know, you get into tricky territory when you start talking about that kind of stuff. And then there's a really interesting geneticist called David Reich who. Who talks about this kind of stuff as well. But it's not my break. Yeah, yeah. It's not my, you know, expertise by any means, but it's really interesting. And basically the core point that I try to make is we are very similar, and we don't really know what happened back then. We don't know why we won. We don't know how much we merged and how much we won. We don't know where that line is. So, yeah, I find it fascinating. And I think, yeah, they had at least as much intelligence as us. They had the same sight. I mean, Neanderthals had bigger brains than us. So, yeah, you know, maybe they were smart.
- [43:07]
A
Yeah. Which a lot of times can point to more capability. But, like, the brain part makes sense to me because you're finding the skull, Right. So you'd be like, oh, the brain fit in there. Makes enough sense. But when we're talking about all the different organs in our body and we find just some skeletal remains of a Neanderthal, can. Is it possible to, like, definitively prove that? Like, oh, yeah, they definitely had a gallbladder right there.
- [43:32]
B
I guess not. But I mean, it's basically the same skeleton as us, so.
- [43:36]
A
Yeah, so you would think.
- [43:38]
B
You think so?
- [43:38]
A
Yeah, but like, it's possible that maybe there were a couple organs that were different, I guess. Yeah, I guess, technically. All right, yeah. How did you get into all this stuff, man? Like before you went to school, like, were you always just fascinated by ancient civilizations growing up?
- [43:53]
B
Yeah, I mean, I've always loved history, all types of history. I kind of veered towards the ancient stuff because I felt that's where the most mystery was. Right. So, I mean, I'm interested in all history all the way through, but when I got to the kind of age of, you know, 17, 18, thinking about going to university, I decided to do ancient history as my degree because I felt, you know, that's where the mystery is, that's where we don't know. And then as I continued to do my degree, I was like, holy shit, we really don't know. We know nothing. And there's a huge, huge story here, a huge empty blank space in our understanding of our past that just no one really understands. And so that's how I got into it. And yeah, I mean, my degree was, was good, man. I, like, I have a lot of respect for the people I went to university with and my professors and everything like that. I don't want people to, to think I'm like anti university or anti my course or anti the people that I met there. And like, I learned a lot of things and I found it really interesting. But I did find myself growing more and more at odds with the perspective of human history that was put forward. Not like the specific things we were taught, but more the high level, macro, wider perspective of human history that we were taught, which was basically that, you know, we've got it, we've got it sorted. We may make a new discovery here or there, but, you know, we know what happened. We, we've got the timeline. It was hunter gatherers all the way until around the neolithic revolution about 10,000 years ago. And then that led to civilizations developing sorted. And I was not sure about that, to be honest. It's such a vast length of time, anything could have happened. Right. So yeah, that's how I got into it.
- [45:30]
A
Were you raising that point, like in class when you were in college, were you like, well, we have found this, this or that, what do you think? And watching their brains like fucking explode?
- [45:39]
B
Not so much because I was only starting the journey myself in my own head. I did. I did. I remember I mentioned. So you know about Gobekli Tepe, right? I remember I mentioned we should. We should. It's so interesting. But I remember I mentioned that I brought that because I was like, yeah, this is a site that clearly has severe implications for understanding of the development of human civilization. Surely this suggests that human civilization is far older and more complex than we think. And I was basically told that isn't your course, mate. You do ancient history. This is archaeology.
- [46:13]
A
Wait, they made a distinction between the two?
- [46:15]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, so technically there is a distinction, right? So archaeology is everything before recorded history, and ancient history is, you know, what we know. Yeah, exactly. But so I. And I was like, really? Come on, man. I'm doing ancient history at university. Sure, we can have this conversation.
- [46:31]
A
But that's a crazy distinction. I didn't. I didn't even know that.
- [46:35]
B
I didn't know the either until I was kind of told that.
- [46:37]
A
That.
- [46:37]
B
But, yeah, ancient history, my course was only from the start of writing until, you know, the end of the Roman Empire.
- [46:45]
A
Nothing new to see here. Don't ask any questions. That's what it is, basically. That's crazy. So you found you started to learn about Gobeki, Gobekli Tepe while you were in school, did you say? Or you had learned about that before?
- [46:57]
B
So I discovered it in my own time while I was at university. I wasn't taught it. It wasn't mentioned on my syllabus. And I was like, like, can we talk about this? And they were like, no, that's not on the course. You need to go do archaeology. And I was like, oh, come on.
- [47:10]
A
For people out there who need a refresher on Gobekli Tepe or somehow haven't heard a lot of guys talk about this, because it is talked about all the time. Can you just give a very broad explanation of where it was and what they found and what the potential implications are?
- [47:22]
B
Yeah. So Gobekli Tepe is a site in modern day Turkey that is dated to around 11,600 years ago. And it's this incredible site with these massive megalithic pillars and these fast circular enclosures, and it's something like 50 times larger than Stonehenge or something ridiculous like that. Has all these incredible intricate carvings on the pillars. They've only excavated about 5% of it, but in my view, in the view of many others, it's a massively disruptive discovery for our understanding of human civilization, because, I mean, you just have to look at pictures of it. It looks like A civilization. You know, how have you got the capability to construct such a site? And it's not the only one, right? There's like. Like 14 or 15 other sites that they're discovering in the region. They're starting to call it the Tashtapella culture. Yeah, very much emphasis on the word culture, not civilization, because it's not deemed a civilization for. How do you make that distinction now?
- [48:13]
A
Like, how can you say one without the other? Like, do we talk about, like, shark culture? You know what I mean? Like.
- [48:19]
B
Well, it's because. Well, so they've got a very. They've got this. This checklist effectively on what a civilization is. And it's basically based on. On Mesopotamia, on ancient Sumer, because that was the first civilization. Ancient civilization that was discovered, or the earliest one that was discovered. So they were like, okay, ancient Sumer, this is the first civilization. And so if we want another civilization to meet the criteria of civilization, it has to hit this checklist of, you know, cities, agriculture, surplus, things like that. And Gobekli Tepe. Well, I. In my view, Tashtapella will be considered a civilization. It's just going to take a while for people to get there. I think in, like, a few decades, people are going to start calling it a civilization. It's just that it's so disruptive because, you know, it's twice as old as the oldest civilization, Right?
- [49:12]
A
Yeah.
- [49:12]
B
So to call it a civilization is going to. It's a big monkey wrench in our idea of human history. So, yeah, I think people will get there over time. But these sites are all connected, right? They have, like, shared symbolism, which suggests a shared cultural identity, suggests trade. It suggests that this was, you know, a cohesive society that all built these massive megalithic sites. I mean, it. It really does sound like a civilization. They just found residential buildings at Gobekli Tepe as well. And that was always an argument why it wasn't a civilization. They always said this was built by hunter gatherers, and they kind of migrated to this site once a year or something to.
- [49:49]
A
They just happen to be fucking amazing artists.
- [49:51]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's another thing. Like, you need specialization to create a site like this and to become such a skilled craftsman, you need time to be doing that as your job. Right. So you need other people to look after the. So while we don't have proof of agricultural surplus, the mere existence of Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe and all these other sites implies surplus. It implies people whose specialist trade was, you know, carving or megalithic construction or whatever you want to call it.
- [50:20]
A
Yeah.
- [50:20]
B
Because otherwise, how do they have time to develop these skills?
- [50:23]
A
It also lines up like, with. Right around the. The time scale of like the younger Dryas period. And what would happen. So is this like. I mean, this is a way over generalization, but is this some sort of like bunker type idea or was it built shortly before and then some people were able to survive in this area or got wiped out all at once? Like, I guess it's all still possibility and they've been excavating it, but like, you have so many obvious professionals doing this as well, and yet they still. There's obviously some sort of ivory tower effect, given that it's so public and so many people can see walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck. But yet they refuse to actually say that.
- [51:09]
B
That.
- [51:10]
A
Yeah, it's kind of crazy.
- [51:11]
B
And like, another thing is, as you say, it's so old, but it's almost. It's not the. It's not like they just woke up overnight and just knew how to do that, right?
- [51:19]
A
Yeah.
- [51:20]
B
It's not like they were just they. That there has to be a kind of development here, then. That's that. So that's the earliest. It possibly. I mean, the latest. It possibly is. Right. 11,600 years ago is the least long ago it possibly was that this civilization, culture, whatever you want to call it, was flourishing. But there has to be a whole kind of civilizational buildup. And that's just the radiocarbon dates, it could be much older than that. Right. Like, that's just. That's just the latest date we have, if you know what I mean.
- [51:49]
A
With all the sites put together, I'm kind of putting you on the spot so we can Google this and see if they have it. But with all the sites that they're finding put together, that they're calling this, what was it? Culture.
- [51:57]
B
Tashtapello.
- [51:58]
A
Tashta Pello culture. Do they have any approximation at this time based on what they found of what the total population of these sites, hunter gatherers, would have been?
- [52:09]
B
Not that I've seen and not that I know, but I would suggest it implies a relatively large population, because otherwise, how are you doing this? And almost more importantly, why are you doing this? Because if you're just a small band of hunter gatherers, like, why do you need to go to such effort to create not just one, but, you know, 14 sites that are all interconnected and have shared symbolism and, and creating these massive Megalithic pillars and these incredibly intricate carvings, like, so, I mean, I don't, I'm not sure what the population estimates are. I reckon they're probably higher than the estimates given, but, yeah, I don't know.
- [52:45]
A
Well, let's see what ciapedia says right here. I got this pulled up while Joe's out of here for a sec. It was. By the way, I don't know if you've seen any of, like, Matt lacroix stuff in the past, but he's made some interest with it with another group of people as well. He's done some interesting excavations out on, like, Lake Vaughan, all in this region. And so, I mean, people can refer the episodes to listen to him explaining with the pictures of everything they found. Like, some of the things they're finding in some cases way down below in the bottom of that lake are so clearly advanced that this wasn't made by, you know, a rock and mortar kind of caveman or something like that. And it's just more evidence in the same region of the world.
- [53:24]
B
Yeah, I listened to him on here.
- [53:27]
A
Oh, awesome.
- [53:27]
B
Yeah. And he was, yeah, talk. I mean, I don't know too much about it other than what I heard him talk about, but, yeah, same region of the world. Clearly a sophisticated construction, at least what they know about it. He's like, doing some expedition now, right, isn't he?
- [53:40]
A
He's done a bunch. He keep, he keeps going back. Like, he's very. Matt. Matt's so passionate about all this stuff. There's some stuff, when he looks at ancient history, I'm like, all right, slow down, slow down. Like, you were great till here, and then you went a little too far. But the stuff that he's working on, on the ground there, there's no doubt that they are, they are on to something. Well, historically, but onto something as far as discoveries go new, like, no question about it now, what the extent of that is going to be, I'm not sure how, what percentage overlap it has with Gobekli Tepe. And that civilization, to me, seems to be certainly along the same lines, but that'll be determined as well. But there's no doubt that there's, there's something special there. I, I really do believe in that. I hope I'm not biased with it, but the evidence that he's had for that in particularly that case is, is pretty good. So that I, I, I just pulled it up. The Tashta Pele.
- [54:32]
B
Is that how we say it to Pella? I mean, I'm probably not, I say Tashtapella. But you know, I'm not obviously not Turkish.
- [54:38]
A
Call us out in the comments. I'm sure we got it wrong, but the Tash Depeller are a group. This is what they're writing on. Ciapedia are a group of Neolithic archaeological sites in Words Other Upper Mesopotamia near the city of Urfa in modern day Turkey. They are the remains of a number of settlements dating to the pre pottery Neolithic period, 9500-7000 BC. Sounds like they even moved up that timeline. Or actually no, that lines up. 9,500 BC would be around 11,600. 11,500. Okay. During transition from nomadic hunter gatherer societies to settled agricultural communities in the region. That's interesting. So in the byline they're literally put, they're calling it like the transition between mean.
- [55:16]
B
Exactly. And so that's. Is that not just another way of saying the dawn of civilization?
- [55:20]
A
That's. Yeah, that's what I would think. So let's, let's see what they had here. Economy and culture. The first segment's called not Economy and Civilization. The societies of Tasha Peller still had not yet developed the herding of animals or agriculture. Their subs, their subsistence depended on hunting and selective harvesting of wild cereal grasses. Before I go on, is there evidence contradicting that?
- [55:43]
B
I don't think so. Not yet. But I mean, I mean it could well have been built by people that lived in that manner. But this again comes back to this extremely narrow definition of civilization that we have. Like we say it can't be a civilization because they didn't have mass agriculture as far as we know. But why does that mean that they can't be a civilization?
- [56:02]
A
Yeah, they could have found another way to be able to eat.
- [56:06]
B
Exactly. And then I mean we'll probably get onto this later but just quickly, like if you look at, you know, what we're discussing, just they're discovering in the Amazon like those people that clearly had a civilization, they didn't use agriculture. They used like this quite sophisticated form of kind of agroforestry, like living off the land. Like that's not agriculture yet they had civilization. So.
- [56:24]
A
Right.
- [56:25]
B
Why is agriculture, you know, one of the check marks of civilization?
- [56:28]
A
Definitely put a pin in the Amazon stuff. I love that topic and I love that you're like so deep in it. You and Luke Caverns are like the guys doing that. I hope you guys continue to go, go all the way with it because it's one of the most undercovered, probably the most undercover place in the world, in my opinion, considering the levels of ancient history that could go to. So we're definitely going to talk about that. I just want to finish this so we have the full context. Man's domestication of animals seems to have started within the broad region of the Tashtapellar culture. Also would point to something very civilizationally, but an early efforts at animal management, especially symbolic representations and entrapment methods. Methods. That's a fancy way of saying, I guess. Hunting seem to broadly coincide with the development of Gobekli Tepe as shown in its animal art. The earliest dates for actual domestication of animals are 9,000 BC for goats and sheep. 8,500 BC for took them another 500 years to do pigs. Interesting 8,000 BC for cattle. All in the area of northern Mesopotamia. Kayonu Tepe, for example, may be where some of the first animal domestication occurred, as the. The pig may have been first domesticated there in 8500 BC. One more paragraph here. Sites such as Kayanu Tepe developed from the cultural tradition of Gobekli Tepe and started to implement agriculture from the 9th millennium BC, as well as other sites such as Nebakori K for Hoyak. I'm definitely saying all these wrong. Holan Chemi, Abu Hayara and Jerf Al Amar. That sounds like a lot of civilization talk to me. And I'm not going to read the next parts, but they have a section called religion. You know, there's a lot of very human civilization things going on here. But that's just me, Michael.
- [58:08]
B
Exactly. So, I mean, so then it just. I mean, what do we even mean by civilization? Why we. Why have we drawn this arbitrary line? It's the invention of writing, basically.
- [58:16]
A
Yeah.
- [58:17]
B
They say no civilization until after they invented writing in Ancient Sumer, around 3000 BC. But in my view, this is all. I mean, and then is it even that important, what you call it? Like, it's clearly incredibly sophisticated culture with megalithic building, shared symbolism, religion, like, you know, I think, as I say, over time it's going to become more and more accepted that the story of human civilization is far deeper, far more complex and just far older than we've traditionally thought.
- [58:48]
A
I think it's going to be this generation of ancient civilization educated people, both in school and not in school. I mean, in general, but especially when you're looking at the ones who go inside the academic institution. The thing is, they do bring their wi fi connection with them. You did bring that. So, you know, you can refer to some things that Go outside the scope of what the dude teaching the class from the textbook in front of you can infer. And what's going to happen is the next generation is you guys are going to be teaching it. And so it'll, I, I do have faith in that part of it. It'll evolve with the times because we're only, you know, 18, 19 years into legit social media at this point. You know what I mean? Like, we're, we're just going to college with social media. Imagine when, you know, they're in this, the growth generation of running things when they're 40 to 60 years old. And we've had that now we're in the AI age and all that. But I, I do think that'll change now when we look at finding evidence like this. Obviously it was a shocking discovery when they first found Gobeki Tepe. And as we laid out, they found a bunch of other sites in Turkey around there. Have we since been able to find any sort of evidence, be it text or some sort of storytelling of some sort, and symbols in other parts of the world that may refer to something like Gobekli Tepe. Like, I don't know, in Egypt, were they talking about something where it's like, oh, that could be Gobekli Tepe?
- [60:11]
B
So I wouldn't say anything solid. I mean, I'm sure some people probably make that connection, and that doesn't mean that connection doesn't exist. But as far as I would say, I'm not sure there's like solid evidence of people knowing about Gobekli Tepe or referencing to Gobekli Tepe. You know, I mean, there's interesting things you can say. There's links between things. But again, you could also say that's just, you know, pattern bias or whatever that's called. You know, you see something that's similar, like Easter island, for example, like completely opposite culture, opposite side of the world, so distant in time. But there's weird similarities with Gobekli Tepelia. You have these statues that, you know, look quite similar, but that doesn't mean there was a connection. Right. But it's interesting. There's this guy called Archaic Lens on X, and he's basically been around the whole world, shout out to him, documenting this style of statue where they have their, their hands around their navel and it's like the same statue all over the world. And so there's some in Easter island that look very similar to ones they found. Not Gobekli Tepe, but Karahan Tepe. Yeah, there he is, yeah, he's got his picture. There you go. Exactly.
- [61:15]
A
Oh, wow. With the, that the map points to all the places these similar statues are found. Look at that.
- [61:21]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, you could just argue it's a common human pose, but.
- [61:24]
A
Or it could be the aliens.
- [61:26]
B
Yeah, but he argues it's, it's sign, like a sign of, you know, some kind of cultural connection between all these places, which is an interesting theory.
- [61:37]
A
But yeah, that's whenever it comes to the pyramids, that's where, I mean, we can get into, of course, the logistics of building them, the stone, how difficult it would be to move certain type of stone from a part of Egypt to the thousand miles away where they built it and stuff like that. But when you look at all these different places around the world that clearly made structures thousands of years ago that are just so similar, you can't tell me it's like born in the human DNA that they're gonna make a, you know, perfect looking thing to the sky that's the same design without some sort of shared knowledge. And you wonder, oh, was there like an underground railroad of rafts going from one place to another for 30 years with two people surviving just to get off and go, oh, here's how you build a pyramid and croaking and dying? I don't know, maybe, but that seems a little crazy to me. It seems like something else was going on there.
- [62:34]
B
Yeah, there are a lot of weird connections like that. And again, it doesn't mean anything. I mean, doesn't prove anything.
- [62:38]
A
That's right.
- [62:39]
B
But it's, it's interesting. I mean, one, I love the connection or the, the similarities between the, the walls in South America in Cusco and the, the stonework on the Menkaure. Pronunciation again, probably terribly wrong, but the Menkaure Pyramid in Egypt. So they have these. I don't know if you've seen the walls in, in Cusco. Let's pull it up. These polygonal walls. Again, this could just be coincidence. It could be people dealing with the same problem.
- [63:04]
A
I'll be the judges.
- [63:06]
B
But it's remarkably similar. So if you, yeah, if you look at the Cusco Wall and then the, the Menkaure Pyramid stonework, it's very similar. It might be quite hard to find.
- [63:17]
A
But we got it. Okay, here we go.
- [63:22]
B
Yeah, so that's, that's Kusko.
- [63:23]
A
This way you're looking for.
- [63:24]
B
Yeah. And then you need the Menkaure Pyramid.
- [63:31]
A
I ain't gonna try to spell that.
- [63:33]
B
M E N K A U R E, maybe.
- [63:36]
A
So you're so worried about pronunciations and stuff. But that's the thing. British people, you guys make everything sound smart that you get forgiven.
- [63:42]
B
Exactly.
- [63:42]
A
Whereas I say. And they're like, what a.
- [63:45]
B
So you need the wall that's at the entrance of the Menkari pyramid. It might be quite hard to find, but.
- [63:56]
A
The wall of the entrance. Yeah, Period pyramid.
- [64:00]
B
It might be quite hard to find a picture that actually displays it. But you had the. You had the pyramid up, but you just need the specific bit of the pyramid. Sorry, this is a very specific thing to bring up. I probably should have brought up.
- [64:11]
A
Yeah, I'm one of those guys, by the way. You're gonna have to bear with me on the pyramids. I've done probably like five podcasts where we go deep on the Egyptian pyramids and I watch videos late at night about them and I still always get the goddamn name. M1's Khufu, which one's Menkara, you know.
- [64:27]
B
So if you look at that picture there and then you look at the actual.
- [64:37]
A
This is the one you want though, Michael? Yeah, yeah, this is what we're looking at right there.
- [64:40]
B
So again, it could just be dealing with the same problem and coming up with a very similar thing, but it is just a startling similarity between the two walls. So these cultures that are like, separated by an absolute age in both distance and time. Time.
- [64:52]
A
So a similar. So what I'm looking at here.
- [64:55]
B
Yeah.
- [64:56]
A
It looks like what seems to be a certain type of stone that's formulating the foundation of a structure. And so you're saying because of the way that foundation is laid and how similar the stone looks in that foundation, it would suggest that it's like, I'm gonna make a dumb relation here. But similarly to how in a neighborhood where it's all the same model house, they have the same kind of established looking base in modern day.
- [65:22]
B
Yeah, yeah, effectively. I mean. So I would argue that it's not evidence of connection. I would argue that it's dealing with a similar problem and coming to a remarkably similar conclusion. Because humans. Yeah. There's only a certain way you can do something. People maybe come to the same result. Right. But they are remarkably similar and the stonework looks really similar. And so it's just one of those weird things.
- [65:45]
A
Things. If you had to put aside your academic rigor for a minute and absolute pure evidence and more focused on like an educated guess hypothesis, would you say that there's a strange connection that we haven't yet figured out between the civilizations that built pyramids? Let's just start simply there.
- [66:10]
B
I would say that could be.
- [66:11]
A
Could be they.
- [66:12]
B
Yeah. I mean, why not? But I wouldn't say there's any solid evidence. And I try.
- [66:18]
A
That's a good answer, dude.
- [66:19]
B
You know, I try. Just want to make a difference in.
- [66:22]
A
Your community, but not sure how.
- [66:24]
B
Go to GoFundMe.com right now and start a GoFundMe.
- [66:27]
A
Seriously.
- [66:28]
B
Your next fundraiser doesn't have to start.
- [66:30]
A
In a school parking lot or a church basement.
- [66:32]
B
You can start a GoFundMe today in just minutes.
- [66:36]
A
Fundraise for yourself a friend or family.
- [66:38]
B
Member or an organization. All that matters is that you care about them. GoFundMe is the trusted place to fundraise.
- [66:44]
A
For what you care about.
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B
With no pressure to hit your fundraising goal, but tons of tools to help you reach it, you can confidently start fundraising right now.
- [66:53]
A
Whether it's creative, local or critical, your cause matters and there's a reason why GoFundMe is backed by millions and chosen by fundraisers everywhere. It works and it matters.
- [67:04]
B
GoFundMe helps you make a real difference.
- [67:07]
A
Start your GoFundMe today at GoFundMe.com that's GoFundMe.com G-O-F-U-N-M-E.com this is a commercial message brought to you by GoFundMe.
- [67:20]
B
I. That's kind of my whole perspective on things. It's like this could be possible, but I'm only going to really push it if I see serious evidence.
- [67:26]
A
And that's, that's the difference. We got to be careful because when you look at like the worst of like academia where they're like shut down anything that doesn't have a PhD, when you start running around with theories and posing it completely as evidence and saying, I'm 100% confident about this was something that's clearly just disprovable on the base fact that it doesn't have any evidence at the moment. You kind of give those people exactly what you want or what they want. You know what I mean?
- [67:52]
B
Yeah. And I think that's a big problem in many ways. Like we decide something doesn't exist, so we don't look for it. But you can't, you know, that's just like, that's a self fulfilling prophecy in a way. You know, I mean like if you're, if you've decided that something cannot exist, you therefore don't look for it. And therefore, because you don't find any evidence of it, because you haven't looked for it, that's proof that it doesn't exist. It's like a circle. Do you know what I mean? That's probably not the best way of explaining that.
- [68:19]
A
No, that's good.
- [68:20]
B
And I think we had that problem a lot throughout history, like even just in the wide idea of lost civilizations. Right. We've decided civilization didn't begin until this date. So we don't really look. I mean, I guess we do kind of look, but because we have this idea that civilization didn't emerge until. Even if you count Gobekli Tepe as a civilization, if we're talking about way in the deep past, no one would ever argue in an academic setting that civilization could have existed 200,000 years ago. So that possibility isn't explored seriously. And then because that possibility isn't explored seriously, there's absolutely nothing to showcase it.
- [68:58]
A
So I just don't understand how then academic type people, people find a skull from a million years ago, and that doesn't open up a conversation. That's, that's, that's what has never. And I, I posed this question, this rhetorical question or whatever it is a million times on a lot of different podcasts. And it's just, it's like insulting to my intelligence that we would ever think that we've reached the limit of something. We've run into this problem in science, too, where people are like, oh, yeah, no, it's just scientific law. The whole point of science is to disprove the latest thing and get to a higher truth. You don't solve science until you know who God is. You don't solve religion until you know who God is. But people, it's almost like they just. They're like, I don't want to know anymore. It's good. We got enough. It's fine. I just want to carry on with my life and we'll figure it out later.
- [69:44]
B
Exactly. I would argue it's a completely unscientific way of viewing things. Right. You've got to put. You got to push the boundaries, because otherwise you're never going to discover anything new. If you're not open to those possibilities, you're always going to stay inside your box, you know, and that's not how science should work, because you should be. You should be pushing every single button, and then maybe one of those buttons will light up and you'll be like, holy. This is completely, like, no one was. No one was looking for this. But if you don't look, you're never going to find. So that's kind of where I come from in all this. And that's why I. That's why I'm not a, you know, on an academic career. That's why I'm not doing the. The career that was laid out for me, you know, do a PhD. That's why I went independent, because that's my viewpoint on the world.
- [70:28]
A
You were, for at least for a few years, though, you were doing completely other things before going independent into this. So you had decided then by the end of college, I'm not going that route. And then you ended up going this route. Why didn't you do it, like, right away to, like, go make content?
- [70:43]
B
Honestly, I was kind of just a bit sick of it, to be honest. I was sick of just the. The mindset that I was. And I didn't really think it was possible, to be honest. I was just like, I'm not really vibing with this, like, worldview, to be honest. So I'm just not going to go down this path. But it never left me, you know, it was always in my head, in the back of my head. I was like, you know, I kind of been quite interested in this kind of stuff, you know. So then I decided to make my YouTube channel about a year ago and yeah, been a crazy journey since then because, yeah, I just have always had that in my head, like. Like, so interested in these ideas and felt I had a relatively unique perspective on them with my traditional education and felt like I could give my opinions in quite a good way, both because of the education, also what the education did give me, which is, you know, the ability to construct arguments and put forward evidence and, you know, construct a compelling narrative, I guess, which is what. That's all history is. And I almost feel like that's. People don't really realize that, that, that the mainstream historians are doing the same thing. They're taking the evidence and they're creating a narrative. And that's fine. But I don't get it when they attack people for doing the same thing but with a slightly different viewpoint.
- [71:53]
A
Yeah, the last five letters of that word are quite interesting and very subjective.
- [71:58]
B
Yeah.
- [71:58]
A
You know what I mean? But the other thing is, like, your channel is awesome. You do a scope of ancient history around the world, like in. And I mean, this is a compliment. You're like a generalist with a lot of different things with which I love. So we'll have that link down below so that people can. Can go check it out. I would highly recommend it. But also, I think, you know, a guy like you, as you grow here it's gonna. It's gonna go up an entirely new level when you're traveling to all these places, too, and seeing it and making your own conclusions. Also, I'm sure doing content these different places so you can bring your audience with you. Like, it's amazing the scope of knowledge you have. Have. We were talking off camera about all the places you haven't been to yet. Like, the scope you have without having gone and seen it or get to sit with it, you know, kind of feel the ghosts around it and whatever. So I do. I do think it'll. It'll be even better.
- [72:52]
B
Yeah, it's definitely something I want to do. That's kind of the dream, in a way, of this channel that I guess I'm on the verge of realizing, which is to actually go to these places in person and be able to create content around that. Because, yeah, as you say, most of the places I talk about, I haven't really been to just because of, you know, financial reasons and, like.
- [73:10]
A
So go join Michael's members only. Actually, I heard Joe Rogan has some money. Maybe he can throw you, like, a hundred bands, get you started here.
- [73:17]
B
Yeah, possibly.
- [73:18]
A
Yeah, he's probably got that line around Nash trails.
- [73:21]
B
Yeah, he's already got it on the. On the way.
- [73:23]
A
I'm sure that was pretty cool, though. That was like, your first podcast doing Rogan or one of your first.
- [73:28]
B
Yeah, it was. Yeah, my first. Well, I mean, I did a couple of, like, zoom ones, but, yeah, that was my first actual podcast, which was just nuts.
- [73:37]
A
That's insane.
- [73:38]
B
So insane. Like, how did he find it you? He found me so early on, mate. Like, so no one watched my channel for, like, six, seven months. And then around March this year, I had a couple of videos that started doing proper numbers, like 100K. And then he, like, saw the second one that did well, and then he shouted me out on. On his show.
- [73:56]
A
Oh, wow.
- [73:57]
B
And that blew my mind. I was like, how is, like, I have, like, two videos that have any views at all, and this guy's talking about me on this show. And, yeah, that was. That was mental. So I don't know how he found me. I guess he's just interested in this stuff.
- [74:09]
A
Stuff. He's definitely interested in it.
- [74:11]
B
Yeah. So, yeah, he shouted me out, and then a few months later, he got. He got me on. And I was very grateful for that. Of course. It was an incredible opportunity, but I was, you know, kind of myself to go on that show.
- [74:23]
A
Yeah, he did great.
- [74:24]
B
It's.
- [74:24]
A
It's. It's it's really cool to see that as well because, like, you know, he can king make pretty much anyone, but if he's looking at a channel might be smaller coming along and he's like, wow, now that guy's great. And it can kind of just be like plucking you out of the crowd and being like, here you go. And now you're, now you're running with it, which is awesome to see, but it's like we also have to have the next generation now coming up. Like, he's a guy who also got a lot more attention on a guy who already had attention like Graham Hancock or like a Randall Carlson who have helped move forward the conversation. And you were telling me off camera like Graham Hancock was a big influence for you. Was that growing up, you, you liked him?
- [75:04]
B
Not so much. So I didn't really get into any of this stuff until about midway through my degree. Right. So I didn't, I wasn't aware of the alternative view of history until, you know, at some point during my degree when I was starting to look around for other explanations really. So, I mean, what kind of happened was I did this module on my university course called Catastrophe, which was, was all about how natural disaster had massively impacted human societies during recorded history. And I found that really interesting. I was. They did this study on the late Bronze Age collapse, which was when all these powerful civilizations around 1000 BC all came crashing down simultaneously within like a few decades of each other. So this was the, the Hittite Empire, the palaces of Mycenaean Greek Greece, the Egyptian New Kingdom, a few others, and these, all these were like the most powerful civilizations in the world, the most, you know, prosperous places in the entire world at that point. And they all came crashing down at the exact same time as each other. And no one really knew why. And that's what we were being taught about. And the theory, the, the best known theory and probably the correct theory, I mean, I agree with this theory, is that it was climate change. It was a small change in climate change which then had this cascading effect. So the climate changed by a few degrees. That led to drought. Drought led to huge civil unrest in these societies that led to kind of rebellions. These societies were all interconnected through trade. Trade collapsed. And so they all came crashing down one after another. And I found that so interesting. I was like, that's ridiculous how such a small, you know, change in climate, something that's really fluctuates all the time, can just bring all these societies down. And so Then I started looking into that more and more and I started looking at the climactic history of the earth and I was like, holy shit. Like the earth has gone through some crazy stuff while humans have been around. And this was the same time this Jebel Irud remains came out that showed we are 300,000 years old. And I was looking at the climactic history through this whole time and I was like, yeah, we've been through some crazy stuff way worse than what happened in the Bronze Age collapse and what could that potentially have meant for humans at that time. And that's what set me on the journey. And then I started looking into alternative points of view because that wasn't spoken about on my course, it was on, it was only recorded history. And I was like, yeah, what about what could have happened back in, you know, way before them? So then I started looking at people like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson and I was, you know, enthralled by that and that's what set me on the journey. But yeah, he's a, he's a really interesting guy. I spoke to him recently and it was a quite surreal moment. That's speak to him. Yeah, but yeah, he's a cool guy.
- [77:44]
A
Yeah, there's, there's, he's definitely one. I think the, the people that have really given a voice to, to that side of things. I, I don't think there's anyone who's been more consequential than him, especially over the past like 20 years. But you know, it's, it's opened up the conversation and we actually this, this is a good spot to talk about some South America things because you had said we were actually looking at it right before in, in your Peru video. I liked how you put it with looking at what the LIDAR scans in South America could tell us about older civilizations potentially living there. You were talking about it there. But one of the things Graham has said in the past that then turns into like these headlines that kind of to his discredit by the way, like it's not his fault, but the headlines then make it a whole new thing is he talks about how there are some, there's evidence for some man made things in, you know, the ancient Amazon jungle. And what, what happens to the headlines is they'll start to come out saying like, like ancient historian Amazon is man made. Which is not fair to Graham because that's not what he's saying. But it creates this narrative that the Amazon which is under constant threat and destruction and potentially poses an enormous risk Climate wise and earth and oxygen wise to the earth. If it were destroyed to a certain level, it makes the idea get planted in people's heads that like, oh, they people made the Amazon so we could make it again, no problem. And I bring this up because a good friend of mine is Paul Rosely. He's a guy who's largely responsible for me sitting here right now. He really helped blow up my podcast when he came on and you know, he's been down there for 20 years and it drives him nuts when people will send him a headline saying, hey look, the Amazon's man made. We can kind of fix it. Because the evidence for man made stuff is like a one off thing here or a one off thing there, some of which Paul will dispute. Other things he's like, it doesn't matter. And so when you're talking about this subject matter, I think it's really important that you like separate the two and say, like, look, here's this amazing creation of the Earth, like this full North America type or United States of America almost sized area of the earth that's just dense jungle that provides all this oxygen. And then by the way, there's a few cool things that happen in there because ancient civilizations existed and because they exist in maybe farther back than we initially thought. So let's start with your actual video you made here where you unearthed. We're going through the evidence, unearthing that there were some older civilizations that had a different name than the ones we talked about, found specifically in Peru. Who were they and when did they exist?
- [80:26]
B
So as in, you mean like Carl super and stuff like that?
- [80:30]
A
Yes.
- [80:30]
B
Yeah. So I mean it's always been the traditional view of South America was always that civilization emerged there quite late in terms of the rest of the world. Right. With the people like the Incas being the kind of first true civilization that emerged in that region. But in recent years, quite a few discoveries have come out to show that civilization there is just as old as the Old World, perhaps even older. Right. So the Inca of something like 1100 A.D. or something. But then they've been discovering these places like the Karla super civilization, which is from about 3,000 BC. So that's, you know, 4,000 years earlier than the Inca and shows that civilization in South America is far, far, far older than the traditional view was. And then they recently discovered another city called Pinico in this region that they think is a kind of continuation of that culture. And you know, these cultures are real sophisticated things. They built pyramids, they had these vast Urban layouts. They had symbolism, like they're really sophisticated civilizations. And then you link that to the discoveries that have been made in the Amazon recently. So that's always been like the classic lost civilization theory, you know, the lost civilizations of the Amazon. Right. That's always been the thing that people would laugh at, like, for hundreds of years. Like, ever since the Spanish first got there. They had. Remember his name? Name, Francesco. Yeah. Is that his name? I can't remember. He. I think he was the one that reported seeing var cities in the jungle. Right.
- [82:02]
A
Allegedly. Like an El Dorado kind of thing.
- [82:05]
B
Yeah. So then he came back to Europe and he was like, yo, I've seen all these vast civilizations.
- [82:10]
A
Steep as a gold.
- [82:11]
B
Yeah. And everyone laughed at him. They were like, what are you talking about? That doesn't exist. And then people came back 100 years later and they couldn't find anything. And so that's always been thought, you know, that guy made it up. But in recent years, they've been doing all this lidar scanning of the Amazon jungle, and they've been seeing these vast, like, geometric earthworks come up from these lidar scans and they're starting to think that, you know, maybe this guy wasn't lying and maybe these civilizations did exist and then they collapsed in the hundred years between these two visits. Which sounds crazy, but then when you think about what happened when Europeans reached South America, you know, it was a big collapse of the indigenous population for various reasons, perhaps primarily disease, but also, you know, what happens when people conquer new lands is that, you know, people get killed. And that's what happened. So. So people always laughed at Orianna or. I don't know how to pronounce that name, but people. Is that right? People always laughed at him and said, you know, he's made that up. And it's always been seen as a conspiracy theory, theory that there were lost civilizations of the Amazon rainforest. But it's starting to come out with these new scans and stuff that there are vast, like, mysteries there that we don't really know about. And I think that's possibly the. One of the biggest frontiers in ancient history is learning about the populations of the Amazon, learning about how sophisticated their civilizations were. And I think it plays into this, the discovery, such as Karl super, because. Because it's proof that civilization in South America is far older and far more complex than was traditionally thought. So once you appreciate that, it doesn't become such a, you know, crazy idea that, yeah, there were civilizations flourishing in the Amazon and now we have pretty solid Evidence that there was. So now it's a matter of kind of going in and excavating that. Which is probably harder than it. Oh yeah, you know, easier said than done obviously. And you don't want to like destroy the whole Amazon rainforest and stuff, but I think that could be some really, really interesting stuff there and I'd love to see it.
- [84:14]
A
There's still significant parts of the Amazon jungle that have never been seen period by anyone. And like I was telling you, I went down there last year for a couple weeks with Paul and when you get underneath that canopy, you, not even, you don't have to go underneath the canopy. You could be right out on, on the river and you just look around, around and you're like, holy, I am a speck out here. Like just imagine, literally imagine mainland America, except the entire thing is covered by 100, 150 foot trees and filled with, you know, equator level ancient species and plant life and God, who knows, spirits and voodoos, I don't even know. But like you even have out there to this day an accepted fact that there's like uncontacted tribes like now living there. They know they're what their name implies, they're uncontacted. If you see them, you're probably dead, you know, and it's like the idea that there wouldn't be ancient civilizations emanating from this place who would have figured out on a very unique plot of land, if that's what you want to call it as well. Yeah. I mean you're talking about a place that has a completely different type of agriculture. If you're going to do it, it has, you know, it's not, most of, it's obviously not on an ocean. It's, it's, it's on a river that runs through it and a bunch of tributaries. Like the room for innovation that is way different than what we would see in other ancient civilizations around the world is vast.
- [85:45]
B
Yeah. And that's what I was alluding to earlier, like the Amazon and what we're discovering there is just shows that civilization doesn't have to follow this path that we've decided it has to follow. It doesn't have to follow the Mesopotamian model. It can be done in so many different ways ways. It doesn't have to be mass agriculture. It's completely dependent on the environment that these people were living in. And these what look to be civilizations in South America probably did it in a vastly different way to the civilizations of the old world. And that just shows that human ingenuity is like a really, you know, variable thing. We're such an adaptable species. We can just do different things depending on our environment, depending on the challenges and the pressures that we face. We can adapt and flourish and in so many different ways. And the Amazon is, is testament to that. And that kind of points to a further point about, you know, the whole world. Like we, we're looking for these civilizations that are based on this model, but they don't have to look like that. They can be so many different models of, of civilization. And we shouldn't just cancel something out because it doesn't fit this checklist. There's so many different ways that it can happen.
- [86:55]
A
Happen. Yeah. And when you, if you just break it down to the base case of what we talk about civilization wise, like what's accepted parlance. Right. Incas. I'm just talking South America in general right now. Incas, Aztecs, Mayans, Olmecs. I know there's some others, but like those, those are the main ones that people talk about. And these are all civilizations that exist far outside, let's say the center of the Amazon junction jungle. You know, you got the Incas on, on the west coast, you got the Mayans in between Mexico and Guatemala and like that area, roughly. Correct me in the comments, you got the Aztecs up in Mexico. I don't remember where, where were the old Mexican.
- [87:36]
B
I think, I'm not an expert. I think around Mexico kind of region.
- [87:39]
A
Yeah, that's.
- [87:39]
B
I might be wrong as well.
- [87:40]
A
Stuff. Let's just.
- [87:41]
B
Yeah, that's Luke stuff. You need to get Luke in here for that one.
- [87:43]
A
Yeah. Southern Mexico, right. So like then you have this whole vast area of land where it's like, oh, we never really wrote down a story of who was in there, as if there wouldn't be people in there. And by the way, you bring up Oriana and that journey that he then dictated, I believe if I remember correctly, and we could pull this up de to check me. But the diary, so to speak, was taken by the priest that was with him or the monk that was with him, who also is a known name. I don't know if we can find that, but he was the one that was writing down what they saw. They basically started on the west coast and then traveled all the way across to the Atlantic Ocean down the river. And they passed these quote unquote, this city of gold with you know, like gold pyramids and people and lights and action. And I just, I don't understand why historians wouldn't be open to the fact that something like that would exist. Yep, there it is. The most famous example is Bartolome de la Casas, a priest who documented the actions of conquistadors, though he was not a conquistador himself and his work was critical of their brutality. Is that the same one or can we type in Francisco de Oriana, priest? Let's do that. That might be the same one. It's Day Oriana. Like. Yeah. Who was the guy? Father Gas. Yeah. Gasper. Daycard. That's it. Carvajal. He was. He was the one who documented it. So, you know, you're getting it from multiple sources in that way. He had men on this journey with him, I think, who corroborated that. And now we have these stories as well. To this day, people talk about El Dorado and where it could be. I mean, there's a famous. Percy Fawcett died trying to go find it. You know, greatest explorer probably in modern history right there. Have you looked at that case very much?
- [89:52]
B
Not really.
- [89:52]
A
No Percy Faucet thing? No. That's so fascinating to me. He just, like, that dude was about the action. Went down there with his son and his son's friend, and then they never came back. The last journey they took. But like, the other thing people I don't think appreciate is that there's not like hiking trails or walking trails in the Amazon. You want to go into the Amazon, you bring a machete and you break. You have to break trees in front of you. You know, to go a mile is like walking 20 miles somewhere else, maybe even more, you know, so the. The ability to explore this and all the things you can run into. That's why governments who technically have parts of these lands, whether it be Brazil or pursuit Peru or whatever, they're not coming out there to police. You know, when happens to Paul, like.
- [90:40]
B
Yeah.
- [90:40]
A
You don't even call the military. There's no one to call. It's just like, I'm sorry, you gotta sort it. Guess they got you, bro.
- [90:46]
B
Yeah, I think. I think part of the problem with South America is because of, you know, what happened when the Europeans came, is that we don't really have a recorded history like we do in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and stuff like that. We don't have that continuous history, that tradition that kind of. Of. Because it basically got wiped out. And that means that it's just vast, vast mystery there that isn't quite the same in. In the old world. And there's so much fascinating stuff in stuff in South America that doesn't Quite make sense. Like, you look at so much of the megalithic stonework, and then you look at the culture that mainstream archaeology says built it, and it just doesn't line up at all. Like, if you look at.
- [91:28]
A
Who did they say built? Built it?
- [91:29]
B
Well, well, it depends what we're talking about, but if we're talking about. So I was kind of referencing, like, some of the sites in Peru, so places like Oytambo and Sashihuaman and stuff, like these incredible sites with these massive megalithic constructions. And then you look at what they say about the Inca, and it's like, this doesn't line up. Like, how are they doing this? Like, I don't know so much about this site, but there's a. The site. Oye, Taitambo again, pronunciation is probably horrifically wrong, but it's up a mountain, right? And they've transported these incredibly massive stones and positioned them on top of this mountain, but the quarry is on the side of another mountain. So they've quarried these stones, they've transported them all the way down this mountain, through a valley, across a river, then up another mountain. And it's like, how have they done that? Because when we look at the Incan, you know, technology, it's just like, yeah, chisels and ropes and how much are.
- [92:26]
A
We talking weight again on these things?
- [92:27]
B
I don't know off the top of my head, but they're very big.
- [92:29]
A
It's like tons.
- [92:30]
B
Yeah, yeah. Very, very big. And.
- [92:32]
A
And we're talking about potential hundreds of miles they're taking them.
- [92:36]
B
Not necessarily hundreds of miles, but, I mean, maybe in some cases, but, you know, it's the terrain. Up a mountain, down a mountain, across rivers. Like, how are you doing that? Why are you doing that? It doesn't. It just doesn't line up with what we know about the Incan civilization. Yeah. And then there's sites like Tiwanaku in Bolivia, which has these incredible, like, precision cuts blocks and stuff. And it's like, how are they doing that? There's no explanation for that. And they just. Because we know the Inca existed, we're like, it was the Inca. The Inca was existed in this region. So they built this. How do they do it? Well, they just did it.
- [93:10]
A
They just did it.
- [93:11]
B
Don't ask questions.
- [93:13]
A
Yeah, I mean, there's one right there. Whoa.
- [93:16]
B
I'm not sure if that's attributed to the Inca, but how big that goddamn thing is, though, it doesn't. It doesn't line up with the known capabilities of the civilizations of the region. Is the point I'm making, which is interesting.
- [93:32]
A
I'm gonna go outside academics with this question. Okay, but do you ever just sit there and like you're staring at the screen and then you sit back and you go, fuck it, it must have been aliens.
- [93:44]
B
I don't know. I don't usually go to aliens. I usually go to humans because I think humans are, are really incredible. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. I don't usually go to aliens because yeah, I just think humans are really incredible. And it probably was humans that did it. I just think the humans were far more sophisticated and there's so much that we've lost and we just assume that what we have is all that there was. Like we know that the Inca existed, We think it was the Inca.
- [94:09]
A
So.
- [94:10]
B
But I think there could be vastly more civilizations, especially in South America, that we just don't know about. About. We have no history of many of these South American cultures that we do know of. They recorded all their history orally and then obviously when they all died, that was all lost. Right. And so we just don't know.
- [94:29]
A
Do we know why they didn't like write it down?
- [94:32]
B
I don't know. But that's another thing about these cultures. They didn't, they didn't even have a written script. And apparently that's one of the hallmarks of civilization. But the Inca didn't have a written script. They had this. They used ropes. I can't remember what it's called, like quipa. That's probably wrong. But they used ropes to like kind of record, keep effectively and really sophisticated, don't get me wrong. But they didn't have a written script and yet they're considered civilization. So why Quebec? They always say, oh, they didn't have a written script. Not civilization.
- [95:02]
A
Subjective. It's completely.
- [95:04]
B
Yeah, quipu. Yeah, something like that. You got it? Close enough.
- [95:07]
A
All right, can we go back to that, Joe?
- [95:09]
B
That.
- [95:10]
A
That's what it looks like. So. Khipu are record keeping devices fashioned from knotted cords. They were historically used by various cultures in the Central Andes of South America and prominently by the Inca empire. Kipu usually consists of cotton or camelid fiber corbs and contains categorized information based on dimensions like color order and number. The Inca in particular use knots tied in a decimal positional system to store numbers and other values in khipu chords. Depending on its use and the amount of information it's stored given, Khipu may have anywhere from a few to several thousand chords. So it's extremely sophisticated. It's not just like Tying one rope and saying, look, we did something. I mean, it's extremely sophisticated. It's just a totally different form of writing. It's not writing, but you know what I mean.
- [95:59]
B
Oh, yeah, no, it's really sophisticated. I don't want to take anything away from the ink or. They were an incredible civilization and they, you know, they were very sophisticated in many ways. But my argument is they're just the ones we know about. Right. What about everything that came before them? We don't really know about that. So we just assume there was nothing. And then this all plays into the, the idea that we've had around the history of the Americas.
- [96:21]
A
Right.
- [96:22]
B
So we've only. We always thought that human history in the Americas was extremely recent. And that's kind of, kind of built into this argument that, you know, these are the first civilizations in the Americas because humans weren't in the Americas for very long. So the traditional argument was Clovis first. Right. You know about, you know about Clovis first.
- [96:38]
A
Remind me.
- [96:39]
B
So Clovis first was the argument for a long time about the first humans to reach. Any type of humans to reach Americas. And this was that humans didn't reach the Americas until about 13,000 years ago, which is incredibly recent if you think about how old our species is. Right. Any type of human but this. And this was the paradigm, this was fiercely defended paradigm for a long, long time. Like people lost their careers over trying to dispute this. For the whole of the 20th century, this was the accepted idea that humans didn't reach the Americas until 13,000 years ago.
- [97:12]
A
What's this called? Clovis. What again?
- [97:14]
B
So the culture is called the Clovis culture. The idea was called the Clovis first theory. So that the Clovis people were the first in the Americas.
- [97:22]
A
Yeah, I want to pull that up. We have a different guy named Clovis right now. Up.
- [97:26]
B
Oh yeah, that's some like.
- [97:29]
A
Yeah, it keeps bringing up some moringa vin.
- [97:31]
B
Some Frank King. Yeah, yeah, not him. You want to type in the Clovis culture.
- [97:39]
A
I don't think we've talked about this on the pod before. I, I've heard that term, but I don't think we talked about this. The Clovis first theory was the long held belief that the Clovis people were the first humans in the Americas arriving around 13. There you go, go. 13,500 years ago by crossing a land bridge from Siberia and spreading south through an ice free corridor. The theory is now largely rejected because the discovery of pre Clovis archaeological Sites such as the Monte Verde in Chile and Paisley Caves in Oregon, which show evidence of human presence in the Americas at least a thousand years earlier.
- [98:11]
B
Yeah. And so this is like a great example of. Of the dogma of archaeology. This is why people usually bring this up, because archaeology basically suppressed. Or North American archaeology basically suppressed this find, a lot of these finds. So like sites like Monteverde in Chile, that was dated to around 15,000 years ago, potentially up to 20,000 years ago. So that's obviously before Clovis. Lots of people were not happy about that when that was discovered in the 1970s by a guy called Tom Dillahay, I think. And like, honestly, he basically almost had his career destroyed because he had these dates of this site and he even had. I know that Dan Richards, Dandy Duncan. I don't know if you've heard about that guy.
- [98:55]
A
Yeah.
- [98:55]
B
But he, he always talks about how North American archaeologists basically tried to get this guy almost killed because he was making these statements. So they wrote a letter to. So he lived in. So this is in Chile. And Chile was run by a dictator at that point. What's his name? Can't remember his name. Pico or something like that. Anyway, people can search.
- [99:21]
A
What years are we talking?
- [99:23]
B
So this was in the 80s. And the site he dated to around 14,000 years ago.
- [99:28]
A
I know the name.
- [99:29]
B
Yeah. I can't remember what I gave was wrong there. Dictator, something like Pete Pinny Co or something. Yeah, yeah, that's the one.
- [99:40]
A
I knew you were on it.
- [99:41]
B
Yeah, I had the pee. So, yeah, so. So these. So this archaeologist even wrote a letter to. To them saying that Tom Dillahay was a CIA plant, which is like a. It's a really dangerous thing to do, man. Like he could have been killed for that. Because they were so against this find because, you know, it made them look really stupid. Right. Because they were all behind this paradigm. Clovis first, 13,000 years ago. And this. This guy's here saying, you know, I've got evidence of that. It's way older than that. Anyway, long story short, he was eventually proven right. There was another cave, another site in Canada called Bluefish Caves, which was even older.
- [100:14]
A
Bluefish Caves.
- [100:15]
B
Bluefish Caves, yeah. So this was an archaeologist called. Archaeologist called. What's his name? I've got his name. Jacques. Jacques sank Mars. That's his name.
- [100:26]
A
Yeah. There is, yeah. The site was first excavated by archaeologist Jacques Shank Mars. Can we scroll down deep? It's right there. Between 1977 and 1987. And the initial radiocarbon dating suggested an age of 24, 000 before present. This was considered controversial in contrast with the Clovis first theory. Yada, yada, yada. Can you go up deep? I just want to grab this. So Bluefish Caves is a site in Yukon, Canada, located 54 km southwest of the Vin Tut Gwichin community of Old Crow. I have no idea where that is, but hopefully people do. It has been suggested the human occupation. Yeah, we already read that part. Okay.
- [101:06]
B
So, yeah, I mean, but he. This guy was vilified for this.
- [101:08]
A
Like he was finding something.
- [101:10]
B
Yeah. And he. His career was destroyed, and he didn't have a career because he found this and.
- [101:15]
A
Isn't that crazy?
- [101:16]
B
It's so crazy. And he was eventually vindicated, like recently, like in the last 15, 20 years.
- [101:23]
A
That's nice. Is he dead now?
- [101:25]
B
I think so. Yeah. I think he is dead.
- [101:28]
A
Don't you love when we do that? Someone, like, lives their whole life going, I'm telling the truth. No, you're not. And then they die and you're like, oh, sorry. Yeah, dead.
- [101:35]
B
See? So he probably lived just long enough to see himself vindicated, but his career was ruined.
- [101:41]
A
That's unbelievable.
- [101:43]
B
For doing what he was supposed to do and making an incredible discovery and proving archaeology wrong. But his career was destroyed, basically. And there's a few examples like that, that. But the point I'm making is that we don't know anymore how old human history in the Americas is. We have no idea, because Clovis first is overruled. And there's an even older site called a white sands footprints in New Mexico where they discovered these footprints that are dated to around 23,000 years old. Very solid dating. So that shows that humans have been here for at least 23,000 years, which is, you know, 10,000 years older than Clovis. Yeah, there you go. Undisputed.
- [102:24]
A
Oh, yeah, those are human feet.
- [102:26]
B
Yeah. So that's the oldest accepted evidence. But there's loads of other sites that are way older that are a bit more controversial. But my argument is that we really do not know how long human beings have been in the Americas.
- [102:40]
A
And that's also like when you. When. Especially when you're looking at South America, forget North America for a second, which is. Certainly has a lot of great arguments as well. But like, you're talking about climates that are goddamn near or on the equator. So if you're. If you're most concerned about, you know, ice periods where, you know, people can't survive because there's no agriculture and shit's Frozen. Well, that's the least likely place for that to be the case. Like, that's why when we look at ancient civilizations, other places, a lot of times they're not always, but like the ones we talk about, like Egypt, not too far from the equator. Right. Like you're, you're looking at places to have warmer climates and therefore have more potential, I guess, to survive. That's a broad way of putting it. But it's like why you would, why you would assume that, forget even the Clovis first period. Why you would assume that the oldest species, human species we know about in South America might be a few thousand years old or something and not older than that doesn't even, it doesn't even make sense. It would be an amazing. It has its dangers like anywhere else, but it would be an amazing climate to live in.
- [103:47]
B
Yeah, the best. Especially South America, as you say. But, but then there's other sites. There's a site called the Cerusi Mastodon site. Have you heard of that?
- [103:55]
A
Ceruse Mastodon.
- [103:57]
B
Ceruti. Mastodon, Ceruti.
- [103:59]
A
I think Lucas talked about this, but let's bring it up.
- [104:01]
B
I'm sure he has. Yeah. I mean it's a very, this is very controversial, but there was a paper published in Nature which is, you know, the most prestigious mainstream journal there is, and this is. Yeah. So they found these broken mastodon bones that look like they've been broken by humans, some kind of humans. And this site's dated to 130000 years ago.
- [104:21]
A
130, 000. Oh, so it's a. Rudy, Mastodon site is a paleontological and possible archaeological site in San Diego county, California. In 2017, broken mastodon bones at the site were dated at around 100, 130,700 years ago. The bones were found with cobblestones displaying use wear and impact marks among the otherwise fine grained sands. Researchers have proposed that these marks were caused by the intentional breakage of the broken bones by hominins using the cobblestones. If true, that would be older by far than the scientific consensus for the habit. Yeah, that's. Yeah, you already nailed all this. I don't know why the.
- [105:01]
B
I'm reading, but you know, I mean that, that's a, that would, if that's true, that would push back human history in America by another hundred thousand years.
- [105:09]
A
Which is like work, you know.
- [105:10]
B
Exactly. That's like four or five times longer than we think. And so what does that suggest? Like, this all buys into the argument of my channel Basically, which is that human history everywhere is far older.
- [105:21]
A
Of course it is.
- [105:22]
B
Than we think.
- [105:22]
A
Of course it is.
- [105:24]
B
And there's other sites as well. But, I mean, there's just. There's a lot.
- [105:26]
A
Yeah, it sounds like you could go on for days. I mean, it's like. It's great. What is, though? So of the ones that we talk about, which could include, by the way, some older ones that now have evidence to be found. What's the most intriguing civilization in South America that you've studied?
- [105:45]
B
Depends what you mean by civilization, because. Well, I mean, I find the civilizations that we accept in South America really interesting. You know, it's really interesting stuff. But I mean, I don't really focus on that because I focus on the older stuff. I focus on the controversy. But that's not to say these things aren't interesting. And people often get that confused with me. I think people, like, criticize me a lot because they're like, you know, you. You're downplaying the sophistication of these civilizations. It's like, I'm not doing that. Like, I think they're really interesting. It's just that I have no beef, you know, with how they're presented. My beef is with this idea that, you know, it's all been cut off at this point, and then nothing happened before then. So that's what I'm like, really going hard. That. So. I mean, I don't know what I. I find them all interesting. I have no favorites. You know, I don't. I don't choose. But yeah, I mean, there is. It's a super fascinating place. I think South America is so interesting because we know so little, and I. It's not like my area of expertise, like, as you say, I'm a bit of a generalist. I kind of just hop all over the place wherever I find something interesting. But I think there's a lot of mystery there.
- [106:50]
A
Yeah, you seem to store all the. Though memory with it. What was the site you were telling me about right before the new one in Mexico? I think you were. You just made a video on this or. We're making a video on it.
- [107:02]
B
I think you mean way. I can't pronounce it. It's.
- [107:05]
A
All right.
- [107:05]
B
Wait. Or way at Laco or something like that. That's.
- [107:11]
A
Do you know the first letter of how it's spelled?
- [107:13]
B
Yeah, it's spelled H, U, E, Y, A, T, L, A, C, O.
- [107:19]
A
Okay. I purposely didn't ask you about this when you mentioned it because I wanted to be surprised. On here. But what. What was going on here?
- [107:27]
B
So this site's super interesting because Basically in the 1960s, a Mexican archaeologist found some artifacts here in. This is in Mexico, I believe. Yeah, near Buella. And he found these artifacts. And then a whole team of American archaeologists came in and they discovered more artifacts. And then they got these team of geologists in to date the kind of the rocks and the sediments around it. And there was this layer of volcanic ash that was above the artifacts. And they sent this ash off for testing, and they were expecting it to be like 15,000, because this was in the time of the Clovis first theory. So they were expecting it to come of align with that theory. And then this ash came back with dating of around 250,000 years old. And the artifacts were below this layer. And the artifacts were in an undisturbed context. Right. So they hadn't been corrupted or anything. They hadn't been. They hadn't slipped down there or anything. They'd been there since before this ash was deposited. And this ash was deposited according to their testing. And they did multiple tests on this and like with various techniques to at least 250,000 years ago. Some of their tests were like 300, 400,000 years ago. So if that's correct, that means that there was some kind of human making tools in Mexico. So in the Americas, you know, 250,000 years ago, at least. Which is just, like, ridiculous because. Yeah. And this was in the time of Clovis first. And then this is another example of archeological dogma, because people weren't happy with that. Like, this guy got his whole artifact collection seized. Seized the site seized by the government. By the Mexican government.
- [109:09]
A
Yeah, yeah. They're real, not corrupt.
- [109:11]
B
They weren't happy with it. And according to the archaeologist's own testimony, or the geologist's own testimony, I should say, the site was cornered off by effectively the Mexican army or armed guards. And they came there, they seized the artifact collection, and they said, you can't do this. The work that they produced wasn't published. They couldn't get it published in archaeological journals. And then when people came back to the site about 10 years later to be like, we're going to sort this out once and for all. It had all been, like, raised flat and there was nothing there anymore. So there's. So the artifacts are gone and the site is gone. But so we just have these stories and this dating that suggests that these tools were in the Americas 250,000 years ago. So you can't prove it because it's all gone now. But this, these geologists were very certain about their dates. And there's been some more recent testing on the, on the ash, I think, which aligns with these dates. I can't remember who did it or what the testing method was. There's a really cool video by this guy called Will Brown. His channel is called Incredible History. He did a great job of shout out Will Brown. He's awesome. He did a great job of kind of outlaying. I did a video too on it. But I point people to his video because he goes more in depth on it. Can we pull that up?
- [110:35]
A
Give him.
- [110:35]
B
Yeah, give him some props, man. He's good.
- [110:37]
A
Yeah. Will, what's the channel called?
- [110:39]
B
His channel's called Incredible History.
- [110:40]
A
Incredible.
- [110:41]
B
And his video, I feel like I've seen that. Yeah, he's great. His video on way at Laco or however you say it is.
- [110:49]
A
That'S, that's how it looks to me me.
- [110:51]
B
You're all the comments on my video are like this guy can't pronounce this thing. Which is fair enough, but it's for engagement. Yeah, this is, this is the video.
- [111:01]
A
Yes, I have seen this guy before.
- [111:03]
B
Yeah, he's good. He does a really good job of kind of outlining the dating, the cold controversy about the COVID up and what it could potentially suggest about a vastly older human presence in the Americas. So then when you start to look at all these things adding up, it's like, you know, how long have we been in these Americas, man? Like how long have human beings, beings been there? And thus why are we against the idea of civilization there being you know, far, far older than the Inca obviously. But even Carl, super and Pinico and these civilizations we're finding recently, how far back does it go?
- [111:35]
A
Yeah, and you're pointing out a lot of things that were found years ago in many cases and just didn't get attention. And it makes, it does, you know, know. You don't want to just make your head go conspiracy on everything like that. But you would wonder why Walter Cronite wouldn't have wanted to cover this on cbs. Like finding something like this. I think that's very interesting. 6:00 clock news. You know, if I'm going back in.
- [111:58]
B
Time, it's not even like conspiracy.
- [112:00]
A
Like it's, it's not, I'm saying the conspiracy of people not covering it, but it's.
- [112:04]
B
That's. I don't even think that's a conspiracy. I think they delib. They like literally covered it up up because they were not happy. Like, you have it with Monteverde, you have it with bluefish cakes. They, you know, they, they wanted to suppress this because, you know, North American archaeologists in the 20th century had built their whole careers around Clovis. First they'd written the textbooks, they taught the lessons. They kind of constructed their whole identity around being the source of information on North America. And then you have these people coming out like, this is not just wrong, but this is almost just ridiculously wrong. Like this. You could be hundreds of thousands of years out here. So they weren't happy about that.
- [112:41]
A
But do you ever wonder if. Let me explain this so I can ask the question properly. But like, if the intelligence agencies had the technology and there's very good evidence that they do to kind of simulate the effect of things on society. Like, if you told society that a truth that they had accepted for a long time wasn't a truth, how would they react on a mass scale and things like that? Do you ever wonder if, like, intelligence agencies could have some involvement when it comes to ancient history? Because perhaps there have been things found that would so shake the structure of maybe every world religion that's ever existed or people's basic, you know, quote unquote, meaning of life that they're like, oh, that would crash society and people can't know about it. Do you ever wonder that?
- [113:29]
B
I do wonder that. I think it would have to be something like really crazy, like, you know, aliens or something, or just like a really, really advanced civilization back in the past. I don't personally believe that. A lot of people, like in this space push the idea that, you know, this all been hidden from us and there's this like, elite that know our true past. I don't buy into that at all. I think it's more when things are covered up. I think it's more like a human idea of, oh, I'm wrong about my job, my whole identity. So I'm not going to push this. I don't think we have. Have evidence of like an advanced civilization from way back in history that people know about and are hiding. I don't think, you know, the intelligence agencies would see. If it was something like aliens, then maybe. But I don't think if it was a human civilization, I don't think that would like, put people out too much, you know, but yeah, you know, maybe it would. I don't know.
- [114:20]
A
But yeah, the aliens thing, I think is a whole different level. And I, I could as much as, like, I want to know, like, I could see why you know, something like that might not be disclosed. And that's also when guys from the government, including, you know, some people have come on my show before. It's, I haven't had one in a while. You know, it makes me wonder, like, all right, why are you here talking about this? And this is probably not the true thing. It's probably something else. Like, I feel like you wouldn't be telling us this, but, you know, it's interesting because if we don't even know, know what happened on our planet, and every day it doesn't get blown up by like 6000 years like Gobekli Tepe, it gets blown up by a million years sometimes like the one in China.
- [115:04]
B
Well, what else don't we know about.
- [115:06]
A
The, forget the solar, the galaxy around us and, you know, how we could have gotten here? I mean, it's, it's strange to even think about why we're alive or what caused it or, you know, we're all like a 1 in 4 trillion chance of just being born in the first place. Like, let's start with that. You know, your mind can go to crazy places thinking about this stuff, but I do, I, I like right now, you know, you go in phases doing this thing. But I, I, I like talking with guys like you that are focused on, you know, the, the history that we can find on our Earth and kind of starting there. Because if we don't even understand the basics of, you know, what we have here with how the, are we going to understand what we got going on up there other than looking at the planets, you know?
- [115:47]
B
You know, I mean, that's almost the point I make all the time, is we don't know as much as we think we know about anything about human history, about our existence, about the universe. Like, we think that we, we've got it all figured out, right? Yeah, but we don't, we don't even know who we are. We don't know what was going on in our heads. Like, so, yeah, I think there's so much still to be discovered and I just hope we can do it before, you know, everything falls apart.
- [116:17]
A
Yeah, I, I'd like to have an optimistic view. I think we're in some weird times right now, but things will come together. Like I said, we're still young, with social media even, you know, I think I do have hope we'll figure out how to use these tools and this access we have to each other a little more constructively before we all kill each other. Right, exactly. That's, that's the downside here. But you were also telling me before you're interested in a lot of different things in history. Like, and I always. I love this when. When guys like you are known publicly for having having one expertise, but then you're like, yeah, I also. This stuff too. And you were saying you would maybe eventually, if not on this channel, on a separate channel, cover things like. I think you said like, World War I or stuff like this. Like, what. What are your other favorite parts that, you know, that aren't ancient, so to speak?
- [117:01]
B
I love it all, mate. I. I love all of history. That's why I did it. University. That's why I do what I do. But, yeah, I mean, like, things like World War I. I have. Have such a huge fascination with World War I. I think World War I. Maybe it's partly because I'm British, but I think World War I was such a pivotal moment. It kind of almost was the beginning of the modern world. It was the end of the kind of old society which was run by, like, kings and empires and stuff. And then it all. It was like this age of like, such illustrious, almost hedonism, them that all came to a head. Like, these people had so much money and these empires were so flourishing that they just didn't know what to do. So they just ended up just creating the worst inferno ever. And everyone died basically. Like. Yeah, it's almost like the beginning of the end of Britain, I think. I think because Britain was obviously the most powerful country in the world at the turn of the 20th century and had so much money and so much influence and so much power that it didn't even. It almost. Almost didn't really realize where it was. And then you have this new upstart country in Germany coming along and trying to, like, take the crown and. Yeah, the fact that all these societies just basically mass industry created, you know, they basically poured the entire society's resources into death and everyone got slaughtered. And I just find that whole period so interesting. And then what. What came out of that, which was. Was, you know, transfer. Transfer of power across the Atlantic to you guys in America. And then obviously all the implications in Europe, which led to the rise of Nazism in Germany and led to the Second World War, which led to the Cold War, which led to, you know, the modern world. So the Domino. Yeah, exactly. I just think that World War I. Exactly, exactly. So, like, what? One bullet led to everything, in a way.
- [118:53]
A
It's also so actually very sad to me how ignored World War I is specifically because then you had World War II, which is now more recent comparatively speaking, happen, you know, just over 20 years later and break out. But you had some of the most, like, brutal warfare ever in World War I, with the trench warfare just, you know, pure savagery of behind the scenes suits paying for everyone else to kill each other. I think, I think probably the wildest story that, that paints that picture is obviously, I'm sure you're familiar with this, but the, that when there were too many wolves in the one battle and they had to call like a ceasefire for a few days, the Germans, and I think it was the Germans and the Brits and the French, like, were playing pickup soccer together. Yeah, and then. Yeah, exactly. And then they had to go back into their trenches two days later, same guys and shoot each other. Like that's nuts.
- [119:49]
B
Yeah, so nuts. The whole conflict is because the whole point of the war, there was no point for that war. That's what makes it so, like, ridiculous in my opinion, because at least when you look at World War II, like, you can see there was a reason behind that. Like, you know, Hitler was taking over the whole of Europe. He had these crazy genocidal ambitions. He wanted to take over the world and exterminate everyone who wasn't like him, you know, and clearly a bad guy. Let's fight that guy. It's a just war, right? World War I, there was no reason to do it. It was just these stupid alliances that all kind of led to a domino effect which led to the entirety of Europe declaring war on each other. And, and it was the first industrial war. I think that's what makes it so interesting and so tragic because you had all these societies that thought about war in the traditional sense. They thought it was this romantic thing because Europe had been at peace for 100 years, basically up until the 20th century. So war was this, you know, far off, distant thing that they thought about Napoleonic times, basically, like these men in fancy coats riding horses and going to glory and there was these little skirmishes and then, you know, you trade a little province here with me and then the war's over. So that was with the idea of war. So they were like, okay, we'll have a little war. But it wasn't. The world had changed. There was these mass industrial societies. They had the ability to call up millions and millions and millions of men. They had weapons like the machine gun and, and like massive artillery. And it just led to this horrific stalemate where the whole of Europe was just trench warfare with just pouring millions of men into this zone of Death and slaughtering them all for what? Because for what? You're allied with me and I'm allied with you and he's allied with him. And he shot him in Sarajevo. So that means that he has to attack him, so you have to attack me. It's just, it's ridiculous. And you know.
- [121:35]
A
Yeah. How many people de. Can we Google this? How many people died in World War I is. It's a obviously horrific number.
- [121:42]
B
Millions and millions of millions. Yeah.
- [121:44]
A
People always talk about World War II, but World War I, over 37 million casualties. So that's 15 to 22 million deaths and 23 million wounded military personnel and civilians combined over like a four year period.
- [122:01]
B
Yeah.
- [122:02]
A
That is absolutely absurd. 8.5 million military, as in deaths, 13 million civilians and then total twin. Wow. Yeah. See, I, I remember, I listened. That's probably like six years ago, maybe seven years ago. Listened to Dan Carlin's.
- [122:25]
B
Yeah. Blueprint for Armageddon. Oh, my God, that's my favorite history podcast episode ever.
- [122:30]
A
Incredible. And you're like, how are we ignoring this? And then to your point, the way that it closed up is what set the, set the stage. You had everything from the Treaty of Versailles, which then basically like completely hamstrung Germany and allowed for a vacuum to suck up with their economy for someone like Hitler to then seize power all the way to. I, I, I hope I get the name right. Like the Sykes Picot Agreement, which just carved up the Middle east and set up just like willy nilly, you know, a bunch of dudes in an office in Europe like, oh, this will work.
- [123:06]
B
Yeah. You can trace back the whole current Middle east conflict to that basically.
- [123:10]
A
Exactly. Balfour Declaration was back then too. Like, it's, it's absurd. And then World War II. I'd love your perspective on this. Like, history is written by the victors. There's no history ever. That's 100% right. It's just a fact of life. I always cite the American Revolution as an amazing experience example. Like, I studied the hell out of that war. It's amazing. There are literally things that are actually written in the history books that you'll read, whether it be HW Brands or some other brilliant historian from that era that, like, when it's, when the war is talked about, where the documentary is made, they don't really mention that. So even the stuff, like some stuff that's written down, they won't mention. And that stuff I'm referring to will be things that are like, negative towards the revolutionaries in the United States. Meaning, like yeah, we did some stuff wrong in that war too, too. But I, you know, I, I'm not one of these, like, it's everything or Nothing or like 5%'s wrong. So we're going to throw out the hundred percent baby out with the bath water. But I can, like, look at it and say, okay, I'm very glad, all due respect to your people, that, you know, we did this revolution and we're able to form this great country. And these guys were amazing and the shit they came up with. But yeah, they did a few things during the war as well, that probably wasn't totally fair to the British. For sure not. And that certainly certainly happened a lot in the other direction. And then, yeah, like in the Constitution, they fucked that up and, you know, didn't abolish slavery and like, meaning you can point to things and call it nuance without excoriating the entire thing. And what's really concerning me about society now with history in general, but I think we've seen a major aspect of it formulate around World War II is that we're looking at narratives that have been told to us before and people are plucking on, you know, that 1% that might be a little different than it was written written. And then they're pulling out that, that bottom card from the house of cards and saying, look, the whole thing comes down, it's actually all fake. And they'll say, you will literally hear people say things sometimes like, you know, Hitler wasn't great, but it was actually Churchill that was the bad guy. And, you know, we should be, you should be able to discuss anything. You should be able to hash things out. I don't want to, like, shut down conversation. But when people are running away with narratives like that and suddenly now using the Internet and algorithms to push them and suddenly report them as truth, do you ever get concerned about how we're discussing, like, even modern history?
- [125:28]
B
Yeah, I mean, historical revisionism, it's, it's worth, it's worth exploring for sure, as you say. But you do have to be careful because as you say, when you, you start taking these narratives, you can like, say this means this, and then the whole thing falls down. Exactly. Like, was church with a book bad guy of World War II? No, like, he wasn't a perfect guy, but he was, he was a man of his era. Right? He was a, he grew up in the, at the end of the 19th century when Britain had the British Empire and was, you know, oppressing everyone around the world. Like, yeah, British Empire had positives but also there was definitely a mindset amongst the, especially the elite of Britain that, you know, they were better than everyone else. And Churchill was a product of that. And you could point to many things that he did that were, you know, not great. And the guy clearly thought that white British men were the best thing in the world. But at the same time, more than almost anyone else I think in the world, he was instrumental in stopping Hitler, right? Because if Britain had surrendered, and Britain was extremely close to surrendering to Germany in 1940, and Churchill was basically the guy that stopped that happening, the British government wanted, or factions of the British government wanted, government wanted to surrender when France fell, for good reason. Like, you're looking at this because people always forget the context of World War I. Like Britain and France and Germany had been through the most horrific traumatic experience, only, you know, less than 20 years or just over 20 years prior. So all these people are still alive. All these people can still remember an entire generation of men being slaughtered, their kids or their brothers or their friends wiped out dead. And you're thinking, fucking hell, lads. The last thing we want to do is do this all over again. And, yeah, it's happening, let's just call it quits. Like this Hitler guy, like, yeah, he's a bit of a nutter, but is it worth wiping out another 3 million men from our population? But Churchill was like the one guy that was like, no, we're not having this. We're going to fight this guy, we're going to beat this guy. So when people say, like, Churchill was the villain of World War II because he, you know, didn't continue with the policy of appeasement or whatever, I'm not quite, not quite down on the arguments why people say that, but he clearly wasn't. And he clearly, more than anyone else, was the guy that kept Britain in the war and thus enabled the Allied cause to keep going, thus enabled America to eventually join the war, and thus enabled the Allies to win the war and thus enabled Nazism and fascism to lose and for, you know, Western democracy, America to become the prominent power, at least east with the Soviet Union, then eventually defeat the Soviet Union, which is a preferable outcome to, yes, fascism.
- [128:08]
A
And you're underlying an amazing point here, which is that a lot of people who will look at this, I find, with revisionism, want to assume the world is a perfectly balanced place where the logical outcome is always going to win. And then when they see an outcome that involves using logic where something has to lose, they cannot accept that they. That that's the case. And what I mean is, in this context, Churchill made a decision that the fastest growing GDP in the world, which was fascist Nazi Germany, that was starting a war on multiple fronts and taking over countries by the day. He made a decision that that was the worst immediate problem. That doesn't mean that he didn't think the Communists were a problem, of course. In fact, he protested like, the whole time, like, oh, we got to work with this fucking Stalin guy. Like, he knew that was a huge issue. He's the guy who invented the Iron Curtain and all that. But he made the best of two bad decisions at the time. That, unfortunately, yes, World War II is the bloodiest conflict ever. Tens of millions of people died. That's terrible. I hate that that happened. The alternative of, like, the United States never getting into the war and me speaking German right now, or definitely me, anyway. Yeah, like. Like, that's worse. I'm sorry. It is. And maybe eventually that would have fallen, but there would have been even more destruction on the way. And, you know, there's even misunderstandings of, like, how Churchill eventually viewed, like, Chamberlain, like, he disagreed with what Chamberlain did. But Chamberlain gets more shit in history than he should. He tried for peace. He did it the wrong way. It didn't work out. Hitler was not a guy you should listen to, but, like, he made the effort. And then what did he say? He's like, if you break this, I'm going to be forced to declare war on you. And he fucking did. Yeah, you know, like, that's what it is. And also, people. People ignore the. Churchill gave the eulogy at Chamberlain's funeral in, like, 1940 or 1941. And he talked about, you know, this guy's gonna be misunderstood in history. We had some disagreements, but, like, he tried.
- [130:07]
B
Yeah.
- [130:07]
A
And now this is what it is. Like, people, you have to live in reality, and reality sucks sometimes. But when you're looking at history, you also have the advantage of having some hindsight. 2020, don't use that the wrong way and assume you could have magically solved the problem back then, you know, and.
- [130:24]
B
You can completely understand Chamberlain's position. As I said, because of the First World War, because of the trauma, you think, let's do anything to stop this happening again. But at some point, Hitler's just. He's going for it, mate. He's. He's. He's ignoring all the deals you make with him. He's attacking all these countries. You've got. You've got to fight him eventually. And Chamberlain did come round to that. But at the end, he was the wrong guy. Churchill came in. Churchill was instrumental in keeping Britain.
- [130:48]
A
Yeah.
- [130:48]
B
You know, in the war. Because if Britain had sued for peace, which they tried to do. Well, they didn't try to do, but factions of the government really wanted to do, then Churchill wouldn't have remained in power. It probably would have been. Have you ever heard of Oswald Mosley?
- [131:01]
A
I don't think so.
- [131:02]
B
He was the fascist leader of. Well, the leader of the British Fascist Party at the time, so probably would.
- [131:08]
A
Have been someone like Mosley.
- [131:10]
B
Yeah. Okay. He's actually in Peaky Blinders, which. I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, he would. It probably would have been someone like him who would have been put in place in Britain, because Britain would have then presumably had, like, you know, good ties with Nazi Germany. So then you might have had a fascist Britain, whole fascist Europe.
- [131:27]
A
Like Hitler.
- [131:29]
B
Yeah. I get. I think he's probably modeling himself on Hitler because Hitler, I guess, was his ideological hero.
- [131:34]
A
Wow.
- [131:34]
B
You know, Britain, like, we weren't. It wasn't like, people think of fascism now as, like, oh, it's evil, but it hadn't happened yet. So people were just seeing that as an alternative. And it's like, well, Mussolini's doing pretty well in Italy. Hitler's fucking smashing it in Europe. Why don't we try this Mosley guy? So someone like Churchill was the guy that kind of stopped that and led to democracy winning.
- [131:59]
A
So also, shout out to the Brits, too, dude. I didn't. Because I didn't. That was one part of World War II I hadn't done, like, a huge deep dive on. I've looked at it my whole life. Life. It's so fascinating to me. But, like, the Battle of Britain and that year, which is all prior to Pearl harbor, by the way, and not just Churchill, but, like, the whole context of the bombing raids back and forth between Britain and Germany on each other. Insane, man. There were a lot of times where Britain could have folded there. And like you said, because of Churchill and obviously a lot of other brave people, they didn't. And that when you really look at, like, between that and the. The evacuation at Dunkirk and everything, being able to, like, keep a standing army together. And you look at. At the pivot of being able to be like, all right, let's have a foot to stand on to win this war. That's really. They deserve a ton of credit for that.
- [132:47]
B
Yeah. So interesting how history can pivot on, like, so tiny, like, things and tiny amount of individuals. Like, because Britain's always Been throughout history. Britain was always a naval power. Right. So that kept Britain secure and we could rule the seas through having the best navy. And that's what led to the British Empire being what it was and everything like that. That. But by the time you get to the 1940s, that's kind of redundant because of air power. So Britain had this amazing navy, but the Luftwaffe could just dive bomb it and destroy it. So Britain was like, how do we defend ourselves now? So they invented radar effectively. And because they invented radar. And radar was literally being invented at the time that World War II broke out. And the first test of British defense radar system was, was the Battle of Britain. And if they didn't have this invention, they wouldn't know when the bombers were coming. They wouldn't know where to send the very few fighters that Britain had to intercept these bombers. And the bombers were targeting all the airfields. And if the Luftwaffe bombers had wiped out the raf, then the Luftwaffe could then wipe out the Royal Navy. And then Germany has free reign on Britain. So without the invention of radar at the exact time by like, I can't remember the guy's name, but there was like one or two people.
- [133:56]
A
Invention of radar. We'll get it.
- [133:57]
B
So radar, I think radar was a little bit older, but the development of the technology into a. A sophisticated defense system literally happened because of necessity at that exact time. And if that hadn't happened, then the RAF would have been wiped out. And obviously the bravery of the RAF.
- [134:12]
A
They had a lot of inventions around World War II in the nick of time. You talking about Robert Watson Watt?
- [134:17]
B
I'm not sure, I'm not sure the.
- [134:19]
A
Name the British invention, radar. So that was the initial invention you're talking about when they figured out how to use it. Okay. So the British invention of radar led by Sir Robert Watson Watt, played a pivotal role in winning the Battle of Britain. The chain home system was the world's first early warning radar network, providing the Royal Air Force with crucial advanced notice of German air raids, allowing them to scramble the fighters, their fighters and effectively direct them to intercept the incoming bombers. Without radar, it is highly unlikely the RAF could have defeated the Luftwaffe. And then the system could detect approaching aircraft from up to 80 miles away. That's amazing.
- [135:00]
B
Yeah. And if like that hadn't that. If that technology hadn't been just at that exact point where it was possible to do that, the whole history of the world would look different. And if that these people hadn't managed to do it.
- [135:11]
A
And that's the thing. You make an Amazing point about how this was only like 20 years after World War I. So people in Britain, they had fathers, sons, brothers, friends who died in that war. People knew the cost of the most brutal cost of war. So. And in the United States, even getting in in the last year, they knew it very well, too. So totally understandable. There were some isolationist feelings. And then the war breaks out and Britain is getting attacked. So they're forced to not be isolationists. But one of the things that I really didn't understand, just how deep it went, was how isolationist we were in America. I read this book when I was telling you I was looking into this a couple years ago called the Splendid in the Vile by Eric Larson, which is about the one year of basically the bombing of Britain. And he talks about, like, the relationship with. It's basically from Churchill's perspective. And he talks about the relationship between Churchill and fdr. And FDR knew this was all a problem. But beginning with the May 1940 bombings, when Churchill was like, Please, help, help. FDR had an election on November 5, 1940, and he was telling Churchill, he's like, bro, I agree with you, but, like, my opponent is running complete isolationism. Stay out of this. So I have to, like, try to run in his direction just to win an election. I don't think you understand. Like, the whole country doesn't support getting involved, so I can't really help. He couldn't even give Churchill a couple totally broken boats that Congress was about to vote on to destroy. Like, they were floating in the Caribbean. Useless. And Churchill's like, it, I'll take them. FDR had to come up with some backhanded, like, secret deal to try to even get them there. It was that isolationist. And so Churchill was like, begging for a year, and then it took Pearl harbor to get the United States involved.
- [137:00]
B
Do you think Pearl harbor was a false flag?
- [137:03]
A
Unfortunately, absolutely. I've had West Point commandos sitting there openly saying that as if it's common parlance. I have have had a dude who wrote a book on the entire thing and the dude who was in the building that this picture on the wall is taken from, which is rockefeller center from MI6 during the build up to World War II, whose sole job was to try to get the United States involved. There are cables that show that FDR knew it was coming and that, you know, that's what it was. And the ultimate poison pill there is that, you know, hindsight 20 20. Funny, because I. I've never looked at a false flag before and been like, well, that was a good idea. It was horrible. You wonder, though, if that hadn't happened, if the world would look a lot different because they knew it would force Hitler's hand, because he was such a big dog guy to like, declare war because the war was only declared on Japan, but they knew that would get Hitler involved and give him an excuse to be like, okay, well, you. We're coming in too. That's. That's a tough one, man.
- [138:04]
B
Yeah. I mean, it's very plausible, I think, not that it was a false flag, but that they allowed it to happen.
- [138:10]
A
Yeah, yeah. There's also, like, there's financial things related to that with what they did with, like, the oil. I forget it off the top of my head, but like the oil exports, I think involving Asia, that would have forced Japan's hand to do. Fix me in the comments on that. I'm. It's hazy, but there were a lot of things going on there and it get. It gets weird. But, you know, we. You should talk about all these things for sure. You know, like I said, no war is. Is ever 100 on the up and up and all that, you know.
- [138:42]
B
Yeah, interesting. Interesting time. But I mean, I think one thing that's probably underestimated in the west is the. The World War II was basically won and lost on the Eastern Front, I think at least agree with you.
- [138:58]
A
Yes.
- [138:59]
B
Because that's where it turned. Because if Hitler had taken Moscow, if Hitler had knocked out the Soviet Union, he's in such a strong position, even with America. But because Stalingrad happened, because it turned on the Eastern Front, that allowed. That allowed the Allies to win effectively. And I think the Soviet Union probably don't get enough credit in the west, probably because they're so ideologically opposed to us. And they're also the enemy. They became the enemy, me. But without that contribution, Hitler probably would have won or at least wouldn't have lost, and there would have been some weird stalemate. Maybe they would have sued for peace. Although probably that goes against Nazi ideology. But.
- [139:38]
A
Yeah.
- [139:38]
B
Yeah, I think that's underestimated in the west because we have, you know, we have this narrative, like Britain and America together, we won the war, we defeated Hitler. But I mean, the real war was the Eastern Front. Right.
- [139:48]
A
So it was all three. And there's no doubt that the Russians, because the war literally ended up coming onto their land, civilians and military. Military alike, through the most bodies at the problem. I mean, that's by a lot. And that absolutely is true. And again, it comes back to that you kind of had to pick the lesser two evils to work with. And at the time, you know, Cold War wasn't great and all that, but didn't drop 45 million bodies in that way, you know, on, on battlefields and, and with the civilians in the middle in a four year period or anything like that, obviously a lot of people, people died and there was destruction within the Cold War. I don't want to underestimate that. But, you know, these are the decisions that have to get made at the time and you can sit there and analyze them to death afterwards. And I still think the, the right overall decision was made by the allies and it was what it was.
- [140:37]
B
Yeah, it had to be done right. It was the only logical decision at the time. But yeah, it's just crazy how reasonable this was as well. I think people forget that this is only like, you know, 60, 70 years ago ago.
- [140:48]
A
Shaped our entire modern world.
- [140:51]
B
Like our grandparents generation lived through this.
- [140:53]
A
Had two guys sitting in that chair who fought in it.
- [140:56]
B
Really?
- [140:56]
A
Yeah.
- [140:57]
B
That's cool.
- [140:57]
A
Yeah, that's, that's the kind of I'll tell my grandkids about and pull up the video and be like, look at that.
- [141:02]
B
Yeah.
- [141:02]
A
You know, but that shows you it's, it's not too, too long ago. Real quick, Michael, this is going great. I just gotta go to the bathroom and then we'll come right back. We gotta talk some Egypt and stuff.
- [141:11]
B
Yeah, we do. I need to go.
- [141:13]
A
That's good.
- [141:13]
B
Cool.
- [141:13]
A
We'll wrap.
- [141:14]
B
Bye.
- [141:15]
A
You know what's one thing I also, I was just thinking about this on, on the bathroom break. But one thing I've never really looked at, there was this video I saw when I was going through like a hardcore ancient Rome phase maybe like a year ago where it showed a, a CGI recreation of like Britain since the ancient Rome times. And it takes you through like each era. But I've never really looked at the history of your country before ancient Rome and like, who was there? Have you done a lot of work on that?
- [141:47]
B
Not so much. But I mean, the Romans came to our country and basically made it good for a long time. And then they left and we went straight back to I guess the Dark Ages. But I mean, Britain before the Rome, before Rome was basically just Celtic tribes, I guess, in just different locations. There was no unification, really. I mean, have you ever heard of Queen Buddha or Buddha?
- [142:07]
A
I don't think so.
- [142:08]
B
So she's pretty famous in Britain because. Yeah, she's famous in Britain because she's kind of seen as like a heroine of British identity, which is kind of a bit silly because we're not really the same. Yeah, there you go. And she was like this warlord and obviously she's a woman, so that, like, made it, like, ridiculous because.
- [142:27]
A
Yeah, they were ahead of the times.
- [142:29]
B
Very ahead of the times. Yeah. And she, like, led some British tribe and she almost unified all the British tribes against the Roman forces in Britain and she almost won. That's the crazy thing. She almost took out the Roman. Roman occupation of Britain.
- [142:43]
A
Was she around when. I didn't look at the years there. Was she around when Caesar was actually leading the armies? There was this.
- [142:49]
B
She's just after, I think. What's the date here? AD 60. Yeah, so, yeah, that would have been after.
- [142:54]
A
He's dead. He's like 53 or something, right.
- [142:55]
B
He's BC. He's like, when did he die? He died like 40 BC or something like that. So this is just in the start of the Roman Empire. So that's maybe this is just after Augustus. Yeah.
- [143:08]
A
44 BC, March 15th. 44.
- [143:09]
B
What did I say? I was pretty close there, wasn't I?
- [143:11]
A
Yeah, you're right. I think said 43.
- [143:13]
B
Yeah, right there. Pretty impressive.
- [143:15]
A
It's up there, bro. You got an encyclopedia. It's great. So this lady was trying to unify all the tribes against the constantly incoming Roman army, but the Romans at this point would have already been occupying. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [143:34]
B
But I mean, so, yeah, I guess less is known about Britain before the Romans. Romans. Because, you know, there was. It wasn't. We weren't really with it. We were just some random island on the edge of the known world. Like, Britain was not a relevant place until quite recently in terms of historical.
- [143:48]
A
Yeah, like the last thousand years.
- [143:50]
B
Yeah, even less than that.
- [143:51]
A
Like 800.
- [143:52]
B
Britain was always just this outcrop on the edge of the known world, like this crazy island where these tribal people lived and no one went. Like, the Romans hated Britain because it was such a hard place to run because it was so far away from their central power and. And it was this place that you had to cross the sea to get there, full of crazy Celts and stuff like that.
- [144:13]
A
So, yeah, a bunch of Conor McGregor's coming at you.
- [144:15]
B
Yeah, basically.
- [144:16]
A
Terrible accent, but whatever, we'll go with it. Are you. Are you someone that's also, like, fascinated with ancient Rome? Do you study that a lot or.
- [144:23]
B
Yeah, so basically that was. My degree, was a lot about ancient Rome. I really. I'm really interested by Rome because, you know, it's fascinating civilization. Right. Like, the whole Roman Empire is so interesting. And. Yeah. So I know a lot about it. I find the period from the transition from republic to empire very fascinating. You know?
- [144:43]
A
How so?
- [144:45]
B
Because it was just a crazy time in world history.
- [144:48]
A
Right.
- [144:49]
B
Where Caesar. See. So do you know the story of it?
- [144:54]
A
Of Caesar getting whacked?
- [144:55]
B
Yeah. And like, then the whole beef that happened after that and then what led to the formation.
- [145:00]
A
Yeah, it was like, now it's been a while, but that was like when they had the. The tripartite thing.
- [145:06]
B
Yeah, you know your stuff. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, I find that whole period of history so fascinating because you had this Roman republic and they were very, you know, they. They were really proud about their identity of not having kings. You can almost make the comparison to the. To the modern day with the no kings protest against trump. But not quite the same thing. Not to be clear. Not quite the same thing. But. But they were. They were terrified of dictators because they used to have kings way back in the very early days of Rome. Of Rome. And then they. They became this republic and they were like, we're never going to have a king again. And then eventually they had these more and more powerful individuals, and Caesar was one of them. And Caesar effectively wanted to take control of all of Rome. And he was becoming so powerful. And he had this. He basically conquered all of Gaul. And you could say he almost conducted a holocaust in Gaul. But that's a. Maybe that's a different. Different topic of conversation. But he was amassing all this power, and they were terrified of him in the. In the Senate because they didn't want a king, and he was acting like a king. So they were like, you can't come back here with an army. You can't. You've got to stay out there. And then he crossed the. What's it called?
- [146:15]
A
This is Rubicon.
- [146:16]
B
Yeah, that's it. It's like a famous phrase, and I forgot the name of the river. But he crossed the Rubicon with his army, and that was basically him declaring war on. On Rome. Rome. And then there was this big civil war which he eventually won. And then he. He wasn't an emperor, but he was almost the first emperor in spirit because he kind of took control of Rome. But then obviously people weren't happy about that. And so then he was assassinated by, you know, all the. The senators, and that's that famous story. And he's like, etu brute, which I don't think he ever said, but that's a Shakespeare line.
- [146:45]
A
Hey, it's a good line.
- [146:46]
B
It's a good line. Exactly. So you might as well just take it as a.
- [146:48]
A
Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.
- [146:51]
B
Exactly. So he was assassinated. Then you had this power vacuum and you had his adopted son who was Octavian. You had Mark Anthony, who was Caesar's right hand man and you also.
- [147:02]
A
He was banging Cleopatra. Right?
- [147:04]
B
They were both banging Cleopatra.
- [147:05]
A
Yeah.
- [147:05]
B
Different times, but they were both bang. Cleopatra. Fair play. And then you had. What's the other guy called that's pretty bad?
- [147:14]
A
Mark Anthony. And then I think he's the third guy.
- [147:16]
B
I think he was Leopard. Leopard.
- [147:17]
A
Lepidus, I think that's right.
- [147:19]
B
Something like that.
- [147:19]
A
Sounds familiar. Mark Anthony, Octavian and third guy. That should bring it up. Google AI should be smart enough. Grok will definitely be smart enough.
- [147:31]
B
Was it Lepidus? Yeah.
- [147:33]
A
Yep.
- [147:34]
B
I should have more confidence in myself. That's fine. Yeah. So they, they basically had this massive civil war which Octavian eventually won at the battle of Actium. Him. And then that led to Mark Anthony and Cleopatra committing suicide. Lepidus got knocked out earlier on. He was a bit of an irrelevant and. And then Octavian became Augustus. Yeah. And he was like, I am the first emperor. And he ruled for ages. He ruled for like, you know, like 60 years time. Yeah. And it was like a very peaceful and prosperous period and he became the first emperor. And yeah, it's just a fascinating time because it's a transition of how they structured their society from republic to empire. And then they had. That was the Roman Empire from then on. And it lasted for quite a while in a, in a good way. But then it did kind of go south later on. But fascinating period. I'm not sure too many people understand the distinction there, but it was a very different society I think once it became an empire because, you know, the power was all concentrated in this one guy, this, this emperor. Emperor who ruled basically the entire known world, which is an incredible thing to, to do and so much power. And he has some pretty bad emperors as well that really abused that power and led to Rome, I guess eventually collapsing. But you also have some good ones as well. Like you have meditations up in, up in your little.
- [148:57]
A
Yeah, Marcus Aurelius.
- [148:58]
B
Exactly. He was a good one.
- [148:59]
A
But the brilliance, I mean I, I actually legit read those like once a day. Day. And like you're like, oh my God, bar, bar. Like every single thing, it's, it's, it makes you look at yourself and be like, he's right. He's right. Like, that guy was amazing.
- [149:17]
B
Yes. He had some real wise ones like him, but then you had some crazy people like Caligula, the guy that made his horse a senator. I think basically, there's a massive you to the. To the Senate, and then also Nero, who was a bit of a crazy dude and. Yeah, fascinating period of history, man.
- [149:33]
A
It's one of those things, like, there was a trend, maybe this was worldwide. It was in America, so it's probably in the uk, too. But there's a trend online a couple years ago where it's like, how often do you think about the holy. And I remember when it came up, I was like, all the time, actually. Like, I don't know if that's like, a weird thing to say, but I think about it all the time. And there's a thief. I always ask for this, and I never have it ready to go. But the map of. The map of. Of Europe, that shows blood veins from the ancient Roman Empire. It's one of my favorite visuals ever because it basically shows how the cradle of, you know, modern civilization in the developed world all leads to Rome. That's not it, but that's close. It literally, it looks like a. Like a human body, but it starts in. In Rome and then leads out, like, a bunch of veins, goes all the way to England and all the way to the east and stretches far and wide. Sorry, I should have had it ready. It's like a Twitter. You found it. No, it's a human body. That's close enough. Yeah, I make it gets the visual across. If people have seen it on Twitter, like. Like Google. All roads lead to Rome. Veins. Let's see if that does it. I don't know. We'll give it one crack. But, like, I just. I'm a real visual person. Yep, there it is. Boom.
- [150:56]
B
All right.
- [150:57]
A
Pull that bad boy over.
- [151:00]
B
Yeah, that's right. I'm using that.
- [151:02]
A
You see what I mean?
- [151:03]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [151:04]
A
It's like. It's like a. Damn it. There it is. That's fine. That's fine. It's. It's. It's like a. A symbol of humanity itself that. That was built right there. And obviously there's been empires since then it fell. And that's a whole story in and of itself. But what we know of, like, you know, quote, you gotta be careful how you say these.
- [151:27]
B
This.
- [151:27]
A
These days, but, like, you know, world order, if you will, kind of emanates from some of the examples that they set. And also, to. To be very fair, like, there's a lot from ancient Greece too. There's a lot from a lot of different civilizations. It's just this one kind of like amalgamate it, if you know what I mean, all together. And it's, it's truly incredible to me.
- [151:46]
B
Yeah, they, they, they kind of put the first to almost unify Europe, I guess. I think that's probably a fair thing to say, which is an incredible achievement at such a time. But obviously it was a really hard thing to maintain because just for obvious reasons. And that's I guess eventually why it fell. But they did, they had a. They had a good run, mate. They had a good run. So very interesting civilization. But yeah, they were heavily inspired by the Greeks, I think. Heavily inspired. Like they really saw themselves as the inheritors of the Greek legacy and Greek culture. And the Greeks then saw themselves as the inheritors of Egyptian civilization in many ways. And obviously both Greece and Rome ruled Egypt for many, many centuries. And yeah, it's quite an interesting continuity there.
- [152:30]
A
They were both pretty obsessed with Egypt. Like it's documented obviously, like it became a part of the Roman Empire at one point and everything too. But, but you know, it's. They looked at, I don't know, you could almost extrapolate it by years in history too. Like they looked at Egypt the way that we look at them. Yeah, in a lot of ways it's kind of like, you know, the 30,000 foot view of the 30,000 foot view, which is always pretty cool to me. But actually on that note, we said we were going to do this before the break, so let's get to it. In Egypt, Ben Van Kirkwyk, I know, has been making waves recently on a bunch of podcasts. I think he went on Joe Rogan and some others as well with like some new information on the pyramids. I have seen absolutely none of it yet. I haven't gotten around to it. So what exactly you were talking about this, like what exactly apparently has been found here and what does it tell us?
- [153:25]
B
Yeah, so it's not the Giza pyramids, it's a different pyramid called Hawara, which is further south in the country. So what Ben has been talking about, and he's done a great job talking about it. I recommend everyone watch his video on his channel and he spoke about on Rogan, so a lot of people would have heard of it. So there's always been this almost tale of the labyrinth of ancient Egypt, the lost labyrinth of ancient Egypt. And ancient writers from Greece and Rome wrote about it and visited it. So the most, the first example is Herodotus. Have you heard of Herodotus? Greek historian, wrote the very famous histories. Almost seen as the father of history, the first historian, in many ways. He claimed to have visited the lost labyrinth of ancient Egypt at Hawara. And he said some pretty outlandish things about it. Like he said it was greater than anything that his people, the Greeks, had ever achieved, both in grandeur and in expense, which is quite a mad thing. He also said it surpassed the pyramids of Giza in terms of its achievement. So the great pyramids of Giza are perhaps the most impressive construction in all of antiquity. Right? And they still confuse us to this day. Like, how were they built? Why are they so big? Why are they so precise? What were they for? They're just massive and they're ridiculously impressive. And he said that this labyrinth surpassed that in grandeur. So it's a more impressive achievement than the Egyptian pyramids, which is a big thing to say. So he went there and he said, you know all this, and he said he went in it and like had a detailed description of all of it. But he wasn't the only one. There was also the Greek geographer Strabo who said he went there, said it was incredibly impressive. There were a few Roman writers like Diodorus Siculus who went there, and Pliny the Elder who went there and Pliny. Pliny the Elder made the interesting claim that the labyrinth was constructed over 3,600 years before his time. So I believe he was writing in the era of Augustus, as we were just talking about the start of the Roman Empire. So 3,600 years before his time would put it, before the first dynasties of ancient Egypt, so before the Egyptian civilization, dynastic Egypt arose. So that's something that's quite a confusing thing. How are they, how are they constructing something that surpasses the pyramids in grandeur before the beginning of Egyptian civilization? That's a pretty crazy thing. So we have all these classical authors that say they visited the labyrinth, say that it was like this incredible construction, but that was it. And then it kind of faded away into obscurity. And everyone thought it was just, you know, this legend and these ancient writers were talking about it. So then you fast forward to the modern day and you get the, the European explorers visiting Hawar. First notable one, I guess is Napoleon Bonaparte, you know, the famous French general. He was obsessed with ancient Egypt. He loved ancient Egypt. He, he once spent a night in the king's chamber of the Great Pyramid and said he Never spoke about it, but apparently he was quite shocked by his experience in there, which is a weird thing, but he spent a night in the king's chamber, which is pretty crazy. So, yeah, and he brought teams of scientists and scholars to Egypt and some of them went to Hawara and they said that they could see some, like, foundations and some ruins at the base of the pyramid there. And that was kind of the first modern identification of the labyrinth's potential location. But that's kind of all it was. And then you fast forward to some British explorers, like most notably Flinders Petrie, who's the famous British Egyptologist. He was the first one to kind of conduct any serious excavations there. And so he drilled into the pyramid and under the base there, and he came across this kind of base that he assumed was the foundation of the labyrinth. That was all that was left of it. And he had this, like, he found this massive base. And he was like, okay, the labyrinth was here and I found all that's left of it, this. This massive base. So the labyrinth was real. These ancient writers weren't making it up, up. But it's gone now, you know, there's nothing left of it other than this base. And that kind of was the theory that for forever, basically about this labyrinth was that it was real. These writers weren't making it up. Petrie found the base of it. That's the end of the story, Right? And that was the case forever. In recent years, in the 21st century, a couple of independent researchers have thought maybe that's not the true, that's not the. The full extent of the story. Right? So there's this interesting expedition in 2008, I believe, called the Matah Expedition, which was led by a Belgian researcher called Louis de Cordier. And he went to Hawara with the permission of the Council of Antiquities in Egypt, the Egyptian authorities, led by Dr. Zahi Hawass, who I'm sure you've heard of a few times. Yeah. So they went. So they went there and they had the permission of Hawass and the Egyptian authorities and they basically, they tried to conduct some scans using, I think, ground penetrating radar. But what they discovered was not that the labyrinth was gone, but that the labyrinth was still there and that they came back with these results that showed these vast subterranean grids beneath the sand of Hawara, completely untouched and still existing. And they wanted to release this. Right. Because obviously that's an incredible find. Like you found the lost labyrinth in of ancient Egypt, this elusive discovery that's been known about since antiquity. But no one's ever found. But apparently according to Louis de Cordier and his team, Hawass and others weren't, they didn't want to release it. They were like, you can't put this out there. They said it was a national security issue to start talk to release this data. And they basically kept finding themselves getting blocked. And eventually, after years and years of this, they were like, you know, fuck this, I'm putting out independently. So they released the scan data to the world on a website that he made at the same time as this, a different team from a company called Merlin Burrows and a man called Tim Akers also conducted, I think, satellite scans of the area. So Tim Akers was, he's dead now, but he was a ex British military satellite scanning specialists, so legit guy, worked with the British military, knows his stuff. They conducted scans of the same area and it came back with similar results. There you go, exactly right on cue. So they, they found the, a similar thing which is these scans of, you know, vast geometric grids in the right area that was identified by Petrie and people with Napoleon. And it appears to look like a vast, you know, labyrinth.
- [160:04]
A
Yes.
- [160:04]
B
Still intact, hidden beneath the sand. And combine that with the results from the Matter High expedition and you start to think, you know, there could be something incredible down here. This could be like the most, you know, shocking and, you know, important discovery in archaeology of our generation. Right. If it's true. They also made the, the interesting claim that, that they found an object in there that was shaped like a Tic Tac and gave off a metallic signature, which is a pretty extraordinary thing to say.
- [160:38]
A
That feels a little, shall we say, not earthly, but.
- [160:42]
B
Yeah, well, exactly. Especially when you combine it with all the kind of UAP stuff and. Right. So, I mean, obviously this is, this is what they're saying. I, I'm just kind of reporting what they're saying. But this, you know, this is a serious people saying this and they, yeah, they can't really explain train. They didn't know what it was. They're just like, yeah, there's this object that's shaped like a Tic Tac down there in this labyrinth that's possibly metallic because it gives off a weird signature. And to the radar trained eye, it looks like not stone, it looks, you know, possibly metallic, which is an interesting thing to say. And that's kind of where we are with it because there's no excavation is allowed there. The Egyptian authorities don't want to do it. There's also the problem of water. So the whole water, yeah, so the whole area is flooded. So in Victorian times they dug an irrigation canal through the area basically for agricultural reasons for local farmers and stuff. And there's like big flooding around the area and there was always the worry that the labyrinth had been flooded and if there was anything left, it's, you know, destroyed by water damage and stuff. But these scans seem to suggest that while there's water damage at a certain level level, the labyrinth is beneath that level. So the water damage is kind of below, I mean above the foundation or the roof that Petrie thought was a foundation, actually maybe a roof and the water's above that, but the labyrinth below and whatever this tic tac object, which they nicknamed Dippy after the skeleton in the Natural History Museum in London, they, they think that that's still intact and the whatever is in this labyrinth is possibly still preserved since antiquity. And that raises, you know, a whole load of possibilities, right? Like at very least it could be an incredibly important discovery for our understanding of Egyptian civilization and Egyptian construction and, you know, could be an extremely important discovery just within the mainstream narrative of Egyptology. Very most. It could be a completely, you know, paradigm shifting discovery. Like how was this thing built, built so long ago? How was it built before the Egyptian dynasties? If Pliny the Elder is correct with his date, what the is Dippy, this potentially metallic object? That's a tic tac shape. So it's very exciting. That's kind of where the story is at the moment.
- [162:55]
A
But they're not allowed to go try to excavate because the government's stopping them. So you can't even.
- [163:01]
B
Yeah, well, the government, the Egyptian authorities don't really want to. I think probably because they of of cost rather than any kind of conspiracy, let's cover it up kind of thing. I think it would be very expensive to get all the water out. You'd have to, it would have serious implications for local farmers and stuff like that. You'd have to redirect that canal. So it would be a tough thing to do. But you know, the archaeological potential of the site is extremely interesting.
- [163:30]
A
Have they talked at all or is. Do we even have enough to be able to go off to, to ask questions about the ability to build it where they did? And what I mean by that is when you look like the pyramid of Giza and some of the other pyramids, there's, there's a lot of evidence to state that like the stone that's used would have had to come from X number of miles away. It Weighed this much. How the could they have even gotten it there would have taken this much time if they even could have physically at the time. Is there anything about this that also runs into those problems?
- [164:02]
B
Well, yeah, the fact that it's underground. I mean, how would you construct something so sophisticated underground? Because you've. When you start looking at the ancient testimonies with this data and you say, okay, this is real. And their descriptions of it are incredible. They're like, I can't remember off the top of my head. But what they say about it is, you know, that it's like this vast maze of these, with these huge columns and pillars and like it's a really incredible thing. And so I can't remember their quotes off the top of my head. But if people should watch Ben's video or I did a video on it as well. And things they say about it just make it sound like an incredible construction. The fact that it was all done under the earth implies some seriously sophisticated construction techniques. Right. Because how do you do that underground? If you, you know, pre dynastic Egypt, they're not supposed to have had anywhere close to this kind of level of technology if it really is that old. So certainly very interesting site.
- [164:53]
A
Night Deep Just found what Herodotus wrote about this. I'll read this for people. And this would have been, you know, between 484 and 425 BC when he was alive, the Egyptians made a labyrinth which surpasses even the pyramids. It has 12 roofed courts with doors facing each other. Six face north and six south, and two continuous lines all within one outer wall. There are also double sets of chambers, 3000 alog together, 1500 above and the same number underground. We learned through conversation about the labyrinth underground chambers. Through conversation. The Egypt caretakers would by no means show them as they were. They said the burial vaults of the kings who first built this labyrinth and of the sacred crocodiles. The upper we saw for ourselves. And they are creations greater than human.
- [165:41]
B
That's a crazy quote.
- [165:42]
A
That's a. Yeah, that's like a. I want to put like a JZ after that. The exits of the chambers and the mazy passages hither and thither. Does that say thither? Yeah, hither and thither through the courts were an unending marvel to us overall. This is a roof made of stone like the walls. And the walls are covered with cut figures. And every court is set around with pillars of white stone very precisely fitted together. Near the corner where the labyrinth ends stands a pyramid 240ft high, on which great figures are cut, a passage to this has been made underground. So with. I was thinking this when you were saying the underground labyrinth and how, you know, it's underground, that's really hard. Am I thinking about this totally wrong and that they could have. They could have dug like a. A giant hole and then built from there and then kind of covered it up, or. Is that them?
- [166:39]
B
Yeah, maybe. But that would have been a pretty, pretty sophisticated construction project for a society that was apparently, you know, just coming out.
- [166:45]
A
They didn't have any cat. They didn't have any, like, you know, caterpillar cranes and. Interesting. Did he say. Can we go back to that quote real fast? He said he learned it through conversation. Right. We learned through conversation about the labyrinth's underground chambers.
- [167:02]
B
Yeah. So he wasn't allowed into the actual underground part of the lab.
- [167:05]
A
Right. Okay. He says the upper we saw for ourselves. Okay, that makes sense.
- [167:09]
B
So he saw the upper and thought that was ridiculous. Not even human. And he wasn't even allowed into the potentially more impressive bit, which was the subterranean part. So it's interesting. And then you have these classical accounts and then they align perfectly with the modern data that shows that there potentially is still a labyrinth down there. And you think, yo, this is a potentially crazy archaeological discovery that we could make if the will is there to do such a thing, if the funding is there. And that's why what Ben does is such important work, because he's bringing this to light. He's bringing this to the masses.
- [167:41]
A
And, you know, absolutely. Yeah.
- [167:44]
B
It's exciting.
- [167:44]
A
Yeah. And Ben does it in, like, a very calm, collected, evidence driven, kind of like sober way, which I really like, because I think that it's going to be really important when you try to bridge these divides between, you know, the academic comics and people actually trying to uncover some things here. You know, you're, you're. The way you say it and the way you present the evidence I think is very important. And he's like. To me, like, I remember when he first went on Danny Jones podcast, like, he's, he's just, he's a cool customer and. And I think, I think that's great. And it's another guy, by the way, who was, like, inspired by other people that came before him to, like, get into this. He was, he was a normal dude and really started studying it and, you know, has made some amazing, certainly some amazing claims and I would say some. Some pretty impressive discoveries about what we don't know down there. That's. Now, you Know, it's cool to see like Joe Rogan bring that to the mainstream so that people can hear about it. But you know, I had Luke in here November 2024. We didn't put out the episodes until the end of January and then beginning of February we did it. We did a couple episodes that, you know, one recording where it basically turned into the 27, 000 year history of Egypt. And when you start to really, when you start to really. I think I literally called it like 20, 000 year history of Egypt part one and then part two is really amazing stuff. But when you start to like actually go through the full length of what we know, and then they inject in the pyramids like kind of out of nowhere and I'm going to find up the years, so I'm not going to try to be exact with the years, but then talk about like how quickly they could have made some of these structures. We already mentioned how difficult it would be to get some of the stone from the river all the way to where the pyramid is and everything. It's like, you don't need to run right away to like, oh, the aliens did it or something like that. But what other, outside of that, like, what other explanations are there for something like the pyramid of Giza being able to build in the time period and, and you know, the length of time it took to actually build it to what it was built into?
- [169:52]
B
I mean, I would argue that the conventional explanation for the construction of the entire Giza plateau doesn't really make sense. Like according to the conventional argument, the Giza pyramid was constructed in at most 20 years, I think, which is, I think that's right ridiculous. And then if you do the maths of like how many stones there are, it's something like they had to. Can't remember these like maths, but it's, it's a crazy, like that's a place of stone like every three minutes for 24 hours a day for that entire 20 year period. And like transport the quarry the stone, transport the stone, lift the stone precisely, place the stone like every four minutes for 24 hours a day. I'm not sure that's the correct maths, but it's something like that.
- [170:32]
A
There was an AI video last year that showed a bunch of giants lifting the stones. I thought that made a lot of.
- [170:37]
B
Sense, something like that, I'm sure, but I mean, yes, it doesn't make sense. And then if you extrapolate out to the entire Giza plateau, like according to the conventional explanation, it was all constructed within the reigns of a couple of pharaohs over like a 60, 70 year period. And it's like really. Because they had to level the whole thing flat, right. Which is a ridiculous thing on itself. And then build the three pyramids and the Sphinx and yeah, it's, it's very odd. And then there's the whole question about the dating of the Sphinx and the water erosion hypothesis, which is really interesting thing.
- [171:10]
A
And yeah, you want to dig into that a little bit. I've talked about that with Matt Lacroix and, and Luke in the past a bunch. But yeah, some of the pictures there.
- [171:19]
B
Yeah, I mean it looks like water erosion. Right. But the paradox there is that there was no rainfall in Egypt since the time of the green Sahara, which was, you know, a lot earlier, or at least the level of rainfall would have been a lot earlier, which suggests that the Sphinx is a lot older because otherwise how would that weathering occur? And the conventional explanation is no, it's just wind and sand. But I don't know, it doesn't really look like wind and sand. Obviously I'm not geologist, but there are geologists who have looked at it like Dr. Robert Shock and they say that is water erosion. That's clear signs of water erosion. And there's also the, the fact that the Sphinx was buried by sand for like the vast majority of like when Napoleon discovered it and other people discovered it, it was buried in sand. Even the Egyptians winds excavated the Sphinx when it was covered in sand. So if it was covered in sand, then how did the wind and sand erode it when it was covered in sand? You know, I've never really seen a explanation for that either.
- [172:14]
A
But isn't that the one where they, where there's like a secret entrance that's blocked off too?
- [172:19]
B
Or a couple of them, what, underneath the Sphinx?
- [172:22]
A
I think there's one like up top too.
- [172:24]
B
That's what I'm saying.
- [172:25]
A
I'm remembering that right. There was a picture we looked at. I want to say that was news episode 153 with Matt Lacroix. I did 153 and 154 with him. I feel like there was a picture towards the end of that first podcast that we looked at. Maybe, actually, maybe I'm mixing some things together, but maybe it's like a picture where Zahi Hwas is standing outside of it or something. But there's like a picture, I'm seeing it in my head towards the top of the Sphinx where there's like a, a manhole and you can't go there. There.
- [172:56]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [172:59]
A
Can you Google aerial shot? Sphinx entrance. Let's try that. I might be misremembering this.
- [173:09]
B
Go.
- [173:09]
A
Refer to episode 153. I remember Matt talked about this and had some images. Might be that first one. I want to say that's it. But I also don't want to say for sure. I don't know. Refer to episode 153. But there's something weird there where they won't let people in certain areas. And again, like, you know, it could be like an explanation, like the other thing we're talking about where they're like, oh, it'd be too much money or shit's got to get moved or there's too much water. That. Whatever it might be. But it's also not a good look because it makes you look like you're hiding something or it makes you look like something's going to be different. And I don't know, maybe I'm looking at this way too simply, but I've always thought, like, if there's more insane history at a place that's a lot more tourist dollars that are coming. Gonna come into your economy if you can prove something like that. So why wouldn't you? I mean, maybe I'm thinking too much.
- [174:14]
B
Dollars and cents, but you think so? Wouldn't you? You think the more mystery. Well, maybe. Maybe it's the opposite. Maybe the more mystery the better. Right. Maybe they don't want to rule it out so people keep coming back. I don't know. I don't know. But, yeah, there's so much mystery in Egypt, so much mystery at Giza, and hopefully, as you know, the generations go past. There's that quote from Max Planck, the physicist, like, science advances one funeral at a time. Time.
- [174:42]
A
Yeah. No, that's good. I've heard that one before.
- [174:44]
B
The old generation die off, you know, maybe these things will change. But we'll see.
- [174:49]
A
We shall see. Do you believe Atlantis existed?
- [174:52]
B
I believe Atlantis is a very interesting story in relation to the wider flood myth. So I don't necessarily. I don't. I mean, I wouldn't rule it out, but I don't necessarily say it existed. But I think in. In conjunction with the flood myth, which is, you know, a consistent story across cultures all across the world. Atlantis is yet another one of them. Yeah. Another famous story of a flood wiping everything out, which, you know, so many cultures across the world have that story. And it's interesting because Plato puts the date of Atlantis, you know, as many People have said. Right. During the younger Dryas.
- [175:31]
A
Right.
- [175:31]
B
He says it's God forgot, he says. He says it's 9,000 years before his time. I think either way, he says it's. If you do the calculations, it's during the younger Dryas, which is interesting. I wouldn't rule out Atlantis existing, but that would. That would then be the lost civilization. Right. So, yeah, you can't say there's evidence of it, but it's an interesting story for sure.
- [175:54]
A
What do you think of Jimmy Corsetti's Richard Strike? I always pronounce that wrong. Structures theory.
- [176:02]
B
It's a good. It's a. I really like how he does it. I really like the videos. I've watched the videos on it. It's really interesting because, you know, it matches up in so many ways to Plato's description. Right. But I don't. Again, is there any evidence or is it just a good way of putting the story together, you know? Yeah, but it's fun. I really enjoy his videos. I really enjoy the way he does it. And I wouldn't rule it out, but I'm not sure you can say that that definitely is Atlantis. Right, Right.
- [176:29]
A
But, yeah, I'd like to think something like that existed. And obviously, like, there's a lot of writings in ancient Greece among some of the philosophers where they refer to it. I wonder sometimes, though, if it's really like some of the, you know, clearly not true stories from the Bible. Think of, like a dude being swallowed by a whale and then, you know, living there and being spit out. Stuff like that was that job. I mean.
- [176:51]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [176:52]
A
But, like, I wonder if it's something like that that's more supposed to be a mirror for our. Ourselves as civilization to look in and aspire to be, rather than something that's real. Whereas it seems like there's significant evidence for something like an El Dorado that exists based on written history and what would make sense over there but Atlantis, it's like they don't even know. It could be here. It could be there. It could be there. It could be this, could be that, could. You know, it's all over the place. So I. I don't know, but that's one I always like. That's one of my favorite ones to. To kind of riff on, because it's like, it could be a lot of things.
- [177:26]
B
Yeah, Well, I mean, the conventional idea is that Plato was just, you know, creating an allegory to talk about his own civilization. Right. But that doesn't mean there's no truth behind it. And Plato isn't the one who came up with the idea. He got it from Solon, who was. Who was passed down through his family from Solon to Plato. And Solon got it from Egypt. Right. And Egypt's this mysterious place and apparently these Egyptian priests were telling him about out this civilization that existed and was wiped out in a single day and night, you know, it's an interesting story.
- [177:57]
A
It certainly is. Are you working on any cool videos right now? On some places around the world, Yeah.
- [178:04]
B
I mean, I've got a few in the pipeline.
- [178:06]
A
Where are you looking?
- [178:08]
B
I just done a video that's not come out yet, which is about this genetic bottleneck we see. It'll be out by the time this episode comes out. But this genetic bottleneck we see in the late Neolithic, so around 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, where basically 95% of men were wiped out, but no women. Which is really interesting because we see this massive bottleneck in the Y chromosome, which is the line that was passed down from father to son.
- [178:36]
A
Luckiest 5% of all time.
- [178:38]
B
Yeah, but that's who we're all descended from. Right. Because they were the survivors of what the conventional explanation is was a massive, like, culture of violence in the late Neolithic of basically mass prehistoric war where all the men were going around killing everyone else and taking the women. Right. So there's. So there's no bottleneck in the mitochondrial DNA, which is the mother, but 95% of the men were wiped out in this period.
- [179:02]
A
Where's the evidence that they, that they found this?
- [179:05]
B
In genetics. It's in our, in our genes.
- [179:07]
A
Oh, that's it. So they're just looking at our genes saying, oh, that had to be at that period right there.
- [179:11]
B
Yeah. And you can see the bottleneck. And it happened. We literally drop right down to 5%. 90 of men were wiped out in this period, but the females were unconnected. And then you align it with archaeological finds and there's all these like, massive pits of bodies with weapon wounds and horrible injuries and people being slaughtered. And it's quite an interesting period.
- [179:33]
A
Yeah, I haven't heard that. Can we Google this genetic bottleneck? 95% of men exterminated.
- [179:44]
B
Yeah.
- [179:44]
A
What, 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, you said?
- [179:47]
B
I think so, yeah. Yeah.
- [179:48]
A
That's also like a wide range too. So it happened over time.
- [179:51]
B
Yeah, but it's across all of Asia, Africa and Europe. So like the whole of the world, except for the Americas.
- [179:58]
A
How large was the population of Homo sapiens at the time?
- [180:02]
B
Approximately not sure off the top of my head, but it was getting big because this was after the agricultural revolution, right? And that's what, that's the theory of. What it is is that we, we apparently settled down and. Yeah, there you go, 95, here we go. We settled down and we had something to fight for. We had like property rights for the first or potentially for the first time in history and.
- [180:23]
A
Yeah, okay, so the forgotten prehistoric war that killed 95 of all men. How a brutal conflict 7,000 years ago left only 1 in 20 men alive. Within every single one of us lies a biological time capsule. 3.16 billion base pairs of DNA. These strands of don't just dictate eye color or height. They hide dark, twisted secrets from humanity's past. One of the most chilling. A forgotten prehistoric war so catastrophic it nearly wiped out men entirely, leaving women outnumbering them 17 to 1. This wasn't a minor skirmish or a regional feud. It was a global slaughter spanning continents, reshaping our genetic code and burying evidence of its horrors and mass graves. Until now. The story begins with a genetic mystery. Researchers analyzing modern human genomes stumbled upon a shocking anomaly. A drastic bottleneck in male genetic diversity dating back roughly 7,000 years. During the Neolithic period, the effect of male population across Africa, Europe, Asia and the Middle east collapsed by up to 95%. Imagine a world where 3.9 billion men vanished overnight, leaving only 200 million survivors. This wasn't a plague, famine or natural disaster. The culprit was far more sinister, Unbridled systematic violence. While mitochondrial DNA passed down through mothers showed stable diversity, Y chromosomes passed from father to son revealed a your apocalyptic drop. Nature doesn't discriminate by gender when wiping out populations. Volcanoes don't target men. Storms don't spare women. This. Oh, wow. Okay, so that makes a ton of sense. This was a human made catastrophe. A coordinated eradication of males so extreme it left scars in our genes. But where are the bodies? Turns out they're everywhere. Over 250 Late Neolithic Massacre sites have been uncovered in Europe alone. Skeleton mountains tell gruesome, stale tales. Skulls shattered by axes, arrowheads and embedded in ribs. Bones stripped of flesh at the. All right, yeah, click to read the full story. But that actually, that last part answered a question I was going to ask. Are there. I was going to say, like even in other parts of history, are there biological diseases and things that could discriminate by gender? Do we know of any examples of that?
- [182:28]
B
I don't think so. Not that I know of anyway.
- [182:31]
A
I mean, that Evidence of, like, they found the sites of massacres with skulls bashed in and stuff. Obviously, points paints the picture here.
- [182:38]
B
That's crazy, though.
- [182:40]
A
95% overnight.
- [182:41]
B
Yeah, it's crazy. Not overnight, but, yeah, you know what I mean?
- [182:46]
A
Over. Over time right there.
- [182:47]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [182:48]
A
They're just dwindling down over and over.
- [182:50]
B
Again, you know, we almost wiped ourselves out, though. And we're all descended from the. The winners, the most horrifically violent of them. That's who we all come from.
- [183:02]
A
Survive, all the fittest.
- [183:03]
B
And this was quite recent. This was, you know, 7,000 years ago, which is recent when you look at.
- [183:08]
A
The story of ostrich Gobekli Tepe.
- [183:11]
B
Mm. Yeah, we're just savagely killing each other.
- [183:15]
A
What else you working on right now?
- [183:17]
B
I can't remember. I haven't. I haven't. Like, obviously I've been in America for a little while, so I haven't actually done too much. But that's one that's coming out tonight, man. I've got a whole list, but I can't remember off the top of my head, but all right, all good. All the historical mysteries, you know, I'm coming from them all.
- [183:34]
A
That's what I'm saying. Everyone's got to check out your channel because you cover. I mean, you cover in every part of the globe and it's only going to get bigger and bigger. So it's awesome to see what you're doing, bro. It's great to have you here in America, too, to hop on. You're gonna have to do this again. You gotta start coming to America a little more too, mate.
- [183:49]
B
I'd love to. And I'm. Yeah, I'm really grateful for you inviting me on. It's been an awesome. An awesome chat and an awesome experience to come out to your beautiful country. So, yeah, very grateful.
- [183:58]
A
Excellent. All right, brother, we'll do it again sometime.
- [184:00]
B
Thanks, Julian.
- [184:01]
A
All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me.
- [184:04]
B
Peace.
- [184:05]
A
Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that, like, button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.