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All right. Well, this took a lot of time to organize, but I'm very excited, and I'm happy you're both here. Thank you. Flint, please introduce yourself to everybody, what you do.

Yeah. Hi, my name is Flint, and I'm an archeologist. I've done archeology my whole life. My dad was an archeologist, and I'm just very passionate about sharing archeology and what we do. I find in general that people don't really understand what modern archeology is about. And so I'm going to try to get that across while here. You know, that's my goal.

Fantastic. Take that microphone and try to keep it about a fifth from your fist, from your face.

1 second.

We have to. His HDMI is not working. It's not going through.

Mine is.

Okay. All right. We had a bit of a technical issue, but we're up. So, Flint, you were just explaining how your passion is archeologist. You're an archeologist, and you have this opportunity to sort of educate people on how archeology is done.

Yeah, that's my goal, is to try to share what we do, why we do it, and what our goals are with it. Yeah.

Okay, terrific. And, Graham, everybody knows you. You've been on this podcast about ten.

Times, largely thanks to you, Joe.

Oh, I'm very happy. Happy to introduce the world to it. Are we okay, Flint with the HDMI.

I think we've been doing shows together since 2011.

You, I think, were one of my first real guests. You might be the first real guest, because before that, it was just my friends, just comedians.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it was all in my house, and we ate pizza, and it was fantastic. Jamie's setting everything up, making sure we're good to go. Okay. The way we'd agreed to do this is, Flint, you wanted to open, and you wanted to do about ten minutes and just sort of explain things.

Yeah.

And so we'll let you do that. And then, Graham, have an opportunity to respond.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Jamie, do you mind pulling up my screen?

Here we go.

All right, so, look, one of the things that I see when I'm online or in person sharing archeology, is I find it's tough to get across what it is. And so I wanted to start with a fun example. So I understand that maybe not everybody can see the screen. So, Joe, do you mind actually just kind of describing what this artifact is?

Oh, you're putting this on me, buddy.

Exactly.

Well, this says, athenian red figure from force BC. And it is two people having sex. It's a man on top of a woman. You see his penis. You see it's. Yeah, it's very graphic.

It is very graphic. So what do you think this shares about what archeology is? Any ideas?

Well, I mean, you're finding artwork and parts of civilization that were left behind and have been around, in this case, since over 2000 years.

Yeah. And for a long time, scholars thought that a piece like this described sort of life in Athens, and they connect it to athenian texts, sort of like Plato describing people having sex, even. Right. And on the other hand, however, every single piece of athenian artwork with graphic sex like this, couples actually fucking with penises and stuff like that, ends up in Italy. It's part of an athenian pornographic export market. And Kathleen lynch and Sean Lewis and others have published on this. And so the real point is that what we're looking at is the painters are designing something for consumers in Italy, and particularly in Etruria. And this instead fits better in with telling us about life in Etruscans and the kind of stuff that they show in their tombs, sort of romance between people or the kind of sexual scenes that they designed themselves in Italy as well. And the whole point here is that archeology is not really about an artifact, it's not about a monument. It's about our patterns. And so when we sort of look at how much archeology there is in the world, this is a map that shows the horn of Africa with every single archeological site that's been surveyed there, and there's 171,000.

That's incredible. It just looks amazing.

It's just. And this is just because of the terrain. Most of the. Many of these are tombs, for example, islamic and pre islamic tombs. And so they're visible on the surface. And so, in many ways, when we think about archeology today in the 21st century, we're thinking about big data sets and trying to analyze them statistically and understand the kind of patterns they put together. And we use innovative technology, sort of lidar lasers from the sky, to see these things underground. For example, here are. This publication by Canuto in 2018 records 61,480 structures still to be excavated, found with lidar and surface survey. Right. And so at the same time, this.

Is for people listening. It says ancient lowland Maya complex as revealed by airborne laser scanning of northern Guatemala. That's amazing.

Yeah. And so, I mean, we have this huge data set, and with it, we get high resolution. For example, the bottom image in red, it shows Luder's trenches, because while there's a lot of archeology, because people have been everywhere. It's very fragile and it's at risk. And that's something I also want to take some time to get across a bit while I'm here. And my own research is very much big data oriented, too. I've studied nearly a million animal bones and teeth and horn fragments from ancient Greece, like this pile here from the island of Crete, from Azoria. And in particular, I also want to get across the kind of precision we have right now. I do what's called isotope analysis. I look at oxygen and carbon isotopes in the teeth of these animals. And by taking molten samples on different parts of the teeth, you can see the different areas that I've drilled on that tooth on the right. And what that does is it lets me understand the diet of the animal and where it's moving in the landscape seasonally. So in different seasons of the year, I can understand the kind of ways that people are raising animals.

We can do this with human remains, too, and we can get this high level of resolution and precision that people don't always realize that we have. Right. And so in this case, I'm here to try to discuss with Graham and to test his lost civilization hypothesis. He has this, he's written about it many books, and he's given many talks here and on Netflix. And he's talked about this idea of a lost advanced civilization from the ice age. An advanced civilization that's around the globe, right? And in particular, he thinks there was a global cataclysm at that time, and the survivors introduced agriculture, architecture, astronomy and arts to hunter gatherers. And so I'm trying to tackle this with an open mind, and I want to tackle this with the perspective of my own experience and my own expertise. And so in that sense, if you think about what Carl Sagan says, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Graham is, in many ways, the first person to admit that the evidence he has is fingerprints. It's kind of what he thinks is this technological transmission to hunter gatherers. But he does not have any direct, dated evidence of this civilization.

It's, after all, a lost civilization. Right? And so what I've been thinking through is, how can my own experience and expertise kind of test this hypothesis in a fair way? That's kind of my goal here while here. And so I'm here to doing a lot of research. I'm here to present what I see are two clear disproofs of a lost, advanced ice age civilization. And, I mean, archeologists were fairly sure this does not exist. We've been looking for this kind of civilization for several hundred years. This idea of a pre flood civilization has been around for several hundred years. And so what I want to do is focus on where my own experience and expertise is. My dad was an ice age archeologist. He studied neanderthal caves. And so I want to dig into some of the stuff that he's excavated and surveyed. These are, for example, 100,000 year old stone tools from Egypt. And so we have just so much ice age evidence and Graham usually ignores it. And he claims that his civilization.

Do you have your notifications on or something? I don't know what the dongle is. The dongle is doing that. If you hit mute, maybe it might stop.

Yeah, I just muted it. Sorry about that.

No worries. No worries.

And so this.

So your claim was that Graham ignores this?

My claim is that he doesn't. He ignores most of the evidence for hunter gatherers in the ice age, which.

Is, is that he ignores it or that he doesn't focus on it as much as he's focused on this ancient, advanced civilization.

I mean, I think that's one in the same. I think if you're going to look at the ice age, we need to look at the totality of evidence to understand what's there. And so, for example, he proposes the reason why the ice age civilization isn't there is because it's underwater. It's been, you know, we've had 200ft of sea level rise since the younger dryas, and therefore it's not accessible. And so I really want to focus on ice age coastlines, evidence from ice age coastlines and excavations underwater, evidence from the ice age, things like that. These areas where he says that archeologists don't look, but we are looking, and what we find is the ephemeral traces of hunter gatherers rather than some sort of advanced civilization. And so that's one thing I want to show. I want to share this kind of evidence. Some of it's new, some of it's not. But I think it's the kind of thing that has a direct bearing on looking for such an ice age civilization.

When you're studying these coastal areas where these ice age people lived, and you're studying these underwater, whatever, what would you call them? Are they cities? Are they towns?

Are they villages? No, these are. These are. So in this case, this is a really brand new find from, like, a month ago. It's actually a hunting wall off the coast of Germany.

So it's where they had their camp.

Yeah. Or maybe just where they drove game along to hunt them, but most of what's underwater are lithic scatter. Scatters of stone tools, stuff like this.

What do you have there?

I have a series of different stone tools. I'll show them off a little later, but. Yeah, sure.

How old is this?

These are all modern replicas made by archeologists, some of them made by my dad, and some of them have been made. I thought you could hook us up.

With some real stuff.

Sorry, no, I can't bring real stuff.

I have a real arrowhead.

I do have an ancient corn cob right here about 1200 years ago from the southern Methodist University archeology collection. And I'll explain why this is here in a bit.

My question for you, though, was how much of the ground do you think has actually been studied when you're looking at these ancient ice age neanderthal populations? Or were they homo sapiens as well?

These are homo sapiens. This is from right at the end of the ice age. So this is modern humans? Yeah.

So these, when you're finding remnants of ancient hunter gatherers, how much evidence, how much of the ground do you think you've studied?

We've definitely not studied most of the ground, but as I'll show, we've studied a lot and we actually put together predictive models on how to find this stuff. And so there. Because it's really expensive to go diving. Right.

And so how many dives do you think have been done? Like, how many times?

Thousands.

Thousands?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. And lots of different sites have been found from all over the world.

And specifically, it was done to try to locate these.

To try to locate Stone age. Ice age stuff. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. And then my second thing I'd like to focus on is food. I am an archeologist who studies ancient food. I'm an environmental archeologist. I've studied millions of animal bones from the past. I've helped collect thousands and thousands of seeds like these. And it's something that people don't realize we can get. We've developed sampling methods and we now, at this point, have millions of archaeobotanical remains. So seeds from ancient civilizations and ancient societies all over the world. And I want to sort of show you how we understand domestication as a process. And we can see where it happened in real time, in real space, this sort of evolution from a wild plant to a domestic plant, because that counters Graham's idea that the civilization introduced agriculture. It was not an introduction. It's something that happened in a real space. And we'll track how we can see humans taking control of the reproductive life cycle of these plants is what I want to show.

Can I pause you for a second?

Yeah, of course.

Is that in a particular region, like right now on earth, there are people that are living in essentially a stone age manner, right?

I wouldn't call it a stone age man.

Well, okay, let's say people in uncontacted indigenous tribes in the Amazon, I mean, they essentially are living with animal skins and bows and arrows, and they're living very similar to the way people lived 10,000 years ago.

I think there's plenty of people living today in their traditional lifestyles. Yeah.

Right. But then there's also people that live in Tokyo, of course. So the world is huge. So if you find evidence of agriculture that dates back to a specific period where you can see the wild plants and you can see this transition into domesticated plants, is it possible that we're dealing with a region? And I think part of the theory about the younger Dryas impact theory was that although it probably devastated the entire human race, it didn't impact all the places the same way. Just like right now, if a volcano goes off in Iceland, we don't even notice it. Right. But over there, it's devastating.

Yes. But in this case, what I'm thinking about is unlike, you know, I know you guys have mentioned at times you can't radiocarbon dates. We can date these seeds. So we can date that transition from domestic to wildlife.

What are the oldest seeds that you found?

Oh, the oldest seeds we have go back tens of thousands of years. The oldest domesticated crops we have go back about 11,000 years.

And where are those from?

From Syria, Turkey. The fertile Crescent area. Yeah.

Is it possible that there was domestication before that in other parts of the world?

I'm going to show you why that's not possible. Okay, cool. Yeah, that's kind of my goal there. Yeah, because, and it's not even that. It's not even a disproof of an advanced civilization. It's a disprove of agriculture period in the ice age. There's a lot of reasons why there was no agriculture. And so I want to get into the weeds on that, let's say. Okay, so just to kind of go off, I also want to explain. I know, man.

What are you doing to us here?

Hey, you got to get the audience.

These are penis pipes.

Is that a pipe?

Yeah. They are not pipes. It's a lamp. Sorry.

Yeah, a lamp.

Okay. But so you know archeology, those are cool. I think archeology should be open. But of course, in the 20th century, the mores of certain italian museums, like here in Naples, they kept this stuff hidden.

So did they hide this because of the graphic nature of it?

Yeah. But it's now open for the last 20 years. If you go to the museum in Naples, they have what's called the Gabbinatto segretto, and it has all the erotic art from Pompeii and Herculaneum and things like that. And archeologists, look, we're underfunded, we're not perfect, but our goal, most of us, is to publish everything open data. And we have, at this point, millions upon millions of archeological records available from things like open context, the archeology data surface, the digital archeological record, even the radiocarbon paleolithic Europe database. So when you're talking about the ice age, we have radiocarbon dates directly dated from 13,000 sites in Europe and Siberia. We have quite a bit of evidence of this, ephemeral evidence for hunter gatherers, if you see what I mean. And so the evidence is just enormous, this database for hunter gatherers. And so I think it's important that we deal with the existing evidence and see where it leads us. If you see what.

And what is the oldest evidence for hunter gatherers, just for the audience?

Oh, God. I mean, that goes back, you know, a million years or something. Pre homo sapiens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And.

But, so, but in terms of what we would consider Stone Age man or, you know, early homo sapiens, what is, like, the earliest buildings that we know of? What's the earliest tools that we know of? What do we have?

The earliest tools we know of are many hundreds of thousands of years right before modern, similar to the ones you just showed us. Yeah, well, they're bigger. They're probably. This isn't quite it either. This is a middle paleolithic style core that my dad made. But the earliest stone tools are quite large, many of them. But as time goes on, they become smaller and smaller because humans become more efficient at using this raw material. Right. Because there's only a few different kinds of stones that you can nap. That's what's called a conchoidal fracture. I'll pass some of these around. At some point, we'll do a show and tell, and I'll show you how we can tell the difference between kind of a man made stone tool versus just a piece of shatter.

I actually just watched a documentary on it, or a YouTube video, I should say. And it was really fascinating watching them nap them.

Yeah, exactly.

They do it with, like, a piece of leather on their leg. And they knock the top of it. It's very interesting.

You even have some lovely deer antler that could be used for that. Right.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

Okay, so continue. So you were saying that we have a very clear chain. Essentially, you're saying there's a clear chain between what we know of in terms of, like, hunter gatherers and then more modern civilizations. It's a pretty linear line.

No, I don't see it as a linear line.

Not linear. That's a bad. But that, you know, at what point in time it started, I should say.

I think what we can say is we can understand, start pinpointing the starts of domestic and things like that. But I think that what this big data set that we now have shows is there is no linear trajectory to human culture. It's actually very heterogeneous what happens. It's different in different areas of the world, and therefore, we need to understand the local context to understand them. And that's really what it's picturing. I mean, in many ways, like, I think Graham's tv show is fun and interesting tv, but I think it misrepresents what we think of as the birth of civilization. We don't really write or teach about that anymore. It's very different in different places. Even the very term civilization is something that everybody has a different definition for, so we almost never use it. I never use the term civilization while teaching or writing, for example. It's just. It's a term that you can use to mean anything. And so it's like this. This grand narrative approach to human prehistory is something that's from the 20th century and not really a component of 21st century archeology, is what I would say.

Got it.

Okay. And so I just want to end with a couple questions for Graham, if he's willing. At different times, he's described the civilization that he's looking for from 12,000 years ago. It was advanced to say our own civilization in the late 18th or early 19th century. And so, you know, as an archeologist, we study technology, we study the material remains of the past. And so I wonder what we're trying to look for. Right. And so I know that this is kind of how the last conversation with Michael Shermer started, and so I get that. But I do want to just quickly say Graham has acknowledged that there's a good chance there's no metallurgy, for example, with this civilization. He said, maybe a decision was made not to use metals, and I'd say we could definitively prove there was no large scale metallurgy in the ice age. If you look at ice cores in the Arctic. Right. We can track metallurgy of the roman period, of medieval periods based on lead emissions that end up in these ice cores. And there are no emissions from metallurgy in the ice age. So we can be sure that there's no global metallurgical civilization that's doing a lot of mining and smelting.

Certainly, they're not doing burning fossil fuels like they might be in the 18th or 19th century. So we know that could not have been around that early because it would show up in the atmosphere. Likewise, we can think about shipwrecks. Right. Graham has mentioned that the bulk of marine archeology has focused on shipwrecks and not the continental shelves. And so the thing is, at this point, we have something like 3 million shipwrecks from around the world. And so one of my questions for Graham is, if this is a global civilization with ships, why is it that we don't have shipwrecks from this global civilization? I see this as a big, big problem. If we're looking for a civilization that's traversing the oceans, we should find these shipwrecks. And similarly, these shipwrecks are located near the coast. They're located on the submerged continental shelves. We are actually exploring these submerged continental shelves in detail. We're able to find scattered, ephemeral shipwrecks, but not monuments of some sort of civilization.

And the shipwrecks, what's the oldest one that we've found so far?

Well, there was one that was just published from about, I think it was about six, 7000 years ago off the coast of Italy that I saw something around there. What I'd say is around the oldest that we have. Yeah.

And at what point in time? These are mostly wooden boats.

Yeah. These are mostly wooden boats. Yeah.

What point in time would they deteriorate completely?

Well, so actually, underwater environments are really good for the preservation of organic remains, which is why we actually get wood in waterlogged environments rather than on land. For example, you either need to be in a really dry environment for wood to preserve or a really wet environment. Or with those seeds I was showing, it needs to be charred. So in general, wood will decay. So, you know, in a lot of underwater environments, it'll just preserve as long as it's in homeostasis, which is why.

That explorers boat that sank, that hit. Whose boat was that? You know, the boat I'm talking about, famous explorer, is this beautiful wooden boat that's almost completely intact at the bottom of the ocean. I think it hit an iceberg.

Yeah.

And which, which explorer was that, Jamie? Do you remember that? Dude, we, we. There's an amazing video of it. It's amazing. Like, they're just zooming in on this, this boat, and it just looks almost exactly like it looked when it sank because the water's freezing cold. That's it right there. Look at that. Ernest Shackleton.

Oh, yeah. Okay, I have this. Yeah.

It's incredible. Like, the whole boat. Just imagine what it had been to been on that boat back then.

I mean, the preservation underwater is amazing. There's the shipwreck off the coast of Italy that I just presented what was on the bad boy of science YouTube about, about shipwrecks and stuff. And there's still the vine netting that was holding the roman cargo was still preserved.

Wow.

And so just underwater preservation is just freaky.

And would it stay that way for 20,000 years, you think?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's this idea that things just decay the older they are, and that's really not true. It depends on the burial environment that they're in. So taphonomy is what archeologists use to study how things survive and how they are there. And so typically, when things are buried, they're very stable or when they're sitting. It depends on where you are on the bottom of the ocean. But typically, it's very, very stable. In fact, the worst place to be is the tidal zone. So when sea level rise is very slow and an area is stuck in that tidal zone, things will get battered. But if things are deeply deposited quickly or sea level rises very quick, that actually helps preserve stuff. And so that's how we can still find these kind of shipwrecks and ice age sites and other sort of settlements underwater.

Now, what about the shifting of sediment at the bottom of the ocean when you're dealing with things like 1020 thousand years ago, 30,000 years ago?

Yeah. So there's actually, I was just talking with Jessica Cook Hale out of Bradford about this, and actually, so she's done some studies off the coast of Florida of sort of hurricanes that are coming in today because she's excavating stone age shell mounds there. And it turns out, actually, that the hurricanes coming in today really don't disturb them much at all. Yeah, she's published on that. So obviously, it's going, this is mostly surface. Yeah. It's going to depend on the specific environment, the answer. So certain environments, it's not going to preserve others. It will? Yeah, it's variable. Is the reality of it.

Was it, was there any other questions for Graham?

Wait a second. I just wanted to end by saying, look, you know, archeologists, we. What we find is what we publish, right? We are not trying to keep stuff hidden. If I found Atlantis, I would publish Atlantis. Klaus Schmidt found Gobekli Tepe. He published Gobekli Tepe. And so I think that that's really important. We want to change and rewrite history. That's how we make a name for ourselves. Every article I have published and most of my colleagues have published is something that is adding and changing our picture of the past. We're not locked in on a specific narrative. What we're trying to do is update the picture of the past for each other, for our colleagues, and for people all around the world to sort of give a sense of, you know, human culture and the diversity of it, the resilience of it and how we've survived this long so that we can learn from it.

Okay, Graham.

Flynn, first of all, thank you for joining me here.

Oh, yeah, thank you for having me.

It's, in a way, a historic occasion, because as far as I know, this is the first time ever that a mainstream archeologist has sat down in a public forum and debated somebody who's looking at the past from an alternative point of view. And I'm grateful to you for sitting in the hot seat and doing that. I think it's really, really valuable, and I hope the audience will find it useful. I'm going to try and recall a few of your questions. The lost civilization that I'm thinking of, it's like a black hole in space to me. It's like something missing in the story of our past, to the extent that I can put form on it. I think we're looking at a civilization like all civilizations that emerged out of shamanism, I believe that they did have rather advanced astronomy and a knowledge of the world, but I don't compare. When I speak of a 19th century level of technology, I'm talking specifically about knowledge of longitude. The longitude problem was not solved by our civilization until the middle of the 18th century. And I'm talking about knowledge of very hard to observe astronomical phenomena, such as the precession of the equinoxes.

That knowledge is normally attributed to the ancient Greeks. But I think there's compelling evidence that it's much, much earlier than that. I'm not quite sure where to start with my, with my first presentation. But you're telling us that archeology is very keen on new ideas. And wants to really explore and investigate the past. Is that right?

That's my perspective, yes, that's your perspective.

All right, let's have a. Let's have a look at Clovis first. Now, tell me what your view on the Clovis first thesis is.

Well, when I was an undergraduate student, I was taught that there were people here before Clovis, and that was over 20 years ago.

And so that would be what decade?

That would be the early two thousands.

The early two thousands. So would you feel that the whole Clovis first idea. Clovis first is the idea that. Excuse me. It's a culture that archeologists call the Clovis culture. The reason that they call it the Clovis culture is because its artifacts were first found in a place called Blackwater draw. And nearby Blackwater draw is the town of Clovis, New Mexico. So archeologists named this culture, the Clovis culture, after that. And it was, for a long while, thought to be the first culture, the first human presence in the Americas. And the dating that was put on, that was around 13,400 years ago. This culture crossed the Bering Straits, which were then a land bridge, as you can see from this image on the screen. They crossed the Bering Straits. They entered into North America. They came down through, often, it was argued, an ice free corridor, although it's very debatable. And then they entered the main part of the Americas and gradually made their way further south. And this was a dominant paradigm until, I would say, the 1990s, when it began to be seriously questioned. But I would wonder whether the ghost of Clovis first is still not haunting archeology.

So let me. Let me just say a few words on this subject. So across the Bering Straits 13,400 years ago, and there's a single common origin. Supposedly, that was the idea with Clovis first. And there have been recent genetic discoveries showing a very close relationship between Australasians and certain peoples of the Amazon rainforest. We talked about this before on your show, Joe, and I can go into that in more detail later. A huge amount of evidence from South America has a bearing on this subject. This is the typical toolset that the Clovis people were thought to have used. And despite the fact that you're telling us that Clovis first has been debunked since the 1990s. Really? And you were taught that it was debunked in the two thousands, we can find new scientists publishing in lesson 2013 questioning the Clovis first model. And those who did question the Clovis first model I do love your picture of this free and open and generous archeology. But actually, archeologists can be very, very mean to other archeologists who disagree with them. And the example of this is Jacques Cinq Mars, who investigated blue fish caves in the Yukon and found evidence of human beings there more than 20,000 years ago.

Now, if that evidence were correct, it would blow the Clovis first model out of the water. People are suddenly in America more than 7000 years before Clovis. The reaction to that was not welcoming. The reaction to that was fury at Jackson Mars. And here's the Smithsonian. Rather than launching a major new search for more early evidence, the fine stirred fierce opposition and a bitter debate. One of the most acrimonious and unfruitful in all of science, noted the journal Nature. And it was a brutal experience for Jacques Cinq Mars. He likened it to the Spanish Inquisition. Audiences paid little heed to his evidence at academic conferences, they gave short shrift to the evidence. Then his competence was questioned. When Jacques proposed that Bluefish case was 24,000 years old, it was not accepted, says William Josey. And the fact is that Jack Cinq Mars was ruined by the archeological reaction to his discovery. His career was wrecked. His research funding was withdrawn. He was ignored by colleagues in the halls of academia. He was insulted and humiliated. It destroyed his life. But he was right. And the fact that he was right was later confirmed. It was confirmed that indeed, human beings had been at Bluefish Cave.

And there's the publication from 2017, I think. Yes, January 2017, confirming that all along, Jacques Cinq Mars had been right, and that the ruining and destruction of his reputation for saying something that other archeologists disagreed with had been wholly unnecessary. And again, the Smithsonian. The study raises serious questions about the effect of the bitter, decades long debate over the peopling of the new World. Did archeologists in the mainstream marginalize dissenting voices on this key issue? And if so, what was the impact on north american archeology? Did the intense criticism of pre clovis sites produce a chilling effect, stifling new ideas and hobbling the search for early for early sites? So here's Clovis debunked. You're telling me that it was debunked in the nineties? Flint. But here's Clovis being debunked again in 2007. National Geographic. Here's Clovis being debunked in 2012. I mean, for a theory that was debunked in the 1990s, it's weird to see it still being debunked in 2012. It's like there's something still there to debunk, isn't there? And Wikipedia entry. Recently, the scientific consensus has changed to acknowledge the presence of pre clovis cultures in the America, ending the Clovis first consensus.

This was a piece from the 15 April 2023. My God. Here's the big think. April 2022. Clovis apparently still needs to be debunked. It's like a zombie. It keeps on haunting archeology, and people keep on having to debunk it. And I'd like to just mention Tom Dillahay. Tom Dillahay discovered the site of excavated the site of Monteverde in Chile, and he found evidence that human beings had been there 14,000, maybe as much as 18,000 years ago in the deep south of South America. And again, the archeology that flint would like us to believe exists would have welcomed that find. But no, that find was not welcomed. That find was massively attacked, particularly by american archeologists. And we now know that Tom Delay has been vindicated and that he was absolutely correct all along, that human beings were in Monteverde thousands of years before Clovis, and he was eventually vindicated. Now, what I want to do, if you don't mind, is just play a tiny little clip from Tom Dillahay himself.

I don't have audio set up for you to do that.

Can you send it to him?

I just have the HDMI cable rapid.

If he sends it to you, can you do that? Sure. Okay.

How do I send it to you? We'll pause after a slight technical hitch.

Okay, we're back.

After a slight technical hitch. Let's play this clip from Tom Dillahay, who was the discoverer and excavator of Monteverde.

I put together an interdisciplinary research team of people, got national geographic funding and National Science foundation funding, and that went pretty well the way we expected it to. And I found that the scientists were open minded. This includes archeologists. We had australian, chilean, and argentinian archeologists working with us. Cumulatively speaking, those people, besides myself, probably had close to 100 years of experience amongst them. What surprised me on the other side of the coin was the stiff closed mindedness of many north american archeologists. But some of the north american colleagues were very difficult to deal with, and I think, at times, presenting a very unhealthy atmosphere, cutting us off before we can present the data at meetings, not talking with us about it, refusing to even look at the data, this sort of thing.

So I think I've got a few minutes left of my presentation time, and I would like to deal with the issue that Flint has mentioned of archeology somehow knowing that there was no lost civilization. If we could call this up on the screen, Jamie. So the Society for American Archeology, of which Flint is a member of, wrote an open letter to Netflix shortly after the release of my show, ancient apocalypse. Really asking Netflix to cancel the show. Not to cancel it. This is quite cleverly put. They said, don't. They said, reclassify it as science fiction. Now, to my mind, what is the result of 30 plus years of work on my part being reclassified as science fiction is as good as canceling it. Netflix did not reclassify it as science fiction, but archeology, the Society for American Archeology, says that it really sees no evidence for an advanced lost civilization of the ice age, and that my series is simply entertainment with ideological goals. So I want to get into the parts of the world that archeology has not looked at that have been.

It's kind of interesting, though, from that statement, just the last thing. Contrary to Hancock's claims, archeology does not willfully ignore credible evidence, nor does it seek to suppress it in the conspiratorial fashion. But we just showed that.

Yeah, we just showed in the case of Tom Dillahay, that his evidence was suppressed. But in the case of Jacques sank Mars, his evidence was suppressed, that archeology was not open minded about the work of these guys, that they suffered humiliation and great difficulty in advancing their work. And furthermore, I'd like to make another point clear. At this point, Flint, I don't think there's an archeological conspiracy against me. I'm not so conceited. I don't imagine there's a conspiracy. I don't think archeologists are sitting together in a kamal conspiring against me. I think that archeology is locked into a mindset about the past, where my ideas simply seem preposterous. And I think it's very annoying to archeology that those ideas have some resonance with. With the public. But I absolutely refute any suggestion that I have ever said that archeology is involved in a conspiracy against me or is trying to suppress my work. That is not the case. Look, there's the sahara desert. A fair bit of archeology has been done in the Sahara desert, but we're looking at 9.2 million Sahara desert. Tell me, how much of the sahara you think has actually been excavated?

Flint. By archeologists?

I'd say a bunch of it has been surveyed, including by my dad.

No, no, no. How much has actually been excavated? What sort of percentage?

Well, a lot of sort of desert archeology does not have excavation. It's eroded away due to the wind.

What's your answer to my question? How much does archeology really know about the past of the Sahara?

Well, we understand about the domestication of pearl millet in the Sahara from when the Sahara was a much more. Much of it was actually more habitable because it was not desert. So we can see the domestication of pearl mill and sorghum.

No, we can see. My question is related specifically to my subject. Has enough of the Sahara been excavated for archeology to exclude any possibility that they've missed anything important in the Sahara?

We have found thousands of sites of ephemeral hunter gatherer remains in the Sahara.

You're still not answering my question. How much of the sahara has archeology actually looked at?

I have no idea, but quite a bit.

Graham, what do you mean by quite a bit?

What I mean is that due to remote sensing, due to surface survey and due to archeological excavation, we actually have reasonable coverage across the sahara. We understand that during green periods in the neolithic, we can see agricultural villages, and before the neolithic, we can find ephemeral hunter gatherer camps where they were napping stones.

But the fact of the matter is around about 1% of the Sahara has been excavated and 99% hasn't. So to say that there's no possibility of any traces of a lost civilization in the Sahara seems to me a bit premature, particularly since during the african humid period, and there were several of them, the Sahara was green and fertile and was a very attractive environment in which to live. I might come onto the ancient maps issue, but there's an ancient map up there which shows a green and fertile sahara. And oddly, it coincides very much with a radar survey of the Sahara done in 2015, showing river channels in exactly the places shown in that ancient map. I think the Sahara is a fascinating underserved area by archeology. And the plain fact of the matter is, it's very expensive to work there, it's very difficult to work there, and archeology has done very little work in the Sahara. Not no work. Not no work, but very little. Not enough to write off the possibility that evidence might be found in the future. You know, you're basing this on our technology now. Now let's look 200 years in the future.

Look how much archeology has progressed in the last 50 years. 200 years in the future. The technologies might be so much more advanced. There's so much stuff that has simply not been looked at. And the Sahara is one of those underserved areas, as far as I'm concerned, so is the Amazon. 6.7 million square kilometers, about five and a half still covered by rainforest. It's bigger than India. Well, here's an article from Nature. 95% of the Amazon has simply not been investigated at all. And those bits that have been investigated are minuscule by comparison. Yet where investigation is taking place in the Amazon, astonishing finds are being made. And these are in the brazilian state of acre. Acre. And geoglyphs have been found there. And I've recently been with. Not all archeologists are as opposed to my work as you and your colleagues, Flint. But I've been with Marty Parsonen, who's a leading archeologist studying the Amazon. I've been with Alsa Ranzi, who's a geographer from Brazil, and with Fabio Davias Filho, who's a lidar expert. This is very recently, actually, and we did some lidar work in that area. And this is the kind of thing that's being found.

Huge, enormous earthworks, geoglyphs, which, were we to find them in the west, we would recognize them as almost as henges. The amount of workmanship that goes into these earthworks is stunning. And they are very precise, very geometrical. You have squares here you have a square enclosing a circle. More of the same. Taquino is a gigantic site. These are just scratching the surface. The archeologists who are working on these sites believe that there are thousands and thousands more of these geoglyph sites, that they're just touching the edge. When I was there with them back in September 23, I think it was, we actually did a bit of lidar work. We put up a drone with lidar attached and we found. We found new geoglyphs, geoglyphs that had not been found before within a mile of geoglyphs that had been found but still covered by canopy rainforest. And Marty and Arceo are of the view that if we were to really investigate the whole of the Amazon from this point of view, we would have to revolutionize our whole view of human history. That archeology has hardly touched this incredibly important region. And therefore, I do not believe that archeology can tell us that it can rule out any possibility of a lost civilization while it has so failed to serve the Amazon and is only now beginning to do so.

And those who are doing that work are convinced that there's much, much, much more to be found. Thousands more of these geoglyphs. For example, 27 million Earth's surface was above water during the ice age, and it's underwater today. So, yes, there has been quite a bit of marine archeology, I think Nick Fleming says there's about 3000 sites have been investigated underwater over the years. But it's, again, you're looking at a tiny fraction of 1% of the submerged areas that have been investigated. I was very excited when I saw this, but it turned out that it was just another search for shipwrecks. And fortunately, some new work is now being done. Archeologists are beginning to look at the submerged area, Doggerland, for example, between what is now Britain and continental Europe, a submerged landmass. They're beginning to investigate this. It wouldn't surprise me at all if lots of evidence of hunter gatherers is found in these submerged areas. I would expect that to be the case. But to say that enough work has been done to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization seems to me absurd when we're dealing with 27 million square kilometers.

And I just want to say that I and my wife Santha, have done a great deal of diving. We did seven years of scuba diving all over the world. And what we did was we followed up local accounts of underwater structures, fishermen, local divers, and we went where they took us. Nan Madol Pohnpei. On the island of Pohnpei, you go a bit further underwater and you start finding structures underwater. Go a bit further still and you find this huge column underwater. This is a depth of 27 meters. That column has been submerged for more than 13,000 years, and it compares very interestingly with this column. If you see on the left, the submerged column at Namibol, on the right, this column from Tinian, the island of Tinian, also in that region of the Pacific. I wonder if the megaliths of Tinian have been misstated. What we're looking at here, and I apologize to listeners who are listening and not watching, but what we're looking at here are my fins disappearing into a tunnel. And that tunnel looks to me, this is in Japan, by the way, off the island of Yonaguni. That tunnel looks to me very man made, particularly when I get inside it and find two on each side, two big megaliths piled one on top of the other.

And then when you come to the end of the tunnel, you see ahead of you these two massive megalithic blocks directly in view from the tunnel. That's a shot that Santa took of me diving beside those megalithic blocks. Just to give you a sense of the scale of them, they're enormous. No, they did not fall from a cliff above. There is no cliff above, and they're in concentration context. We're looking at a huge rocky outcrop with these two megalithic blocks on the side. But let's go round to the right of that rocky outcrop, and we find a rock hewn area with steps and those steps, archeologists tend to argue this is all completely natural. I have done more than 200 dives at Yonaguni. Santa and I risked our lives. We are not dilettantes. We are in this out of conviction. We're in this out of passion for our subject. We've done more than 200 dives at Yonaguni. I've been hands on with this structure and all the other structures around it, and I am absolutely confident that we're looking at a rock hewn structure, a natural rock face that was cut and shaped by human beings.

Here at Kerama, we're looking at a stone circle underwater, depth 30 plus meters. 32 meters. I think being submerged again for more than 13,000 years there, I'm videoing for scale. You can see somebody down that beside that central megalith. Flint, do you think nature made that?

I see no evidence of it being man made, if that's what you're saying.

You see no evidence of that being man made. You see a central upright. You see upright surrounding it. You see the outer curve, the inner curve of the outer megalith, matching the outer curve of the central megalith. And to you, that's not even interesting.

I mean, even the photos you were showing the Yonaguni showed a lot of natural fractures along straight lines. And so I think that it's really easy to confuse what can happen naturally and geologically with something that looks kind of anthropogenic. But this does not look man made to me. It does not look like anything I've ever seen.

Well, that's interesting, because I took a geologist diving there, Wolf witchman. He's very skeptical. He was skeptical about Yonaguni, but he did confess after we came up from the dive at Kerama that there's no way, in his opinion, that this could have been made by nature. This is a rock wall off Taiwan. Again, Santa and I went diving there. That's a local diver called Steve Scheer. He's showing us this rock wall. We can get in close to it. We can see a sort of pediment in front of it. And if you get up close, you can see that it is actually made of individual blocks put together. Let's go to India. Southeast coast of India. My wife Santha was born in Malaysia, but she's of tamil south indian origin. So we had a great advantage, advantage in south India in talking to local fishermen and divers because Santha speaks the Tamil language fluently. And we had asked them, are there any structures underwater off here? And they said, you bet there are. There's a whole city underwater off here. And we've complained to the government about it because we keep catching our nets on it and fishermen have to go down and sometimes they die trying to free the nets.

We'd like the whole thing cleared away. So we said, would you take us out there and show us? And it took some time to put it together. This was an expedition with the scientific Exploration Society in Britain that I put together. As you can see, it's a very low tech expedition. But when we got out there. Come on, Flint, tell me these are man made. Tell me these are natural blocks.

That's a very blurry picture, Graham.

Tell me that they're natural blocks. Tell me.

I cannot tell for sure with these photos.

Okay, there I'm putting my diving knife between two blocks, and there and then a curved wall. Actually, the team from the National Institute of Oceanography in India, who were with us, were intrigued by this.

Do you have any more photos of that, maybe more convincing?

No, that's what I've got, but I'm trying to keep it short.

Right. Some of them do have characteristics of stone walls, for sure, but it's hard to tell.

That's the top of a stone wall. The rest of it's buried in sand on the left. There on the right, a stone wall with a standout feature above it. To suggest that these things are natural seems to me completely absurd. And my point is that if Santa and I, with no external funding, the only funding we have. I've never had financial sponsorship from anybody. The only funding that we have is the kind readers who buy my books and allow us to undertake this research. And we've risked our lives for 30 years investigating this research. And if we can find structures of this nature underwater on our very limited basis, then I would imagine that a detailed archeological survey would find much more. So the submerged continental shelves, the Sahara desert and the Amazon alone, these are three large underserved areas by archeology. And I think it's premature for archeology to say that they can rule out any possibility of a lost civilization while there's so much of the earth that remains to be studied. And actually how much of the so called developed industrial countries, how much of land area of those countries have been investigated?

I mean, so look, a, I fully agree with you that I'd like to see more archeology done in ethical, informed ways. I am not trying to argue against searching for sites in the Sahara, the Amazon, or underwater, I think we can hopefully agree that more archeology needs to be done. I would say in developed countries, our coverage is even better, though, mainly due to the fact that laws require archeological excavation and survey prior to construction. So whenever there's sort of construction going on in cities, there's archeology happening. Whenever pipelines or highways or things like that are being done, there's survey and there's excavation. And so, I mean, at this point, our numbers of archeological sites are well in the millions, right? And billions of artifacts that have been found. And so I'm not trying to say it's perfect, though. And at the same time, the kind of excavations that happen sort of on a rescue basis before construction, they're not going to have the same kind of investment that an academic project will have. On the other hand, an academic project's going to make a much smaller hole, you know, because we are focusing on maximizing the evidence that we can get.

And so, you know, in no way am I trying to say that archeology has perfect coverage, but we do have quite a bit of coverage that people are unfamiliar with. And we do have quite a bit of coverage of this late ice age period where we have many, many thousands of sites from ephemeral hunter gatherers underwater, above water and elsewhere as we do above water. Yeah.

Would you mind showing Yanaguni again? Because those other images aren't nearly as compelling to me as some of the right angles and what looks like passageways and that curved surface underground, that, to me, that's a wild one. See, the other stuff, I'm like, things look weird in nature sometimes, and I'm not an expert. And so I look at that, I'm like, that's blurry. It's green. It's odd. Yeah, it's odd. Maybe if you were there physically, you would have a different impression of it. Maybe it would look more like a stone wall. But Yanaguni, to me, blows me away. This blows me away. But the other image blows me away of the curved front of that feature and what looks like steps to the right of it.

So there's that tunnel.

That's crazy, too. That's crazy, too, because the lines line up. It looks like two blocks were cut and placed on each side, and there seems like a very clear passageway in.

Between them, especially since at the end of the passageway, you're confronted by this. This is what you look at.

These are crazy. Like, if these are natural formations, they're so bizarre that you have enormous straight lines and right angles that look like they were cut and not just straight on one side? Straight on all sides.

Do you mind going? Yeah. So look at this slide. You can see even to the right of those two blocks that what Graham is calling blocks. You can see these sort of straight angles that are made. You can see another vertical one to the left as well. Right.

So how do you think they were placed in that manner?

Well, I don't know if they were placed. I think so.

You think it's possible that they just broke off at some point in history and landed like that? I think, again, this is compelling to me, but not as compelling as the other one. Show me the other one with the front curved surface. This.

Notice that this looks crazy.

Like this. The whole thing looks crazy. The steps look crazy. The fact that it's all this one uniform flat line. Yeah. Some of these look bizarre.

Nature sometimes looks bizarre, though. I mean, you know, if I'm assuming that people have investigated this, like, geologists.

And stuff, from where Masaki, Professor Masaki Kimura has investigated it, and he's published extensively on it, and he's a geologist. He's absolutely convinced that Yonaguni has been worked extensively by human hands.

And haven't other geologists, like Robert Schoch, suggested that it's not?

Yeah, I took Robert there. His initial impression was that it was. That it was man made. Later, he changed his view. That's fine. He did three dives there.

But, I mean, I don't know. I've seen a lot of crazy natural stuff, and I see nothing here that, to me, reminds me of human architecture, and I've seen human architecture all over the world.

Jamie, go to that one that we were just looking at with Graham. It's a lower right, like, below the main image to the right hand side. Yeah. The next one. That one. Yeah.

It's certainly crazy. I'll give you that. Yeah. You know, I'm not going to deny that it's an impressive flat.

That surface is very bizarre, and how it juts off and it's flat below it in a uniform line. The curved surface of the front of it is very bizarre, too, that the other image that you had, Graham.

But stone oftentimes fractures in straight ways. You know, that's how it fractures naturally.

Yeah, I get it. I get it. It's just the. The appearance of those stones stacked in a uniform manner in that tunnel, all these things, and that this exists somewhere else. It's very similar.

These might be renderings of what they.

Think it looks like, I suppose.

I mean, regardless we still have no dates from this. We have no artifacts.

We do have dates from the submergence. You're looking at material that's more than 12,000 years old. This was a tough dive. Massive currents there. This is Kerema off Akajima in the Okinawa group of islands. To me, Flint, it's stunning that you see that as a totally natural thing. But I guess we've just got very different eyes. The central upright surrounded by upright megaliths, all cut out of the bedrock. Very similar to the chamber recently excavated at Karahantepe, where you have uprights cut out of the bedrock as well. It seems to me inconceivable that nature could have made this, that nature could have separated out this central upright and then created the uprights surrounding it in such a perfect way.

But it's not totally perfect. Right. Look at the back. The back is much larger.

Yeah.

There's a piece on the side that seems like it's cut out, and then there's a piece in front that seems like it's cut out. But even the one to the lower left is not. It's not cut the same. It's odd that you have that passageway when you're looking down, and it's sort of uniform on all sides around the monolith. That's pretty fascinating. It's interesting.

My point is, not nearly enough work has been done by archeology.

And how long ago was supposedly was this above ground?

About 13,000 years ago. Somewhere of that order. Somewhere of that order. That was the last time it could have been done above ground. Otherwise, nature, if Flint believes so, has done it. But I'm pretty confident we're looking.

What is the most compelling evidence that you've seen in an underwater site of manmade construction or moving of stones?

I repeat, this is Kerama. I am not showing. I'm only showing a fraction of the slides that we have from Yonaguni. Yonaguni isn't simply that terrace. It's a whole series of monuments which continue over a distance of a couple of miles underwater. There's a huge stone face carved out of the rock. There's a passageway down at the bottom of Yonaguni there, as rocks have been cleared to the side, away from the passageway. It's the combination of all of these different things across an area of 2 miles off the island of Yonaguni that make that one of my high priority sites for man made workmanship. And the indian sites are also extremely intriguing. And unfortunately, none of that work has been followed up, which is a pity. And when we come to what you call rescue archeology, flint, if we come back to northern Europe, for example, I mean, the last place on earth that I would look for the remains of a lost civilization is northern european, because northern Europe was a frozen wilderness during the ice age, and any lost civilization worth its salt would not have focused a lot of effort on northern Europe in that time.

The place to look is down near the tropics. It's down near the equator. It's in places that weren't horrifically cold and unbearable during the ice age. And when you talk about rescue archeology, this is one of the problems I have, is that there is no targeted search for the possibility of a lost civilization, because archeologists are really convinced that no such thing could have existed. So what we get is accidental discovery. Somebody's building a road or building a dam. They call in the archeologists to see if there's any archeology that's going to be disrupted, and some archeology is found sometimes. That's how the Ceruti mastodon site near San Diego was discovered, because roadworks were being done there. But this is not a targeted search for a lost civilization. This is accidental discovery. I would maintain that in the Amazon rainforest, in the Sahara desert, in the 27 million square kilometers of continental shelves massively underserved by archeology, and in other areas of the world, archaeology's focus is on very limited parts of those, not on massive parts of them. And then I'm sure you know this flint, that when we come to most archeological sites, the amount of the site that is excavated is rarely more than 5% and often less than that.

And that's for good motives to preserve the site for future generations of archeologists to investigate. But again, it doesn't, I think, allow archeologists to lay such claim to the past that they can absolutely rule out any possibility of a lost civilization.

Okay, Flint.

Yeah. I mean, so if you want to. Jamie, do you want to look up the site? Pavlopetry. P a V l O p E T R I. This is a site in the Aegean. And this is an example of kind of what, uh, I mean, I can boot it up on my computer, if you could. So if you look at this, you have very clear stone courses, for example, underwater. And it's not just sort of stone courses and walls that we find. This is from a few thousand years ago. What we find actually are a ton of artifacts with it. Right? They dive, they excavate, they pull up ceramics, they pull up stone tools, and they are able to, therefore show that this was an occupied place. This is obviously not due to sea level rise. This is due to tectonic activity that this is now underwater. Helicae off the north coast of Greece also is another one that people have suggested might have inspired Plato's Atlantis, because it happened during Plato's lifetime that that city was submerged underwater. And so we actually do find, you know, from more recent times, actual underwater sites aplenty and Pavlopetri.

What year was that?

I think it's from about 3000. Oh, 3000 years ago or so. So like 1000 bc ish. I could be off back.

Are you saying those are natural blocks at Pavlopetri?

No, I'm saying, you can say, see clear stone courses. That looks exactly like the type of architecture we have above ground. And so the same kind of stone courses, what you have at yon Lagoon, the historic period.

No.

Huh.

You would expect that from the historic.

Yeah, we would. And so I would expect, though, if you're going to make an argument for something like Yonaguni, that it would look like architecture. Maybe even the type of architecture that.

You have looks like megalithic architecture to me. Looks like rock hewn architecture. It looks like the rock hewn areas of Sacsayhuaman, for example. Jamie actually pulled us.

We see many different blocks. Exactly. We see multiple courses of blocks down.

You know, Saxe Huaman, have you been there?

No, I've never been there, granted.

So how can you possibly talk about it?

Because I've seen photos of it.

Well, I've been there dozens of times.

Wait, wait.

I was there just a few weeks ago.

Okay, but let's. Let's look at the images so we can discuss.

Let's look at the images, because Sacsahuaman is a very complicated site. Yes, there are huge blocks in the zig zag walls of Sacsahuaman, but there are also huge rock cut areas with steps in them.

I don't understand how being there lets you talk about it better than me. You've been there as a tourist to see how archeologists have conserved it and preserved it and presented it for people coming by. That is not the same thing as excavating a site. That is not the same thing with understanding archeological literature. Tell me that. I've not been there, so I cannot talk about.

It's obvious that you're ignorant of the site, Flint. You're ignorant of the site because you don't know what the site looks like. You don't know the huge areas that are cut out of solid rock.

Let's just talk about blocks and let's, like, look at it and.

Yeah, let's do that.

Let's look at it.

How do you spell that? Sacsay woman. S a c s a y h u a m a n. Okay, got it. Now, that's the blocky walls that you've been talking about.

Yeah. And that doesn't look anything like Yonaguni.

But they confront another area. You were showing us some pictures of it earlier, Jamie. A whole rock hewn hillside.

I don't know. None of that looks like Yonaguni. This looks like actual architecture.

Yeah, it is. I. Yeah, I agree, but this is not the picture that I would like to see.

Do you want to find it, Graham, and put it up through HDMI? Because Jamie, obviously, I know what he.

Was asking for, but you had it stumbled across it.

I wasn't.

It wasn't there on purpose or anything. It was probably in here somewhere.

And, like, how I got there, I was clicking around.

So.

Hmm.

Let's see if we can get.

And, I mean, you know, part of the goal, though, is to also have a date. So, you know, like some of that stuff that you showed off the coast.

In that one there.

Okay.

There's lots of this in Sacramento, Manfred, as you would know if you'd been.

There, this still does not look anything like Yonaguni.

It doesn't look like a series of steps cut out of rock.

I mean, it looks like a series of steps. Yeah, but it doesn't look like. It actually looks like a room. There even is what I see on the left, for example, to me, it.

Looks similar, but not similar in that whole room area on the left hand side that I don't think anybody could look at that and ever argue that that wasn't made by humans. I think that's so clear. Whereas if you look at. Go back.

But I also don't know if this is Saksehua. This is on Quora, right?

Yeah, I don't know what it is.

Let's go look and see what. It's a photo by something.

It is.

It is. Okay. Your wife.

So the difference to me is, like, there's some instances, like in between the steps where you look at that flat surface and the uniform line across the flat surface, that does look similar to Yonaguni. Some of the stuff on the right looks much more refined than what you see in Yonaguni, but that also could be attributed to the underwater erosion. Right. In thousands and thousands of years. Whereas how old is Sacsay hua mon to be?

Well, that's an ongoing argument, Joe.

Well, Pedro Sieza de Leon mentioned it was only built 100 years before he was there.

The difference between, in my mind, Sacsayouaman shows all those other things that are so clearly architecture, so clearly stone blocks fitted and piled onto each other. You don't quite see that level of sophistication at the Yonaguni site, but you do see some stuff that's very bizarre and doesn't look like it's natural.

And I suggest if we were to look further and spend the money and investigate thoroughly, we would find a lot more. I'm simply raising this to address Flint's apparent point that archeology has done enough already to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization. That's certainly what's said in the SaaS letter to Netflix and Flint.

What is your position on that? Specifically what he's talking about South America. That South America would be a place where an advanced civilization would thrive because it wouldn't during the ice age time, because it wouldn't be experiencing the brutal cold that northern Europe had.

No, but I still think we'd want to find some sort of evidence of things like agriculture. Right. And so we can look at the development of agriculture in South America and in Mesoamerica. I have slides on that and we can see that it actually, we can see the transition from wild to domestic in real space and time.

In which areas, though.

So in Mesoamerica, we can see it with teosinte. Further south, in the northern part of South America, we can can see it with a variety of different crops.

And these are all areas that are outside of the rainforest?

No, some of them are the edges of the rainforest.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, look, we've done a lot of work in the rainforest with lidar in particular, and that's been dated based on excavations Stephan Rostain just published in 2024, a series of lidar structures that were all connected with one another alongside major roads. And based on excavations of several of them, it dates to about 2500 years ago. And so this is the key thing is we want to understand clear dates for stuff. And that is the key thing. We have plentiful evidence. Do you mind if I show you some of our ice age evidence that we have?

I think the HDMI resets when you're shutting the computer.

Did I shut my computer?

Yeah.

I'm sorry. Is it. Should I unplug it then? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Technology, man.

I don't know.

Sorry.

I have a cheap computer. I need to. I work for a public university and have a small grant.

I don't think it's the computer's problem. I think it's all good.

Let me pull up my actual one. So let's look at some of the ice age stuff that we can look exactly where Graham says we're not looking. And I want to show you what we do have. No, no.

I say you're not looking enough.

Okay? But I want to show you what we find when we do look, because I completely agree, Graham. I actually hope the people who are interested in more archeology happening donate to things like the Archeological Institute of America, the European association of Archeologists, and the Society for American Archeology, that can help fund more surveys and experts.

If somebody wanted to do that, where would they go?

To their websites. SaaS.org comma, archaeological.org dot. I think it's archaeological.org dot. Can I give you guys the links to put it on the YouTube and stuff like that?

Sure, yeah.

So archaeological.org for the Archeological Institute of America. And I'll give you guys the links for that so you can show that.

I just wanted to get it out there while it's still in people's minds listening to this.

Look it up. Archeological Institute of America, Society for American Archeology, and European association for Archeologists. Okay. They are great institutions that support stuff. I just want to dedicate this quick thing to my dad. He was an ice age archeologist. He innovated how to do mapping and how to look at stone tools. And please blame him for any of my mistakes, any of his colleagues that are listening. So I want to talk about one of his surveys that he actually did in the upper deserts of Egypt. Egypt above Abydos. Abydos is famous because that's where the pre dynastic dynasty came from in Egypt. But up in the upper areas, him with Debelshevsky and Shannon McFerrin, they went and they surveyed 2100 different places where, based on sort of the geology of the areas, they thought there was a decent chance that people might have been there in the past because of it being not a desert environment, but more of a savannah, more green, and because of erosion, there might be stuff visible. Right? So they targeted these areas and they found what? Nearly 200 different sites, all dating to the ice age. Dense scatters, some of them dense.

Not all of them are dense, like this one on the right of lithics of stone tools that showed people working in place, and they mapped them out in the desert. They have 36,000 different artifacts that they found in this survey. And in many places, they could actually refit these back together so they could understand that people were doing this right here in this spot. And so, you know, one of the great things about desert survey is, because of all the wind erosion, we actually should have exposed more architecture, more artifacts, and because it's so dry, things like organic material preserve sometimes as well. And so we actually have this picture of stuff that's different than, say, you know, in a more temperate zone. But if we start looking at underwater sites, I talked with doctor Jessica Cook Hale, who's now at the University of Bradford, who has done underwater dives and found ice age sites off the coast of Florida. So this is in the Gulf of Mexico. Jamie. Oh, I have to give this to you. Sorry. I have a video here for you.

You could airdrop it.

I'm low tech, Graham.

Well, it's just windows.

Yeah, I know, I know.

Isn't that a part of a big lawsuit right now?

And so one of the things that she does is she is an underwater archeologist who focuses on the Stone Age and this period that we're talking about at the end of the ice age and what we're looking at here, she'll talk about it. It's just a short 1 minute clip is this site's underwater. They all date to the end of the ice age. And so there are lithic scatters, just like my dad found in the Sahara desert, of hunter gatherers under underwater sites, though. And so let's see what some of these look like.

Can I ask you something? How do they go about choosing these areas to search?

Yeah, she's going to explain that. So what she does is she develops predictive models based on the geomorphology. This is her find, actually, her colleague finding some stone tools. So they look at the underwater geomorphology. They take known sites above water, and then they predict where they might be able to go and successfully find material. And then they go dive. And often enough, they do find that material, and they're able to find. Here we go. Yeah. Has some of the densest terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene occupations in the american southeast. We're definitely in Florida. We don't just do random dives. We go back from the known to the unknown. We look at terrestrial patterns. We look at cultural types. So periods where people were using shellfish as a subsistence base. It's really important to look at those sites on land and say, what are the factors? What environmental patterns or cultural patterns can we tease out of these larger distributions? And then we project it offshore. And if we're fortunate, then after we pull all those threads together, this is what we get. And so, yeah, this is just like with my dad when he targeted areas in the Sahara.

Now she's at University of Bradford, and they're doing dives in different areas of Europe, and they're specifically targeting this kind of stone age material from this period, and they're able to see, successfully find it. And so I think that that's important to understand because this material is there to find, even though it's very much ephemeral material from hunter gatherer camps. And this is oftentimes outcrops of stone for making these kind of stone tools. So that's what they're actually finding, is where they're making it, looking at the geomorphology to find them. And so if we. Sorry, let's get past this. We already talked about this wall, but I also wanted to brought up other kinds of underwater finds that have been found from the Stone Age. Kosker cave. It's a painted cave. It's 115ft underwater, off the coast of Marseille, found recently in 1985 by Henri Kosquet. And it's dated to 27,019 thousand years ago and dated by radiocarbon. It's actually the painted cave with the most radiocarbon dates from it. Right. And this is what we have. We have panels of black horses. We have. It's one of the only painted caves with sea creatures.

For example, these auks, I think there's some stuff that they describe as jellyfish. There's a black stag. And so we actually are looking underwater and successfully finding this kind of material. But it's not just underwater, because I don't think we need to stop there. If we look at this culture in Europe at the end of the ice age, this magdalenian culture that's associated with most of these painted caves from about 17,000 to 12,000 years ago, the exact period that Graham's civilization should date to. We have radiocarbon dates from a large number of these caves very clearly locked in, in time. And what do we see? They're actually, even with sea level rise, they're only a couple miles from the ice age coast. So these are very, very close. There's not room for some sort of empire there, or civilization.

I claim no empire.

Okay, that's fine.

That's just another way you misrepresent my work.

Okay, I'm sorry for misrepresenting your work, Graham, but there's no room for some sort of large agricultural civilization along most of these coasts, because the way sea level rise has worked is it's variable in different places. And so we actually have a whole lot of coverage near to ice age coasts from the end of the ice age, not the glacial maximum.

Can you explain those lines?

Yeah. So these are lines based on 100 meters and 120 meters of sea level rise, which is about the amount that existed from the younger dryas. There's more from the glacial maximum, but that's 20,000 years ago. We're talking about 12,000 years ago at the end of the ice age. And so they're only these. All these caves on the north of Spain are only a few miles away from that ice age coastline. So just, you know, short walking distance.

Right. So anything that had been submerged would have to be within those boundaries.

Yeah, exactly. And there's only a few miles there. It's not like a huge untapped landscape to look at, if you see what I mean.

Not in the Bay of Biscay.

Not in the Bay of Biscay.

Not in many places to take the sunda shelf, for example.

Okay.

Enormous amount of submerged material there. I'm not disputing that we're gonna find that we're gonna find hunter gatherer sites underwater. I'm simply saying, and you seem to keep evading this issue, that not enough has been done to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization. There were hunter gatherers all over the world during the ice age, and of course we're going to find hunter gatherer sites underwater. But to say that we've done enough underwater archeology to rule out the possibility that something very surprising might be found underwater, to me, is actually dishonest. There's just not enough being done. There's not enough being done in the Sahara, there's not enough being done in the Amazon, and there's not been done enough on those 27 million square kilometers of submerged continental shelves. The whole area between the malaysian peninsula, the indonesian islands, out over to New guinea and Australia, the submerged Sunda shelf and the Sahul area, to me, is absolutely fascinating. And not enough underwater archeology has been done there to rule out the possibility. I'm not saying that we're not going to find hunter gatherer sites, of course we are. But I'm saying that for archeology to claim, and to quite viciously and unpleasantly attacked me for suggesting the possibility that there might be a lost civilization to make that claim, while having failed thus far to investigate thoroughly the vast areas of the submerged continental shelves, the vast areas of the Amazon rainforest, the vast areas of the Sahara desert that have not been investigated.

That claim is premature and that claim is disingenuous.

But we have thousands of sites.

I don't care how many sites you.

Can give me a second.

There's 3000 underwater sites that have been found.

Graham, working with archeology is working from the known and what we actually have towards the unknown. And when you say that we're not investigating these areas, I'm showing you that we have. We have.

No, I admit you have.

Okay, so let me explain. Don't misrepresent me. I'm not misrepresenting.

Of course, you've surveyed some of those areas.

Yes, we've surveyed quite a bit of them and quite a bit of them are on.

What do you mean by quite a bit? How much of the submerged continental shells?

Graham? I'm going to keep showing you areas that we have evidence for. Why do we have so much evidence for ephemeral hunter gatherers, but not evidence from an advanced civilization that is global, that should leave behind monuments that are far easier to find? Instead, what we get are plentiful sites outside and in caves that show coastal interactions. We have evidence of these hunter gatherers interacting with the coastlines. They're collecting shellfish and fish. They're turning them into beads. They turn whale bones into points to hunt with into other kinds of artifacts. And these whale bones and these shells don't just end up on those coastal sites, they end up further inland as well. So we can see all over the world this kind of coastal interaction. And it's not just areas like that. So, for example, sea level rise is not even everywhere, just off on the southern coast of Crete. I've been here. Doctor Tom Strasser has shown me around this site very thankfully. I'm very much in debt to him. This is an area where the african tectonic plate is moving under the european tectonic plate. And so the land is rising faster than the sea level has risen.

And so tom specifically targeted it for survey. He found dozens of sites and then he excavated several of them. What this is, is this is an uplifted sea cave. It's a cave that was formed from wave action, you know, before the ice age. And then with tectonic uplift, it raised up many, many, many meters above the current sea level. And what did he find? He found a stone Age hunter gatherer camp. He excavated it, he found obsidian, he found other kinds of lithic tools. He found animal bones. And he dated it to right at the end of the ice age.

Right. None of that's surprising to me.

Okay. Just keep so easily how much of.

The submerged continental shelves have actually been investigated by archeology?

It doesn't matter.

It does matter.

Oh, it doesn't matter.

27 million square kilometers the size of Europe and China added together, and you've investigated less than 5% of it. That doesn't matter.

The fact that we found thousands of these hunter gatherer sites does not matter.

It does matter. Of course you're going to find. That's what I expect to find in the world.

Both things can be true.

Both can be true.

Or we can go to North America, where we have 12,000 different sites, I think it is with Clovis points, and we can see where these coastlines are on the eastern seaboard. Yes. There's a large amount of submerged continental shelf, including the area in Florida where we saw Jessica cocail dived and found sites. If you look at the western seaboard, on the other hand, there is not nearly as much of a submerged continental shelf. And what's really interesting about the western seaboard is not only have we been exploring it for 40 plus years, and we have multiple sites dating to this period at the end of the ice age, sometimes with wood and cording, other times with stone tools, all of them hunter gatherers. 1 second, Graham? Sure. And so you mentioned this Clovis first hypothesis, right? It's been decades. You bring up news articles and headlines that say that it's still being debunked. That's not what archeology is. Our articles ourselves don't say that. Our articles instead present new hypotheses like the Kelp highway hypothesis, because scholars do not write the headlines for media articles. I cannot help how journalists portray what we do.

Okay.

And so what we're looking at is this new migration pathway, the Kelp highway hypothesis, done by John Ehrlandson and others. And what we can do is we can specifically target areas that are above water. So what's happening along the Pacific coast, north in Canada, is the glacier is melting and that causes sea level rise, but the weight of the glacier pushes down the land. So as it melts, there's less weight on the land, and it's called isostatic rebound. So there's a whole chunk of the Pacific coast, sorry, along Canada, where it's above land right now for us to excavate. And people have been targeting that. Out of the University of Victoria, for example, Duncan McLaren has found footprints right there on what is an end of the ice age coast from about 15,000 years ago. These are footprints in beach sand from three different people from this analysis, and so we can get these ephemeral traces of hunter gatherers moving into the Americas at this time. Maybe some of them had lived there for a few thousand years. And we can target these areas that are above land, that were ice age coasts, using our knowledge of geology.

That is what we do. It's not that we're necessarily looking for one thing or another. We're targeting areas that are exposed, that we can understand coastal interactions at this early time. And whatever we find, whether it's footprints or something else, we work to publish it. And then we put together clear dates of the stratigraphy in order to get it at high resolution. When these people were walking on this coastline, on this beach, if you see what I mean, these three different people right here.

But how did you feel when Tom Dillahainey, Tom Dillahay was the excavator Monteverde, how did you feel when he was describing what was ultimately true, but was being dismissed and he was being shut off and people weren't willing to look at the data? How do you feel as an archeologist?

Oh, I think that's complete. I don't mean that what Graham's saying is bullshit. I think it's complete bullshit. For any colleagues of mine that try to shoot down actual evidence, that is ridiculous. I'm not trying to say that all of archeology is like. Any community of people there includes some assholes. I have worked with some assholes before. Right. And so I would say, though, that to represent that as all of archeology is kind of silly, because most archeologists don't focus on the peopling of America. Me, I do ancient greek research. When people arrive in America does not impact the research I do. For example, all my greek colleagues, all people that do chinese archeology, people that do archeology of Australia, none of those people really have a horse in the game for the peopling of Americas. And so if there were a few asshole archeologists, well, then I condemn them. I think that is a. A problem, you know? And I think that there are just like in any community of people, whether it's politicians, entertainers, or in your neighborhood, there's assholes. We should say that that's the wrong way to be. And if those people are assholes, I think that's a problem.

Flynn, you were showing us a picture of Florida.

Yeah.

Recently, the submerged continental shelf around Florida. Let's go back to that.

Sure.

That's why I interrupted you, and apologies for doing that.

You're fine. Now.

We're looking at the Florida peninsula, and just to the right of that we're looking at a large island that was above water during the ice age. It's in the light shaded green area. The dark shaded bit is the island called Andros. But what we're looking at is the Bahama banks that were above water during the ice age. So this might be a good opportunity to get into the controversial issue, Bimini, which is one of the many issues that I featured in ancient apocalypse and that I've been attacked.

Do you mind if I actually finish my PowerPoint first, or.

Oh, go ahead. Yes. Okay.

Sorry. No, you're fine. All right.

We'll go back to Bimini.

Yeah, we can get to Bimini in a second. I do want to point out that right in downtown Miami, right here, is an archeological site called Cutler Ridge, which also dates to the end of the ice age. It has shells, it has lithics, it has even, I think, human remains. And it shows that kind of coastal interaction not too far from the ice age coast. It's just a few miles away.

Sorry.

Let me have images from that.

No, I don't think I do. I'm sorry.

No worries.

We could google it if we want. But I do want to just sort of end this little thing by saying that we have coastal ice age archeology from around the world, from Africa, from Asia, from Australia, from the Americas. Everywhere you look, there are ice age coastal sites. For example, this set of beads from a burial of a child from La Madeleine. These are marine beads found inland. They were embroidered into the clothes that this child was buried in. Right. It's about a seven year old little child buried there. And so you get these kind of pictures of the past, of the people that lived in this sort of tough terrain and exploited the coasts all over the world. And so I just want to really emphasize underwater archeology. We find things, for example, like a seawall off the coast of Israel trying to combat the coast level rise that was happening in the Stone Age. Right. We have lithic artifacts on submerged archeological sites all over the world from different periods. And so we really are looking for this. We're not just finding shipwrecks, and we are finding plentiful stone age stuff, hunter gatherer sites.

And it just sort of. It strikes me as unbelievable that we have so many thousands of sites that show coastal interactions at the end of the ice age from these hunter gatherers, but we have no evidence of a lost, advanced civilization. That strikes me as maybe this doesn't disprove it, but it makes it very, very hard to swallow, if you see what I mean, because nobody really understands how much archeology we have. We have a lot these days. It is a study of big data. It's not a study of just going to one site after another. It's about aggregating this to understand how people were living at the past and sometimes zooming in to get pictures of individual people and how they survived to draw.

I have to really repeat myself here. Yeah, I can go back up there. We're looking at less than 5% of the continental shelves that have been studied at all by archeology. I'm not surprised that we find hunter gatherer traces underwater. I'm very glad that we do. I would be very surprised if we didn't. But what I'm saying is that not enough of that 27 million square kilometers has been investigated. Only a tiny fraction has been investigated. And that fraction is not enough to draw the conclusion that we can absolutely say there was no lost civilization. Same goes for the Amazon rainforest. Same goes for the Sahara desert.

But can we say there's no evidence for an advanced civilization in what they have studied?

In what they have studied, yes, we can say there's no evidence for an advanced civilization, but that brings us to another issue of what is studied and what is not studied by archeology, which we can get into. And we will get into. But I would like to go back to Flint's inundation map of Bimini and we. Just beneath the compass rose there. Can we highlight that somehow? Yeah. The submerged Bahama banks. The grand Bahama banks. You're on them now. That was a big island above water during the ice age, and it actually stayed above water until about 6900 years ago. So let's just talk, because I know Bimini has been a very controversial issue. I don't know if it's a controversial issue for you, but certainly for a large number of your colleagues, the suggestion that the so called Bimini road is a man made artifact has been mocked and laughed at a great deal.

I'm not sure if mocked is right, but I've definitely heard it's a geological sand beach. It's the beach sand.

Are you familiar with the.

General work.

That'S been done at Bimini?

I am not a geologist, so I'll go with. No, but I've heard from other geologists that it is definitely not man made.

Okay, well, what I. Can I. Can I put my. Can I put my HDMI? Hdmi. I've got so many different pairs of glasses here. It's really crazy. Bimini inundation maps.

Yes.

I just want to say I worked with Doctor Glenn Milne, who's a leading geologist studying marine archeology. This is the Piri Rees map. And change my glasses yet again, I'll tell you, old age is a bitch. So it's this map that I'm interested in. It's this large island. And the possibility that that large island was depicted on, as it looked during the last ice age, that it is the submerged Bahama banks. And that running up the middle of it is a depiction of the so called Bimini Road. Now, I'm showing, as it looks today, top left, where the Bimini Islands are, and the island of Andros. If you go back 4800 years, bottom left, you can see that the grand Bahama banks were submerged, but up until 6900 years ago, they were above water. And 12,400 years ago, they were above water. And I must say, that looks very much to me like the island that's depicted on the Piri Reis map. This is Glenn Milne. He worked with me on the inundation maps for my 2002 book, Underworld. I think you have to agree that he's a very major expert in the field. And these in oops, these inundation maps that he has given us are a very accurate representation.

And those original maps, the ancient ones, how old are they?

That's the 1513 Piri Rees map, which was based on more than 20 older source maps. As he tells us on his own handwriting, we only have a fragment of the map. It's full of inaccuracies and problems. But I'm just.

You know, what would convince me?

What?

So I used to do a lot of GIS for archeological projects where I'd take historical maps and I try to line them up with actual terrain, like satellite imagery and stuff like that. You should work on georectifying these maps to see how they line up in real space, because right now, what I see, I have to squint to see if it looks right or not. And so I think working with something like a GIS expert to geo rectify this stuff and show how actually accurate it would be, where you could actually statistically measure that would make it a lot more convincing in my mind.

No, that's a very good idea, Flint. Thank you.

Can we see images of the Bimini road itself?

I'll show you a couple of slides if I can put this up. Come on. And that's me diving on the Bimini road.

And so these are arranged in what fashion? I see just small segments of it.

No, there's a huge, extensive area, runs for about more than half a mile right off the coast of Bimini, of these blocks. Now, what I want to get to here is the suggestion that this is totally a natural site. You're not familiar at all with the work that's been done on this flint.

It's not my expertise. No.

Yeah, because if you read the literature, you'll find that archeologists constantly refer to work that was done by Eugene Shin and a couple of other geologists, arguing that, a, the Mooney road is totally natural, and b, that it's pretty young. It's only 3000 years old or so. But this is an area where there's a real problem, because in the literature on that, archeologists cite the 1980 and later work of Eugene Shin, which itself cites his 1978 article. But 1978 article is very hard to find. I had to do a lot of work to get hold of it, and I did. And actually, the 1978 article contradicts almost everything that's said in the 1980 and later and later articles. The whole authority for are there any.

Artifacts from the Bimini road? Because I've excavated road surfaces and I found lots of artifacts as an artifact.

But let me just play you again, Jamie. I guess I'll have to airdrop this to you. Let me just play you a little clip from Eugene Shin, upon whose authority the Bimini road is being dismissed as. As totally natural and very recent. Could we airdrop this, Jamie?

And then I'd like to show you what a road surface looks like under excavation afterwards from a project I work on in Romania.

So this is the guy whose work on Bimini is used by archeology to dismiss it as a, totally natural and b, totally recent. So we would hope that he would be an honest person, that he wouldn't disguise his own findings from an earlier period of time. How do I play it? Oh, you play it. Okay. And this is just a little clip from Eugene Shin. Yeah.

Well, I remember when I first met you, I was a young graduate student, Rasmus, and I remember running into you and you were carving this stone statue and somebody asked you what you were doing with it, and you said you were taking it over to the Bahamas.

And throw it overboard and hoping that.

These people would find. So I don't know if you followed up on that.

Well, someone told me they saw it.

In a magazine somewhere, but I kept.

Waiting for something that really happened.

The guy who's planting artifacts on the Bimini road is the main authority that is used to dismiss the Bimini road as a man made. As a man made structure.

Did he actually do that or was he just joking? Around about doing that.

Not clear. I think joking about it would be in very bad taste as well. And especially referring to the sheep who think that it might be.

Well, it's certainly not a scientific approach to my mind.

It's not a scientific approach at all. I think this is the moment where I'm going to do my sort of second major presentation.

Do you mind if I quickly show some images of a road surface?

Yeah, please.

I'm very happy for you.

Sure. Jamie, do you mind showing the HDMI?

I'd like to see better images of Bimini road, maybe.

Jamie, there's loads of images of Bimini road on the net.

In Romania, we did a series of magnetometry surveys. This is called hystria. It's sometimes referred to as the Romanian Pompeii. And so to ground truth, our magnetometry survey, we opened up trenches to find these roman roads. And so what you see when you look at roman roads is you see pottery in the packing of it. You see animal bones. In fact, they specifically use these complete foot bones from cattle and horses and amphora toes. Amphora are these kind of ceramic vessels used to transport wine and olive oil and things like that as drainage. And so, you know, as you dig into a road surface, you expect to find this kind of material everywhere. I've excavated roads in Greece, in Italy, and in Romania.

And how old are these roads?

These are from. This is about 2000 years ago. Yeah. And so this is the kind of packing that you get. You get plentiful artifacts associated with roads all the time. And there's no reason I could see maybe the animal bones not preserving underwater, but ceramics preserve really well those thousands and thousands of shipwrecks that we've excavated. Most of what we find is the wood from the ship and then ceramic vessels. And so that survives. Ceramic is virtually indestructible once it's high fired. And so, you know, this is the kind of stuff that we find alongside road surfaces, and we find it everywhere in the world.

And at Bimini, how much searching have they done looking for things like that?

A great deal of work has been done by amateurs who archeologists have poured really most unpleasant scorn on for several decades. But that work has, in my view, been highly valuable and has been worthwhile doing. Claim that the Bimini road is a road. That's just what it's referred to these days. I do claim that it's a very large megalithic structure which was submerged by rising sea levels.

So calling it a road is an unfortunate term. You can't compare it to this road.

We don't know what it is, but it's. What it is is a series of megalithic blocks laid out side by side. Let's see images of it.

Perhaps something more that gives you the scale of it, because there's a problem with looking at things up close.

Yeah. And can I just give a quick shout out to UT Austin which directs that project? Yeah, Ut Austin. You guys rock.

Shout out. Okay, so that looks crazy. Man made that last image, though. Go to. Go back to that last one. That. That's crazy. I mean, that is. How big are these stones?

They. They weigh a couple of tons each. They're about 12ft long on one side by about 15ft long.

They're fairly uniform in size.

They're fairly uniform in size in many cases, and again, the contrary has. Has been claimed. In many cases, they are propped up on other blocks. Underneath them, there are multiple layers. And in many cases, the bedding planes do not, in fact, slope, as one would expect if this were natural. They're horizontal. And this is one of the things that's been missed in the geological literature. But go to the one in the.

Upper left hand corner, Jamie, please. Yeah.

You know, I'm just looking for some proof here.

Right.

Things look cool. I get that. But it's like a question of how do we tell the difference between man made and natural? And that's not easy. And I've never really again seen architecture like this. We don't see stuff like this on the sites that Graham goes to. An ancient apocalypse, for example. It doesn't look like this. If it's the same culture at those places, we'd expect to see more sites that look like this.

Right. We're dealing with completely different parts of the world. Correct.

Yeah. Which is my point, that it's not all one culture. Yeah, I agree.

So this one is fascinating. Look at that one.

That.

That doesn't intrigue you? You don't look at that and go, wow, that really looks man made.

I think it looks really cool. But again, it's. I've seen a lot of.

But if that. If you knew for sure that was man made, that would. That would. Wouldn't that sync up? Like, if you knew for sure, if this had been dated and everyone knew where this came from and you saw this and this was from an archeological site that was well known and established, you would look at that and say, yes, that fits that.

If we.

You wouldn't look at that if it was in a well known archeological site and say, oh, this piece is man made. All the other stuff is clearly natural.

I mean, look to me. I don't see anything that tells me that it's man made, is all I can say.

I screwed that up. What I meant to say is, I.

Get what you're saying.

If you looked at this, you wouldn't say, this is natural. If you looked at this at a known archeological site, I just reversed it. Sorry. If you looked at this at a known archeological site and there was other structures there, and then there was this, you would say, this is a part of that. You wouldn't say that this is natural.

Not necessarily.

So there's a site that I worked.

But look at this right here.

I get what you're saying, but you.

Know what I'm saying. Like, if there was. If there was other structures next to that that were clearly man made, you would assume I would think, that that would be man made as well.

No, that was. What I was going to say is there's oftentimes a lot of natural stones alongside archeological stones at sites. There was this one example of a perfectly circular depression at this site in north of Pilos. And so we kept saying to ourselves, it's in the middle of a stone structure. And so we went back and forth on whether it's man made or not, this circular depression. Geologists showed up. They said, nope, that part's not man made, if you see what I mean. We listen and collaborate with geologists who understand how to tell the difference.

Well, we definitely know that that happens with sinkholes. There's a great example of this very circular sinkhole that goes. It was like hundreds of feet deep. Right, Jimmy? That one that swallowed up those buildings. And it looks crazy, like someone took an apple core to the earth.

And it's completely nuts what could happen.

That is nuts. But that's sort of a different thing than stones being laid out in a uniform fashion like that.

No, it wasn't here. What was the name of the site?

What are you looking for?

No, no, she was looking at pilos, which is not the site itself. It was an early Helladdock site north of it that I'm blanking on right this second.

So since we saw Eugene Shin and the reference from the audience to the. To the sheep who believe in outrageous possibilities, like a lost civilization of the ice age, I want to address Flint the way that you dealt with the media about my work, and I'm going to show a little PowerPoint presentation here, and we'll talk it through. Well, we know that it's very painful to be burnt at the stake. And heretics were burnt at the stake until relatively recently. And there's Galileo brought before the inquisition for heresy. And here we have Flint Dibble, who, sorry if I'm being direct, Flint, but you do recently appear to have set yourself up as a sort of modern inquisition to investigate and test whether output actually fits into what is regarded as acceptable thought by the mainstream. So I noticed your attack on the homo naledi controversy on your YouTube channel. And that concerns the work of Lee Berger, who's explorer in residence with National Geographic. He was really too big a target for you to bring down, Flint. But this guy, my friend, Danny Hillman Nathawajaja, he wasn't such a big target for you to bring down.

And you presented this video on your YouTube channel where you refer to it as a pyramid scheme, which is an insult in itself. And I'd like to take this opportunity just to play a little clip from Flint's YouTube channel, if that's all right with you, Flint?

Yeah, feel free.

Okay, Jamie, another bit of airdrop here. Now this is a clip from your YouTube channel.

This was an interview with Doctor Lutvihlv.

Now you very smart that you brought on a couple of indonesian speakers to join your assassination of the work of Danny Hillman, Natui Jaja.

Because Doctor Luffy Yondri excavated the site of Gnung Padang, he did major excavations there.

Indeed so. Indeed so. And there's a conflict of interest between him that's literally at the bottom there. There's a conflict of interest between him and Danny regarding Gunung padding and work done in Gunung Padang. But I'm more interested in the way that you guys present this and the mockery that's involved in it. Let's just play that little clip, Jamie.

Harry, do you want to expand on any of these points or bring up a different point of view of your thoughts on this article?

Criticism about the, uh, the outer first.

Okay.

If you see the outdoors is, uh.

There is a Dani human.

And the others is you can see.

Only one, the archeologists. Who is the archeologist? The one archeologist. Archeologist is the son. Yeah, yeah. Eleven is the geologist. All the Gerapi and the geologists.

It's not the archeologists.

Wait, wait. They have one sentence. They say on top of this buried decayed rock mass, a unique stone artifact resembling a traditional sundanese dagger called Kujang stone was discovered. That is all they say. Is that how you identify artifacts in Indonesia?

Denied of the oldest pyramid? I think it's only Ali Akbar, who support him for this one.

He's the only one. There's only one. That's the only one, I think, because I don't. I don't find the anime person and the Graham Hancock, too, is a circle.

Of the pseudo science for me. So his circle is not the archeologist. You know, the ordinary people are people in the outside.

They're waiting our research, and they're waiting what we say, because they always believe what we said. The archeologists said.

We said, is the civilization.

Okay? Is civilization.

It's like that because we are the researcher.

We are the archeologists.

Now, I'll continue with my little bit of presentation there, if we can call that up again, Jamie, that's the still Flint. And then let's go on. So here we have. You have great influence on media and culture. You say that you just have a small YouTube channel, and that's true. Flint, you do have a small outreach on YouTube, but you have a much larger outreach with. With journalists. And you've put yourself forward, you and John Hoops, actually, as people that journalists should talk to. So this concerns Gunung padang. Now, Gunung Padang was the first episode in my Netflix ancient apocalypse tv series. It's about this huge pyramidal structure in the island of Java in Indonesia, which the work of Danny Hillman, who's a very experienced geologist, has suggested might be as much as 25, 27,000 years old at the very base of it. And here we have the Guardian. Well, there's quite a bit Bill Farley on the left, he's strongly recommending that Flint's interview, the one I've just shown a clip from, be watched. There's Bill Farley saying it was not worthy of publication. This is the article that Danny Hillman and his team published, a peer reviewed article on this.

It went through a year of peer reviewed before it was published, until Flint and his colleagues began to put pressure on in the media. Here's the claim being rubbish by Dibble and others. They point out that Natwajir provided no evidence that buried material was made by humans. Actually, they did. In Danny's estimation, what the remote sensing shows is rock structures that have been cut and shaped and moved into place by human beings. And the net result is, of all this pressure, was that archeological. Archeological prospection. The journal that published the paper came under such huge pressure. There was such huge amount of media fuss about this. And I do think, actually, that all of that was caused. I think poor Danny suffered because his findings were featured in my show. I think the reaction of archeology to my show was probably why Danny got targeted. But at the end of the day, the witchfinder general worked out and the peace was retracted, causing massive humiliation for Danny and his team. Now, what Danny and his team asked for was that criticisms be published alongside the article, but that the article not be retracted. And that seems to me to be fair enough.

Flint and his colleagues have really created a huge fuss in the media about me. And this is just a small example. Satan loves Graham Hancock the most.

But wait a minute. But hold on. They didn't post that, right?

Who? No, no, no. I'm talking about Flint's influence on media.

Can I make it.

But you can't connect Flint to that. Go back to that image again. You can't connect Flint to this.

Well, I can I make a quick comment.

But even if. But this. Satan loves Graham Hancock the most is either one of two things. It's either an insane person or it's some sort of a propaganda campaign. It's someone who's trying to dismiss you or get the fundamentalist christians against you.

It followed the onslaught on my work following the release of ancient apostles.

I understand, but this person might have gone after you anyway.

I'm talking about.

Can I make a quick comment about my media influence? A lot of my media influence has to do with you announcing this conversation. The media rarely ever got in touch with me about you until you announced this conversation over a year ago. And then since then, I've had plentiful journalists get in touch with me to comment on things related to your show. So you're the one that's actually giving me this media platform. I do not go to these journalists at all. They contract me. And.

Which is great, because that's why you're here. And I'm happy you're here to do this. And I think we could do this amicably. We can discuss these things. The issue of whether or not this site has any evidence.

I'm moving on from gunning Padang.

Okay. But talking about, I think that's kind of important. So for the people listening, like, what evidence is there?

The evidence is, can we see, of dedicated work that's published in that paper, which eventually was retracted.

Why were you laughing when you saw that tool?

Because it wasn't a tool.

You don't think that's a tool?

No.

What do you think that is?

I think it's natural. Again, that was. That looked absolutely nothing like any human made tool I've ever seen. And to be honest, the excavator of the site agrees. And so you know that it was never described in water.

Can we see that again? Can we see that imaging?

I don't have it on me, but you can go back on there.

We'd have to play the video again.

It's. We can google it if you want to.

I just want to see that image.

I can google it.

Actually, that's the least important part of it.

Right, but the image right there, that piece right there, boy, that piece looks like a tool to me. It looks like it's been shaped by human hands.

If you cut out that, you cut out the part where we go into it in a little more depth and we compare it to the Kujang daggers, which.

Okay, I'm not saying it looks like a kujang dagger. I don't even know what that is. But what if someone showed me that in the museum? I would say, oh, 100% that was made by human beings. Does it mean it 100% was. I mean, in the weirdest of circumstances. Could that be naturally formed? Perhaps, but, boy, it doesn't look like it. Look at the right angles at the base of it, how it looks like it's carved and worked. Look at the line down the center of it.

That's not how we identify here.

I understand, but that looks very similar to the touch of modern humans or some human that we would recognize as human on stone.

And that's the importance of people that are familiar with the millions of artifacts that do exist. So we can look for things that.

Doesn'T look to you like it was worked?

Not really, no.

No. It looks like just a natural stone.

That looks a weird eroded stone from a slope.

So, like, maybe thousands and thousands of years of a channel passing underneath. The base of it has a rotor.

Sediment, stuff like that, abrading against it.

But how do you. What about the uniform peak? Which. Fairly uniform. The peak of it, the way it expands at the base and it looks like there's a.

It's just not how we identify tools, though.

The line down the center of it, I understand, but that's nothing about that.

No, no. And in fact, part of what we were laughing at is that they don't describe it or go into any detail about it in the article. They just describe it in half of a sentence, and then they show an image that's about the size of my. You know, like a quarter or a nick.

How large is the actual artifact?

I think it's something like this.

So you're making about twelve inches. Okay.

The artifact is the least important part of Danny's work.

I was just fascinated by the dismissal of it, that you guys were laughing. Laughing. Because I just don't know if that's a thing to laugh at.

Part of that was in the context of the fact that Lutvillandri had been snubbed. He'd been working at that site for several decades. He'd published a book on it. And none of his research was ever acknowledged in this article. And the media never, ever went to him, which is why I got in touch with him, because there's all this publicity around this site, Ganung Padang, partly because Graham's right. It was on his show. And nobody's paying attention to the fact that major excavations had happened there.

This is. I'm sorry interrupting you, but this image looks much less man made.

Yeah. And that's just another image of the same thing.

But the other side of it is probably what we're looking at previously. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Okay. That looks man made once. So one side does and one side does not. Just to my untrained eyes. Bottom, bottom. Right hand corner. Jamie, click on that one. Yeah, get. Make that a little larger. That's. That looks odd. That looks very odd. That looks like somebody worked it. The other side does not.

There's not another artifact in the world like it.

Can I be clear?

Yeah. Please.

That the issue here is not that odd.

I understand. I mean, we were probably getting lost in the weeds.

Danny Hillman and his team have done years of investigative work with seismic tomography, with ground penetrating radar. Using their expertise in those technologies, they are of the opinion that we can see the image second roughly in the middle, at the top there.

Those are photographs from Lutva Yondri's book, not from Danny Hillman's article. This is the excavations that he did. No, I'm talking about where he has clear radiocarbon danger.

Sorry. I'm talking top left. Top left. Where you see the red and the blue. Yes. This is an example of the resistivity tomography work that Danny and his team.

In the article, there's a question mark after tunnel chamber.

And my view is that this work needed to be taken much more seriously and not rubbished and dismissed in the way that it has been. And that I do feel that the retraction of the article, rather than the publication of opposing comments, is important. And thirdly, Lutfridge Yondry has not done any of the work looking into the deep depths of Gunung padang. His excavations have only been in the top meter or so.

Can I pause you for a second? Here and explain what we're looking at. So the people listening, we're looking at an analysis of the ground structure and what type of instruments were used.

Seismic tomography, which sends sound waves down into the ground and bounces back a reflection of what is seen. Low resistivity. High resistivity and ground penetrating radar. We don't have time to go into all of this in depth. The information has been extensively published. I've published on my website a massive article by Danny responding to the retraction of his article. And I suggest that we don't waste a lot of time going on with it.

Okay. But what evidence is there that this is man made?

The evidence is the interpretation that Danny and his team, who are largely geologists, have put upon the imagery that they receive from their remote sensing work. And their suggestion is that there are manmade tunnels and chambers in the depth of Gunung Padang, that the stonework in Gunang Padang is not in its natural formation or natural shape that has been placed by human beings. And when you go down and you take up soil samples associated with that stonework, you find that they date back to about 25,000 years ago.

None of those cores came from that tunnel or chamber or any of those features that they described.

None of this is a reason for the article to be retracted.

I never called for the article to be retracted. Still available online in its full text and all of its images there.

Do you think having the word retracted across the top of an article helps the credibility of the article?

Yeah, but they. They did not do an honest job of presenting the archeology of the site by ignoring the major excavations that have already taken place there. And I think that that's very important.

When the excavations have been in the top meter.

What was the findings of those excavations?

Yeah, can I get the HDMI really quickly, Jamie? Okay, so on the left is actually the book published by Lou Fiondry. And I'll show you some of the trenches that he's done. He's done. So there's this megalithic architecture there, and he's gone down in all the different terraces and along many of the different walls and excavated below them so that you can get datable material from under the walls that are visible. The same walls that Graham featured in episode one of ancient apocalypse. Right. And so in the case of all of them, he has carbon charcoal that he has taken, and that dates to 2500 years ago. It's impossible for there to be clear charcoal underneath all of these walls.

Here.

Let me get a photo. Also, he's found plentiful artifacts. Ground stone. This is for grinding sort of plant products. This is pottery that he's found. And then charcoal found underneath each of these walls, where there's sterile soil. Date that. And that tells you that the wall dates after that. And consistently across all of them. The dates came back as about 2100 years ago. So 100 bce is when the walls that we see on the site were built.

Dani doesn't dispute any of that for the depths to which Lutfri Yondri excavated.

But he doesn't demonstrate of anything unmade.

On Denis, 20 meters below. He does demonstrate its manhood.

And he claims that there was a reorganization of the site that was reorganizing an earlier layer. But these photos from this excavation demonstrate that this was not built on earlier architecture. This is built on soil. And so there's no architecture directly underneath these terraces. None of the areas where Danny excavated or dropped the core into have anything to do with the standing architecture that's there.

So, to summarize, these particular excavation sites are very clear. 2000 something, 100 years, 2100 years. Very clear. Now, Graham, what evidence is there that there's man made structures or any evidence of manmade construction that's older than that there?

It's the interpretation of the ground penetrating radar and the seismic resistivity, seismic tomography work that's been done. It's the interpretation of that made by Danny and his team past a year.

Which is just this that we're looking at here.

No, there's much more, but we just don't have time to go there. I'm actually giving a presentation on Flint's influence on media and culture. Culture. And we're getting drawn into it.

But it's important because something that comes up, and I want to clarify, but what evidence that you could show us that looks like man made structures, man made tunnels, man made anything other than this stuff that's on the outside. So the presumption is that these deeper layers are older. But why?

They're definitely older because of the carbon dating of the soils that have been brought up beside them. Comes to question is whether those soils were associated with anything worked by human beings.

Right. And what evidence is it there that there are?

The evidence is the interpretation of Danny and his team from the remote sensing that we are looking at stone work that has been manipulated and maneuvered by human beings.

And how do they make that decision?

They never claim anything was manipulated and maneuvered. They never claim that in that article. I've read that article at the depth.

Of Gunung Padang, that the stone is not in its natural formation.

They claim that that's a tunnel chamber. Question mark.

Question mark.

They have another area where they claim there's a step question mark. And I have never seen evidence for a pyramid where you're saying your question marks for these things.

But this is not. Excuse me, can we be clear? This is not. So when we talk about all the conflict involved in something that is clear as day, like the Bimini roads. Right. So he disagrees. He says it could be a natural formation. Other people agree. This is less evidence than that. Right. Because we're not seeing the actual stone structures. We're not seeing the actual work. We're interpreting this. Ground penetrating.

Yeah, exactly. So with archeology, we'd often do what we call ground truthing. So I showed you that road at hystria, excavated by the University of Texas at Austin. The first thing we did was we did remote sensing. So we did magnetometry. And before we could figure out exactly whether the magnetometry was accurate or not, we put in trenches to test it. And that's always what you do when you do remote sensing, whether it's remote sensing with satellite imagery, lidar magnetometry, GPR, ground penetrating radar is here. You always want to make sure that you test it, because you have to be questioning that your interpretation of it can be wrong, because that does happen quite a bit of time. You know, it's like if you go out with a metal detector, right, and you get some signals, it's not always going to be what you want it to be, if you see what I mean. And so you actually go and you test it. That's just the way that all archeology with remote sensing works, right? Yeah.

Okay, this is. Okay, obviously, we don't have time to get into depth, but, yeah.

What I'll say is there's a major article by Danny published on my website which presents all his evidence and which. And which addresses the issue of what he regards as the unfair retraction of his paper. And I don't believe his paper would have been retracted if Gunung Padang had not appeared as episode one of my Netflix series.

Is that evidence to you as compelling or less compelling than Bimini Road?

It's at least as compelling. At least as compelling. But we don't have time to get into it here. I want to complete what I was saying, which is the influence that Flint and his colleagues have on media and culture, and if we can put my HDMI back on. Yeah. So this was the next slide. This is Benjamin Steele from the SEO Journal, search Engine journal. Thank you, flink Dibble, for speaking with him. And we're learning that how algorithms are rewarding good faith critique by legit scientists and creators. People ask, here's just a Google search. Archeologist Flint Dibble says Hancock's claims reinforce white supremacist ideas, stripping indigenous people of their rich heritage and instead giving credit to aliens or white people. Actually, I've never.

Did you really say that?

No, I said that this idea of Atlantis, the way it goes back 200 years, it has been used for those reasons.

So are you saying your quote is incorrect?

I think that it's editing me out of context. Graham, I've never called you a white supremacist or a racist.

No, no, you've said. You've said that. You.

Hang on.

That's because. That's because you're very, if I may say so, very slippery in the way that you deal with, because you know perfectly well. You know perfectly well that saying that my work encourages white supremacy, racism and encourages racism is going to end up with me being tarred as a racist. And you know very well that tarring somebody as a racist in this day. Look, the results there, down there, make no mistake. Hancock is a white supremacist like Trump. Believe it's racist fiction pretending to be.

These are not my words.

Well, no, I'm talking about your influence.

On mid century sources. You cite 16th century sources, and I label those as racist. And I see it as a problem to readapt those kind of sources without critiquing them, because this idea of a white Atlantis is what existed in the 19th century.

I have no such idea.

But you might not. But you're citing those sources on critics.

Why should I not?

And I never make that the foreground of anything that I write. I put that in there as a paragraph, and I say he should not be citing these kind of sources without critiquing them because they do the harm. There's a lot of harm in the specific about that.

What are these sources that you're studying about Atlantis? And why do you think that they reinforce white supremacy?

Yeah, sure. So the reason is, is because for a long time, Atlantis was used as a colonial justification by the crown of Spain for claiming land in the new world. And so what the. This idea of Atlantis from the 16th, built up into the 19th century with the book on Atlantis by Ignatius Donnelly, it described this as this kind of global superpower that was, you know, european and that was responsible for these monuments in indigenous areas. It stripped credit away from local cultures of their heritage.

Right, but he's not doing that.

I never said he did. I said that he's citing these sources.

But this is something that is a very nuanced subject. And when you say that it reinforces white supremacy.

Again, I said the sources do.

Right, but go back to the quote, Jamie. Go back to the tweet.

But listen.

But this quote here reinforce white supremacist ideas. Stripping indigenous people with a rich heritage and instead giving credit to aliens or white people. None of those things are true.

I know. Graham doesn't even talk about aliens. Right, but I said that not in specific relation to Hancock's claims, but in specific relation to this narrative of Atlantis that has gone back hundreds of years.

Right, but that.

But here's the Guardian. So they're misquoting you, are they? As Dibble states, such claims reinforce white supremacist ideas. They strip indigenous people of their rich heritage and instead give credit to aliens or white people. Why didn't you get the Guardian to put that right?

Well, I don't.

Did you actually say that, though?

I did not say that. Graham reinforces white supremacist ideas, as I've said.

So this quote is not real.

They strip the. The stories of Atlantis. Yes, and I think that that's an issue. So, Graham, you go around the world to megalithic sites. Right?

So the quote. The quote reinforce white supremacist ideas. That's not yours?

No, that's not a quote. It's not in quotation.

Right. It was in the other article. That's what I'm getting.

And again, they strip indigenous people of their rich heritage and give credit to aliens or white people. Well, in short, the series promotes ideas of race science that are outdated and long debunked. And this is your own.

Right.

But that's your quote.

This is your own article. Flint. Here you are. I'm quoting from. That's a quote from your article published in the conversation. This sort of race science is outdated and Lansink's debunked, especially given the strong links between Atlantis and Aryans proposed by several nazi archeologists. You are associating me with this, and.

You are attempting to distance yourself from that is actually what I'm trying to do.

Is not what you're doing, though. You're associating him with that. Clearly I don't.

Propaganda.

You don't think. Look at the way it's phrased on your article. This sort of race science is outdated and long since debunked, especially given the strong links between Atlantis and Aryans proposed by several nazi archeologists. That's like a part of the headline.

So you want me to show you some tweets I've gotten from people that are fans of Graham Hammond?

Listen. Stop.

Stop.

Don't do that. They're not connected to him. They're just humans. There's a lot of crazy people in the world. This is you. We're talking about you.

Yes, but what I'm trying to say is that people misinterpret Graham. There's lots of people on the Internet that think that he's talking about a lost white civilization.

This is something that you chose to highlight at the top of the page.

No, I did not highlight that at the top of the page.

Why is that like.

That's actually near the end of it.

That's a quote from the article.

That's near the end of it.

But it. Why is it up there like that?

I put it there.

You did it. Oh, Jesus.

I did not put that there.

I'm just taking an extract from Flint's article.

Okay, but you did print it. You did print that. This sort of race science is outdated, long since debunked. What were you referring to when you said that? If you were referring to Graham, I.

Was referring to his take on the Olmec heads, where he described them as from an african culture. And he specifically took that from Ignatius Donnelly, who also described them that way almost in the exact same words, based on their facial appearances. Despite the fact that Anne Ciphers has done excavation there and demonstrated with DNA and artifacts that these were indigenous people from that area in Mexico. And so that was an older essay that Graham has written, and that was what that quote was specifically relevant to.

But how does it reinforce white supremacist ideas that they were seafaring Africans?

Well, because, again, it strips credit away from the people who actually did that.

So that doesn't reinforce white supremacy. It reinforces. Look, if anything, he's trying to say that it was black people from Africa that were able to seafare and create these structures.

Pretty silly stereotypes, is what I said.

What do you mean about facial features?

Yeah, yeah.

But there's many people that have made those connections looking at those. They look polynesian.

Perhaps. The people that have excavated it and done the DNA right at that site at San Lorenzo have shown that none of those people had african descent.

Right. But what are those structures representative of? Are they the people that were there?

Of course.

Or. But is it possible.

No, we don't have no evidence of african destruction.

We don't have any evidence of it. But we do have this. The actual structure of those faces. And they do. I mean, be honest, they look either polynesian or.

I can bring up some.

They look fascinating.

Excuse me. I can bring up some imagery on. Perhaps we'll do that next. But I would just love to just complete this little point that I want to make here, which is the influence of Flint and his colleagues on media and culture. And again, we've got the Society for American Archeology. 5000 members. Flint is one. Flint's co author, John Hoops, actually helped to write this letter for the Society of American Archeology. They're saying that I embolden extreme voices that misrepresent archeology archeological knowledge in order to spread false historical narratives that are overtly misogynistic, chauvinistic, racist, and anti semitic. I mean, you apply those labels to somebody, and you're going to get that person hated by a lot of people.

Whole ball.

I did not write. No, your co author, John Hoops, wrote it. We urge Netflix to add disclaimers that the content is unfounded. They want it to be called science fiction, in other words. That's a very clever way of canceling me. Cancel culture at work.

Go back to that.

Why would you so much more of a celebrity than me?

Here's Flint. Netflix. Correct. Correct. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I am Flint.

That's.

That's not really my problem. Hey, Netflix. Hey, Netflix. Correct your mistake and reclassify ancient apocalypse's fantasy. Netflix collects your correct your mistakes. This is you pushing this, Flint and then the general media fishy Netflix show ancient apocalypse. That is the most dangerous show on Netflix. You use the word dangerous repeatedly in your conversation piece.

I don't think so. I don't think I've ever called you dangerous, Graham. I've not called these things. You're misinterpreting me.

You don't think I'm dangerous? You don't think that I think that.

The way that you refer to archeology as you say that your number one enemy of archeology and things like that, you are promoting people to dislike what we do. We are doing our jobs. No, you started off ancient apocalypse.

I'm calling us patronizing. I'm saying arrogant archeologists see me as public enemy number one.

That's exactly saying. We're not sitting around thinking about you. Most. Most of my dad's colleagues, when I mentioned I'm coming on here to do this, they had no idea. You talk about the ice age.

Speaking of archeologists like Euphra, who see me as public enemy number one. And who have quite a substantial outreach in the media. Unilab right here. Pseudo archeology, as Dibble calls it, acts to reinforce white supremacist ideas. Flint Dibble, interview, ancient apocalypse, Graham Hancock, and conspiracy theories. I mean, what the fuck is the conspiracy theory? That archeology. That archeologists are conspiring against me, which I've never said or ever suggested.

You claim we're trying to hide the evidence.

No, I don't.

Clovis. First we shut down alternative. Tell me narrative.

Tell me where. Tell me where. I've claimed that you hide the evidence.

You have claimed many times that we try to shut down alternative narratives, that we try to silence them. That suggests there's an archeological conspiracy where we're all working together to have one narrative.

No, it suggests that there's a strongly held point of view, there's a paradigm, and that those who go against the paradigm are likely to be attacked. Like Tom Dillahay, like Jacques Cinq, Mars.

All of them still had successful careers for many decades, but Jacques sank Mars, excavated many other sites.

Rap. But are you denying that he was attacked for the very thing that you're saying archeologists don't do?

No, but that's the. I'm denying there's a coordinated attack. There was no coordinated attack.

Never said there's a coordinated attack on Dillahay.

There was not an attack.

No, of course.

Was there more than one person?

I have no idea. This was before I was even.

How many architects were involved in this?

Hmm?

How many? When the people that criticized Dillahay, that went after him.

Oh, very large number. The Clovis first lobby, the Clovis police, as they used to be called by.

So it's not. It wasn't.

Think about how many people actually study the Clovis period. That is a tiny period in one area of the world. The majority of archeologists do not study that. Even american, most Americans, later periods.

It's fundamental to the issue of the peopling of the Americas.

But it's direct evidence of a group of archeologists going after this one guy for saying something that turned out to be correct.

It's evidence of an academic argument. Which happens. Yes.

Not that simple. Right. Because he was correct, and they dismissed him. They wouldn't listen to his evidence, and he turned out to be correct.

You mean he kept excavating that site? He invited people down there and convinced him that he was right if they.

Didn'T listen to him and they didn't take the data, and they did dismiss him, and publicly they still did all those things. That you're trying to obfuscate.

I'm not trying to obfuscate anything. That's. No, that's not fair at all.

That would.

He invited. They did. Where? He invited down a series of Clovis first people. And he convinced them at Monte Verde. They came down there, they had a conversation. He showed them the evidence. And what resulted from that conversation was that entire group changing their mind on stuff. It was very. I'm not saying there were not a few bad actors. There's assholes everywhere. But what I am trying to say is that it's not some sort of conspiracy of everybody in archeology against Dillahay.

But nobody said everybody, and nobody sang conspiracy. I don't believe there's a conspiracy against me. I've said that a thousand times.

You said you're public enemy number one.

Yes, I am. Clearly Flint to you, because you have. And John Hoops, for example, from the University of Kansas. I can play you some stuff from John Hoops too, if you want.

So what is this right here? It says, to Graham, jimmy, and others, we see you, and we'll share with the world just how you try to bully and censor us. Who's trying to censor you?

Well, I'd argue that when people swarm me.

This is a quote from Flint Dibble, by the way, from one of his tweets.

There's times when people swarm me and they.

People online, you mean?

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Tweet people.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't read that.

Okay. I try not to, but I have a small twitter account.

Yeah, but that has nothing to do just people. It's just random people. When you're public, okay. And you post something public and you get involved in a discussion about some contentious issue that's public, the whole world can attack you. So try to connect that to Graham or connect that to anything. You're just dealing with people.

Mm hmm.

That he's not responsible for that you're responsible if you engage and read it.

Flint, do you believe that there's such a thing? You know, we've all heard the word big father. Do you think there's such a thing as big archeology?

No.

Oh, how odd. Because here you are. Flint Dibble, January 23. January 23. This 2023 scare quotes.

It's sarcasm.

The reality is we live in a period where we're seeing an increased distrust of scholars and scientists. As an archeologist, I think we have to respond by engaging with the public. And we do. In many ways, the reach of big archeology is way beyond that of Graham Hancock. Think about the millions of schoolchildren and parents who visit museums, et cetera, et cetera. You just told me you don't believe in the big archeology, but right here you've said there is a big archeology.

That's in quotes for sarcasm.

Oh, sorry, you lost me there. Because you're saying, so you don't think that the millions of schoolchildren and the teaching. That the teaching of archeology, what archeology teaches us about the past, forms the basis of the education system about the past? Not people like me, people like you. That forms the basis of the education system about the past. Now, you like to present yourself as this small, lone voice, but frankly, by comparison with big archeology, as you call it, in your so called scare quotes, by comparison with that, my outreach is very small. Even on Netflix.

Graham, I was hoping we'd have a respectful conversation.

Yes, I was hoping that you would not disrespect me in the way that you.

I came here to present sexual evidence, and I've done that here.

You have dibble, exhorted colleagues to mobilize worldwide in the battle against pseudo archeology. If there's any conspiracy here. Who's it against? Let's move on. Next one.

Flint, are you having fun?

The ball's in your court.

The ball's in my court.

Yeah, go ahead. Say something. Say something interesting. Say something new.

Say something interesting.

Well, listen, this is like.

I came here to have a respectful conversation. I want to be very clear about this, Graham. I have critiqued the sources that you have used. And I've critiqued the evidence that you used. I have only met you for the first time today, so I do not know how you are as a person or how you treat other people. And so, to be honest, I think that you've just tried to go and smear me back for what you see as a smear on yourself. Fair enough. That's okay.

I'm just presenting facts. What you actually said, I'm prevent.

I'm presenting facts as well. From archeology.

Yes, and I showed you big data. Evidence that we actually have done in the area.

Disproves your entire civilization.

Let's have a look at it. Doesn't disprove my entire civilization. How could you possibly do that when you've only investigated less than 5% of the continental shells, 1% of the Sahara, 1% of the Amazon? How can you possibly dispute.

How can you claim there's an ice age civilization and ignore all the ice age evidence that we have?

The ice age evidence that you have? Don't dispute it. Of course, there were hunter gatherers in the world in the ice age.

There's hunter gatherers in the world now.

I'm sorry, there's hunter gatherers in the world now. There's hunter gatherers in the Amazon rainforest. There's hunter gatherers in the namibian desert.

I mean, you exist with hunter gatherers today.

Why shouldn't an advanced civilization have coexisted with hunter gatherers in the past?

I mean, look, as I've said, I think you have an issue with the sources that you cite, and I think that you have an issue with the evidence that supports your civilization. I think we should probably have a break and clear our heads.

Take a break.

I'm deeply unhappy that you have associated me with white supremacism, racism, misogyny.

I mean, notice it was always the same quote, recycled. So I said something once and then it gets recycled in like, 15 years.

I understand, but you said it.

I did say it, and I said that there's this history of this idea which has been used by white supremacists, and that's an issue. And I would like Graham to separate himself from that history in a stronger way because he goes around the world to different cultures and he claims that instead of their ancestors building this stuff, it was done by his civilization. They were the ones that taught people around the world how to do that. But does he do that in his own backyard? Does he go to Stonehenge and say that Stonehenge was built by this lost civilization? No, he says it was built by neolithic british people.

Because I wouldn't look for a lost civilization in northern Europe during the ice age.

Why not? We have other gatherers there. Yes.

A lost civilization would not be choosing to live in northern Europe during the ice age. It was a frozen fucking wilderness.

Not everywhere.

Why would they want to live there?

Not after the last glacial maximum. We have people in the UK living there.

Well, it's not where I live. I look in areas, in underserved areas of the world we talked about.

This is an issue. We have the.

We talked about these mysterious strangers, the.

Lovely aspects of humans around the world and. And then he goes around and tells people it wasn't their ancestors that did that.

No, I don't tell people that. Well, I don't. I'm sorry, I don't.

He doesn't tell people a civilization that created it.

I don't very well teaching ancestors of.

The people that were there before in the exact same area.

Let me summarize in very brief what I am actually saying. I'm saying that there was a cataclysm at the end of the last ice age. It's called the Younger Dryas. There are arguments about whether this cataclysm was caused by fragments of a disintegrating comet. This is the comet research group. This is the younger Dryas impact hypothesis. But I'm saying there was a cataclysm at that time. There was a civilization. Now, it's you, not me, who say that that civilization was an empire. It's you, not me, who say that that civilization, you know, had temples and was highly advanced in every. I don't say that. I don't say that. I'm looking. In my view, what we're looking at is a civilization like all others that emerged out of shamanism, but that went a little bit further than some other civilization, than some other shamanistic cultures that developed a highly advanced knowledge of astronomy, that was able to explore and map the world. And I'm saying that at the end of the ice age that civilization was largely destroyed, that a very small number of survivors settled amongst hunter gatherers as we would today. I've made this point before, but if there was a cataclysm on our planet today, people from our so called advanced technological civilization would not survive it.

We have absolutely no hope of surviving a global cataclysm like the younger Dryas because we are spoilt children of the world. We do not have the survival techniques. The people in the world who know how to survive are the hunter gatherers in the world today. And if I were a survivor of this civilization, I would head for hunter gatherers and I would try and make my home amongst them so that I could have some hope of surviving. And that's all that I'm suggesting, is that a civilization which had quite advanced astronomy, which was able to map the world, had a knowledge of longitude. I'm not saying they had machines, I'm not saying they had motor cars, I'm not saying they sent spaceship to the moon. I'm saying that they were destroyed at the end of the ice age, that there were a very small number of survivors, that those survivors settled amongst other hunter gatherer peoples and benefited from their knowledge and exchanged knowledge with them. I am not saying that they introduced agricultural products to those people. I'm not saying they brought agriculture from where they came from. I'm saying that they helped to nurture the idea of agriculture amongst those people.

I suggest you take a little bathroom break, clear our heads, relax, come back. So let's discuss some of the ancient construction let's discuss.

Before we do that, can I just. The issue of the Almec heads.

Yes.

I have no view, actually, on what they are, but can I just show some pictures, please? Yeah, yeah. Jamie, let me get the. Let me get the. Yeah. So these are the almec heads. Santa photographed these in Mexico way back in the early 1990s. And they're certainly intriguing looking. I'm not sure whether they're Africans, whether they're Polynesians, or whether they're Maya. They could well be Maya.

They're Almec.

I'm just interested. Yes, they're Almec. We have a strong connection between the so called almec civilization and the Maya civilization. Maya is, in a sense, are the inheritors of the Olmec civilization. I'm interested by things like this. I don't know what to make of them. These are Olmec figures from tresapotes. In the center is a picture of pharaoh caffre wearing the nemes headdress. And I'm just intrigued by the fact that these Olmec figures wear a very similar headdress to that. I don't know what to make of it. I'm not saying that ancient Egyptians went to Central America. I'm not saying that Central Americans went to ancient Egypt. What I'm suggesting is that maybe both of them inherited a shared idea from an ancestral civilization that was ancestral to them both. And then in the same Olmec culture, we have these images. On the left, the figure that's often referred to as the ambassador. And on the right, the figures called the dansantes, the dancer figures from Monte Arbano. I mean, Flint. What do you make of these figures? What sort of ethnic group would you think they belong to?

I don't identify ethnic groups like that, man. Like it's a stone carving. That's not how we identify ethnic groups.

No, I'm not actually interested. So.

Good.

So you don't identify an ethnic group, but what you would do. You see beards on these figures?

Yeah. And people all over the world, on every continent, have beards from different ethnic groups.

It's just curious that amongst the Olmecs, we have this and we have this and we have this. And I'm just intrigued by that. I don't know.

People look different.

I don't know what it means exactly, but I do find it intriguing.

And I see this as actually an example of the problems here because you cite spanish colonial literature about, say, a white quetzalcoatl. Coming. You talk about this? No, no, no. Kinds of people. Yes. You do intrigue.

We got to get correct on this. We've got to get correct on this. Are you saying that the whole story of the bearded, pale skinned quetzalcoatl was a spanish invention?

Yes, I am. I can show you a depiction of quetzalcoatl from the pre spanish period.

I can show you. Wait, I can show you depictions, too.

No, can I please get the. Here we go. This is quetzalcoat on the Borgia codex. This is from before any Europeans arrived in the new world. This is on a hide. It is. The ink has been analyzed, the hides have been analyzed, and this individual has tan skin, no beard, but a feathered headdress, because this is the feathered serpent.

Well, actually, we can't see anything from that image, but that's not the point that I want to make. The point that I want to make is, do you think that the Spanish deliberately imposed an idea of quetzalcoatl on the.

I think that every single source that we have of white skin in indigenous americas comes from spanish sources, and therefore.

I see it quoting indigenous sources, but.

Quoting them inaccurately, because people quote things in biased ways. This happens all the time.

How do you know they're quoting them inaccurately?

Because, again, we have earlier representations.

Is there a doctor?

These individuals show they don't have white. This is the documents.

Graham, is there a document against. About this spanish conspiracy? Do you regard the peoples of Mexico, the peoples of Colombia, the peoples of Bolivia, are so stupid that they would simply accept an imposition upon them by the Spaniards?

No. I think that interpreting these kind of sources is difficult. And so, Jamie, do you mind playing my video by Curly Tlapoyawa? He's an indigenous archeologist here in Mexico. He is a co host of the Tales from Aslantis podcast.

Can I interrupt you? How old is that image? The image you just showed, it's from.

Like, the 14th century BC.

Okay, 40th century AD.

Sorry. Yes. I misspoke. Chill.

So this is pre spanish invasion?

Yeah, it's been dated and studied, the hides and the inks.

Is there others of quetzalcoatl from that period or before?

Yeah, there's other quetzalcoatl images. Similar. They're all very similar. Yeah. If you go on Wikipedia, there's several images of them. Of him.

Okay, go ahead, please.

I'm Krilleet Lapoyawa, an archeologist and cultural consultant specializing in Mesoamerica. I want to briefly touch on why expertise is so important when it comes to researching our ancestral cultures. And I'm going to use the example of a mistake involving the feast of Panchetza, a Mexica ceremony celebrating the rebirth.

Of the sun during the winter solstice.

Panketzalistli translates to the raising of the banners in the Nahuatl language, this refers to the multiple banners that are constructed to decorate the various temples and sacred centers associated with this feast. Now, when the Spanish Cronistas wrote about the feast of banquets Ali, they truncated the word pan quezalisli to the first three letters, p a n. Pan, leaving us with la fiesta de Pan, or the festival of Pan. This shortening of words in colonial Spanish was pretty common, as paper was in short supply, and this was an effective way of saving space. Spanish friars had developed an entire method.

Of shorthand to accomplish this. Well, the problem arose when a non.

Expert looked at these writings and didn't account for this shorthand, and la fiesta de Pan became erroneously translated as festival of bread.

Pan is bread in Spanish.

This simple mistake can cause this individual's research into Mexico festivals to go entirely off the rails, and it completely distorted the actual meaning of the festival, all because someone without adequate training decided to claim something without adequate evidence. Expertise matters. Context matters.

It makes sense to me that if a group of people were conquered by white people who showed up on boats and dominated the society, that they would have a great influence on a lot of the myths and cultures, and. And not only that, but that they would heavily discourage deviation from the changes that they have made to those myths. And if you did that over the course of one generation, you would have a complete different narrative.

What intrigues me is that whether he's described as having white skin or a beard or not, we have a tradition of a civilizing hero. Quetzalcoatl in Mexico, Bochica in Colombia, Viracocha in Bolivia, depicted as a bearded individual who comes in a time of chaos, who teaches certain skills, and then leaves. This tradition is a pan american tradition. David Carrasco, I think you have to respect the work of David Carrasco, has drawn attention to this and to the notion that the magical pen of Cortes could somehow have hoodwinked an entire continent into making up myths. And I just don't think that's credible at all. I don't understand what your video is telling us either.

My video is trying to explain the complexity of difficulty of interpreting spanish sources. Can I show a different video that talks about the complexity of quetzalcoat as a figure?

Sure.

Can you play the video by. Sorry, let me. The one by Marika Stoll. But not the hallucinogens. One. The other one. Hello, everyone. My name is Marika Stahl. I'm an archeologist and research associate at Indiana University. I also live in Oaxaca and work closely with rural indigenous communities. It's been claimed that archeologists do not engage with indigenous myths. This is simply not true. But once again, context matters. For example, the Kesel cow myth that Graham frequently cites was written a hundred years after the conquest by hispanicized indigenous scribes who were educated by spanish priests. Hence the overtly christian overtones of this myth. But let's examine an indigenous mishtek story recorded prior to the conquest. Several gods, including Katsakoa or Lord Nynewind in Nichtek mythology, perform a mushroom ceremony and create the known world at Apollo. During this ceremony, Lord Nywen plays music by scraping a stone around a human skull. This is a completely different picture of quetzalcoat than the one we get from the post conquest myth preferred by Graham. In fact, in the MishtEka alta today, when asked by anthropologist John Monaghan to draw QUEtZalcoaT, his indigenous volunteers drew a plumed serpent surrounded by clouds.

Again, context matters. And so the key thing I'm trying to say here is that quetzalcoat, all these different figures, they're not all one thing that you lump together. There's a variety of different traditions. You pick and choose the one that you prefer for your story, which is fine. I think that your investigations and your beliefs are. Are totally cool. I'm not going to convince you otherwise. Same with people listening. I'm trying to show the facts here and just how complex the situation is of indigenous myths, of archeological evidence. We have a lot of different evidence.

A pan american myth of a bearded civilizer could not have been imposed on the indigenous population entirely by Spaniards. So that's my view. That's David Carrasco's view as well. Again, if you look at my response to the SAA's attempt to get Netflix to reclassify my show as science fiction, you'll find detailed information on that.

There's sharing my screen really quick.

Can I pause you for a second, though? We know that once indigenous people are colonized, that they try to at least alter their beliefs, and if not, indoctrinate them into whatever beliefs they have. And we have recent evidence for that in North America with how Native Americans were treated when they were put on reservations and brought into school systems and forced Christianity and told that they couldn't use their language. I mean, we have very recent evidence of human beings trying to impose their ideas on the people that they've conquered. It makes sense to me that that would be something that would also would have been done by the Spaniards that entered Mexico.

Yeah, I'm not persuaded by that. In this case, the myth is too widespread. And that constant reference to a bearded figure is very odd. And as a civilization bringer in a time of chaos, in a time of disaster, after a great cataclysm, again, I mean, Flint and I can disagree on this. I'm intrigued by that information. And I don't think that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were so easily hoodwinked by the Spaniards.

I don't think it's hoodwinked. It's conquered.

And I also think it's a lot more complex than that. So I study ancient greek mythology, and you can see how these oral traditions change over time anyway, even without being conquered. Right. You can see, for example, the weapons, the spears and the shields that homeric heroes use. Sue Sherrit has an article on this. And so, you know, you can see how Achilles spear changes its description from a big Bronze Age style spear, the kind of spear that we see in Bronze Age graves. And then the next line, he has a smaller Iron Age style spear, the kind of thing that we see painted on Iron Age pots. And so, you know, you can see how these oral traditions adapt to what's going on around them. And I think that that's important to recognize here with these kind of traditions that are. That are written down by spanish educated indigenous people and by spanish priests as.

Well, also that you must take into consideration, I would imagine, that a lot of these people can't read and that they're actually probably not only being conquered by the Spaniards, but they're also being imposed upon with their language, which we know to be fact, which is why Mexicans speak Spanish.

Some of these traditions were recorded by Bernardino de Sahagun within 20 years of the Concord. Bernardino de Sahagun is relied upon extensively.

By archeologists years after the conquest.

After the conquest.

Right. But don't, man, you could do a lot in 20 years. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

And again, there's just no evidence for these kind of culture heroes with this color skin or those kind of.

Let's take a bathroom break.

I don't care about the color skin. I do care about the culture heroes.

Okay, we'll take a bathroom break. We'll come back. Much more to talk about.

Okay, thank you all.

All right, we're back.

I'd like to. I'd like to pick up on this, finally, on this issue of Quetzalcoatl and on Sahagun and on the interpretation of indigenous traditions. And this is in my reply to the Society for American Archeology and their attempt to have my series reclassified as science fiction fiction, where they suggest that all these stories were made up. David Carrasco is a leading scholar of the Americas, and he writes, I have no doubt that Cortes was striving to impress the royal mind with his extraordinary management skills, or that his literary craft was elegant and profoundly political. What is challenging to me is glendinning. She's just another one of these archeologists who say that it was all made up. Historians claim that this spanish political fiction of both Quetzalcoatl returning and Moctezuma's vacillation and collapse was picked up by Sahagun, who powerfully reinforced it, erroneously thinking it was an indian belief, when in fact the ruler's gesture of abdication was a very late dawning story, making its first appearance 30 or more years after the conquest. The stunning implication is that this spanish fiction, the story of Moctezuma's paralysis, parades down the years through the literature and scholarship and is internalized by commentators less wary than Clinton, and all the way to Leon Portilla, who falls unconsciously under Cortes's charismatic pen along with the rest of us.

This means that Leon Portilla's extensive nahuatl training and sense of the aztec ethos, not to mention Sahagun's profound familiarity with spanish native exchanges, contribute no effective critical stance in relation to the spanish literary craft which later Spaniards were not aware of and which a number of Indians internalized as their own. I'm quoting from David Carrasco here. I'm simply stating that this issue about Quetzalcoatl is more complicated than Flint would perhaps wish us to believe.

Well, no, I've stated from the very beginning that it's extremely complicated, that there's a lot of different versions of quetzalcoatl mythology. And so I think that it's wrong to say that there's only one version of that.

I don't say there's only one.

Well, you only use one in your argument. I tend to think, though, also, that this is fairly irrelevant at this point, because I think what we're still missing is any kind of accurate archeological evidence with dates. So when you go, for example, to the olmec heads or you talk about quetzalcoat, or when you talk about any of the kind of evidence that you have a yonagunian underwater, we're still missing dates. And how this relates to your larger hypothesis of a lost ice age civilization. And so I think that that's important to think about. Well dated evidence. So do you mind if I go into my argument about the domestication of plants and food and things like that?

Sure.

Okay.

Could I just. Since we talked about Danny, Danny Hillman and Gunung Padang, I do have a major article on my site where Danny refutes the retraction of his paper. And there are some images with that which will perhaps help us to understand what he's. What he's talking about. Sorry, I'm having to doing scroll through an enormous amount of material here. There's a very long article on my website.

Like you, I've probably created like, 500 slides for this conversation.

This is not a slide. I'm live on my website here. I don't know how to get to the bottom of this enormous piece of work.

You don't have a slider on the right hand side?

I tried to use it, and when I used it, did something weird with the screen. I'm very old tech.

Can you do, like a search for a text?

Yeah, this is a Mac.

I just want to get to the end of it. There we are. Yeah, yeah. I just want to show some of these pictures that Danny puts up.

Okay.

And I would urge those who are interested in getting into this matter in depth to look in more detail at what Danny has to say in this article. But there's that so called Kujang stone, or man made artifact. But it's really. These are the different units that have been identified with the remote sensing.

Not actually remote sensing. Those units were identified from a scarf that was exposed. But that's okay.

I'm not finding the pictures I want here.

What are you trying to find?

I'm trying to find the imagery of natural column rocks, Gunung Padang columnar rocks. It's the way, when you get down deep, that this material is referenced that Danny and his team have concluded that even in the 27,000 year old parts of Gunung Padang, we are dealing with man made workmanship. I won't take it further than that.

Which slides are these? Are you talking like b eight, b nine and b ten?

Yeah, yeah.

And those are at 27,000 years?

No, those are not. But he's pointing out that as we go deeper, we get material which is not in its natural formation, but is in a formation that was placed by. By human beings. And I would.

We sort of covered that before, but like. Yeah. What is. What's showing that it was placed by human beings. Is this what they're. What was that last image that you had up there? A little higher up above that? What is not above that? The one that shut that in the outline of the area, what is that?

That's the five terraces. It's a terrace slope, in a sense.

Right. So that's what has been.

Yeah, that's what's been excavated by Lufi.

And at the base of that, it's been dated to about 2100 years.

Yeah, exactly.

That's right. And Danny doesn't dispute that it's the. It's the deeper material that's. That's of interest.

Right. But what. What evidence is it that shows the deeper material has been manipulated by humans?

Well, if we can pause for a minute, let me run through this enormous article and I will see if I can find it.

Is any of the evidence visual?

Yes.

So is it that same sort of thing that, like the imagery that showed?

Yes, it's like that Rorschach test is what I call it. Yeah.

So it's. It's.

I'm sorry, it's too big. It's too big an article for me to go through. It's there on my website. It's Danny's retraction. It's Danny's refutation of the retraction.

What are you specifically looking. Looking for in this?

I'm looking for his first ground penetrating radar and his seismic tomorrow.

Why don't you just do a search for ground penetrating radar on this page? Just. What is it? Command F. Jamie will hook you up. Okay. Ground penetrating radar. Okay. How many versions of it is two. There's only two.

This is the correspondence between him and the. And the editorial team from archeological perspective, which unfortunately ended up in the article being retracted. Instead.

I want to point out, when I interviewed Doctor yonder, his goal, talking to me, was to write a response. Like, we never got in touch with the journal to retract. It was other people that did that. We wanted to write a response, and I think we're still aiming to do so. So that's our goal.

I don't know about Kunungpurang.

Yeah.

And while we're on my website, I'd just like to say that I've recently put up a major article concerning Gobekli Tepe and the issue of whether we're looking at a transfer of technology or gradual evolution or both. There's been a huge amount of research done around Gobekli Tepe. Archeologists have suggested that that research vitiates my argument that Gobekli Tepe was a transfer of technology. I've been investigating that research in depth, and my view is it strengthens my argument enormously. But again, we're getting into material that's too far and too deep to go into here. I would just like, no, I think.

We should get into.

What makes you think it's a transfer of technology?

Well, I start off my Netflix series by saying it's an enormous sight. You can't just wake up one morning with no prior skills, no prior knowledge, no background in working with stone and create something like Gobekli Tepe. There has to be a long history behind it, and that history is completely missing.

Do you mean to fian culture?

To me it very strongly speaks of a lost civilization transferring their technology, their skills, their knowledge to hunter gatherers. And what I've done in this article is I've brought up to date myself investigation into Gobekli Tepe. Of course, the Natufians are dealt with a great length in this article. How do I search natufian? There are many predecessor cultures.

The question is, who worked in stone?

Who worked in stone? The question is, when did this stone work? If you look at the research by Hackley and Gopher, for example, and of the introduction of geometric elements into the stonework in pre Gobeklitepi cultures, you find that almost all of it comes after the beginning of the younger Dryas, not before the beginning of the younger dryas. There is an interesting development at Ayn Malaha in Israel, also called Ainan, where some kind of geometric plan seems to have been put into place. But the bulk of the work, the bulk of the, I hate to use the word that archeologists dislike, a neolithic revolution, but the bulk of the revolution took place after the younger Dryas.

So that's why you think it's evidence of a transfer?

Yes, I do.

Except that the fact that there's no domesticated plants or animals echo Becklitepe. So if there's a transfer of knowledge, why are they not transferring agriculture?

Well, there was actually agriculture in Abu.

Herrara, for example, but not at Gobeklitepe. Abu Herrera is a natufian site that was occupied before Gobekli Tepe.

Would you find agriculture around Notre Dame? Yeah, we're a sacred site. Gobeklitepe was a sacred site.

And we know that they're hunting gazelles by the thousands and harvesting wild plants. This has been published ad nauseam by people like Laura Dietrich, who have talked about the kind of plants that they're harvesting and the. Right.

But was it possible that they just didn't bring food to this area because it was a sacred site for ceremony and ritual and perhaps not at all for people to live in.

No, it seems more like they were there about half of the year. So they're there during the warm months. If you look at the harvesting season from the plant remains we have and then the wild plants that are gathered and then if you look at the isotope evidence and the mortality profile from the teeth of the animals that they're slaughtering, we see that they're there basically during the warm six months of the year. So this is.

But not at Gobekli Tepe.

At Gobekli Tepe I'm talking about. Yeah, for about six months out of the year. That's when people are there harvesting these. And so I sort of say they found an ecological niche and they've learned how to exploit this and to sort of stay there for half the year. They probably went to the lowlands during the other half of the year, which is a fairly common mobile, pastoral or hunter gatherer strategy, which is where you move to where the food is in different seasons. Right. And so that area is a very naturally abundant area during the warm months. And so, you know, there's so much more that's under excavation right now by Lee Claire and other colleagues that shows sort of domestic spaces around this ceremonial center that we have. I sort of think of it as like Washington DC. We have the ceremonial center in downtown and then we have the less nice looking areas outside.

Is it possible that there was a sophisticated culture that also was hunter gatherers because the resources were so rich that they didn't need agriculture?

Yeah, I think that's what we're seeing in this period is sort of.

There was no need to. There was no need to grow plants.

I think they found a successful niche and they really exploited it and did a great job with it. And so I think that that's what's going on, right, in this period, and it's also the period where we can start to see the start of domestication.

And so do you think that that also explains the resources that were required to build such immense stone structures that they had the time to do this because they had abundant food?

Yeah, they had abundant food six months out of the year. And while they're there, they, they had the time to build those kind of structures.

But they. Were they the first of those kinds of structures, you think that were.

Well, I mean, that's a tough question to ask. So, I mean, we certainly have t shaped pillars from other sites in the region in fact, there were some that were found by Klaus Schmidt before he found Gobekli tepe at Navali Chori.

It's a younger site. Naval Echori is a younger site.

It is a younger site. And so I think there's more invest. But what we do have is good monumental architecture from that period that we've known about for 60 years. If you go to Teles Sultan or Jericho, there's a pre pottery neolithic tower there. And so it's an enormous, not megalithic, but enormous monumental structure that we've known about in that area from the exact same period.

So this is pre metallurgy? This is.

This is all pre metallurgy, pre wheel? Yeah, well, yeah, probably pre wheel.

And where are they getting these stones from?

From the area. Most of them seem to be local. The quarries at Gobekli Tepe are right nearby.

And how do you think they moved those things?

You know, there's so many different ways to move large stones. There's been so many different experiments that show with rollers or ropes, you can get enough people and know how levers and you can do that. And so, you know, there's so many videos on YouTube of Wally Wallington and others that show you how you can move stones weighing many, many, many tons.

I don't think there's any mystery around the moving of the stones. Yeah. And I don't claim that there is. I think what's intriguing, I go back.

To Tapi, but there's certainly, as in Egypt.

Yes, Egypt's a bigger mystery and we can go into that, show us how. But what intrigues me about Gobeklitepe is the precision, the underlying geometrical plan of the site and the astronomical alignments of Gobekli Tepe. And I think that the transfer of technology that I referred to did take place. It took place gradually. There's a site called Tal Karamal. You've spoken of Jericho. The tower of Jericho is fascinating. It's a sort of neolithic skyscraper in a way, but it's after the younger Dryas, there's tal caramel, which has got five towers, quartic tepe, Bontuclutara, Abu Herrera. Abu Herrera is a fascinating sight. And it was hit by an airburst. According to the team working on the younger Dryas impact hypothesis. Hypothesis Abu Hera, the destruction of Abu Herrara took place because one of those comet fragments 12,800 plus years ago exploded over Abu Herara within 100 or 200 miles of Gobekli tepe.

Certainly a controversial point. I'm not an expert on this particular topic, but I know a lot of people that believe that the evidence is not there for the younger Dryas impact hypothesis.

Yeah, there's a huge dispute going on about it.

It's an interesting specialty, though, interesting discussion in science to say that destruction is an archeologist best friend. So when sort of a site is destroyed suddenly from earthquakes, from volcanoes, from warfare, from fire, it actually helps preserve material for us. And so, you know, if there is this kind of global catastrophe, that should make things more preserved and easier for archeologists to find.

But isn't that dependent upon the scale of the catastrophe?

Well, no, because even, like, it's not going to be, what, incineration everywhere? Because we still have hunter gatherer evidence everywhere.

Right, but it could be incineration in a lot of places. And the hunter gatherer evidence that you have is after the fact.

No, the hunter gatherer evidence we have is from well before the fact as well. Yeah, we have hunter gatherer evidence going back hundreds of thousands of years.

Right. But have you seen the evidence of the younger Dryas impact theory in terms of, like, iridium levels, nano diamonds?

I'm not someone who's qualified to be able to comment on that. I'm more thinking about it from an archeological point of view, which is that if there was a destruction, just like with Pompeii or herculaneum, with the pyroclastic flow, that stuff helps preserve material for us. Same thing with earthquakes knocking over buildings.

Right.

Would an atom bomb preserve material for us?

Yes, because the atom bomb, the very center of it, might vaporize stuff, but then the whole area that gets abandoned afterwards because of the radiation, that actually is going to make that area an archeological paradise for people once that radiation goes away.

But if Randall crosses work on the impact to what was the ice that.

Was covering North America in one small landscape.

What do you mean?

Meaning he talks about it in the scablands, right?

Not just the scablands. He talks about that, but he also just talks about that there's massive evidence of intense erosion, so very quick water flow that happened through an area that was absolutely devastating.

I mean, look, so the more rapid a destruction is, the better it preserves for us. Just like with sea level rise.

Right, but dependent upon how strong the force is.

Right.

But if it's a global catastrophe, how is it so strong everywhere? Yet it's not wiping out our evidence from hunter gatherers at this exact same time. We have ephemeral traces, footprints, campgrounds, fires and hearths.

We have lithics because human beings did survive.

Right? Yeah, but we have it from this exact same period.

Right. Did survive at that same time, and.

It didn't wipe out the traces of them from that period.

But the traces you're talking about are.

Stone tools and hearths, footprints, things like that, that are extremely ephemeral, animal bones and seeds. We have all of these things from the period around this supposed destruction.

But do you have them in the area where the supposed destruction.

We don't know where the supposed destruction happened because nobody's ever found that.

But with Randall Carlson's descriptions of this massive, massive floods of water, just hundreds of millions of pounds of water.

Let's go to J Harlem Bretz long before Randall Carlson. I mean, the channel scablands are an enigma. The massive water flows. I don't think anybody's disputing that. Massive amounts of water flow through there. It's a question of exactly when that happened and why.

Also, what would be left over in that area. There's not evidence of hunter gatherers in that area from that.

Well, I remember he showed when he was here last, he showed sort of mammoth bones from that kind of period.

No, that was from Siberia, though, wasn't it? Was it from Siberia or.

I don't remember. But it wasn't from the channel scablance. But let's cut to the chase here. 12,800, between 12,000, 912,800 years ago, a very dramatic climate episode occurred, and that's called the younger dryas. The world had been gradually warming up before that, and then suddenly it went very, very cold. There is evidence of a six meter sea level rise at exactly that time, which is very hard to explain, but it looks like the suggestion is that that was due to impacts on the ice cap, on the north american ice cap and perhaps on the european ice cap. The evidence for the younger dryas impact is found in what are called impact proxies, and that's iridium nanodiamonds, platinum melt glass like trinitite, found in sites across a vast area of the earth's surface, 50 million plus square kilometers, an enormous area. Abu Herrara, next to Gobeklitepe, happens to be one of those areas. And what they're suggesting is that a fragment of a comet blew up in the sky, that it was an airburst, exactly the same thing that happened over Tunguska in Siberia on the 30 June 1908. That was an object that fell out of the sky, almost certainly out of the torrid meteor stream, which is thought to be the progenitor of the remnant giant comet, because that's the peak of the beta taurids.

It wasn't big enough to hit the earth and create a crater. It blew up in the sky. When it blew up in the sky, fortunately, over an uninhabited area of Siberia, it flattened 2000 sq mi of trees. It was absolutely catastrophic. If it had.

No.

There is evidence.

There is evidence compelling.

It's not.

No. Vance Halliday and his colleagues just published a huge refutation of this entire hypothesis.

What do they think you're talking about?

I'm sorry, calling something a refutation doesn't mean it's a refutation, but it still is not. We reply to.

That's currently.

Well, actually, it has. It has been replied to extensively by Martin Swett Marden.

But are you. You referring to Abu Haruk? You referring.

I refer to the entire idea of the younger dryas impact hypothesis.

Right, but tonguska, you're done.

You know, I'm not debating.

But that's what you were saying then.

I misled him.

Okay. You misheard him. He was talking about the amount of forest that was flattened by the Tunguska.

I misheard him.

I thought did happen during the tour at Meteor shower.

I. Yeah, I guess it happened.

Yeah.

Recently, like 100 years ago.

Yeah, but it did happen. But it did happen during the same time of the year where the earth passes through.

Okay. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not debating tungus.

Okay. Yeah, that was what it seemed like.

I think.

I think this would be a good moment for me to just give a little bit of information about the younger Dryas impact typos. Okay, can we. Can we do that? Because it's very important to my feelings about. And, God, these short sight. I tell you, being 73 is no joke. Yeah. So the younger Dryas impact hypothesis. Since 2007, it's been a compelling and thoroughly documented case. It's been put together by more than 60 eminent scientists. Of course, some scientists oppose them as well. Was hit 12,800 years ago by multiple fragments of a disintegrating comet. Mark Boslow is one of the authors of that refutation piece that you've just put in. Here he is saying that Graham Hancock's use of the impact hypothesis in Netflix is all wet. Here we have a post responding to that. Graham Hancock is a charlatan and a fraud. Younger Dryas impact hypothesis is widely debunked. I'm sorry, it's not. If you want to learn about the work done, go see Mark Boslow. Here's that paper you're talking about, Flint. The comprehensive refutation of the younger Dryas hypothesis. Because something is called something does not mean it is something.

Have you read it? It's fairly detailed.

I have read it in great detail. And I've also read James Lawrence Powell, who the authors of this paper largely ignore, but who is a highly respected figure and in whose view the younger Dryas impact hypothesis has been prematurely rejected. Bill Napier is a member of the Comet research group. He's the person who's connected it to the torrid media stream. He's talking about the evidence of a large comet, about entering the inner solar system about 20,000 years ago, going into fragmentation, creating a wide debris trail through which the earth passes twice a year. And it's a catastrophe of celestial origin, which occurred around 12,900 bc BP before the present. Now, you're referring to a refutation paper, but would you really so quickly accept it when you look at the credentials of the people in the comet research? I mean, James Kennett, marine geologist, professor at the University of California. He's a world expert in paleo oceanography. Doctor Richard Firestone, James Whitker, Albert Goodyear, Alan west. There I am with Alan west at the younger Dryas boundary in Murray Springs. And the younger Dryas boundary is full of the signatures of a massive cosmic impact, probably an airburst, rather like the airburst that took place over Abu Huraira.

I'm not expecting anybody to read these papers I'm putting up here. I'm just saying that the younger Dryas impact hypothesis has been widely published, extensively published over the last decade, that there's a huge amount of information in support of it there. We're looking at the younger Dryas boundary field extending on the right as far as Abu Herrara and on the left, covering most of North America. It's also found in Belgium, by the way. It's found in the deep south of Chile. It's found in Antarctica, it's found all over the world. And this platinum anomaly, documented at the younger Dryas onset, is particularly important. But the evidence of a cosmic impact at Abu Herrara, that one. I mean, we know that Michael Shermer is an opponent of my work, but even Michael Sherman, Michael Shermer, in my view, by the way, I want to thank Michael for this. A true gentleman. When he realizes he's got something wrong, he says so. And here he says, in the light of the work at Abu Herrera, he says he's going to adjust his priors. In about my theory, in the light of this evidence from a massive cosmic impact over Abu Herrara.

So the fact that a paper has been published which claims to refute the younger Dryas impact is really not anything at all. The question is, what's the depth to that refutation? Is it a solid refutation? Does it really work? And why is it that the same team who claim to have refuted the younger Dryas impact hypothesis in 2023 also published a requiem for the younger Dryas impact hypothesis in 2011? Clearly, there was something wrong with their 2011 requiem.

I am not a scholar that focuses on these kind of questions. I focus on archeological evidence, so I'm going to try to reply from that perspective. And so one of the examples you give is, if this is Abu Herrera, for example, the site is still there for us to excavate. We understand that it has some of the earliest domesticated crops there. And so the entire point is that this kind of. Even if this hypothesis is true, it would not have wiped out the evidence for the civilization that you're looking for, because we can see very clearly that if it's true at Abu Hera, it did not wipe out the entire settlement. It's there. We're excavating it now.

Isn't Abu Herrera one of the first places that show evidence of real agriculture?

Yeah. So let's talk about some of.

That's part of the evidence.

Can we talk about some agriculture? Sure. All right, cool. Can you boot up my hd?

You got all excited.

Yeah. This is like my stuff, finally. I did my dad's stuff earlier. Now I get to do some of my stuff. In fact, this is some of the sites I work on. So. Okay, I want to be clear that we have a lot of evidence for ancient plants and seeds. Right? I'll show you the statistics. We have hundreds of thousands, millions of these just from the time period of thinking about domestic. So how do we even collect tiny little seeds of grains and beans and peas? Any idea, Joe?

No.

Okay, so you know how wood floats? So does carbonized plant material. So, basically, we collect samples from every single unit that we excavate, and we put it in what's called a flotation tank, where we pump up a bunch of air to separate any charred plant material from the soil and sediment. And then it sort of drains out right around here into a mesh, and then we can start to study it under a microscope. So, all right, big question. What the heck is the difference between wild and domesticated wheat? Any ideas? No. No. Graham?

Yes. The domesticated wheat depends on human beings helping it continue.

And how do we identify that?

Not quite sure.

Okay. That's important, though. So all right, let's go to the bottom here. It's the scar, right where that wheat kernel, or the spikeless that the wheat seed is attached on it attaches to the plant. And the reason for this is in wild plants like wheat or beans or peas, it's going to propagate itself by falling off the plant easily. If birds or humans are harvesting it, it's not that it wants to, it doesn't have agency, but it propagates itself more easily by shattering easily off of the stem of the plant. On the other hand, as soon as humans start gathering it, that does nothing because some seeds fall. It replants itself in the field. But as soon as humans start gathering it and planting it in new fields, then all of a sudden there's an evolutionary sort of impact on the plant itself. And so what's selected for is the mutation for a seed that hangs onto the plant. Do you see what I mean? Because you're cutting off the plant, taking it with you, and then planting it somewhere else. And so this is a shift in grains that we call a brittle to a tough ruckus.

And you can see it's kind of a clean scar right here on the left in wild wheat, while it's a much sort of tougher scar on the right.

Do we know what the evolutionary mechanism is that would cause it to do that?

Yeah. So there's two different genes that actually control this in wheat, for example. And so we actually know, just statistically speaking, and by sampling wild wheat today, that this is going to exist within any field of wild wheat, there's going to be a few seeds with this genetic mutation, and then as soon as humans start collecting it and cultivating it, planting it somewhere, it's going to automatically put evolutionary pressure on that. And it's over time. And we see this shift from shattering to non shattering in barley, in wheat, in rice, in every single grain species that we have domesticated. And so you can see this statistically, for example, in China, where over time, a, we have 35,000 of these now that we're studying. B, you can see the population of rice at archeological sites. It starts off mostly as brittle, meaning it shatters easily. And over time, it takes about 1500 years for rice to evolve, to become fully domesticated, where it hangs onto the plant more easily. And so we see this repeatedly. We could see this later on in the holocene. So we're talking several thousand years later, like 5000 years ago in sort of the Sahara desert, during the green Sahara periods, where we see the domestication of pearl millet, same exact transition is what happens.

And you can see these statistics of it happening changing statistically over time. The population of millets in these regions, from a brittle raucous that breaks off easily to a tough raucous where the seed hangs on.

How does it figure out that?

It's just. Yeah, it's just that it's just selectionary pressure. It's the pressure of humans now collecting it and then planting it. So as soon as there's one seed that's like that, with that mutation, it slowly proliferates every single time humans replanted in a new field.

It just takes.

Yeah. It just takes thousands of years. Yeah. And we see this in wheat, barley, rice, oats, teosinte, which becomes corn. We see it in millet sorghum. We see it with the pods for beans and peas. So the pod changes how it breaks off the plant and again, it goes from shattering to tough. And so we see that with lentils, chickpeas, peas, common beans, runner beans, soybeans, fava, vetch, all of these species, dozens of them, it's the first sign of human domestication. And so that's what we can see. The second sign is, actually, I'm sorry.

How many thousands of years does it take before this starts showing something?

Well, it starts showing up fairly quickly, immediately. So you get small percentages of it. For example, you can see this with the rice graph here with all of them. So at Abu Herrara, for example, it's a small percentage of the crops that actually have this feature to it.

So looks like just 150 years, it starts changing.

Yeah, it slowly starts changing over. In fact, Gordon Hillman first worked out this would happen really rapidly, that it would take just a few hundred years for the population of these plants to change over. Now we know it takes a few thousand years for it to. To fully the full population at archeological sites, to go from wild, breaking off easy types to domesticated, hanging onto the plant types.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, it's just fascinating how the plant somehow or another, adapts and figures it out that this is the way to survive.

It's really cool because it's not human selection either. In fact, 40 years ago, when we first started studying domestication, we thought that all this was due to conscious human selection. And now we know that it's actually plant adapting to us and what we do. Yeah, it's cool as hell, isn't it?

I agree with you on all of that. I don't want to stop you with your presentation, but how does that. What bearing does that have on getting rid of a lost civilization?

I'm going to get there again. It's not about getting rid of a lost civilization. I'm actually here to show that there's no agriculture at all in the ice age. It doesn't have to do with the lost civilization, but that's a key component of your civilization. So the second trick.

Well, there's no agriculture at all amongst the Inuit either, right?

No. No.

Right. But they survived.

But in his books and in his Netflix series, he describes the civilization as introducing agriculture. He talks about seed banks and things like that. Oh, yeah. And the magicians of the gods. I have a quote in here.

Show me.

Okay. You want me to.

Yeah, I want to see it.

Give me a second. It seems fanciful to. You want to use it? I don't. I can't do your accent.

You want to read it?

It seems fanciful to imagine that we might, in an almost high tech sense, be looking at the specifications of a seed bank here. Oh, this is from fingerprints of the gods?

No, it's from magicians of the gods.

Oh, maybe I repeated it in magicians. And this is about the underground Vara that Yima is said in myth to have created following a disastrous. Following a disastrous cataclysm.

But is it possible that this cycle of domesticating wheat and beans and all these different things has taken place many, many times and that if you left them alone, they would go back to the wild form where if they're like, if there was a disaster and people stopped growing them in this particular region, how long would it take for them to revert back to their original?

Thousands of years ago. Thousands of years. Thousands of years ago.

How many thousands of years, you think?

Well, I don't know, because, I mean, we've. I'd have to look that up because I know that we've observed this kind of stuff. Feral domesticates going feral, but I don't have that option.

And you said how many years from the original till the whole.

Something like 3000 years. Dorian Fuller's actually published a lot on estimating the time range of this.

So if you had agriculture in 12,800 years ago, around the time of the younger Dryas impact theory, and then people are resorted to hunter gatherers again, it takes a long time before they start using agriculture again, is it?

That's not what he's claiming. He's claiming that.

Yeah, I know. But I'm asking, is it possible that those plants convert and then the process would happen again once people started growing them intentionally.

That's tough to tell, because what we see is this is exactly at that time, at least in southwest Asia, where this domestication starts.

We haven't seen the reverse happen.

No, no, no.

But is it possible?

Well, I mean, it would have had to have happened a lot earlier if.

People weren't cultivating it anymore. Wouldn't the natural selection revert back to the original?

I agree with that. It would revert back, but it would.

Take a long time.

It would take a long time. And so I want to get into how the natural x trait size takes thousands of years after that, which is the selection for large seeds. So we measure these seeds and we can see their change over time. And I have here a really cool.

Is this a selection by farmers and by people that are.

That's such a great question, because actually we think at first it's not. So this is the plants adapting to the fact that they're being planted in plowed and tilled and cleared fields. And so large resources, no larger seeds actually grow fast. So they out compete their neighbors that might have implanted with smaller seeds because.

It'S monocrop, because they're constantly surrounded by other plants that are similar. And so they're competing for resources.

They're competing for resources and the ones with larger seeds on average growth. So a lot, this is done from a lot of experimental archeology, that is. Yeah. Glynis Jones, Dorian Fuller and others. Glynis Jones at Sheffield, who's retired now, has taught me this.

Just the fact, I mean, I know we're in the middle of this crazy debate, but just, just the wonder of nature itself, the complexity involved in these natural life forms adapting to their environment is so fascinating. And the fact that it's such a contentious issue amongst biological creatures, specifically human beings, because of religious implications. But if you just look at it in terms of what we know for sure with plants, it is such a bizarre, bizarre process, so fascinating and complex, and there's so much going on, and just with our understanding of the communication that plants have with each other through mycelium and the different organisms that exist in the earth, and that they're sharing resources and, like, what a bizarre, fascinating world.

Almost mysterious.

There's a lot to learn.

So mysterious. Well, there's a lot to learn for.

Sure, but I think that's what's cool, because we have this kind of stuff. So you asked about selecting. Yeah. So this is a maze cob, from about 1250 ad. This is part of the Southern Methodist university archeological.

That's how little they were back then.

That's how little they were. So if you want to hold it, you can chuck it over here.

How old is this?

That's from about 800 years ago. Yeah.

Folks, this is like a thumb. Not even my thumb. It's like. It's like one of my smaller fingers.

And just to get us crazy, like.

They think of a corn cob today is just. I mean, I had one over thanksgiving. Massive. It was like this big.

Exactly. Now, that's human selection. That's human selection at that point.

Crazy. That's amazing.

And to give you a sense of just how much we find, this is our charred corn kernels. Again, methods university.

And how old are these?

So this. They're not exactly sure where they come from. They think they're sub sampled from collections at Pop Creek Pueblo in New Mexico. So several hundred years old for sure. But, yeah, they were collected a long time ago, so they're not sure.

Yeah, the kernels are so tiny. And the only way dehydrated.

They're charred.

They're charred. Right.

But would they be larger? Yeah, they probably would have been larger. So we. We study how charring impacts these things as well. Yeah. So we do a lot of experiments to understand that, so that we can see the shape and the size and stuff like that.

That is so cool.

So, to get back to your question, though, because I think you react to a good question. When we think about sort of this change over time with domestication, we also see a change in time in the kind of stone tools that people are using. So it takes thousands of years before we start seeing these sickle type blades associated with harvesting these crops. Right. And then the next step we can take is this introduction, this sort of transfer of technology that agriculturalists do when they move into Europe and elsewhere. And we can track this in real time. So this is from a project, the very. I was actually doing the flotation to collect the plants from this project when I was a student. And this is in Albania, directed by University of Cincinnati. So these are the trenches that we excavated. But this is one of the earliest agricultural sites in Europe from about 6400 bc. Right. And what's really cool is we can see what this kind of introduction looks like. We see a full package introduced at the same time. We see multiple different domesticated plants, multiple different domesticated animals, as well as new types of artifacts like stone tools and pottery of different types than what the hunter gatherers were using there.

And so this is kind of a parallel. This is where we see this transfer of technology is when agriculturalists spread out and they take a whole package with them. We call it the neolithic package. Right. And so that's one of the key things, is we have parallels for this. And so when we go back to this sort of end of the Stone age type period, where we're maybe looking for something like a seed bank or a shelter that's keeping these Noah's ark or something like that, what we can also look at is it doesn't look like anything's introduced. These plants and animals get domesticated in the natural regions where their wild progenitors were growing and living. And so there's not like an introduction of a new species that was not there. Instead, we already saw these wild plants in place in the ice age, in these spaces. And then we see, we can date directly these with radiocarbon. Right? There's no reason to assume anything else. We date plant remains and bones directly. And then lastly, I just want to talk about not archeological evidence, but paleoecological evidence. So these are kind of cores taken in lakes, lagoons, swamps, on the seafloor.

And this is what a palinologist. So those are people that study pollen. Look at. And so this map is from an article that I was actually a co author on, looking at different paleo ecological proxies around the greek peninsula. So we're looking at.

Is that a real image of pollen?

Yeah, this is pollen under an electron microscope from Dartmouth College. I think it is this image. And so we have these kind of cores that give us a sense of the landscape. And, you know, we can track, for example, the rise of different agricultural societies from pollen that floats through the air. We can track, for example, tree crops when they start getting introduced and when they become common, we can track grains and when they come in and become very common in these different regions. And the key thing I want to draw your attention to is a lot of these proxies. These cores are taken from coastal areas, and some are even taken from underwater. So we have underwater cores from the seabed, and we can reconstruct these sunken landscapes and this sort of ecosystem that was there. And nowhere do we see an ecosystem of agriculture, our boraculture, or anything like that. Instead, we see very natural landscapes, the type of landscapes that hunter gatherers would live in. And so this, I think, is really important, because there really is. It's not just that there's evidence, no evidence for agriculture that early. We have evidence against it from those pollen cores.

But also this article by Peter Richardson and colleagues points out that agriculture, it was probably too hostile of a condition for agriculture in the ice age. The reason why is because there's too little CO2. Plants need carbon dioxide to be able to propagate and grow and be grown intensively. In particular, it's also a period of aridity. It's very dry because so much of, of the freshwater is trapped at it, the poles in the ice sheets.

But this is not the case of the Amazon. Right. An equator, the environment would be different.

But we have pollen cores from those areas. And again, we have no evidence of any kind of intensive agriculture.

Those vastly understudied areas, I never.

But they are vastly understated. Right?

Well, sure. You have to imagine that a pollen core is actually tracking a larger landscape, right? Because pollen travels really far. And so you're able to, with one core, track a much larger landscape and put that together. And so, you know, I just cannot emphasize this enough. We need to. I have a phrase I like to use about archeology. It's we work from the known to the unknown. So this is true. When we excavate, we come down on the stub of a wall and we change what we're doing to follow what we know, which is that wall, and we expose it. When we found the Griffin warrior tomb at Pilos, for example, we found the corner on the very first day and by the third day we already expanded the trench so that we could catch what we know is there. And so it's the same kind of thing when you dig a layer. It's the same thing when you sort of test a hypothesis like Graham's, which is we want to work from what we do know. What we do know from the ice age and what we do know from right after this period of domestication.

And so what we do know is all this kind of natural evidence about the climate, about the ecology and about how domestic actually happens. And so that's why I think that unlike the other part with the ice age sort of coastal stuff, I think that's sort of like why do we keep finding tens of thousands of ice age sites that are hunter gatherers? It's a bit of a coincidence we don't find your civilization here.

It's not tens of thousands, it's 3000 sites.

That's not true. We have 13,000 different sites in the paleolithic radiocarbon database.

No, no, I'm talking about underwater.

Okay, but we have 3 million shipwrecks that have been mapped.

Not relevant.

According to UNESCO. And they're on the continental shelves.

Can I pick up on some points you've made or you've not quite finished yet.

Sure, you can pick up. Graham.

I don't ever claim that the very small numbers of survivors of my proposed lost civilization introduced plant species. What I'm saying is that they introduced the concept of domestication plants. There is evidence of early, very early agriculture more than 20,000 years ago at a hollow gatherers. Yeah, of a hollow two. It never reached the stage of domestication.

They're gathering, not planting.

That goes back 23, what, 24,000 years ago, they gathered, but they did not domesticate. And there are a number of attempts at domestication, but it's after the younger Dryas that we see this suddenly surge in domestication. Now, I'm not saying, and I've never said, and you will not be able to find a quote where I've said that they introduced agriculture, they introduced the idea of agriculture, and we're talking about a very small number of people. The myths speak of seven sages again and again in multiple locations around the world, bringing the idea of agriculture, but that agriculture is then applied to locally available plant species. And we do then see the long process of domestication beginning after the younger Dryas, not before it. We don't see that domestication occurring before 12,900 years ago. We see some attempts at gathering crops, we see some sheen on sickles that show that people were cutting wild grasses and using the seeds. We do see all of that, but we don't see domestication. The steps that begin to lead us towards domestication begin after the younger Dryas. And I think that's the elephant in the, the room. I think that what happened there during the younger dryas is extremely mysterious.

And I don't think we have the whole story, and I'm simply proposing that the survivors of a civilization who were in very small numbers traveled around the world seeking refuge, sharing their knowledge with those they took refuge amongst, and sharing the knowledge of those they took refuge amongst. It was an exchange, not a one way trip, and they did not bring plants and seeds with them. They worked with what was locally available. And that's precisely what we see happening after 12,900 years ago in this whole area of hundreds, thousands of square miles around Gobeklite Tepe, going right down into the Jordan valley, Abu Herrara being a particularly interesting example. Very close to Gobeklite Tepe is the first steps being taken towards domestication. There've been multiple attempts to harvest wild grains before that, but no domestication. Suddenly we see the domestication happening and of course, it's happening with locally available plants. I've never said that they introduced plant species from elsewhere, but if they're introducing.

The technology of agriculture, that would imply that they had agriculture beforehand, which, as I'm trying to show, does not. It doesn't make any sense. You need to invent new species of plants. You need to go against all the evidence that we have.

What new species of plants? Why do you need to? Well, because they were using wild grasses in the area of, of where they. In the Jordan Valley. They were using them.

23, 23,000. Yeah, in the area of those wild.

Plains, but they did not domesticate them.

But then what was your civilization growing?

I don't know.

What I do know is it's very.

I have, I don't know. What do you not understand about the word lost? I don't. I don't know what they were growing. But what I'm mystified by is this sudden surge towards domestication, which you rightly say is a long, slow process. It doesn't, it doesn't happen overnight. It takes, it takes a long time. But we see those first steps being taken after, not before, the younger Dryas.

And that's where sudden, we're talking about thousands of years when agriculture starts in different places. So, you know, it's very early in southwest Asia, but it's a thousand or plus year lag in East Asia or Mesoamerica. So when people say suddenly, I think that that's a misinterpretation of the evidence. What are human generations?

We're talking hundreds of.

Of human genetics.

What I'm referring to suddenly is the transition from harvesting wild grasses to setting in process a project that will lead to domestication of wild grasses. And that cannot be demonstrated before the younger Dryas. It can only be demonstrated after the younger Dryas.

It's not a project, it's just planting them in the ground.

And that's why I think that there's something odd about the younger Dryas episode. And to me, that's something odd when I combine it with mythology from all around the world about the destruction of a great civilization in a global cataclysm, about the fact that there were a few survivors, about the suggestion that they traveled around the world sharing their knowledge and ideas. That's why I think that this, that the spark for the agricultural revolution that we say we see in that area was introduced, not the agriculture itself, not the plants themselves. They used locally available plants. They'd be daft.

But to play devil's advocate, yeah. If they did do that, wouldn't it would immediately show up as agriculture?

No.

Why would it take thousands of years for it to take?

Because it takes a long time to domesticate plants. As Flint has been saying, it's not something.

Well, you. But you see the shift starting immediately.

You see the shift in 150 years.

And you see it immediately at Abu Herrera.

Yes. And then elsewhere, not as early.

But is it also possible that the younger gyrus impact theory affected the climate and it made agriculture more possible? And then they figured it out after that because it was colder, right?

Yeah.

We've had lots of cold periods in the past. If you go back through the ice age, 400,000 years or so.

Right. That's a different species of human, almost. No, no, they hadn't. 400,000 years.

400,000 years.

But they hadn't figured out anything that we.

The earliest evidence so far for anatomically modern humans is from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. It's about 320,000 years old, 315,000 years old, something like that. Anatomically modern humans. So I think it makes sense.

But they hadn't.

But my point is they hadn't figured out anything that we figured out.

No.

So wouldn't it make sense that at one point in time, the human species would figure out agriculture? And if that transition would take place for over a period of thousands of years after a massive shift in the climate.

The mystery to me is why, during the previous massive shifts in the climate that took place multiple times over the 400,000 years.

Because humans hadn't evolved to do any of the things that they evolved to do, eventually build structures, dams, boats, seafaring, all those things took place afterwards. Right. So there has to be a timeline for all innovation.

I'm responding to your point. Was the climate shift the trigger for agriculture?

It had to be the trigger for something. Right. What I'm saying, whenever there's a massive change in the environment, people adapt to that change. And if you look at the sophistication levels of societies over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, they always move towards a more sophisticated. They figure out new ways, new methods, they get better at things. It just makes sense that they would eventually figure out agriculture in this area.

There were multiple attempts to figure out agriculture.

Right.

But they only come.

But also probably multiple attempts to figure out how to make a boat before they figured out how to make a submarine.

Yes.

Right.

I mean, so I tend to think that what we see with our record is it's very heterogeneous, so that's why we see agriculture showing up at different times in different places. And so I think that that's really key to get across. I do think that this climatic change, it introduced more CO2, it introduced more humidity and rainfall. That made agriculture actually possible, sort of as an intensive undertaking to do. And so I think that that's really important to acknowledge. But I don't want to sort of say that human agency didn't have something to do with that, because humans were the ones that chose to change from just gathering to planting. And so I think that's really, really key to demonstration.

I want to get to Egypt because I think it's one of the most bizarre accomplishments of human beings. And the age of Egypt is a fascinating piece of discussion because whatever it is, one of the more fascinating things is Robert Schock out of Boston University, the geologist who examined the erosion in the temple of the Sphinx and determined it to be thousands of years of rainfall and which would predate the sphinx by quite a bit, because this is all stone that had been moved by human beings and it had been used to construct the sphinx and this temple. The sphinx had been carved out. It's very clear that it was carved out. And you see these massive fissures that look exactly like water erosion. He specifically said that he showed these images to other geologists without telling them what they were looking at. And they almost unanimously said that it was water erosion over thousands of years of rainfall. And then when he would show them exactly what he was telling them to describe, then they didn't want to have any part of it because they're like, okay, now you're saying something that's really crazy, because now you're saying that this structure is 11,000 years old as opposed to 4500 years old.

Surprise, surprise. I'm gonna disagree with you.

Shall we look at me?

No. Robert Sachs.

Shall we look at some images?

Yeah.

Sphinx.

Let's look at images of the water erosion, because it's.

And then I'll show some images of the quarries nearby.

Let's do that. Yeah, sure. So if you could hook me up again, Jamie, to the HDMI. And again, credit to my wife, Santa, who has taken every risk with me, every step, every dive for the last 30 plus years. This is her aerial photograph of the Sphinx enclosure and of the Sphinx temple.

So cool.

How did you get that picture?

In a helicopter?

Wow.

Back in, oh, the mid nineties somewhere. Sphinx temple, directly in front of the sphinx, so called. And the valley temple to the left as we, as we view it. And you can see that the sphinx is, is a rock hewn structure cut out of the bedrock with a trench around it. And if we go in here, the notion that the sphinx bears the marks of precipitation induced weathering is an evolution of an idea that the late, great John Anthony west had many, many years ago. You've had John on your show before. He was a dear friend of mine.

He was great. Magical Egypt. I can't recommend enough of fascinating, fascinating material is two of them, two series, I think there's like three DVD's in each one. And it's just incredible stuff. Just, just on the undisputable things about the construction methods and how fascinating it is that they built these things.

Marvelous, out of the box thinker. I miss him so much. He was. He was a dear friend. It was he who brought Robert Schoch to the Giza plateau. And Robert took a look at the erosion around the sphinx and eventually came to the conclusion that the best explanation for it was that this sphinx enclosure had been subjected to at least 1000 years of extremely heavy rainfall. And Robert Schock right now puts that back to around the 10,000 bc date, 12,000 plus years ago, during the younger dryas, when indeed there were heavy rains in Egypt. And it's these deep vertical fissures in the side of the, the enclosure wall which most clearly demonstrate what he's talking about. That rainwater pouring off the edge of the plateau would have carved. It would have selectively cut out the softer areas of rock and created these fissures that we see through it. And this rounded, scalloped profile in Robert Schoch's view and in mine.

And I've had Robert Schoch on as well. We talked about it for a long.

Time, and I want to pay tribute to Robert Schoch here. He and I have had our differences, but Robert Schoch, in my view, is a hero. Robert Schock is a mainstream academic who has stuck his neck out for an idea that is very unpopular with mainstream academics. He's taken all the risks for his career. He's put himself out there and he's spoken his truth. And I want to respect Robert Schoch. I want to express that respect. And kudos to Robert Schoch for everything he's done. He's helped to advance this field enormously and to allow people to think previously unthinkable thoughts.

And I've seen him attacked mercilessly, mercilessly, mercilessly.

This happens again and again with archeologists, unfortunately. I'll just complete this point because it's often said that the Sphinx was the work of the pharaoh Khafre and that these two temples were the work of the pharaoh Khafre, particularly the Vali temple that we see on the right there. There's no inscriptions in the Sphinx temple. But when we come to the Vali temple, what we're looking at is a limestone core, and those limestone blocks were actually taken out of the Sphinx trench, which was then faced in a later time with granite. And there's a quote from Robert Schoch there, who's saying that basically the original temples were limestone and that they were faced with granite. That's the interior of the temple. You can see that there's definitely two phases of construction there. There's the granite. No dispute that that's old kingdom Egypt. And then there's the limestone, massive megalithic walls behind it, which are heavily eroded, as you can see even from here. Now, interestingly, is that temple really associated with the pharaoh Khafre? In 1947, Ies Edwards, who was one of the leading Egyptologists of his time, wrote this. Around each doorway is a band of hieroglyphic inscription giving the name and titles of the king.

No other inscriptions or relief occur anywhere else in the building. That's been taken to assume that the name of the king was given as Caffrey. Actually, Edwards corrected himself in 1993. Around each doorway was carved a band of hieroglyphic inscription giving the name and titles of the king. But only the last words, beloved of the goddess bastet and beloved of the goddess Hathor, are preserved. No other inscriptions occur anywhere else in the building. In other words, there's nothing in that temple that directly connects it to the pharaoh Khafre. But what's interesting is the way that that granite facing, which certainly was done in the old kingdom, has actually been. The interior of the granite has actually been cut to match the heavily weathered limestone that it's covering. It's been cut to shape that they're honoring and respecting that ancient structure. And so, in my opinion, the geological evidence on the antiquity of the sphinx is strong. There's no doubt that the ancient Egyptians were there, that they did work on the sphinx. The head of the sphinx was recarved into a human head. I and my colleagues believe it was originally the head of a lion, that the sphinx was an entire lion.

But the evidence that it's been carved is that it has far less erosion than the rest of the body. Correct.

And also the head is way out of proportion to the rest of the body. That's a. That's an issue because one thing the ancient Egyptians were pretty good at when they put their minds to it, was proportion. Yeah. And the disproportionate size of the head of the sphinx in relation to the whole body of the sphinx.

I mean, if you look at other ancient egyptian sphinxes, they also have small heads. If you put my head on a lion, it would look small and they look relatively small.

Indeed, it would look small. That's the point. It was a lion before and it was cut. That was heavily eroded and it was then cut down into a human head.

But it does have a distinctly different form of erosion.

No, that's actually where I come and disagree with you.

I have.

What's your evidence? It was connected to the head.

Oh, yeah. And I can show you why. It's a different stratum of the natural limestone. So if you look at the geology of the area, are you finished, Graham? If not, I'll put up some slides.

Yeah, go ahead.

Okay. Yeah, let's do this. So, first off, I want to sort of show this is what it looks like. Even the neck. You don't see the neck today because it's because they expanded the headdress as a support for the head. And so the point is, is that there's these different layers of this, of this limestone here that we can understand geologically. And so there's this very dense limestone that's up by the head, and then the rest of the limestone is much more fragile and porous. So I do want to be clear. How do we date the sphinx? What kind of evidence, archeologically, are we using? And so what that comes from is largely radiocarbon dates from the pyramids themselves. So pieces of wood that were in the. In between the blocks of the pyramids have been radiocarbon dated and definitively tell us that the pyramids were built during the old kingdom. Right.

Didn't they do work on the pyramids at multiple stages where they would probably, like, reseal things and surface things and clean things? If they were constructed 12, 13, 20,000 years ago and people were still inhabiting them 5000 years ago, wouldn't it make sense that they would do things to them?

Well, we have inscriptions in there from areas that are sealed off from the actual construction. Graffiti from the workmen, referring to, for example, friends of Khufu and different workmen gangs that are in there. And these are in areas graffiti, like, they tagged? Yeah, yeah, they tagged it. Exactly.

You know, particular graffiti in the Khufu cartouche has long been suggested as a.

Forgery by Howard Weiss, except it uses versions of Khufu's name that were not known until later by vice scholars. And so that's.

That's what versions of those?

I don't know, man. I don't read hieroglyphs. I.

Where'd you get that information?

Egyptologist.

Where'd you get that information?

Um, I got. No, not from Zahi owas. I've never met sahihawas. I got that information from reading, man. But. Okay, so let's go back. How do we know that these radiocarbon dates with the blocks in the pyramid relate to the sphinx itself? Because the sphinx is just hewn out of natural stone. Right. These different layers here. So the reason we know is because geochemists have done stone sourcing on the chemistry of these stones in the pyramids, and they've been able to trace them to different quarries at Giza. And so this is photos of different quarries and cuttings for the quarries. And so they've taken samples from the quarries themselves and from the stones in the pyramids. They do different kinds of geochemical analyzes to show the ratios of, in this case, magnesium and iron, and then they trace them back to specific quarries there. And so they know that a bunch of the stones from Khafre, for example, come from the area of the sphinx. The sphinx is from a quarry. It's a quarry site for those stones. And so one of the things.

Go back to that slide for a second.

Yeah.

We're cutting the quarry walls. Okay.

And so this is a photo of some of these quarries. And I want to point out that the quarry walls look a lot like exactly the walls of the sphinx itself. It has the same kind of erosion on it. It has the same kind of rough working on it. And so what you're actually seeing with the sphinx is you're seeing this roughened shape from quarrying, which is then built with nicer stones around it.

Right. But we're talking about the temple, the sphinx. The outside structure is what Robert Schoch was discussing that shows much more clear indication of the water erosion. Not necessarily this, which shows a lot of kind of different erosion.

By the way, this restoration on the paws of the sphinx is modern.

Yes, that is modern. I'm not going to deny that. But what I'm trying to explain to you is that we can't. A, I don't think that that anybody really agrees with shock that it is erosion. B, if it is erosion, well, a lot of geologists do. Not nerd, but many geologists do.

Many geologists do agree with them.

Very few.

I think it's quite a bit. Graham, you would know more than I do.

I think it's quite a bit, too, but it doesn't really matter to me. I think, whether geologists agree with him or not, whether archeologists agree with him or not, he's spoken his truth, he's made his case, and I think it's a strong and compelling case.

And what I'm trying to do is present the evidence that goes against him. Right.

But when you look at those fissures that are in that wall, you see.

The same thing on quarries there. You know, it's the same exact kind of fissures on. This is just a completely different quarry and a different.

That's not the most specific example of it, though, if you show other examples of that wall.

And so, I mean, there's other examples.

Of that wall that are much more rounded out.

So I have been the Giza, by the way.

See, this just doesn't look the same to me.

Wait. But I have a reason for saying that. I've been to Giza. The one time I went Giza, it rained. In fact, the taxi got into an accident because the oil on the. On the road got so slick that we were hit from behind.

Right.

It does very minor fender bender, but.

The nine radically changed.

How date erosion like this. That takes a lot of experimentation, and I've seen no evidence that shows how to date this kind of erosion to 12,000 years ago or something.

Are you in control of the thing now?

I am, and I was going to show.

Can you show images from what you were looking at when it shows the water erosion?

Because it's.

It looks very different, though, the images that Graham was showing from the. Where Robert Schalk did his work, it's much more extreme. The ones that you have are from a distance, and the other ones are kind of blurry. And you're looking at it, it looks similar, but like, I was there in 2003.

I'm sure you were.

I'm sure you were. But the, like, this is different. Different. The fissures in there are different. They really look like water flow. And if you're talking about the different layers of stone, which are softer in some layers and harder in other. If you did have that kind of water flowing through it, it would make sense that the softer layers would be more eroded. And that's Robert Shock's contention.

And how are you going to date that, though, to however long ago? One of the other key disproving.

But don't you date it, though, by the amount of rainfall that we know took place at a certain time, because.

A small amount of rainfall can also cause erosion, especially in a dry environment. So very dry environments, a tiny amount of rainfall can actually damage things even worse because things are so dry.

But that level of erosion, well, but.

You need to come up with some independent way of dating it. And that's why. That's where the issue is. What we do have is independent confirmation that the blocks in the pyramids came from the quarry right there.

Right.

And we have dates on those blocks from radiocarbon dates of wood in between those blocks.

There's an area where my work is misunderstood. I strongly support Robert Schock on the 12,000 year old dating of the sphinx and of the megalithic temples in front of the sphinx. I've never claimed that the pyramids are 12,000 years old.

Oh, I know. It didn't say.

I didn't say.

I know. Some people do, though.

Some people do. I've never claimed that. I do not seek to divorce.

That is why I brought up from the notion that they been resurfaced, because that's the claim.

Yeah, I've heard that claim.

People had been living in them for thousands of years. And so that the material that you're dating is from that time period.

Yeah.

And what do you make of the hieroglyphs that show kingdoms going back 30,000 years?

I've never heard that, so I have no comment.

It's in. It's in all the king lists of the.

Oh, you mean the dating of that? Yeah. Well, so there's a lot of issues with the way that those are dated because they're not precisely dated. It's just generations. So it's about how you interpret that kind of stuff, but it's still. It becomes an issue of mythology. Are they adding in extra generations there and stuff like that, or are they.

Actually reporting their truthful memory of their past?

Well, but we'd want to have directly dated evidence of that.

You might want to have that.

Well, yeah, I think if we're going to talk about archeological evidence, we need directly dated stuff.

And one of the things that's fascinating about Egypt is the discovery of older construction methods that are below and very sophisticated below the surface, that different temples were built on previous construction.

I mean, that happens in every culture where you see sort of spaces being reused in different ways.

Right, right.

Temple of Horus at Edfu, where the Atlantis story is told in an ancient egyptian context, is a good example of that, because the temple of Horus at Edfu is just the latest incarnation of a series of older temples that has stood on that site. It does. It is a regular issue in ancient Egypt.

And so how much time are we talking about then? So if we go back to 4500 years ago, which is the established date of the construction of the great pyramid, right. Somewhere around that.

EDfU dates to the ptolemaic period. So it's actually after plato. So can I talk a second about.

We'll come to that. I think it'd be really good to talk about Edfu and Atlantis.

All right. Briefly, though, we've been doing this for a long time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. That's great. Everybody's hanging in there. But these temples that were built on these older temples, what time period is ascribed to them? Like, what's the oldest construction in the.

Case of EdfU comes into the early old kingdom? The earliest, not prehistoric.

So what year?

Maybe 4000 years ago.

And so what is the oldest construction that we're aware of in Egypt?

I mean, we have nihilists, buildings that go back, you know, 8000 years or something. 9000 years? Yeah.

I think the oldest construction that we're aware of in Egypt is the great Sphinx and the megalithic temples in front of it. That's my view.

I mean, but we have no evidence from the Giza plateau of any occupation that early. And that's one of the most intensively explored archeological landscapes in the world.

In terms of food, seeds.

In terms of anything. Yeah, in terms of artifacts or seeds or food, we have nothing that dates act that old.

The question is, like, what would be left?

Well, we'd find stuff. Just like we find stuff everywhere.

I mean, is it there a point of no return, though? Like, there's a. Is there a time period, whether it's 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, where all the stuff you're looking for would have already been consumed by the earth?

No, because when you work in stone, this survives. What about fire, pottery? Bones themselves are going to survive in that kind of environment.

What do we think they use to transport these stones, cut these stones, place them? And how did they have a mathematical understanding of geometry to the point where they could put together this immense structure of 2,300,000 stones? If you think about everybody else that was alive 4500 years ago, you don't think of anything even remotely as sophisticated as Egypt.

I don't know. I think what we're starting to see is that there is a lot more.

Stuff that's very right but there's nothing.

Like the great parent look in terms of like, visual striking stuff. I agree.

Also accomplishment.

Yeah. And I mean, but the Egyptians tell us that they do it. They tell us the names of their engineers that design it, like Imhotep. And they have depictions of them moving enormous stones and statues that take, you know, 50, 60 people. They do it on sand here. Wait, I have this booted up in my Google if you want. Jamie. This is from later, but. Sorry, I hate Google sometimes, but this is from a little later. I think it's new kingdom, but it shows people moving this enormous statue. And so what they're actually doing is doing it on San. Come on, Washington Post.

And what year is this image from?

Oh, God, it's. I think it's new kingdom. So maybe 2500 years ago, something. No, more than that. 3000 years ago ish. But what they're showing is they do it on a sledge right here.

A sledge.

And then they pour water on the sand so that it can actually help move it. And so it makes it actually doable to move something that large. And so, I mean, I just want to get back to the point that, look, humans are smart people.

Can I ask you this, though? Is this. This is 2000 years ago.

Probably more like 3000.

Isn't that after these things are made, this?

Well, no, because the Egyptians kept constructing large things.

So they did have things like this that they made.

During this time, they stopped building pyramids, but they still built enormous temples like a carnegie.

And these enormous statues, sliding megalithic statues on wet sand. I'm not disputing that. But what I'm wondering is how you get a series of actually dozens of 70 ton granite blocks up to 300ft above the base of the pyramid to form the ceiling of the king's chamber and the floor and the ceilings of the relieving chambers above the king's chamber. No matter how much wet sand you've got, you're not going to get them 300ft in the air.

Levers.

Levers?

What?

Levers?

Yeah, well, levers made of wood. We can find this.

No, no, hang on. Levers made of wood. You've been to Giza, so you know what the great pyramid looks like. We're envisaging a ramp, right?

It's possible, yeah.

A ramp to bring stones up to that.

I'm envisioning very smart people with large labor forces. And the equipment needs me too.

I'm envisaging that too. But I find it difficult to see how your wet sand example gets 70 ton granite blocks 300ft in the air.

But you've got to make the concession that there's such a jump between what these people were able to do and what everybody else was able to do. There's such a difference. I mean, I think there's such a difference.

Doing something different is how I'd put it.

It's not just doing something different, it's doing something on a scale that no one is doing. 4500 years ago. That scale is insane. I mean, it's cool as hell, but it's also. It's so different. Yeah, it's as different to the rest of the world is to hunter gatherer civilizations that are in the Amazon, to people that are living in Manhattan.

And that's why the roman period, Egypt was a tourist destination. You know, to go there and see these marvels. And so if ever since they've been built, it's become a tourist destination because they're so visually striking and they really grab at everybody's imagination. Right. And so there's something very enigmatic about that. But I don't want to sort of say just because it's enigmatic and mysterious that we should not give credit to these people because they were. No, it's the same people, smart people.

No one's saying don't give credit to these people. I think even people that are dating Egypt back, like the hieroglyphs that date it back to more than 30,000 years, it's the same people. No one's saying it's different people that did it. What everyone's saying is like, how did they achieve the level of sophistication that they absolutely, undeniably had at the very most recent, 4500 years ago? So just that alone, like, what the fuck was going on there?

There's a date stamp at Giza. This concerns another issue between archeology and me, is what counts as it evidence? What can we regard as evidence? Archeology dismisses the great sphinx as evidence for an older civilization on the grounds that you've put can't be presented as evidence for an older civilization. And the other thing that archeology tends to dismiss is mythology and tradition. Can I give a small, quick presentation? Which is much to do with Egypt and much to do with what impassions me about this subject. And then we'll come back to flint. So this is another one of Santa's amazing pictures of the great pyramid from the air. The ancient Egyptians spoke of a time called Zeptepi, the first time when the gods walked the earth. And if we're going to find out when that was you need to have knowledge of an obscure astronomical phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes. Now, we all know that we, everybody's heard the song. We live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Actually, this connects to this idea because the earth wobbles on its axis, and it's the viewing platform from which we observe the stars.

It changes the times that particular stars rise in times of year, and it changes the positions of those stars in the sky as viewed from the air. Right now, at dawn on the spring equinox, the sun rises against the background of the constellation of Pisces. We live, if you like, in the age of Pisces, and we will do for the next hundred years or so. But because of the processional wobble, we're going to move into the age of Aquarius in about a hundred years. That just means that the constellation of Aquarius will house the sun on the spring equinox in that time because of the precessional wobble. And these shifts take place at the rate of about one degree every century. Now, the discoverer of precession is attributed, the discovery is attributed to a greek astronomer and mathematician called Hipparchus. And we're looking at 127 bc. But these guys, Giorgio de Santillana and Herthe von descend, in an amazing piece of work called Hamlet's mill, strongly dispute that. And they suggest that we're looking at an extremely ancient knowledge of procession, worldwide heritage of a lost civilization to which all subsequent civilizations in all parts of the globe, forgetful of the source of the precious legacy they received, are the ungrateful heirs.

Giorgio de Santillana was professor of the history of science at MIT. Herthe van descend was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University. So theyre no lightweights. They refer to the fact that a series of numbers keep cropping up in ancient myths all around the world, associated with imagery. And those numbers are all based on the number 72. I have to be quick about this, but 72 divided by two is 36. 72 plus 36 is 108. 108 divided by two is 54. There's a whole series of numbers in ancient mythology, far more ancient than the Greeks, which deploy these numbers. They go back into the rig Veda in written forms, and much, much earlier than that. If we go to Angkor in Cambodia, an amazing sight. Santa took this from a helicopter way back in the nineties. You'll find at ANgKOR a myth displayed on the walls, and that's called the churning of the milky OcEaN. And here we see the great serpent wrapped around the body of Mount Mandera. And teams of demons and angels are pulling on the body of the serpent. And this is seen as an image of precession of the precessional wobble by Santilliana and van descent.

And they point out that it's not Only expressed in myth, but also in architecture. So at ANgKOR thom, we've got 108 statues on the bridge. ThAt's a processional number. It's 72 plus 36, 54 on each side. And it's the churning of the milky ocean by Mount Mandera that's being displayed there. Angkor Wat is like the great Pyramid is aligned to within a fraction of a single degree of true north, south, east and west. And on the spring equinox, if you go to angkor and stand at the end of that long causeway right in the center, you'll observe this and you'll only observe it. Then you'll observe the sun rising directly over the central tower and sitting on top of the central tower of Angkor Wat. This site, nobody disputes it, is an equinoctial marshmallow. It's designed to celebrate the spring equinox. And that's what you see at that time. And at that time only. Let's jump over to Egypt now when we come to the Nile delta. Here's the great pyramid. Now, I'll give you some statistics. It's 481.39ft high. Originally, it's a bit lower today. It lost some 30ft from its top in an earthquake.

Footprint of the base, 13.1 acres. Weight 6 million tons. 2.3 million blocks lost. Casing stones also came off in that earthquake, 115,000 of them, weighing ten tons, each covering an area of 22 acres. Anger of slope is 52 degrees and this monument is aligned to within three sixtieths of a single degree of true north. Why do I pick three sixtieths? Because degrees are divided into 60 minutes. So we're talking about three arc minutes, a tiny fraction of a single degree of error in the great pyramid. The great pyramid seems to be speaking to the earth. It's not only aligned almost precisely to true north, it's placed very close to latitude 31 third of the way between the equator and the north Pole. And most mysteriously of all, if you take the height of the great pyramid and multiply it by 43,200, which is a precessional number, it's one of those numbers. You get the polar radius of the earth, and if you measure the base perimeter of the great pyramid and multiply it by the same number you get the equatorial circumference of the earth. So we have a monument that is perfectly aligned to geographical north and that encodes the dimensions of the earth on a scale based on a key motion of the earth itself, the precession of the earth's axis.

This, to me, is very clever. Now, I'm not going to support that here. There's not much time, but if anybody wants to freeze the frame and look at this slide, all this information comes from ies Edwards about the statistics of the great Pyramid. And the calculations are there. Now, there's the Giza plateau, there's our three great pyramids. It's hard to. Can you see the Sphinx in this, Flint?

No. Maybe I missed.

How about Eugene?

Is that it in the left hand corner?

Yeah, it's in the left there. It's in the left there. It's 270ft long, but you can see how it's kind of dwarfed by the. By the pyramids in the background. The great sphinx looks over the Nile valley. That's the Nile valley we're looking at. And the great sphinx is oriented perfectly due east. We've talked about the erosion of the sphinx. This is the view from the back of the sphinx's head. If you were there at the summer solstice, you would see the sun rising very far to the left, far to the north of east. If you were there at the winter solstice, you'd see the sun rising very far to the south of east. But if you're there on the spring equinox, you see the sphinx is looking directly at the rising sun, just like Angkor does. It's an equinoctial marker. It's clearly there to celebrate the equinoctial moment. And we find the same kind of metaphor of a whirling, churning process taking place in ancient Egypt, for example, here. And the question then becomes, was there a time when the lion sphinx looked at a lion in the sky? And yes, there was a time when the lion sphinx looked at a lion in the sky.

And that time is around 12,600 years ago. It's not a single moment, it's an epoch of several hundred years. But the constellation of Leo was. The age of Leo was rising, housing the sun 12,600 years ago. Procession can be used to fix the date of monument still is today. The Hoover dam has a star map built into it which freezes the skies above the Hoover dam. And the reason that is there, the architect said, in remote ages to come, intelligent people with knowledge of precession would be able to discern the astronomical time of the dam's construction. So let's use this processional tool to consider the age of the whole Giza plateau. I strongly reaffirm, I do not insist that the pyramids are 12,000 years old. I do insist that the Sphinx is 12,000 years old. I think it's a very strong argument that Robert Schoch has made. But I do think the ground platforms for the sphinx were there. I think for the pyramids were there 12,000 years ago. And I think the project was completed much later by the ancient Egyptians. You need to know a bit about egyptian mythology. The God Osiris, who walked the earth in the legendary Zeptepi, the first time, murdered by 72 conspirators.

Another one of those processional numbers eventually becomes the ruler of the ancient egyptian afterlife kingdom, which is called the duat, which is both an underworld and a region of the sky. And here's Robert Baval's Orion correlation. And one of Robert's strongest critics is Ed Krupp from the Griffiths Observatory in Los Angeles, who doesn't accept the correlation. Nevertheless, he does accept that, according to the pyramid text, the pharaoh rose to the stars as Orion. Egyptian astronomy recognized Orion, at least his belt, as the celestial incarnation of Osiris. And I want to pay tribute to Robert Baval. He's another researcher in this alternative field who has suffered massive, heart rending attacks by the academic establishment, and yet who has contributed a key idea that is worthy of further consideration. One of the reasons I don't separate the great pyramids from the ancient Egyptians is that there are four shafts cut through the body of the great pyramid, and this is not disputed. The southern shaft of the king's chamber points directly at the belt of Orion and specifically at the lowest of the three stars as it crosses the meridian, which is the north south line in the sky in the epoch that the pyramids are supposedly built, around 2500 bc.

And so do all the other four shafts also target stars in that epoch, the epoch of 2500 bc. But when we come back to the sphinx, we have to remember this alignment is slow. It would have remained recognizable for more than a thousand years, roughly the younger dryas, roughly from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago. What confronts us at Giza, in my view, is a three dimensional representation of the sky of about 12,800 to 11,600 years ago. We have the sphinx looking due east at the constellation of Leo. At the moment the sun bisects the horizon. We find that the constellation of Orion is sitting due south on the meridian with its three belt stars in the same pattern as the three great pyramids. Pyramids on the ground. And not only that, but precession has caused the orientation of the belt stars to change. In 2500 BC, they were in the wrong orientation. 10,500 BC, they're in the right orientation. And I'm just asking, are we looking at the date stamp of Zeptepi the first time, written in the astronomical language of precession? And lastly, in case anybody doubts that we've made up these images, these are shots from stellarium.

This is 10,600 BC. This is the due east view from Giza, looking at the constellation of Leo rising in direct line with the gaze of the sphinx. As the sun breaks the horizon, Leo is a bit higher. If we look due south at that moment, we'll see the constellation of Orion sitting due south on the meridian. And finally, we have Orion and the sphinx in this single image. These are genuine images from stellarium. Anybody can have a computer software program and go look at the ancient skies. And the ancient skies tell us that there's this astonishing connection between the sphinx in its equinoctial alignment and the constellation of Leo, and between the great pyramids and the constellation of Orion as it looked 12,500 years ago.

Flint, what is your take on this? The understanding of the processional equinoxes? Do you buy it?

Unsurprisingly, no. So let me explain. So, my issue here, let's. There's a bunch of things that Graham talked about, and I have replies to a few different ones. And then I'd like to do a quick presentation of. Jeez, this has been a long conversation. So I think the issue with the lion facing Leo rests on that assumption. So, obviously, it's facing the sunrise. It even aligns reasonably well with the equinox. But we don't have any examples of, say, a constellation sign facing another constellation sign. That's a. It's a one off example that, as I started at the very beginning, archeology is built upon patterns. And so a one off example to me is not convincing that that's the intention of that, is to have it facing Leo, because we only have this one example, and it's an interesting idea, but I don't see it as proven at all if we want to get into some of the math. So, look, I had surgery this last year, and I was listening to one of your podcasts, Graham, while I was zonked out of my mind on killers.

That must have been fun.

Yeah. And so it wasn't a Joe Rogan podcast. It was a different one you did. But so I wanted to check out this math about the pyramid. And so what? I mean, I know that you did not originate with this math, but you use it a lot to explain how cultures see the procession. And so, in a sense, you take the height of the pyramid, 146.5 meters. You're trying to see how it relates to the polar radius of the earth, 6,356,000 meters. And then you're using this precession number, 72, which is the amount that the earth wobble changes by one degree, is 72 years. And so you multiply it by 43,200. Why is that a processional number? Because that's 72 times 600. And I checked it. I checked it in different kinds of things. If you do it in feet or you do it in metric system, it works, right? Because that's how math works with multiplication, it's going to be transferable to different kind of units, and it's 99.57% accurate. But then I thought to myself, wait a second, can we find this elsewhere? And sure enough, as Graham states, you can. So I went to my own backyard, the Parthenon in Greece.

And the Parthenon has 46 inner columns plus 23 outer columns, for a total of 69 columns, which I think is a pretty cool number in and of itself. You got 69, and then you can multiply 69 by 576,000, which is also a processional number of 72 times 8000, and you get 39,744,000, which is 99.17% average, accurate to the global circumference of the earth. And kind of my point here, though, is that this will work for everything, because you have such a large number, you can solve it yourself. So let's take 420. We all love 420, right? So you just do this backwards. You take the polar radius of the earth, 6,356,000. Divide that by 420, divide it by our precession, 72, and you get the solution to this problem, which is 210. Let's round that to 210, which is pretty cool, because that's half of 420, plus it's three times seven times ten. And then when you do it in reverse, 420 times 15,120, which is that processional number of 72 times 210, and you get 6,350,400. It's 99.91% accurate, more accurate than the height of the great pyramid. So every time you smoke a joint, you are connecting with the earth mathematically.

The reality is that math is there to find relationships between numbers. And so we can go and find those very easily if we work them out. And I'm not saying that you did this in reverse. I'm saying that we're always going to find mathematical relationships between such numbers. And so that's what I think is really important here to think about that. It's always going to be there. If you look, it's not something that the Egyptians necessarily encoded in there. That's a large assumption, if you see what I mean.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. What doesn't make sense to me is how do you think they were able to align the pyramid to true north, south, east and west within such a slight degree of error? And do you think they had knowledge at all about the processional equinoxes?

For the second one, I'd say I see no evidence of knowledge of the processional equinoxes in ancient egyptian art, architecture. In terms of the first question, aligning it with true north, there's different ways you can do that with the North Star or by even on an equinox, if you hold up an obelisk or a stick and you trace the shadow that it makes, you're going to end up getting true north, east, southeast, west. And so there's different ways that they could have worked out what true north was. Which one they used, I'm not sure.

But the level of accuracy that they achieved, smart people just be kind of beyond smart. That's what freaks me out about the whole subject. It's like, how was this? Regardless of the argument about the date, whatever it is, humans built it. They did. Somehow they made something that is so immense and so mind blowing that today people scratch their heads and say, how.

Yeah. And I think that that's such a cool thing when you think about the past. You know, they didn't have tv. They didn't have Joe Rogan. Rogan to listen to. They had the stars above them. And so, you know, I fully agree with Graham that a lot of ancient cultures are looking at the stars, and we can track different times when they're aligning things with solstices, equinoxes, or different.

What do you make of what looks like ancient drill marks and all these different bizarre ways? It seems like they were carving the stones out. That's kind of inexplicable.

Yeah, see, I'm not sure if I'd say it's inexplicable. You oftentimes see those drill marks, and so they're not as precise as some people always claim on online and stuff like that.

Not just that they were precise, but that it required a drill that moves at an insane speed.

Well, I think it required a lot of sand. There was the abrasion of the sand that actually did that. And so the sand itself is just slowly abrading down the granite with a.

Core, but coring it. Like, what would you use to do that?

A drill made of copper or bronze and then sand and water. Yeah.

There's never been shown to be possible.

Against myths.

On YouTube, they've done those core samples. Like, they dug into.

They drilled into granite like that.

Yeah, I know that they tried to cut them, and it took a long time.

Oh, yeah.

Song back and forth.

I think that's what we need to think about, is this takes a long ass time. It's a huge achievement of human energy and things like that.

I'd like to just finish on this point of the date stamp. It's not one thing, it's two things. It's the three pyramids on the ground and their relationship to Orion. At the same moment that the sphinx, equinoctially targeted very precisely, not slightly, but perfectly due east, is gazing at its celestial counterpart in the sky. And the Milky Way is in position over the Nile river as well. At the same time, a picture of the sky that we're looking at at Giza. A picture of the sky 12,600 years before our time that we're looking at at Giza. And I don't think that's a coincidence. I think that's a deliberate, intentional date stamp that's been placed on that place. It's not just one monument. It's a whole complex of monuments on the Giza plateau, and indeed the Nile river as well, which are being put on the ground to mirror the sky at that time. And I think it's worth taking seriously. I think it's worth investigating. And then we add the issue of the erosion of the sphinx to this, which also puts it back to 12,000 years. And I think it's unfortunate that archeology is so hurried to dismiss all of this and so unwelcoming to the possibility that we might be missing something in the human story.

Can I give a little conclusion myself?

Sure. Please do.

All right, Jamie, do you mind if I could share my slides? First of all, I really want to express thank you to both of you for having me.

Thank you. Thanks for coming.

I want to say, I'm not here to tell people what to believe. I really am not. I'm here to try to share the kind of evidence that we have and what archeologists actually do, and I really do strongly believe that we do update with new evidence. I think that every single paper we publish is trying to change the paradigm of how we see the past with new methods, new evidence and new things like that. And what we're starting to realize is that, that humans were very resilient and very innovative. We're seeing these mammoth bone structures going back 30,000 years, something like that, 20,000 years. I think I got that date wrong. It's been a long chat, but so we're seeing this evidence for sort of major hunter gatherer monuments that is growing and really changing our picture of who we are. But at the same time, I want to say that archeology is very much about cultural heritage around the world. We need to give credit to the people that things, and we need to really understand how modern people see their own cultural heritage and respect that. And so I just want to give a shout out to everybody listening from all over the world.

Be proud of who you come from. But lastly, not lastly, I have a couple things I want to say, but I want to say there's major threats to archeology that are going on in the world right now. There was just a major BBC article from yesterday, Wales, where I am right now. There's a 20% across the board cutting to cultural heritage in Wales. They're talking about closing the National Museum in Cardiff, the National Museum of Wales, one of the jewels of that sector there. And so I want to draw everybody's attention. I'll share the links with you guys to this petition in front of the welsh parliament to try to get this debated, because it's really important that these scale of cuts do not happen. Everybody that's listening, Graham, I think you and me can agree that archeological research is important. You could not do the research you do without the kind of cultural heritage initiatives that happen.

Absolutely not. I couldn't do any of the work I do without the work that's been done by archeologists. And I've said that on Joe's show multiple times.

I agree with you, and I want people to support the funding of archeology history at Cardiff University, where I teach, there's threats to cut all ancient languages from the program, from the teaching program. Latin, ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Hebrew. And so this is a huge deal. If you want to have people go out and do their own research, we need to have these kind of subjects available at public universities, like Cardiff University, one of the top archeology departments in the world. It was just ranked just a few weeks ago in one of the world rankings as like in the top 20 or 30 in the world. It had just closed. Sheffield, where I learned how to study ancient animal remains. University of Sheffield just completely axed and destroyed a few years ago. And so what we're seeing is a complete defunding of the humanities and the social sciences in history and archeology, anthropology, classical studies and more. And so please, if we care about understanding these mysteries from the past, we need to fund being able to teach people. We need to fund the actual research into it.

Can I ask what's the motivation behind defunding archeology?

Saving money to put on what? I have no idea. New buildings. We don't actually cost that much. Most of our research is. Is funded through grants that we competitively get. Like my grant that I use to do my isotope analysis or it's funded through private donations.

I can understand how with our knowledge of history it's so. It's so fascinating that archeology would somehow or another be underfunded.

Yeah, it's real bad. UNC Greensboro just seems cut their anthropology archeology.

It's crazy when you consider what our culture does spend money on, right? That it's not spending money on finding out who we are and where we came from, finding out about our past.

Is there better evidence that we're sick?

Yeah, it's very good evidence that we're sick.

That we don't want funding of our.

We want to live in the sick civilization.

We tick all the boxes for the next lost civilization.

I'll get to that in a second.

Oh no, I would like to. Since you've had your moment here. Flinder, do you have.

Oh no, I have just a couple more things to say and then you can finish up.

We agree.

Sorry. We also face threats like looting. So the trade in archeological artifacts usually comes from looting done by terrorists, different cartels around the world. And we need funding to protect sites and things like that. But I want to share that there's good archeology on YouTube. I want to give a shout out to the world of antiquity. Stefan Milo, Archeology tube there's a new channel by Doctor Smitzy Nathan that I think is really interesting. Pause this. Go check out some of these channels. There's also a lot of really great archeology podcasts. I want to give a big shout out to the tales from Atlantis, the dirt movies we dig, and one that's not on here that I'm going to appear on next week. Talking about the Bronze Age collapse and climate change in the eastern Mediterranean is. Let's talk about myths, baby. Hosted by Liv Albert. So check those out. But lastly, I just want to talk about why it matters that we study the past. When we look at scholarship and understanding the collapse of societies, what we usually see is human resilience. It's not like everybody dies. People survive. It's the upper crust of society that disappears.

It's the palaces, it's the political structures, it's the major temples, it's the monuments, it's the art. Normal people survive. And so what I want to say is, if you are wealthy and you're listening to this and you're worried about societal collapse, don't go and try to hide from it. You need to invest in our society. That is what your wealth and status is based upon, is our society itself. So you need to invest in the resilience of the people around you and not thinking that you can protect yourself. Because if you look at history. Go read these books. Eric Klein's book comes out tomorrow. Guy Middleton's book goes all over the world and looks at collapse. It is the rich and the elites who get eaten. So we have to invest in everyone if we want to survive this. And my own research into climate change at the end of the Bronze Age, what it shows is that the ancient Greeks adapted too late. It took them hundreds of years to realize that the climate had dried, and it took them hundreds of years to adapt their food production systems. And so let's not do that.

We understand how the world is changing around us. Let's listen to that and try to invest in our future. Everything we do, whether it's trading stocks, deciding how to fix our plumbing, deciding on what we're going to do, it's based on our knowledge of. Of the past. And so we need to invest in our knowledge from the past and what it can tell us so that we can act properly today. Thank you.

Ironically, you sound like you're preparing us for the collapse of civilization.

I already gave that interview.

It sounds like what you're saying.

Yeah.

Sounds like rich people better put your money back into society.

Exactly.

Or we're fucked. Graham, you want to wrap this up?

Yeah. It's been an interesting conversation, Flint. There's so much, both from my side and from yours, that we've not been able to touch on. My request to you is I showed that clip where you're calling for a crusade against pseudo archeology with pseudoarchaeology from the beginning. I believe your friend John Hoops, or your co author John Hoops, is one of. Of the. The moderators of my Wikipedia page, which people cannot edit. My Wikipedia page. It's locked. Now the request that I have is, is it necessary for archeology to insult those of us who come from different perspectives and look at the past in a different way? Insult people like Robert Baval, insult people like Robert Schock, insult people like John Major Jenkins, who John Hoops had a horrible campaign against back in the 2010s through until John died in. John Major Jenkins died in 2018. Does mainstream archeology have to insult us all the time in that way? Is it not possible to have a meeting of minds and say, well, here are a bunch of outsiders. We archeologists think that they're completely crazy, but let's actually entertain their views. Let's look at them. Let's not be so combative about this.

When I first started writing about this fingerprints of the gods in 1995, I was immediately attacked by archeology. It began immediately. BBC Horizon devoted a whole program to trying to rubbish my work. And having gave platform to archeologists to do that, why do we need to have this conflict? Why is it not possible to have multiple points of view on the past? Why ultimately, does archeology so much want to control the narrative about the past? And why do so by attaching notions like racism and white supremacy to people that archeology disagrees with? Is it not possible to have disagreements that don't, that don't involve all of that? I'll tell you frankly, I was hurt, badly, wounded badly as a human being by this association that you were very largely responsible for, of my work with white supremacy, racism and all the other stuff that's written about in the SaaS letter. I don't think any of that was necessary. I don't think any of that got to grips with the fundamentals of my work or my ideas. It was just an attempt to write me off and to smear me. And I think it's most unfortunate.

And perhaps if anybody can learn a lesson from this, it's actually, we're all on the same side. We're all looking at the past. We're all trying to solve the mystery of the past. Some of us are doing it in a, in a rigorous scientific manner, in the manner that you are. Some of us are doing it in multiple different ways. I've devoted 30 years of my life to this subject. I'm passionate about this subject. It matters to me. I have never knowingly told a lie, although I am constantly accused of lying. I tell my truth and I try to represent my truth as best as I can, and I believe that's true for the majority of people. In the alternative, can't we have some kind of meeting of minds between alternative approaches to the past and the archeological approach to the past. And is it not possible that something beautiful might grow out of that?

If I could speak to that? I think the problem is one of communication and this bizarre modern time where someone says something and then a bunch of people attack that thing that someone says. There's a big difference between a rational, calm, kind person being able to have a disagreement with someone face to face, because, like, I think today there were some contentious moments. But I think overall, we set a very nice tone of just letting each side speak to what they believe and what the evidence shows and have a very, I think, a productive conversation about it. And I think part of the problem is most people don't have access to the people that are saying these things that they disagree with. So what do they do? They make a YouTube video or they make a blog post, or they make a podcast, whatever it is, and they dispute it. And they attack that person. And maybe they insult that person, or maybe they connect that person to a bunch of horrible things because they're so emotionally invested in one side or the other side being correct, whether they're right or wrong. And I think it's a function that it's a part of how human beings aren't really meant to talk to each other that way.

They're not meant to share ideas. They're meant to do this. Human beings are designed to sit down and talk to each other. And I think so much of our world's problems, other than obviously, geopolitical issues and military issues, and so much of our differences with each other, it's a lot of it is a lack of communication. We don't necessarily honestly communicate about things. And where you get a more nuanced understanding of who this person is you're talking to, where they. They stand, who they are, what their beliefs are, how did they get to these places? What caused them to think like this? And it's also the effect that it has on the person who's attacked, who wants to kind of attack back, you know, which is very unproductive. It's very unproductive to carry around that pain. It's very unproductive to carry around that criticism. And it burdens you, and it takes away resources from all other parts of your life. It can create stress. It can create a ripple effect that affects personal relationships, excuse me, business relationships, all sorts of things in your life, your health, whether or not you take care of yourself.

You're so embattled in these conflicts with human beings that are almost mostly unnecessary, especially at that level amongst kind, intelligent people that really just want to find out what's true.

A good statement, Joe.

We can all be nicer to each other.

I agree with you.

We can all.

We can all be nicer. And it doesn't need to. It doesn't need to involve pouring scorn and mobilizing hatred against others. As I say, I've been involved in this conflict with archeology for 30 plus years. But the thing that hurt me the most is this bizarre association of me with racism and white supremacy and anti semitism and misogyny. All these words are in the Society for American Archeology Letter, which tried to get my show branded as science fiction.

So, I mean, one thing that I would say is I read your books in the upcoming release of your show. Right. And the tone between your books and the tone between your show is night and day. You were very compelled.

What do you mean by the upcoming release of my show?

I meant back two years ago.

Yeah.

So you read.

Read all my books.

No, several of them, though.

Okay.

You have a lot of books.

Because that's the other thing I'm going to pick you up on. That I'd like to say right now is in a show like this, we've gone a bit, probably over 3 hours.

Oh, yeah. We're at like four, 4 hours and 30 minutes, but it's not enough.

I've written a large number of books, thousands of footnotes. For those who'd like to evaluate my work. Do check out the books. It can't. It can't be possibly sampled here, just as Flint's can't, on the basis of a three hour show. But I think we've done well. I think there is a. I think there is some kind of meeting of minds. I like you as a person, but.

I hope that we change our tones on both ends, because, like I said, the tone you chose in that show was offensive to archeologists. Yeah.

That was, that was because I'd been offended by archeologists for 30 years.

But if we want to end this and take the temperature down. Yep.

Yeah.

We have to think about how we do this. And we need to talk about different aspects of that in a friendlier way.

Here. Here.

So are you. Are you still going to crusade against pseudo archeology?

Well, what is it?

Well, I think. But the best way to crusade against stuff that's not correct is to do what you've done. Just come. Come.

That's why I agreed to come here. Yeah, it's great.

And I think everybody's goal is the same. We want to find out what happened. Like what this incredible history of the human species. It's so bizarre and especially when it comes to. I am so fascinated with Egypt that one, to me, is the craziest of crazy. Like, what was going on there, like, what changed in the world that that's not possible anymore, that societies like that don't exist. And how did they exist 4500 years ago in this one place?

And they maintained their civilization for 3000 years?

Yes, it's crazy. It was also a place rich with resources at the time. There's a lot of. A lot of factors, right. But it's just. That's the most important thing. It's like, what happened? What happened? What, what was the process? So thank you, Flint, for coming on, and thank you for explaining all that stuff about grain and agriculture that was really, really fascinating.

Next time I'll share my research on bones and ancient drugs.

I want to hear it. Let's talk. Let's talk. And thank you, Graham. It's always great to talk to you and I really appreciate all your work and your years of dedication to this. And it's just opened up these conversations and I think it's interesting. It's just really interesting to find out what happened.

Yeah. Well, Joe, thank you to you for hosting this first time ever kind of event. My pleasure.

I think it was great. I think this could be done with a lot of subjects, you know, like, people don't have to be assholes.

You can all be nice. That's a beautiful line to add. People don't have to be.

You don't have to be. All right, bye, everybody. Buddy. Bye.