Skip to content
The Joe Rogan ExperienceThe Joe Rogan Experience

Joe Rogan Experience #2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint Dibble

Graham Hancock, formerly a foreign correspondent for "The Economist," has been an international bestselling author for more than 30 years with a series of books, notably "Fingerprints of the Gods," "Magicians of the Gods" and "America Before," which investigate the controversial possibility of a lost civilization of the Ice Age destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. Graham is the presenter of the hit Netflix documentary series "Ancient Apocalypse." https://grahamhancock.com https://www.youtube.com/GrahamHancockDotCom https://twitter.com/Graham__Hancock Flint Dibble is an archaeologist at Cardiff University who has conducted field work and laboratory analyses around the Mediterranean region from Stone Age caves to Egyptian tombs to Greek and Roman cities. Flint enjoys sharing archaeology - from the nitty gritty to the grand - with people around the world. Subscribe to his YouTube channel, "Archaeology with Flint Dibble," or follow him on X/Twitter for behind-the-scenes deep dives into 21st century archaeology. www.youtube.com/flintdibble https://twitter.com/FlintDibble Links for donations to: the Archaeological Institute of America: https://www.archaeological.org/donate/ the Council for British Archaeology: https://www.archaeologyuk.org/support-us/donations.html the Society for American Archaeology: https://ecommerce.saa.org/saa/Member/SAAMember/Fundraising/SAA_Donate.aspx

Graham HancockguestJoe RoganhostFlint DibbleguestGuest (very short clip, unidentified)guestDr. Danny Hilman Natawidjaja (likely, Gunung Padang geologist)guestCurly TlapoyawaguestMarika Stahlguest
Apr 16, 20244h 26mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:06

    Intro

    1. GH

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

    2. NA

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

  2. 0:06 – 2:02

    Setting the stage: archaeology vs. “lost Ice Age civilization” debate format

    1. JR

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music) Okay, good. 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. Uh, Flint, uh, please, uh, introduce yourself to everybody, what you do, and...

    2. FD

      Yeah. Hi. My name is Flint, and I'm an archeologist. I've done archeology my whole life. Uh, my dad was an archeologist, and, uh, 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 gonna try to get that across while here, you know, that's, that's my goal.

    3. JR

      Fantastic. Um, take that microphone and try to keep it about a fifth from your, a-

    4. GH

      I'll just-

    5. JR

      ... fist from your face.

    6. GH

      One second. We have to, his, uh, HDMI is not working. It's not going through.

    7. FD

      Mine is not?

    8. JR

      Oh, it's okay. All right. We had a bit of a technical issue, but we're up. So Flint, uh, you were just explaining how, uh, your, your passion is archeologists, you're an archeologist and, and you have this opportunity to k- sort of educate people on how archeology is done.

    9. FD

      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.

    10. JR

      Okay. Terrific. Um, and Graham, everybody knows you. You've been on this podcast-

    11. GH

      Well, l-

    12. JR

      ... about 10 times.

    13. GH

      Largely thanks to you, Joe. (clears throat)

    14. JR

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

    15. GH

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

    16. JR

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

    17. GH

      Yeah, yeah.

    18. JR

      And it was all in my house, and we-

    19. GH

      It was.

    20. JR

      ... we ate pizza and it was-

    21. GH

      Yeah.

    22. JR

      ... it was fantastic. Um, Jamie's setting everything up, making sure we're good to go. Okay. Um, the way we'd agreed to do b- this is, Flint, you wanted to open and you wanted to do about 10 minutes and just sort of explain things.

    23. FD

      Yeah.

    24. JR

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

    25. GH

      Yeah.

    26. FD

      Yeah, thank you. Um, Jamie, do you mind pulling up my screen?

    27. JR

      Here we go.

  3. 2:02 – 3:52

    Flint’s ‘artifact lesson’: why context and patterns matter more than a single object

    1. FD

      All right. So look, uh, one of the things that I see when I'm online and, 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 is, can see the screen. So Joe, do you mind actually just kinda describing what this artifact is that you see?

    2. JR

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

    3. FD

      Yeah, exactly. (laughs)

    4. JR

      (laughs) Uh, well, this is a Athenian red figure from, uh, 470 BC. And, uh, it is two people having sex. It's a man on top of a woman. You see his penis, you see the, it's, uh, yeah, it's very graphic.

    5. FD

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

    6. JR

      (clicks tongue) Well, I mean, you're finding f- artwork and, and parts of civilization that were left behind and, you know, have been around, in this case since over 2,000 years.

    7. FD

      Yeah. And for a long time, scholars thought that a piece like this described sort of life in Athens, and they connected it to Athenian texts, sort of like Plato describing people having sex even. Right? And, uh, on the other hand, however, every single piece of Athenian artwork with graphic sex like this, couples actually fucking with penises and stuff like that, ends up in Italy. It's part of an Athenian pornographic export market. And Kathleen Lynch and Sean Lewis and others have published on this. And so the real point is, is that what we're looking at is, uh, is the painters are designing something for consumers in Italy, and particularly in Etruria. And this instead fits better in with telling us about life in Etruscans and the kind of stuff that they show in their tombs, sort of romance between people or the kind of sexual scenes that they design themselves in Italy as well. And the whole point here is that 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

  4. 3:52 – 5:47

    Archaeology as big data: surveys, LiDAR, looting evidence, and lab precision

    1. FD

      the Horn of Africa with every single archeological site that's been surveyed there. And there's 171,000 of them.

    2. JR

      That's incredible.

    3. FD

      Yeah.

    4. JR

      It just looks amazing.

    5. FD

      It's just, and this is just, uh, 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-

    6. JR

      And this is, this is, uh, for people listening says, "Ancient lowland Maya complex as revealed by airborne laser scanning of Northern Guatemala." That's amazing.

    7. FD

      Yeah. And so, I mean, we have this huge data set, and with it we get high resolution. For example, the bottom image in red, it shows looters' trenches 'cause while there's a lot of archeology, 'cause people have been everywhere, there's, it, it's very fragile and it's at risk. And that's something I also wanna take some time to get across a bit while I'm here. Um, 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, um, from Azoria. And in particular, I also wanna get across the kind of precision we have. Right now, I l- do what's called isotope analysis. I look at oxygen and carbon isotopes in the teeth of these animals. And by taking multiple samples on different parts of the teeth, you can see the different areas that I've drilled on that tooth on the right, right? And what that does is it lets me understand the diet of the animal and where it's moving in the landscape seasonally. So in different seasons of the year, I can understand the kind of ways that people are raising animals. We can do this with human remains too,

  5. 5:47 – 13:51

    Flint’s two-pronged challenge: underwater/coastlines and the origins of agriculture

    1. FD

      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, I'm here to try to discuss with Graham, um, and to test his lost civilization hypothesis. He has this i- he's written about it, many books, and he's, uh, 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 glo- a global cataclysm at that time and the survivors introduced agriculture, architecture, astronomy, and arts to hunter-gatherers. And so I'm trying to ta- 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'm- I mean, archeologists were fairly sure this does not exist. We've been looking for this kind of civilization for several hundred years. It's- it- it's 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, 103,000-year-old stone tools from Egypt. And so we have just so much Ice Age evidence, and Graham usually ignores it. And he claims that the- his civilization-

    2. JR

      Do you have your notifications on or something? I do not.

    3. FD

      I don't know what that is.

    4. JR

      I think it's the dongle. The dongle is doing that?

    5. FD

      I'm sorry.

    6. JR

      Yeah. D- maybe, if you hit mute, maybe it might stop it. But-

    7. FD

      Yeah, I just muted it.

    8. JR

      Okay.

    9. FD

      Sorry about that.

    10. JR

      Good. No worries. No worries.

    11. FD

      And so this, this-

    12. JR

      So you, you, your claim was that Graham ignores this?

    13. FD

      My claim is that he doesn't ... he ignores most of the evidence for hunter-gatherers in the Ice Age, which is, we have-

    14. JR

      Is that he ignores it or th- that he doesn't focus on it as much as he's focused on the ac- ancient advanced civilization?

    15. FD

      I- I mean, I think that's one and the same. I think if you're gonna 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 'cause it's underwater. It's been, you know ... We've had, uh, 200 feet of sea level rise since the Younger Dryas, and therefore it's not accessible. And so I really wanna 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 wanna show. I wanna share this kinda evidence. Some of it's new, some of it's not. But I think it's the kinda thing that it has a direct bearing on looking for such an Ice Age civilization.

    16. JR

      When you're studying, um, these coastal areas where these Ice Age people lived and you're s- you're studying these underwater, um, whatever ... Uh, w- what would you call them? Are they, uh, cities? Are they towns? Are they villages?

    17. FD

      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.

    18. JR

      So it's where they had their camp?

    19. FD

      Yeah, or maybe just where they drove, uh, game along-

    20. JR

      Oh, okay.

    21. FD

      ... to hunt them. But most of what's underwater are lithic scatters, scatters of stone tools. Stuff like this.

    22. JR

      What do you have there?

    23. FD

      I have a series of different stone tools. I'll-

    24. JR

      Come on. Give it up.

    25. FD

      ... show them off a little later. But yeah.

    26. JR

      Let me touch one of them.

    27. FD

      Yeah, sure.

    28. JR

      Uh, how old is this?

    29. FD

      Uh, these are all- these are all modern replicas.

    30. JR

      Oh, okay.

  6. 13:51 – 17:35

    Open data and ‘archaeology isn’t linear’: terminology, transparency, and public access

    1. FD

      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.

    2. JR

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

    3. FD

      Yeah. But it's now open. For the last 20 years-

    4. JR

      Oh, okay.

    5. FD

      ... if you go to the museum in Naples, they have what's called the Gabinetto Segreto, and it has all the erotic art from Pompeii and Herculaneum and things like that. And 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 Service, 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, the evidence is just enormous, this database for hunter-gatherers, and so I, I, I think it's important that we deal with the existing evidence and see where it leads us, if you see what I mean.

    6. JR

      And what is the oldest evidence for hunter-gatherers? Just for the audience? Like-

    7. FD

      Oh, God. I mean, that goes back f- h- you know, a million years or something.

    8. JR

      A million year-

    9. FD

      Pre-homo, homo sapiens. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    10. JR

      Okay. And but, so, but in terms of what we would consider a Stone Age man or, you know, w- early homo sapien, what, what is like the earliest buildings that we know of? What's the earliest tools that we know of? What do we have?

    11. FD

      The earliest tools we know of are many hundreds of thousands of years. Right? Um, before modern homo sapiens.

    12. JR

      Similar to the ones you just showed us?

    13. FD

      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 uh, the earliest stone tools are quite large, um, 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 knap. 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, a manmade stone tool versus just a piece of shatter, like a rock.

    14. JR

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

    15. FD

      Yeah, exactly.

    16. JR

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

    17. FD

      You even have some lovely deer antler that could be used for that, right? (laughs)

    18. JR

      Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

    19. FD

      Yeah.

    20. JR

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

    21. FD

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

    22. JR

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

    23. FD

      I think what we can say is we can understand, start pinpointing the starts of domestication and things like that.

    24. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    25. FD

      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.

    26. JR

      Right.

    27. FD

      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, 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.

    28. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    29. FD

      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.

    30. JR

      Okay.

  7. 17:35 – 23:38

    Flint’s pointed questions: metallurgy in ice cores, shipwreck expectations, and preservation

    1. FD

      Yeah. And so, I- I just wanna end with a couple questions for Graham, if he's willing. Um, in- in- at different times, he's described that the civilization that he's looking for from 12,000 years ago, it was advanced as, 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- I wonder what we're trying to look for, right? And so, I know that this is kinda how the last conversation with Michael Shermer started. (laughs) And so, I get that. But I do wanna just quickly say, Graham has- has acknowledged that there's a good chance there's no metallurgy, for example, um, 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- 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- 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, 'cause 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 three million shipwrecks from around the world. And so one of my questions for Graham is if this is a global civilization with ships, why is it that we don't have shipwrecks from this global civilization? I see this as a big, big problem. If we're looking for an- a- 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.

    2. JR

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

    3. FD

      Um, well, there was one that was just published from about, I think it was about 6,000, 7,000 years ago, off the coast of Italy that I saw. Um, something around there would s- say, what I'd say is around the oldest that we have. Yeah.

    4. JR

      And at what point in time do- these are mostly wooden boats?

    5. FD

      Yeah, these are mostly wooden boats. Yeah.

    6. JR

      What point in time would they deteriorate completely?

    7. FD

      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 o- on land, for example.

    8. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    9. FD

      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 th- you know, in a lot of underwater environments, it'll just preserve as long as it's in homeostasis.

    10. JR

      Which is why that, uh, explorer's boat that sank, uh, that hit the- w- whose boat was that? Do you r- do you know the boat I'm talking about?

    11. FD

      No, I don't know it from.

    12. JR

      Famous explorer. It's this beautiful wooden boat that's almost completely intact at the bottom of the ocean.

    13. FD

      Uh-huh.

    14. JR

      I think it hit an iceberg.

    15. FD

      Yeah. Like-

    16. JR

      And wh- which explorer was that, Jamie? You remember that, dude? We- we- there's an amazing video of it. It's amazing. Like they're just b- zooming in on this- this boat, and i- it just looks almost exactly like it looked when it sank, 'cause the water's freezing cold. That's it right there. Look at that. Ernest Shackleton.

    17. FD

      Oh, yeah. Okay.

    18. JR

      Isn't that incredible?

    19. FD

      I have seen this. Yeah.

    20. JR

      It's incredible. Like the whole boat, just imagine what it would have been to have been on that boat back then.

    21. FD

      And I mean, the preservation underwater is amazing. There's this shipwreck off the coast of Italy that I just presented, uh, 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- the Roman cargo is still preserved.

    22. JR

      Wow.

    23. FD

      And so, the just underwater preservation is just freaky. And-

    24. JR

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

    25. FD

      Oh, yeah.

    26. JR

      Yeah?

    27. FD

      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.

    28. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    29. FD

      And so typically, when things are buried, they're very stable. Or when they're, you know, sitting- it depends on where you are on the bottom of the ocean. But typically, it's very, very stable. In fact, the worst place to be is the tidal zone. So when sea level rise is very slow, and an area is stuck in that tidal zone, things will get battered. But if things are deeply deposited quickly, or sea level rise is very quick, that actually helps preserve stuff. And so that's how we can still find these kind of shipwrecks and Ice Age sites and other sort of settlements underwater.

    30. JR

      Now, what about the shifting of sediment at the bottom of the ocean when you're dealing with things like 10, 20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago?

  8. 23:38 – 37:15

    Graham’s rebuttal: Clovis First as a case study in paradigm resistance

    1. GH

      (laughs) Flint, first of all, thank you for joining me here.

    2. FD

      Oh, yeah. Thank you for having me.

    3. GH

      Uh, it's, in a way, a historic occasion, uh, 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. Uh, and I'm grateful to you for sitting in the hot seat and-

    4. FD

      (laughs)

    5. GH

      ... doing that. Uh, I think it's, uh, I think, I think it's really, uh, re- really valuable, and I, I, I hope the audience will, will find it useful. Um, I'm gonna try and recall a few of your questions. The, the, 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, that I can, uh, put form on it, I think we're looking at a civilization, like all civilizations, that emerged out of shamanism. Um, I believe that they did have rather advanced astronomy, um, and, uh, a knowledge of the world, um, but I don't compare... Wh- when I speak of a 19th century level of technology, I'm talking specifically about, uh, knowledge of, um, longitude. The longitude problem was not solved by our civilization until the middle of the 18th century. Um, and, uh, 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, uh, I think there's compelling evidence that it's, that it's much, much, uh, earlier than that. I'm not quite sure where to start with my, with my first presentation, but, um, you're telling us that archeology is very keen on new ideas and wants to really explore and investigate the past. Is that right?

    6. FD

      That's my perspective, yes.

    7. GH

      That's your perspective, all right. Let's have a, let's have a look at, um, at Clovis First. Now, um, (clears throat) tell me what your view on the Clovis First, uh, thesis is.

    8. FD

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

    9. GH

      Mm-hmm. And that's... So that would be what decade?

    10. FD

      That would be the early 2000s.

    11. GH

      The early 2000s.

    12. FD

      Yeah.

    13. GH

      So would you, would you feel that Clo- the whole, the whole Clovis First idea... Clovis First is the idea that (clears throat) , excuse me, it's a culture that archeologists call the Clovis culture. Um, the reason that they call it the Clovis culture is because its artifacts were first found in a, in a place called Blackwater Draw. Uh, and nearby Blackwater Draw, uh, is, uh, the town of Clovis, New Mexico. So archeologists named this culture the Clovis culture, uh, after, after that, and it was for a long while thought to be the first, uh, culture, uh, the fi- the first human presence in the Americas. And the dating that was put on that was around 13,400 years ago, that this culture crossed the Bering Straits, which were then a land bridge, as you can see from this, uh, 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, ice-free corridor, although that's very debatable. Uh, and then they entered the m- main part of the Americas and gradually made their way further south. And, and this was a, a dominant paradigm, uh, until, I would say, the 1990s when it began to be seriously questioned. Uh, but I would, I would wonder whether, whether the ghost of Clovis First is still not, uh, haunting archeology. So let me, let me just say a few words on, on this subject. Uh, so they crossed the Bering Straits 13,400 years ago. Um, and, uh, there's a single common origin. Supposedly, that was the idea with Clovis First. Um, and, uh, there have been recent genetic discoveries showing a very close relationship between Australasians and certain peoples of the Amazon rainforest. We've talked about this before on your show-

    14. FD

      Mm-hmm.

    15. GH

      ... Joe, and I can go into that in more, in more detail later. Um, a huge amount of evidence from, from South America has a bearing on this subject. This is the, the typical tool set that, that the Clovis people were, were thought to have used. Um, and, uh, despite the fact that, um, you're telling us that Clovis First has been debunked, um, since the 1990s really, and you were taught that it was debunked, uh, in the 2000s, we can find, um, uh, New Scientist publishing a piece in 2013, uh, questioning the Clovis First model. Uh, and those who did question the Clovis First model, I mean, I mean, I, 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, uh, the example of this is Jacques Cinq-Mars, who investigated Bluefish Caves in the Yukon and found evidence of, of human beings there more than 20,000 years ago. Now, if that evidence were correct, it would blow the Clovis First model out of the water. People are suddenly in America more than 7,000 years before Clovis. Uh, the reaction to that was not welcoming. The reaction to that was, uh, fury at Jacques Cinq-Mars. Um, and here's the Smithsonian. "Rather than launching a major new search for more early evidence, the find stirred fierce opposition and a bitter debate, one of the most acrimonious and unfruitful in all of science." Notice, note its general nature. Um, and, and it was a brutal experience for Jacques Cinq-Mars. He likened it to the Spanish Inquisition. Uh, audiences paid little heed to his evidence at academic conferences. They gave short shrift of the evidence. Uh, then, uh, his competence was questioned. "When Jacques proposed that Bluefish Caves was 24,000 years old, it was not accepted," says William Josey. Um, and, uh...The fact is that, uh, Jacques Cinq Mars was ruined by the archaeological reaction to his discovery. His career was wrecked. His research funding was withdrawn. Uh, 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. Uh, it was, it was confirmed that, uh, indeed, uh, human beings had been, uh, at, at Blue Fish Cave. There's the, the, the, the publication from 2017, I think. Um, uh, yes, uh, January 2017, confirming that all along, Jacques Cinq Mars had been right, and that the ruining and destruction of his reputation, uh, for saying something that other archaeologists disagreed with had been wholly unnecessary. And, and again, the Smithsonian, "The study raises serious questions about the effect of the bitter decades-long debate over the peopling of the New World. Did archaeologists in the mainstream marginalize dissenting voices on this key issue, and if so, what was the impact on North American archaeology? Did the intense criticism of pre-Clovis sites produce a chilling effect, stifling new ideas and hobbling the search for early, uh, for, for, for, for early sites?" So, here's Clovis debunked, and you're telling me that it was debunked in the '90s, Flint, but here's Clovis being debunked again in 2007, National Geographic. Uh, 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? Um, and, and, and, uh, Wikipedia entry, uh, recently the scientific consensus has changed to acknowledge the presence of pre-Clovis cultures in the America, ending the Clovis First consensus. This was a piece from the 15th of April, 2023. My God, here's the bink, big think, uh, April 2022. Clovis apparently still needs to be debunked. It's like a zombie. It keeps on haunting archaeology, and people keep on having to debunk it. Uh, and I'd like to just mention Tom Dillehay. Tom Dillehay, um, discovered the site of, e- excavated the site of Monte Verde in Chile. And he found evidence that human beings had been there 14,000, maybe as much as 18,000 years ago, uh, in the deep south of South America. Uh, and again, the archaeology that Flint would like us to believe exists would have welcomed that find, but no. That find was not welcomed. That find was massively attacked, particularly by American archaeologists. Um, and, uh, w- what we now know that, uh, uh, that, um, Tom Dillehay has been, uh, vindicated, um, and that he was absolutely correct all along that human beings were, uh, in Monte Verde thousands of years before Clovis. Um, and, um, th- he was eventually vindicated. Now, what I want to do, if you don't mind, is just play a tiny little clip from Tom Dillehay himself.

    16. NA

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

    17. JR

      Can you send it to him?

    18. NA

      I just have the HDMI cable.

    19. JR

      Right, but if he sends it, sends it to you, can you do that?

    20. NA

      Sure.

    21. JR

      Okay.

    22. GH

      How do I send it to you?

    23. JR

      You can Air-

    24. GH

      Send it to me.

    25. JR

      ... drop it to him?

    26. NA

      AirDrop, you have a Mac.

    27. GH

      Hmm?

    28. JR

      We'll pause.

    29. GH

      Yeah.

    30. After a slight technical hitch.

  9. 37:15 – 43:45

    Underserved regions argument: Sahara, Amazon, and the 27 million km² submerged shelves

    1. GH

      Desert, but we're looking at 9.2 million square kilometers of the Sahara Desert. Tell me how much of the Sahara you think has actually been excavated, Flint, by archaeologists.

    2. FD

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

    3. GH

      No, no, no. How much has, how much has actually been excavated? What sort of percent do you have in mind?

    4. FD

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

    5. GH

      Oh, so what, what's your answer to my question? How did, how, how much does archaeology really know about the past of the Sahara?

    6. FD

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

    7. GH

      No.

    8. FD

      We can see Ice Age sites across it.

    9. GH

      My question is related s- specifically to my subject. Has enough of the Sahara been excavated for archaeology to exclude any possibility that they've missed anything important in the Sahara?

    10. FD

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

    11. GH

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

    12. FD

      I have no idea, but quite a bit, Graham. (laughs)

    13. GH

      What do you mean by quite a bit?

    14. FD

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

    15. GH

      Hmm. But the fact of the matter is, round about 1% of the Sahara has been excavated, uh, and 99% hasn't. Uh, 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, uh, green and fertile, uh, and was a very attractive environment in, in which to live. I, I might come on to the ancient maps issue, but there's an ancient map up there which shows a green and fertile Sahara, and oddly, it, uh, coincides very much with a radar survey of the Sahara done in, done in 2015, showing f- river channels in exactly the places shown in that ancient map. I think the Sahara is a fascinating, underserved area by archaeology, uh, and the plain fact of the matter is, it's very expensive to work there, it's very difficult to work there, and archaeology has done very little work in the Sahara. Not no work, not no work, but very little. Not enough to write off the possibility that evidence might be found in the future. You know, you're basing this on our technology now. Let's look 200 years in the future. Look how much archaeology has pr- progressed in the last 50 years. 200 years in the future, the technologies might be so much more advanced. There's so much stuff that is simply not being looked at, and the Sahara is one of those underserved areas, as far as I'm concerned. So is the Amazon. Uh, 6.7 million square kilometers, about five and a half still covered by rainforest. Uh, it's bigger than, bigger than India. Uh, and, um, well, here's an article from Nature. Uh, 95% of the Amazon has simply not been investigated at all, and those bits that have been investigated, uh, are minuscule by comparison. Yet, where investigation is taking place in the Amazon, astonishing finds are being made. Uh, and these are in the Brazilian state of Acre, Ak-ray, uh, and geoglyphs have been found there. And I've recently been with, not all archaeologists, um, are as opposed to my work as you and your colleagues, Flint. But I've been with Martti Paasonen, uh, who's a leading archaeologist studying the Amazon. I've been with Alceu Ranzi, who's a geographer from, from Brazil, and with, uh, Fabio Tavares Filho, who's a Lidar expert. Uh, this is very recently, actually. Um, and, uh, we did some Lidar work, uh, in that area, and this is the kind of, this is the kind of things being found, huge, enormous, uh, earthworks, geoglyphs which, were we to find them in the West, we would recognize them as, almost as henges. Uh, the amount of workmanship that goes into these ear- earthworks is stunning. Um, and they are very precise, very geometrical. You have squares. Here you have a square enclosing a circle. Um, more of the same. Uh, Takino is a gigantic site. These, these are just scratching the surface. The, the archaeologists 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, uh, back, uh, in September 23, I think it was, we actually did a bit of Lidar work. We put up a drone with Lidar attached, and we found new, 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 rain forest. 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 archaeology has hardly touched this incredibly important region. Uh, and therefore, I do not believe that archaeology can tell us that it can rule out any possibility of a lost civilization while it has so failed to serve the Amazon and is only now beginning to do so, and those who are doing that work are convinced that there's much, much, much more to be found, thousands more of these geoglyphs for example. 27 million square kilometers, uh, of the Earth's surface was, um, above water during the Ice Age and is under water today. So yes, there has been quite a bit of marine archaeology. Uh, uh, uh, I think Nick Fleming says there's about 3,000 sites have been investigated under water, um, over the, over the years. But it's, again, you're looking at a tiny fraction of 1%, uh, 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. Um, and fortunately some new work is now being done. Archaeologists are beginning to look at the submerged area, Doggerland, for example, between what is now Britain and, and continental Europe, uh, a submerged land mass. They're beginning to investigate this. It wouldn't surprise me at all if, 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

  10. 43:45 – 59:54

    Underwater ‘anomalies’ showdown: Yonaguni, Kerama, Taiwan wall, and India blocks

    1. GH

      I and my wife Santha have done a great deal of diving. We did seven years of scuba diving all over the world, and what we did was we followed up local accounts of underwater structures, fishermen, local divers, and we went where they took us. This is 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. Uh, and it compares very interestingly with this column, if you see on the left, the submerged column at Nan Madol, on the right, this column from Tinian, the island of Tinian, uh, also in that region of the Pacific. I wonder if the megaliths of Tinian have been misdated. That, 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, uh, disappearing, uh, into a tunnel. And that tunnel, uh, looks to me, uh, this is in Japan by the way, off the island of Yonaguni, that tunnel looks to me, uh, very manmade, particularly when I get inside it and find two, on each side, two big megaliths piled one on top of the other. Uh, and then when you come to the end of the tunnel, you see ahead of you these two massive megalithic blocks, um, directly in view from the tunnel. Uh, that's a shot that Santha 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. Uh, and there's the- they're in context. We're looking at a huge rocky outcrop with these two megalithic blocks on the side. But let's go round to the right of that rocky outcrop and we find a rock hewn area, uh, with steps, and those steps, uh, archaeologists tend to argue this is all completely natural. I have done more than 200 dives at Yonaguni. Santha and I risked our lives. We are not dilettantes. We are in this out of conviction. We'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 structured, uh, natural rock face that was cut and shaped by human beings. Uh, here at Kerama, we're looking at a stone circle underwater, depth 30 plus meters, 32 meters I think, been submerged again for more than 13,000 years. Um, there I'm videoing for scale. You can see somebody down that, beside that central megalith. Flynn, do you think nature made that?

    2. FD

      I see no evidence (laughs) of it being manmade if that's what you're saying. (laughs)

    3. GH

      You, you, you see no evidence of that being manmade?

    4. FD

      No.

    5. GH

      You see a central upright. You see uprights surrounding it. You see the outer cur- the inner curve of the outer megalith matching the outer curve of the central megalith and to you that's, that's not even interesting?

    6. FD

      I mean, even the photos you were showing at 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 manmade to me. It does not look like anything I've ever seen.

    7. GH

      Well, that's interesting because I took a geologist diving there, Wolf Wichman. Um, uh, he's very skeptical. He, 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, by nature. This is a rock wall, um, off, uh, Taiwan. Uh, again, Santha and I went diving there. That's a local diver called Steve Shea. Uh, he's showing us this rock wall. Uh, 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, uh, put together. Uh, let's go to India, southeast coast of India. Uh, my wife Santha, uh, was born in Malaysia but, uh, she's of Tamil, South Indian origin, so we had a great advantage, uh, in South India-... in talking to local fishermen and divers because Santha speaks the Tamil language fluently. Uh, and we had asked them, "Are there any structures underwater off here?" And they said, "You bet there are. 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- free the nets. We'd like the whole thing cleared away." So we said, "Would you... would you take us out there and show us?" Um, 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 (laughs) low-tech expedition. Um, but when we got out there... Come on, Flint, tell me these are man-made. Tell me these are natural blocks.

    8. FD

      (laughs) That is a very blurry picture, Graham.

    9. GH

      Well, just tell me it's a... tell me they're natural blocks. Tell me-

    10. FD

      I cannot tell for sure from... with these photos.

    11. GH

      Okay. T- there, I'm putting my diving knife between two blocks. And there, and then a curved wall. Um, actually, the team from the National Institute of Oceanography in India, uh, who were with us, were intrigued by this. Uh-

    12. JR

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

    13. GH

      Uh, no. That's... that's... that's... that's... that's what I've got. Um, but, uh, I'm trying to keep it short.

    14. JR

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

    15. GH

      That's the t- 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. Um, to suggest that these things are... are... are natural seems, to me, uh, completely absurd. And my point is that... that if Santha 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, um, is, uh, the kind readers who b- buy my books and, uh, allow us to undertake this research. And we've risked our lives for... 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 archaeological survey would find much more. So, the submerged continental shelves, the Sahara Desert, and the Amazon alone, these are three large underserved areas by archaeology. And I think it's premature for archaeology to say that, uh, 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, uh, so-called developed industrial countries, how much of land area of those countries have been investigated?

    16. FD

      I mean... So look, A, I fully agree with you that I'd like to see more archaeology done in ethical, informed ways. I am not trying to argue against searching for sites in the Sahara, Braz- the Amazon, or underwater. Um, I think we can hopefully agree (laughs) that more archaeology needs to be done. I would say in developed countries, our coverage is even better though, mainly due to the fact that laws require archaeological excavation and survey prior to construction. So whenever there's sort of construction going on in cities, there's archaeology happening. Whenever pipelines or highways or things like that are being done, there's survey and there's excavation. And so, I mean, at this point our... our... our numbers of archaeological sites are well in the millions, right? And billions of artifacts that have been found. And so there... we... i- it's not... I'm not trying to say it's perfect though. And at the same time, the kind of excavations that happen sort of on a rescue basis before construction, they're not gonna have the same kind of investment that a... an academic, uh, project will have. On the other hand, an academic project is gonna make a much smaller hole, you know, because w- we are focusing on maximizing the evidence that we can get. And so, you know, I... nobody... in no way am I trying to say that archaeology has perfect coverage, but we do have quite a bit of coverage that people are unfamiliar with. And we do have quite a bit of coverage of this late Ice Age period where we have many, (laughs) many thousands of sites from ephemeral hunter-gatherers underwater, above wa- above water-

    17. GH

      Right.

    18. FD

      ... and elsewhere.

    19. GH

      C- Do y- As we do above water.

    20. FD

      Yeah.

    21. JR

      Would you mind showing Yonaguni again?

    22. GH

      No.

    23. JR

      'Cause tho- those other images aren't nearly as compelling to me as, uh, some of the right angles and what loo- looks like passageways and that curved surface underground.

    24. GH

      Sure.

    25. JR

      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... a stone wall. But Yonaguni, to me-

    26. GH

      Show-

    27. JR

      ... blows me away. The... This blows me away, but the other image blows me away of the... the curved front of that feature and what-

    28. GH

      So...

    29. JR

      ... looks like steps to the right of it.

    30. GH

      So there's that tunnel. Uh-

  11. 59:54 – 1:07:15

    Flint’s counterexample: what a real underwater city looks like (Pavlopetri)

    1. FD

      Yeah. I mean, so if you wanna ... Jamie, do you wanna look up the site Pavlopetri? P-A-V-L-O-P-E-T-R-I. This is a site in the Aegean, and this is an example of kind of what a ... I mean, I can boot it up on my computer if you like.

    2. GH

      Yeah.

    3. FD

      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- they- 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. Helike 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, um, aplenty.

    4. JR

      And Pavlopetri, uh, what year was that? That it was submerged.

    5. FD

      Uh, I think it's from about 3,000 ... Oh, 3,000 years ago or so. So like 1,000 BC-ish. I- I could be off by a couple hundred years.

    6. GH

      Are you saying there was a natural box at Pavlopetri?

    7. FD

      No. (laughs) I'm saying you can see- see clear stone courses that looks exactly like the type of architecture we have above ground.

    8. GH

      Mm-hmm.

    9. FD

      And so the same kind of stone courses. What you have at Yonaguni-

    10. GH

      You would expect that from the historic period, no?

    11. FD

      Huh?

    12. GH

      You would expect that from the historic period.

    13. FD

      Yeah. We would. And so I would expect, though, if you're gonna make an argument for something like Yonaguni, that it would look like architecture, maybe (laughs) even the type of architecture that you have-

    14. GH

      Looks like megalithic architecture to me. Looks like rock-hewn architecture. It looks like the rock-hewn areas at Sacsayhuaman, uh, for example. Jamie actually pulled up some pages of those steps.

    15. FD

      No. We see many different blocks at Sacsayhuaman. We see multiple courses of blocks stacked one on top of each other.

    16. GH

      Do you know Sacsayhuaman? Have you been there?

    17. FD

      No. I've never been there, Graham.

    18. GH

      So, how can you possibly talk about it?

    19. FD

      'Cause I've seen photos of it.

    20. GH

      Well, I've been there dozens of times and, in fact, I'm a-

    21. FD

      Wait, wait. How can you actually talk about archeology without ever ex-

    22. GH

      I was there- I was there- I was there just a few weeks ago.

    23. FD

      Wait a second. (laughs)

    24. JR

      Okay. But let's- let's look at the images so we can discuss this.

    25. GH

      Let's look at- let's look at the images because Sacsayhuaman is a very complicated site. Yes, there are huge blocks in the zigzag walls at Sacsayhuaman, but there are also huge rock-cut areas with steps in them.

    26. FD

      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.

    27. GH

      Well, it's just obvi-

    28. FD

      To tell me that I've not been there, so I cannot talk about archeology-

    29. GH

      It's- it's obvious that you're ignorant of the site-

    30. FD

      (laughs)

  12. 1:07:15 – 1:23:31

    Flint’s evidence tour: targeted survey, predictive models, and Ice Age coastal archaeology

    1. JR

      Okay.

    2. FD

      ... 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.

    3. JR

      Okay.

    4. FD

      And I wanna show you what we do have.

    5. GH

      No, no, I say you're not looking enough.

    6. FD

      Okay. But I wanna show you what we find when we do look.

    7. GH

      Okay.

    8. FD

      'Cause I completely agree, Graham. I actually hope that people who are interested in a more archaeology happening donate to things like the Archaeological Institute of America, the European Association of Archeologists, and the Society for American Archeologists. That can help fund more, uh, surveys and excavations.

    9. JR

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

    10. FD

      Uh, to their websites, saas.org, archaeological.org. I think it's archaeological.org. Um, can I give you guys the links to put at the, on the YouTube and stuff like that?

    11. JR

      Uh, sure. Sure.

    12. FD

      Yeah, so archaeological.org for the Archaeological Institute of America, and I'll give you guys the links for that-

    13. JR

      Okay.

    14. FD

      ... so you can show that.

    15. JR

      Terrific.

    16. FD

      Um-

    17. JR

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

    18. FD

      Yeah. Look it up, Archaeological Institute of America, Society for American Archeology, and European Association for Archeologists.

    19. JR

      Okay.

    20. FD

      They are great institutions that support stuff. I just wanna 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-

    21. JR

      (laughs)

    22. FD

      ... any of his colleagues that are listening. Um, so I wanna talk about one of his surveys that he actually did in the upper deserts of Egypt above Abydos. Abydos is famous 'cause that's where the pre-dynastic, uh, f- uh, dynasty came from, uh, in Egypt. But up in the upper areas, him with Deb Olszewski and Shannon McPherron, they went and they surveyed 2,100 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, uh, it being, um, not a desert environment, but more of a savanna, 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. Um, 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, uh, organic material preserves sometimes as well. And so we actually have this picture of stuff that's different than, say, you know, in a more temperate zone. Um, but if we start looking at, um, underwater sites, I talked with Dr. Jessica Cook Hale, who's now at the University of Bradford, who has done, um, underwater dives and found Ice Age sites, um, 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.

    23. GH

      You could airdrop it.

    24. FD

      No, no, I don't know if you can airdrop.

    25. JR

      No, it's okay. Skip the Flash stuff.

    26. GH

      (laughs)

    27. FD

      I have a Mac for that.

    28. JR

      Yeah, he's got a...

    29. FD

      Yeah. I'm low tech, Graham. (laughs)

    30. JR

      Well, it's just Windows.

Episode duration: 4:26:58

Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript

Transcript of episode -DL1_EMIw6w

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

iOSAndroidClaudeChrome