Joe Rogan Experience #2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint Dibble

Graham Hancock 0:00 (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Narrator 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 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...

Flint Dibble 0:24 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.

Joe Rogan 0:43 Fantastic. Um, take that microphone and try to keep it about a fifth from your, a-

Graham Hancock 0:47 I'll just-

Joe Rogan 0:47 ... fist from your face.

Graham Hancock 0:48 One second. We have to, his, uh, HDMI is not working. It's not going through.

Flint Dibble 0:52 Mine is not?

Joe Rogan 0:52 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.

Flint Dibble 1:07 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.

Joe Rogan 1:13 Okay. Terrific. Um, and Graham, everybody knows you. You've been on this podcast-

Graham Hancock 1:18 Well, l-

Joe Rogan 1:18 ... about 10 times.

Graham Hancock 1:19 Largely thanks to you, Joe. (clears throat)

Joe Rogan 1:20 Oh, I'm very happy. Happy to introduce the world to it. Are we okay, Flint, with the HDMI?

Graham Hancock 1:24 I think we've been doing shows together since 2011.

Joe Rogan 1:27 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.

Graham Hancock 1:35 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:36 And it was all in my house, and we-

Graham Hancock 1:37 It was.

Joe Rogan 1:37 ... we ate pizza and it was-

Graham Hancock 1:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:39 ... 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.

Flint Dibble 1:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:52 And so we'll let you do that, and then, Graham, you'll have an opportunity to respond.

Graham Hancock 1:56 Yeah.

Flint Dibble 1:56 Yeah, thank you. Um, Jamie, do you mind pulling up my screen?

Joe Rogan 2:01 Here we go.

Flint Dibble 2:02 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?

Joe Rogan 2:19 Oh, you're putting this on me, buddy.

Flint Dibble 2:20 Yeah, exactly. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 2:22 (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.

Flint Dibble 2:37 It is very graphic. So what do you think this shares about what archeology is? Any ideas?

Joe Rogan 2:41 (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.

Flint Dibble 2:52 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

Flint Dibble 3:52 the Horn of Africa with every single archeological site that's been surveyed there. And there's 171,000 of them.

Joe Rogan 3:58 That's incredible.

Flint Dibble 3:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:59 It just looks amazing.

Flint Dibble 4:01 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-

Joe Rogan 4:39 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.

Flint Dibble 4:47 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,

Flint Dibble 5:47 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-

Joe Rogan 7:49 Do you have your notifications on or something? I do not.

Flint Dibble 7:52 I don't know what that is.

Joe Rogan 7:53 I think it's the dongle. The dongle is doing that?

Flint Dibble 7:54 I'm sorry.

Joe Rogan 7:54 Yeah. D- maybe, if you hit mute, maybe it might stop it. But-

Flint Dibble 7:57 Yeah, I just muted it.

Joe Rogan 7:58 Okay.

Flint Dibble 7:59 Sorry about that.

Joe Rogan 7:59 Good. No worries. No worries.

Flint Dibble 8:00 And so this, this-

Joe Rogan 8:02 So you, you, your claim was that Graham ignores this?

Flint Dibble 8:04 My claim is that he doesn't ... he ignores most of the evidence for hunter-gatherers in the Ice Age, which is, we have-

Joe Rogan 8:09 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?

Flint Dibble 8:16 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.

Joe Rogan 9:05 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?

Flint Dibble 9:18 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.

Joe Rogan 9:24 So it's where they had their camp?

Flint Dibble 9:26 Yeah, or maybe just where they drove, uh, game along-

Joe Rogan 9:29 Oh, okay.

Flint Dibble 9:29 ... to hunt them. But most of what's underwater are lithic scatters, scatters of stone tools. Stuff like this.

Joe Rogan 9:35 What do you have there?

Flint Dibble 9:36 I have a series of different stone tools. I'll-

Joe Rogan 9:38 Come on. Give it up.

Flint Dibble 9:38 ... show them off a little later. But yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:39 Let me touch one of them.

Flint Dibble 9:40 Yeah, sure.

Joe Rogan 9:41 Uh, how old is this?

Flint Dibble 9:42 Uh, these are all- these are all modern replicas.

Joe Rogan 9:43 Oh, okay.

Flint Dibble 9:44 Made by archeologists. Um-

Joe Rogan 9:45 Oh, it's garbage, then.

Flint Dibble 9:45 Some of them made by my dad.

Joe Rogan 9:46 (laughs)

Flint Dibble 9:46 And some of them have been made by-

Joe Rogan 9:48 (laughs) I thought you're gonna hook us up with some real stuff.

Flint Dibble 9:49 Sorry. No, I can't bring real stuff.

Joe Rogan 9:51 No worries. I have a real arrowhead.

Flint Dibble 9:53 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 9:53 It's from here, from this area.

Flint Dibble 9:54 I do have an ancient corn cob right here.

Joe Rogan 9:57 Oh. That's not nearly as interesting.

Flint Dibble 9:57 Um, from about 1,200 years ago, from the Southern Methodist University Archeology Collection. And I'll explain why this is here-

Joe Rogan 10:03 Okay.

Flint Dibble 10:03 ... in a bit. But, uh-

Joe Rogan 10:04 My question for you, though, was, um, how much of the ground do you think has actually been studied when you're looking at these, uh, ancient, uh, Ice Age Neanderthal populations. Or were they Homo sapiens as well? Or-

Flint Dibble 10:16 These are Homo sapiens. This is from, you know, right at the end of the Ice Age. So this is modern humans.

Joe Rogan 10:20 Okay.

Flint Dibble 10:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:20 So these ... When, when you're finding remnants of ancient hunter-gatherers, how much evidence ... How much of the ground do you think you've studied?

Flint Dibble 10:30 We've definitely not studied (laughs) most of the ground.

Joe Rogan 10:32 Right.

Flint Dibble 10:32 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 they're ... 'Cause it's fairly expensive to go diving.

Joe Rogan 10:39 Right.

Flint Dibble 10:39 Right? And so-

Joe Rogan 10:40 And how, how many dives do you think have been done? Like how many times have-

Flint Dibble 10:42 Thousands. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:43 Thousands?

Flint Dibble 10:43 Yeah. Oh, yeah. And lots of different sites have been found from all over the world.

Joe Rogan 10:47 And specifically, it was done to try to locate these-

Flint Dibble 10:49 To try to locate Stone Age-

Joe Rogan 10:51 ... ancient civilizations?

Flint Dibble 10:51 Ice Age stuff. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:53 Okay.

Flint Dibble 10:53 Yeah. Um, 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. Um, and it's something that people don't realize we can get. We- we've, we've developed sampling methods and we now, at this point, have millions of, 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 and 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. Uh, 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. It's wh- what I want to show you.

Joe Rogan 11:47 Can I pause you for a second?

Flint Dibble 11:48 Yeah, of course.

Joe Rogan 11:48 Is that ...... in a particular region? Like right now, on Earth, there are people that are living in essentially a Stone Age manner. Right?

Flint Dibble 11:55 I wouldn't call it a Stone Age manner, no.

Joe Rogan 11:56 Well, okay, let's, let's say people in uncontacted indigenous tribes in the Amazon.

Flint Dibble 12:01 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 12:02 I mean, they, they essentially are living with animal skins and bows and arrows, and they're, they're living very similar to the way people lived 10,000 years ago.

Flint Dibble 12:09 I think there's plenty of people living today in their traditional-

Joe Rogan 12:12 Yeah.

Flint Dibble 12:12 ... lifestyles, yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:13 Right, but then there's also people that live in Tokyo. Right?

Flint Dibble 12:15 Of course.

Joe Rogan 12:15 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 the, e- like right now if a volcano goes off in Iceland, we don't even notice it. Right? But over there, it's devastating.

Flint Dibble 12:49 Yes. But in this case, what I'm thinking about is, unlike, you know, you, I, I know you guys have mentioned at times you can't radiocarbon date stone. We can date these seeds. So we can date that transition from domestic to, or from wild to domestic.

Joe Rogan 13:00 And what are the oldest seeds that you've found?

Flint Dibble 13:02 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.

Joe Rogan 13:09 Oh. And, and where are those from?

Flint Dibble 13:10 Um, from Syria, Turkey, the Fertile Crescent area. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:14 Is it possible that there was domestication before that in other parts of the world?

Flint Dibble 13:18 I'm gonna show you why that's not possible.

Joe Rogan 13:19 Okay, cool.

Flint Dibble 13:20 Yeah, that's kinda my goal there. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:21 Okay.

Flint Dibble 13:21 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 wanna-

Joe Rogan 13:32 Okay.

Flint Dibble 13:32 ... get into the depths-

Joe Rogan 13:33 Let's do it.

Flint Dibble 13:33 ... the weeds on that, let's say. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:34 Okay.

Flint Dibble 13:35 Um, so just to kinda go off, I also wanna explain-

Joe Rogan 13:38 More penises.

Flint Dibble 13:38 I know, man. You gotta-

Joe Rogan 13:39 Flint, what are you doing to us here?

Flint Dibble 13:40 (laughs) Hey, you gotta get the audience somehow, right?

Joe Rogan 13:42 (laughs) These penis pipes? Is that a pipe?

Flint Dibble 13:44 Yeah, they are. Yeah. Not, not pipe, it's a lamp. Sorry. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:47 That's a rough, rough pull. Oh, a lamp. Okay.

Flint Dibble 13:48 Yeah, yeah. Um, but, so, you know, archeology-

Joe Rogan 13:50 Those are cool.

Flint Dibble 13:51 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.

Joe Rogan 13:59 So did they hide this just because of the graphic nature of it?

Flint Dibble 14:01 Yeah. But it's now open. For the last 20 years-

Joe Rogan 14:03 Oh, okay.

Flint Dibble 14:03 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 14:52 And what is the oldest evidence for hunter-gatherers? Just for the audience? Like-

Flint Dibble 14:56 Oh, God. I mean, that goes back f- h- you know, a million years or something.

Joe Rogan 14:59 A million year-

Flint Dibble 15:00 Pre-homo, homo sapiens. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:02 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?

Flint Dibble 15:19 The earliest tools we know of are many hundreds of thousands of years. Right? Um, before modern homo sapiens.

Joe Rogan 15:24 Similar to the ones you just showed us?

Flint Dibble 15:26 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.

Joe Rogan 15:56 I actually just watched a documentary on it, or a YouTube video, I should say. And it was really fascinating watching them knap them.

Flint Dibble 16:02 Yeah, exactly.

Joe Rogan 16:02 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.

Flint Dibble 16:07 You even have some lovely deer antler that could be used for that, right? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 16:10 Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Flint Dibble 16:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 16:12 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.

Flint Dibble 16:27 No, I don't see it as a linear line. I actually-

Joe Rogan 16:29 Not, not, not linear, that's a bad... But that you know at what point in time it started, I should say.

Flint Dibble 16:34 I think what we can say is we can understand, start pinpointing the starts of domestication and things like that.

Joe Rogan 16:40 Mm-hmm.

Flint Dibble 16:40 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.

Joe Rogan 16:51 Right.

Flint Dibble 16:51 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.

Joe Rogan 17:17 Mm-hmm.

Flint Dibble 17:17 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.

Joe Rogan 17:24 Okay.

Flint Dibble 17:24 And so, it's like this- this, uh, this grand narrative approach to human pre-history is something that's from the 20th century and not really a component of 21st century archeology, is what I would say.

Joe Rogan 17:35 Got it. Okay.

Flint Dibble 17:35 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.

Joe Rogan 19:37 And these shipwrecks, what's the oldest one that we've found so far?

Flint Dibble 19:40 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.

Joe Rogan 19:51 And at what point in time do- these are mostly wooden boats?

Flint Dibble 19:54 Yeah, these are mostly wooden boats. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:55 What point in time would they deteriorate completely?

Flint Dibble 19:58 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.

Joe Rogan 20:08 Mm-hmm.

Flint Dibble 20:08 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.

Joe Rogan 20:23 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?

Flint Dibble 20:29 No, I don't know it from.

Joe Rogan 20:30 Famous explorer. It's this beautiful wooden boat that's almost completely intact at the bottom of the ocean.

Flint Dibble 20:35 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 20:35 I think it hit an iceberg.

Flint Dibble 20:37 Yeah. Like-

Joe Rogan 20:37 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.

Flint Dibble 20:54 Oh, yeah. Okay.

Joe Rogan 20:55 Isn't that incredible?

Flint Dibble 20:55 I have seen this. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:56 It's incredible. Like the whole boat, just imagine what it would have been to have been on that boat back then.

Flint Dibble 21:01 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.

Joe Rogan 21:15 Wow.

Flint Dibble 21:16 And so, the just underwater preservation is just freaky. And-

Joe Rogan 21:19 And is it, um, would it stay that way for 20,000 years you think?

Flint Dibble 21:22 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:23 Yeah?

Flint Dibble 21:23 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.

Joe Rogan 21:35 Mm-hmm.

Flint Dibble 21:35 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.

Joe Rogan 22:06 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?

Flint Dibble 22:13 Yeah, so that- there's actually, I was just talking with, uh, 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, to s- 'cause 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 gonna-

Joe Rogan 22:33 So it's marst- mostly surface, uh, water.

Flint Dibble 22:34 Yeah, it's gonna depend on the specific environment is the answer.

Joe Rogan 22:37 Mm-hmm. Okay.

Flint Dibble 22:37 So certain environments, it's not gonna preserve. Others, it will. Yeah. It's variable-

Joe Rogan 22:43 Okay.

Flint Dibble 22:43 ... is the reality of it.

Joe Rogan 22:44 Was- was there any other questions for Graham?

Flint Dibble 22:46 Um ...

Joe Rogan 22:47 Were those the two you said you have for you?

Flint Dibble 22:47 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 Göbekli Tepe, he published Göbekli 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.

Guest (short clip, unidentified) 23:36 Okay. Graeme?

Graham Hancock 23:38 (laughs) Flint, first of all, thank you for joining me here.

Flint Dibble 23:43 Oh, yeah. Thank you for having me.

Graham Hancock 23:44 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-

Flint Dibble 24:06 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 24:06 ... 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?

Flint Dibble 25:31 That's my perspective, yes.

Graham Hancock 25:32 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.

Flint Dibble 25:42 Well, when I was an undergraduate student, I was taught that there were people here before Clovis, and that was over 20 years ago.

Graham Hancock 25:48 Mm-hmm. And that's... So that would be what decade?

Flint Dibble 25:50 That would be the early 2000s.

Graham Hancock 25:52 The early 2000s.

Flint Dibble 25:52 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 25:52 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-

Flint Dibble 27:41 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 27:41 ... 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.

Narrator 32:46 I don't have audio set up for you to do that.

Joe Rogan 32:49 Can you send it to him?

Narrator 32:51 I just have the HDMI cable.

Joe Rogan 32:52 Right, but if he sends it, sends it to you, can you do that?

Narrator 32:55 Sure.

Joe Rogan 32:55 Okay.

Graham Hancock 32:57 How do I send it to you?

Joe Rogan 32:58 You can Air-

Graham Hancock 32:58 Send it to me.

Joe Rogan 32:58 ... drop it to him?

Narrator 32:58 AirDrop, you have a Mac.

Graham Hancock 33:00 Hmm?

Joe Rogan 33:02 We'll pause.

Graham Hancock 33:03 Yeah.

33:03 After a slight technical hitch.

33:05 Okay, we're back.

33:06 Uh, after a slight technical hitch. Uh, let's play this clip from Tom Dillehay, uh, who was the, um, discoverer and excavator of Monte Verde.

Guest (short clip, unidentified) 33:22 I put together an interdisciplinary research team of people, got National Geographic funding and National Science Foundation funding. Um, and, uh, that went pretty well, the way we expected it to, and I found that the scientists were open-minded. Uh, this includes archaeologists. We had Australian, Chilean, uh, and Argentinian archaeologists working with us. Ac- accumulatively speaking, th- those people, besides myself, probably had close to 100 years of experience amongst them. Um, what surprised me on the other side of the coin was the stiff, uh, close-mindedness of many North American archaeologists. But I s- some of the North American colleagues, um, were very difficult to deal with and I, I think at times presenting a very unhealthy, uh, atmosphere, uh, cutting us off before we could present the data at meetings, uh, not talking with us about it, uh, refusing to even look at the data, th- this sort of thing.

Graham Hancock 34:27 So, um, I think I've ... (coughs) 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, uh, archaeology somehow knowing that there was no lost civilization. Um, if we could call this up on the screen, Jamie. So, the Society for American Archaeology, of which Flint is a member, uh, wrote an open letter to Netflix shortly after the release of my show, Ancient Apocalypse, uh, really asking Netflix to cancel the show. Not to cancel it, this is quite cleverly put. They said, "Don't care." They, 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, uh, canceling it. So, Netflix did not reclassify it as science fiction, but, but archaeology, the Society for American Archaeology, uh, says that, uh, it really sees, uh, no evidence, uh, for, uh, an advanced, uh, lost a- lost civilization of the Ice Age, and that, uh, it's simply, my series is simply, uh, entertainment with ideological goals. So, I want to get into the, the parts of the world that, um...... that archaeology has not looked at, that have been unders-

Guest (short clip, unidentified) 36:00 It's kinda interesting though, from that statement, the, just the last thing. Contrary to Hancock's claims, archeology does not willfully ignore credible evidence, nor does it seek to suppress it in a conspiratorial fashion.

Graham Hancock 36:12 Yeah.

Guest (short clip, unidentified) 36:12 But we just showed that.

Graham Hancock 36:14 Yeah, we just showed in the case of Tom Dillehay that his evidence was suppressed, that in the case of Jacques Hunquarras, his evidence was suppressed, that archaeology was not open-minded about the work of these guys, that they suffered, uh, humiliation and, uh, great difficulty in ad- in advancing their work. And furthermore, I'd like to make another point clear at this point, Flint. I don't think there's an archaeological conspiracy against me. (laughs) I'm not so conceited. I don't imagine there's a conspiracy. I don't think archaeologists are sitting together in a cabal conspiring against me. I think that archaeology is locked into a mindset about the past, where my ideas simply seem preposterous, and I think it's very annoying to archaeology that those ideas have some resonance, uh, with the, with the public. But I absolutely refute any suggestion that I have ever said that archaeology is involved in a conspiracy against me or is trying to suppress my work. That is, that is not the case. Um, look, there's the Sahara Desert. A fair bit of archeology has been done in the Sahara

Graham Hancock 37:15 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.

Flint Dibble 37:25 I'd say a bunch of it has been surveyed, including by my dad.

Graham Hancock 37:28 No, no, no. How much has, how much has actually been excavated? What sort of percent do you have in mind?

Flint Dibble 37:32 Well, a lot of sort of desert archeology does not have excavation. It's eroded away due to the wind, and so-

Graham Hancock 37:37 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?

Flint Dibble 37:45 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.

Graham Hancock 37:57 No.

Flint Dibble 37:57 We can see Ice Age sites across it.

Graham Hancock 37:59 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?

Flint Dibble 38:11 We have found thousands of sites of ephemeral hunter-gatherer remains in the Sahara.

Graham Hancock 38:16 You're still not answering my question. How much of the Sahara has archaeology actually looked at?

Flint Dibble 38:20 I have no idea, but quite a bit, Graham. (laughs)

Graham Hancock 38:22 What do you mean by quite a bit?

Flint Dibble 38:24 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.

Graham Hancock 38:43 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

Graham Hancock 43:45 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?

Flint Dibble 46:30 I see no evidence (laughs) of it being manmade if that's what you're saying. (laughs)

Graham Hancock 46:32 You, you, you see no evidence of that being manmade?

Flint Dibble 46:34 No.

Graham Hancock 46:34 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?

Flint Dibble 46:46 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.

Graham Hancock 47:01 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.

Flint Dibble 48:28 (laughs) That is a very blurry picture, Graham.

Graham Hancock 48:30 Well, just tell me it's a... tell me they're natural blocks. Tell me-

Flint Dibble 48:32 I cannot tell for sure from... with these photos.

Graham Hancock 48:34 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-

Joe Rogan 48:51 Do you have any more photos of that, that are maybe more convincing?

Graham Hancock 48:55 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.

Joe Rogan 49:00 Right. Some of them do have characteristics of stone walls, for sure, but it's hard to tell.

Graham Hancock 49:04 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?

Flint Dibble 50:17 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-

Graham Hancock 51:43 Right.

Flint Dibble 51:43 ... and elsewhere.

Graham Hancock 51:44 C- Do y- As we do above water.

Flint Dibble 51:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:45 Would you mind showing Yonaguni again?

Graham Hancock 51:48 No.

Joe Rogan 51:48 '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.

Graham Hancock 51:58 Sure.

Joe Rogan 51:59 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-

Graham Hancock 52:18 Show-

Joe Rogan 52:18 ... 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-

Graham Hancock 52:26 So...

Joe Rogan 52:26 ... looks like steps to the right of it.

Graham Hancock 52:28 So there's that tunnel. Uh-

Joe Rogan 52:29 That's crazy too. That's crazy too, because the... 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.

Graham Hancock 52:41 Especially since at the end of the passageway, you're f- confronted by this. This is what you look at.

Joe Rogan 52:46 These are crazy. Like i- i- if these are natural formations, they are 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.

Flint Dibble 52:59 Do you mind going... Yeah. So look at this slide. You can see even to the right of those two blocks, the... the... what Graham is calling blocks, you can see these sort of straight angles that are made. You can see another... a l- a vertical one to the left of them as well.

Joe Rogan 53:11 Right. So how do you think they were placed in that manner?

Flint Dibble 53:13 Well, I don't know if they were placed. I think this is where we need-

Joe Rogan 53:15 So you think it's possible that they just broke off at some point in history and landed like that?

Flint Dibble 53:19 I think they were-

Joe Rogan 53:20 Again, this is compelling to me, but not as compelling as the other one. Show me the other one with the... the front curved surface. This.

Flint Dibble 53:26 Notice that f-

Joe Rogan 53:26 This looks crazy. Like this... the whole thing looks crazy. The steps look crazy. The... the... the fact that it's all this one uniform flat line.

Flint Dibble 53:35 Let me just switch to my computer to show you these.

Joe Rogan 53:37 Yeah. Some of these look bizarre.

Flint Dibble 53:40 Nature sometimes looks bizarre though (laughs) . I mean-

Joe Rogan 53:42 Right.

Flint Dibble 53:42 ... you know, I... I... if... if... uh, I'm... I'm assuming that people have investigated this, like geologists and stuff, from what I remember reading.

Graham Hancock 53:48 Yeah, Masaaki, Professor Masaaki Kimura, um, has investigated it, and he's published extensively on it, and he's a- he's a geologist. He's absolutely convinced that Yonaguni has been worked extensively by human hands.

Flint Dibble 54:00 And haven't other geologists like Robert Schoch suggested that it's not?

Graham Hancock 54:03 Yeah, I took Robert there. Um, his initial impression was that it was, uh... that it was man-made. Later, he changed his view. That's fine. He did, uh, three dives there.

Flint Dibble 54:13 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.

Joe Rogan 54:21 Jamie, go to that one that we were just looking at with Graham. It's, uh, l- lower right, like below the main image to the right-hand side. Yeah, the next one. That one.

Graham Hancock 54:29 That one?

Joe Rogan 54:29 Yeah.

Flint Dibble 54:34 It's certainly crazy, I'll give you that. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 54:36 Yeah. It's-

Flint Dibble 54:37 You know, I'm not going to deny that.

Joe Rogan 54:38 ... very bizarre-

Flint Dibble 54:39 It's an impressive-

Joe Rogan 54:39 ... how flat that surface is, very bizarre, and how it juts off and it's flat below it in a uniform line. The curved surface of the front of it is very bizarre too. That, uh, the other image that you had, Graham.

Flint Dibble 54:51 But stone oftentimes fractures-

Joe Rogan 54:52 Mm-hmm.

Flint Dibble 54:52 ... in straight ways.

Joe Rogan 54:53 Right.

Flint Dibble 54:53 You know? That's how it fractures naturally.

Joe Rogan 54:56 Yeah, I get it. I get it. It's just, uh, i- th- the, the appearance of those stones stacked i- i- in a uniform manner in that tunnel, all these things, and that th- this exists somewhere else, it's very similar.

Graham Hancock 55:12 Okay. Yeah. These might be renderings of what they think it looks like, I suppose.

Joe Rogan 55:17 Mm-hmm.

Flint Dibble 55:17 I mean, regardless, we still have no dates from this. We have no artifacts for this, and this-

Graham Hancock 55:21 Well, we do have- we do have dates from the submergence. Uh, you're looking at material that's, that's more than 12,000 years old.

Flint Dibble 55:26 Well, you're looking at stuff that was above land.

Graham Hancock 55:28 Uh, this was- this, this was a, this was a, a tough dive. Uh, massive currents there. This is Kerama, um, off Akagima, um, in the Okinawa group of islands. Uh, t- to me, Flint, it's stunning that you, that you see that as a totally natural thing, but I guess we've just got very different eyes. Um, the central uprights surrounded by upright megaliths, all cut out of the bedrock, very similar to the, uh, the- the chamber recently excavated at Karahan Tepe, uh, where you have uprights cut out of the bedrock as well. Uh, it seems to me, uh, 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. Uh-

Joe Rogan 56:11 But it's not totally perfect, right? Like, look at the back. The back is much larger.

Graham Hancock 56:16 Yeah, it's not.

Joe Rogan 56:16 There's, 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.

Graham Hancock 56:32 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 56:33 It's interesting.

Graham Hancock 56:35 My poi- my point is, not nearly enough work has been done by-

Joe Rogan 56:38 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 56:39 ... archeology.

Joe Rogan 56:39 And how l- long ago was, supposedly, was this above ground? About this way?

Graham Hancock 56:44 About 13,000 years ago. Somewhere of that order. Somewhere of that order. Um, that was the last time it could have been done above ground. Otherwise, nature, if Flint believes so, has done it, but, uh, I'm pretty confident we're looking at manual workmanship here.

Joe Rogan 56:57 What is the most compelling evidence that you've seen in an underwater site that, uh, of manmade construction or m- moving of stones?

Graham Hancock 57:06 I repeat, this is Kerama. Uh, 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, which continue over a distance of a couple of miles underwater. Um, there's a huge stone face carved out of the rock. Uh, there's a passageway. Uh, down at the bottom of Yonaguni there is rocks that have been cleared to the side away from the passageway. Um, it's the combination, it's the combination of all of these different things across an area of two miles off the island of Yonaguni, uh, that make that one of my high priority sites (clears throat) for, for manmade workmanship. And the Indian sites are also extremely intriguing. And unfortunately, none of that work has been, has been followed up, uh, which is a pity. Uh, and, and when we come to what you call rescue archeology, Flin- Flint, if we come back to Northern Europe, for example, I mean, the last place on Earth that I would look for the remains of a lost civilization is Northern Europe, because Northern Europe was a frozen wilderness during the Ice Age. And any, any lost civilization worth its salt, uh, would not have focused a lot of effort on Northern Europe in that time. The place to look is down near the tropics, down near the equator. It's in places that weren't, uh, horrifically cold and, and unbearable, uh, during the, 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 archeology is already convinced that no such thing could have existed. So, what we get is accidental discoveries. 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 Cerruti Mastodon site in, um, in, uh, near San Diego, uh, was, was discovered, because roadworks were being done there. Um, 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, uh, massively underserved by archeology, and in other areas of the world, archeology'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, that when we come to most archeological sites, the amount of the site that is excavated is rarely more than 5% and often, uh, 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, it, uh, 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.

Joe Rogan 59:53 Okay. Flint?

Flint Dibble 59:54 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.

Graham Hancock 1:00:09 Yeah.

Flint Dibble 1:00:13 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.

Joe Rogan 1:00:57 And Pavlopetri, uh, what year was that? That it was submerged.

Flint Dibble 1:01:00 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.

Graham Hancock 1:01:06 Are you saying there was a natural box at Pavlopetri?

Flint Dibble 1:01:08 No. (laughs) I'm saying you can see- see clear stone courses that looks exactly like the type of architecture we have above ground.

Graham Hancock 1:01:14 Mm-hmm.

Flint Dibble 1:01:15 And so the same kind of stone courses. What you have at Yonaguni-

Graham Hancock 1:01:18 You would expect that from the historic period, no?

Flint Dibble 1:01:19 Huh?

Graham Hancock 1:01:20 You would expect that from the historic period.

Flint Dibble 1:01:21 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-

Graham Hancock 1:01:30 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.

Flint Dibble 1:01:38 No. We see many different blocks at Sacsayhuaman. We see multiple courses of blocks stacked one on top of each other.

Graham Hancock 1:01:42 Do you know Sacsayhuaman? Have you been there?

Flint Dibble 1:01:44 No. I've never been there, Graham.

Graham Hancock 1:01:45 So, how can you possibly talk about it?

Flint Dibble 1:01:46 'Cause I've seen photos of it.

Graham Hancock 1:01:47 Well, I've been there dozens of times and, in fact, I'm a-

Flint Dibble 1:01:49 Wait, wait. How can you actually talk about archeology without ever ex-

Graham Hancock 1:01:51 I was there- I was there- I was there just a few weeks ago.

Flint Dibble 1:01:53 Wait a second. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:01:54 Okay. But let's- let's look at the images so we can discuss this.

Graham Hancock 1:01:56 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.

Flint Dibble 1:02:06 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.

Graham Hancock 1:02:19 Well, it's just obvi-

Flint Dibble 1:02:20 To tell me that I've not been there, so I cannot talk about archeology-

Graham Hancock 1:02:22 It's- it's obvious that you're ignorant of the site-

Flint Dibble 1:02:24 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 1:02:24 ... Flint. You're ignorant of the site-

Flint Dibble 1:02:25 Why am I ignorant of it?

Graham Hancock 1:02:25 ... because you don't know what the site looks like. You don't know-

Flint Dibble 1:02:28 Well, instead of-

Graham Hancock 1:02:29 ... the huge areas that are cut out of solid rock.

Joe Rogan 1:02:30 Let's not-

Graham Hancock 1:02:31 You just talk about blocks. There's much more to it-

Joe Rogan 1:02:32 Let's not bicker here and let's, like, look at it and discuss it.

Graham Hancock 1:02:35 Yeah. Let's do that.

Joe Rogan 1:02:36 Let's look at it.

Narrator 1:02:36 Uh, how do you, um ... How do you spell that, Sacsayhuaman?

Graham Hancock 1:02:40 S-A-C-S-A-Y-H-U-A-M-A-N.

Narrator 1:02:45 Got it. Okay, got it. Uh, subscribe, uh ...

Graham Hancock 1:02:52 Now, that's the blocky walls that you've been talking about.

Flint Dibble 1:02:55 Yeah. That doesn't look anything like Yonaguni.

Graham Hancock 1:02:56 But they confront another area. You were showing us some pictures of it earlier, Jamie. Uh, a whole rock-hewn hillside.

Flint Dibble 1:03:06 I don't know. None of that looks like Yonaguni. This looks like actual architecture.

Graham Hancock 1:03:09 Yeah. It is actual architecture.

Flint Dibble 1:03:10 Yeah. (laughs) I agree.

Graham Hancock 1:03:12 Yes. Yeah. But this is not the picture that I would like to see.

Joe Rogan 1:03:17 Uh, do you wanna find it, Graham, and put it up through HDMI? 'Cause Jamie obviously is-

Narrator 1:03:23 I mean, I know what he was asking for, but I stumbled across-

Graham Hancock 1:03:24 You had it up a few moments ago, Jamie.

Narrator 1:03:25 ... stumbled across it, though. It wasn't- it wasn't there on purpose or anything. It was probably in here somewhere, and, like, how I got there, I- I was clicking around, so ...

Joe Rogan 1:03:33 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:03:35 Let's see if we can get, uh, Sacsayhuaman-

Flint Dibble 1:03:38 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 of India-

Graham Hancock 1:03:43 Yeah. Uh, in this- in this-

Narrator 1:03:45 There you go.

Graham Hancock 1:03:45 That one there.

Joe Rogan 1:03:46 Okay. That's it.

Graham Hancock 1:03:46 There's lots of this in Sacsayhuaman, Flint, as you would know if you'd been there.

Flint Dibble 1:03:49 (laughs) This still does not look anything like Yonaguni to me.

Graham Hancock 1:03:53 It doesn't look like a series of steps-

Flint Dibble 1:03:55 No.

Graham Hancock 1:03:55 ... cut out of rock?

Flint Dibble 1:03:56 I mean, it looks like a series of steps, yeah, but it doesn't look like ... It actually looks like a- a- a room there, even, is what I see on the left, for example.

Joe Rogan 1:04:03 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:04:03 It's not a room.

Joe Rogan 1:04:04 It's- to me, it looks similar, but not similar in that whole room area on the left-hand side. That is ... 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.

Graham Hancock 1:04:16 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:04:17 Whereas, if you look at ... Go back. Back to the image, please.

Flint Dibble 1:04:19 But I also don't know if this is Sacsayhuaman.

Joe Rogan 1:04:21 Yes, it is.

Flint Dibble 1:04:21 This is on Quora, right?

Narrator 1:04:23 Yeah. I don't know what it is.

Flint Dibble 1:04:24 Let's go look and see what it-

Narrator 1:04:25 Oh.

Flint Dibble 1:04:25 It's a photo by something.

Graham Hancock 1:04:27 It is. It is.

Flint Dibble 1:04:27 So ... Oh, it is. Okay. (laughs) Your wife.

Joe Rogan 1:04:30 Okay.

Flint Dibble 1:04:30 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:04:30 So, the- the- the difference to me is, like, there's some, uh, like, instances, like in between the steps, where you look at that flat surface and- and the- the uniform line across the flat surface, that does look similar to Yonaguni. Um, 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?

Graham Hancock 1:04:51 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:04:51 And thousands and thousands of years. Whereas how old is Sacsayhuaman supposed to be?

Graham Hancock 1:04:56 Well, that's an ongoing argument, Joe.

Joe Rogan 1:04:58 Hmm. Okay.

Flint Dibble 1:04:58 Well, Pedro Cieza de Leon mentioned it was only built 100 years before he was there.

Joe Rogan 1:05:02 The difference between, in my mind, is Sacsayhuaman 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.

Graham Hancock 1:05:22 And I suggest if we were to look further and spend the money and investigate thoroughly, we would find a lot more. I'm- I'm simply raising this to address Flint's apparent point that, uh, archeology has done enough already to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization. That's certainly what's said in the SAA's letter to Netflix.

Joe Rogan 1:05:40 And Flint, what is your position on that? Uh, sp- specifically what he's talking about South America, that South America would be a place where an advanced civilization would thrive 'cause it wouldn't ... During the Ice Age time 'cause it wouldn't be ex- experiencing the brutal cold that Northern Europe had.

Flint Dibble 1:05:55 No. But I still think we'd wanna find some sort of evidence of things like agriculture, right? And so, uh, 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.

Joe Rogan 1:06:10 In which areas, though?

Flint Dibble 1:06:12 So in Mesoamerica, we can see it with Teosinte. Further south in- in the northern part of South America, we can see it with the variety of different crops.

Joe Rogan 1:06:19 And these are all areas that are outside of the rainforest?

Flint Dibble 1:06:21 No. Some of them are at the edges of the rainforest, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:23 The edges?

Flint Dibble 1:06:23 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. Stéphan Rostain just published in 2024 a series of- of LiDAR structures that were all connected with one another alongside major roads. And based on excavations of several of them, it dates to about 2,500 years ago. And so this is the key thing, is we wanna understand clear dates for stuff.

Joe Rogan 1:06:46 Mm-hmm.

Flint Dibble 1:06:46 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?

Narrator 1:06:52 Yeah. Sure. Hit reset. I- I think the HDMI resets when you're shutting the computer 'cause it-

Flint Dibble 1:06:56 Did I shut my computer?

Narrator 1:06:57 Yeah.

Flint Dibble 1:06:58 All right. Sorry. Is it ... Should I unplug it then?

Narrator 1:07:00 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Flint Dibble 1:07:00 Okay.... technology, man.

Joe Rogan 1:07:04 I know.

Flint Dibble 1:07:04 (laughs) Sorry, I have a cheap computer. I need to ... (laughs) I, I work for a public university and have a small grant. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:07:10 I don't think it's the computer's problem.

Flint Dibble 1:07:12 Um-

Joe Rogan 1:07:12 I think it's all ... It's all good. Um-

Flint Dibble 1:07:14 Let me pull up my s-

Joe Rogan 1:07:15 Okay.

Flint Dibble 1:07:15 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:07:21 Okay.

Flint Dibble 1:07:21 And I wanna show you what we do have.

Graham Hancock 1:07:23 No, no, I say you're not looking enough.

Flint Dibble 1:07:24 Okay. But I wanna show you what we find when we do look.

Graham Hancock 1:07:27 Okay.

Flint Dibble 1:07:27 '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.

Joe Rogan 1:07:43 If somebody wanted to do that, where would they go?

Flint Dibble 1:07:45 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?

Joe Rogan 1:07:58 Uh, sure. Sure.

Flint Dibble 1:07:59 Yeah, so archaeological.org for the Archaeological Institute of America, and I'll give you guys the links for that-

Joe Rogan 1:08:04 Okay.

Flint Dibble 1:08:04 ... so you can show that.

Joe Rogan 1:08:05 Terrific.

Flint Dibble 1:08:05 Um-

Joe Rogan 1:08:05 I just wanted to get it out there while it's still in people's minds who are listening to this.

Flint Dibble 1:08:08 Yeah. Look it up, Archaeological Institute of America, Society for American Archeology, and European Association for Archeologists.

Joe Rogan 1:08:13 Okay.

Flint Dibble 1:08:14 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-

Joe Rogan 1:08:26 (laughs)

Flint Dibble 1:08:26 ... 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.

Graham Hancock 1:10:12 You could airdrop it.

Flint Dibble 1:10:14 No, no, I don't know if you can airdrop.

Joe Rogan 1:10:15 No, it's okay. Skip the Flash stuff.

Graham Hancock 1:10:16 (laughs)

Flint Dibble 1:10:16 I have a Mac for that.

Joe Rogan 1:10:16 Yeah, he's got a...

Flint Dibble 1:10:18 Yeah. I'm low tech, Graham. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:10:20 Well, it's just Windows.

Flint Dibble 1:10:21 Yeah. No, I know. Um...

Joe Rogan 1:10:23 Isn't that a part of a big lawsuit right now?

Flint Dibble 1:10:25 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 one-minute clip, is this site's underwater, they all date to the end of the Ice Age. And so they're lithic scatters, just like my dad found in the Sahara Desert, of hunter-gatherers under w- underwater sites, though. And so let's see what some of these look like.

Joe Rogan 1:10:51 Can I ask you something?

Flint Dibble 1:10:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:52 How do they go about choosing these areas to search?

Flint Dibble 1:10:55 Um, yeah, she's gonna explain that.

Joe Rogan 1:10:56 Okay.

Flint Dibble 1:10:57 Um, so what she does is she develops predictive models based on the geomorphology. This is her find f- or, uh, actually her colleague finding some stone tools. So they, 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-

Guest (short clip, unidentified) 1:11:20 The auxiliary-

Flint Dibble 1:11:20 Here we go. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:21 Okay.

Guest (short clip, unidentified) 1:11:21 ... river has some of the densest terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene occupations in the American Southeast, so 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. Uh, that's really important to look at those sites on land and say, "What are the factors? What environmental patterns or cultural patterns can we tease out of these larger distribution?" And then we project it offshore, and if we're fortunate, then after we pull all those threads together, this is what we get.

Flint Dibble 1:11:54 And so yeah, this is just like with my dad when he targeted areas in the Sahara, the ... Now, she's at University of Bradford, and they're doing dives in, in different areas of Europe, and they're specifically targeting this kinda Stone Age material from this period, and they're able to successfully find it. And so I, I, 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 kinda 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 ... No, sorry. Let's get past this. Um, 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. Cosquer Cave, it's a painted cave. It's 115 feet underwater, off the coast of Marseille, found recently in 1985 by Henri Cosquer, and it's dated to 27,000 and 19,000 years ago, and dated by radiocarbon. It's actually the painted cave with the most radiocarbon dates from it, right? And this is what we have. We have panels of black horses. We have th- it's one of the only, um, painted caves with sea creatures. For example, these auks. I think there's, there's, uh, 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, 'cause 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? Well, 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.

Graham Hancock 1:13:50 I claim no empire.

Flint Dibble 1:13:51 (laughs) Okay, that's fine.

Graham Hancock 1:13:52 That's just another way-

Flint Dibble 1:13:53 I-

Graham Hancock 1:13:53 ... you misrepresent my work.

Flint Dibble 1:13:55 Okay, I'm sorry for misrepresenting your wo- 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.

Joe Rogan 1:14:15 Can you explain those lines?

Flint Dibble 1:14:17 Yeah, so these are lines based on a, a 100 meters and a 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.

Joe Rogan 1:14:42 Right, so anything that had been submerged would have to be within those boundaries.

Flint Dibble 1:14:47 Yeah, exactly, and there's only a few miles there. It's not like a huge, untapped, uh, landscape to look at, if you see what I mean.

Graham Hancock 1:14:54 Not in the Bay of Biscay, no.

Flint Dibble 1:14:56 Not in the Bay of Biscay. Not in many places, though.

Graham Hancock 1:14:58 But, uh, take the Sunda Shelf, for example.

Flint Dibble 1:15:00 Okay.

Graham Hancock 1:15:01 Enormous amount of, uh, submerged material there. I'm not disputing (laughs) that, 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 gonna 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 been done. There's not enough been done in the Sahara, there's not enough been 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, uh,