Joe Rogan Experience #2368 - Michael Button
Narrator, Joe Rogan (host), Michael Button (guest), Guest (guest), Narrator, Narrator, Guest (guest), Narrator, Guest (guest), Narrator, Narrator
In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Narrator and Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan Experience #2368 - Michael Button explores questioning Human History: Lost Civilizations, Cataclysms, and Hidden Evidence Joe Rogan and YouTuber-historian Michael Button explore whether human civilization is far older and more complex than mainstream academia currently accepts.
Questioning Human History: Lost Civilizations, Cataclysms, and Hidden Evidence
Joe Rogan and YouTuber-historian Michael Button explore whether human civilization is far older and more complex than mainstream academia currently accepts.
They discuss anomalous archeological finds, rapid climate shifts, cataclysms, and preservation limits to argue that entire technological cultures could have risen and vanished without leaving obvious traces.
The conversation critiques academic gatekeeping, highlighting how new discoveries like Göbekli Tepe, the Kalambo wooden structure, and deep Saharan and Turkish enigmas disrupt established timelines.
They also touch on UFOs, strange mummies, and advanced ancient engineering as possible clues that our understanding of both human prehistory and non-human intelligences is radically incomplete.
Key Takeaways
Human cognitive sophistication likely predates the current 50–60,000-year ‘cognitive revolution’ model by hundreds of thousands of years.
Finds like the 476,000-year-old Kalambo wooden structure, which required planning, joinery, and engineering, suggest advanced behavior long before Homo sapiens were supposed to be ‘mentally modern’.
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Preservation limits mean we should expect almost no trace of very ancient civilizations, even if they were real.
Button notes that concrete, metal, glass, and modern cities would crumble to near invisibility in 100,000 years, and we currently have only about nine Homo sapiens sites older than 100,000 years globally—far too little to generalize confidently about all humans over hundreds of millennia.
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Göbekli Tepe is a major ‘smoking gun’ that civilization predates Mesopotamia by thousands of years.
The 12,000-year-old megalithic, astronomically aligned site and its related Taş Tepeler culture show large-scale planning and symbolic architecture in a context still labeled ‘hunter‑gatherer,’ forcing a rethink of what counts as ‘civilization’ and how early it began.
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Massive climate swings and cataclysms could have repeatedly reset human progress.
Events like the Late Bronze Age Collapse, the Toba supervolcano (~74,000 years ago), Younger Dryas impacts, rapid Sahara desertification, and recurring ‘cataclysmic’ impacts every ~100,000 years could erase or drastically shrink prior cultures, leaving minimal archeological residue.
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Key regions such as the Green Sahara, submerged coasts, and parts of Turkey are vastly underexplored for deep prehistory.
The Sahara was a lush, river‑laced landscape for ~9,000 years, and there are hints of enormous underground complexes in Egypt and Turkey (e. ...
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Mainstream academic culture often suppresses or slows paradigm shifts in human history.
Rogan and Button highlight the Clovis First controversy, defensive reactions to Graham Hancock, and ridicule of early Göbekli Tepe and Sphinx re‑dating ideas as examples of gatekeeping driven by ego, career protection, and institutional inertia rather than pure evidence.
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A growing body of anomalies—advanced stonework, precision artifacts, and odd mummies—suggests our model of both human and possibly non-human pasts is incomplete.
They cite Egyptian precision masonry and drill holes, the Antikythera mechanism, deep-time cart ruts in Turkey, and tridactyl Peruvian mummies with non-human skeletal traits as phenomena that either require new explanations or imply unknown cultures or species.
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Notable Quotes
“We only have nine Homo sapiens sites older than 100,000 years—and we use that to extrapolate what every human was doing for 200,000 years.”
— Michael Button
“Gobekli Tepe is the biggest smoking gun that civilization is older and more complex than the traditional model suggests.”
— Michael Button
“We’re always looking for ourselves in the past, but there are so many different ways culture could have flourished.”
— Michael Button
“The idea that you know exactly what happened 5,000 years ago—shut up, bitch. You don’t know.”
— Joe Rogan
“We are a species with amnesia… and things just keep getting older.”
— Joe Rogan (quoting Graham Hancock)
Questions Answered in This Episode
If the Kalambo structure forces us to push behavioral modernity back by ~400,000 years, what other core assumptions about human evolution might be off by similar magnitudes?
Joe Rogan and YouTuber-historian Michael Button explore whether human civilization is far older and more complex than mainstream academia currently accepts.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Given the preservation problem and the tiny sample of very ancient sites, what kind of new survey methods (e.g., LiDAR, deep geophysics, AI-guided prospecting) are most likely to reveal evidence of much older complex societies?
They discuss anomalous archeological finds, rapid climate shifts, cataclysms, and preservation limits to argue that entire technological cultures could have risen and vanished without leaving obvious traces.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should we redefine ‘civilization’ in light of sites like Göbekli Tepe and Derinkuyu so that our categories don’t blind us to alternative pathways of complexity?
The conversation critiques academic gatekeeping, highlighting how new discoveries like Göbekli Tepe, the Kalambo wooden structure, and deep Saharan and Turkish enigmas disrupt established timelines.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What institutional or cultural changes inside academia would encourage open engagement with anomalies instead of reflexive dismissal and personal attacks on alternative researchers?
They also touch on UFOs, strange mummies, and advanced ancient engineering as possible clues that our understanding of both human prehistory and non-human intelligences is radically incomplete.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
If some of the more controversial evidence—such as tridactyl mummies or deep-time cart ruts—were conclusively validated, how would that reshape not just archeology, but our broader philosophical view of humanity’s place in Earth’s history?
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Transcript Preview
(drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) What's happening?
How are you, Joe?
Good to see you, man. Nice to meet you.
You too, man. Pleasure.
I love your channel, man. It's really great.
Thank you.
You, you're really doing some really interesting videos. When did you get started?
(clicks tongue) Thanks. Well, I only started the YouTube less than a year ago. So-
That's crazy.
(laughs) Yeah, it's been a bit of a wild ride.
I don't even know how I found it. It was like one of them YouTube recommends things. It just popped up and I, uh, I don't remember which one it was. It was something on ancient history.
Yeah.
And I was like, "Oh."
(laughs)
"All right."
Yeah, it was cool. I mean, uh, yeah, I started just under a year ago, but no one started watching until like March, and then I think you started seeing me just after that point and it's been a bit of a big, you know, journey since then, upwards and ... (clicks tongue) But it's been very exciting and very happy to be here today, very excited to be in Austin and, uh, yeah, looking forward to talk about some ancient history.
(clicks tongue) So did you start off on y- a traditional academic journey and then sorta get sidetracked into a YouTube career? Like how did this work?
Yeah, basically. So I studied ancient history at university for four years, um, and I've always been interested in history. I've done history all the way through. Like I was fascinated by that history as a kid, and got to the stage of my life where it was, you know, thinking about going to university, so I thought, "I'll do ancient history at university," and studied there for four years. Graduated, all of that kinda stuff, but (clicks tongue) there came a point during my degree where I was kind of, you know, a little bit ... I w- I didn't quite agree with their kind of high-level ideas regarding the timeline of history and what we're taught about our ancient past. And it wasn't that I disputed anything that I'd been taught, and I have like great respect for the people that I met at university and my professors, and I don't dispute anything that we were taught actually on the course, but it was more the kinda high-level macro perspective of history that I found myself having more and more questions about, and (clicks tongue) yeah, so once it-
What, what bothered you? Like what were the questions?
It was kind of the big questions regarding the origins of civilization and how deep civilization goes and how complex human behavior, you know, I thought went way back further into history than what we were being taught, and I wasn't too ... I, I just didn't buy this idea that nothing happened for like vast stretch of time. 'Cause it was during my course that they found the modern humans. They made this discovery in Morocco in 2017 or 2018 I think, and that was when I was at university.
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