May 16, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:34:55
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 3...2... | ||
| This is live, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| And this is a very unusual podcast we're going to have here in a very unusual discussion. | ||
| I have to my left Michael Shermer, very famous skeptic. | ||
| He's been on the podcast before. | ||
| Of course, Randall Carlson, amazing gentleman who knows far too much about terrifying things like asteroids. | ||
| And Graham Hancock, author, also a fantastic human being, many times been on this podcast as well. | ||
| And This all came out of a podcast that Randall and Graham and I did recently and Michael Shermer commented on it and it was all essentially on the hypothesis that the great extinction that happened with the North American land animals that happened somewhere around the end of the Ice Age And the end of the Ice Age, | ||
| the abrupt end of the Ice Age, being caused, please correct me if I fuck any of this up, being caused by a comet impact. | ||
| Michael Shermer had some questions about that, and we said this would be an amazing podcast to get everybody together in a room and go over this. | ||
| Since then, there's been some interesting stuff that's happened. | ||
| I thought this was really fascinating, that Forbes has a mainstream article in Forbes, Did a Comet Wipe Out Ice Age Megafauna? | ||
| Just a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| And then there was also this interpretation that's fairly recent as well about one of the stone tablets, one of the stone carvings, rather, on Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| And Graham, you would probably be the best to describe that. | ||
| Yeah, that was published in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, a peer-reviewed journal, by a couple of scientists from the University of Edinburgh. | ||
| And they are proposing an interpretation of the Gobekli Tepe imagery. | ||
| There's quite a lot of imagery on those T-shaped pillars, particularly one pillar, pillar 43 and enclosure D. And their deduction, what they take from their interpretation, of course many will disagree with them, their interpretation is that those images are speaking of the comet impact. | ||
| They're speaking of a comet that hit the Earth roughly 12,900 years before our time. | ||
| And Randall, this has been something that you've been obsessed with for many, many years now. | ||
| We've documented and detailed it in many conversations that we've had on the podcast. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I can't say that I'm that familiar with that article. | ||
| I haven't had a chance to get into it. | ||
| But this idea that the comet impact is what has caused the end of the Ice Age? | ||
| Well, it's so complex, but now what we do is we throw some type of an impact into the mix, and it seems to fill gaps. | ||
| Pull this right up to you. | ||
| It seems to fill gaps that were, at this point, still unexplained. | ||
| You know, there's varying theories between Some extent of climate change and some extent of human predation that caused the extinction and I've always felt like you can't blame it on one or the other. | ||
| I think humans probably had a role but only in the very final stages of the extinction event and one of the One of the scenarios would certainly suggest that there were extreme climate changes between what's called the Balling Alorod, | ||
| which was the rather gradual warming at the very end of the Pleistocene, which was then followed by the Younger Dryas, which was the return to full glacial cold, and in the end of the Younger Dryas, which is dated at about 11,600, which is considered now to be the boundary of the Holocene, post-Younger Dryas, pre-boreal it's called. | ||
| Would be the beginning of the Holocene. | ||
| And it seems that most of the extinctions did occur between roughly 13,000 and 11,600 years ago, although the dating has a widespread on it, so you can't pinpoint it down to a specific event. | ||
| But I've always felt like that there had to be something we needed to look at that triggered The extreme climate changes that we do see at the end of the Ice Age. | ||
| And to my opinion, you can't attribute that solely to Milankovitch theories, which is basically the changing solar terrestrial geometries, because they're too slow. | ||
| And what we see at the end of the Ice Age were very rapid climate changes. | ||
| One of the things that I think has been missing has been the trigger. | ||
| Wallace Brecker pointed out years ago that possibly a major flood from the draining of Lake Agassiz caused an interruption of the thermohalene circulation, which is basically the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean, and that this might have been what triggered the Younger Dryas and then also contributed to the mass extinction events. | ||
| But now I think that the dating of the draining of Lake Agassiz is too late for that and was probably a latter event within the overall melting phenomena that occurred between roughly 14,600 and about 11,000 years ago. | ||
| Somewhere in there we have to fit that mass extinction event and I definitely have thought that climate change was the dominant factor in that. | ||
| But then what triggered the climate change? | ||
| That always seemed to me to be something that was not ever really explained. | ||
| The comet impact theory is very controversial, but the evidence has been steadily mounting now for a decade. | ||
| Including physical evidence, right? | ||
| Like the core samples that show nuclear glass scattered out throughout Asia and Europe at roughly the same time period when they do the core samples? | ||
| Yes, most of it's dating to 12,800 to 13,000 years ago. | ||
| These are called impact proxies. | ||
| Impact proxies. | ||
| Nanodiamonds, melt glass, microspherules. | ||
| These kind of things are associated with impact, not necessarily always caused by impact. | ||
| So this has been part of the reason for the controversy, but it's the abundance of all of these at a particular level which leads a large group of scientists to feel that we have had a... | ||
| It's the full assemblage of things that is difficult to explain by processes without invoking some type of a cosmic event. | ||
| And it also corresponds with what you believe is a period where Earth travels through a series of comets. | ||
| Well, this gets us to the ideas of what would be called the British neocatastrophists. | ||
| Victor Klube and William Napier and a number of others that have theorized that from time to time Earth encounters the debris from a large disintegrating comet. | ||
| And there's an interesting William Napier addresses this in an interesting article I can pull up here pretty soon, that possibly around 13,000 years ago, Earth may have encountered some of the debris from a disintegrating comet, which ultimately goes back to Fred Whipple, who is one of the godfathers of cometary science. | ||
| Could I just come in on that for a second? | ||
| I mean, specifically, Bill Napier and Victor Klub are identifying the remnants of this comet. | ||
| With the torrid meteor stream, which is familiar, I think, to everybody. | ||
| We pass through it twice a year. | ||
| We see meteorites particularly at the end of October, early November. | ||
| That debris stream is still there. | ||
| It still contains, according to their argument, bits of the comet. | ||
| There are large objects in it, like comet Inki, Rudnicki, Ogiatto, and so on, four or five kilometers in diameter. | ||
| And the suggestion is that the meteor stream has got lots of small bits of dust, but it's got some larger stuff too. | ||
| And some of that stuff fell out of the meteor stream 12,800 years ago and impacted primarily the North American ice cone. | ||
| Now, Michael, when you listened to that podcast, you had some questions. | ||
| You are a professional skeptic, so of course you're skeptical. | ||
| What are your thoughts about all this? | ||
| Yeah, let me pull back and give a bigger picture. | ||
| After the podcast, I went and got the book. | ||
| Magicians of the Gods. | ||
| And actually, I listen to it on audio. | ||
| So it's, I don't know, like 16, 18 hours of Graham reading with his wonderful British accent, which, as you know, for Americans, that elevates the quality of the argument by an order of magnitude. | ||
| Yeah, that's how they sell things in infomercials over here. | ||
| And Graham, you're a good writer. | ||
| It's a very compelling story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| You're a great skeptic. | ||
| And so I think a number of points about, in general, the idea of alternative archaeology, which is really what we're talking about here. | ||
| I prefer that to pseudo-archaeology because that's supposed to be a little bit of an insult. | ||
| Alternative archaeology. | ||
| So it's good to remember that, so you have these guys on the podcast for three or four hours, and the audience listening thinks, yeah, why don't these guys get a fair hearing? | ||
| I mean, it's like there's the mainstream and then there's these guys. | ||
| But there isn't just these guys. | ||
| There's hundreds of alternative archaeological theories. | ||
| So which one gets the play, which one gets attention, which one doesn't? | ||
| And for a mainstream archaeologist who's busy in the field and trying to get grants and so on, they mostly just don't have the time to sort through all these alternative theories because this is just one. | ||
| And as we'll see in the next couple hours, there's hundreds and hundreds of things to be addressed. | ||
| So that's kind of what we do. | ||
| So just to rattle off a few, the lost tribes of Israel who colonized the Americas, Mormon archaeology, explanation of Native Americans, the Kensington rune stones in Minnesota that the Vikings had come here, the black Egyptian hypothesis. | ||
| When I was in graduate school, this book called Black Athena was published, that the Egyptians were actually black, and that The, you know, sort of Western white male dominance of history had written them out of the past. | ||
| So, you know, this was a whole alternative history, alternative archaeology. | ||
| Piltdown man, Thor Heiderdahl, in his hypothesis that the Polynesian islands were colonized by South Americans who went... | ||
| West to... | ||
| went east to west. | ||
| That's since been debunked, but that's yet another one of these things. | ||
| South American archaeology, Omec statues seem to have like African features on them. | ||
| So maybe Afghans went directly across to South America. | ||
| So there's, you know, Eric Van Donegan, Zechariah Sitchin. | ||
| Now most of these Graham rejects in his book, to your credit, so you're a good skeptic too. | ||
| But for an outsider to an anthropologist from Mars who steps into this thing cold, doesn't know anything, it's like, well, they're all alternative, which is the right one? | ||
| And how do we know? | ||
| And so the way it works in science is... | ||
| You know, the default position is the skeptical position. | ||
| We assume your hypothesis is not true, not just you, anybody's hypothesis, like the Klube-Napier hypothesis. | ||
| That was widely published. | ||
| It was widely covered in mainstream scientific journals and popular science magazines like Scientific American. | ||
| And it has not fared that well over the last decade or so. | ||
| It's still around. | ||
| It's still debated. | ||
| So you put it in the mainstream through peer-reviewed journals. | ||
| And then you go to conferences and you have it out. | ||
| And that's kind of where we end up with, well, this is what we think is probably true for now. | ||
| And then all these other people out here, if they don't jump in and into the pool where everybody is, Then there's no way for an outsider to know whether these alternative things have any validity or not, other than they make a compelling case in a popular book, yes, but what do the mainstream scientists think? | ||
| And the problem is that, so a couple of specific things, like what I call patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise, you know, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich or whatever. | ||
| Those are fun examples. | ||
| You know, taking, like, pectoglyphs and then comparing them to constellations, like, you know, here we have some constellations on your roof here. | ||
| It's easy in the mind's eye to find a pattern. | ||
| The question is, did those people really think 10,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago? | ||
| So this is a field called archaeoastronomy. | ||
| Ed Krupp, the director of the Griffith Observatory here in LA, this is what he does. | ||
| And sometimes he thinks the patterns mean something. | ||
| Sometimes they're totally random. | ||
| Or he takes something like the pyramids. | ||
| As Graham knows, there's a hundred theories about the pyramids. | ||
| And there's the mainstream one, and then there's all these other ones. | ||
| And this is why people like... | ||
| The director there, he just can't deal with them all. | ||
| Just as one example I used in my book, Why People Believe Were Things, that one guy calculated that if you divide the height of the pyramid into twice the side of the base, you get the number close to pi. | ||
| And then he just sort of works all these different numbers, so therefore it's cosmically significant. | ||
| Well, Richard Hoagland was the best example of that, right? | ||
| He would find these patterns in Mars and claim that if you go from this rock to half the distance, why would you do that? | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| He would create these patterns. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's okay. | ||
| All scientists look for patterns. | ||
| Take climate change. | ||
| Either the Earth is getting warmer or it's not. | ||
| Either it's human-caused or it's not. | ||
| There's a pattern in the data. | ||
| You can see the pattern. | ||
| The question is, is the pattern real? | ||
| So this is why we use the term climate consensus. | ||
| It's not a democracy. | ||
| It's not like we voted on it and decided this is the truth. | ||
| It's that independently, all these different scientists working in different fields, publishing in different journals, come to the same conclusion. | ||
| So we call this consilient science or convergence of evidence science. | ||
| That it's not like these guys are meeting on the weekends going, boy, we got to combat those crazy right-wingers with our data. | ||
| They're independently coming to these conclusions. | ||
| So that lifts our confidence that, yeah, there's probably something to their theory. | ||
| Such that there's now so much data converting to this, you'd have to deconstruct every one of those independent lines. | ||
| So then you have things like... | ||
| What I call the problem of the residue of anomalies. | ||
| In any field, there are residue of anomalies we can't explain. | ||
| So, like UFOs, for example. | ||
| Ufologists, and me, a skeptic, agree that 90 to 95% of all the UFO sightings are explained by natural phenomena. | ||
| Venus, swamp gas, airplanes, geese, whatever. | ||
| They know that. | ||
| And so we're really only talking about 5%. | ||
| Like, how do you explain that one right there in 1967 on June 3rd? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No one knows that one. | ||
| And then from there, they build, well, that's my case. | ||
| If you can't explain that, then I have a case. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Well, that's very different than what we're talking about here. | ||
| How is that relevant to us here? | ||
| It's totally relevant because I think almost all of your argument is based on this residue of anomalies, what we call the God of the gaps argument. | ||
| If you, scientists, can't explain this particular rock right here, Or that particular petroglyph, and I'm going to count that toward my compilation of data to support my hypothesis of a lost civilization. | ||
| But no one is saying that the scientists can't explain it. | ||
| What essentially, particularly Randall, with his series of images as shown, is that what you have here is something that can be explained by rapid melting of the ice caps. | ||
| Randall, step in, if you will. | ||
| Well, I'll just... | ||
| Okay, go ahead if you want. | ||
| Well, they do say... | ||
| I mean, it depends what you mean by rapid. | ||
| You know, I mean, a glacial dam that, as our geologist will tell us in a moment, that breaks, that's fairly rapid. | ||
| Back in 96, there was a very popular book called The Noah's Flood. | ||
| This was a serious book by two geologists that said it was the rapid filling up of the Black Sea that swamped over the civilizations living on the edges of this, and that that's where the Noachian flood story comes from. | ||
| Okay, so it was widely debated and so on, and since it hasn't fared that well. | ||
| But that's fairly rapid. | ||
| I mean, we're talking over the course of weeks or months or years. | ||
| To a geologist, you know, thousands of years is rapid. | ||
| So, you know, an impact by a comet happens in a couple hours or a couple of days or weeks versus a couple of months or years. | ||
| What do we mean by rapid? | ||
| Okay, well, what are you saying then? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So what are you saying about their theories in particular? | ||
| Okay, so the problem, I think, Graham, the deepest problem is much of your theory depends on negative evidence. | ||
| That is, I don't accept the mainstream explanation for the pyramids, the Sphinx, the Machu Picchu, whatever. | ||
| Well, let's not talk about that. | ||
| Let's just talk about this specific subject, because it's going to take a long time just to cover astroidal impacts. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| So, my final point is the falsifiability one. | ||
| That is, what would it take to refute your hypothesis? | ||
| Like, for me, the answer would be, like, if Gobekli Tepe turned out to be what you think it might have been, The place where advanced ancient civilization once inhabited or they used it. | ||
| Where are the metal tools? | ||
| Where are the writing, the examples of writing? | ||
| Perhaps a decision was made not to use metal. | ||
| Perhaps a decision was made that... | ||
| Errors had taken place, that in reinventing civilization we shouldn't perhaps go down quite the same route as before. | ||
| Perhaps writing isn't always an advance. | ||
| Perhaps an oral tradition which records in memory, which enhances and uses the power of memory, may be a very effective way of dealing with information. | ||
| We regard writing as an advance, and I can see lots of reasons. | ||
| Why it is an advance, but if we put ourselves into the heads of ancient peoples, maybe it wasn't. | ||
| I mean, there's a tradition from ancient Egypt that the god Thoth, god of wisdom, was the inventor of writing. | ||
| But we have a text in which he is questioned by a pharaoh who is saying, well, actually, have you really done a good thing by introducing writing? | ||
| Because then the words may roam around the world without wise advice to put them into context. | ||
| And what will happen to memory when people... | ||
| So there might be a choice, not Not to go that way. | ||
| Alright, but then what do you mean by advance? | ||
| When you say there used to be a lost advanced civilization before 10,000 years ago... | ||
| Well, let's just pause here for a second, because what we know for a fact is that the carbon dating in all the area around Gobekli Tepe is somewhere around 12,000 years. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| 11,600 years ago is the earliest they've found so far, but a great deal of Gobekli Tepe is still underground. | ||
| Right, so at least what we know is someone built some pretty impressive structures 11,600 years ago. | ||
| 7,000 years before Stonehenge. | ||
| So when that story broke, this is long before you came along with your book, it was controversial in the sense that we thought hunter-gatherers could not do something like this because to do that you need a large population with a division of labor and so forth. | ||
| And so the response to archaeologists was, well, I guess we were wrong about hunter-gatherers. | ||
| Maybe they can do more stuff than we gave them credit for. | ||
| So why is that not a reasonable hypothesis versus it was actually advanced, but we mean something completely different by advanced, not writing and metal and technology. | ||
| We mean, I don't know what you mean. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Well, I mean, we have a body of archaeology, which goes on for decades, which is saying that megalithic sites... | ||
| For example, Gigantia in Malta or Hagorim or Menaedra. | ||
| Megalithic sites date to no older than five and a half to six thousand years old. | ||
| Gigantia would push it close to six thousand years old. | ||
| There are no older sites than that and therefore the megalithic site is associated with a certain stage of Neolithic development. | ||
| Then along comes Gobekli Tepe, 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. | ||
| Incredibly sophisticated site, very large scale. | ||
| I mean, Klaus Schmidt, sadly he's passed away. | ||
| I spent three days working the site with him. | ||
| He was very generous to me. | ||
| He showed me a lot. | ||
| He talked to me a lot. | ||
| And he said basically 50 times as much as they've already excavated is still under the ground, that there's hundreds and hundreds of giant stone pillars that they've identified with ground-penetrating radar. | ||
| He's not even sure If they're ever going to excavate them. | ||
| But by all accounts, we are looking, if we take what's still under the ground into account, we're looking at the largest megalithic site that's ever been created on Earth. | ||
| And it pops up 11,600 years ago with no obvious background to it. | ||
| It just... | ||
| Well, that we know of. | ||
| But to me, that's immediately a rather puzzling and interesting situation. | ||
| And I would be remiss as an author and an inquirer into these matters if I didn't take great interest in that. | ||
| The sudden appearance, 7,000 years before Stonehenge, of a megalithic site that dwarfs Stonehenge. | ||
| To me, that's a mystery, and it's really worth inquiring into. | ||
| To put it into perspective, that's more than 2,000 years older than what we now consider to be the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza in comparison to us to then. | ||
| So between our time now in 2017 and the construction of the Great Pyramid, you're talking about 2,000 years earlier than that. | ||
| And that is unbelievable when you're talking about 7,000 years before what we thought people were doing. | ||
| Okay, but my point was that instead of, before we go down the road of constructing a lost civilization that was super advanced, but different from our idea of advanced, why not just a tribute to these fully modern hunter-gatherers who had the same size brains we have and so on, that they were able to figure out and do this. | ||
| We just underestimated their abilities. | ||
| But why did archaeologists tell us for so long hunter-gatherers couldn't do it and we needed agricultural populations that could generate surpluses, that could pay for the specialists to... | ||
| Yes, that was the theory. | ||
| So now what archaeologists are saying, I guess we were wrong about hunter-gatherers. | ||
| Well, they might be wrong about hunter-gatherers or there might be another civilization that they had not discovered that has been unearthed by time. | ||
| Sorry, Michael, lost civilizations are not such an extraordinary idea. | ||
| I mean, nobody knew that the Indus Valley civilization existed at all until some railway work was done around Moenjodaro in 1923. Suddenly, a whole civilization pops up out of the woodwork that's just never been taken into account before the 1920s. | ||
| We still can't read its script, you know? | ||
| The idea that we come across that another turn of the spade reveals information that causes us to reconsider... | ||
| Not just was it hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists, but perhaps something bigger than this is involved. | ||
| Or in between that. | ||
| That's not such an extraordinary idea. | ||
| I get it that mainstream archaeology doesn't want to go there, but that's my job to go there. | ||
| No, I don't think that's correct. | ||
| They would be happy to go there if there's evidence for it. | ||
| By what you just said, they now fully accept the Indus Valley civilizations. | ||
| How did that happen if they were dogmatically closed-minded? | ||
| I don't say that they were dogmatically close-minded about that. | ||
| The evidence, the massive amount of evidence that came up with the discovery of Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, Dolavira, and other such sites is very difficult. | ||
| You have to be completely stupid to say that that's not a civilization. | ||
| Gobekli Tepe is a bit more nuanced. | ||
| You know, we have stone circles. | ||
| We have some interesting astronomical alignments, the world's first perfectly north-south aligned building. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| No, definitely. | ||
| Again, that's a patternicity thing. | ||
| Well, I'm citing Klaus Schmidt, you know. | ||
| Well, that's all right. | ||
| But any of us who read back into history 10,000 years ago, what we're thinking, that they might have been thinking, that's always dangerous for anybody, not just you, all of us. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| Who is Klaus Schmidt? | ||
| Klaus Schmidt was the original excavator of Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| He was the head of the German Archaeological Institute dig at Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| He kindly spent three days showing me around the site. | ||
| And really nobody's disputing the astronomical alignments of Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| They weren't particularly interesting to Klaus Schmidt, but they're there. | ||
| And what is the alignment? | ||
| Like how is it established? | ||
| Well, when you have a perfectly north-south aligned structure, perfectly north-south, a true north, not magnetic north, then you are dealing with astronomy by definition. | ||
| And there are other alignments of the stone circles. | ||
| True north as established today or with the precession of the equinoxes when you're talking about 12? | ||
|
unidentified
|
True north is always true north. | |
| Okay. | ||
| It's the rotation axis of our planet. | ||
| Okay, so to this day it points exactly in the same place where it was pointing? | ||
| It always points to true north. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Sure they want to go there. | ||
| They would be happy to go there. | ||
| Case in point, two weeks ago in the journal Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, there was published an article that... | ||
| Humans, or maybe Neanderthals, lived in San Diego area 130,000 years ago. | ||
| This is an order of magnitude older than the Clovis data, so 13,000. | ||
| This was the mastodon bones they found that were smashed. | ||
| Mastodon bones, yes. | ||
| So here's an example of how, okay, so clearly there's not some conspiracy to keep alternative people or fringe or radical theories out. | ||
| It was published in peer-reviewed, the most prestigious journal in the world. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| And then what happened? | ||
| Well, hasn't there been a massive reaction to that and lots of scathing remarks by other academics? | ||
| Yes, but that's normal. | ||
| That's how science works. | ||
| You get pushed back. | ||
| You've got to have a thick skin. | ||
| It's just the way it goes. | ||
| You've got to have a thick skin, that's for sure. | ||
| But maybe sometimes your skin is so thick that you just can't sense anything around you. | ||
| Well, of course, we don't want that either. | ||
| So what do you think is going on when you look at something like Gobekli Tepe that's covered, covered up purposefully, right? | ||
| Yes, deliberately buried. | ||
| Again, I cite Klaus Schmidt. | ||
| He's the authority on this. | ||
| He's the excavator. | ||
| He absolutely adamantly insists that that site was deliberately buried and finally covered with a hill, which is what Göbekli Tepe means in the Turkish language, pot-bellied hill. | ||
| And you're talking about something. | ||
| Give me the perspective of how large they believe it is currently. | ||
| What's excavated at the moment is on a scale of Stonehenge. | ||
| What's under the ground may be as much as 50 times larger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| But Buckley-Tepley, no one lived there. | ||
| There's no tools. | ||
| There's no... | ||
| Well, you're talking about 12,000 years old, though. | ||
| But if it's buried, there should be pottery. | ||
| There's no pottery, no writing, no articles of clothing. | ||
| No one lived there. | ||
| Well, you're saying nobody lived there, so why should they have pottery? | ||
| Why should pottery be in the field? | ||
| Why would they go along and break some pots and stick it in the artificial field? | ||
| But how about something? | ||
| They're trash. | ||
| Something that would indicate it's a different kind of people than what we're used to seeing in the archaeological record. | ||
| It's just rubbish that they poured in. | ||
| It's just stones and earth. | ||
| Buckets of it. | ||
| In other words, Graham, for you to gain Support for your theory amongst mainstream archaeologists. | ||
| They want to see positive evidence to overturn the old theory. | ||
| In other words, the burden of proof is on the person challenging the mainstream. | ||
| I completely agree. | ||
| In every field. | ||
| But isn't there some proof that the mainstream idea of these hunters and gatherers never had anything in what the theory was that would indicate these people were capable of building something even remotely the size of Gobekli Tepe? | ||
| To me, that's the stunning That's the beauty of this find. | ||
| It overturns our ideas of primitive hunter-gatherers that could not do this. | ||
| Apparently they can. | ||
| That's one possible assessment. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I call this, somebody else called it, the bigotry of low expectations. | ||
| It's like, we had this kind of low expectations for these hunter-gatherers, maybe we should jettison that idea. | ||
| And in my own other field of history of religion, it also threw that off, because this apparently was a kind of a spiritual, religious... | ||
| That's the wrong word. | ||
| They wouldn't have used anything like that. | ||
| Actually, nobody can know that, Michael. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But if it was, the big National Geographic article emphasized that, maybe this is the very first religious, spiritual temple ever built. | ||
| Because they didn't live there, so they went there for a reason. | ||
| But isn't it also possible that this is signs that civilization was more advanced 12,000 years ago than we thought? | ||
| Okay, more advanced. | ||
| Again, what do we mean by advanced? | ||
| We're talking about the ability to construct an amazing structure. | ||
| How big was it? | ||
| How tall are these stones? | ||
| Some of them are 20 feet tall. | ||
| Some of them are smaller with astronomical alignments. | ||
| Klaus Schmidt called it a center of innovation. | ||
| He was intrigued by the way that agriculture emerges around Gobekli Tepe at the same time that Gobekli Tepe is created. | ||
| I mean, he went on record with me. | ||
| Perhaps he's not right, but he went on record with me as saying that was the first Thank you very much. | ||
| That what we're looking at is evidence of some kind of transfer of technology, that people came into that area who had other knowledge and that that was applied and perhaps they mobilized the local population around this site. | ||
| Perhaps that's precisely why we see agriculture developing there. | ||
| So perhaps that's the skill that's being passed on. | ||
| But I don't see anything particularly... | ||
| Okay, the stone work is spectacular, but that's not any more advanced than a few millennium afterwards. | ||
| But you're talking about something 20 feet tall made of stone by people that were hunter-gatherers? | ||
| But a couple hundred people can move multi-ton stones. | ||
| There's no mystery in moving the stones. | ||
| They're still moving 20-ton stones in Indonesia today. | ||
| I mean, megalithic cultures still exist. | ||
| You also know that the carving on the outside is extremely complex. | ||
| It's three-dimensional carving. | ||
| Okay, but... | ||
| But you know what that means? | ||
| But Lasko at 30,000 years ago has magnificent cave paintings with three-dimensional animals. | ||
| But that's painting. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying when I say three-dimensional carvings? | ||
| Yeah, like the Venus. | ||
| No, the carvings were on the outside, meaning they didn't carve them into the rock, they carved away the rock around them, which is pretty sophisticated stuff for hunter-gatherers, and they're doing this on these 20-foot-tall stone columns. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty impressive stuff. | ||
| Okay, but there the assumption is that they couldn't have figured this out. | ||
| We know from modern societies where, say, Australian Aborigines, in one generation, they go from stone tools to flying airplanes. | ||
| The brains are quite capable of doing these amazing things. | ||
| It's the same brains. | ||
| Did they go from stone tools to flying airplanes without somebody introducing them to airplanes? | ||
| Yeah, you're actually making his argument for him. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It's not that much of a reach to carve stone. | ||
| People have been carving stones for thousands of years. | ||
| But the entire archaeological opinion on megalithic sites for decades before this was precisely that it was beyond their ability to do that. | ||
| Right, and now the mainstream has changed its mind about this. | ||
| Or at the very least... | ||
| A little shift. | ||
| Let's pause for a moment. | ||
| Let's pause for a moment. | ||
| So, for sure, we all agree human beings made this. | ||
| Yes, not aliens. | ||
| So the argument is not whether or not aliens made it. | ||
| The argument is whether or not humans made it that were sophisticated. | ||
| Well, they're clearly sophisticated enough to make this incredible structure that is some sign of some sort of civilization. | ||
| I believe so, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| It's a gigantic structure. | ||
| I agree with Graham that we've, again, undersold who these people were. | ||
| My friend Jared Diamond goes to Papua New Guinea. | ||
| He talks in the opening chapter of Guns, Germs, and Steel, how smart these people are that live out there in nature, what it takes to survive. | ||
| He wouldn't last an hour, you know, from L.A., he wouldn't last an hour with his Papua New Guinean friends out there in the wild. | ||
| Well, that's just because he doesn't know how to survive, and they've been passing down the information for generation after generation. | ||
| They're very smart. | ||
| Okay, so it's not a problem of intelligence. | ||
| And is there... | ||
| Okay, so here's the other thing we don't know, is that there might be lots more of these sites and where there's... | ||
| There are. | ||
| I visited one of them, Karahan Tepe. | ||
| You've got the T-shaped pillars sticking out the side of a hill in a farmer's backyard. | ||
| I mean, I think we're actually at the beginning of opening up this inquiry, not at the end of it, by any means. | ||
| Okay, but then before you... | ||
| Okay, why not just say, we don't know. | ||
| This is a spectacular mystery. | ||
| You leave it at that. | ||
| Why write a book that says, I'm going to fill in all the gaps with this? | ||
| You guys on the mainstream side won't speculate and won't explore. | ||
| I don't claim to be an archaeologist. | ||
| I'm not a scientist. | ||
| I'm an author. | ||
| It's my job to offer an alternative point of view and to offer a coherently argued alternative point of view. | ||
| And I must say, go Beckley Tepe strikes me as a gigantic fucking mystery and a mystery that is worthy of exploration from a point of view that may not satisfy you. | ||
| Oh, well, you don't have to satisfy me. | ||
| You and your colleagues. | ||
| And I certainly don't have to satisfy you or them. | ||
| That's not my project. | ||
| But like your opening chapter with Schmidt, I thought I really loved the kind of conversational style you had with Schmidt in the book where he's dialoguing, where Schmidt goes, and look at this. | ||
| And then he says, but wait, what's that again? | ||
| A little bit like Columbo. | ||
| Like, wait, I have just one more question. | ||
| And, you know, the mystery kind of thickens. | ||
| That's perfectly okay. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| I mean, that's what science is all about, is uncovering mysteries that we then have to figure out. | ||
| So there's always more mysteries. | ||
| But that doesn't mean, that's not positive evidence in favor of a particular theory like a lost civilization. | ||
| It's just, we can't explain this. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We certainly can't explain it, and you can't explain it by saying that we underestimated hunter and gatherers either. | ||
| Well, why not? | ||
| We know they made it. | ||
| Whatever you want to call them. | ||
| Well, we know humans made it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| We know humans made it. | ||
| So whatever you want to call them. | ||
| But why do they believe that people were only hunters and gatherers 12,000 years ago? | ||
| It's because they didn't have any evidence to the contrary. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is evidence to the contrary. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| So you agree that there weren't hunter and gatherers? | ||
| Okay, but there's several stages in between. | ||
| Just, you know, 12 people living out in the jungle by themselves versus us. | ||
| You know, there's like a whole bunch of different... | ||
| Well, I would say that Gobekli Tepe is a gigantic stage. | ||
| Well, we don't... | ||
| Okay, they didn't live there, so we have to figure out where were they living and what was there. | ||
| So that has to be excavated. | ||
| We've excavated 10% of it, right? | ||
| And meanwhile, what you're saying is that we shouldn't speculate at all, because I mean, mainstream archaeology is speculating. | ||
| Mainstream archaeology is speculating when saying it definitely was hunter-gatherers who did this. | ||
| That's also a speculation. | ||
| That seems more of a reach. | ||
| Okay, but not... | ||
| They may be more than hunter-gatherers. | ||
| They may have been partially settled. | ||
| You can have any kind of number of states... | ||
| But what you can't apparently have is the possibility of a transfer of technology from people who were really masters of that technology already when they came in. | ||
| But where are these people? | ||
| Well, you're dealing with an incredible... | ||
| 12,000 years ago, their fingerprints are there. | ||
| Let's find their homes. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know that their homes matter. | ||
| Would their homes even survive after 12,000 years? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| They're trash. | ||
| They're tools. | ||
| They're something. | ||
| Screw trash and tools. | ||
| We've got Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| It confronts us. | ||
| It challenges the mainstream model. | ||
| I think it's reasonable to consider the possibility that there was something more than just hunter-gatherers involved here in creating this extraordinary place. | ||
| And that's all I've done. | ||
| It seems to me that to say hunter-gatherers could build this, I wouldn't be opposed to the idea that they're hunting and gathering, but it does certainly imply a lot of leisure time. | ||
| A lot of leisure time. | ||
| Well, again, if we place this back particularly within that climate zone at 11,006 to 12,000, 13,000 years ago, whatever it turns out to be, we're dealing with an extremely demanding and challenging climate. | ||
| Which wouldn't necessarily, to my mind, be conducive to the emergence of a settled culture that would be capable of undertaking a project on this scale. | ||
| And as somebody who's built a lot of things and moved quite a few heavy weights in my time, I find the idea sort of perplexing to me that they would be... | ||
| What I would have to ask is, what is their motive? | ||
| What is their motive for undertaking a project on this scale? | ||
| Because it's an enormous project. | ||
| And to move a 20-ton block of stone is really a challenging task to undertake. | ||
| Today? | ||
| Today! | ||
| Well, without the infrastructure of large... | ||
| Machines and so forth. | ||
| But to do it by hand, it would be an enormous undertaking. | ||
| To me, it's like, when are they having time to hunt and gather when you're engaged in a project of this scale? | ||
| But we know hunter-gatherers have way more free time than modern society people do. | ||
| That's the one thing we've learned is that it's a pretty good way to make a living, actually. | ||
| They have a better, varied diet than we have. | ||
| This is the Neanderthal diet, right? | ||
| They have a better, varied diet and a lot more free time. | ||
| A lot less stress. | ||
| We knew that all along about hunter-gatherers when we were saying they couldn't build megalithic sites. | ||
| But we're looking at a time where the environment is undergoing rapid changes, to which adaptations would be extremely challenging. | ||
| And we know those changes are going on all over the planet. | ||
| We know that sea levels are rapidly rising over a period of a few thousand years, from a sea stand low of about 400 feet up to the present level. | ||
| We also know that That biotas were shifting dramatically all over the planet. | ||
| The effects of the Younger Dryas were global. | ||
| Pretty much that is, I think, the emerging consensus now. | ||
| That both hemispheres, north and south, were being affected by the climate changes of the Younger Dryas. | ||
| So what we're doing is replacing this phenomena, this project, within this context of these extremely challenging times in which, you know, adaptation to the environmental changes Could easily be the all-consuming challenge of the times. | ||
| I'm just finding it difficult to imagine a disconnect, to see this disconnect between a project of this magnitude and the motive for doing it during a time when obviously the environment could be posing serious constraints upon people's ability to function in that Well, Randall, we don't even know the motives of the Easter Islanders and why they raised these huge... | ||
| But we know they did it. | ||
| But hasn't that become a central question, though? | ||
| Something had to have motivated them. | ||
| But let's get back to Tebekli Tepe. | ||
| So let's just be real clear. | ||
| We know they're humans. | ||
| We know that it's at least 12,000 years old. | ||
| And we know that the real dispute here, the real question is, did these people have structures and did they have agriculture? | ||
| We know that they were human beings. | ||
| They were essentially modern human beings. | ||
| So, were they hunter-gatherers or did they have structures in agriculture? | ||
| Well, before Gobekli Tepe, they didn't have structures and they didn't have agriculture. | ||
| After Gobekli Tepe, they did. | ||
| So, the fact that they were able to build something so monumental, what kind of a leap is it at all to think that these people could figure out how to plant food and figure out how to make a house? | ||
| Well, I mean, again, if you look back 30,000 years, 40,000 years to these cave paintings, these are pretty sophisticated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| They are. | ||
| Clearly they had abstract reasoning. | ||
| They could think from the concrete to the abstract and so on. | ||
| It's not a big reach to go from that to moving stones around. | ||
| I'd say there's a big difference between painting and engraving on cave walls. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think so. | |
| To me, the painting is even more sophisticated. | ||
| Sorry, I'm creating the largest megalithic site that's ever been built on Earth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think there's a huge difference between those two. | ||
| I mean, nobody would compare the construction effort on Stonehenge or Gigantia with cave paintings. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| The cave paintings are magnificent. | ||
| I've had the privilege to visit many of the painted caves. | ||
| Stunning work. | ||
| And as Picasso said when he came out of Lascaux, we have invented nothing. | ||
| I mean, that was that modern human mind... | ||
| Symbolic-minded at work there, but this is another matter. | ||
| This is a large-scale construction project that's going on, and it's not just a construction project. | ||
| It's not like huts. | ||
| It's hundreds and hundreds of very, very large megalithic pillars, which have to be mobilized, brought to the place. | ||
| You know, organizing a workforce in order to do that, even that requires preparation and time and learning and practice. | ||
| It's not something that you wake up one morning and just can do overnight. | ||
| You think that the paintings are more impressive than Gobekli Tappi? | ||
| Yeah, or at least comparable. | ||
| I think that's absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| To convey three-dimensionality on a 2D plane, that's what Picasso meant. | ||
| It's like, wow, that's incredible. | ||
| It's like developing perspective. | ||
| And to use the natural shape of the walls to create a three-dimensional perspective look, that's pretty abstract. | ||
| You're comparing apples and pears. | ||
| It's not a construction project. | ||
| We don't have to compare them. | ||
| But I don't think it's even What I'm saying is that it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to think these people were pretty smart. | ||
| Well, we know that they were smart. | ||
| We know that they were smart just because of the fact that those construction projects were done. | ||
| By who? | ||
| By whoever. | ||
| We know that they were smart. | ||
| Whoever built Gobekli Tepe was clearly intelligent. | ||
| Whoever made those 3D carvings, clearly they were intelligent. | ||
| But to think that someone drawing on cave paintings is more impressive than erecting 20-foot stone columns with three-dimensional carvings on them of a lot of animals that weren't even native to the region. | ||
| That's not necessarily the case. | ||
| Because they could have been extinct. | ||
| But my point, Joe, is that these paintings are like, say, 30,000, 40,000 years old to Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| So there's tens of thousands of years to develop more that we're very likely to find more archaeological sites. | ||
| And yet, up till now, we haven't found that. | ||
| We haven't found all of that intermediate material. | ||
| See, if I could actually see that intermediate material between the upper Paleolithic cave art and Gobekli Tepe, if I could see the gradual evolution and development of skills, I wouldn't need to invoke a lost civilization, the survivors of a lost civilization who've mastered those skills elsewhere to come in and teach those skills at Gobekli the survivors of a lost civilization who've mastered those skills elsewhere | ||
| But it still looks to me like a transfer of technology unless you can show me that evolutionary process whereby I can understand how this group of hunter-gatherers became equipped to create this giant site where they practiced, where they learned the skills to move the stones, to organize the workforce, to feed and water the workforce in a rather dry place. | ||
| All of that is actually quite a logistical challenge. | ||
| Yep, and obviously somebody met it somehow. | ||
| Some humans. | ||
| So the real question is, did they have structures? | ||
| Did they have agriculture? | ||
| Did they have some sort of a community where they lived in an established location? | ||
| I would imagine so. | ||
| So that would push back the time where we thought that there was a civilization. | ||
| That would push them back into a realm of at least stepping out of the hunter-gatherer stage. | ||
| Now, your guy Schmid, as you show in your book, he did not go as far as you guys. | ||
| Certainly not, no. | ||
| But he admitted it's a mystery. | ||
| Okay, that would be the scientific approach. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| Great mystery. | ||
| Let's just wait and see. | ||
| Versus, I'm going to postulate a lost civilization. | ||
| Nothing wrong with that, Graham. | ||
| It's a free country, and scientists do this all the time, as you've mentioned. | ||
| There's a rather humorous thing, which I have to say, actually... | ||
| I might even ask Jamie to pull up the couple of images of Fingerprints of the Gods. | ||
| That's the book I'm best known for. | ||
| And when I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, essentially I was saying civilization is much older and much more mysterious than we thought. | ||
| And I was ridiculed for proposing that. | ||
| 2013, one of the magazines that ridiculed me, New Scientist magazine in Britain, publishes as a cover story, a picture of Gobekli Tepe, and the headline, Civilization is much older and much more mysterious than we thought. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Okay, fair enough. | ||
| And scientists do do this. | ||
| I mean, I've followed paleoanthropology for my whole adult life. | ||
| And one of the big mysteries is how did we get a big brain? | ||
| How did we get to abstract reasoning from, say, what chimps can do? | ||
| No one knows. | ||
| The doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years, right? | ||
| And because no one knows, every couple of years there's a new book out. | ||
| It's climate change. | ||
| It was... | ||
| The throwing arm, cooking food. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| Cooking meat. | ||
| You know, meat is another big one. | ||
| A Harvard perfect... | ||
| Meat. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And these books come and go. | ||
| And some of them have legs. | ||
| Some of them don't. | ||
| And it's just the way it goes. | ||
| And then there's Terrence McKenna's theory. | ||
| It's pretty obvious it was psychedelics. | ||
| Yeah, that's Terrence McKenna's stoned ape theory. | ||
| Not that made the brain bigger, but that... | ||
| Switch the brain on. | ||
| Is this the old Julian? | ||
| Julian Jaynes, no. | ||
| The bicameral mind, not at all. | ||
| This is David Lewis Williams, who's professor of anthropology at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. | ||
| His neuropsychological theory of cave art. | ||
| All kudos to Terence McKenna and Food of the Gods. | ||
| What a brilliant... | ||
| What a brilliant alternative thinker. | ||
| But David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwatersrand has been working on this problem since 1973, and his argument is that the remarkable similarities that we see in rock and cave art all around the world are explained that we're dealing with a shamanistic art. | ||
| Shamanism involves altered states of consciousness. | ||
| This is typical visions of altered states of consciousness, and it seems to have accompanied a great leap forward in human behavior. | ||
| And you covered this in your book? | ||
| I covered it in Supernatural. | ||
| As did Richard Wrangham's theory. | ||
| This is a highly regarded scientist at Harvard. | ||
| So he's the meat-eating guy. | ||
| It's cooking meat. | ||
| By cooking the protein, that's what gives you the energy to build a huge brain. | ||
| All right, so now this guy is starting with 10 pluses on his side. | ||
| He's Harvard and already respected. | ||
| And even so, his book was like, eh, maybe. | ||
| Well, it's probably a series of different events and a bunch of different factors. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It could be a number of different things. | ||
| So, let's get away from Gobekli Tepe and ancient civilizations, and let's get back to the geological evidence, which, Randall, you're an expert at. | ||
| And this is one of the main things that you had a dispute with, and this is one of the reasons why we got everybody together. | ||
| Now, what is your thoughts on what Randall and Graham proposed, specifically Randall, who is much more on the geological side of things? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, this is why I brought in my phone-a-friend, a geologist. | ||
| So, by way of background, after your show, I thought, you know, let's just give this a fair hearing. | ||
| This is what we do. | ||
| So this will be our cover story, and I think the end-of-summer issue comes out. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| I hope that Marc Defant... | ||
| Is going to be doing some more work on the draft of his article for you that is up online, because that article is full of bullshit statements about me which are demonstrably false. | ||
| He's on. | ||
| Yeah, he's there, and I'm happy to engage with those particular issues. | ||
| Well, I'll have to put on my reading glasses. | ||
| And whatever article's online, this has not been published yet. | ||
| Well, it claims that it's a draft of the article that will appear in a 2017 edition of Skeptic magazine. | ||
| So pull it up, Graham, and give you a chance to have your time in court. | ||
| Let's let Graham go over it first, and then we'll have Mark on to refute what he said. | ||
| So here's the font on magicians of the gods. | ||
| By the way, Michael, I mean, you say that you're here to, you know, to respectfully aim to get at the truth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Conjuring up the lost civilization from nothing. | ||
| Yeah, let me just get to the top of this. | ||
| I've got it here. | ||
| Just bear with me a second. | ||
| So, amongst the words in Mark Defant's article, he's accusing me of duping. | ||
| The public. | ||
| He's saying that I'm public enemy number one. | ||
| He's accusing me of arm waving. | ||
| I admit I do wave my arms. | ||
| Pontificating. | ||
| Well, my grandfather was a minister of the church. | ||
| Little interest in peer-reviewed research. | ||
| Claimed that no academic would debate. | ||
| That's Utter bullshit. | ||
| I had a debate with Zahi Hawass. | ||
| He's a leading Egyptian Egyptologist. | ||
| Back in 2015, it was not my fault that Zahi Hawass walked out on that debate. | ||
| I can play the video, if you like, a minute and a half of Zahi Hawass lambasting me and then walking out and refusing to debate further. | ||
| So it's bullshit to say I don't debate or I'm not willing to debate. | ||
| And finally, he says that I'm conning a hellacious number of people into buying his books. | ||
| Now, how can we get any dialogue going when somebody begins like that? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Then would you like some further? | ||
| Bear with me because I just have to scroll down and I don't have a mouse... | ||
| I don't have a mouse. | ||
| So, Hancock and Carlson claimed that several times that no academic would debate them. | ||
| Not true. | ||
| I'm accused of doing an about-face since fingerprints of the gods. | ||
| Are my views not allowed to evolve with new evidence? | ||
| Is that somehow a crime on my part? | ||
| Let me just finish. | ||
| Then, a cheap shot, you know, he cites Jesus Gemara and accuses me of not having the scientific knowledge to deal with issues of gravitation. | ||
| Now, it's true that Jesus Gemara, who is a descendant of the Incas, who has worked 70 years on the megaliths of Sacsayhuaman, whose father before him, Alfredo Gemara, worked 70 years, it's true that he's got a way-out theory about gravitation. | ||
| Thing is, I state in my book that it's a way-out theory. | ||
| What I go on to say, quoted in the attack, is that, however, this isn't the part of his theory I'm interested in. | ||
| Where I feel he is solidly persuasive is in his observations of the anomalous character of the monuments of the Andes, etc., etc. | ||
| Defante doesn't cite that. | ||
| He just presents me as buying what Jesus Guamara says. | ||
| I mean, if that's the standard that you're going to have in Skeptic magazine, you have a serious problem. | ||
| And then Gobekli Tepe, he contends that Gobekli Tepe is too advanced to have been completed by hunter-gatherers and must have been constructed by a more advanced civilization. | ||
| Well, no, that's not what I say. | ||
| I say it was constructed by hunter-gatherers, but that they were advised and supported by people who had knowledge of this kind of work beforehand. | ||
| How is that different? | ||
| I think it's very different. | ||
| I'm not saying it was constructed by. | ||
| I'm saying that a group of people settled amongst hunter-gatherers and transferred some skills for them. | ||
| He says that, he quotes me, Hancock makes the following stunning claim. | ||
| Quote, our ancestors are being initiated into the secrets of metals and how to make swords and knives. | ||
| I do not make that claim. | ||
| I'm reporting that this claim is made in the book of Enoch. | ||
| That is not my claim. | ||
| Then what else? | ||
| So you don't think that's the explanation? | ||
| Well, I'm being misrepresented by your author here. | ||
| If he wants to represent me, if he accuses me of cherry-picking, he shouldn't cherry-pick my statements. | ||
| He should quote it in full context. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're still working on this. | |
| Let's get it right. | ||
| You don't accept it. | ||
| It's out there on the internet. | ||
| He's still working on it, but he's published online. | ||
| Here's a beautiful one. | ||
| I didn't know it was online. | ||
| Here's a beautiful one. | ||
| He cites Klaus Schmidt on the character. | ||
| Schmidt makes a salient point, almost as if he anticipated Hancock's book. | ||
| Quote, fabulous or mythical creatures such as centaurs or the sphinx, winged bulls or horses, do not yet occur in the iconography and therefore in the mythology of prehistoric times. | ||
| They must be recognized as creations of the high cultures which arose later. | ||
| Well, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. | ||
| You've just been talking about the painted caves. | ||
| Go to Chauvet Cave. | ||
| You'll see a lion man, Holsteinstad, a lion man carved out of mammoth ivory. | ||
| Go to Chauvet, bison man, straddling lion woman. | ||
| Her right arm is transferring... | ||
| It's transforming into the head of a lion. | ||
| So certainly these mythical creatures did exist in the Upper Paleolithic and it's rubbish to say that they didn't. | ||
| I mean, how can I go on? | ||
| The teapot. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So he's taking issue with me because I suggest that the vulture on Pillar 43 in Enclosure D is representing the teapot asterism of the constellation of Sagittarius. | ||
| And he goes and gives us little things of Uncle Sam and Some other thing that he shows, you know, anybody can impose any image on anything. | ||
| Well, it's not my fault that a couple of academics who didn't even talk to me and had nothing whatsoever to do to me have published a major study in the, I quote it again, the Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, a peer-reviewed journal, where they make precisely that identification. | ||
| So at least I'm not alone. | ||
| At least there are peer-reviewed credentialed scholars who also agree that that figure is representing the teapot asterism within the constellation of Sagittarius. | ||
| No reference to that. | ||
| Shock's opinions were supposed to not go into the minutiae because they've already been dismissed by a study by Liritsis and Vafiadu. | ||
| Far from it. | ||
| That study doesn't dismiss Shock at all. | ||
| None of that study was done on the body of the Sphinx itself. | ||
| It was done in the Valley and the Sphinx temples. | ||
| And by the way, the dates are extremely troubling. | ||
| Some of them could push it as far as 3600 BC that the work was done or as early in some cases as 1000 BC. | ||
| I don't think that study proves anything. | ||
| Anything and so on and so forth. | ||
| Just to clarify what you do believe then, so that we don't misrepresent you. | ||
| So you don't think that the lost civilization instructed them on the use of metals? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't see evidence for that. | ||
| But why would you put that in the book then? | ||
| I didn't put it in the book. | ||
| I was quoting the Book of Enoch. | ||
| It's a huge passage on the Book of Enoch. | ||
| It's not me who's saying that. | ||
| It's the Book of Enoch that's saying that. | ||
| Okay, I understand, but why... | ||
| All I require your defant to do... | ||
| Is to state that Hancock is citing the Book of Enoch. | ||
| He didn't do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's the word? | |
| Disingenuous? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that the polite word you guys use? | |
| It seems more than disingenuous. | ||
| It's a character assassination. | ||
| What the question is, what's the context of including that in your book? | ||
| I forget. | ||
| Well, the context is that actually I was criticizing Zachariah Sitchin. | ||
| That's primarily what I was doing. | ||
| So you don't think that a lost civilization instructed the people who built Gobekli Tepe on the use of metals and tools? | ||
| I see no evidence for that. | ||
| I see Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| I can't go say they instructed them on the use of metals and tools unless I can find evidence for it. | ||
| Well, so what did they do? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| They generated agriculture. | ||
| They created a center of excellence around which a hunting gatherer... | ||
| No, not they who built Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| The lost civilization that advised them that you think happened. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What did they do if they... | ||
| They've come through a cataclysm. | ||
| They're survivors, few in number. | ||
| This is my scenario. | ||
| You don't have to accept it. | ||
| I'm sure you don't. | ||
| They take refuge amongst hunter-gatherers. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| You probably have some survival skills. | ||
| I don't have many. | ||
| I mean, if we were to have a comet impact in the world today, which were to take out all the underpinnings of modern civilization, I might go settle with hunter-gatherers because they're the people who know best how to live in that situation. | ||
| I have no survival skills. | ||
| Yeah, so go settle amongst her together. | ||
| But I might be able to transfer some of my knowledge to them. | ||
| I might have something that I could transfer to them. | ||
| And I might have very strong reasons why I might not choose to transfer all of it. | ||
| So, in other words, perhaps this is what happened. | ||
| Okay, maybe. | ||
| But how is that different from Zachariah Sitchin's? | ||
| Well, the aliens advised him. | ||
| Well, that's a lot different. | ||
| I think it's massively different, especially since Zachariah Sitchin has his aliens arriving here in 1970s NASA technology. | ||
| Weirdly, he wrote his book in the 1970s. | ||
| I mean, I don't go there. | ||
| I don't make that suggestion. | ||
| I'm simply saying... | ||
| Perhaps there's been a forgotten episode in human history. | ||
| Perhaps its fingerprints are present at a number of sites around the world. | ||
| But perhaps the extremely defensive, arrogant and patronizing attitude of mainstream academia is stopping us from considering that possibility. | ||
| And therefore, I campaign to get that possibility considered. | ||
| And I try to do so with as loud a voice as possible. | ||
| Well, you're doing it. | ||
| You're doing it, man. | ||
| But doesn't it disturb you that you... | ||
| I mean, you run Skeptic Magazine and someone publishes something like that? | ||
| I mean, that goes against the whole idea of critical thinking. | ||
| I mean, it's misrepresenting his quotes. | ||
| It's misrepresenting his perspective, his point of view. | ||
| It's really disingenuous. | ||
| This is one reason we're doing this, so we could get his... | ||
| But why would anybody write something like that? | ||
| And why would you guys publish something like that without checking the facts? | ||
| We are. | ||
| This was not supposed to be posted online. | ||
| It's online, though. | ||
| How does something get online if it's not supposed to be? | ||
| Why is such a person who will do that a useful contributor to your side of the debate? | ||
| One of the reasons we're here is to get your point of view exactly right. | ||
| So you're saying that there's no evidence that any lost civilization exists, only the fingerprints of their influence on later peoples we do know existed. | ||
| I'm saying there are physical objects. | ||
| I say Gobekli Tepe is one of them. | ||
| I say the Sphinx is another. | ||
| But see, this is that argument from either ignorance or personal incredulity. | ||
| I don't accept the mainstream, or I can't think of how this pyramids could have been built, therefore it was built by somebody else through some other technology. | ||
| That's not what he's saying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's not what I'm saying. | |
| They're just post-dating it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What I'm saying is the Sphinx is older. | |
| I do go with Robert Schalk's argument on the geology. | ||
| I'm also very interested in the astronomy of the site. | ||
| And again, I have slides that I could show on this if we have time. | ||
| You might want to get into Ed Krupp's criticism of the Orion correlation and why he says it's upside down. | ||
| I can talk to you about that. | ||
| We do. | ||
| I mean, I know Ed Krupp's argument about that. | ||
| That was from the 90s, I think. | ||
| What's your thoughts on Robert Schock's conclusions? | ||
| That's not something I know much about. | ||
| Well, you should. | ||
| It's a huge factor. | ||
| It's a huge factor. | ||
| Because it's all about water erosion. | ||
| Your Mark Defant knows about Schock, and he rejects it on the basis of that paper. | ||
| And that paper really doesn't date the Sphinx. | ||
| It works with dating of large blocks in the valley and the Sphinx temples. | ||
| There's not a single sample taken from the Sphinx. | ||
| Alright, then who dated it? | ||
| Who dated it? | ||
| And then why do mainstream archaeologists not accept the older date for the Sphinx? | ||
| And the answer is because they have a whole bunch of other evidence that points to the date that they think it does. | ||
| The answer to your question is very simple. | ||
| Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass put it on record back in 1992 when John Anthony West and Robert Schock first presented the rainfall erosion evidence on the Sphinx. | ||
| And what Lehner and Hawass said is, the Sphinx can't possibly be 12,000 plus years old because there was no other culture anywhere in the world that was capable of creating large-scale monumental architecture like this. | ||
| Show me one other structure that's capable of doing that. | ||
| Well, they could say that in 1992, Michael, but they can't say it in 2017, not since Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| If you don't mind, Graham, could you please, for people, so this could be a standalone thing, people could understand, what is the argument about the Sphinx, the enclosure of the Sphinx, and Dr. Robert Schock from Boston University, who's a geologist, what was his conclusion? | ||
| What Schock is saying is that the Sphinx and the trench out of which the Sphinx is cut... | ||
| It bears the unmistakable evidence of precipitation-induced weathering, weathering caused by exposure to a substantial period of heavy rainfall. | ||
| And that is particularly pointed out in the vertical fissures in the trench. | ||
| You see, the Sphinx itself has been subject to so much restoration over so many years that it's difficult for people to even see the core body of the Sphinx today. | ||
| But you can see the vertical fissures even down at the back of there. | ||
| That is what shock counts as rainfall, precipitation-induced weathering, heavy rainfall, which is selectively removing the softer layers and leaving the harder layers in place. | ||
| And the problem is we don't have that rainfall in Giza, in Egypt, four and a half thousand years ago. | ||
| You have to go back much earlier to get that rainfall. | ||
| That's the suggestion. | ||
| So that's the suggestion by Robert Schock, independently of your conclusions? | ||
| Totally independently, yeah. | ||
| Schock disagrees with me on many things, as a matter of fact. | ||
| And I disagree with him on many things, but I think he's on the money on this. | ||
| So that alone would set back at least that one... | ||
| I mean, it's pretty much established that the Great Pyrene of Giza was constructed about 2,500 BC, right? | ||
| There's absolutely no doubt that a huge project went on at Giza around 2,500 BC. So your argument is not that the whole thing was that much older, was that parts of it seemed to have been from an earlier civilization, or at least that civilization far, far earlier than was... | ||
| I would say that the ground plan, what we have at Giza, the basic layout of the site, was established in what the ancient Egyptians called Zeptepe, the first time. | ||
| Astronomically and geologically, I and my colleagues suggest that the first time can be dated to the period of about 12,500 to 13,000 years ago. | ||
| That was when the site was laid out, because there's intriguing astronomical alignments of the Great Pyramids to the belt of Orion. | ||
| I know Ed Krupp has a completely opposite view on this. | ||
| And of the Great Sphinx to the constellation of Leo, rising due east, housing the sun on the equinox, the astrological age of Leo. | ||
| Again, I have slides I can... | ||
| It aligns with the geological evidence that Robert Schock concludes... | ||
| It aligns with the geological evidence. | ||
| Thousands of years of rainfall. | ||
| The age of Leo pretty much exactly spans the younger Dryas, as a matter of fact. | ||
| And so the only argument against that at the time was that there were no other structures like that from 12,000 years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| And then Krupp said that the Orion correlation wasn't real because it was upside down. | ||
| Do you want to get into that now? | ||
| Well, first... | ||
| That's not the only argument. | ||
| It's that, okay, if the Sphinx is built, or the layout for the whole thing is built in, say, 10, 11,000 years ago, and then the pyramids are built, you know, 2500 B.C., what happened in between? | ||
| Where are all the people, the trash, the places where they lived? | ||
| Well, there's a bunch of different styles of construction. | ||
| But not dated in between. | ||
| I would propose, Michael, something like a monastery. | ||
| Which has a relatively small archaeological footprint, is on the site. | ||
| I mean, the idea of information, knowledge, and traditions lasting for thousands of years within a religious system shouldn't be too absurd to us. | ||
| I mean, Judaism is dealing with ideas that are already best part of 4,000 years old if we go back to Ur of the Chaldees and so on and so forth. | ||
| So that's all I'm suggesting, really, that the idea is preserved, maintained, that the survivors... | ||
| On where? | ||
| On the site, but in something like a monastery. | ||
| Which has got a very small archaeological footprint. | ||
| It is not high. | ||
| Perhaps, again, one can only speculate, and I think there's a lot of speculation on the archaeological side too, one can only speculate, perhaps having gone through a cataclysm, perhaps they felt to blame for this, wrongly or rightly. | ||
| I mean, there are many, many traditions in which humanity's behaviour is implicated in the cataclysm that takes place. | ||
| And perhaps they didn't want to switch civilisation on completely right there. | ||
| Perhaps they waited, passed down the knowledge through initiates, Enough was there to create a mystery because it's undoubtedly a mystery that the construction of the great pyramids, the first huge pyramids in Egypt, preceded only really by the Zoser pyramid at Saqqara, that the construction of the great pyramids is vastly superior to the construction of the pyramids of the fifth and sixth dynasty that follow it. | ||
| And that's a little bit counterintuitive that we have this collapse in skills. | ||
| One would have expected it to got better. | ||
| So it sounds like the work on the pyramids started already with a level of knowledge in hand. | ||
| Yes, but okay, so here's how I would think about that. | ||
| There's a lot of perhapsing and maybes. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Yes, well, so you have a bunch of Egyptologists and archaeologists who have been working on this site for centuries. | ||
| This is one of the most, you know, ancient mysteries and so on. | ||
| And so let's say there's like 20 lines of evidence that point to, built roughly around this time period here. | ||
| And then you come on and say, okay, but there's this one anomaly of the rain thing, and there was only rain at this time. | ||
| Now there's a huge gap. | ||
| You have one anomaly or line of evidence here and like 20 here. | ||
| Well, we're talking about different structures, though. | ||
| There's not a lot of evidence that points to the Sphinx being from a particular time period. | ||
| Well, he's saying like 12,000, right? | ||
| I'm saying the rainfall evidence suggests that. | ||
| Right, but other evidence. | ||
| Add its alignment. | ||
| And its alignment with the constellation of Leo housing the sun at dawn on the spring equinox. | ||
| It's an equinoctial mark, and nobody would dispute that. | ||
| Nobody would dispute that the ancient Egypt... | ||
| Well, no, I mean, if you make a monument pointing perfectly Jewish... | ||
| I've stood on the back of the Sphinx at dawn on the spring equinox, and believe me, again, I could show a picture, its head lines up perfectly. | ||
| With the rising sun. | ||
| No, I don't think anybody, even Krupp, is disputing that it's an equinoctial marker. | ||
| Now, here's the thing. | ||
| You're an ancient Egyptian. | ||
| You're building an equinoctial marker in 2500 BC. Do you know what constellation is housing the sun in 2500 BC? I haven't run the little program. | ||
| It's the constellation of Taurus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So? | |
| So logically, if you're creating an equinoctial, and the ancient Egyptians were not shy about making images of bulls, plenty of them, if you're making an equinoctial marker in 2500 BC, you really should create it in the form of a bull, not in the form of a lion, you know? | ||
| That's the puzzling issue, and yet we do have a time when a lion constellation housed the sun at dawn on the spring equinox, and that is the period of the younger dryers. | ||
| Okay, I'd say that's a pretty big leap. | ||
| Well, I know you'd say that, and your colleagues all say that too. | ||
| And then we have a gap of about five or six thousand years where there's nothing. | ||
| I'm going to refer back to several articles that were published in the 80s and 90s. | ||
| This one is from Nature, Early 80s, Late Quaternary History of the Nile. | ||
| And what it's discussing is the evidence that there was a major shift In the hydraulic regime of the Nile River. | ||
| It says, between 20,000 and 12,000 years before present, when timberline in the headwaters was lower, vegetation cover more open than today, the Nile was a highly seasonal braided river, which brought mixed coarse and fine sediments down to Egypt and Sudan. | ||
| This cold, dry interval had ended by 12,500 years before present, when overflow from Lake Victoria and higher rainfall in Ethiopia sent extraordinary floods down the main Nile. | ||
| And those floods have been documented to have been 120 feet above the modern flood plain of the Nile. | ||
| Any civilization, or whatever you want to call it, living along the Nile River at that time, Would have had to abandon whatever they were doing there in this regime, this intensified hydraulic regime. | ||
| And it goes on to say, it marked a revolutionary change to continuous flow with a superimposed flood peak. | ||
| So what happened is that there was a major environmental change that occurred right there around 12,000 to 12,500 years. | ||
| The dating could be adjusted somewhat since the early 80s, but the point is made is that because of a major Hydrological change, major vegetation cover change, major environmental change, this would have caused also imposed changes upon whatever culture was existing there or living there at the time. | ||
| Now what we have is In the aftermath of that event, we have basically the emergence of desert, which now would require serious adaptation. | ||
| It's very likely, too, that these events could have also decimated the population at the time, leaving basically no workforce. | ||
| And then, over a period of two or three or four thousand years, you find that That there's enough of a recovery that these kind of monumental structures can be renewed. | ||
| But it's clear from this and a lot of other studies, studies in the eastern Mediterranean showing that there are sap repel layers, which is basically material that has been washed in from the continental surface that has not oxidized. | ||
| It has essentially become rotten and Carried in organic material, carried in off of the continents by this enhanced regime of water flow, actually forcing so much water that there was a fresh water lid on the eastern Mediterranean that caused a cessation in the circulation between the upper waters and the lower waters. | ||
| Reducing the amount of oxygen brought down to the to the lower waters and so you had these layers of mud that formed on the bottom of the Mediterranean that show this massive influx of fresh water flowing off of out of the Nile and off of the the Egyptian continent at this same time so Clearly the evidence shows that there were major climatic changes that occurred around this time. | ||
| It is not so speculative to imagine that whoever, whatever, and we don't have to invoke any kind of a super advanced civilization, but whatever cultures were there that were perhaps capable of carving blocks of stone, transporting blocks of stone, | ||
| as they were at Gobekli Tepe during this time range, That their activity would have been interrupted to the extent that it might have taken millennia to recover, to get the labor force necessary to undertake major monumental programs on the Giza Plateau. | ||
| So I think that if we assume this gradualistic scenario, yeah, that's a fair question to ask. | ||
| What happened in that interval? | ||
| But if there is a major climatic downturn and a major disruption of the settled patterns of whatever culture was already there, then, you know, now we might have an explanation why there would be a gap. | ||
| Especially if these events caused a bottleneck in the population of the area. | ||
| Of course this is all speculative, but it is not speculative to say that there is multiple lines of evidence suggesting these major even cataclysmic changes that engulfed that part of the world during that era. | ||
| So that could provide an explanation of why there is a gap there. | ||
| Makes a ton of sense. | ||
| Well, does it because... | ||
| Does it not? | ||
| Only if you have to have the Sphinx in conjunction with 12,000 years ago and the lost civilization. | ||
| If you just say that rainwater erosion on the Sphinx is not an explanation for the age and that the traditional accepted age is what we think it is, then there's no gap to fill. | ||
| So really, all we're talking about is we have, again, lots of evidence here, one anomaly here. | ||
| I really want the anomaly thing to stick, so I've got to explain the gap. | ||
| The gap is explained by environmental changes. | ||
| Yeah, but what is the lots of evidence other than a lot of assumptions and a lot of maybes? | ||
| Actually, can you cite me a single contemporary inscription from the date that the Sphinx is supposed to have been made that refers to the Sphinx? | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Can you cite a single contemporary inscription? | ||
| Contemporary to the date that Egyptologists ascribe to the Sphinx. | ||
| In other words, to the reign of Khufu. | ||
| Can you cite me a single inscription that talks about the Sphinx being built? | ||
| This is not, I don't study this area, I don't know. | ||
| Okay, well you can't, because there is no such inscription. | ||
| Okay, well, so? | ||
| Well, one would have thought there would be. | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
| It's a giant project. | ||
| It's 270 feet long, it's 70 feet high, it's carved out of solid rock. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| No reference to it at all in the Old Kingdom. | ||
| You actually have to come down to the New Kingdom to get references to the Sphinx in inscriptions. | ||
| But you've already said that the pyramids were built at the time we think they were built, not... | ||
| Thousands of years ago. | ||
| I would say that a great deal of work was done on the pyramids at the time of 2500 BC. I think the ground plan was laid out earlier. | ||
| And we have like the step pyramid, which is cruder and not as well designed as the other pyramids. | ||
| That's a transitional stage at that time. | ||
| Often argued to be a transitional stage. | ||
| You've been to the step pyramid, I'm sure. | ||
| No, no, I'm not. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you've been to Giza, though. | ||
| No, I've never been to Giza. | ||
| Oh dear. | ||
| Well, they do make a very different impact. | ||
| I mean, I've climbed the Great Pyramid five times. | ||
| I mean, you're dealing with something orders of magnitude different in terms of what's required. | ||
| I mean, this thing weighs six million tons. | ||
| Oh, I understand. | ||
| It's 281 feet high. | ||
| It consists of two and a half million individual blocks of stone. | ||
| It's aligned to true north within three sixtieths of a single degree. | ||
| I mean, to compare that to Zoser is really not a valid comparison at all. | ||
| What's more interesting to me is the radical decline that takes place in pyramid building skills in the fifth and sixth dynasty. | ||
| Go to Unas, go to Pepe, go to Teti at Saqqara. | ||
| These are shambles. | ||
| You can hardly even recognize them as a pyramid. | ||
| What happened to all that knowledge that's invested in the Great Pyramid? | ||
| Why does Egypt devolve so rapidly? | ||
| How do we explain this pristine, amazing work that's done on the Great Pyramid unless there's a legacy of knowledge being attached to it? | ||
| Okay, so every Egyptian archaeologist knows everything you just said, and they don't accept any of your arguments. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| That's why I'm needed, because somebody's got to counter this. | ||
| Is it just that they're closed-minded, and they follow Zahia Vash, and they never think for themselves? | ||
| You want to see a closed mind? | ||
| I'll play you a one-and-a-half-minute video of Zahia Vash refusing to debate with me. | ||
| All of them? | ||
| Every one of the Egyptologists and archaeologists over the last two centuries and so on? | ||
| They're all dogmatically closed-minded and they can't see the arguments as clear as you? | ||
| Or is it they're not convinced by your argument? | ||
| They're not convinced by my argument. | ||
| They genuinely and absolutely believe that their argument is right. | ||
| The notion that I'm proposing is apparently so preposterous to them that it isn't even worthy of consideration, but it is worthy of insults and attacks on me, on my integrity, on my decency as a human being, on my honesty. | ||
| All of those things get attacked. | ||
| You know, because mainstream... | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| I'm ready for that. | ||
| And by the way, I know that archaeologists, academics constantly attack each other all the time. | ||
| I used to take this stuff personally, but then when I see what they do to each other, the ravaging attack dogs are let loose on any new idea. | ||
| I sometimes wish scientists would actually look for what's good in a new idea rather than what's bad. | ||
| But I get why they do look for what's bad. | ||
| But in other words, some young graduate student working in that area could make a name for himself by overturning... | ||
| My son was a young graduate student at the University of Cardiff studying Egyptology. | ||
| He got marked down in his degree because he proposed the possibility that the pyramids and the Sphinx might be or might have older origins. | ||
| He was impressed by my work. | ||
| It did him a lot of harm in his degree. | ||
| And if all this was true, then eventually it would come out. | ||
| You haven't answered my point. | ||
| If you go against the mainstream view, your career does not progress as an Egyptologist. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| Give me an example. | ||
| How is it that we know anything that we know about Egyptology now? | ||
| Give me an example from Egyptology of somebody who's gone against the mainstream view and been lauded for so doing. | ||
| Well, look, we don't believe everything about it that we believed two centuries ago at, say, Napoleon's time, right? | ||
| How did all that knowledge come about? | ||
| How did all the change in that science develop? | ||
| Well, it really begins with Champollion and the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone. | ||
| How was he able to do that against the mainstream? | ||
| There was no mainstream that he was against. | ||
| This is my point. | ||
| The mainstream has taken time to form, and it's very solid now. | ||
| Egyptologists all sing from the same hymn book. | ||
| You'll find very little disagreement amongst them on anything. | ||
| But this is true in every field. | ||
| But somehow or another, Einstein managed to make an impact because he turned out to be right. | ||
| Well, I'm no Einstein, and I don't know if I'm right, but I'm going to continue to oppose that mainstream. | ||
| Somebody has to. | ||
| I don't know if that's a valid comparison, Einstein and archaeology. | ||
| Take paleoanthropology. | ||
| I mean, it's a completely different field now than a century ago. | ||
| How did that happen if no one ever accepts new ideas? | ||
| They do. | ||
| It happens all the time. | ||
| Well, they're being forced to accept Gobekli Tepe, and that's a new idea. | ||
| You know where you were talking about things taking a long time, and what seems like a long time to us is really a blink of the eye in terms of archaeology? | ||
| We're in the middle of that. | ||
| We're essentially in the middle of that with things like Gobekli Tepe, with Forbes publishing an article about the Younger Dryas possibly being impacted by comets and that being one of the causes of mass extinction. | ||
| Right. | ||
| These are all mainstream ideas now. | ||
| And when Alvarez proposed the impact hypothesis for the demise of the dinosaurs in 1980, it was ridiculed. | ||
| And Buddy turned out to be right, and then that became the accepted mainstream. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It takes time. | ||
| And now people are challenging that. | ||
| Wasn't the key turning point the finding of the crater? | ||
| That's what made the difference. | ||
| It's kind of hard to argue with that. | ||
| So again, where's your crater? | ||
| Well, this is where perhaps we need to bring in our phone-a-friend, you know, Malcolm LeCompte, one of the Younger Dryas impact scientists. | ||
| I mean, the point being made is the following. | ||
| Firstly, that the primary impacts were on ice. | ||
| There may have been as many as four impacts, that they were on the North American ice cap. | ||
| Some craters have been suggested, for example, very deep holes in the Great Lakes. | ||
| Other craters have been and will be looked at by the team in the coming months, whether it includes the Corosol Crater. | ||
| Crater, the Quebec terrain, and so on and so forth. | ||
| There are candidates. | ||
| The crater has not been found yet, but I would be surprised if a crater was easy to find when, you know, the impact is on two-mile-deep ice. | ||
| And, you know, one of the biggest strewn fields in the world, which is the Australian tektite strewn field, there's no crater associated with that, but everybody accepts the impact proxies. | ||
| There's enough of them to justify that, and that's what's going on around this impact hypothesis. | ||
| So on a related question to that is not the lost civilizations and the demise of humans, but the megafauna extinction of North American mammals. | ||
| So this has been long debated before the impact hypothesis was proposed. | ||
| And the competing hypotheses were overhunting, humans just hunted them, to the point, not every last one, to the point where the population numbers get too low and these species can't survive. | ||
| Or climate change, or both. | ||
| The climate change weakened the populations, then the humans came over and overhunted them. | ||
| Alright, so, and then the impact hypothesis is proposed. | ||
| Okay, so this was debated, and it didn't fare that well because there were a lot of mammals and other species that didn't go extinct that you would expect from a massive impact like that, it would have wiped out. | ||
| Why the selected species, the kinds of species that humans would hunt, are the ones that went extinct, whereas these others didn't? | ||
| Well, why would humans be hunting the largest species? | ||
| There's no evidence that humans hunted the predators. | ||
| There is evidence that they hunted woolly mammoths, but it's very sparse. | ||
| I mean, you have no more than a dozen sites that show association between human hunting and mammoths. | ||
| And a lot of those, like the Lubbock Lake site, is now being questioned. | ||
| What was previously interpreted as being butchering marks on On the mammoth remains there are now being reinterpreted as possibly natural marks on the mammoth bones. | ||
| But it's a big stretch to go from, okay we've got a dozen sites where we have mammoth remains and along with those mammoth remains we find a few Clovis spear points In two or three cases we actually find, or they have found, spear points embedded within the mammoth, | ||
| like in the rib cage, but it's a very large stretch to go from there to say that ten or twelve million woolly mammoths, or four species of mammoths on four continents, were wiped out by Paleo-Indian hunters, probably in bands of no more than two or three dozen, Have you ever been to a head-smashed-in buffalo site? | ||
| Yes, but that's a good example because nowhere did that go anywhere close to exterminating the species of American bison. | ||
| But each site has its own particular explanation. | ||
| It could be hunting, it could be a massive flood. | ||
| Earthquake, whatever. | ||
| Could be a massive flood, yes, exactly. | ||
| I think there you and I would be in complete agreement. | ||
| What does it mean by massive? | ||
| Global versus, you know, local. | ||
| So, for example, there's 52 mammalian genera went extinct in South America. | ||
| Why would they go extinct in South America? | ||
| About the time that humans were moving down, they're hunting. | ||
| The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis includes South America. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It does. | |
| There were impacts there. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Again, the dating of the migration of humans into South America is controversial at this point. | ||
| There is evidence that humans were there long before. | ||
| Paul Martin's idea of blitzkrieg requires that the animals be so stupid that they had no adaptive capabilities to the appearance of a new predatory species. | ||
| But what is being demonstrated from examining the life ways of The Paleo-Indian peoples is that they had very diversified diets, and they were hunter-gatherers. | ||
| Now, why would they be choosing the largest, most dangerous animals to hunt when they had such a proliferation of other smaller animals? | ||
| We know that they were foraging, we know that they were eating seafood and fishing, because all of this is being found in the camps. | ||
| And then it certainly doesn't explain the extermination of the cave bears, the short-faced bears, the camelops, the giant beavers, the giant armadillos, the American Pleistocene lion, the ground sloths that were the size of giraffes. | ||
| Four species of proboscideans, meaning mammoths, extinct on four continents. | ||
| And to me, like, wait a second. | ||
| We cannot invoke a modern example to say, well, here is... | ||
| How about the Maori? | ||
| Well, that's controversial also. | ||
| I mean, they drove the mowerbirds extinct in... | ||
| Past eagle. | ||
| Well, that's an assumption. | ||
| If you ask the Maori themselves... | ||
| There's a big difference between that and people with atlatls killing off all the saber-toothed tigers. | ||
| But here's another answer to one of your questions. | ||
| You were saying, like, why would some of the animals be alive? | ||
| Well, we know that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago didn't kill everything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is a massive impact, far bigger than anything we're talking about. | ||
| And many, many animals survived that. | ||
| So we don't know why things survive and why they don't. | ||
| It could be proximity to the impact. | ||
| It could be that their food source wasn't removed. | ||
| It could be that their predators were wiped out and they managed to survive. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of animals that are still alive today in this continent. | ||
| Like, for instance, a pronghorn antelope. | ||
| A pronghorn antelope, Dan Flores, who's a wildlife historian, wrote an amazing book. | ||
| On it, and when he was talking about the American savanna during, you know, like 15,000 plus years ago, there was all sorts of crazy animals millions of years ago that were like cheetahs that were running down animals at extreme speeds, which is the reason why pronghorn antelopes can run so much faster than any of their current predators. | ||
| Something much faster than them was killing them, and that was wiped out, but they managed to make it. | ||
| One of the reasons why they probably managed to make it is because their predators were wiped out. | ||
| It's not an even... | ||
| Another point, Michael. | ||
| If it's overkill, it's intriguing that the overkill occurs, you know, precisely in the Younger Dryas window, because I think you'd agree that now the whole story of the peopling of the Americas is pretty much up for grabs. | ||
| I mean, Clovis first was the dominant model for a very long time, and under that model, we're to envisage these Clovis hunters coming in across the Bering Land Bridge, going down the ice-free corridor, and then in like 800 years, With their sophisticated fluted points, they wipe out all the mammoths in North America. | ||
| But now we know that humans have been coexisting and butchering mammoths, coexisting with mammoths for thousands of years before that, possibly tens of thousands of years before that. | ||
| You mean from evidence in Siberia? | ||
| I don't only mean from evidence in Siberia. | ||
| I mean, I can cite you from Nature magazine just recently. | ||
| Huge, huge number. | ||
| I don't think the Yukon is in Siberia, is it? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think the Yukon's in North America. | ||
| Jacques Sankt Mars, you know, the excavator of the Bluefish Caves in the Yukon. | ||
| Back in the 1970s was proposing that human beings had been in the Americas at least 24,000 years ago. | ||
| His reputation was utterly destroyed. | ||
| His research funding was withdrawn. | ||
| He was given no access to grants. | ||
| He wasn't able to do his work. | ||
| He was heavily penalized and punished by the community. | ||
| And now just a few weeks ago we have the Smithsonian coming out and saying, sorry, we got it wrong. | ||
| Jacques Sainte-Mars was right all along. | ||
| And Tom Dillehay, you know, with his work in Monteverdi, the shit that he had to take. | ||
| I think we're in a very interesting time. | ||
| The peopling of the Americas is really a paradigm that has absolutely been overthrown. | ||
| The notion of Clovis first. | ||
| Well, you disagree with Smithsonian then, which is fine. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| No, the Mesa Verde, again, it's an anomaly. | ||
| It's an isolated site. | ||
| Where are all the sites between Clovis and Monteverde? | ||
| Do you honestly think Clovis was still first? | ||
| For thousands and thousands of years. | ||
| Come on, Michael. | ||
| Do you think Clovis was still first? | ||
| Where are all the people between Clovis and Monteverde? | ||
| Not my problem. | ||
| It is your problem. | ||
| No, it's not my problem. | ||
| They're there in Monteverde and they're there in North America. | ||
| Go figure. | ||
| What's more likely? | ||
| Go figure why there's a Denisovan trace in South American Indians and not in North American Indians. | ||
| It's like the nature paper I brought up earlier. | ||
| Maybe people cross the ocean. | ||
| That there were Neanderthals or humans in San Diego 130,000 years ago. | ||
| But when you look at that... | ||
| Okay, so they have mammoth bones. | ||
| It looks like they might have been broken in the length, okay? | ||
| And the tools, but they're not... | ||
| Okay, the tools. | ||
| We're kind of changing subjects here, though. | ||
| Well, no, no, no. | ||
| You're trying to quibble the evidence of earlier human presence. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You're trying to quibble it. | ||
| Well, not quibble. | ||
| Well, you're quibbling it. | ||
| You're quibbling it. | ||
| What are you saying very specifically that's opposing what he just said? | ||
| The reason archaeologists don't accept earlier than Clovis, say earlier than about 13,000, 14,000 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They do. | |
| It's massively accepted. | ||
| Say Mesa Verde, for example. | ||
| Okay, I have to bring up an image at this point. | ||
| Why don't they accept Mesa Verde? | ||
| They do accept Mesa Verde. | ||
| It is accepted now. | ||
| Michael, are you sure about this? | ||
| As what, 24,000 years? | ||
| Fifteen plus. | ||
| Possibly significantly older. | ||
| Fifteen is kind of the outside of the window that humans came across the Bering Strait. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| Not 24,000 years. | ||
| Could you open Clovis first? | ||
| Not 130,000 years ago. | ||
| Now, if it turns out that that nature paper is right and that's confirmed, then that does overturn the mainstream theory for sure. | ||
| But why would you... | ||
| This is not like your field of study. | ||
| Why would you argue against the Nature paper? | ||
| Okay, I'll just give you... | ||
| Let's quote the Smithsonian. | ||
| I ask professionals... | ||
| Smithsonian, slide number five. | ||
| Today, decades later, the Clovis first model has collapsed. | ||
| Okay, based on dozens of new studies, we now know that pre-Clovis peoples slaughtered mastodons in Washington State, dined on desert parsley in Oregon, made all-purpose stone tools that were Ice Age version of the X-Acto... | ||
| Yeah, between 13,000... | ||
| That's not... | ||
| No, look at the... | ||
| All between that, and then 24,000 years down at the bottom, Michael. | ||
| You know, are you saying the Smithsonian are wrong on this? | ||
| Michael, you're jumping to conclusions before you even read that. | ||
| You want to be right. | ||
| So badly, you didn't read the part, and other animals there... | ||
| Hold on a second! | ||
| Confirming that humans had butchered horses and other animals there 24,000 years ago. | ||
| It says it right there, and you are arguing against it without even reading it, which means you want to be right. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, that's absolutely what's going on. | ||
| Because I have no dog in this fight. | ||
| Well, why didn't you read that whole thing before you started pointing at you being correct? | ||
| You published Skeptic Magazine and you have no dog in the fight? | ||
| You're asking me, why don't mainstream archaeologists accept dates in the tens of thousands... | ||
| Okay, call it whatever you want. | ||
| It goes back 11, 13, 15... | ||
| But what do you think about what that says? | ||
| That there's evidence they butchered horses 24,000 years ago? | ||
| Okay, I would have to check the site on that. | ||
| I haven't seen this article. | ||
| Well, now that you have seen it... | ||
| Not my problem. | ||
| You're here opposing this and you're saying there's no evidence you haven't even read the fucking article. | ||
| Okay, I'm not opposing anything. | ||
| I'm saying this is the reason why scientists accept these dates here because there's lots and lots of evidence for 10,000, 11,000, 12,000. | ||
| Then you find one person that says 24,000. | ||
| Another one like two weeks ago. | ||
| This is not one person. | ||
| This is very disappointing that you're arguing this without really doing any research about it. | ||
| The article is titled, What Happens When An Archaeologist Challenges Mainstream Thinking. | ||
| And that's in the Smithsonian in the month of March. | ||
| Jack sunk Mars. | ||
| It was a brutal experience. | ||
| Something that St. Mars once likened to the Spanish Inquisition. | ||
| At conferences, audiences paid little heed to his presentation, giving short shrift to the evidence, etc., etc., etc. | ||
| The result was always the same. | ||
| When he proposed that Bluefish Caves was 24,000 years old, it was not accepted. | ||
| What the Smithsonian are saying is now, this is accepted. | ||
| You need to get up to speed with the data, Michael. | ||
| Okay, my archaeology friends, like Jared Diamond, who I just checked with on this, who's at UCLA. Well, he certainly has a dog in the fight. | ||
| Well, he just says, here's the problem. | ||
| For 50 years, people propose pre-Clovis examples, recites, or evidence. | ||
| They never hold up. | ||
| The dating turned out to be incorrect. | ||
| The carbon-14 was not calibrated right. | ||
| There was this, there was that. | ||
| They never hold up. | ||
| So essentially, you're quoting a friend. | ||
| Yeah, you're quoting a friend. | ||
| You're quoting a friend who says the evidence hasn't held up before. | ||
| Instead of quoting these articles with these scientists who are talking about the data that's showing that human beings butchered horses 24,000 years ago, you're disputing it just because you talked to a friend. | ||
| I'm saying that that has to be confirmed. | ||
| But why argue against it? | ||
| I'm not arguing against it. | ||
| You certainly were. | ||
| No, I'm just saying that... | ||
| Was he? | ||
| Am I wrong? | ||
| I feel you were arguing against it and saying that it's not the case and quibbling it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| If I'm correct, you seem to be a Clovis First advocate. | ||
| Put your reputation on the line and say you advocate Clovis First. | ||
| I'm not going to put a label on it. | ||
| I'm going to say in the latest evidence that overwhelmingly shows humans coming across the Siberian Straits into North America 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,000 years ago. | ||
| That they definitely did then. | ||
| They definitely did then. | ||
| Did they before? | ||
| What could push it back much earlier would be if they came by boat. | ||
| So like where I live in Santa Barbara, there are sites on the Channel Islands that go back 11,000, 12,000 years ago. | ||
| And they came by boat. | ||
| Now the problem is, well, if they lived on the shores, which is where the good fishing and eating is, Those are underwater. | ||
| And short of doing good underwater archaeology, which is hard to do and expensive, and most of it's probably gone, we may never know. | ||
| One of my beefs with archaeology, actually, is that 10 million square miles of the planet that were above water during the Ice Age are underwater now, and marine archaeology is still mainly looking at shipwrecks, you know. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| They do that because it's where the light is. | ||
| Well, that leaves a big unanswered question. | ||
| At any rate, for the record, can I at least say that you completely oppose the Smithsonian's position on this, that there has been no paradigm shift? | ||
| I will look at this. | ||
| I haven't seen the Smithsonian thing. | ||
| All right, I'm not aware of the horse find from 24,000 years ago. | ||
| I am aware of the 130,000-year date from the Nature paper two weeks ago. | ||
| I have a slide on that, too. | ||
| Okay, but show the stone tools. | ||
| They're nothing like Clovis points. | ||
| It's just a big, like, hand rock that might have been used. | ||
| It might have been random. | ||
| Sorry, a big hand rock is all there is before 13,000 years ago? | ||
| No, I'm talking about the 130,000-year-old site. | ||
| Oh, 130,000-year-old site. | ||
| Oh, you're talking about the San Diego thing. | ||
| We don't need to talk about that. | ||
| That raises interesting questions. | ||
| Was it Neanderthals? | ||
| Was it Denisovans? | ||
| Was it anatomically modern humans? | ||
| Or is it a misdated site? | ||
| It raises interesting questions. | ||
| Or is it a misinterpreted site? | ||
| Because they aren't stone tools. | ||
| They're just rocks. | ||
| I'm not pinning anything to that. | ||
| I'm saying yes, that report was published in Nature. | ||
| The question is not necessarily just about the stone tools. | ||
| It's about how the bones were shattered. | ||
| And they believe the bones were shattered deliberately. | ||
| Indicating that someone was trying to get at the marrow. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or. | |
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| Or a tractor rolled over it a couple years ago and it was excavated and broken that way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no, no, no. | |
| No one had excavated. | ||
| That's just speculation on your part. | ||
| No, not on my part. | ||
| This was one of the responses to the paper. | ||
| Immediately the find has been quibbled by the archaeological mainstream. | ||
| Of course, it's been published by the archaeological mainstream, too, and the rest of the mainstream is quibbling it. | ||
| So we'll see how that plays out. | ||
| But I thought you said that can't happen. | ||
| We will say what can't happen. | ||
| That the mainstream won't allow, you know, radical ideas. | ||
| Nature published it, and the idea is being quibbled. | ||
| And here the Smithsonian publishes, so apparently it's okay. | ||
| Nature certainly would not have published it if the evidence were not strong. | ||
| I accept that. | ||
| Nature's not in the business of publishing, you know... | ||
| Fringy stuff. | ||
| It is a radical proposal, but it's strong enough to justify publication in nature. | ||
| What's interesting to me is that the immediate reaction of the archaeological community is not to say, well, what could this mean? | ||
| Let's look into the implications of this. | ||
| I mean, if there were Neanderthals or Denisovans in North America 130,000 years ago, we have a whole new scenario building here that really should interest everyone. | ||
| Instead of the first reaction is, Let's destroy this because it's really annoying. | ||
| Let's get rid of it. | ||
| Let's prove it's wrong. | ||
| Let's suggest that it was a fucking bulldozer or something like that. | ||
| Maybe it was. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The work hasn't been done yet. | ||
| But that instant sort of... | ||
| It's almost like an immune response to an idea that doesn't fit into the prevailing paradigm. | ||
| But the other work, the work in South America, the Bluefish Caves work, that's really not controversial anymore. | ||
| That's very widely accepted. | ||
| Clovis First is a discredited and abandoned position. | ||
| And I have something else to ask you, actually, concerning genetics and DNA. I'm sure you're well up on that. | ||
| I mean, can you explain why we have a strong signal of Denisovan DNA in certain groups of South American Indians and in Australian Aborigines and Melanesians? | ||
| But that Denisovan DNA doesn't crop up in North American Indians. | ||
| How would we explain that if they all came through the Bering Strait? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Well, it could be boats. | ||
| I mean, this just happens to be something I don't know anything about. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So part of the problem of even doing this is that... | ||
| It was your idea. | ||
| Well, here we are talking. | ||
| This is good. | ||
| But part of the risk is that you're going to find something I don't happen to know about. | ||
| And then it's like, you see, I made my point. | ||
| What point? | ||
| Okay, so in the history of the peopling of America, that area, there's always somebody that comes in with, it's not Clovis, it's this, it's that, and rarely do they last. | ||
| Why? | ||
| The dates were miscalibrated or whatever. | ||
| It's not just that scientists are closed-minded, although they can be. | ||
| It's that the convergence of evidence isn't strong enough to overturn the mainstream theory. | ||
| But it does happen. | ||
| Maybe there are multiple migrations into North America, and we just don't have all the sites. | ||
| But when somebody comes up with a site that's tens of thousands of years earlier than all the others that are accepted here, and it's over here, where are all the sites in between? | ||
| It's like the 5,000-year gap with the Egyptian complex. | ||
| Where are the sites? | ||
| If it's true, they didn't fly there. | ||
| So how'd they get there? | ||
| And there must be a trail somewhere that we could find, unless they came by boat, and then that evidence is gone. | ||
| Or unless you're dealing with 24,000 years ago and there's not much evidence to find. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| But if they came by boat, then that clearly implies they had navigational skills, they had the ability to build boats, and find your way across the ocean. | ||
| You can do the coast. | ||
| You don't need a big ocean going. | ||
| No, you don't need an ocean going. | ||
| I mean, this is one hypothesis that's proposed, is that they came across by boat just following the shore. | ||
| The same area as the Bering Strait. | ||
| Yeah, you're just 100 feet offshore, you can go in and... | ||
| Most likely both, right? | ||
| And one of the issues, of course, was the short-faced bear was so formidable, according to Dan Flores, that it would have been a huge impediment for people crossing on foot anyway. | ||
| And the short-faced bear went extinct right around the time we see more evidence of human beings entering in. | ||
| But why did it go extinct? | ||
| That's the big question. | ||
| Well, you have to add that to the list of predators that there would have been no reason for humans to have been hunting. | ||
| Yeah, well that's an enormous, enormous animal. | ||
| So there's sort of two factors that go on here. | ||
| There's positive evidence in favor of a hypothesis, then there's negative evidence against the mainstream hypothesis. | ||
| And you really need both. | ||
| So it's not enough to just say, I don't accept the evidence for here. | ||
| Okay, that's fine. | ||
| Scientists do that all the time. | ||
| What evidence? | ||
| Let's speak in specifics, because you keep doing this. | ||
| You keep saying, well, they find things, and it turns out, no, that's not true. | ||
| You're essentially proving your point of being a skeptic without having any real cases. | ||
| You just keep saying this. | ||
| All of the cases we're talking about. | ||
| But no, you can't say all the cases. | ||
| If you don't want to cite anything specifically, don't keep bringing up things that are refuted because you don't have anything that you're pointing to. | ||
| So you're just muddying the water. | ||
| You're essentially pissing in the pool. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| The Clovis thing, for example. | ||
| Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| The pyramids. | ||
| All of these... | ||
| What's been disproved? | ||
| No, okay, I'm making a slightly different point. | ||
| That's the problem, is that you're not addressing the actual issues we're talking about. | ||
| You muddy the water by saying things have been tossed out the window, so we have to be careful here and toss these things out the window as well. | ||
| Not toss out, just... | ||
| We contemplate them, published in Nature, for example. | ||
| So let's watch what happens to the 130,000-year-old hypothesis. | ||
| If it holds up, and there's other sites that are dated that way, and so on and so forth, that will be truly revolutionary, and scientists would accept it. | ||
| They were. | ||
| You see, the problem is that when you have a very strong paradigm like Clovis first, which really dominates American archaeology, prehistoric archaeology for a very long period, it's difficult from a career point of view for archaeologists to come up and propose alternative sites. | ||
| Those who did, like Tom Dillahay, like Jacques Sankt-Mars, paid a very heavy price for so doing. | ||
| So the incentive to go looking for older stuff than Clovis Is extremely low in the archaeological community as a result of this ferocious reaction that went on for 30 or 40 or even 50 years. | ||
| You know, I mean, also consider the Valsichilo excavations in Mexico, where the suggestion of some sort of human presence 230,000 years ago. | ||
| I mean, that good archaeology, but it was utterly dismissed and the archaeologists involved were ruined for getting involved in that. | ||
| It's hard to see how that's a profession that encourages people to think out When careers get ruined and research funding gets withdrawn for an idea that doesn't fit the current mainstream hypothesis. | ||
| We don't like to think that scientists do that. | ||
| They do that. | ||
| Are you familiar with Michael Cremo's book, Forbidden Archaeology? | ||
| I know Michael, yeah. | ||
| And he makes, in my mind, as compelling a case as you do. | ||
| For his, humans were here tens of millions of years ago. | ||
| And, you know, his book is, you know, 900 pages long. | ||
| Tens of millions? | ||
| Yeah, tens of millions, okay? | ||
| And he's a Hindu. | ||
| So his idea is, you know, this sort of long recycling and... | ||
| But what evidence is it based on for tens of millions of years? | ||
| I'm not here to defend Michael Cremo or to have a discussion about Michael Cremo. | ||
| That's not why I'm sitting at this table. | ||
| I understand, but my point is that... | ||
| Michael Cremo is not me. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But there's lots of alternative archaeology. | ||
| This is where I began. | ||
| There's lots of alternative archaeology books and theories about this. | ||
| Right, but what evidence is there that supports that? | ||
| None. | ||
| So why are you bringing up that when there's evidence that he's bringing up? | ||
| Cremo's evidence is similar to his. | ||
| Why? | ||
| It's mostly negative evidence that I don't accept the date of this. | ||
| There is this peculiar sort of footprint-looking thing in the mud. | ||
| Cremo refers specifically to the knowledge filter. | ||
| The most useful thing about that book is the publication of reports, archaeological reports, which are no longer available to the public, which do suggest an alternative point of view. | ||
| I would say it's a very useful book to read. | ||
| Beyond that, I have nothing to say about it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, but that's not necessarily true. | ||
| You're saying his only evidence... | ||
| He's pointing to some pretty significant evidence. | ||
| The Sphinx thing is a geologist from Boston University proposed this because of water erosion. | ||
| Because of water erosion that could have only been done by thousands of years of rainfall, in his opinion, as a... | ||
| As a qualified geologist. | ||
| That's not a lack of evidence. | ||
| I understand, but why do no other geologists or archaeologists accept it? | ||
| Actually they do, and I've had multiple conversations with Robert where he has cited the fact that he has gotten a considerable body of support from other geologists. | ||
| Not from Egyptologists, but from geologists who do recognize The effects of severe water erosion on limestone, carbonate rocks, and that's what we have there. | ||
| We have a severe water erosion that appears and is preserved on the quarry walls around the Sphinx. | ||
| The Sphinx itself, as Graham said, is difficult to ascertain because of all of the reconstruction that has gone on. | ||
| But the quarry walls, which would have once had the very distinct stepped profile of a typical quarry, No longer have that. | ||
| Now they have a textbook profile, parabolic profile, that would be consistent with sheet flooding, which would be both dissolution, because carbonate rocks dissolve in acidic waters, and what's called corrosion, which would be the effects of water loaded with sand sediment, which would make it very rough. | ||
| So if you've got the sand sediment Flowing over the edge of what would have been a quarry wall, what you're going to end up with is a smoothing off of the rough corners and the final result would be a very rounded profile like you see there. | ||
| You would also see where the fissures in the rock would be selectively widened and opened by the water penetrating those fissures. | ||
| I mean it has all the earmarks of a very textbook case of water erosion. | ||
| Don't you think it's very disingenuous comparing that to someone who thinks that human beings have been here for tens of millions of years with no evidence to support it whatsoever? | ||
| Well, of course, he doesn't say he has no evidence. | ||
| He has a 900-page book full of evidence. | ||
| It's the quality of the evidence. | ||
| What about the quality of that evidence? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If it was that good, you know, we're not geologists sitting here. | ||
| If it was that good, why don't geologists look at it and go, he's right? | ||
| But they do. | ||
| Well, they do! | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| You're not listening. | ||
| They do? | ||
| They all do? | ||
| No, they don't all do. | ||
| Some geologists who work with Egyptologists say that shock is wrong. | ||
| Okay, we have a geologist on the line. | ||
| Why don't we ask him? | ||
| Mark? | ||
| Well, we can have one guy's opinion. | ||
| We could also have other guys' opinions that we can get from our guests. | ||
| I mean, this matter has been in the public domain since 1992. It hasn't gone away. | ||
| Schock's argument that we are looking at precipitation-induced weathering on the Sphinx has not been debunked. | ||
| It has been opposed. | ||
| It has been disagreed with. | ||
| But that is different from saying it's debunked, and Schock stays solid and strong. | ||
| On that issue, he is a credentialed geologist. | ||
| He is a professor of geology at the University of Boston. | ||
| He has a right to speak out about this, and he's stated his view. | ||
| I happen to find his view very interesting, especially since it correlates with what I regard as the interesting astronomy of the site. | ||
| I think that site has origins that do go back. | ||
| Into the Younger Dryas. | ||
| That's my opinion. | ||
| I've stated it many times, and I've presented the evidence that I think underwrites that opinion. | ||
| You and your colleagues are absolutely at liberty to disagree, and you do. | ||
| You don't think it's disingenuous to compare that to someone who says something that defies our current understanding of human beings and the actual evolution of humans? | ||
| You're talking about someone who's saying that human beings are how many millions of years old? | ||
| Tens of millions. | ||
| Tens of millions. | ||
| Well, we know for a fact, right? | ||
| If you pay attention to evolution, right? | ||
| We weren't even humans a million years ago, correct? | ||
| I mean, there are creationists who think... | ||
| Okay, but we're not talking about them. | ||
| We're talking about Graham Hancock. | ||
| I know. | ||
| But my point was that, so here you have the mainstream scientists. | ||
| And so it's like, there's Graham. | ||
| He seems so reasonable. | ||
| But there's 50 like him. | ||
| And each of them thinks that they're right. | ||
| There's your language. | ||
| He seems so reasonable. | ||
| So you're right there accusing me of dissimulation. | ||
| And you're saying there's 50 like him. | ||
| The subject is that I'm not, and then there's 50 like me. | ||
| More patronizing, arrogant, deeply unpleasant and personal approach. | ||
| Graham, I'm sorry. | ||
| I didn't mean it to sound like that. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| Okay, I have a larger point. | ||
| Apology accepted. | ||
| When you're faced with a bunch of different alternative theories that are coming in, take physics. | ||
| I mean, every physicist, like you just had Lawrence Krauss, he gets these letters daily of people saying, I think I figured out why Einstein was wrong. | ||
| And he can't address them all. | ||
| And they're smart people, they're thoughtful people, they really believe it. | ||
| What do you do with that? | ||
| That's my point. | ||
| I feel that's not my problem. | ||
| If there are other alternative theories, that's not my problem either. | ||
| It's the problem for the mainstream to sort it out and figure which to pay attention to and which not. | ||
| Well, I'm suspicious of the whole idea of the mainstream, because even looking in the mainstream, you find so many divergent points of view that, you know, I think that's basically a fiction. | ||
| That there is this mainstream that has arrived at this consensus, and that there are no ulterior motives there, and that there are no dogmas that are being perpetuated there. | ||
| You know, I mean, I look at a lot of the geological stuff and realize that there are many different points of view. | ||
| When we talk about these floods at the end of the last ice age, there are many divergent points of view. | ||
| There is what could be considered the mainstream, yet even that has multiple interpretations. | ||
| And the same with the comet idea. | ||
| You know, I mean, I don't know what constitutes the mainstream there, because there have been a group that has opposed it at every turn, but at the same time, the group that accepts the comet hypothesis has continued to grow. | ||
| In fact, there's even a number of individuals involved that set out specifically to disprove it or discredit it, who are now basically on board. | ||
| And it has grown from being a small handful of scientists to there are now 63 scientists from 55 Different institutions that are on board with the idea that something remarkable happened at the end of the last Ice Age. | ||
| It was probably exogenic, meaning something from outside, something from space. | ||
| There's no consensus as to exactly what that was, which would be normal because these discoveries are in their infancy at this point. | ||
| But there's been an attempt to discredit the idea, simply because that as the evidence has come in over the last decade, it has evolved, and new mysteries have been opened up as the evidence comes in, and the claim is being made, well, there's no consistent interpretation of this evidence, and therefore We've debunked it. | ||
| I mean, an example is Pinter's requiem. | ||
| Pinter and Dalton's requiem for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. | ||
| I mean, they published a paper in PNAS saying requiem, suggesting that the impact hypothesis is already dead. | ||
| That was in 2011. Every single one of Pinter's points have been responded to. | ||
| Those who are critical of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis rarely cite the fact That the so-called refutations have themselves been refuted, that new information is constantly coming in. | ||
| I see a very one-sided game being played here with a group of academics who are determined to demonstrate that there could have been no possibility of anything like a comet impact 12,800 years ago, and that these 63 or 65 scientists who are proposing that are just completely wrong. | ||
| And when they refute the refutations, I very rarely see that referred to or commented upon at all. | ||
| Your colleague DeFant has dismissed the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis without actually going in detail into the debate that's gone on. | ||
| He has this graph in his paper showing all these different dates for these That's from one of the critical papers. | ||
| You know, there's another side to this argument. | ||
| So he needs to be listening to what the other side would say. | ||
| Well, that's the point where maybe we should have Marc Defant come on and maybe we should have Malcolm Lecomte come on as well, because Malcolm Lecomte is actually one of those 63 Younger Dryas impact scientists. | ||
| Explain to people that are just listening to this, what is this graph that you're showing? | ||
| Well, this is the carbon-14 date ranges from samples taken from the Younger Dryas boundary. | ||
| So this is the boundary here, and the point of this is that there's not a single consistent series of dates that would consistently show, yep, absolutely for sure at every site it comes in right there, is that they bounce around a lot here. | ||
| Now maybe Mark, this is, you know, his area, he could come on and Skype here. | ||
| They bounce around, and what's the point of this for the layperson who's listening to this? | ||
| Well, so if you take the ones that are above the gray line, then those are showing that something like an impact happened much earlier, or much later. | ||
| And the ones below it are that it's, you know, much earlier. | ||
| So where's the consistency of a single impact consistent across that I don't think there's any argument that it was a single impact. | ||
| In fact, there's arguments that there's... | ||
| No, there's more than one... | ||
| We're talking about a stretch of thousands of years and multiple impacts. | ||
| The younger Dryas runs 1,200 years. | ||
| Randall, please give me your... | ||
| Because you're the expert at this. | ||
| Well, these are dates for the Younger Dryas. | ||
| There's a big spread, obviously, but there's also a lot of possibilities for introducing inaccuracies into the dating. | ||
| What's called the old wood effect can sometimes make Make it appear to be older than it is by a millennium or two millennium. | ||
| But what we certainly do see here is a clustering right around 13,000 years ago. | ||
| That looks pretty evident to me. | ||
| And everybody knows who does radiocarbon dating that the dating might have Errors and inconsistencies in it. | ||
| The one article I think that came out last year by James Kennett and 25 others was the Bayesian chronological analysis consistent with synchronous age of 12,835 to 12,735 calibrated years before present for Younger Dryas Boundary on four continents. | ||
| That's a refutation of precisely what you're publishing there. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's a refutation of this. | ||
| But Mark Defant does not refer to that refutation. | ||
| Jamie, could you pull up The Age of Leo? | ||
| I think I gave that to you. | ||
| And go to slide number 167. Wow. | ||
| 167. And that refers to the go to slide 167. Jesus, you're not fucking around. | ||
| 167 slides? | ||
| There we go. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| A cosmic impact event at 12,800 calibrated years before present formed the Younger Dryas boundary layer containing peak abundances in multiple high temperature impact related proxies including spherules, milk glass, and nano diamonds. | ||
| Bayesian statistical analysis of 354 dates from 23 sedimentary sequences over four continents. | ||
| Established a model Younger Dryas boundary age of 12,835 calibrated years before present. | ||
| Supporting a synchronicity of the Younger Dryas boundary layer at high probability, 95%, this range overlaps that of a platinum peak recorded in the Greenland ice sheet and of the onset of the Younger Dryas climate episode in six key records, suggesting a causal connection between the impact event and the Younger Dryas. | ||
| Due to its rarity and distinctive characteristics, the Younger Dryas boundary layer is proposed as a widespread correlation datum. | ||
| And Randall, if I can remember what you said correctly, you believe that there was probably more than one significant impact over a period of several thousand years. | ||
| Let me pop in on that very, very quickly. | ||
| I don't mean to cut you off, but let's be clear. | ||
| The suggestion is that 12,800 years ago, Comets break up into multiple parts. | ||
| I mean, anybody who saw the Shoemaker-Levy 9 NASA films back in 1994 is aware that that comet broke up into more than 20 fragments, all of which hit Jupiter, sometimes creating explosions larger than the Earth itself. | ||
| So I don't think it's controversial that comets break up into fragments. | ||
| And this is the suggestion of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, that we're dealing with a giant comet that broke up into multiple fragments that orbits in the torrid meteor stream, and that four of those fragments, that's the suggestion, four largest fragments, fell out of the torrid meteor stream, coming in on a trajectory roughly northwest to southeast, crossing the North American ice cap, and there are up to four impacts on the North American ice cap. | ||
| Impactors then continue across the Atlantic Ocean. | ||
| There's a suggestion of impacts in Belgium and indeed as far east as Abu Huraira in Syria. | ||
| It's a global event. | ||
| 50 million square kilometers of the Earth's surface is within the Younger Dryas boundary field. | ||
| It's a really huge thing. | ||
| So the suggestion is that there were multiple impacts at the beginning. | ||
| Now, the next question is what happened 11,600 years ago when the Younger Dryas ends? | ||
| And global temperatures shoot up incredibly rapidly, and the science on that is much less advanced than the science on the beginning of the Younger Dryas. | ||
| Fred Hoyle, back in the 1980s, was puzzled by the sudden temperature increase at the end of the Younger Dryas, and he suggested presciently, I would say, that this may have been caused by a comet impact in an ocean. | ||
| So maybe other bits of the torrid meteor stream impacted the Earth, other filaments within the stream impacted the Earth 11,600 years ago, or maybe something else caused it. | ||
| I mean, Robert Schock is in favour of extraordinary solar activity being responsible for that warming. | ||
| We don't absolutely know, but that's broadly the suggestion. | ||
| We have the beginning and the end. | ||
| It certainly impacts at the beginning, possibly impacts other things at the end. | ||
| Well Klub and Napier and others, Duncan Steele and other astronomers, have speculated that there could be impact eras, epochs, in which there's an enhanced possibility of the Earth being impacted. | ||
| Particularly if you have a large comet that enters into the solar system, begins to undergo a hierarchy of disintegrations, and basically litters the inner solar system with material. | ||
| And we do know that the Earth crosses the torrid meteor stream twice each year. | ||
| Once in late June and once in late October, early November. | ||
| And we know that the Tunguska event of 1908, which is not speculative, I mean, that happened. | ||
| It occurred on June 30th, which would have been the peak of the torrid meteor shower. | ||
| It also came from the direction of the Sun. | ||
| Its position in space, where it emanated, its radiant point in space from which it emanated at that time was totally consistent with the torrid meteor stream radiant. | ||
| So it's very possible that the Tunguska event of 1908 was a member of that family of meteorites. | ||
| Again, there's nothing definitive there, but it would be a prime candidate for investigation. | ||
| Again, I mentioned earlier, this goes back to the work of Fred Whipple, way back in the 1940s, who began to Researched the tarred meteor stream and came to believe that it was much, much more active in the past than it is now. | ||
| That it's an old, diffuse meteor stream that at one time, and like Graham said, you know, it has multiple objects still within it. | ||
| Comet Enki is the best known. | ||
| That's a fragment of the original giant comet. | ||
| Of the original giant comet that they estimate might have been based upon the amount of material still remnant in the zodiacal light cloud that perhaps it was somewhere around 60 miles or 100 kilometers in diameter. | ||
| And another thing that I'm taken to task for is that I report the work of Klub and Napier and their suggestion that the torrid meteor stream is actually fucking dangerous and that we should be paying attention to it, that it has been a hidden hand in human history in the past and that it can cause us trouble in the future. | ||
| Now this is not gloom and doom. | ||
| We have the technology to deal with the large objects in the Taurid meteor stream if any filaments are on an orbit that will result in impacts on the Earth. | ||
| At the very least, it's extremely unwise of us not to pay attention. | ||
| I'm accused of being sort of a doom-monger and constantly predicting the end of the world and this and that, but actually I'm simply reporting astronomers who are very concerned about the Taurid meteor stream and the possibility that we may face further impacts from it in the future. | ||
| That's not woo-woo, that is science, you know. | ||
| Absolutely, and I would agree with that. | ||
| And that is a form of catastrophism that scientists accept as very real. | ||
| Some do. | ||
| Well, lots. | ||
| What, if anything, do you oppose about what they've just said? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| Nothing about the Younger Dryas period? | ||
| Just a technical question. | ||
| Your slide was 12,800. | ||
| Gobekli Tepe, the oldest C14 dates are what? | ||
| 11,600. | ||
| That's a 1,200 year gap. | ||
| That's kind of a slow catastrophe. | ||
| To be very clear about the Younger Dryas, one of the puzzling things about it is that you have cataclysm at the beginning, and this global temperature slump is surely cataclysmic by any standards, and you have cataclysm at the end. | ||
| A huge increase in global temperatures. | ||
| And you have meltwater pulse 1b. | ||
| You have a lot of water going into the ocean at that time. | ||
| So both ends of the Younger Dryas are cataclysmic. | ||
| And it's at the recent end of the Younger Dryas, 11,600 years ago, that we see Gobekli Tepe mysteriously popping up. | ||
| And I know that you're... | ||
| Staunch opponent of Atlantis and that you believe Plato made Atlantis up in order to make a political point, and you may be right, but the date that Plato puts on the submergence of Atlantis is 11,600 years ago, 9,000 years before the time of Solon, which happens to coincide with Meltwater Pulse 1b and the end of the Younger Dryas, which I would have thought would cause you to rethink your position on Plato just a little. | ||
| Well, it's interesting. | ||
| I'm open to the idea. | ||
| I tend to read myths in the same way your guest Jordan Peterson does. | ||
| It's a story to deliver some sort of moral homily to us. | ||
| It's a commentary on our own culture, our society. | ||
| It's a literary way of delivering a message to people. | ||
| That's how I tend to read. | ||
| Instead of reading them like, let's see if we can figure out what happened historically. | ||
| There's hard data in Plato's whatever you think it is. | ||
| And that hard data is that the submergence of Atlantis happened 9,000 years before the time of Solon. | ||
| That is a date. | ||
| That is 9,600 BC. That is 11,600 years ago. | ||
| This, to me, is a strong reason why we shouldn't just completely dismiss Plato's notion of a lost civilization of the ice age. | ||
| I'm not against that idea. | ||
| I mean, the idea that, say, the parting of the Red Sea happened because of some impact. | ||
| I'm not against that idea. | ||
| I'm not proposing that. | ||
| Please don't go there. | ||
| Waste of time. | ||
| Okay, but there are people that think that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Or that the plagues of the Bible can be explained by natural events. | ||
| I don't go there. | ||
| Waste of time. | ||
| Deal with Plato. | ||
| All right. | ||
| But my point is that some of them may have historical origins. | ||
| Some of them may be completely made up as mythic stories for some other reason. | ||
| You have to take them one at a time. | ||
| In my opinion, the Plato one is a commentary on his own culture of Athens and being too bellicose, being too warlike, and that this is not good for where we're going. | ||
| That's my opinion. | ||
| And the fact that he picks a date that coincides with a geologically significant date of flooding is not really going to change your opinion? | ||
| I think, well, I think, again, that's... | ||
| It's a pretty amazing coincidence. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| I mean, we're finding a connection, not Plato. | ||
| Well, Plato said there was an advanced civilization with advanced agriculture, advanced architecture, advanced navigational abilities, which was submerged by the sea, swept from the face of the earth, so that mankind had to begin again like children, with no memory of what went before. | ||
| And lo and behold, he puts a geologically significant date on that, a date that we ourselves have only known is significant in the last 20 or 30 years. | ||
| So, where is this place, this Atlantis? | ||
| Not my problem. | ||
| There's a long history of people speculating. | ||
| If we found a site, that would be a big plus for that position. | ||
| Go do more marine archaeology. | ||
| Well, if we take it literally, obviously, then it's... | ||
| Below the ocean. | ||
| But, you know, I don't necessarily take Plato's account literally, but I do say, well, it's rather coincidental that his dating falls exactly on meltwater pulse 1b when we know there was a huge influx of water into the ocean. | ||
| And also, if we look at his geography, it's interesting because he cites, you know, basically a land mass west of the Pillars of Hercules, which is Pillars of Hercules, the Straits of Gibraltar. | ||
| And he places this essentially in the Mid-Atlantic. | ||
| I think it was Krantor, one of the commentators on him, that said it was something like three or four days sail west. | ||
| But if you look there, there is a sunken landmass that sank at the end of the last ice age because of the rapidly rising sea level. | ||
| And this has been well established by marine geology, looking at evidence that the Azores Plateau underwent an isostatic subsidence, which would have been resulting from The rapidly rising sea level. | ||
| We know there's no doubt that the North American continent has rebounded isostatically after the removal of this tremendous mass of ice that mantled North America up to anywhere from 1,000 to possibly 1,500 feet. | ||
| Well, if you do a comparable isostatic adjustment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, you'll find that the Azores Island Complex are much, much larger. | ||
| And it turns out that that might actually be a nice place to develop at least a maritime culture, something along the lines of the Phoenicians or the Minoans. | ||
| During the period of the Ice Age, because during the period of the Ice Age, the climate of the world was so much different than now. | ||
| You know, the Great Basin area was filled with huge lakes, vegetation, forests, savanna, and grasslands. | ||
| Like Graham said, with the lowered sea level, there were much larger areas of the coastline that were exposed. | ||
| And that's probably where most of people would have resided during the Ice Age, is near the coastlines, because that would have been the most benevolent place. | ||
| With the rising of the sea level, all of that's lost. | ||
| And there's nothing really fringed about saying, well, people might have lived on islands in the Mid-Atlantic, especially when we know that those islands most likely had a benevolent climate during the Ice Age. | ||
| So I don't go into, you know... | ||
| Me neither. | ||
| flying machines or whatever, all of this speculative stuff that has accreted to it. | ||
| But if we just keep it simple and say, well, is it possible that a culture along the lines of the Minoans or the Phoenicians could have existed? | ||
| Could they have existed on an island culture in the Mid-Atlantic? | ||
| And there's nothing really, you know, extreme about that idea, in my mind, in my opinion. | ||
| Even the idea that a more advanced, sophisticated, quasi-technological culture coexisted with hunter-gatherers isn't too strange. | ||
| I mean, we do so today. | ||
| We coexist with hunter-gatherers in the Amazon jungle who don't even know we exist. | ||
| I mean, so I don't see why a priori that's just an impossible idea to look at. | ||
| Am I misremembering that in your book you mention Indonesia as a site for Atlantis? | ||
| I mentioned Gunung Padang not as a site for Atlantis. | ||
| That's Danny Hilman Natawajaja, who is a geologist. | ||
| He's Indonesia's leading expert in megathrust earthquakes, as a matter of fact. | ||
| He has written a book proposing that Indonesia was Atlantis and that Gunung Padang, which he's been involved in investigating, is a site from Atlantean Times. | ||
| Danny has proposed that. | ||
| Now, what's interesting about Indonesia... | ||
| I think we're good to go. | ||
| I think we're good to go. | ||
| I think he has a point. | ||
| I think it's an interesting... | ||
| It's one of those areas in the world where there was very large-scale flooding. | ||
| Huge amounts of land were swallowed up. | ||
| Also, Sahel, the connection of Australia to New Guinea during the Ice Age was also washed away. | ||
| There's a whole range of issues regarding sea level rise in that very area, which anybody with an interest in these subjects should be paying attention to. | ||
| Quite possible that, like today, many of the advanced civilizations of today are on the water, whether it's New York or Los Angeles, and that was probably the case back then. | ||
| And so the idea of Atlantis might not have been about one particular area, but many advanced areas that were wiped out along with their knowledge. | ||
| This is the thesis of that book I mentioned, Noah's Flood, that the two geologists with the Black Sea theory, that they were, you know, rimmed with small villages and, you know, massive flooding almost instantly wiped out, and then that gets passed down as, you know, the oral tradition is these myths. | ||
| To me, that seems totally reasonable. | ||
| Totally reasonable. | ||
| Why don't we get into more discussion about the actual impact hypothesis and the mega flooding so that we can get our guys on standby, get them involved. | ||
| What is your geologist, your geologist, since you're by yourself and there's two of them, what is your geologist opposed to what Randall and Graham are proposing? | ||
| I think it's on the impact hypothesis versus the multiple glacial dams that burst over periods of time, like that slide. | ||
| Okay, let's call him up and get him on Skype. | ||
| We've never done this before, so this might suck. | ||
| Well, hopefully it'll work. | ||
| See, this slide here, he is showing these are each independent carbon-14 dates of these different instant floods in North America from each individual ice dams. | ||
| And what separates these dates? | ||
| They're separated by... | ||
| Well, it looks like from 20,000 to 12,000, so all before the impact. | ||
| Well, 12,800, wasn't that one? | ||
| Mark's on the line. | ||
| Mark, can you hear us? | ||
| Yes, I can hear you. | ||
| Mark DeFent. | ||
| Mark DeFent, thank you very much for doing this. | ||
| We really appreciate you coming on here. | ||
| It's my pleasure. | ||
| So, you've had a chance to listen to these guys talk. | ||
| What is your thoughts, just stepping into this cold? | ||
| Well, first of all, I did not mean to upset Mr. Hancock. | ||
| He seemed to be quite disturbed, and I want to apologize if I've disturbed him. | ||
| No, no, you haven't disturbed me, and I'm not upset. | ||
| It's just simply that you're extremely selective in what you present in your draft, admittedly draft article that you've chosen to put online. | ||
| You don't represent me accurately. | ||
| Let me go ahead and answer his question because I know we're getting short on time. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| We have plenty of time. | ||
| We have plenty of time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, first of all, would you allow me just to address Gobekli Tepe for a minute? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Would you like to address the article first? | ||
| I think that probably would be the most fair since we just brought that up. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| What was the question then? | ||
| Graham? | ||
| Well, I read out on air various passages in your article where you misrepresent me. | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| Sorry? | ||
| No, I didn't misrepresent you. | ||
| You didn't misrepresent me. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| In fact, you said that I said that... | ||
| That I was actually talking about someone in Indonesia when I said you didn't understand Newton's physics. | ||
| No, I didn't say you were talking about someone in Indonesia. | ||
| I said you were talking about Jesus. | ||
| You don't know Satan, Tony and McHanis. | ||
| Jesus Gamara in Peru is who I was talking about. | ||
| And Jesus Gamara does have very exotic views on gravitation, which I state seriously are not my interest. | ||
| I do say he may be right, but I don't say he's right. | ||
| I say this is not my interest. | ||
| And I go on to say what my interest in his work. | ||
| You pick on that. | ||
| You're drowning me out here. | ||
| I was asked to explain whether or not I thought I was misleading. | ||
| And I don't think I was misleading. | ||
| You clearly state in there that maybe gravity was due to the way we've changed orbits around the Sun. | ||
| Gravity is not due to that. | ||
| It's due to the mass and the inverse of... | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| I don't state that. | ||
| Jesus Guamara states that, and I say I disagree with it. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I want to be respectful. | ||
| I can't really hear you when I'm talking. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| But I feel like you are selectively changing the meaning of what I'm saying. | ||
| Well, why don't you quote me as these words from my text? | ||
| When you say that I buy the gravity thing of Jesus Guamara, why don't you quote me when I say... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hold on. | |
| This is just the opposite of that. | ||
| What I go on to say, not quoted in the attack, is the following quote. | ||
| However, this isn't the part of his theory I'm interested in. | ||
| Where I feel he is solidly persuasive is in his observations of the anomalous character of the monuments of the Andes. | ||
| I am not pinning anything on Jesus Gemara's gravitational ideas. | ||
| I am saying very clearly what it is in his approach that I am interested in. | ||
| I am not going to dismiss all of his approach because he has an approach on gravity that you don't like. | ||
| That's not even of interest to me. | ||
| No, Mr. Hancock, what I brought up him for was simply to state that you didn't understand And I say it right there, that you don't understand Newton's physics. | ||
| But I'm not even talking about Newton's... | ||
| I'm not talking about... | ||
| If you don't understand Newton's simple physics, the laws of Newton... | ||
| If I wished to make an argument about gravity, I wouldn't go saying that that isn't the part of Jesus Gamara's theory that I'm interested in. | ||
| I'm interested in the other aspect of his work, his observations through years of fieldwork... | ||
| My point wasn't that, Michael. | ||
| My point was simply to point out that you didn't understand Newton mechanics when I'm talking about this guy. | ||
| You're a complete wasting time here. | ||
| Okay, Graham, the way the article is... | ||
| Michael, hold on a second. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Let these guys talk it out. | ||
| We did misrepresent him. | ||
| We did. | ||
| The way the sentence is structured, it's clearly out of context. | ||
| We're going to change that. | ||
| Yeah, I was taken out of context, and that's what I'm objecting to. | ||
| Mark, I'm not sure why he included it in the book in the first place, but he's not arguing about gravity at all. | ||
| So we will fix that. | ||
| Maybe we can get straight to the flooding thing that Randall was talking about. | ||
| As long as Graham is fine with that. | ||
| I mean, Graham, I know there was something else that you objected to. | ||
| Well, yeah, the other thing that I find to be misrepresenting is the statement, yet Hancock makes the following stunning claim, quote, Our ancestors are being initiated into the secrets of metals and how to make swords and knives. | ||
| What Mark Defant does not tell his readers is that I make that claim. | ||
| I don't make that claim. | ||
| I am actually reporting what is said in the Book of Enoch. | ||
| That's not me who's saying that. | ||
| That's the Book of Enoch. | ||
| Graham, we'll fix that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Otherwise, let's get back to the main meat of this, for God's sake. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Just give me the list of things and I'll fix them. | ||
| I will. | ||
| Because that's not the point of that. | ||
| Well, Mark, you're obviously very critical of Graham's work, and maybe erroneously so. | ||
| But let's get to what you think about what you've heard so far. | ||
| All right, Mr. Rogan. | ||
| I don't want to come across as a pompous scientist. | ||
| What I want to do is I want to protect people... | ||
| From these grandiose assumptions. | ||
| Graham in his first... | ||
| Mr. Hancock in his first book... | ||
| Please call me Graham. | ||
| Please call me Graham. | ||
| Okay, Graham in his first book in Fingerprints suggested that there was a continent where this civilization lived and through some machinations this continent went south and ended up destroying that civilization. | ||
| Well... | ||
| As a geologist, that's just nonsense. | ||
| And now he comes back and he wants us to believe that he was all wrong. | ||
| And then all of a sudden it's okay now to believe in comet strikes, to kill this famous civilization that's supposed to exist. | ||
| This is duping people. | ||
| I don't know if he means to do it, but he certainly seems to be duping people. | ||
| Mark, all my work is in print and online. | ||
| I mean, I gather that you see your role as a protector for the public. | ||
| Obviously you feel that the public are not intelligent enough to make discerning decisions of their own in this respect. | ||
| However, to address... | ||
| I'm saying that the public doesn't understand the science To the degree that you're misrepresenting. | ||
| So they need the superior knowledge of Marc Defant in order to understand... | ||
| No, I think they need the knowledge of science, not the knowledge that I have. | ||
| Let me come to your point, which is you're saying that I proposed one mechanism for cataclysm in Fingerprints of the Gods, and that I'm proposing another mechanism for cataclysm today. | ||
| What I proposed in Fingerprints of the Gods was that there had been a gigantic cataclysm In the ballpark of 12,500 years ago, I looked at a number of possibilities of which the most striking to me at the time was Earthcrust displacement. | ||
| And Earthcrust displacement is reported as the work of Charles Hapgood, not my work, but I do report it in Fingerprints of the Gods as an excellent theory which explains the information. | ||
| Since I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, I've learnt a lot. | ||
| I've learnt a lot, and I wouldn't want to defend that theory strongly today. | ||
| I don't know if you have bought the latest edition of my book, the paperback edition of Magicians of the Gods, but it contains a chapter saying whatever happened to Earthcrust displacement. | ||
| I address the change of view in this, and I think I have a right to change my view, and I think it's healthy that... | ||
| I mean, why would I stick... | ||
| Permanently to a view that I hold in 1995 if new evidence persuades me that it's wrong. | ||
| I'm sure that's a good thing, not a bad thing. | ||
| And fundamental proposition is we had a massive global cataclysm in the ballpark of 12,500 years ago. | ||
| So naturally, it's of great interest to me when a large group of scientists, more than 60 of them, over a period of more than 10 years now, present evidence of a massive comet impact event 12,800 years ago exactly in the window I proposed. | ||
| Graham, that's how you're slippery. | ||
| You are applying that there are a lot of people out there that believe in this. | ||
| There are some people that believe in it, I agree. | ||
| But for the most part, I think taking an honest view, the comet hypothesis has gotten debunked. | ||
| Well, that's complete rubbish, Mark. | ||
| By the way, I would also point out that in fingerprints, you had people believing that the end of the world was coming in 2012. Now, how am I supposed to take you seriously when you say things like that and then change your mind? | ||
| We could all be dead by now if we believed you. | ||
| I have absolutely changed my mind on the Mayan calendar. | ||
| I regard the Mayan calendar as an interesting technological artifact with a better estimate of the length of the solar year than the estimate that we have with today. | ||
| The Mayan calendar is based primarily on the position of the sun amongst the constellations at the winter solstice. | ||
| And we are in an 80-year window when the sun sits astride the dark rift of the Milky Way between the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpio on the winter solstice. | ||
| That window is 80 years wide. | ||
| So the story of the Mayan calendar, by the way, isn't actually quite over yet. | ||
| Do you know what the constellation means? | ||
| Yes, I know exactly what procession means. | ||
| Okay, well, all of this stuff that you claim is on a procession. | ||
| A procession is the... | ||
| Is the Earth spinning like a top? | ||
| It has nothing to do with running through comet clouds. | ||
| And yet you're saying that somehow we're on some sort of cycle where the comets are going to come back and strike the Earth right now, sometime during the next 40 years. | ||
| That's what you said in magicians. | ||
| No, that's what Victor Klube and Bill Napier and Emilio Spedicato say. | ||
| I'm a reporter! | ||
| You're the one that said in your book, you just got all over Mr. Sherman... | ||
| Michael Schirmer for saying the same things about other people. | ||
| I want to know what you think. | ||
| You tell me what you think. | ||
| I am a reporter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can't cop out on it. | |
| You're talking about science. | ||
| Mark, we can't talk over each other like this. | ||
| I am a reporter. | ||
| And it is my job to report the work of other people, and I report the work of Victor Klub, Bill Napier, and Emilio Spedicato, all of whom draw attention to the torrid meteor stream, and who regard it as the greatest collision hazard facing the Earth at this time, and who specifically indicate that we may run into a filament of the torrid meteor stream in the next 30 years that is going to be very bad for our civilization. | ||
| It has nothing to do with precession. | ||
| When did I say it had anything to do with precession? | ||
| You have a whole section on precession in Magicians of the Common. | ||
| Indeed, as a clock, as a timer, as a way of going back through the ages, but I'm not saying precession is causing this encounter with the Taurid Meteor Stream. | ||
| Go find the paragraph where I say that. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| What you're saying is that we're on a cycle. | ||
| That 12,000 years ago, this civilization was destroyed and now you're saying, uh-oh, that civilization was so smart that they knew we were going to go through another shower and we're all doomed in the next 40 years. | ||
| You didn't say doomed in magicians like you did in fingerprints. | ||
| But we must conclude that that's your opinion, because I don't know anybody else that you've referenced on that issue. | ||
| The procession has nothing to do with that, and it's not even on that cycle. | ||
| It has a cycle of about 21,000 years. | ||
| 25,920 years, actually, for a procession. | ||
| One degree every 72 years, give or take a small margin. | ||
| That is the precession. | ||
| You're really teaching grandma to suck eggs here. | ||
| So anyway, I guess this has just been going on all day. | ||
| You can't criticize Michael for bringing up other people that are saying strange things and comparing it to you and say, oh no, you can't say that because it's not about me. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| You're... | ||
| You're doing the same thing. | ||
| You're reporting about other people and saying nonsense. | ||
| Yeah, I'm reporting the work of Victor Klu, Bill Napier, and Emilio Spedicato. | ||
| And I also indicate that I strongly support that work. | ||
| That's as far as I go. | ||
| Mark, if I could stop you here. | ||
| So you think that this comet wiping out all the Ice Age megafauna theory has been debunked? | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| No, sir, I have not saying that. | ||
| But I think that if you read the literature carefully... | ||
| The majority of scientists right now, and I know that this is still a go, and you know what I like about the comet people is that they're doing it in the scientifically right way. | ||
| They're getting people to review the material, they're getting people to go through that gauntlet to where they get criticized, they make sure that they do things right, and they get it out there. | ||
| Firestone did this in 2007, he was crucified, he's come back, his group has come back with a lot of good stuff. | ||
| So I want to wait and see this play out. | ||
| I said that in my paper that we're going to have to wait to get a conclusion here. | ||
| So I'm not saying that they're wrong, but right now, if I read the literature as a scientist, I have to say that the comet guys are getting hit pretty hard. | ||
| What do you make of the latest platinum paper in Nature's scientific reports? | ||
| The platinum anomaly across North America and its coincidence in time with the Greenland ice cores and the platinum anomaly there. | ||
| What do you say to that? | ||
| Well, I say that, and maybe we can bring him on, The problem with that is that what does platinum have to do with the comet? | ||
| You know, platinums are high in asteroids, but they're not high in comets. | ||
| Comets are icy bodies. | ||
| I saw the paper. | ||
| I read it. | ||
| I think it's interesting, but I can't for the life of me figure out how he's correlating it. | ||
| He has, in the different areas of the Clovis, he has platinum concentrations that are seemingly not matching up. | ||
| They're outside the Younger Dryas. | ||
| They're inside the Younger Dryas. | ||
| I'd like you to show those if you can, because it's hard to understand what he's trying to say, other than it doesn't refute the common hypothesis. | ||
| Let's bring Malcolm on, since he's one of the co-authors of the platinum paper. | ||
| This is going to get super complicated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can only do one caller at a time. | |
| We can only do one caller at a time, apparently. | ||
| Well, I think Markham should have his voice in. | ||
| Well, I don't want to criticize him if he can't be here. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| What I'd like to do is go back and talk a little bit, if I may, about Gobekli Tepe, because I've read... | ||
| I know that Schmidt never, ever found anything to suggest that there were anything in the early part of Gobekli Tepe that were not hunter-gatherers. | ||
| They all were hunter-gatherers. | ||
| You know, he found 22,000 stone tools there when he dug that place up. | ||
| I'm not disputing that. | ||
| He never found any domesticated animals. | ||
| He never found any domesticated grain. | ||
| He found tons of bones of animals. | ||
| So we know that about 100 to 200 people were probably working on Gobekli Tepe at one time, and they were fed by wild animals and grain. | ||
| So there's no reason to go out on a limb here and say that some magical civilization came in. | ||
| And by the way, that's another thing that drives me crazy. | ||
| You're saying that these guys were magicians. | ||
| You're saying that they had secret knowledge. | ||
| What possible secret knowledge did they give to the people at Gobekli Tebi? | ||
| How can you possibly say things like that? | ||
| Again, I'm not saying that. | ||
| The word magicians of the gods comes from the Apkalu in ancient Sumer, and they were considered to have superior powers, and they were considered to be magicians of a sort. | ||
| Should I not report that, because it's there in the Sumerian text? | ||
| No, I think you should tell us what Michael's been asking all day, is what were their superpowers. | ||
| I'm not saying that they had superpowers. | ||
| It's the Sumerians who said that. | ||
| I simply report that. | ||
| You can regard that as a cop-out if you like, but I am a fucking reporter. | ||
| Why did you call your book Magicians of the Gods? | ||
| Because that's the direct implication of the Apkalu. | ||
| They were the Magicians of the Gods. | ||
| It sounds like you're saying they had magical powers to me. | ||
| No, I'm saying that they were the magicians of the gods as they were called in an ancient culture. | ||
| That's all I'm saying. | ||
| Okay, well, I just want your audience to know that Schmidt, who worked there for 20 years, that didn't go there for two days and look around, take some notes and leave and write a book on it, he worked there for 20 years. | ||
| And he found, with dates and everything, he found that there were hunter-gatherers there building those megaliths. | ||
| If you went to Easter Island and you found the Moai and you said, oh my gosh, there must have been some secret civilization that made these Moai because stupid hunter-gatherers couldn't possibly make these. | ||
| Well, we know that there were no special people on Easter Island. | ||
| It had to be made by hunter-gatherers. | ||
| Why would you poo-poo the go-bankly turkey and have to call a superior civilization to do that? | ||
| Are you seriously saying that the inhabitants of Easter Island were hunter-gatherers? | ||
| Well, absolutely. | ||
| And if matter of fact, we can see the population of the Pacific Ocean. | ||
| They had no agriculture? | ||
| Are you saying that? | ||
| We know that they didn't get to the Pacific Ocean until about 1,000 years ago. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| What do you think they were? | ||
| They certainly weren't a big civilization. | ||
| Mark, please let him respond. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Well, first of all, did you meet Klaus Schmidt? | ||
| Do you know him personally? | ||
| Well, you know he's dead, and you know that I haven't met him. | ||
| Okay, well, I did meet him. | ||
| I do know him personally. | ||
| I did record my interviews with him, with his agreement, and what he states clearly... | ||
| I don't disagree with you that the people around Gobekli Tepe were hunter-gatherers when Gobekli Tepe was started. | ||
| What precisely intrigued Klaus Schmidt Was the possibility, his phrase not mine, that Gobekli Tepe was a center of innovation, a place where new ideas were deliberately seeded and spread out in the population. | ||
| I have Klaus Schmidt on record saying that. | ||
| I quote him saying that in my book. | ||
| And that to me is a very interesting proposition because it suggests that we have a site here that is being used to mobilize a population and to transfer to them the knowledge of agriculture, which suddenly appears... | ||
| Around Gobekli Tepe at the time that Gobekli Tepe is functioning. | ||
| What do you mean by suddenly? | ||
| What I mean by suddenly is Klaus Schmidt stated very clearly that these are the people, the very same people who made Gobekli Tepe, in Klaus Schmidt's view, are the people who quote-unquote invented agriculture. | ||
| If you don't mind me interrupting here for a second, what about Easter Island? | ||
| Was Easter Island established by hunter-gatherers or not? | ||
| You were saying not? | ||
| You say it was established by hunter-gatherers. | ||
| I say not. | ||
| I say Easter Island was an agricultural society. | ||
| What's there to hunt and gather on a tiny island? | ||
| Have you been to Easter Island? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have. | |
| Six times. | ||
| And you know you can walk across it in three hours. | ||
| What's there to hunt and gather on that? | ||
| Oh, no, you're misunderstanding my point. | ||
| My point is that these are not sophisticated people. | ||
| I want to go back and agree with you on Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| I think that you've got Schmidt right. | ||
| And in fact, it's a UNESCO site. | ||
| We all recognize how important it is. | ||
| But what I think Michael and I can understand... | ||
| It's how this ties into some magnificent civilization. | ||
| There's nothing there that indicates that they were influenced by some other civilization. | ||
| They started out as hunter-gatherers, and then they evolved into agricultural society. | ||
| And that's what makes it a great site. | ||
| Can I answer you? | ||
| You're seriously saying that there's nothing there. | ||
| I mean, the largest megalithic site on Earth, 7,000 years older than Stonehenge is there. | ||
| There's no background to it. | ||
| No evidence of practice or training. | ||
| The megalithic site itself is the problem for me. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Honestly, we've got megaliths in quite a few sites. | ||
| And by the way, you're right. | ||
| There's a megalith just down the road from Gobekli Tepe, and there are probably several other. | ||
| I can see them on maps. | ||
| Yeah, we need to get to the bottom of this. | ||
| We've got a wonderful amount of work to do there. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| So I think, Graham, we're in good agreement on this. | ||
| Okay, so you guys are in agreement on that. | ||
| What I want to point out is that I don't think that there's any need to call upon This great civilization that you say exists. | ||
| Well, to me, the simplest explanation is a transfer of knowledge, a transfer of technology. | ||
| I've been writing about the possibility of a lost civilization for more than a quarter of a century. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| I hope that it's a useful contribution to the debate. | ||
| I mean, archaeologists can choose not to listen to anything I say, to dismiss me as a complete lunatic, as they often do, to accuse me, as you do, in writing of duping the public, of conning the public, and so on and so forth. | ||
| I didn't use the word conning. | ||
| Well, you did use the word conning, actually. | ||
| It's in the very last paragraph of your article, because I got it right here in front of me. | ||
| We will fix that. | ||
| You did use the word conning. | ||
| Michael, this was the first thing I wrote. | ||
| I just put it up for my students. | ||
| Well, it's there. | ||
| It's there. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I am left with... | ||
| What I am left with is that Hancock... | ||
| I'm going to put my reading glasses on so I can read this properly. | ||
| What I am left with, this is quoting you Mark, is that Hancock has a real knack for conning a hellacious number of people into buying his books. | ||
| I mean that's a direct ad hominem insult. | ||
| It's online in your article. | ||
| Do you stand by it or not? | ||
| Listen, I apologize to you for the use of that language. | ||
| Is that what you want to hear? | ||
| Because I do. | ||
| I'm sorry you used it in the first place. | ||
| I think you're misleading your students. | ||
| Why would you say that you're just putting that online for your students as if that's not a big deal? | ||
| You're putting it on the internet. | ||
| And to say you're just putting it online for your students and you've been proven incorrect on how many different times in this article now? | ||
| Well, about seven. | ||
| Proven incorrect? | ||
| I haven't been proven incorrect. | ||
| Well, you have. | ||
| You misquote me. | ||
| You don't give the context. | ||
| And even Michael has said that the skeptic article will not reflect these out-of-context statements that you're making here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the core is, is the impact hypothesis likely to be true or not? | ||
| And as an independent phenomenon, is it connected? | ||
| To Gobekli Tepe and the Younger Dryas. | ||
| I mean, that's kind of what we're getting at. | ||
| Maybe you can explain that graph that shows all the glacial dam bursts and the dating of those as thousands of years before the 12,800-year impact. | ||
| Can we put the map up first? | ||
| We need to map up first. | ||
| You guys can get into what does that mean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which map is that? | |
| Which map? | ||
| On your own? | ||
| Which map, Mark? | ||
| I'm sorry, it's the glacial map. | ||
| Western Washington, or Washington State, Oregon. | ||
| Jamie will put it up. | ||
| And by the way, to protect Michael here, I submitted this. | ||
| Michael made an immense amount of changes on that paper. | ||
| I put it up because I wanted my students to see it. | ||
| I had no idea that people would go online and look at that like you have. | ||
| And unfortunately, you've sent tens of thousands of people probably to it by letting them know it's on here, and I'm sorry for that. | ||
| But anyway, let's go to this. | ||
| But why is it okay to just put that up online for your students? | ||
| Yeah, I don't get that. | ||
| How come you don't have any problem with that, but you do have a problem with it as it stands, being released to the general public? | ||
| Um... | ||
| I think I stand by everything I said, except for the personal comment at the end. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so let's put up this map. | |
| Let's get back to the map. | ||
| Okay, the brown areas are... | ||
| Now, I have to emphasize that the Scablands is very famous. | ||
| People have been working on... | ||
| Geologists have been working on this for more than 100 years, I bet. | ||
| And very intricate, detailed mapping. | ||
| And we now know what areas have been flooded. | ||
| That's in the brown. | ||
| The green areas are the old glacial lakes. | ||
| One of them you can see is the Columbia Lake. | ||
| And the other one on the far right, over in Montana, that's Lake Missoula. | ||
| Now, I guess my point here is that you guys want to make the flooding out here to be immense. | ||
| And I think Brett's original idea was that there was just one flooding. | ||
| But then Brett came to understand, after looking at the data and all of the geologic work, that it wasn't just one flood, that it's many floods. | ||
| And that was the point of all of those dates that I show you, that there have been at least 17 specific floods dated. | ||
| There are probably as many as 40 to 50 floods out there. | ||
| And they're all probably related to Glacial dams breaking. | ||
| Now, where in the world would you ever say that this small area relative to an entire continent, why would you say that this is evidence for a comet strike? | ||
| Not even the comet guys are saying that this flooding out here is related to a comet. | ||
| Because there are a large number of area, a very small number of actual area that is flooded. | ||
| If you take a look now at my dates, or not my dates, but the dates, do you have that, Michael? | ||
| We're going to bring that up, but let's let Randall Carlson address you now, because he's the one that's the expert of this. | ||
| I mean, he's got a point that if you just look at, if you confine your examination to this area, but the point is, is you've got evidence of mega-flooding all around the ice sheet margin, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. | ||
| You've got the work of... | ||
| Keyhue and Lord in the Midwestern states. | ||
| South Dakota, North Dakota, Eastern Montana. | ||
| You've got massive spillways out there that discharged off the ice sheet. | ||
| You have Glacial River Warren that was undoubtedly formed by most likely Glacial Lake Agassiz. | ||
| And you've got the St. Croix River where I took Graham a couple of years ago that had mega floods down it. | ||
| There were mega floods down the Mississippi River. | ||
| There was Glacial Lake, Wisconsin that discharged down the Wisconsin River, left the Wisconsin Dells. | ||
| There are the Finger Lakes in New York that probably were created by massive floods emanating off of that. | ||
| No, they were scoured. | ||
| Scoured! | ||
| Exactly, right. | ||
| They were scoured, and they were probably scoured by subglacial floods that were coming under high pressure. | ||
| Because, you know, you have the drumlin fields that are just to the south of them. | ||
| And you've probably seen the work of John Shaw and Claire Beaney and Bruce Rainey and those out of Canada. | ||
| Yes, but I think Sean's idea about drumlins is crazy. | ||
| Well, why would that be? | ||
| How do you propose the drumlins then were formed? | ||
| Oh, easily. | ||
| The glaciers came forward and topped the terminal moraine and spread the moraines out into drumlins. | ||
| But how? | ||
| I mean, you've got features that look like they're totally fluvially produced. | ||
| They look like inverted boatels. | ||
| You look at the internal stratification. | ||
| How does glaciers create internal stratification? | ||
| I've looked at numerous drumlins in Canada, I've looked at drumlins in New York State, I've looked at drumlins in probably a dozen different places, and where you can see exposures, you see stratification. | ||
| You don't see, if glaciers are grinding over a deformable substrate, how is it that they produce anything other than a chaotic jumble of glacial till? | ||
| You can actually see layering. | ||
| I've seen it myself, and we can pull up pictures of it here in a minute, and I'd like for you to explain it to me. | ||
| Before you do that, because I'm not disagreeing with you. | ||
| A drumlin, by definition, is made up of till. | ||
| I think we're getting kind of technical for this audience, but, you know, an esker is something that's stratified, not a drumlin. | ||
| So you're misidentifying them as drumlins? | ||
| No, I am not misidentifying drumlins. | ||
| I know very clearly the difference between an asker and a drumlin. | ||
| I've looked at many askers. | ||
| I've hiked on them. | ||
| I've flown over them in airplanes. | ||
| But certainly you must agree that the Finger Lakes are gouged. | ||
| They are gouged, yes. | ||
| Are they gouged by glaciers, or are they also gouged by subglacial megafloods? | ||
| That's the question, and I think that's a fair question to ask. | ||
| And if we look at some of the studies, we find out that the depositional material in them is massive. | ||
| It's not stratified, it's massive, as if it was dumped in there over a very short period of time. | ||
| Let me go back to the bigger picture. | ||
| But hold on a second, what's your point about that? | ||
| Sorry Joe, I can't hear you. | ||
| I'm sorry, respond to that, what he just said. | ||
| What am I responding to? | ||
| Look, we're going to have to disagree. | ||
| I mean, what am I supposed to... | ||
| I don't want to get in an argument with him here. | ||
| He thinks that they're done by water. | ||
| I think that traditionally, the way most geologists see the Finger Lakes is they're gouged out. | ||
| They're parallel to one another. | ||
| If he thinks it's water, okay, what can we do? | ||
| We can disagree, I guess. | ||
| Let me go back up to the main glacier, the Laurentide Glacier. | ||
| Wally Broker suggested in the 90s... | ||
| That water potentially was changed from flowing down the Mississippi Valley into the Atlantic or the Arctic. | ||
| No one has been able to find any evidence of flooding towards the Atlantic or the Arctic. | ||
| When you say there are all kinds of evidence of flooding up there, Wally Broker backed off of his theory because we couldn't find any flooding up there. | ||
| What he backed off of was the idea that the draining of Glacial Lake Agassiz triggered the Younger Dryas. | ||
| Because the dating of the draining of Glacial Lake Agassiz was post Younger Dryas. | ||
| And so that's what he backed off of. | ||
| He didn't necessarily back up. | ||
| Look, we know that the moraines have been carefully mapped. | ||
| You can watch the Atlantide Glacier move back moraine after moraine, and there are no holes in that moraine that suggest flooding. | ||
| There's no change in the lake level of Lake Agassiz. | ||
| There's no evidence there, Randall, for flooding. | ||
| You've got it wrong if you look at the careful mapping that the geologists have done. | ||
| You've just said that there was no change in the level of Lake Agassiz. | ||
| How is that possible? | ||
| I mean, as the ice receded, the glacial Lake Agassiz expanded, and at some point it finally breached right there by Big Stone Lake in Minnesota and basically carved out the Minnesota River Valley, which geological studies have confirmed, they call it River Warren and have confirmed that essentially it was carrying its peak discharge was roughly 4,000 times greater than the modern Minnesota River that flows there. | ||
| And where did that end up? | ||
| That flowed into the Mississippi. | ||
| The Mississippi then conveyed that water into the Gulf of Mexico and deposited huge amounts of Delta material that New Orleans is built on now. | ||
| You know, you're trying to make a flood where a flood isn't. | ||
| There's a difference between a glacier melting, which causes a lot of water, and a comet striking it, which creates copious amounts of water. | ||
| I think you guys referred to it the last time as a tsunami. | ||
| There's no evidence of a tsunami in North America. | ||
| And by the way, here's another question. | ||
| Why are you guys talking about North America? | ||
| When your Atlantis is supposed to be in Egypt, or you guys have run around, you found some evidence of flooding in North America, and somehow this relates to a destruction of Atlantis and some lost civilization. | ||
| Well, that's not Randall. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's not what I'm talking about right now. | |
| I'm not talking about that. | ||
| We know there was a Phenoscandian ice sheet. | ||
| We know there was a Cordillera ice sheet. | ||
| We know there was a Laurentide ice sheet. | ||
| We know they all melted. | ||
| We know that there was somewhere around 6 million cubic miles of ice wrapped up in those ice sheets at the late glacial maximum. | ||
| They're all gone now. | ||
| They had to melt. | ||
| That was an enormous amount of water. | ||
| And I don't know if you have been. | ||
| Out to the scab lands. | ||
| I've been going back to the scab lands and the area of Glacial Lake Missoula since 1970. I've been across that thing 60,000 miles. | ||
| Back and forth I have over 10,000 photographs of the material in the field. | ||
| And I can tell you those floods were enormous. | ||
| They were beyond... | ||
| Yeah, you're cherry picking. | ||
| Look at the map. | ||
| You've shown some pictures. | ||
| You know we can measure those current ripple marks that you've shown. | ||
| We can measure how much water went over them. | ||
| All you have to do is measure the current ripples. | ||
| You can go into Camas Prairie and you've got a current ripple field there that is about seven miles long. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know it very well. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And the high water mark in there is at 4,200 feet above sea level. | ||
| The floor of Camas Prairie is just 1,400 feet lower than that. | ||
| So we know that there were 1,400 feet of water that passed through Camas Prairie and down into the Flathead River. | ||
| No, we don't. | ||
| Are you disregarding the high water marks? | ||
| From the bottom of the canyon to the top of the canyon is not what it was when the water first started flowing in that area. | ||
| You can't take the bottom of the canyon and say, oh, there must have been 4,000 feet of water here. | ||
| I'm not talking about a canyon. | ||
| I'm talking about Camas Prairie Basin, which is not a canyon. | ||
| It's a basin. | ||
| Well, it had to erode at one time. | ||
| Well, most of the material in there was washed in. | ||
| So, I mean, we don't know how much it would have eroded until somebody does some core samples to get down to... | ||
| Something that can be dated to earlier than the late glacial maximum. | ||
| But the floor of Camas Prairie is thick layers of very coarse gravel, boulders, and this is what composes the current ripples that you see there. | ||
| I mean, I don't see how you can look at those current ripples that are sometimes 40 and 50 feet in amplitude with 200 and 300 feet cord lengths and say that that wasn't a catastrophic flow. | ||
| It was a catastrophic flow, but it wasn't like a tsunami. | ||
| Well, then how would you characterize it? | ||
| We can play this game. | ||
| Are you saying that... | ||
| Every geologist on the planet... | ||
| Practically, says that there were about 40 different floods until you came along, and now you're trying to refute this because somebody told you a common story. | ||
| You're not familiar with the work of Victor Baker or Russell Bunker or a number of others that have challenged the 40 floods hypothesis. | ||
| And are you going to tell me that those current ripples in Camas Prairie are created, they're the product of 40 separate floods? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| In fact, when you showed me your pictures, I could see the flow changes in that. | ||
| Oh, don't give me your incredulous stuff. | ||
| Even incredulous doesn't mean you're right. | ||
| You do the incredulous all the time, Mark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's because you say some pretty incredulous things. | |
| 40 floods created the Camas Prairie. | ||
| That's what you're saying. | ||
| That's the product of 40 separate floods. | ||
| I don't know how many floods have been in there. | ||
| I know that they're counting them. | ||
| And I last read something to the effect of 40, somewhere around there. | ||
| Yeah, that's based on the work of Richard Waite, goes back to the early 80s, and I think he's got... | ||
| No, go to his graph. | ||
| Can we go to his graph? | ||
| Whose graph? | ||
| Which graph is this, Mark? | ||
| It's the one right below the map. | ||
| Yeah, this one. | ||
| It's the dating of the floods. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| We're at that right now. | ||
| Look, Randall, hopefully we're disagreeing as comrades here rather than just fighting each other. | ||
| I'm just trying to give you some data here. | ||
| Look at those. | ||
| Those are Missoula floods, Lake Missoula. | ||
| He's got them dated. | ||
| You're seeing the dates. | ||
| He's got standard deviations, one and two standard deviations on the median there. | ||
| So we've got these things pinned by multiple carbon dates. | ||
| The little bell curves there show how many carbon dates he's got. | ||
| And you can see that these are documented very, very well. | ||
| So I don't understand why you're so opposed to multiple floods. | ||
| In fact, I heard in the last time you guys were on this show, I heard you say that you thought there were multiple floods. | ||
| Now you're trying to argue against that idea. | ||
| No, I am not. | ||
| I still think there were multiple floods. | ||
| I think we have to look at two distinct regimes of floods, though. | ||
| And as far as the radiocarbon dating, the thing we have to be really careful of is that Floods will entrain older sediment. | ||
| And in that older sediment, there could be radiocarbon dated material that doesn't really date the time of the flood, but was excavated by the flood, entrained into flood waters, and then redeposited. | ||
| You know, that's a major problem with radiocarbon dating any time you look at flood sediments. | ||
| And I do believe there were multiple floods. | ||
| That's, you know, I think it's a misinterpretation to think that I only think that there was one flood. | ||
| But there, you know, the problem is here, and I do, I think, we're colleagues, and my approach to this is just like, you know, in the MMA, when two guys get out there and try to beat the crap out of each other, and then at the end of it, they give each other a hug. | ||
| That's kind of where I'm coming from. | ||
| So, you know, there's nothing personal here. | ||
| I'm sorry we couldn't give each other a hug, but I feel the same way. | ||
| And by the way, you guys are very bright. | ||
| And very knowledgeable. | ||
| Well, you know, I really value this, because I'm looking for holes in this idea, very much so. | ||
| And I have done some serious thinking about this over many years, and I have interviewed most of the geologists that have worked on it. | ||
| I've been in half a dozen field trips, guided by the main geologists that have worked on this, and had a chance to dialogue with them. | ||
| And, you know, I'm convinced that, you know, there's still some... | ||
| There's a lot to be learned about this. | ||
| And I think we need to be looking at, like you said, the big picture. | ||
| And, you know, we could get back to a discussion of the Finger Lakes and how they formed. | ||
| I think that's important. | ||
| I think we could get back to a discussion about drumlins and how they formed. | ||
| You know, there is studies on the Valley Heads mooring that are at the south end of the Finger Lakes that have... | ||
| I can't think of who did it right now, I could pull it up, but basically said it's water deposited. | ||
| But there's a lot of unresolved issues about what happened during this transition, planetary transition, out of the last ice age, and I think it's important that we have these discussions, that we have these dialogues, and that we try to get to the bottom of what actually happened, without imposing too many preconceptions upon our models, because I think we're looking at something very unprecedented here. | ||
| Randall, I couldn't have said that better. | ||
| It was very well articulated. | ||
| Let me go back to the big picture, if I could, just for a minute, because I want to address something that Graham said earlier, and that is that Graham seems to have this idea that comets break up all the time, but people that understand, I think, comets and meteorites understand that the The comet Schumer Levy or whatever it was that broke up. | ||
| Schumer Levy 9. It broke up because of the gravitation of Jupiter. | ||
| We would not expect these comets to break up entering into the atmosphere. | ||
| It's one of the problems that the comet people have had. | ||
| Firestone once suggested a four kilometer wide comet striking them and now they've broken it up into multiple comets. | ||
| The problem is you can't get it separated. | ||
| If a comet breaks up, it's very hard to separate it so that it hits in multiple places. | ||
| And so this is a big picture kind of problem that the comet people are having with the scientists. | ||
| So you may be able to get it to hit the North American ice sheet, but I'm telling you that the studies are showing that You're not going to be able to do this without leaving some marks. | ||
| And so far, nobody's been able to find a crater. | ||
| Do you know that they're suggesting that a four-kilometer comet, if it could break up, it would generate one million crater Meteor, craters. | ||
| You know how big that was? | ||
| That was 49,000 years ago. | ||
| We don't see that in the climate record. | ||
| 49,000 years ago, we should see it. | ||
| We don't see it. | ||
| It's barely a little thing. | ||
| We're going to have a huge comet strike. | ||
| Malcolm Lecomte has been standing by for the best part of three hours. | ||
| Since he's a member of the Comet Research Group, wouldn't it be a good time to bring him on? | ||
| Yeah, we can bring him on as long as Mark is satisfied that he said his piece. | ||
| But unfortunately, Mark, we can't have two people on the phone at the same time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I really appreciate you having me on, Joe. | ||
| I appreciate you coming on, too, and I'm glad you guys, especially you and Randall, seem to have ironed out a lot of your ideas. | ||
| Randall's a great guy. | ||
| There's a lot to be learned here, obviously, and there's a lot that already has been learned, and this is an It's an unbelievably fascinating subject. | ||
| And I think oftentimes when these debates get heated, a lot gets lost in who's wrong or who's right. | ||
| But I think what we can all agree on is that what we're dealing with is an unbelievable point in history, in the history of this planet. | ||
| And trying to figure out what caused it and why is some really fascinating stuff. | ||
| So Mark, I really appreciate your time and really appreciate you imparting your knowledge on us. | ||
| Mark, if at all possible, I would love to kind of keep some of this dialogue going, because I really would value your input. | ||
| I tried to write you, Randall, and I couldn't get through. | ||
| I'm not sure why. | ||
| I'm not either, because if I would have seen that, I definitely would have responded. | ||
| Well, I have a website. | ||
| Please send me. | ||
| I'd love to keep up with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I will. | |
| We'll definitely connect you guys after this is over. | ||
| And thank you once again, Mark. | ||
| Really, really appreciate you calling in. | ||
| If I can just say, I do hope you'll revisit your article and just have a look at the context in which you present me there. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Never meant to insult you. | ||
| Thank you, Mark. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now, we are going to call caller number two. | ||
| This is a fascinating podcast, though. | ||
| And your friend who's waiting is? | ||
| Markham LeCompte. | ||
| Markham LeCompte. | ||
| And he's one of the Comet Research Group scientists. | ||
| This is a large and diverse body of scientists who come at the material with different expertise and different It happens that Malcolm is a co-author of the recent I Regarded Highly Significant paper, Finding a Platinum Anomaly Across North America. | ||
| And I would hope he might begin with addressing why that might indicate a comet impact. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is Malcolm on? | ||
| It should be. | ||
| Malcolm, can you hear us? | ||
| I can hear. | ||
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| How are you, Malcolm? | ||
| Thank you very much for joining us. | ||
| I'm happy to be here. | ||
| So, give us your thoughts on what Graham just said, if you would, as to why it makes sense that it was a comet that hit and why there would be these large deposits of these, what was it exactly? | ||
| Platinum in the recent paper, but Malcolm is also an expert in magnetic microspherules and I think he can address that issue as well. | ||
| The whole range of proxies, of impact proxies. | ||
| Now, Malcolm, please just give us your thoughts on this entire phenomenon, if you will. | ||
| I will. | ||
| Happy to be here. | ||
| Happy to have you. | ||
| Is he breaking up? | ||
| No, go ahead. | ||
| Go ahead, Malcolm. | ||
| I think there's an issue. | ||
| Seems to be the... | ||
| Oh, I know what's going on. | ||
| I've got a feedback. | ||
| I've got to turn off this. | ||
| Oh, yeah, you've got to mute that other video. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| You're listening to us at the same time as talking to us. | ||
| You're getting us on like a 40-second delay or something. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| Okay, we cool now? | ||
| Actually, I was very interested to hear Mark's... | ||
| His initial statement kind of put me off, but his subsequent statements I thought were pretty accurate. | ||
| And there are many problems with the hypothesis that there was an impact. | ||
| And that's the way I consider it. | ||
| I don't really think in terms of a common impact. | ||
| I think in terms of an extraterrestrial impact. | ||
| Because I don't think we've proven a common impact. | ||
| I don't think we know what kind of an impact it was. | ||
| There's too many questions that have to be answered. | ||
| So, I can't sign up to say that I'm defending the comet impact hypothesis because I don't frankly know what it was. | ||
| We have a lot of evidence that appears to be extraterrestrial in nature. | ||
| We have magnetic microspherals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can give you a... | |
| The different criticism we get is that the evidence has not been replicated. | ||
| And that's where I thought Mark was going when his initial statement was that the comet impact hypothesis has been debunked. | ||
| And I think what he meant was, if I can speak for him, was that the fact that it was a comet has been debunked. | ||
| I don't think that's necessarily true yet. | ||
| It just doesn't indicate it. | ||
| That it was a comet. | ||
| We have indications that it was more of an asteroid than anything else. | ||
| And I can conceive of a rubble pile that somehow became disassociated, although there'd have to be a mechanism or a model for that, and I don't think we have a model for that. | ||
| Asteroids come in many flavors, and rubble piles are certainly one. | ||
| Loose aggregates of material that could become separated, possibly. | ||
| But I just don't know at this stage. | ||
| I guess the biggest criticism that we faced in terms of the impact hypothesis is that the evidence has not been replicable. | ||
| And we now have I guess three or four evidence lines that have been replicated by numerous independent groups. | ||
| If you look at the nanodiamonds, which may be the most controversial of the bunch of the evidence lines, that's been replicated by four different groups independent. | ||
| Five different studies. | ||
| The magnetic microspherals, which were initially treated very hostily because they didn't understand what we were talking about, and some of that was a self-inflicted wound on the part of the initial study, which didn't show what we really were finding. | ||
| And that's been corrected, and yet the same objection or criticism is being made. | ||
| Magnetic microspherals are typically very... | ||
| Well, they're melted and then they're quenched. | ||
| They're subjected to high temperatures and then those temperatures are rapidly reduced, which is sort of accepted to be characteristics of an impact. | ||
| So we've got that evidence of an impact, and that's been replicated by 10 different independent groups, including many of the same sites that were originally disputed. | ||
| So, the disputation has been largely based upon the failure to do the most basic part of the protocol, which is to do the scanning electron microscopic analysis of the spherules. | ||
| Okay, that is the microspherals and the nanodiamonds. | ||
| The other is the discovery of platinum, iridium, or osmium, which are the platinum group elements which are characteristic of an asteroid impact. | ||
| And we found some evidence of iridium. | ||
| Not a lot, but there have been certain sites that are rich in iridium. | ||
| And once again, this is at the Younger Dryas boundary. | ||
| Not above, not below. | ||
| It's there. | ||
| At that boundary. | ||
| So that date seems to be pretty solid. | ||
| And iridium is indicative of an impact of extraterrestrial origin, correct? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| The platinum is simply just another more plentiful platinum group element. | ||
| Obviously that's why they're called the platinum groups. | ||
| Osmium is one that is usually associated with iridium. | ||
| There are now 11 studies by independent groups that have confirmed the occurrence of platinum, osmium, or iridium. | ||
| So it looks to me like the evidence is piling up. | ||
| The most recent one, of course, is the platinum study by Moore that just came out a few months ago. | ||
| Now Randall Carlson just, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but Randall Carlson just had us pull up some images that we're looking at. | ||
| Randall, please explain what this is. | ||
| Well this is from Malcolm's 2012 independent evaluation of conflicting microspheral results from different investigations. | ||
| This is his supplementary information figure 4. So it's just so that the people watching this can actually see what you're talking about when you're Discussing the rapid quenching effect on the surface of the microspherals. | ||
| So we've got up on the screen here, Supplementary Information Figure 4, where you've got the microspherals from Topper, Blackwater Draw, and Paw Paw Cove. | ||
| So just so people can see what that surface texture looks like. | ||
| Yeah, you see these, they look like leaf-like structures across. | ||
| Some of them are harder to see, but they're there. | ||
| If you see the original image, it's large enough and clear enough to actually see these, what we call dendritic structures or almost like a carpet weave. | ||
| Those are essentially truncated crystallization. | ||
| It's a crystallization process that's quenched. | ||
| I'm not a geologist. | ||
| I've had geologists try to explain it to me. | ||
| And that's what I'm trying to do here. | ||
| But the fact that these are enhanced, these things are quite enhanced at the Ember Dryas and really depleted above and below. | ||
| Now there are spherules throughout the column. | ||
| Any column of soil, when you go down vertically deeper, you find spherules. | ||
| But those spherules are typically what we call orthogenic, which means that they're created by terrestrial processes. | ||
| You need to do a scanning electron microscope and X-ray dispersive spectroscopy to differentiate those from the terrestrial processes that are producing these things. | ||
| Yeah, your figure five has a framboidal spheryl, which is probably what you're talking about. | ||
| If you could go to slide 113, Jamie, and you'll be able to see. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| You can see very distinct difference. | ||
| So we've got your figure five up in the screen now, Malcolm. | ||
| Yeah, that's a typical framboid. | ||
| And when you look at an optical microscope, they look just like the, or very much like the, what we call impact spherules or magnetic microspherules. | ||
| And they occur much more frequently. | ||
| I mean, I've got sites that have tens of thousands of these things in every couple of centimeters of sediment. | ||
| So you've got to separate the impact spherules or the magnetic microspherules from these things. | ||
| But what you appear to be saying, Markham, is that there is an abundance of impact proxy evidence, which, in your opinion, adds up to a cosmic impact of some sort, not necessarily a comet, you're suggesting an asteroid. | ||
| It's a mysterious event in that sense, but what it adds up to is an impact, in your view. | ||
| Is that a fair summary? | ||
| All these, what we call proxies, the impact spherules, the platinum group elements, the The melt glass, which I haven't discussed yet, and the nanodiamonds are enhanced, and the enhancement has been replicated on numerous occasions for each of these proxies. | ||
| So anyone who says that the work of you and your team has been completely debunked is clearly not completely familiar with the literature then? | ||
| That would seem to be the case. | ||
| We're disingenuous in that regard. | ||
| So I would say that, because typically what we see is that the opposition literature does not cite the studies that have come out. | ||
| We try and cite both the critical studies and ours and give reasons why our studies supplant theirs. | ||
| But I wish they would share, but that hasn't been the case. | ||
| It would be nice if we could have had you on with Mark so you guys could exchange information, but unfortunately our capability is that we can only take one phone call at a time. | ||
| We will definitely try to update that for the new studio, although we never anticipated this was going to happen in the first place. | ||
| It's been awesome. | ||
| Oh, there we go. | ||
| Up on the screen, Malcolm, we've got from Ted Bunch et al. | ||
| 2012, very high temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic air bursts and impacts 12,900 years ago. | ||
| So we have figure from supplementary information 6. The light photo micrographs of magnetic and glassy spherules from Melrose, Pennsylvania and it shows the the wide variety of shapes which includes spherules, ovals, teardrops, | ||
| and dumbbells and I think so you can see pretty distinctly what you're talking about here with it with the glassy spherules and then like particularly I'm not sure if you were co-author of this paper or not. | ||
| I was not. | ||
| You were not, okay. | ||
| Are you familiar with that paper? | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| Good, okay. | ||
| Yeah, it shows some very interesting teardrop shapes, dumbbell shapes, and where you can actually see that, like, dumbbell H up there consists of two dissimilar Accretionary spherules, one clear silicon-rich and the other opaque iron-rich that have been fused together. | ||
| And that's pretty convincing evidence of the energy that's involved in these phenomena, that you actually have these fused spherules like this. | ||
| And then, Jamie, if you go down to the next image, which is a scanning electron microscope images comparing younger drive boundary spherules on the top row with known impact spherules on the bottom row, this is a very interesting comparison because, and you've probably seen this one, Malcolm, A, there's three across the top, three across the bottom, and A is actually a From Knudsen's or Knudsen's farm in Canada, it's a Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary spheryl. | ||
| And just below it is a Younger Dryas spheryl from Lake Utsio in Mexico. | ||
| And one can see the morphological similarity of the two quite clearly. | ||
| Then C and D compares. | ||
| C is a spheryl from the Tunguska airburst. | ||
| And then D is Younger Dryas Boundary from Lyngen, Germany, which dates to 12,800 years before present. | ||
| And there you can see very clearly the rapid quench melt texture on the surface between the two, comparing Tunguska Airburst with A Younger Dryas Boundary object. | ||
| And then finally E and F we have an Iron Calcium Silica Spheryl from Meteor Crater compared with an Iron Calcium Silica Younger Dryas Boundary Spheryl from Abu Haria Syria. | ||
| And again in each of these cases you can see the similarities between the different types of objects. | ||
| So you have these three objects which are Come from that Younger Dryas boundary layer, all which have morphological similarity to known impact proxies. | ||
| And this is very difficult to dismiss this as being mere coincidence. | ||
| Yeah, I would agree. | ||
| And those are very, especially the A, C, B, and D pictures are very similar to the material that I'm taking out of the Younger Dryas boundary at the sites that I've been looking at. | ||
| Malcolm, what evidence, if any, are you aware of about what is that nuclear glass material called trinitite? | ||
| From what I understand, there's quite a bit of that that also appears in the same time period in the core samples? | ||
| There are some instances of it, but I wouldn't say quite a bit. | ||
| Some of these, I mean, they're very site-specific. | ||
| And one of the things I've been trying to do is work my way closer and closer to Canada and see if there's any truth to this whole idea that the primary impact site was Canada. | ||
| So I've been trying to look at sites closer and closer. | ||
| I've seen sites in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania that produce what appears to be some form of trinitite or milk glass, or what Ted Bunch would call scoria-like objects. | ||
| And it seems to bear out that, at least that far, we're getting richer material out of the sediment, out of the under dryness boundary sediment. | ||
| And is this trinitite, this material, only produced in this manner? | ||
| It's also produced through nuclear explosion tests, right? | ||
| But other than that, is this the only way that it's produced on Earth? | ||
| Well, an impact would do it, or a fulgurite could do it. | ||
| A fulgurite is what's produced by a lightning strike. | ||
| It could produce spherules. | ||
| It could produce all the high-temperature products that you see in an impact. | ||
| But in a very limited way. | ||
| You wouldn't expect to see it in a layer unless there was some sort of global lightning storm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What I was going to say about the melt glass is that in the material we're looking at, you see evidence of melted zircons, melted chromite, all of which are very high temperature features, indicating a very high temperature that was experienced by that particular object. | ||
| Are you seeing the image we have up here? | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| Yeah, A is from Meteor Crater, and B is from the Trinity nuclear test, and then with the 22 kiloton yield, and then C is from one of the Soviet-era nuclear tests, and D is, again, a scoria-like object from Abu Huria. | ||
| And then if we go to, let's see... | ||
| You've got to love that it says Stalinite. | ||
| The scoria-like objects, the melt glass for scoria-like objects has only been found in about half a dozen sites to this point. | ||
| So we're still, you know, and I think it's a matter of how close you are to an impact point. | ||
| And if they're very far apart, that would lend credence, I think, to this idea of multiple impacts. | ||
| If they seem to get more plentiful as you get further and further north, then maybe there's more legitimacy to a primary impact site. | ||
| Right now, we just don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're still working that out. | |
| Alright, we got another nice slide from the Bunch article here. | ||
| A beautiful slide, yeah. | ||
| Calcium oxide, rich scoria-like object created by the melting of carbonate and silica-rich precursor rocks. | ||
| The yellow area is the calcium oxide, the white area is lechatelurite, and dark areas are iron oxide. | ||
| So that's a really nice... | ||
| The electrotelurite. | ||
| Yeah, I've been struggling with getting that pronunciation down. | ||
| And then, Jamie, if you go to the next one, we will see there's a scoria-like object from Meteor Crater, Arizona. | ||
| And you could toggle back and forth between the two so the people can kind of see the similarity between them. | ||
| And I see a lot. | ||
| In the sites that produce milk glass, that's what I'm seeing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those two types of particulates. | ||
| And how much of this material are you finding in these sites? | ||
| Well, you don't find, I have to say, you don't find a lot of this material. | ||
| It's a struggle to get it. | ||
| But what you don't find is anything above or below it, that particular layer. | ||
| Unless you know that it's been a very dynamic environment, in which case it can be spread out in the soil column. | ||
| And what's the implication of nothing above it and below it? | ||
| Well, that you've got a specific date for it. | ||
| And the layer that we typically try and just limit our investigation to layers that have been dated to the hemorrhagrius boundary or contain the hemorrhagrius boundary layer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, like I say, if you have a very dynamic environment, it can really screw things up. | ||
| It can be very difficult to interpret. | ||
| So this is difficult. | ||
| If you've got a lot of flooding, repetitive flooding. | ||
| Difficult science to do. | ||
| Say again? | ||
| This is difficult science to do. | ||
| Yeah, and I should add there that proving an impact is not easy. | ||
| It takes a while, and just as proving an impact crater is not easy, as I'm sure Mark would agree, that you find a crater, there's no guarantee that it's either an impact event or a volcanic event until you do the research. | ||
| And spend the time to investigate it. | ||
| But if you could summarize for us, what's your opinion now on the balance of the evidence? | ||
| Always bearing in mind that you may change that opinion as more evidence comes in. | ||
| Yeah, I would say we're facing an unprecedented type of event here that appears to have been something approaching global. | ||
| I mean, we've got evidence now in South America, we've got evidence, and a lot of this stuff is unpublished. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of things that I could bring up that aren't published, so it's kind of useless to refer to them, because there's no way of checking what I'm saying. | ||
| But we're seeing stuff that goes very far into South America. | ||
| And we're seeing things in Syria. | ||
| We haven't looked elsewhere. | ||
| We've seen it out in the Pacific Ocean. | ||
| We've seen it in Europe. | ||
| So, I mean, where does it end? | ||
| Right now, we haven't found an end to it yet. | ||
| And it's all at the Younger Dryas boundary. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What have you found in the Pacific Ocean? | ||
| Well, Sharma has found... | ||
| There's a paper I can cite from his... | ||
| It may even be just a presentation. | ||
| I can quote it. | ||
| He says, we infer that the central Pacific was a site of deposition of osmium resulting from dust cloud following a meteorite impact at 12,000 kiloanadams plus or minus 4,000. | ||
| So right in that ballpark, Sharma says that he found osmium, and I believe he's come up with microspherals from that same core. | ||
| So the Central Pacific gives you an idea of how extensive this thing was. | ||
| Now, Malcolm, this is obviously some controversial material. | ||
| It's fairly new in terms of the public consciousness. | ||
| Have you had anybody debate you on this, or have you had anybody oppose you? | ||
| Yeah, it goes with the territory. | ||
| I wish the opposition, in some respects, in some cases, I wish the opposition was of a bit higher caliber than what I've seen. | ||
| I think it's been a sad state that the most virulent opposition has not, I haven't regarded it as particularly high quality. | ||
| Malcolm, Michael Shermer here. | ||
| Do you have an opinion on the association of the impact with the megafauna extinction and also then Graham's hypothesis about the extinction of this lost civilization? | ||
| I won't even comment on the lost civilization aspects of this. | ||
| I have a hard enough time dealing with the meteorite impact. | ||
| As far as the megafauna goes, I think that I guess I would say all of the above. | ||
| I think that all these factors came into play. | ||
| You've got humans who are, for that period, technologically advanced with the Clovis point and the atlatl and the spear, the replaceable spear tip. | ||
| That must have been devastating to the fauna. | ||
| But the idea of attacking a proboscinian to me is almost unthinkable. | ||
| Today, if you don't have a high-powered rifle, I just don't see how you realistically go up against a bull elephant. | ||
| I mean, it just strikes me as far too dangerous to take on. | ||
| But there are aspects of that question that I think are going to be very interestingly debated in the next... | ||
| The next couple of years or so, we have a book coming out that addresses that directly at one of the sites I've been researching, that the whole extinction of the megafauna may have been as much related to religion as something else. | ||
| There may have been a religion built around the extinction of the megafauna. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Well, you'd want the evidence for that, and that evidence will be coming out in a book that's going to be published in about a month or two. | ||
| I could speak to the whole idea of hunting bull elephants, though, unfortunately. | ||
| People have been hunting them with bows and arrows forever. | ||
| It's not an atlatl. | ||
| Atlatl is less effective. | ||
| You get less range, but people hunt... | ||
| With not just modern compound bows, which are very powerful, which would allow you to shoot from 100 yards away, but with long bows. | ||
| They've been hunting elephants with bows and arrows for a long time. | ||
| You know, especially the thing with woolly mammoths was that they would go after the females, apparently, according to Dan Flores, who wrote American Serengeti, and that the females would keep the young in their body. | ||
| Their gestation period was very long. | ||
| I believe you said it was two years. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| I think he said it was two years. | ||
| And so it made them extremely vulnerable when they were pregnant. | ||
| Obviously, if you kill off the females that are pregnant, you're killing off a substantial part of the breeding population, and the population suffers tremendously. | ||
| So that was one. | ||
| But it also could have been that end. | ||
| You know, I mean, humans, I'm sure, had an impact on virtually anything that we could eat when we were starving. | ||
| But whether or not we wipe them out, the blitzkrieg hypothesis, there's a lot of holes in that theory, according to a lot of people that have studied it. | ||
| Well, I think if you have an environmental impact or a degradation of the environment that might follow a significant impact, you know, extraterrestrial impact, so you're reducing the population or stressing the population of megafauna that way, and then you've got a population of hunters in addition to that, especially if they're, for some reason or other, focused on hunting proboscenians, and when the number gets limited, they don't care whether it's a female or a male. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's very reasonable. | ||
| Malcolm, is there anything else you would like to add before we let you go? | ||
| No, I guess one thing is I found it interesting in the discussion of the scab lands and that was really, it was looking at the scab lands from flying over them when I was a young naval officer that got me interested in science and why I pursued science. | ||
| It was looking at the catastrophes that were etched in the landscape there, the catastrophic floods that really caused me to pursue a A career in science. | ||
| It's really a remarkable landscape. | ||
| It's just a personal observation. | ||
| Well, Mark, we're very, very thankful for your time, and we really, really appreciate your input here, and it means a lot. | ||
| And thank you for everything you've done. | ||
| Thank you for everything that you continue to do to highlight this. | ||
| It is such a fascinating subject, and it's so amazing, and it's just, without someone like you presenting hard data in science, it would definitely be lost. | ||
| So thank you, thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Malcolm. | ||
| Yeah, thank you, Malcolm. | ||
| Alright, Malcolm, we're gonna let you go. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Take it easy, buddy. | ||
| Sound down. | ||
| Time for your nap, Malcolm. | ||
| It's a lot of energy. | ||
| These podcasts are long. | ||
| I mean, four hours. | ||
| The guy was sitting there on standby, probably, you know, chomping at the bit. | ||
| Jamie, before we go, I want to see some pictures of the scab lands, because that is pretty amazing stuff. | ||
| And Randall, one more thing before we go. | ||
| One thing that you pointed out to me during one of the episodes that was so stunning was these woolly mammoths that had been literally knocked over by an impact with broken legs and that died on the spot. | ||
| Do you have those images? | ||
| I do. | ||
| That was actually a Mastodon. | ||
| Mastodon, I'm sorry. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to see those. | ||
| So let's go to the Scablands first so we can show the audience on YouTube, which is, by the way, only about 10% of the people that watch this. | ||
| So if you're listening to this, go check out the Scablands on Google, and you can see this. | ||
| Describe it to us, Randall. | ||
| Well, this is textbook scab land right here. | ||
| Let's see, this is probably Rock Lake or Sprague Lake in the Cheney-Palouse scab lands. | ||
| Yeah, you see the potholes there, that's a sign of turbulence, extreme turbulence within the water. | ||
| Colking is what the process is called, where it's so turbulent that it actually produces vortexes, high intensity vortex motion in the water. | ||
| It'll pick up sediment and then it can drill its way right into the bedrock. | ||
| Going down there, that's Palouse Falls, which Wow. | ||
| That's an underfit waterfall because what you have to realize is that at the peak of the flooding this entire scene was submerged below water and the cataract here is an extinct feature and the flow over here was thousands of times greater than the present Palouse River that you see right there. | ||
| We've got a lot of great pictures up on the Geocosmic Rex website and some awesome video clips. | ||
| Geocosmic Rex, R-E-X. Rex, okay. | ||
| I thought you were saying wreck, like a car wreck. | ||
| Well, it's a play on words. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So, yeah, we are talking about that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, and we've got some great drone footage on there. | ||
| Did we show that last time I was here? | ||
| I don't believe we did. | ||
| We might have, did we? | ||
| I think you showed a bit of the Camas Prairie ripples. | ||
| Did we show potholes, cataract? | ||
| Yeah, this whole Scabland thing has literally fascinated me since 1970. And like Malcolm, I think that summer of 1970, traveling out in some of these landscapes was... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here we go. | |
| Yeah, here we go. | ||
| This is the drone footage. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Yeah, and let's see. | ||
| Be ready to pause if we need to here. | ||
| Is this the beginning? | ||
| Because at the beginning we have a Google Earth image so you can get a sense of what we're looking at here. | ||
| Go back to the beginning. | ||
| Right at the very beginning. | ||
| Let's see if... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It starts off with the drone. | |
| Oh, it starts off with the drone. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There should be... | ||
| Another one that actually... | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| This is pretty cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These are 400-foot cliffs. | ||
| This was a recessional cataract, very similar to Dry Falls. | ||
| The water was pouring, coming from behind our view here. | ||
| Where is this specifically, if anybody wanted to go watch this or look at this area? | ||
| Oh, the actual area? | ||
| This is in eastern Washington. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where specifically? | ||
| This is on the eastern rim of Quincy Basin, it's called. | ||
| It's right along, just if you can see up there where those cliffs are in the middle distance, right below there is the Columbia River. | ||
| And this is just north of Wenatchee, Wisconsin, Washington. | ||
| So basically what we had here was plucking, quarrying as the water poured over this ridge. | ||
| This is the Babcock Ridge and behind us is the Quincy Basin which served as a temporary holding pond. | ||
| And let's see, as the drone comes around, I'm looking for the team. | ||
| Oh, keep going. | ||
| Zoom in a little bit more there, Jamie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think we did show this. | |
| You can see you guys down there on the ground, right? | ||
| Yeah, we're in there somewhere lost in the vastness of the... | ||
| Yeah, now I remember we did show this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What about those images of the Mastodons? | ||
| Let's look at those and then let's get out of here. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| For that, you have to go to the world of the Pleistocene. | ||
| Which I just should have given you. | ||
| That sounds like an amusement park. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The world of the Pleistocene. | ||
| Could be a winner. | ||
| Some dudes with animal skins on them. | ||
| Well, maybe if they succeed in cloning some of those flash-frozen animals up there. | ||
| They're really talking about doing that, right? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how plausible it is, but... | ||
| That seems like a terrible idea. | ||
| What could go wrong? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| It's not like there's any diseases. | ||
| Well, that's one of the big concerns about climate change, right? | ||
| That we're going to release some diseases that we don't have an immune system for? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Go to slide 78. This is a good example of... | ||
| By the way, who is more thoroughly documented than Randall Carlson? | ||
| Jesus Christ, man. | ||
| Go to slide 6,222. | ||
| 50 plus years of walking the walk in the Channel Scablands. | ||
| Yeah, this is a bone deposit. | ||
| And what happens is that in the particularly warm years, when the permafrost around the rivers collapses, it exposes these huge deposits of bones, which have been buried in the permafrost. | ||
| This is, you know, when I look at stuff like this, this is why I say there had to be another mechanisms of extinction besides human hunting. | ||
| Because this pile... | ||
| Yeah, because... | ||
| Is it possible that this... | ||
| I mean, it's not necessarily at the bottom of a cliff, right? | ||
| Because you know that they pushed a lot of them off cliffs. | ||
| Yeah, no, no. | ||
| This is stuff that when the river floods, it erodes the banks. | ||
| And then this stuff falls out of the riverbanks. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's been locked into the permafrost for however many thousands of years. | ||
| And it seems like there's, interestingly, two peaks of dates that one... | ||
| Right around 13,000, and the other one around 36,000, that the fossilized remains are dating to. | ||
| Which could point to, potentially, that there was some sort of an impact back then as well, or something else, some sort of an event. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who knows? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't have an opinion on that. | ||
| But by having all these together, I mean, has it been theorized that perhaps there's not a cliff near this, right? | ||
| Yeah, just off to the right. | ||
| There is a cliff? | ||
| There is a cliff. | ||
| We're at the bottom of a cliff right here. | ||
| Actually, it's a riverbank. | ||
| You know that that was a hunting method. | ||
| They used to storm them off the side of cliffs, and they literally couldn't even eat all of them. | ||
| Like buffalo head smashed in. | ||
| They would run so many of them off cliffs. | ||
| Yeah, but here's the thing. | ||
| When you look at... | ||
| These mortality events of modern animals, even like looking at elephants that perished during some of the severe droughts in the 80s in Africa. | ||
| Taphanomic studies show that it doesn't take three, four, five years before the remains have completely disappeared. | ||
| In order to preserve a fossil, it has to be rapidly removed from any kind of forces, oxidation, or scavengers, or anything that would consume it, see? | ||
| This stuff has been, again, it's been frozen in the permafrost for however many years, 10 or 12 or 15,000 years. | ||
| So it was likely covered in an event? | ||
| Covered in an event, yes. | ||
| Now, there was one that I really wanted you to get to that was a mastodon that had been literally knocked over and had broken legs. | ||
| Yeah, we could look very quickly at slide 92. This is one of the more interesting anomalous events. | ||
| This was the flash-frozen woolly mammoth. | ||
| Go to slide 93. It's a much clearer... | ||
| Yeah, this was a mammoth, a six-ton mammoth that was, again, one of these river collapses. | ||
| The banks collapsed during a warm spring and exposed this remains of a woolly mammoth with soft tissue preserved, contents of the food in its stomach undigested, actually a mouthful of food. | ||
| The hips of the mammoth were both broken, as if he was thrown back on his haunches very violently. | ||
| He had an erect penis, which suggests that he was suffocated. | ||
| Or he was a freak? | ||
| Or he was a freak, yeah. | ||
| Michael laughs at that. | ||
| The wolves ate the flesh off the skull. | ||
| That's why it's buried like that. | ||
| You'll see the front-left forelimb there. | ||
| You'll see the bottom there, left, right at the center of the screen. | ||
| That's his back leg that you see right there. | ||
| The interesting thing about this is, you know, the... | ||
| Rapidity of climate change that's implied by being able to freeze a six-ton mammoth because the contents of his stomach, according to the studies, had not really even putrefied yet, which implies that the entire carcass had been frozen through and through probably in less than 10 hours. | ||
| Well, like Utsi, the Iceman, that's what happened to him. | ||
| That's exactly what happened to him, yes. | ||
| Interesting point, and that would be a subject that we... | ||
| And he fell in between a crevice and a glacier, correct? | ||
| Yeah, and probably got rapidly buried under the snow and the ice, and that's how he ended up being preserved overnight. | ||
| The next slide actually shows a reconstruction in a museum in Russia, showing the circumstances under which he was found. | ||
| If you go to, let's see. | ||
| By the way, as a sidebar on Utsi, to show you how science changes rather slowly sometimes, it was a decade before they found out he was murdered, because they found arrow point in his scapula here that cut his bone, and he had defensive wounds on his hands and arms, so he'd gotten in a fight, and he had other people's blood on his hands, so he gave as good as he got and lost a fight, so he was murdered. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And that took, with all that careful observation and laboratories, 10 years before that came out. | ||
| Fascinating stuff. | ||
| So sometimes this stuff has to just take a while. | ||
| So if I can try to find some common ground before we sign off with Graham. | ||
| You know, your book, you have this really great sentence that I quote. | ||
| It would mean at least that some yet unknown and unidentified people somewhere in the world had already mastered all the arts and attributes of a high civilization more than 12,000 years ago. | ||
| And sent out emissaries around the world. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think this is entirely possible cognitively, for sure. | ||
| And, you know, what would do it for me would, you know, the boats that they sent the emissaries out on, the wood, carbon-14 dated, and some specific examples of high arts and attributes of high civilization. | ||
| So if it's not metal and riding... | ||
| Then whatever it is, I would change my mind. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That's good to hear, Michael. | ||
| And I think as the research continues in this area, for the last few years, having been very much an outsider, I have felt that the evidence is moving in a direction that is helpful to the argument that I make. | ||
| I hope it'll continue to be that way. | ||
| I hope the evidence that you're looking for will come out. | ||
| But I'm trying to, like I say, my role as a reporter, and I'm trying to be a reporter for the alternative sides of things, but to do so in an effective and hopefully thoroughly referenced way. | ||
| There's a good argument in the history of science to be made for the role of outsiders, I mean complete outsiders, to come in and shake things up. | ||
| I mean Freeman Dyson is an example. | ||
| Totally self-taught. | ||
| Autodidact. | ||
| I call you an autodidact. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And if nothing else, they push people to really figure out what it is they believe and why, because otherwise no one's going to challenge them. | ||
| Harlan Bratz is a good example of that. | ||
| You know, a high school teacher. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How about Randall Carlson? | ||
| He's a good example of that, too. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Do you still want to look at this real quick? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I got it right here. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| He could go for days. | ||
| That's what I love about Randall. | ||
| He never gets tired of this stuff. | ||
| If you could bottle your enthusiasm, it would be an awesome pill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, maybe we can talk about that. | |
| Put it in the memory focus there. | ||
| Alright, we're going to look at this mastodon here. | ||
| Is it 125? | ||
| 125, yeah. | ||
| So this is a mastodon that was dug up in a pit years ago. | ||
| Excavation showed that the bones were lying on and in a layer of limey clay or marl about one foot in thickness. | ||
| When it gets up there and it goes on to say, the skeleton proved to be badly disturbed and the bones crushed and broken. | ||
| As an example of the amount of disturbance, one of the ribs lay beneath one of the tusks, while another was thrust through an aperture in the pelvis. | ||
| A shoulder blade rested to the right of the skull and one of the large neck vertebrae was found about 10 feet from the skull, near a portion of the pelvis. | ||
| In spite of the wide dislocation of the parts, Now this is where it really is interesting. | ||
| The bones of one of the feet remained intact and in place, very possibly in the spot where the animal last stepped. | ||
| So in other words, The foot, there was a foot still embedded in the soft material where he was apparently stepping at the time whatever happened to him. | ||
| And this is all the same time period as the other mastodon? | ||
| We don't have dating on this, but it likely was at the very end probably right in that Younger Dryas window because of the amount of sediment over it. | ||
| Go to the next slide, Jamie, and we'll see 126, we can get a better view. | ||
| So this thing, theoretically at least, was blown back. | ||
| Yeah, go to... | ||
| there we go. | ||
| There you can see one of the femurs that's been busted squarely across. | ||
| They go on to say that even the largest of the bones, such as the thigh bones, were broken squarely across in places, indicating that some considerable force had been exerted upon them. | ||
| Any conclusion as to an agency powerful enough to cause such destruction must be highly speculative. | ||
| So, basically, what you're seeing here is a mastodon that got smashed into the ground. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The forces... | ||
| There were strong, powerful shear forces that would have literally separated his leg from the foot that's still... | ||
| Immersed into the ground. | ||
| So, I mean, there are many examples of this. | ||
| And the last slide we're going to show. | ||
| If you go back, I promise. | ||
| I once went digging with Jack Horner, the paleontologist, the dinosaur digger. | ||
| And he showed these debris flow pileups of dinosaur bones that had been splintered and broken. | ||
| And these are huge, just from the force of the water and then piling up of a wall. | ||
| And so, if you could do it to a dinosaur. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 85. 85 is an interesting slide because what it shows is the London ivory docks, which over a period of about two centuries, this was mammoth ivory that's being dug out of the Siberian permafrost. | ||
| That's just a drawing. | ||
| Oh, that's just a drawing, yeah. | ||
| That's the problem with that. | ||
| Like, that's what it looked like. | ||
| Well, this is what it looked like. | ||
| A 19th century scene showing the ivory floor of the London docks covered by thousands of mammoth tusks. | ||
| And this went on year after year after year after year for roughly two centuries. | ||
| There is so much of that mammoth ivory, by the way, that they use it to make knife handles. | ||
| I actually have a knife handle that was made out of mammoth ivory. | ||
| Yeah, and still to this day, not only is it legal, but it's common to use mammoth ivory for different kinds of things. | ||
| There's so much of it. | ||
| Well, they're not an endangered species because they're... | ||
| It's kind of a loophole. | ||
| In this case, though, what we have is tux that are being, again, dug out of the permafrost. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, how did they get there? | ||
| That becomes the question. | ||
| Does it have anything to do with human predation, or was it a natural catastrophe that somehow ended up putting all these mammoths down and burying them into permafrost? | ||
| That's the question I want to raise. | ||
| Well, I think we raised a lot of questions. | ||
| I think we got some pretty good answers. | ||
| I think we had some great dialogue, and I really appreciate your time, all three of you guys. | ||
| And thank you to Malcolm, and thank you to Mark, and thank you to Young Jamie. | ||
| Well, thanks for hosting us. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Thank you to you, Joe. | ||
| Can I do a quick shout-out? | ||
| Yes, shout it out. | ||
| I want to thank Brad Young, Cameron Wiltshire, My brother Rowan, my wife Julie, for helping all make this possible. | ||
| I also want to have people go to the Geocosmic Wrecks website and the Sacred Geometry International website for a lot more of this kind of stuff. | ||
| Then I'm going to thank my beloved partner and wife, Santa, who's shared every adventure with me for the last quarter of a century. | ||
| We've climbed the Great Pyramid together, we've been at the bottom of the ocean together, and I wouldn't be doing any of this stuff if it weren't for that wonderful woman behind me. | ||
| Michael Sherman, who do you want to thank? | ||
| Oh, I'll thank my wife, Jennifer, my little boy, Vinny, and my agent, my lawyer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No, no, but Skeptic.com and my partner, Pat, who keeps the show running when I'm running around doing things like this. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And Joe Rogan. | ||
| Let's thank Joe Rogan, because I can tell you this, Joe. | ||
| I speak all over the world, and whether it's South Africa, or whether it's Japan, or whether it's Britain, or whether it's the United States, or whether it's Croatia, people come up to me and they say, Joe Rogan sent me. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| You have the most interesting guest. | ||
| Well, you're one of them, dude. | ||
| All you guys are. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| We'll see you guys soon. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bye. |
Export Selection