Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson, and Michael Shermer clash over the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, with Hancock citing 2017 research linking Gobekli Tepe’s Pillar 43 to a comet strike (~12,800 years ago) and Schock’s weathering evidence at the Sphinx, whose Leo alignment fits that era. Carlson supports extreme geologic changes—nanodiamonds, melt glass, and megafloods in the Scablands—while Shermer demands falsifiable proof, dismissing lost-civilization claims as unfounded. The debate hinges on whether rapid climate shifts and megafauna extinctions stem from cosmic events or human-driven collapse, with Hancock arguing mainstream archaeology’s resistance to paradigm shifts may have obscured deeper truths. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.