#2546 - Michael Button

The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. Hey, hey Joe.

Hey brother, what's going on? Good man, it's been a wild year for me. I've had a day. Since I was last year, I mean, I've seen my YouTube growth numbers.

I couldn't have imagined before. I've met so many cool people. I've managed to get to a point where it's now my job to research and investigate ancient history and the vast mysteries of our past. And yeah, I mean, that's something I was doing for free before.

So the fact that I'm now able to do that full time is just an immense privilege. I'm so grateful to everyone that's helped me get there, including you. I'm now fantastic content. Thank you.

And it's such an interesting subject and the giant blind spot that the mainstream archaeologists have left has allowed all these people to go through and get a much larger audience, even than them. And it's really important when someone like you does it because you're so thorough and you're so objective and you're so measured in the way you describe these things and talk about these things. There's no fantastic claims, no hyperbole. It's all very well laid out.

And even when you go to extreme possibilities of these things, it's very measured. So I really appreciate that. Well, thank you. I appreciate you saying that.

Yeah, yeah, I'm always trying to make it as good as I possibly can. I'm trying to list what people say and try to improve. And I don't think I've reached the peak of where I could possibly be, but I'm trying my hardest. But it's not just that.

I mean, as you say, I think there are so many people out there. And now that I'm in this position, I've seen it firsthand, there are millions and millions of people around the world that are deeply fascinated by these questions, by the vast mysteries of our past. As well, they should be. And they also know that we're getting a very narrow version of it from mainstream economics.

And they are so determined to cling to their timelines and cling to this notion that anything new is discovered by people outside of their little circle can't be accurate. And I think that's so silly. Yeah, I mean, I think someone like me has the kind of advantage of the fact that because I didn't continue my career in academia, I wasn't in academia, but that was the pathway that I was on. Because I've gone independent now, I kind of have the freedom, if you like, to talk about these ideas in a much more open way than maybe I would have been able to, if I was, well, wouldn't have been able to if I was still in academia, because I'm not restricted by funding or I'm not restricted by even the pressures of people working in academia, I mean, I get a lot of hate anyway.

I think I have that freedom to almost come up things from a completely open-minded perspective and speak about these ideas without any restrictions. And I think that is the advantage that I have, the academics perhaps don't. So yeah, I mean, I'm in a great place. So let's get into it.

So in the last year, a lot of wild stuff has been discovered, which is really exciting. It's so interesting how quick this stuff is moving. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, there's been, I think two papers in particular that have come out in the year since I was last year on the show that I think have huge ramifications for how we view history.

So I mean, I don't know where to start. I mean, I think we should start like this. I think as things currently stand, there are three huge questions that archaeology cannot answer. And it's interesting because these three questions we used to think we had an answer to, but in light of new discoveries and of new evidence coming up, we no longer have the answer to these questions.

And I think that's fascinating because it's almost like the rug has been pulled out from underneath our understanding of human history. But on the surface, it's kind of like business as usual. Do you know what I mean? It's one of these questions.

So I mean, and this is just coming from me, right? I'm not an academic. I'm not a professional archaeologist. I'm just, I mean, I have a degree in ancient history.

My main qualification is that I'm a super nerd for all this stuff and I spent my whole life researching it. So that's the caveat on everything. So don't take what I say as gospel and I always encourage people to go and look at the actual archaeology, go and read the journals, read the papers and go investigate what you are self-fuliting. Listen to what I say, but don't take what I say as gospel because the end of the day, I'm just a YouTuber, you know, so that's the caveat I want to put on it.

But from my mind, these are the three questions that I think archaeology can no longer answer, but used to think I had an answer for. So the first question is, and we spoke about this a little bit last time, is the fascinating question of why after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of human beings like us being on this planet, why did it take so long for civilization to emerge? And then why when it did, did it emerge in all these different, unconnected locations, all over the globe at pretty much the exact same time? So we see civilization flourishing in Mesoamerica, we see civilization flourishing in South America, in Egypt, in the Invis Valley, in Mesopotamia, in ancient India, in ancient China, all around about the same time, give or take a thousand or so years, but compared to the time span of human beings on this planet, you know, 300,000 years plus for modern humans.

And I would argue some of these papers are showing that it could be a lot longer than that. Why after so long did civilization suddenly crop up all over the place? And we no longer can answer that question in light of new discoveries. That's question one, why does civilization emerge everywhere, all at once after, so long of not doing so?

Question two is how old is human intelligence? How long have humans been intelligent? How long has a mind like ours really inhabited this planet? And I think two papers in particular that have come out in the 12 months since I was here have huge ramifications for that question.

And also combined into that is the question of other human species. How intelligent were other human species? Because we used to think that we were the smart ones. I mean, our name, Homo sapiens, literally translates to wise man, which is an incredibly humble thing for us to say about ourselves.

But yeah, so that's question two, how old is human intelligence? And again, I think the answer is we don't have the answer anymore. So that's really fascinating. And then question three is when did humans first reach the more isolated land masses?

So that's the Americas where we are right now. And also Australia, which is perhaps less important, but still interesting. And again, we don't have the answer for that anymore. And I think whatever the answer is to these three questions, why does civilization appear everywhere, all at once, how old is human intelligence?

And when did humans first reach the more isolated parts of the world? The answer to those questions, whatever it is, I think it's fundamentally important because whatever the answer is, the reason we're all here, right, is the reason we all live in the civilization. It's the reason we all enjoy the fruits of everything that we exist in today. And yet we don't know the answer anymore.

But as I said on the surface, everyone's kind of carrying on like its business as usual. But we no longer know the answers to the most fundamental questions of how we got here. So yeah, so for question number one, why did all of these civilizations emerge? And roughly the same time.

What do you think? Do you think that this is incorrect and that these civilizations probably existed far earlier than that? But there's no evidence of them because of time and just erosion and natural catastrophes and fill in the blank, all the factors. And or we have not discovered some of these yet, like some of the weirdness of the Amazon.

You know, as they find these, what would appear to be the grids of ancient cities that are hidden in the jungle that they're discovering with the LiDAR and these other technologies that were unavailable until fairly recently. So we know that not only was the Amazon filled with people, but it was filled with millions of people. And that's crazy. That is a crazy shift in the way we used to look at the Amazon just a few decades ago.

And we don't know who these people were. We don't know. Like if you go really far back, like the Olmecs is just a word. We gave them that word.

We don't know what the fuck they were doing. We have no idea what they looked like. We know some of the heads look roughly either Polynesian or perhaps even African. It's very strange, very strange.

Big giant heads that are left behind. And that's like the cornerstone of what we understand about the civilization. Okay. What?

What do you think? Who knows? It's just a rough guess. Like there's really nothing to go on.

Do you think that this is just like as far back as we can find stuff or do you think? Well, what do you think? Well, I think in terms of the civilization question, I think it's just, I think it's an old idea that we kind of drew this line. And the line is the invention of writing.

So it's around 3000, 4000 BC. Was the invention of writing or supposedly was the invention of writing. And that in the 20th century was kind of given as the marker of civilization. We were finding all these civilizations in the 20th century like ancient Sumer.

And so that was kind of given as the start of civilization. I think in terms of like more recent stuff. So 3000 BC back to like 12,000 BC. I think the answer is that clearly civilization is older.

I mean, considering we see things like Tashnapello, Quebecitepe, 12,000 years ago. I think that is a civilization. I think over time that will come to be accepted as a civilization. And I think whatever you want to define civilization as, I think we can now clearly say that it did exist 12,000 years ago rather than 6,000 years ago.

So that's a kind of doubling of the timeline. In terms of going back much further than that, I think then you get into kind of like purely hypothetical scenarios like is it possible. And that's when I think things like the history of human intelligence start to come into play because it was incredibly recently that we thought humans were only got intelligent. We thought humans were young, like only 100,000 years old, only a few decades ago.

And now we know we're much older than that. And so this is how I mean about everything kind of being back on the table again because we now have a incredibly increased time span of human intelligence that I would argue in our comments this later stretches over a million years. And yet the old idea, which is still sort of in place but I think is breaking. I think most archaeologists would accept that it's breaking.

But the old idea was that humans only became intelligent around 50,000 years ago. And so because that idea kind of was in hold, it almost made sense, right? So humans only existed from 100,000 years ago, they got smart 50,000 years ago. Then the climate got good around 14,000 years ago.

We see the agricultural revolution and the emergence of the first civilizations. Like it was very neat, you know what I mean? But now in light of new evidence and in light of new discoveries, suddenly everything's back on the table, suddenly the whole time span of prehistory or not the hold of prehistory. But I would argue and I'll get onto why I think this later, I would argue that the time span of human intelligence has increased by 20 times from 50,000 to over a million years.

And I'll explain why in a minute. But I think that puts everything back on the table. I think the possibilities of prehistory are so vast now because of our understanding that the shift is so dramatically in the last few decades. And I don't think anyone's really talking about it.

And that's kind of why I do what I do because I really want to bang this drum if you like the everything's back on the table, as I say. And so yeah, I kind of got a bit sidetracked there from the original question. Well, that's a no, it's a great start. Jesse Michaels was here yesterday and he had a really fascinating theory.

I don't know if it's not his theory or is it someone else's theory, the ergot theory? His theory was that he believes that agriculture and that as they started agriculture wasn't just significant in that you could stay in one place and you'd have food and you always had a reliable diet. You didn't have to worry about starving to death. And then you because you had that sort of relaxation that came with that, you could start inventing things and building things and civilization with advanced.

He thinks it's also because ergot grows on these different wheats and barley and grains and that these people, whether knowingly or unknowingly, were probably ingesting this psychedelic substance, which is akin to LSD and that this was a key part of what Brian Merr rescue talked about in the Illucinian Mysteries in his great book, the Immortality Key. And that this was probably what led to a lot of invention, a lot of innovation, a lot of alternative thought, a lot of creativity and a lot of whatever the wild advancements of the time were. Did you see that they just not proved it, but they just did a study on the Illucinian Mysteries where they showed that they were doing, they did have a book because when Brian wrote that book, they hadn't proved that, but something just came out of it. Did you see the, it was a puma bone pipe that they found that tested positive for DMT?

Well, in, I do not know. I think it was, I don't, it might have been in the American, no, where was that? Peru. Yes.

Really? Yes. I don't know what this is all about because it's a fascinating subject because not only does it not imply that they were willingly taking psychedelic drugs, it's somehow or another, they knew how to make DMT. Like okay, what?

Because that's a complicated process when you have to separate the molecule from whatever plant it's in and then you have to figure out that you need a free base that are smoking it like how what? This is actually a Northwestern Argentina. Aha. The Inca Quava, a high altitude cave site in Jujoy, Northwestern, Argentina.

The tubular smoking pipes are made from the long bones of a puma. They were found alongside and a denanthura, and a denanthura, and denanthura seeds, including the plant commonly associated with vylca, cebil, snuff traditions, residue testing detected tryptamine alkaloids in the pipes. So they were figuring out how to take these seeds and smoke them. The material has been dated to roughly 2,130 BCE, over 4,000 years ago.

That makes the final amongst the oldest direct archaeological evidence for intentional use of psychoactive and a denanthura, and a denanthura, and a den, sorry, scientists in the southern Andes. That's fucking crazy. The careful answer is DMT was detected in pipe residues, but and a denthura, colubrina, is not simply a DMT plant. It's psychoactive chemistry can include Bufatinen DMT and 5 MeO DMT in varying quantities.

Depending on plant material and preparation, the archaeological interpretation is that the pipes were used in a ritual context involving, one more time, and denanthura, rather than proof that people were using modern purified DMT. Either way, they're smoking whatever the fuck that stuff is, they're getting DMT from it. So they had figured out somehow or another that ingesting it through smoke. Now one of the reasons why this is particularly significant is there's scholars out of, I think it's the University of Jerusalem that believe that the burning bush, that Moses encountered, that's what they think.

The translation was, they believe it was possibly the Caesare tree, which is apparently rich in DMT. So that Moses has Moses trips ball and gets some really good solid rules to live by and comes back with them and said, Hey, this is what God said. Yeah, I mean, I think it's clearly the case that ancient cultures, not just in South America, but across the world, were using psychedelic substances. And yeah, that's interesting.

I mean, the theory of whether that caused agricultural weather that led to civilization or anything like that, I mean, I don't know, but it's certainly interesting that human beings seem to be experimenting with psychoactive substances for a long, long, long, long time. And yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah. And much like in our culture today, and you know, especially what happened in 1970, where all that stuff was demonized and put on schedule one back then during the Illucinian mysteries, the reason why those mysteries stopped is because the powers that be were like, Hey, these guys are a fucking problem.

These trippy dudes are the weird ideas who invented democracy. They're going to fuck this whole thing up. We're not going to be able to run it and tell everybody what to do and force them to go into war. Yeah, the powers that be always want to restrict any kind of like thought that's outside of the, what they want people to think they don't want people to think as freely as they can.

Anything that limits their control, you know, because everybody wants control and there's always new groups that say, you don't know what fuck you're doing. Let me take the realm. And that's always been the case, which is probably good for people. You know, it probably is what leads to, I mean, not the more part of it, but probably these new ideas is what leads to an advanced civilization rather than stagnation that we find in some places in the world where they haven't had a chance to do that.

Yeah. You know, like my friends have been to Afghanistan, they had to serve over there, essentially saying that like this, they're living like people lived thousands of years ago. There's warlords and they control regions and that's how they've always done it. And they live this weird nomadic lifestyle in the mountains and it's not much different than the way it was thousands and thousands of years ago.

Very kind of like a, yeah. And if you don't have, if that guy's, and these groups just stay in control forever, like it's like there's no motivation for them to change and evolve and grow. Nothing's no innovation or anything. Yeah, nothing's happening.

Also, they're stuck in the mountains. You're just trying to live. Yeah. But you know, when you, when you think of these places, these very fertile places on earth where like particularly Turkey, Turkey's fascinating, you know, and many people are now speculating that that if there is a singular place, that, that might have been one of the birthplaces of true civilization.

This episode is brought to you by Blue Choo. Man, let's talk about Blue Choo. They're already the number one brand for better sex, but what they're doing with Blue Choo gold is completely next level. Gold is a four in one formula designed to make your bedroom noisy again.

Obviously it gets you hard like you're back in your twenties and everything is handled 100% online, but gold boosts your arousal, getting you ready for sex physically and mentally. Plus it dissolves under your tongue for faster absorption. So you get that spontaneous energy back. Look at this.

That's gold is three times stronger, five times faster and eight times longer lasting than old school methods. Blue Choo gold is the real deal right now by two months of Blue Choo gold and get the third free with my code Rogan. You'll also receive free overnight shipping. Head over to bluechoo.com for details and important safety information.

Check it out. This ad and the products being advertised are intended for United States audience. Yeah. I mean, I think it undoubtedly is.

I think Tash Tappello, which is in modern day Turkey is the earliest evidence in my view of something akin to civilization. And now archaeologists will say it's not civilization because it doesn't quite tick off every part of the checklist. But I think that's neither here nor there. I think it's clearly a very sophisticated culture.

I mean, you have like 14 sites there and now clearly shown to be interlinked shared symbolism, shared religious traditions, same architectural styles, very impressive architecture, clearly organized labor stratified society because how do you achieve that without someone at the top and someone below? And these are all things that we used to think were civilization, right? And yeah, people are happy with us calling Tash Tappello a civilization. But I think it will get there.

But don't you think that's just because of them trying to protect their timeline that they've been teaching? Yeah, and I think it will change. I don't think there's any other explanation of them. I mean, it fits, as you said, all the criteria for civilization that we used to apply and the fact that they were moving the goalposts just because they didn't know it existed.

And they're finding residential buildings that go back to the Tappello and that was one that used to say that people didn't live there. They must have migrated there. But now they find them that people did live there like I guess permanently or at least semi-permitantly. Yeah, there's all the sites and quite a vast area all connected.

And so the only ones they haven't got now is writing and there's an interesting discovery regarding writing a go back to the Tappello and agriculture. Yeah, we talked about that yesterday. A different thing. Yeah, really interesting.

So are those where you see those pillars or those sites where you have like those concentric circles? Those are the famous ones anyway. Carla Han Tappi, Gabakli Tappi, Safer Tappi, those are the biggest ones. And only 5% of Gabakli Tappi currently has even been excavated, right?

Yeah. Which is pretty crazy. When you think like, okay, how many of them are also still underground? Like how many do we know only exist because of ground penetrating radar and all the other techniques?

Yeah, I mean, as well, Gabakli Tappi, if all of it was excavated is something like 50 times larger than Stonehenge and Stonehenge is obviously an incredibly famous site. And yeah, it's so much bigger and like to be clear, it is standard archaeological practice to not excavate too much of a site. But what are we looking at here? That's Gabakli Tappi.

And what are we looking at in terms of these grids? I think maybe that's the kind of archaeological grid. I think I'm not 100% sure. It seems like it, right?

Because it seems like the grids go on top of these circles, which doesn't make any sense. So obviously they have to go very slowly. The risk of destroying some incredible find, some beautiful ancient thing because you're using tractors or something like this is too great. It is valid.

But I would argue, and I've said this before, is the Gabakli Tappi as a site that has such important ramifications for our understanding of civilization and the origins of civilization that it should receive special treatment, right? Because it is the oldest site that looks like civilization. So I always think that maybe we should not, obviously you want to be careful when you go in and you want to follow correct archaeological procedure. But at the same time, what if a relic like equivalent to the razette stone, the one stone that we found that completely translated Egyptian hieroglyphs and opened up ancient Egypt to our understanding?

What if some kind of equivalent artifact is hiding in the unexcavated 95% of Gabakli Tappi? That could be waiting for that for us to find. You talked about this war before, Joe. Yeah, I don't remember ever seeing it, but it's not new, but it was also found to go back with Tappi.

It was painted. I think like some of the mouth is painted red. It's crazy looking. It's life found pretty close to life.

The whole thing is really fascinating because it's also, I think it's the first evidence of 3D carving in stone too. Yeah, it's really, I think it's true. Yeah. What we're saying about that is like these boars and snakes and all these different animals that are on these incredible pillars, they're not carved into it.

The stone is carved around it, which is advanced. It takes a sophisticated use of tools and understanding of how to work stone to be able to do something like that. And crucially specialization, right? That's someone's job, they're not out there gathering food.

That's their job. That's their job. Hey, how'd you move those? Yeah.

What those stones are huge? The biggest ones are like, how many? I think most of them are like 10 tons, but I think they found one that hadn't been moved by the quarry that was something like 50 tons. And obviously they would have assumed that they would have had a method to move that or they wouldn't have carved out.

Yeah, 50 tons is high and stubby little peckers. Clutching? Clutching their peckers. Yeah.

Okay. Whatever you're into, bro. Must have been a weird world back then. And then the real question is, is this the oldest civilization or is this the oldest reboot of civilization that was destroyed by the Great Flood and by the Younger Dryas Impact and whatever the fuck could have happened to whatever civilization previously existed?

That's what things get real squirrely. Yeah, well, exactly. Because if that is a civilization which I think is becoming clear that it is, it doesn't really matter how you define civilization, it's clearly incredibly sophisticated. Like it's a very sophisticated problem.

Yeah. Exactly. Who cares? It's clearly very sophisticated.

It's like when Fauci was talking about gain a function. Like a fucker. You know what we're talking about. Exactly.

But yeah, that means the timeline of civilization, whatever you want to call it, has doubled from 6,000 years to 12,000 years. So then the question becomes, how far much further back does it go? It's clearly Tashdapelo, Gabeclet Tappé. It's not the first thing these people built.

They didn't, they weren't starting from scratch. They weren't just hunting together as they thought, let's try something new and build this. Like it's clearly a long procedure up to that point. So how far back does that go?

That's... And for people that don't know, we should probably explain that one of the reasons why they're able to accurately carbon test, go back to tapping, is because, and this is where it gets really weird, the dirt is uniform in that it was intentionally covered. So these sites weren't covered, you know, just over time, like maybe the Sphinx wasn't Egypt. They were covered intentionally and they were covered 11,600ish years ago.

So how old were they before they were covered? Yeah, of course. I mean, that's the only, the earliest date we have, but that doesn't mean it's the date that they were constructed. And why were they covered?

Yeah, I mean, there is debate over that, but that's what Klaus Schmidt thought. What is the debate? Well, some people say it wasn't intentionally covered, and it was just kind of like a landslide. Like a crazy landslide that'll happen at once?

Because I mean, it's really hard to prove. What an amazing landslide that covers everything. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I would still lean towards the original interpretation from the original archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, but obviously not.

Why did he think that covered it? I don't know. Conquering civilization, or like fuck these people and their beautiful pillars. No, I think he thought the people that built it covered it.

Interesting. I guess he can't, you can't tell, can you? And that's the thing with so much of this stuff is that no one knows, and especially the further back you get in time, anyone that talks with any confidence around the past. And this is one of my main bug bears with archaeology.

Like, I love archaeology and I have a huge respect for the archaeologists. I think they do amazing work, but one of my main bug bears is the confidence in which people talk about the past and ruling out other possibilities, because at the end of the day, none of us know what happened in the deep past, especially when you start getting back to these crazy timescales. It's all speculation. And it doesn't matter if you're a youtuber like me or if you're a professor.

And it's all just speculating based on the very limited evidence that we have. And so I don't like it when people say definitive things. I always try and say, maybe this is the case, or maybe that's the case. We don't know.

And I think everyone should approach history with that mindset. And that's kind of, if I can get any message across to people, that is the message. Like, we don't know. And here's the possibility and here's the possibility.

And here's the evidence that we think is true, but it's really hard to tell. But it also does stand to reason that biology and archaeology, as they expand the timeline, as biology has expanded the timeline, archaeology should probably tag along. Well, that's what I mean about the fact that the rocks kind of been pulled out from underneath us. What on purpose means here?

There's good reason I think humans intentionally deposit at least some of the fill. Enclosure D alone contained roughly 500 cubic meters of rubble and cultural debris and particular items including broken anthropomorphic sculpture heads appear to have been deliberately placed near pillars during refilling. But archaeologists do not have definitive evidence for the often repeated popular claim that its builders intentionally buried the entire site at once to hide it, preserve it, or mark a single ritual closure. The mound is man-made in the sense that it consists of accumulated archaeological deposits, formation, involve both human actions and natural sediment movement ending around 8000 BCE.

Yo, that's a long fucking time ago. I don't think people even really could wrap their head around how long we're talking. Especially, that's the other thing about one of the things that I loved about your whole video series was the one where you were talking about what would be left if there was a human civilization a hundred thousand or more years ago. And that's not unreasonable if this biology assessment is correct, is that there have been humans far longer than we used to think.

So that's the case. Because if we used to think it was 50,000 years, I think when I was in high school they were saying the homo sapiens were like 50,000 years older, maybe a hundred. Now the conventional estimate is like what, three? So the oldest fossils we have of anatomically modern humans are 315 to 360,000 years old.

I mean, it's the same fossil set from Chibeleru de Morocco. But this is obviously really hard to date accurately, but it's between 300 and 350,000. And then I think it's really important to note that the fossil record is incredibly incomplete because most people don't leave a fossil. It's so unlikely that you fossilize.

It's something like one in a million. So it's such a crazy metric to try to figure out what the past is from these tiny scraps. It's like trying to read a book by a single shard of a piece of paper with a half a sentence in it. And you're like, we think this book was about like, fuck, there's not much evidence.

That's the problem. But the evidence that they do find is pushing the timeline way back, way back. And that alone, you would think archaeology would go, well, hey guys, in light of this new evidence, maybe we should consider the possibility of the civilization. It's quite a bit older than we think.

They are the same exact animal. What would take them 300,000 years to develop complex civilization and agriculture and all these different things? Like why would it take so long? And is it possible that given the incredible possibilities in terms of what kind of natural disasters took place, just asteroid impacts that we find them all over the earth, all over the earth.

And some of them are 20,000 years old, 50,000 years old. We find everywhere. Like what kind of an impact would that have had? What would be left of those civilizations?

And all those questions, again, guys, like you are the ones proposing them and putting them out there. And it's a really good question. It's especially in light of what we understand about humans biologically. Like, doesn't it make sense that these people, these just as anatomically, completely like us?

Like why would it take them hundreds of thousands of years to figure out a roof? Yeah, exactly. But I think we have clear evidence now that what we call modern intelligence behavioral modernity goes back so, so, so much further than we think. Like I would argue back over a million years in light of a couple of papers that have come out in the last 12 months.

So, I mean, there's been two really significant papers I think since we last spoke. One of them I think has really big ramifications for human intelligence. And that's a paper that came out regarding the island of Sulawesi, which is in Indonesia. And this is in relation to human seafaring.

So seafaring was always thought to be an exclusively sapien-straint, exclusively modern human-straint because it's a really hard thing to do, right? You need to be quite clever to build a boat, to build something that's sophisticated enough to be seaworthy to get across ocean boundaries and to reach isolated lambasses. And we always thought that was only sapiens until very recently. But a paper came out in August last year.

You actually sent it to me. Yeah, I don't think you sent me a post that was about stone tools that was found. And I was like, that's interesting. I clicked on the paper.

And then I was like, wow, look where these stone tools were found. And it was really, really interesting because they were found on Sulawesi. And Sulawesi is an island that crucially sits east of something called the Wallace Line, which is a biogographic boundary, which means that it has been an island and separated from the mainland for tens of millions of years and separated by deep ocean channels that are between, depending on the flotchoring sea levels at the time, between 50 and 100 kilometers across. So it's always been an island.

And yet in August 2025, archaeologists at a site called Callio found stone tools on Sulawesi. And that means that some type of human, probably not sapiens, but I guess you never know, some type of human managed to cross that ocean boundary and reach Sulawesi. And that's fascinating. But it's worth saying that it's not the only piece of evidence in the region.

There's also a decade or so ago, we found stone tools on florets, which is just below Sulawesi. It's another island and crucially again, east of the Wallace Line. So again, you have to cross an ocean boundary to get to florets. And they found stone tools there that are 1.02 million years old.

And I didn't even say the Sulawesi tools are 1.04 to 1.4 million years old. So over a million years ago, some type of human was crossing ocean boundaries to get to these islands. And there's also Luzon, which is just above Sulawesi, same region. And they found stone tools there, which are 700,000 years old.

Now, the theory always was that this was an accident. When we just had florets, the theory was that it was accidental drift. So a couple of humans were swept up to sea and somehow survived the storm, the ocean, and the tropical sun clinged to some driftwood and made it to florets. And somehow survived and colonized the island.

But now that we've got florets, Luzon and Sulawesi, three islands all in the same region, all separated by this ocean boundary, I think it's starting to point less towards accident and more towards behavior, right? More towards the deliberate sea crossing. Because to colonize, I was doing some research because of these discoveries. And there's actually been a few papers from NASA on how many humans you need to colonize an isolated landmass.

And NASA were doing it for like, if you're going to Mars or something. And you need a certain amount of humans or breeding age to not have like genetic problems in a population. So you need a certain amount of humans of a breeding age to ensure viability, right? Because otherwise you're going to inbreed and you're going to die out because of genetic issues.

And they say it was something like, you need 160 people at least. And that is with strict breeding controls and genetic testing. We can probably assume they weren't doing genetic testing on themselves. And so then the number somewhere near 500.

So what are the chances that 500 individuals were all swept out to see at the same time all survived the crossing and all landed on island and colonized it? That's a huge amount of humans for an accident, you know what I mean? And then three times in three separate islands all in the same region. At what point does accident start looking like behavior?

Do you know what I mean? Because what are the chances of 500 individuals all being swept out to see all survived in all region these islands and all colonizing in three separate occasions, all around about a million years ago? I think it's not a high chance. I think if we apply Occam's razor to it, which is the simplest explanation wins.

I think the simplest explanation is that these humans were intelligent enough to build boats, right? And that is a controversial opinion. That's not accepted. It's accepted that the humans reach these islands.

That's not controversial. Humans were on these islands a million years ago. It's just not accepted that it was intentional. Yeah, it's not accepted that it was intentional.

It seems silly. I think it doesn't make any sense. It's not a 500 of them make it over by floating and surviving. Yeah.

What exactly? All the same time. In 2002, Ryan Wedding was an Olympic snowboarder at the top of his game. Ryan's style is really gunning in gold.

And in less than a minute, it slipped away. But he continued to chase the high. Ryan James Wedding. He controls one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in this world.

I'm Michelle Shepherd and from CBC Podcasts and the Toronto Star, the most wanted Olympian. The most wanted Olympian, available now on Spotify. Exactly. And this is what I mean about taking data points from different kinds of science.

Yeah. Because I'm looking into what NASA is saying about humans colonizing somewhere and I'm saying, well, look, 500 people or more than 500 people of breeding age as well, not just people, all reaching an island on three separations, all in the same region. Are we sure this wasn't deliberate? So I think that has huge ramifications for human intelligence because that was always thought to be exclusively Sapien's thing, building a boat, because that's really hard.

To build a boat, you have to have planning, you have to have foresight, you have to be good enough at carpentry to construct something that's seaworthy, you have to trial an error. Yeah, trial and error. And you have to have the imagination as well to dream about what's on the other side of the horizon and the bravery and the incredible reckless courage to go for it and to go out there across the horizon and reach an island and possibly navigate through the stars. Like they knew how to do that.

Maybe. Maybe. Because otherwise, why would you set out? Right.

And how would you repeat it? Exactly. Yeah. Do you remember which way you went?

That worked. It's a fucking dude with a giant brow ridge furry face is telling you, I remember going this way, like, are you fucking sure? How are you doing? Are you using the stars?

Like, what are you doing? And humans weren't even going to have complex language by them. They weren't men. They weren't men to be capable of this.

That's crazy. We're seeing these things. If you're getting a group of people to agree to get in the boat, if they can't communicate with each other, that seems ridiculous. It seems even more ridiculous.

Because let's say at the minimum of 50 kilometers, how long does it take you to row 50 kilometers? Seems like it would be days. It'd be tough, wouldn't it? And no, an ocean as well.

Like a nice top. Right. If you even survive, how long is it going to take before you get across? I mean, maybe they figured out when the stormy season was and they time it for when it's not so stormy.

But I mean, how are they doing that? Do they have a calendar a million years ago? Whatever they were doing. If it was deliberate, which I think the evidence points towards is a clear sign of what we call modern intelligence and organization and most likely communication, which we always used to think only emerged 50,000 years ago.

And so now if it's over a million years old, you know, that's like that's a 20 times and it could be 1.4. The sort of way to talk about it. It's a 1.04 to 1.4. So that's I don't know what's that like 25 times old, let me think.

That's so funny that that point four. That's a lot. It's huge. It's absolutely fantastic.

And this is what you were saying about like people can't get their heads around the sheer enormity of these timescales that we're talking about. Like it's so long. Yeah. So long.

Well, another weird one that's come up fairly recently that I know you've talked about is the copper mining in North America. Yeah. That one blew me away. The volume of copper that was removed.

Yeah, they had a whole copper industry in North America, 9,000 years ago, which is just listen to that again. Say that one more time. The whole copper industry in North America, 9,000 years ago. And that's the same as the earliest state anywhere else in the world.

And the volume. This is where this is going to free people out. Tell them how much copper was removed. I don't know if the top of my head, but it's a lot and to be fair, there's lots of natural copper.

I think it's in the kind of northern parts of the United States as it is now. I don't know how much they removed the top of my head, but it is a lot of copper and like a commercial copper mine volume. Yeah. That's why I said industry like it's big.

It's so crazy. And I don't understand how they determined the amount of copper that was removed. But if that is correct, that seems to indicate that there was some sort of sophisticated metallurgy going on in North America, 9,000 years ago. Yeah, which is as early as anywhere else in the world.

And that completely flies in the face of what we used to think about people in North America. And it's interesting because what the evidence appears to show is that they did this for a few thousand years, but then they dropped it and they stopped doing it. And I don't know what that suggests, but either it suggests something happened to them or they decided they didn't want to do anymore. But either way, it kind of goes against this idea that we've always kind of assumed that technology is like an escalator, right?

We always assume that technology is an escalator. Yeah, there you go. Here it is. 5 billion pounds of copper.

What? So wrap your head around this, folks. Archaeology and date mining and copper tool use, but it's generally cannot calculate annual or century specific production 9,500 years ago. One older broad estimate puts a total archaic period extraction in the Lake Superior region at up to about 1.5 billion pounds of copper, roughly 680,000 metric tons.

That covers many millennia, not the century 9,500 years ago. So that means that they were doing it for thousands of years. They're saying it covers many millennia. Yeah, they were doing it for, yeah, as it says, the peak between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago.

That's crazy. That's crazy. So at least 9,500 years ago, they started doing this somewhere around there and they did it for thousands of years. They removed copper for thousands of years.

It was just sitting on the top. They called it float copper, I think. Like that, like float year ago. That's probably how they first started finding it.

Yes, that's right. And then they probably started digging. Now, precious metals, what we call precious metals, they exist in weird deposits. It's like, raradic.

It's all over the place. Come find me. Yeah. And these people use this stuff for weapons.

They use this stuff for jewelry. They use it for all kinds of things. Arrow points, I'm sure. They probably use it for all sorts of things.

They had to use it for weapons. Yeah. I think they found like spare points and stuff. Yeah, maybe that makes sense.

But then they dropped it. And then they stopped doing it. And we don't know why they did that. But as always, there's the copper head arrow.

It goes against this idea that technology is like an escalator. And you just take one level of technology and you keep going up. It shows that people can invent something or discover something and then stop doing it and forget about it. And I think that has implications for how we look at prehistory as a whole because it suggests that people, rather than just going straight line this linear path upwards, we can go up and down and forget things and we discover things.

And this is the alternative theory, is that we're a reinvention of civilization currently. And that we're the most advanced reinvention that we're aware of. But it doesn't mean that there hasn't been some sort of a civilization before us that perhaps reached heights where we are or greater in a completely different direction. I think when you look at some of the stone structures that exist, those are the best evidence because they're so perplexing.

The stones in Lebanon. What are they called the trilathon stones? Yeah, Balbeck. Yeah.

Those are crazy. Like what happened there? How? How?

How did you get them up there? It's weird because they're attributed to the Romans, right? But there's no Roman records of them doing that. And that's not particularly weird in itself until you realize that it's a bigger engineering project than anything the Romans did anyway.

I mean, the Coliseum is obviously an incredible thing, but the blocks aren't as big as these blocks at Balbeck. And yeah, they don't mention it anywhere. And you'd think that a civilization that documented as much of the Romans would at least mention their biggest engineering project somewhere. You know what I mean?

That doesn't mean it wasn't the Romans, but it's just a weird thing. It's very weird. It's very weird. And it's also weird that like many places, the structures that are on top of it are not as sophisticated, but not as difficult to do.

That's how it is over and over and over again. That sucks. Well, I'm on. That's a lot of these places.

You see the base, the oldest stuff. It seems like they find stuff and they build on top of stuff that was already there. And then you're dealing with thousands and thousands of years of civilization where people don't even remember who build it. You know, they're like, the gods.

The gods put these rocks here. It happens all over the world. Yeah. And then the sites are the best site in the region because that's why someone's built their original.

It makes sense to reuse them. But that doesn't mean that the latest civilization that used it was the bust. I mean, it could be, but it also doesn't mean that they are definitively. But often that's how we take it.

And yeah, that's not necessarily the best way of looking at them. I think what you said earlier is really important that we can't possibly know and to make these definitive statements about things where you just don't have enough evidence. You don't have enough facts. You can't really say definitively.

We know. And that drives experts crazy because they don't like to do that. They don't like to let that go. Especially humans, especially men.

They love the ego that comes with being the one who has the information, the expert opinion, that appeal to authority, that I'm the one who can tell you. Oh, this is nonsense. These Michael buttons on YouTube with their bullshit, their archaeological bullshit. They love doing that.

But no one's listening to them. That's what's cute. Yeah. And I'm grateful with a lot of people listening to me.

Well, like I said, you're really good at it. And it is undeniably. Just based on what we said so far, this is undeniably strange. It's undeniably weird.

And it's undeniably, at least to mean you. Interesting. That's why the subject will hopefully continue the pathway that it's on. Because there's so many people like you now that are looking at this stuff.

And they're very credible people who are very objective. The Ben Van Kirkwicks of the world. And Jimmy Corsetti is always looking at this stuff and go, hey, there's a lot going on here, people. There's a lot.

Yeah. I think it's interesting that the more we uncover, the more we discover, the more new evidence that comes out. I think what we're starting to realize is that the limits on our own knowledge are vastly bigger than we ever used to think. We used to think we kind of had it figured out.

And this is what I'm talking about with those three questions I mentioned at the start. We used to think we had the answer to these big questions. But with each new discovery, we're starting to realize just how vast the unknown is. I think I think I think there's two subjects where this kind of applies.

I think the first is physics and obviously I'm not smart enough or clever enough to talk about physics in any meaningful capacity. But I think it's fair to say that the more we learn about the nature of reality and the universe, the more we realize just how big it is and how crazy it is and how little we understand about our place in it. And I think the other subject is history. I think the more we learn about history, the more we realize how huge the amount of time humans have been on this planet is how long in my life hours has been on this planet, how long humans that are very similar to us have been on this planet is.

And I think it's a vital thing because physics is kind of the question of where are we, but history is kind of the question of who are we and where do we come from. And that's why I'm so interested in it because it's a fundamental question to civilization. So here we are. I think it's really important.

So that's why I talk about this stuff. Yeah. And also it's cool. It's very cool.

It's so fascinating. I love it. I know you love it too. It's great.

Well, it's so weird. It's so weird to think like what was it like thousands and thousands of years ago? What did they know? Where did they learn it?

And was, are these stories, these flood myths that exist in all these ancient cultures? Is this an echo of a historical record of people trying to keep track of this event that took place that crushed us and brought us down to a few thousand people all over the world and we had to rebuild? And that's also when you go back thousands of years in the conventional timeline, people were so barbaric. They were so horrible just a few thousand years ago.

If they were capable 5,000 years ago of building ancient Egypt, probably earlier than that, but why were they so brutal 2,000 years ago? Because I think those are the people that survived. I think the people that survived were probably terrible. They had to be.

We know that the Toba volcano, which was like, is that Indonesia? 70,000 years ago? Got us down to just a few thousand people globally? Yeah.

Imagine that life. Imagine what you had to do to stay alive. Imagine even the thought of raising children in a world where there's only 7,000 people left in limited amounts of food and most of the population of earth is dead. What?

This is crazy. We've been through some crazy things as a species. You did it. Didn't you do a video of there's some evidence that at some point in history, most people were killed off in war?

Yes. That is related to what you were just saying about. So just after the agricultural revolution, the theory is that because humans then had property and were kind of defending things that people got a lot more violent and there's a lot of evidence that around 6,000 years ago, basically all the men died, there's like evidence that 95% of male bloodlines were removed and we can see this from the Y chromosome in genetics. And there's a massive drop off of the genetic diversity in male bloodlines.

And something like 95% went. And no one quite knows why this is, but we see lots of mass graves around this time and violent graves and all these people were killing each other. It might not have been that, but it's weird that it only affected men because if it was an actual disaster, it wouldn't be specific to either gender. But it's only men.

So some people think it's like a big amount of violence, but no one really knows. But it's really interesting. Well, it doesn't make sense though. I mean, think if you go from hunter and gathering where you're constantly moving nomadic tribes, people bunch of people stick together, you're intense or whatever, and then all of a sudden you're stationary and you've developed agriculture and you stay put and then there's hunter-gatherer tribes that still exist because guess what?

It's not like it was a uniform discovery of agriculture. Everybody adopted it and there was no more hunter-gatherer tribes and there's no more tribes of wandering marauders. So there's still these tribes of wandering marauders. And so now you have to defend this spot because you're stuck there because you're dumbass bill of house.

Well, the Mongols used to make fun of people that lived in houses. They thought they were fools and they lived in felt tense period. That's how you're supposed to live. You keep moving.

And this idea of staying put, like, look at these idiots. Like, we're just going to go sack their city. Like, they really had no respect for people that were so stupid that they stuck themselves behind walls. Like, you assholes can't even run away.

You're going to launch lit human beings on fire with catapults onto your thatched roofs and set everything ablaze. It turns out people are really good at starting fires when you light them on fire because we're fatty. Yeah. Mongols figured out a lot of cute stuff.

But it makes sense that that's when war would become ubiquitous. This episode is brought to you by Key Tone IQ. I've tried a lot of supplements. But for years, it's been one thing that I've been obsessed with to keep my brain locked in and that's key tones.

And energy molecule, our brains naturally create when pushed to our limits. Key tones used to cost thousands of dollars a shot and were only used by super elite people. But now, thanks to a $6 million research contract with the military, Key Tone IQ had a breakthrough and you can finally get key tones online on Amazon or at Target for $5 a shot. They don't taste good.

But damn do they work. Trust me, if you rely on your brain for your day to day success like I do, take Key Tone IQ. I take it and I love it. I feel sharper.

I make better decisions. I have faster memory recall and I'm more productive. Your brain thrives on key tones. Go to ketone.com slash Rogan for 30% off your subscription order or find ketone IQ at Target stores nationwide in the protein and electrolyte aisle and get your first shot free.

They're so confident in it that they even offer a 60 day money back guarantee. So go ahead and take your shot. Yeah, once we sat down and once we owned, stay put. You're on Target.

Exactly. You have something to defend with it. Life's local crops, all houses, I should say. And so, you have this quality of evidence that violence did increase massively as we entered the agricultural age that we're still in.

It's very interesting. It's very interesting. And it also is logical. It's a logical progression of how people would behave given the fact that now all of a sudden they have resources, they've accumulated it, they have a very specific location.

They have to defend that location. That's what people figure out walls and that's a big, you know, whatever. The weird thing is the great wall of China, like the arrow turrets are facing the wrong way. Yeah, yeah, a lot of it.

A lot of the great wall, the arrows are facing inward. It's trying to keep people in the wrong way. Or try to keep people from China going to wherever, whatever's on the other side. It might have been some sections of it weren't constructed by the people that we think were constructed it.

You never seen that? No, it was very weird. Like people pondered. Like why are the arrows?

Because there's these slots where they can be protected but shoot arrows through. But they're facing towards China. They're not like China defending the wall against the Huns. It's weird.

Nice, strange. See if you can find some of that. I'm looking for a really great answer in this. It's part of it is and part of it isn't.

Mostly the great wall's defensive features face north outward towards the step. The usual direction of major raids innovation but many surviving sections have arrow slits and parapets facing both north and south including seemingly inward towards China. Why face inward? Defense after a breach.