Graham Hancock Criticizes Archaeology as a Science | Joe Rogan

Well, it's fascinating to me that the geneticists would rely on the archaeologist being that the geneticists have the actual DNA they can examine where the archaeologists are piecing things together. Yeah, absolutely. Little tiny bits of information over the entire landscape. And then you consider how much information they don't have access to that's in the ground. Exactly. There's so much. I strongly resist the idea that archaeology is a science. I don't think it should be described as a science. What do you think it should be described as? It's more like a kind of philosophy. It's an attempt to interpret the past based on rather flimsy and limited evidence. And what you find in that interpretation is that the preconceptions of the individuals involved are being imposed upon the evidence, which then turns out to support their preconceptions. And that's not a scientific way of doing things. A scientific way of doing things is testing hypotheses and seeking to falsify them and seeing if they work out. So the problem is drawing these conclusions and then being too rigid with these conclusions upon further evidence. That's my view. Yeah. That archaeology has been much too rigid and that there's a climate of fear in archaeology. I don't mean to pick particularly on archaeologists here. I think this is generally true across other disciplines as well. These days academics are driven by the need to publish research papers. That's what they build their careers on. If they can get a paper on their bit of research published in Nature or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, etc., that's good for their careers. But then you confront the gatekeepers in those publications who regard any archaeological idea that is not part of the mainstream accepted consensus with great suspicion and are most reluctant to publish that information. Now what is the mainstream, when archaeologists talk about seafaring humans, what do they date that to? Because the Polynesians, right? Well, the great seafaring adventure that is accepted by archaeology is called the Polynesian Expansion. And it's a remarkable story. And that occurs roughly 3,000 to 3,500 years ago. And those Polynesians were amazing ocean navigators. They could cross distances of thousands of kilometers with pinpoint accuracy. I mean, it's not an accident that the Polynesians found Easter Island. Finding Easter Island is a really challenging project. Easter Island is 2,000 miles from the coast of South America. It's 2,000 miles from the nearest other island, which is Tahiti. It's just a little speck in the middle of the ocean. But the Polynesians found it and settled there and appear to have brought a reproductively viable population there and appear to have made voyages back and forth. But that was 3,000 to 3,500 years ago. That was not 12,800 years ago. And this is where archaeology is adamant position that ocean voyaging was begun by the Polynesians and that there was no major ocean voyages before that, I think needs to be strongly questioned and it needs to be strongly questioned in the light of this DNA evidence from the Amazon rather than rejecting the evidence. And tempt should be made to consider what that might mean. Well, it's interesting because we know that the Egyptians had boats. And so what I mean, if there were boats 4,500 years ago, why do we think that they didn't try them out in the ocean? That doesn't make any sense, especially if they existed 1,000 years prior, which is also possible. No, archaeologists wouldn't argue that the Egyptians had boats. That is still within the framework of accepted history. It's the notion of a global navigating culture in the Ice Age that archaeologists can't swallow. It's a subject that I've kept on coming up against over a number of years. I think the best evidence for it is ancient maps which show the world as it looked during the last Ice Age. I first explored this in Fingerprints of the Gods and I've touched on the mystery again. And I have an appendix on the subject in this book because I think these are very important. We're talking about maps that were drawn roughly between the 1300s and the 1700s. In other words, in relatively recent history. However, these maps were largely based on much older source maps which they copied. And we can say that for sure because one of the famous maps is the Piri Reis map which was created by a Turkish admiral called Piri Reis in the year 1513. Actually only a corner of his map has survived. It was originally a world map. We now just have a bit that shows the east coast of South America and North America and the west coast of Africa. Piri Reis writes in that map that it is in his own handwriting that he based it on more than 100 older source maps, some of which had come from the library of Alexandria. In other words, that maps had been, when the library of Alexandria had been destroyed in the fourth century AD or whenever it was, some of its contents had been rescued and brought to Constantinople which became the Turkish capital and Piri Reis had access to those maps and he incorporated information from those maps on his maps as well as incorporating more recent navigational information. And this is one of a whole category of maps which are extremely hard to explain. All of them based on older source maps now lost, all of them incorporating extremely precise relative longitudes and latitudes. Latitude is not that difficult a technological feat, but longitude is a difficult technological feat. Longitude involves a chronometer. It involves knowing the time at the place you began your voyage and the local noon as well and calculating the difference between them. You need a chronometer that will keep accurate time at sea with the motions of a ship and it's just a plain fact that our civilization did not invent such a chronometer until the late 18th century. Before that, we didn't know what longitude we were at and ships were constantly sailing unexpectedly into coastlines that they thought were hundreds of miles further away. So the discovery of the technique to do longitude was a major civilizational advance. Its presence in maps based on much older source maps that actually show the world as it looks during the last ice age suggests that somebody during the last ice age was mapping the world and had mastered the technique of calculating longitude. Classic example of these maps, and I make a point of this, is what's called the Pinkerton world map which was drawn in the year 1818 and it was based on the latest navigational information at that time. I reproduced that map in the book. What's missing from the map, entirely missing, is Antarctica. There's just a hole at the bottom of the world. There's nothing there. And the reason there's nothing there, there's another Pinkerton map that shows that. The reason that you need to find one that's centered on Antarctica, the reason that Antarctica is not there is that our civilization hadn't discovered Antarctica in 1818. So they couldn't authentically put it on a map in 1818. Actually we discovered it in 1819 and that's when it starts appearing on modern maps. The problem is that Antarctica appears repeatedly on these much older maps and it appears in the right place and a bit bigger than it is today, but very much as it looked during the last ice age. So what all of this suggests to me is that the world was mapped and explored by a global seafaring culture with a level of technology that was at least equivalent to ours at the end of the 18th century during the ice age. Wasn't there also a map of Greenland that showed it underneath the ice? Yes, there are. And another intriguing thing, I mentioned the Piri Reis map just now. Shown on the Piri Reis map lying off the east coast of North America is a large island with a row of megaliths, like a road of megaliths running up the middle of it. That island is in the exact place of the Grand Bahama banks. And... Is it on? Is it on this one? Yeah, it is. But can I point it out to you because the map is rotated. It's there. That's right there. Okay, this thing. That one. Okay. Right here. That's great that you can bring this up, Jamie. That's amazing. So this island is sitting there off the southeast coast of North America. Look at the way these two draw things back then too. And what you see running down the middle of it is this road-like feature of megaliths up on the map again. Yes, I see right there, yeah. These here. Now the thing is, it was a long period of my life when I did a lot of scuba diving and I was looking at underwater structures. And one of the sites I dived on was the Bimini Road, which is in the Grand Bahama banks. And the Bimini Road is exactly where that island is. And here's the issue. I don't care whether the Bimini Road is natural or man-made. For me, the mystery is that it is shown above water on that map. And the last time it was above water was thousands and thousands of years ago. So for me, this is all evidence that we shouldn't dismiss the possibility that our ancestors had achieved a level of technology where they could explore and map the world's oceans. We shouldn't dismiss that. There it is right there. So we don't know what those stones are or how they were created. But boy, do they look artificial. That's the oniguni in Japan we're looking at now. But the... Go back to that image, Jimmy, the last image that we were just looking at. Look at that. I mean, that looks so man-made. And you can see that it's rather like the pattern that's shown on the island in the map. How deep is that today? Oh, it's not very deep. It's about 20 feet. But we think that that was above water at some point. It was definitely above water during the last ice age. When it finally went underwater, it may have been as late as 8,000 or 9,000 years ago. Is there anything else compelling that's in the immediate area that seems to indicate that there was some sort of a man-made structure? Well, nobody's looked for it. And the whole effort of archaeology has been to dismiss the significance of the Bimini Road. How would they dismiss that? Well, they say it's just a me. They say it's totally natural. Come on! Is it? Go back to that image again. I have to look at some other ones. But go back to that image that we just saw. Yeah. Are you sure? As somebody who spent a lot of time diving on the Bimini Road, I can tell you I absolutely do not think it's natural. I think it's a man-made structure. But the argument is that it's a kind of beach rock that forms in these blocky formations. Does it? Yes, beach rock does form in blocky formations. But here, I believe that the beach rock has been used as a construction material. But, I repeat, the key issue is not whether the Bimini Road is man-made or not. The key issue is that it features on a map above water. And that is a dating project. That tells us that somebody was mapping that bit of the world when it was above water. So you would go back to that one? That takes us back a very long way into the past. The one that you just pulled up. Yeah, look at that one. That's a stunning place. It's an amazing site. It's just like the odds of that being in that order with those uniformly sized rocks for how long is that? Oh, hundreds of feet. It's actually shaped like the letter J. It's a giant underwater structure. It's really an enormous thing and very beautiful to dive on. And there's lots of very gentle, sweet nurse sharks down there that you can play with. So that looks much more like random. It's more random. And bits of it do look more random. And bits of it look highly constructed. I would not seek to claim that the Bimini Road is absolutely man-made. My claim about the Bimini Road is it's really fucking weird that it appears on a map above water. Yes. A map that was drawn in 1513 based on older source maps.