Joe Rogan Experience #961 - Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson & Michael Shermer

3, 2, this is live ladies and gentlemen and this is a very unusual podcast we're going to have here and 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 fucking need 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. Well I thought this was really fascinating that Forbes has a mainstream article in Forbes did a comet wipe out ice age megafauna and this is actually from 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, peer-reviewed journal by a couple of scientists from the University of Edinburgh and they are proposing an interpretation of the Gobekli Tepe imagery, there's quite a lot of imagery on those T-shaped pillars particularly one pillar, pillar 43 and enclosure D and their deduction what they take from their interpretation of course many will disagree with them, their interpretation is that those images are speaking of the comet impact, they're speaking of a comet that hit the earth roughly 12,900 years before our time. And Randall this has been something that you've been obsessed with for many many years now, we've documented it and detailed it in many conversations that we've had on the podcast. Yes now I can't say that I'm that familiar with that article, I haven't had a chance to get into it. But this idea that the comet impact is what has caused the end of the ice age? Well it's so complex but now what we do is we throw some type of an impact into the mix and it seems to fill gaps that have. Pull this right up to you. It seems to fill gaps that were at this point still unexplained, you know there's varying theories between some extent of climate change and some extent of human predation that caused the extinction and I've always felt like you can't blame it on one or the other, I think humans probably had a role but only in the very final stages of the extinction event and one of the scenarios would certainly suggest that there were extreme climate changes between what's called the bawling alerod 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 then 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 wide spread on it so you can't pinpoint it down to a specific event but I've always felt like 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 in 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 and so 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 Thermohaline circulation which is basically the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean and that this might have been what triggered the Younger Dryas and then also contributed to the mass extinction events but now I think that the dating of the draining of Lake Agassiz is too late for that and was probably a latter event within the overall melting phenomena that occurred between roughly 14,600 and about 11,000 years ago. Somewhere in there we have to fit that mass extinction event and I definitely have thought that climate change was the dominant factor in that but then what triggered the climate change that always seemed to me to be something that was not ever really explained. The comet impact theory is very controversial but the evidence has been steadily mounting now for a decade. Including physical evidence right like the core samples that show nuclear glass scattered out throughout Asia and Europe at roughly the same time period when they do the core samples? Yes, most of it's dating to 12,800 to 13,000 years ago. These are called impact proxies, nanodiamonds, melt glass, microspherules, these kind of things are associated with impact not necessarily always caused by impact so this has been part of the reason for the controversy but it's the abundance of all of these at a particular level which leads a large group of scientists to feel that we have had a comet impact in the past. It's the full assemblage of things that is difficult to explain by processes without invoking some type of a cosmic event. And it also corresponds with what you believe is a period where Earth travels through a series of comets. Well this gets us to the ideas of what would be called the British Neo-Catastrophist, Victor Klube and William Napier and a number of others that have theorized that from time to time Earth encounters the debris from a large disintegrating comet and there's an interesting, William Napier addresses this in an interesting article I can pull up here pretty soon that possibly around 13,000 years ago Earth may have encountered some of the debris from a disintegrating comet which ultimately goes back to Fred Whipple who is one of the godfathers of cometary science. Could I just come in on that for a second? I mean specifically Bill Napier and Victor Klube are identifying the remnants of this comet with the torrid meteor stream which is familiar I think to everybody. We pass through it twice a year. We see meteorites particularly at the end of October, early November. That debris stream is still there. It still contains according to their argument bits of the comet. There are large objects in it like cometing Enki, Rudiniki, Orgiato and so on, four or five kilometers in diameter. And the suggestion is that the meteor stream has got lots of small bits of dust but it's got some larger stuff too and some of that stuff fell out of the meteor stream 12,800 years ago and impacted primarily the North American ice cone. Now Michael when you listen to that podcast you had some questions. You are a professional skeptic so of course you're skeptical. What are your thoughts about all this? Yeah let me pull back and give a bigger picture after the podcast I went and got the book Magicians of the Gods and actually I listened to it on audio so it's I don't know like 16, 18 hours of Graham reading with his wonderful British accent which as you know for Americans that elevates the quality of the argument by an order of magnitude. Yeah that's how they sell things in infomercials over here. And Graham you're a good writer. It's a very compelling story. Thank you. You're a great skeptic. And so I think you know 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 a little bit of it is supposed to be a little bit of an insult so 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. Right. And it's not 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 Runestones of Minnesota that the Vikings had come here the black Egyptian hypothesis when I was in graduate school this book called Black Athena was published at the Egyptians were actually black and that the sort of Western white male dominance of history had written them out of the past. So this was a whole alternative history alternative archaeology built down 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 that's yet another one of these things South American archaeology all mixed statues seem to have like African features on them. So maybe Africans went directly across to South America. So there's like Eric Van Donikin Sakurai asstichin 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 what what the way it works in science is 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 clue 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 but that. 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 but what are the mainstream scientists think. And the problem is is that so a couple of specific things like what I call patternicity the tendency to find meaningful patterns and random noise you know the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich or whatever. Those are fun examples. But you know taking like pectigraffs pectigraffs pectigraffs and then comparing them to constellations like 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 10000 years ago 5000 years. So this is a field called archaeo astronomy. Ed Krupp the director of the Griffith Observatory here in L.A. this is what he does. And sometimes the pattern he thinks the patterns mean something. Sometimes they're totally random. And or you take something like the pyramids you know as 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 you know has he just can't deal with them all you know. So this is one example I used in my book white people believe were things that you know one guy calculated that if you divide the height of the pyramid into twice the side of the base you get the number close to pi. And then he just sort of works all these different numbers so therefore it's cosmically significant. Well Richard Hoagland was like the best example of that right. He would find these patterns in Mars and like in claim that like if you go from this rock to half the distance and like why would you do that like that doesn't make any sense. He would create these patterns. Right and that's okay I mean all scientists look for patterns. So like just take climate change either the earth is getting warmer it's not either it's human caused or it's not there's a pattern in the data you can see the pattern. The question is is the pattern real. So this is why we call it we use the term climate consensus. It's not a democracy it's not like we voted on it and decided this is the truth it's that independently all these different scientists working in different fields publishing in different journals come to the same conclusion. So we call this conciliant science or convergence of evidence science that it's not like these guys are meeting on the weekends going boy we got to combat those you know those crazy right wingers with our data. They're independently coming to these conclusions that lifts our confidence that yeah there's probably something to their theory such that there's now so much data converted to this you'd have to deconstruct every one of those independent lines. So then you have things like what I call the problem of the residue of anomalies in any field there are residue of anomalies we can't explain so like UFOs for example. The UFOlogists and me a skeptic agree that 90 to 95 percent of all the UFO sightings are explained by natural phenomena Venus swamp gas airplanes geese whatever they know that and so we're really only talking about 5 percent like how do you explain that one right there in 1967 on June 3rd. I don't know no one knows that one and then from there they build well that's my case then if you can't explain that then I have a case no no no. That's very different than what we're talking about. How is that relevant to us here? 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 you know 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. No one is saying that the scientists can't explain it what would essentially particularly Randall with a series of images as shown is that what you have here is something that can be explained by rapid rapid melting of the ice caps and Randall step in on if you will. Well just okay go ahead if you want. Well they do say I mean it depends what you mean by rapid you know I mean a glacial dam that as our geologists will tell us in a moment that that breaks that's fairly rapid. Back in ninety six it 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 no noacian 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 comment it happens in a couple hours or a couple of days or weeks versus a couple of months or years. What do we mean by rapid? Okay well what are you saying then? Okay so what are you saying about their theories in particular? Okay so the problem I think Ram the deepest problem is is much of your theory depends on negative evidence that is I don't accept the mainstream explanation for the pyramids the Sphinx the Machu Picchu whatever. Well let's not talk about that let's just talk about this specific subject because it's going to take a long time just to cover astral impacts. So my final point is is the false offiability one that is what would it take to refute your hypothesis like for me the answer would be like if go go Beckley Tepi turned out to be what you think it might have been the place where advanced ancient civilization once inhabited or they used it. Where are the metal tools? Where are the writing the examples of writing? Perhaps a decision was made not to use metal perhaps a decision was made that errors had taken place that that that in reinventing civilization we shouldn't perhaps go down quite the same route as before. Perhaps writing isn't always an advance perhaps perhaps an oral tradition which which records in memory which enhances and uses the power of memory may be a very effective way of of dealing with information we regard writing as a as an advance and I can see lots of reasons why it is an advance but if we put ourself 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 we have a text in which he is he is questioned by a pharaoh who is 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 to put them into into context and what will happen to memory when people so so there might be a choice not to not to go that way. All right but but then what do you mean by advance when you say there used to be a lost advanced civilization before 10,000 years ago? Let's just pause here for a second because what we know for a fact is that the carbon dating in all the area around Gobekli Tepe is somewhere around 12,000 years is that correct? 11,600 years ago is the earliest they found so far but a great deal of Gobekli Tepe is still underground. Right so at least what we know is someone built some pretty impressive structures 11,600 years ago. And years before Stonehenge. So when 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 what 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 they were it was actually advanced but we mean something completely different by advanced not writing and metal and technology we mean I don't know what you mean what do you mean? Well I mean we have we have a body of archaeology which goes on for decades which is saying that megalithic sites for example Gigantea in Malta or Hagarim or Menidra megalithic sites date to no older than five and a half to six thousand years old Gigantea would push it close to six thousand years old and there are no older sites than that and therefore that the megalithic site is associated with a certain stage of neolithic development. Then along comes Gobekli Tepe, seven thousand 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 fifty times as much as they've already excavated is still 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 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 eleven thousand six hundred years ago with no obvious background to it it just comes out of nowhere to me that's rather well that we know of but to me that's a that's immediately a rather puzzling and interesting situation and I would be remiss as as an author and an inquirer into these matters if I didn't take great interest in that the sudden appearance seven thousand years before Stonehenge of a megalithic site that dwarfs Stonehenge to me that's a mystery and it's really worth inquiring into we love to put it into perspective that's more than two thousand 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 in the construction of the great pyramid you're talking about two thousand years earlier than that and that is unbelievable when you're talking about seven thousand years before what we thought people were doing okay but 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 advance why not just attribute to these fully modern hunter-gatherers who had the same size brains we have and so on that they were able to figure out and do this we just underestimated their abilities but why did archaeologists tell us for so long hunter-gatherers couldn't do it and we needed agricultural populations that could generate surpluses that could pay for the specialists to theory but that was so now with archaeologists are saying well I guess we were wrong about hunter-gatherers well they might be wrong about hunter-gatherers or there might be another civilization that they had not discovered that has been unearthed by time okay but after a certain amount of lost time 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 Moenjo-Daro 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 that we come across that another turn of the spade reveals information that causes us to reconsider not just was it hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists but perhaps something bigger than this is involved or in between that that's not that's not such an extraordinary idea I get it that mainstream archaeology doesn't want to go there but that's my job I don't think that that's correct they they would be happy to go there if there's evidence for it by what you just said they now fully accept the Indus Valley civilizations how did that happen if they were dogmatically closed-minded and I don't say that they were dogmatically closed-minded about that the evidence the massive amount of evidence that came up with the discovery of Moenjo-Daro Harappa Dola Vera another and other such sites is very difficult you have to be completely stupid to say that that's not a civilization go back to tepis a bit more nuanced you know we have stone we have stone circles we have some interesting astronomical alignments the world's first perfectly north-south aligned building maybe no definitely again that's a pattern is anything well I'm citing clash met well that's all right but I 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 a dangerous for anybody not just you all that's a good point who's clash met clash met was the original excavator of go back to tepi he was the head of the German archaeological Institute dig at go back to tepi he kindly spent three days showing me around the site and and really nobody's disputing the astronomical alignments off go back to tepi they weren't particularly interesting to clash met but they're there and what is the alignment like houses established when you have a perfectly north side north south aligned structure perfectly north south to true north not magnetic north then you are dealing with astronomy by definition and there are other alignments of the sun true north has established today or with the procession the true north is always true north okay it's the rotation axis of our planet okay so it to this day it points exactly in the same place where it was pointing they always points to true north okay but but back to this you know they don't want to go sure they want to go there they would happy be happy to go there case in point two weeks ago in the journal nature the most prestigious scientific journal in the world there was published an article that humans or maybe Neanderthals lived in San Diego area a hundred and thirty thousand years ago this is an order of magnitude older than the Clovis days this was the mastodon bones they found that were smashed on bones yeah so so here's an example of how okay so clearly there's not some conspiracy to keep alternative people or fringe or or radical theories out it was published in peer reviewed the most prestigious journal in the world there it is to be said what happened well there's been a massive reaction to that and lots of lots of scathing remarks by other academics yes but that's normal that's how science works you get you get pushed back it's you got to have a thick skin it's just the way it goes you've got to have a thick skin that's that's for sure but maybe sometimes your skin is so thick that you just can't sense anything around well of course we don't want that either so what do you think is going on when you look at something like go back to tappy that's covered covered up purposefully right yes deliberately buried again I cite Klaus Schmidt he he's the authority on this he's the excavator he absolutely adamantly insists that that site was deliberately buried and finally covered with a hill which is what go back to tappy means in the Turkish language potbellied hill yeah and you're talking about something give me the perspective of how large they believe it is currently as of current what's excavated at the moment is on a scale of stonehenge what's under the ground may be as much as 50 times larger Jesus but but it will buckly-tepley there no one live there there's no tools there's no well you're talking about 12,000 years old but if it's buried it should be there should be pottery there's no pottery no writing no articles of clothing no one live there were you saying nobody lived there so why should they have pottery why should pottery be in the field but why would they go why they go along and break some pots and stick it in the artificial something they're trash when they something that would indicate it's different a different kind of people than what we're used to seeing in the archaeological record well in other words it's just rubbish that they poured in it's just stones and earth buckets of it in other words Graham for you to gain support for your theory amongst mainstream archaeologists they want to see positive evidence to overturn the old theory in other words the burden of proof is on the person challenging the mainstream i completely agree in every field but isn't there some proof that the 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 go back to me that's the stunning beauty of this find it overturns our ideas of primitive hunter gatherers that could not do this apparently they can so that's one possible yeah that's right so this i call this somebody else called the bigotry of low expectations you know it's like we had this kind of low expectations for these hunter gatherers maybe we should jettison that idea and in my own other field of the history of religion it also threw that off because this apparently was a kind of a spiritual religious that's the wrong word they wouldn't have used actually nobody can nobody can know that that's right so but if it was this is the big natural geographic article emphasize that maybe this is the very first religious spiritual temple ever built because they didn't live there so they went there for a reason isn't it also possible that this is signs that civilization was more advanced 12 000 years ago than we thought okay more advanced what do we again what do we mean by we're talking about the ability to construct an amazing structure well okay how big was it like how tall were these stones some of them are 20 feet tall yeah some of them are smaller with with with uh astronomical alignments clausch smith called it a center of innovation he was intrigued by the way that agriculture emerges around gobeckley tepi at the same time that gobeckley tepi is is 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 agriculture these were the people who invented agriculture now to me the notion that a group of hunter gatherers wake up one morning and invent megalithic architecture the world's largest megalithic site and at the same moment invent agriculture stretches credulity a bit and i think i would prefer to propose and i have proposed that what we're looking at is evidence of some kind of transfer of technology that people came into that area who had other knowledge and that that was applied and perhaps they mobilized the local population around this site perhaps that's precisely why we see agriculture developing there so perhaps that's the skill that's being passed on but but i don't see anything particularly okay the stone work is spectacular but that that's not any more advanced than a few centuries a few millennium afterwards but you're talking about something 20 feet tall made of stone but we know a couple hundred people can move multi-ton stone there's no mystery in moving the stones they're still moving 20 ton stones in indonesia today but megalithic culture still exists you also know that the carving on the outside is extremely complex it's three-dimensional carving okay but i mean you know that means but last you know what that means but last go at 30 000 years ago has magnificent cave paintings with three dimensional animals but that's painting you know that but but there's you know hold on a second do you know what i'm saying when i say three-dimensional carvings yeah like the venus no the carvings were on the outside meaning they didn't carve them into the rock they carved away the rock around them right which is pretty sophisticated stuff for hunter-gatherers and they're doing this on these 20 foot tall stone columns i mean it's pretty impressive stuff okay but there the assumption is that they couldn't have figured this out we know from modern societies where say australian aborigines in one generation they go from stone tools to flying airplanes the brains are quite capable of doing these amazing things did they go from stone stone tools to flying airplanes without somebody introducing them to airplanes yeah you're actually making his argument for him no no it's not that much of a reach to carve stone people have been carving stones but the entire archaeological opinion on megalithic sites for decades before this was precisely that it was beyond their ability to do that and now the mainstream has changed it's okay but let's let's or at the very least a little shift let's pause for a moment let's pause for a moment so for sure we all agree human beings made this yes not okay even so the argument so the argument is not whether or not aliens made it the argument is whether or not humans made it that were sophisticated well they're clearly sophisticated enough to make this incredible structure that is is some sign of some sort of civilization i mean i believe so yeah it is it's a gigantic structure i agree with gran that we we've again undersold who these people were my friend jared diamond goes to papa new guinea he talks at the opening chapter of guns germs and steel how smart these people are that live out there in nature what it takes to survive oh sure he wouldn't last an hour you know from l.a he wouldn't last an hour with his papa new guinea and friends out there in the in the wild well that's just because he doesn't know how to survive and they've been passing down the information for generation after generation very smart okay so it's not it's not a problem of intelligence and is there okay so here's the other thing we don't know is that there might be lots more of these sites and and where there's there are i visited one of them kara hantepi you've got you've got the t-shaped pillars sticking out the side of a hill in the farmer's backyard i mean i i think we're actually at the beginning of opening up this inquiry not at the end of it by any means but then before you okay why not just say we don't know this is a spectacular mystery you leave it at that right why write a book well you guys i'm gonna fill in all the gaps 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 becley tepi strikes me as a gigantic fucking mystery and a mystery that is worthy of exploration from a point of view that may not satisfy you oh well it doesn't you don't have to satisfy me you and your you and your colleagues and i don't i don't i certainly don't have to satisfy you or them that's not my project like your opening chapter with schmidt i thought i really loved the um 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 but but what wait what's that again now he's like a little bit like colombo like wait wait i have just one more just one more question and you know the mystery kind of thickens that's perfectly okay that's great i mean that's that's what science is all about is uncovering mysteries that we then have to figure out so there's always more mysteries but that doesn't mean that's not positive evidence in favor of a particular theory like a lost civilization it's just we can't explain this full stop yeah we certainly can't explain it and you can't explain it by saying that we underestimated hunter and gatherers either well why not we know they made it whatever you want to call them well we know humans made it that's right we know humans made it so whenever you want to call them but why do they believe that people were only hunters and gatherers 12 000 years ago it's because they didn't have any evidence the contrary right this is evidence to the contrary i agree so you agree that there weren't other hunter and gatherers okay but there's there's several stages in between just you know 12 people living out in the jungle by themselves versus us you know there's like a whole bunch of different well i would say that gobeckley tepi is a gigantic stage well we don't okay they didn't live there so we we have to figure out well where where were they living and what was there so that that has to be excavated well they only have excavated 10 percent of it and meanwhile what you're saying is that we shouldn't speculate at all because i mean mainstream archaeology speculating mainstream archaeology is speculating when saying it's definitely was hunter gatherers who did this that's also that seems more of a reach okay but not okay they may be more than hunter gatherers they may have been partially settled there's you can have any kind of number of states but what you can't apparently have is the possibility of a transfer of technology from people who are really masters of that technology already when they came in but where are these people where's well you're dealing with an incredible 12 000 years ago they have fingerprints in there let's find their homes i don't know i don't know that their homes matter would their homes even survive after 12 000 years i'm not sure but what survives there's something screw trash trash and tools we've got gobeckley tepi it confronts us it challenges the mainstream model i think it's reasonable to consider the possibility that there was something more than just hunter gatherers involved here in creating this extraordinary place and that's all i've done it seems to me that to to say hunter gatherers could build this i'm not wouldn't be opposed the idea that they're hunting and gathering but it does certainly imply a lot of leisure time yes a lot of leisure time well we know hunter gat but sorry that's okay it was like well again if we place this back particularly within that that climate zone at 11 000 6 to 12 000 13 000 years ago whatever it turns out to be we're dealing with an extremely demanding and challenging climate which 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 um i i find it the the idea sort of um perplexing to me that they would be what i what i would have to ask is what is their motive what is their motive for undertaking a project on this scale because it's an enormous project and to move a 20 ton block of stone is really a challenging task to undertake today today well without without you know uh you know the infrastructure of of of large uh machines and so forth um but to do it by hand it would be an enormous undertaking and and i you know to me it's like when are they having time to hunt and gather when you're engaged in a project of this scale but but we know hunter gatherers have way more free time than modern society people do that's the one thing we've learned is that it's a pretty good way to make a living actually they have a better buried diet than we have this is the you know the neanderthal diet right they have a better buried diet and a lot more free time yeah but that's a lot more a lot less stress we knew that all along about hunter gatherers when we were saying they couldn't build megalithic science but we're we're looking at a time to do it 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 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 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 this phenomena this this project within this context of these extremely challenging times in which you know adaptation to the environmental changes could easily be the the all consuming challenge of the times i i'm just finding it difficult to imagine a disconnect to 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 or random we don't even know the motives of the easter islanders and no we don't they raise these huge but we know they did it but doesn't that become a central question though what something had to have motivated but let's get back to tepe so we so let's just be real clear we know there are humans we know that it's at least 12 000 years old and we know that the real dispute here the real question is did these people have structures and did they have agriculture we know that they were human beings they were essentially modern human beings so were they hunter-gatherers or did they have structures before go back to tepe they didn't have structures and they didn't have agriculture off to go back to tepe they did so the fact that they were able to build something so monumental what kind of a leap is it at all to think that these people could figure out how to plant food and figure out how to make a house well i mean again if you look back 30 000 years 40 000 years to these cave paintings these are pretty sophisticated yeah beautiful they are clearly they had abstract reasoning they could think from the concrete to the abstract and so on it's not a big reach to go from that to moving stones around i'd say there's a big difference between painting and engraving on cave walls and creating the largest megalithic site that's ever been built on earth wait a minute i think there's a huge difference between those two i mean nobody would compare the construction effort on on stonehenge or gigantea with with cave paintings i agree with you the cave paintings are magnificent i've had the privilege to visit many of the painted cave stunning work and as picasso said when he came out of laska we have invented nothing i mean they were this that was that modern human mind symbolic mind at work there but this is another matter this is a large-scale construction project that's going on and it's not just a construction process like huts it's hundreds and hundreds of very very large megalithic pillars which have to be mobilized brought to the place you know organizing a workforce in order to do that even that requires preparation and time and learning and practice is not something that you wake up one morning and just can do overnight you think that the paintings are more impressive than go back to tapping yeah or at least comparable i think that's i think that's absolutely ridiculous to convey three dimensionality on a 2d plane that that's what picasso meant it's like wow that's a growth it's like developing perspective and to use the natural shape of the wall it's but it's not to create a three-dimensional perspective look is that's pretty abstract you're comparing apples and pears it's not a construction project okay it's it's not i don't think we don't have to compare but i don't think it's even remotely what i'm saying is that it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to think these people were pretty smart they had absolutely smart we know what they were smart just because the fact that those construction projects were done by who by whoever we know that they were smart whoever built go back to tapu 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 erected 20-foot stone columns with three-dimensional carvings on them of a lot of animals that weren't even native to the to the region that's uh yeah that's not necessarily the case because they could have been animals but my point is that these paintings are like say 30 40 000 years old to go back to tapi so there's tens of thousands of years to develop more that we that we're very likely to find more archaeological sites and yet between those up till now we haven't found that we haven't we haven't found all of that intermediate material which is see if i if i could actually see that intermediate material between the upper paleolithic cave art and go back to tapi 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 that go back to tapi but it still looks to me like a transfer of technology unless you can show me that evolutionary process whereby i can understand how this group of hunter-gatherers became equipped to create this giant site where they practiced where they learned the skills to move the stones to organize the workforce to feed and water the workforce in a rather dry place all of that is actually quite a logistical challenge yep and obviously somebody met it somehow some humans yes so the real question is did they have structures did they have agriculture did they have some sort of a community where they lived in an established location i would i would imagine so that would push back the time where we thought that there was a civilization that would push them back into a realm of at least stepping out of the hunter gather stage now your guy schmidt as you show in your book he did not go as far as you said certainly not right but he admitted it's a mystery okay why that would be the scientific approach i don't know what it is great mystery let's just wait and see versus uh i'm going to postulate a lost civilization nothing wrong with that graham it's a free country and scientists do this all the time as as you've mentioned there's a there's a rather humorous thing which i have to say actually i might even ask jimmy to pull up the um the uh couple of images of fingerprints of the gods that's the book i'm best known for uh and when i uh 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 picture of gobecly tepi and the headline civilization is much older and much more mysterious than we thought fair enough okay fair enough and and and scientists do do this i mean i followed paleoanthropology for my whole adult life and one of the big mysteries is how did we get a big brain how do we get to abstract reasoning from from say what chimps can do no one knows the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years because no one knows every couple years there's a new book out it's climate change it was the throwing arm cooking food cooking meat you know meat is another big one a harbor perfect meat okay and these books come and go and some of them have legs some of them don't and it's just the way it goes and then there's terence mekama's pretty obvious it was psychedelics yeah that's terence mekama's not the main the brain begging about that switch the brain on this is the old julian um the uh julian jane's no the bicameral mind not at all this is david lewis williams who's professor of anthropology at the university of whit what is around in south africa his neuropsychological theory of cave art uh all kudos to terence mekama and food of the gods he what a brilliant thinker what a brilliant alternative thinker but david lewis williams at the university of whit what is round had been working on this problem since 1973 and his his argument is that the remarkable similarities that we see in rock and cave art all around the world are explained that we're dealing with a shamanistic art shamanism involves altered states of consciousness this is typical visions of altered states of consciousness and it seems to have accompanied a great leap forward in human behavior and you covered this in your book i covered it in supernatural supernatural as did uh you know richard ringham's theory he's this is a highly regarded scientist at harvard so he's the meat eating guy that you know it's cooking meat right so by cooking the protein that's what gives you the energy to build a huge brain all right so now this guy is starting with 10 10 pluses on his side he's harvard and already respected and even so his book was like me well it's probably a series of different events and a bunch of different factors that's right could be a number of different things so let's get away from gobeke tepi and ancient civilizations and let's get back to the geological evidence which randall you're an expert at and this is one of the main things that you had a dispute with and this is one of the reasons why we got everybody together now what are what is your thoughts on what randall and gram proposed specifically randall who is much more on the geological side of things yeah well this is why i i brought in my phone a friend right geologist so but by way of background after your show i thought you know this let's just give this a fair hearing this is what we do so this will be our cover story and i think the end of summer issue comes out really thoroughly i hope that mark defunct 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 demonstratively false he's on yeah he's there and i'm happy to i'm happy to engage with those with those particular issues well i have to put on my reading glasses and that whatever articles online this has not been published yet well it claims it claims that it's a draft of the article that will appear in a 2017 edition of skeptic magazine so pull it up gram and sure why don't we bring mark on it yeah let's let gram uh go over first so we'll have mark on so here's the font on magicians of the gods and by the way michael i mean you say that you're here to you know to respectfully aim to get at the truth yeah there is conjuring up a lost civilization from yeah let me let me just um get to the top of this uh i've got it here just bear with me a second so amongst the words in mark difance article uh he is accusing me of duping the public he's saying that i'm public enemy number one he's accusing me of arm waving i admit i do wave my arms pontificating well my grandfather was a minister of the church a little interest in peer-reviewed research claimed that no academic would debate that's utter bullshit i had a debate with zahi hawas he's a leading egyptian egyptologist back in 2015 that was not my fault that zahi hawas walked out on that debate i can play the video if you like a minute and a half of zahi hawas lambasting me and then walking out and refusing to debate further so it's bullshit to say i don't debate or i'm not willing to debate and finally he says that i'm conning a hellacious number of people into buying his books now how can we get any dialogue going when somebody begins like that okay then would you like some further bear with me because i just have to scroll down and i don't have a mouse i don't have a mouse so hank hock and carlson claimed several times that no academic would debate them not true i'm accused of doing an about face since since fingerprints of the gods are my i mean are my views not allowed to evolve with with new evidence is that somehow a crime on my part let me just finish then um a cheap shot you know he cites he suskamara um and and and and and accuses me of not real not having the scientific knowledge to issue deal with issues of gravitation now it's true that he suskamara who is a descendant of the incas who has worked 70 years on the megaliths of sakshi huaman whose father before him alfredo gamara 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 um 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 adids etc etc difant doesn't cite that he just presents me as buying what he suskamara says i mean if that's the standard that you're going to have in skeptic magazine you have a serious problem uh and then gobeck litepi uh he contends that gobeck litepi is too advanced to have been completed by hunter gatherers and must have been constructed by a more advanced civilization well no that's not what i say i say it was constructed by hunter gatherers but that they were advised and supported by people who had knowledge of this kind of work beforehand how is that getting getting away i think it's very different i'm not saying it was constructed by i'm saying that that a group of people settled amongst hunter gatherers and transferred some skills for them uh he says that um he quotes me hankok makes the following stunning claim quote our ancestors are being initiated into the secrets of metals and how to make swords and knives i do not make that claim i'm reporting that this claim is made in the book of enoch that is not my claim then what else um so you don't think that's the explanation well i'm i'm being misrepresented by your author here but all right if he wants to represent me if he accuses me of cherry picking he shouldn't cherry pick my statements he should quote it in full context let's get it right well it's out there you don't it's out there on the internet well you still work here's a beautiful one i didn't know it was online here's a beautiful one he cites clausch smith um on the on the character smith makes a salient point almost as if he anticipated hankok'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 shove cave you'll see a lion man holintine start a lion man carved out of carved out of mammoth ivory go to go to shove bison man straddling lion woman her right arm is transferring is transforming into a 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 okay so he's he's taking issue with me because i suggest that the vulture on pillar 43 and 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 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 uh at least there are there are peer-reviewed credential scholars who also agree that that figure is representing the teapot asterism within the constellation of sagittarius no reference to that um shock's opinions were supposed to not go into the minutiae because they've already been dismissed by a study by lyritzis and vafiatu far from it that study doesn't dismiss shock at all none of that study was done on the body of the sphinx itself it was done in the valley and the sphinx temples and by the way the dates are extremely troubling some of them could push it as far as 3600 bc that the work was done or as early in some cases as 1000 bc i don't think that study proves anything and and and so on and so forth just to clarify what you do believe then so that we don't misrepresent you uh so you don't think that the law civilization instructed them on the use of metals i don't know i don't see evidence for that i'd go back but why would you put that in the book then i didn't put it in the book i was quoting the book of enoch it's a huge passage on the on the book of enoch it's me not me who's saying that it's the book of enoch the same i understand but but why all i require all i require your defunct to do is to state that hank hulk is citing the book of enoch he didn't do that okay that is uh what's the what's the word uh disingenuous is that the polite word you guys use but it seems more than disingenuous it's it's a character well but what the question is is why would what's the context of including that in your book i forget well the context is that actually i was i was criticizing zachariya sitchin that's primarily what i was so you don't think that a law civilization instructed the people who built gobekele tepi on the use of metals and tools i see no evidence for that i see gobekele tepi i can't i can't go say they instructed them on the use of metals and tools unless i can find evidence for it well so what did they do we don't they generated agriculture they created a center of excellence around which not the not the they who built gobekele tepi the law civilization that advised them that you think happened yeah what did they do if they they've come through a cataclysm they're survivors few in number this is my scenario you don't have to accept it i'm sure you don't uh they settle amongst take refuge amongst hunter gatherers i mean i don't know you'll probably quite have some survival skills i don't have many i mean if uh if we would have a common impact in the world today which were to take out all the underpinnings of modern civilization uh i i might go settle with hunter gatherers because they're the people who know best how to live in that situation i have no survival skills yeah so go settle amongst hunter gatherers but i might be able to transfer some of my knowledge to them i might be able i might have something that i could transfer to them and i might have very strong reasons why i might not choose to transfer all of it but so in other words perhaps this is what happened okay maybe but how is that different from uh zacharias citchen's that well the aliens advised it well i don't need different i think it's massively different especially since zacharias citchen has his aliens arriving here in 1970s nasa technology weirdly he wrote his book in the 1970s i mean i don't i i i don't go there i don't make that i don't make that suggestion i'm simply saying perhaps there's been a forgotten episode in human history perhaps its fingerprints are present at a number of sites around the world but perhaps the extremely defensive arrogant and patronizing attitude of mainstream academia is stopping us from considering that possibility and therefore i campaign to get that possibility considered and i try to do so with as loud a voice as possible well you're doing it you're doing it man doesn't it disturb you that you i mean you run skeptic magazine and someone publishes something like that i mean that goes against the whole idea of critical thinking i mean it's it's misrepresenting his quotes it's misrepresenting his perspective his point of view it's it's really disingenuous this is one reason we're doing this so we could get his but why would anybody write something like that and why would you guys publish something like that without checking the facts we are uh this was not supposed to be posted online and why is such a good reason why it's online though how does something get online if it's not why such a person who will do that a useful uh contributor to your side of the debate uh well one of the reasons we're here is to get your point of view exactly right all right so you're saying that there's no evidence that any law civilization exists only the nine not saying that only the fingerprints of their their influence on later peoples we do know existed i'm saying there are physical objects i say go back to tepi is one of them i say the sphinx is another but see this is that argument from either ignorance or personal incredulity i don't accept the mainstream or i can't think of how this pyramids could have been built therefore it was built by somebody else through some other technology that's not what he's saying they're just post-dating it i'm just you know the sphinx is older uh i do go with robert schock's argument on the geology i'm also very interested in the astronomy of the site and again i have slides that i could show on this if we have time you might want to get into ed crupp's criticism of the orion correlation and why he says it's up to upside down i can talk to you about that you know we do i mean i i know ed crupp's argument about that and that was from the 90s i think what's your thoughts on robert schock's conclusions i don't that's not something i know much about well you should it's a huge factor it's a huge factor because it's all about water erosion no's about shock and he rejects him on the basis of that paper yeah and that paper really doesn't date the sphinx it works with dating of large blocks in the valley and the sphinx temples there's not a single sample taken from the sphinx all right then who dated it who dated it limits this at bafiyad and then why why do mainstream archaeologist not accept the older date for the sphinx and the answer is because they have a whole bunch of other evidence that points to the date that they think the answer is very to your question is very simple mark laner and zahi hawass put it on record back in 1992 when john anthony weston robert schock first presented the rainfall erosion evidence on the sphinx and what laner 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 gobeck retepe's 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 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 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 is difficult for people to even see the core body of the sphinx today but it's these you can see the vertical fissures even down at the back of there that is that is what schock counts as rainfall precipitation induced weathering heavy rainfall which is selectively removing the softer layers and leaving the harder layers in place and the problem is we don't have that rainfall in giza in egypt four and a half thousand years ago you have to go back much earlier to get that rainfall that's the suggestion so that's the suggestion by robert schock independently yes of your conclusions totally independently yeah schock disagrees with me on many things as a matter of fact and and i disagree with him on many things but i i think he's on the money on this so that alone would set back at least that one i mean it's pretty much established that the great period of giza was constructed about 2500 b.c right absolutely no doubt that a huge project went on at giza around 2500 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 i 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 zep tepe the first time uh astronomically and geologically i and my colleagues suggest that the first time can be dated to the period of about 12 and a half to 13 000 years ago that that was when the site was laid out because there's intriguing astronomical alignments of the great pyramids to the belt of arian i know ed crump has a completely opposite view on this and of the great sphinx to the constellation of leo rising due east housing the sun on the equinox the astrological age of leo again i have slides i can and that was aligned with the geological evidence that robert shock concludes it aligns with the geological evidence the age of leo pretty much exactly spans the younger dryas as a matter of fact and so the only argument against that at the time was that there were no other structures like that from 12 000 years correct and then and then crump said that the that the arian correlation wasn't real uh because it was upside down but do you want to get into that now well first um that's not the only argument it's that okay if the sphinx is built uh or the layout for the whole thing is built in uh you know say 10 11 000 years ago and then and then the pyramids are built you know 2500 bc what happened in between where all the people the trash the places where they lived well there's a bunch of different styles of construction something like that but not dated in between i would propose michael something like a monastery which has a relatively uh 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 is dealing with ideas that are ready best part of 4000 years old if we go back to or the childies and so on and so forth so that's all i'm suggesting really that that the idea is preserved maintain that the the survivors of the survive on the site but in something like a monastery which is 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 behavior is implicated in the cataclysm that takes place and perhaps they didn't want to switch civilization on completely right there perhaps they 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 zosa pyramid at sakara 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 pyramid started already with a level of knowledge in hand yes but okay so here's here's i would think about that there's a lot of perhaps seen and maybes because yes well so you have a bunch of egyptologists and archaeologists who have been working on this site for centuries this is one of the most you know ancient mysteries and so on and so say let's say there's like 20 lines of evidence that point to built roughly around this time period here and then you come on and say okay but there's this one anomaly of the rain thing that and there was only rain at this time now there's a huge gap you have one anomaly or line of evidence here and like 20 here we're talking about different structures so there's not a lot of evidence that points to this finx being from a particular time period well he's saying like 12 000 right i'm saying the rainfall evidence suggests that other evidence at its alignment that its alignment with the constellation of leo housing the sun right at dawn on the spring equinox it's an equinoxial marker nobody would dispute that nobody would dispute that the ancient egypt well no i mean if you make a monument pointing perfectly jewish i've stood on the back of the sphinx at dawn on the spring equinox and believe me again i could show a picture its head lines up perfectly with the rising sun but no i don't think anybody even crop is disputing that it's an equinoxial marker now here's the thing you're an ancient egyptian you're building an equinoxial marker in 2500 bc do you know what constellation is housing the sun in 2500 bc i haven't run the little program where is the constellation of torus so so logically if you're creating an equinoxial and the ancient egyptians were not shy about making images of bulls plenty of them if you're making an equinoxial 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 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 trias okay i'd say that's a pretty big leap well i know you say that and your colleagues also that and so now and then we have a gap of about five or six thousand years where there's nothing there's no yeah please do i'm going to refer back to several articles that were published in the 80s and 90s this one is from 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 in the hydraulic regime of the Nile river it says between 20,000 and 12,000 years before present when timber line 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 entered 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 floodplain 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 the in this regime this intensified hydraulic regime and it says 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 vegetational 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 in the eastern Mediterranean showing that there are sapropel layers which is caused 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 freshwater lid on the eastern Mediterranean that caused a cessation in the the the 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 freshwater 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 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 would have been that their activity would have been interrupted to the extent that it might have taken millennia to recover to get the get the labor force necessary to undertake major monumental programs on the Giza Plateau so so I think that if we assume this gradualistic scenario yeah that's a fair question to ask we're what happened in that interval but if there is a major climatic downturn and a major disruption of the 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 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 that could provide an explanation of why there is a gap there makes ton of sense well it does it because does it not it only if you have to have the sphinx in conjunction with 12,000 years ago in the lost civilization if you just say the 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 yeah 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 got to explain the gap the gap is explained by environmental changes yeah but what is the what is the lots of evidence other than a lot of assumptions it's a lot of maybes it's all i mean actually can you cite me a single contemporary inscription from the date that the sphinx is supposed to have been made that refers to the sphinx uh i'm sorry can you cite a single contemporary inscription contemporary from ancient contemporary to the date that egyptologists ascribe to the sphinx in other words to the rain of kufu can you cite me a single inscription that talks about the sphinx being built this is i i don't study this area i don't know okay well you can't because there is no such inscription okay well so well one would have thought there would be well maybe it's a giant project it's 270 feet long it's 70 feet high it's carved out of solid rock nothing but you have no reference to it at all in the old kingdom you actually have to come down to the new kingdom to get references to the sphinx in inscriptions but you've already said that the pyramids were built at the time we think they were built not thousands i would say that a great deal of work was done on the pyramids at the time of 2500 bc i think the ground plan was laid out and we have like the step pyramid which is cruder and not as well designed as the other pyramids that's that's a transitional stage at that time often argued to be a transitional stage have you you've been to the step pyramid i'm sure no no i'm not right and and you've been to giza though no i've never been to giza oh dear well well they do make a very different impact i mean i've climbed the great pyramid five times and i mean you're dealing with something orders of magnitude different in terms of what's required i mean this thing weighs six million tons it's 481 feet high it consists of two and a half million individual blocks of stone it's aligned to true north within 360 of a single degree i mean to compare that to zoser is really not a valid comparison at all what's more interesting to me is the radical decline that takes place in pyramid building skills in the fifth and sixth dynasty go to unas go to peppy go to teddy at sakara these are shambles you can hardly even recognize them as a pyramid what happened to all that knowledge that's invested in the great pyramid why does egypti devolve so rapidly uh why how do we explain this christine amazing work that's done on the great pyramid unless there's a legacy of knowledge being attached to it okay so every archaeologist egypt egyptian archaeologist and egyptian knows everything you just said they did and they don't accept any of your arguments why not that's why i'm needed because somebody's got to counter this is it just that they're closed-minded and they follow uh zahi avas and they never think for themselves you want to see a close mind i'll play your one and a half minute video of zahi awash refusing to debate with me but but all of them every one of the egyptologists and archaeologists over the last two centuries and so on you know they're all dogmatically closed-minded and they can't see the arguments that clears you or is it they're not convinced by your argument they're not convinced by my argument they genuinely and absolutely believe that their argument is right the notion that i'm proposing is apparently so preposterous to them that it isn't even worthy of consideration but it is worthy of insults and attacks on me on my integrity on my decency as a human being on my honesty all of those things get attacked you know because mainstream 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 i when i see what they do to each other the ravaging attack dogs are let loose on on any new idea i sometimes wish scientists would would actually look for what's good in a new idea rather than what's bad but i i get why they do look for what's bad but in other words a some young graduate student working in that area could make a name for himself by overturning uh you know my son was a young graduate student at the university of kardif studying egyptology he got marked down in his degree because he proposed the possibility that the pyramids and the sphinx might be or might have older origins he was impressed by my work it did him a lot of harm in his degree and and if all this was true uh that eventually you have an answer my point come out and answer my point which is if you go against the mainstream view your career does not progress as an egyptologist i disagree i mean how is it how is it that we know anything that we know about egyptology give me an example from egyptology of somebody who's gone against the mainstream view and been lauded for so doing well look we don't believe everything about it that we believed two centuries ago at say nepolian's right how did all that knowledge come about how did all the change in that science development it only begins with shampolion and the deciphering of the rosetta stone all right how was he able to do that against the mainstream there was no mainstream all right so that he was a saint there was no the mainstream has taken time to form and it's very solid now i mean egyptologists all sing from the same hymn book you'll find very little disagreement amongst them on anything every field but somehow or another einstein managed to to make an impact because he turned out to be right well i'm no einstein and i don't know if i'm right but i'm going to continue to oppose that mainstream somebody has to know that's a valid comparison einstein and archaeology all right well take paleoanthropology i mean it's a completely different field now than a century ago how did that happen if no one ever accepts new ideas they do it happens all the time well they're being forced to accept go back to tepe and that's a new idea that you know 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 in terms of archaeology we're in in the middle of that we're essentially in the middle of that with things like go back to tepe with forbs publishing an article about the younger dryest possibly being impacted by comets and that being one of the causes of mass extinction right and when these are all mainstream ideas now when alvarez proposed the impact hypothesis for the demise of the dinosaurs in 1980 it was ridiculed and and but he turned out to be right and then that became the accepted right it takes time well but what was the key turning people are challenging that wasn't the key turning point the finding of the crater that's what that's what made the difference yes it's kind of hard to argue with that again where's your crater well this is where perhaps we need to bring in our phone a friend you know okay marcum lakomt one of the one of the younger dryest impact impact scientists i mean the the point the point being made is the following firstly that the primary impacts were on ice that 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 uh other craters have been and will be looked at by the team in the in the coming months whether it includes the coruscal crater the quebecia terrain and so on and so forth there are candidates the the crater has not been found yet but i would be surprised if a crater was easy to find when uh you know the impact is on two mild deep ice and you know one of the biggest strewn fields in the world which is the australian strewn tektite strewn field there's no crater associated with that but everybody accepts the impact proxies there's enough of them to to justify that and that's what's going on around this impact hypothesis so on a related question that is not the lost civilizations and the demise of humans but the megafaunal extinction of north american mammals so this has been long debated uh before the impact hypothesis was proposed and the competing hypotheses were over hunting humans just hunted them to the point where 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 over hunted them all right so um 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 uh 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 i there's no evidence that human humans hunted the predators there is evidence that they hunted woolly mammoths but it's a very sparse i mean you have no more than a dozen sites that show association between uh human hunting and mammoths and a lot of those like the lubbock lake site is now being questioned what was presumably what was previously interpreted as being butchering marks on on the the mammoth remains there are now being reinterpreted as possibly natural marks on the 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 10 or 12 million woolly mammoths or 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 and have you ever been to a head smashed in buffalo site yes but but but that's a good example because nowhere did that go anywhere close to exterminating the species of american bison but but each site has its own a particular explanation could be hunting could be a massive flood earthquake whatever they could be a massive flood yes exactly i think there you and i would be in complete agreement to me by massive there's global versus you know local so for example there's 52 mammalian genera went extinct in south america why would they go extinct in south america about the time that humans were moving down there hunting the younger dryer says impact hypothesis includes south america there were impacts there it does and and and you know again the dating of the the migration of humans into south america is controversial at this point um you know there is evidence that humans were there long before you know paul martin's idea of of blitzkrieg requires that the animals be so stupid that they couldn't they they they had no adaptive capabilities to the appearance of a new predatory species but well what is being demonstrated from examining the life ways of of the paleo indian peoples is that they had very diversified diets um and they were hunter gatherers um 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 there was and and fishing um because all of this is being found in the in the camps um and then it certainly doesn't explain the extermination of you know the the cave bears the short-faced bears the camel ops the the giant beavers the giant armadillos the american Pleistocene lion the the the the ground sloths that were the size of giraffes um four species of of proboscidians meaning um mammoths extinct on four continents and to me like wait a second we don't we cannot we cannot invoke a modern example to to say well here is how about the mowery well that's controversial also um i mean they drove the uh mallow birds extinct in past eagle well that's an assumption if you ask the mowery themselves between that and people with adylatiles killing off all the saber tooth tigers and here's another answer to one of your questions you were saying like why would some of the animals be alive well we know that the the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago didn't kill everything right that is a massive impact far bigger than anything we're talking about and many many animals survived that so we don't know why things survive and why they don't it could be proximity to the impact right it could be that their food source wasn't removed it could be that their predators uh were wiped out and they they managed to survive i mean there's a lot of animals that are still that are alive today in this continent like for instance a pronghorn antelope pronghorn antelope uh dan flores who's a wildlife historian wrote an amazing book um on it and we when he was talking about the american savannah during you know like 15 000 plus years ago there was all sorts of crazy animals millions of years ago that were like cheetahs that were running down animals at extreme speeds which is the reason why pronghorn antelopes can run so much faster than any of their current predators something much faster than them was killing them and that was wiped out but they managed to make it one of the reasons why they probably managed to make it is because their predators were wiped out it's weird it's not an even another point michael um if it's overkill um it's it's intriguing that the overkill occurs you know precisely in the younger dryest window because i think you'd agree that now the whole story of the peopling of the americas is 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 bearing 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 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 i mean from evidence in siberia i i don't only mean from evidence in siberia i mean i can cite you from from nature magazine just recently huge huge number i don't think the ucon is in siberia is it no i think the ucon's in north america jack sunk mars you know the excavator of the bluefish caves in the ucon back in the 1970s where proposed was proposing that human beings had been in america's at least 24 000 years ago his reputation was utterly destroyed his research funding was withdrawn he was given no access to grants he wasn't able to do his work he was heavily penalized and punished by the community and now just a few weeks ago we have the smithsonian coming out and saying sorry we got it wrong jack sunt mars was right all along and tom dillahay you know with his work in monty verde the shit that he had to take uh i think we're we're in a very interesting time the peopling of the americas is is really a paradigm that has absolutely been overthrown the notion of clothes first well you disagree with smithsonian then which is fine i'm i do too no the mesa verde you know it's an iso again it's an anomaly it's an isolated site what do you where are all the sites between clovis and monta verde do you honestly think clovis was still first for thousands and thousands of years come on mike and do you think clovis was still first where are all the people between clovis and monta verde not my problem not it is your problem it's not my problem they're there in monta verde and they're there in north america go figure it's more likely that go figure why there's a denis elven trace in south american indians and not in north american indians it's like the nature paper i brought up earlier maybe people crossed the ocean that uh that there were neanderthals are humans in san diego 130 000 years ago okay but when you look at that okay so they have mammoth bones it looks like they might have been broken in the length you know okay and the tools but they're not okay the tool we're kind of changing subjects here though well no no no you try to quibble the evidence of earlier human presence that's right you're trying to quibble it well not quibble just you're quibbling it you're quibbling it and you're going to rewrite the science very what are you saying very specifically that's opposing what he just said the reason archaeologists don't accept earlier than clovis say earlier than about 13,000 14,000 years it's massively it's massively except like say say mesa verde for example okay i have to bring up an image at this point why don't they accept mesa verde they do accept mesa verde as it it is accepted michael are you sure about this as what 24 000 years 15 plus possibly possibly significantly yeah okay so 15 is kind of the outside of the window that humans came across the Bering Strait that's possible not 24 000 years not 130 000 years ago now if it turns out that that nature paper is right and that's confirmed that that does overturn uh the mainstream theory for sure but why would you this is not like your field of study why would you argue against the nature paper let's okay i'll just give you let's quote the smithsonian smithsonian slide number five today decades later the clovis first model has collapsed okay based on dozens of new studies we now know that pre clovis peoples slaughtered mastedons in washington state dined on desert parsley in oregon made all-purpose stone tools that were ice age version of the x-acto place 13,000 that's not no look at the all between that and then 24 000 years down at the bottom michael you know are you saying the smithsonian are wrong on this michael you're jumping to conclusions before you even read that you want to be right so badly you didn't read the part and other animals there hold on a second confirming that humans had butchered horses and other animals there 24 000 years ago it says it right there and you are arguing against it without even reading it which means you want to be right no no that's absolutely what's going on because i have no dog in this fight well why did you read that whole thing before you started pointing at you being correct you published skeptic magazine and you have no dog in the fight you're asking me why don't mainstream archaeologists accept you should be skeptical of clovis first hands about okay call it whatever you want it goes back 11 13 what do you think about what that says that there's evidence they butchered horses 24 000 years ago okay i would have to check the site on i haven't seen this article well now that you have seen it not my problem okay now that you have probably there you say you're proposing this and you're saying there's no evidence you haven't even read the fucking article okay i'm not opposing anything i'm saying you certainly are this is the reason why scientists accept these dates here because there's lots and lots of evidence that is scientists 11,000 12,000 that is that is that is scientists then you say you find one person that says 24,000 another one like two weeks ago this is not one person this is very disappointing that you're arguing this without really doing any research about it and then and then the article is titled what happens when an archaeologist challenges mainstream thinking um and and that's in the smithsonian in the month of march okay jack sunk mars it was a brutal experience something that sank mars once likened to the spanish inquisition at conferences audiences paid little heed to his presentation giving short shrift to the evidence etc etc etc as all was always the same when he proposed that bluefish caves was 24 000 years old it was not accepted what the smithsonian are saying is now this is accepted you need to get up to speed with the data michael okay my my archaeology friends like jared diamond who i just checked with on this who's at ucla well he certainly has a dog in the fight and and uh well he just says here's the problem for 50 years people propose pre-clovis uh examples or sites or evidence they never hold up they always the dating turned out to be incorrect this the carbon 14 was not calibrated right there was this there was that they never hold up it's not essentially you're quoting a friend for 50 years well you're quoting a friend who says the evidence hasn't held up before instead of quoting these articles with these scientists who are talking about the data that's showing that human beings butchered horses 24 000 years ago you're disputing it just because you talked to a friend i'm saying that that has to be confirmed that particular so i argue against it i'm not arguing against you certainly were no i'm just saying that was this am i right i feel you were arguing against it and saying that it's not the case and i don't know and you seem to be if i'm correct you seem to be a clovis first advocate but put your put your reputation on the line and say you i'm not going to put a label on it i'm going to say in the latest evidence that that overwhelmingly shows humans coming across the siberian straits into north america 11 12 13 14 15 000 years ago that they definitely did then they definitely did that and now did they before what could push it back much earlier it would be if they came by boat okay so like where i live in san a barber there are sites on the channel islands that go back 11 12 000 years ago and they came by boat now the problem is is well if they lived on the shores which is where the good fishing and eating is those are underwater and and short of doing good underwater archaeology which is hard to do inexpensive and most of it's probably gone we may never know it's 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 still mainly looking at shipwrecks you know well okay they do that because it's it's you know it's like it's where the light is well it leaves a big unanswered question at any rate so for for the record can i at least say that you completely opposed the smithsonian's position on this and there has been no paradigm shift i will look at this i haven't seen this miso anything all right i'm not aware of the horse find from 24 000 years ago i am aware of the 130 000 year date from the major paper i have a slide on that too uh and and if okay but i think the major speculation tools they're nothing like clovis points it's just a big like hand rock that might have been used it might have been random sorry a big hand rock is all there is before 13 000 years ago no i'm talking about the 130 000 year old 130 000 year old you're talking about the san diego thing we don't we don't need to talk about that why that that raises interesting questions was it neanderthals was it denis sovens was it anatomically modern humans 130 000 years it raises interesting questions or is it a misinterpreted site because they aren't stone tools they're just rocks i'm not pinning anything to that i'm just i'm i'm saying yes that's the question is not necessarily just about the stone tools it's about how the bones were shattered and they believe the bones are shattered deliberately indicating that someone's trying to get at the marrow indicating more yeah maybe or a tractor rolled over it you know a couple years no no no no no no no no no no no no one and no one had excavated that's just speculation on your part immediately this fine on my part this was one of the uh immediately the find has been quibbled by the archaeological mainstream of course it's been published by the archaeological mainstream too and the rest of the mainstream is quibbling it so we'll see how that plays out i thought you said that can't happen we will say what can't happen that the mainstream won't allow uh you know radical ideas nature published it and the idea is being quibbled and 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's a it is 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 say well what could this mean let's let's look into the implications of this i mean if there were neanderthals or denis sovents in north america 130 000 years ago we have a whole new scenario building here that really should interest everyone instead of 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 hasn't been done yet but that instant sort of it's almost like an immune response to a 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 and melanesians but that that denisovan dna doesn't crop up in north american indians how would we explain that if they all came through the bearing strait i have no idea well it could be boats but i mean this just happens to be something i don't know anything about okay so part of the problem of even doing this is that was your idea well here we are talking this is good but part of the risk is that you're going to find something i don't happen to know about and then it's like you see i made my point what point that okay so in in like the history of the peopling of america that that area there's always somebody that comes in with it's you know 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 close-minded although they can be it's that the convergence of evidence isn't strong enough to overturn the mainstream theory so but but it does happen uh you know 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 like 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 where's it's like the gap the five thousand year gap with the egyptian complex where are the sites if it's true we they didn't fly there so how'd they get there well and there must be a trail you know somewhere that we could find unless they came by boat and then that's evidence is or unless you're dealing with 24 000 years ago and there's not much evidence to find that maybe but if they came by boat then that clearly implies they had navigational skills they had the ability to build boats and and you know find your way across the ocean big ocean you can do the coast that's not quite as you don't need a you know big ocean going but you don't need an ocean going but i mean there's one hypothesis that that you know that's proposed is that they came across by uh by boat just following the shore you just the same area as the bearing strait yeah you're just 100 feet offshore you go in and and uh most likely both right and one of the issues of course was the uh short-faced bear was so formidable according to dan flores that it would have been a huge impediment for people crossing on foot anyway and the short-faced bear went extinct right around the time we see more evidence of human beings entering in but why did it go extinct that's the big question well you have to add that to the list of of predators that there would have been no reason for humans to have been hunting yeah well that's an enormous enormous animal so there's sort of two two factors that go on here there's positive evidence in favor of a hypothesis then there's negative evidence against the mainstream hypothesis and you really need both so it's not enough to just say uh i don't accept the evidence for here that okay that's fine scientists do that all the time what evidence what are you well let's speak let's speak in specifics because you keep doing this you keep saying well they find things and it turns out no that's not true and then you're essentially like proving your point of being a skeptic without having any real cases well you just keep saying this all of the cases is it but but no you're not saying you can't say all the cases if you don't want to cite anything specifically don't keep bringing up things that are refuted because you don't have anything that you're pointing to so you're just muddying the water okay you're essentially pissing in the pool no no the clovis thing for example go back to tepi the pyramids all of these what's been disproved no okay i'm making a slightly different point that that's the problem that is that you're not addressing the actual issues we're talking about you muddy the water by saying things have been tossed out the window so we have to be careful here and toss these things out the window as well not toss out just contemplate them published in nature for example so let's watch what happens to the 130 000 year old hypothesis if it if it holds up and there's other sites that are dated that way and so on and so forth and that will be truly revolutionary and scientists would accept it they would 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 um it's difficult it's difficult from a career point of view for archaeologists to come up and propose alternative sites those who did like tom diller hey like jack sank 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 valsikilo uh excavations in in mexico where their 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 were ruined for getting involved in that it's hard to see how that's a profession that encourages people to think outside the box when careers get ruined and research funding gets withdrawn for an idea that doesn't fit the current mainstream my father certainly we don't like to think that that scientists do that they do that are you familiar with michael kramo's book forbidden archaeology i know michael yeah okay so uh now and he makes in my mind as compelling a case as you do and for his humans were here tens of millions of years ago and you know his book is you know 900 pages long tens of millions yeah tens of millions okay and he's a hindu so his idea is you know this sort of long recycling and and what evidence is it based on for tens of millions of years i'm not here to defend michael kremo or to have a discussion about michael kremo that's not why i'm sitting at this table i understand but my point is that michael kremo is not me that's right so but but there's lots of alternative archaeology this is where i began there's lots of alternative archaeology books and right but what evidence is there that supports that none so why are you bringing up that when there's evidence that he's bringing up no kremo's evidence is similar to his it's mostly negative evidence that i don't accept the date of this there is this peculiar sort of footprint looking thing in the mud kremo 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 which do suggest an alternative i would say it's a very useful book to read beyond that i have nothing to say about it right so yeah but that's not necessarily true you're saying his only evidence maybe he's pointing to like some pretty significant evidence like this this fink's thing is is a geologist from boston university proposed this because of water erosion because of water erosion that could have only been done by thousands of years of rainfall in his opinion as a as a qualified geologist and like that's not a lack of evidence i understand but why do no no other archaeologist or archaeologist there are other well that's not true 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 it 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 i mean they have 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 curation 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 a very rounded profile like you see there and 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 it has all of the earmarks of a very textbook case of water erosion don't you think it's very disingenuous comparing that to someone who thinks that human beings have been here for tens of millions of years with no evidence to support it whatsoever well he doesn't say of course he doesn't say he has no evidence he has a 900 page book full of evidence it's the quality of the evidence what about the quality of that evidence it's okay okay if it was that good you know we're not geologists sitting here if it was that good why don't geologists look at it go he's right but they do that's the point they do they all do no they don't all do some geologists some geologists who work with egyptologists say that shock is wrong we have a geologist on the line why don't we ask him mark well we can have one guy's opinion we could also have other guys opinions that we can get i mean this matter has been in the public domain since 1992 it hasn't gone away yeah shock's argument that we are looking at precipitation induced weathering on the sphinx has not been debunked it has been opposed it has been disagreed with but that is different from saying it's debunked and shock stays solid and strong on that issue he is a credential geologist he is a professor of geology at the university of boston he has a right to speak out about this and he stated his view i happen to find his view very interesting especially since it it correlates with what i regard as the interesting astronomy of the site i think that site has origins that do go back into the younger dryas that's my opinion i've stated it many times and i've presented the evidence that i think underwrites that opinion you and your colleagues are absolutely at liberty to disagree and you do you don't think it's disingenuous to compare that to someone who says something that defies our current understanding of human beings and the the actual evolution of humans okay you're talking about someone who's saying that human beings how many millions of years old tens of millions tens of millions well we know for a fact right as far if you pay attention evolution right that's what we weren't even humans a million years ago correct i mean there are creationists who think okay but we're not talking about them we're talking about grammy i know i know but my point was that so here you have the mainstream scientists and so it's like there's gram he seems so reasonable but there's 50 like him and each of them thinks that they're they're right they're not there's your language he seems so reasonable so you you're right there you're accusing me of dissimulation and you're saying there's 50 like me the subtext is that i'm not and then there's 50 like me you're this is more patronizing arrogant i don't mean deeply unpleasant and personal approach gram i'm sorry i didn't mean it to sound like that i really don't okay okay i have a larger point that you accepted yeah that when you're faced with a bunch of different alternative theories that are coming in and it's not it's a take physics i mean every physicist like you just had lawrence crouse 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 and they're smart people they're thoughtful people they really believe it what do you do with that that's my point and i feel that's not my problem and if there are alternative other alternative theories that's not my problem either it's the problem for the mainstream to sort it out and figure which to pay attention to and which not all right well i'm suspicious of this the whole idea of the mainstream because even looking in the mainstream you find so many divergent points of view that i 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 alternative ulterior motives there and that there are no dogmas that are being perpetuated there you know i mean i look at the a lot of the geological stuff and and realize that there are many different points of view when we get talk about the 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 this the comet idea um 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 of individuals involved that set out specifically to to disprove it or discredit it who are now basically on board and it has grown from being a small handful of scientists who are now 63 scientists from 55 different institutions that are on board with the idea that something remarkable happened at the end of the last ice age it was probably exogenic meaning something from outside something from space there's no consensus as to exactly what that was which would be normal because these discoveries are in their infancy at this point but there's been an attempt to discredit the idea simply because that as the evidence has come in over the last decade it has evolved and new mysteries have been opened up as the evidence comes in and the claim is being made well there's no consistent interpretation of this evidence and therefore we've debunked it i mean an example is pinterest's requiem pinterest dalton requiem for the younger dry ice impact hypothesis i mean they've published a paper in pnas saying requiem suggesting that the impact hypothesis is already dead that was in 2011 every single one of pinterest points have been responded to those who are critical of the younger dry ice 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 that referred to or commented upon at all again your your colleague difant has dismissed the younger dry ice impact hypothesis without actually going in detail into the debate that's gone on he has this graph in his paper showing all these uh different dates for the uh these that's from one of the critical papers you know there's another side to this argument so he needs to be he needs to be listening to what the other side would say well that's the point where maybe we should have mark difant come on and maybe we should have uh marcum lacomte come on as well because marcum lacomte is actually one of those 63 younger dry ice impact scientists well what is that we explained to people that are just listening to this what is this graph that you're showing well this is the um carbon 14 date ranges from samples taken from the younger dryest 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 yet absolutely for sure at every site it comes in right there is that they bounce around a lot here so now maybe marc this is you know his area he could come on and skype here they bounce around and what's what's the point of this for the lay person who's listening to this uh well so if you take the ones that are above the gray line then those were those are showing that something like an impact happened much earlier or much later and the ones below it are that it's you know much earlier so where's the consistency of a single impact consistent across that middle of that i don't think there's any argument there was a single impact in fact there's there's arguments that there's no there's more than one date we're talking about a stretch of thousands of years and multiple impacts the younger dryest runs 1200 years randall please please give me your your because you're the expert at this well these are dates for the younger dryest there's a big spread obviously but there's also a lot of possibilities for introducing inaccuracies into the dating the what's called the old wood effect can sometimes uh make uh 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 that the dating might have errors and inconsistencies in it the one article i think that came out last year by james kennet and 25 others was the by asian chronological analysis consistent with synchronous age of 12 835 to 12 735 calibrated years before present for younger dryest boundary on four continents that's a refutation of precisely what you're that is it is it's a reputation of this but mark difant does not refer to that reputation jamie could you pull up uh the age of leo i think i gave that to you um and go to slide number um 167 wow 167 and that that that refers to the go to slide 167 jesus you're not fucking around 167 slides there we go there we go a cosmic impact event at 12 800 calibrated years before present formed the younger dryest boundary layer containing peak abundances in multiple high temperature impact related proxies including spherules milk glass and nano diamonds by asian statistical analysis of 354 dates from 23 sedimentary sequences over four continents established a model younger dryest boundary age of 12 835 calibrated years before present supporting a synchronicity of the younger dryest boundary layer at high probability 95 percent this range overlaps that of a platinum peak recorded in the greenland ice sheet end of the onset of the younger dryest climate episode in six key records suggesting a causal connection between the impact event and the younger dryest due to its rarity and distinctive characteristics the younger dryest boundary layer is proposed as a widespread correlation datum and randall if i can remember what you said correctly you believe that there was probably more than one significant impact over a period of several thousand years let me let me pop in on that very very quickly i don't mean to cut you off but but the the let's be clear the suggestion is that 12 800 years ago uh there was a comments break up into multiple parts i mean anybody who saw the shoemaker levy nine nasa films back in 1994 is aware that that comet broke up into more than 20 fragments all of which hit jupiter uh sometimes creating explosions larger than the earth itself all right so i don't think it's controversial that comets break up into fragments and this is the suggestion of the younger dryest 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 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 there are up to four impacts on the north american ice cap the the the the impact has then continue across the atlantic ocean there's a suggestion of impacts in belgium and indeed as far east as abu hoorah in in in syria it's a it's a global event 50 million square kilometers of the earth's surface is is within the younger dryest 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 dryest 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 dryers fred hoyle back in the 1980s was puzzled by the sudden temperature increase at the end of the younger dryers 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 shock is is in favor of uh extraordinary solar activity being responsible for that warming we don't absolutely know but that that's broadly the suggestion we're at the beginning and the end certainly impacts at the beginning possibly impacts or other things at the at the end well clube and napier and others dunken steel and other astronomers have speculated that there could be impact um eras epochs in which there's a 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 um once in uh 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 it it's um its position in space where it where it emanated its radiant point in space from which it emanated at that time was totally consistent with um the torrid meteor stream radiant so it's very possible that the that the tunguska event of 1908 was a member of that family of meteorites um and so you know that would be again we don't there's no nothing definitive there but it would be a prime candidate for investigation that that perhaps and again i mentioned earlier this goes back to the work of fred whipple way back in the 1940s who began to um research the tarred meteor stream and came to believe that it was much much more active in in the past than it is now that it's an old diffuse meteor stream that at one time um and like graham said you know it's it has multiple objects still within it um comodenky is the best known comodenky is the best known that's a fragment that's a fragment of the original giant of the original giant comet that they estimate might have been um based upon the amount of material still um remnant in the zodiacal light cloud um that perhaps it was somewhere around 60 miles or 100 kilometers in diameter and another thing that i'm that i'm taken to task for is that that i report the work of clubin napier and their suggestion that the torrid meteor stream is actually dangerous and that we should be paying attention to it that it has had 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 torrid meteor stream if any filaments are on an earth uh 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 torrid meteor stream and the possibility that we may face further impacts from it in the future that's not wu wu that is science you know absolutely and i would agree with that and that's that and that is a form of catastrophism uh that scientists accept as they're very real some do that well lots i mean there's you know what if anything do you oppose about what they've just said nothing nothing nothing about the younger dryas period well so i uh just on a technical question you had your slide was 12 800 on there and so get go back to tepi the you know the oldest c14 dates or what 90 so 11 000 all right so that's a 1200 year gap that's a kind of a slow catastrophe well no no go back to tepi we to be very clear about 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 you have a massive spike 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 go back to tepi mysteriously popping up and i know that you're a 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 nine thousand years before the time of solon which happens to coincide with meltwater pulse 1b and the end of the younger dryas which i would have thought would cause you to rethink your position on plato just a little well it's interesting i'm open to the idea i tend to read myths in the same way your guest jordan peterson does that you know it's a story to deliver some sort of moral homily to us it's a commentary on our own culture our society it's a way a literary way of delivering a message to people that's how i tend to read instead of reading i'm like let's see if we can figure out what happened historically but there's hard data there's hard data in plato's whatever you think it is and that hard data is data is that the submergence of atlantis happened nine thousand years before the time of solon that is a date that is 9 600 b c that is 11 600 years ago this to me is a strong reason why we shouldn't just completely dismiss plato's notion of a lost civilization of the ice i'm not against that idea i mean the idea that say the parting of the red sea happened because of some impact i don't i'm not proposing that please don't go there i'm not waste of time okay but but there are people that think that i don't okay or or that the plagues of the bible can be explained i don't go there waste of time but deal with plato all right so but my point is that some of them may have historical origins some of them may be completely made up as mythic stories for some other reason you have to take them one at a time in my opinion the plato one is a commentary on his own culture of athens and being too bellicose being too warlike and that this is not good for where we're going that's my opinion and the fact that he picks a date that coincides with the geologically significant date of flooding it is not really going to change your opinion i think well i think again that's pretty amazing coincidence is it i mean we're finding a connection not plato i mean we're plato said there was an advanced civilization with with advanced agriculture advanced architecture advanced navigational abilities which was submerged by the sea swept from the face of the earth so that mankind had to begin again like children with no memory of what went before and lo and behold he puts a geologically significant date on that a date that we ourselves have only known is significant in the last 20 or 30 years so where is this place this atlantis i mean so as you know there's not my problem there's a there's a long history of people speculating if we found a site that would be a big plus go do more marine archaeology well if we if we take it literally obviously then it's below the ocean but i you know i i don't necessarily take plato's account literally but i do say well it's rather coincidental that he his dating falls exactly on meltwater pulse 1b when we know there was huge influx of water into the ocean and also if we look at the his geography it's interesting because he cites um you know basically a land mass west of the pillars of heracles which is pillars of hercules the straits of gibralter and he places this in the essentially in the mid-atlantic um i think it was crant or one of the comp the the um commentators on on him that said it was something like three or four days sail west but if you look there there is a sunken land mass 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 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 uh rebounded isostatically after the removal of this tremendous mass of ice that that mantled north america up to anywhere from a thousand to possibly 1500 feet well if you 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 a 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 um you know the great basin area was filled with huge lakes um vegetation forests savannah and grasslands um like graham said um with the lowered sea level there were much larger areas of the coastline that were exposed um and that's probably where most of people would have resided during the ice ages 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 the that those islands most likely had a a benevolent climate during the ice age so i i don't go into you know crystal technology and 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 uh in my mind even the idea that a more advanced sophisticated technological quasi technological culture co-existed with hunter-gatherers isn't too strange i mean we just had the 20th century we do so today we coexist with hunter-gatherers in the amazon jungle who don't even know we you know we exist i mean so i i don't see i don't see why a priority that's just an impossible idea to look at my misremembering that you uh in your book you mentioned indonesia as a site for atlantis i mentioned i mentioned gunung padang not as a site for atlantis that's danny hillman nattuwajaja who is a geologist um he's indonesia's leading expert in mega thrust 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 uh is a site from atlanti in times danny has danny has proposed that now what's interesting about indonesia is that indonesia sits upon the sunda shelf and the sunda shelf was one of the parts of the world that was most massively flooded at the end of the ice age i mean if you go back to the end of the ice age you're not looking at the malaysian peninsula you're not looking at the indonesian islands out going out towards the philippines you're looking at a giant continent-sized land mass all of which went underwater at the end of the last ice age really rather rapidly so i think he has a point i think it's an interesting it's 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 the connection of australia to new guinea during the ice age was also washed away there's there's there's a you know a whole range of of issues regarding sea level rise in that very area which anybody with an interest in these subjects should be paying attention to so it's 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 yeah that's a with this is the thesis of that book i mentioned noah's uh flood that the the two geologists with the black sea theory uh that there were you know it was rimmed with uh small villages and you know the massive flooding almost instantly wiped out and then that gets passed down as you know the oral tradition is these myths to me that seems totally reasonable totally reasonable yeah well why don't we get into more discussion about the actual impact hypothesis and the mega flooding so that we can get our uh you know our guides on standby get them involved what is your geologist your geologist it's you're by yourself and there's two of them um what is your that's only fair right what is your geologist opposed to what uh randal and gram are proposing i i think it's the uh on the impact hypothesis versus the um multiple glacial dams that burst over periods of time like that i have that slide okay let's call him up and get him on skype and we've never done this before so this might suck well hopefully it'll work see this this slide here um he is showing these are each independent carbon 14 dates of these different instant floods in north america right from in in each individual ice dams and what separates these dates uh they're separated by well looks like from 20 000 to 12 000 so all before uh the impact well 12 800 wasn't that one oh yes marks on the line so it's marks on the line uh what is this mark would it mark can you hear us yes i can hear you mark defend mark defend thank you very much for doing this we really appreciate you coming on here it's my pleasure uh so you've had a chance to listen to these uh guys talk what what is your thoughts just stepping into this cold well first of all uh i did not mean to upset mr hancock uh he seemed to be quite disturbed and i want to apologize if i've disturbed him no no you haven't you haven't disturbed me and i'm not i'm not upset it's just simply that you're extremely selective in what you present in your in your draft admittedly draft article that you've chosen to put online uh you don't represent you don't represent me accurately let me go ahead and answer his question because i know we're getting short on time no no no we're we have plenty of time we have plenty of time okay well first of all could i would you allow me just to address uh go back please happy for a minute sure would you like to address the article first i think that probably would be the most fair since we just brought that up okay uh i'm sorry what what was the question then gram well the question i i read out on air various passages in your article where you misrepresent me um no i did sorry no i didn't misrepresent you you didn't misrepresent me okay so in fact you you said that that i said that uh that i was actually talking about someone in indonesia when i said you didn't understand newton's physics you know i didn't say i'm sorry i didn't say i didn't say you were talking about someone in indonesia i said you were talking about heisus heisus gomara in um in peru is who i was talking about and heisus gomara does have very exotic views on gravitation which i state seriously are not my interest i do say he may be right but i don't say he's right i say this is not my interest and i go on to say what my interest in this is his work you pick up here you're drowning me out here i was asked to explain whether or not i thought i was misleading and i don't think i was misleading you clearly stayed in there that maybe gravity was due to the way uh we've changed orbits around the sun gravity is not due to that it's due to no i don't state that mass and the inverse of what what do you mean i don't state that heisus gomara states that and i say i disagree with it come on i say i disagree with it i want to be i want to be respectful i can't really hear you when i'm talking i apologize but i i feel like uh you've you are selecting selectively changing the meaning of what i'm saying well why don't you why don't you quote me as these words from my text when you say that i buy the gravity thing of heisus gomara why don't you quote me when i say hold on this is just the opposite of that what i go on to say not quoted in the attack is the following quote however this isn't the part of his theory i'm interested in where i feel he is solidly persuasive is in his observations of the anomalous character of the monuments of the andes i am not pinning anything on heisus gomara's gravitational ideas i am saying very clearly what it is in his approach that i am interested in i'm not going to dismiss all of his approach because he has an approach on gravity that you don't like that's not even of interest to me and i say so in the book you don't report that therefore i suggest you misrepresent me well mr hancock what i brought up uh him for was simply to state that you didn't understand and i say it right there that you don't understand newton's physics but i'm not even talking about newton's i'm not talking about it just if you don't understand newton's simple physics i am not talking of newton if i if i wished if i wished to make an argument about gravity i wouldn't go saying that that isn't the part of heisus gomara's theory that i'm interested in i'm interested in the other aspect of his work his observations through years of field work my point was simply to point out that you didn't understand newton mechanics i don't think about this stuff you're completely wasting time here okay grant we uh the way the article is hold on a second hold on let these guys talk about we did misrepresent him we did yeah the way the sentence is structured uh it's clearly out of context we're we're changing we're gonna change that yeah i was taken out of context and that's what i'm object part i'm not sure why he included in the book in the first place but he's not arguing about uh the gravity at all so we will fix that maybe we could get straight to the the flooding thing that uh that uh as long as gram is fine with that i mean gram i know there was something else yeah the other the other thing that i i find to be misrepresenting is that the statement yet hankok 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 the fact does not tell his readers is that i make that claim i don't make that claim i am actually reporting what is said in the book of enoch that's not me who say well that's the book of enoch gram we'll fix that okay otherwise let's get let's get back to the main meat of this for god's sake just give me the list of things that you know and i'll fix i will fix them yeah okay that's not the point of that um well mark you're obviously very critical of gram's work and uh maybe erroneously so but let's let's get to what you think about what you've heard so far all right mr ogan um i i don't want to come across as a as a pompous scientist what i want to do is i want to protect people from these grandiose uh assumptions gram in his first mr hancock in his first book please call me gram fingerprints please call me gram okay gram in his first book in fingerprints suggested that that there was a a continent uh where the civilization lived and through some machinations this continent uh went south and ended up destroying that civilization well as a geologist that that's just 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 so i'm sure this this famous civilization is supposed to exist so mark is duping people i don't know if he means to do it mark certainly seems to be duping mark all my work is in print and online i mean i see that i gather that you see your role as a protector for the public obviously you feel that the public are not intelligent enough to make discerning decisions of their own in this respect however to address saying that the public doesn't understand the science okay so to the degree that you're misrepresented so they need the superior knowledge of mark defant in order to understand we'll find i think they need the knowledge of science okay well that's okay knowledge that i have let me come to your point which is you're saying that i proposed one mechanism for cataclysm in fingerprints of the gods and that i'm proposing another mechanism for cataclysm today what i proposed in fingerprints of the gods was that there had been a gigantic cataclysm in the ballpark of 12 500 years ago i looked at a number of possibilities of which the most striking to me at the time was earth crust displacement and earth crust 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 uh explains the information since i wrote fingerprints of the gods i've learned a lot i've learned 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 the paperback edition of magicians of the gods but it contains a chapter saying whatever happened to earth crust 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 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 uh i'm 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 you are applying that there are a lot of people out there to believe in this there are there are some people that believe in it i agree but for the most part i think taking an honest view the common hypothesis has gotten debunked well that's complete rubbish that's complete rubbish 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 and we could all be dead by now i have absolutely changed my mind on the mayan calendar uh 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 uh 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 but i'm not i'm not means yes i know exactly what precession means okay well all of this stuff that you claim is on a precession a precession is the is the the earth spinning like a top don't teach with running through comic 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 uh right now sometime during the next 40 years that's what you said in magicians no that's what that's what big that's what victor club and bill napier and amelios pedicato say i'm a reporter you're the one that said in your book you just got all over and i make mr shermer michael shermer for for saying the same things about other people i want to know what you think but mark you told me what you think i am a reporter and i make it very clear you can't cop out on it hold on let me finish you're talking about science mark we gotta we can't talk over each other i am a reporter and it is my job to report the work of other people and i report the work of victor club bill napier and amelio spedicato all of whom draw attention to the torrid meteor stream and who regard it as the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at this time and who specifically indicate that we may run into a filament of the torrid meteor stream in the next 30 years that is going to be very bad for our civilization it's not my thing to do with precision procession when when did i say it had anything to do with precession you have a whole section of procession in magicians of the god 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 torrid meteor stream and go find the paragraph where i say that no no no what you're saying is that we're on a cycle that 12 000 years ago this civilization was destroyed and now you're saying 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 yeah you didn't say doomed in magicians like you did in fingerprints but we we must conclude that that's your opinion because i don't know anybody else that you've referenced on that issue well the procession has nothing to do with that it's not even on that cycle i never has a cycle of about about 21 000 years 25 cycles are you in on 25 920 years actually for precession one degree every 72 years give or take a small margin that is the procession you're really you're really teaching grammar to suck eggs here so so anyway i i 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 you and say oh no you can't say that because it's not about me it's not true you're you're doing the same thing you're reporting about other people and saying nonsense yeah i'm reporting i'm reporting the work of victor clue bill napier and amelio spedicato and i also i also indicate that i strongly support that work that's as far as i go mark if i could stop you here you so you think that this comment wiping out all the ice age megafauna theory has been debunked is that what you're saying no sir i have not saying that but i think that if you read the literature carefully the majority of scientists right now and i know that this is still 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 his group has come back with a lot of good stuff so i want to wait and see this play play out i said that in my paper that we're going to have to wait to 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 are getting hit pretty hard what do you take what do you make of the latest platinum paper in nature's scientific reports the platinum anomaly across north america and it's coincident uh in time with the greenland ice cores and the platinum anomaly there what do you say to that well i say that and maybe we can bring him on uh the problem with that is is that what does platinum have to do with the comet you know platinums are high in asteroids but they're not high in comets comets are icy bodies i saw the paper i read it um i think it's interesting but i i can't for the life of me figure out how he's correlating it uh he has in in the different areas of the clobus he has platinum concentrations that are that that are seemingly not matching up they're outside the the younger dryas uh they're inside the younger dryas i'd like to i'd like you to show those let's bring let's let's bring it's hard to understand what he's trying to say let's bring it doesn't refute the common hypothesis let's bring markham on since he's one of the co-authors of the um platinum paper this is going to get super complicated but let's try to do one color at a time we can only do one color at a time apparently well i think my markham you know should should should have his voice i don't want to criticize him if he can't be here that's okay but i'd like to do is he can be here a little bit if i may about uh go go becky tepi because i've read uh schmidt i know that schmidt never uh ever found anything to suggest that there were anything in the early part of go becky tepi that that were not hunter gathers they all were hunter gathers you know he found 20 i think i i may be wrong on this but i think he found 22 000 stone tools there uh when he dug that place up i've not never found any domesticated animals he never found any domesticated grain he he found tons of bones of animals so we know that about 100 to 200 people were probably working on go becky tepi at one time and they were fed by wild animals and grain so there's no reason to go out on a limb here and say that some magical civilization came in and by the way that's another thing that drives me crazy you're saying that these guys were magicians you're saying that they had secret knowledge what possible secret knowledge did they give to the people that go back to tepi how can you possibly say i'm not saying that the word magicians of the gods comes from the apkalu in ancient sumer and they were considered to have superior powers and they were considered to be magicians of a sort and i should i not report that because it's there in the samarian text what michael's been asking all day is what were their superpowers i'm not saying that they had superpowers it's the samarians who said that i simply report that you can regard that as a cop out if you like but i am a fucking reporter magicians of the god because that's the direct implication of the apkalu they were the magicians of the gods like you're saying they had magical powers to me no i'm saying that they were the magicians of the gods as they were called in an ancient culture that's all 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 date with dates and everything he found that there were hunter-gatherers they're building those megaliths i don't know if you went to if you went to easter ireland can i see you found the the moai and 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 uh sorry are you saying i have to call a superior civilization are you seriously are you seriously saying that the inhabitants of easter island were hunter-gatherers well absolutely and in fact in fact we saw that little island of the pacific ocean they had no agriculture are you saying that the pacific ocean until about 1000 years ago unhealed until about 1000 years ago what do you think they hold on a second weren't uh a big civilization mark please let him respond go ahead well first of all have you met did you meet klashmit do you know him personally well you know he's dead and you know that i haven't met him okay well i did meet him i do know him personally i know i did record i did record my interviews with him with his agreement and and what he states clear i don't disagree with you that the people around gobeck lee tepi were hunter-gatherers when gobeck lee tepi was started what precisely intrigued claus smith was the possibility his phrase not mine that gobeck lee tepi was a center of innovation a place where new ideas were deliberately seeded and spread out in the population i have claus smith 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 gobeck lee tepi at the time that gobeck lee tepi is functioning what do you mean by sudden i add to that what i mean by what i mean by suddenly is claus smith that stated very clearly that these are the people the very same people who made gobeck lee tepi in claus smith's view are the people who quote unquote invented agriculture if you don't mind me interrupting for a second what what about easter island was easter island established by hunter-gatherers or not you were saying not yet you say you say it was established by hunter-gatherers i say not i say easter island was an agricultural society what's it what's that to hunt and gather on a tiny island have you been to easter island i have six times and you know you can walk across it in three hours what's that a hunt and gather on that oh you know you're misunderstanding my point my point is that these are not sophisticated people okay but sorry you said you agree with you on gobeck lee tepi uh i think that you got schmidt right and in fact it's a unesco site we all recognize how important it is but what what what i think michael and i can understand is how this ties into some some magnificent civilization there's nothing there that indicates that they were influenced by some other civilization except they had they started out as hunter-gatherers and then they evolved into uh um uh agriculture society and that's what makes it a great site can i answer you you're seriously saying that there's nothing there i mean the largest megalithic site on earth seven thousand years older than stonehenge is there there's no background to it no evidence of practice or trade the megalithic site itself is the problem for me okay i honestly we've got megaliths in quite a few sites and by the way you're right there's a megalith just down the road from gobeck lee tepi and there probably so that several other i i can see him on maps yeah we need to get to the bottom of this wonderful amount of work to do there you bet so i think you grammar and good agreement on this okay so i want to point out is is that i don't think that there's any any need to call upon uh this great civilization that you you say exist well to me the simplest explanation is a transfer of knowledge a transfer of technology i've i've been writing about the possibility of a lost civilization for more than 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 you know you were well you did use the word conning actually it's in the very last paragraph of your article because i got it right here in front of me we will fix that you did use the word conning michael this is the first thing i wrote i just put it up for my students well it's there it's there wait wait wait a second hold on one second i am left i am left with what i am left with is that hancock i mean i'm going to put my reading glasses on so i can read this properly what i am left with this is quoting you mark is that hancock has a real knack for conning a hellacious number of people into buying his books i mean that's a direct and hominem insult it's online in your article do you stand by it or not listen i apologize to you for the use of that language is that what you want here because i do sorry you used it in the first place i think you're misleading your students why would you say that you're just putting that online for your students as if that's not a big deal you're putting it on the internet and just saying you're just putting it online for your students and you've been proven incorrect and how many different times in this article now well about seven incorrect i haven't been proven incorrect well you have you missed quote me you don't give you don't give the context and even even michael and even michael has said that the skeptic article will not will not reflect these out of context statements that you're making here right so the core is is the impact hypothesis likely to be true or not and as an independent phenomenon is it connected to go back lee tepi and the younger dryas i mean that's kind of what we're getting at so right then we can maybe you can explain that graph that shows all the the glacial dam bursts and the dating of those as as thousands of years before the 12 800 year impact can we put the map up first we need to map that you guys can get into what is that what does that mean well which map is that which map on your um which map mark uh i'm sorry it's the glacial map uh western washington or washington state in organ yeah okay jamey put it up and and by the way uh i i should to protect michael here i i submitted this michael made immense amount of changes on that paper i put it up because i wanted my students to see it i had no idea that people would go online and look at that like you know but good lord and unfortunately you've sent tens of thousands of people probably to it by letting them know it's on here and i'm sorry for that well anyway let's go but why is it okay to just put that up online for your students yeah i don't know why you why how come you don't have any problem with that but you do have a problem with it as it stands being released to the general public um well you know i think maybe i think i stand by everything i said except for the the personal comment at the end well we'll see if that's okay so let's say the editing process yeah let's okay let's put up this map let's get back to the map okay the brown areas are now i have to emphasize that that the scablands is very famous people have been working on geologists have been working on this for more than a hundred 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 uh is the columbia lake and the other one on the far right over in montana uh that's lake musulo now i i guess my my point here is is that you guys want to make the flooding out here to be immense and i i think bret's you know original idea was that there was just one flooding but then brex came to to understand after looking at the data and all of the geology 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 were 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 uh uh 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 comma strike comet strike not even the comet guys are saying that this flooding out here is related to a continent because there are a large number of area a very small number of of area actual area that is flooded if you take a look now at my dates or not my dates but the dates uh do you have that michael the one with uh we're going to bring that up but uh let's let randal carlson address you now because he's the one that's the expert of this i mean he's he's got a point that if you just look at if you can find your 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 um the work of uh kee hew and lord in the midwestern states um south dakota north dakota uh eastern montana you've got massive spillways out there that discharged off the ice sheet you have glacial river warren that was undoubtedly uh formed by most likely glacial lake agassiz uh and you've got um the st croy 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 dales um there are the finger lakes in new york that probably were created by uh massive floods emanating off of that scoured scoured exactly right they were scoured and they were probably scoured by sub-glacial floods that were coming under high pressure because you know you have the drumland fields that are just to the south of them and you've probably seen the work of john shawn uh claire beaney and ruse reine and those out of canada i think shawn's idea about drumlins is crazy well why why would that be why would how do you propose the drumlins then were formed oh easily uh the glaciers came forward and topped topped the the terminal moraine and spread the the moraine's out to the into drumlins it but how i mean you've got you've got features that look like they're totally fluvially produced you have they look like inverted boat else you look at the internal stratification how does glaciers create internal stratification i've looked at i've looked at at numerous drumlins um 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 if glaciers are grinding over a deformable substrate how is it that they produce anything other than a a chaotic jumble of glacial till you can actually see layering i've seen it myself and we can pull up pictures of it here in a minute and i'd like for you to explain it to me before you do that because i'm not disagreeing with you okay a drumming by definition is made up of till i think we're getting kind of technical for this audience but you know an esker is something that's stratified not a drumlin so you're you're miss you're misidentifying them as drumlins no i am not misidentifying drumlins i know very clearly the difference between an esker and a drumlin i've looked at many eskers i've hiked on them i've i've flown over an airplane the finger legs are gouged they are gouged yes are they gouged by glaciers or are they also gouged by subglacial mega floods that's the question and that i think that's a fair question to ask and if we look at some of the studies we find out that the that the depositional material in them is massive it's not stratified it's massive as if it was dumped in there over a very short period of time let me go back to the uh to the bigger picture but hold on a second what's your point about that well sorry joe i can't hear you i'm sorry respond to that what he just said what am i responding to oh look we're gonna have to disagree i mean what am i supposed to argue i don't want to get in an argument with him here he thinks that they're done by water i think that the traditionally the way most geologists see the grit 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 well let me go back up to the to the main glacier uh the lorenti glacier wally broker suggested in nine in the 90s that water potentially was changed from flowing down the mississippi valley uh into the atlantic or the arctic no one has been able to find any evidence of flooding towards the atlantic or the arctic so when you say there are all kinds of evidence of flooding up there wally broker backed off of his of his theory because we couldn't find any flooding what he backed off of was the the idea that the draining of glacial lake agassiz triggered the younger dryas because the the the dating of the draining of glacial lake agassiz was post-younger dryas and so that's what he backed off of he didn't necessarily back up look we know that there were that there were somewhere rains have been carefully uh they've been carefully mapped you can watch the lorenti glacier move back moraine after moraine and there are no holes in that moraine that that suggests flooding there's no change in the lake level of lake agassiz there's no evidence there randal for flooding you've got it wrong if you look at the mapping that the careful mapping that the geologists have done you've just said that there was no change in the level of lake agassiz how is that possible i mean as the ice receded the glacial lake agassiz expanded and at some point it finally breached right there at by big stone lake in minnesota and and basically carved out the minnesota river valley which geological studies have confirmed they call 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 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 in which cases that creates copious amounts of water i think you guys referred to it the last time is a tsunami there's no evidence of a tsunami in north america have you and by the way here's another question why do you guys why are you guys talking about north america when your atlantis is supposed to be in egypt or or you guys have run around you found some evidence of flood in north america and somehow this relates to uh a destruction of atlantis and some lost civilization well that's not forget that that's not what i'm talking about right now i'm not talking about that we know there was a fan of scandia and ice sheet we know there was accordion i sheet we know there was a lorentide i sheet we know they all melted we know that there was somewhere around six million cubic miles of ice wrapped up in those uh in those ice sheets at the end of the at the late glacial maximum they're all gone now they had to melt that was an enormous amount of water and i don't know if you have been out to the scab lands i've been going back to the scab lands and the area of glacial lake mizula since 1970 i've been across that thing 60 000 miles back and forth i have over 10 000 photographs of the material in the field and i can tell you those floods were enormous they were beyond cherry picking look at the map you've shown some pictures you know we can measure those current ripple marks that you show we can measure how much water went over them all you have to do is measure the current ripples you can go into camas prairie and you've got a current ripple field there that is about seven miles long the i know i know it very well okay and the high water mark in there is at 4200 feet above sea level the floor of camas prairie is just 1400 feet lower than that so we know that there were 1400 feet of water that passed through camas prairie and down into the flathead river no no we don't well because then are you disregarding are you disregarding the high water mark from the bottom up from the bottom of the canyon to the top of the canyon is not what it was when the water first started flowing in that area you can't take the bottom of the canyon and say oh there must have been 4000 feet of water here i'm not talking about a canyon i'm talking about camas prairie basin which is not a canyon it's a basin well it had to erode at one time well most of the material in there was washed in so i mean we don't know how much it would have eroded until somebody does some core samples to get down to something that can be dated to earlier you know than the late glacial maximum but the floor of camas prairie is is thick layers of very coarse gravel boulders and this is what composes the the current ripples that you see there i mean i i don't see how you can look at those current ripples that are sometimes 40 and 50 feet in amplitude with two and 300 feet cord lengths and say that that wasn't a catastrophic flow maybe it wasn't it was a catastrophic flood but it wasn't like a tsunami well then how would you characterize it there and and we can you know we can do we can play this game are you saying there are are every geologist on the planet practically says that there were about 40 different floods until you came along no no no no you're obviously for somebody not familiar you're not familiar with the work then a victor baker a russel bunker or a number of others that have challenged the 40 floods hypothesis and are you going to tell me that those current ripples in camas prairie are created they're the product of 40 separate floods oh absolutely in fact when you show them your pictures i could see the flow changes in that oh don't give me the the your incredulous stuff i'm sorry this doesn't mean you're right you do you do the incredulous all the time mark well so that's because you say some pretty incredulous 40 floods created the camas prairie i want that's what you're saying that's what that's the product of 40 separate floods those current i don't know how many floods have been in there i know that there are they're going they're counting them and i and i last read something the effect of 40 somewhere around yeah that's based on the work of richard weight goes back to the to the early 80s and i think he's got no don't go go to go to his graph can we go to his graph who's graph which graph is this mark uh it's the one right below the map yeah this one it's the dating of the floods here we go we're at that right now i think i hopefully hopefully we're disagreeing uh in it as comrades here i'm just trying to give you some data here look at those uh those are mezula floods uh late late mezula he's got him dated you're seeing the dates he's got standard deviations one and two standard deviations on on on on the median there uh so we've got these these things pinned by multiple carbon dates the the little bell curves there show how many carbon dates he's got and you can see that that these are documented very very well yeah so i don't understand why you're you're so opposed to multiple floods in fact i heard in the last time you guys were on this show i heard you say that you thought there were multiple floods now you're trying to argue against that idea i am not i i'm still i still think there were multiple floods i think we have to look at two distinct regimes of floods though and and and as far as the 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 the time of the flood but was excavated by the flood and trained into flood waters and then redeposited so you know that that that's a major problem with radiocarbon dating anytime you look at flood sediments and i do believe there were multiple floods that's uh 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 i my approach to this is just like you know in the mma when two guys get out there and try to beat the crap out of each other and then at the end of it they give each other a hug that's kind of where i'm coming from so you know there's nothing personal here you can give each other a hug but i feel the same way and by the way you guys are very bright and and very knowledgeable well you know i i i really value this because i'm looking for you know i'm looking for holes in this idea very much so and 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 the main geologists that have worked on this and had a chance to dialogue with them and and you know i i'm convinced that you know there's still some there's a lot to be learned about this and and i think we need to be looking at like you said the big picture um 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 drumlands and how they formed um you know there is studies on the valley heads moraine 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 there it's water deposited but 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 we try to get to the bottom of what actually happened without you know imposing too many preconceptions upon our models because i think we're looking at something very unprecedented here um randal i couldn't have said that better it was very well articulated let me go back to the big picture if i could just for a minute because i i want us to to address something that gram said earlier and and that is that gram seems to have this idea that that comets break up all the time but but people that understand um i think comets and meteorites understand that though the the comet schumer levy or whatever it was that broke up shimeko levy nine it broke up because of the gravitation of jupiter uh we would not expect these comets to break up uh entering into the atmosphere is one of the problems that the comet people have had a 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 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 uh 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 credit do you know that that they're suggesting that a four kilometer comet if it could break up it would generate one million uh crater um meteor craters you know how big that was that was 49 000 years ago we we don't see that in the in the climate record 49 000 years ago we should see it we don't see it it's barely a little thing markham le compt has been standing we're gonna have a huge comet strike markham le compt has been standing by for the best part of three hours and since he's a member of the comet research group wouldn't it be a good time to bring him on yeah we we can bring him on uh as long as mark has satisfied that he said his piece uh but unfortunately mark we can't have uh two people on the phone at the same time okay well i i really appreciate you having me on joe i appreciate you coming on too and i'm glad you guys especially you and randall seem to have uh ironed out a lot of your uh ideas well i think there's a great guy there's a lot to be learned here obviously and there's a lot that already has been learned and this is an unbelievably fascinating subject and i think oftentimes when these debates get heated a lot gets lost in who's wrong or who's right but i think what we can all agree on is that what we're dealing with is an unbelievable point in history and the history of this planet and trying to figure out what caused it and why is uh some really fascinating stuff so mark i really appreciate your time and really appreciate you uh imparting your knowledge on us mark if it all possible i would love to kind of keep some of this dialogue going because i i really would value your input um i tried to write you randall um and i couldn't get through i don't sure why i'm not either because if i would have seen that i definitely would have responded so well i have a website please send me i'd love to i will i will definitely connect you guys um after this uh is over and thank you once again mark really really appreciate it if i can just say i i do hope you'll revisit your article and just have a look at the context and wish you present me there absolutely never mentioned so thank you thank you mark okay now uh we are going to call caller number two this is uh it's a fascinating podcast though and uh your friend who's waiting is markum lacomte markum he's one of the comet research group scientists uh this is a large and diverse body of of scientists who come at it the material with different expertise and different areas of knowledge uh it happens that malcolm is a co-author of the recent diary guard a tiny significant paper uh finding a platinum anomaly across north america uh and i would hope he might begin with a with addressing uh why that might indicate a a comet impact right is malcolm on you should be malcolm can you hear us i i can hear you excellent how are you malcolm thank you very much for joining us i'm happy to be here uh so give us your thoughts on what gram just said if you would as to why uh why it makes sense that it was a comet that hit and why there would be these uh large deposits of these what was it exactly platinum in the recent paper but but malcolm is also an expert in magnetic microspherules and i think he can address that issue as well and the whole range of proxies of impact proxy now mal and malcolm please just give us your thoughts on this entire phenomenon if you would i will um happy to be here happy to have you is he breaking up no go ahead go ahead malcolm i think there's an issue seems to be yeah can you i know what is going on i've got a uh feedback i've got to turn off this okay yeah you got to mute that uh other video oh okay okay you're listening to us at the same time as talking to us here you're gonna get you're you're getting us on like a 40 second delay or something exactly yeah okay we go now actually i was very interested to hear marx uh his initial statement kind of put me off but his uh his subsequent statements i thought were were were pretty accurate and uh there is there are many problems with the the uh the hypothesis that there was an impact and that's the way i consider i don't really think in terms of a common impact i think in terms of an extraterrestrial impact because i don't think we've proven a common impact i don't think we've proven we i don't think we know what kind of an impact it was there's too many questions that have to be answered uh so i can't sign up to say that i'm defending the common impact hypothesis because i don't frankly know what it was uh we have a lot of evidence that appears to be extraterrestrial in nature we have magnetic microspherals i can give you the most frequent criticism we get is that the the evidence has not been replicated and that's where i thought mark was going when he his initial statement was that the common impact hypothesis has been debunked and i think what he meant was if i can speak for him um was that the fact that it was a comet has been debunked i don't think that's necessarily true yet it just isn't indicated that uh that it was a comet it's we have indications that it was more of an asteroid hit than anything else and and i can conceive of a rubble pile that somehow became uh disassociated although there'd be there'd have to be a mechanism or a model for that and i don't think we have a model for that um asteroids come in many flavors and rubble piles are certainly one loose loose aggregates of material that could become separated possibly but uh i just don't you know i just don't know at this stage um i guess the uh the biggest criticism that we faced in terms of of the impact hypothesis is that the evidence has not been replicable and we now have i guess four three or four uh evidence lines that have been replicated by numerous independent groups look at the nanodiamonds which may be the most controversial of the bunch of the evidence lines that's been that's been replicated by four different groups independent uh five different studies the magnetic microspherals which were initially uh treated very hostile 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 there's the same objection or criticism is being made magnetic microspherals are typically very well they're melted and then they're quenched uh they they're subjected to high temperatures and then those temperatures are 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 and including many of the same sites that that were originally disputed so then the disputation has been largely based upon the failure to do the most basic part of the of the protocol which is to to do the scanning electron microscopic analysis of the spherals okay that that is the uh 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 not a lot but there have been certain sites that are rich in iridium at and once again this is at the under driest boundary not above not below it's there at that boundary so that date seems to be pretty solid and iridium is indicative of an impact of extraterrestrial origin correct that's correct the platinum is simply just another more more plentiful uh platinum group element obviously that's why they're called the platinum groups uh osmium is one that is usually associated with iridium there are now 11 studies by independent groups that have confirmed the uh the occurrence of platinum osmium or iridium so it looks to me like the evidence is piling up uh the most recent one of course is the platinum study by more that just came out a few months ago now randall carlson just i'm sorry to interrupt you but randal carlson just had us pull up some images that we're looking at randal please explain what this is well this is from uh malcolm's 2012 um independent evaluation of conflicting microspheral results from different investigations this is his supplementary information figure four so it's just so that that the people watching this can can actually see what you're talking about when you're um discussing the rapid quenching effect on the surface of the microspherals so so we've got up on the screen here um supplementary uh information figure four where you've got the microspherals from toffler black water draw and pawpaw cove so just just so people can see what that surface texture looks like uh 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 they actually see these what we call dendritic structures or or uh almost like a carpet uh weave those are essentially truncated crystallization it's uh 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 uh yeah the fact that these are enhanced these these things are quite enhanced at the ever dry ice and really depleted above and below now there are spherals throughout the column any column of of soil uh when you go down vertically uh deeper you find spherals but those spherals are typically what we call orthogenic which means that they're created by terrestrial processes you need to do a scanning electron microscope and um x-ray uh dispersive uh spectroscopy to differentiate those from the uh terrestrial processes that are producing these things yeah your figure five has a uh a framboidal spheral which is probably what you're talking about if you could go to slide 113 jamie and and you'll be able to see yeah there it is you can see very distinct difference so we've got your figure five up in the screen now malcolm um that's a typical framboid and they're when when you look at an optical microscope they look just like the or very much like the uh uh the what we call impact spherals or magnetic microspherals and they occur much more frequently i mean i've got i've got sites that have tens of thousands of these things in every couple of centimeters of sediment so you've got to separate the uh this the make the the impact spherals or the magnetic microspherals from these things but what you appear to be saying malcolm is that there is an abundance of impact proxy evidence which in your opinion adds up to a cosmic impact of some sort not necessarily a comet you're suggesting an asteroid it's a mysterious event in that sense but what it adds up to is an impact in your view is that a fair yeah a fair these what we call proxies the the impact spherals the uh platinum group elements the uh 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 these proxies so anyone who says that that the work of you and your team has been completely debunked is is clearly not completely familiar with the literature now that's that would seem to be the case that are were uh disingenuous in that regard we have so i would say that that uh because typically what we see is that the the the opposition literature does not cite the studies that have come out yeah we try and cite both the critical studies and hours and give reasons why our studies supplant theirs and that's what i have but i wish they would share but uh could you go it hasn't been the case slide 82 it would be nice if we could have had you on with mark so you guys could exchange information but unfortunately our capabilities that we can only take one phone call at a time uh we will definitely try to update that for the new studio although we never anticipated this was going to happen in the first place but uh it's been awesome oh there we go up on the screen uh malcolm we've got um from from ted bunch at al 2012 very high temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic air bursts and impacts 12 900 years ago so we have figure uh from supplementary information uh six 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 um and i think so you can see pretty distinctly what you're talking about here with the with the glassy spherules um and then like particularly uh i don't i not sure if you were co-author of this paper or not i was not you were not okay are you familiar with that paper do you know the image good okay yeah it shows some very interesting you know teardrop shapes dumbbell shapes and where you can actually see that um 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 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 dry boundary spherules on the top row with known impact spherules on the bottom row this is a very interesting comparison because and i you've probably seen this one malcolm a there's there's three across the top three across the bottom and a is actually a um from nudson's or nudson's farm in canada it's a young a cretaceous tertiary boundary sphero and just below it is a younger driest sphero from lake utio in mexico and one can see the morphological similarity of the two quite clearly then c and d compares uh c is a uh a sphero from the tunguska airburst and then d is younger driest boundary from lindjian germany which dates to 12 800 years before present and there you can see very clearly the the the rapid quench melt texture on the surface between the two comparison comparing tunguska airburst with um a younger driest boundary object and then finally e and f we have uh an iron calcium silica sphero from meteor crater compared with uh an iron calcium silica younger driest boundary sphero 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 driest boundary layer all which have morphological similarity to known impact proxies and this is very difficult to dismiss this as being mere coincidence yeah i would agree and uh those those are very especially the ac b and d uh pictures are very similar to the material that i'm taking out of the younger driest boundary at the sites that i've been looking at uh-huh malcolm what evidence if any uh are you aware of about what is that nuclear glass material called tri tri-tinitite trinitite trinitite that's how you say it trinitite trinitite that's how you say it well i from what i understand there's quite a bit of that that also appears in the same time period in the core samples there are some instances of it but i wouldn't say quite a bit uh some of these i mean they're very site specific and one of the one of the things i've been trying to do is work my way closer and closer to canada to see if there's any truth to the to this whole uh idea that the primary impact site was canada so i've been trying to look at sites closer and closer and i've seen sites in new jersey this would be eastern canada i've seen sites in new jersey new york and pennsylvania that produce uh what appears to be some form of trinitite or or melt glass uh or what ted bunch uh would call scoria like objects and it seems to to uh to bear out that that uh at least that far uh we're getting richer material out of the sediment out of the unrijuris boundary sediment is this trinitites this material only produced in this manner or it's also produced during nuclear explosion test right but other than that is this the only way that it's produced on earth well an impact would do it uh or a fulgurite could do it a fulgurite is is what's produced by a lightning strike could produce a spherules it could produce all the high temperature products but you see it an impact but in a very limited way you wouldn't expect to see it in a in a layer unless there was some sort of global lightning storm um the uh what i was going to say about the uh the melt glass is that in in the material we're looking at you see evidence of of melted zircons melted chromite all of which are very high temperature features indicating very high temperature that was experienced by that particular object are you seeing the image we have up here yes okay okay good yeah there a is from meteor crater and b is from the trinity nuclear test so and then uh 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 uh abu hooria so yeah so and then if we go to uh let's see um you gotta love that it says stalinite yeah go go jimmy scoria like objects the uh the melt glass or scoria like objects has only been found in about half a dozen sites to this point um so we're still you know and i think it's a matter of how close you are to an impact point and if they're very far apart that would lend credence i think to the this idea of multiple impacts if they seem to be get more you know more plentiful as you get further and further north and maybe there's more more legitimacy to uh to a primary impact site uh right now we just don't know now we're still we're we're still working that out all right we got another nice slide from from the bunch article here uh the careful slide yes calcium oxide rich scoria like object created by the melting of carbonate and silica rich precursor rocks the yellow area is the calcium oxide the white area is lachate and dark areas are iron oxide so that's a really nice yeah i've been struggling with getting that from that situation down um and then jimmy if you go to the next one we will see uh there's a scoria like object from meteor crater arizona and you could toggle back and forth between the two so the people can kind of see the similarity between them um and i see a lot that's what i in the sites that produce milk class that's what i'm seeing yeah those two those two types of uh particulates and how much this material are you finding in these sites well you don't plan i have to say you don't find a lot of this material it takes it's a struggle to get it but what you don't find is anything above or below it that particular layer unless you know that there's been a very dynamic environment in which case it can be spread out uh in the in the soil column and what's the implication of nothing above it and below it well that that uh you've got a specific date for a specific date for it and the layer that we we typically try and just limit our investigation to layers that have been dated to the emergriest boundary or contain the emergriest boundary layer right well like i say if you have a very dynamic environment it can really screw things up um it can be very difficult to interpret so this is difficult flooding repetitive flooding difficult science to do say again this is difficult science to do uh yeah and and uh i should add there that proving an impact is not easy it takes a while and and it just is proving an impact crater is not easy as i'm sure mark would agree that you find a crater there's no guarantee that's either an impact impact event or a volcanic event until you do the research and spend the time to investigate it but if you could summarize for us what's your opinion now on the balance of the evidence always bearing in mind that you may change that opinion as more evidence comes in yeah i would say we were facing an unprecedented type of event here that appears to have been uh something approaching global i mean we've got evidence now in south america we've got evidence uh and a lot of this stuff is unpublished i mean i there's a lot of things that that i could bring up that aren't published so that it's kind of useless to 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 uh and we're seeing things in syria we haven't looked elsewhere we've seen about the pacific ocean we've seen it uh in europe so i mean where does it end and it's all we haven't found an end to it and it's all at the younger dryest boundary that's correct yeah what have you found in the pacific ocean uh well sharma has found so it is a paper i can cite from his his uh may even be just a presentation uh i can quote it he says we infer that the central pacific was a site of deposition of osmium resulting from dusk from dusk cloud following a meteorite impact at 12 12 000 kill animes plus or minus 4 000 so right in that right in that ballpark sharma says that uh he found osmium and i believe he's he's come up with microspherals in that that same core but uh so the central pacific is an idea that or gives you an idea of how extensive this this thing was now malcolm this is obviously some controversial material it's uh it's it's fairly new in terms of the public consciousness have you had anybody debate you on this or have you had anybody oppose you yeah it goes with it goes with the territory i i wish the uh the opposition in some respects in some cases i wish the opposition was of a bit higher caliber than than what i've seen i think it's uh it's been a sad state that uh the most virulent opposition has not but i have i haven't regarded as particularly high quality malcolm michael shirmer here just uh do you have an opinion on uh the the association of the impact with the megafauna extinction and also then graham's hypothesis about the you know extinction of this lost civilization i the uh i won't even comment on the lost civilization aspects of this i have a hard enough time dealing with the meteorite impact uh as far as the megafauna goes i i think that uh i guess like i would say all of the above i think that all these these factors came into play you've got uh humans who are you know for that period technologically advanced with the clovis point and the uh the atlatl and the spear the replaceable uh spear tip that must have been devastating to the fauna but the the idea of attacking a a proboscinian to me is almost unthinkable i mean those things are today if you don't have a high-powered rifle uh i just don't see how you you realistically go up against a a bull elephant i mean it just strikes me as far too dangerous to take on but uh there are aspects of that question that i think are going to be very very interestingly debated in the next the next couple years or so we have a book coming out that addresses that directly at one of the sites i've been researching that uh the whole extinction of the megafauna may have been as much related to religion as something else there may have been a religion built around the extinction of the megafauna how so that's well that you'd want the evidence for that and that that evidence will be coming out in a book and that's going to be published in about a month or two oh i could speak to the whole idea of hunting bull elephants though unfortunately people have been hunting them with bows and arrows forever uh it's not an adalatal adalatals 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 a hundred 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 willie mammis was that they would go after the females apparently according to dan flores who wrote american serendeti and that the females would keep the young in their body their gestation period was very long like i believe he 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 that humans i'm sure had an impact on virtually anything that we could eat when we were starving but whether or not we wiped 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 you have it you know if you have an environmental impact or a degradation of the environment that might follow a a significant impact you know extraterrestrial impact so you're 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 uh proboscetians and when when the number gets limited they don't care whether it's a female or a male and they go after whatever they can get then i think the population of megafauna is going to suffer so i think it's a combination of factors not necessarily just one yeah i think that's very reasonable um malcolm is there anything else you would like to add before we let you go uh no i i i guess one thing is the interest i found it interesting in the discussion of uh the uh the scab lands and and uh that was really it was looking at the scab lands from 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 that the catastrophes that were etched in the landscape there uh the catastrophic floods that really caused me to pursue a a career in science it's really a remarkable landscape uh that's just a personal observation well mar we're very very thankful for your time and we really really appreciate your input here and it means a lot and 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 uh it's just without someone like you presenting hard data in science it would definitely be lost so thank you thank you so much thank you thank you malcolm yeah thank you malcolm all right malcolm we're gonna let you go okay take it easy buddy sound down time for your nap malcolm it's a lot of energy so these podcasts are long i mean four hours the guy was sitting there on standby probably you know chomping at the bit um jamie before we go i want to see some pictures of the scab lands because that is pretty amazing stuff and randal one more thing before we go um one thing that you pointed out to me during one of the episodes that was so stunning was these woolly mammoths that had been literally knocked over by an impact with broken legs and that died on the spot do you have those images i do that was actually a mastodon mastodon i'm sorry yeah yeah i want to see those so let's go to the scab lands first so we can show the audience on youtube which is by the way only about 10 of the people that watch this so if you're listening to this go check out the scab lands on on google and you could see this describe it to us randal well here well this is um textbook scab land right here um let's see what this is probably rock lake or sprag lake into chaney polluce scab lands um yeah you see the potholes there that's a sign of turbulence extreme turbulence uh within the water um colking is then is what the process is called where you get 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 into the bedrock um going down there that's polluce falls which was it it said 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 uh polluce river that you see right there um we've got a lot of great pictures up on the geocosmic rex website and some awesome video clips um and our last i'm sorry geocosmic rex rex okay and i thought you were saying wreck like a car wreck well that's it's a play on words okay so um so yeah we are talking about that okay but um yeah we got some great drone footage on there did we show that last time i was here i don't believe we did we might have did we showed a bit of the um the camas prairie ripples did we show potholes cataract um yeah there yeah this this whole scabland thing is has literally fascinated me since 1970 and um and like malcolm i think that summer of 1970 traveling out in some of these landscapes where yeah here we go um this is the drone footage wow that's incredible yeah and and let's see be ready to pause if we need to here is this the beginning because at the beginning we have a google earth image so you can get a sense of what we're looking at here go go back to the beginning right at the very beginning let's see if it starts off with the drone oh it starts off with the drone okay there should be another one that actually that's okay this is pretty cool yeah this is this is these are 400 foot cliffs this was a recessional cataract very similar to dry falls the water was pouring coming from behind our view here where is this specifically if anybody wanted to go watch this or look at this area oh the actual area yeah this is in eastern washington this is this is on the eastern rim of quincey basin it's called it's right along just if you can see up there um where those cliffs are in the middle distance right below there is the columbia river and this is just north of wenatchee wisconsin wisconsin washington um so basically what we had here was a you know plucking uh quarrying as the water poured over this ridge this is the babcock ridge and behind us is the quincey basin which served as a temporary holding pond and let's see as the as the um drone comes around i'm looking for the um for the team oh uh keep going zoom in a little bit more there jamie i think we did show this you can see you guys down there on the ground right yeah we're in there somewhere lost in the vastness of the um yeah now i remember we did show this yeah what about those images of the the the mastodons let's look at those and then let's get out of here okay um for that you have to go to the world of the Pleistocene on the which i just should have given you that sounds like a amusement park yeah the world of the Pleistocene could be over there some dudes with animal skins on them well maybe if they succeed in um you know cloning some of those flash frozen animals up there maybe really talking about doing that right yeah i don't know how plausible it is but that seems like a terrible idea the lost world nothing is not exactly diseases well that's one of the big concerns about climate change right that we're going to release some um diseases that we don't have an immune system for yeah go to uh slide 78 this is a good example of by the way who is more thoroughly documented than Randall Carlson Jesus Christ man go to slide 6222 50 plus years of walking the walk in the channel scablands uh yeah this this is a bone deposit um and what happens is that in the particularly warm years when the um 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 i is why i say there had to be another mechanisms of extinction besides human hunting because this pile yeah because is it possible that this i mean it's not necessarily at the bottom of a cliff right because you know that they pushed a lot of them off cliffs and no no this this is stuff that when the the river floods it erodes the banks and then this stuff falls out of the river banks right so it's it's been locked into the permafrost for however many thousands of years and it seems like there's interestingly two peaks of dates that one uh right around 13 000 and the other one around 36 000 that that the um that the that the fossilized remains are dating to which could point to potentially that there was some sort of an impact back then as well or something else some sort of event i i don't know i don't have an opinion on that but by having all these together i mean has it been theorized that perhaps this was at the there's not a cliff near this right yeah just off the to the right there is there is a cliff we're at the bottom of a cliff right here that is the actually it's a river bank so so just off you know that that was a hunting method they used to storm them off the side of cliffs and they never they literally couldn't even eat all of them like head smashed buffalo head smashed they would they would run so many them off cliffs that yeah but but here's the thing here's the thing when you look at at the the more these mortality events of modern animals even like looking at elephants that that perished during some of the severe droughts in the 80s in africa taphonomic studies show that it doesn't take three four five years before the the remains have completely disappeared um in order to preserve a fossil it has to be rapidly removed from any kind of forces oxidation or scavengers or anything that would consume it see this stuff has been again it's been frozen in the permafrost for for however many years 10 or 12 or 15 000 years so it was likely covered in an event covered in an event yes now what there was one that i really wanted you to get to that was a mastodon that had been literally knocked over and had broken legs yeah that would be um we could look very quickly at slide 92 this is one of the more interesting anomalous events this was the um the flash frozen woolly mammoth um go to the go to slide 93 it's a much clearer yeah this was um a mammoth six ton mammoth that was again one of these river collapses the banks collapsed during a warm spring and exposed this uh remains of a woolly mammoth um with soft tissue preserved contents of the food in its stomach undigested actually a mouthful of food the hips of the mammoth were were both broken as if he was thrown back on his haunches very violently um he had an erect penis which suggests to that he was suffocated which is he was a freak or he was a freak yeah he was getting right that michael laughs at that that's um the wolves ate the the flesh off the skull that's why it's it's uh buried like that you'll see the front left fore limb there you'll see the bottom there left right at the center of the screen that's his back leg oh wow that you see right there um the interesting thing about this is uh you know the the 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 been putrified yet which implies that the entire carcass had been frozen through and through probably in less than 10 hours um well like it see the ice man that's you know that's what happened to him that's exactly what happened to him yes interesting point and that would be a subject that we should talk about and he fell in between a crevice in a glacier correct yeah and probably got rapidly buried under the under the snow and the ice and that's how he ended up being preserved yeah overnight exactly the next slide actually shows a reconstruction of the of the in in the uh in a museum in russia showing what the the mammoth the circumstances under which he was found if you go to let's go in as a sidebar on uzi 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 bloods on his hand so he gave as good as he got and lost a fight so he was murdered wow and that that took with all that careful observation in laboratories of 10 years before that came out yeah fascinating stuff sometimes this stuff has to just take a while so if i can try to find some common ground with before we sign off with graham um you know your you know your book you have this really great sentence that i quote this it would mean at least that some yet unknown 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 um and you know i would do it for me what you know the boats that they sent the emissaries out on the wood carbon 14 dated um and some specific examples of high uh arts and attributes of high civilization so if it's not metal and writing then you know whatever it is i would change my mind absolutely that's good to hear michael and i i think as the as the research continues in this area for the last few years um having been very much an an outsider i 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 will will come out but i'm trying to like i say my my my role is a reporter and i'm trying to be a reporter for the alternative sides of things but to do so to do so in an effective and and hopefully there's a good argument in the history of science to be made for the role of outsiders i mean complete outsiders uh to come in and shake things up i mean freeman dyson is an example you know yeah totally self-taught auto die deck they called you an auto die deck absolutely and they can make and if nothing else they push people to really figure out what it is they believe and why because otherwise no one's going to challenge them harlan bratz is a good example of that yeah a high school teacher right and how randal carlson is good example that's absolutely well six example well listen you still want to look at this real quick the man stood on i got it right here let's do it he could go for days 125 about randal he never gets tired of this stuff if you could bottle your enthusiasm and be an awesome pill well maybe we can talk about that put it in the memory focus there yeah all right we're gonna we're gonna look at this this mastodon here um 125 125 yeah so this is a mastodon that was dug up in a pit years ago um excavation showed that the bones were lying on and in a layer of limey clay or marl about one foot in thickness um when the mid 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 the now this is where 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 um and this is all the same time period as the other mastodon we don't have dating on this um but it it likely was very at the very end probably right in that younger dryest window because of the amount of sediment over it go to the next slide jamie and we'll see 126 we can get a better view so this thing theoretically at least was blown back yeah go to there we go there you can see one of the femurs that's been busted squarely across um 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 into the ground wow the the forces there were strong powerful shear forces that would have literally separated his leg from the foot that's still immersed into the into the ground so i mean there are many examples of this and the last slide we're going to show if you go back this i promise you know i once went digging with jack hornor the paleontologist the dinosaur digger and he he showed these um debris flow uh pileups of dinosaur bones that had been splintered and broken wow and these are huge uh just from the force of the water and then piling up at the at the of a wall and so if you do it to a dinosaur wow right 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 um this was uh mammoth ivory that's being dug out of the siberian permafrost that's just a drawing oh that's just a drawing yeah well that's the problem with that like that's what it looked like well this is what it looked like a 19th century scene showing the ivory floor of the london docks covered by thousands of mammoth tusks and this went on year after year after year after year for roughly two centuries there is so much of that mammoth ivory by the way that they use it to make knife handles i actually have a knife handle you yeah that was made out of mammoth ivory yeah and still to this day not only is it legal but it's common to use mammoth ivory for different kinds of things there's so much of it well they're not an endangered species because they're it's kind of a loophole in this case though what we have is tux that are being again dug out of the permafrost right so how did they get there that becomes the question right does it have anything to do with human predation or was it a natural catastrophe that somehow ended up putting all these mammoths down and burying them into permafrost that's the question i want to raise well i think we raised a lot of questions i think we we got some pretty good answers i think we had some great dialogue and i really appreciate your time all three of you guys and uh thank you to malcolm and thank you to mark and uh thank you to young jamie oh thanks for hosting my pleasure and thank you just treat can i do a quick shout out yes i want to thank brad young camryn wilshire my brother roan my wife julie for helping all make this possible uh i also want to have people go to the geocosmic recs website and the sacred geometry international website for a lot more of this kind of stuff then i'm gonna thank my beloved partner and wife santa who's shared every adventure with me for the last quarter of a century we've climbed the great pyramid together we've been at the bottom of the ocean together and i wouldn't be doing any of this stuff if it weren't for that wonderful woman behind me michael shermer who you want to thank oh thank my wife jennifer my little boy vinnie and uh my agent my lawyer no no no but skeptic.com and my partner pat who uh you know keeps the show running when i'm running around doing things like this all right and joe rogan let's thank joe rogan because i can tell you this joe i speak all over the world and whether it's south africa or whether it's japan or whether it's britain or whether it's the united states or whether it's croatia people come up to me and they say joe rogan sent me yeah oh well thank you i appreciate it i appreciate everybody's interesting guests no really well you're one of them dude all you guys are thank you so much all right we'll see you guys soon thank you bye so long you