Joe Rogan | Humans Have Been in America of 130,000 Years?? w/Graham Hancock

So, what was the motivation behind creating this book, America Before? It's a curious mixture of things. I have been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization for more than 25 years. That was the essence of my book, Fingerprints of the Gods, that was published in 1995, that there has been a huge forgotten episode in human history. I continued to follow that in a series of other books. By the time I got to 2002, when I published a book called Underworld, that followed seven years of scuba diving on continental shelves, looking for structures that were submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age, I really felt I'd done it. I felt I'd walked the walk. I'd put out to the public a massive body of information, and I thought my role in this is over, and I can breathe a sigh of relief because it's hot in this particular kitchen, and I can go do something else. I ended up writing a book about psychedelics. I ended up writing supernatural meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind about the role of psychedelics in the origins of the human story. But then, new information started to come out that touched on the lost civilization idea, and I couldn't just stand by and ignore that information. That's why I published Magicians of the Gods in 2015. Then as I was researching that book, I became aware of something I hadn't realized before, that there's a mass of new information from the Americas, specifically from the Americas, which completely rewrites the story of human history, that the Americas have been misrepresented for a very long time by archaeology. Archaeologists will be annoyed with me for saying that. They have a way of forgetting their own errors, of saying, oh, well, we knew that all along. It wasn't the case. But the fact of the matter remains that for the best part of 50 years, from the 1960s through until about 2010, American archaeology was locked in a dogma that they actually had a name for, which was Clovis First. That they invented a name for a culture. They called them the Clovis Culture. We don't know what they called themselves. They were hunter-gatherers. They first appear in the archaeological record 13,400 years ago, and they vanished from the archaeological record 12,600 years ago. For a very long time, it was maintained adamantly that these were the first Americans, that no human being touched the soil of the Americas until 13,400 years ago. Just animals, but no human beings present at all. Any archaeologist who attempted to dispute that dogma, and I use the word deliberately, there should be no room for dogma in science, but any archaeologist who challenged that would face severe problems with his or her career. They would be mocked and humiliated at conferences, like an archaeologist called Jack Sankh-Mars from Canada who excavated in the Yukon. Humiliated at conferences, insulted, accused of making stuff up, their research funding would be withdrawn. Basically to challenge Clovis First was the end of your archaeological career. So naturally, very few archaeologists wanted to challenge Clovis First. What was this gentleman in the Yukon? What was this gentleman? Sankh-Mars. And interestingly, the Smithsonian, just in 2017, did a big kind of mea culpa, a big admission about this, that everybody had got things wrong, that Jack Sankh-Mars had been ruined by the Clovis First lobby, but he'd been right all along. The site he excavated in the Yukon was re-excavated in 2017, and every single thing he said was correct, even though they had just sneered at him. What year was he? He was excavating in the 1980s and the 1990s. He's still alive? He's still alive. He's still alive, yeah. Is he bitter? Well, I think he's vindicated, and it's kind of nice to be vindicated. There's almost a place in folklore for the individual who is scorned and humiliated by others, but who turns out to be right, and he was right. But my point about this is that what it meant was, since it was the dogma that Clovis was raised, that the oldest states were 13,400 years ago, there seemed to be no logic to archaeologists in digging deeper. You know how it is with archaeology that the upper levels are the youngest, and the deeper you go, the older it gets. That's why we say upper paleolithic for the late ice age and lower paleolithic for the late stone age and lower for the older stone age. And the feeling was, no need to dig below the Clovis lair, because we already know that there were no human beings there before that. And then a few archaeologists, I mentioned Jack Sanck Mars, but another is Al Gugier from the University of South Carolina, who excavated a site called Topper in South Carolina. Now, Topper is an incredibly rich Clovis site. It's full of their tools, their points. They made these special flint points that were used as arrowheads and spears. Great Clovis site. He finished excavating the Clovis level, and then he did something that was supposed not to be done. He decided to dig deeper, and he carried on digging down. And there was a layer of about a meter and a half of barren soil, and then beneath that, more human artifacts. And they finally date those back to more than 50,000 years ago. And then in 2017, published in Nature by Tom Demare, who's the chief paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, and a bunch of other very high-level paleontologists, published in Nature magazine, Evidence for Human Presence in North America 130,000 years ago. Now, this has really put the cat amongst the pigeons. Now, if humans were oppressed in North America 130,000 years ago, and archaeologists have been telling us for 50 years that they were only present from 13,000 years ago, that's 10 times as long that we've had humans in North America capable of doing stuff, and the archaeological dogma has prevented any search for what they were doing until very recently. What's the evidence from 130,000 years ago? Okay, so what... It's not the... Let me be clear about this, because this is something that is often misrepresented in my views. It is not the evidence for an advanced civilization that we find 130,000 years ago in America. The evidence that we find is evidence for human presence. And what they were doing was very much stone-age stuff. It's a mastodon. It's a mastodon skeleton that was excavated. It was actually found by accident during road construction near San Diego. And an archaeologist was attached to the road construction crew and immediately stopped construction, and they investigated it thoroughly. And what they found was so much dynamite in the early 1990s when they found it that they decided not to publish at the time, because what they found was evidence that those mastodon bones had been cracked open by human beings using tools and that the marrow had been extracted, that one tusk had been left standing upright in the ground, and another had been left beside it, that a femur of the animal had been taken away completely from the site. And there was assemblages of instruments that were used to smash and break the bones. And the conclusion of the team was that only one kind of creature could have done that work using tools on a mastodon, and that's human beings. That's classic, classic human behavior. So this sets the goalposts in a totally different place. Suddenly we have to consider that humans have been in America for 130,000 years. We already know that a dogmatic approach of archaeology has rather refused to look at anything older than 13,000 years ago. And what it does is it generates an engine of demand that we need to be looking at those missing 100,000-plus years. We need to be looking at it hard. And of course the immediate reaction has not been to go looking for stuff in the other 100,000 years. Most archaeologists have responded by saying this is impossible. It can't be so, but that's precisely what they said to Jacques Saint-Mars, who said that humans were in bluefish caves in the Yukon 25,000 years ago. And it's precisely what they said to Al-Gudier, who said humans had been at Topper 50,000 years ago, and they were both right. And I believe that Tom Demiret and his team, you don't get a big article published in Nature unless it's already pretty solidly based and pretty much peer-reviewed. It has produced a reaction. I would be wrong to say that it's universally accepted. It's very much challenged, but it's intriguing. What is the challenge of it? What is the challenge? The challenge fundamentally comes from we archaeologists know that there were no human beings in the Americas that far back. To put it in perspective, it's about 60,000 years before the first evidence of human beings in Europe. It's about 60,000 years before the first evidence of human beings in Australia. And this is just evidence of the first human beings? Yes. We have to point out how difficult it is to find evidence of human beings. It's extremely difficult to find. You know, sometimes we imagine that archaeologists are working with masses of skeletal material. No they're not. They're not. I mean, the whole – this is one of the ironies. The whole Clovis first dogma, you would think that they had masses of material to work with. They did have the tools, but in terms of skeletal remains, just one. Just one single skeletal remain from material. Now, one of the things that Michael Shermer had sent me was this dispute that perhaps the bones had been cracked open by the excavation material. Yeah. Are they excavation machines? I saw Michael's email last night, and I appreciate that Michael wants to continue to engage with this subject. And that's his job. He's a professional skeptic, and it's his role to do so. But what he misses out – it's true that a new paper has been published, which raises questions over the – what's called the Ceruti Mastodon site, which is the site that Tom Demeray at San Diego Natural History Museum excavated. And what's interesting, since I can – since Michael took the trouble to write the questions, can I just – Sure. Can I just read you something that I responded to on this? Sure. Which is that – Just do it into the microphone. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, this paper was in no way a refutation of the original paper in nature. As a matter of fact, the gentleman who wrote that paper never even looked at the archaeological remains that are now in the San Diego Natural History Museum. What it is – what he based it on is reference – I'm quoting from the abstract of the paper itself – reference to a freeway, right-of-way map and construction plans, contemporary road-building practices and work site photographs available on the internet. In other words, the site was not visited. They simply looked at secondary references. They did not look at the archaeological material. And they ignored the entire argument of Tom Demeray and his colleagues who had already addressed that issue. They didn't look at the bones? They did not look at the bones. When you break a fresh bone, it has a characteristic kind of spiral fracture that does not happen when you break a fossilized bone. And Tom Demeray and his team specifically ruled out road-making machinery as responsible for this breaking pattern because they actually carried out experiments on modern elephants, deceased elephants, and they broke their bones. And the kind of fracture that you get in a fresh green bone is completely different from the kind of fracture you get in a fossilized bone. So unfortunately, this paper pays no attention to that. It just looks at road plans and says there was road work there. It must have been done by road work. I think it's very sloppy, very weak, and it's certainly not the answer. We can expect ongoing debate. And that is healthy. But this is not a strong case at all. So this points to the first evidence that we found. And is there any effort underway to try to uncover more evidence from a similar time? Well, I'm going to cite Tom Demeray, the chief paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum. That's what he would like to see. He makes the point to me. I interview him. I spent a day with him at the National History Museum. He was very generous with his time. I did an extended interview, and I quote from it in America before. And his wish is that archaeologists, instead of spending all their time trying to find ways to dismiss and get rid of his findings, his wish is that they would spend a little bit of that time looking at deposits older than 13,400 years, and even being willing to go back as far as 130,000 years. That would be a proper scientific response. There is a thorough body of work put forward by a very senior group of scientists who hesitated before they published it. They had the information back in the 1990s, but it wasn't until refined dating techniques later than in the 21st century that they finally were sure what they had and that they published it in Nature in 2017. It's an important study. And I think what's going to happen is that we're going to find much more evidence of a very ancient human presence in the Americas, and that's what Tom Demiret thinks as well. And as he points out, if we don't look, then we're never going to find it. If we allow dogma to stop us looking and saying, oh, it's impossible that humans were in the Americas 130,000 years ago, so we won't bother to look. What a failure of science that is. And to spend all the time instead trying to get rid of the evidence that doesn't fit the current paradigm. But it's so fascinating that just this fortuitous discovery during a construction site could change the way people perceive things. You've just got to wonder how much of that stuff is under, I mean, how deep did they have to go to find these mastodon bones? Well, so this is a road cut that's being made. So those would be pretty deep down, 10, 15 feet down. The grader is going through and flattening them. It varies from place to place depending on soil deposition, the stratification of the soil. But the key point is that what you need to do is go deeper than 13,400 years ago. And you need to do so with dedication and vigor and with some kind of funding. And at the moment, archaeology doesn't see the point of that. If the paper in Nature by Tom Demiret was alone, if there were nothing else than that, I wouldn't place so much trust in it. But I've spent a lot of time during the researching of this book with archaeologists who did dig deeper. What those archaeologists all confirm is that there have been human beings in the Americas for tens of thousands of years. And it's not surprising that that can be pushed back to 130,000 years ago because part of the argument about the peopling of the Americas has to do with a place that we now call the Bering Straits between Alaska and Siberia, which during the ice age were at times a land bridge. They were exposed because of lowered sea levels. But migrants who crossed that land bridge from Siberia on many occasions over periods of tens of thousands of years would find themselves confronted then by the North American ice cap, which oddly wasn't at the tip of Alaska but began further in. So there was living space in a bit of Alaska, but you couldn't get through the ice mountains, these literally ice mountains, two miles deep, covering the whole of North America and preventing access to the unglaciated parts of America. The thing is that what happened around 13,400 years ago, there had been a period of global warming and the ice sheets began to melt and a corridor opened up between what's called the Cordilleran ice sheet and the Laurentide ice sheet, the two major ice keeps in North America. And it's thought that the migration came through that corridor. Well, the thing is that exactly the same thing happened between 140,000 years ago and 120,000 years ago. There was an episode of global warming, an ice-free corridor opened up, and the same opportunity to enter the Americas was there at that period than it was at the later period. And Tom Demmery's point in mind is that we have to pay much more attention to that earlier period. And that's really why I've gone ahead and written this book, is to try to put before a broad general audience, hopefully in language that makes sense, an assembly of all the latest information that casts doubt on the story we've been told. Because my goodness, if archaeology is wrong about the story of the peopling of the Americas, if it's radically wrong as it now appears to be, then our whole understanding of human history has to change. It's not just the history of the Americas, it's the history of the entire world. It has been an absolute article of faith amongst archaeologists that civilization began in the old world. Indeed, I have a book in my library called History Begins at Sumer, and it's by Samuel Noah Kramer, a very renowned archaeologist. And it's a good book, actually. But the argument is that this is where civilization began in the culture that we call the Sumerians in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, and that it began about 6,000 years ago. And that civilization is entirely an invention of the old world. It has nothing to do with the new world at all because the new world was populated so late. This has been the argument. And this is the argument that now radically and suddenly begins to change, that the Americas, this enormous land mass, resource rich, bountiful in every way, south of Minnesota, south of the ice cap, vast land areas that are bountiful, get into Central America, South America, the Amazon, just huge areas of land that were very, very offered great potential for human occupation. Dogma has said there were no humans there. Now the first bits of evidence are coming out that says there were humans there. And if that's the case, then we must consider the possibility that the story of civilization might have begun in the Americas, not in the old world at all. It might be a new world invention, not an old world invention.