Joe Rogan | Technology is Changing Our Understanding of History w/Graham Hancock

I had a thought once while I was under the influence, and it was a thought that one day computational powers will reach a point where they will be able to take into consideration all of the objects on Earth and what we know about the history and vividly recreate the past through computation to the point where you could actually know who did what, when people did things, and that, I mean, I don't even know if this would be physical. Today certainly not be possible, but with the exponential increase in computational power and technology and innovation that one day will reach a point where you'll be able to watch, you'll be able to see what happened, and they'll be able to recreate what happened exactly, and that this would be something that would be, I mean, it's impossible for us to imagine that someone would be able to do that right now. But that one day with technology, as it gets more and more advanced, we will reach some sort of an innovation or some sort of an invention that will allow us to go back and see, literally see what happened, how things were done. Technology is changing our whole understanding of the past, and what you're envisaging is perfectly possible. We will come to a time if- 100 years, 500 years. Perhaps less. If we don't first destroy ourselves entirely as a civilization, we will come to a time where our cleverness and our techniques will allow a much wider opening up of the past than has presently happened. But it is already happening. One of the areas of science that I go into in America before is genetics and DNA. This is an area of science that was not much informing archaeology until about the 1990s, but since the 2000s has become very important in archaeology because the technology has been developed where ancient DNA can be extracted and tested, and you can actually genotype an entire individual from DNA that may be 15, 20,000 years old. And this new technology of genome sequencing and DNA is another factor that is raising huge question marks over the past of the Americas. And one of the issues I go into in this book is the presence in the Amazon rainforest of a very specific, clearly identifiable pattern of DNA, which is only found in one other place in the world, and that is in Australasia, in Papua New Guinea and amongst Australian aborigines. It's Australasian DNA. Now, in South America. Not only in South America, but in the depths of the Amazon rainforest amongst tribes who have only been contacted in the last 20 or 30 years. And furthermore, although skeletal remains are rare, it has been found in ancient skeletal remains that are close to 11,000 years old in the Amazon. So that tells us that this DNA signal has been in the Amazon for at least 11,000 years. The geneticists think that it came to the Amazon during the last Ice Age, and this raises a huge mystery because the peopling of the Americas is supposed to have occurred from Siberia across the Bering Straits, down through that ice-free corridor into North America, down through North America, into South America, into Central America, and finally into South America. If it was the whole story, then we would find this DNA signal in North America and in Central America. We would not find it only in the Amazon. And I talked to some of the leading geneticists about this, specifically Professor Eske Willislev at the University of Copenhagen, who's been the lead author in a number of major studies of ancient DNA. And I asked him, what do you make of this Australasian DNA in the Amazon? And he said, honestly, we don't have a proper explanation for it at the moment. But what he did say is that the most parsimonious explanation, he used that specific word, the most parsimonious explanation is that a group of people during the Ice Age crossed the Pacific Ocean and ended up in South America and settled in the Amazon and brought their DNA with them. That would account perfectly for the DNA data. And when a scientist says the most parsimonious explanation, what that scientist is saying is he likes that explanation, that it's a simple, direct, clear explanation of the DNA mystery. But then he added, however, it doesn't make practical sense. And I asked him, well, why doesn't it make practical sense? And he said, because the archaeologists tell me that no human population was capable of crossing the Pacific Ocean during the Ice Age, at which point it was natural for me to say, do you really trust the archaeologists? And he said, well, in science, we do trust the work of other scientists. We don't really question it. We don't really investigate it. That's their side of the business. And my view is that that is rather than taking this weird anomalous Australasian DNA signal in the heart of the Amazon as something to be explained away and as something for it to be denied that it could be connected to a voyage across the Pacific Ocean. Maybe it's the first compelling evidence that voyages were taking place across the Pacific Ocean during the Ice Age. And maybe we should be opening up that whole issue for exploration. And again, I think a lost civilization is the best answer. And that near the end of the Ice Age, when the Younger Dryas cataclysm unfolds, it's not an overnight thing. It's very bad. 12,800 years ago, there's about 1,200 years of horror. I don't think the civilization went down in a single day and night. I think there were survivors. I think bits of it were left. I think their project was to restart civilization. And I suggest very strongly that where they tried to mount that project was amongst the hunter-gatherers who coexisted in the world with them at that time. We ourselves are an advanced civilization, at least that's what we call ourselves. And we coexist in the world with hunter-gatherers. It's not an odd idea that an advanced civilization to hunt together should coexist. And there is separation between us and the Amazonian hunter-gatherers. There are tribes in the Amazon that are uncontacted and that we don't know even exist. If a catastrophe on the level of the Younger Dryas were to occur today, I don't think that our civilization would make it through. We are the spoilt children of the earth. We are just used to having everything laid on. The supermarket shelves are groaning with food. We can get food delivered to our homes. We have roofs over our head. We have shelters. We have clothing. Everything is taken for granted. I guess you're an exception, but very few people in modern Western culture know how to survive. They don't have survival skills. They don't know how to hunt. They don't know how to gather. They don't know how to grow crops because they've handed that responsibility over to others. We live in a society that's highly segmented and specialized and different people specialize in different things, but nobody has the vast general survival skill that a hunter-gatherer has. So in a global cataclysm, actually, at first counterintuitively, the people who would survive it would be the hunter-gatherers. And an advanced civilization would be smart if they were survivors to seek refuge amongst hunter-gatherers to make that the place where they might try to restart their civilization. And that's why I think that this Australasian DNA signal in the Amazon may be part of the evidence for a sort of outreach effort that was being made by a lost civilization, seeing the disaster coming down on it and realizing that something needed to be done.